After losing his parents, this three year old orangutan, named Suryia, was so depressed he wouldn’t eat and didn’t respond to any medical treatments. The veterinarians thought he would surely die from sadness. Primates and dogs are usually wary of one another. The zoo keepers found an old homesick dog on the grounds in the park at the zoo where the orangutan lived and took the dog home to the animal treatment center. The dog, named Roscoe, kept returning to see the orangutan. The two lost souls bonded, share food, and have been inseparable ever since.
The orangutan found a new reason to live and each always tries his best to be a good companion to his new found friend. They are together twenty four hours a day in all their activities. See the video, it is really something to watch them together, riding the elephant, swinging on the stair rail, clinging to a bicycle and rolling together on grass. They live in Northern California where swimming is their favorite pastime, although Suryia (the orangutan) is a little afraid of the water and needs his friend’s help to swim..
Author: Peter Buckley
Music from another room- 1998 DVD
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Music From Another Room [DVD] [1998]
‘Music from another room’ is a 1998 romantic comedy dependent on fate to drive the main storyline, the pretty predictable one of no-hope underdog Danny (Jude Law) trying to win
the hand of already engaged Anna (Gretchen Mol). As a brown eyed five year old, he helped deliver her, and decided he would marry her. Twenty five years later, blue eyed Danny heads in the right direction by returning to his hometown, to move in with girlfriend Sarah. As he arrives, she is moving out, clearly intending to be gone before he gets there. Danny: ‘I thought you loved me.’ Sarah: ‘Really? What made you think that?’ Danny: ‘Probably when you said you loved me.’ Sarah: ‘You take things too literally..’ Probably as well to walk away, Danny.
At least he is in the right town. Soon, by accident, Danny meets Anna, attractive, unavailable, but far worse, cool, highly strung, and seeing herself as the emotional caretaker of the family. Danny is not deterred, even as he finds himself entangled with each of the eccentric Swann family members including the blind and sheltered Nina (Jennifer Tilly), the cynical feminist sister Karen (Martha Plimpton), bullying brother Billy (Jeremy Piven) and neurotic wife Irene (Jane Adams), eccentric academic father Richard (Bruce Jarchow), and mother Grace (Brenda Blethyn). For Grace’s personality, think Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet.
The Boys are Back- 2009 DVD
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The Boys Are Back [DVD] [2009]
Based on a true story, Clive Owen stars as a successful Australian sportswriter cast into the role of single parent to six year old Artie after the tragic death of wife Katy. He had another son, teenage Harry, by a previous marriage, living in England. How does a widowed man, cope with a job and running the house? For me, the story was really about how a husband and father, and a child and son, and equally apparent in them both, dealt with their grief, and coping without wife and mum for all the ordinary things we all take too much for granted.
Resolving to reach out to Artie, he comes up with his own style of parenting, ‘just say yes’, no rules, no chores..
Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny
Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny (2003) by Michael Gearin-Tosh
Guest Review by Mr Chris Wollams, and originally published in Icon magazine
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This is the inspiring story of one man following a diagnosis of cancer, and the decisions he faced.
This book is both excellent and controversial. Over a six month period, Michael Gearin-Tosh found out about the options available for treatment of Myeloma including chemotherapy, but in parallel, he became more intrigued by the Gerson Therapy and embarked on his own personal treatment plan. The Gerson Therapy is time consuming and not for everybody and it must be remembered that cancer is a very individual disease.
But Michael believed in the Gerson Therapy and this, coupled with his self-belief and natural energy, has seen him through the last eight years. All credit to him; he should be an icon for cancer patients and his book an essential read. His book does highlight the extraordinary gulf between ‘conventional’ medicine and ‘alternative’ medicine and the success of Michael Gearin-Tosh in controlling his cancer has significant implications for us all.
Sir David Wetherall FRS, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University said in his letter to the Sunday Times about the book, “Though I do believe passionately in scientific medicine, I have not got to the stage of being so blinkered that I cannot believe that at least some aspects of the more complementary approach may have a lot to offer. I think they could be put to the scientific test, and should be, but whether this will happen is far from clear. But of one thing I am sure; regardless of what a patient is suffering from, their personal reaction to their situation and their state of mind is of critical importance, and to ignore them in the face of high technology and medical practice is to court disaster”..
Dangerous Dogs?
A Dog attacking a family child, or a stranger, is a story all too common on the news. The pattern always seems to be the same: a family pet, which just happened to be a pit bull, for example, never injured anyone in its life, and had never been ill-treated, out of the blue attacked a child, another dog, or its owner.
Understandably perhaps, most people feel if a dog attacks someone it should immediately be put down. Since there are simple ways to reduce the risk of a horrific accident, all dog owners should be confident of being the one in charge at all times. My purpose in writing this is simply to make this point. I am not personally anti-dog, we have a Jack Russell (type) ourselves, known to friends and family by the macho name ‘Horlicks’, and I am very aware of how beneficial it can be for a family to own a dog. As a society, we owe a debt to dogs, for assisting the blind, the Police, rescuing people, landmine clearance, and a thousand tasks we never give a thought to. The annual awards ( http://www.pdsa.org.uk/animal bravery awards) given to outstanding dogs that saved peoples lives are very moving..
