#This show's crew had a lot of East Asians in it too mind you

[foolishfantasia]

People who still think Infinity Train got cancelled because they, sanded a character to bits, cremated a conscious white man, and okayed a monster with severed arms make me laugh because Owen, the man, Dennis has already confirmed that CN & HBO had no problem with their insane deadly ideas. If anything they were pretty quick to approve them.

Yah wanna know what didn't get approved so quickly/approved begrudgingly? Jesse's American Indian/Native heritage and the Rymin's heartfelt conversation about how it isn't easy to be Asian American/Asian Canadian in any creative industry. Why did Jesse being himself take 7 months to be approved? What did Dennis mean when he said a similar thing happened with Min and Ryan?

[miss-nerdstiles]

THE WEST WING #105 [5-17] The Supremes Full transcript Written by Deborah Cahn Directed by Jessica Yu.  I do not own this in any way, nor do I get anything from the sharing of it.

(MONDAY)

(CROWD OUTSIDE)

DONNA: (on phone) Tommy at Justice.  Covitz at Justice.  Citizens For a Strong America. Archbishop Gaudio, Archbishop Rummel…

JOSH: What?!  

DONNA: Rummel! Of New York. Man of God.

JOSH: I can't hear a damn...  Excuse me please.  Thank You.  How are these people up so early?  

DONNA: It's a Supreme Court seat.  They had sign-painting parties the second Justice Brady dropped dead.  Council sent a new list, said burn the old list.

JOSH:  Listen to this.  “They cavalierly sacrificed the unborn innocents and beckon, arms akimbo, the reaper, the horseman and the apocalyptic end.  Akimbo is a word you wish got used more.  There’s someone out there selling  “Who Would Jesus Nominate” t-shirts.  

DONNA: They’re in Leo’s. They just started.  

(OUTSIDE LEO’S OFFICE)

JOSH: You want this?  

DONNA: You don't like it?  

JOSH: Not really. Sorry I'm late.

LEO: Dem Leadership is in with the President.  

JOSH: They giving us more names?

LEO: I'm sure they are.  

TOBY: I need the short list by the end of the week.  

LEO: Your schedule.  Your schedule.  Mine.  Keep 'em quick.  You got 3 judges an hour.  

C.J.: Who has Austin Girelli from Connecticut?  

TOBY: Me.  

C.J.: ACLU called about him.  I don't think it'll be a problem, but ask him about that migrant workers thing he wrote.  

JOSH: Why isn't Haskins on here?

LEO: Having an affair with his clerk.  

MARGARET: Toby - Dubar on line two.  

C.J.: Here’s Bernstein. And this is…

TOBY: [on phone] Senator? Yes, Senator.  No we're not having a party over the death of a Supreme Court Justice.  Well, not a big party.  

JOSH: Evelyn Baker Lang?  

LEO: Fourth circuit.  

JOSH: Isn't she kind of a lefty?

LEO: Yeah  

C.J.: Decoy duck.  And don’t do it in your office.  Do it someplace where the press can see her.  

LEO: We want the left flank sufficiently mollified and the right flank sufficiently panicked so as to inspire a little conciliation on all flanks.  

JOSH: Lang should do the trick.

TOBY: Put Fred Canterbury down on some list of people we’ll never consider.  

C.J.: Baker Lang's just with Josh?

LEO: You want Toby too?  

C.J.: It'll look more like we're taking her seriously.  

LEO: Toby, Evelyn Baker Lang will be your 8:45 with Josh.  Let's go, people. First one to find me a Supreme Court Justice gets a free corned beef sandwich.  

(ROOSEVELT ROOM)

JOSH: Obviously we're impressed with your record.  

TOBY: Your work on the 14th Amendment in particular is the stuff dreams are made of.  

JOSH: But before anything else, we want to gauge your interest level.  This will certainly be a lifestyle...  

LANG: We can just chat  

JOSH: I'm sorry?  

LANG: I hear you really went to bat for Eric Hayden.  

JOSH: I wish we could have gotten him confirmed.  

