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beatlesdumpsterfire · 3 years ago

Note

prompt -> everyone cowers in front of ringo's supreme power

There’s a reason why Ringo never played drum solos. If you thought it was because he simply didn’t like them, then I’m sorry, but you got fooled by a famous Beatles lie. No, Ringo didn’t play drum solos because he had stage fright, or he thought that they were too ostentatious - he refused to play them because he knew it would give him too much power. So much power, in fact, that he could cause the end of the world.

Sounds dramatic, I know, but don’t believe me? Back in the Hamburg days, after being heckled by a rambunctious crowd for over 2 hours straight to play something that could put Buddy Rich to shame, Ringo finally cracked. He ran 64th notes down his drum kit in such a rapid succession that he started to glow bright orange, as if he were on fire. Rory and the rest of the band didn’t know what to do with their glowing orb of a drummer, but they didn’t have much time to fret on it anyways because the walls of the Kaiserkeller started to rattle and crack, which made the German audience, still recovering from WW2, duck for cover with a collective yelp.

“Ringo!” Rory tried to yell over the ear-splitting noise that was coming from Ringo as his orange glow got progressively brighter. Ringo couldn’t hear him because he was in the zone. The Auto Zone. “Quit it!!”

Ringo moved from his 64th notes to smacking away at his cymbals like he was releasing the rage of a thousand years. The middle of the dance floor started to cave in, swallowing those who couldn’t move away fast enough. If you listened closely, you could hear a deep, Liverpudlian laugh coming from the pit. The only reason Ringo didn’t cause the end of the world on this occasion was because, as he was about to start balancing his twirling drumsticks on his nose, his allergies (the thing that humbles us all) got the better of him, causing him to let out a loud sneeze that rocketed him away from his set. With his senses knocked back into him, Ringo gaped at the chaos in front of him and turned to Rory, who was gaping back at him with a look on his face that could only mean Ringo was out of the band.

This is the history of The Beatles that you don’t know about. Ringo was a freelancer for a brief moment in Hamburg before John, Paul, and George found him. There had been a rumor circulating that there was something wrong with Ringo, but when the three lads saw him standing outside of a club one cold evening, lighting a cigarette in his own solitude, they just assumed that everyone else was being mean and hinting at how big his nose was.

And just like that, Pete was out and Ringo was in, because John, Paul, and George had heard that Ringo could really bring the house down. Ringo had tried to warn his new band members on multiple occasions that he suspected there was something wrong with him, but all of them insisted that he was fine and that his nose really wasn’t that big, so he had nothing to worry about. Ringo wasn’t so sure about that but, following the Incident, he had braved the drums once again and managed to keep a steady beat without causing Armageddon. Needless to say, that didn’t mean he was any less nervous about playing. Luckily, he insisted enough times that he would never do a drum solo, and John, Paul, and George listened, though they did think he was a little bit looney.

And things were alright like this for a while, through the ups and downs of their career, playing across the globe to thousands of screaming fans. Ringo never once let his guard down: there were no solos coming from him, no matter how many people wanted it.

That fateful night in Hamburg felt like another life, so much so that Ringo nearly forgot about the unusual power he contained. It wasn’t until he was pushed to the edge that he remembered he held the fate of the world in the palm of his hand, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

The year was 1969, the holiest year of them all, and Ringo was about ready to thrust his head through some drywall, he was so fed up with his bandmates. The incessant bickering over which songs made the cut on the album and which didn’t were really starting to drive him up the wall. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was just the icing on the cake.

“We need another take on that one,” Paul announced to the band with an air of authority that Ringo wished he could strangle. They had just finished playing through their forty-seventh take and, although Paul was acting like it wasn’t his fault, it was absolutely his fault that they had to play the damn song again. For someone who acted like he was the leader of the band, Paul sure was having trouble remembering his baloney lyrics.

Without a word, John let his guitar slip out of his hands so it clunked to the ground in an amplified drop, its buzzing filling the room. John left them like that, stomping to the door and letting himself out, back to sanity. George gazed longingly at the door like he wanted to follow behind John, but he knew too well that Paul wasn’t going to let that happen. Completely unbothered by John, Paul turned to face the engineers in the sound booth and motioned in a grand gesture for them to start a new tape.

George looked across at Ringo and Ringo stared blankly back at him. He was really trying to repress everything he was feeling.

“Take 48,” George Martin nervously announced into their headphones, like he knew he was stoking a fire.

“Ringo, I’m gonna need some more umph on that drum part,” Paul turned back to Ringo with a smug look stretched across his face. “If you can handle it.”

That was it. That was freaking it. That was the line. The line’s way back there. Paul crossed that line. He crossed that line so hard it’s not even funny.

Ringo stood from his kit but, unlike John, he didn’t book it for the door. Instead, he rushed around the room, gathering every single percussion instrument he could find.

“I’ll give you umph,” he growled at Paul. In return, Paul smiled back at him because that was exactly what he wanted. In between them, George grabbed at his head. His two mates were really making him question why they were his mates in the first place.

“Take 48!” Paul called up to George Martin, spinning his finger around to motion that they start the tape. Then, he turned back to Ringo, who was staring at him with so much intensity it was a miracle Paul wasn’t sent flying backwards.

“One, two, one two three...”

Paul started to play the opening chords on his dinky little piano but Ringo wasn’t having any of that, oh no. He pounded into his snare drum so hard one of the drumsticks broke through the skin. Instead of pulling it out, Ringo left it there and grabbed a tambourine, which he proceeded to bang against his hi-hat. Paul wasn’t sure what Ringo was doing, but they had experimented enough in the past that he let it slide. George, on the other hand, was silently whispering prayers to himself as he stared at Ringo's glowing figure in horror. Ringo knew exactly what he was doing; if he did a drum solo, he could wreck their studio enough that he wouldn’t have to listen to Maxwell’s frickin Silver Hammer again. The trouble was, Ringo didn’t know when the right time was to stop.

By the time he started using two maracas as drumsticks on a timpani, Ringo began to slowly levitate. George’s whispered prayers were becoming louder from his panic. Up in the booth, it looked like the two remaining Beatles were performing an exorcism on Ringo.

“What the-” George Martin muttered. The boys must have stumbled across some new kind of street drug that really messed you up.

“Maxwell Anderson, majoring in medicine,” Paul cheerfully sang from his piano, his back turned to Ringo. Ringo started to shake in place, now suspended 5 feet above the ground, clicking castanets angrily while glaring down at Paul. George gaped as Ringo's color switched to a fiery, Kool Aid Man-red. It was bad. Paul continued to unknowingly play, but his left hand took a break to wipe some sweat from his brow. Someone must have turned up the heat, he mused to himself.

But no, it was Ringo, on the brink of causing a thermonuclear explosion. George was initially concerned for Ringo’s safety but, after seeing actual waves of heat emitted from his beige suit, George decided that his pal wasn’t worth it. He’d had some great memories with Ringo, but he could remember those later in therapy. For the meantime, he was getting the hell out of dodge, to wherever John had escaped to.

The problem was, Ringo’s power was sucking George so dry that he hardly had any energy left in him to move. It was like the goddamn relativity cadenza all over again. The more Ringo banged out the drum solo of the millenium, the more powerful he became. No one could stop him, he was a god. Ringo, god of the bongos. The most feared of them all.

Something caused Paul to finally turn around (probably Mal missing his cue to play the anvil because he was too distracted by whatever the hell Ringo was up to) and, when he did, his jaw dropped.

“Wot the fuck Ringo?” he shouted. They hadn’t agreed that Ringo could become a celestial being during their recording session. At that moment, John barged back in through the door, ready to give his half-hearted apology to Paul. That was quickly thrown in the trash when John looked up at their drummer, who now resembled a ball of fire, like the sun or something. (Even though it seems appropriate, no, unfortunately George didn’t write Here Comes the Sun about this event - that song had already been recorded at this point). John, as terrified as he was, couldn’t help but let out a loud cackle at the spectacle that was playing out in front of him. He knew that their session for Maxwell’s Silver Hammer had been bad, but he didn’t realize it was this bad, so much so that their drummer was spontaneously combusting.

“Silence, mortal!” Ringo boomed down at John, not even missing a beat on his woodblock solo.

That got John to shut up pretty fast.

“No one dares laugh at the almighty and powerful Ringo!” Ringo continued, his words practically searing through everyone’s skulls. “I can end you with the crash of a cymbal, I can tear this planet apart, piece by piece with only the sheer power of my mind!”

“Good for you, Ringo,” Paul stammered out as he tried to hide behind his piano. Paul was smart to pick up on the fact that, out of all of them, Ringo probably had the biggest score to settle with him. He really sincerely hoped that his charm would be enough to keep Ringo from smiting him but, just to be extra safe, he threw one of his famous winks Ringo’s way. Ringo, in turn, glared at Paul and pulled out a triangle.

“With a single ding on this triangle,” Ringo bellowed out, so loudly that everyone in England could hear him, “our planet will cease to exist.” He floated closer to Paul and Paul in return tried to back up, though he quickly found himself pushed against the wall. “Is that enough umph for you, Paul?” Ringo sneered back at him. Paul tried to respond that Ringo really didn’t have to do that and, actually take 14 had come out pretty good, but he found all of his words trapped in his throat. Ringo’s power was too overwhelming. Ringo seemed satisfied that he had terrified Paul so much that he finally shut his yap and, to really gloat in his glory, his hand slowly crept towards the triangle.

The closer Ringo got to hitting that triangle, the bigger he got. The image was straight out of Alice in Wonderland - in a matter of seconds, Ringo had grown too big to fit in their studio. That didn’t matter much, as the heat coming off of him helped sear away the wooden ceiling so it came crashing around him.

He’s really getting a big head, John mused to himself, though he didn’t dare make his observation out loud, which was a good decision because he would have been a goner otherwise. At this point, Ringo’s feet stretched the entire length of the studio (or, what remained of it) and his head was well above the skyline of London, where everyone could see him and scream with horror before going, “Wait, is that Ringo Starr from the Beatles?”

Ringo was only inches away from the triangle now and London had never been hotter. The ocean was starting to dry up on the coast, fields were bursting in flames at random, and children started asking their parents why they didn’t have more fans in their houses. Alongside the heat, the ground started to quiver before shaking, rattling, and rolling. Cars rocked in the street, smashing into each other, and trees and buildings started to tilt sideways, like wannabe Leaning Towers of Pisa. People were starting to panic, because nothing this exciting had ever happened in England before.

“Ringo!” George tried to call up to his mate, though he knew it was no use, considering how high up Ringo was. “Please, stop it!” John and Paul heard George’s desperate pleas over the commotion and joined in, falling to their knees and clasping their hands together, begging with all the energy they had left.

“We’ll let you have more songs on our album!” John tried.

“I’ll bring you more flowers,” George tried.

“We’ll stop recording Maxwell’s Silver Hammer for once and for all!” Paul tried without really thinking.

Ringo was a millimeter away from making contact with the triangle. But then, he stopped. And, faster than you could say “Maxwell Anderson,” the shaking and heat stopped. Ringo had almost instantly shrunk himself back down to his normal size and was no longer glowing a searing red. He calmly set the triangle down on the stool next to his kit and turned around to look at Paul, John, and George.

“Good,” was all he had to say. And, with that, he turned on his heel and strutted out of the practically demolished studio, whistling a happy tune to himself. Left behind, Paul, John, and George all tried to compose themselves.

“A new rule for the band,” Paul started slowly, “let’s not mess with Ringo.”

“Agreed,” John was quick to respond.

“Agreed,” George repeated.

#beatles ask #beatles fanfiction #ringo starr #george harrison #paul mccartney #john lennon #idk why I made paul a jerk here #sorry paul fans #ringo is a metaphysical being

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lovelucybradford · 4 years ago

Text

I Pretend You’re Mine (5)

A/N: Back with the promised continuation chapter!

Not sure if you’re interested, but when I was writing, in my head I pictured:

Betty White as Grandma Rose

Richard Madden as Levi

Peter Gallagher as Jason Martin

Scott Eastwood as Drew

Masterlist

Tags: @empath-bunny

@ityagirljay

@wolfarrowepz

@supernatural-crazed-girl

Five: You Were Romeo (I Was a Scarlet Letter)

Day 1: Thursday, June 13th

7:00 pm- Welcome Cocktails in the Stardust Lounge, Deck 6

“Champagne, miss?” The formally dressed waiter offered a flute of sparkling wine, a raspberry garnish floating in the glass. Rosalie took it from his hands with no hesitation, sending the attendant a silent smile of thanks. She put the glass to her lips, then paused and looked up at Derek.

“Will people judge me if I chug this whole thing right now?” she voiced, loving the amused smile that lit up her partner’s face at the innocent question.

“I thought we didn’t care anymore what people thought of us,” Derek reminded her, though she knew that when he was referring to ‘we’, he really meant her. Derek never was one to care what people thought of him.

Rosalie weighed her options, then decided that her family judged her anyways so why not have a good time?

In order to get through this hellish night, she’d have to be tipsy. Best start now.

Without a word of affirmation, she forewent her instilled manners and chugged the glass down in one long sip. Rosalie wasn’t normally a fan of champagne, unless it was Dom Perignon, which she realized made her sound like a total snob. It was the one thing that she’d inherited from her father, her expensive taste in food and drink. It seemed by the familiar, rich, and delicious taste of the bubbly that the cruise ship staff had only provided the very best for their VIP guests.

Rosalie searched for a place to set her glass, finding a nearby unoccupied table and gently depositing it there. She, quite literally, couldn’t afford to even chip one of the crystal goblets. She stumbled back to Derek, who was waiting for her with an open arm.

“You ready for this?” he whispered in her ear, his breath hot on her neck. It caused unvoluntary goosebumps to crawl up her arms, which she prayed he didn’t notice.

Was she ready?

A part of her never would be. She’d purposely left this part of her life behind, knowing all too well how toxic it was for her mental health. But Rosalie knew if she backed out now, then the family would know that they finally got to her. They would think that she was still strung up and heartbroken about Drew, or jealous of her stepsister for getting the diamond that was meant for Rosalie.

And sure, she had been… once upon a time.

Moving back to Beacon Hills, reconnecting with normal people, people she loved more than her own blood relatives… it had put everything into perspective for her again.

Rosalie could once again be herself, be that strong woman that Talia Hale had raised to be when Rosalie’s own mother had fallen short. The strong, kind, generous, goofy, compassionate, empathetic woman with a mind of her own and a head on her shoulders. Not the ice queen, the submissive and serious woman that her father had tried to warp her into.

And for that, Rose was forever thankful.

She was different now, but exactly the same. And this version of her, with her closest confidantes by her side, wouldn’t cower in a corner.

Rosalie held her head high, meeting Derek’s gaze with a confident look in her blue eyes.

“Yes,” she declared, feeling her confidence rise.

“Good.”

“Lead the way, Prince Charming.”

Derek snorted and shook his head at the nickname, but complied and escorted Rosalie further into the room. She searched for a friendly face among the crowd. Normally, she’d be able to find Lydia by her head of bright red hair, but nearly half of the people in the room had some shade of red hair.

Thankfully, Rosalie didn’t have to look all that hard, as Charlotte came bounding up to her aunt, screaming, “Auntie Rosie! Uncle Derek!”

And suddenly, as the child wrapped her arms around one of Derek’s legs and one of Rosalie’s, all of the attention in the room shifted to the couple.

“Is that Rosalie?” her cousin Noah commented to the man next to him.

“Who the hell is that with her? Because dayum, I’d like to tap that ass,” Noah’s twin, Nick, said back.

“That has to be her friend,” Uncle Alex said to his wife, his lips around a glass of Scotch.

“Not with the way he’s holding her. Besides, did you hear her niece call him Uncle? How she managed that is beyond me,” Aunt Sarah replied, looking Rose’s companion up and down with hungry eyes.

Rosalie ignored all the talk, even though it seemed as if the crowd wasn’t even attempting to be discreet in their conversations.

She reached down to pat Charlotte’s blonde head. “Hey, honey! I missed you!”

Derek ruffled Charlotte’s curls playfully, to which the little girl pretended to be angry with him. But Rosalie could see the smile that she was hiding as Charlotte clutched the adults’ legs even harder.

“All right, all right, Charlie. Let’s let Auntie Rosalie and Uncle Derek breathe, yeah?” Rosalie’s brother, Levi, broke through the crowd, detaching his daughter from the couple and telling her to go on and play with her cousins.

As soon as the little girl was out of sight, Levi enveloping his sister in a hug. Derek held out his hand for a friendly shake, but Levi pulled him into an embrace as well, the two men patting each other fondly on the back.

“I’m digging the beard,” Derek approved, gesturing to Levi’s newly grown beard while rubbing his own.

“What can I say? I was inspired by yours. Although I have to say, mine looks a little better. Y’know, because it’s still all one color,” Levi joked, comparing his solid red scruff to Derek’s salt-and-pepper look.

