Month: March 2016

Open Season on LGBTQ Folks

Standard

An excellent post on human rights and dignity!

The Tony Burgess Blog

I am a supporter of LGBTQ people. They are citizens who pay taxes, contribute to community, sit in houses of worship on the Sabbath and are our neighbors.

However they are treated by some as second class citizens. It troubles me to see laws protecting their civil rights and freedom from discrimination being eroded by intolerant groups who are more interested in maintaining the status quo from long ago. What this is about is about the dignity and freedom of people to be who they are no matter what.

Women’s rights are being impacted for the negative too.

I am a man of faith who loves his neighbors as himself so I am concerned about people on the fringes. My religious freedoms have never been threatened. Anything that is new and different seems to threaten some folks and its sad they live in fear. Our political climate is a raging…

View original post 49 more words

100 Followers!

Standard

Please look at this excellent blog!

Glass Footsteps

Screenshot_2016-03-29-20-28-28

I just checked my blog stats and was very excited to see that I now have one hundred followers! I didn’t expect to have so many readers as I currently do. I set up this blog both as therapy for myself but also in the hopes that my words could educate and inspire others. I hope I can make even a tiny difference in the world with regard to how society views people with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder like me, as well as spreading awareness about mental health in general and trying to provide support to others going through similar problems to me. I think this is a perfect time to say a thank to everyone who has read my blog and all the support you all have given me,it means a lot to me 🙂 Go raibh míle maith agaibh! 

View original post

Favorite Horror Films of the 1960s: Rosemary’s Baby

Standard

Rosemarys_baby_poster

https://en.wikipedia.org

Rosemary’s Baby is one of the most successful, influential, and important films in the history of American cinema, if not world cinema. In 1968, Roman Polanski directed this highly successful film, which was based on the novel by Ira Levin.  This book was also a bestseller, and the movie is a very close adaptation from the novel, often pulling its dialogue directly from the book. It is one of the rare cases when the film is almost as good as the book upon which it is based.

RosemarysBabyBook

https://en.wikipedia.org

In addition to being highly successful, this film used religious elements that arguably influenced other works such as The Exorcist.  It is clearly a Christian work and deals with the devil as the main antagonist, one that, in classic Gothic fashion, threatens an innocent.  This is a film that also speaks to the issue of fate vs free will and the choice of rejecting or embracing evil. The plot deals with a young woman whose husband might be part of a cult of the devil. She become impregnated, and the film features a disturbing sequence of a dream when a creature or demon or the devil rapes her. Her husband tells her he had sex with her while she slept; either way, both versions are deeply disturbing. The film equates sexual and spiritual victimization.  Rosemary gives birth, and nearly the entire population of the building in which she lives are shown as part of the cult.  In a chilling moment, she is told that her baby has “its father’s eyes,” and the child has glowing eyes.  At this point, Rosemary cradles the infant.

Is the film attacking the victimization of this young woman? Is she implicated at the end as part of accepting her place in the cult and the delivering of the devil’s child? That is ambiguous, but the film demands we examine the question and arrive at our own answer.

Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes star in the movie, and it would launch Mia Farrow into stardom.

If you are interested in horror cinema, this is a very important film, but it comes with the trigger warning, that many aspects of it are potentially deeply disturbing.

Echo: A Poem on Bullying

Standard

This is an important post on bullying.

Glass Footsteps

I have previously touched on the subject of bullying on my blog before. Bullying is an issue which affects so many teenagers, and I regret to say I am among their number. It seems in secondary school especially, that there are some people that just make it their mission to single out anyone who is remotely different in any way; to harass, to jeer, to inflict harm. Without a doubt, many of those with Asperger’s will experience bullying at some point in their life time. We’re predisposed to be different to our peers. To me, the psyche of a bully is one of the most indecipherable things in the world. It is difficult for me to comprehend the desire to inflict pain on another human being. Despite the fact that bullying is an incredibly serious matter, it is unfortunately it is not always treated that way. The damage inflicted by bullying can…

View original post 398 more words

Dublin 1916 | Jean Reinhardt

Standard

A profound post about an important event in Irish history.

First Night History

Ruins of the Metropole Hotel, Sackville Street (Courtesy of National Library of Ireland)

This year being the centenary anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, there has been more than the usual effort put into relating and remembering events that led to Ireland becoming an independent nation. Here, we don’t have a particular date for an Independence Day – as does America with the 4th of July – but it was with the Rising that Ireland declared its independence from Britain. As I think of those fateful events that took place one hundred years ago I am reminded of a family member who was in Dublin city at the time.

My husband’s grandfather, Christopher, tried to join the British army when he was 13 years old; his older brother, Michael, was already fighting in France with the 8th Battalion of The Dublin Fusiliers. He never said much about the Rising…

View original post 32 more words