I was 15 years old in 1976 when a friend of mine played me the song “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” The voice scared me at first. I laughed at the title, but upon listening a little deeper, I heard something I had never heard before in pop music. I instantly dove into his material, buying every album that Waits had released up to that point. It would be easy to argue that most music fans who discovered Tom Waits in the ’70s have stuck with him throughout his entire career, buying every new record up until his last one The post Tom Waits’ Best Song From Each Of His Studio Albums appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

News Venom: The Last Dance Venom and Eddie Go Out in Style in the Final Trailer for Venom: The Last Dance The greatest love story in comic book film comes to an end By Molly Templeton | Published on September 12, 2024 Screenshot: Sony Pictures Entertainment Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Sony Pictures Entertainment There’s always a bigger, badder monster, isn’t there? In Venom: The Last Dance, that bigger, badder creature is Venom’s creator, Knull, whose name apparently must not be spoken. He’s coming to Earth because the delightful Eddie Brock/Venom duo (both played by Tom Hardy) has something he wants. Love? Chemistry? Symbiotic bliss? Probably it’s something less nice, but those things are the reasons why we’re here for these movies. The Venom films are the unlikeliest of charmers, but Tom Hardy has been pulling off this weird symbiotic magic since the first film arrived in 2018. The trailers for this third film really, really want us to believe our bonded heroes are facing a tragic separation, but this is still a Marvel product. I simply refuse to believe that end will be 100% final. Here’s the brief synopsis for Venom: The Last Dance: In Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance. The final Venom film is written and directed by Kelly Marcel, who wrote the first two (and also created the TV series The Changeling). Hardy and Marcel came up with the story together. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, and Stephen Graham co-star this time around. Venom: The Last Dance is in theaters October 26th.[end-mark] The post Venom and Eddie Go Out in Style in the Final Trailer for <i>Venom: The Last Dance</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Mark as Read Coming to Terms With Climate Fiction What once seemed like a subgenre of science fiction is actually much bigger By Molly Templeton | Published on September 12, 2024 Credit: Elena Mozhvilo [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Elena Mozhvilo [via Unsplash] When I first encountered the label “climate fiction,” in the late 2000s, I hated it. It didn’t help that it was shortened into “cli-fi,” a term that still gives me an ick response that I can’t entirely justify. But beyond that, it seemed unnecessary: Climate fiction, I felt, fit under the umbrella of science fiction. Wasn’t that a big enough umbrella? Wasn’t climate science, you know, science?  A decade and a half later, I’ve slowly come around to the fact that I had it backwards. It’s not that climate fiction should huddle under sci-fi’s umbrella. It’s the other way around. Science fiction is climate fiction. I’ve been reading mostly science fiction this year in order to compile a list of the year’s best SF books. The process has been educational, and fascinating, and at times deeply frustrating; there is simply so much more fantasy than there is SF, at least right now. But there is also a lot of writing being published as literary fiction, by literary imprints and publishing houses, that seems to me that it would, ten years ago, have been published as science fiction. Books that read like realism except for the temperature, the strange flora, the slightly more advanced robots. Stories about the future; stories that might as well take place in the present. Stories deeply concerned with how we’re going to live, and where, and who’s going to get to see the future that is barreling towards us.  (That tricky “us.” These are mostly American and British books, concerned with Western lives and futures. Not all of them. But most of them. This is worth noting, too. A reader is largely limited by what is available to read in one’s language and country.) Some things I read about: Unspecified apocalyptic conditions. A weather event. A future full of only robots. Immortality. Life on the moon. Life on Mars. Spaceships looking for other livable planets. More spaceships looking for other livable planets. Spaceships that found other livable planets so long ago that the details of where they came from have been lost. Time travel to save the planet. Communities living post-water wars. An Earth you can only live on with masks and filters. An Earth being sentimentally re-greened, centuries in the future. Toxic algae. Toxic clouds. Toxic tech. New kinds of environmental exploitation. Life on a gas giant because Earth is uninhabitable. Life in segregated spaceships, presumably because Earth is uninhabitable. A desert Earth, a baking Midwest.  