Vrbo! Give your marketing director a raise for this one

'Check me good!'

Attempts by the group and park rangers to revive the man failed

'One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness'

The video actually shows Obama visiting Nelson Mandela's cell in July 2013.

'the RNC has made it its mission to provide confidence'

Income-driven student loan

Everyone knows the legendary Black Sabbath albums released in the 1970s, from their debut album Black Sabbath up until Sabotage in 1975, although there were a few more releases during that era. Fans of Ronnie James Dio are also familiar with albums like Heaven and Hell, Mob Rules, and Dehumanizer. However, the band went through several other lineups with different lead singers, including Born Again with Ian Gillan, Seventh Star with Glenn Hughes, and of course the Tony Martin albums. With a vast amount of material to choose from, much of this music may have been overlooked by casual fans, The post 10 Most Underrated Black Sabbath Songs appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Excerpts Fantasy Read an Excerpt From J. M. Miro’s Bringer of Dust In the second book in the Talents Trilogy, the world of the dead is closer than you think… By J. M. Miro | Published on August 28, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share the first chapter from J. M. Miro’s Bringer of Dust, the sequel to Ordinary Monsters and the second book in The Talents—out from Flatiron Books on September 17th. You can also listen to the same excerpt from the audiobook edition, read by Ben Onwukwe. Click here to jump straight to the audio excerpt! Agrigento, Sicily, 1883. With the orsine destroyed, Cairndale lies in ruins, and Marlowe has vanished. His only hope of rescue lies in a fabled second orsine—long-hidden, thought lost—which might not even exist.But when a body is discovered in the shadow of Cairndale, a body wreathed in the corrupted dust of the drughr, Charlie and the Talents realize there is even more at stake than they’d feared. For a new drughr has arisen, ferocious, horned, seemingly able to move in their world at will—and it is not alone. A malevolent figure, known only as the Abbess, desires the dust for her own ends. And deep in the world of the dead, a terrible evil stirs—an evil that the corrupted dust just might hold the secret to reviving or destroying forever.So the dark journey begun in Ordinary Monsters surges forward, from the sinister underworld of the London exiles, to the mysteries of a sunlit villa in nineteenth-century Sicily, to the deep catacombs hidden under Paris. Against bone witches, mud glyphics, and a house of twilight that exists in a netherworld all its own, the Talents must work together—if they are to have any hope of staving off the world of the dead, and saving their long-lost friend. Lights Were Going Out All Over the World—1883Chapter 1: Kindred Alice Quicke stood under a ragged plane tree in the gloom of Montparnasse, her hat brim dripping, the collar of her oilskin coat turned high against the rain. She was quiet, dark-eyed. She carried a finger-blade hidden in her sleeve, another at her ankle. In one hand she gripped a four-foot-long iron bar, like a cudgel. A fiacre rounded the corner, clattering and splashing past, its driver hidden, side-lanterns swaying. Otherwise Paris was dark. The rain was dark. She looked ordinary, to the ordinary eye. That was the thing about monsters: the real ones always did. She’d been in the city nearly a month, spreading a ripple of unease through any crowd. It wasn’t the clothes she wore, the trousers, the stained oilskin coat; in Paris, at least, a woman in a man’s clothes drew little interest. Though her knuckles were bigger than most men’s, and the backs of her wrists were scarred like a blacksmith’s, and there was clay clumped in her tangled yellow hair, none of that mattered. What mattered was the thin crescent of light in her eye, like a blade turned sideways, that warned off most inquiries. Four months ago she’d killed her partner and friend, shot him in the heart while looking into his eyes, and before that she’d seen horrors that belonged only in fairy tales, children afflicted with strange talents, and monsters too, real monsters, the kind she couldn’t stop seeing even after she’d shut her eyes. She’d been hurt badly by one of those monsters, impaled by a tendril of smoke on the roof of a speeding train. Whatever it was that had infected her then was in her still. In the mornings she’d awake in pain and press a hand to her ribs, to the old wound of it, imagining some monstrous thing uncoiling there, just under the skin, a part of her. Now a figure in a mud-spattered cloak turned onto the boulevard, walking fast in the rain. It was Ribs. She carried a bull’s-eye lantern clipped to a belt at her waist. Alice stepped out of the shadows and together they hurried to a manhole cover in the street. Alice pried it up with the iron bar, the rain foaming over the edge, over the rusted iron rungs, pouring down into the sudden blackness. Ribs clambered in. Alice followed. Buy the Book Bringer of Dust J. M. Miro Book 2 of The Talents Buy Book Bringer of Dust J. M. Miro Book 2 of The Talents Book 2 of The Talents Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget And then, clinging to the iron rungs, Alice reached up and dragged the heavy covering back into place, cutting off the rain. And in the darkness she followed her friend down, deep into the catacombs of Paris. “Jesus,” she muttered, when she felt her boots collide with the bottom. Her voice echoed back. “Some light here, maybe?” After a moment the shutter on the lantern opened. It was an old-fashioned candle lantern with a fish-eye lens, a beam of weak yellow light illuminating the gallery. Ribs had taken it off her belt and leaned it against the wall. Alice could see the girl drawing back her wet hood, smoothing her red hair. The air was cold, sour. Ribs was grinning, gap-toothed, at her. “Not Jesus. Just me.” Alice gave her a flat look. “What?” “I waited nearly an hour.” The