Category Archives: Cryonics

Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days shed become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didnt match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucies father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucies whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, People Who Eat Darkness, is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood, the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no nonfiction novel. But like Capote, hes less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but its an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of bad girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capotes day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator jobs for law enforcement authorities theres handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucies father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japans prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucies disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those disposable women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, naive perhaps, out of her depth, but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucies story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in People Who Eat Darkness concern what Parry refers to as the script expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their childs disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucies mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucies final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think youve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didnt know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obaras recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

View post:
“The Mansion of Happiness”: Matters of life and death

Panibagong challenge ang gagawin ni Zaijian Jaranilla sa kanyang bagong teleserye, ang Lorenzos Time.

Katulad ng ginawa niyang pagpapaiyak at pagpapasaya sa mga manonood ng May Bukas Pa at Ikaw ay Pag-ibig, muling gagawin ito ng 10-year-old actor. Subalit di tulad noon, kakaibang bata ang makikita ng mga manonood.

Gagampanan ni Zaijian ang character ng isang batang may sakit na progeria, isang genetic condition kung saan mabilis ang pagtanda ng isang tao.

Upang magawa ito nang maayos, sumailalim si Zaijian sa isang workshop na pinamunuan ng veteran actor na si Pen Medina.

Ayon kay Zaijian, siya ang nagturo sa kanya kung paano kumilos at magsalita katulad ng mga matatanda.

Parang sinasabi niya po kasi sa akin kung ano yong dapat kong gawin.

Itinuro niya kung paano yong lakad ko. Yong lakad na pangmayaman. Pero parang may script siyang binibigay sa akin tapos po [tuturuan niya ako] kung paano yong boses ko, paglalahad niya nang makausap siya ng PEP.ph (Philippine Entertainment Portal) at iba pang miyembro ng media pagkatapos ng press conference na inihanda para sa cast ng programa.

Ito ay ginanap sa 9501 Restaurant sa loob ng ABS-CBN compound sa Quezon City kagabi, Hunyo 21.

Bagamat ilang beses na siyang nagkaroon ng teleserye, minsan ay kinakabahan pa rin daw si Zaijian.

Aniya, May konting kaba po kasi mayroon pa rin po akong nakakasamang magagaling na artista.

See the rest here:
Zaijian Jaranilla called “boy wonder” by Lorenzo’s Time director

Sometimes a groundbreaking idea is not enough. Sometimes a brilliant notion slouches along until an innovator with a nose for the entrepreneurial realizes its potential, perfects its contours and gives it mass appeal. For cars, it was Henry Ford. For electric light, it was Thomas Edison. For computers, it was Steve Jobs. And for the global food market, it was Clarence Birdseye.

Birdseye, whose name is synonymous with frozen food, revolutionized the way we eat. Generations of Americans have become familiar with the tidy little packages that bear his name in supermarket refrigerators. By perfecting a flash-freeze method a technique he learned from Inuit of the North Sea Birdseye single-handedly transformed the American diet and took the food industry from local to global in the course of a decade.

"Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man" by Mark Kurlansky

Its because of Birdseye that Americans expect peach pie in winter, fish fillets in Kansas and TV dinners in a hurry. And it is because of him that whole communities in America left farmlands for urban life.

Birdseye was no scientist or laboratory intellectual. Like Ford, Edison and Jobs, he had no college degree; like them, he depended largely on native intelligence and an irrepressible spirit of can-do. In Birdseye, Mark Kurlanskys brisk account of the mans galvanic trajectory, we are reminded that American ingenuity has often relied less on a classroom than on insatiable curiosity and a well-lit garage.

Kurlansky is best known for epic portraits of small-scale subjects, among them Salt, Cod and The Basque History of the World. He brings a nimble, no-frills journalism to these tasks, and the result is a series of eye-opening books on worlds we might otherwise never see. Salt becomes a history of humankind, complete with explorers and revolutionaries. Cod is a rollicking tale of adventure, with a fish as its celebrated star. The Basque History ends up being a paean to a highly inventive people: Europes earliest explorers, Spains first bankers, a race defined by curiosity, ingenuity and grit.