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Angela’s Ashes A Memoir of a Childhood
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To take up a Pulitzer prize-winning book that has consistently sold in the millions, and appear to take it apart, may seem like an act of iconoclasm. I shall therefore begin by saying that it is one very enjoyable read. Neither did the film version ( Angela’s Ashes [DVD] [2000]) disappoint me, at least, it is one of those rarest of experiences when you sit and watch an adaptation of a book and are forced by the end to acknowledge the makers did a better job than you might have done, despite “two and a half hours of rain”..
The book quote on the back neatly summarises the contents: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood”.. You can see why this quote was chosen over any other to sell the book, it combines the comfortable certainty of a publisher with another abused child story on the desk, with the skeptical but human reaction, ‘I bet it wasn’t really as bad as all that.. was it?’
Forde Abbey
History
In the peaceful solitude of its secluded position it is possible to imagine just how Forde Abbey, near Chard, along the Somerset/Dorset border, looked to many of its previous owners, from its mediaeval beginnings to the present day: monks going about their daily round of work and prayer, prosperous parliamentary gentlemen discussing the cavalier threat, gifted philosophers debating the imponderable, elegant Victorian ladies fanning themselves by the fireside and country gentlemen going about their work on the estate.
Foundation
In 1136 Richard de Brioniis founded a Cistercian monastery at Brightley in Devon. However, the land was too barren for an agricultural community, forcing the monks to return to Surrey in 1141. On their journey, they met their former patron’s sister and heir, Adelicia de Brioniis. Determined to honour the wish of her dead brother, she offered them the use of the Manor of Thorncombe and a site on the River Axe. They accepted and within seven years the monastery of Forde Abbey was built.
Wildlife of Scotland
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Wildlife of Scotland (1979) Fred Holliday (ed)
In this 1979 198 page book, commissioned by the Scottish Wildlife Trust, eleven writers have presented a comprehensive, yet personal survey of the wildlife inhabiting Scotland’s rich and varied landscape. Man’s influence upon the land and the animals, past and present, has been given special attention, and inevitably sounds a warning for the future.
People are not now so directly dependent upon the land, communications are vastly improved, wildlife is increasingly accepted as a source of pleasure and deserving of protection, and hence there is reason for optimism. However, it is certainly reasonable in return to collectively and individually conserve the habitats of native wildlife, to minimise or eliminate the loss of plant and animal species regardless of how aesthetically pleasing or useful on a practical level..
The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) by William Tyndale
This is a Guest blog by Mr Roy Elliot. My thanks to him for permission to reproduce it here.
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The Obedience of a Christian Man (Penguin Classics)
Influential remarkable book written almost 500 years ago
This remarkable book needs to be set in context. It was written almost 500 years ago, during the brutal persecution of those who believed the simple Gospel and in the absolute authority of “Scripture alone”.
William Tyndale, a gifted scholar educated at Oxford and ordained a priest, saw at first hand the widespread corruption within the Roman Catholic Church.
Rome believed that it could not err and it held ultimate power even over the king and government. A core belief was, and still is, that “Church Tradition” holds equal, or even more authority than the Bible. The Church went to extreme lengths to prevent the ordinary folk from having any independent understanding of the Bible, particularly in what it said regarding purgatory, confessing sins to a priest, the selling of indulgences, praying to Mary, praying to Saints, salvation by works and money payments, etc…
Continue reading The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) by William Tyndale
Depression
Almost all of us have experienced some form of depression, perhaps one in four or five at any one time. For the ones that haven’t (or haven’t yet), it can be near impossible to adequately understand what the partner or friend is going through, and by the nature of the beast, near impossible for them to tell you.
There is a huge amount of material in print and online about depression, and it is my view that much is good, but much is not so good. My reasons for adding the following comments are as follows.
- Let’s not be dogmatic. We do owe a lot to all the professional doctors, researchers, and modern medication; however, they would not be telling the truth if they claimed to have the perfect answer. For all our similarities, we are not robots, we are all unique.
- Although I fully accept the need for up to date advice, depression is almost as old as mankind, and the thoughts we do have in writing, from the Bible, the Koran, Confucius, and others, as well as modern first person accounts, can be helpful, even illuminating.
Timothy Bright (1586) wrote: ‘How diversely the word melancholy (depression) is taken’. He categorised depression as that type which ‘is not moved by any adversity present or imminent’ in which ‘the melancholy.. abuseth the mind’. He was describing a depressive disorder, almost certainly bipolar depression. He also described a second type of melancholy where ‘the peril is not of body’ but ‘proceedeth from the mind’s apprehension’ requiring ‘cure of the minde’, or as we would say, psychotherapy..