Rosalie elbowed Derek in the side teasingly. “Yeah, you old man!”

Derek raised one brow and stepped away from Rosalie, crossing his arms. “Oh sure, call me old man one more time.”

Rosalie beamed up at him, wagging her own brows. “What would you rather me call you? Sugar daddy?”

With one fell swoop, Derek was pressed against her, fingers tickling the small expanse of visible skin on her waist. Rose squealed with laughter, trying in vain to pull away from him and begging for mercy.

Levi cleared his throat loudly, causing the couple to separate. Rosalie’s cheeks burned red at the embarrassing scene that she had been a part of. Surely her brother would tease her about it.

Instead, Levi looked a bit pissed.

“So, I guess my daughter didn’t dream up your engagement, then. This,” Levi gestured to Rosalie and Derek, “is really happening?”

Derek shifted his weight on both feet. Rosalie bit her lip and looked to the floor guiltily. She loved her brother. She really did. But she knew that Levi had loose lips, and he’d surely have one too many and (unintentionally) let slip the whole ruse. That, and Rose couldn’t take the disappointment from him.

“It’s about fucking time,” Levi added, sounding a lot more jovial. Rosalie’s and Derek’s heads shot up instantly, shocked at his comment.

Levi slapped Derek on the shoulder. “Bro, I am so glad you didn’t listen to me.”

“What’s he talking about?” Rosalie interrogated Derek.

Derek scratched the back of his neck and turned his head towards the large window next to them. Before he could explain, Jess, Levi’s wife, snaked her arms around her husband’s waist, resting her chin on his shoulder. “Lee was telling me all about how he’d threatened Derek with his guns if he even put his hands on you.”

Rosalie’s jaw dropped. Derek stayed unusually silent. “You gave Der the boyfriend talk?! When was this, big brother?”

Levi raised both hands in surrender. “In my defense, Derek was a horny college kid back then, and I was only trying to protect my little sister. You know the, um, milestones that come with prom night.”

The tapping of a mic interrupted their conversation, which Rosalie was thankful for since she was at a loss for words.

She’d remembered that night in question, fondly. It was the night that she’d realized that she’d had feelings for Derek. Rosalie’s then-boyfriend, Ryan, had dumped her a week before prom for another, more sexy, more experienced, girl. Rosalie was heartbroken, and had sworn off prom, until Derek had shown up on her doorstep in a suit with a pink corsage and a sparkling silver tiara.

She’d laughed, of course, at the reference to the childhood nickname. Then, she’d excitedly rushed upstairs to ready herself, leaving Derek at the mercy of one Levi Martin. Levi Martin, who had, apparently, threatened to cut off Derek’s balls and feed them to the family dog if he had even touched his baby sister in an inappropriate way.

(Levi was always… poetic when it came to his threats.)

Rosalie had hoped, prayed, that as Derek had driven her home in his black Camaro, that he would kiss her, to put a fairytale ending on a perfect night. Sure, he’d kissed her when he dropped her off at her front door… on the cheek, like a brother, or a best friend, might.

Rosalie had dreamt about that night for years afterwards, of what it would be like if he had actually kissed her.

_______________

“I’m sorry, Grandma Rose. I have to go rescue my fiancé from your dear grandson.”

Rosalie stood from the table, feeling a rush in her head for a few seconds. She was definitely tipsier than she thought.

Once Rose got her bearings, she strutted, barefoot, to Derek, who looked highly uncomfortable. With every inch that Nick advanced on Derek, the man backed a considerable distance away.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have an amazing ass?” Rosalie heard Nick flirt from paces away. The way that Nick was looking at Derek, the way that he was blatantly hitting on the man when Nick knew that Derek was taken, it unsettled something in Rosalie. Her vision turned red as she approached the two from behind, wrapping an arm around Derek’s waist.

“Hi Nick. Sorry, this amazing ass is mine.” Rosalie didn’t know what she was saying, didn’t really think through what she was doing. All she knew was that she was grabbing Derek’s right butt cheek with her hand, smiling smugly as Nick’s eyes widened.

Derek waited until Rose’s cousin scurried away before stiffly asking, “Rosalie, why are you grabbing my ass?”

Rosalie let go of Derek immediately, feeling as if she’d spontaneously combust in mortification. “I am, so, so sorry. I just kind of… he was ogling you and it made me mad. Like you’re gorgeous but you’re more than just a pretty face and an incredible ass.” Rosalie’s eyes widened at her word vomit, and now she definitely wanted to throw herself from the nearest balcony and test her drunken theory that she was secretly a mermaid.

“I… I need a drink.”

Derek turned to face her, a hint of a forming chuckle on his lips. “I think you’ve had enough of those, babe.”

Rosalie wished that she could slink away. She wished that someone would hit her in the head, and she’d wake up with amnesia. Maybe she could change her name and move to Antarctica? Yeah, that would be good.

Derek rolled his eyes, grabbing his best friend by the elbow and latching her hand back onto his arm. “I’m not mad at you, Rosalie. Feel free to grab my ass anytime if it makes you feel better.”

Rosalie tried to scowl, but the frown was turning upward with every second. “I hate you so much.”

Derek escorted the two back to Rosalie’s table, where Grandma Rose looked completely unimpressed with the whole shindig. Before they sat, he pulled Rose close and whispered, “I’ll let you grab my ass as long as I can grab yours.”

At that, he pulled out Rosalie’s chair and plopped her down, taking the one next to her. Rose was speechless. Did that actually come out of his mouth? Wait, did he actually want to grab her behind? Yep. Those were his words. Exactly.

Rose’s cheeks flushed a healthy shade of pink. Derek laughed at her slowly coloring face, to which she smacked him on the thigh under the table. Before she could remove her hand, Derek grabbed it and held it between the two of them.

“I always knew the two of you would end up together.” Grandma Rose said wistfully, looking at the couple with soft eyes.

You and everyone else, apparently. Everyone but Derek, Rosalie thought sadly, and tried to shove the painful pang in her heart.

“You know how I knew, Rosalie?” Grandma Rose shakily reached for her flute of champagne, taking a long sip. “I knew it when this one, this big, strong, handsome man,” the old woman reached for Derek’s free hand and patted it kindly, “punched my idiot son in the face at that party, after you got your master’s degree.”

Rosalie snickered at the memory. Jason and Derek had never gotten along. Jason thought Derek was ‘some jock who was too concerned with an unlikely career in basketball instead of his studies’. Derek thought Jason was a ‘pompous, cheating, scumbag, son of a bitch’. (Both quotes were their words exactly)

All of the building tension exploded when Jason had chosen to make a below-the-belt comparison between Rose and Ashleigh’s accomplishments. As if they weren’t celebrating Rosalie graduating from Columbia University, an ivy league, with a master’s degree, with the highest honors.

Derek had broken Jason’s nose. Jason had gotten a restraining order (his favorite defense tactic; it expired last year).

“I’m so sorry,” Derek told Rosalie’s grandmother, though he didn’t sound the least bit remorseful.

“Oh, sweetheart. It wasn’t like every sane person at that party wasn’t thinking the same thing. You were the only one brave enough to do it. Rose’s knight in shining armor.”

Derek’s face flushed red, a rare sight for a man with so much confidence.

“Rosalie, dear. I do have to warn you, Drew and Ashleigh are here.”

Rosalie sighed. She knew that they would be here. The pair had done a very good job at avoiding them; Rose wondered when they’d finally make it around her and Derek’s way. If Rose were lucky, maybe they’d just avoid her the whole trip. Only in her dreams…

“I know, Grandma. I—have you seen them yet?”

“Yes, I had the misfortune of running into both of them while yelling at your father for dragging his ninety-two-year-old mother on an extravagant trip. Do you know how long the plane flight was? Anyways, Drew called me ‘grandma’. You know what I told him, loves?”

Derek and Rosalie looked to each other, both knowing that it was probably something rude. Grandma Rose was Rosalie’s favorite relative, outside of her brother and Lydia. She was the most real of all of them. She spoke her mind and wasn’t afraid to let anyone know how she felt.

“I told him to go fuck himself.”

Derek choked on his glass of white wine. Rosalie smacked him on the back a few times, unable to hold in her shaking laughter.

“Yes, I told dear old Drew to go fuck himself. The only man that’s allowed to call me that is Derek. He doesn’t have his head up his ass. He sees how beautiful, wonderful, and deserving of love my real granddaughter is.”

All jokes aside, Grandma Rose’s words warmed Rosalie’s heart. At least one of the extended family members didn’t think she was a disgrace.

“Well, kids. Would you look at that? The pompous son of a bitch wants to go blab about himself. Someone should go tell him to shut up.”

Rosalie looked to the small stage at the front of the lounge. Sure enough, there was her father, Jason, dressed to the nines in a likely customized Hugo Boss suit, a pink Hibiscus sticking out of his breast pocket. Jason looked around at the crowd, clearing his throat to get the attention of his guests.

“Welcome, everyone! I’m so glad that you’re here and could join me on this fantastic excursion…”

Jason continued his schpeal and Rosalie tuned him out. He was likely talking about how great he was for paying for everyone’s accommodations, or how lucky they were to be spending time with him on this 1K-a-night cruise. Rosalie had heard it all before, multiple times, and she was sick of it, frankly.

What was it about rich people’s money that made them think that they were gods and should be treated as such?

Derek squeezed Rosalie’s hand hard, his nails digging into the back of her hand.

She looked to him in explanation, but he only nodded his head towards the stage.

Where Drew was shepherding Ashleigh up the steps, his hand resting on her backside.

“Yes, as I said, we have two exciting announcements that Evelyn and I could not wait to share with you tonight.”

Jason looked fondly towards Ashleigh and Drew, who were now hobbling towards him. There were resounding gasps and excited squeals, but Rosalie could only focus on Drew.

Drew was still as handsome as the day that she had first met him. His blue eyes sparkled with confidence and charm. He’d grown a beard since Rosalie had seen him last, wafts of brown hair covering his strong jaw. He stood behind Ashleigh, his hands moving to rest on her stomach, and that’s when time stood still.

Because, under Drew’s lithe fingers, was a protruding bump. Rosalie, despite herself, couldn’t help the gasp that formed around her lips, nor the shaking of her hands.

Drew, when he was with her, had told Rosalie that he didn’t want kids. He’d had daddy issues too and didn’t want his offspring to grow up with a messed-up dad. Even though Rosalie desperately wanted a family, she was so in love with Drew that she’d put those dreams aside, for him.

Now, Drew stood proudly cradling his pregnant fiancée’s stomach as he spoke sweet nothings into her ear, looking thrilled to become a dad.

Derek squeezed Rosalie’s hand tightly, then removed it to wrap around her shoulders instead, nestling her into him. Derek’s lips brushed the top of Rose’s head, then her forehead.

“Fuck, Rosie. I’m so sorry. I… he didn’t deserve you. You’re better off without him. Do you want to go?” Derek whispered huskily in Rosalie’s ear, breaths coming out shallowly.

Rosalie didn’t need to feel the tenseness of his arm around her to know that he was pissed. She could tell just by the tone of his voice that he wanted to kill Drew.

Rosalie turned her head so that now her lips would be close to his ear. “I… I should have known. I—No, we need to stay. If I leave now, then Ashleigh and Evelyn will know that they’ve won, and I can’t let that happen.”

Rosalie rested her head on Derek’s shoulder, finding comfort in his embrace.

Someone kicked her leg under the table. Rosalie raised her head to look at Derek questioningly. His expression matched her own.

“Rosalie? Dear, are you here?” Jason called from the stage, his snake-like grey eyes checking the crowd for his daughter.

“She’s here, you pompous prick!” Grandma Rose yelled to her son, shoving Rosalie gently with a hand to her back. From a distance, Rosalie heard Stiles guffaw. She imagined that Lydia smacked him in the head while trying to control her own laughter.

Jason scowled, but ignored his mother, watching with a forced smile as his daughter and her ‘fiancé’ ascended the stairs. Derek had a tight hold around Rosalie, who had forgone her shoes in the shock of the moment. She leaned on him, both physically and metaphorically, for strength.

“Some more good news for my daughters. Somehow, someone managed to put a ring on my dear little Rosalie. Yes, it shocked us, too. Good on you, Derek!” Jason looked to Rosalie’s bare feet. “And it seems he doesn’t mind her habit for walking around barefoot. Welcome to the family, Derek Hale!”

Most of the crowd laughed, Evelyn and Ashleigh’s shrill merriment sticking out the most. Derek held Rosalie tighter. She bit the inside of her lip in an attempt to stay strong.

From Jason’s other side, Drew asked, “Wait. Isn’t that the guy who broke your nose?”

Derek rested his forehead on the side of Rose’s head, huffing into her ear “Yes. That was me. And if you don’t shut up, I’ll break your nose, too, you douche”.

That made her chuckle, and with his arms securely around her, Rose knew that she’d be alright as long as Derek was by her side.

#teen wolf #derek hale #derek hale fic #derek hale fanfiction #derek hale x oc #tyler hoechlin #derek hale au #derek hale fluff

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waitineedaname · 4 years ago

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And Did You Know That You Were Always Like A Fantasy?

happy late birthday @notedchampagne! also on ao3

---

If someone had told Jon two years earlier where he would be and who he would be there with, he would have scoffed. Really? With him? It would have been too absurd to consider. If someone had told him two months earlier, he would have been scared to believe it. Really? And we’re safe? It was too perfect to even hope for.

But here he was, standing at Martin’s side in the kitchen of a Scottish safehouse, rinsing the soap suds off the dishes Martin handed him and swaying gently to the soft music playing off of Martin’s phone.

The peaceful domesticity scared him sometimes. He would catch himself getting too comfortable, and he would be seized by a sudden terror that it was a trick or that it would all be yanked out from underneath him, that some fearsome monster was waiting for just the right moment to strike him down. He would count the doors and stare at the cobwebs in the corners and avoid his own gaze in the mirror. It couldn’t be real. After all that had happened, after all he had done and become, he couldn’t have this scrap of happiness.

It was real, though. Martin, if nothing else, was real. It was hard to deny that fact when he had Martin’s warm body brushing against his side as they went through the domestic motions of washing the dishes together. It was hard to deny the memories of Martin’s soft kisses on his cheeks or the victorious laugh Martin let out when he discovered a long forgotten bottle of wine in the cupboard or the dozens of pictures in his phone of Martin posing next to indifferent Highland cows.

Even if the worst was yet to come, it was hard to care during mornings like this, when everything felt still and quiet. Not the still quietness of a world holding its breath, but the peace of waking up naturally to light filtering in through curtains, with the arm of the person he loved around his waist.

Martin roused him out of his thoughts by leaning across the sink to turn up the volume on his phone. “Oh, I like this song.”

Jon huffed out a soft, fond laugh. He couldn’t help but think the song was the same as the last dozen he’d played; apparently Martin’s fondness for “lo-fi charm” extended to soft indie music Jon had never heard of, but he couldn’t bring himself to mind.

Jon didn’t realize he was singing along until he felt Martin staring at him. “What?” He said, caught off guard.

“I didn’t think you knew this song.” Martin said with pleased surprise.

“I don’t.”

“...Ah.” Martin said. “Well, I guess there are worse things to Know?”

“I suppose.” Jon sighed, unhappy despite the relatively innocuous nature of the Knowledge. It would never become less unsettling to suddenly Know things he didn’t ask for. Martin gently bonked his hip against Jon’s, distracting him from the downward spiral that seemed imminent.

“I’ve never heard you sing before.”

“It’s not like we hosted karaoke nights.” Jon smiled wryly.

“I’m fairly certain Tim planned one, but it never happened for… whatever reason.” Martin steered the conversation away from another uncomfortable subject. “You have a nice voice, you know.”

“I’m flattered.” Jon said, a sarcastic tone covering genuine happiness at the praise. “Would you believe I was in a band while at Uni?”

“No, I wouldn’t believe that, actually.” Martin’s expression was of surprised delight.

“We were quite eccentric.”

“Now that I do believe.”

Jon allowed that a self-deprecating huff of laughter. “A bunch of dramatic Oxford students singing about space pirates and cyberpunk Frankenstein and Arthurian legends retold as sci-fi westerns…” He smiled fondly at the memory.

“Jon.” He looked over to find Martin looking at him with restrained glee. “Please tell me you have recordings of this somewhere.”

“What, currently? No.”

“You don’t understand. I have to hear this right now.”

“I can’t help you! It was over a decade ago.” He laughed at Martin’s exaggerated pout and leaned up to press a kiss to his nose. “Sorry, darling.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I’ll just lose sleep knowing there are probably pictures of my boyfriend dressed as a space pirate, and I can’t see them.” Martin heaved a great sigh, but there was a smile playing at his lips. He dried his hands and turned to place them on Jon’s hips. Jon followed suit by taking off his dish gloves and draping his arms over Martin’s shoulders.

