Temple bells will peal joyfully at the sunrise hour on Friday as lakhs of devout Hindus celebrate the birth of Lord Hanuman. The avatar of Lord Shiva is worshipped with offerings of sesame oil, banana, blue flowers and vermilion.
Goswami Tulsidas' Hanuman Chalisa narrates the various episodes that exemplify the singular devotion showed by the monkey god for his master, Ram.
After the battle of Lanka was won and the demon king, Ravan, was slain, it was time for Ram's coronation in Ayodhya. Each of the generals in battle had received prizes and honour when Sita's attention was drawn to Hanuman who stood silently by. Urging him forward, she gave him her own necklace made of the choicest pearls. However, to her astonishment, Hanuman began to take it apart with his teeth, breaking open each pearl, peering closely, then casting it aside with a look of disappointment.
When she asked why, Hanuman said he was seeking the image of his beloved Ram inside them but because he saw nothing, they became worthless. A sharp courtier interjected to ask if Hanuman saw Ram within himself. To everybody's amazement, the monkey king rended his chest to show the image of Ram and Sita embedded in his heart.
William "Dave" O'Shell, distraught over charges of child abuse that were being leveled against him, snapped on June 30, 2008, killing his wife, Tiffany O'Shell, in their Henderson, Colo., home before taking his own life.
Just a few weeks earlier, their green-eyed, 3-month-old daughter, Alyssa, had been placed in a foster home because x-rays revealed 11 broken bones and doctors assumed that she had been beaten.
But they were wrong.
On the same day as the murder-suicide, a doctor at Colorado Children's Hospital suspected something else and was later proved right: Alyssa had a rare genetic disorder that caused her bones to fracture -- one that authorities had confused for abuse.
Alyssa died of spinal muscular atrophy on Oct. 28, 2008, but the tragedy has rippled through a family and an aggressive social services system that is meant to protect children.
Now, four years later after all lawsuits have been unsuccessful, Alyssa's maternal grandparents are saying the tragedy could have been averted.
"We were looking for action. We could care less about the money," said Paul Cuin, Tiffany O'Shell's adoptive father. "We wanted someone to sit up and say, 'This is wrong and we need to change things.'"
Cuin said there were no avenues for the O'Shells, both respected police officers, to plead their innocence.
"If our kids had some sort of outlet or grievance process or gone to someone, we would have a whole different story today," he said. "The system has to change."
A judge gave Cuin, 59, and his wife, Jackie Cuin, 50, custody of Alyssa after the death of their daughter and son-in-law, despite the objections of social services, according to a story first published in the Denver Post.
The newspaper obtained medical, social services and police records in their investigation, as well as court documents on the Cuins' lawsuits.
"They were wonderful parents," said Paul Cuin, who is a supermarket manager. "We never had a single doubt in our minds [over whether] abuse was involved. We knew from the beginning, they loved that baby."
They nursed Alyssa until her death and are convinced that if doctors knew more about SMA, the disease might never again be confused with child abuse.
A year after the 1996 Olympics, I ranked twenty-third in the world in the 100-meter breaststroke and twenty-sixth in the 200-meter.
My parents did their best to shelter me from the unanimous criticism of public opinion. I didn't need anyone to tell me how bad I stunk; I knew that already. The harsh numbers of my ranking told the whole story. At least that's what I thought until I got acquainted with a whole new kind of low.
I had come into the living room of our house to find the newspaper because I wanted the movie listings; I needed to find a flick I could lose myself in. After looking on the couches and coffee table, I sat on the recliner chair where my dad read the newspaper and all of his books. I saw a piece of newsprint sticking out from in between a stack of books. Thinking it might be the paper, I lifted up the four or five volumes on top. Instead I found a hidden stash of clippings and knew immediately they were about me.
Since the start of my career, my dad was my own personal archivist, clipping any and all articles about me so that I could have them later on in life. But after carefully cutting them out, he always put them into the big red scrapbook he kept in his room.
Reading the dozen or so articles in my lap, I saw clearly why these hadn't made it into the book. Sportswriters called me fat, washed-up, and finished. I'd never do anything good in swimming again, they wrote. There it was in black and white, a complete validation of the negative voice playing on a loop in my head. It was true, I was a fat loser. The words I attacked myself with stared out at me from the page, causing a kind of sweet dread. I had suspected that everyone was talking about me, and they were. The shame -- this wasn't just a couple of mean girls at school but the whole world -- hurt so much it almost veered 180 degrees into pleasure. I wrapped myself up in sadness like a martyr, then tucked the clips back in their hiding spot so my dad wouldn't know I had found them.
I didn't talk about what was happening to me with anybody -- not my dad, mom, friends, or coach. Everyone knew that I knew I sucked, but we all ignored it. Hop into the pool, do your sets, dinner, homework, bed. Business as usual. At the time I was grateful for the normalcy. The last thing I wanted to do was draw more attention to myself. Not addressing something, however, doesn't mean it goes away.
