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A Milky College Encounter A college science project causes an erotic milky mess. By Aester - Listen to the podcast at Steamy Stories. It was the last day of the biology 101 project. With Alice and I having missed the first lesson we had to finish up the project while the rest of the class started the regular lessons again. As we walked through the hallway, to the independent study area, I walked slightly behind her, so I could steal glances at her magnificent ass. I really had hit the jackpot with this project; by a stroke of luck we were both not present for the first lesson, which meant we got paired up automatically as the only remaining college freshman students. I was supposed to be at the state university, but the new concussion protocols disqualified me. I was still trying to get used to not being the star athlete on campus. Now I had to rely on my brain for my future success in life. Normally I would never get the chance to do a group assignment with her. Even though we got along pretty nicely, she is the center of attention, which meant she was always preoccupied, or engaged with other people. Alice is basically the perfect girl. She's from another suburb on the other side of the metropolitan area from my high school.  The first thing anyone would notice about her is her body. She has probably the best apple bottom in the school, which she usually has on display, in her tight jeans. She has wide feminine hips that flow into a small, perfectly flat waist. Her ass sways gracefully through the halls of the community college. Yet this waist is rarely admired as it is obscured by her massive chest. Her boobs are the most implausible part about her. They are the size of her head, if not slightly bigger. I've never seen her cleavage, but her shirts, struggling to stretch over those colossal mammaries, and then tucked into her jeans, draws more attention than any other young woman could, flaunting a deep cleavage. As if that wasn't enough she has a cute face, full luscious lips (you could mistake her for having a well-done lip filler) and beautiful brunette hair with blonde highlights. Her personality was great to go along with that. Her pleasant and engaging friendliness really surprised me. When I first met her, I expected her to be bitchy, but she was anything but that. She has a warm personality and is always flaunting her beautiful smile. I really enjoyed talking to her, as did probably every other guy, and most girls in school, but I rarely got to. I imagine most women with a body like hers would be self-absorbed and exploit guys. And that's usually because they can get away with, well, anything; because of their hot, sexy body. But Alice treats everyone with kind acceptance and mutual respect. She seems undeterred by lewd comments and ogling. This project however, was a godsend, since it had given me a lot of time with her. Our Own Study Group. We sat down in a little secluded space and got to work, though we were basically done with the project already. "There is no way!" Alice exclaimed, upon me telling her one of those random facts (did you know the human nose never stops growing?). "Yeah it's true!" I replied, she was obviously overestimating the rate of this growth, but I was having a little fun. "In fact, since the first time we met, your nose has gotten considerably bigger!" "What!? You're bullshitting me!" "No it's true! Look it up" She proceeded to google it on her phone as I grinningly waited. "Wow, you are right" she said, with her eyes still glued to the phone. She proceeded to feel her nose, as if to make sure it was still the same size. I couldn't tell if she was just acting or actually serious. "You're so smart" Alice continued. Okay, now I knew for sure that she was playing. "I know, I know" I responded. "And you're good at other things" I said glancing down quickly at her bust, which now partly rested on the desk. "You did not just!" She responded with a serious look. I broke out laughing and she struggled to keep her act of being infuriated, betrayed by her smile. We had been doing this kind of flirtatious teasing since the beginning of the project, and the privacy of this desk allowed me to push it further. Unfortunately I couldn't tell whether she was as into me as I was into her, as she was pretty flirtatious with a lot of guys. I guess she just really enjoys the attention. "I'm going to go to the toilet" she announced. I got a beautiful view of her ass as she walked down the hallway, she probably realized that I was looking and swayed her hips a little more, enjoying how she was teasing me. Alice had a reputation for staying in the toilet for very long, much to the annoyance of teachers. It probably had something to do with the strict no phone policy of the school, which meant if you wanted to use your phone, you had to get out of the classroom some way or another. As I knew it would take a while before Alice returned, I tried to get more comfortable in the wooden desk chairs. There was a serene quietness in the hallway, it was pretty late in the day, and if you paid very close attention, you could hear the chatter of the last lessons in the distance. Usually I would mistake this atmosphere for being a lonely depressing one, but with Alice's presence it seemed perfect, like we were alone in the world. I took to scrolling on Reddit, but found myself daydreaming about Alice, with some gif playing endlessly in the background. I didn't know how to feel about Alice, like probably any other red blooded male I was sexually attracted to her, and had found myself fantasizing about her while masturbating. Her body was simply ridiculous, I had yet to find a porn-star that had a body that could match Alice's. Since the start of this project something changed however. Alice was more in my thoughts than ever, but I couldn't stand the sexual fantasies I had had about her. Knowing what this meant I admitted to myself that I had a crush on her. I pondered if I should send her a text sometime, especially since the project was coming to an end, our friendship would probably deteriorate if I didn't undertake something. "Being very productive I see." A voice came. I tore myself from my daydream as Alice smiled and winked as she sat down. I hadn't even heard her approach. I quickly put my phone away. Something seemed off, as Alice immediately got to work without saying a word. She bent over the desk while writing. For a second I admired how her breasts rested on the desk. I wondered how weird it would be to have those huge things hanging off your chest, always getting in your way. Alice looked up, I quickly diverted my eyes, caught in the act of staring. Yet something caught my eye and I quickly returned my gaze, looking her in the eye. Her eyes were slightly red, as if she had cried. "Wow, Alice, what's wrong?" I asked her, shocked at the sudden seriousness of the situation. "Oh, it's nothing. I'm just not feeling great" She responded, her usual positive energy seemingly vanished. For a second I accepted the answer, but quickly realized how weird it was that in about ten minutes she went from her usual happy self to almost crying. I got the feeling that something serious had happened. "Alice, you know that you can trust me; right?" "Did something happen?" I continued. She looked up at me. Her eyes suggested she could start crying any second. I unconsciously felt a sort of anger building in myself, like I wanted to protect her from whatever had hurt her like this. "Alice?" I softly and slowly repeated, as she seemed lost in thought. After a few, tense, seconds she finally gave in. "Come with me" She said, barely loud enough to hear, as she stood up. In the Women's Faculty Restroom. I walked with her through the hallway. My emotions were through the roof, the same anger was there but also a kind of fear. She walked  a bit slower, with her arms crossed under her heaving boobs. She went into a faculty bathroom and I followed her. Once inside she locked the door behind me. This faculty bathroom was different in that sense, it still had stalls but for some reason the entire room could be locked. She leaned against the side wall and looked at the ground, not willing to make eye contact. "I have a condition" She started. “I need to know you'll respect my private health issues, because I desperately need help now.” She paused, hesitant to explain. I didn't know what to think. Before I could say anything she took a deep breath and continued. “Sometimes the pill causes a rare set of conditions. Over this semester, I developed some rare side effects from birth control pills.” "All my hormones are hyperactive. I lactate. My boobs make milk, even though I'm not pregnant." Then she explained, “My gynecologist thinks this will subside, but for the past few months I've been dealing with a dairy farm on my chest.” I was astounded with this information, but she continued. "I need to pump the milk out every few hours, otherwise they swell and start to hurt badly." I was dumbfounded. She proceeded to look through her bag and then produced a breast pump. There was a suction cup with a bottle, and attached to that was a small plastic tube that led to a hand pump. "It's broken" she explained. She made eye contact with me for the first time since we came into the bathroom. It was obviously awkward for the both of us, but the seriousness of the situation cut through this awkwardness a little. Before I could react she put the pump system in my hands. "I need it to work." She continued. "I don't know how I'll get through the rest of the day, otherwise; and it hurts like hell." Her voice quivered, then transitioned to a silent whimper. It was all still a blur of info for me to process. I just looked her in the eyes, and hoped that I was expressing empathy, while I took the pump from her. I'm pretty technically inclined so I started to inspect it, hoping it was something easy to fix. It felt weird handling the pump, it being such a feminine item, it made me feel like I wasn't supposed to touch it. I quickly established that there couldn't really be anything wrong with the suction cup and bottle, so I proceeded to look at the pump section. I noticed how Alice stuffed her hand under her shirt, when she touched her breast she let out a heavy sigh, affirming that they really were painful. She must have noticed me looking, but acted as if I wasn't there, which in turn made me feel a little more at ease, since I still had a strong feeling I wasn't supposed to see all this. I tried to test the hand pump for a second, but then noticed that a part of the plastic casting had cracked. There was no way it could be repaired. Alice looked a little calmer, maybe because now she wasn't alone with this problem anymore. "Alice. Eh. It's not going to work anymore. The casing is cracked along the intake fitting. It sucks air and prevents the buildup of a vacuum of low air pressure. I can't repair it without an epoxy resin, and that will require several hours to set up and harden." I broke the bad news to her. “I can try to have it repaired overnight?” "Oh okay, Thanks," she responded, with obvious disappointment. Alice moved so she could sit on the large bathroom sink counter, and closed her eyes, probably deep in thought. We stood for a few minutes in silence, both not knowing what to say or do. I wanted to ask her if she had a spare pump or if there was some other way to get the milk out, but I knew must have considered all that before. "Screw it, there's no other way," she broke the silence. She'd been building up the courage to sacrifice her modesty, in hopes that I could at least show her some emotional support while she attempted to employ the manual expressing process that her gynecologist's nurse had told her about, a few months ago. Alice stood up and removed her shirt. I stood in awe as I her bra was revealed. "Should I, leave?" I asked her, gesturing to the door. "You don't have to," she answered. I wasn't exactly sure what she meant. She turned towards the wall and unclasped her bra. After having removed her bra, she turned towards the sink covering her nipples with her arm. Her breasts overflowed her arms and looked even bigger now exposed. She removed her arm from her breasts and I saw them in their full glory. They were plump and swollen. Almost like when a flat-chested woman first gets cheap D cup silicone implants. But these were more naturally hanging from her chest. There was no tell-tale crease on the topside of her mammaries, where a cheap silicone implant would take on the look of an over-inflated water balloon. Viewing her naked upper body from behind was marvelous! Still in her tight denim jeans, her wide hips flowed upward beautifully into her waist; which was quite narrow. I stepped aside and got a full view of her front torso in the large wall mirror, and her flat tummy made her globes look even bigger. They looked incredibly firm and sat high on her chest, I wondered if this was her natural shape or the swelling she talked about. Her pink areola was about 2 inches across and topped by a huge nipple, about as thick as her (admittedly small) fingers. Around her areola angry blue veins emphasized how engorged her breasts were. She started to manually press around her breasts by hand. Her small hands struggled to circumnavigate her massive swollen breasts, being so firm and large. Her heavy sighs indicated how painful and frustrating the process was.  It took about half a minute of tedious massaging before the first milk droplets started coming. With her breasts being so engorged, I expected the floodgates to open and rain milk, but her efforts were only met with small squirts. In a bout of frustration she put both hands on a single boob and squeezed, finally producing a sizeable stream. I started to feel uncomfortable as I was just staring at her without a purpose. Finally I realized that there was a reason I was still here. I gently approached her and she turned toward me slightly in a gesture of approval. She'd been too bashful to ask, but hoped I'd offer to help.  I slowly, hesitantly, reached out and placed my hand on her breast with her nipple between my thumb and index finger. The first thing I noticed was the heat, then the firmness. I gently squeezed and was surprised to find how little the breast yielded. "You can squeeze harder," she encouraged me. I squeezed harder and then felt the breast giving in under the pressure, a steady stream of milk shot out, over my shoulder and hitting the mirror at the other end of the counter. It was followed immediately by another sigh. It seemed my larger hands were better suited to this task, looking at her other boob, which she was still trying to milk herself, her fingers didn't reach much further than her areola. After a little while I settled into a sort of rhythm, it seemed like the flow of milk was only now getting up to steam, and she confirmed. "Yeah, that's good; like that." We stood in front of the sink. The tiled wall, mirror and sink were slowly developing a coat of thousands of milk droplets. Whatever mess we made, we could take care of later, now the only thing important was relieving her. Now that I was getting the hang of it, she released her grip from her other breast, since her own efforts seemed to be in vain. She closed her eyes and used her arm to lean on the sink. Her sighs were still constant.  I settled into a rhythm of starting high on the breast and firmly compressing so the milk glands emptied near the nipple. I noticed that alternating breasts allowed the tissue to recover and the breast returned to a natural shape while I was busy constricting the other breast. "Does it hurt?" I asked. "Yeah it does, but it's a good kind of pain. It's hard to describe." Up to this point the flow of milk didn't seem to have slowed down at all. And with her other breast still full I decided to change my approach. I stood behind her and reached under her arms, finding both breasts. I realized that pressing her breast tissue against her ribs was not conducive to better extraction. I had to start my manual pressing from the base of her breast and try to draw her flow out away from her chest. This also seemed less painful for Alice. As I continued alternately milking both breasts at the same time, her sighs got heavier and huskier. I was wondering if she got sexual pleasure out of this. She stood up and leaned back on me and let her head rest between my neck and shoulder. It seemed like the same stimulation that causes sexual arousal, actually releases the milk, a gush of lactation flowed for a few minutes. With her this close to me, I smelled her sweet scent, it wasn't a perfume, just the way she smelled. I recognized the smell from when I had been around her but it was about a hundred times stronger now that she was leaning on me. She was emitting a pheromone, perhaps. I was in a thin tee shirt, and hugging the sexiest girl on campus, and milking both of her breasts into the mirror of the faculty women's restroom.  She was leaning back into me with her eyes closed and a very pleasant expression on her gorgeous face. I've never had a wet dream this good! As impossibly unreal as it seemed, I was getting used to the situation, and because of that, actually realizing how ridiculous it was. For the first time in the roughly 10 minutes we'd been in the bathroom I noticed my raging boner, and how her ass just grazed past it occasionally. My cock was a flagpole ascending tightly up to the elastic waistband of my boxers. Alice hadn't opened her eyes since I started milking both breasts; yes, breasts. This was the best education in human anatomy I could get. In this room, I awakened to the masculine role of supportive partner to the female reproductive and nurturing process. I could not call these amazing mammaries by the crude terms used by schoolboys. I sensed a strong feeling she was now enjoying my assistance, which made me feel satisfied as I'd apparently helped her out of her predicament. My hands were now soaked in milk as well, the wetness making her breasts slippery. In my newfound awareness I also found my hands aching, which prompted me to stop for a second and change my grip. When I stopped for repositioning, Alice woke up from her trancelike state. Through the milk stained mirror I noticed the smile on her face. "Are you enjoying this?" I softly asked, as I resumed my grip and started gently milking. My mouth was just an inch from her ear and I'd been unaware that I was softly breathing on her neck. "Um, yes at this point it's very enjoyable." Alice answered me, blushing. Then she looked me in the eye, through the mirror's reflection; "I take you are enjoying it as well?" "Very much so." I softly replied into her ear with a look of honest gratitude. I noticed that her breasts were getting softer, which allowed me to milk her a lot better. I experimented with various alternating patterns and started getting up to a high pace. She moaned in response, and leaned forward; using both arms to lean on the sink. I leaned forward with her, resting my chest on her back. She hunched her back slightly and firmly pressed her ass cheeks on either side of my boner. There was no way she didn't feel this. Even through hers and my own jeans I could feel the softness of her ass, which formed into my crotch. I proceeded to milk her relentlessly, having become bolder with how hard I squeezed which she didn't seem to mind at all. The milk now mostly fell on the sink. I slowly started noticing her rocking her hips, pressing harder into my crotch, along both sides of my cock. Her own smell and the strong scent of what must be milk, filled the air and intoxicated me. Her grinding on my crotch became more intense. With her breasts hanging below her they basically lay in my hands, giving me a sense of their significant weight. With every squeeze my fingers now sank deep into her breast tissue, very coated by a film of milk. Her moaning and grinding was constant and was driving me to the edge. My cock started to spasm involuntarily and I knew that I was going to cum very soon. I began extending my milking motions closer to her erect nipples. This clearly drove Alice to an ecstasy of heavy breathing "Your hands feel so good on my nipples." She said through the breathy moans. I noticed how with every squeeze her breasts expanded to the sides, causing a huge side-boob under her exposed armpit. Entranced with this sight I exploded in my boxers. I, involuntarily, aggressively thrust into her soft ass, finally responding to her grinding. As the most intense orgasm I'd ever had rocked my body I continued to tightly press her ass into the counter. My knees went weak. She responded by pressing her ass even harder into my cock, further stimulating my orgasm. My cock just kept spurting, giving me the largest cumshot I'd ever had, but sadly, in my pants. When the orgasm subsided I noticed I had stopped milking and instead had held her nipples in a firm grip during the course of my orgasm. Realizing this I quickly resumed milking her, but noticed a bit of spasmic twerks from her pelvis. Then she took a huge breath, followed by a few moans. Alice's milk had definitely subsided, and after about a minute she called it a thorough milking. Returning Favors. "Thank you so much" She said as she turned toward me. Her face radiated with joy and satisfaction. "You can't imagine how troubled I was when my pump broke." "No problem" I answered her, and continued: "They look like they've calmed down." Her breasts were now in what must be their natural state, with a beautiful teardrop shape, her huge pink areola and nipples pointing up slightly, all above that beautiful flat tummy. "Yeah they have, they feel so much better!" You're very skilled! This is the most thoroughly emptied I been in weeks! I'll be able to make it through the rest of my classes, now. I reached out and touched her breast. Her large, still erect nipple pressed into my palm, and the now soft breast flesh yielded under my fingers. 15 minutes ago, these were hard pressurized globes, but now they lay more naturally from her chest, and sway with her slightest move. For some reason this felt like a bold move, even though I had spent about 15 minutes squeezing them, it was just different now that I faced her, and she looked me in the eye. She responded with a smile and a giggle. She really felt comfortable and safe with me. "I take it you like them?" "Oh yes, I sure do. They're beautiful. You're beautiful" I added "Thanks" she responded with her warm smile as she moved into hug me. As we hugged she pressed herself firmly into me, her still bare chest spreading out over mine, and my still present boner into her lower waist. "I guess we need to clean up" I announced as I looked glanced at the various milk coated surfaces in the bathroom. We both laughed for a bit at the sight. "No, I'll clean up." "It's my milk anyway." She responded. "Speaking of which, I first need to clean something else." She said, as she sank to her knees. It didn't take me long to realize what was happening. As she grabbed my belt with both hands and unbuckled, then she looked up at me with a naughty smile. As she dropped my pants and briefs to my knees, I really didn't know what to expect. I was now fully erect and still coated in my own cum from a few minutes ago. She carefully assessed the eruption and said; “I feel somewhat responsible for your, uh, mess. I hope you're can be as comfortable with me helping you, as I am with your help?” Alice reached over to her bag and got out a packet of moist wipes. Somewhere I was disappointed, thinking that she'd lick it clean or something, but I couldn't complain. She proceeded to slowly wipe my raging hard-on clean with the wipes. I got the feeling she was teasing me, with her very slow and careful wiping and getting her face very close. The cold wet wipes couldn't suppress my erection, with  Alice's hand gripping my rod constantly. My cock was spasming from the attention, which she clearly noticed. Even my balls were subjected to her thorough cleaning, which she did by using her small soft hand to lift my shaft and her other hand to wipe my sack thoroughly. She had her face so close I could swear I felt the heat of her face radiating on my cock. I was afraid that I'd burst at any moment, cumming all over her pretty face. My spasms were getting more frequent and I swear that if she put her hand on my shaft one more time I'd cum, and then she stopped. She put the wipes away and looked up at me. I don't know how my face looked, but the tension must've been very noticeable. She laughed at my expression and announced. "And now for your reward." She put her hand on my shaft and started slowly jerking. She clearly knew what to do, but there was still a little awkwardness in her movement, which only made it cuter. It didn't take long at all before I was very close, she moved her hand excruciatingly slowly and my breathing was getting irregular. With her great sense of knowing how close I was, exactly when I felt myself ejaculating, and the cum shooting through my dick, she put the tip in her mouth; wrapping just the tip inside her beautiful luscious full lips. I shot powerful blasts, with shot after shot shooting into her warm mouth. She struggled to keep her mouth closed on my shaft as she proudly smiled. When I was done she stood up and swallowed my load while looking me straight in the eye. "All cleaned up." She announced in a sultry voice. The intense sexuality of her act caught me off guard and I stood flabbergasted with my mouth open. She broke out laughing causing me to break out of my shock and join her in laughing. "I'm sorry, I just had to do it" She explained. This is where our flavor of playful teasing and flirtatious acts met reality, and it caught me off guard. "You caught me off guard!" I responded. "You should be glad I didn't call you daddy!" She added laughing My cock twitched when she said ‘daddy', I didn't expect I would find that so hot. I knew I needed to find some kind of comeback, and thought quickly. "Well, it's great we found another thing you're incredibly good at." She turned toward me with a shocked look. "You!" She exclaimed. She proceeded to repeatedly hit me on the shoulder in a playful way, which looked ridiculous with her still exposed boobs swinging violently on her body. I insisted on helping her clean the bathroom. We pretty much used up all the toilet paper in the room but we got it done. I was increasingly curious how the milk tasted, but I wasn't going to lick it from a bathroom wall. Still, I was confident I'd get to taste it someday. When we were all done she proceeded by putting her bra on. It was a huge thing, I could tell her head would fit into one of the cups. I looked on, fascinated, as she tried to put the huge thing on. She looked up at me. "Why don't you help me, instead of just looking?" She asked me, in a playful arrogant way. I stood behind her and started to get to work on the six clasps that held the thick band. I tried to see if there was a tag somewhere, I was very curious about her bra size, but I couldn't find one. She had the expression of a woman who enjoyed the caring attention of a man who showed gentle care for her. As we finally exited the bathroom the coolness of the hallway was pleasant. In total we'd only spent about 30 minutes in there, yet so much happened it felt like an eternity. Alice announced. "In a few hours I'll need to milk again, so I need to get to my backup pump." Please tell the teacher I need to go home, but I'll be back. "Yeah my hands are getting pretty tired anyway." I responded, as if she was willing to go through this again today. Alice just smiled and went in for a quick hug "You're amazing! I'm so glad we're science partners! Let's talk after school." When I returned to the desk in the hallway, where I'd left all of my stuff, I sat down. The biology lesson had long ended. I should go find the teacher to hand in the project, and make up some excuse for disappearing. As I strolled through the empty hallways of the high school, I pondered what I'd text Alice as an icebreaker. I had just gotten the golden ticket, and I would be dating the most pretty, perfect girl I'd ever known.   By Aester for Literotica