I am not going looking for these elements. These are all details from the books I’ve picked up that were published this year. These are not not all the climate-related settings or plot points, not by a long mile. And this isn’t new: authors have been writing about our changing world for decades. The quantity, though, is a more recent happening. The fact that these books are coming from literary publishers and not just SFF imprints is relatively new. Science fiction, in the form of climate fiction, has escaped the spaces culture has made for it, provided it is packaged and presented properly. One must wear the right clothes to go to the literary fiction ball. I feel like I am saying something both obvious and not, but there is a weird, wary space between people who identify as readers of one genre or another; sometimes we get defensive, and the next day we want to share. Are SFF readers venturing forth to read the climate novels in the other bookstore sections? Are litfic readers recognizing that they’re dipped their toes in genre wells? Does it matter? And why do people keep asking what it’s for? There are a lot of articles about climate fiction, and a lot of them take a sort of educational, slightly activist angle: Climate fiction will show us the way. Climate fiction will make us think about climate differently. Will climate fiction save us? Is climate fiction useful? Is it harmful? Does it make us too despondent to do anything?  Let me rephrase my earlier statement: Climate fiction is just another way of saying fiction. Fiction written now, or in the last few decades, or in this century, or since Frankenstein, which was written in the “Year Without Summer”—however you want to frame it: It’s climate fiction. Lydia Millet wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “To name it as genre is a patronizing act of containment.” (I both agree with this—the basic reality of human lives is not really a genre—and find it frustratingly dismissive about genre. But that is an argument for another time.) Jeff VanderMeer, in Esquire: “‘Cli-fi’ is often interpreted to be a subset of ‘sci-fi,’ and thus it’s expected to contain a speculative element. Yet, in this moment, cocooned uncomfortably within climate crisis, as if trapped within a porcupine turned inside out, the issue is not speculative. It permeates everything and everyone, even those who have not recognized it yet.”  In 2016, in The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh asked—of himself and other writers—why they did not tackle climate change head on in fiction. His exploration of why that might be is dense and elegant and powerful, a masterful statement on (mostly literary) fiction and how it works. He recognizes literary fiction’s “partitioning” of science fiction, observes that literary fiction has been diminished by this division, and describes what was them being labeled climate fiction as a subset of science fiction “made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future.” Five years later, in The Guardian, Ghosh said, “I think that the world has changed us, and the inflection point was 2018.” He cites fires, floods, hurricanes, and Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory. 2018 was six years ago, which means that—given the oft-glacial pace of publishing—we are seeing, now, the arrival of books that may have been influenced by, or bought by publishers in the wake of, the success of The Overstory, which was a literary book from a literary publisher. And outside of the pages of books, too, we are also seeing more of what Ghosh saw in 2018: floods, hurricanes, fires. In Oregon, where I live, we have had a record fire season. Again. It feels like every year is a record we didn’t want to set. And things are much, much worse in so many other places. Do we need to ask what climate fiction is “for,” what it does or accomplishes? It reflects reality. It tells a story we are still learning to tell. Climate change is the water we swim in (or the lack thereof). It affects and informs everything about how we live. Matthew Salesses, in an incredible Literary Hub piece, writes: “If not for climate change, I could roughly predict what kind of racism I will face for the rest of my life, because I have faced the same kind of racism for my entire life so far. What destabilizes that future survivance is precisely the climate.” I had to sit with that statement for a while. All those years ago, when I resisted the idea, the label, of climate fiction, I was wrong. It’s not a kind of science fiction; science fiction is a kind of climate fiction. What once seemed speculative becomes existential. What once might have looked like a distant future, hopefully avoidable, now looms, immediate and pressing. It is everyone’s concern. There is no umbrella big enough.[end-mark] The post Coming to Terms With Climate Fiction appeared first on Reactor.

