"One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, with each new place less stimulating than the last. When the children acted out, Chuck spared not the rod. (He was also suspected of being closeted: in the early Sixties, a family friend claimed to have seen him cruising in a public restroom.) For her part, Bea had already had a baby with her stepbrother when she was fifteen; her parents covered it up by claiming the child as their own. She had a weakness for amphetamines, often chain-smoked in front of the television, and was twice committed to mental hospitals. Robert once found a suicide note she’d left in the family car. His older brother Charles went further than that; he tried to kill himself by guzzling furniture polish when he was in his late twenties. Charles got beat up a lot in high school and liked to smash bottles and slash tires; he never moved away from home and spent his last decades heavily medicated, before taking his own life in 1992. Sandra, one of two sisters, married a close friend of Robert’s named Marty; when she became pregnant, she supposedly told Marty, in Nadel’s words, that “she’d fucked everyone, including the pizza delivery boy, and wanted a divorce.” (Robert experienced his first orgasm while wrestling Sandra when they were teenagers.) Carol, the other sister, seems to have led a comparatively quiet life and keeps to herself. Finally there’s Maxon, the youngest brother, an epileptic who refused to treat his seizures. When he wasn’t assaulting women, he embraced asceticism. “Every six weeks since the late 1970s,” Nadel writes, “he has passed a twenty-nine-foot strip of cotton through his gastrointestinal system, in the mouth and out the anus, a cleansing that takes about a week to complete.”
"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."
Sami Blood is set in Sweden in the 1930s and concerns a 14-year-old girl who experiences prejudice at a nomad school for Sami children, and decides to escape her town and disavow her Sami heritage.
The film premiered at the 73rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in the Venice Days section, in which it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label Award and the Fedeora Award for Best Debut Director.
Reposted from 2018, because today I rewatched the movie with new eyes, after having discovered that the "Fin-" part of my Finseth family name indicates that some ancestor had been from the Sami ethnic group.
The movie is a bit dark because it examines prejudices the southern (Uppsala) Swedes had (1930s) against the subarctic Samis - prejudices that starkly resemble ones the Europeans in North America had against the Native peoples there. The acting was superb - especially by the lead - Lene Cecilia Sparrok - who is a Norwegian Southern Sami reindeer herder/actress.
"We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know we know they are lying.
We know they know we know they are lying.But they are still lying."
"In this case, surgical resection was performed for cosmesis. Histopathological assessment showed amorphous eosinophilic deposits, positive Congo red staining, and apple-green birefringence under polarized light. The specimen also stained positive for thioflavin T under fluorescence."
Chana Joffe-Walt:"One of the hardest places to see through chaos in the middle of a war-- fog of war, all that. This is especially true for the war in Gaza. There is very limited information moving in and out of Gaza. Israel has banned international press from entering the strip for nearly 18 months, except for a few brief trips, accompanied by and under the control of the Israeli military. One rare outside group has gotten a view on the ground of Gaza-- medical workers. Since the start of the war, over 100 American doctors and nurses have traveled to Gaza, treated patients there for weeks at a time, and come back out. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah talked to a dozen of them who volunteered there...Ike Sriskandarajah:"Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from the US-- he's also volunteered as a doctor in the war in Ukraine and with Palestinians in the West Bank. He's closely studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though his family is from a small ethnic minority in what is now Pakistan.Feroze Sidhwa:"The nurse that was showing us around didn't really speak English very well, and she just pointed at these two kids, and just pointed at her head, and said, shot, shot. There were four kids in the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head. I just thought that that was unbelievable. And I just assumed that she was just wrong. I didn't think she was lying, but she was just incorrect. That probably was a shrapnel injury or something like that. But then, I looked at these kids, and they didn't have any other evidence of an explosive injury. And then we pulled up their CT scans, and sure enough, it did look like they had been shot in the head. And then we went on and found two more kids also shot in the head in the other ICUs.Ike Sriskandarajah:"Feroze works at a hospital near Stockton, California, which has higher rates of violent crime than most of the country.Feroze Sidhwa:"But to see four kids with gunshot wounds to the head already admitted to the hospital when I get there, it certainly struck me as being very unusual...Feroze Sidhwa:And what I wrote down is that I was going through the ICU, and I found an eight-year-old girl shot in the head overnight. Her pupils are fixed and dilated. It's a transcranial gunshot wound, definitely non-survivable...Feroze Sidhwa:Yeah, the bullet didn't stop. And then, let's see, the next day. So the next day, the eight-year-old girl had died, and in the same bed is a 14-year-old boy shot in the right chest and the head.The next day, I said, I went through the ICU afterwards. The 14-year-old boy turns out to be 12 when his family arrived. So then, let's see, two days later, he's been replaced by a 13-year-old boy shot in the head. I wrote, he'll also die.So then on