A Milky College Encounter A college science project causes an erotic milky mess. By Aester - Listen to the podcast at Steamy Stories. It was the last day of the biology 101 project. With Alice and I having missed the first lesson we had to finish up the project while the rest of the class started the regular lessons again. As we walked through the hallway, to the independent study area, I walked slightly behind her, so I could steal glances at her magnificent ass. I really had hit the jackpot with this project; by a stroke of luck we were both not present for the first lesson, which meant we got paired up automatically as the only remaining college freshman students. I was supposed to be at the state university, but the new concussion protocols disqualified me. I was still trying to get used to not being the star athlete on campus. Now I had to rely on my brain for my future success in life. Normally I would never get the chance to do a group assignment with her. Even though we got along pretty nicely, she is the center of attention, which meant she was always preoccupied, or engaged with other people. Alice is basically the perfect girl. She's from another suburb on the other side of the metropolitan area from my high school.  The first thing anyone would notice about her is her body. She has probably the best apple bottom in the school, which she usually has on display, in her tight jeans. She has wide feminine hips that flow into a small, perfectly flat waist. Her ass sways gracefully through the halls of the community college. Yet this waist is rarely admired as it is obscured by her massive chest. Her boobs are the most implausible part about her. They are the size of her head, if not slightly bigger. I've never seen her cleavage, but her shirts, struggling to stretch over those colossal mammaries, and then tucked into her jeans, draws more attention than any other young woman could, flaunting a deep cleavage. As if that wasn't enough she has a cute face, full luscious lips (you could mistake her for having a well-done lip filler) and beautiful brunette hair with blonde highlights. Her personality was great to go along with that. Her pleasant and engaging friendliness really surprised me. When I first met her, I expected her to be bitchy, but she was anything but that. She has a warm personality and is always flaunting her beautiful smile. I really enjoyed talking to her, as did probably every other guy, and most girls in school, but I rarely got to. I imagine most women with a body like hers would be self-absorbed and exploit guys. And that's usually because they can get away with, well, anything; because of their hot, sexy body. But Alice treats everyone with kind acceptance and mutual respect. She seems undeterred by lewd comments and ogling. This project however, was a godsend, since it had given me a lot of time with her. Our Own Study Group. We sat down in a little secluded space and got to work, though we were basically done with the project already. "There is no way!" Alice exclaimed, upon me telling her one of those random facts (did you know the human nose never stops growing?). "Yeah it's true!" I replied, she was obviously overestimating the rate of this growth, but I was having a little fun. "In fact, since the first time we met, your nose has gotten considerably bigger!" "What!? You're bullshitting me!" "No it's true! Look it up" She proceeded to google it on her phone as I grinningly waited. "Wow, you are right" she said, with her eyes still glued to the phone. She proceeded to feel her nose, as if to make sure it was still the same size. I couldn't tell if she was just acting or actually serious. "You're so smart" Alice continued. Okay, now I knew for sure that she was playing. "I know, I know" I responded. "And you're good at other things" I said glancing down quickly at her bust, which now partly rested on the desk. "You did not just!" She responded with a serious look. I broke out laughing and she struggled to keep her act of being infuriated, betrayed by her smile. We had been doing this kind of flirtatious teasing since the beginning of the project, and the privacy of this desk allowed me to push it further. Unfortunately I couldn't tell whether she was as into me as I was into her, as she was pretty flirtatious with a lot of guys. I guess she just really enjoys the attention. "I'm going to go to the toilet" she announced. I got a beautiful view of her ass as she walked down the hallway, she probably realized that I was looking and swayed her hips a little more, enjoying how she was teasing me. Alice had a reputation for staying in the toilet for very long, much to the annoyance of teachers. It probably had something to do with the strict no phone policy of the school, which meant if you wanted to use your phone, you had to get out of the classroom some way or another. As I knew it would take a while before Alice returned, I tried to get more comfortable in the wooden desk chairs. There was a serene quietness in the hallway, it was pretty late in the day, and if you paid very close attention, you could hear the chatter of the last lessons in the distance. Usually I would mistake this atmosphere for being a lonely depressing one, but with Alice's presence it seemed perfect, like we were alone in the world. I took to scrolling on Reddit, but found myself daydreaming about Alice, with some gif playing endlessly in the background. I didn't know how to feel about Alice, like probably any other red blooded male I was sexually attracted to her, and had found myself fantasizing about her while masturbating. Her body was simply ridiculous, I had yet to find a porn-star that had a body that could match Alice's. Since the start of this project something changed however. Alice was more in my thoughts than ever, but I couldn't stand the sexual fantasies I had had about her. Knowing what this meant I admitted to myself that I had a crush on her. I pondered if I should send her a text sometime, especially since the project was coming to an end, our friendship would probably deteriorate if I didn't undertake something. "Being very productive I see." A voice came. I tore myself from my daydream as Alice smiled and winked as she sat down. I hadn't even heard her approach. I quickly put my phone away. Something seemed off, as Alice immediately got to work without saying a word. She bent over the desk while writing. For a second I admired how her breasts rested on the desk. I wondered how weird it would be to have those huge things hanging off your chest, always getting in your way. Alice looked up, I quickly diverted my eyes, caught in the act of staring. Yet something caught my eye and I quickly returned my gaze, looking her in the eye. Her eyes were slightly red, as if she had cried. "Wow, Alice, what's wrong?" I asked her, shocked at the sudden seriousness of the situation. "Oh, it's nothing. I'm just not feeling great" She responded, her usual positive energy seemingly vanished. For a second I accepted the answer, but quickly realized how weird it was that in about ten minutes she went from her usual happy self to almost crying. I got the feeling that something serious had happened. "Alice, you know that you can trust me; right?" "Did something happen?" I continued. She looked up at me. Her eyes suggested she could start crying any second. I unconsciously felt a sort of anger building in myself, like I wanted to protect her from whatever had hurt her like this. "Alice?" I softly and slowly repeated, as she seemed lost in thought. After a few, tense, seconds she finally gave in. "Come with me" She said, barely loud enough to hear, as she stood up. In the Women's Faculty Restroom. I walked with her through the hallway. My emotions were through the roof, the same anger was there but also a kind of fear. She walked  a bit slower, with her arms crossed under her heaving boobs. She went into a faculty bathroom and I followed her. Once inside she locked the door behind me. This faculty bathroom was different in that sense, it still had stalls but for some reason the entire room could be locked. She leaned against the side wall and looked at the ground, not willing to make eye contact. "I have a condition" She started. “I need to know you'll respect my private health issues, because I desperately need help now.” She paused, hesitant to explain. I didn't know what to think. Before I could say anything she took a deep breath and continued. “Sometimes the pill causes a rare set of conditions. Over this semester, I developed some rare side effects from birth control pills.” "All my hormones are hyperactive. I lactate. My boobs make milk, even though I'm not pregnant." Then she explained, “My gynecologist thinks this will subside, but for the past few months I've been dealing with a dairy farm on my chest.” I was astounded with this information, but she continued. "I need to pump the milk out every few hours, otherwise they swell and start to hurt badly." I was dumbfounded. She proceeded to look through her bag and then produced a breast pump. There was a suction cup with a bottle, and attached to that was a small plastic tube that led to a hand pump. "It's broken" she explained. She made eye contact with me for the first time since we came into the bathroom. It was obviously awkward for the both of us, but the seriousness of the situation cut through this awkwardness a little. Before I could react she put the pump system in my hands. "I need it to work." She continued. "I don't know how I'll get through the rest of the day, otherwise; and it hurts like hell." Her voice quivered, then transitioned to a silent whimper. It was all still a blur of info for me to process. I just looked her in the eyes, and hoped that I was expressing empathy, while I took the pump from her. I'm pretty technically inclined so I started to inspect it, hoping it was something easy to fix. It felt weird handling the pump, it being such a feminine item, it made me feel like I wasn't supposed to touch it. I quickly established that there couldn't really be anything wrong with the suction cup and bottle, so I proceeded to look at the pump section. I noticed how Alice stuffed her hand under her shirt, when she touched her breast she let out a heavy sigh, affirming that they really were painful. She must have noticed me looking, but acted as if I wasn't there, which in turn made me feel a little more at ease, since I still had a strong feeling I wasn't supposed to see all this. I tried to test the hand pump for a second, but then noticed that a part of the plastic casting had cracked. There was no way it could be repaired. Alice looked a little calmer, maybe because now she wasn't alone with this problem anymore. "Alice. Eh. It's not going to work anymore. The casing is cracked along the intake fitting. It sucks air and prevents the buildup of a vacuum of low air pressure. I can't repair it without an epoxy resin, and that will require several hours to set up and harden." I broke the bad news to her. “I can try to have it repaired overnight?” "Oh okay, Thanks," she responded, with obvious disappointment. Alice moved so she could sit on the large bathroom sink counter, and closed her eyes, probably deep in thought. We stood for a few minutes in silence, both not knowing what to say or do. I wanted to ask her if she had a spare pump or if there was some other way to get the milk out, but I knew must have considered all that before. "Screw it, there's no other way," she broke the silence. She'd been building up the courage to sacrifice her modesty, in hopes that I could at least show her some emotional support while she attempted to employ the manual expressing process that her gynecologist's nurse had told her about, a few months ago. Alice stood up and removed her shirt. I stood in awe as I her bra was revealed. "Should I, leave?" I asked her, gesturing to the door. "You don't have to," she answered. I wasn't exactly sure what she meant. She turned towards the wall and unclasped her bra. After having removed her bra, she turned towards the sink covering her nipples with her arm. Her breasts overflowed her arms and looked even bigger now exposed. She removed her arm from her breasts and I saw them in their full glory. They were plump and swollen. Almost like when a flat-chested woman first gets cheap D cup silicone implants. But these were more naturally hanging from her chest. There was no tell-tale crease on the topside of her mammaries, where a cheap silicone implant would take on the look of an over-inflated water balloon. Viewing her naked upper body from behind was marvelous! Still in her tight denim jeans, her wide hips flowed upward beautifully into her waist; which was quite narrow. I stepped aside and got a full view of her front torso in the large wall mirror, and her flat tummy made her globes look even bigger. They looked incredibly firm and sat high on her chest, I wondered if this was her natural shape or the swelling she talked about. Her pink areola was about 2 inches across and topped by a huge nipple, about as thick as her (admittedly small) fingers. Around her areola angry blue veins emphasized how engorged her breasts were. She started to manually press around her breasts by hand. Her small hands struggled to circumnavigate her massive swollen breasts, being so firm and large. Her heavy sighs indicated how painful and frustrating the process was.  It took about half a minute of tedious massaging before the first milk droplets started coming. With her breasts being so engorged, I expected the floodgates to open and rain milk, but her efforts were only met with small squirts. In a bout of frustration she put both hands on a single boob and squeezed, finally producing a sizeable stream. I started to feel uncomfortable as I was just staring at her without a purpose. Finally I realized that there was a reason I was still here. I gently approached her and she turned toward me slightly in a gesture of approval. She'd been too bashful to ask, but hoped I'd offer to help.  I slowly, hesitantly, reached out and placed my hand on her breast with her nipple between my thumb and index finger. The first thing I noticed was the heat, then the firmness. I gently squeezed and was surprised to find how little the breast yielded. "You can squeeze harder," she encouraged me. I squeezed harder and then felt the breast giving in under the pressure, a steady stream of milk shot out, over my shoulder and hitting the mirror at the other end of the counter. It was followed immediately by another sigh. It seemed my larger hands were better suited to this task, looking at her other boob, which she was still trying to milk herself, her fingers didn't reach much further than her areola. After a little while I settled into a sort of rhythm, it seemed like the flow of milk was only now getting up to steam, and she confirmed. "Yeah, that's good; like that." We stood in front of the sink. The tiled wall, mirror and sink were slowly developing a coat of thousands of milk droplets. Whatever mess we made, we could take care of later, now the only thing important was relieving her. Now that I was getting the hang of it, she released her grip from her other breast, since her own efforts seemed to be in vain. She closed her eyes and used her arm to lean on the sink. Her sighs were still constant.  I settled into a rhythm of starting high on the breast and firmly compressing so the milk glands emptied near the nipple. I noticed that alternating breasts allowed the tissue to recover and the breast returned to a natural shape while I was busy constricting the other breast. "Does it hurt?" I asked. "Yeah it does, but it's a good kind of pain. It's hard to describe." Up to this point the flow of milk didn't seem to have slowed down at all. And with her other breast still full I decided to change my approach. I stood behind her and reached under her arms, finding both breasts. I realized that pressing her breast tissue against her ribs was not conducive to better extraction. I had to start my manual pressing from the base of her breast and try to draw her flow out away from her chest. This also seemed less painful for Alice. As I continued alternately milking both breasts at the same time, her sighs got heavier and huskier. I was wondering if she got sexual pleasure out of this. She stood up and leaned back on me and let her head rest between my neck and shoulder. It seemed like the same stimulation that causes sexual arousal, actually releases the milk, a gush of lactation flowed for a few minutes. With her this close to me, I smelled her sweet scent, it wasn't a perfume, just the way she smelled. I recognized the smell from when I had been around her but it was about a hundred times stronger now that she was leaning on me. She was emitting a pheromone, perhaps. I was in a thin tee shirt, and hugging the sexiest girl on campus, and milking both of her breasts into the mirror of the faculty women's restroom.  She was leaning back into me with her eyes closed and a very pleasant expression on her gorgeous face. I've never had a wet dream this good! As impossibly unreal as it seemed, I was getting used to the situation, and because of that, actually realizing how ridiculous it was. For the first time in the roughly 10 minutes we'd been in the bathroom I noticed my raging boner, and how her ass just grazed past it occasionally. My cock was a flagpole ascending tightly up to the elastic waistband of my boxers. Alice hadn't opened her eyes since I started milking both breasts; yes, breasts. This was the best education in human anatomy I could get. In this room, I awakened to the masculine role of supportive partner to the female reproductive and nurturing process. I could not call these amazing mammaries by the crude terms used by schoolboys. I sensed a strong feeling she was now enjoying my assistance, which made me feel satisfied as I'd apparently helped her out of her predicament. My hands were now soaked in milk as well, the wetness making her breasts slippery. In my newfound awareness I also found my hands aching, which prompted me to stop for a second and change my grip. When I stopped for repositioning, Alice woke up from her trancelike state. Through the milk stained mirror I noticed the smile on her face. "Are you enjoying this?" I softly asked, as I resumed my grip and started gently milking. My mouth was just an inch from her ear and I'd been unaware that I was softly breathing on her neck. "Um, yes at this point it's very enjoyable." Alice answered me, blushing. Then she looked me in the eye, through the mirror's reflection; "I take you are enjoying it as well?" "Very much so." I softly replied into her ear with a look of honest gratitude. I noticed that her breasts were getting softer, which allowed me to milk her a lot better. I experimented with various alternating patterns and started getting up to a high pace. She moaned in response, and leaned forward; using both arms to lean on the sink. I leaned forward with her, resting my chest on her back. She hunched her back slightly and firmly pressed her ass cheeks on either side of my boner. There was no way she didn't feel this. Even through hers and my own jeans I could feel the softness of her ass, which formed into my crotch. I proceeded to milk her relentlessly, having become bolder with how hard I squeezed which she didn't seem to mind at all. The milk now mostly fell on the sink. I slowly started noticing her rocking her hips, pressing harder into my crotch, along both sides of my cock. Her own smell and the strong scent of what must be milk, filled the air and intoxicated me. Her grinding on my crotch became more intense. With her breasts hanging below her they basically lay in my hands, giving me a sense of their significant weight. With every squeeze my fingers now sank deep into her breast tissue, very coated by a film of milk. Her moaning and grinding was constant and was driving me to the edge. My cock started to spasm involuntarily and I knew that I was going to cum very soon. I began extending my milking motions closer to her erect nipples. This clearly drove Alice to an ecstasy of heavy breathing "Your hands feel so good on my nipples." She said through the breathy moans. I noticed how with every squeeze her breasts expanded to the sides, causing a huge side-boob under her exposed armpit. Entranced with this sight I exploded in my boxers. I, involuntarily, aggressively thrust into her soft ass, finally responding to her grinding. As the most intense orgasm I'd ever had rocked my body I continued to tightly press her ass into the counter. My knees went weak. She responded by pressing her ass even harder into my cock, further stimulating my orgasm. My cock just kept spurting, giving me the largest cumshot I'd ever had, but sadly, in my pants. When the orgasm subsided I noticed I had stopped milking and instead had held her nipples in a firm grip during the course of my orgasm. Realizing this I quickly resumed milking her, but noticed a bit of spasmic twerks from her pelvis. Then she took a huge breath, followed by a few moans. Alice's milk had definitely subsided, and after about a minute she called it a thorough milking. Returning Favors. "Thank you so much" She said as she turned toward me. Her face radiated with joy and satisfaction. "You can't imagine how troubled I was when my pump broke." "No problem" I answered her, and continued: "They look like they've calmed down." Her breasts were now in what must be their natural state, with a beautiful teardrop shape, her huge pink areola and nipples pointing up slightly, all above that beautiful flat tummy. "Yeah they have, they feel so much better!" You're very skilled! This is the most thoroughly emptied I been in weeks! I'll be able to make it through the rest of my classes, now. I reached out and touched her breast. Her large, still erect nipple pressed into my palm, and the now soft breast flesh yielded under my fingers. 15 minutes ago, these were hard pressurized globes, but now they lay more naturally from her chest, and sway with her slightest move. For some reason this felt like a bold move, even though I had spent about 15 minutes squeezing them, it was just different now that I faced her, and she looked me in the eye. She responded with a smile and a giggle. She really felt comfortable and safe with me. "I take it you like them?" "Oh yes, I sure do. They're beautiful. You're beautiful" I added "Thanks" she responded with her warm smile as she moved into hug me. As we hugged she pressed herself firmly into me, her still bare chest spreading out over mine, and my still present boner into her lower waist. "I guess we need to clean up" I announced as I looked glanced at the various milk coated surfaces in the bathroom. We both laughed for a bit at the sight. "No, I'll clean up." "It's my milk anyway." She responded. "Speaking of which, I first need to clean something else." She said, as she sank to her knees. It didn't take me long to realize what was happening. As she grabbed my belt with both hands and unbuckled, then she looked up at me with a naughty smile. As she dropped my pants and briefs to my knees, I really didn't know what to expect. I was now fully erect and still coated in my own cum from a few minutes ago. She carefully assessed the eruption and said; “I feel somewhat responsible for your, uh, mess. I hope you're can be as comfortable with me helping you, as I am with your help?” Alice reached over to her bag and got out a packet of moist wipes. Somewhere I was disappointed, thinking that she'd lick it clean or something, but I couldn't complain. She proceeded to slowly wipe my raging hard-on clean with the wipes. I got the feeling she was teasing me, with her very slow and careful wiping and getting her face very close. The cold wet wipes couldn't suppress my erection, with  Alice's hand gripping my rod constantly. My cock was spasming from the attention, which she clearly noticed. Even my balls were subjected to her thorough cleaning, which she did by using her small soft hand to lift my shaft and her other hand to wipe my sack thoroughly. She had her face so close I could swear I felt the heat of her face radiating on my cock. I was afraid that I'd burst at any moment, cumming all over her pretty face. My spasms were getting more frequent and I swear that if she put her hand on my shaft one more time I'd cum, and then she stopped. She put the wipes away and looked up at me. I don't know how my face looked, but the tension must've been very noticeable. She laughed at my expression and announced. "And now for your reward." She put her hand on my shaft and started slowly jerking. She clearly knew what to do, but there was still a little awkwardness in her movement, which only made it cuter. It didn't take long at all before I was very close, she moved her hand excruciatingly slowly and my breathing was getting irregular. With her great sense of knowing how close I was, exactly when I felt myself ejaculating, and the cum shooting through my dick, she put the tip in her mouth; wrapping just the tip inside her beautiful luscious full lips. I shot powerful blasts, with shot after shot shooting into her warm mouth. She struggled to keep her mouth closed on my shaft as she proudly smiled. When I was done she stood up and swallowed my load while looking me straight in the eye. "All cleaned up." She announced in a sultry voice. The intense sexuality of her act caught me off guard and I stood flabbergasted with my mouth open. She broke out laughing causing me to break out of my shock and join her in laughing. "I'm sorry, I just had to do it" She explained. This is where our flavor of playful teasing and flirtatious acts met reality, and it caught me off guard. "You caught me off guard!" I responded. "You should be glad I didn't call you daddy!" She added laughing My cock twitched when she said ‘daddy', I didn't expect I would find that so hot. I knew I needed to find some kind of comeback, and thought quickly. "Well, it's great we found another thing you're incredibly good at." She turned toward me with a shocked look. "You!" She exclaimed. She proceeded to repeatedly hit me on the shoulder in a playful way, which looked ridiculous with her still exposed boobs swinging violently on her body. I insisted on helping her clean the bathroom. We pretty much used up all the toilet paper in the room but we got it done. I was increasingly curious how the milk tasted, but I wasn't going to lick it from a bathroom wall. Still, I was confident I'd get to taste it someday. When we were all done she proceeded by putting her bra on. It was a huge thing, I could tell her head would fit into one of the cups. I looked on, fascinated, as she tried to put the huge thing on. She looked up at me. "Why don't you help me, instead of just looking?" She asked me, in a playful arrogant way. I stood behind her and started to get to work on the six clasps that held the thick band. I tried to see if there was a tag somewhere, I was very curious about her bra size, but I couldn't find one. She had the expression of a woman who enjoyed the caring attention of a man who showed gentle care for her. As we finally exited the bathroom the coolness of the hallway was pleasant. In total we'd only spent about 30 minutes in there, yet so much happened it felt like an eternity. Alice announced. "In a few hours I'll need to milk again, so I need to get to my backup pump." Please tell the teacher I need to go home, but I'll be back. "Yeah my hands are getting pretty tired anyway." I responded, as if she was willing to go through this again today. Alice just smiled and went in for a quick hug "You're amazing! I'm so glad we're science partners! Let's talk after school." When I returned to the desk in the hallway, where I'd left all of my stuff, I sat down. The biology lesson had long ended. I should go find the teacher to hand in the project, and make up some excuse for disappearing. As I strolled through the empty hallways of the high school, I pondered what I'd text Alice as an icebreaker. I had just gotten the golden ticket, and I would be dating the most pretty, perfect girl I'd ever known.   By Aester for Literotica

