#Alanic Clothing New York

[queerism1969]

Notable transgender people from history

Here's the list I put together for when people on non-trans subreddits claim we didn't exist until recently:

Ashurbanipal (669-631BCE) - King of the Neo-Assryian empire, who according to Diodorus Siculus is reported to have dressed, behaved, and socialized as a woman.

Elagabalus (204-222) - Roman Emperor who preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, presented as a woman, called herself her lover's queen and wife, and offered vast sums of money to any doctor able to make her anatomically female.

Kalonymus ben Kalonymus (1286-1328) - French Jewish philosopher who wrote poetry about longing to be a woman.

Eleanor Rykener (14th century) - trans woman in London who was questioned under charges of sex work

[Thomas(ine) Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas(ine)_Hall) - (1603-unknown) - English servant in colonial Virginia who alternated between presenting as a woman and presenting as a man, before a court ruled that they were both a man and a woman simultaneously, and were required to wear both men's and women's clothing simultaneously.

Chevalier d'Eon (1728-1810) - French diplomat, spy, freemason, and soldier who fought in the Seven Years' War, who transitioned at the age of 49 and lived the remaining 33 years of her life as a woman.

Public Universal Friend (1752-1819) - Quaker religious leader in revolutionary era America who identified and lived as androgynous and genderless.

Surgeon James Barry (1789-1865) - Trans man and military surgeon in the British army.

Berel - a Jewish trans man who transitioned in a shtetel in Ukraine in the 1800's, and whose story was shared with the Jewish Daily Forward in a 1930 letter to the editor by Yeshaye Kotofsky, a Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn who knew Berel

Mary Jones (1803-unknown) - trans woman in New York whose 1836 trial for stealing a man's wallet received much public attention

Albert Cashier (1843-1915) - Trans man who served in the US Civil War.

Harry Allen (1882-1922) - Trans man who was the subject of sensationalistic newspaper coverage for his string of petty crimes.

Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886–1954) - socialite, chef and hostess in Oxnard California, whose family and doctors supported her transition at a young age.

Lili Elbe (1882-1931) - Trans woman who underwent surgery in 1930 with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran one of the first dedicated medical facilities for trans patients.

Karl M. Baer (1885-1956) - Trans man who underwent reconstructive surgery (the details of which are not known) in 1906, and was legally recognized as male in Germany in 1907.

Dr. Alan Hart (1890-1962) - Groundbreaking radiologist who pioneered the use of x-ray photography in tuberculosis detection, and in 1917 he became one of the first trans men to undergo hysterectomy and gonadectomy in the US.

[Louise Lawrence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Lawrence_(activist)) (1912–1976) - trans activist, artist, writer and lecturer, who transitioned in the early 1940's. She struck up a correspondence with the groundbreaking sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey as he worked to understand sex and gender in a more expansive way. She wrote up life histories of her acquaintances for Kinsey, encouraged peers to do interviews with him, and sent him a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs, personal correspondences, etc.

Dr. Michael Dillon (1915-1962) - British physician who updated his birth certificate to Male in the early 1940's, and in 1946 became the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty.

Reed Erickson (1917-1992) - trans man whose philanthropic work contributed millions of dollars to the early LGBTQ rights movement

Willmer "Little Ax" Broadnax (1916-1992) - early 20th century gospel quartet singer.

Peter Alexander (unknown, interview 1937) - trans man from New Zealand, discusses his transition in this interview from 1937

Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989) - The first widely known trans woman in the US in 1952, after her surgery attracted media attention.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (1940-present) - Feminist, trans rights and gay rights activist who came out and started transition in the late 1950's. She was at Stonewall, was injured and taken into custody, and had her jaw broken by police while in custody. She was the first Executive Director of the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, which works to end human rights abuses against trans/intersex/GNC people in the prison system.

Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer and community worker in NYC; co-founded STAR, a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women

Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer; co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera

[edutainer2022]

So I got under the weather - fever, sore throat, snuffles, the works. But I am "busy" (tm) and, therefore, need to be "fine" (tm). So I'm indulgently reposting a little fluffy Tracy-fever piece I wrote out this summer. I may or may not be eyeing another fever-snippet in my notes. Depends on how "fine" (tm) I am. Please, enjoy!

PUPPY BASKET

A puppy basket. Jeff didn't recall who exactly coined the term - his wife or himself. Or maybe his mother. The point was - with three kids so close in age (and then two more down the line) the flues and colds, and stomach bugs tore through the bunch like a wildfire. There was not enough manpower in the household to keep up with sick boys quarantined in different rooms. So it was just easier and more expedient to stash the sniveling and coughing, and sniffling, and generally miserable puppy ball in the master bedroom. Lucy and himself took shifts sitting vigil, giving meds and fluids, kissing burning up brows. If he were planetside, of course. Later, when the boys' mother was gone, it would be, likely, Scott's room and the elder boys taking up watch hours, while he was busy with grief and work. The one time he came home from New York to find all five boys succumbed to a flu, pretty much delirious in his room, little Alan hoarse from crying - even Scott too weak from fever to call Grandma (and too anxious to call 911 lest child services got a wiff) was a memory he didn't dare revisit often.

He could distantly recall that a feverish Scott would be restless, Virgil would be cuddly, John would be clingy. Gordon would peel off any scrap of clothes on him. Someone would invariably end up upside down with feet propped on the pillow.

That morning got him investigating in Scott's room first thing. Gordon and Alan drew a short straw and were off for a supply run early on (a bright and whistling Gordon and a grumpy half-asleep Alan). Virgil was not expected down this side of 10 am, John was just back from orbit the night before. But Scott never made it to see the Tinies (did they even call the boys that anymore? Alan was starting college in a month!) off, have his run and a morning coffee-cum-strategy session with Dad - something that had become a new, cherished routine for them. The parent alarm in him, that never lay quite dormant even through the endless night of the Oort Cloud, was now blaring full force.

Fair enough, Jeff found his eldest room in an uncharacteristic disarray - a blanket kicked off all the way from the foot of the bed down to the floor, last day clothes scattered on the carpeting - something he came to recognize more as the youngest style, not Scott, who had tried to emulate Dad's military crisp order since he was five and learned to make his own bed. Scott was soon found by his father's increasingly concerned gaze in the middle of the bed, tangled sheets and disheveled curls a testament to a night of tossing and turning, breathing shallow and raspy. Jeff's immediate guess was a nightmare - heaven knows he was no stranger to warding off those, plaguing his boy's naturally light sleep. But a fine sheen of sweat, covering Scott's face and neck, belied a different answer altogether. Jeff wasn't surprised, when the brow he reached for to smooth away the soaked fringe, was burning. Scott wasn't asleep per se - eyes squeezed shut against a headache - but he definitely wasn't alert and present either. Jeff wasn't surprised, but he was getting increasingly panicked. His own mother gave him a semi-clean bill of health and was currently in Kansas, helping a friend out. The time difference made the call tricky. Not impossible, of course, there  was no inconvenience Grandma wouldn't go through for him or his boys, for which Jeff was eternally greatful, but all the more weary to disturb his getting increasingly fragile Ma more, than necessary. Kayo was visiting with her own father, so that was not an option as well. The problem was, with Grandma away, there was no medic on the island. Unless, of course... Jeff remembered Virgil determined and precise with a medscanner, and later - all business and in-trade jibberish with the medical staff at the rehab center he had to spend first months back on Earth at. Despite budding worry, as Scott keened quietly and shifted under his father's soothing touch, Jeff smiled fondly. Virgil was, arguably, the closest to his Grandpa in looks and demeanor, but it appeared he followed his Grandma's professional leanings. He should try and wake Virgil up. Scott was definitely under the weather.

As if on cue, the door opened and a gigantic burrito walked in. Jeff started. The burrito was, upon a closer inspection, a human, barefoot, wrapped up in a blanket head to toe. The walking burrito was also eliciting grunts and a lung-splitting cough. Ouch. The intruder ignored Jeff completely, sidestepped the bundle of clothes on the floor, and collapsed on the bed, next to Scott, wrapping the latter immediately in a cocoon of limbs and blanket, like a cuddle pillow. Scott is restless, Virgil is cuddly... Jeff was beginning to get a bad, bad feeling about it. A quick dive into the fluffy depths of fabric and hair confirmed his fear - Virgil had a fever too. That left...