John Kirby's 'Suckers and Losers' Moment

The mission was a success, but it may have been prohibited by space law.

Otherwise known as shy bowels.

For decades, most who asked have accepted a simple story for how these prized objects form, but the truth may be much more interesting.

It’s been a good year for science, and a pup named Bow.

Do you know how many eggs a woman has? If not, ABC’s Jimmy “non-sequitur” Kimmel believes you are not allowed to be pro-life because on Wednesday’s show, Kimmel and his liberal audience guffawed at self-described pro-lifers not being able to answer questions about female anatomy that they certainly would not be able to answer themselves. Kimmel teed up a man-on-the-street segment by hyping Tuesday night’s debate, “Kamala Harris forcefully defended a woman's right to choose last night, it was very effective, and it got me wondering about how much some of these people who seem to know what's best for women's bodies, how much they actually know about the female anatomy. So, we sent a team deep into the heart of Texas to find out.”     The segment featured 14 individuals, 12 men and two women, and the interviewer began by asking one man, “It's come to my attention a lot of Democrats think that pro-life people don't know anything about the female reproductive system, and I just, kind of, want to prove them wrong. How many eggs does a woman have?” The man replied, “I have no idea,” which was probably the same answer 99 percent of Kimmel’s audience would have given. Kimmel has done man-on-the-street interviews before about female anatomy to mock pro-lifers before, but this time the people interviewed were explicitly labeled pro-life. The problem with such segments is that viewers have no idea what is real or scripted for the sake of a laugh, nor do they see what was left on the cutting room floor because an interviewee gave the correct answer. Additionally, how many eggs a woman also has nothing to do with the ethical question of when life begins. If Jimmy Kimmel Live! ever asks you how many eggs a woman has, you can throw the question back at them by answering it depends on the woman’s age. One clip of correct answers that did make it was when the interviewer put up a diagram of the female reproductive system and asked, “Just identify as many organs as you can, okay? Go.” One man rattled off, “The anus. The vagina. The clitoris,” but he was still laughed at because of the way he pronounced “clitoris” as "cligh-tore-us" so pro-lifers still can’t win even when they debunk the segment’s explicit point. After doing another game of “Woman or IKEA,” the segment concluded with another man being asked, “Have you played pin the tail on the donkey before? Of course you have. This is pin the reproductive system on the woman. Okay, so super easy. You just have to pin the reproductive system on the woman, okay.” The man proceeded to place the reproductive system on the picture upside down, which, assuming there was no made-for-TV-behind the scenes hijinks, says more about that one man than pro-lifers as a whole, but admitting that would undermine Kimmel’s whole point. Here is a transcript for the September 11 show: ABC Jimmy Kimmel Live! 9/11/2024 11:49 PM ET JIMMY KIMMEL: Kamala Harris forcefully defended a woman's right to choose last night, it was very effective, and it got me wondering about how much some of these people who seem to know what's best for women's bodies, how much they actually know about the female anatomy. So, we sent a team deep into the heart of Texas to find out.  INTERVIEWER: Do you consider yourself pro-life or pro-choice? MAN 1: Pro-life. WOMAN 1: 1 Pro-life. MAN 2: Pro-life. MAN 3: I'm pro-life. MAN 4: I think a woman should make her choice before she gets in bed. INTERVIEWER: It's come to my attention a lot of Democrats think that pro-life people don't know anything about the female reproductive system, and I just, kind of, want to prove them wrong. How many eggs does a woman have? MAN 1: I have no idea. INTERVIEWER: What does the C in C-section stand for? MAN 1: Not sure. INTERVIEWER: How many eggs does a woman have? MAN 5: I have no clue. INTERVIEWER: Do you know where she stores her eggs? MAN 5: Uterus, I think. INTERVIEWER: Just identify as many organs as you can, okay? Go. MAN 6: The vagina. MAN 7: I'm assuming this is an anus? I don't know. I don't even know -- is a side view? INTERVIEWER: Well, you got the anus right. MAN 8: The anus. The vagina. The clitoris. INTERVIEWER: The what, now? MAN 8: The clitoris. I don’t know, it’s over here someplace. INTERVIEWER: The fallopian tubes? MAN 9: Uh – INTERVIEWER: Oh. MAN 9: Oh no, I already guessed that. INTERVIEWER: Do you have a girlfriend? MAN 9: I don't. INTERVIEWER: You don't? Wow. Okay. So we're going to play a game we're calling "Woman or IKEA?" I'm going to say a name and you're going to tell me if it's a female reproductive organ or a piece of furniture from IKEA, okay. MAN 10: Okay. INTERVIEWER: Mons pubis. MAN 10: That’s going to be IKEA. INTERVIEWER: Part of the female reproductive system. MAN 10: Oh my word. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Hemnes. MAN 10: I’m going to say that’s a female reproductive system, no— INTERVIEWER: No, that's IKEA. The myometrium. WOMAN: IKEA. INTERVIEWER: Female reproductive system. WOMAN 1: Oh. INTERVIEWER: I know. The kallax. MAN 11: Female. INTERVIEWER: Nope, IKEA shelving unit. MAN 11: Damn it. INTERVIEWER: What about the uvula. MAN 4: Uvula, that’s female. INTERVIEWER: And where is that located on the female? MAN 4: That is, the uvula is below the waist on the female. INTERVIEWER: Actually, you got one in the back of your throat. MAN 4: Oh, that uvula. Uvula, yeah, I'm sorry, I misheard. INTERVIEWER: What did you think I was talking about? The uvula. MAN 1: Oh, yeah, female. INTERVIEWER: And where is that located? MAN 1: Cervix. INTERVIEWER: Mons pubis? WOMAN 2: I don't know what that is. I'm going to guess IKEA. INTERVIEWER: What kind of teacher were you? WOMAN: I taught biology and human anatomy. INTERVIEWER: Have you played pin the tail on the donkey before? Of course you have. This is— MAN 12: Yeah. I can see where this is going already. INTERVIEWER: Pin the reproductive system on the woman. Okay, so super easy. You just have to pin the reproductive system on the woman, okay. MAN 12: All right. INTERVIEWER: Okay? Think about it. And you’re sure you’ve had sex before?