Some hauntings whisper. Others pull. When one family moved into a home with a sparkling pool and mirrored closets, they thought they'd found paradise. Instead, their child was drawn into a nightmare that nearly cost him his life. But the true danger waited outside—at the pool. From the very first day, the water seemed charged with an eerie, electrical presence. The child felt compelled to return to it again and again, even when it was closed for winter. More than once, he found himself standing at the edge of the deep end with no memory of walking there, as if something unseen had led him. One January afternoon, the pull became deadly. Entranced, he stepped onto the snow-covered ice, fully aware that this was how he would die. A faint crack echoed beneath his feet before he plunged waist-deep into the freezing water. It was only then, as if released from a spell, that he snapped back to himself and scrambled to safety. Later, a chilling thought took root: Was this the spirit of a drowned boy? Was the pool itself haunted by tragedy, forever seeking to pull another life beneath its surface? And were those faces in the mirrors… his? #HauntedPool #GhostStories #RealGhostStoriesOnline #MirrorGhost #HauntedReflections #ParanormalActivity #CreepyStories #DrownedSpirit #TrueGhostStory #SupernaturalEncounters Love real ghost stories? Don't just listen—join us on YouTube and be part of the largest community of real paranormal encounters anywhere. Subscribe now and never miss a chilling new story:

Geoff and Marie's Good Life: Part 15The Live Sex ShowGeoffrey performs in public.Based on posts by Only In My Mind, in 15 parts. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels.We were sitting cuddling together on the sofa when Colin arrived, with Mia in tow. Angie had offered to cook that afternoon and we were trying to decide what we fancied. I suggested a chilli con carne with rice. Angie decided otherwise."Kids," she called. They wandered in from the kitchen with glasses of milk and a chocolate biscuit each."If I go shopping for ingredients, would you two help me cook tea tonight?" The two teens shared a look and agreed. "Right," she announced, standing up. "Go and sort out your homework with grandad; I'll go shopping."I stood and went to get my wallet. She glared at me. "Go on. Do it," she challenged me. "I bloody dare you to offer me money to get food for the people I care about."I carefully closed the drawer and apologized for my insensitivity. "I just don't want you to think that we take you for granted," I explained.Her expression softened. "And if I ever feel that way, I'll say something, but right now it's my turn to give. Please allow me that."I went and pulled her into a hug. "Sorry Angie. You know I wouldn't deliberately upset you. Am I forgiven?"She returned my hug. "You were never in trouble. I was just reminding you that we're family now and I want to contribute too."She gave me another squeeze, a brief kiss and she left. I turned to the kids, who had watched our exchange, fascinated. "What?" I asked.Colin shook his head. "Not sure about this whole adult relationship stuff," he griped. "They are all weird." Mia smiled at his comment, but didn't argue. To be fair, the lad had a point."Okay." I clapped my hands. "Homework?"It turned out that they were studying climate change. Their teacher had given the class three questions and they were free to choose which one to answer. I suggested that Colin and Mia avoided answering the same question so they weren't accused of copying, and sent them off to the study.Angie was back and in the kitchen laying out her ingredients when the teens finally reappeared. Colin, ever the gentleman, had allowed Mia to use our laptop for her slides, while he had used my tablet. That was fine; it wasn't as though we regularly used our devices to cruise porn sites. Besides, I had made sure that Marie knew to use private tabs if she was viewing adult content. The kids were old enough to start learning about relationships. Images of explicit sex were not on their agenda for some years to come.I sent them in to the kitchen and, with their permission, went to check over their homework. I was reassured. If I had seen job applications written that thoughtfully, they both definitely would have qualified for an interview.I joined the others in the kitchen, only to find that I was redundant. Colin was slicing an onion, Mia was chopping mushrooms and Angie was trimming what looked like a pork fillet. She looked up and shook he head, smiling. "The sous chefs are doing fine," she explained. "I want them to feel confident that they can work without being micro-managed."I watched Colin. He was doing well. Slow, perhaps, but careful. Mia was taking equal care to have all the slices of mushroom a similar thickness."Shall I set the table then?" I suggested. The consensus was that yes, I could perhaps make myself useful that way."Set for a starter, main and dessert, please," Angie advised me. "We have a full menu planned.""Wine?""A nice white, maybe an oaked chardonnay," suggested Colin. "I checked on my phone," he explained, in response to my surprised expression.I grunted and went to set about my assigned tasks, and that was how Marie found me when she returned from work. "That's my job when you're the cook," she observed."I have been supplanted by our wicked betrothed and her evil teen minions," I sulked."That's nice, dear," she said, absently, as she bustled about putting her coat away.We went into the kitchen together once I had finished. My wife walked up behind Angie and gave her a big hug. "Geoffrey is feeling emasculated," she told her friend. The minions looked on in amusement.Angie gave a derisive snort. "It's my turn to cook with the kids because I'm here today. Geoff can take his turn any day.""There you go, Geoff," my wife reassured me. "We still enjoy your cooking, it's just that Angie gets less opportunity." Seeing as how I was only pretending to be upset, it was easy to pretend that all was forgiven. I accepted the explanation with a kiss for both of my girls and went off in search of a bottle of wine.I sat and red, while Marie and Angie caught up in the kitchen. Marie joined me ten minutes later. "Angie's bursting to tell me about her day, but all she dare say in front of the kids is that you and she had a pleasant afternoon."I glanced at the door. "I don't think we should have this conversation here and now. If one of the youngsters walks in, the guilty silence will just be uncomfortable for everyone. So how was your day?"And so we sat and I listened to her accounts of generous donors, sweet natured old ladies and the occasional twat who tried to bargain down the price on the ticket. For Fuck's sake! It's a charity shop. And Marie was clear; the worst offenders were most obviously not short of change. They were just tight bastards. Not that my beloved ever capitulated. She would just smile sweetly and remind them where they were, pointing out that they were welcome to try the same approach in John Lewis with her full support.We made the occasional foray to the kitchen but our offers of help were politely, but firmly, rebuffed. To be fair, the atmosphere was relaxed. I asked about the menu and, after looking to the chef for approval, Mia ran through it. "We are starting with cubes of baked breaded brie on a bed of salad with a lingonberry relish. Then there is pork stroganoff with green vegetables and rice. For dessert we are having individual warm pear frangipane tartlets with chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream." She paused. "Oh, yes," she continued. "If anyone is still hungry there's a selection of cheeses as well as olives, and some nice bread to go with dipping oils and vinegars."I did a quick calculation in my head. "At today's prices, I reckon that meal would come in at about £50 plus per head just in a country pub." Mia just grinned at me. I carried on. "Can I afford to get used to eating like this?"I looked around the kitchen brigade and saw three unreasonably happy cooks. Angie was obviously less demanding of the children and seemed thrilled to be able to pass on her knowledge. Colin just loved cooking and Mia seemed to be determined to learn so that she could help her mum.I turned to Angie. "This all smells wonderful. Wendy and Linda should both be here well before six. Is that okay, Chef?"Angie looked at her team. "Starters on the pass for six o'clock.""Yes Chef!" They shouted in unison. We shook our heads and left them to it.Wendy arrived first. Mia had sent her a text to say that they were eating at our place again. Wendy tried to apologize for intruding but we, particularly Marie, were having none of it. "We love having Mia with us. I know she's very mature but, as Colin is here anyway, it makes no sense for her to be at home, alone," my wife told her. "In addition, Angie is doing a cookery masterclass and she is way more tolerant of the kids than she is with me, so it's easier just to let them get on with it."Mia must have heard her mum's voice because she left the kitchen, briefly, to give her mum a hug before apologizing. "Sorry mum, but I need to turn the tarts so they brown evenly." And, with that, she dashed back to the kitchen. We led a bemused Wendy to the living room, sat her down and asked about her day. Her eyes filled as she explained just how grateful she was not to come home to have to start cooking a meal, even just for one night. She had a decent job in the Civil Service so money wasn't too much of a problem. She just struggled finding time to be the wage earner, housekeeper and mum. She felt guilty too that Mia seemed to feel obliged to sacrifice her spare time to help around the house rather than being a teenager.Marie glanced at me. We're not telepathic but I was certain we were thinking the same thing. Wendy was so caught up in being the perfect single parent, she had forgotten how to be Wendy.We never really got the chance, that evening anyway, to pursue that thought as we heard the front door open to herald our daughter's arrival. What followed, by then, seemed oddly familiar. Hearing his mother greeting us, Colin emerged from the kitchen, hugged his mum, and promptly departed, shouting over his shoulder, "Sorry mum. Got to dash. I can't let the rice overcook. Love you."Linda appeared as flummoxed as Wendy had. "I don't know what it is about this house, but there always seems to be something odd going on just lately." Wendy looked at her in surprise. "What?" my daughter retorted. "How many other throuple weddings have you been invited to? Even more particularly, how many with a Star Wars dress code?" She shook her head. "Christ, I hope it isn't genetic; otherwise I'm well and truly fucked!" She put her hand to her mouth guiltily and checked to see that neither of the youngsters had overheard. "Sorry all. That just slipped out," she apologized. "I've had a weird day at work too. Some half-wit manager wanted me to;” She did the 'air-quotes' with her fingers. "; Expedite a delivery to an important client in Nice.""Let's sit down and you can vent in comfort," I suggested. I led our daughter through and Marie followed with Wendy. "Now, go on. Story so far, idiot, big words, France. New readers start here."She explained that, in order to cover his ass for something that his team had screwed up, said half-wit tried to make it Linda's problem to solve. The vehicle in question was already in France and the driver had to observe French law. The only way to 'expedite' the delivery would be to exceed his permitted hours or fly another driver out to take over; neither was going to happen. Being Marie's daughter, of course she just picked up the phone and asked the operations manager for a cost code for the air fare from Gatwick to Lyon. Apparently the idiot had just assumed that Linda, being a woman could just, who knows? Make it go away?Ops manager had obviously queried the request and Linda, quite disingenuously, told him. It was not well received. She sighed. "On the upside, I got the problem back where it belongs. On the other hand, now I have to watch my back in case he tries to retaliate." She took a deep breath and sat back. "Thank you." We must have looked puzzled. "For just listening and not telling me what I should have done," she explained. She thought for a moment. "This place is still weird though."As she finished that thought, Colin appeared from the kitchen with a white napkin over his arm, to invite us take our places at the table. Linda looked at me. "See?" She mouthed. I could only grin in reply.We took our seats as directed and were joined by Angie and Mia. Colin disappeared to the kitchen and returned with the bottle of wine I had selected and placed in the fridge earlier. Handing it to me to open he returned to the kitchen. Angie cleared her throat. "Wendy, Linda; would you be prepared to let Mia and Colin have a small glass of wine with their meal? They have put their hearts into preparing it; it seems unfair that they miss out on that one component."Mia sat, apparently startled, and watched as her mother considered Angie's request. Wendy nodded slowly. "That seems fair. I'd rather she experienced alcohol in a civilized setting like this." She looked around the table. "Rather than getting hammered at her first student party at Uni."Linda nodded in agreement. "I'll get some glasses for them." Colin reappeared carrying three plates that he placed in front of Angie, Marie and Wendy. He made the journey again, this time serving Linda, Mia and me. He made the final trip for his own starter. As he sat, I reached across and poured a half measure of wine into his glass. He looked to his mum for reassurance. She smiled in acknowledgement. I poured a similar glass for Mia and then shared the remainder amongst the adults.I picked up my glass. "Ladies, Colin, a toast to the Chef and her crew." We four non-cooks raised our glasses in tribute; the cooks acknowledged our compliment and then joined in the toast. Then we attacked the food. The brie was delicious and matched beautifully with the sweet fruit jam. I watched surreptitiously as Colin finished a mouthful and self-consciously took a sip of wine. His brow furrowed as he reconciled the flavors of the wine and the food. He went back to his food looking thoughtful. We finished the starter and complimented the cooks on the flavor and the presentation. It had looked as good as it tasted.We moved onto the main course. Angie and Mia plated up in the kitchen, while Colin worked 'front of house'. Again, the meal was delicious. Angie's version was discs of pork in an onion and mushroom sauce made with crème fraiche, Dijon mustard and smoked paprika, finished with a hint of lemon juice. The plain white rice was perfect for soaking up the sauce.Colin sipped his wine again. "It tastes different with this course," he commented. "It still works but in a different way." He looked to Mia for opinion."Is it because the lingonberry was so sweet that the wine tasted sharper?" She asked me.I shrugged. "Probably. It might even be something to do with the lactic acid in the crème fraiche. What matters is whether you like it.""I do," she smiled and turned to Angie. "Thank you;” She hesitated. "I'm sorry. But I don't know what to call you.""Grangie," offered Colin."Or Angie," suggested our fiancée.Wendy seemed uncomfortable. "Isn't that a bit familiar? Wouldn't Mrs. and your surname be more appropriate?""Technically," interjected Linda. "If you were going to insist that we stand on ceremony, Mia should address Angie as Professor Weston." She frowned at the thought. "Nope. This place is weird enough already. Angie or Grangie. He's Geoff or grandad; that's Marie or grandma and I'm Linda. We want you and Mia to be comfortable here."Mia considered. "Thank you Angie for getting mum and Linda to let us have wine with the meal.""You both earned it dear," Angie assured her. "Now. Desserts, I think."Again, the two girls plated as Colin served. The tartlets looked amazing; a light short crust pastry filled with an almond flavored sponge topped with poached pear cubes. On each plate there was a swirl of chocolate sauce over a generous quenelle of vanilla ice-cream, starting to melt where it touched the still warm tart. I knew where Angie had gone shopping for the ingredients for the meal, and the small fragrant black specks confirmed that she had not economized on cheap ice-cream. This was made with actual vanilla pods. The aroma from the plate was amazing; it was all that I could do not to dive straight in. Still, manners required that I wait until everyone was served, so that's what I did.Once Colin was seated, we began. The taste was amazing. I glanced towards Angie in inquiry. "Star anise as well as cinnamon," she clarified. I nodded, impressed, and turned back to my dessert and savored the remainder. I watched as Colin took another sip of his wine and then Mia as she followed suit. Colin actually shuddered. Mia merely looked disappointed."Have a sip of water," I suggested. "And then wait a couple of minutes after you've finished eating."After the seven plates were all but polished clean, we thanked our catering team. It had been an absolutely lovely meal and the final course had been a triumph. Linda and Marie stood to clear the table, but returned immediately to sit with our guests and chat as we finished our wine."I've never eaten like that before," Wendy admitted."At home, you mean?" Asked Linda.Wendy shook her head. "Ever. My husband didn't like 'fancy foreign muck' so it was fish and chips, takeaways or just ready meals." Her voice cracked with emotion. "Even now, most of our meals are out of the freezer. I can boil potatoes and grill sausages and reheat tinned or frozen veg. My dad just liked the same old stuff too, so that's all my mum taught me. That's about my limit. At this moment," she admitted, sadly, "Mia's almost certainly a better cook than I am."Angie surprised me. She isn't always the most diplomatic of us. "Being untutored is not the same as being a failure." She reached for Wendy's hand. "Tell us how we can help, and between us, you have a group of capable cooks here who are happy to teach you whatever we can."Marie and I finished our drinks and Linda joined us in the kitchen. The brigade had washed and tidied as they went so there was only really the crockery to deal with. That went in the dishwasher. We cleaned the hob and worktops and sorted out the saucepans then returned to the living room. The teens had disappeared, leaving Angie and Wendy talking about food.When Wendy confessed that she would struggle to even shop for a meal such as we'd just had, Linda made a contribution. "A girl I work with wanted to branch out from the same old stuff she always cooks, so she orders from one of those on-line delivery companies. She swears by them now." She picked up her phone. "I can call her and if you decide to do it and say she recommended them to you, then you'll both get a discount."Wendy looked uncertain. The poor woman had no self-confidence at all. Linda left the room and returned two minutes later scrolling on her phone. "Here," she said, passing her phone to Wendy. "Jan told me how to install their app. Pick four meals for two people from this menu list and you'll get everything you need delivered next week, along with recipe cards. Jan said the instructions are dead simple and she's actually learning to cook from doing it."Wend called for Mia to come and choose with her and, together they picked four meals that they thought they might enjoy cooking together. While they did, Colin and I chatted about his first experience of wine with a meal. "It tasted nice, except with dessert," he told me. "Would a sweeter wine have been nicer?""Probably," I acknowledged. "There's a lot of snobbery and nonsense about wine, but some types do go with some foods better than others. I didn't find it clashed to the extent that you did, so personal preference and experience play a part too."At that point Mia called him over to see what she and her mum had chosen for the following week. He pointed to one selection. "Grandma makes that sometimes. It's ace."Wendy passed the phone back to Linda and the pair completed the sign up and the first order, making sure to claim the discount. Wendy seemed conflicted. "I'm a bit nervous about having to make something I've never done before," she confessed. "But I'm excited at the same time.""Think of this," my wife suggested. "As long as you have a loaf of bread, a tin of baked beans and some cheese in the house, even if it all goes horribly wrong, at least you won't starve."The conversations about food carried on until Wendy looked at her watch. "Oh goodness," she exclaimed. "Look at the time!" And after collecting Mia and thanking us for our hospitality, within ten minutes they were gone.Linda pulled me into the kitchen. "That poor girl's husband did a proper number on her: the bastard," she spat. "She copes okay at work because she knows her job. But as a person;” She paused, speechless."I know, sweetheart. We all do. And she's such a lovely woman too."She stared at me, suspiciously. "Are you three planning something?""No," I answered, sort of honestly. "But if an opportunity presents itself, we would probably try to help her see what a worthy person she is."

in the dance again in their pants again make me prance in the wind and glance at you friend

On this episode, we're heading to Brazil and discussing Glauber Rocha's Entranced Earth (1967), a pivotal work of the Cinema Novo movement. Following our exploration of Costa-Gavras' Z (1969), we're delving into the turbulent world of Brazilian filmmaking in the wake of the 1964 military coup. Entranced Earth isn't just a film; it's a cinematic rebellion against political corruption and authoritarianism. Rocha's work, along with the broader Cinema Novo movement, redefined Brazilian cinema with its raw, politically charged narratives and innovative film techniques. We discuss how Rocha and the other Cinema Novo filmmakers, inspired by Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, crafted a uniquely Brazilian cinematic language to confront social inequalities and spark critical discourse. Join us as we examine Rocha's "Aesthetic of Hunger" manifesto and discuss how Entranced Earth continues to resonate in our ongoing struggle against rising fascism and authoritarianism in the US and worldwide. Follow us at: Patreon / Twitter / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook 

Supporta BLMP genom att bli en patron! Spana in de olika alternativen på http://www.patreon.com/blmetalpodcast Vi kickar igång nya året med att satsa stort, högt hårt och smalt. Mycket missnöje! Playlist: Bølzer - Entranced by the Wolfshook Atomic Goatcrime - Genocide Cult Blood I Am The Intimidator - Gasoline Labyrinthus Stellarum - Lost in the Void Godflesh - Like Rats The Deads - Rakt fram Vittra - Satmara Celtic Frost - Dethroned Emperor I samarbete med Medborgarskolan.

   An experiential episode down below.    In this re-run session from The Embodiment Conference 2020, Daria Halprin will speak about the essential connection between art and life that can facilitate healing and change, and will guide you through a taster experience of the Tamalpa Life/Art Process.    Find out more about Daria here: https://www.dariahalprin.org/  and the Tamalpa Institute here https://www.tamalpa.org/  -----------------------------------------------------------------    Daria Halprin: dancer, poet, teacher, and author, is among the leading pioneers in the field of movement/dance and expressive arts  education and therapy. Her work bridges the fields of somatic psychology, movement/dance therapy, expressive arts therapy,  community based arts and health education, organizational consultancy, leadership development,  social change and performance. Bringing a life-long practice in the arts to her work, published writings include : Coming Alive; The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy; contributing author Expressive Arts Therapy: Principles and Practices, Poesis: Essays On the Future of the Field; Body Ensouled, Enacted and Entranced. In 1978 Daria co-founded the Tamalpa Institute where she directs training programs in movement/dance and expressive arts education, consultancy and therapy. She teaches in educational, health and art centers throughout the world. ------------------------------------------------------------------        Get $100 OFF our CEC course - use the code CEC100PODCAST on https://embodimentunlimited.com/cec/     Get a free copy of Mark's latest eBook for coaches (12 tools) at this link: https://embodimentunlimited.com/coachingpodcast     Join Mark for in-person workshops – https://embodimentunlimited.com/events-calendar/?utm_source=TEP&utm_medium=Description&utm_campaign=Events    Join free coaching demos sessions with Mark – https://embodimentunlimited.com/free-coaching-with-mark/?utm_source=TEP&utm_medium=Description&utm_campaign=Demo    Find Mark Walsh on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/warkmalsh/

PREVIEW: CLEOPATRA: CAESAR: Conversation with classicist Daisy Dunn on her new work, "THE MISSING THREAD," regarding the Roman people's disregard of the crafty young Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra VII, who famously entranced the all-conquering Caesar. More in the coming weeks. 1891 Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra

Megan is a spirited adventurer, the heart and soul behind Smoky Mountain Soul Adventures. With a deep-rooted connection to North Carolina, Megan's journey through life has been as diverse as the landscapes she calls home.Born and raised amidst the charm of North Carolina, Megan's love affair with her state has been a lifelong affair. From the serene coastlines to the majestic peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Megan has traversed every corner with a curious spirit and an open heart. ⁣ In 2019, Megan's life took a poignant turn when she and her family settled in the embrace of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was here, amidst the whispering pines and cascading waterfalls, that Megan found solace and purpose. Entranced by the rugged beauty of her surroundings, she made it her mission to share the wonders of the mountains with others. As the proprietor of Smoky Mountain Soul Adventures, Megan is more than just a guide; she's a storyteller, a curator of experiences, and a custodian of memories. With an intimate knowledge of the hidden gems scattered throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains, Megan offers bespoke hiking tours tailored to each traveler's desires. ⁣ Whether it's chasing the vibrant hues of autumn foliage, discovering secluded swimming holes, or standing in awe before the grandeur of towering waterfalls, Megan's tours promise unforgettable adventures. With her infectious enthusiasm and boundless energy, she invites visitors to immerse themselves in the magic of the mountains. Yet, Megan's journey to entrepreneurship was not without its trials. In the face of personal tragedy, she found the courage to redefine her path and embrace her true calling. The loss of her husband to cancer served as a poignant reminder of life's fleeting nature, igniting within her a fervent determination to live with purpose and intention. Driven by a desire to honor her husband's memory and seize each moment with unwavering resolve, Megan embarked on a new chapter of her life. By transforming her passion for hiking into a vocation, she not only found healing but also discovered a profound sense of fulfillment.