“There are certainly worse things to lose sleep over.” Jon said, playing with a tuft of hair that curled over the back of Martin’s neck.

“I guess so.” Martin pressed his face into the top of Jon’s head, and when the song on his phone switched to something with a quicker tempo, he could feel Martin’s smile. He started swaying, hands still on Jon’s waist.

“Martin,” Jon said with a warning in his voice, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m not doing anything.” Martin replied innocently. He stood up straight and smiled down at Jon.

“I’m fairly certain this is something.”

Martin rolled his eyes fondly. “I’m dancing. You know, that thing people do where they move in time to music? Surely you’ve heard of it.”

“I know what dancing is, I’m just- I’m not very good at it.” Jon protested, even though he was already matching Martin’s movements with only the slightest stutter.

“You don’t have to be good at it. Come on.” Martin stepped back and took Jon’s hands, pulling him into the middle of the kitchen. They weren’t even dancing, not really. It was more of a combination of sways and shimmies that made Jon laugh and shuffling footwork as they avoided stepping on each other’s toes. Jon felt more than a little ridiculous, but if he was completely honest with himself, he would do any amount of ridiculous things to keep that happy, adoring look in Martin’s eyes. An adoring look that morphed into one of mischief as Martin said, “I’m going to spin you.”

“Y- Oh!” Jon didn’t even get the chance to question it before Martin was guiding his arm around in a spin. It wasn’t exactly the most elegant maneuver, and he almost lost his balance for just a second, but it startled a laugh out of him all the same. Martin looked delightfully smug when he faced him again. Well, two can play at that game.

Martin must have seen the look in Jon’s eyes when he decided his next move, but he only had half a second to look inquisitive when Jon slid his hands around Martin’s back. Martin leaned back with him as he was dipped, and Jon relished the surprised awe in Martin’s eyes for just a brief moment.

And then they simultaneously remembered Jon’s limited upper-body strength.

Jon’s arms gave out and Martin yelped as he fell, grabbing onto Jon, who let out a shout as he went tumbling down too.

The two of them fell in a heap on the floor, Martin letting out a soft “oof” as he took the brunt of the fall with Jon collapsed on his chest. Martin groaned quietly, and Jon scrambled upright.

“Oh- Oh god, Martin, I’m so sorry. Are you alright?” Jon’s heart seized with panic as he saw Martin sling an arm over his face and start shaking. Oh god, was Martin crying? Jon would never forgive himself. Wait, no, not crying-

“That was so stupid.” Martin managed to say through helpless laughter. He slid his arm off his face to reveal bright eyes and a brighter smile. Jon gaped intelligently at him. “I’m twice your size, how could that have possibly gone well?”

“I…” Jon stammered for an excuse. “I thought it would be romantic.”

“Oh, it was romantic, sure. Really stupid, though.” Martin was still giggling weakly up at Jon, and some of the anxiety slid out of him. Still, he had to ask.

“You’re sure you’re alright?”

“I’m fine, Jon.” Martin rolled his eyes. “I’ve dealt with worse than a bruise before.”

Jon slid back to sit on Martin’s shins as Martin lifted himself into a sitting position. He touched the back of Martin’s head gently, and Martin stalwartly did not flinch. “I can get you some ice.”

“I said I’m fine.” Martin grabbed his hands before he could get up, a laugh still playing in his voice. “You don’t need to fuss.”

“I’m not fussing.” Jon protested. Martin gave him a look, and he huffed. “Besides, that’s rich coming from you.”

“Alright, fair.” Martin smiled and kissed Jon’s knuckles, still not letting go. “If you really want to make it up to me… you can find your college band’s stuff?” He asked oh-so-hopefully. Jon laughed softly.

“I’ll see if there’s anything on YouTube. Satisfied?”

“Yes.” Martin looked pleased with himself as he finally stood and pulled Jon to his feet with him. “Now come on, we have dishes to finish.”

The peace might be deceptive, the happiness a trick to convince him to let his guard down, but when he shot Georgie a text requesting concert pictures from their college days while Martin chatted politely with a shopkeeper later that afternoon, Jon was convinced he wouldn’t trade it for anything.

#tma #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #jonmartin #the magnus archives #my writing #okay to reblog #I'm still getting a feel for their voices but man sometimes you just gotta write some fluff #hopefully there will be some more tma fics coming from me soon #I desperately want to write some archival staff antics...#I finish finals soon so if you guys have any ideas/requests send em my way!

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britesparc · 4 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #475

Top Ten Films Named After the Protagonist

I’m afraid this is another of those weeks where the list is not only plucked-as-if-from-nowhere, but is also going to be relatively perfunctory. I’ve had quite a few mammoth lists recently, and the kids have been off for Easter so I’ve had less time to sit down and waffle with my keyboard. As such, we’re going off on a random tangent (the best kind of tangent, let’s be honest): films named after the protagonist.

I remember when Michael Clayton came out, and without knowing anything about the film, I was a bit confused; “Michael Clayton” seems such an ordinary name. Was it a true story? Was I supposed to know who this guy is? It seemed a strange, non-exciting, non-explanatory title for a film that’s actually relatively twisty-turny. And, of course, once you sit down and think about it, there are actually quite a few films where the whole hook is “here’s a movie about this guy you don’t know”. Furthermore, some of them are pretty darn great.

Obviously I had to establish some rules, because if you say “ooh, yeah, films where the title is the main character’s name,” then instantly you could say, well, that’s every superhero movie, right? So I instantly discounted that; if it’s a pseudonym or a codename or whatever, it’s out. Sorry, Batman. Sorry, Spider-Man. Also, by that same rationale, sorry, The Quiet American or The English Patient; technically, those are characters, but they’re not their names, so they’re out. I’m also discounting anything where there are other words in the title apart from a name; so, yes, that discounts Batman Begins and The Amazing Spider-Man, but also Get Carter. And it has to be one person, so no The Blues Brothers (or, I guess, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, or Goonies).

Where I have taken a moment is whether or not to consider one-word titles; WALL-E, for instance, or Dave. In the end, I have decided – and this feels even a little arbitrary even for me – that WALL-E would be excluded on the grounds that that’s not a real name. it’s not a codename, necessarily, but it’s more of a model number; it only becomes a name because WALL-E is, to all intents and purposes, a person. If you want you can slot WALL-E in at number one, because that’s where it would be if it were included. Dave, as it happens, wouldn’t have made the list (although it’d probably be in the Top Fifteen). But another one that I’ve decided – after much internal deliberation – to exclude is Amélie, because I feel like its real title is Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. That’s words other than a name. Sorry, Amélie. But like WALL-E, that’s a masterpiece, so would have probably been about number three.

So there we go: utterly arbitrary rules established, we now present a Top Ten.

John Wick (2014): it’s a film very much about a bloke called John Wick, a name that’s simultaneously very ordinary and also a bit weird. And then it gets into its stride, and Keanu is just offing dudes like a cross between Batman and the Terminator. Excellent action, a great stoic performance by Reeves, but also a rich and deep mythology that slowly unfolds. The sequel is better, but it all started here.

Jackie Brown (1997): Tarantino’s forgotten film, a far more subtle and slower film than most of his others, lacking the histrionics and heightened alternate-reality stuff he’s getting more famous for. Despite QT being relatively young at the time, it’s actually a really sweet meditation on aging and chances passing you buy, anchored by a great, humane performance from Pam Grier. Despite the twisty plot and crime chaos, she’s the dead centre, cool but also realistically vulnerable. Also has Samuel L. Jackson being a badass.

Forrest Gump (1994): often criticised for its sentimentality (unfairly, I think) and its politics (yeah, I’m with you there) Gump is still great. Tom Hanks gives the character a ton of heart and pathos, walking a difficult line between a broad portrayal and nuanced characterisation. As a whirlwind tour of boomer history unfolds around him, he remains an engaging centre. The end of the film, when he struggles to ask if his son is smart, is a beautiful, heartbreaking moment.

Barton Fink (1991): a great exercise in stylised Coen weirdness. John Turturro’s Fink is a delightful arsehole, a writer full of his own self-importance, but as he is sucked further and further into this Hollywood hell, we still root for him and sympathise with him, even if he is in many ways the architect of his own downfall. Kudos, too, to John Goodman for his supremely demonic performance, which really should have bagged him an Oscar nom.

Jerry Maguire (1996): another film that could be criticised for its sentimentality, or maybe even its hypocrisy, criticising the commerciality of the sports industry whilst also cheering about one of the characters bagging a multi-million-dollar contract. But Cruise himself, as Jezza, gives one of his best performances as a man struggling to remain moral and ethical both at work and at home as he rushes into a hasty marriage. The oft-ridiculed “you complete me” scene is actually amazing and really emotional. And the kid is cute.

Donnie Darko (2001): a twisty oddity that came out of nowhere, starring a brother-and-sister team of actors we’d never heard of before, with famous people (her off E.T., him off ER) in supporting roles. But Jake G anchors the film with a great performance, genuinely making us wonder whether trippy supernatural stuff is going down, or if he’s just becoming unhinged. A really cool, interesting, unnerving film, that managed to successfully weaponise 80s nostalgia before that became annoying.

Napoleon Dynamite (2004): another one of those films that sort of came from nowhere, full of unknowns, but instantly built a huge cult following almost immediately. It’s delightfully weird, with its own internal logic, creating a world of weirdos and outcasts that we just completely root for right from the off, and it all hinges on Jon Heder’s central performance as the gangly, strange-looking, crazy-named Napoleon. Altogether now: “Yes, I love technology…”

Michael Clayton (2007): only this low because I don’t remember its twists and turns as well as I should. This is a taut and twisty thriller, with a man discovering a conscience and uncovering all kinds of nefarious corporate behaviour. Its great because the stakes aren’t world-altering, just big-scale bad behaviour and people earnestly opposing it. Full of tremendous performances but it’s got another heartfelt turn by Clooney at its centre.

Erin Brockovich (2000): another great person-investigates-corporate-bastardry, with Julia Roberts never-better as the earnest and earthy Erin who transcends her comparatively lowly status to throw her heart and soul behind the battle for justice. Her performance defines the film (and rightly won her an Oscar), which in terms of events and plot is relatively straightforward, but is shot through with a level of down-to-earth realism and a beautiful portrayal of friendship between Brockovich and lawyer Ed Masry (Albert Finney).

Ed Wood (1994): a film made at the peak of Burton’s powers, before his stylisation became a bit overbearing, and before his constant casting of Depp became annoying (and well, well before Depp himself became problematic). This is a love letter to the golden age of moviemaking and also to the schlocky B-movies Wood himself traded in, finding heroism in the example of one under-talented man making poor artistic choices. Depp is sweet and endearing with an earnest drive behind his good nature, making us root for him throughout. Arguably Depp’s best performance and Burton’s best film. But all due respect to Martin Landau, Sam Jackson should have won the Oscar that year.

#top ten #films #movies #actors #names

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freedomartspress · 5 years ago

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Three Poems — Tongo Eisen Martin

Kick Drum Only

All street life to a certain extent starts fair

Sometimes with a spiritual memory even

Predawn soul-clap/ your father dying even

Maybe I’ve pushed the city too far

My sensitivities to landfill districting and minstrel whistles/

White supremacist graffiti on westbound rail guards

-all overcome and reauthored

The garbage is growing voices

Condensed Marxism

modal gangsterism for a warrior-depressive

Underpass in my pocket

because I am a deity

or decent bid on the Panther name

revolutionary violence that chose its own protagonists

or muted stage of genius

A merciful Marxism

Disquieted home life

Or metaphor for relaxing next to a person

Who is relaxing next to a gun

I stare at my father for a few seconds

Then return to my upbringing

Return to the souls of Ohio Black folks

Revolution is damn near pagan at this point

You know what the clown wants? The respect of the ant.

Wants a pen cap full of bullets

Wants to see their ancestors in broad daylight

I am not tired of these rooms; just tired of the world that give them a relativity

My only change of clothes prosecuted

The government has finally learned how to write poems

shoot-outs that briefly align…

that make up a parable

white bodies are paid well, I posit

do white men actually even have leaders?

all white people are white men

white men will only ever be metaphors

all I do is practice, Lord

A rat pictures a river

Can almost taste the racial divide

Can almost roll a family member’s head into a city hall legislative chamber

Knows who in this good book will fly

I have decided not to talk out of anger ever again, Lord

Met my wife at the same time I met new audience members for our pain

We passed each other cigarettes and watched cops win

A city gone uniquely linear

Harlem of the West due a true universe

“I will always remember you in fancy clothes,” my wife said

so here I sit… twisting in silk ideation

My rifle made of tar

My targets made of an honest language

This San Francisco poetry is how God knows that it is me whining

Writing among the lesser-respected wolves

Lesser-observed militarization

Dixie-less prison bookkeeping/I mean the California gray-coats are coming

lynch mob gossip and bourgeois debt collection

I mean, it’s tempting to change professions mid-poem

in a Chicago briefing, a white sergeant saying, “blank slate for all of us after this Black organizer is dead.”

standard academics toasting two-buck wine at the tank parade

bay of nothing, Lord

nuclear cobblestones, gunline athleticism

and the last of the inherited asthma

children given white dolls to play with and fear

facial expressions borrowed from rich people’s shoe strings

I can hear hate

And teach hate

And call tools by people names

And name people dead to themselves

no one getting naturalized except federal agents soon

carving the equator into throats soon

I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord

pre-dawn monarchy

friends putting up politician posters then snorting the remainder of the paste

minstrel scripts shoveled into the walls by their elders

my children sharpening quarters on the city’s edge

For these audiences

I project myself into a ghost like state

For these gangsters, I do the same

every now and then, we take a nervous look east

Sleep becomes Christ

Sleep starts growing a racial identity

do you ever spiral, Lord?

has the gang-age betrayed us?

be patient with my poems, Lord

So much pain

there is a point to crime…

There has to be if race traitors come with it

Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?

Better presidents than these have yawned at cages

Have called us holy slaves

Filled the school libraries with cop documentaries

Baby, I don’t have money for food

I have no present moment at all

I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money

I go to the railroad tracks

And follow them to the station of my enemies

A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative

All over the united states, there are

Toddlers in the rock

I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket

And why blood agreements mean a lot

And why I get shot back at

I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway

White skin tattooed on my right forearm

Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed

into a rat-infested manhood

My new existence as living graffiti

In the kitchen with

a lot of gun cylinders to hack up

House of God in part

No cops in part

My body brings down the Christmas

The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets

Pray over the 28th hour’s next beauty mark

Extrajudicial confederate statue restoration

the waist band before the next protest poster

By the way,

Time is not an illusion, your honor

I will return in a few whirlwinds

I will save your desk for last

You are witty, your honor

You’re moving money again, your honor

It is only raining one thing: non-white cops

And prison guard shadows

Reminding me of

Spoiled milk floating on an oil spill

A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over its demise

A new lake for a Black Panther Party

Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulders

Pharmacy doors mid-slide

The figment of village

a noon noose to a new white preacher

Wiretaps in the discount kitchen tile

-All in an abstract painting of a president

Bought slavers some time, didn’t it?

The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars

A cold-blooded study in leg irons

Leg irons in tornado shelters

Leg irons inside your body

Proof that some white people have actually fondled nooses

That sundown couples

made their vows of love over

opaque peach plastic

and bolt action audiences

Man, the Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science

Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists

My arm changes imperialisms

Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies

Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums

Artless bleeding and

the challenge of watching civilians think

“terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy…beg for settler polity”

“I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids’ heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests.”

Modern fans of war

What with their t-shirt poems

And t-shirt guilt

And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus,

I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life

The Chicago Prairie Fire

First, I must apologize to the souls of the house

I am wearing the cheek bones of the mask only

Pill bottle, my name is yours

Name tagged on the side of a factory of wrists

Teeth of the mask now

Back of the head of the mask now

New phase of anti-anthropomorphism fending for real faces

Stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family

I am not creative

Just the silliest of the revolutionaries

My blood drying on

my only jacket

just as God got playful

the police state’s psychic middlemen

Evangelizing for the creation of an un-masses

An un-Medgar

Blood of a lamb less racialized

or awesome prison sentence

Good God

Elder-abuse hired for the low

dog eat genius

Right angle made between a point

On a Louisiana plantation

And 5-year old’s rubber ball

3 feet high and falling

like a deportee plane

to complete my interpretation

(of garden variety genocide)

I am small talk

about loving your enemies

A little more realistically

About paper tigers

And also gold…

I need my left hand back

I broke my neck on the piano keys

Found paradise in a fistfight

Maybe I should check into the Cuba line

Watching the universe’s last metronomes

some call Black Jacobins

Just wait…

These religions will start resigning in a decade or two

Some colorfully

Some transactional-ly

In a cotton gothic society

Class betrayal gone glassless/ I mean ironically/ my window started fogging over too

Wondering which Haiti will get me through this winter

Which poem houses souls

Which socialist breakthroughs

Breakthroughs like ten steps back

Then finally stillness

Stillness

Then stillness among families

a John Brown biography takes a bow

I’m up next to introduce Prosser to Monk

I remember childhood

Remember the word “Childhood” being a beginning

Scribbling on an amazing grace

I rented this body from some circumference of slavery

Remember being kicked out of the Midwest

Strange fruit theater

Lithium and circuses

Likeminded stomachs

The ruling class blessing their blank checks with levy foam…

with opioid tea

Sentient dollar bills yelling to each other pocket to pocket

Cello stands in the precinct for accompanying counterrevolutionaries

My mother raised me with a simple pain

A poet loses his mind, you know, like the room has weather

Or first-girlfriend gravity

Police-knock gravity

Mind-game gravity

Or revolution languishing behind

The sugar in my good friend’s mind

“The difference between me and you

Is that the madness

Wants me forever”

A pair of apartments

Defining both my family

And political composure

Books behind my back

Bail money paved into the streets

Playing:

Euphoria

Cliché

Bracing for the medicine’s recoil

Sharing a dirty deli sandwich with my friends

Black Jacobins

Underground topography

Or grandmother’s hands

Psychology of the mask now

Teeth of the mask again

—

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already was nominated for a California Book Award.

