#BDN my fellow Southerner~

[feekins]

thoughts and things that stuck out to me while re-reading ch 5-6 of Trigun vol 1

(NOTE: from this point forward, I'm reading the [physical] Dark Horse and [online] Overhaul translations side-by-side)

oh, Millie =u= I adore how she's both absent-minded and very perceptive/insightful!

speaking of which...

🤔

ahhhhh yes, my top fav minor baddie in Trigun, Brilliant Dynamites Neon - so over-the-top, so COOL

and I LOVE that I'm reading his first appearance on my birthday =u=

btw, the hell is this? I always assumed it was some sort of bomb, but what do y'all think?

Southern-coded Southern-coded

SouthERN-CODED SOUTHERN-CODED *vibrates in most of life spent in the American south*

and here's an interesting translation discrepancy (Dark Horse on the left, Overhaul on the right) - bc of it, I was always like "oh yeah, bc BDN's gonna shoot him in the teeth!"

"bite the dust" makes a hell of a lot more sense;;;;;;;;

AND FINALLY...

pinky out ✨️

[skateofministry]

Skateboarding was the best addition to the Tokyo Olympics

The BDN Opinion area runs individually and does not set newsroom policies or add to reporting or modifying short articles in other places in the paper or on bangordailynews.com.

Caroline Petrow-Cohen is an Opinion intern at the Los Angeles Times.

Skateboarding made its Olympic launching at the Tokyo Games this year, bringing a revitalizing modification of speed to the world’s most significant competitors. Unlike most other Olympic occasions, the culture of skateboarding is based not in winning however in delight and uniqueness.

Since its beginning, skateboarding has actually defied conformity. Born in California in the 1950s, skateboarding ended up being associated with the counterculture of the ’60s and worked as a safe house for society’s castaways. Considered more of a way of life than a sport, skateboarding used an escape from the mainstream and a platform for individuals to be themselves.

Skateboarding’s international appeal released it onto the Olympic phase, however its counterculture roots live and well. Other Olympic occasions exist within a plainly developed structure, however skateboarding has actually been anti-establishment from the start.

“Skateboarding presents so many more options than you typically have in sports,” stated Neftalie Williams, a going to fellow at Yale University and postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California, who studies the interaction of variety, identity and skate culture. “You have an entire sporting culture that’s marginalized, that has placed less emphasis on competition and focused more on expression, and has learned that that’s the vocabulary.”

In in this manner, skateboarding is almost difficult to specify. But ask a skater at any level what skating indicates to them, and you’ll get a comparable response: What attracted them to the sport was flexibility, neighborhood and imagination, not competitors or being the very best.

“There’s no other sport in the world, no other art in the world, no other culture in the world that transcends boundaries in the way that skateboarding does,” stated sponsored Los Angeles skater Ethan Singleton, who’s dealt with research study with Williams at the University of Southern California.

Skateboarding doesn’t rather suit any standard sports box, much less the ultra competitive and extremely refined spirit of the Olympic Games. But its existence in Tokyo brought a playfulness and uniqueness to the sport world’s most significant phase.

“I was having an absolute blast,” American bronze medalist Jagger Eaton stated about completing in the street occasion, where he nodded his head to music and chuckled with his fellow rivals at the top of the course. All 20 skateboarders completing there got along with one another, he stated.

“Growing up, skateboarding was my freedom and my creative outlet,” Eaton stated. “Skateboarding is an art form, and every one of us does it differently. Name another sport like that in the Olympic Games.”

Every skateboarder has their own distinct design, exposed in the method they approach barriers, pop techniques or get their board midair. There are no guidelines in skateboarding, no requirements, no stiff structure — even at the Olympics. According to Mimi Knoop, expert skateboarder and head coach for the U.S. Olympic skateboard group, judges score the professional athletes based upon technique development, trouble level and creativity.

“We don’t have points for certain tricks because we wanted to stay away from that to keep it a little more creative,” Knoop stated. “It comes down to little subtleties that aren’t really written down or necessarily defined in our sport. It makes things a little subjective, but that’s just how we do it.”

In the middle of tense competitors and psychological health battles, skateboarding resembled a beacon of light as I viewed the Olympic Games.

“Skateboarding is where I feel I can express myself and let my own creativity play out,” American Olympian Alana Smith stated. “At the Olympics, I definitely feel like it freshens up the environment and shows that it doesn’t have to be such a stressful time.”

While skateboarding enables a professional athlete’s uniqueness to shine through, the neighborhood is cohesive also. “I feel like we’ve always been looked at as the outcasts,” Smith stated, describing the social preconception pinned on skateboarders, “and we’ve all become a really big family.”

If you viewed the Olympics, the method the skateboarders connected with each other was frequently in plain contrast to other professional athletes. Competitors at some occasions, like gymnastics or swimming, generally didn’t roaming far from their colleagues. But skateboarders were delighting in each other’s business and lifting each other up despite nation association.

“From my point of view, we’re having a lot more fun than everyone else,” Knoop stated. “There’s an unspoken understanding between skaters and a bond that’s there.”