Hypnosis. You've seen it in movies, cartoons, and maybe even on stage! But is it real? And if so, what is it? Join Molly and co-host Jasmine as they uncover the truth about hypnosis and its power to heal. They'll hear from pediatrician and hypnosis expert, Dr. Daniel Kohen, about what it is and isn't (spoiler alert – it isn't mind control!). They'll also chat with 13-year-old Joshua who uses hypnosis to overcome anxiety! Plus, a special appearance from the ghost of Franz Mesmer, a famous practitioner and the man behind the word mesmerizing. Entranced? Stick around for a new and puzzling mystery sound!Do you have your Smarty Pass yet?? Get yours today for just $4/month (or $36/year) and get bonus episodes every month, and ad-free versions of every episode of Brains On, Smash Boom Best, Moment of Um, and Forever Ago. Visit www.smartypass.org to get your Smarty Pass today!____________This episode was sponsored bySitka Seafood Market - Use promo code Molly35 to receive $35 off your first order. Indeed - Use promo code brainson to receive a $75 sponsored job credit

HypnoStory (they/them) loves to share the joy and power of hypnosis with most anyone who will listen. They have been doing various forms of hypnosis for over 25 years, and have taught for Charmed!, Entranced, NEEHU, KinkyCon, and The Fetish Fair Fleamarket among others. In addition to erotic and recreational hypnosis, they occasionally perform as a stage hypnotist and work with clients using hypnosis for personal growth. Together with their partner Panda, they offer kink and hypnokink education through their company Pandastory, LLC, and also run CONsolation (a Discord server that presents kink education) We start this episode with my cynicism regarding hypnosis and how it can be misused, some of the misinformation out there, and how to navigate unsavory players. We dive a bit deeper into that piece regarding kink in general and how to be safer when vetting playmates. We talk about engaging in different play qualities and ways to approach a hypnosis scene even when you don’t know specifically what you are aiming for. The Hypnokink 101 class is available on a sliding scale at - https://www.pandastory.love/101 The discord group is called - CONsolation - https://discord.gg/UrtkFT5d Is an invite like that will never expire. Please visit whatexcitesus.com and/or patreon.com/whatexcitesus

This episode withHypnoStory about Hypno Kink and Erotic Hypnosis is part 1 of 2, because we had such a lovely conversation that I wanted to share all of it with you.If you would rather wait and listen to the whole conversation, I understand that. HypnoStory (they/them) loves to share the joy and power of hypnosis with most anyone who will listen. They have been doing various forms of hypnosis for over 25 years, and have taught for Charmed!, Entranced, NEEHU, KinkyCon, and The Fetish Fair Fleamarket among others. In addition to erotic and recreational hypnosis, they occasionally perform as a stage hypnotist and work with clients using hypnosis for personal growth. Together with their partner panda, they offer kink and hypnokink education through their company Pandastory, LLC and also run CONsolation (a Discord server that presents kink education)We talk about: What is hypnosis, sort of. What is Hypno Kink, mostly. Our experiences being nervous about being kinky and going to events. Stage hypnosis and hypnosis for change - ways they are similar and different.We break as I’m starting to bring some of my cynicism to the table, and that's where we will pick it up next time. The Hypnokink 101 class is available on a sliding scale at - https://www.pandastory.love/101The discord group is called - CONsolation - https://discord.gg/UrtkFT5dOther Mentions: Read Only Mind - https://readonlymind.com/James Tripp - https://www.hypnosiswithouttrance.com/Sarah Sloan - https://www.sarahsloane.net/ Devyn Stone & his property Guan Xuan - https://www.devynstone.com/Hannah the Scribe - https://hannahthescribe.com/ Please visit whatexcitesus.com and/or patreon.com/whatexcitesus

Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta Part 1 Chapter 3 Texts 1-4 śrī-parīkṣid uvāca bhagavantaṁ haraṁ tatra bhāvāviṣṭatayā hareḥ nṛtyantaṁ kīrtayantaṁ ca kṛta-saṅkarṣaṇārcanam bhṛśaṁ nandīśvarādīṁś ca ślāghamānaṁ nijānugān prītyā sa-jaya-śabdāni gīta-vādyāni tanvataḥ devīṁ comāṁ praśaṁsantaṁ kara-tālīṣu kovidām dūrād dṛṣṭvā munir hṛṣṭo 'namad vīṇāṁ ninādayan paramānugṛhīto 'si kṛṣṇasyeti muhur muhuḥ jagau sarvaṁ ca pitroktaṁ su-svaraṁ samakīrtayat TRANSLATION Śrī Parīkṣit said: Arriving in Śivaloka, from a distance the sage Nārada saw Lord Śiva, Śrī Hara, who had just finished his worship of Lord Saṅkarṣaṇa, Śrī Hari. Entranced in ecstatic love, Lord Śiva was dancing and loudly singing the glories of his Lord, while his associates played instrumental music and shouted “Jaya! Jaya!” With great affection he praised his assistants like Nandīśvara, as well as the goddess Umā, who was expertly clapping her hands. The sight of all this delighted Nārada. Vibrating his vīṇā and nodding his head to show respect, he called out several times, “You are the greatest recipient of Kṛṣṇa's mercy!” and in a sweet voice he recounted to Lord Śiva everything just told him by their father, Lord Brahmā.

Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta Part 1 Chapter 3 Texts 1-4 śrī-parīkṣid uvāca bhagavantaṁ haraṁ tatra bhāvāviṣṭatayā hareḥ nṛtyantaṁ kīrtayantaṁ ca kṛta-saṅkarṣaṇārcanam bhṛśaṁ nandīśvarādīṁś ca ślāghamānaṁ nijānugān prītyā sa-jaya-śabdāni gīta-vādyāni tanvataḥ devīṁ comāṁ praśaṁsantaṁ kara-tālīṣu kovidām dūrād dṛṣṭvā munir hṛṣṭo 'namad vīṇāṁ ninādayan paramānugṛhīto 'si kṛṣṇasyeti muhur muhuḥ jagau sarvaṁ ca pitroktaṁ su-svaraṁ samakīrtayat TRANSLATION Śrī Parīkṣit said: Arriving in Śivaloka, from a distance the sage Nārada saw Lord Śiva, Śrī Hara, who had just finished his worship of Lord Saṅkarṣaṇa, Śrī Hari. Entranced in ecstatic love, Lord Śiva was dancing and loudly singing the glories of his Lord, while his associates played instrumental music and shouted “Jaya! Jaya!” With great affection he praised his assistants like Nandīśvara, as well as the goddess Umā, who was expertly clapping her hands. The sight of all this delighted Nārada. Vibrating his vīṇā and nodding his head to show respect, he called out several times, “You are the greatest recipient of Kṛṣṇa's mercy!” and in a sweet voice he recounted to Lord Śiva everything just told him by their father, Lord Brahmā.

Welcome episode 219 of The Cloud Pod podcast - where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts are Justin and Jonathan, and they discuss all things cloud, including clickstream analytics, databricks, Microsoft Entra, virtual machines, Outlook threats, and some major changes over at the Google Cloud team.  Titles we almost went with this week: TCP is not Entranced with Entra ID The Cave you Fear to Entra, Holds the Treasure you Seek Microsoft should rethink Entra rules for their Email A big thanks to this week's sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world's most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

The one who humbly stoops to save his people is the infinitely supreme Creator and Upholder of all things.

It's that wall between you and the world Where you are— That sets you apart; The star of your own show Covered in sawdust, —an unpolished tryphophobe, Hyperboles and hyperbolic chokeholds on the shows you love, the clothes you used to own; A phone in airplane mode, No knowing what the code is, Lol don't tell God you're bored in New York Oh wow WOW W0000W. Don't tell God you're bored at all. INFINITI I'm not amused. SUPCREE I know, right. SUNNI BLŪ fuck, I'm bored. SUPACREE's FIRST ANUAL FLEX AWARDS First Flex, of course goes to SKRILLEX— for showing up in New York unannounced —then leaving me there to die. !. Major flex. Now that that's out of y question . way. ARMIIN VAN BUREN— for dropping an album on my birthday. Flex. KX5 for putting my name in a song. — and spelling it right. Super major flex . SENZA GLUTEN restaurant SOL LEWITT Not so suddenly, I had grown tired of the psychological game that was being played, whether it was in my own mind or otherwise—and had decided to withdraw; I couldn't bother myself m by worrying about things that were entirely out of control-however, by maintaining a distance, by now, I had realized that there's m I paid attention to anything at all, the more in control of it I was—and so I did my best to keep away, and as hard as it it was to not speak with my son, now that he was with my mother and potenrially happier—as speaking to him before he has always sounded sad—and though it was a sad situation in general, the time had passed that I was going to fight my old family on anything, and continue to be fucked over by the same patterns and behaviors they had always used against me, now that I understood very well the rules of power, taking in the lessons I had learned as sacred—as well as myself; not that I was sinless, but after all I had sacrificed, I did seem to emanate something Holy, and though I had to have considered all that had happened some kind of spiritual awakening, I still worshipped my God, no matter how apart from it I felt or was—and I never really was, anyway. Something indeed was strange—and though I considered myself to be in great mental health, consistently dealing with people who were not—ie, the whole of the general public—to be disasterously draining Hey where you going? I'll give you a run for your money— Heres a train ride; I'll show you. Take this. Don't kill me. You're already dead Oh my GOD! Take this watch What is this!? Put in on? Is it Apple— WHAT! will it sync with my phone?! Phones—where we're going, we don't need phones! OKAY, THAT'S IT. I wanna see this fucking movie!! Which fucking movie! I don't care! Just put all the scenes together and call it a complication or something - lol I love compilations. Ew, lady, gross. Who is that. That's that lady. *slurps* Ew! Yeah, I remember her now. Fuck. I hate Manhattan You know why?! Dudes in suits. People in blazers and shit, Pleated slacks. Like wtf you go to a dry cleaners?! Fuck you. Rich ass motherfuckers. Cuffling wearing morherfuckers. The worst part is, They look delicious. All of em. And here I am, in my baggy ass pants, just trying to pretend. I don't live in fucking Queens. But at this point—you know what? I look like I live in fucking Queens. I'm one pair of crocs away from really not giving a fuck about my life at all. Sit here and write for awhile, why don't you? Now that it's nice, take the big city vibes in Life isn't high stakes and New York minutes— it's Sitting in ignorant bliss, A memorable moment, Listening to fountains, from a distance And not trying to fix it— For a moment It's an optical illusion. Just as you were— And you still are, on the surface Still accomplished, under all that Loveless news, financially discontent, Still, not worthless All the words were up to something; Just as quick as adderall or some Focus sets in —a force of useless nature Underwater in midtown Manhattan The mad hatter, sitting at the entrance to the matrix, Entranced and enthralled by the mallets and maladies, One that tricked her has imagined It's a trickle down effect It's just a deficit of culture Redirected and defected, But de facto— (As was written) Haven't had a laugh in ages Haven't trusted ever aince; And heaven comes just when the words have all been written In the end, We are GOD Let me see your eyes. Are you looking down at me. I'm always looking down at you. So you are. Your eyes, please Try to wipe the confusion off your face a bit; It's settling in between the brows, And you've no makeup to cover it— What a menace. She is— Mirage to men, and still a central figure in their fantasies, imaginations and emissions, Pull the trigger, then: Nobody needs you here And nobody needs to hear it Nobody needs to feel the words I wondered once, Then lived them, written In my fingertips. Another iPhone wins the war; A wind reminds me just of him Another human Can I go now? Are you done yet? Have you cum yet? Did you get a hug yet— Or a lunch ticket Has Skrillex mentioned you in Instagram— Or have you called your family? No. Then you're not fucking done yet You asked me what to do with the festival project: The answer is: “just do it,” Put it somewhere, go to bed and to the gym— and when it's finished, and the money's rolling in. and Jimmy Fallon phones you, happy that a dollar in his hand at random landed in it— That's when you're finished. What if that never happens. That's what “IF” is. What's the difference. Oh, there's Eminem again. Finally. God dammit. Talking to God at the plaza. Slipping away through the alley Falling in love with Manhattan. Wondering when you'll be happy I almost swore to God that Hal's the Broadway musicals being advertised were fakes— they just seemed so terrible, so bad that it had actually made me feel— that I somehow had a chance I'm at the Whole Foods running up a bill Feelin kinda hype—take a pill, needa chill. Get real: i'ma feel this later l, I'mma oh like a quarter of a mill I already gave you the deal When I left Israel, It's real! Wtf. Jesus WhT. What are you doing. Just—trust me- I don't trust you. You don't trust JESUS? NO. I'm your brother! So what! That's even worse! Here, take the wheel. No' Take the wheel! No' FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS TMPL FITNESS- for offering one-day trials to their boujee ass gym— Lol didn't I write this already You wrote everything already. Oh. ShT happens. Ugh. What happens next. Whatever happened to— NO. HE'S NOT COMING. He's coming now. NO. Yes. CANCEL THE PARTY. You can't cancel a party that's been going on for 4 days. Damn. It's been four days. So far. Yeah Supacree's a legend for this. I'm gonna have to put you on The spot right now, I'm sorry. Sorry for what. I don't know. Suddenly, the deadmau5 and the avicii hit all at once. At the same time. The same time. Speaking of bass cannons. Oh, that's right. SUPACREE'S FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS KX5 A second award. Goddamn it, fool! kx5–for making a dick-shaped bass cannon. SUPER HARD fucking flex. Literally. Are you a gym rat— or a gym shark?! I'm a gym rat. Wouldn't you rather— Hold that thought ::|pause Fuck this game. I quit. You can't quit Nobody quits! I fuxking quit. You can't quit Don't quit i figured it out Figured what out The game. It's no fun anymore You figured it out What is it What's the secret I JUST WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU oh. -42 Yeah. Are you sure. YES. Get away from me— I will throw you in the ocean! Lol. That's it? That's the end of the episode? Yes. {Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2023 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. © -U.

It's that wall between you and the world Where you are— That sets you apart; The star of your own show Covered in sawdust, —an unpolished tryphophobe, Hyperboles and hyperbolic chokeholds on the shows you love, the clothes you used to own; A phone in airplane mode, No knowing what the code is, Lol don't tell God you're bored in New York Oh wow WOW W0000W. Don't tell God you're bored at all. INFINITI I'm not amused. SUPCREE I know, right. SUNNI BLŪ fuck, I'm bored. SUPACREE's FIRST ANUAL FLEX AWARDS First Flex, of course goes to SKRILLEX— for showing up in New York unannounced —then leaving me there to die. !. Major flex. Now that that's out of y question . way. ARMIIN VAN BUREN— for dropping an album on my birthday. Flex. KX5 for putting my name in a song. — and spelling it right. Super major flex . SENZA GLUTEN restaurant SOL LEWITT Not so suddenly, I had grown tired of the psychological game that was being played, whether it was in my own mind or otherwise—and had decided to withdraw; I couldn't bother myself m by worrying about things that were entirely out of control-however, by maintaining a distance, by now, I had realized that there's m I paid attention to anything at all, the more in control of it I was—and so I did my best to keep away, and as hard as it it was to not speak with my son, now that he was with my mother and potenrially happier—as speaking to him before he has always sounded sad—and though it was a sad situation in general, the time had passed that I was going to fight my old family on anything, and continue to be fucked over by the same patterns and behaviors they had always used against me, now that I understood very well the rules of power, taking in the lessons I had learned as sacred—as well as myself; not that I was sinless, but after all I had sacrificed, I did seem to emanate something Holy, and though I had to have considered all that had happened some kind of spiritual awakening, I still worshipped my God, no matter how apart from it I felt or was—and I never really was, anyway. Something indeed was strange—and though I considered myself to be in great mental health, consistently dealing with people who were not—ie, the whole of the general public—to be disasterously draining Hey where you going? I'll give you a run for your money— Heres a train ride; I'll show you. Take this. Don't kill me. You're already dead Oh my GOD! Take this watch What is this!? Put in on? Is it Apple— WHAT! will it sync with my phone?! Phones—where we're going, we don't need phones! OKAY, THAT'S IT. I wanna see this fucking movie!! Which fucking movie! I don't care! Just put all the scenes together and call it a complication or something - lol I love compilations. Ew, lady, gross. Who is that. That's that lady. *slurps* Ew! Yeah, I remember her now. Fuck. I hate Manhattan You know why?! Dudes in suits. People in blazers and shit, Pleated slacks. Like wtf you go to a dry cleaners?! Fuck you. Rich ass motherfuckers. Cuffling wearing morherfuckers. The worst part is, They look delicious. All of em. And here I am, in my baggy ass pants, just trying to pretend. I don't live in fucking Queens. But at this point—you know what? I look like I live in fucking Queens. I'm one pair of crocs away from really not giving a fuck about my life at all. Sit here and write for awhile, why don't you? Now that it's nice, take the big city vibes in Life isn't high stakes and New York minutes— it's Sitting in ignorant bliss, A memorable moment, Listening to fountains, from a distance And not trying to fix it— For a moment It's an optical illusion. Just as you were— And you still are, on the surface Still accomplished, under all that Loveless news, financially discontent, Still, not worthless All the words were up to something; Just as quick as adderall or some Focus sets in —a force of useless nature Underwater in midtown Manhattan The mad hatter, sitting at the entrance to the matrix, Entranced and enthralled by the mallets and maladies, One that tricked her has imagined It's a trickle down effect It's just a deficit of culture Redirected and defected, But de facto— (As was written) Haven't had a laugh in ages Haven't trusted ever aince; And heaven comes just when the words have all been written In the end, We are GOD Let me see your eyes. Are you looking down at me. I'm always looking down at you. So you are. Your eyes, please Try to wipe the confusion off your face a bit; It's settling in between the brows, And you've no makeup to cover it— What a menace. She is— Mirage to men, and still a central figure in their fantasies, imaginations and emissions, Pull the trigger, then: Nobody needs you here And nobody needs to hear it Nobody needs to feel the words I wondered once, Then lived them, written In my fingertips. Another iPhone wins the war; A wind reminds me just of him Another human Can I go now? Are you done yet? Have you cum yet? Did you get a hug yet— Or a lunch ticket Has Skrillex mentioned you in Instagram— Or have you called your family? No. Then you're not fucking done yet You asked me what to do with the festival project: The answer is: “just do it,” Put it somewhere, go to bed and to the gym— and when it's finished, and the money's rolling in. and Jimmy Fallon phones you, happy that a dollar in his hand at random landed in it— That's when you're finished. What if that never happens. That's what “IF” is. What's the difference. Oh, there's Eminem again. Finally. God dammit. Talking to God at the plaza. Slipping away through the alley Falling in love with Manhattan. Wondering when you'll be happy I almost swore to God that Hal's the Broadway musicals being advertised were fakes— they just seemed so terrible, so bad that it had actually made me feel— that I somehow had a chance I'm at the Whole Foods running up a bill Feelin kinda hype—take a pill, needa chill. Get real: i'ma feel this later l, I'mma oh like a quarter of a mill I already gave you the deal When I left Israel, It's real! Wtf. Jesus WhT. What are you doing. Just—trust me- I don't trust you. You don't trust JESUS? NO. I'm your brother! So what! That's even worse! Here, take the wheel. No' Take the wheel! No' FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS TMPL FITNESS- for offering one-day trials to their boujee ass gym— Lol didn't I write this already You wrote everything already. Oh. ShT happens. Ugh. What happens next. Whatever happened to— NO. HE'S NOT COMING. He's coming now. NO. Yes. CANCEL THE PARTY. You can't cancel a party that's been going on for 4 days. Damn. It's been four days. So far. Yeah Supacree's a legend for this. I'm gonna have to put you on The spot right now, I'm sorry. Sorry for what. I don't know. Suddenly, the deadmau5 and the avicii hit all at once. At the same time. The same time. Speaking of bass cannons. Oh, that's right. SUPACREE'S FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS KX5 A second award. Goddamn it, fool! kx5–for making a dick-shaped bass cannon. SUPER HARD fucking flex. Literally. Are you a gym rat— or a gym shark?! I'm a gym rat. Wouldn't you rather— Hold that thought ::|pause Fuck this game. I quit. You can't quit Nobody quits! I fuxking quit. You can't quit Don't quit i figured it out Figured what out The game. It's no fun anymore You figured it out What is it What's the secret I JUST WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU oh. -42 Yeah. Are you sure. YES. Get away from me— I will throw you in the ocean! Lol. That's it? That's the end of the episode? Yes. {Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2023 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. © -U.

