(Source: allisonweiss)
(Source: botherjoseph)
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out-patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. “Why, he’s hardly taller than my eight-year-old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face … lopsided from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ‘til morning.”
He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no success. No one seemed to have a room. “I guess it’s my face … I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments…”
For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me. “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.”
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. “No thank you. I have plenty.” And he held up a brown paper bag.
When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him for a few minutes. It didn’t take long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
He didn’t tell it by way of complaint. In fact, every other sentence was preface with a thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch. He refused breakfast. But just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favor, he said, “Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair.”
He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.”
I told him he was welcome to come again.
On his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen. He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they’d be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. and I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.
During the years he came to stay overnight with us, there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden. Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery … fish and oysters packed in a box with fresh young spinach or kale … every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly precious.
When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!”
Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have known him, perhaps their illness’ would have been easier to bear. I know our family will always be grateful to have known him. From him, we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.
Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all … a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket.
I thought to myself, “If this were my plant, I’d put it in the loveliest container I had!” My friend changed my mind.
“I ran short of pots,” she explained,” and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting out in this old pail. It’s just for a little while, until I can put it out in the garden.”
She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining such a scene in heaven. “Here’s an especially beautiful one,” God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in this small body.”
All this happened long ago … and now, in God’s garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.
permalink
Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
permalink
What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?
by Carina SantosScream 2 (1997)
D: Wes Craven
C: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox, Jamie Kennedy, Liev Schreiber, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jerry O’ConnellScream 2 is the sequel to the widely popular Scream. Now in college, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is set on escaping her past. However, her survival of the Woodsboro murders has been turned into material for a horror franchise called Stab (where she is hilariously portrayed by Tori Spelling). Stab seems to have inspired a new incarnation of the mass murderer “Ghostface,” and Sidney is once again in the middle of things. Dewey Riley (David Arquette) leaves Woodsboro in the hopes of protecting Sidney. Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), once reporter and now best-selling author of “The Woodsboro Murders,” upon which Stab is based, tries once again to get to the bottom of things.
Scream 2 opens with a sneak preview of Stab, where Jada Pinkett plays Maureen, a girl reluctant to see “a dumb ass white movie about some dumb ass white girls getting their white asses cut the fuck up.” Before we know it, the adaptation of the Woodsboro murders is being played before a sea of Ghostfaces, as masks were given out by the cinema. This sequence encapsulates the magic of Scream: it’s all fun and games until someone gets gutted. Unfortunately, Scream 2 doesn’t really have much more of these up its sleeve.
Jamie Kennedy reprises his role as Randy Meeks, the resident film geek who also survived the Woodsboro murders. Randy’s obsessive outlining of sequel conventions (and ticking these off as they happen in real life) was another reminder of what Scream was, apart from the gore—self-aware, a little absurd, and frightfully funny. Scream, while letting the audience in on everything, still remained a murder mystery. Scream 2 teases but rarely delivers.
Full of generic horror tropes, where each conventional plot twist is debunked only to introduce yet another typical horror movie move, Scream 2 plays a game of “Guess how many people can die in 120 minutes” instead of focusing on “Whodunnit?” Even Scooby-Doo knows this is the way to go, to get a truly memorable reaction.
In the end, there are more red herrings than real clues, and there is never really any actual provlem solving. What we get is an uneven storyline, a mile-high body count, and a handful of good scares here and there.
It does make for great material for media studies enthusiasts and horror fans, though.
A gem of a scene that I personally enjoyed is when Cici Cooper (Sarah Michelle Gellar) meets the masked murderer. Who knew Gellar, who at the time of Scream 2’s release was playing Buffy Summers, could play the victim, too? This is partly why I love the Scream franchise: it’s so good at blurring the lines between what we are familiar with as real (SMG as The Chosen One) and what we perceive to be fiction (Cici Cooper, hapless victim).
Perhaps it was the pressure of following a stunning horror movie that made Scream 2 lackluster when held up next to its older brother. While the movie wasn’t bad itself—it is a pretty good scary movie—the script and story shouldn’t have been sacrificed for a few cheap scares and twists. I don’t think it did so badly, though, as there are two more Scream sequels to come.
Ultimately, Scream 2 is successful in many ways, being part of a franchise that is so deeply ingrained in everyone’s pop culture consciousness. It just isn’t as good a story as the first one.
I like it. :)) scary huh :))
COLUMN / SOLEMN A man stood on a supporting column for the Jiaxing-Shaoxing Bridge in Haining, Zhejiang Province, China, Tuesday. Builders claim it will be the world’s longest multispan, cable-stayed bridge when it is completed. (Photo: AP via the Wall Street Journal)
Ghost In The Woods
by Don Jaucian and Jansen MusicoLiberacion (2011)
D: Adolf Alix Jr.
S: Jacky Woo, Mercedes CabralThere is an air of mystique that wraps itself around stories passed on through word of mouth that makes Philippine folklore so rich and magical. Concealed within the shadows of the countryside, these accounts, myths, and ghost stories never fail to mystify any ear with a penchant for such things. Adolf Alix Jr.’s Liberacion is such a tale. It is a ghost story seemingly plucked out from an era that sparked an abundance of them.
Set at the very end of the Japanese occupation, the film follows a group of tortured soldiers searching for truth and solace in a foreign land. A Japanese soldier, Makoto (Jacky Woo), leads what’s left of his team through a long and winding tunnel, their escape route leading out to the shrouded expanse of the woods.
In the beginning there is the slow and teasing drip of water inside the cave. Then, there is the darkness, occasionally illuminated by the small glow of their lamps. The soldiers almost blindly follow their leader into whatever end, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. From there, they’re spit out into the wilderness and are left to endure battles more gruesome than what they were asked to fight.
Alix’s forest is a hell of trees and rocks where tired souls are further tortured. The troop’s journey is exhausting, a slow drag made more agonizing by the jittery unsureness of the space and silence around them than by the hardships inflicted by man and nature. Minutes pass and we witness one man’s slow descent to madness, not in the pyscho-horror sense of the word but in an unnervingly fatalistic one. Makoto treads the thin line between reality and fantasy as he burrows in his conviction and dedication to his duty as a defender of his country, refusing to acknowledge the fact that Japan has been defeated in the second World War until his own general hands him the retreat order.
The line blurs as the years wear on, etching lines on his face and piling an even heavier burden in his soul. But with the appearance of an almost nymph-like lady of the forest (Mercedes Cabral), Liberacion strangely turns towards the fantastic—a jungle fever dream that blends history and the history we know through backyard tales of old, tellingly depicting our impulses, perceptions, and desires.
cooooool :))
(Source: waterfiction)
