Entrusting the Witches to Ḫumuṭ-tabal: the ušburruda Ritual BM 47806+

The hitherto unpublished Late Babylonian fragment BM 47806 + adds another example to the group of rituals which counteract witchcraft by banning sorcerers to the netherworld. Šamaš is asked to hand them over, on his journey to the netherworld, to Ḫumuṭ-tabal, the ferryman of the dead. The edition of BM 47806 + is preceded by a brief overview of rituals of this type, including a discussion of the relationship between ritual burial of figurines – symbolising the dismissal of sorcerers to the netherworld – and their ritual burning, the other single most important technique of figurine magic deployed to kill warlock and witch

Femme-liminale: corporeal performativity in death metal

Given the research undertaken into notions of Dark Leisure (Spracklen, 2013), space becomes an engendered negotiated terrain not only in terms of performing masculine inscribed music such as Death Metal but occupying space within the scene itself. Claiming identity through mapping one's relationship to societal constructs of self and notions of belonging within peripheric and marginalised music forms such as Death Metal means that gender becomes foregrounded. Death Metal in its socio-musical constructs is male; the virtuosity and dexterity required to compose and perform it has its legacy in patriarchal cultural practices such as lead guitar solos and traditional band formations being occupied in the majority by men. There are of course exceptions to the rule but they do not occupy leading positions in the genre. There exists a preconceived notion that girls can’t play guitar, let alone Death Metal because its difficulty levels exceed a traditional three chord structure. Women’s involvement is restricted to either bass under the assumption that it is easier than guitar (White Zombie, Bolt Thrower) or in some instances vocals However this is dealt with as a novelty; Angela Gossow (Ex- Arch Enemy) providing a viable example. Whilst an anti-hegemonic, anti-establishment ideological position is maintained in Death Metal, for women who transgress the boundary between audience member or “girlfriend” of a band member, to performing Death Metal, the liminality of experience means occupying a patriarchal space at the same time as transgressing sexist and sexualised gender tropes. Whilst it can be noted that men within the Death Metal scene do not necessarily knowingly ascribe to societal gender constructs as an overt operational paradigm of behaviour, seeing as no single person can divorce themselves in totality away from contemporary cultural texts and practices, fundamental gender codes underpin interaction on and off stage. For women who perform Death Metal, the choice to either accept or deny constructs of femininity and ‘sexiness’ exists as polemics; to acknowledge the male gaze or to reject it can act as primary signification of manoeuvrability within the scene. This paper seeks to deconstruct notions of gender performativity, subversion and extreme metal in order to present a narrative on liminality, sexualisation and corporeality

The discourse deictics ^ and <-- in a World of Warcraft community

In the written English variety used in a community of World of Warcraft players, two iconic lexical items created from symbols have undergone semantic change. The words analyzed are ^ and <--, which have shifted from iconic deictic items used for discourse reference to non-iconic epistemic meanings. ^ shifted from a discourse deictic to an affirmative of a previous utterance, and <-- shifted to a self-identifying meaning similar to a pronoun. The existence and evolution of these lexical items are related to the medium in which they were created, as their meanings are associated with a visual-spatial environment created by textual chat in the virtual world. The different meanings of ^ and <-- currently exist in polysemy in the community, and the continuum of meanings are documented using data from natural language use spanning three years. A statistical analysis is performed on the data, and a diachronic change in meaning is found; furthermore, the observed change follows the path of semantic shift processes previously documented in spoken language. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd

The survival of witchcraft prosecutions and witch belief in South West Scotland

During the era of the Scottish witch-hunts, Dumfries and Galloway was one of the last regions to initiate witch prosecutions, but it was also one of the most reluctant to completely surrender all belief in witches until a comparatively late date. In the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries south-west Scotland, better known for the persecution of covenanters, took the practice of witchcraft and charming very seriously indeed, and for perhaps longer than other parts of Scotland, though the area has received surprisingly little scholarly investigation. The trial evidence is not incompatible with that found elsewhere though there is less demonic content. Accusations of witchcraft in this region were mostly concerned with the troubles of everyday life, agricultural problems, family tensions and disagreements between neighbours. From 1670 to about 1740, the very decades that were giving birth to the Scottish Enlightenment, learned interest in the supernatural was actually on the increase and the topic received an unprecedented level of questioning, investigation, and scrutiny. Ironically, the ‘superstitions’ that both church and state had been attempting to eradicate for some two hundred years were now being used to defend religion against the growing threat of atheism. The zeal of the ministers does seem to have contributed to the endurance of witch beliefs in the South West, as elsewhere. Against this backdrop, the survival of witch belief and the continued prosecution of witches in southwest Scotland is examined, thus contributing to our understanding of the individualistic nature of witch persecution and the various dynamics at play within the Scottish witch-hunting experience

Fast and Precise Symbolic Analysis of Concurrency Bugs in Device Drivers

© 2015 IEEE.Concurrency errors, such as data races, make device drivers notoriously hard to develop and debug without automated tool support. We present Whoop, a new automated approach that statically analyzes drivers for data races. Whoop is empowered by symbolic pairwise lockset analysis, a novel analysis that can soundly detect all potential races in a driver. Our analysis avoids reasoning about thread interleavings and thus scales well. Exploiting the race-freedom guarantees provided by Whoop, we achieve a sound partial-order reduction that significantly accelerates Corral, an industrial-strength bug-finder for concurrent programs. Using the combination of Whoop and Corral, we analyzed 16 drivers from the Linux 4.0 kernel, achieving 1.5 - 20× speedups over standalone Corral

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 21 (04) 1967

published or submitted for publicatio

Scholarly Program Notes of Recital Repertoire

This document introduces Jacques Offenbach\u27s Pardieu! C\u27est une aimable charge from La Jolie Parfumeuse, Giacomo Meyerbeer\u27s Ecoutez! Adamastor roi des vagues profondes from L\u27Africaine, Robert Franz\u27s 6 Gesänge, op. 30, Gioachino Rossini\u27s Largo al factotum from Il barbiere di Siviglia, Peter Warlock\u27s The First Mercy, As ever I saw, and Jillian of Berry and J.S. Bach\u27s Ich habe genug, BWV 82. Each of these works is presented with a brief history of its composer as well as relevant historical context and information regarding the origins of their texts. A short analysis of both text and music is included in each chapter

Mother Courage : a chronicle of the thirty years war (1618-1648)

A single mother and her grown children. A team now. The fathers have come and gone and are barely remembered. These are her children. By contrast, Matthew (27; 56) identifies an anonymous woman as "the mother of Zebedee's children." We'll talk about it, for what it may mean. More important is the fact that this group is headed by a dominant female. Let's see if it makes a difference. Demian, as you'll remember, was the product of matriarchy, as it were, and seemed to be none the worse for it. It wasn't even worth mentioning. Fifty years later, Edgar Wibeau of Plenzdorf's The New Sorrows of Young W. (1972), a modern version of Goethe's bestselling novel Werther written 200 years earlier, and one of the most brilliant pieces of theatre post-Brecht, does find it worth mentioning. He is "sick & tired" of being paraded as living proof that "a single mother can successfully raise a male.