It's that wall between you and the world Where you are— That sets you apart; The star of your own show Covered in sawdust, —an unpolished tryphophobe, Hyperboles and hyperbolic chokeholds on the shows you love, the clothes you used to own; A phone in airplane mode, No knowing what the code is, Lol don't tell God you're bored in New York Oh wow WOW W0000W. Don't tell God you're bored at all. INFINITI I'm not amused. SUPCREE I know, right. SUNNI BLŪ fuck, I'm bored. SUPACREE's FIRST ANUAL FLEX AWARDS First Flex, of course goes to SKRILLEX— for showing up in New York unannounced —then leaving me there to die. !. Major flex. Now that that's out of y question . way. ARMIIN VAN BUREN— for dropping an album on my birthday. Flex. KX5 for putting my name in a song. — and spelling it right. Super major flex . SENZA GLUTEN restaurant SOL LEWITT Not so suddenly, I had grown tired of the psychological game that was being played, whether it was in my own mind or otherwise—and had decided to withdraw; I couldn't bother myself m by worrying about things that were entirely out of control-however, by maintaining a distance, by now, I had realized that there's m I paid attention to anything at all, the more in control of it I was—and so I did my best to keep away, and as hard as it it was to not speak with my son, now that he was with my mother and potenrially happier—as speaking to him before he has always sounded sad—and though it was a sad situation in general, the time had passed that I was going to fight my old family on anything, and continue to be fucked over by the same patterns and behaviors they had always used against me, now that I understood very well the rules of power, taking in the lessons I had learned as sacred—as well as myself; not that I was sinless, but after all I had sacrificed, I did seem to emanate something Holy, and though I had to have considered all that had happened some kind of spiritual awakening, I still worshipped my God, no matter how apart from it I felt or was—and I never really was, anyway. Something indeed was strange—and though I considered myself to be in great mental health, consistently dealing with people who were not—ie, the whole of the general public—to be disasterously draining Hey where you going? I'll give you a run for your money— Heres a train ride; I'll show you. Take this. Don't kill me. You're already dead Oh my GOD! Take this watch What is this!? Put in on? Is it Apple— WHAT! will it sync with my phone?! Phones—where we're going, we don't need phones! OKAY, THAT'S IT. I wanna see this fucking movie!! Which fucking movie! I don't care! Just put all the scenes together and call it a complication or something - lol I love compilations. Ew, lady, gross. Who is that. That's that lady. *slurps* Ew! Yeah, I remember her now. Fuck. I hate Manhattan You know why?! Dudes in suits. People in blazers and shit, Pleated slacks. Like wtf you go to a dry cleaners?! Fuck you. Rich ass motherfuckers. Cuffling wearing morherfuckers. The worst part is, They look delicious. All of em. And here I am, in my baggy ass pants, just trying to pretend. I don't live in fucking Queens. But at this point—you know what? I look like I live in fucking Queens. I'm one pair of crocs away from really not giving a fuck about my life at all. Sit here and write for awhile, why don't you? Now that it's nice, take the big city vibes in Life isn't high stakes and New York minutes— it's Sitting in ignorant bliss, A memorable moment, Listening to fountains, from a distance And not trying to fix it— For a moment It's an optical illusion. Just as you were— And you still are, on the surface Still accomplished, under all that Loveless news, financially discontent, Still, not worthless All the words were up to something; Just as quick as adderall or some Focus sets in —a force of useless nature Underwater in midtown Manhattan The mad hatter, sitting at the entrance to the matrix, Entranced and enthralled by the mallets and maladies, One that tricked her has imagined It's a trickle down effect It's just a deficit of culture Redirected and defected, But de facto— (As was written) Haven't had a laugh in ages Haven't trusted ever aince; And heaven comes just when the words have all been written In the end, We are GOD Let me see your eyes. Are you looking down at me. I'm always looking down at you. So you are. Your eyes, please Try to wipe the confusion off your face a bit; It's settling in between the brows, And you've no makeup to cover it— What a menace. She is— Mirage to men, and still a central figure in their fantasies, imaginations and emissions, Pull the trigger, then: Nobody needs you here And nobody needs to hear it Nobody needs to feel the words I wondered once, Then lived them, written In my fingertips. Another iPhone wins the war; A wind reminds me just of him Another human Can I go now? Are you done yet? Have you cum yet? Did you get a hug yet— Or a lunch ticket Has Skrillex mentioned you in Instagram— Or have you called your family? No. Then you're not fucking done yet You asked me what to do with the festival project: The answer is: “just do it,” Put it somewhere, go to bed and to the gym— and when it's finished, and the money's rolling in. and Jimmy Fallon phones you, happy that a dollar in his hand at random landed in it— That's when you're finished. What if that never happens. That's what “IF” is. What's the difference. Oh, there's Eminem again. Finally. God dammit. Talking to God at the plaza. Slipping away through the alley Falling in love with Manhattan. Wondering when you'll be happy I almost swore to God that Hal's the Broadway musicals being advertised were fakes— they just seemed so terrible, so bad that it had actually made me feel— that I somehow had a chance I'm at the Whole Foods running up a bill Feelin kinda hype—take a pill, needa chill. Get real: i'ma feel this later l, I'mma oh like a quarter of a mill I already gave you the deal When I left Israel, It's real! Wtf. Jesus WhT. What are you doing. Just—trust me- I don't trust you. You don't trust JESUS? NO. I'm your brother! So what! That's even worse! Here, take the wheel. No' Take the wheel! No' FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS TMPL FITNESS- for offering one-day trials to their boujee ass gym— Lol didn't I write this already You wrote everything already. Oh. ShT happens. Ugh. What happens next. Whatever happened to— NO. HE'S NOT COMING. He's coming now. NO. Yes. CANCEL THE PARTY. You can't cancel a party that's been going on for 4 days. Damn. It's been four days. So far. Yeah Supacree's a legend for this. I'm gonna have to put you on The spot right now, I'm sorry. Sorry for what. I don't know. Suddenly, the deadmau5 and the avicii hit all at once. At the same time. The same time. Speaking of bass cannons. Oh, that's right. SUPACREE'S FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS KX5 A second award. Goddamn it, fool! kx5–for making a dick-shaped bass cannon. SUPER HARD fucking flex. Literally. Are you a gym rat— or a gym shark?! I'm a gym rat. Wouldn't you rather— Hold that thought ::|pause Fuck this game. I quit. You can't quit Nobody quits! I fuxking quit. You can't quit Don't quit i figured it out Figured what out The game. It's no fun anymore You figured it out What is it What's the secret I JUST WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU oh. -42 Yeah. Are you sure. YES. Get away from me— I will throw you in the ocean! Lol. That's it? That's the end of the episode? Yes. {Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2023 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. © -U.

It's that wall between you and the world Where you are— That sets you apart; The star of your own show Covered in sawdust, —an unpolished tryphophobe, Hyperboles and hyperbolic chokeholds on the shows you love, the clothes you used to own; A phone in airplane mode, No knowing what the code is, Lol don't tell God you're bored in New York Oh wow WOW W0000W. Don't tell God you're bored at all. INFINITI I'm not amused. SUPCREE I know, right. SUNNI BLŪ fuck, I'm bored. SUPACREE's FIRST ANUAL FLEX AWARDS First Flex, of course goes to SKRILLEX— for showing up in New York unannounced —then leaving me there to die. !. Major flex. Now that that's out of y question . way. ARMIIN VAN BUREN— for dropping an album on my birthday. Flex. KX5 for putting my name in a song. — and spelling it right. Super major flex . SENZA GLUTEN restaurant SOL LEWITT Not so suddenly, I had grown tired of the psychological game that was being played, whether it was in my own mind or otherwise—and had decided to withdraw; I couldn't bother myself m by worrying about things that were entirely out of control-however, by maintaining a distance, by now, I had realized that there's m I paid attention to anything at all, the more in control of it I was—and so I did my best to keep away, and as hard as it it was to not speak with my son, now that he was with my mother and potenrially happier—as speaking to him before he has always sounded sad—and though it was a sad situation in general, the time had passed that I was going to fight my old family on anything, and continue to be fucked over by the same patterns and behaviors they had always used against me, now that I understood very well the rules of power, taking in the lessons I had learned as sacred—as well as myself; not that I was sinless, but after all I had sacrificed, I did seem to emanate something Holy, and though I had to have considered all that had happened some kind of spiritual awakening, I still worshipped my God, no matter how apart from it I felt or was—and I never really was, anyway. Something indeed was strange—and though I considered myself to be in great mental health, consistently dealing with people who were not—ie, the whole of the general public—to be disasterously draining Hey where you going? I'll give you a run for your money— Heres a train ride; I'll show you. Take this. Don't kill me. You're already dead Oh my GOD! Take this watch What is this!? Put in on? Is it Apple— WHAT! will it sync with my phone?! Phones—where we're going, we don't need phones! OKAY, THAT'S IT. I wanna see this fucking movie!! Which fucking movie! I don't care! Just put all the scenes together and call it a complication or something - lol I love compilations. Ew, lady, gross. Who is that. That's that lady. *slurps* Ew! Yeah, I remember her now. Fuck. I hate Manhattan You know why?! Dudes in suits. People in blazers and shit, Pleated slacks. Like wtf you go to a dry cleaners?! Fuck you. Rich ass motherfuckers. Cuffling wearing morherfuckers. The worst part is, They look delicious. All of em. And here I am, in my baggy ass pants, just trying to pretend. I don't live in fucking Queens. But at this point—you know what? I look like I live in fucking Queens. I'm one pair of crocs away from really not giving a fuck about my life at all. Sit here and write for awhile, why don't you? Now that it's nice, take the big city vibes in Life isn't high stakes and New York minutes— it's Sitting in ignorant bliss, A memorable moment, Listening to fountains, from a distance And not trying to fix it— For a moment It's an optical illusion. Just as you were— And you still are, on the surface Still accomplished, under all that Loveless news, financially discontent, Still, not worthless All the words were up to something; Just as quick as adderall or some Focus sets in —a force of useless nature Underwater in midtown Manhattan The mad hatter, sitting at the entrance to the matrix, Entranced and enthralled by the mallets and maladies, One that tricked her has imagined It's a trickle down effect It's just a deficit of culture Redirected and defected, But de facto— (As was written) Haven't had a laugh in ages Haven't trusted ever aince; And heaven comes just when the words have all been written In the end, We are GOD Let me see your eyes. Are you looking down at me. I'm always looking down at you. So you are. Your eyes, please Try to wipe the confusion off your face a bit; It's settling in between the brows, And you've no makeup to cover it— What a menace. She is— Mirage to men, and still a central figure in their fantasies, imaginations and emissions, Pull the trigger, then: Nobody needs you here And nobody needs to hear it Nobody needs to feel the words I wondered once, Then lived them, written In my fingertips. Another iPhone wins the war; A wind reminds me just of him Another human Can I go now? Are you done yet? Have you cum yet? Did you get a hug yet— Or a lunch ticket Has Skrillex mentioned you in Instagram— Or have you called your family? No. Then you're not fucking done yet You asked me what to do with the festival project: The answer is: “just do it,” Put it somewhere, go to bed and to the gym— and when it's finished, and the money's rolling in. and Jimmy Fallon phones you, happy that a dollar in his hand at random landed in it— That's when you're finished. What if that never happens. That's what “IF” is. What's the difference. Oh, there's Eminem again. Finally. God dammit. Talking to God at the plaza. Slipping away through the alley Falling in love with Manhattan. Wondering when you'll be happy I almost swore to God that Hal's the Broadway musicals being advertised were fakes— they just seemed so terrible, so bad that it had actually made me feel— that I somehow had a chance I'm at the Whole Foods running up a bill Feelin kinda hype—take a pill, needa chill. Get real: i'ma feel this later l, I'mma oh like a quarter of a mill I already gave you the deal When I left Israel, It's real! Wtf. Jesus WhT. What are you doing. Just—trust me- I don't trust you. You don't trust JESUS? NO. I'm your brother! So what! That's even worse! Here, take the wheel. No' Take the wheel! No' FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS TMPL FITNESS- for offering one-day trials to their boujee ass gym— Lol didn't I write this already You wrote everything already. Oh. ShT happens. Ugh. What happens next. Whatever happened to— NO. HE'S NOT COMING. He's coming now. NO. Yes. CANCEL THE PARTY. You can't cancel a party that's been going on for 4 days. Damn. It's been four days. So far. Yeah Supacree's a legend for this. I'm gonna have to put you on The spot right now, I'm sorry. Sorry for what. I don't know. Suddenly, the deadmau5 and the avicii hit all at once. At the same time. The same time. Speaking of bass cannons. Oh, that's right. SUPACREE'S FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS KX5 A second award. Goddamn it, fool! kx5–for making a dick-shaped bass cannon. SUPER HARD fucking flex. Literally. Are you a gym rat— or a gym shark?! I'm a gym rat. Wouldn't you rather— Hold that thought ::|pause Fuck this game. I quit. You can't quit Nobody quits! I fuxking quit. You can't quit Don't quit i figured it out Figured what out The game. It's no fun anymore You figured it out What is it What's the secret I JUST WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU oh. -42 Yeah. Are you sure. YES. Get away from me— I will throw you in the ocean! Lol. That's it? That's the end of the episode? Yes. {Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2023 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. © -U.

It's that wall between you and the world Where you are— That sets you apart; The star of your own show Covered in sawdust, —an unpolished tryphophobe, Hyperboles and hyperbolic chokeholds on the shows you love, the clothes you used to own; A phone in airplane mode, No knowing what the code is, Lol don't tell God you're bored in New York Oh wow WOW W0000W. Don't tell God you're bored at all. INFINITI I'm not amused. SUPCREE I know, right. SUNNI BLŪ fuck, I'm bored. SUPACREE's FIRST ANUAL FLEX AWARDS First Flex, of course goes to SKRILLEX— for showing up in New York unannounced —then leaving me there to die. !. Major flex. Now that that's out of y question . way. ARMIIN VAN BUREN— for dropping an album on my birthday. Flex. KX5 for putting my name in a song. — and spelling it right. Super major flex . SENZA GLUTEN restaurant SOL LEWITT Not so suddenly, I had grown tired of the psychological game that was being played, whether it was in my own mind or otherwise—and had decided to withdraw; I couldn't bother myself m by worrying about things that were entirely out of control-however, by maintaining a distance, by now, I had realized that there's m I paid attention to anything at all, the more in control of it I was—and so I did my best to keep away, and as hard as it it was to not speak with my son, now that he was with my mother and potenrially happier—as speaking to him before he has always sounded sad—and though it was a sad situation in general, the time had passed that I was going to fight my old family on anything, and continue to be fucked over by the same patterns and behaviors they had always used against me, now that I understood very well the rules of power, taking in the lessons I had learned as sacred—as well as myself; not that I was sinless, but after all I had sacrificed, I did seem to emanate something Holy, and though I had to have considered all that had happened some kind of spiritual awakening, I still worshipped my God, no matter how apart from it I felt or was—and I never really was, anyway. Something indeed was strange—and though I considered myself to be in great mental health, consistently dealing with people who were not—ie, the whole of the general public—to be disasterously draining Hey where you going? I'll give you a run for your money— Heres a train ride; I'll show you. Take this. Don't kill me. You're already dead Oh my GOD! Take this watch What is this!? Put in on? Is it Apple— WHAT! will it sync with my phone?! Phones—where we're going, we don't need phones! OKAY, THAT'S IT. I wanna see this fucking movie!! Which fucking movie! I don't care! Just put all the scenes together and call it a complication or something - lol I love compilations. Ew, lady, gross. Who is that. That's that lady. *slurps* Ew! Yeah, I remember her now. Fuck. I hate Manhattan You know why?! Dudes in suits. People in blazers and shit, Pleated slacks. Like wtf you go to a dry cleaners?! Fuck you. Rich ass motherfuckers. Cuffling wearing morherfuckers. The worst part is, They look delicious. All of em. And here I am, in my baggy ass pants, just trying to pretend. I don't live in fucking Queens. But at this point—you know what? I look like I live in fucking Queens. I'm one pair of crocs away from really not giving a fuck about my life at all. Sit here and write for awhile, why don't you? Now that it's nice, take the big city vibes in Life isn't high stakes and New York minutes— it's Sitting in ignorant bliss, A memorable moment, Listening to fountains, from a distance And not trying to fix it— For a moment It's an optical illusion. Just as you were— And you still are, on the surface Still accomplished, under all that Loveless news, financially discontent, Still, not worthless All the words were up to something; Just as quick as adderall or some Focus sets in —a force of useless nature Underwater in midtown Manhattan The mad hatter, sitting at the entrance to the matrix, Entranced and enthralled by the mallets and maladies, One that tricked her has imagined It's a trickle down effect It's just a deficit of culture Redirected and defected, But de facto— (As was written) Haven't had a laugh in ages Haven't trusted ever aince; And heaven comes just when the words have all been written In the end, We are GOD Let me see your eyes. Are you looking down at me. I'm always looking down at you. So you are. Your eyes, please Try to wipe the confusion off your face a bit; It's settling in between the brows, And you've no makeup to cover it— What a menace. She is— Mirage to men, and still a central figure in their fantasies, imaginations and emissions, Pull the trigger, then: Nobody needs you here And nobody needs to hear it Nobody needs to feel the words I wondered once, Then lived them, written In my fingertips. Another iPhone wins the war; A wind reminds me just of him Another human Can I go now? Are you done yet? Have you cum yet? Did you get a hug yet— Or a lunch ticket Has Skrillex mentioned you in Instagram— Or have you called your family? No. Then you're not fucking done yet You asked me what to do with the festival project: The answer is: “just do it,” Put it somewhere, go to bed and to the gym— and when it's finished, and the money's rolling in. and Jimmy Fallon phones you, happy that a dollar in his hand at random landed in it— That's when you're finished. What if that never happens. That's what “IF” is. What's the difference. Oh, there's Eminem again. Finally. God dammit. Talking to God at the plaza. Slipping away through the alley Falling in love with Manhattan. Wondering when you'll be happy I almost swore to God that Hal's the Broadway musicals being advertised were fakes— they just seemed so terrible, so bad that it had actually made me feel— that I somehow had a chance I'm at the Whole Foods running up a bill Feelin kinda hype—take a pill, needa chill. Get real: i'ma feel this later l, I'mma oh like a quarter of a mill I already gave you the deal When I left Israel, It's real! Wtf. Jesus WhT. What are you doing. Just—trust me- I don't trust you. You don't trust JESUS? NO. I'm your brother! So what! That's even worse! Here, take the wheel. No' Take the wheel! No' FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS TMPL FITNESS- for offering one-day trials to their boujee ass gym— Lol didn't I write this already You wrote everything already. Oh. ShT happens. Ugh. What happens next. Whatever happened to— NO. HE'S NOT COMING. He's coming now. NO. Yes. CANCEL THE PARTY. You can't cancel a party that's been going on for 4 days. Damn. It's been four days. So far. Yeah Supacree's a legend for this. I'm gonna have to put you on The spot right now, I'm sorry. Sorry for what. I don't know. Suddenly, the deadmau5 and the avicii hit all at once. At the same time. The same time. Speaking of bass cannons. Oh, that's right. SUPACREE'S FIRST ANNUAL FLEX AWARDS KX5 A second award. Goddamn it, fool! kx5–for making a dick-shaped bass cannon. SUPER HARD fucking flex. Literally. Are you a gym rat— or a gym shark?! I'm a gym rat. Wouldn't you rather— Hold that thought ::|pause Fuck this game. I quit. You can't quit Nobody quits! I fuxking quit. You can't quit Don't quit i figured it out Figured what out The game. It's no fun anymore You figured it out What is it What's the secret I JUST WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU oh. -42 Yeah. Are you sure. YES. Get away from me— I will throw you in the ocean! Lol. That's it? That's the end of the episode? Yes. {Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2023 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. © -U.

Mary, though not yet aware of her own power, is on the verge of awakening, bringing life and beauty back to the now barren soil. Treading carefully through the garden—her hands embracing the earth, sowing the seeds that would soon bring the blooms to life once more—Mary finds solace in this enchanted world.In her journey, she discovers a kindred spirit in the gruff, reserved Ben Weatherstaff, whose love for roses is unveiled, a love nurtured by a cherished memory of a lady. The little being whose songs of joy fill their ears, the robin, watches with a keen eye, drawing ever nearer, whispers of friendship between them growing stronger with each day.It is during this week of sunshine that Mary makes the acquaintance of Dickon—the wild, carefree boy who seems to be a part of nature itself, who charms the creatures of the earth with his wooden pipe and gentle demeanour. Entranced by his unique air and the love they both share for the creatures and plants around them, Mary is drawn to reveal her secret to this enchanting boy.