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k-racer · 5 years ago

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A Formula 1 Fantasy Universe using GPM2 2019 Mod: Intro, entry list, and race calendar

Hello there, after a long break from posting stuff on here.

This is going to be a randomized let’s play of Grand Prix Manager 2, using the recently released 2019 mod as a foundation, but with three expansion teams joining in so that we have a full 26 car entry list. I will be taking control as one of the expansion teams, so enjoy the ride!

The 2019 Entry List

Here’s what the lineups look like for all 13 teams after conducting a Draft Lottery and a snake format Fantasy Draft based off the lottery results complete with a preview of what I think the team’s fortunes are. Remember, in F1 each team can only have two race drivers at a time, and a backup reserve driver is highly recommended and actually required by the game itself. That’s the main reason why each team must have three drivers signed before the start of the season!

Mercedes

14 Fernando Alonso

63 George Russell

T 24 Lucas di Grassi

Will Fernando Alonso finally gets his elusive third Driver’s title? With the best overall car on paper, this is his best and probably final chance that he gets to do just that! On the other side of the garage is George Russell, who will make his F1 debut under massive pressures to perform straight away. George already has proven everything in the junior categories, winning titles in every single category of the ladder, F4, F3 and F2. This has the potential to be awesome like their recent successes over the last five years or maybe it would turn into a nightmare like when Alonso had to partner Hamilton in 2007?

Ferrari

27 Nico Hulkenberg

99 Antonio Giovanizzi

R 28 Brendon Hartley

The Number 27 is officially back on a Ferrari! With Ferrari signing Nico Hulkenberg, they have just gotten a driver that was looking for a top tier ride all of this time, and he finally got his wish. He will perform with a chip on his shoulder and maybe take the Tifosi by the neck and push them to work harder than ever to get that elusive team’s title back to Italy. The biggest question mark regarding the Scuderia is the #2 slot with Antonio Giovanizzi, who only has two f1 starts to his name with Sauber as an injury replacement, but he had to struggle with an inferior car, maybe being in an elite team will help him?

Red Bull-Aston Martin

33 Max Verstappen

25 Jean Eric Vergne

T 37 Nick Cassidy

Max Verstappen was going to stay put as soon as it was announced that Red Bull Racing would get the first pick in the lottery. Now, the bigger question, can Max become the second Red Bull driver to win the Driver’s title? His chances are decent but the biggest question mark is the new in-house built Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR1 engine. If it’s reliable, expect them to be contenders for the team’s title, especially if Jean Eric Vergne relishes his second chance in Formula 1, fresh after winning the Formula E Championship. If not, Nick Cassidy, the team’s new tester will have a stab at things sooner than later.

Renault

3 Daniel Riccardo

77 Valtteri Bottas

T 6 Artem Markelov

Mr. Smiley has a new home! After being treated harshly at red bull racing last year, he decided to exit the program altogether and joined a factory team in desperate need of a savior. In addition, Valtteri Bottas, a perfect #2 driver during his time at Mercedes AMG before being let go over the lack of one-lap qualifying pace relative to Hamilton joins the Enstone-based team looking to crack into the big three conversation once again. What does this mean for Artem Markelov, who was looking to crack into F1 after finishing 2nd in F2 during the 2017 season? He will be a hot prospect going forward, that’s for sure.

Haas-Ferrari

11 Sergio Perez

88 Robert Kubica

T 50 Josef Newgarden

Money is starting to be a problem over at Haas especially if the rumors that Rich Energy is a faker happens to be true. In the meantime, they have Sergio Perez’s Carlos Slim backing of companies providing a more stable back-up package if the Rich Energy deal happens to be blocked by a court. On the other side, is an amazing comeback story, Robert Kubica, who almost lost his life before the 2011 F1 season, is officially back in a F1 race seat. There’s no question that his qualifying pace is still great, but how can his race pace be especially considering his physical limitations post-rally crash?

Racing Point-BWT

31 Esteban Ocon

94 Pascal Wehrlein

T 34 Nyck de Vries

Racing Point is now officially a full-fledged constructor now. They still have a customer Mercedes Benz Engine but it’s rebadged as BWT. As for their drivers, they kept Esteban Ocon, a promising talent that is looking for a promotion to Mercedes AMG, when and if Fernando Alonso calls it quits. Pascal Wehrlein, who is back into a F1 race seat after a year’s worth of testing work with Ferrari is the other driver. Nyck de Vries is the team’s reserve driver, after getting his F1 super license thanks in part of his stellar F2 finish last year.

McLaren-Cosworth

44 Lewis Hamilton

20 Kevin Magnussen

T 40 Paul Di Resta

Just as Lewis Hamilton was looking like he could potentially get his 6th drivers title, the FIA has decided to conduct a sport-wide fantasy draft in an effort to stop his domination. Despite this, Lewis Hamilton has returned back to McLaren, after Zak Brown selected him 3rd overall in the draft. With McLaren rebuilding after years of devastating management calls since Lewis left before the 2013 season, the hope is that he turns them back into title winners. His teammate would be Kevin Magnussen, who is also returning to the team for a second stint. Hopefully, the in-house built Cosworth engine is up for the task.

Alfa Romeo

5 Sebastian Vettel

13 Pastor Maldonado

T 36 Luca Ghiotto

The newly renamed Alfa Romeo F1 team, who is now building their own engines, has managed to steal an elite level qualifying talent to spearhead their rebirth since flopping big time during the ground effect era of the early 80’s. Sebastian Vettel who failed Ferrari thanks to the massive pressures of driving for the Tifosi, has returned back to the team that gave him his F1 debut in 2007. However, in a highly debatable move, the Alfa Romeo Management decided to give the second seat to an interesting driver, Pastor Maldonado, who was out of F1 since the end of 2015 has somehow got more money to spare!

Toro Rosso-Honda

10 Pierre Gasly

23 Alexander Albon

T 53 Alexander Rossi

Entering year two of the Honda engine partnership, Toro Rosso are hoping to build on a modest start by improving driver talent across the board. Pierre Gasly stays put which is a good thing for research and development work. Alexander Albon, a relatively late addition to the draft, was selected as the team’s second driver after initially was hoping to crack into Formula E instead. As for the test driver, that role falls on a resurgent Alexander Rossi, after spending the last three years back in the United States honing on his race craft in the IndyCar championship.

Williams-Mercedes

7 Kimi Raikkonen

4 Lando Norris

T 21 Esteban Guiterrez

Things couldn’t get much worse for Claire Williams, right? After going for the extra money in 2018, which backfired them in the worst possible way. They are now going in the opposite direction, going for experience and proven quantities that can help set up and develop a car that desperately needs it. Kimi Raikkonen, an elite racing talent still at this point of his career despite losing some outright one-lap pace over the last few seasons, signs on a one-year prove it deal. For the other seat, they are going with Rookie Lando Norris the 2nd place finisher in F2 last year, who has star level qualities already.

Panthera-Honda (User Controlled by Myself)

16 Charles Leclerc

18 Lance Stroll

T 70 Naoki Yamamoto

Now for the brand-new teams that will enter Formula 1 in 2019. First up, Panthera Team Asia, who will use Customer Honda Engines. It also helps that this expansion team got the 2nd overall pick in the draft and snatched Charles Leclerc away from Alfa Romeo. He can lead this team far if given a solid baseline to begin with. The bigger issue is at the #2 seat, with Lance Stroll, now being separated from his rich dad for the first time in his racing career, after Lawrence decided to run the Racing Point team. How well can he respond to this separation? At worst, Naoki Yamamoto is a quality driver that should get some looks.

SMP-Renault

26 Daniil Kvyat

2 Stoffel Vandoorne

T 35 Sergey Sirotkin

The second of the three Brand-new teams, SMP Racing has decided to go with two drivers looking for fresh starts to their F1 careers after fizzing out with their previous teams. Daniil Kyvat, who bombed out with Red Bull and refined his career with a simulator job at Ferrari the previous year, has a new lease at life with SMP racing. The other seat will be taken by Stoffel Vandoorne, who failed to produce alongside Fernando Alonso at McLaren over the last couple years, but he should be better in a lower-pressure environment. Sergey Sirotkin, the team’s reserve, pays the bills for the Renault engines if anything.

Campos-Porsche

55 Carlos Sainz Jr.

8 Romain Grosjean

T 9 Marcus Ericsson

The last of the three Brand-New teams, Campos Racing has managed to convince Porsche to return to Formula 1 as an engine supplier only. As for their drivers entering 2019, they managed to draft Carlos Sainz Jr. with the 4th pick in the draft, and he will spearhead the charge for this young team that is looking for a role model to rally around. As for the other race driver, they are counting on Romain Grosjean to be less of a crasher in the races and more helpful with feedback during the practice sessions. If that doesn’t happen, Marcus Ericsson, a useful veteran is always welcome to try.

The 2019 Race Calendar

1 Albert Park: Melbourne, Australia

2 Bahrain International Circuit: Sakhir, Bahrain

3 Circuit de Catalunya: Barcelona, Spain

4 Monte Carlo Street Circuit: Monte Carlo, Monaco

5 Circuit Gilles Villeneuve: Montreal, Canada

6 Silverstone Circuit: Silverstone, Great Britain

7 Nurburgring: Nurburg, Germany

8 Hungaroring: Budapest, Hungary

9 Spa-Franchorchamps: Spa, Belgium

10 Monza Circuit: Monza, Italy

11 Marina Bay Street Circuit: Singapore

12 Suzuka Circuit: Suzuka, Japan

13 Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez: Mexico City, Mexico

14 Circuit of the Americas: Austin, United States

15 Interlagos Circuit: Sao Paulo, Brazil

16 Yas Marina Circuit: Abu Dhabi, UAE

The First round will be posted shortly, stay tuned!

#formula 1 #f1 #onlyinagame #alternate universe #grand prix manager 2 #letsplay

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years ago

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Sun Myung Moon was found guilty of US tax fraud and sent to Danbury prison in 1984

Guilty Father: Moon did not pay his taxes

TIME May 31, 1982

Soon after Sun Myung Moon opened an account at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1973, the Korean evangelist came by to make a deposit accompanied by two women carrying large purses stuffed with an assortment of bills. It took clerks an hour to count the currency, which totaled $100,000. A Chase banker recalled the women saying that the money came from street sales of flowers by members of Moon’s Unification Church. The Moonies, who refer to their leader as “Father,” and who regard him as a manifestation of God, were zealous collectors of funds, and deposits to his Chase accounts were frequent—perhaps too frequent. In a New York City federal court last week, a jury of ten women and two men decided, after four days of deliberation, that Moon was guilty of conspiring to avoid taxes on $162,000 in personal income for the years 1973 through 1975. He faces up to 14 years in prison, $25,000 in fines and a possible deportation hearing by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Moon, 62, was convicted of failing to report as personal income $112,000 of interest on $1.6 million in his Chase accounts, as well as $50,000 worth of stock in Tong Il Enterprises, a profit-making import company that Moon controlled. Convicted with him was his top financial aide, Takeru Kamiyama, 40, who was charged with helping the evangelist prepare false tax returns to conceal the income, attempting to block the subsequent Government investigation by submitting phony backdated documents, and lying to a grand jury.

Throughout the trial, which lasted more than six weeks, the evangelist’s attorney, Charles Stillman, insisted that the cash and stocks, although held by Moon, actually belonged to his Unification Church and were therefore not subject to taxation.

One key witness for the prosecution was Michael Warder, 35, a former church executive who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He testified that on several occasions Kamiyama had turned down his requests to use funds from the Chase accounts for church purposes with the explanation that the bank deposits were “Father’s money . . . not accessible.”

Moon accepted the verdict impassively, but officials of his church denounced the judgment as “unjustified persecution.” The evangelist’s attorneys plan to appeal the conviction.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100323055426/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,925417,00.html

________________________________________

Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharias:

“Clearly Moon was convicted of evading taxes on $112,000 in personal income derived from interest on $1.6 million he had deposited for the church. He also received another $50,000 in unreported stocks for the taxable years 1973–1976.

Rev. Moon’s accountant, Takeru Kamiyama, was sentenced for conspiracy to file false tax returns, lying before a grand jury, and obstructing justice.

In contrast to Moon’s claim that it was the church’s funds, the testimony showed he personally purchased $1,500 gold watches, stock, and paid tuition for his children’s education from the accounts.

Rev. Moon was not persecuted by the IRS: he and his accountant evaded personal taxes and lied to the grand jury, which places them under the same laws as any other American citizen. It is noteworthy that Moon could have received a fourteen-year sentence, so his eighteen-month sentence shows the mercy of the jurors, not persecution.”

from “Kingdom of the Cults,” Chapter 12: The Unification Church

________________________________________

Nansook Hong: “The [tax] trial began on April 1, 1982. …

Father [Sun Myung Moon] demonstrated contempt for civil law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers…

There was no question inside the church that the Reverend Moon used his religious tax exemption as a tool for financial gain in the business world. … No matter what the lawyers said in court, no one internally disputed that the Reverend Moon commingled church and business funds. No one had any problem with it. How often had I heard church advisers discuss funneling church funds into his business enterprises and political causes because his religious, business, and political goals are the same: world dominance for the Unification Church. It was U.S. tax laws that were wrong, not Sun Myung Moon. Man’s law was secondary to the Messiah’s mission.”

from “In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family”

________________________________________

Moon is sentenced to 18-month term

By Arnold H. Lubasch

New York Times July 17, 1982

... Mr. Moon, who would be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the sentence, was also fined the maximum of $25,000 plus the costs of prosecution. And he could face deportation proceedings.

The maximum sentence for Mr. Moon could have been five years for conspiracy and three years on each of three tax charges involved in his failure to report $150,000 in income from bank accounts and securities.

“I have treated him as I would treat anyone else,” Judge Goettel said. He also expressed his “sincere belief that the jury treated the case that way.

”The judge imposed a six-month sentence and a $5,000 fine on a codefendant, Takeru Kamiyama, one of Mr. Moon’s top aides. Mr. Kamiyama was convicted of the conspiracy charge, of assisting in the tax fraud and of lying to the grand jury. ...

Jo Ann Harris and Martin Flumenbaum, the chief prosecutors, urged the judge to treat Mr. Moon the same as “any high-ranking business executive” convicted of having used his organization to avoid personal income taxes.

In the crowded courtroom, filled with somber supporters of Mr. Moon, Judge Goettel declared that “general deterrence” called for a prison term. He said it would be unfair to free someone who could afford top lawyers when “poor people who get caught” go to jail for relatively minor crimes.

If Mr. Moon received a suspended sentence, the judge went on, millions of people would believe that “the rich and the powerful go free.”

Judge Goettel said he had received “several thousand letters” in Mr. Moon’s behalf, some from scientists, political leaders and officials of other churches expressing “fear that freedom of religion was being threatened.”

Judge Discounts Fears

“I think these fears are totally unwarranted in this case,” he continued, saying the letters indicated a misunderstanding of the issues. He added, “It is the crime that dictates the sentence more than anything else.”

The case was not limited to tax-fraud charges involving the failure to report income from bank accounts and securities, Judge Goettel said. He stressed that Mr. Moon had also been convicted of a conspiracy involving false documents, perjured testimony and obstruction of justice.

If the failure to report the income had been the only charge, a suspended sentence could be appropriate for Mr. Moon under the circumstances, the judge said. He suggested that the “the cover-up scheme” was more serious than the original offense.

