A heart pump no bigger than a fountain pen has just been approved by the FDA for use in children, having already saved adult lives in a revolutionary way. Cardiologists don’t even need to open a chest cavity to install the Impella 5.5, the world’s smallest heart pump that can keep a heart going during […] The post World’s Smallest Heart Pump ‘A Game-changer’ in Keeping Failing Hearts Going Without Major Surgery appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Reading the Weird Martha has two… — Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “Mommy” By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on February 5, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “Mommy,” first published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales. You can find it in Mike Ashley’s Weird Sisters: Tales from the Queens of the Pulp Era. Spoilers ahead! Mrs. Ellison is a well-to-do childless widow looking to adopt “a wonderful little daughter.” Now, standing in the Acipco County Orphanage yard, she has plenty of choices. On the seesaw is a dark-haired “lovely cherub.” On the swingset is a laughing brown-eyed girl who reminds Ellison of herself. How’s she to make a decision that will change her life and a child’s forever? It feels “inhuman” to be “shopping for a daughter.” If only the child herself had the vision to select her adopter. A tug makes Ellison look down at a thin girl with “penetrating blue eyes” too large for her “sallow, sensitive face.” Ellison’s never seen a more unattractive child, and yet the girl’s smile is sweet and strange, “full of wistfulness and yet the paradox of a quiet knowledge.” A timid yet compelling voice asks: “Are you the lady my mommy sent for me?” Ellison asks if the girl’s mommy has “gone to Heaven.” No, the girl answers. Her mommy talks to her every night. The matron arrives and sends the girl—Martha—away. Her impatient tone surprises Ellison, who watches other children shying away from the girl. Matron explains that Martha’s their “problem child.” A misfit, Ellison supposes. Understandably so if the mother visits but can’t take Martha home. But no: Martha’s mother died the previous year. Shocked by her loss, Martha’s convinced that her mother’s always beside her, and is surprised others can’t see her. Truth be told, strange things happen around Martha. Her mother, a “dance-hall hostess,” bore Martha out of wedlock. The birth woke “a fierce maternal instinct.” Mother took a mill job, where conditions aggravated her tuberculosis; though she “fought death with a stubborn will that prolonged her life by months,” she finally had to tell Martha she was casting aside her sick body so she could take better care of her. Hence the fixation. Needled by Ellison’s skepticism, the matron supplies details. Once, an actress arranged to adopt Martha. Martha protested that Mommy hadn’t sent that lady. Last minute, the actress backed out. She’d broken her nose in a fall, leaving her future income uncertain. It turned out that she’d meant to adopt Martha as a publicity stunt, to divert attention from a scandal. Another time, the orphanage’s meager amusement fund had to exclude ten children from attending a circus. Martha, one of the ten, so loudly insisted that Mommy would pay the extra children’s way that the matron reluctantly gave in. As she was buying tickets, a bundle of cash appeared underfoot—just enough to cover the extra children! Then, last fall, Martha swallowed a safety pin. An ice storm prevented getting help, but a bus carrying convention-going physicians broke down in front of the orphanage, and an EENT specialist soon had that safety pin out. Finally, Martha’s always finding pennies, candy, toys, which she says Mommy leads her to. No wonder the other orphans believe Martha’s attended by a ghost! And who’ll want to adopt a “crazy child”? Ellison wants her, that’s who. What Martha needs to break her delusion is an affectionate home. Though she hopes Ellison won’t regret her sudden decision, the matron agrees to speed the necessary formalities. Ellison then goes to embrace the solitary Martha. Martha feels like “a small bony doll” in her arms. Like a challenge. When Ellison tells Martha she’s to call her Mommy from now on, the girl gravely says she will, if Mommy says it’s all right. Oh, and she so hopes Ellison will be the one Mommy has picked! Ellison leaves, uncertain whether she’s “won the first match” with her new daughter. A few days later, she dismisses her chauffeur to drive Martha home herself. She’s come with a new silk dress and a terrier puppy who delights Martha, and yet Ellison seethes at the thought of the “selfish hysterical woman” who gave that damaging death-bed