For the PNW Yarn Crawl, Ewe and I Yarns is focusing on Turkey as their theme! Therefore, we talk about Turkish fiber traditions today, so you have some extra background information when you look at all the fiber goodness at Ewe and I! We cover Turkish color-knitting and we highlight Turkish rugs. We hope to see you soon at the PNW Yarn Crawl at Ewe and I! https://www.eweandiyarns.com/ Email us with suggestions and concerns at: Spinningayarnstale@gmail.com Or follow us on Instagram! Spinningayarnstale Patterns Talked about today:  The Bonnie Cardigan:  https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/bonnie-27 Pictures of Turkish Socks as well as a lovely article: https://pieceworkmagazine.com/sock-monday-turkish-socks/ RESOURCES:  a, n. (2020, March 2). Knitted socks from Turkey – craft techniques. THE CRAFT ATLAS. Retrieved March 6, 2023, from https://craftatlas.co/crafts/handmade-knitted-socks-from-turkey Aktaş, B. M., & Veryeri Alaca, I. (2017). The co-knitting project: A proposal to revive traditional handmade socks in Turkey. The Journal of Modern Craft, 10(3), 237–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2017.1394524 Hershberger, L. D. T. (2018, February). Entranced by Turkish Socks. Piecework, 26(1). Nargi, L. (2014). Knitting around the world: A multistranded history of a time-honored tradition. Voyageur. Looms & Tools. Babak's Oriental Carpets. (n.d.). Retrieved March 8, 2023, from https://www.babaksorientalcarpets.com/pages/looms-tools YouTube. (2013). YouTube. Retrieved March 8, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsWL-2xHFps. Turkish rug motifs. Turkish Rug Motifs. (n.d.). Retrieved March 12, 2023, from https://www.abc-oriental-rug.com/turkish-rug-motifs.html Koçak, N. (2022, October 4). Artistry at work: Dazzling, traditional carpet-weaving of Türkiye. Daily Sabah. Retrieved March 12, 2023, from https://www.dailysabah.com/life/history/artistry-at-work-dazzling-traditional-carpet-weaving-of-turkiye Ferriter, M. (n.d.). Turkish spindles archives. TurkishFolkArt. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://turkishfolkart.com/product-tag/turkish-spindles/ Turkish spindles archives. TurkishFolkArt. (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://turkishfolkart.com/product-tag/turkish-spindles/

Academy Award Theater | If I Were King | This episode aired, May 11, 1946Cast: Ronald ColmanStory: In Paris, which has long been besieged by the Burgundians, François Villon is the despair of Father Villon, the priest who took him in and raised him from the age of six. Father Villon takes François to mass after his latest escapade. There François spies a beautiful woman, Katherine DeVaucelles. Entranced, he tries to strike up an acquaintance, reciting one of his poems (from which the film takes its title) and pretending it was written specially for her. On the surface, she is unmoved, but when soldiers come to take him into custody, she provides him with an alibi.: : : : :My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- VARIETY X ARMED FORCES -- THE COMPLETE ORSON WELLESSubscribing is free and you'll receive new post notifications. Also, if you have a moment, please give a 4-5 star rating and/or write a 1-2 sentence positive review on your preferred service -- that would help me a lot.Thank you for your support.https://otr.duane.media | Instagram @duane.otr

Excited to commence a weekend family camping trip on a secluded beach, Anastacia begins to notice strange lights of assorted colors illuminating the night sky. Entranced by the spectacle, she wonders if she is being coaxed by the unnatural phenomenon to come away with them. Could the origins of these lights be connected to other worldly beings?Location: Neltjeberg Beach, St.Thomas, USVI SOURCES:https://stthomassource.com/content/2020/11/04/neltjeberg-estate-remains-in-moolenaar-family-hands-after-170-years/https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/909e5206-61a0-42c6-af84-1d7ef6c5b7a9SPONSORS:Sparrow & The Finch Designs  Are you in need of a graphic design company that can help your business soar to new heights? Look no further than Sparrow and The Finch Designs! Our team of skilled designers can create stunning logos, eye-catching advertisements, and visually stunning websites that will make your business stand out from the flock. Trust Sparrow and The Finch Designs to bring your vision to life. Contact us today at 512-316-8830 to get started! Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this podcast please send us 5 stars with a raving review to show your support! Your feedback and kind words motivate us to keep doing what we do and show up to be a fuller podcast for you here at Caribbean Mystics. Do you or someone you know have a true story that takes place in the Caribbean Region? email us at caribbeanmysticspodcast@gmail.com . Social MediasIG: @CaribbeanmysticspodcastFB: @CaribbeanmysticspodcastYoutube: Caribbean Mystics PodcastHostsGabrielle Querrard (IG: @gquerrard) Paulina Creque (IG: @rudegal_p)Theme song “Folktale Jouvert Riddim” by Umi Marcano

The Seoul Man discusses what a Korean Drama is and the wonderful impact it has had on him. This feeling is shared by millions of fans worldwide! Korean Drama genre television is taking the world by storm and there is good reason for this. The first episodes explores why I and millions of other people are entranced by KDramas. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theseoulman/support