"John!" - he had to spring from the edge of the bed with speed and agility that would make his physiotherapist proud in time to catch a swaying ginger son from planting face first on the floor. John appeared soundlessly, a ghostly vision, almost translucent where he would normally be pale. A sneeze almost send them both toppling again, but Jeff managed to maintain balance and helped John walk the short distance to the other side of the bed. There was no question how the ginger was going to spend his spiking fever - the moment he climbed onto the mattress, John attached himself to Scott side like a limpet, the way Jeff had only seen Alan do so far. When sick, Scott was restless, Virgil was cuddly, and John was clingy. Well, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Puppy basket is go!

Jeff was halfway through the mental checklist of things he would need to make the logistics of his three eldest sons down for the count work (fluids, medscanner and monitors to keep track of the fevers, ask Brains if the medkits were in the same spots now, call Ma as soon as the time difference would permit, coax, trick and blackmail the boys into cold meds and cough syrup, call Gordon and Alan to stay away for the day and to go fetch Grandma from the farm, make sure Brains was alright and quarantined in his lab and rooms, check himself up, because Jeff needed to be on top of his game for the sick boys - the day and the following night could be tough), when a loud shriek pierced the silence of the room. Scott was frowning and trying the disentangle himself from Virgil's death grip. Jeff reached for his agitated son's shoulder and rubbed a thumb over - in the haze of the fever Scott could get disoriented and start fighting any restraint. Jeff knew the boy would never forgive himself, if he hurt Virgil, even unintentionally. But Scott was not to be easily placated. His face contorted with effort and, likely, a worsened sinus pain, to Jeff's astonishment, the young man grabbed a barely protesting John, lifted him bodily over his own frame, like he was a... well... puppy, and stuffed him into Virgil's arms, that immediately closed the hug around a different brother, as Scott rolled to the side in a sleek stealth maneuver. He would have rolled all the way over the edge of the bed, had Dad's arms not stopped him. That must have computed to the cold addled brain as "safe", since Scott stopped struggling almost immediately and let out a snuffle in a voice Jeff hadn't heard since when the kids' mother was alive. "M'hot", Scott complained without opening his eyes. Jeff reckoned he should probably be more concerned about photosensitivity and the fact any of the boys was yet to notice or acknowledge him. Jeff made an attempt to hoist Scott up against the headrest, but thought better of it as another painful moan escaped. Instead, he sort of rolled the son back to the center of the bed, closer to the pile of other brothers. Scott seemed game for that and shifted to snuggle and spoon against John's back. That elicited a hum and a sneeze from the ginger. Virgil didn't stir. Puppy basket indeed.

Satisfied that Scott was settled for the moment and the other boys seemed to have fallen asleep, Jeff felt confident enough to go looking for the fever vigil supplies and an extra coffee for himself. But he didn't leave before leaning to reach the assorted temples and forheads for the mandatory kiss better and a soft stroke. So sue him, he missed a lot longer than eight years of being their Dad first.

A detour to the infirmary, a chat with Brains, a lot more strained one with Ma and an anxious one with the Tinies later - Jeff was on his way back to Scott's rooms. Gordon and Alan, of course, offered to come back and help with their ailing brothers immediately. But Jeff shuddered at the idea of having all five of the boys sick at once. He was good, but the tenure in space was taking its toll. The youngest boys would be well supervised under Grandma's watchful eye, till it was safe (or absolutely necessary- something Jeff tried not to dwell on) to return to the island.

The sight that greeted him upon return to the bedroom tugged the corners of his lips up despite himself. Seeing his sons sick or hurting in any way brought him no joy, but the picture was just too precious and hilarious at the same time. John had shifted upside down, somehow, so Virgil was now cuddling his brother's feet. John was also curled in an upside down ball, head resting on Scott's stomach. Scott, in an attempt to cool off, cast his long, long limbs every which way, including over Virgil's lap and head, in a comical replication of the Vitruvian Man. As Jeff stepped in, though, the eldest shifted again, to curl himself around John protectively and to draw Virgil into a side hug. Jeff needed to go ahead with the med scanners and to get the boys awake long enough to make sure they got a drink of electrolytes and some saltines, but first he paused to reach for his comm watch and snap a picture of the puppy basket. He would cherish the moment while it lasted. And he could always use it as blackmail backup against these three running themselves to the ground - under the threat of the photo being leaked to the Tinies.

[romanthroughthefield]

okay so it wasn’t my next post but whatever-

Why Something To Believe In is Actually a Good Song (Contrary to Popular Belief):

disclaimer: i’m not a media analyst or whatever i’m just a person with an opinion (and the delusional idea that i know jack kelly better than anyone)

1. first things first i genuinely think that alan menken is a genius composer. how could i not? he has created some of the most influential scores in modern day cinema. regardless of your opinion on the song place in newsies i think that looking at the chord progression, lyrics, and instrumentals you have to admit that it is a nice song to listen to.

2. addressing some issues people have with jatherine i think a lot of the issues people have with this song come from the pre-conceived notion that their relationship was “rushed” or built on “jack being a creep” which i simply just don’t agree with. possibly a side tangent but don’t come a knockin’ doesn’t make jack out to be a creep it simply states that he participates in hookup culture. a line in which he literally laughs while singing. jack and katherine have a very flirty and joking relationship up until this point and not once did i read into this as katherine being uncomfortable. jack finds katherine as an equal, a match for his wit and humor. this is the first girl he’s ever felt a deeper connection with. he is literally in disbelief that a “girl like her could ever wind up with a guy like him.” the song only further deepens their relationship. they state that the love that they have discovered here is new for them. it doesn’t mean that their madly in love, i mean they’re teenagers, it just means that they love each other and what they brought into each others lives. it’s “rushed” if you people that this song is a confession of deep love which i simply just don’t think it is.

4. a deeper look into what believing means “jack already had something to believe in! he had the newsies” “katherine had herself and her career.” people like to deny it but jack didn’t like his life before the strike. it wasn’t because of the newsies of course but can you really think that stealing food and clothes for the boys he cares about in the lodging house was his endgame for him? that’s why he had santa fe, so he could dream. his “something to believe in” was a dream not a reality.

when katherine comes along that is his first tether to reality. they can change the way new york is run. this doesn’t have to be his life anymore. now his “something to believe in” was a reality in front of him not just a dream that would save his crushing reality of not being able to care for his boys properly.

same thing goes for katherine in the sense that her career was finally “busting out of the social pages” until she immediately got shot down. her father’s pressure was not her end goal, she wanted to make a career for herself but was denied it. when jack arrives and she finally gets a story to run with and the courage to change the way that new york is run she discovers her “something to believe in.” jack and katherine each awaken something in each other, they each believe in each other. i mean that is literally said in the song but it goes deeper than just their love for each other, they literally have changed each others lives.

4. from a composers point of view: something to believe in gets no hints/preludes/reprises/playoffs or anything of the sort which the entire rest of the album does (except thats rich im pretty sure but thats completely different). point is any number that jack or katherine sing in up to this point has either already been lamented again or will be in the future. something to believe in stands alone in its present, it is literally the time frane that jack wishes he could freeze. it is a singular moment in which their unique situations come together. before they kiss in the song jack ends his longer phrases with a stagnant note. after his kisses her the notes at the ends of his phrases climb up. from a strictly technical point of view he literally rises up because of katherine believing in him.

idk i didn’t proof read this let me know if it makes sense

[medeafive]

Halloween special

This one-shot is set after "Give me something I can nail myself to" but you don't have to read that first (or at all). Just know that Bucky and Natasha have had sex recently (which everybody knows about) but are decidedly not in a relationship right now.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

"You're seriously trying to tell us this is an accident," Clint remarks.

"Yeah, of course," Natasha insists. "I just didn't want to end up on the cover of the New York Post like last year."

"Oh, yeah, the sexy grave digger," Tony remarks. "Infamously."

She pulls a face. "Well, this year, I thought, what's less sexy than a children's book?"

"Oh dear." Tony sips on his champagne. "You have no idea."

