It's a Scooby-Doo reunion when Scooby and the rest of the Mystery Gang gather at a circus carnival under the big top. But when the clowns enter the ring, things go from merry to mayhem: clowns turn into robots, Scooby Snacks are snatched, and parents are kidnapped! It's up to you to help Scooby and the rest of the gang unravel the mystery of the three-ring circus in this You Choose ebook adventure.

When Scooby-Doo and the gang arrive at Professor Dinkley's archaeological dig in Mexico, they find Velma's uncle missing, and the workers terrified of chupacabras and Aztec gods--and the reader must help them solve the mystery.

Circuses and film are a natural pairing, and the new essays making up this volume begin the exploration of how these two forms of entertainment have often worked together to create a spectacle of onscreen alchemy. The films discussed herein are an eclectic group, ranging from early silent comedies to animated, 21st century examples, in which circuses serve as liminal or carnivalesque spaces wherein characters--and by extension audience members--can confront issues as far-reaching as labor relations, sensuality, identity, ethics, and more. The circus as discussed in these essays encompasses the big top, the midway, the sideshow and the freak show; it becomes backdrop, character, catalyst and setting; and it is welcoming, malicious or terrifying. Circus performers are family, friends, foe or all of the above. And film is the medium that brings it all together. This volume starts the conversation about how circuses and film can combine to form productive, exciting spaces where almost anything can happen.

By its very nature the clown, as represented in art, is an interdisciplinary phenomenon. In whichever artform it appears – fiction, drama, film, photography or fine art – it carries the symbolic association of its usage in popular culture, be it ritual festivities, street theatre or circus. The clown, like its extended family of fools, jesters, picaros and tricksters, has a variety of functions all focussed around its status and image of being “other.” Frequently a marginalized figure, it provides the foil for the shortcomings of dominant discourse or the absurdities of human behaviour. Clowns, Fools and Picaros represents the latest research on the clown, bringing together for the first time studies from four continents: Europe, America, Africa and Asia. It attempts to ascertain commonalities, overlaps and differences between artistic expressions of the “clownesque” from these various continents and genres, and above all, to examine the role of the clown in our cultures today. This volume is of interest for scholars of political and comic drama, film and visual art as well as scholars of comparative literature and anthropology.

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. At the turn of the 21st century, the Brazilian punk and hardcore music scene joined forces with political militants to foster a new social movement that demanded the universal right to free public transportation. These groups collaborated in numerous venues and media: music shows, protests, festivals, conferences, radio stations, posters, albums, slogans, and digital and printed publications. Throughout this time, the single demand for free public transportation reconceptualized notions of urban space in Brazil and led masses of people across the country to protest. This book shows how the anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeoisie stance present in the discourse of a number of Brazilian bands that performed from the late 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century in the underground music scenes of Florianópolis and São Paulo encountered a reverberation in the rhetoric emanating from the Campaign for the Free Fare, subsequently known as the Free Fare Movement (Movimento Passe Livre, or MPL). This allowed the engaged bands and the movement for free public transportation to contribute to each other’s development. The book also includes reflections on the Bus Revolt that occurred in the northeastern city of Salvador, unveiling traces of the punk and anarcho-punk movements, and the Revolution Carnivals that occurred in the city of Belo Horizonte, an event that mixed lectures, vegetarianism, protests, soccer, and punk rock music.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Dispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy’s uncertain future, by the country’s most perceptive and fearless political journalist. In twenty-five pieces from Rolling Stone—plus two original essays—Matt Taibbi tells the story of Western civilization’s very own train wreck, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion. Years before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society. Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign; the rise of the “dangerously bright” alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the “Racial Holy War” to come; and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. At the center of it all stands Donald J. Trump, leading a historic revolt against his own party, “bloviating and farting his way” through the campaign, “saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.” For Taibbi, the stunning rise of Trump marks the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement. Taibbi frames the reporting with original essays that explore the seismic shift in how we perceive our national institutions, the democratic process, and the future of the country. Insane Clown President is not just a postmortem on the collapse and failure of American democracy. It offers the riveting, surreal, unique, and essential experience of seeing the future in hindsight. “Scathing . . . What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase.”—San Francisco Chronicle