I was recently diagnosed with a medical condition. I've got a mild case of it, but it brings a few troublesome complications regardless, nothing serious. And as one might well do, the first thing I did when I got home upon receiving my diagnosis was Google it to learn more. The list of symptoms included what took me to treatment in the first place, a good number of troubles I don't have, and a surprising entry: poor body image. The diagnosis? Scoliosis.
Now, if I'm being officially diagnosed for the first time at age 35, obviously my scoliosis isn't terribly problematic. I was monitored for it as a child (do they still do those annual scoliois screenings at school? It somehow seems like a remnant of the '70s, like the Dorothy Hamill haircut) but it was so mild that it barely qualified as scoliosis, and it didn't warrant treatment -- certainly not intervention like surgery or a brace. Basically, my muscles compensate for my wonky spine, running me through varying degrees of pain; I treat it with exercise, occasional ibuprofen, massage, and masturbation. (Deenie in da house!) In other words, it's not a huge deal, and it's not something that weighs on my mind a lot.
But there it is, that symptom far down on the list -- below the physical pain, below the visual cues -- poor body image. There's a whole body of work devoted to studying the psychosocial effects of scoliosis, particularly in adolescents, but it boils down to this: Something about your body is "wrong," and chances are it's not something you ever thought was a problem, and you really can't do much of anything about it. Wearing a brace may or may not have an impact on patients' body image, but there's evidence supporting a correlation between scoliosis and body image, regardless of treatment.
Now, the people being studied aren't people like me: I'm an adult, for starters, and one with a very mild case of scoliosis. Though I've been told repeatedly by chiropractors, tailors, and osteopaths that there's something irregular about my form, nobody until recently has used the word scoliosis about my body since the sixth grade. Whatever body image problems I have come from the usual suspects -- perfectionism, media, growing up girl -- not my spinal curvature.
But it's not hard for me to see how my body image has shifted ever so slightly in the past few weeks. Part of it was the pain that drove me to seek treatment; it's difficult to feel like your body is something to be proud of when you're wincing whenever you take off your shirt. But more than that, I've learned that -- and this is an unkind term -- I'm misshapen. I found myself complaining of feeling "broken" and "twisted" -- words I've never used to describe myself. Whenever I've had a problem with my body, there's been a part of me that has known it's in my head, because the concerns I had were solely about about how I appeared. If I thought my thighs were unappealing, there was still a part of me that understood that "unappealing" was subject to interpretation. With a twisted spine that was causing me pain -- that wasn't in my head, that was in my bones.
Get ready to meet your new best TV friends: "Best Friends Forever" (premieres Wed., Apr. 4, 8:30 p.m. ET on NBC) is the kind of show you're gonna want to hang out with every week. Just trust me.
Written, created by and starring funny ladies (and real-life friends) Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham, "Best Friends Forever" is a sweet, funny, so-true-it-doesn't-feel-like-a-sitcom kind of sitcom. I visited the set and instantly fell in love with the whole vibe, but watching these two women work together reminded me of those "Best Friends" split heart charms you got with your grade school partner in crime -- they just fit together.
In this case, when Jessica (the "Be/Fri" half of the heart charm) gets served divorce papers, she moves back in with the friend who completes her, Lennon (the "st/ends" half of the heart charm). The only thing that can come between these two perfectly split halves is Lennon's new live-in boyfriend, Joe (played by Luka Jones).
Here's the gist:
Lennon: "Essentially it's a story about two best friends who are so close -- it's like that romantic relationship that girls have in middle school that travels with them."
Jessica: "Someone brought this up to us: The word 'friendsbians.' You're so close you might as well be having sex, but you're not. [Laughs.] So really it's a love story about two women. It's a romantic comedy, but instead of a boy and girl, it's Jessica and Lennon."
Lennon: "And the twist is that a month ago, I moved my forever boyfriend, who's the love of my life, into my old apartment and now Jess is back. So I'm having to balance the two of them for the first time together in the same place."
They complete each other's stories like this a lot, in real life and on the show. It makes viewers feel even more "inside" than just eavesdropping on a chat between good friends -- it makes you feel like you're in their company. And the way St. Clair and Parham write has a lot to do with that.
How does Kelly Clarkson celebrate her two Academy of Country Music wins? By singing Britney Spears' pop hit "Til the World Ends," of course!
"I thought this might be a fun one that you all might enjoy," Clarkson told the crowd at a recent concert. "I'm going to sing it a little differently ... I love that song."
Clarkson covered the pop princess' hit single Tuesday night in Los Angeles, as a part of her nationwide Stronger tour, but she put her own acoustic spin on the infamous dance track. The first "American Idol" winner slowed it down but still managed to bring the cheering fans to their feet.
The Fray should take note. This is how you properly rework a song.
Clarkson's latest album Stronger is currently holding steady at No. 19 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
Speaking of covers, check out some of our favorite "Somebody That I Used to Know" covers below. The Gotye song will next be covered on "Glee."
Jeremy Renner is poised to become the next A-list star thanks to "The Avengers" and "The Bourne Legacy," which means it's just as good a time as any to revisit the time Christina Aguilera passed out at his birthday party.