"And Barnes just so happened to do the mad hatter," Sam throws in. "Entirely uncoordinated?"

"That's not even a costume," Natasha states. "He just ruined a suit in the wash and put on a hat. I, on the other hand -"

"You seem to know quite a lot about how that costume was made," Clint interrupts.

"Fuck you, you just made it another take-your-bow-to-work day," Natasha returns. "And really, why would we do matching costumes? That's ridiculous."

"Seems a little too convenient to be true," Sam suggests. "Plus, it's the first time Barnes even went to the Halloween gala. What are the chances you'd just end up with a couple's costume?"

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Natasha argues. "But Alice and the mad hatter don't exactly hook up."

"Yeah, but she's seven," Tony reminds her. "You really don't look seven, trust me."

"Yeah, hate to break it to you but the tabloid thing probably won't work out," Clint says. "That photographer has been trying to get a shot of you for half an hour. Which, I assume, is why you haven't left us yet, we're blocking the view so nicely."

Natasha groans. "Come on! My neckline is way up here."

"Yeah, sorry to tell you," Clint confirms, not sounding sorry at all. "It's the stockings."

Tony grins. "Don't let Freezer Burn hear that. He already has that uptight jealous look."

"I hate all of you," Natasha states. "Clint, next year, we're really doing Frankenstein."

"Oh sure," Tony agrees. "I'm sure you won't look sexy in a lab coat and glasses at all."

"Stitched up clothing," Sam adds.

Natasha sighs. "Remind me why I even come to these things?"

"Almost fourteen million dollars for charity," Tony replies. "And not an insignificant chunk of that is from that very New York Post cover."

Sam pulls a face. "Eww."

"Hey, it's Steve's job to be the posterboy." She waves at him. "Oh, there he is. Hey, Cap!"

Steve, looking kind of lost with his hands in his pockets, comes over with a confused face. "Yeah?"

She grabs his arm and leads him away. "Come on, we're getting a drink."

"Mhm," Steve makes. "And why do you need me for that?"

"Need a human shield against the photographers," she explains. "And who better than the man with a plan? Except for the halloween costume, it seems."

Steve rolls his eyes. "It's a costume, thank you very much. What do you want?"

"Whiskey sour," she replies, settling on the bar chair, quite a way from the cordon and Steve's broad back should be shielding her fine. "Really? What are you supposed to be?"

"Alan Turing," Steve replies. "Just Whiskey for me, thanks."

She snorts. "I'm not sure you understood the assignment."

"At least I had all the clothes already," Steve argues. "I mean, you're never wearing that dress again, are you?"

"You should rebrand to Captain Planet," she suggests. "Thanks."

Steve sighs, taking his Whiskey with a nod. "I hate these things so much. It's rare to see so much hypocrisy in one room."

"You and me both, pal," she mutters into her drink. "What time is it?"

Steve pulls out an honest-to-God pocket watch. "2150. If this thing isn't running behind again."

"Great," Natasha decides, taking a big sip. "This drink and I'm off."

Steve rolls his eyes. "Oh, I see. Should've known."

"What?"

"Buck left not even five minutes ago."

"Oh come on, that's just a coincidence."

"Sure. Just like the costumes."

"I'm serious. We're just both leaving around the earliest time we politely can."

"You can just say it, you know. No need to make up all these excuses."

"I'm not lying. Don't give me that look."

"Which look?"

"The single dad look. Not mad but disappointed."

"Just go already, nobody's buying it anyway."

She snorts, sliding off her stool. "Okay, okay. But I'm really just off to bed."

Steve sighs. "I didn't want details."

"Alone," she specifies. "Can't wait to get under my blanket."

Steve shakes his head. "Sure. Tell your blanket hi."

[opera-ghosts]

Tenor Tom Burke as Mario singing an aria from Act II Puccini's opera 'Tosca'.

How pit lad Thomas Burke, ‘The Lancashire Caruso’, conquered the world but died in obscurity.

By Alan Whittaker

Few people today have heard of the tenor known as the Lancashire Caruso. But at his peak Tom Burke enthralled discerning opera audiences at La Scala in Milan and New York’s Met.

Although he was comparatively unknown in Britain, Dame Nellie Melba, one of the era’s great divas and a woman of formidable authority, heard him sing in Italy and insisted he appear as Rodolfo opposite her in a 1919 production of La Boheme at Covent Garden – a performance that earned him four encores at the end of Act One.

‘At last an English tenor with a voice of pure Italian flavour,’ enthused one critic.

Away from the opera circuit his lyrical voice and vibrant personality endeared him to packed provincial theatres in Britain who delighted in his repertoire of sentimental Irish songs and popular Edwardian drawing-room ballads such as The Minstrel Boy, Killarney, The Mountains of Mourne, Roses of Picardy, Mary, Because, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and You Are My Heart’s Delight. He was billed as The Minstrel Boy.

Tom’s career was as dramatic and turbulent as any opera storyline, and in the space of 20 tumultuous years he enjoyed wealth, fame and the favours of many beautiful women, only to sink into penniless obscurity as a barman in a golf club.

Tom’s early recordings are now rarities; crackling, scratchy remnants of the Celluloid Age of cylinders – as distant as the Jurassic Age from modern recording studios with their sophisticated electronic gadgetry.

But there is no mistaking the quality of the voice first heard at the coal face of a colliery entertaining fellow miners; the feeble yellow glow of helmet lamps for footlights and a huddled audience of intensely respectful coal-streaked faces sipping cold tea from tin cups, a mile underground and four miles from the pit shaft.

It was a voice that years later, when Burke was an international celebrity, intrigued King George V, not the most mentally athletic or artistically inclined monarch in Europe. After seeing Burke perform the King decided he would like to meet the singer. It was a command, not a request.

Tom’s response was not the most courteous or diplomatic. “Tell the old bugger to wait,” he told the hapless royal emissary.

It was a stupid throw-away gesture but typical of Burke who carried an invisible coal wagon of smouldering contempt and loathing for the wealthy toffs from privileged backgrounds who seemed to control the destinies of working class people without ever working or making any contribution to society or caring about the plight of poor families.

It was an attitude carved into his character from bitter childhood memories. Tom was born in 1890 and brought up in the Lancashire pit town of Leigh, the eldest of nine children of an impoverished Irish miner. Like so many of his generation, memories of his childhood, often in relentless poverty, left an indelible scar that refused to heal. Bread and margarine as a meal, no milk for a pot of tea, slum housing in Mather Lane, four children in one bed, scavenging for coal on slag heaps during the pit strikes, the queue of disconsolate decent people at the charity soup kitchen and the sight of his mother Mary patching piles of second hand clothes by candlelight. Even in ‘good times’ meat was a luxury reserved for Sunday lunch.

It was a scandalous scenario all too familiar to hundreds of poor families but light years from Sandringham or Balmoral.

As a small boy, Tom acquired a love of singing from his father, Vince, who would sit him on his knee and sing Irish lullabies. He left school aged 12 and after a year working FULL TIME in a silk mill, he became a coal miner, joined Leigh Brass Band and learned to play the cornet. But singing was his greatest pleasure.

Vince and Mary were loving parents and with two wages now coming in decided to buy a second-hand piano. Mary pawned her precious sewing machine to help pay the weekly instalments.

It was a four-mile walk from the pit head to Mather Lane and by chance a music teacher heard Tom singing as he made his way home with a group of fellow miners. He liked what he heard and was instrumental in sending the 17-year-old to a singing teacher in nearby Atherton, who suggested Tom should enrol at Manchester College of Music.

To raise the tuition fees, Tom sold tripe in pubs, entertained customers by singing, and worked as a waiter. When he was 19 he walked from Leigh to Blackpool to hear the world-renowned tenor Enrico Caruso sing at the Winter Gardens. It was a wearying round hike of some 60 miles but it inspired young Burke to dream of becoming a professional singer.

He auditioned for the Halle Choir but was rejected by the musical director as ‘too ordinary’. The orchestra’s conductor thought differently and arranged for Tom to sing for London impresario Hugo Gorelitz, who was in Manchester searching for talented vocalists. He reckoned the raw young lad from Lancashire showed promise and after an audition Tom was given a contract, told to enrol at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and pay his fees by singing at various venues selected by Gorelitz. His voice coach was Edgardo Levi and he persuaded his friend Caruso, who had popped into the Academy for a chat, to listen to his pupil.

