#The Mississippi Gambler

[taffetastrology]

The signs as The Mississippi Gambler costumes

Aries

Taurus

Gemini

Cancer

Leo

Virgo

Libra

Scorpio

Sagittarius

Capricorn

Aquarius

Pisces

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Elizabeth Taylor (Cleopatra, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)—iconic actress with purple eyes and a double row of eyelashes, the real ebony dementia ravenway of old hollywood. known for her stunning tastes when it comes to jewelry and her incredible, incredible advocacy during the AIDS crisis.

Piper Laurie (The Mississippi Gambler)— Because she's so (rightfully) well-recognised for her later-life career, I don't think enough people (in the general tumblr age bracket) know about Piper Laurie's earlier years as a certified and oscar-nominated Hot Vintage Movie Woman!

This is round 1 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

{additional propaganda submitted under the cut]

Piper Laurie:

Elizabeth Taylor:

I've been trying to steer clear of the absurdly-big names, but damnit, those violet eyes got me. The *talent*, the *presence*, the string of marriages and (temporally out-of-bounds) work in combating AIDS and pioneering in the concept of the celebrity fragrance line.

Not only did she have gorgeous violet eyes and lashes for days and one of the hottest voices ever, she was also a big supporter of the gay community

Child actress turned starlet, Liz dominated films as one of the greatest screen legends of classic hollywood. If your protagonist has violet eyes, they're imitating hers.

A Legend. She was serving milf rage in Whos Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. A Star in every sense of the word.

She was renowned for the beauty of her eyes; they were a dark blue but could look violet in certain lighting, something that photographers would actually touch up to look even more so in pictures. But even more striking was a genetic mutation that gave her a double row of eyelashes. She was also famed for her string of husbands -- 8 marriages to 7 men. Two-time hubby Richard Burton once said she was “a wildly exciting love-mistress… beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography.”

Her EYES. Early and loud support for gay rights and AIDS victims. Married a bunch of hot dudes, Burton twice!

just look at her. she's gorgeous. there's a video somewhere of her applying her eyeliner in the mirror and I think about it all the time

THE Hollywood actress of all time. Not only was she known for her long dark locks and blue-violet eyes, she also had one of the wildest life stories ever….. She’s Carrie Fisher’s stepmother because her father Eddie Fisher cheated on Debbie Reynolds with Liz. She was knighted as a dame of England. She was married to seven different men, one of them twice. She was also very kindhearted and did a lot of charity activism.

Asides from being an iconic actor, she did a lot of philanthropy and co founded the American Foundation for AIDS research. She’s sometimes considered one of the last great stars of old hollywood

[citizenscreen]

Tyrone Power in Rudolph Maté‘s THE MISSISSIPPI GAMBLER (1953)

[larkingame]

wyatt abrams, a playlist

go down gamblin’ | blood sweat & tears // devil's right hand | johnny cash //I am a man of constant sorrow | the soggy bottom boys // ramblin' man | larkin poe //ace of spades | lisa leblanc //the gambler | kenny rogers //blood sweat & murder | scott h. biram // stuck in the middle with you | steelers wheel // conman coming | monica heldal // don't take your guns to town | jonny cash // have you ever seen the rain | willie & paula nelson // mississippi | the secret sisters // my poor son | the roe family singers // hard times | ethel cain // song of sorrow | elle king // waiting around to die | townes van zandt // redemption day | johnny cash // the truth won't set us free | sara watkins // god's gonna cut you down | johnny cash // where did you sleep last night | hellbound glory // cocaine blues | johnny cash // old number seven | the devil makes three // tears of gold | larkin poe // the hand that feeds | the crane wives // highwaymen | the highwaymen // mammas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys | waylon jennings + willie nelson // midnight rider | allman brothers band // hurt | johnny cash

[ceofjohnlennon]