Not everybody concurs that skateboarding belongs in the Olympics. Some state the Games represent a commercialization that wanders off too far from skateboarding’s counterculture roots. But skateboarding never ever actually required the platform of the Olympics in the very first location.

Sports representative Yulin Olliver, who represents Olympians like Mariah Duran and Bryce Wettstein, stated that skateboarding as a sport and way of life is naturally self-dependent. There’s no requirement for coaches, groups or arranged competitors. Those things exist in skateboarding, obviously, however not out of need. As long as there are people who skateboard and discover delight in doing so, the culture of skateboarding will stay strong.

“It’s almost like the Olympics needed skateboarding,” Olliver stated, “not the other way around.”

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[jjqrs]

The Anti-Muslim Gun Range Owner Has a Bright Political Future

.As bombogenesis continues to descend on us by the kilogram, we begin here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). Last year, we had a referendum about lifting the cap on the number of charter schools here. There was a tsunami of outside dark money thrown behind the proposal from the education “reform” industry from all points of the compass. Despite that, the measure failed, miserably. Now there’s a major push to find out how the campaign was funded, and the results are not pretty, and one of its primary backers just got whacked with the biggest campaign-finance fine in the state’s history. From WBUR:

A New York-based group that backed last year's charter school ballot question has paid more than $425,000 to Massachusetts as part of a campaign finance settlement announced Monday. The civil forfeiture by Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy (FESA) is the largest in the 44-year history of the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. Investigators say the group raised more than $15 million from individuals and then contributed it to the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee in a manner intended to disguise the true source of the money. The money represented 70 percent of the $21.7 million reported received by the charter school committee.

The administration of Governor Charlie Baker is tangled up in this is several uncomfortable ways.

The contributors included Board of Elementary and Secondary Education Chair Paul Sagan, who gave nearly a half-million dollars. Sagan previously has acknowledged a $100,000 donation to a separate pro-charter school ballot question group. Last year, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker dismissed critics of Sagan's $100,000 donation, calling the criticism "a nothing-burger." Baker, a longtime supporter of charter schools, said last year that Sagan sought and won the approval of the state Ethics Commission before making the donation. Baker on Monday again defended Sagan and a second administration official -- Secretary of Technology Services and Security Mark Nunnelly, who gave $275,000 to FESA -- saying they "complied with all state laws with respect to this." Asked if he had previously been aware of Sagan's nearly $500,000 contribution, Baker said: "I don't know off the top of my head."

This is not a good answer. Anyway, the next time someone pitches you the whole it’s-for-the-kids, underdog, Won’t Back Down load of bollocks about the power of teachers' unions, point to this story and laugh at them.

We get out from under bombogenesis and escape to Nebraska, where a state senator is desperately concerned that the mellows of conservative students at the state university are being unnecessarily harshed. From the Nebraska Radio Network:

Erdman is one of three state senators who had complained the university failed to deal quickly with a complaint from a student who said she was harassed while recruiting for a conservative organization. University of Nebraska – Lincoln sophomore Kaitlyn Mullen of Highlands Ranch, Colorado says some faculty derided her when she set up a table on campus outside the Nebraska Union to recruit for Turning Point USA, a conservative organization. Mullen complained graduate assistant Courtney Lawton called her a neo-fascist. University of Nebraska President Hank Bounds has stated Lawton will not be returning after her contract expires at the end of the year. Two personnel from the UNL communications department resigned in wake of the controversy.

Wait a minute. Conservative snowflake gets called a name by a grad assistant who subsequently lost her gig behind it, and this clown still isn’t satisfied? (Apparently, there was chanting, and Lawton flipped off the snowflake, too. Still…) The delicate constitutions of our rising conservative children is a topic worthy of further study.

Speaking of which, let’s skip on over to Arkansas, where The Kansas City Star has found a way to entertain us with the tale of Jan Morgan, who achieved a small measure of fame that she’s trying to cash in for a larger measure by running for governor.

Morgan declared her gun range was a “Muslim Free Zone” in 2014 on social media and her website, insisting it was for her safety. “I refuse to train the next islamic (sic) terrorist,” Morgan wrote on her site, adding that “countless others” contacted her to express support. But many religious and civil liberties advocates said Morgan was denying rights protected under the Civil Rights Act, according to the Guardian. The U.S. Department of Justice said officials were monitoring the range in 2015 for potential constitutional violations. “It’s unfortunately similar to what we’ve historically seen with public business accommodations in the South during the 1960s that literally advertised black people weren’t allowed,” Jenifer Wicks, litigation director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Guardian. “She seems to have turned that on its face.” The Arkansas Times reported in early 2015 that a father-son duo who visited Morgan’s range were turned away by a woman who told them, “I would hope if you were Muslim you guys wouldn’t be cowards and would be up front about it.”

The father and son weren’t Muslims but instead practiced Hinduism.