girl winked. “It weren’t my fault you was there early. Anyway I got us lunch. I don’t reckon you remembered to?” “No one saw you?” “Saw me?” Ribs’s tone was wounded. She sniffed, opened her cloak to reveal a package in brown paper, tied off under one arm. “Look at this. A baguette an half a cheese. No reason we got to be all bones, just because everyone else down here is, right?” Alice suppressed a smile. Ribs was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old but there was something about her that made Alice think she’d never been a kid, not really. And something else that made her think she’d never quite be a grown-up. The catacombs were thick with silence. Three tunnels branched off in different directions, tall and arched. Alice closed her eyes, and the dark ache bloomed in her side. They were seeking the second orsine, a door between worlds, a way to cross into the land of the dead and find a living boy trapped within. It was somewhere under Paris. Dr. Berghast had told Alice as much, in his sunlit greenhouse at Cairndale long months ago, a bonebird clicking weirdly at his wrist, his eyes cold and dead. And almost as soon as she’d arrived in Paris she’d felt it, an ache radiating up out of the old wound in her side, a coldness that seeped down her left arm into her fingertips. It was as if the infected dust that Jacob Marber—corrupted talent, servant of an evil more terrible than anything Alice had imagined—had left in her was stirring, waking up. As if it knew an orsine was near. And like a hook in her side, tugging at her, it had led her forward, first through the crowded lanes and boulevards, across the bridges, then down into the maze of the ossuaries. Ribs, who’d come with her, could only trail along, watchful. Alice, for her part, just went where it hurt worst. But they weren’t in the ossuaries now. There were miles of ancient quarries under Paris, tunnels and stairs carved out of the limestone, submerged chambers, wells hidden in the absolute darkness. Only a small part of it was known. There were stories of things living deep in the underground, pale creatures, vengeful spirits. Cutthroats and pickpockets. Stories of servants lost in the black when their lanterns extinguished, their bodies only found years later. Stories of sudden drops, of dead ends, of ceiling collapses. Maybe some of it was even true. But Alice, for her part, figured probably the worst thing in that darkness was her own self and the thing that was inside her. Ribs was looking at her funny. “So? Which way, then?” Alice grimaced. She started down the left-hand tunnel, retracing their steps from the night before, following the line of red chalk they’d slowly been adding to. Ribs came along behind. The tunnels were wide at first, dry. The lantern’s beam was weak and wobbled as Ribs walked. They could see a few feet ahead, nothing more. The tunnel turned and turned again, then they descended an iron staircase put in sometime in the last century, and crept past a well and through a fissure in the limestone. All the while they watched for the line of red chalk that marked their way. They came out in a long gallery, the ceiling supported by pillars, their shadows crooked and silent in the black. The air was colder. They hurried on. They’d stop now and then for a sip of water or a twist of bread but they did not linger long. Ribs would climb up onto a block of limestone and sprawl out with her arms dangling, or flop down onto the ground if it was dry, and she’d breathe wearily in the bad air. It was during one such rest that Ribs mentioned their friend, the dustworker Komako. She’d gone to Spain in search of an ancient glyphic, and its secrets about the second orsine. She’d insisted on going alone. “So bloody stubborn. Je-sus. I guess she’s probably all right, though?” “That girl can handle herself,” Alice murmured. “It’s the glyphic I’d be worried for.” She heard Ribs snort. The darkness seemed to lean in, muffling their voices. Alice didn’t like the new tiredness she heard in her friend. She said, “We’re going to find this second orsine. You know that, right?” The girl was quiet. “Ribs?” “Sure,” Ribs said at last. “But it’s after we find it what worries me.” “After, we’ll get Marlowe out. That’s what’ll happen.” Ribs rolled onto her side, raised her face. In the glow of the lantern it looked unearthly and pale. “It’s what else gets out I don’t like to imagine. Charlie was awful scared when he come out, back at Cairndale. I remember it.” The damp turned suddenly colder in the gallery. “I keep thinking bout him, like. At night. When I try an sleep.” “Charlie?” “Not Charlie.” But Alice knew who Ribs meant. They didn’t talk about Marlowe, not often. She thought of the little boy she’d known, the calm certainty in his face, the way he’d chosen to believe in her goodness despite everything, the strange power that had been in him. It felt like a lifetime ago. That night she’d first seen his talent, the blue shine in that sideshow tent outside Remington. The rough men watching him with tears in their eyes. She wasn’t sure what to say. Ribs had sat up now and was pushing the tallow higher into the lantern, then taking out the spare candle she’d brought. “You go into the dark because it’s where the bad things are,” Ribs murmured. “Because it’s the only way to fight them. I get it. But in the dark, it’s easy to start thinking evil is stronger than it is.” Alice was quiet. Ribs surprised her sometimes. She could feel the little blade strapped to her wrist, the consolation of it. Sometimes, she thought, the bad things weren’t in the dark at all. They were right in front of you, in the light, the whole time. She got to her feet. The rock overhead felt heavy, crushing. Beyond the candlelight, the dark seemed to go on forever. “We should keep going,” she said softly. Excerpted from Bringer of Dust. Copyright © 2024 by Ides of March Creative Inc. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. The post Read an Excerpt From J. M. Miro’s <i>Bringer of Dust</i> appeared first on Reactor.