Likewise, Birdseye turns out to be less a biography than a glimpse into an exuberantly inventive time in America. Little is known about Birdseyes personal life, and Kurlansky is quick to admit it. But the impact of the mans inventions is on full view here: the whaling harpoon, the dipping of livestock to control ticks, the science of crystallization and cryonics, innovations in food packaging, advances in refrigeration, the birth of the sunlamp, the production of dried edibles, the papermaking revolution. We see a tireless tinkerer, a restless mind, a quintessentially American inventor, driven by two questions about the world around him: Why? and Why not?

He was born in the age of the steamboat and died in the age of the satellite. In Kurlanskys hands, the arc of Birdseyes life, which spanned from 1886 to 1956, is a history of the American imagination. Birdseye came into the world alongside the telephone, the phonograph and the light bulb, and then rode to manhood on a wave of ingenuity. By the time he was 10, Americans had invented fountain pens, cash registers, Coca-Cola, washing machines, escalators, contact lenses and automobiles. By the time he was 20, factories were churning out a whole host of American products and reaping the riches of the industrial age.

Continued here:
Book review: ‘Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man’ by Mark Kurlansky

SCIENCE ACQUIRES OFF-NETWORK SYNDICATION RIGHTS TO "FRINGE"

--Episodes of the Critically Acclaimed Drama to Premiere on SCIENCE in Fourth Quarter 2012--

(Silver Spring, Md.) - SCIENCE today announced that the network has acquired the off-network syndication rights to FRINGE, the acclaimed dramatic series from creators J.J. Abrams (Lost, the Star Trek and Mission: Impossible movies), Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek, Transformers) and Roberto Orci (Star Trek, Transformers), and executive producers Jeff Pinkner (Alias, Lost), J.H. Wyman (The Mexican, Keen Eddie) and Bryan Burk (Lost, Alias, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol). The agreement with Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution grants the network the rights to the four existing seasons of the series as well as the upcoming fifth season which debuts on FOX this fall (Fridays 9/8c), as well as behind-the-scenes features and unseen bonus footage. FRINGE will begin airing on SCIENCE in the fourth quarter of 2012.

"FRINGE is the kind of smart, lean-forward programming that our viewers gravitate toward. The combination of compelling characters and excellent science-themed storytelling make this franchise a huge addition for our network," said Debbie Myers, General Manager and Executive Vice President of SCIENCE. "We're going to deepen the audience experience with FRINGE by giving them more of the access to the writers and creative process than ever. We're also going to work with our cadre of leading experts to explore the real-world science that provides the foundation for these completely engrossing narratives."

"We couldn't be more pleased to be in business with SCIENCE," said Ken Werner, President, Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution. "By licensing the off-network rights to 'Fringe,' they are acquiring a program with a devoted audience that will further bolster their programming schedule and bring new viewers to the network to discover compatible programs that fit perfectly with their television viewing tastes."

FRINGE explores the ever-blurring line between science fiction and reality, where hybrid monsters tear through sewers, thieves walk through walls and portals open to parallel universes. Unable to police a world in which science has advanced beyond our wildest dreams - and nightmares - FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham (series star Anna Torv) seeks help from eccentric 'fringe' scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his jack-of-all trades son, Peter (Joshua Jackson). Under the direction of Special Agent Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick) and assisted by Agents Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole), Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) and Lincoln Lee (Seth Gabel), the Fringe Team investigates unusual incidents that defy human logic and unimaginable events that threaten our very existence on a universal scale.

Irrevocably linked to a parallel "other" universe by the machinations of a younger Walter Bishop trying to save the life of his son, Olivia and alternate-born Peter must bridge two universes while wrestling with questions of identity and destiny... and a multiverse threatened by the mysterious Observers. With the help of Nina Sharp (Blair Brown), who runs Massive Dynamic, the omnipresent corporation founded by Bishop's former lab partner, William Bell (recurring guest star Leonard Nimoy), the Fringe team imagines and tests the impossibilities while investigating unbelievable events, macabre crimes, and mystifying cases involving pyrokinesis, neuroscience, cryonics, genetic engineering, astral projection, and other fantastical theories. When the unimaginable happens, it's their job to stop it.