TOBY: Judge Lang, if the President were to...  

LANG: Is he still teaching?

JOSH: Eric?  Yeah.  Umm...again, if we...  

LANG: A conservative anchor of the court has just died.  A young brilliant thinker who brought the right out of the closet and championed a whole conservative revival.  You cannot replace Owen Brady with a woman who overturned a parental consent law.  You'd be shish-ka-bob'd and set aflame on the south lawn.  Two reporters have... three reporters have walked by since we started.  I'm window dressing. That's fine. I'm happy to help.  But let's just chat about the weather.

(OUT IN THE HALL)

TOBY: Not bad.

JOSH: That's what we're talking about.  Maybe we should put her on the short list.  

TOBY: Yeah

JOSH: Okay, who's next?  (Donna gives them folders)

TOBY: That’s his.

DONNA: This is…

JOSH: That’s a “no”.

ACT ONE  

(DONNA’S DESK)

DONNA: Sign, please.  

JOSH: You want to move it so I can see?  

DONNA: Not really  

JOSH: Why are we apologizing to Ashland?  

DONNA: We sent him flowers. Condolence flowers.  

JOSH: Condolences?  

DONNA: For his death.  

JOSH: He's alive.  

DONNA: That's what he said.  

JOSH: We sent flowers to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on the occasion of his death?  

DONNA: They were supposed to go to Justice Brady's family.  

JOSH: Get protocol on the phone.

DONNA: They didn't actually....

JOSH: We did this?!  

DONNA: It was an honest mistake. Ashland's 80, he's knock knock knocking on ....  

JOSH: Who put the order in?

RYAN: Hey guys!  

JOSH: You sent a funeral bouquet to the family of the living breathing Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?

RYAN: No I sent them to the guy who died , Brady.  

JOSH: No, actually you didn't.

RYAN: This is terrible.  Umm... I really apologize.  You know I am a nightmare with details.  It's embarrassing.  This stuff just leaks out of my head. We should leave the detail work to Donna.  She's got the head for it.  I'm more of a big picture kind of guy.  

JOSH: She's here because she's invaluable.  You're here because your uncle's so powerful I can't fire you.  Big Picture.  

LISA: Hi.  Bad time?  

JOSH: I'm on my way out.  

LISA: Two minutes.  

RYAN: Lisa, right?  You work for the Judiciary Committee.  

LISA: Staff Director.  

RYAN: Ryan Pierce, we met at my office.  

JOSH: Excuse us.  

LISA: Is he the one who flipped the car in Nice?  

JOSH: Yeah.  

LISA: When do I see names for Brady's seat?  

JOSH: Do you want to let the body cool?  

LISA: You’re meeting with Barwald, Girelli, Evelyn Baker Lang.

JOSH: Here we go.

LISA: Whose acid trip is that?

JOSH: Just take a breath.  

LISA: The committee’s not going to let the balance of the court hurl wildly to the left.  You fill Brady's seat with...  

JOSH: It's not Brady's seat.

LISA: It's not your Senate.

JOSH: We're just looking at the field.  

LISA: Girelli has a fondness for Vicodin and Evelyn Lang is not an option.  Save us all some time.  

JOSH: We're some democrats over here.  We're not going to nominate a born again elk hunter with a tattoo of the confederate flag on his ass.  

LISA: Look at Arthur Lopez or Brad Shelton or Mayra Height.  You go with Barwald or Lang and the Senate is going to make the next year of your life a living hell.  I tell you this as a person who would be your friend if I was a person who looked for different things in friends.  

JOSH: We should do this in more often.  

LISA: As often as it takes.

(LEO’S OFFICE)

LEO: [on phone] We don't' hate Asians.  No we don't.  Justice Wong is more valuable to us where he is. Certainly. Thank you sir. [hangs up] Do a drive-by with Sebastian Cho, Massachusetts Supreme.  

TOBY: Yeah.  You were looking for me?  

LEO: You hear about a congressional delegation to the Middle East?  