Full story: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/17/nyregion/moon-is-sentenced-to-18-month-term.html

________________________________________

Newsweek August 6, 1984

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 64, checked into his residence for the next 18 months – the federal prison in Danbury, Conn. – to find that he not only had 50 room mates but a new job as well. The convicted tax evader and leader of the Unification Church (which claims more than 2 million followers worldwide) was bunked in the facility’s low-security “camp” area and promptly assigned to KP duty. “He’s doing menial kitchen work, like loading dishwashers, mopping floors and washing tables,” says warden Dennis Luther, who explained that the new inmate’s employment options were limited because he doesn’t speak English. “I’m not worried about conversions,” added the warden. “We don’t allow inmates to be coerced into anything by anybody, whether they’re Protestant, Catholic or whatever.”

________________________________________

New York Times July 5, 1985

Sun Myung Moon’s scheduled full release from Federal custody is August 20.

On July 4, Mr. Moon reported to Phoenix House, a halfway house in Brooklyn involved in treating drug abuse, where he is to spend nights, except for possible single-night and weekend passes, for the next 46 days as a condition of his release. During the day, Mr. Moon, who is 65 years old, will be free to resume his church duties. ...

Mose Durst said, “We feel liberated from the burden of the unjust imprisonment of an innocent man of God. We are sorrowful because our nation, which we love and honor and who celebrates her 209th anniversary this very day, still finds it so difficult to put her most profound ideals into practice.”

Full story: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/05/nyregion/moon-released-after-11-months-in-a-us-prison.html

________________________________________

When we heard how Father [Sun Myung Moon] was keeping church money in his name, the USA Headquarters warned him that in the USA the government often used the tax laws to imprison enemies that hadn’t broken any other laws. USA Headquarters advised Father not to put the money in his name, and explained the safe and proper way to bank the funds.

Father asked if what he was doing was illegal. The answer was: No, it’s not illegal, but can be twisted by the government to persecute Father and the church. Father decided to keep the money in his name.

USA Headquarters hired accounting consultants to advise the church about how to handle the funds. They told Father the same thing as our Headquarters staff had. Father’s response was the same, is it illegal. The answer was the same, “No, but…” Father decided to keep the money in his name.

At the time I didn’t know about this, so when I was asked to do Father’s taxes, I told him that he needed to have it done professionally, because in the USA, tax laws are used to put people in prison when there was no other way to imprison people. The answer came back, via David Kim, that it cost too much to do it professionally. (At the time I thought that the cost was for the accountant. Later I realized that it was to save about $5,000 dollars in taxes.) I still wouldn’t do it, so Joe Tully was recruited.

My opinion is that David Kim was advising Father and that Father was taking his advice. At the time David Kim was Father’s chief advisor in the USA. After David Kim’s advice proved faulty he was put out to pasture doing minor missions and finally sent to UTS.

My experience has been that Father trusted early followers who had proven their loyalty more than younger members, especially when the older members were Korean.

I believe that Father was afraid that the money would somehow be stolen by someone if it was in the name of the Church rather than his name. This has happened in Korea.

________________________________________

Takeru Kamiyama was also jailed for his part in the crime.

At one point Kamiyama got in trouble with Moon and was exiled to Japan to lecture Divine Principle. … Kamiyama got getting dangerously close to full insurrection by pushing his version of DP – “Our Course” onto all his department staff.

Next, he was exiled to Pantanal and I’m sure that wasn’t a walk in the park, either. I suspect Kamiyama has been raked over the coals. Interestingly, he is featured in that piece on Pantanal on the Catholic site, “The Tablet” December 16, 2000:

“They gave me an aerial photo of the place, without my asking, and showed me their accounts, again without my asking. The relevance of this is that the Moonies have been accused of money laundering, drug-trafficking and arms-trading. Such allegations may be a hysterical over-reaction. On the other hand, what on earth are the Moonies doing with huge tracts of land in the middle of nowhere?

All the money for this project comes from voluntary donations, said Takeru Kamiyama, who is in charge of Puerto Leda, and he showed me the list of offerings for that year, mostly in the range of $5,000 dollars and some more than $50,000 dollars. The total came to more than $1 million. Will it be enough for what he wants to do here? When I need more I can ask for more; that is not a problem. He told me it all came from Japanese Moonie missionaries or church leaders. That’s strange, I said, how do missionaries come to earn so much money to donate in a single year to a single project? He said they asked their wives and children to contribute, and some had businesses, and of course they all had their salaries. So the church pays them salaries, which they pay back in the form of donations, he said.

The land at Puerto Leda amounts to 80,000 hectares, but of course the aerial photo only showed the immediate vicinity of the river, where the Moonies (13 Japanese, only one of whom spoke Spanish) were now constructing a living base…

… From the outside balcony, my hosts pointed out some crocodiles swimming in the river, black dots from where we were. It was all very impressive, this taming of the wilderness, and the Moonies were beginning to relax. I understand that Reverend Moon has been imprisoned in the United States, I ventured. He knows all about that, said Mr Sano of his colleague, Mr Kamiyama. He was in prison with him.

How interesting, I said. You must be very close to Reverend Moon. Were you his only colleague to be imprisoned with him? Yes, he said, and before I came here I was president of the Church in Japan.

I was impressed. You are obviously a very important person in the movement, I said. (Later a Moonie pastor from Guyana confirmed to me that Mr Kamiyama was one of the most senior Church members in the world, but now taking a much more humble position. …)

I asked many questions about that fascinating moment in the Reverend Moon’s history. It was one of six imprisonments, they told me, in various countries, and the excuse for this pure political persecution, they told me, had been that Mr Kamiyama had brought $2 million into the United States and opened an account in the name of Reverend Moon. I should have put in the name of the Church. It was a small mistake, he said. As a result Reverend Moon was accused of evading $7,000 in taxes. Mr Kamiyama confided: I don’t like politicians. They are very complicated. They change their minds very quickly.”

I heard about that directly from Tom Boutte, the USA UC controller, who was privy to the affair. He told me that Kamiyama rejected Neil Salonen’s advice to open the account in the church’s name to avoid legal problems later. Kamiyama insisted Japanese members would be happier sending money “to Father”. Boutte said in his view, Kamiyama had no respect for American law and custom, and that’s why Moon ended up in Danbury prison. I believe it. And I further believe Moon knew it, too. He was mighty pissed off with Kamiyama.

________________________________________

Frederick Sontag from “Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church” (1977)

“As this book went to the publisher, these fears were confirmed by the arrest of the church’s leaders in Korea on charges of income-tax evasion.” (page 199)

________________________________________

Guilty Moon. Law firm was paid $100,000 up front and $50,000 a month to obtain a presidential pardon for Moon. It failed.

Sun Myung Moon was scammed several times in Korea in the 1950s and 60s

The Korean Government raided the Il-hwa Ginseng Company for tax evasion in February, 1977

Where did Moon get all that money from?

Moon extracted $500 million from Japanese female members

A huge FFWPU scam in Japan is revealed

FFWPU / UC of Japan used members for profit, not religious purposes

$80 million: 4,200 female Japanese followers allegedly deposited as much as $25,000 each in the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Uruguay.

400 Japanese men and women were flown to the US. “Each person took, I think, about $2,000,” Soejima said.

I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills to smuggle into the US

#Sun Myung Moon #tax evasion #guilty #jail #Takeru Kamiyama #Danbury #untraceable cash #Unification Church #FFWPU #messiah

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laurasfox-originals · 5 years ago

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Every Dawn With You (Fist To The Heart Side Story, Patreon Exclusive) by Laura S. Fox

This is an excerpt taken from the side story I wrote for Fist to the Heart. It is about how Douglas met Martin and the circumstances that brought them together as secret lovers.

Start of excerpt

Every Dawn With You

The woman was moving on top of him, in rhythmic, relentless moves. Douglas squeezed his eyes shut.

“Hey, look at me,” the woman said and caught his chin.

He obeyed without a word. She smiled, but there was something crooked in how she did that. With firm hands, she dragged his to her hips. The gossamer material slid under his fingers, giving him a small shiver.

As hard as he tried, there was barely half an erection what he could manage. Without a doubt, she had to be disappointed, and she wasn’t the only one. Douglas looked away from her beautiful face. She was aesthetically pleasing, without a doubt, but her beauty and famous sex appeal did nothing for him.

It wasn’t her fault. Douglas let his eyes slid away from her, and through the half-opened door, he caught a glimpse of pale buttocks moving to and fro, sinking between two slender legs. In that den of iniquity, there was no shame in taking voyeuristic pleasure. The man moving on top of the unseen woman had strong, muscular thighs, and Douglas watched in fascination as he fucked.

“Hmm, finally,” his female partner murmured.

His cock was finally hard; that must have been what she meant by that. Douglas pressed his fingers into her hips, his eyes drawn to the man in the other room, to the way his muscles flexed as his moves became frantic, shorter. Finally, his buttocks pulled themselves tight, and Douglas came almost at the same time with him.

His partner moved away, pulling her gown around her slender body. With studied gestures, she picked a long cigarette from her purse and lit it. She watched him through the curtain of smoke as she blew it toward him. Her eyes were inquisitive. “Many consider me a sort of prize.”

Douglas pushed his spent cock inside his pants and stood up from the chair. “For all the right reasons,” he offered courteously. “You are extremely beautiful, Odette.”

She smirked. “Such a gentleman. You paid a lot of money for this.” She gestured vaguely as if he had suddenly decided to buy the place.

“Thank you,” Douglas said.

Odette let out a short, strange laugh. “You’re welcome. Although I have no clear idea of what you could be thankful for. Clearly, you weren’t here while we went at it.”

“I must apologize.” Douglas straightened up his tie and patted his pockets for no reason. “A lot has been going on lately.”

“Rumor has it that you inherited a fortune. Was it a shock – your parents passing away?”

Yes, at twenty-seven, he was the sole heir to what could be considered a sizable fortune.

“My mother died fifteen years ago. My father’s death wasn’t that much of a shock, in the sense that he had been ill for a long time.”

“Still, you lost your father,” Odette pointed out.

“We weren’t close,” Douglas said, and, to his ears, that sounded like an apology.

Odette shrugged. “I haven’t seen my folks in years, and it’s not like I miss them. It is what it is, right?”

Douglas nodded shortly. An unpleasant sensation of suffocation was creeping in; he wanted to be out of there.

“You know, Douglas, I double as a confidante rather well.”

“That’s good, I suppose.”

“I’m not just saying it.” Odette blew more bluish smoke, making it dance toward the ceiling. “I can keep a secret.”

“I don’t have secrets,” Douglas said and put one hand into his pocket. There was a small lighter there, and he remembered he wanted to offer it as a gift for her. He took it out. “I heard a lot about what a chain smoker you are.”

Odette took the offered lighter and watched it carefully. “Exquisite craftsmanship.”

“It’s supposed to be unique. I can’t truly vouch for that.”

She caressed the golden surface and the intricate lines making a lion’s head. “It’s beautiful. I’ll keep it.”

Douglas offered her a polite smile. “I should be on my way.”

“For the price you paid, you could sleep here,” Odette said.

Douglas threw a short look toward the half-opened door to the other room. The man must have left already, and there was no sign of the woman, either. “It’s pretty animated here, isn’t it?”

“We could just close the door. Although,” Odette said as she moved slowly toward him, “it would be a shame if we did that, right?”

Douglas stepped aside, retreating from her touch as if stung. “I really should go.”

Odette caught him by the arm. “To thy own self be true, Douglas. Consider it a piece of friendly advice.”

He didn’t reply this time. She caressed his arm in passing and kissed him on the cheek. Then she brought the cigarette to her lips and turned her back on him. Could it be that she had guessed, that one thing not even he was sure what it meant?

***

“It is rather peculiar to have so much money and no wife.”

Douglas linked his fingers together and crossed his legs. His lawyer was watching him across the desk. “Why so? Seeing how rich I am, I should enjoy my freedom.”

“Should. A strong word. People like to gossip a lot, Douglas,” Murray said, his eyes never leaving him. “That you spend quite a bit of money on loose, easy women.”

“It is my right to do so, and seeing how I am young, I believe I’m allowed a few indiscretions. By the way, when you say people, you do mean my relatives, don’t you?”

Murray smiled. “It’s not their business. But people in this family tend to consider me the go-to individual when something is not as they like.”

“I am taking care of everyone. Isn’t it enough?”

“They say they care about your reputation.”

“Reputation.” Douglas pursed his lips. “This family makes money by taking advantage of people’s vices. It’s hard to believe that I should be a pillar of society. My profligate lifestyle should be of no concern to them.”

Murray laughed. “Still. It’s just something your father liked to project. It appears to me that you are trying a bit too hard to prove otherwise.”

“I won’t marry just for the sake of stopping gossip among my relatives. As for the rest of the world, they could just all go to hell.”

“Hmm, why the repressed anger, Douglas?”

Why was everyone so interested in what he felt or thought these days?

“It doesn’t matter.” Murray waved like it indeed was nothing. “You’re in a position that allows you many things. Maybe you should act more on what your heart tells you. With your father gone, there is no one to stop you from doing so. I know he was a rigid man.”

“More like a pious bastard, once he realized he wouldn’t get well,” Douglas said with a thin smile.

“I trust you to take good care of business, Douglas. As for your relatives, I’ll just tell them what you want me to. After all, it is from your hand that they’re all eating.”

“You shouldn’t bother. I see that they don’t have the nerve to pester me directly. Why are they interested in learning whether I have intentions to marry or not?”

“They may suffer from the same affliction as your father: sudden piety.”

“Are they all dying?”

Murray laughed. “If only. No, they just want to find a wife for you, if what my research tells me is true. Someone they can manipulate and have working in their favor.”

“That will not happen in a million years,” Douglas replied. “Well, I have no intention to marry. Not now, and not in the foreseeable future, either.”

“It’s a good decision. If your relatives might not throw a gold digger at you, others might just throw themselves on their own accord. Your decision is wise.”

“You seem pleased with it,” Douglas noticed.

“Why should I not? I may be your lawyer, but I’m also your friend. You’re not the kind to marry.”

That was an odd thing to say. Douglas looked at Murray, trying to read something in his lawyer’s demeanor. There seemed to be nothing there to read, though.

***

It wasn’t a good place for someone of his station to be, but Douglas could not care less. His relatives aside, the veiled allusions made by Odette and his lawyer were bringing up hidden thoughts, thoughts he believed had to be buried forever.

Maybe Murray thought he was running wild, throwing money at women like Odette, hungry for a life free of restrictions. His relatives mostly thought he was spending money they would have instead spent in his stead.

And Odette … the source of the turmoil in his head right now was linked to those last words she had thrown at him.

To thy own self be true? Obviously, Odette was no ordinary working girl. To quote Hamlet couldn’t be part of her job description. She was not ordinary at all. Mostly, she could be considered an artist, a belly dancer, sometimes a performer, someone who, indeed, fascinated him, but not in a sexual way. It was true that many considered her a prize; not many could brag about having been let into her bed.

Technically, he hadn’t been there, either. She had just straddled him while he sat on a chair, and worked him, while he watched another man, and let his fantasies run free just for the sake of not making a complete fool of himself by not managing to ejaculate.

At first, he had considered his lack of attraction for women some strange fluke, just another shortcoming he needed to deal with. The realization that he was, in fact, quite a sexual creature, but only when under the most unnatural circumstances, had come as the sort of truth he didn’t want to think of.

Instinctively, he had withdrawn from it, afraid, deep down in his gut, that someone would notice or guess it. Odette might have realized it, with her shrewd intelligence, but she hadn’t said the words directly. Douglas wasn’t sure he wanted to hear that being said back to him.

It was a secret not to be handled at all, not with tentative hands, not even with a simple look. It needed to be buried and stay that way.

Then why was he here? Murray was right. There was repressed anger inside him, and he needed to work it out. His shortcomings, his flaws had to be worked out of him, driven out of him, cut with a scalpel if there was no other way.

***

A few men threw him curious looks as he found his way through the crowd. Even in the plainest clothes, he seemed to stick out like a sore thumb. The long corridor he entered was damp and smelled faintly of mildew. Without one ounce of hesitation, he knocked on a door.

“What do you want?” the man inside barked at him as he let himself in.

His hands were busy splitting some money, making tall towers and patting them with satisfaction.

“How would you like to make some extra cash?”

The man watched him and stopped caressing his stash. “Do you want me to arrange some fight for you?”

“I want to get into the ring,” Douglas said directly.

The man measured him up and down. “And arrange that you win.”

Douglas shook his head. “No.”

Now the man cocked his head and stared at him like he was a lunatic. “You look like a rich man. A bit too pretty to be in a place like this if you ask me.”

A smirk accompanied the last remark.

Douglas shrugged and took out the money he brought from his pocket. He threw it on the desk. Greedy hands reached for it and started counting.

“Well?” Douglas asked.

“I don’t think I have anyone that would be close to your size. We only work with big boys here.”

“That’s all right. The bigger, the better,” Douglas said.

