NEW YORK — Nine-year-old Oliver Cahill, who has battled rare brain cancer for over half his life, recently met Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson thanks to the Make-a-Wish Foundation, confirmed multiple sources who wish the subject of a creator never came up.
“I was telling Oliver all about the Big Bang and the evolution of life and he asked me how God plays into all of this,” recounted Dr. Tyson. “I laughed at first because that is one of the dumbest questions a kid has ever asked me. We confront paradoxes that have puzzled humanity for millennia. One such involves reconciling the concept of an all-powerful and benevolent deity with the existence of suffering. I said ‘Oliver, if God exists why are you in pain all the time? This must be a punishment, and you must have done something really bad.’ It was around that time his father looked like he was about to punch me, but cooler heads prevailed.”
“I mean come on, either God doesn’t care, or can’t do much. I mean Oliver had NO empirical evidence to prove God is real,” Tyson added.
Oliver’s father, Roger Cahill, was horrified by the experience.
“He called my son a ‘Philistine.’ And then I swear he mumbled something about how it’s ‘Always the dumb ones.’ Then peppered Oliver with this Christopher Hitchens shit, and made him watch 90-minutes of Stephen Hawking videos,” said Cahill. “Even the nurses tried to pull him away because Oliver is prone to migraines. It took us like two hours to get him out of the room. He did autograph a Blu-Ray copy of ‘Cosmos’ though, maybe I’ll be able to sell that for a few bucks in four months.”
This is not the first controversy for Make-A-Wish who remain defiant in the face of widespread criticism.
“At Make-A-Wish, we celebrate diverse interests and strive to fulfill the unique wishes of every child. We’ve broadened our horizons by inviting guests like Werner Herzog, Noam Chomsky, and Bill Maher, offering experiences that inspire wish recipients to engage with the world as it is,” said an official spokesperson. “While our guests may not be perfect, we believe they contribute valuable perspectives. Admittedly, Werner’s presentation included some challenging audio clips from ‘Grizzly Man,’ and Bill’s discussion veered off-topic towards Islamophobia but despite these hiccups, we remain committed to providing enriching experiences for the children we serve.”
Dr. Tyson, meanwhile, remains proud of the experience and hopes for more in the future. “Honestly, I thought it went great. It was just another win for science,” he chuckled.
A curious ritual in honor of someone alive and well, don’t you think? The very word “memorial” implies that you are remembering someone because they are no longer around. It’s circumstantial, but where there’s smoke there’s fire.
Here we see The Beatles on their 2015 Norweigan cruise line tour. Fans and theorists have pointed out that Lennon’s appearance in the photo is somewhat off. The chin isn’t quite right, and given that Lennon would have been 75 in 2015, he should appear to be much older.
Once again, The Beatles use their album artwork to air their dirty laundry, this time around so blatantly it’s a wonder more people have not picked up on it. The five photos of John Lennon speak louder than words. From left to right he is clearly saying “Hey, it’s me, John Lennon,” “I would like to speak to you about a serious matter, my impending death,” “Here I am making an ‘8’ with my hands because that’s the decade I will be shot in,” “You will miss me, John Lennon, very much after I am shot in 1980” and “Maybe I’ll come back as a zombie, who knows, but first, I have to die.”
It seems unlikely that John Lennon would have lived to hear acts such as Cocteau Twins, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Depeche Mode without wanting to make that sound his own.
If you type “John Lennon death” into Google a plethora of physical evidence will appear including coverage by noted anchors and newspaper front pages from 1980 all claiming John Lennon had been killed. In all of our research, we did not find a single printed retraction.
Everyone had a take on this thing and yet Lennon’s socials remained curiously silent. Why? Because he’s tweeting “Greta was snubbed” in heaven now, that’s why!
As we saw in Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary, the Fab Four’s working dynamic was often fraught with tension. Still, it’s suspicious that in all the time since the band’s official 1970 breakup, George Harrison and John Lennon never collaborated. Harrison has in fact taken absurd lengths to distance himself from Lennon, going so far as to fake his own death in 2001. Why? Maybe because he knows the truth, and it tears him up inside.
We consulted with legal experts, and they all confirmed that the only way a will is actionable is upon the death of its author, even if all involved parties go to town hall together in person and ask really nicely.
If you play the serendipitously titled song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” backward, and at just the right speed, the line “She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand like a lizard on a window pane, The man in the crowd with his multicolored mirrors on his hobnail boots, lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working over time, a soap impression of his wife that he ate and donated to the national trust” sounds an awful lot like “I, Jonathan Lennon of the famous rock band The Beatles have every intention of dying at the hands of Mark David Chapman, a crazy person who reads ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’”
Strapping Young Lad’s debut is more of a fascinating mess than Fiorentino’s “Madonna and Child with Cherubs.” The jumbled collage of hastily stitched together songs is a document of Townsend, mostly by himself with a drum machine, searching for SYL’s sound in real-time. The album’s more focused lyrically, though, with the main theme being a flailing temper tantrum aimed at the music industry: “Then, hell, I’ll stand aside, and with your plans I’ll never tamper / I’ll sit and write you songs and be a happy, happy camper.” Given that he’d sharpen SYL’s songwriting on later records, the importance of “Heavy As A Really Heavy Thing,” then, lies more in its promise than its execution.
Consider this their true debut. Here, SYL are an actual band, one that’s coming into focus and making denser and heavier music than before. In other words: “City” is what “Heavy” shoulda been. Devy and Co. are still finding the balance between death, thrash, and industrial, mostly leaning into the latter two. The result is good but not great. Meanwhile, the album’s supposed lyrical theme is Los Angeles. If that’s the case, then “Hating, burning, waiting, falling / Fucking, twisting, human cancer / Fuck your bullshit America” sums up L.A. (and existence) about as well as anything.
This is their most death metal-est album. The quartet pushes the thrash and industrial elements into the background, favoring raw production and aggressive musicianship for a more feral sound. The songwriting is sharper, but the overall presentation isn’t quite cohesive. Townsend, meanwhile, matches the music’s tone with his angriest writing on an SYL record, casting aside the silliness. The throughline is the fear and paranoia in a post-9/11 world, so you get acerbities like “Born son of righteousness / Holy water holding back the storm” and “Machines, they pay for war / Bring on the hate, my god.” While a bit unfocused, “Strapping” is the band inching closer to greatness.
SYL’s final record is their thrashiest and most streamlined, with the death metal and industrial components relegated more than Norwich City FC. “The New Black” is almost sarcastically melodic and catchy, with lyrics about popularity (“You and your band, you fucking suck / Hell yeah, you fucking suck”) and selling out (“I am the anti-product, rotten to the core / Sell me, the anti-product, rock me to the bone”) so facetious that Devy’s tongue probably went through his cheek. Coincidence or not, this is their “Black Album.” Take that how you will.
Turns out, fourth time’s the charm. Devy and Co. finally find the right blend of thrash, death, and industrial. “Alien” is easily SYL’s best-played and most fully-realized record. And because of the progressive songwriting, it’s also their most self-indulgent. (To wit: The closer is 12 minutes of droning noise that offers the level of patience-testing usually reserved for the DMV.) Thankfully, the band’s humor returns to counteract that. The theme this time seems to be an alien’s anthropological study of humans. Thus, you get absurdist observations like “Love, the paradox of needing / Oh, love, make way for breeding” and “And being human / Is fucked as it is / With all these questions / Of faith and of kids.” “Alien” is the perfect title for an SYL album because they’re weird and they’re fucking proud of it.