TOBY: Next month.  

LEO: It was Jordan and Egypt. Now they want to add Israel and do a day in the territories and meet with this shadow negotiation crew.  State's iffy.

TOBY: As they should be.  The Prime Minister is going to go through the roof.  

LEO: Not to mention the Palestinian authority.  

TOBY: I'll look into it.  

LEO: Andy's leading the delegation.  Is that going to be a...  

TOBY: No.  I'm on it.  

JOSH: President's on his way.  What's up?  

TOBY: We hate Asians.  

JOSH: Okay.  

(OUTSIDE OVAL OFFICE)

DEBBIE: Ah Rina, how goes it?

RINA: These are today's. And Mr. Ziegler says that the President would want this before their 1:00.  

DEBBIE: Oh here, you can put it in his hot little hands yourself.

RINA: Ah, this is for you, sir.

BARTLET: Thank you Lana.  

RINA: Uh, thank you sir.  (to Debbie) It…

DEBBIE: I hate to do this, but it's Rina, sir.  

BARTLET: What?  

DEBBIE: The girl in the dress with the flowers.  

BARTLET: Just now?  

DEBBIE: Yes.  

BARTLET: What'd I call her?

DEBBIE: Lana.  

BARTLET: Who's Lana?  

DEBBIE: I'm guessing an exotic dancer from your spotty youth.  

BARTLET: I should apologize.  Get her back.  

DEBBIE: You asked me yesterday how the schedule gets off the rails.  

BARTLET: Yeah.  

DEBBIE: This is how.  

LEO: Good afternoon, Mr. President.  

BARTLET: Hey, we make any friends?

JOSH: Maybe Zimmerly, Shelton.

TOBY: Mehldau.  

JOSH: Lang was pretty impressive.

BARTLET: The gal from the 4th?  Didn't she strike down some stuff?

JOSH: Parental consent for abortion.  

BARTLET: Yeah, that's not going to happen.  

LEO: She was a red flag to the bull.  

JOSH: Well, it's working.  Lisa Wolfe from the judiciary committee showed up today spewing all kinds of threats and admonitions.  

LEO: About what?  

TOBY: Three dems on the committee called, elated we were considering bold choices.  

LEO: If the strategy's working, let's get her in again.  

BARTLET: You like Shelton?  

JOSH: Yeah.  Moderate, insightful, gets it.  

BARTLET: Let's meet him.  Who else?  

JOSH: Helen Waller.  Beresford Bannett DC Circuit.  Ellis Yaffe.  Martha Zell. Uh.. Howard Kagen out of New York.

(TUESDAY)

(C.J.’S OFFICE)

TOBY: What are you doing?  

C.J.: Nothing.  

TOBY: What?  

CAROL: She has a date.  

C.J.: And she's getting fired.

TOBY: Evelyn Lang’s coming back in for another red herring performance, 3:00.  You don't find that annoying?  

C.J.: I'll have Carol march the Times by Lang at three.  

TOBY: Brad Shelton's in with the President.  

C.J.: We like him.  

TOBY: Yeah,  we do.  

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: E. Bradford Shelton.  What's the E for?  

SHELTON: Elijah.  

BARTLET: That's a burden.  

SHELTON: Hence the E.  

BARTLET: I hear good things about you from my staff.  What did they miss?  

SHELTON: My son burned you in effigy.  

BARTLET: Did you watch?  

SHELTON: I didn't. It was a campus demonstration against American presence in Saudi Arabia.  There's a photo in his yearbook.  Someone'll dig it up.  I thought it would sound better in person than on paper.  

BARTLET: I'm not sure it did.  Did he burn anybody else?  

SHELTON: No, just you.  

(HALLWAY)

LANG: Well, I’ve missed you both.

JOSH: We appreciate this.  

LANG: I keep running into Brad Shelton in the parking lot.  Some say coincidence. I'm not so sure.  

JOSH: You have been very patient.

LANG: Well I don't mind.  But people wonder why the appellate system is so backed up.  We shouldn't let them know this is how I spend my time.  