Whether Caruso was genuinely impressed or merely humouring an old friend is not clear but over a warm hand clasp he told the wide-eyed Burke: “One day you will wear my mantle, but first you must go to Italy. There you will find your voice.”

Burke took his advice and headed for Italy with his young wife Marie, who came from a well-to-do show business family. In Milan he learned the language, lost his flat Lancashire dialect, sang in several opera houses and once stepped in as a substitute for Gigli, the world famous tenor.

The Great War of 1914-18 saw Tom back in London and ready for military service but the Army authorities decided he would be far better employed entertaining the troops than slogging it out in the infantry.

Following his appearance opposite Melba at Covent Garden he made 14 records for Columbia and during the next decade became the toast of London society.

He appeared at Covent Garden in 1920, with Beecham conducting, and the composer Giacomo Puccini, who heard him at rehearsal, was so impressed he insisted Tom be given roles in two more of his operas. It seemed as though the world was at his feet for that same year he was offered £400 a performance – the highest offer ever made to a British singer – to appear in America. He and Marie set sail for New York.

Then the wheels came off. His agent had advertised him in the States as ‘Ireland’s greatest ever tenor’ – not the smartest publicity stunt when John McCormack was around, delighting packed theatres, and proving the nostalgic voice of Home to every Irish exile in America. It was the equivalent of attempting to pass off George Formby as the new Elvis.

The critics were unanimous and venomous. “John McCormack can sleep easily,” wrote one. There were concerts in small theatres but the £400 a night flow dried up and Marie, an accomplished singer, returned to England to raise cash. She appeared in the London stage production of Showboat with the incomparable Paul Robeson. But Tom’s philandering had strained the marriage and they were divorced.

Left to his wayward ways, Tom regularly made the headlines with his drinking and womanising. There had to be questions about his judgement. Would any sensible person pick a quarrel over a pretty girl with Jack Dempsey, the undisputed ex-world heavyweight boxing champion who was known as the Manassa Mauler? Or cross a Mafia boss in a dispute involving another woman; an altercation that left Burke in hospital with a gunshot wound and a compelling urge to get out of town?

A surprise offer to return to Britain with an engagement at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall with John Barbirolli conducting was gratefully seized. He couldn’t quit America too soon and left the next day leaving a pile of debt.

Back home he visited Leigh where he was given a rapturous welcome by the adoring mining community that spawned him, but London and the bright lights beckoned. He sang to a packed Albert Hall and toured the country enchanting provincial theatre-goers. It seemed The Minstrel Boy was back in business; his American experience an unfortunate hiccup. He could afford a flat in the West End, a Rolls-Royce and a butler.

But the self-destructive streak was never far from the surface. He quarrelled with Barbirolli, agents and impresarios, and even slated the people who queued at Covent Garden to hear him perform. “They are not music lovers,” he sneered. “They go to opera because it’s the thing to do, rather like appearing at Royal Ascot. Just showing off.”

His philandering lifestyle – revolving around booze, broken promises, and attractive women – made him unreliable and on many occasions he failed to turn up for singing engagements. As a result he was shunned by agents and theatre managers and earned nothing for a year. He was an outcast.

Worse was to follow. He lost £100,000 – an enormous amount at the time – in the Wall Street Crash and in 1932 was bankrupt. By 1934 he was renting a tiny threadbare room; a washed-up, disgruntled has-been. The man who had taken Covent Garden by storm became a bookies’ runner, steward at a golf club, and a waiter.

He tried running a club in Leigh but a police raid and charges of illegal drinking forced its closure and Tom moved to Sutton, Surrey, where in 1969 he died aged 78.

A selection of the recordings he made during the 1930s with film of him entertaining soldiers wounded in the Great War can be found on YouTube including Puccini’s soaring Nessun Dorma, a rigorous test for even the most talented tenor. Tom’s version would have pleased the composer.

He is buried in the cemetery at Wallington, Surrey, and the inscription on his headstone reads: ‘Never have I heard my music so beautifully sung’- Puccini.

The glitzy, costumed world of grand opera may no longer remember the Minstrel Boy but for some time after his death a group of admirers in workaday Leigh would meet occasionally to play his records and, over a few beers, talk with pride about the local lad who became The Minstrel Boy and the Lancashire Caruso.

[jess-moloney1]

There are some people who say to defend Jess «if she wanted to become famous, she could have chosen and dated someone who is more famous than Jamie », but I noticed something that other people have noticed or maybe not, Jamie is the new Johnny Depp version of this generation for 17 years now since he played in Sweeney Todd in 2007, with a very famous director and with very famous actors (Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman).

Jamie is the new version of Johnny Depp of this generation, because he is a chameleon actor, which means that he is able to play and adapt in all role in a film as a wizard, sailor, vampire, hunter of shadows, cow boy and others exactly like Johnny Depp and we must not forget that Jamie is a singer, musician and he was part of a group of singers and musicians « Counterfeit » (who were very popular and famous from 2015 to 2020) and he is a model and has posed for several clothing brands.

I suppose Jess knew by heart Jamie’s professional career well before she date with him, she learned well about everything on him and she realized at one point (I don’t know when exactly), that he was becoming more and more famous every day since 2007 and she started stalking him even if she knew that he was in a relationship with someone else, which means that this woman had no respect for him and his ex partners and for his private life, everything she did to attract Jamie’s attention is due to the fact that she had to know his personal life by heart, what he likes to do outside of work like surfing, his tastes in music (her favorite hard rock bands), tattoos, his style of woman, travel, hiking, beach, spending time with his family and his friends and she managed to get into his life in this way, to make him believe that she likes all his tastes and she certainly made him believe that they are made to be together and that they are soul mates.

Jamie is popular and famous with teenagers, young adults and adults so it was enough and interesting for Jess’s business (and not for the person he really is and not out of love) to choose and date Jamie and he has a lot of followers on IG, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter.

Jamie announced on IG that he was going to be part of the cast of Stranger Things season 4 in October 2020 (before Jess appeared weirdly in his life), this show is world famous and has gained many fans since 2016 and I suppose Jess upon learning that Jamie was recruited by the Duffer brothers she understood that he would become even more famous and she did not waste time attracting Jamie’s attention on IG and weirdly 2 years later she appeared with a fake smile on her face at the preview of Stranger Things season 4 with Jamie in New York (Is it a coincidence ?).

So people who continue to find excuses about the fact that Jess could have found someone more famous than Jamie is not convincing to me to defend her and she is not innocent and benevolent as she seems, knowing that this woman had only one goal: to sit in the foreground and be welcomed on a red carpet (thanks to Jamie, not thanks to herself).

I agree with you. Most likely nothing was “a coincidence” it was a well-planned sick, cruel  game to Jess and Jamie became her victim. The way she’s stalking people is obsessive and morbid. She’s also paranoid and probably has serious mental health problems and other sh*t to deal with. Jamie is an amazing, multi-talented person with a big heart. He deserves so much better than her. I think there’s nothing that he can’t do if he puts enough effort into it. I also see why Jess chose Jamie. 

Like you said, Jamie is famous, popular and handsome. He would have a real chance to become even more famous and popular. When he gets new fans and that way becomes more known, the same thing could happen to Jess. There’s a chance that if Jess had been with someone more famous and not as talented as Jamie, people would have discovered her secrets and that could have destroyed all her future chances. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that.

Before the publication of the grand jury’s indictment, it was possible to believe that Trump’s retention of classified documents was reckless and stupid. The indictment reveals that recklessness and stupidity are the least of his sins. With Trump, it’s always a mistake to equate anarchy with purposelessness or to think that the farce is not deadly serious. Trump’s hoarding of official secrets is both breathtakingly careless and utterly calculated. At the heart of that calculation is a cold resolve to not give up the power that access to highly restricted information had given him.

The most immediately striking parts of the indictment may, in this regard, be something of a distraction. The photographs that show boxes of papers at Mar-a-Lago, piled high on a ballroom stage, in a bathroom, and spilling out onto the floor of a storage room, convey an almost comic sense of chaos. If comedy is generated by incongruity, what could be more incongruous than nuclear plans or details of “potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack” sitting beside a toilet?