n the lead-up to this week’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the polls showed a dead heat, both nationally and in seven swing states. The 2024 race is, by all measures, the closest presidential race we have seen in our lifetimes. But the usual presidential math applies The person upon whom the race becomes a referendum loses. For Trump, then, the task of the debate was threefold: to hammer the point that Kamala Harris is responsible for the failed policies of the Biden-Harris White House and that he is the agent of change -- a proposition with which the majority of Americans tend to agree; to drive home that Harris is actually dangerously far-left, and that she is lying about her current policy positions to protect them from scrutiny; and that she is incompetent, having blown every single task she has ever been handed. In short, Harris is a cipher; it is Trump’s job to clarify who she is. For Harris, the task was more complicated: she had to avoid all of these points, and she had to somehow go further by providing an effective counter. It wasn’t enough to merely dodge punches; she had to establish that she is different than Joe Biden in some marked way, that she is a moderate who has experienced a change of heart, and that she isn’t the cackler who regularly enjoys a heaping helping of word salad. And for the moderators, the task was to help Kamala Harris achieve all of these things. They certainly did their best. David Muir and Linsey Davis turned in the most discreditable job of moderation in presidential history. They repeatedly (and wrongly) fact-checked Trump four times, without ever calling Harris on a single one of her lies. They asked Trump follow-ups and demanded clarification while allowing Harris to skate on her bumper sticker platitudes. They structured their questions to elicit prepared responses from Harris, while demanding that Trump forgo obvious responses to Harris’ lies. It worked. It threw Trump off of his game. Distracted by the three-on-one pile-on, eager to defend himself from every charge and to engage in fisticuffs over his remarks and record, Trump forgot his reason for being there: to target Harris. Instead, he talked about Jan. 6 and the election of 2020 and his record on COVID and his proposals on tariffs and his negotiations with the Taliban. Harris, meanwhile, appeared relatively cool and collected; she dodged nearly every question, with the help of her Praetorian Guard. But there’s a problem: Because both Harris and the media were so intent on dragging Trump down, they forgot that Harris needs to do more than label Trump; she needs to redefine herself. She didn’t do that at all during the debate. Perhaps some Americans came away from the debate more quiescent about her incoherence. But none will come away satisfied that she represents a change in the direction of the country. None will be assuaged that she is a moderate unifier. That’s because she isn’t. Yes, she did better than Trump did, with the help of her loyal apparatchiks. But she didn’t close the deal. Perhaps that’s because she can’t close the deal. The lies are just too big for Americans to swallow. In the end, she is only the nominee because she is Joe Biden’s vice president; she has never won a single primary vote as a candidate. In the end, she is only on the debate stage because of the Biden-Harris administration, in which she claims a critical role. In the end, it is Harris who ran as a Bernie Sanders socialist in 2019, and it is Harris who says that her values haven’t changed. Americans aren’t stupid. And they still have more questions about Harris than about Trump. Trump still has two months to remind Americans to ask those questions.