Fringe is produced by Bad Robot Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television. The creative team behind the series includes executive producers Abrams, Pinkner, Wyman, Burk and Joe Chappelle (The Wire) and consulting producers Kurtzman, Orci and Akiva Goldsman (The Da Vinci Code).

# # #

About SCIENCE:

View post:
Science Acquires Off-Network Syndication Rights to "Fringe"

Getting a baseball book published has long been on my "bucket list."

So far, I've had three of them rejected. One is a biography of Bobo Newsom - I will pause here while you all say "who?" Another is a series of interviews with old-time

St. Louis players called "A Dozen Brownies w/Assorted Nuts." The publisher took one look at the table of contents and thought I was nuts. The third was a biography of Bill Veeck.

For that one, the publisher sent back a note saying "Why bother? You can't top `Veeck As In Wreck."'

That book, written in 1961 by Veeck and Ed Linn, is undoubtedly a classic.

Fortunately for Paul Dickson, he's working with a different publisher. Dickson's full-length bio of Veeck - "Bill Veeck, Baseball's Greatest Maverick" was published this month.

Dickson's book, which took 10 years to research and write, is a valiant attempt to capture an elusive subject. So far, the reviews are favorable and sales have been brisk.

Dickson will be at the South Pasadena Public Library on Thursday, from 7 to 9 p.m., to sign his book and discuss Veeck's role in the integration of baseball.

The program will be held in conjunction with The Baseball Reliquary's "And The Walls Came Tumblin' Down" exhibit, currently on display at the library.

The South Pasadena library is located at 1100 Oxley Street.

Continued here:
THEN AND NOW: Another book about a true pioneer

BOSTON, May 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --In the two-way mirror that often is a reflection of life or art, another trend is forming. The worlds of literature and Hollywood are colliding again, this time with a focus on cryonics, the science intended to reanimate people after death and freezing.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120516/NE07839)

The debut novel from Bruce E. Spitzer, Extra Innings, about baseball great Ted Williams returning to life through cryonics, was published last month by Bear Hill Media. Extra Innings was featured recently in Sports Illustrated Magazine and ranked in the top 25 on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list for sports fiction.

A cryonics movie, Freezing People is Easy, is in pre-production in Hollywood and will shoot in the fall, reportedly starring Paul Rudd, Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson and Christopher Walken. Inspired by Bob Nelson's memoir We Froze the First Man and an episode of Chicago Public Media and Public Radio International's This American Life, Freezing People is the story of Nelson's first cryonics attempts in the 1960s. Errol Morris will direct. Producers include Steven Zaillian and Garrett Basch of Film Rites. Toronto-based Entertainment One announced last week that it will distribute the pic worldwide.

TV got into the act last winter when Larry King announced on CNN that he wanted to be cryonically preserved. Can reality TV be far behind?

Unlike Freezing People, which looks back at the beginnings of cryonics, Spitzer's Extra Innings looks forward, featuring Ted Williams reanimated in 2092. In real life he was cryonically preserved after death in 2002. In his imagined return, Williams plays again for the Red Sox, bats against a robot "Botwinder" pitcher that he abhors, pilots jets for the Marines, and struggles in a future world beset by global warming and flooding.

"The narrative resonates with the consequences of the major issues we face in our world todaythe steroids debate in sports, global warming, corporate greed, technology run rampant, and the moral ambiguity of war," says Spitzer. "It's a societal and personal journey. Flawed in his first life, Williams must decide in the second, what's more important: the chance to win his first World Series or the chance to be a better man."

Extra Innings, adds Spitzer, is not only about science, baseball, redemption, and the quest for meaning in this life and the next, it's humorous as well. "Similar to what we're likely to see in Freezing People, you can't help but poke a little fun at the idea of returning to life after being frozen."

For more information visit: http://www.ExtraInningsTheNovel.com. Published by Bear Hill Media, ISBN: 9780984956906, 398 pages. Extra Innings is available in print and as an eBook from online booksellers. Or, ask for it in a favorite bookstore.

CONTACT: Skye Wentworth 978-462-5553 skyewentworth@gmail.com

Read this article:
Cryonics is Trending in Literature and Hollywood