It all seems random and haphazard, an impression greatly magnified by the knowledge that Mar-a-Lago, in the eighteen months after Trump took the documents from the White House, was, as the indictment states, the venue for “more than 150 social events, including weddings, movie premieres and fundraisers that together drew tens of thousands of guests.” The New York Times has published photographs, scraped from social media, of people in party dresses or casual summer clothes around the Mar-a-Lago pool. We can see that, behind them, the door that leads to the storeroom, which was packed with boxes of official papers, is wide open. In those boxes, when the FBI opened them in August 2022, were eleven documents marked Top Secret, thirty-six marked Secret, and twenty-eight marked Confidential. It would have been the least thrilling spy thriller ever made. No James Bond high-tech gadgets or George Smiley ingenuity—just turn up in a cocktail dress, slip through an open door, and help yourself to the US military’s contingency plans for invading Iran.

Yet this ludicrous vulnerability to foreign spies is both remarkable and somewhat beside the point. The slapdash storage of classified papers is shocking—but also misleading. It defines the scandal as, in the words of Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s indifference toward the country’s most sensitive secrets.” But this is not a tale of indifference. Trump cared a great deal about the value of the documents. He cared enough, per the indictment, to suggest that his attorney lie to the FBI and a grand jury about what papers he did or did not have. Even Trump does not engage in a criminal conspiracy purely for its own sake. The retention of those boxes mattered to him because he understood the market value of what they contained.

It is important to bear in mind that chaos is Trump’s natural element. It is the medium in which his narcissism thrives. When there is no plan, the only law is his own desire. He alone knows at any given moment what he will do. In this light, the apparent disorderly storage of the boxes at Mar-a-Lago does not signify a lack of concern with what they contained. It is just the norm of Trumpworld. Derangement is his modus operandi.

The indictment makes clear that Trump knew very well that he was breaking the law. He was repeatedly warned by the National Archives and Records Administration that if he did not hand over the missing records, he would be referred to the Department of Justice. He had, of course, made a very big point in his attacks on Hillary Clinton of the need for zero tolerance for any lack of rigor in the handling of classified documents. He fully understood that the laws applied to everyone, including the president. As he declared in September 2016, before that year’s election, “We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified.” As president, in July 2018, he issued a statement saying that “as the head of the executive branch and Commander-in-Chief, I have a unique constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information, including by controlling access to it.”

More specifically, Trump knew that he was taking huge risks when he allegedly instructed his lawyer to lie to the FBI and the grand jury. That lawyer, quoted in the indictment, recalls that when Trump told him to take a folder of documents to his hotel room, he made a silent “plucking motion,” as if to say, “if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Precisely because Trump knew that he was committing a crime, he preferred not to utter the incriminating words. There is nothing thoughtless or accidental in all of this. He clearly believed that the risks were worth taking.

This does not suggest that he was holding these documents merely as souvenirs. It’s quite possible to believe that part of his motivation lay in his fantasy that he was still the real president: retaining the intelligence briefings he received as POTUS would make him still, at some level of self-delusion, potent. The two known occasions, cited in the indictment, when Trump produced some of the documents to outsiders while explicitly referring to them as secret and confidential have this air of showing off—perhaps as much to himself as to those he was trying to impress. It is also quite reasonable to think of him experiencing a tingle of pure pleasure in imagining his own impunity—knowing that he was committing the ultimate transgression and thrilling to the idea that he would get away with it because he had always in his life gotten away with everything.

But these elements of twisted psychology can coexist with a more rational impulse: to keep hold of secrets that could be traded at some point for his personal gain. Trump sees himself above all as a deal-maker: “The nation’s classified information” is a potentially lucrative part of one or many deals.

This intent would be treasonous. Trump may not have actually committed treason, but he was consciously putting himself in a position to be able to do so. For what is not secret is the identity of the foreign countries that would be most interested in acquiring the details of the military plans and vulnerabilities of the US and its allies. The indictment states that the documents also included information that could identify US agents and informants in some of those countries and “the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.” This is worth underlining: Trump went to great lengths to retain for himself, as a private citizen, the power to reveal to any foreign power not just US military secrets but the workings of US intelligence-gathering in those countries. It is impossible to believe that he did this accidentally or without considering that he might at some time use that power in return for some financial or other benefits.

Which makes it all the more astonishing that most of the Republican Party is fine with this. Much of the history of the right in America is bound up with paranoia about the possible existence of traitors at high levels of government. Here is stark evidence of the existence of one at the very highest level of government, and Republicans are rushing to defend him. The Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington famously asked, “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?” and answered, “For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” If the hoarding of state secrets as valuable currency cannot be called treason, the concept has gone the way of honor, truthfulness, and respect for law. It has ceased to exist for the Republican Party.

[The New York Review]

Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review, a columnist for The Irish Times, and the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, was published in the US last year. (June 2023)

[enterprisewired]

U.S. Businesses Brace for Potential Trump Tariffs, Opt for Diverse Strategies Amid Uncertainty

Source: intellinews.com

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With President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs looming, U.S. businesses are strategizing ways to protect their operations from the potential economic ripple effects. Trump’s proposal includes a 10% tariff on all imports and a substantial 60% tariff on goods made in China, a significant trading partner for the U.S. There is also a suggested 25% levy on imports from Mexico. If enacted, these measures could elevate consumer prices and provoke retaliatory tariffs from affected countries, leading to a cascade of economic consequences. Economists warn that Trump’s tariff plan, which may be his most impactful economic policy, could drive inflation, disrupt U.S.-China trade, and revert import duty rates to levels not seen since the 1930s.

Businesses Respond by Front-Loading Inventories

Many U.S. businesses are taking proactive steps to mitigate risks. For example, M.A.D. Furniture Design, based in Hong Kong, is accelerating shipments of its Chinese-manufactured furniture to a warehouse in Minneapolis, anticipating a smoother transition if the tariffs come into effect. Similarly, Joe & Bella, an online clothing retailer based in Chicago, has significantly increased orders for popular Chinese-made items, such as shirts and pants, to ensure supplies last through the upcoming Chinese New Year when factory operations pause for several weeks. “We wanted our merchandise delivered before Chinese New Year to avoid potential delays and tariff impacts,” said co-founder Jimmy Zollo.

Front-loading, or preemptively increasing inventory, has been a common strategy among importers to avoid trump’s tariff costs. However, with the breadth of products that could be affected by Trump’s proposed tariffs, experts speculate that U.S. ports might become congested if many companies employ similar tactics. This strategy requires businesses to invest heavily in storage and logistics, a costly endeavor that some, particularly small businesses, may not be able to afford.

Smaller Businesses Weigh Options Amidst Uncertainty

While larger companies with sufficient resources might lean toward front-loading, some small business owners are adopting a cautious approach, prioritizing cash flow over large, preemptive stockpiling. Hilla Hascalovici, CEO of New York-based Periodally, a company that sells Chinese-made heating patches for menstrual relief, has decided against early orders, citing the high costs of storage and expedited shipping as deterrents. Similarly, Max Lemper-Tabatsky of Denver-based Oaktree Memorials, which imports cremation urns from Asia and Europe, has chosen a “wait-and-see” approach rather than committing significant capital based on potential trump’s tariffs that may not materialize.

Freight companies, too, are preparing for the potential changes. Alan Baer, president of OL USA, a freight handling company, anticipates a slowdown in shipments if the tariffs are enacted, potentially leading to reduced demand for his firm’s services. “Tariffs in shipping are challenging no matter the scenario,” Baer remarked, highlighting the potential for workforce reductions if tariffs lead to decreased import volumes.

In light of Trump’s tariff policies during his presidency from 2017 to 2021, many in the business community remain skeptical but cautious, acknowledging that campaign promises do not always result in implemented policies. However, with the possibility of substantial tariffs, U.S. businesses are adopting a mix of preemptive and conservative strategies to navigate the uncertainty ahead.

[westeroswisdom]

Designer Michele Clapton was interviewed on the occasion of the London and New York auctions of Game of Thrones costumes and artifacts.