promise. She imagines Martha’s first mother sitting between her and Martha in the car. Yet, though she does sense an “alien presence,” it feels like it sits on Martha’s other side, guarding the child in that direction while Ellison guards her in the other. What a strange, superstitious image. She gives Martha a one-armed hug. Martha snuggles into it, “aglow with happiness,” but she sours the mood by telling Ellison how Mommy said she’d picked Ellison a long time ago. Ellison draws back, stung, and says sternly that Martha must stop pretending Mommy hasn’t gone to Heaven! Martha screams, but not at the ultimatum. Ellison looks up to see a driverless gas truck barreling down the narrow hill street directly at them. There’s no room to pull out of the way. She urges Martha to jump out of the car and run, but Martha goes on whispering for Mommy to make the truck stop. As Ellison struggles to drag Martha from the doomed vehicle, the runaway truck lurches sideways, gears stripping, and halts just five feet from them. People rush over, including the truck’s driver. He was sure the truck was braked, but if a packing case hadn’t knocked the gear-shift into reverse at the last minute— Ellison can only nod. She looks from the truck to Martha, whose strange quiet smile has amazed the onlookers. After a moment, Ellison whispers, “Let you and I and… and Mommy go along home.” The Degenerate Dutch: Mrs. Ellison thinks of Mommy as a “selfish hysterical woman,” and matron is at pains to talk about her scandalous life prior to Martha’s birth. Madness Takes Its Toll: The adults really, really don’t want Martha to be right about Mommy. Her mind has been tortured beyond endurance, resulting in a positive fixation. She’s a “crazy child”—why would anyone want her when there are “so many normal ones to be had”? Anne’s Commentary Mary Elizabeth Counselman published widely during the decades when fiction and poetry were standard features of general interest magazines—her work appeared not only in genre mags like Weird Tales but in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. I wonder what the readers of LHJ and GH would have made of “Mommy.” The title is innocuous enough, appropriate for an upbeat, nostalgic, even inspirational story. The introductory note to “Mommy” in the Weird Sisters anthology describes it as “moving” and “atmospheric.” “Moving” and “atmospheric” are adjectives that can cut more than one way, as (for me) does the story itself. The same note remarks that Counselman’s 1942 story, “Parasite Mansion,” got wider recognition after being adapted for Boris Karloff’s Thriller. Alan Warren’s series guide, This is a Thriller, includes a quote from Counselman about her horror writing philosophy:  “The Hallowe’en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies. My eerie shades bubble with an irrepressible sense of humour, ready to laugh with (never at) those earth-bound mortals whose fears they once shared.” “Mommy” may not recall HPL or Klarkash-Ton, but there are more facets to Counselman’s creed than are expressed in the paragraph above. Martha’s spectral Mommy is “eerie,” but she’s hardly bubbly, humorous, or sympathetic to the foibles and fears of the living. Martha’s not the one with the pathological fixation. Instead she’s the object of a “maternal instinct” so fierce it has burst the bonds of death. In her life as a dance-hall hostess and millworker, Mommy was the victim. As a ghost, Mommy can be the victimizer, only in the sacred cause of motherhood. Can you blame the tigress for defending her cubs, whether the perceived threat is a predator or an ecotourist bumbling into her den? Put blame aside, the predator deprived of a meal or the ecotourist of a limb needn’t be happy about it. Mommy’s routine actions on Martha’s behalf are benign. She steers the girl to small change and treats. She arranges for Martha and the other left-out children to attend a circus, while sparing the matron unwarranted expenditure. She reroutes a bus of MD’s to the orphanage so that the applicable specialist can pluck a safety pin from Martha’s throat. She chats with Martha in the night and promises to pick the right adoptive mother for her. Where’s the harm in any of this? The harm is in the accumulation of small uncanny events which make the staff and other orphans afraid of Martha, leaving her suspected, resented, isolated, shunned. A larger uncanny event is the accident that makes Martha’s actress adopter cry off. The matron initially regrets Martha’s lost opportunity. Then she learns that the actress only wanted to adopt Martha as a publicity stunt to overshadow her involvement in a looming scandal. Martha’s loss was a lucky escape, but