"John might as well have worn a sandwich board announcing the end of the world, so clearly was he dressed for attention. His jeans were the tightest anywhere – he only got out of Mimi's house by wearing a pair of flannels over them, taking them off on his way to college and shoving them in a shoulder bag – and he had a long, frocked black jacket, like a Mississippi gambler. He wore it all with a swagger, with self-assurance camouflaging all his insecurities. Stuart, who adopted his own individual style, dressed for himself – who but a few intimates would see his red underpants? Stuart was impressed by him, and even more so when he heard about John's group, the Quarrymen, named after the Quarry Bank High School that John and the original band members had attended. But the band was not the main attraction. John was overtly anarchic, whereas Stuart's anarchy was expressed by pushing artistic boundaries, painting large works when he should have been doing small-scale material. Stuart's rebellion was mostly acceptable, whereas John's sometimes wasn't. We are all shocked and appalled by wild behaviour, but we are also excited and fascinated by it. John was also very, very funny. Stuart loved that and could keep up with it. There was a lot of banter between them, each of them always trying to get the better line. Once, round at our house, John said to me, 'You know, your brother's a little genius.' I got back quickly, 'He thinks you're a big genius.' His smile embraced me. John was also very dangerous, and there is a kind of excitement about that too. That unpredictability. In their banter John could be very cruel but, like a strong parent, Stuart contained that, which also made John feel safe."

ㅡ From the book "The Beatles' Shadow" by Pauline Sutcliffe.

[tragedycoded]

wip intro: doom metal love story

The two stare at each other, Calvin watching Cole with his hands on his hips, finally caught up to the fort sheriff who'd been dogging him for months and he was everything he'd thought he'd be. Admiring him, until his knees give out and he slumps. Everything he'd thought he'd be even after he slumps. Calvin catches him, mindful of where his hands grip, almost loving. Cole coughs and is unable to steady himself. His arms dangle. His head rests upon his nemesis's shoulder. He's limp. He may as well be dead already. "Couldn't'a asked for better," Calvin says, quiet, like this is just for the four of them, as if this were something for the two to die proud of. "You're gonna live forever, in a way. Both of ya. Don't that sound nice?"

Synopsis

U.S. Army Cavalry First Sergeant Cole Sullivan has had more than enough time to count the mistakes he's made in the last year. At the end of his career, the decorated Civil War veteran has been sent to one of the last forts still standing across the Mississippi River. His best friend, Surgeon Erik Hofer, has pulled every string he could reach to be here with him. Stuck with a leg that won't heal and a head injury that altered his personality, Sullivan gets through each day by relying on Hofer, and by neither complaining nor thinking about the past. Three recruits have gone missing since he arrived in the spring, and he has no notion of where they might have gone, or why they might have deserted.

Then his former lover, an outlaw and gambler who goes by the name Arthur Royston, appears at the fort in a desperate state. Royston is the reason Sullivan lives in a broken body--he pushed him off a moving train nearly a year ago. He claims he had a reason, that what would have happened if he hadn't is worse than their current situation, and that he's here to help Sullivan find his recruits.

Sullivan has no reason to believe him. What Sullivan wants to do is leave him in the fort stockade to rot. But Sullivan has a horrible feeling this has happened before, and he refuses to allow it to happen again.

Alternating timelines between an isolated frontier fort and the ailing Kansas riverfront town where everything started, Doom Metal Love Story is an existential horror novel about love, pain, and time loops.

Details

Word Count: 167.1k Genre: Weird Western/Horror Romance Trigger Warnings: Violence, blood, gore, death (human and animal), body horror, mention of past sexual assault, military setting, period-appropriate attitudes and language.

First in a trilogy. Describing the rest of the trilogy will spoil Book 1.

Where To Read It

As of this update (14 October 2024):

Draft 5 is available in its entirety on AO3 [click here]

The final draft (6) will be published in 2025.

Etc.

Book 2's first draft is ~70% complete.

Book 3 is in the outlining stage.

The draft on AO3 will come down a month before publication.

I will be publishing an interactive fiction version of the entire story after the third book is drafted.