TOBY: Well, if you were less appealing.  

LANG: Same to you sir.

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: Affirmative action is going to be back in the next few years.  Let's start there.  

SHELTON: What do I know about it?

BARTLET: What do you think about it?

SHELTON: I don't know.  Not the answer you were looking for?  

BARTLET: Not really.  

SHELTON: Unnerving isn't it?

BARTLET: Is there another topic you'd be more comfortable with?  

SHELTON: Nothing comes to mind.

BARTLET: Perhaps you should make something up.  

SHELTON: I'm not trying to be cagey, but I don't position myself on issues and I don't know what I think about a case until I hear it.  There are moderates who are called that because they are not activists.  And there are moderates who are called that because sometimes they wind up on the left and sometimes on the right.  

BARTLET: You think I want someone who’s gonna vote with Ashland?  

SHELTON: I think you are looking for somebody who will vote with him now and replace him later.  

BARTLET: And that's not you?

SHELTON: Wish it were.  He's a giant.  But my allegiance to the eccentricities of a case will reliably outweigh my allegiance to any position you might wish I held.  

(ROOSEVELT ROOM)

JOSH: Let's talk a little bit about what the judiciary committee's concerns would be.  We can safely say reproductive rights are gonna come up.  

TOBY: They're going to say judicial activism, particularly in drori.  How would you address that?  

LANG: And you're who?  

TOBY: I'm sorry?  

LANG: Who are you?  We're playing committee.  

JOSH: This will be coming from one of the 11 Republicans on there.  Mitchell -  

LANG: You can only be one.  

JOSH: We don't need to -  

LANG: If you're Webster, the question is 'Where do you stand on Roe v Wade?'.  And the answer is 'Judicial ruling shouldn't be based on personal ideology, mine or anyone else's'.  If you're Davies, the question is 'How would you approach a D&X case?' because he's the drum banger on partial birth.  And the answer is 'I don't comment on hypotheticals'.  If you're Malkin, you're from Virginia, so you ask about my decision in drori.  I take you point by point from the doctor to the father to Casey to undue burden to equal protection back to Roe at which point you can't remember the question and I drink my water for a minute while you regroup.  

JOSH: Will you excuse us for a second?

(OUT IN THE HALL)

JOSH: I love her.  I love her mind.  I love her shoes.  

TOBY: We march her to five senator's offices and they'll be so scared they'll beg us to put Shelton on the court.  

(ROOSEVELT ROOM)

JOSH: Sorry. You were vetted by the FBI when you hit the Federal bench, but if we re-opened an investigation....

LANG: I'm a shill, right?  Why would you bother with a background check?  

JOSH: Humor us.  

TOBY: If there's anything that they didn't find...  

LANG: Let's see, umm... in high school I snuck a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover out of the public library and never returned it.  In college I got a marijuana plant from my roommate as a birthday present.  And in year two of law school I had an abortion.  Can I get some water while you regroup?

ACT TWO  

JOSH: Okay.  Okay.  

LANG: I tell you this so you'd be prepared. It might not come up, but if it did, I wouldn't comment.  

JOSH: But if they know, it'll be hard.  

LANG: Roe v Wade affords me the right to terminate a pregnancy and to do so, free from all restraint or interference of others.  

JOSH: A hearing room....  

LANG: I'm told I have a right to privacy.  I think this would be the sort of thing it's referring to.  I also bet like a drunken sailor during my bi-monthly games of Hearts.  Do you wanna talk about that?

(C.J.’S OFFICE)

C.J.: An abortion?  

TOBY: Of all the gin joints in all the world....  

JOSH: Maybe they won't find it.

TOBY: Oh, they'll find it.  

JOSH: Yeah, but who's going to bring it up?  The committee, they'd look like monsters.  

C.J.: They don't have to.  Someone leaks it to the tabloid press, it's a feeding frenzy in 12 hours.  

JOSH: She says she can handle it.

C.J.: Oh, okay.  