Clapton, a winner of multiple Emmy Awards for Outstanding Costumes for a Series, has long been hailed, and rightly so, as a visionary for her work on Game of Thrones. She has awards and acclaim to last a lifetime just for this series, not to mention her work on The Crown and an impressive roster of films. She spent a decade on Game of Thrones, turning a Tower of Babel’s worth of influences – ancient Greece and Rome, Japan, Iran, Native American, and on and on – into a singular, striking body of work.

Interviewer Robert Wilonsky brought up the effect of the clothes on the actors.

Robert Wilonsky: We haven’t even discussed where the actors come into this equation – the people who have to carry these clothes, who use them as inspiration as much as the words. Alan Alda once told me he didn’t become Hawkeye on M*A*S*H until he stepped in those combat boots and slipped on those dog tags – all of which belonged to actual soldiers. “It’s a mysterious thing,” he said, “but it makes you feel more at home in the character.” Michele Clapton: It’s important to listen to their interpretations of the characters. Sometimes they come with a little nugget of insight, and you develop together. Aidan Gillen, who played Littlefinger, brought such a sense of precision to the tiniest details, which is great because his costume is plain, but there was something about this neck clasp that became a key to this character, who was so ambitious. Later we came up with having this beautifully printed image in this plain coat, not that you really saw it – you might get a flash – but a lot of his costume was so internalized. It becomes a part of that character: He knows something you don’t. Pedro Pascal brought such a life to his character and worked closely on his things so that they should move. But over time, all of these actors knew their characters and started to inhabit them, and they either trusted me to move forward or came with lots of thoughts about where they should go. And then there was Diana Rigg, who said, “Darling, I should be wearing a wimple because I don’t want to spend hours in hair.” That’s why she’s the only one in a wimple. And it was gigantic. Robert Wilonsky: I’d always heard that Kit Harington didn’t love the weight of his wardrobe. But the truth is, if the costumes are too light, the characters don’t move the way they should onscreen. Michele Clapton: If a costume is weightless, that changes the gait, the movement, and I don’t believe it anymore. Kit’s coat did get heavier because of the weight of his responsibilities. I wanted to move him from this thin cape of the young boy to the weight of what happens when he goes north, into the cold. There were also actors who said they wanted to wear metal armor because it felt more real to them. Others did not feel the same. [Laughs]

There's much more via the link at the top of the post.

[orpheusdrinkinga40inadeathbasket]

On the cover of the Stooges' 1970 album Fun House, Iggy Pop melts into a torrent of orange. His arms are thrust up behind him. He wears shiny black opera gloves to the elbow. His hair is long for a boy, and it looks like he hasn't washed it in weeks—it glints with built-up grease. He looks down at himself, his eyes closed and peaceful but his lip twisted up into a sneer. It's a submissive pose: his arms aren't tied but they're positioned like they could be, like he's bound on the floor ready for a beating. The gloves make him look feminine but also primed for deviant, scatological sex. Maybe he just doesn't want to get his hands dirty. … As a front man, [Iggy] was less willing to project power and confidence than he was to subject himself to humiliation. Much of the Stooges' shock value came from Iggy's abject stage presence. In photos from the late '60s and early 70s, he wears dog collars and crawls on all fours, staring wide-eyed at the camera as if begging the photographer to debase him. He's almost always shirtless, and he moves as if his partial nudity were just as shocking as a woman's would be. Titless, he struts like he's got his tits out for all to see. Years before David Bowie made a spectacle out of face paint, spandex, and hair dye, Iggy pranced onstage in what he's called "a maternity dress" (Ron described it as "an old white nightshirt from the 1800s that went all the way down to his ankles"). He shaved his eyebrows, painted his face white, and wove aluminum foil into his hair. By the time the Stooges booked their first New York show Iggy had pared down the look to something more convincingly androgynous. "This guy with blond bangs—who looked like Brian Jones—came out onstage and at first I thought he was a chick," said Alan Vega of the New York band Suicide, another proto-punk outfit with an ear for the macabre. This anecdote, in which Iggy is simultaneously mistaken for a Rolling Stone and a woman, epitomizes the singer's complex and chimerical presence.  Iggy voraciously interpolated femininity into his outlandish stage costumes. In a series of photos from 1973, he's wearing one-legged sequined tights and knee-high leather boots; in an image shot by queer photographer Leee Black Childers the same year, he pairs an embroidered peasant blouse with tight jeans and what looks like toenail polish, though it could just as easily be blood pooled beneath the nail. Vega recalled seeing him perform in "dungarees with holes, with his red bikini underwear with his balls hanging out." In many shots, Iggy's contorted to the point of defying physics, bent over backwards like he's about to snap in half. He looks possessed. His performance tested the limits of physicality. He would binge on hard drugs and vomit onstage, first discreetly behind an amplifier, later onto the front row of the crowd. He'd fall off the stage and keep singing while bleeding. … The makeup and clothing Iggy wore onstage had little to do with glamour. It accentuated his abjection, intensifying the band's violently masculine provocations. It wasn't that Iggy wanted to embody femininity's poses, mannerisms, and affectations. He exploited femininity's markers to call attention to the brittleness of American manhood, and to repel the eye that tried to gender him. It worked for his bandmates in high school, and it worked for him onstage.

Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

The collective cultural memory of the '60s suggests the decade was a safe haven for male femininity. Long hair on both genders abounds in retellings of the era—the hippie is a soft and shaggy archetype. But most of the imagery now associated with the '60s didn't arrive until the end of the decade. The United States was slow to metabolize shifting gender norms; years after the Beatles were televised into American homes, men could still catch flak for wearing their hair past their collars. "People would chase you for ten blocks, screaming, 'Beatle!' They were out of their fucking minds—that was the reality of the sixties," said artist Ronnie Cutrone. "Nobody had long hair—you were a fucking freak, you were a fruit, you were not like the rest of the world." Trans punk singer Jayne County similarly remembered getting flak in high school for growing her hair out like the Beatles. "I walked all the way [to the record store] and back and every once in a while somebody would yell out their car, 'Sissy!' or they'd yell, 'Look, it's Ringo!' because I had a little Beatles haircut and everything," she said. "Way back in the dark ages, when I was in high school, people still didn't know what gay or queer was or anything like that." That the word "Beatle" could ever have been used as a homophobic slur—that it fit right next to "sissy" in the vocabulary of bigots—seems outrageous by contemporary standards. In retrospect, the Beatles' gender transgressions look as tame as their innocent melodicism. But the Stooges grew up in an environment that punished deviations from normative masculinity, and being bored numb by their surroundings, they sought as much punishment as possible.

Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

[edutainer2022]

I am on a long, long commute from Paris back to Ukraine, so I may be able to wrap up some WIPs, if the fancy strikes.

It's a "Tracy fever" little fic, but nothing too angsty, just pure fluff and an attempt at levity.

PUPPY BASKET

A puppy basket. Jeff didn't recall who exactly coined the term - his wife or himself. Or maybe his mother. The point was - with three kids so close in age (and then two more down the line) the flues and colds, and stomach bugs tore through the bunch like a wildfire. There was not enough manpower in the household to keep up with sick boys quarantined in different rooms. So it was just easier and more expedient to stash the sniveling and coughing, and sniffling, and generally miserable puppy ball in the master bedroom. Lucy and himself took shifts sitting vigil, giving meds and fluids, kissing burning up brows. If he were planetside, of course. Later, when the boys' mother was gone, it would be, likely, Scott's room and the elder boys taking up watch hours, while he was busy with grief and work. The one time he came home from New York to find all five boys succumbed to a flu, pretty much delirious in his room, little Alan hoarse from crying - even Scott too weak from fever to call Grandma (and too anxious to call 911 lest child services got a wiff) was a memory he didn't dare revisit often. He could distantly recall that a feverish Scott would be restless, Virgil would be cuddly, John would be clingy. Gordon would peel off any scrap of clothes on him. Someone would invariably end up upside down with feet propped on the pillow.

That morning got him investigating in Scott's room first thing. Gordon and Alan drew a short straw and were off for a supply run early on (a bright and whistling Gordon and a grumpy half-asleep Alan). Virgil was not expected down this side of 10 am, John was just back from orbit the night before. But Scott never made it to see the Tinies (did they even call the boys that anymore? Alan was starting college in a month!) off, have his run and a morning coffee-cum-strategy session with Dad - something that had become a new, cherished routine for them. The parent alarm in him, that never lay quite dormant even through the endless night of the Oort Cloud, was now blaring full force.