The man rubbed one ear, grimaced, and seized the money between his thumb and his index, evaluating the thickness of the wad as if he hadn’t just counted it earlier. “You sure you want to get messed up? I could arrange something. You could walk out of here the winner.”

“I don’t want that. I want a clean fight.”

The man grinned. “Weird place to ask for something like that.”

“What? Are all your matches decided in advance?”

“No. We need some for show, too,” the man replied.

“So you do have fighters who don’t throw matches. Put me with one of them.”

The man scratched his head, made a move to count the money again, and then seemed decided. “All right. But this guy will send you to the floor fast. You’re a skinny bastard.”

Douglas grimaced, but it wasn’t his place to correct the man or his language.

“Are you sure you’re all right with picking your teeth from the floor? You might not look as handsome as you’re now after the guy wipes the floor with you.”

“I don’t particularly care about that.”

The man shrugged. “To each their own, I suppose. Swing by tomorrow night. This stays here,” he placed one fat hand over the cash Douglas had given him.

“Of course.”

He turned on his heels to leave.

“Can I give you some advice?” the man called at his retreating back.

Everybody was in the mood to give him that these days. He half-turned.

“Be a no show tomorrow. No one will know, and you’ll get to keep all your teeth.”

***

Many would have found it odd to learn about his ways of dealing with repressed anger, as Murray had put it. They might have said that it was too cold, too calculated. What sane man could schedule a fight so that he could get thrashed inside a ring hours in advance?

Anger was supposed to burn bright and fizzle fast. A brawl in a bar, a punch thrown to a wall. But Douglas was not that kind of man.

This was what he wanted, to be cold, to be calculated, and to be able to throw in a few punches before he would most probably be taken down and dragged away, maybe not in one piece. Then he would call himself a man, and he would see to the flukes of his character in the only way he knew how.

“You came,” the man from before welcomed him.

He nodded shortly. “I have my equipment here.” He tapped on the bag he wore on one shoulder.

“You don’t have something hidden in those gloves, do you?”

Douglas shook his head. “I want a clean fight.”

The man shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

***

Douglas stepped into the ring, ignoring the shouts. He blocked everything, sure that most of what the audience was yelling were aimed at him and not at all flattering. He was there for only one thing, which could be called retribution against his own self.

He jumped a few times up and down, warming up. From the opposite corner, a man stood up and walked toward him. Douglas took him in with unhidden interest. He was a tall man and had at least a few inches on him. His face was imperturbable, but his eyes were measuring Douglas in turn, too. If he was surprised in regards to his opponent, he didn’t show it.

Douglas felt a small surge of anger growing inside his chest. This man was everything he wasn’t; he was an embodiment of masculinity, with firm, large hands, a face cut in granite, and, above all, he carried himself with the poise of someone who knew he couldn’t be easily defeated.

He surely didn’t have troubles getting it up when in bed with a beautiful woman, Douglas thought, trying to fuel his anger with vulgarities. The referee made them come closer. Douglas stared into the man’s eyes and snarled, showing his teeth. That mountain of a man didn’t look impressed and, for once in his life, Douglas wanted to be taken seriously, as a man, not as someone who had to do others’ bidding.

They stepped back, and the referee whistled. Douglas went straight at the other, decided to make his intentions known. His opponent dodged swiftly and moved around, without hitting back.

Douglas set his jaw hard. Was this man trying to make a fool of him? He followed the other, determined to land at least one punch. For his size, the man was quick on his feet.

It wasn’t like Douglas was some novice. He had boxed for years, and he knew the sport in and out. It was true that except for some friendly sparring, he had never gone against an opponent.

Definitely, not one like that. Douglas shook his head, to push a few strands of rebellious hair away from his forehead. He examined his opponent again; his chest was marvelous, hard muscles everywhere, and Douglas almost lost his bearings for a moment.

That wasn’t the right moment to fantasize about a man’s body. He was there to get rid of those thoughts, to prove himself. His anger flared and went at the other again. To his surprise, the man tied him up and kept him close. Douglas could feel his hot breath on his cheek and saw himself as a ridiculous, a sorry excuse of a man, as his cock got hard right away.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the man said into his ear.

The referee broke them apart. Douglas frowned and watched the other. Good thing his shorts were large; the last thing he needed was to be humiliated in front of an audience. Could it be that his opponent had guessed what was going on with him?

It was hard to believe that. He waited this time; sooner or later, the other had to make a move on him, or else he would make sure to ask for his money back. He had paid for something else.

His opponent took him by surprise, aiming low. That wasn’t very orthodox. He should have gone for the face. But, in a way, it had been a clever call on his part, as Douglas sucked in a breath, as the man’s punch ended up straight into his ribs.

It was funny in a way to have survived a round against a man like that, as the referee sent them to their corners. Across the ring, Douglas watched the other with interest. He was handsome, in a stern, restrained way, and Douglas needed to stop thinking that. His face gave nothing away, as his steely eyes set on Douglas hard.

He felt slightly unnerved by that look. It was time to go back for another round. Maybe the match was thrown, regardless of his specific request. The only thing that mattered was probably when he would go down, and the stakes were high at that moment. Was it the second round? The third?

He would find out soon. This time, he tried a different tactic, pelting his opponents with punches from both sides. Maybe he was shorter and lighter on his feet, but that could be an advantage, too.

The man stepped back, maybe a little surprised at the attack. For just one moment, Douglas let himself dragged with the flow and paid for it. His opponent’s punch found the same bruised ribs and hit him again.

He doubled over and fell to his knees. The referee hurried to him, but he waved. He was fine, he was damned fine, and now he could feel like they finally got somewhere with this.

Next thing he knew, he was tied up again.

“Just give up,” the man said into his ear again, and, for a moment, Douglas thought his opponent’s lips had caressed his skin in passing.

He must have imagined it; his cock didn’t think the same, but all that testosterone had to be put to other uses. Sex had nothing to do with it; it was the necessity to prevail over the base longings of his body.

With rancor, he pushed the other back and tried hitting him again. The man’s impassible face was making him see red in front of his eyes. Soon, he would lose his footing and do something stupid, but until then, he was there, he was alive, and he would hit that man at least once.

The referee’s whistle sent them to their corners again. So, it would be during the third round, Douglas thought as he wiped his face with a towel. His chest was rising and falling fast, and, as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he needed the rest, clearly more than his opponent who seemed to barely break into a sweat.

Douglas knew he was out of his league. The most unpleasant part of it was what was going on with the lower part of his body. He was reacting to that man, in such a bad way, that for a moment, he thought if it weren’t better to throw in the towel.

The third round, the man pushed him into the ropes. He towered over him while Douglas made a great effort to guard his face, keeping his elbows close to the body, hoping to protect his bruised ribs, too. But, most of all, he tried not to breathe in the man’s scent, powerful and masculine, making him dizzy with desire, desire he could make no sense of, and didn’t want to understand, to begin with.

This time, his opponent said nothing, choosing to bruise his arms until the referee pulled him back.

For a moment, Douglas breathed. It was enough for the other to catch him with his guard down. This time, the blow to the chin made his head snap back, and he was soon in free falling.

He didn’t register the fall of his body or the impact he made with the floor. For a moment, maybe two, he blacked out. No, that couldn’t be it. He had much more to give and fight. He rolled on the floor, trying to get up, on one knee, at least.

The referee was counting, shouting on top of him. He saw a pair of boxing shoes stopping inches from his eyes. Despite the rules, his opponent must have come closer.

“Just stay down,” he heard a voice telling him, and he knew it had to be that man.

“And the winner is … Martin ‘The Butler’ Hoffman!”

Butler? Douglas would have laughed if that pounding in his head had stopped already. That man couldn’t be that. Butlers didn’t know to throw punches like that. What a funny thought.

End of excerpt

You can read the entire story on my Patreon.

#FIST TO THE HEART #mm romance #my original fiction #Patreon Exclusive #side story #douglas x martin

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back-and-totheleft · 5 years ago

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Natural Born Opponents

Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers has been linked to more violence than any other movie. But when John Grisham learned that a friend of his had become the latest victim of one such copycat killing, the best-selling novelist and lawyer decided to hold Stone accountable. [...]

Hollywood's dark tradition of inspiring reckless and criminal behavior includes one presidential-assassination attempt (John Hinckley's shooting of Ronald Reagan, linked to Taxi Driver), outbreaks of gang violence and/or murder (Colors, New Jack City, Menace II Society), and the murder and mutilation of a prostitute (The Silence of the Lambs). Two years after its theatrical release, though, Natural Born Killers remains in a class by itself, having been linked to more copycat killings than any film ever made. To its creator, the incidents merely confirm the film's vision of America as a society that glamorizes violence. But critics of Natural Born Killers observe that in the film, unlike in real life, violence occurs in a moral void. Mickey and Mallory, the hallucinogenic-drug-ingesting thrill riders portrayed by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, are not, in the end, forced to reckon with justice as, say, Bonnie and Clyde are. They grow world-famous as their murder toll climbs. Arrested by corrupt and pathological cops, they break out of prison like heroes and ride away happy as the closing credits crawl.

Indeed, the closest precedent for Natural Born Killers, in the gleefulness of its characters as they conduct violent acts, and the relative freedom they enjoy in the end, is A Clockwork Orange. Upon its release in 1971, critics wrote admiringly of its violence as a social statement. [...]

"What do I want from Stone?" Simpson says in his office near the Amite courtroom. "If he's found negligent, you're looking at $20 to $30 million."" [...]

The question I have as I re-emerge from the Byerses's trailer—appreciating for a moment the simple pleasure of walking—is this: Would Ben and Sarah have done what they're accused of doing without the influence of Natural Bom Killers?

Oliver Stone, of course, has his own answers. In a response to Grisham published in L.A. Weekly, the director declares that his accuser "is on the age-old hunt for witches to explain society's ills . . . ignoring Shakespeare, who reminds us that artists do not invent nature but merely hold it up to a mirror." Follow Grisham's logic, he suggests, and look where it leads. "Has your father been brutalized? Sue Oedipus and call Hamlet as a witness. Do you hate your mother? Blame Medea and Joan Crawford. Has your lawyer-husband been unfaithful? Slap a summons on Grisham since, after all, he wrote The Firm."

Grisham, observes Stone, says that both Sarah and Ben had had serious drug problems and received psychiatric treatment. If they watched Natural Bom Killers "at the crucial moment when the carefully twisted springs of their psyches finally uncoiled," the film is hardly to blame for that. Parents and schools are more accountable; so is television, with images of violence far more pervasive than those of one two-hour film. Even so, Stone writes, "an elementary principle of our civilization is that people are responsible for their own actions."

Two of the country's best-known First Amendment lawyers agree with Stone, and find Grisham's legal reasoning dubious at best. "I'm kind of surprised by Grisham," muses Martin Garbus, who has represented Andrei Sakharov and Peter Matthiessen. "We all believe words have some meaning . . . but product liability? That's silly. The whole point of product liability is that you have to show a causal effect. With breast implants—or with cigarettes . . . we've seen over the years how hard it is to prove causal effect. When you get into the area of what triggers a person's mind, you get into the realm of fairy tales. . . . When I was a kid, I was terrified by Fantasia and by Bambi, when the mother deer was killed. Those moments are etched in my mind. But I didn't go out and murder anyone because of it."

Even if such an effect could be shown, says Floyd Abrams, who has represented The New York Times since the Pentagon Papers, "the notion that because one crazed person reacts to a book or movie by doing something illegal the moviemaker or writer should be liable is at war with the First Amendment." So, says Abrams, is Grisham's whole notion of a film as a product. "[Grisham's] books, modest from a literary perspective, are not like breast implants. They are fully protected First Amendment speech, and the notion of judging them from some almost undefinable negligence standards is very troubling."

Oliver Stone, presented with Grisham's indictment, responds in turn from Los Angeles. "If Grisham were the author of delightful bedtime stories, I could perhaps understand his perspective on my work. However, given the fact that his work is all built around the committing of heinous crimes (murder, the rape of a young child, suicide), his attacks on me seem more than disingenuous. The fact is, Mr. Grisham has become a very rich man off a body of work which utilizes violent crime as a foundation for mass entertainment.

"For example, his book (soon to be a major motion picture) A Time to Kill has as its protagonist a man who murders with clear premeditation two young racists who raped his 10-year-old daughter (a rape which Mr. Grisham writes about in horrifyingly graphic detail). The man's lawyer wins his freedom for these murders of vengeance. Mr. Grisham invites his readers to cheer the man's release, although he is unequivocally guilty of murder.

"Thus, one may presume that, according to Mr. Grisham's logic, the next time a 'righteous' revenge murder takes place (or, for that matter, the rape of a child) he will be happy to assume liability if it can be shown that the offender had read or seen A Time to Kill."

Point to Mr. Stone, though it seems, to this moderator, that Grisham presents his violence within a moral order. His protagonist in A Time to Kill is found not guilty by reason of insanity, but only after a lengthy trial that shows all the checks and balances of the law at work. Natural Born Killers has no moral frame.

Stone, of course, disagrees.

"Natural Born Killers is an in-your-face satire of a moral order turned upside down," he declares. "It's a wake-up call to a schizophrenic country and culture which decries violence but just can't get enough of it. Viewers are bombarded day in and day out by tabloid trash shows, entertainment and news programs which convert tragedy into soap opera, replete with weepy musical sound tracks and reportage that drips with fake emotion. ... So much for the 'moral order' that Natural Bom Killers is accused of upsetting."

Stone's response is persuasive, and set against it, Grisham's argument pales. Establishing cause and effect between screen violence and real-life violence seems all but impossible to do in any clear, definable way; even if it were possible, allowing courts to draw lines between acceptable and unacceptable art would not only subvert the First Amendment but be a fine prescription for Fascism.

-Michael Schnayerson, "Natural Born Opponents," Vanity Fair, July 1996 [not available online]

#oliver stone #john grisham #Natural Born Killers #vanity fair #first amendment #violence in film

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nightcoremoon · 5 years ago

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call me jaded but I'm sick of liberals bitching about the gun debate. someone literally needs to get some assault rifles and shoot up a GOP rally, specifically targeting all the heads of the party, and take em all out. nonviolent peaceful protest hasn't worked, it isn't working, it won't work. the only solution to ensure public safety for the citizens of the united states is to kill all of the degenerate republicans who refuse to change anything. the rich white imperials must die for anything to change because otherwise they'll just keep cheating and lying and buying their way into more power and they will not stop until all that's left is just them and their sympathizers. they will kill every member of every minority before they lose power.

"but killing is wrong"

yes. I know. but if you had a gun to the head of a deranged man with his finger on a button that will kill 6 people, and you didn't stop him before he pressed that button, YOU are responsible for the deaths of those six people because YOU had the opportunity to save them but you didn't take it. if superman hadn't snapped zod's neck and zod had killed those people on the subway, superman would've been responsible for their deaths too. and this is the same way. every single shooting that happens is on the backs of those who did nothing but allow the politicians to let this continue to happen because the NRA is lining their pockets. so the more that we collectively let them live, the more children and black men die, the greater the responsibility on our shoulders, on those of us with the moral high ground. you have to commit a relative evil to stop an absolute evil. you have to kill a killer to stop him from killing, especially if the justice system IS that killer. and, guys, the justice system serves the state, not the people.

you fucking pastel commies disgust me through your inaction and fake idealism. you wanna seize the means of production so bad but all you do is make memes and cry about how the government is corrupt BUT YOU WON'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. believe me, if I had the financial and physical means, if I wasn't borderline impoverished and the victim of a degenerative muscular disease, I'd have long ago just said fuck it and planned my way through slaughtering trump and pence and ryan and all the rest of the cattle driving our country further into the ground. I'd willingly sacrifice my own life to secure a better future for those below me, and outlined a manifesto citing things like I did it because god said thou shalt not commit adultery or some other weird bullshit like that to keep the onus on the target. and if I could, I mean, who the fuck am I? just some rando on the internet. there's probably a hundred people out there just like me but they might be in better circumstances than me and they'd be willing to go through with that.

but they aren't.

so I guess it won't happen.

and innocent people will continue to get mowed down as time goes by and nothing changes.

they killed Lincoln. they killed JFK. they killed Martin Luther King. they killed Gandhi. they kill the people trying to make positive changes in the world. but who killed Reagan? who killed Hitler? who killed Stalin? old fucking age. they got to live long full healthy lives after killing millions, all because nobody had the balls to storm them and kill them before they had the chance to hit those numbers. so who will kill trump when he inevitably decides to go full gestapo and attempt genocide? nobody. no one will do a goddamn thing about it because they're too squeamish to kill for the greater good.

so you know what, fuck the sadness. fuck the anger. fuck the passive aggressive onion news articles. I refuse to care anymore. it's not my problem if it doesn't affect me directly. I'll care when someone steps the fuck up and takes care of business and kills the corrupt right wingers. but for now I'm done. no more gun bullshit. it's happened a hundred times in the past couple years and not a damn thing has changed. people here love saying that the right won't do anything different but the left and the center didn't do anything different either. evil people cannot be the only ones who aren't above killing because that makes the self labeled "good guys" a bunch of spineless hacks.