TOBY: Well, we need her.  She's the cautionary tale.  Without her, we may not get Shelton.

C.J.: You been outside today?  We don't hand someone to the madding crowd so they can take the heat off some guy from Indiana.  

JOSH: The woman is - you should hear her.  

C.J.: What? So she IS a serious candidate?  

JOSH: She should be.  

C.J.: She's going to be on posters under a headline that says 'Wanted for the murder of 15 million American children'.  

JOSH: Let's think about this.

C.J.: Let it go.  

JOSH: No.  Really, nominees live or die by Roe v Wade.  We're playing along with the ridiculous notion that the Supreme Court is a single issue body in a way it hasn't been since, I don't know what...  

TOBY: Slavery.  

JOSH: Exactly.  So she had an abortion. Who the hell are we?  

C.J.: You think I like this? You keep this up, somone's going to take this to the press and this bright woman's going to be a checkout counter spectacle. Get her out of the building.

(WEDNESDAY)  

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: Brad Shelton could work for us.  I like him.

LEO: So talk to him this afternoon.  He's going to start getting calls.  

BARTLET: Who else?  

TOBY: Wisnewski’s a good maybe.  The majority leader’s really pushing him.  And Barkham from the 5th, though he has a question.  

JOSH: It's a tax thing.  We're looking into it.  

BARTLET: You still having a love affair with Evelyn Lang?  

JOSH: No. Uh, Robert Brant.

BARTLET: How come?  

JOSH: She won't make through vetting.  

BARTLET: Why not?  

TOBY: She had an abortion.  

JOSH: Robert Brandt’s on the 9th circuit state.  Stan Yancy's worked with him and says he's always kept his cards -  

BARTLET: When did she have an abortion?  

JOSH: Law school.  

BARTLET: Before or -  

C.J.: After '73, it was legal.

BARTLET: We discarding anybody else for legal activities?  

TOBY: Not yet.  

BARTLET: Tonsillectomy? We down on surfing this year?  

C.J.: She'd be publicly eviscerated.  

BARTLET: 27 million women voted for me.  I think they might had in mind that I was going to protect this particular right.

JOSH: We have plenty –

BARTLET: “I like that guy from Florida with the good hairdo, but I want to retain my right to choose, so I'm voting for what's-his-name, married to Abbey Bartlet.”  

TOBY: Sir.  They're going to make this about her objectivity.  

BARTLET: We promised the committee a short list by Friday.  I want her name on it.  

LEO: Okay.  

STAFF: Thank you, Mr. President.  (EXEUNT)

BARTLET: That pisses me off.

LEO: Apparently.  

BARTLET: We marched her around here all week.  The honor of a place on the short list is the least we could do.  

LEO: We’re still going with Brad Shelton?  BARTLET: (nods)

(DONNA’S CUBICLE)

RYAN: Filling a seat on the Supremes…heady stuff.  

DONNA: Don't call them that.

RYAN: My uncle calls them that.  So does the minority leader.  So does Henry Clark.  You know him? He's on the court.  

DONNA: You drop one more name and I'm going to staple your mouth shut.  

RYAN: (chuckles)

JOSH: There’ll be hell to pay at Agincourt.  I've offended the dauphin.  

DONNA: Lisa Wolfe called twice.  Senator Webster called regarding E. Lang.  “What can you possibly be thinking?”  Senator Milbank, regarding Lang.  “NO NO NO NO NO.” Bertha McNull, “Not a snow ball's chance in...” oh, that's not about Lang.  That's about the highways bill.  

JOSH: I need a drink.  

DONNA: Sun’s not over the yardarm.

JOSH: C.J.'s right.  

DONNA: Usually. You want a Black Eyed Susan?  

JOSH: Is that a drink?  

DONNA: It's a cookie.  My mom sent them.  

JOSH: No -- Yes.  

DONNA: Peanut butter with a chocolate kiss.  

JOSH: They’re cat people?  [holding up cookie tin]

DONNA: No they're not.  

JOSH: These theirs?  