Fair enough, Jeff found his eldest room in an uncharacteristic disarray - a blanket kicked off all the way from the foot of the bed down to the floor, last day clothes scattered on the carpeting - something he came to recognize more as the youngest style, not Scott, who had tried to emulate Dad's military crisp order since he was five and learned to make his own bed. Scott was soon found by his father's increasingly concerned gaze in the middle of the bed, tangled sheets and disheveled curls a testament to a night of tossing and turning, breathing shallow and raspy. Jeff's immediate guess was a nightmare - heaven knows he was no stranger to warding off those, plaguing his boy's naturally light sleep. But a fine sheen of sweat, covering Scott's face and neck, belied a different answer altogether. Jeff wasn't surprised, when the brow he reached for to smooth away the soaked fringe, was burning. Scott wasn't asleep per se - eyes squeezed shut against a headache - but he definitely wasn't alert and present either. Jeff wasn't surprised, but he was getting increasingly panicked. His own mother gave him a semi-clean bill of health and was currently in Kansas, helping a friend out. The time difference made the call tricky. Not impossible, of course, there's no inconvenience Grandma wouldn't go through for him or his boys, for which Jeff was eternally greatful, but all the more weary to disturb his getting increasingly fragile Ma more, than necessary. Kayo was visiting with her own father, so that was not an option as well. The problem was, with Grandma away, there was no medic on the island. Unless, of course... Jeff remembered Virgil determined and precise with a medscanner, and later - all business and in-trade jibberish with the medical staff at the rehab center he had to spend first months back on Earth at. Despite budding worry, as Scott keened quietly and shifted under his father's soothing touch, Jeff smiled fondly. Virgil was, arguably, the closest to his Grandpa in looks and demeanor, but looks like he followed his Grandma's professional leanings. He should try and wake Virgil up. Scott was definitely under the weather.

As if on cue, the door opened and a gigantic burrito walked in. Jeff started. The burrito was, upon a closer inspection, a human, barefoot, wrapped up in a blanket head to toe. The walking burrito was also eliciting grunts and a lung-splitting cough. Ouch. The intruder ignored Jeff completely, sidestepped the bundle of clothes on the floor, and collapsed on the bed, next to Scott, wrapping the latter immediately in a cocoon of limbs and blanket, like a cuddle pillow. Scott is restless, Virgil is cuddly... Jeff was beginning to get a bad, bad feeling about it. A quick dive into the fluffy depths of fabric and hair confirmed his fear - Virgil had a fever too. That left...

"John!" - he had to spring from the edge of the bed with speed and agility that would make his physiotherapist proud in time to catch a swaying ginger son from planting face first on the floor. John appeared soundlessly, a ghostly vision, almost translucent where he would normally be pale. A sneeze almost send them both toppling again, but Jeff managed to maintain balance and helped John walk the short distance to the other side of the bed. There was no question how the ginger was going to spend his spiking fever - the moment he climbed onto the mattress, John attached himself to Scott side like a limpet, the way Jeff had only seen Alan do so far. When sick, Scott was restless, Virgil was cuddly, and John was clingy. Well, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Puppy basket is go!

Jeff was halfway through the mental checklist of things he would need to make the logistics of his three eldest sons down for the count work (fluids, medscanner and monitors to keep track of the fevers, ask Brains if the medkits were in the same spots now, call Ma as soon as the time difference would permit, coax, trick and blackmail the boys into cold meds and cough syrup, call Gordon and Alan to stay away for the day and to go fetch Grandma from the farm, make sure Brains was alright and quarantined in his lab and rooms, check himself up, because Jeff needed to be on top of his game for the sick boys - the day and the following night could be tough), when a loud shriek pierced the silence of the room. Scott was frowning and trying the disentangle himself from Virgil's death grip. Jeff reached for his agitated son's shoulder and rubbed a thumb over - in the haze of the fever Scott could get disoriented and start fighting any restraint. Jeff knew the boy would never forgive himself, if he hurt Virgil, even unintentionally. But Scott was not to be easily placated. His face contorted with effort and, likely, a worsened sinus pain, to Jeff's astonishment, the young man grabbed a barely protesting John, lifted him bodily over his own frame, like he was a... well... puppy, and stuffed him into Virgil's arms, that immediately closed the hug around a different brother, as Scott rolled to the side in a sleek stealth maneuver. He would have rolled all the way over the edge of the bed, had Dad's arms not stoped him. That must have computed to the cold addled brain as "safe", since Scott stopped struggling almost immediately and let out a snuffle in a voice Jeff hadn't heard since when the kids' mother was alive. "M'hot", Scott complained without opening his eyes. Jeff reckoned he should probably be more concerned about photosensitivity and the fact any of the boys was yet to notice or acknowledge him. Jeff made an attempt to hoist Scott up against the headrest, but thought better of it as another painful keen escaped. Instead, he sort of rolled the son back to the center of the bed, closer to the pile of other brothers. Scott seemed game for that and shifted to snuggle and spoon against John's back. That elicited a hum and a sneeze from the ginger. Virgil didn't stir. Puppy basket indeed.

Satisfied that Scott was settled for the moment and the other boys seemed to have fallen asleep, Jeff felt confident enough to go looking for the fever vigil supplies and an extra coffee for himself. But he didn't leave before leaning to reach the assorted temples and forheads for the mandatory kiss better. So sue him, he missed a lot longer than eight years of being their Dad first.

A detour to the infirmary, a chat with Brains, a lot more strained one with Ma and an anxious one with the Tinies later - Jeff was on his way back to Scott's rooms. Gordon and Alan, of course, offered to come back and help with their ailing brothers immediately. But Jeff shuddered at the idea of having all five of the boys sick at once. He was good, but the tenure in space was taking its toll. The youngest boys would be well supervised under Grandma's watchful eye, till it was safe (or absolutely necessary- something Jeff tried not to dwell on) to return to the island.

The sight that greeted him upon return to the bedroom tugged the corners of his lips up despite himself. Seeing his sons sick or hurting in any way brought him no joy, but the picture was just too precious and hilarious at the same time. John has shifted upside down, somehow, so Virgil was now cuddling his brother's feet. John was also curled in an upside down ball, head resting on Scott's stomach. Scott, in an attempt to cool off, cast his long, long limbs every which way, including over Virgil's lap and head, in a comical replication of the Vitruvian Man. As Jeff stepped in, though, the eldest shifted again, to curl himself around John protectively and to draw Virgil into a one-sided hug. Jeff needed to go ahead with the med scanners and to get the boys awake long enough to make sure they got a drink of electrolytes and some saltines, but first he paused to reach for his comm watch and snap a picture of the puppy basket. He would cherish the moment while it lasted. And he could always use it as blackmail backup against these three running themselves to the ground - under the threat of the photo being leaked to the Tinies.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 11.21 (before 1960)