that same day, I wrote, I took care of a two-year-old girl who was brought to the ED after being shot in the head. She arrived with bilateral fixed and dilated pupils, also a non-survivable brain injury. We then had a mass casualty event a few minutes later...Ike Sriskandarajah:At the same time that Feroze was starting to document this, Mark, working with his patients-- he was seeing the same thing. He vividly remembered the day he saw two kids brought in who had both been shot in the head and the chest.Mark Perlmutter:One of the kids was there with a family member. I ripped up his shirt, and there was a bullet entry wound right over the heart. And then I picked up the dressings on his forehead, and a second bullet went in right in front of his left ear hole, in front of his ear and out of his neck.Ike Sriskandarajah:Oh, my god. What was the kid doing when this happened?Mark Perlmutter:Walking with their adult to get water.Ike Sriskandarajah:Was there a street battle happening?Mark Perlmutter:I didn't ask if there was a street battle going on, but it happened twice in the same day.Ike Sriskandarajah:Could you say the second time?Mark Perlmutter:Yeah, right next to that kid was another kid who got shot in the head and the chest. And that child had no adult with him, so I couldn't get a story. It's hard to see it.Ike Sriskandarajah:These weren't kids injured by collapsing buildings. They were kids who'd been shot-- direct gunshot wounds into 12-year-olds, eight-year-olds, even toddlers...Ike Sriskandarajah:13 children in 14 days. Even with all the other traumatic injuries and deaths they saw, the kids who were shot really stuck with Mark. It was haunting him.Mark Perlmutter:Early on, I thought it was just an isolated jerk carrying out, because every army has jerks. War changes people, and so you can absolutely have rogue people behaving inappropriately...Adam Hamawy:When I was in Iraq, there were civilians that were injured. There were children that were injured. And that's called incidental, collateral damage, all the terms that we use to cleanly justify what's happening. But the scale was, I mean, not even-- not even close to this.I mean, I probably took care of, like, five, six children the whole time I was in Iraq, and I wasn't there for three weeks. I was there for eight months. I mean, it didn't look-- it didn't appear that they were intentional targets. Those you could really say that they were wrong place, wrong time.I didn't see targeted gunshots to little kids that were five, six years old or 10, 15 years old. In fact, I mean, I'm thinking back. I mean, I don't think I saw a gunshot wound to a kid at all when I was there...Adam Hamawy:These are little children that are being shot, and these aren't stray bullets. These are aimed. They're precise. So a stray bullet will explain one or two of them. It's not going to explain the string of precise, targeted shootings that are being done on children since October.Ike Sriskandarajah:The medical worker I spoke with who spent the most time in Gaza also saw the most kids shot-- 50. She showed me a picture she took of a scan of a five or six-year-old's skull. There's a bullet in the middle of it. She was told this child was playing with their friends when an armed quadcopter drone came overhead and shot the child...Ike Sriskandarajah:Feroze reached out to as many American medical workers as he could-- doctors, nurses, paramedics. He created a survey to send out and compiled all the answers. The results stunned him.Feroze Sidhwa:Almost everybody had the exact same experience. Almost universally, they said the same thing, which I really was surprised by.Ike Sriskandarajah:Out of the 53 American medical workers surveyed who did emergency care for children in Gaza, 44 said they saw kids shot in the head or chest...Ike Sriskandarajah"Feroze published an op ed in the New York Times with the results of the survey. A group of the doctors wrote two letters to then President Biden outlining what they saw. Feroze thought that would mean two things-- they'd get a call from the White House and there'd be an investigation...Ike Sriskandarajah:I talked with three people who worked at the US State Department and reviewed allegations like this, including the person who, until recently, was the Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, a position that used to be called the War Crimes Ambassador. They all agreed the doctors' report sounded credible and significant enough to investigate.Each of them said the next step should be asking Israel for answers. One, who is involved in vetting US weapons transfers, told me if this had been another country other than Israel, this is what would have happened...So we asked the Israel Defense Forces how they explained the reports from American medical workers. They declined both my interview requests, but sent a statement, saying, "The IDF does not target minors and takes extensive measures to prevent harm to civilians, including children. The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm and operates in full compliance with international legal obligations. For security reasons, we cannot elaborate on operational policies."
“One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”“Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”
"Thanks to your support, WCK has offloaded 49 trucks of essential food supplies at the Kerem Shalom crossing after more than 80 days of border closures. This milestone brings us closer to resuming meal production in Gaza, where our operations had been paused after serving over 130 million meals and 26 million loaves of bread. While awaiting approvals for additional deliveries, our field teams remain ready to restart operations, with trucks loaded, fuel secured, and kitchen systems prepped. In the meantime, we’ve distributed over 2 million liters of clean drinking water, reaching 170,000 liters in a single day, bringing hope and dignity to communities in need. Thank you for standing with us to help nourish those facing unimaginable hardship."