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dillydedalus · 5 years ago

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what i read in july

THAT’S MORE LIKE IT aka i’m finally out of the (relative) reading slump for good & my bro james joyce was there

men explain things to me, rebecca solnit the original mansplaining essay is great, and still scarily relevant; the others in this collection (most on feminist issues) are also quite good; some aspects are a bit dated & problematic so be aware of that. 2.5/5

erschlagt die armen!, shumona sinha (tr. from french, not available in english) short but very impactful novella about a young french woman, originally from india, who works as an interpreter in the asylum system and becomes more & more broken by this system of inhumane bureaucracy and suffering, until she snaps and hits a migrant over the head with a wine bottle. full of alienation and misery and beautiful but disturbing language - the title translates to ‘beat the poor to death’ so like. yeah. 3.5/5

fire & blood: a history of the targaryen family I, george r r martin look, it’s a 700-page-long fake history book about a fictional ruling dynasty in a fictional world, and i’m just That Obsessed & Desperate about asoiaf (and i don’t even care about the targs That Much). anyway, now i know more about the targs than any ruling family from, you know, real history, which is like, whatever. this is pretty enjoyable if you are That Obsessed, although i will say that some bits are much better than others (there are some dry dull years even in everyone’s fav overly dramatic dragon-riding incest-loving family) and the misogyny really is. a lot. too much. way too much. BUT i did really like Good Best Queen Alysanne (her husband king joe harris is alright too i guess) and i found my new westerosi otp, cregan stark/aly blackwood, who both have Big Dick Energy off the fucking charts. 3.5/5 (+0.5 points for cregan and aly’s combined BDE)

the old drift, namwali serpell hugely ambitious sprawling postcolonial nation-building novel about zambia, told thru three generations of three families, as well as a chorus of mosquitoes (consistently the best & smartest parts). there is A LOT going on, in terms of characters, of plot points, of references to history (the zambian space programme) and literature (finally my knowledge of heart of darkness paid off) and thematically, and honestly it was a bit too much, a bit too tangled & fragmented & drifty, and in the end i probably admire this book more than i liked it, but serpell’s writing is incredibly smart and funny and full of electrical sparks 3.5/5

a severed head, iris murdoch the original love dodecahedron (not that i counted). iris murdoch is fucking WILD and i love her for it. this is a strange darkly funny little farce about some rich well-educated londoners and their bizarre & rather convoluted love lives. not as grandiosely wild as the sea the sea, but fun nevertheless. 3/5

midnight in chernobyl, adam higginbotham jumping on the hype bandwagon caused by the hbo series (very weird to call the current fascination with chernobyl a hype bandwagon but you know). interesting & well-written & accessible (tho the science is still totally beyond me) & gets you to care about the people involved. lots of human failure, lots of human greatness, set against the background of the almost eldritch threat of radioactivity (look up the elephant foot & see if you don’t get chills), and acute radiation syndrome which is THE MOST TERRIFYING THING ON EARTH . 3.5/5

normal people, sally rooney honestly this is incredibly engrossing & absorbing once you get used to how rooney completely ignores ‘show don’t tell’ (it works!), i pretty much read the whole thing in one slow workday (boss makes a dollar, i make a dime so i read books on my phone on company time, also i genuinely had nothing to do). i also think rooney is really good at precisely capturing the ~millenial experience in a way that feels very true, especially the transition from school to uni. BUT i really disliked the ending, the book never engages with the political themes it introduces (esp. class and gender) as deeply as it could and the bdsm stuff never really gets TIED UP LOL. so overall idk: 3.5/5

störfall: nachrichten eines tages, christa wolf quiet reflective undramatic little book narrated by a woman waiting to hear about the outcome of her brother’s brain surgery on the day of the catastrophe at chernobyl - throughout the day she puts down her thoughts about her brother and the events unfolding at chernobyl, as well as the double uncertainty she is trying to cope with. really interesting to read such an immediate reaction to chernobyl (the book came out less than a year after chernobyl). 2.5/5

the man in the high castle, philip k dick it was fine? quick & entertaining alternative history where the axis powers win the war, some interesting bits of worldbuilding (like the draining of the mediterranean which was apparently a real idea in the early 20th century?) but overall it’s just felt a bit disjointed & unsatisfying to me. 2.5/5

fugitive pieces, anne michaels very poetic & thoughtful novel about the holocaust, grief, remembrance & the difference between history and memory, intergenerational trauma, love, geology and the weather. i’m not sure how much this comes together as a novel, but it is absolutely beautifully written (the author is a poet as well) and very affective. 3.5/5

american innovations, rivka galchen short collection of bizarre & often funny short stories about neurotic women whose furniture flies away, or who grow an extra breast, or who are maybe too occupied with financial details. very vague & very precise at once, which seems to be the thing with these sort of collections. 3/5

fool’s assassin (fitz & the fool #1), robin hobb YAASS i’m back in the realm of the elderlings!!! i thought this was one of the weaker installments in the series - i still enjoyed it a lot, and Feelings were had, but it just doesn’t quite fit together pacing-wise & some of the characterisation struck me as off (can i get some nuance for shun & lant please?) and tbh fitz is at peak Selfcentred Dumbass Levels & it drove me up the fucking wall. molly, nettle & bee deserve better. still, completely HYPE for the rest of the trilogy. 3.5/5

JAMES JOYCE JULY

note: i decided not to read dubliners bc it’s my least fav of joyce’s major works & too bleak & repetitive for my mood right now AND while i planned not to reread finnegans wake bc……. it’s finnegans wake…. i kinda do want to read it now (but i also. really don’t.) so idk yet.

a portrait of the artist as a young man, james joyce y’all. i read this book at least once a year between the ages of 15 and 19, it’s beyond formative, it is burnt into my brain, and reading it now several years later it is still everything, soaring and searing (that searing clarity of truth, thanks burgess) and poetic and dirty, and stephen is baby, and a pretentious self-important little prick and i love him & i am him (or was him as only a pretentious self-important teenage girl reading joyce can be him - because this truly is a book that should be read in your late teens when you feel everything as intensely and world-endingly and severely as my boy stephen does and every new experience feels like the world changing). anyway i love this book & i love stephen dedalus, bird-like, hawk-like, knife-blade, aloof, alienated, severe and stern, a poet-priest-prophet if he could ever get over himself, baby baby baby. 5/5

exiles, james joyce well. there’s a reason joyce is known as a novelist. this is….. a failed experiment, maybe. a fairly boring play about an adulterous love-square and uh… love beyond morality and possession maybe??? about how much it would suck for joyce to return to ireland??? and tbh it’s not terribly interesting. 2/5

travesties, tom stoppard a wild funny irreverent & smart antic comedy inspired by the fact that during ww1, james joyce, lenin, and dadaist tristan tzara were all in neutral zurich, more or less simultaneously; they probably never met, but in this play they do, as dadaist poetry, socialist art critique, and a james joyce high on his own genius & in desperate need of some cash while writing ulysses, AND the importance of being earnest (joyce is putting on a production of it) all collide in the memories of henry carr, who played algernon & later sued joyce over money (tru facts). not my fav stoppard (that’s arcadia) but it’s funny & fizzy & smart & combines many many things that i love. 4/5

ulysses, james joyce look i’m not really going to tell y’all anything new about ulysses, but it really has everything, it’s warm & human(e) & cerebral & difficult & funny & sad & healing & i always get a lot out of it even tho there’s bits (a lot of them) i’ll never wrap my head around. ultimate affirmation of humanity or whatever. also stephen dedalus is baby. 5/5

dedalus, chris mccabe the fact that this book (sequel to ulysses about what stephen dedalus might have done the next day) exists and was published ON MY BIRTHDAY is proof that the universe loves me.

anyway this is very very good, very very clever, extremely good at stephen (less good at bloom but his parts are still good), engages w/ ulysses, portrait & hamlet (& others) very cleverly & does some cool meta and experimental shit. y’all it has stephen talking to a contemporary therapist about how he’s stuck in joyce’s text which is all about joyce & very little about whoever stephen is when he’s not joyce’s alter ego/affectionate but slightly amused look at younger self and ithaca is an interview w/ the author about how his relationship to his dad influenced his response to ulysses and I’M INTO IT. the oxen of the sun chapter replaces the whole ‘gestation of english prose’ w/ just slightly rewriting the first pages of about 10 novels published between ulysses and now & it does lolita w/ “bloom, thorn of stephen’s sleep, light in his eyes. his sire, his son’ and i lit. screamed. anyway i don’t want to give this 5 stars (yet) bc i think some of the experimental stuff ended up a bit gimmicky & didn’t add that much to the text but fuck. that’s my boy & i want to reread it right now. 4.5/5 ALSO it’s a crime no literary weirdo woman has written ‘a portrait of the artist’s sister’ about delia ‘dilly’ dedalus, shadow of stephen’s mind, quick far & daring, teaching herself french from a 3rd hand primer while her father drinks the nonexistent family fortune away and her older brother is getting drunk on a beach & starting fights w/ soldiers bc he’s a smartarse

#the books i read #long post

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ask-the-magic-nations · 6 years ago

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Could you explain better the Kirkland bros family tree? I'm really confused, to be honest. Are they all born from different fathers?

THE ASK I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR thank you anon (though i’m sorry I confused you)

Yes, all the Kirkland brothers have different fathers, except for Tadgh and Fingal who are twins.

The Kirkland family is an rich and influential pureblood family - like the Malfoys - but the grandparents of the Kirkland bros were NOT good parents. All three of their children - Martin, Madelina and Elaine - ran away after Hogwarts and were all seven kinds of fucked up.

((Important Note: the parents, especially those who aren’t countries, won’t play much part in the story. They have names purely so that I have a way of differentiating them.))

Madeline (Nyo!England) was the eldest and had a LOT of pressure put on her as a kid to be the Perfect Slytherin, etc. She grew up to have issues with alcohol, and wasn’t ready for children, so when she shacked up with a muggle - Angus o Murchadha - it was basically agreed that she wouldn’t be raising them.

Thing is, since they were both nineteen, Angus wasn’t fussed on raising them either. Obviously Madeline didn’t want to hand them over to her parents, so they went to Angus’ parents.

However, Angus’ parents - John o Murchadha and Aileen Dunbar - had split a few years earlier, and neither wanted the other to have full custody of both boys (Madeline never told any of them that she was a witch). So Fingal (APH Scotland) went to live with Aileen and her boyfriend Neil Brown in her home of Glasgow, whilst Tadgh went to live with John and his new wife Aoife Kelly in their home in Waterford. Since the divorce between John and Aileen was so bitter, neither ever saw each other. Fingal took Aileen’s surname - Dunbar - whilst Tadgh took John’s. Their father also wasn’t the best ever (Madeline was very self-destructive when it came to men and didn’t tend to have good taste) and neither boy ever really saw him.

Madeline also hopped it, because she was really afraid of her parents finding her, and moved down to Wales, and ended up in Swansea, where she met a twenty-year-old trainee hairdresser Aeron. Aeron’s kind of different because unlike a lot of Madeline’s beaus he’s actually a nice person. They ended up together because they were confused and conflicted and in a difficult patch. Anyway, when Madeline gave birth to Dafydd (APH Wales), Aeron was fully willing to raise his son, eventually sharing custody with his husband Dylan.

So Madeline’s just off doing her own thing, and needing to repair her wand, returns to London, even though she’d been avoiding it pretty studiously as a location because her parents did occasionally stay there. Either way, she did end up running into a familiar wizard, Christopher Thomas.

Anyway, the inevitable happens, and Madeline finds out she’s pregnant again. She tells Christopher, who really doesn’t want to know, to the point that when Arthur is born he doesn’t even give him his surname. Madeline, who feels guilty about abandoning her other kids, decides to try her hand at child raising, and ends up taking Arthur (APH England) with her as she travels around the UK. By the time Arthur is about four or five, though, it’s got too much, and she leaves Arthur on the doorstep of Christopher’s estranged father, Cudwar.

Madeline leaves the UK and heads across to Ireland, where she happens to run into a man called Calvin Killough. He alone of her muggle boyfriends discovers that she’s a witch, because he knows the signs (his brother Evan is a muggleborn wizard). Unfortunately, in a very Petunia-ish way he’s very bitter about the whole thing, and when Seamus (APH Northern Ireland) is born he’s sent straight to live with Evan and his wife Saoirse in Donemana. Saoirse happens to be a relation to Aoife Kelly (Tadgh’s adoptive grandmother) and after seeing a picture of Madeline they’re all like. Hang on. So Seamus and Tadgh do know about each other, even if they never saw each other that much.

After this, and hearing about the ‘death’ of her sister Elaine, Madeline decides to get her head together and disappears to Europe for a while.

A while later, Fingal and Tadgh, Dafydd, Arthur, and Seamus (who are 9, 8, 6, and 2 respectively), are living relatively happily. But by this point their maternal grandparents have got wind of things - although they don’t know about Seamus yet - and decide that they need to raise their grandsons to make sure they grow up into proper purebloods (although they know that Fingal, Tadgh and Dafydd were raised by muggles, they assume that their daughter would never sleep with a muggle and that they’ve just been adopted).

Tadgh and Fingal’s grandparents - who are all somewhat Dursley-ish in their opinion on magic - gave them up without a fight in return for some payment, since the only reason either party had taken a grandson was to spite the other anyway. On the other hand, Dafydd’s dads both have memory charms placed on them.

(Dafydd would spend the next four years intensively studying memory charms and more specifically how to break them, until he managed to get Aeron and Dylan to follow him to Swansea’s version of Diagon Alley and undid the memory charms (he was working on the theory that in such a packed magical place a bit of underage wizardry would go unnoticed, and was right).)

Arthur is actually sent to live with the Kirklands by the government, since Cudwar dies and Christopher is unwilling to take care of him. It’s several more years before they find out about Seamus, but although Evan has a memory charm put on him, Saoirse is on holiday at the time, and when she gets back they reverse it. They both try to get custody of Seamus again, but since they’re both muggleborns, neither have any hope against such an old and prestigious family as the Kirklands.

Meanwhile, three or so years after the birth of Seamus, Madeline has managed to straighten herself out somewhat, and meets a wizard called Tobias Prince from a small pureblood family, and they settle down in Southampton and have a son named Peter. The relationship ends up breaking down when Peter in 3, and he and Madeline go to live in Sealand.

It’s a similar story for Madeline’s siblings Martin (2p!England) and Elaine (Nyo!2p!England), except they both emigrated - Martin to Australia and Elaine to America. Since they’re not the firstborn, their parents aren’t so interested in them, and eventually concede that as long as Martin and Elaine send their kids to Hogwarts, they’ll leave them in peace. (It took them longer to find Elaine, since she faked her own death, but they do eventually manage it.)

Martin marries a woman named Bethany Trent (Martin and Elaine are a lot less troubled that their older sister), and together they have two kids - Stephen (APH Australia) and William (APH New Zealand), before splitting. Bethany takes William and returns to New Zealand, but they keep it amicable for the kids and Stephen and William do get to see each other. A few years later Martin has a brief fling with a woman named Lucy Johnson, who gives birth to Florence (APH Wy), who she leaves with Martin to raise.

In America, Elaine meets and falls in love with a man called Mason Jones from Alabama. They have twin boys together, but end up splitting. It’s amicable, but Elaine - who now goes by Elaine Williams - is really paranoid about being found by her parents, and wants to move away. She takes Matthew (APH Canada) to live with her in Canada, whilst Alfred stays with his father. For the first few years they barely see each other, until Mason convinces Elaine that instead of having one each, they should do a time share. After that, Matthew and Alfred move between their parents’ houses throughout the year. Elaine and Mason intend to send their kids to the American wizarding school (I forget what it’s called), but a few months before they’re due to start, Elaine’s parents find her and make her put her kids into Hogwarts (to learn ‘proper magic’) in return for leaving them alone.

#Hetalia #Harry Potter AU #Hogwarts AU #APH England #APH Scotland #APH Ireland #APH Northern Ireland #APH Wales #APH Sealand #APH America #APH Canada #APH Australia #APH Wy #APH New Zealand

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fibula-rasa · 6 years ago

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24-Hours in The Twilight Zone

When I learned that a certain cable network isn’t doing their annual Twilight Zone marathon this year...

I decided to plan out a 24-hour block of Twilight Zone episodes myself. I limited myself to episodes that reflected on American life or American history to fit the holiday. (In other words, don’t come at me if your favorite episodes aren’t on this list. All of mine aren’t either!)

All episodes included are available streaming through Netflix and Amazon Prime. The full guide with episode numbers is below the jump, but here’s a Primetime preview:

Happy Viewing!