164 BCE – Judas Maccabeus, son of Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, rededicates the Temple in Jerusalem, an event that is commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah. (25 Kislev 3597 in the Hebrew calendar.) 235 – Pope Anterus succeeds Pontian as the nineteenth pope. 1386 – Timur of Samarkand captures and sacks the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, taking King Bagrat V of Georgia captive. 1620 – Plymouth Colony settlers sign the Mayflower Compact (November 11, O.S.) 1676 – The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer presents the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light. 1783 – In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes make the first untethered hot air balloon flight. 1789 – North Carolina ratifies the United States Constitution and is admitted as the 12th U.S. state. 1851 – Mutineers take control of the Chilean penal colony of Punta Arenas in the Strait of Magellan. 1861 – American Civil War: Confederate President Jefferson Davis appoints Judah Benjamin Secretary of War. 1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound. 1894 – Port Arthur, China, falls to the Japanese, a decisive victory of the First Sino-Japanese War; Japanese troops are accused of massacring the remaining inhabitants. 1900 – Claude Monet's paintings shown at Gallery Durand-Ruel in Paris. 1902 – The Philadelphia Football Athletics defeat the Kanaweola Athletic Club of Elmira, New York, 39–0, in the first-ever professional American football night game. 1905 – Albert Einstein's paper that leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula, E = mc², is published in the journal Annalen der Physik. 1910 – Sailors on board Brazil's warships including the Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Bahia, violently rebel in what is now known as the Revolta da Chibata (Revolt of the Lash). 1916 – Mines from SM U-73 sink HMHS Britannic, the largest ship lost in the First World War. 1918 – The Flag of Estonia, previously used by pro-independence activists, is formally adopted as the national flag of the Republic of Estonia. 1918 – The Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 is passed, allowing women to stand for Parliament in the UK. 1918 – A pogrom takes place in Lwów (now Lviv); over three days, at least 50 Jews and 270 Ukrainian Christians are killed by Poles. 1920 – Irish War of Independence: On "Bloody Sunday" in Dublin, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassinated a group of British Intelligence agents, and British forces killed 14 civilians at a Gaelic football match at Croke Park. 1922 – Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia takes the oath of office, becoming the first female United States Senator. 1927 – Columbine Mine massacre: Striking coal miners are allegedly attacked with machine guns by a detachment of state police dressed in civilian clothes. 1942 – The completion of the Alaska Highway (also known as the Alcan Highway) is celebrated (however, the highway is not usable by standard road vehicles until 1943). 1944 – World War II: American submarine USS Sealion sinks the Japanese battleship Kongō and Japanese destroyer Urakaze in the Formosa Strait. 1945 – The United Auto Workers strike 92 General Motors plants in 50 cities to back up worker demands for a 30-percent raise. 1950 – Two Canadian National Railway trains collide in northeastern British Columbia in the Canoe River train crash; the death toll is 21, with 17 of them Canadian troops bound for Korea. 1953 – The Natural History Museum, London announces that the "Piltdown Man" skull, initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found, is a hoax. 1959 – American disc jockey Alan Freed, who had popularized the term "rock and roll" and music of that style, is fired from WABC radio over allegations he had participated in the payola scandal.

[coevolutionquarterly]

When I last worked at a bookstore, I'm pretty sure this was on the list of books that were required to be kept inside the "consistently shoplifted" locked glass case.

[ID: a full-page ad for Abbie Hoffman's book Steal this book, listed as $2 on the photo of the cover. The text reads as follows:

"over 30 publishers rejected this book so...

STEAL THIS BOOK in Boston, Mass. at: Book Mart, 659 Washington St. (Second aisle on the left is the best bet.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in Atlanta, Ga. at: The Bookworm, 92 Forsyth St., NW. (Try during the noon-hour rush.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in Miami, Fla. at: Book fair, N.E. 20th Ave. and 163rd St., North Miami Beach. (Use washroom to hide books in clothing.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in Philadelphia, Pa. at: Bradd Alan Book Store, Cheltenham Shopping Center, Cheltenham. (Very busy Sunday and most evenings.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in Milwaukee, Wisc. at: Rhubarb Book Store, 1618 Wells. (Lots of blind spots.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in New York, N.Y. at: Eighth Street Book Shop, 17 West Eighth St. (Use booster box on tables of books.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in Washington D.C. at: Washington Circle Community Book Shop, 2147 K St. NW. (Work out of the back of the store.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in Chicago, Ill. at: Store Front, 2578 North Lincoln. (Camera is a dummy; ignore it.)

STEAL THIS BOOK in Los Angeles, Calif. at: Pickwick Book Shop, 6743 Hollywood Blvd. (They never check shopping bags.)

A Handbook for Survival and Warfare. Over 300 pages packed with the latest dope on:

HITCH HIKING FIRST AID STREET FIGHTING LIVING UNDERGROUND DOPE DEALING SHOPLIFTING DEMONSTRATIONS MONKEY WARFARE COMMUNICATIONS COMMUNES FOOD CONSPIRACIES LIVING FREE COUNTERFEITING LEGAL ADVICE

Over 100 photos, illustrations, cartoons, and misspellings. Special sections on N.Y., S.F., Chi., L.A.

PIRATE EDITIONS, 640 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012 Distributed by Grove. (If your bookstore refuses to carry this book, write us.)

Royalties on this book go to WPAX - PO Box 410, Cooper Station, New York, N.Y. 10003. - - Radio Broadcasting to G.I's in South East Asia - - We need your help too!"

There is a photo of Abbie Hoffman labeled "Illustration of Proper Technique" showing him furtively sneaking a book inside his shirtfront.]

[fayewonglibrary]

Faye Wong: 'Words often fail me when I talk' (1995)

The singer, who performs here tonight, says she expresses herself better through music.

The 26-year-old Hong Kong based star has become the fastest rising pop phenomenon in the Chinese music industry.

Tonight and tomorrow, Singaporeans will be able to catch Faye Wong's first concerts here at the Singapore Indoor Stadium.

With brisk sales for tickets to Wong's two-day concert being reported by Jasper Production, it is ironic that the Beijing-born singer, who has won over most of the region and all of Hong Kong with her silky voice and seamless, emotive singing, once claimed she did not have the confidence of peers like Anita Mui and Sally Yeh to stage a concert of her own.

And yet, her debut in Singapore follows a series of sell-out concerts in Hong Kong, which the organizer had to extend from the planned 10 to 15, and later to 18.

Among the almost 200,000 people who caught her show in the British territory, were peers such as singers Alan Tam, Andy Lau, Kenny Bee, Lau Sung Yan, and other star celebrities.

But Faye Wong who?

For those not yet familiar with the singer whom industry pundits are touting as the next Sally Yeh, the 26-year-old Hong Kong-based star has become the fastest rising pop phenomenon in the Chinese music industry. All in a mere five years.

Today, she is a household name in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Malaysia and Singapore. Mention "Faye" and images of a doll-like face framed by outrageous wigs come to mind.

Though born and bred in Beijing, Wong's secret is that unlike most of her peers, she is not your typical Chinese pop singer. She has manged to gather a large following among the young, old and even the English-educated Chinese.

Part of her uniqueness is that while Wong admits to drawing inspiration from Western singers such as The Cranberries, Sinead O'Connor, Whitney Houston, and Cocteau Twins, the more popular she gets, the more individualistic and alternative the singer becomes.

Her unconventional dressing and nonchalant attitude often draw extreme reactions from fans - you either love it or hate it.

Besides wigs, she has appeared in see-through outfits on variety shows and clothes worn inside out à la Madonna.

At the 93.3 FM Hit Awards presentation at the Singapore Indoor Stadium last September, she arrived in a pair of white flip-flops.

On a phone interview with Life! from Hong Kong, where Wong was recording, her public relations officer quoted the star as saying: "I do not really give much thought to how I mix and match my clothes. I dress according to my moods. It is not a publicity ploy on my part."

Yet her avant-garde image has certainly spawned copy cats from stars like Sammi Cheng to Shirley Kwan, to even Tony Leung Chiu Wai.

This is a far cry from when she was just an unknown singer dressed in tacky shirts and jackets, until she took a one-year hiatus in New York three years ago, and came back a totally different woman.

Confidence, character, coolness - that just about sums up Faye Wong, especially the latter quality which is a sore point with the Chinese press. Her answers to questions are often short and curt.

Most of the time, Wong would have you believe that she would rather open her mouth to sing than to talk.

But when asked about her cold and arrogant attitude, the singer says that she freezes up every time when faced with unfamiliar people and places.

"I'm better at communicating through my songs than in public speaking," she once told a Hong Kong magazine. "Words often fail me when I talk."

But no matter, she speaks her own mind and her care-less attitude is exactly what keeps her followers intrigued, and radio stations giving her recent hits, such as 'I Am Willing' and 'Sky' frequent airplay.

These songs will be heard once again tonight and tomorrow live in a show that Wong has promised over the phone will be the same format as her Hong Kong shows.

Translated, this means you can expect great singing, but do not expect her to make many costume changes or small talk.

Even her boyfriend, China rocker Dou Wei, who guest stars in the concerts, will provide just music accompaniment. In Hong Kong, he played the flute.

As the star speaks her mind: "It is not a wild carnival, but a music show."

——————————————————���———

SOURCE: THE STRAITS TIMES

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