Episode one hundred and fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “See Emily Play", the birth of the UK underground, and the career of Roger Barrett, known as Syd. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "First Girl I Loved" by the Incredible String Band. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, due to the number of Pink Floyd songs. I referred to two biographies of Barrett in this episode -- A Very Irregular Head by Rob Chapman is the one I would recommend, and the one whose narrative I have largely followed. Some of the information has been superseded by newer discoveries, but Chapman is almost unique in people writing about Barrett in that he actually seems to care about the facts and try to get things right rather than make up something more interesting. Crazy Diamond by Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson is much less reliable, but does have quite a few interview quotes that aren't duplicated by Chapman. Information about Joe Boyd comes from Boyd's book White Bicycles. In this and future episodes on Pink Floyd I'm also relying on Nick Mason's Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd: All the Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin. The compilation Relics contains many of the most important tracks from Barrett's time with Pink Floyd, while Piper at the Gates of Dawn is his one full album with them. Those who want a fuller history of his time with the group will want to get Piper and also the box set Cambridge St/ation 1965-1967. Barrett only released two solo albums during his career. They're available as a bundle here. Completists will also want the rarities and outtakes collection Opel.  ERRATA: I talk about “Interstellar Overdrive” as if Barrett wrote it solo. The song is credited to all four members, but it was Barrett who came up with the riff I talk about. And annoyingly, given the lengths I went to to deal correctly with Barrett's name, I repeatedly refer to "Dave" Gilmour, when Gilmour prefers David. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A note before I begin -- this episode deals with drug use and mental illness, so anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to skip this one. But also, there's a rather unique problem in how I deal with the name of the main artist in the story today. The man everyone knows as Syd Barrett was born Roger Barrett, used that name with his family for his whole life, and in later years very strongly disliked being called "Syd", yet everyone other than his family called him that at all times until he left the music industry, and that's the name that appears on record labels, including his solo albums. I don't believe it's right to refer to people by names they choose not to go by themselves, but the name Barrett went by throughout his brief period in the public eye was different from the one he went by later, and by all accounts he was actually distressed by its use in later years. So what I'm going to do in this episode is refer to him as "Roger Barrett" when a full name is necessary for disambiguation or just "Barrett" otherwise, but I'll leave any quotes from other people referring to "Syd" as they were originally phrased. In future episodes on Pink Floyd, I'll refer to him just as Barrett, but in episodes where I discuss his influence on other artists, I will probably have to use "Syd Barrett" because otherwise people who haven't listened to this episode won't know what on Earth I'm talking about. Anyway, on with the show. “It's gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound. “Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.” That's a quote from a chapter titled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" from the classic children's book The Wind in the Willows -- a book which for most of its length is a fairly straightforward story about anthropomorphic animals having jovial adventures, but which in that one chapter has Rat and Mole suddenly encounter the Great God Pan and have a hallucinatory, transcendental experience caused by his music, one so extreme it's wiped from their minds, as they simply cannot process it. The book, and the chapter, was a favourite of Roger Barrett, a young child born in Cambridge in 1946. Barrett came from an intellectual but not especially bookish family. His father, Dr. Arthur Barrett, was a pathologist -- there's a room in Addenbrooke's Hospital named after him -- but he was also an avid watercolour painter, a world-leading authority on fungi, and a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society who was apparently an extraordinarily good singer; while his mother Winifred was a stay-at-home mother who was nonetheless very active in the community, organising a local Girl Guide troupe. They never particularly encouraged their family to read, but young Roger did particularly enjoy the more pastoral end of the children's literature of the time. As well as the Wind in the Willows he also loved Alice in Wonderland, and the Little Grey Men books -- a series of stories about tiny gnomes and their adventures in the countryside. But his two big passions were music and painting. He got his first ukulele at age eleven, and by the time his father died, just before Roger's sixteenth birthday, he had graduated to playing a full-sized guitar. At the time his musical tastes were largely the same as those of any other British teenager -- he liked Chubby Checker, for example -- though he did have a tendency to prefer the quirkier end of things, and some of the first songs he tried to play on the guitar were those of Joe Brown: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, "I'm Henry VIII I Am"] Barrett grew up in Cambridge, and for those who don't know it, Cambridge is an incubator of a very particular kind of eccentricity. The university tends to attract rather unworldly intellectual overachievers to the city -- people who might not be able to survive in many other situations but who can thrive in that one -- and every description of Barrett's father suggests he was such a person -- Barrett's sister Rosemary has said that she believes that most of the family were autistic, though whether this is a belief based on popular media portrayals or a deeper understanding I don't know. But certainly Cambridge is full of eccentric people with remarkable achievements, and such people tend to have children with a certain type of personality, who try simultaneously to live up to and rebel against expectations of greatness that come from having parents who are regarded as great, and to do so with rather less awareness of social norms than the typical rebel has. In the case of Roger Barrett, he, like so many others of his generation, was encouraged to go into the sciences -- as indeed his father had, both in his career as a pathologist and in his avocation as a mycologist. The fifties and sixties were a time, much like today, when what we now refer to as the STEM subjects were regarded as new and exciting and modern. But rather than following in his father's professional footsteps, Roger Barrett instead followed his hobbies. Dr. Barrett was a painter and musician in his spare time, and Roger was to turn to those things to earn his living. For much of his teens, it seemed that art would be the direction he would go in. He was, everyone agrees, a hugely talented painter, and he was particularly noted for his mastery of colours. But he was also becoming more and more interested in R&B music, especially the music of Bo Diddley, who became his new biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love?"] He would often spend hours with his friend Dave Gilmour, a much more advanced guitarist, trying to learn blues riffs. By this point Barrett had already received the nickname "Syd". Depending on which story you believe, he either got it when he started attending a jazz club where an elderly jazzer named Sid Barrett played, and the people were amused that their youngest attendee, like one of the oldest, was called Barrett; or, more plausibly, he turned up to a Scout meeting once wearing a flat cap rather than the normal scout beret, and he got nicknamed "Sid" because it made him look working-class and "Sid" was a working-class sort of name. In 1962, by the time he was sixteen, Barrett joined a short-lived group called Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, on rhythm guitar. The group's lead singer, Geoff Mottlow, would go on to join a band called the Boston Crabs who would have a minor hit in 1965 with a version of the Coasters song "Down in Mexico": [Excerpt: The Boston Crabs, "Down in Mexico"] The bass player from the Mottoes, Tony Sainty, and the drummer Clive Welham, would go on to form another band, The Jokers Wild, with Barrett's friend Dave Gilmour. Barrett also briefly joined another band, Those Without, but his time with them was similarly brief. Some sources -- though ones I consider generally less reliable -- say that the Mottoes' bass player wasn't Tony Sainty, but was Roger Waters, the son of one of Barrett's teachers, and that one of the reasons the band split up was that Waters had moved down to London to study architecture. I don't think that's the case, but it's definitely true that Barrett knew Waters, and when he moved to London himself the next year to go to Camberwell Art College, he moved into a house where Waters was already living. Two previous tenants at the same house, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, had formed a loose band with Waters and various other amateur musicians like Keith Noble, Shelagh Noble, and Clive Metcalfe. That band was sometimes known as the Screaming Abdabs, The Megadeaths, or The Tea Set -- the latter as a sly reference to slang terms for cannabis -- but was mostly known at first as Sigma 6, named after a manifesto by the novelist Alexander Trocchi for a kind of spontaneous university. They were also sometimes known as Leonard's Lodgers, after the landlord of the home that Barrett was moving into, Mike Leonard, who would occasionally sit in on organ and would later, as the band became more of a coherent unit, act as a roadie and put on light shows behind them -- Leonard was himself very interested in avant-garde and experimental art, and it was his idea to play around with the group's lighting. By the time Barrett moved in with Waters in 1964, the group had settled on the Tea Set name, and consisted of Waters on bass, Mason on drums, Wright on keyboards, singer Chris Dennis, and guitarist Rado Klose. Of the group, Klose was the only one who was a skilled musician -- he was a very good jazz guitarist, while the other members were barely adequate. By this time Barrett's musical interests were expanding to include folk music -- his girlfriend at the time talked later about him taking her to see Bob Dylan on his first UK tour and thinking "My first reaction was seeing all these people like Syd. It was almost as if every town had sent one Syd Barrett there. It was my first time seeing people like him." But the music he was most into was the blues. And as the Tea Set were turning into a blues band, he joined them. He even had a name for the new band that would make them more bluesy. He'd read the back of a record cover which had named two extremely obscure blues musicians -- musicians he may never even have heard. Pink Anderson: [Excerpt: Pink Anderson, "Boll Weevil"] And Floyd Council: [Excerpt: Floyd Council, "Runaway Man Blues"] Barrett suggested that they put together the names of the two bluesmen, and presumably because "Anderson Council" didn't have quite the right ring, they went for The Pink Floyd -- though for a while yet they would sometimes still perform as The Tea Set, and they were sometimes also called The Pink Floyd Sound. Dennis left soon after Barrett joined, and the new five-piece Pink Floyd Sound started trying to get more gigs. They auditioned for Ready Steady Go! and were turned down, but did get some decent support slots, including for a band called the Tridents: [Excerpt: The Tridents, "Tiger in Your Tank"] The members of the group were particularly impressed by the Tridents' guitarist and the way he altered his sound using feedback -- Barrett even sent a letter to his girlfriend with a drawing of the guitarist, one Jeff Beck, raving about how good he was. At this point, the group were mostly performing cover versions, but they did have a handful of originals, and it was these they recorded in their first demo sessions in late 1964 and early 1965. They included "Walk With Me Sydney", a song written by Roger Waters as a parody of "Work With Me Annie" and "Dance With Me Henry" -- and, given the lyrics, possibly also Hank Ballard's follow-up "Henry's Got Flat Feet (Can't Dance No More) and featuring Rick Wright's then-wife Juliette Gale as Etta James to Barrett's Richard Berry: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Walk With Me Sydney"] And four songs by Barrett, including one called "Double-O Bo" which was a Bo Diddley rip-off, and "Butterfly", the most interesting of these early recordings: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Butterfly"] At this point, Barrett was very unsure of his own vocal abilities, and wrote a letter to his girlfriend saying "Emo says why don't I give up 'cos it sounds horrible, and I would but I can't get Fred to join because he's got a group (p'raps you knew!) so I still have to sing." "Fred" was a nickname for his old friend Dave Gilmour, who was playing in his own band, Joker's Wild, at this point. Summer 1965 saw two important events in the life of the group. The first was that Barrett took LSD for the first time. The rest of the group weren't interested in trying it, and would indeed generally be one of the more sober bands in the rock business, despite the reputation their music got. The other members would for the most part try acid once or twice, around late 1966, but generally steer clear of it. Barrett, by contrast, took it on a very regular basis, and it would influence all the work he did from that point on. The other event was that Rado Klose left the group. Klose was the only really proficient musician in the group, but he had very different tastes to the other members, preferring to play jazz to R&B and pop, and he was also falling behind in his university studies, and decided to put that ahead of remaining in the band. This meant that the group members had to radically rethink the way they were making music. They couldn't rely on instrumental proficiency, so they had to rely on ideas. One of the things they started to do was use echo. They got primitive echo devices and put both Barrett's guitar and Wright's keyboard through them, allowing them to create new sounds that hadn't been heard on stage before. But they were still mostly doing the same Slim Harpo and Bo Diddley numbers everyone else was doing, and weren't able to be particularly interesting while playing them. But for a while they carried on doing the normal gigs, like a birthday party they played in late 1965, where on the same bill was a young American folk singer named Paul Simon, and Joker's Wild, the band Dave Gilmour was in, who backed Simon on a version of "Johnny B. Goode". A couple of weeks after that party, Joker's Wild went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] But The Pink Floyd Sound weren't as musically tight as Joker's Wild, and they couldn't make a living as a cover band even if they wanted to. They had to do something different. Inspiration then came from a very unexpected source. I mentioned earlier that one of the names the group had been performing under had been inspired by a manifesto for a spontaneous university by the writer Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi's ideas had actually been put into practice by an organisation calling itself the London Free School, based in Notting Hill. The London Free School was an interesting mixture of people from what was then known as the New Left, but who were already rapidly aging, the people who had been the cornerstone of radical campaigning in the late fifties and early sixties, who had run the Aldermaston marches against nuclear weapons and so on, and a new breed of countercultural people who in a year or two would be defined as hippies but at the time were not so easy to pigeonhole. These people were mostly politically radical but very privileged people -- one of the founder members of the London Free School was Peter Jenner, who was the son of a vicar and the grandson of a Labour MP -- and they were trying to put their radical ideas into practice. The London Free School was meant to be a collective of people who would help each other and themselves, and who would educate each other. You'd go to the collective wanting to learn how to do something, whether that's how to improve the housing in your area or navigate some particularly difficult piece of bureaucracy, or how to play a musical instrument, and someone who had that skill would teach you how to do it, while you hopefully taught them something else of value. The London Free School, like all such utopian schemes, ended up falling apart, but it had a wider cultural impact than most such schemes. Britain's first underground newspaper, the International Times, was put together by people involved in the Free School, and the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which is now one of the biggest outdoor events in Britain every year with a million attendees, came from the merger of outdoor events organised by the Free School with older community events. A group of musicians called AMM was associated with many of the people involved in the Free School. AMM performed totally improvised music, with no structure and no normal sense of melody and harmony: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] Keith Rowe, the guitarist in AMM, wanted to find his own technique uninfluenced by American jazz guitarists, and thought of that in terms that appealed very strongly to the painterly Barrett, saying "For the Americans to develop an American school of painting, they somehow had to ditch or lose European easel painting techniques. They had to make a break with the past. What did that possibly mean if you were a jazz guitar player? For me, symbolically, it was Pollock laying the canvas on the floor, which immediately abandons European easel technique. I could see that by laying the canvas down, it became inappropriate to apply easel techniques. I thought if I did that with a guitar, I would just lose all those techniques, because they would be physically impossible to do." Rowe's technique-free technique inspired Barrett to make similar noises with his guitar, and to think less in terms of melody and harmony than pure sound. AMM's first record came out in 1966. Four of the Free School people decided to put together their own record label, DNA, and they got an agreement with Elektra Records to distribute its first release -- Joe Boyd, the head of Elektra in the UK, was another London Free School member, and someone who had plenty of experience with disruptive art already, having been on the sound engineering team at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric. AMM went into the studio and recorded AMMMusic: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] After that came out, though, Peter Jenner, one of the people who'd started the label, came to a realisation. He said later "We'd made this one record with AMM. Great record, very seminal, seriously avant-garde, but I'd started adding up and I'd worked out that the deal we had, we got two percent of retail, out of which we, the label, had to pay for recording costs and pay ourselves. I came to the conclusion that we were going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records just to pay the recording costs, let alone pay ourselves any money and build a label, so I realised we had to have a pop band because pop bands sold a lot of records. It was as simple as that and I was as naive as that." Jenner abandoned DNA records for the moment, and he and his friend Andrew King decided they were going to become pop managers. and they found The Pink Floyd Sound playing at an event at the Marquee, one of a series of events that were variously known as Spontaneous Underground and The Trip. Other participants in those events included Soft Machine; Mose Allison; Donovan, performing improvised songs backed by sitar players; Graham Bond; a performer who played Bach pieces while backed by African drummers; and The Poison Bellows, a poetry duo consisting of Spike Hawkins and Johnny Byrne, who may of all of these performers be the one who other than Pink Floyd themselves has had the most cultural impact in the UK -- after writing the exploitation novel Groupie and co-writing a film adaptation of Spike Milligan's war memoirs, Byrne became a TV screenwriter, writing many episodes of Space: 1999 and Doctor Who before creating the long-running TV series Heartbeat. Jenner and King decided they wanted to sign The Pink Floyd Sound and make records with them, and the group agreed -- but only after their summer holidays. They were all still students, and so they dispersed during the summer. Waters and Wright went on holiday to Greece, where they tried acid for the first of only a small number of occasions and were unimpressed, while Mason went on a trip round America by Greyhound bus. Barrett, meanwhile, stayed behind, and started writing more songs, encouraged by Jenner, who insisted that the band needed to stop relying on blues covers and come up with their own material, and who saw Barrett as the focus of the group. Jenner later described them as "Four not terribly competent musicians who managed between them to create something that was extraordinary. Syd was the main creative drive behind the band - he was the singer and lead guitarist. Roger couldn't tune his bass because he was tone deaf, it had to be tuned by Rick. Rick could write a bit of a tune and Roger could knock out a couple of words if necessary. 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' was the first song Roger ever wrote, and he only did it because Syd encouraged everyone to write. Syd was very hesitant about his writing, but when he produced these great songs everyone else thought 'Well, it must be easy'" Of course, we know this isn't quite true -- Waters had written "Walk with me Sydney" -- but it is definitely the case that everyone involved thought of Barrett as the main creative force in the group, and that he was the one that Jenner was encouraging to write new material. After the summer holidays, the group reconvened, and one of their first actions was to play a benefit for the London Free School. Jenner said later "Andrew King and myself were both vicars' sons, and we knew that when you want to raise money for the parish you have to have a social. So in a very old-fashioned way we said 'let's put on a social'. Like in the Just William books, like a whist drive. We thought 'You can't have a whist drive. That's not cool. Let's have a band. That would be cool.' And the only band we knew was the band I was starting to get involved with." After a couple of these events went well, Joe Boyd suggested that they make those events a regular club night, and the UFO Club was born. Jenner and King started working on the light shows for the group, and then bringing in other people, and the light show became an integral part of the group's mystique -- rather than standing in a spotlight as other groups would, they worked in shadows, with distorted kaleidoscopic lights playing on them, distancing themselves from the audience. The highlight of their sets was a long piece called "Interstellar Overdrive", and this became one of the group's first professional recordings, when they went into the studio with Joe Boyd to record it for the soundtrack of a film titled Tonite Let's All Make Love in London. There are conflicting stories about the inspiration for the main riff for "Interstellar Overdrive". One apparent source is the riff from Love's version of the Bacharach and David song "My Little Red Book". Depending on who you ask, either Barrett was obsessed with Love's first album and copied the riff, or Peter Jenner tried to hum him the riff and Barrett copied what Jenner was humming: [Excerpt: Love, "My Little Red Book"] More prosaically, Roger Waters has always claimed that the main inspiration was from "Old Ned", Ron Grainer's theme tune for the sitcom Steptoe and Son (which for American listeners was remade over there as Sanford and Son): [Excerpt: Ron Grainer, "Old Ned"] Of course it's entirely possible, and even likely, that Barrett was inspired by both, and if so that would neatly sum up the whole range of Pink Floyd's influences at this point. "My Little Red Book" was a cover by an American garage-psych/folk-rock band of a hit by Manfred Mann, a group who were best known for pop singles but were also serious blues and jazz musicians, while Steptoe and Son was a whimsical but dark and very English sitcom about a way of life that was slowly disappearing. And you can definitely hear both influences in the main riff of the track they recorded with Boyd: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Interstellar Overdrive"] "Interstellar Overdrive" was one of two types of song that The Pink Floyd were performing at this time -- a long, extended, instrumental psychedelic excuse for freaky sounds, inspired by things like the second disc of Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention. When they went into the studio again with Boyd later in January 1967, to record what they hoped would be their first single, they recorded two of the other kind of songs -- whimsical story songs inspired equally by the incidents of everyday life and by children's literature. What became the B-side, "Candy and a Currant Bun", was based around the riff from "Smokestack Lightnin'" by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] That song had become a favourite on the British blues scene, and was thus the inspiration for many songs of the type that get called "quintessentially English". Ray Davies, who was in many ways the major songwriter at this time who was closest to Barrett stylistically, would a year later use the riff for the Kinks song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains", but in this case Barrett had originally written a song titled "Let's Roll Another One", about sexual longing and cannabis. The lyrics were hastily rewritten in the studio to remove the controversial drug references-- and supposedly this caused some conflict between Barrett and Waters, with Waters pushing for the change, while Barrett argued against it, though like many of the stories from this period this sounds like the kind of thing that gets said by people wanting to push particular images of both men. Either way, the lyric was changed to be about sweet treats rather than drugs, though the lascivious elements remained in. And some people even argue that there was another lyric change -- where Barrett sings "walk with me", there's a slight "f" sound in his vocal. As someone who does a lot of microphone work myself, it sounds to me like just one of those things that happens while recording, but a lot of people are very insistent that Barrett is deliberately singing a different word altogether: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Candy and a Currant Bun"] The A-side, meanwhile, was inspired by real life. Both Barrett and Waters had mothers who used  to take in female lodgers, and both had regularly had their lodgers' underwear stolen from washing lines. While they didn't know anything else about the thief, he became in Barrett's imagination a man who liked to dress up in the clothing after he stole it: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Arnold Layne"] After recording the two tracks with Joe Boyd, the natural assumption was that the record would be put out on Elektra, the label which Boyd worked for in the UK, but Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra records, wasn't interested, and so a bidding war began for the single, as by this point the group were the hottest thing in London. For a while it looked like they were going to sign to Track Records, the label owned by the Who's management, but in the end EMI won out. Right as they signed, the News of the World was doing a whole series of articles about pop stars and their drug use, and the last of the articles talked about The Pink Floyd and their association with LSD, even though they hadn't released a record yet. EMI had to put out a press release saying that the group were not psychedelic, insisting"The Pink Floyd are not trying to create hallucinatory effects in their audience." It was only after getting signed that the group became full-time professionals. Waters had by this point graduated from university and was working as a trainee architect, and quit his job to become a pop star. Wright dropped out of university, but Mason and Barrett took sabbaticals. Barrett in particular seems to have seen this very much as a temporary thing, talking about how he was making so much money it would be foolish not to take the opportunity while it lasted, but how he was going to resume his studies in a year. "Arnold Layne" made the top twenty, and it would have gone higher had the pirate radio station Radio London, at the time the single most popular radio station when it came to pop music, not banned the track because of its sexual content. However, it would be the only single Joe Boyd would work on with the group. EMI insisted on only using in-house producers, and so while Joe Boyd would go on to a great career as a producer, and we'll see him again, he was replaced with Norman Smith. Smith had been the chief engineer on the Beatles records up to Rubber Soul, after which he'd been promoted to being a producer in his own right, and Geoff Emerick had taken over. He also had aspirations to pop stardom himself, and a few years later would have a transatlantic hit with "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" under the name Hurricane Smith: [Excerpt: Hurricane Smith, "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?"] Smith's production of the group would prove controversial among some of the group's longtime fans, who thought that he did too much to curtail their more experimental side, as he would try to get the group to record songs that were more structured and more commercial, and would cut down their improvisations into a more manageable form. Others, notably Peter Jenner, thought that Smith was the perfect producer for the group. They started work on their first album, which was mostly recorded in studio three of Abbey Road, while the Beatles were just finishing off work on Sgt Pepper in studio two. The album was titled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, after the chapter from The Wind in the Willows, and other than a few extended instrumental showcases, most of the album was made up of short, whimsical, songs by Barrett that were strongly infused with imagery from late-Victorian and Edwardian children's books. This is one of the big differences between the British and American psychedelic scenes. Both the British and American undergrounds were made up of the same type of people -- a mixture of older radical activists, often Communists, who had come up in Britain in the Ban the Bomb campaigns and in America in the Civil Rights movement; and younger people, usually middle-class students with radical politics from a privileged background, who were into experimenting with drugs and alternative lifestyles. But the  social situations were different. In America, the younger members of the underground were angry and scared, as their principal interest was in stopping the war in Vietnam in which so many of them were being killed. And the music of the older generation of the underground, the Civil Rights activists, was shot through with influence from the blues, gospel, and American folk music, with a strong Black influence. So that's what the American psychedelic groups played, for the most part, very bluesy, very angry, music, By contrast, the British younger generation of hippies were not being drafted to go to war, and mostly had little to complain about, other than a feeling of being stifled by their parents' generation's expectations. And while most of them were influenced by the blues, that wasn't the music that had been popular among the older underground people, who had either been listening to experimental European art music or had been influenced by Ewan MacColl and his associates into listening instead to traditional old English ballads, things like the story of Tam Lin or Thomas the Rhymer, where someone is spirited away to the land of the fairies: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Thomas the Rhymer"] As a result, most British musicians, when exposed to the culture of the underground over here, created music that looked back to an idealised childhood of their grandparents' generation, songs that were nostalgic for a past just before the one they could remember (as opposed to their own childhoods, which had taken place in war or the immediate aftermath of it, dominated by poverty, rationing, and bomb sites (though of course Barrett's childhood in Cambridge had been far closer to this mythic idyll than those of his contemporaries from Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, or London). So almost every British musician who was making music that might be called psychedelic was writing songs that were influenced both by experimental art music and by pre-War popular song, and which conjured up images from older children's books. Most notably of course at this point the Beatles were recording songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" about places from their childhood, and taking lyrical inspiration from Victorian circus posters and the works of Lewis Carroll, but Barrett was similarly inspired. One of the books he loved most as a child was "The Little Grey Men" by BB, a penname for Denys Watkins-Pitchford. The book told the story of three gnomes,  Baldmoney, Sneezewort, and Dodder, and their adventures on a boat when the fourth member of their little group, Cloudberry, who's a bit of a rebellious loner and more adventurous than the other three, goes exploring on his own and they have to go off and find him. Barrett's song "The Gnome" doesn't use any precise details from the book, but its combination of whimsy about a gnome named Grimble-gromble and a reverence for nature is very much in the mould of BB's work: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "The Gnome"] Another huge influence on Barrett was Hillaire Belloc. Belloc is someone who is not read much any more, as sadly he is mostly known for the intense antisemitism in some of his writing, which stains it just as so much of early twentieth-century literature is stained, but he was one of the most influential writers of the early part of the twentieth century. Like his friend GK Chesterton he was simultaneously an author of Catholic apologia and a political campaigner -- he was a Liberal MP for a few years, and a strong advocate of an economic system known as Distributism, and had a peculiar mixture of very progressive and extremely reactionary ideas which resonated with a lot of the atmosphere in the British underground of the time, even though he would likely have profoundly disapproved of them. But Belloc wrote in a variety of styles, including poems for children, which are the works of his that have aged the best, and were a huge influence on later children's writers like Roald Dahl with their gleeful comic cruelty. Barrett's "Matilda Mother" had lyrics that were, other than the chorus where Barrett begs his mother to read him more of the story, taken verbatim from three poems from Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children -- "Jim, Who Ran away from his Nurse, and was Eaten by a Lion", "Henry King (Who chewed bits of String, and was cut off in Dreadful Agonies)", and "Matilda (Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death)" -- the titles of those give some idea of the kind of thing Belloc would write: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Matilda Mother (early version)"] Sadly for Barrett, Belloc's estate refused to allow permission for his poems to be used, and so he had to rework the lyrics, writing new fairy-tale lyrics for the finished version. Other sources of inspiration for lyrics came from books like the I Ching, which Barrett used for "Chapter 24", having bought a copy from the Indica Bookshop, the same place that John Lennon had bought The Psychedelic Experience, and there's been some suggestion that he was deliberately trying to copy Lennon in taking lyrical ideas from a book of ancient mystic wisdom. During the recording of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the group continued playing live. As they'd now had a hit single, most of their performances were at Top Rank Ballrooms and other such venues around the country, on bills with other top chart groups, playing to audiences who seemed unimpressed or actively hostile. They also, though made two important appearances. The more well-known of these was at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, a benefit for International Times magazine with people including Yoko Ono, their future collaborator Ron Geesin, John's Children, Soft Machine, and The Move also performing. The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream is now largely regarded as *the* pivotal moment in the development of the UK counterculture, though even at the time some participants noted that there seemed to be a rift developing between the performers, who were often fairly straightforward beer-drinking ambitious young men who had latched on to kaftans and talk about enlightenment as the latest gimmick they could use to get ahead in the industry, and the audience who seemed to be true believers. Their other major performance was at an event called "Games for May -- Space Age Relaxation for the Climax of Spring", where they were able to do a full long set in a concert space with a quadrophonic sound system, rather than performing in the utterly sub-par environments most pop bands had to at this point. They came up with a new song written for the event, which became their second single, "See Emily Play". [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] Emily was apparently always a favourite name of Barrett's, and he even talked with one girlfriend about the possibility of naming their first child Emily, but the Emily of the song seems to have had a specific inspiration. One of the youngest attendees at the London Free School was an actual schoolgirl, Emily Young, who would go along to their events with her schoolfriend Anjelica Huston (who later became a well-known film star). Young is now a world-renowned artist, regarded as arguably Britain's greatest living stone sculptor, but at the time she was very like the other people at the London Free School -- she was from a very privileged background, her father was Wayland Young, 2nd Baron Kennet, a Labour Peer and minister who later joined the SDP. But being younger than the rest of the attendees, and still a little naive, she was still trying to find her own personality, and would take on attributes and attitudes of other people without fully understanding them,  hence the song's opening lines, "Emily tries, but misunderstands/She's often inclined to borrow somebody's dream til tomorrow". The song gets a little darker towards the end though, and the image in the last verse, where she puts on a gown and floats down a river forever *could* be a gentle, pastoral, image of someone going on a boat ride, but it also could be a reference to two rather darker sources. Barrett was known to pick up imagery both from classic literature and from Arthurian legend, and so the lines inevitably conjure up both the idea of Ophelia drowning herself and of the Lady of Shallot in Tennyson's Arthurian poem, who is trapped in a tower but finds a boat, and floats down the river to Camelot but dies before the boat reaches the castle: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] The song also evokes very specific memories of Barrett's childhood -- according to Roger Waters, the woods mentioned in the lyrics are meant to be woods in which they had played as children, on the road out of Cambridge towards the Gog and Magog Hills. The song was apparently seven minutes long in its earliest versions, and required a great deal of editing to get down to single length, but it was worth it, as the track made the top ten. And that was where the problems started. There are two different stories told about what happened to Roger Barrett over the next forty years, and both stories are told by people with particular agendas, who want particular versions of him to become the accepted truth. Both stories are, in the extreme versions that have been popularised, utterly incompatible with each other, but both are fairly compatible with the scanty evidence we have. Possibly the truth lies somewhere between them. In one version of the story, around this time Barrett had a total mental breakdown, brought on or exacerbated by his overuse of LSD and Mandrax (a prescription drug consisting of a mixture of the antihistamine diphenhydramine and the sedative methaqualone, which was marketed in the US under the brand-name Quaalude), and that from late summer 1967 on he was unable to lead a normal life, and spent the rest of his life as a burned-out shell. The other version of the story is that Barrett was a little fragile, and did have periods of mental illness, but for the most part was able to function fairly well. In this version of the story, he was neurodivergent, and found celebrity distressing, but more than that he found the whole process of working within commercial restrictions upsetting -- having to appear on TV pop shows and go on package tours was just not something he found himself able to do, but he was responsible for a whole apparatus of people who relied on him and his group for their living. In this telling, he was surrounded by parasites who looked on him as their combination meal-ticket-cum-guru, and was simply not suited for the role and wanted to sabotage it so he could have a private life instead. Either way, *something* seems to have changed in Barrett in a profound way in the early summer of 1967. Joe Boyd talks about meeting him after not having seen him for a few weeks, and all the light being gone from his eyes. The group appeared on Top of the Pops, Britain's top pop TV show, three times to promote "See Emily Play", but by the third time Barrett didn't even pretend to mime along with the single. Towards the end of July, they were meant to record a session for the BBC's Saturday Club radio show, but Barrett walked out of the studio before completing the first song. It's notable that Barrett's non-cooperation or inability to function was very much dependent on circumstance. He was not able to perform for Saturday Club, a mainstream pop show aimed at a mass audience, but gave perfectly good performances on several sessions for John Peel's radio show The Perfumed Garden, a show firmly aimed at Pink Floyd's own underground niche. On the thirty-first of July, three days after the Saturday Club walkout, all the group's performances for the next month were cancelled, due to "nervous exhaustion". But on the eighth of August, they went back into the studio, to record "Scream Thy Last Scream", a song Barrett wrote and which Nick Mason sang: [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Scream Thy Last Scream"] That was scheduled as the group's next single, but the record company vetoed it, and it wouldn't see an official release for forty-nine years. Instead they recorded another single, "Apples and Oranges": [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Apples and Oranges"] That was the last thing the group released while Barrett was a member. In November 1967 they went on a tour of the US, making appearances on American Bandstand and the Pat Boone Show, as well as playing several gigs. According to legend, Barrett was almost catatonic on the Pat Boone show, though no footage of that appears to be available anywhere -- and the same things were said about their performance on Bandstand, and when that turned up, it turned out Barrett seemed no more uncomfortable miming to their new single than any of the rest of the band, and was no less polite when Dick Clark asked them questions about hamburgers. But on shows on the US tour, Barrett would do things like detune his guitar so it just made clanging sounds, or just play a single note throughout the show. These are, again, things that could be taken in two different ways, and I have no way to judge which is the more correct. On one level, they could be a sign of a chaotic, disordered, mind, someone dealing with severe mental health difficulties. On the other, they're the kind of thing that Barrett was applauded and praised for in the confines of the kind of avant-garde underground audience that would pay to hear AMM or Yoko Ono, the kind of people they'd been performing for less than a year earlier, but which were absolutely not appropriate for a pop group trying to promote their latest hit single. It could be that Barrett was severely unwell, or it could just be that he wanted to be an experimental artist and his bandmates wanted to be pop stars -- and one thing absolutely everyone agrees is that the rest of the group were more ambitious than Barrett was. Whichever was the case, though, something had to give. They cut the US tour short, but immediately started another British package tour, with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Move, Amen Corner and the Nice. After that tour they started work on their next album, A Saucerful of Secrets. Where Barrett was the lead singer and principal songwriter on Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he only sings and writes one song on A Saucerful of Secrets, which is otherwise written by Waters and Wright, and only appears at all on two more of the tracks -- by the time it was released he was out of the group. The last song he tried to get the group to record was called "Have You Got it Yet?" and it was only after spending some time rehearsing it that the rest of the band realised that the song was a practical joke on them -- every time they played it, he would change the song around so they would mess up, and pretend they just hadn't learned the song yet. They brought in Barrett's old friend Dave Gilmour, initially to be a fifth member on stage to give the band some stability in their performances, but after five shows with the five-man lineup they decided just not to bother picking Barrett up, but didn't mention he was out of the group, to avoid awkwardness. At the time, Barrett and Rick Wright were flatmates, and Wright would actually lie to Barrett and say he was just going out to buy a packet of cigarettes, and then go and play gigs without him. After a couple of months of this, it was officially announced that Barrett was leaving the group. Jenner and King went with him, convinced that he was the real talent in the group and would have a solo career, and the group carried on with new management. We'll be looking at them more in future episodes. Barrett made a start at recording a solo album in mid-1968, but didn't get very far. Jenner produced those sessions, and later said "It seemed a good idea to go into the studio because I knew he had the songs. And he would sometimes play bits and pieces and you would think 'Oh that's great.' It was a 'he's got a bit of a cold today and it might get better' approach. It wasn't a cold -- and you knew it wasn't a cold -- but I kept thinking if he did the right things he'd come back to join us. He'd gone out and maybe he'd come back. That was always the analogy in my head. I wanted to make it feel friendly for him, and that where we were was a comfortable place and that he could come back and find himself again. I obviously didn't succeed." A handful of tracks from those sessions have since been released, including a version of “Golden Hair”, a setting by Barrett of a poem by James Joyce that he would later revisit: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, “Golden Hair (first version)”] Eleven months later, he went back into the studio again, this time with producer Malcolm Jones, to record an album that later became The Madcap Laughs, his first solo album. The recording process for the album has been the source of some controversy, as initially Jones was producing the whole album, and they were working in a way that Barrett never worked before. Where previously he had cut backing tracks first and only later overdubbed his vocals, this time he started by recording acoustic guitar and vocals, and then overdubbed on top of that. But after several sessions, Jones was pulled off the album, and Gilmour and Waters were asked to produce the rest of the sessions. This may seem a bit of a callous decision, since Gilmour was the person who had replaced Barrett in his group, but apparently the two of them had remained friends, and indeed Gilmour thought that Barrett had only got better as a songwriter since leaving the band. Where Malcolm Jones had been trying, by his account, to put out something that sounded like a serious, professional, record, Gilmour and Waters seemed to regard what they were doing more as producing a piece of audio verite documentary, including false starts and studio chatter. Jones believed that this put Barrett in a bad light, saying the outtakes "show Syd, at best as out of tune, which he rarely was, and at worst as out of control (which, again, he never was)." Gilmour and Waters, on the other hand, thought that material was necessary to provide some context for why the album wasn't as slick and professional as some might have hoped. The eventual record was a hodge-podge of different styles from different sessions, with bits from the Jenner sessions, the Jones sessions, and the Waters and Gilmour sessions all mixed together, with some tracks just Barrett badly double-tracking himself with an acoustic guitar, while other tracks feature full backing by Soft Machine. However, despite Jones' accusations that the album was more-or-less sabotaged by Gilmour and Waters, the fact remains that the best tracks on the album are the ones Barrett's former bandmates produced, and there are some magnificent moments on there. But it's a disturbing album to listen to, in the same way other albums by people with clear talent but clear mental illness are, like Skip Spence's Oar, Roky Erickson's later work, or the Beach Boys Love You. In each case, the pleasure one gets is a real pleasure from real aesthetic appreciation of the work, but entangled with an awareness that the work would not exist in that form were the creator not suffering. The pleasure doesn't come from the suffering -- these are real artists creating real art, not the kind of outsider art that is really just a modern-day freak-show -- but it's still inextricable from it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Dark Globe"] The Madcap Laughs did well enough that Barrett got to record a follow-up, titled simply Barrett. This one was recorded over a period of only a handful of months, with Gilmour and Rick Wright producing, and a band consisting of Gilmour, Wright, and drummer Jerry Shirley. The album is generally considered both more consistent and less interesting than The Madcap Laughs, with less really interesting material, though there are some enjoyable moments on it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Effervescing Elephant"] But the album is a little aimless, and people who knew him at the time seem agreed that that was a reflection of his life. He had nothing he *needed* to be doing -- no  tour dates, no deadlines, no pressure at all, and he had a bit of money from record royalties -- so he just did nothing at all. The one solo gig he ever played, with the band who backed him on Barrett, lasted four songs, and he walked off half-way through the fourth. He moved back to Cambridge for a while in the early seventies, and he tried putting together a new band with Twink, the drummer of the Pink Fairies and Pretty Things, Fred Frith, and Jack Monck, but Frith left after one gig. The other three performed a handful of shows either as "Stars" or as "Barrett, Adler, and Monck", just in the Cambridge area, but soon Barrett got bored again. He moved back to London, and in 1974 he made one final attempt to make a record, going into the studio with Peter Jenner, where he recorded a handful of tracks that were never released. But given that the titles of those tracks were things like "Boogie #1", "Boogie #2", "Slow Boogie", "Fast Boogie", "Chooka-Chooka Chug Chug" and "John Lee Hooker", I suspect we're not missing out on a lost masterpiece. Around this time there was a general resurgence in interest in Barrett, prompted by David Bowie having recorded a version of "See Emily Play" on his covers album Pin-Ups, which came out in late 1973: [Excerpt: David Bowie, "See Emily Play"] At the same time, the journalist Nick Kent wrote a long profile of Barrett, The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett, which like Kent's piece on Brian Wilson a year later, managed to be a remarkable piece of writing with a sense of sympathy for its subject and understanding of his music, but also a less-than-accurate piece of journalism which led to a lot of myths and disinformation being propagated. Barrett briefly visited his old bandmates in the studio in 1975 while they were recording the album Wish You Were Here -- some say even during the recording of the song "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", which was written specifically about Barrett, though Nick Mason claims otherwise -- and they didn't recognise him at first, because by this point he had a shaved head and had put on a great deal of weight. He seemed rather sad, and that was the last time any of them saw him, apart from Roger Waters, who saw him in Harrod's a few years later. That time, as soon as Barrett recognised Waters, he dropped his bag and ran out of the shop. For the next thirty-one years, Barrett made no public appearances. The last time he ever voluntarily spoke to a journalist, other than telling them to go away, was in 1982, just after he'd moved back to Cambridge, when someone doorstopped him and he answered a few questions and posed for a photo before saying "OK! That's enough, this is distressing for me, thank you." He had the reputation for the rest of his life of being a shut-in, a recluse, an acid casualty. His family, on the other hand, have always claimed that while he was never particularly mentally or physically healthy, he wasn't a shut-in, and would go to the pub, meet up with his mother a couple of times a week to go shopping, and chat to the women behind the counter at Sainsbury's and at the pharmacy. He was also apparently very good with children who lived in the neighbourhood. Whatever the truth of his final decades, though, however mentally well or unwell he actually was, one thing is very clear, which is that he was an extremely private man, who did not want attention, and who was greatly distressed by the constant stream of people coming and looking through his letterbox, trying to take photos of him, trying to interview him, and so on. Everyone on his street knew that when people came asking which was Syd Barrett's house, they were meant to say that no-one of that name lived there -- and they were telling the truth. By the time he moved back, he had stopped answering to "Syd" altogether, and according to his sister "He came to hate the name latterly, and what it meant." He did, in 2001, go round to his sister's house to watch a documentary about himself on the TV -- he didn't own a TV himself -- but he didn't enjoy it and his only comment was that the music was too noisy. By this point he never listened to rock music, just to jazz and classical music, usually on the radio. He was financially secure -- Dave Gilmour made sure that when compilations came out they always included some music from Barrett's period in the group so he would receive royalties, even though Gilmour had no contact with him after 1975 -- and he spent most of his time painting -- he would take photos of the paintings when they were completed, and then burn the originals. There are many stories about those last few decades, but given how much he valued his privacy, it wouldn't be right to share them. This is a history of rock music, and 1975 was the last time Roger Keith Barrett ever had anything to do with rock music voluntarily. He died of cancer in 2006, and at his funeral there was a reading from The Little Grey Men, which was also quoted in the Order of Service -- "The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.” There was no rock music played at Barrett's funeral -- instead there were a selection of pieces by Handel, Haydn, and Bach, ending with Bach's Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major, one of his favourite pieces: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major"]  As they stared blankly in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before. Mole rubbed his eyes and stared at Rat, who was looking about him in a puzzled sort of way. “I beg your pardon; what did you say, Rat?” he asked. “I think I was only remarking,” said Rat slowly, “that this was the right sort of place, and that here, if anywhere, we should find him. And look! Why, there he is, the little fellow!” And with a cry of delight he ran towards the slumbering Portly. But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.