6:00am - The Shelter (3.3)

Things get ugly when a birthday party in a peaceful suburb is interrupted by a civil defense alert.

6:30am - The Old Man in the Cave (5.7)

In 1974, the survivors of nuclear apocalypse try to stay alive with the aid of a mysterious man in a cave at the outskirts of town. (Starring James Coburn & John Anderson)

7:00am - Two (3.1)

Two lone soldiers from opposing armies find one another in the shambles of main street. (Starring Charles Bronson & Elizabeth Montgomery)

7:30am - The Silence (2.25)

An cranky rich old man bets a boisterous rich young man to stay silent for an entire year. (Starring Franchot Tone)

8:00am - A Thing About Machines (2.4)

Man versus all machines. (Starring Richard Haydn)

8:30am - Static (2.20)

A nostalgic old man tunes in for a second chance. (Starring Dean Jagger)

9:00am - Young Man’s Fancy (3.34)

A newlywed isn’t ready to leave behind his childhood home to his new wife’s chagrin.

9:30am - Nightmare as a Child (1.29)

A teacher is haunted by a peculiar and demanding child.

10:00am - Walking Distance (1.5)

A stressed out ad man tries to go home again. (Starring Gig Young)

10:30am - The Big Tall Wish (1.27)

A small boy makes a big wish for his friend, a washed-up boxer, to win a fight. (Starring Ivan Dixon)

11:00am - The Mighty Casey (1.35)

The Hoboken Zephyrs bring in a ringer. (Starring Jack Warden)

11:30am - I Sing the Body Electric (3.35)

A grieving family turns to Facsimile Ltd. to fill the void in their lives. (Starring Josephine Hutchinson)

12:00pm - Mirror Image (1.21)

A woman has a ticket to start a new life in a new town, if she can ever leave the bus station. (Starring Vera Miles)

12:30pm - The After Hours (1.34)

Sometimes you just want to buy a simple, undamaged gold thimble for your mother’s birthday and then the fabric of reality begins to fray. (Starring Anne Francis)

1:00pm - The Passersby (3.4)

Around the end of the Civil War, the wife of a Confederate soldier awaits his return.

1:30pm - An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (5.22)

An adaptation of the Ambrose Bierce story. A man is executed for sabotage.

2:00pm - Back There (2.13)

A man gets the chance to test out his theories on time travel. (Starring Russell Johnson)

2:30pm - Long Live Walter Jameson (1.24)

A close colleague discovers the true reason Walter Jameson is such a good history teacher. (Starring Kevin McCarthy)

3:00pm - Still Valley (3.11)

A Confederate soldier thinks black magic might turn the tides of the Civil War. (Starring Gary Merrill & Vaughn Taylor)

3:30pm - The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms (5.10)

National Guardsmen running exercises discover the Battle of Little Bighorn is still being waged.

4:00pm - The Grave (3.7)

A hired gun visits the grave of his latest victim. (Starring Lee Marvin, Lee Van Cleef, & James Best)

4:30pm - The Hunt (3.19)

A day of hunting doesn’t go as planned for a man and his dog.

5:00pm - Black Leather Jackets (5.18)

When a bunch of motorcycle riding delinquents move in, the aftermath isn’t quite what the townspeople expect. (Starring Shelley Fabares)

5:30pm - Ring-A-Ding Girl (5.13)

A warm welcome is planned for the Ring-A-Ding girl when she returns to her hometown.

6:00pm - The Mind and the Matter (2.27)

A New Yorker fed up with people exercises his psychic abilities. (Starring Shelley Berman)

6:30pm - Hocus-Pocus and Frisby (3.30)

The town yarn spinner attracts the attention of extraterrestrial visitors. (Starring Andy Devine)

7:00pm - The Brain Center at Whipple’s (5.33)

A factory owner is on a mission to fully automate his factory. (Starring Richard Deacon)

7:30pm - The Changing of the Guard (3.37)

In the face of retirement, an elderly professor contemplates his past and future. (Starring Donald Pleasance)

Primetime!

Enjoy a six-hour block of episodes that cross the United States while you avoid your neighbors who shouldn’t be trusted with fireworks.

8:00pm - A Stop at Willoughby (1.30)

A New York ad man is overwhelmed by the stresses of modern city life and dreams of a simpler life, in a simpler place, with simpler people. (Starring James Daly)

8:30pm - The Monsters are Due on Maple Street (1.22)

A friendly suburb descends into paranoia and chaos with little motivation. (Starring Claude Akins & Jack Weston)

9:00pm - The Hitch-Hiker (1.16)

A school teacher hits a snag on a cross-country trip. (Starring Inger Stevens)

9:30pm - It’s a Good Life (3.8)

A small town (once located in middle America) is plagued by a two-eyed, two-legged, 3-foot-tall monster. (Starring Bill Mumy, Cloris Leachman, & John Larch)

10:00pm - The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank (3.23)

When Jeff Myrtlebank wakes up at his own funeral, he causes quite a stir. (Starring James Best & Sherry Jackson)

10:30pm - The Masks (5.25)

On the night of Mardi Gras, an old man holds a strange party for his greedy, self-centered relatives. (Starring Robert Keith)

11:00pm - A Hundred Yards Over The Rim (2.23)

A father travels an impossible distance in the New Mexico desert to find help for his son. (Starring Cliff Robertson)

11:30pm - Dust (2.12)

On the day of a young man’s execution, a con man tries to charge for salvation. (Starring John Larch, Thomas Gomez, & Vladimir Sokoloff)

12:00am - The Prime Mover (2.21)

A telekinetic short-order cook gets taken for a ride by his best friend. (Starring Buddy Ebsen)

12:30am - The Whole Truth (2.14)

A cursed (or enchanted) car passes through the lot of an unscrupulous used car salesman. (Starring Jack Carson)

1:00am - The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine (1.4)

A faded film star isn’t ready to let go of her past. (Starring Ida Lupino & Martin Balsam)

1:30am - The Bewitchin’ Pool (5.36)

Two children, distressed by their parents’ troubled marriage, escape to a magic swimming hole at the bottom of their pool. (Starring Mary Badham)

2:00am - The Fugitive (3.25)

The unlikely friendship of an old man and a disabled child is even more unlikely than it seems.

2:30am - The Midnight Sun (3.10)

A painter and her landlady try to stick in out in New York City as the earth slowly closes in on the sun. (Starring Lois Nettleton)

3:00am - People Are Alike All Over (1.25)

A nervous astronaut finds life on Mars (Starring Roddy McDowall)

3:30am - Third from the Sun (1.14)

In the face of certain destruction, two men and their families launch a daring interplanetary escape. (Starring Fritz Weaver)

4:00am - Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? (2.28)

A diner crowded in with bus passengers finds there may be a Martian in their midst.

4:30am - Mr. Garrity and the Graves (5.32)

Bringing people back from the dead ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. (Starring John Dehner)

5:00am - I am the Night - Color Me Black (5.26)

The sun doesn’t rise over a town where a man is about to be executed for killing a bigot. (Starring Michael Constantine)

5:30am - In Praise of Pip (5.1)

A lone shark gets to thinking about his life after he learns his son was wounded while serving in the army abroad. (Starring Jack Klugman & Bill Mumy)

Added note: If you’re in the US and have a TV antenna, the network Decades is also running a marathon!

#Twilight Zone #the twilight zone #twilight zone marathon #fouth of july marathon #Rod Serling #marathon #netflix #amazon #amazon prime #television #tv #1960s

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Rachael Dottle

It might seem obvious that having a wide-open field, as Democrats have for their 2020 presidential nomination, would make it easier for a relatively obscure candidate to surge to the top of the polls. But I’m not actually sure that’s true. Democrats might not have an “inevitable” frontrunner — the role that Hillary Clinton played in 2016 or Al Gore did in 2000. But that very lack of heavyweights has encouraged pretty much every plausible middleweight to join the field, or at least to seriously consider doing so. Take the top 10 or so candidates, who are a fairly diverse lot in terms of race, gender and age — pretty much every major Democratic constituency is spoken for by at least one of the contenders. After all, it was the lack of competition that helped Bernie Sanders gain ground in 2016; he was the only game in town other than Clinton.1

So as I cover some of the remaining candidates in this, the third and final installment of our “five corners” series on the Democratic field, you’re going to detect a hint of skepticism about most of their chances. (The “five corners” refers to what we claim are the the five major constituencies within the Democratic Party: Party Loyalists, The Left, Millennials and Friends, Black voters and Hispanic voters2; our thesis is that a politician must build a coalition consisting of at least three of these five groups to win the primary.) It’s not that some of them couldn’t hold their own if thrust into the spotlight against one or two other opponents. Instead, it’s that most of them will never get the opportunity to square off against the big names because the middleweights will monopolize most of the money, staff talent and media attention. Rather than pretend to be totally comprehensive, in fact, I’m instead going to list a few broad typologies of candidates that weren’t well-represented in the previous installments of this series.

This type of candidate has been popular in the minds of journalists ever since Gary Hart’s failed presidential bids in 1984 and 1988 — but it never seems to gain much momentum among actual Democratic voters. In this scenario, a Western governor or senator (e.g. Hart, Bruce Babbitt or Bill Richardson) runs on a platform that mixes environmentalism, slightly libertarianish views on other issues (legal weed but moderate taxes?) and a vague promise to shake things up and bring an outsider’s view to Washington.

This platform makes a lot of sense in the Mountain West, but I’m not sure how well it translates elsewhere in the country. In theory, the environmental focus should have some appeal among millenials. (That particularly holds for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who would heavily focus on climate change in his campaign as a means of differentiating himself.) And Party Loyalists might get behind an outsider if they were convinced that it would help beat President Trump, but “let’s bring in an outsider to shake things up” was one of the rationales that Trump himself used to get elected, so it doesn’t make for as good a contrast in 2020 as it might ordinarily. The Left isn’t likely to be on board with the Great Western Hope platform, which tends to be moderate on fiscal policy. And while the states of the Mountain West have quite a few Hispanic voters, they don’t have a lot of black ones. It’s not that Inslee or former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper aren’t “serious” candidates — being a multi-term governor of medium-sized state is traditionally a good credential — but it’s also not clear where the demand for their candidacies would come from.

You might say something similar about the various mayors that are considering a presidential bid.What niche are the mayors hoping to fill, and are there actually any voters there?

Maybe in “The West Wing,” a hands-on problem solver from Anytown, USA, would make the perfect antidote to a Trumpian president. In the real world, Democrats think the country is in crisis under Trump, and there are a lot of candidates who have more experience dealing with national problems.

But Eric Garcetti and Bill de Blasio, the current mayors of Los Angeles and New York, respectively, have at least had to build complicated coalitions in big, complicated cities — and so they would probably be more viable than the mayors from smaller cities. De Blasio cruised to an easy re-election in New York in 2017 on the basis of support from black, Hispanic and leftist white voters, a coalition that could also be viable in the presidential primary. (De Blasio hasn’t taken concrete steps toward a 2020 bid, but he also hasn’t ruled one out.) Garcetti, who has what he describes as “Mexican-American-Jewish-Italian” ancestry, could find support for his bid among Hispanic voters.

Bloomberg might belong in a different group, as someone who’s not just a former mayor but also fits into the entrepreneur/celebrity/rich person category below and has some of the baggage that comes with that. And unlike de Blasio, Bloomberg wasn’t especially popular with nonwhite voters in New York.

This is a group of candidates I’m quite bullish about, by contrast — especially Stacey Abrams, if she runs. In defeating longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th Congressional District last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is too young to run for president until next cycle) built a coalition of Hispanics, The Left and millenials. Not that everyone necessarily has Ocasio-Cortez’s political acumen, but the potency of this coalition seems rather obvious, in retrospect. Since The Left tends to be pretty white on its own, a Hispanic, black or Asian left-progressive candidate has more potential to build a broader coalition. And millennials, who are sympathetic to left-wing policy positions but also care a lot about diversity, might prefer a Latina or a black woman to an older white man.

In fact, it’s not clear why, other than for reasons having to do with her race and gender, Abrams isn’t getting more buzz as a potential candidate than Beto O’Rourke. (It’s true that Abrams might have designs on Georgia’s 2020 Senate race instead of the presidency; it’s also true that there wasn’t a “Draft Abrams” movement in the same way that influential Democrats almost immediately called on O’Rourke to run for president after his loss to Ted Cruz.) Both performed quite well relative to how Democrats usually do in their states, with Abrams losing to Brian Kemp by 1.4 percentage points in the Georgia governor’s race and O’Rourke losing to Cruz by 2.6 points in Texas’s Senate race. (Andrew Gillum, who barely lost Florida’s governor’s race, can’t make this claim, since Florida is much more purple than either Georgia or Texas.) Both became huge national stories. And both are lacking in the kind experience that traditionally sets the stage for a presidential run. It’s not that I’m down on O’Rourke’s chances; the opposite, really (see Part 2 of this series). But if O’Rourke can build a winning coalition from millennials, Hispanics and Party Loyalists, Abrams (or possibly Gillum) could create one from black voters, millenials and The Left.

I’m not going to spend too much on this category because, in practice, both New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe are likely to have a lot of problems if they want to ascend to the presidential stage. Party nominations are not just about building coalitions but also creating consensus, and McAuliffe and Cuomo have probably picked one too many fights with liberals and spent too much time critiquing liberal policy proposals to be tolerable to a large enough share of Democrats to win the nomination. Of the two, Cuomo would probably be the more viable as he’s shifted toward his left recently, although he’d still have a lot of work to do to repair his relationship with progressives.

Were it not for their abrasive approaches, the Cuomo and McAuliffe coalitions might be a bit more viable than you might assume. In particular, those coalitions consist of minority voters plus relatively moderate Party Loyalists. Cuomo assembled a similar coalition last September and soundly defeated the more liberal Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic primary for governor before being elected to a third gubernatorial term in November thanks to a landslide 84-14 margin among nonwhite voters.

What about the various billionaires considering a presidential run? Count me as skeptical that a CEO title will impress Democrats. Money has never been terribly predictive of success in the primaries (see e.g. Steve Forbes or Jeb Bush) — and candidates such as former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Tom Steyer, the hedge fund billionaire who last week decided that he wouldn’t run for president, have fared notably poorly in early surveys of Democrats. And that makes sense, because it’s not really clear what sort of Democratic voter they’re supposed to be appealing to. The Left is likely to regard the billionaires suspiciously, at best. Nor are rich white men who have never run for office before liable to have a lot of initial success in appealing to black or Hispanic voters. Finally, their timing is poor given that the president is Trump and that the last thing most Democrats will want is another billionaire with no political experience.

Want a billionaire whose chances I’d take seriously? How about Oprah. One three-pronged coalition we haven’t discussed yet is one consisting of Black voters, Hispanic voters and Millennials and Friends; a nonwhite celebrity who was able to engage voters that didn’t ordinarily participate in primaries3 could potentially win on that basis.

Finally, there are a few people running for president who don’t have anything resembling the traditional credentials for doing so, but who at least have pitches that are a little different than what voters will be hearing elsewhere. Tulsi Gabbard, the four-term representative from Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District, was one of Sanders’s early endorsers last cycle, but she also has a heterodox set of positions, such as her frequent defenses of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and her former opposition to gay rights, that won’t win her fans among any of the traditional Democratic constituencies.

Richard Ojeda, a crew-cut Army veteran and former West Virginia legislator who says he voted for Trump in 2016 and looks the part of a (stereotypical) Trump voter, is presenting what’s essentially a left-wing set of economic policies in a very different package than voters would normally to get that message from. I’m not quite sure how the pitch would go over if, say, Ojeda makes it to a debate stage, which might never happen because the Democratic National Committee and the networks might consider him too obscure. But it’s worth bearing in mind that The Left is the whitest and most male of the Democratic constituencies, so a candidate who intentionally plays into that identity might not be the best one to build bridges to the rest of the party.

Then there’s John Delaney, who decided not to run for re-election to Congress so he could run for president instead — and in fact has already been running for president for well more than a year. He’s preaching a message of bipartisanship, which could win him plaudits from the pundits on the Sunday morning shows, but which it’s not clear that many actual Democrats are looking for. Instead, more Democrats are willing to identify as “liberal” than had been in the past and fewer say they want a candidate who compromises.

That’s all for now! As I mentioned in the first installment of this series, some things we’ve written here are surely going to seem laughably wrong in retrospect. It wouldn’t necessarily have been obvious at this point four years ago that Clinton would do so well with black voters, for example (a group she lost badly to Barack Obama in 2008), or that Sanders would become such a phenomenon among millennials. Fundamentally, however, the U.S. has “big tent” parties, consisting of groups that may not have all that much in common with one another. And so, the nomination process is a coalition-building process. Candidates such as Sanders and Joe Biden, who poll well among one or two groups, may lead in the polls initially. But ultimately the candidate who wins the nomination will be the one who can best bridge the divides between the different constituencies within the party.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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