[neilphen]

She stands on the banks of the mighty mississippi alone in the pale moonlight waiting for a man a riverboat gambler said that hed return tonight they used to waltz on the banks of the mighty mississippi loving the whole night through til the riverboat gambler went off to make a killing and bring it on back to you evangeline, evangeline curses the soul of the mississippi queen that pulled her man away bayou sam, from the south louisiana had gambling in his veins evangeline, from the maritimes was slowly going insane

[twenty-words-or-less]

Mississippi Grind

Summary: Estate agent and unlucky gambler Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) meets significantly younger and much luckier gambler Curtis (Ryan Reynolds) and go on something of an odyssey together.

Incredibly stressful examination on addiction and the difficulty of quitting with two compelling central performances. Ambiguous but hopeful ending, too.

Rating: 4.25/5

Photo credit: Roger Ebert

[reasoningdaily]

In the years before the Civil War, New York police officers sold free Black Americans into enslavement. Public Domain/Courtesy of Wikicommons

 Clashes between protestors and the police from Portland to Atlanta to Kenosha are recent flashpoints in the long history of policing in America. While the police today emerged from a hodge-podge of national and international iterations, one of the United States’ earliest and most storied forces, the New York City police, offers modern Americans a lesson in the intractability of problems between the black community and the officers sworn to uphold the law.

That long history is both bleak and demoralizing. But this past also reminds us that real change will only happen by learning from the collective American experience, one in which those who supported systems of oppression were met by others who bravely battled against them.

As the nation’s most populous city for most of its history, New York has been uniquely affected by this dynamic. In the decades before the Civil War, when Gotham’s police force was becoming regularized and professionalized, Manhattan routinely erupted in riotous violence over the very meaning of equality.

No one individual embodied the brawling roughness of New York policing like Captain Isiah Rynders of the U.S. Marshals.

Born in 1804 in the Hudson River town of Waterford, New York, Rynders was a gambler on Mississippi River steamboats. He reportedly killed a man after a card game and fled to his home state around 1837.

Known for his thunderous voice, a powerful memory, and a penchant for histrionics, Rynders made an immediate impact on New York City.

Black New Yorkers became his main target, and for decades, he patrolled the streets looking for runaways who had escaped enslavement in the South and who, against tremendous odds, had found freedom in Manhattan.

The Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause required northern free cities like New York to return the self-emancipated to their southern enslavers, and the NYPD and officers like Rynders were only too willing to comply, conveniently folding their hatred of black people into their reverence for the nation’s founding document. Armed with the founders’ compromise over slavery, Rynders and his fellow officers,

men like Tobias Boudinot and

Daniel D. Nash,

terrorized New York’s black community from the 1830s up through the Civil War.

And, even worse, it often mattered little whether a black person was born free in New York or had in fact escaped bondage; the police, reinforced by judges like the notorious city recorder Richard Riker, sent the accused to southern plantations with little concern and often even less evidence.

Thanks to Rynders, Boudinot, and Nash, the New York police department had become an extension of the powerful reach of southern slavery, and each month—and often each week in the summer months—brought news of another kidnapping or capture of a supposed runaway.

Black New Yorker John Thomas, for example, was claimed by an enslaver from Louisville, Kentucky. Thomas purportedly fled slavery along the Ohio River, then travelled through Canada, and ultimately found a job as a porter in a Manhattan hotel.

In late 1860, Thomas was arrested as a fugitive by the Manhattan police. While in prison, Thomas hastily drafted a note, dropped it out his cell window, and asked a passing boy to give the note to his employer, who submitted a writ of habeas corpus.

Unfortunately, the marshal on duty was none other than Rynders, who produced a different black man in response to the writ, and the judge declared the writ satisfied. In the meantime, Thomas’ employer and friends learned, too late, that one of Rynders’ deputies had taken the real John Thomas to Richmond, where he would be transported to Kentucky, lost in the darkness of American slavery, like untold numbers of other kidnapping victims.

Fortunately, New York’s black community was not without heroic defenders like David Ruggles, the tireless activist and journalist. Ruggles led the city’s antislavery community while the likes of Rynders, Riker, Boudinot and Nash, a group so wicked that Ruggles had labeled them “the kidnapping club,” patrolled the streets and docks in search of their next prey.

