"Monsters Lead Such Interesting Lives" – Daffy DuckFrom the 1930s-1950s, no movie show was complete without a cartoon, and no cartoon was complete without an established character like Bugs Bunny or a caricature of a celebrity, or preferably both. In the same period, Universal Studios dominated the horror genre with its Classic Monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It ...

During the Apartheid years in South Africa, a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was smuggled around the prison on Robben Island. The book's significance resides in the fact that the book's owner, Sonny Venkatratham, passed it to a number of his fellow political prisoners in the single cells, including Nelson Mandela, asking them to mark their favourite passages with a signature and date. Informally known as "the Robben Island Bible", numerous prisoners selected the speeches...

To many people, the Marx Brothers always seemed cartoonish. Small wonder that film animators plucked their personas from their first appearances in The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) and caricatured them in countless animated appearances in theatrical cartoons. Their animated likenesses have since been wisecracking in television cartoons, direct-to-video movies, fan films, commercials, flip books, avatars, emoji, a slot machine, and two TV pilots so rare they...

Giving and receiving mercy is central to living a life of passion and is central to living the life God calls us to. We all need mercy at different times in our lives, and we all have an obligation to give mercy to others at different times in our lives. If you think about it, God’s mercy is overwhelmingly generous. He calls us to respond with the same spirit of generosity. The perfect companion for the Year of Mercy called for by Pope Francis, Beautiful Mercy provides an encounter with th...

The 2016 presidential election was unconventional in many ways. The election of President Donald Trump caught many by surprise, with a true outsider — a candidate with no previous governmental experience and mixed support from his own party — won the election by winning in traditionally Democratic states with coattails that extended to Republican Senate candidates and resulted in unified Republican government for the first time since 2008. This result broke with the pre-election convention...

Where did SARS come from? Have we inherited genes from Neanderthals? How do plants use their internal clock? The genomic revolution in biology enables us to answer such questions. But the revolution would have been impossible without the support of powerful computational and statistical methods that enable us to exploit genomic data. Many universities are introducing courses to train the next generation of bioinformaticians: biologists fluent in mathematics and computer science, and data a...

Being Murdered. Not so great.Waking up in your least-favorite game afterwards . . .While trying to figure what the whole “sword” thing is all about and which end of it he’s supposed to point at the cuddly, woodland creatures who keep giving him owies, Lucas stumbles across a player who looks rather familiar.Is it the man who murdered him? If it is, why is there, and how can Lucas make him pay for what he did? Worse yet, he’s pretty sure he left the stove and

This volume in the popular Ignatius Catholic Study Bible series leads readers through a penetrating study of The First and Second Books of the Maccabees using the text itself and the Church's own guidelines for understanding the Bible.Ample notes accompany each page, providing fresh insights by renowned Scripture scholars Matthew and Leeanne Thomas as well as time-tested interpretations from the Fathers of the Church. These helpful study notes provide rich historical, cult...

Clever or Lucky?Does it really matter if you’re still alive?Having survived sure death, Horus and his friends barely have time to breathe before they rush off to face the impossible again. It’s for a good cause. Finding really nice guy’s long-missing son is something you kind of have to do right away. It’s just good manners, there’s less guilt, and your mom won’t nag you as much afterwards.A possibly insane fellow player might know the son’s whereabouts. The only pr...