  Did the Victorians invent ghost hunting? Tim Prasil, author of Certain Nocturnal Disturbances: Ghost Hunting Before the Victorians and the familiar voice of Spectral Edition segments, returns to the Big Seance with the answer! Plus nocturnal surveillance, the legendary story of Athenodorus, centuries of rattling chains, Hinton Ampner, and the purposeless ghost! Visit BigSeance.com/220 for more info. Other Listening Options Direct Download Link   In this episode: Episode Teaser :00 Intro :50 Tim Prasil writes ghostly mysteries; he anthologizes quirky, mostly 19th-century fiction, and explores historical ghostlore. He's also been known to scribble a limerick. Once upon a time, he had a career in radio broadcasting that took him from announcing to copywriting — and from Illinois to Mississippi, back to Illinois, to Wisconsin, and finally to South Carolina. He then moved to Boston and earned an M.A. in English, taught in upstate New York, and moved to Milwaukee to earn a Ph.D. in English. After thirty years of teaching at the university level in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, he's now focusing on his books. Some of those titles include Help for the Haunted: A Decade of Vera Van Slyke Mysteries (from 1899-1909), The Victorian Ghost Hunter's Casebook, Entranced by Eyes of Evil: Tales of Mesmerism and Mystery, and The Lost Limericks of Edgar Allan Poe. 1:26 Did the Victorians invent Ghost Hunting? Spoiler Alert! No they didn't. What led up to Tim writing Certain Nocturnal Disturbances: Ghost Hunting Before the Victorians. 4:19 Nocturnal surveillance and the legendary story of Athenodorus. 10:41 The trend of ghosts with rattling chains. “I'm hoping that some of my readers are ghost hunters, and maybe they're a member of an investigation team, and they see that that tradition goes back to the 1500s and they say, ‘That's cool! I am part of this very long legacy.'” 16:55 The legend of Antoinette Deshoulieres 19:17 Joseph Glanvill, the Drummer of Tedworth, and other historical ghost hunts. Plus the practice of interviewing witnesses. 23:18 “One thing I've learned about history is that it's often a mistake to ask, ‘What did people believe back then?' The better question is, ‘What did people disagree about back then?'” 28:53 What will the future say about our ways of ghost hunting and researching the paranormal? 30:24 Hinton Ampner and the Purposeless Ghost 32:00 Tim and superstitions 37:18 What time in history would Tim like to go back to? And who would he be? 39:05 Tim's experiences with a theatre ghost! 40:21 Ghost hunting was very leisurely in the Victorian period. You let the ghosts come to you. 42:19 Tim Prasil's most treasured possession 44:28 The tradition of sharing ghost stories by a fire and Tim's Tales Told When the Windows Rattle YouTube series 47:44 More on Tim's Spectral Edition segments. 51:29 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 53:10 Outro 55:48 Easter egg 57:05   Tim's Previous Interviews and Spectral Edition Segments Episode 111 - Interview on the book, Spectral Edition: Ghost Reports from U.S. Newspapers, 1865-1917 Episode 22 - Tim's first appearance and interview on the book, Help for the Haunted: A Decade of Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mysteries (1899-1909)  Tim's Spectral Edition segments: Episodes 47 thru 95 and episodes 198 and 200.   For more on Tim Prasil BromBonesBooks.com Tim's Books on Amazon Facebook: @BromBonesBooks Twitter: @TimPrasil     The Big Seance Podcast can be found right here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, Amazon Music, and iHeart Radio. Please subscribe and share with a fellow paranerd! Do you have any comments or feedback? Please contact me at Patrick@BigSeance.com. Consider recording your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! You can also call the show and leave feedback at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. The candles are already lit, so come on in and join the séance!  

Legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain said Patrick Süskind's novel “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” was his favourite book, probably because the protagonist, Grenouille, has such a murderous hankering for the smell of teen spirit. The story follows Grenouille, who is, in turn, following his preternatural nose through 18th-century France. Born odourless and orphaned in a Paris slum, Grenouille can smell everything except himself. Entranced by the art of perfumery amidst the miasma of the city our anti-hero sets out to learn his craft, but everything changes when he gets his first whiff of love. Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include: "Perfume" by Patrick Süskind “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson “A Passage North” by Anuk Arudpragasam "In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" by Marcel Proust Additional segments throughout the podcast include: Inner Shelf Fact or fiction What are you reading? On that Quote Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesamepagepod_ Email: seamusandblake@gmail.com IG: https://www.instagram.com/on.the.same.page.podcast/ ---------- #bookpodcast #podcast #book #novel #bannedbooks #perfume #patricksuskind #animalfarm #georgeorwell #ulysses #jamesjoyce #annefrank #thecountofmontecristo #thebluesteye #tonimorrison #whereswally #aclockworkorange #lolita #paris #literature #books #novels #podbean #spotifypodcasts #applepodcasts #audible #books #novels #audibleau #lit #onthesamepage #whatareyoureading #literaryfacts #podbean

It's been a while since we talked about erotic hypnosis, so this week Bex interviews Kate about how hypno is manifesting in her relationship and kink life currently. Mystery | Dollification | Long-Distance Realism | Slipping Into It | Submission | Aptitudes | Subject Skills | Trance vs. Subspace | Waking Yourself Up | Depth & Metaphor | Altering Perceptions | Pre-Talk | Topping | In-Scene Feedback | Real vs. Hypnotic Sensations | Non-Sexual Stuff | Hypno Goals

Today's guest on the Writer's Parachute, Guiding Author and Writer dreams to a perfect landing®...is:  Author/Writer, Janet Wolanin AlexanderBe sure to follow the Writer's Parachute on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @WriterParachutehttps://www.facebook.com/writerparachute/https://www.instagram.com/writerparachute/https://www.twitter.com/writerparachute/Janet's Bio:An avid reader when I was young, I started writing off and on. About the time I retired from teaching, I had a pile of horse stories that looked high enough for a book and my writers' group helped me get it published. Later, after getting republished by a larger publishing group that introduced me to more writers and showed me how to make a few improvements, I got my book republished. Then I published a second book. I'm now working on my third. I live in Southern Indiana with my supportive husband Jim. We presently have 6 strays: two dogs and four cats. We board my wonderful horse Highlander nearby a wonderful place to trail ride.At Home on a Horse in the Woods: A Journey into Living Your Ultimate Dreamhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B081631373/Are you frustrated because your dream hasn't come true? When you took actions that didn't work out did you get stuck? Are you tempted to abandon your dream forever? Don't! Another choice can lead you to ultimate happiness. Author Janet Wolanin Alexander knows how you feel. At Home on a Horse in the Woods shares how alternating bouts of pursuit and denial became incredibly paralyzing. Finally, on the verge of abandoning her dream forever, a powerful moment of truth broke her pattern and set her free.Although your dream may be different than hers, her memoir will show you:- Why the desires of our heart are meant to be followed and not forgotten- How to turn frustration and stagnation into transformation- And that every dreamer needs support in order to succeed.Get unstuck and back on your journey. Now it the time to start living your ultimate dream!Braiding Horsehair Bracelets: Your Beginner's Guidehttps://www.amazon.com/Braiding-Horsehair-Bracelets-Beginners-Guide/dp/1647466768Janet learned about horsehair jewelry when a friend showed her a bracelet she had purchased out West during vacation. Entranced, Janet vowed to braid one from her own horse's hair. After spending years seeking instruction and practicing her skills, she wrote this comprehensive guide to save you some of the time and frustration she went through. The sooner you begin braiding your keepsake bracelet, the sooner you will wear your love for your horse on your sleeve!Connect with Janet here:Website: https://swishtails.comFacebook: https://facebook.com/swishtailsandtales/Instagram:  https://instagram.com/swishtailsDon't forget to email Janet for the pdf tip&

Danger comes knocking at the gates of Jericho! Entranced by the Bible story, Genet wonders if there's a way to know if it really happened.

With Firefly, I'm Deeply Entranced(a song to celebrate Joss Whedon's Sublime Masterpiece ‘Firefly' & a Reimagined Tribute to ‘Bad Romance' by the Modern Musical Queen herself, Lady Gaga) *Original written by Lady Gaga & RedOne**Awesome Covers by Halestorm and Jay Smith ***Thank you: -To Joss Whedon, for his sublime creativity and for his Midas ability to turn everything that his pen gracefully touches into a phenomenal cult classic : )-To everyone who has ever been any part of the mega shows known as Firefly, Roseanne, or Buffy& to Lady Gaga, for her brilliant musical masterpiece known as ‘Bad Romance' (aka: the song which inspired this humble tribute)!!!Lyrics:So: with Firefly, I'm deeply entrancedSo: with Firefly, I'm deeply entrancedThank you, Joss WhedonThank you, Joss WhedonThank you, Joss WhedonWith Firefly, I'm entranced Thank you, Joss WhedonThank you, Joss WhedonThank you, Joss WhedonWith Firefly, I'm entranced Thank you, Joss WhedonWatching your worlds puts me at easeYou're so creativeGot intimidating knowledgeExtenuating You write great dramaDrama ma maYou write great drama Malcolm Reynolds and Inara SerraShe's a companion, heaven-sent Summer plays RiverHer character's pretty hardcore and intenseSimon's her brother Brother Brother Brother Simon's her brotherYou know your fans love trueBecause the worlds you mold seep through Into cultureWith Firefly, deeply entrancedCause Buffy's cool and allThere's nothing wrong with RoseanneBut for me, with Firefly, I'm deeply entrancedStill, Buffy's cool and allThere's nothing wrong with RoseanneBut for me, with Firefly, I'm deeply entrancedWith Joss WhedonNathan Fillion's my favorite leading man With Joss WhedonNathan Fillion's my favorite leading man Firefly keeps me entrancedFirefly keeps me entrancedJayne can be a lover or a monster Kaylee, a brilliant engineerEasy on the eyes In this story, we're all criminals More a matter of which kindWild West toughTough Tough ToughWild West tough Firefly's intergalactic Flying interstellar spaceshipsBut there's no Federation or Senate to protect you hereSo learn to be slick Love like Zoë & WashWash Wash WashLove like Zoë & WashYou know your fans love you Because the worlds you create seep through Into cultureFirefly keeps me entrancedYeah, Buffy's cool and allThere's nothing wrong with RoseanneBut for me, with Firefly, I'm deeply entrancedStill, Buffy's cool and allThere's nothing wrong with RoseanneBut for me, with Firefly, I'm deeply entrancedWith Joss WhedonPlus Nathan Fillion's my favorite leading man For Joss WhedonNathan Fillion's my favorite leading man Firefly keeps me entrancedFirefly keeps me entrancedFirefly keeps me entrancedIt keeps me entranced Aha : ) fantastic actingSaffron, Badger, Jubal, NandiAha : ) great directingLove Niska, Atherton, Bourne, & TraceyAha : ) fantastic actingSaffron, Badger, Jubal, NandiAha : ) great directingLove Niska, Atherton, Bourne, & TraceyHis direction, I'm following Shiny space mixed with the Wild WestWe're the BrowncoatsDefending against ReaversCannibalisticWe've got Shepherd BookPlus an awesome alien twistSerenity, our last adventurePerfectly poetic, its endI didn't want it to endNever wanted it to endIt keeps me entrancedIt keeps me entranced Yeah, Buffy's cool and allThere's nothing wrong with RoseanneBut for me, with Firefly, deeply entrancedYeah, Buffy's cool and allThere's nothing wrong with RoseanneBut for me, with Firefly, deeply entrancedWith Joss WhedonNathan Fillion's my favorite leading man With Joss WhedonPlus Nathan Fillion's my favorite leading man Firefly keeps me entrancedFirefly keeps me entrancedFirefly keeps me entrancedIt keeps me entrancedEnd*Tribute by Melissa Smith:-Melzy of Wonderland on Youtube -Mel's Music on Spreaker, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Castbox, Deezer, Podcast Addict, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Podchaser, Facebook &-Melissa_Martinek_Smith on Instagram (AKA: MelsMusic)

Now fantasy is a Nora staple, but it wasn't always! In this episode, we are going back to the roots with her first books in the genre with the first two books in the Donovan Legacy: Captivated (1992) and Entranced (1992).

We are chatting with Oakland, CA's Psychic Hit in this week's chapter. Having just released their debut, Dre and Justin dive into their secret origins and how the band has been blossoming out, as well as being reared on the 36 Chambers, getting "Entranced by the Sad Wings of Destiny", talk about Metallica (again!), what's really in their name, trading in jorts for bell-bottoms, pulling out all the stops for their album photoshoot, how the Oakland scene boosts up its members, Kadavar's genial nature, bucket list shows to play, reflect on a year of social injustice (but also some progress), weird band merch, and playing with Los Dug Dug's. Support Psychic Hit Track featured is "Livin' On" off of their debut, Solutio, available now for purchase!

The beef is feeling a little one-sided and the boys are gonna whine about it. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Episode one of Entranced hour with Sowmiya serves as an introduction to the podcast, and of course what the listeners can expect from Sowmiya's podcast. During this episode/teaser, she dives into her idea behind the podcast, shares some hidden traits, and provides background on the inception of Entranced Hour with Sowmiya.

Join Sowmiya Dinakaran on Friday, July 30th of her birthday for the premiere episode of her brand new podcast, Entranced Hour!

Released May 2021. What is music? What is it about sound waves played in a specific order, pitch, and tempo, that causes an emotional reaction in a person, and what is it that drives someone to pursue it as a career? Marco Castillo is a Brazilian-Canadian musician and songwriter based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Entranced by music since he was a child, Marco has a passion for creating and performing and teaching. http://www.marcocastillo.ca/ Intro and outro music: Mind Games - Mathew Mcguire.

The massive ranch sprawls across over 500 acres of northern Utah in a region known as the Uintah Basin. The whole area has, since the days of early Spanish missionaries, swirled with rumours of strange goings on. In the words of journalist George Knapp, it’s “been the site of simply unbelievable paranormal activity. UFOs, Sasquatch, cattle mutilations, psychic manifestations… you name it, residents here have seen it.” Join us as we get to the bottom of it.. or something.. https://linktr.ee/monsterfuzz

SIGN UP FOR THE POTTER DISCUSSION NEWSLETTER AND CLAIM YOUR GUIDE HERE!In this episode I reveal what Dumbledore's actual plan was. Enjoy!Summary: We never truly understand what Dumbledore's plan is. That is because he doesn't confide in anyone. And, his plan is forever changing. This is Dumbledore's true plan in the first Harry Potter book. Dumbledore started by bringing Harry to the Dursley's where he grew up. When Harry turned eleven, Dumbledore could have sent anyone to pick Harry up, but Hagrid was the one picked. That may have been because Dumbledore wanted Harry to become good friends with Hagrid from the start. That turned out well, as Hagrid helped Harry a lot through his days at Hogwarts. Then, after Harry got all his things from Diagon Alley, he spent a fortnight at the Dursley's house before going to King's Cross to catch the Hogwarts Express. But oh no! Harry has no idea where to go.  That is when Mrs. Wealsy shows up, loudly saying how the train station was packed with muggles. That seems a little too perfect. And as we see the Weaslys being great assets to Harry, we can assume Dumbledore might have told Mrs. Weasly what to do. Then Harry goes to Hogwarts. There, all seems well until the students are informed of a mystery in the castle. When Harry and his friends are running from Filch one night, they stumble into that very secret. They find Fluffy the three headed dog. Only a day later, Hagrid let slip that the dog was his, and the secret behind it was only between Dumbledore and Nicholas Flamel. It's odd that Hagrid tells Harry the exact information to get the answer. Did Dumbledore tell him to? On Christmas, Harry conveniently gets a present (from Dumbledore) that allows him to move around the castle at night. Harry goes to the library to find Flamel. After another run in with Filch, Harry runs to the mirror of Erised. Entranced, Harry goes back every night. The last night he does this, Dumbledore is waiting. But Harry isn't expelled. When Harry finds out who Flamel is, they hurry down the third floor corridor. Somehow, Harry makes it through the whole thing! It's as if Dumbledore designed it that way... Gmail: ThePotterDiscussion@gmail.comInstagram: @thepotterdisucssionWebsite: https://www.thepotterdiscussion.buzzsprout.com

This week we talk about Eve's many "Marriage Rules!" It's a great bit of comedy relief in the series that we all love, but also, they are pretty solid relationship rules in general. If you want to follow along with these, we have created a Wiki page for the Marriage Rules, and you can find it HERE: https://indeath.fandom.com/wiki/Marriage_Rules Tara and Jen's cats were both having a needy night when we recorded this, so you might hear them in the background alot in this episode. We get a question about Nora Roberts' "Donovan" series and how Mel and Sebasion from "Entranced" might be early Eve and Roarke prototypes. We've also discussed how Nora's "Night Tales" series contain early Eve & Roarke Prototypes as well. It's an interesting subject that we had planned on discussing in a Podvella anyway, so, you might get an episode on that soon. BONUS! We have also discussed inviting fans onto the podcast occasionally for a "Fan Profile" episode. In preparation for this, we came up with a list of a dozen "get to know you" questions to ask. But since this episode was pretty short, we decided to have each other answer all of these questions. So, this is a "get to know us" segment! The following are links to some of the things we discussed on the podcast, just in case you are curious and want to check them out. Books we've read recently     Some of our Favorite Podcasts! Music on our Playlist! ]        .      .    .  

Cinema Novo month continues with a look at Glauber Raucha's Terra em Transe also known as Entranced Earth or Land of Anguish. It's the story of the mythical country of El Dorado where the events seem to oddly parallel the political upheaval of Brazil from 1960 to 1966. It was initially banned by the Brazilian government until enough public outcry allowed it to be shown domestically as well as in film festivals.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unknown Lady Yuri Falik (1936-2009) [Sung in Russian] [English translation:] The restaurants on hot spring evenings Lie under a dense and savage air. Foul drafts and hoots from drunken revelers Contaminate the thoroughfare. Above the dusty lanes of suburbia Above the tedium of bungalows A pretzel sign begilds a bakery And children screech fortissimo. And every evening beyond the barriers Gentlemen of practiced wit and charm Go strolling beside the drainage ditches— A tilted derby and a lady at the arm. The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water A woman's shriek assaults the ear While above, in the sky, inured to everything, The moon looks on with a mindless leer. And every evening my one companion Sits here, reflected in my glass. Like me, he has drunk of bitter mysteries. Like me, he is broken, dulled, downcast. The sleepy lackeys stand beside tables Waiting for the night to pass And tipplers with the eyes of rabbits Cry out: “In vino veritas!” And every evening (or am I imagining?) Exactly at the appointed time A girl's slim figure, clothed in silk, Glides past the window's mist and grime And slowly passing through the revelers, Unaccompanied, always alone, Exuding mists and secret fragrances, She sits at the table that is her own. Something ancient, something legendary Surrounds her presence in the room, Her narrow hand, her silk, her bracelets, Her hat, the rings, the ostrich plume. Entranced by her presence, near and enigmatic, I gaze through the dark of her lowered veil And I behold an enchanted shoreline And enchanted distances, far and pale. I am made a guardian of the higher mysteries, Someone's sun is entrusted to my control. Tart wine has pierced the last convolution of my labyrinthine soul. And now the drooping plumes of ostriches Asway in my brain droop slowly lower And two eyes, limpid, blue, and fathomless Are blooming on a distant shore. Inside my soul a treasure is buried. The key is mine and only mine. How right you are, you drunken monster! I know: the truth is in the wine. — Alexander Blok (1880-1921) Kangaroo Sergei Ekimov (b. 1974) [Sung in Russian] [English translation:] Dreams didn't keep me in bliss today: I awoke early in the morning And went out breathing in fresh air To look at my lively kangaroo. He tore down bunches of tarry needles And chewed them for no reason—silly! He began jumping toward me Making funny loud noises. His caresses are so clumsy, But I love to caress him back And see his little brown eyes Enlightening our feast in a flash. Later I sat on a bench, weary, Dreaming of someone who is far away and unknown— The one whom I love: Why is he not coming to me? My thoughts are clearly lying down Like leaves' shadows in the morning: I do want to caress someone As I was caressed by my kangaroo. — Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921) “Unknown Lady” and “Kangaroo" were recorded by the Houston Chamber Choir in the album “Ravishingly Russian" released in MSR Classics in 2010.

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