certain aspects of the affair are unnervingly macabre. Why did Martha fight going to the actress and scream that Mommy hadn’t picked her for Martha’s new mother? How weird that the actress took a fall downstairs the morning the adoption would have been finalized, not to break a leg or neck but her nose—a greater calamity for a woman whose career depended on her looks. If Martha’s Mommy was responsible for the fall, wouldn’t that make Mommy seem outright vindictive as well as protective? The most spectacular of Mommy’s “saves” is her rescue of Martha, and Ellison, from the runaway truck. Or is this instead her most sinister intervention? Mrs. Ellison has been skeptical about Mommy’s existence and intends to cure Martha of her delusion. Even so, she herself visualizes “Mommy” as a ghost to be slain; driving Martha home, she seethes with resentment towards the girl’s birth mother. The metaphoric ghost grows in her own mind toward supernatural reality, a wraith she must exorcise from both her and Martha. But the alien presence she senses in the car sits not like a barrier between her and Martha, but on Martha’s other side, an allied guardian. Ellison rejects this impression, and when Martha speaks of Mommy choosing Ellison all along, she commands Martha to forget her “nonsense” about Mommy being real. Is it coincidence or consequence that in the next moment the two see the runaway truck? I lean toward consequence—having just extended an olive branch to Ellison, Mommy’s angered by its rejection and decides Ellison needs a harsher lesson. Ever the adept poltergeist, Mommy releases the truck’s brakes. Moments later, when Ellison proves worthy by trying to get Martha to safety before herself, Mommy diverts the truck. Martha knew Mommy would save them, hence her calmness in the face of certain squashing. Hence her “strange, quiet smile” after the near-miss. She believes Mommy’s earned Ellison’s belief. Sure enough, Ellison’s first words post-scare—post-warning?—is to propose that she and Martha and Mommy go home. Together. I hope this new extended family will be a happy one for all, including the miraculously yap-free puppy. Maybe it can be, too, as long as Ellison remembers that Martha does have two Mommies, and that one of them can be either a fierce ally or a fiercer opponent. It’s New-Mommy’s choice. Ruthanna’s Commentary With this week’s selection, “surprisingly wholesome weirdness” reaches subgenre status for our column. The twins in “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery” are dangerous, but like any tantrum-thrower really just need firm parental understanding. Then there’s the gallant limb-returning narrator of “The Mummy’s Foot,” and said foot’s grateful recipient. And now a mostly-benevolent guardian ghost, and a story where the scariest thing is 1930s adoption norms. Which are, admittedly, pretty scary. I’ve also recently read Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear, the latest in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. That book primed me to raise my eyebrows hard at adoptive parents too busy with their “virtuous rescuer” scripts to actually notice the kids they’ve got, or upset when kids don’t gratefully comply with said scripts. Thus, I was fully prepared for Mrs. Ellison to pay for her hubris—and for her insistence that she was Martha’s only mother. It would hardly be a surprising fate, for someone who expects a recent orphan to be instantly all hugs. But of course, this is a time when that attitude was normal—where even acknowledging adoption at all was often worth a side-eye, let alone acknowledging any valid role for birth parents in a kid’s life. It was a time not only of closed adoptions and lying to kids about your genetic relationship, but of second husbands throwing stepkids out on the street as “another man’s children.” The idea that a kid might have two moms and no dad was beyond the pale. One of the moms being dead does not ease the concept. As someone genetically unrelated to my kids—a childless cat lady by some standards, despite being up late last night snuggling an anxious child with a migraine—I take this kind of thing personally. I give Doyleist kudos, therefore, to Counselman for favoring of this non-traditional family arrangement, and Watsonian ones to Mrs. Ellison for getting her head out of a certain orifice. Even if it took a near-death experience to force the issue. I’m not the only one who thought for a minute there that Dead Mom wanted both New Mom and Martha to join her in the afterlife, right? But no, she just wanted to make a firm disciplinary point. We can all be glad that she shares powers but not moral tendencies with a certain wendigo.  