And we venture back into the storm again to check in with Paul LePage, the human bowling jacket who is the governor of Maine, and whose approach to the more unfortunate of his fellow citizens continues to lodge itself between Simon Legree and Soylent Green. From The Bangor Daily News:

This school year, Gov. Paul LePage’s administration is spending $1.7 million on after-school programs that once would have gone to low-income families with children in the form of cash assistance. The administration has described the change as a way to “better support our youth,” but anti-poverty program experts decried it as an ineffective way to keep kids clothed and fed at a time when the rate of Maine children living in deep poverty has been rising. “After-school programs don’t pay the rent, and they don’t keep kids in underwear. They don’t keep the parents in underwear,” said Luke Shaefer, an associate professor of social work at the University of Michigan and coauthor of the book “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.”

A BDN review of state contracting documents shows more than a dozen nonprofit organizations are receiving more than $1.7 million this school year from the federally funded Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, grant. The Maine Department of Health and Human Services has awarded more than 80 percent of the funds without using the state’s formal competitive bidding process, the documents show. The department says that’s part of an effort to fund programs outside of southern Maine.

In other words, he’s shuffling money for needy families off to some Christian youth programs. In general, as the BDN points out, this is yet another example of how block-granting federal programs to the states is an open invitation to finagling by governors like LePage.

The federal government distributes the TANF grant to states ostensibly so they can provide cash assistance to low-income families and help them find work. But since the grants come with few legal restrictions, states have used them to cover a range of other expenses, including marriage classes in Oklahoma and private college scholarships in Michigan. Since 2012, the number of low-income families with children in Maine who receive cash assistance has fallen by two-thirds, causing the state to amass a pot of millions in unspent federal TANF funds. The LePage administration has touted using some of that money on after-school programs as a benefit of eliminating the cash benefits.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Seismic Test Pilot Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of how that state is cracking down on scofflaws. From KFOR4:

“We’ve all seen the semis that are side by side that are doing the speed limit or slightly under the speed limit, and they hang out there and that causes congested traffic behind them, people get road rage, causes events where we have crashes,” Trooper Dwight Durant, of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, told KFOR in November. “Those are the things that we are trying to eliminate.” The new restriction states that a vehicle may not be driven in the left lane except when overtaking and passing another vehicle, other than in situations where traffic conditions or road configurations require the use of the left-hand lane in order to maintain safe traffic conditions.

OK, maybe there’s a public safety element to this, but, priorities? C’mon, Oklahoma.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Source: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14752704/arkansas-gun-range-ban-muslims-governor/ 

[docscastlemedia]

On September 6, 2017, not even a full 3 months away, was the birth of another successful small black business in Baltimore, MD. Hellooooo Kora Lee’s Gourmet Desserts and Brunch! It’s about time I got around to sharing some new black excellence on Doc’s Castle Media.

Kora Lee’s Gourmet Dessert and Brunch is located in downtown Baltimore, directly off light rail stop of N Howard Street and W Monument Street. The neighborhood looked sketchy but what can anyone expect dinning on Howard Street, where more than half of the strip is out of business and filled with vacant buildings. But I digress because that’s a topic for another blog.

I visited this Gourmet shop while accompanying my fellow co-hosts of the Busy Doing Nothing Podcast to interview the owner of the newly open spot on Howard Street. Our faces were greeted with friendly faces as soon as we walked in. It felt like walking into your aunt’s or granny’s house on a Sunday afternoon.

The atmosphere was great. As soon as I walked in the door, I felt like I was visiting a close aunt as I caught onto the music vibes. Classic MJ played on the radio as we waited to order some southern style brunch. I had to remind myself where I was when Thriller came through the speakers because I was ready to get in-formation to perform the infamous Thriller dance. I was ready to dance for my food.

Chris, Jill and I placed our orders. I ordered The Lanrane, a southern styled cheddar biscuit smothered in creamy gravy, itsy-bitsy bites of sausages, and a side of sliced tomatoes sprinkled with parsley leaves. I’m drooling as I’m writing about it while recalling the exact taste my taste buds experienced that afternoon. Such creamy goodness surpassed all cheddary biscuits I’ve ever tasted including Red Lobster’s famous cheddar biscuits.

Jill and Chris enjoyed their dishes too. So much so they didn’t dare to demolish them on camera. They savored them for once the interview with Kora Lee was done. But as for me, it became RIP to my plate. I was “hangry” and couldn’t wait.

During our interview with Ms. Kora Lee, we discussed many topics. Just to touch on a few, we discussed her motivation to open her restaurant in Baltimore, whether she gains a lot of support from other Black people and businesses, and what’s new to expect from this young but thriving small business.

View the full interview with owner Kora Lee of Kora Lee’s Gourmet Dessert and Brunch via the Busy Doing Nothing Podcast, below.

What’s your favorite small business to support in Baltimore? Share with our readers in the comments. Let’s start a movement to build non-traditional business customs.

Be sure to like Kora Lee’s Gourmet Desserts and Brunch on Facebook, and other social media, to keep up with events happening at the restaurant.

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Have you heard of the Busy Doing Nothing Podcast? Read Doc Finally Joins A Podcast Series as a Regular on Doc’s Castle Media and learn all about it!

FOOD: Kora Lee’s Gourmet Desserts in Baltimore #BusyDoingNothing Interview & Review (Watch Episode 27 of BDN Podcast) On September 6, 2017, not even a full 3 months away, was the birth of another successful small black business in Baltimore, MD.