The incident happened last year during a soiree to celebrate Renner's 40th birthday. At the time, the star was quoted as telling friends that he found Aguilera with her then-boyfriend in one of his bedrooms.
"I run up and open the door and I'm like, 'Um, hi. What are you doing?' She just starts slurring," he reportedly said at the time. "Her boyfriend was rubbing her back. Who comes to someone's birthday party that they don't know and gets in their bed?! My parents were there!"
Looking back on that fateful night with The Hollywood Reporter, Renner seemed a bit more level-headed.
"She was just chilling in one of the bedrooms," he said in a new interview. "I was happy to meet her. I was a big fan. Mind you, I was probably pretty shit-bagged at the time."
About that: during his sit-down with THR, Renner revealed that he likes to get "wasted" and took drugs when he was younger.
He's also got a history of violence -- which you might remember, if you saw the story about him being involved in a Thailand bar fight that left one man stabbed with an axe.
"It was a silly, tragic accident that happened to this guy," Renner said of the fight, which happened at 4 a.m. local time. "He was saying stuff, and 20 people jumped on him. I was in flip-flops. I don't do bar fights. Did he deserve to get stabbed and almost murdered by 20 people? F--- no."
The Aussie television viewers will miss all the action of the fifth edition of the Indian Premier League, starting in Chennai (capital city of south Indian state Tamil Nadu) on Wednesday, due to a stalemate involving Australian television networks and Indian cricket administrators.
Network Ten held the rights for the first four seasons of the IPL but declined to broadcast last year's tournament, mainly because of the poor ratings and also because it coincided with a diversification of its One HD channel away from consisting solely of sport, according to The Age.
The newspaper also reported that it is believed the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has sought a hefty price whenever a new IPL TV rights contract has been discussed with Australian networks.
So now the only option left for the Australian cricket fans is to watch the eight-week tournament via the internet, streamed live at ipl.indiatimes.com and youtube.com/indiatimes.
The successor to Ten for the now-lapsed IPL rights, Fox Sports, is about to begin its broadcast of the West Indies Tests, while on weekends it has significant AFL, rugby league, rugby union and soccer commitments. (PTI)
A federal appeals court judge on Tuesday seemed to take offense to comments President Barack Obama made earlier this week in which he warned that if the Supreme Court overturned his signature health care overhaul it would amount to overreach by an "unelected" court.
The Supreme Court is set to issue a ruling later this year on whether to strike down some or all of the historic health care law.
During oral arguments in Houston in a separate challenge to another aspect of the federal health care law, U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith said Obama's comments troubled a number of people who have read them as a challenge to the authority of federal courts.
"I'm referring to statements by the president in the past few days to the effect, I'm sure you've heard about them, that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed unelected judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed, he was referring of course to Obamacare, to what he termed a broad consensus and majorities in both houses of Congress," Smith told Dana Kaersvang, an attorney with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.
On Monday, Obama issued a direct challenge to the Supreme Court, saying he didn't believe the high court would take the "unprecedented" step of overturning a law passed by a strong majority of Congress.
"I want to be sure that you are telling us that the Attorney General and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts through unelected judges to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases," Smith said.
A somewhat surprised Kaersvang told Smith the Justice Department does recognize this power by the courts and made reference to a landmark 1803 case that formed the basis for judicial review.
However, Smith ordered Kaersvang to submit a letter to the appeals court by Thursday stating the position of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department on the concept of judicial review.
"The letter needs to be at least three pages, single spaced, no less and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the president's statements," Smith said.
If you've been feeling a little down about your looks lately, having a drink (or just believing you've had a drink!) can make you feel more attractive, according to a new study.
French scientists have conducted two experiments indicating that the more alcohol you think you've had in a day will increase your self-confidence in your appearance, even if you haven't had any.
The Agence France-Presse reports the scientists conducted one experiment in a local bar where 19 people were asked to assess their attractiveness on a scale of one to seven. Their alcohol levels were then measured, and the results were pretty interesting: the higher the amount of booze that was drunk, the higher the self-confidence of the testee.
But what's even more interesting is what happened in phase two.
The scientists asked 94 men to taste-test a new fruit cocktail and deliver a filmed message. The testers told the volunteers that half would be given an alcoholic version and the others would be given a placebo.
Those who believed they had drunk alcohol gave themselves high self-assessments, regardless of whether they had actually ingested any booze, while those who had believed they hadn't had a sip of alcohol gave themselves a low assessment, even when there had been a hefty amount of liquor in their drinks. So, basically, believing is feeling! Said lead psychologist Laurent Begue:
"Our study shows that the mere fact of believing that you have drunk alcohol makes you feel more attractive. The alcohol dose has no effect in itself."
So, why is it that we feel sexier with a glass of wine in our hands? According to the article, it's "alcohol-related expectancy," meaning the more we drink, the hotter we think we are, because we're more at ease with others:
"The concept of alcohol is linked to social lubrication, to making you feel at ease with others."
