Author: Overcoming Adversity | Buteau’s Odyssey

I have to confess, the idea for this blog post was inspired by a song playing on the radio. I stopped to listen, as it happened to be one of my favorite bands, Fleetwood Mac. I know the song well, “Never Going Back Again.” This is where I began. The Pattern Beneath the Words The line is simple: “Been down one time, been down two times / I’m never going back again.” On the surface, it is about the unraveling of the relationship between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. But beyond that, it speaks to a very specific kind of…

Gigi Bannister seeking assistance for husband’s careReggie Bannister needs no introduction to long-term horror fans. He’s practically the face of the entire Phantasm franchise — from 1979 to 2016 he portrayed the series’ ice cream truck driving, ponytail sporting, Tall Man battling, quadruple-barrel shotgun toting and occasionally acoustic guitar playing antagonist … fittingly enough, also named Reggie.Today, Reggie is 80 years old and in hospice care in California. And as his spouse Gigi Bannister told Wicked Horror, he could use your help more than ever.“Reggie’s condition is Lewy Body Dementia (LBD), secondary to Parkinson’s disease,” she said. “Same as Michael…

“It is a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”—Lewis Caroll’s The Red Queen Memory and imagination may be two sides of the same coin. Both our memories and imaginations recreate images of the past and future from existing fragments. So too for dreams, according to a recent study. A new study in Nature Neuroscience centers on how the brain remembers an experience that carries both a location and emotional charge. A memory is rarely a plain record of where we were. It carries tone, consequence, and bodily feeling. Place and emotion often fuse in our minds. This study…

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The benches cleared during the fourth inning of a game between the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox on Tuesday night, though no punches were thrown.The Red Sox led 8-2 after three innings before Wilson Contreras and Wilyer Abreu led off the fourth with long home runs.Tigers pitcher Framber Valdez then hit Trevor Story with a 94-mph fastball on the next pitch. Story stared at the mound while Tigers catcher Dillon Dingler and plate umpire Adam Beck got between he and Valdez.That caused both benches to empty and the bullpens to eventually come onto the field. No one seemed particularly…

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This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Sometimes my head just spins as I try to understand misophonia. One of the most difficult areas for me has to do with the auditory neuroscience underlying the condition, since I am less familiar with it than I am with psychology. Most of us don’t know auditory neuroscience, and this inhibits our ability to read the research. I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Prashanth Prabhu, who clarified many of these issues for me. He has published over 10 misophonia papers in just the past few years. His knowledge is a goldmine,…

The 2013 slasher spoof Cinco De Mayo DEFINITELY delivers the genre goods.2013’s Cinco De Mayo is unexpectedly solid stuffCinco De Mayo, as widely celebrated as it is, is also one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted holidays in the United States. A lot of people think it’s Mexico’s Independence Day, which is actually September 16. What Cinco De Mayo actually commemorates is Ignacio Zaragoza and his troops defeating the French at the First Battle of Pueblo in 1862. And how and why that’s become a day for Americans to get white girl wasted on Dollaritas at Applebees is simply beyond…

At some point in your life, you have been drawn to someone whom you should not have liked, at least on paper. Not the charming rogue of a romantic comedy or the morally complex antihero in a prestige drama. I mean someone whose appeal was less about psychological complexity and more about audacity. Someone who said the thing you’d never say out loud, or who went after people with a kind of gleeful disregard for consequences that made something in you (some quiet, buried part of you) feel a flicker of satisfaction. Someone whose cruelty, even directed at others and…

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