Joined by activists like Horace Dresser, Arthur Tappan, Charles B. Ray and other antislavery protestors, Ruggles fought relentlessly against those officers and marshals who threatened black liberty.

Just as modern protestors decry the role of the police in the quest for order, black and white activists in pre-Civil War New York claimed that the force was little more than a vigilante expression of the worst tendencies of white residents.

A more professionalized police force, however, did not mean one more suited to the protection of black civil rights. On the contrary, in the early 1800s, the police proved sadly and persistently indifferent to the black lives they were supposed to protect.

By modern standards, the early NYPD was a ragtag band of barely organized and only partially trained officers. The daytime police remained inadequate to deal with the robberies, violence, prostitution, gambling and other crimes of a city approaching 300,000 people in the 1830s.

Only 16 constables, elected by citizens of each ward, along with about 60 marshals appointed by the mayor, patrolled the city. Only constables and marshals had the power to arrest under a magistrate’s orders. Armed with warrants issued by Riker, marshals like Rynders could terrorize Gotham’s black residents, who came to fear the police presence in their neighborhoods.

Part of the fear emanated from the fact that Rynders’ confederates Boudinot and Nash did not wear uniforms or carry any kind of badge signifying their authority.

The familiar dark blue uniforms of the NYPD were not instituted until the 1850s, so African Americans harassed or arrested by the police could not even be sure that they were being accosted by legal authorities.

Equally problematic was the fact that neither Nash nor Boudinot earned regular salaries on which they could depend; their ability to support themselves and their families came from fees set by state law, which virtually required officials to arrest as many people as possible.

The situation almost guaranteed corruption, and tied the financial interests of the New York police force to the financial interests of southern slaveowners. Not that they needed any push to over-police the black community, but patrollers like Nash and Boudinot had every incentive to use their blanket writ to arrest as many accused fugitive slaves as they possibly could. In fact, their financial well-being depended on it.

Boudinot and Nash operated almost like independent agents in a police force that was itself in disarray, an institutional chaos that only rendered Black lives even more vulnerable. Fernando Wood, elected mayor in 1854, controlled the police department and relied heavily on Irish immigrants to man the force.

But by the 1850s, anti-Irish politicians were trying to establish a new police force, soon to be called the Metropolitans, that would replace Wood’s Municipals. A clash erupted in 1857 when Wood refused to back down, and for months, the city actually had two competing police departments who battled each other as much as they combatted crime.

Both Wood’s Municipals and the state’s Metropolitans were guilty of malfeasance and dereliction of duty.

In fact, the Municipals, led by police chief George Matsell, had been called “slave catchers” by the city’s black community and its allies in the Republican press.

George Matsell, a member of the NYPD since 1840, himself was suspected of corruption, and rumors spread that he extorted money from criminals, seized stolen property for his own use, and skimmed the profits of illegal activities.

By the time the Municipals and Metropolitans vied for control of the New York police, Matsell had managed to build a sprawling summer mansion within a vast vineyard in Iowa, where local landmarks still bear his name. New York politician Mike Walsh labeled the heavy-set Matsell a “walking mass of moral and physical putrefaction.”

The crisis between the Municipals and the Metropolitans was only resolved when Wood and the Municipals finally backed down and the Metropolitans emerged as the city’s permanent and only official police force. Yet, the new police force proved no more respectful of black lives.

Boudinot became a captain in one of the city’s main wards and Rynders became a Democratic elder statesman during and after the war. In fact, New York City, always ready to defend the cotton trade with the South, voted against Lincoln in 1860 and harbored racial conservatives like Wood during the war and after. Embodied by newspapers like The New York Weekly Caucasian, one of the nation’s most prominent promulgators of white supremacist ideology, the city remained an unfriendly place for African Americans.

One hundred and fifty years later, policing has changed a great deal, particularly in its militarization and organization, but the tensions between the nation’s black communities and the police are still very much evident.

Black Americans have been fully aware of this history for generations because they have been the objects of so much of the violent quest for law and order. Although many people might assume that Riker’s Island was named after the city recorder, it appears that the name originates less from an individual and more from Manhattan’s general Dutch heritage. But though their origins may be different, both the prison and the city recorder share a similar past of neglecting the plight and suffering the New York’s most vulnerable residents.

