Getting back in shape))

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Happy Bday to my mom ❤️

by M. K. Bhadrakumar (Indian Punchline) China’s ‘New Silk Road’ freight train to Europe. (File photo)

The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks. I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood. Coronavirus: the week explained - sign up for our email newsletter Read more As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that. First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days. You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom… Advertisement You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest. Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes. You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again. You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training. You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all. You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules. You will count all the things you do not need. The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant. Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month? You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair. You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.#Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce. Many children will be conceived. Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy. Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die. You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU. You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps. You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.#italyItaly

Ever since JK Rowling first published her account of the “boy who lived”, theories about the inspirations for Harry Potter – and the magical world he inhabits – have abounded. Cafés and landmarks everywhere from Scotland to Portugal display signs claiming to have played host to the author while she wrote the novels – or, more boldly, to be the basis for the likes of Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, and Hogsmeade. Fortunately, one muggle plucked up the courage to ask Rowling about it on Twitter, and she obliged with a lengthy response. “If you define the birthplace of Harry Potter as the moment when I had the initial idea, then it was a Manchester-London train,” she wrote. “But I’m perennially amused by the idea that Hogwarts was directly inspired by beautiful places I saw or visited, because it’s so far from the truth.” She then contradicted assertions that she had used a 14th-century street known as the Shambles in York as a model for Diagon Alley, and that any of Edinburgh’s landmarks really shaped her conception of Hogwarts. “A truthful tour of HP ‘inspirations’ would involve a stationery guide pointing a stick at a picture of my head, which would be zero fun and nobody would buy tickets,” she quipped. “If I’d genuinely been inspired by every old building, creepy alleyway, pub, graveyard and underpass that’s claimed, I’d have spent my late twenties on a non-stop road trip between locations, and I promise I didn’t. I was mostly sitting in places I could get a cheap coffee/could afford the rent and making it all up.” As for where she wrote the first lines of The Philosopher’s Stone? “The first bricks of Hogwarts were laid in a flat in Clapham Junction,” she revealed, along with a photograph of the building where she was “renting a room” over “what was then a sports shop”. Slightly more romantically, she penned the chapter in which Harry gets his first wand from Ollivanders under a tree – even posting a photograph of it, although she neglected to reveal its exact location. “I can’t absolutely guarantee they haven’t taken away the old tree & planted a new one in the same corner of the field. I haven’t been there for nearly 30 years. But I think it’s this one.” #harrypotter #jkrowling #hpfuns #harrypottermovies Tbilisi

some quotes from Spirited Away “Once you meet someone, you never really forget them. It just takes a while for your memory to come back to you.” – Zeniba ,,Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember." - Zeniba “You still haven’t noticed that something precious to you has been replaced.” – Haku “Listen, Haku. I don’t remember it, but my mom told me… Once, when I was little, I fell into a river. She said they’d drained it and built things on top. But I’ve just remembered. The river was called the Kohaku River. Your real name is… Kohaku.” – Chihiro Ogino “Something you wouldn’t recognize. It’s called love.” – Kamaji “I’ve gotta get out of this place. Someday I’m getting on that train.” – Lin ,,I hope one day you have the courage to run away from everything that makes you miserable."#art #movie #anime #spiritedaway #HayaoMiyazaki #world #quotes #photo

Dak Prescott plans to be at training camp with the Dallas Cowboys, if and when it starts, on the richest one-year contract in franchise history.

Nasa to open International Space Station to tourists👉🏻 მე, 1 დოლარადაც არ შემიძლია🥴 ვინმემ მომიყევით მერე შთაბეჭდილებები✌🏻 Nasa is to allow tourists to visit the International Space Station from 2020, priced at $35,000 (£27,500) per night. The US space agency said it would open the orbiting station to tourism and other business ventures. There will be up to two short private astronaut missions per year, said Robyn Gatens, the deputy director of the ISS. Nasa said that private astronauts would be permitted to travel to the ISS for up to 30 days, travelling on US spacecraft. "Nasa is opening the International Space Station to commercial opportunities and marketing these opportunities as we've never done before," chief financial officer Jeff DeWit said in New York. Nasa said that private commercial entities would be responsible for determining crew composition and ensuring that the private astronauts meet the medical and training requirements for spaceflight. The two companies hired by Nasa are Elon Musk's SpaceX, which will use its Dragon capsule, and Boeing, which is building a spacecraft called the Starliner. These companies are likely to charge any private astronaut a similar "taxi fare" to what they intend to charge Nasa for its astronauts - close to $60m per flight. Nasa had previously banned any commercial use of the space station and prohibited astronauts from taking part in for-profit research. Nasa does not own the station however - it was built, beginning in 1998, with Russia, which has taken a more relaxed approach in recent decades to commerce. In 2001, US businessman Dennis Tito became the first tourist to visit when he paid Russia around $20 million for a round trip. Nasa's announcement on Friday is part of a move towards full privatisation of the ISS. US President Donald Trump published a budget last year which called for the station to be defunded by the government by 2025. The space agency recently announced that it planned to return to the moon by 2024, taking the first woman there and the first person in decades.

One of the officers had been on the job four days. One was on his third shift ever. And Derek Chauvin, who pressed his knee into George Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes, was the field training officer for one of them.