The near-accident is, in fact, the only really frightening thing in the story. The matron is frightened by plenty of other things, but chiefly seems to find the mere idea of the supernatural Not Okay. She’s at equal pains to warn Mrs. Ellison that she’s dealing with a ghost who buys children circus tickets, and to claim that she doesn’t believe in any such thing. On the one hand, the inexplicable intrudes itself into ordinary life, eek. On the other hand, think of the number of maternal ghosts who’d have pushed another kid down the stairs so Martha could take their place, or released a lion to take bloody vengeance on the “luckier” kids. Such a ghost might well stand between Martha and a new mortal parent “like an invisible wall,” or leave marks “that time could not erase.” But really, in this case, negotiation seems very possible. Especially if successful compromise comes with circus tickets and never having to wait for a doctor’s appointment. Closer… closer… next week, join us for Chapters 49-51 of Pet Sematary.[end-mark] The post Martha has two… — Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “Mommy” appeared first on Reactor.

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  Have you noticed a pattern among mean girls in the media and “feminists” whose feminism stops short for conservative women? Let’s just say, the bitter shrews who attack the looks and accomplishments of young women supporting President Donald Trump are no beauty queens. Typically, it’s the most odious looking creatures that have the most to say.  Take the squawking lunch table of outgrown mean girls on The View, for example. Those ladies look like someone dumped sacks of potatoes in nylons before smearing on lipstick, but they have the confidence to throw darts at Trump White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, a mother and the youngest female to take on the role. She has achieved more within the very first years of her adult life than what Whoopie Goldberg could ever achieve.  There’s a Yiddish word that describes Goldberg and her jealous ilk perfectly. Mieskeit: A repulsive-looking person. But what typically distinguishes a mieskeit from other uglies, is the miserably bitter attitude that comes with it.  In fact, Marxism is based on the woes of a mieskeit. You can't encapsulate the destructive ideology’s woke manifestation any better than through the pettiness of a jealous, miserable shrew.  Grab a front row seat to the ugly pageant, starring the media’s mieskeit in my latest episode of “Woke of the Weak.”  

Reacting Wednesday on NBC’s Today to President Trump’s bombshell proposition Tuesday that the United States should take over the Gaza Strip to make it the Riviera of the Middle East, chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel decried this as having elicited “shock and horror” from Middle East leaders and argued a Trump administration rebuilding the terrorist state “would be the — tantamount to ethnic cleansing in the region because many Palestinians don’t want to go.” Engel told co-host Savannah Guthrie that he had “been speaking, Savannah, since this announcement came from President Trump with powerful leaders in the region, members of royal families and their — the universal reaction was shock and horror.”     “People don’t believe this is feasible. They’re not sure if Trump is serious, but they believe that this should not happen, that it would be destabilizing, that it would be the — tantamount to ethnic cleansing in the region because many Palestinians don’t want to go. The neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan, don’t want to take them in,” he added in unsurprisingly hot rhetoric given someone with a long history covering for the Palestinians. Engel further huffed that “in theory, if this were to go ahead, the U.S. military going in there and removing people with — with a barrel of a gun and putting them on some sort of busses and trains and sending them into a countries where they don’t want to go and countries where they’re not welcome.” He conceded the “simplistic argument” was that Gaza has “been destroyed” and there’s “two million people living there without basic services, so why wouldn’t they want to go someplace elsewhere they could have a better life and create an opportunity to rebuild the — the territory[.]” From there, however, he pivoted back to disgust: But the question is President Trump talks about making this a Riviera — a riviera in the Middle East for whom? For Palestinians or for Israelis? Palestinians certainly believe if there is going to be any kind of construction there under Trump’s perspective. it would be for the Israelis and that the Palestinians