Now, with some white Americans learning the fraught history of policing for the first time, have they come to realize that the last moments and utterances of Eric Garner, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and untold others are but modern expressions of a deep and deadly struggle that stretches back to America’s earliest beginnings.

[internatlvelvet]

From his set of "Mississippi Gambler", Tyrone Power visits Loretta Young on her set of "Because of You"

[gatutor]

Piper Laurie-Tyrone Power "El caballero del Mississippi" (The Mississippi gambler) 1953, de Rudolph Maté.

[pettyrevenge-base]

Horrible roommate with insane boyfriend who won’t leave? Byeeeeeee!

Managed to find an awesome house to rent after college with two other friends. One was my good buddy from undergrad, let’s call him Ben. The other was someone who I’d gotten to know through another close friend, and let’s call her Crystal. Everything is all fine, and actually great for quite some time. Lived our own lives, but had a great time hanging out together too. The perfect roommate situation.

That is, until Crystal started dating Pablo. Pablo was the ultimate deadbeat with a Napoleon complex. Just a little over a month into our lease, Pablo got evicted from his placed, and Crystal asked if he could stay for a short period while he looked for a new place. Being understanding and empathetic, and trusting Crystal (we had no reason not to), we said sure as long as it’s temporary. Big mistake.

Pablo lost his job. Pablo had been dishonorably discharged from the military. Pablo was a(n) (unsuccessful) gambler. Pablo was a drunk (it was New Orleans, so it’s not like any of us had a leg to stand on here), but he was a dangerous drunk. He would verbally abuse Crystal, waking up the whole household in the middle of the night with fights. He killed her pet fish by running it under scalding hot water. He would hurl racial slurs at my then-boyfriend. He broke Ben’s Wii. On numerous occasions, he left the front door wide open (anyone who knows New Orleans knows this is a bad move, even in the safest areas). He left an empty pot on the stove with the burner on, and I came home to a house full of smoke. He was really putting everyone’s lives in danger.

Ben and I decided to have a house meeting to discuss our concerns with her, and, knowing that sometimes emotions can flair, we came with a written agenda so as to just stick to the facts. Yet Crystal defended him, and offered no solution to when he would be leaving and finding his own place (spoiler: he never would).

[Really rubbing salt in the wound, Pablo had gambled much of their money and Crystal was having trouble making rent one month. She asked if she could borrow it and pay me back next paycheck. Again, being a trusting empath, and feeling like we had no other choice, I did. I was furious to find out that the two of them had left for a long weekend at a casino resort in Mississippi before having paid me back.]

Well, now for the petty revenge:

I had been working two full-time jobs. I saved like crazy, and it was 2008 and housing prices had dipped. I decided to buy my own home. Ben knew all about this (so did my landlady), and was planning to be my roommate in the new house, but I never mentioned a single word to Crystal. I found a great place, made an offer, and closed a little thereafter.

It just so happened that the day I closed on the house, when we were already planning to move and just get the hell out of dodge, Crystal and Pablo took one of their famous casino getaways. We got around 15-20 of our close friends, one of whom had an enormous truck and a giant flatbed (of course someone did, it was Louisiana). Many hands make light work, and within a few short hours the entire house other than their room was cleared out. (Ohhhh, did I mention?: All the furniture, all the kitchen stuff, everything in the common rooms belonged to either me or Ben).

Crystal and Pablo returned home at the end of a full day of gambling, only to find a completely empty house except for their room. We told them we had switched the utilities (that were under my name) to the new house, and we had informed the landlady, and paid out our share of the remainder of the lease. The looks on their faces was priceless. We left and never saw them again, halleloo.

TL;DR - Roommate’s psycho boyfriend moved in, never left, went bananas. Other roommate and I got a huge group of friends to help move all our stuff to a new house without telling them, in just a few hours time while they were away. They returned to a completely empty house except for their stuff. Priceless looks on their faces as we left for the last time.