To call the past eight weeks in presidential politics unprecedented would be a wild understatement. It was just over two months ago when President Joe Biden—a man deemed highly successful and mentally sharp by our legacy media—took to the stage to debate his predecessor, Donald Trump, and promptly expired. It took another month for Biden to drop out of the race, prompted by the backstabbing Democratic cadre of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; and, most importantly, former President Barack Obama, all of whom wheedled donors and cudgeled Biden into submission. It then took promptly one day to solidify Vice President Kamala Harris in Biden’s stead. It has been more than a month since Biden was defenestrated in favor of Harris. Since then, Harris has answered precisely zero difficult questions from the media. She has spent the intervening weeks being “brat”—that is, social media-friendly and utterly vacuous. We know that she likes Doritos, that she enjoys cooking, that she supposedly makes a mean brisket, that she wears Chuck Taylors. When asked outside Air Force Two what she will do next this week, she answered, “We’re going to walk up those stairs.” Deep stuff. And yet there are less than 70 days to the election. Republics are predicated on the idea that the voters deserve to know something about the candidates for whom they vote. Voters already know everything there is to know about Trump. He’s the most overexposed political figure in history, and we’ve already seen what his presidency looks like. But voters have been shielded from Harris. According to the legacy media, her 2019 presidential campaign policy positions are completely irrelevant: She’s now sent out surrogates to disown her own position on decriminalizing border crossings (she was in favor), electric vehicle mandates (she was in favor), private health insurance (she was against), “reimagining public safety” or defunding the police (she was in favor), and fracking (she was against), among others. All of that in the last month alone. Yet the media apparently have zero questions. Meanwhile, we’ve been told that she’s not even tied to the administration in which she is currently the vice president. This week, Politico headlined, “Vance tries to tether Harris to Biden during Michigan rally.” Tries to? She’s the sitting vice president! Her boss—the same person she shivved to steal his nomination—is currently still the president. Sam Stein of The Bulwark and MSNBC headlined, “Dems spent four days in Chicago castigating, belittling, and demonizing Donald Trump. And then they did something even more vicious: They turned him into the incumbent.” Trump the incumbent? She’s the sitting vice president of the United States! All of this is why Harris must avoid scrutiny. She’s obviously squirrelly on debating Trump: First, she tried to bully Trump into accepting the same debate rules he’d accepted against Biden. Then she denied him extra debates. Then she tried to switch the rules. Her campaign has gone through Talmudic discussions internally to determine if and when she ought to be interviewed. Their verdict: OK, fine, but only if pretaped while joined by happy but cloddish sitcom dad running mate Tim Walz. This entire charade smacks of disdain for the American people. Rig the nomination process in favor of Biden; throw Biden off a cliff in favor of Harris; hide Harris behind an Instagram filter while she dances and calls herself “Momala” for the duration of the campaign. At no point do Democrats want Americans to understand just what Harris will do as president, or to connect her to what she’s already done as vice president. Perhaps it will work. If so, Americans will only have proved H.L. Mencken’s cynical theory: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Hiding Harris: Will Naked Political Ploy Succeed? appeared first on The Daily Signal.