would be displaced and never be allowed to return to their homes or their homeland. Asked by co-host Craig Melvin what a U.S. intervention would look like, Engel responded Gaza would see “a gorilla war because some Palestinians could be incentivized no doubt that — when they go back to their homes and that is happening right now, Palestinians are moving from the southern parts of the Gaza Strip to the north...finding very little left.” “[Y]ou’d have American troops occupying potentially for a long term one of the most problematic places in the entire Middle East and for administration and for a President who said that he wants to get out of foreign wars, this would certainly be a very potentially violent entanglement,” he concluded. To see the relevant NBC transcript from February 5, click “expand.” NBC’s Today February 5, 2025 7:06 a.m. Eastern [ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: International Reaction to Trump’s Gaza Plan] SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Lots to chew on here. Let’s get to NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel. He, of course, has covered this region for — for decades. Lived there as well. Richard, let’s start with the — the reaction that’s coming in. We’ve already heard from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. How are world leaders, particularly in the Middle East, reacting? RICHARD ENGEL: So, I’ve been speaking, Savannah, since this announcement came from President Trump with powerful leaders in the region, members of royal families and their — the universal reaction was shock and horror. People don’t believe this is feasible. They’re not sure if Trump is serious, but they believe that this should not happen, that it would be destabilizing, that it would be the — tantamount to ethnic cleansing in the region because many Palestinians don’t want to go. The neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan, don’t want to take them in. So, that would mean, in theory, if this were to go ahead, the U.S. military going in there and removing people with — with a barrel of a gun and putting them on some sort of busses and trains and sending them into a countries where they don’t want to go and countries where they’re not welcome. There’s a very simplistic argument that could be made that sure, it makes a lot of sense. You’ve got an area that’s been destroyed. You have two million people living there without basic services, so why wouldn’t they want to go someplace elsewhere they could have a better life and create an opportunity to rebuild the — the territory? But the question is President Trump talks about making this a Riviera — a riviera in the Middle East for whom? For Palestinians or for Israelis? Palestinians certainly believe if there is going to be any kind of construction there under Trump’s perspective. it would be for the Israelis and that the Palestinians would be displaced and never be allowed to return to their homes or their homeland. CRAIG MELVIN: Richard, this idea that the President floated yesterday that he’s not ruling out the possibility of sending troops to the region, and we heard a number of lawmakers seem pretty dismissive of that. What would that look like, Richard, and what — what could the potential fall-out of U.S. troops being in that part of the world — what would that fall-out look like as well? [ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: Trump Says U.S. Will “Take Over” Gaza] ENGEL: The U.S. would be entering into a gorilla war because some Palestinians could be incentivized no doubt that — when they go back to their homes. And that is happening right now, Palestinians are moving from the southern parts of the Gaza Strip to the north. They’re finding very little left. They’re seeing tremendous amounts of damage, so some Palestinians probably could be encouraged to leave, but many others would not. Hamas has already said it won’t leave. Other factions would certainly emerge, so you’d have American troops occupying potentially for a long term one of the most problematic places in the entire Middle East and for administration and for a President who said that he wants to get out of foreign wars, this would certainly be a very potentially violent entanglement. GUTHRIE: Alright Richard, we’ll continue to follow it. Thank you for your analysis. Appreciate that.

Amish bread is yeast bread, which the Amish call old-fashioned church bread. You may also want to try this delicious Cheddar Bay Biscuit Bread! It’s perfect addition to just about any dinner. ❤️WHY WE LOVE THIS RECIPE This old-fashioned Amish bread is the type of bread usually served at church meals.  This bread is excellent...