Source: reddit.com/r/pettyrevenge

[citizenscreen]

Tyrone Power in Rudolph Maté’s THE MISSISSIPPI GAMBLER (1953)

[darkmaga-returns]

This article was originally published by George Ford Smith at the Mises Institute.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values . . .? — Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society,” December 5, 1996

John Law, the early eighteenth-century Scottish gambler and financier, thought the best way to revive an ailing economy was to remove the “great scarcity of money,” as he wrote in a 1705 monetary tract. A decade after its publication, he took his ideas to the Continent and sold them to Philippe d’Orleans, the regent in charge of France’s finances, who needed a scheme more sophisticated than his failed program of coin clipping and confiscation to save the nation from bankruptcy.

In 1716, Philippe set Law up as head of the Banque Générale, the country’s central bank, giving it and him monopoly control of the note issue. Having won the nation’s trust with declarations of allegiance to sound money principles—he had promised his banknotes would be “payable on sight” in unadulterated gold coin—Law proceeded to apply another element of his theory. Because a scarcity of money, he believed, was the root of France’s economic problems, and since banknotes backed purely by precious metals would be in short supply, he began issuing notes “backed” by the nation’s vast landholdings. Exactly how one would redeem banknotes for acreage he neglected to explain.

Very importantly, Law and Philippe also created a trading company called the Compaignie des Indes, a vaporous entity said to have monopoly trading rights in France’s Louisiana territory. Initially, shares in the company could only be purchased with government bonds still on the market, which had fallen to about one-fifth their value. To the public, the trading company and its investment strategy became known as the Mississippi System.

Philippe was very pleased with the results. People from all ranks were buying shares of the Compaignie des Indes. Share prices began to soar. People were trading and speculating with Law’s paper money, and France’s economy was coming alive. Philippe decided John Law was correct that a shortage of money was an economic evil. He was so pleased with the change in the economy he brought the government closer to the action. He renamed Law’s bank the Banque Royale and, by late 1719, it had cranked out enough new bills to inflate the money supply by a factor of sixteen, no doubt to avert the evil of a monetary shortage.

Will and Ariel Durant describe the madness Law had ignited:

The narrow, dirty Rue Quincampoix, where the System had its offices, was for two years the Wall Street of Paris. Buyers and sellers of all classes, duchesses and prostitutes, Parisians, provincials, foreigners, gathered there in numbers, and excitement mounted day by day. Some were trampled to death in the crush, or were run down by the carriages of the aristocracy. . . fortunes were made in a day. A banker made 100 million livres, a hotel waiter thirty million. Now for the first time men heard the word millionaire.

[kmp78]

“What kind of major social influencers and world leaders do you suppose they'll evolve into? 🤔”. - I don’t know them nor do you. But, Oprah Winfrey was born up in rural Mississippi to a soldier and an unwed mother. She was raised by a strict and abusive grandmother. She is now worth billions and has done amazing things for humankind. She was a no one once. Nelson Mandela was from a small tribe in South Africa, lost his father at 9 and was raised by a tribe member. Familiar with the term apartheid? What about Nobel Oeace Prize? He was a no one once. CGE Mannerheim’s father was a gambler who abandoned his family to live with his mistress after running his family into bankruptcy. Mannerheims mother died when he was a young teen and he was sent to a cadet academy from which he was expelled. Guess you are familiar enough with your own country’s history to know his contributions… He was a no one once. Shall we talk about Christ… just a poor carpenter…. ANYONE can become ANYTHING ! You are simply jealous and resentful because you chose to be a nothing influencing nor leading anyone and are still a no one.

Ah yes, Mandela and social media leg-spreaders are fighting the same fight. ✊️

And btw DON'T EVEN TALK TO ME ABOUT MANNERHEIM UNLESS YOU DO SOME RESEARCH. 🤦🏼‍♀️

You wanna know where he was born and spent his childhood?

AT LOUHISAARI MANOR. 🙄

He and his siblings had a Swiss governess and went to private lyceums. He and his family were always at the top of the Finnish social hierarchy.

HE WAS NEVER IN HIS LIFE A "NO ONE". 🙄