DONNA: Shadrach and Meschach.

JOSH: Two cats, they’re cat people.  

DONNA: For years they only had one, but he died over Christmas.  

JOSH: This is a dry cookie.

DONNA: After what was deemed an appropriate mourning period, they went to get a new one. And my mother liked the abyssinian and my father liked the gray.  And they claim that after 39 years of marriage, they’ve outgrown compromise, so they got both.  It doesn't make them cat people.  The house doesn't smell. Do I have crumbs?  

(TOBY’S OFFICE)

JOSH: They pick one.  They pick one! That's how we get Evie Lang. And not as a decoy.  We put her on the court.  

TOBY: Hi.  

JOSH: The Chief Justice says he wouldn't step down because the President wouldn't be able to fill his seat with another liberal lion.  She's the liberal lion. Ashland resigns, she takes his seat, okay?  And we offer the Republican Senate Judiciary Committee the opportunity to hand-pick a conservative for Brady's seat.  We put 'em both up.  

TOBY: I’m ordering mu-shu. You want some?  

JOSH: Listen to me.  

TOBY: No.  

JOSH: I'm serious.  

TOBY: And then we got what, after we hand the Republicans a seat on the Supreme Court with a red bow on top?

JOSH: We have a balanced court.  They can't let Brady's seat go to a liberal.  So let them keep it.  Meanwhile, we name the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the nation's history.  I'm taking it to the President.  

TOBY: No you're not.  Do not go in there.  

(HALLWAY)

JOSH: Trip him.  

TOBY: Ashland is 82.  We may have an opportunity to put two people on this bench. That's two seats we fill with Democrats.  

JOSH: Moderates.  

TOBY: What do you care how moderate they are?  Two is twice as many as one.

(OUTSIDE OVAL OFFICE)

JOSH: Can I get in there?  

DEBBIE: No, just a minute.  

TOBY: We don't need him.  

JOSH: Not moderate, mediocre.

TOBY: What, Shelton’s not bright enough for you?  

JOSH: I want more than bright.  If we had a bench full of moderates in ’54, 'Separate but Equal' would still be on the books, and this place would still have two sets of drinking fountains.  

TOBY: Moderate means temperate.  It means responsible.  It means thoughtful.  

JOSH: It means cautious.  It means unimaginative.  

TOBY: It means being more concerned about making decisions than making history.  

DEBBIE: Indoor voices please.

JOSH: Is that really the biggest tragedy in the world?  That we nominated somebody who made an impression instead of some second rate crowd pleaser?

TOBY: The ability to see tow sides of an argument is not the hallmark of an inferior intellect.  

DEBBIE: Toby!

JOSH: What about the vast arenas of debate a moderate won't even address? A mind like Lang's?

DEBBIE: Josh!  

JOSH: Let them pick a conservative with a mind like like Justice Brady had.  

DEBBIE: Josh!  

JOSH: You can hate his positions, but he was a visionary.  He blew the whole thing open.  He changed the whole argument.

DEBBIE: (sprays water in Josh’s face) The President will see you now.  

BARTLET: And you?  

TOBY: I think they're going to pick a young, spry, conservative ideologue who's going to camp out in that seat for 45 years.  

JOSH: Fine.  Two voices are articulating the debate at either end of the spectrum.  

BARTLET: Filling another seat on the court may be the only lasting thing I do in this office. Shelton's a great choice. He'll make us proud. And if Ashland resigns in a year, we’ve got a stack of great options. We can't give it away.  

JOSH: Mr. President, the first woman in that chair.  

TOBY: We go out on some limb here and alienate the Senate, they'll tread water for three years, and we get nobody. The next guy gets to fill Brady's seat.  

BARTLET: Take it to Ashland.  See what he says.

TOBY: How’d you come up with it?

JOSH: What?  

TOBY: The swap-a-dee-doo.  

JOSH: There was.... Donna's mom... I thought it up in the shower.

(JUSTICE ASHLAND’S OFFICE)

ASHLAND: Who let them in?  

TOBY: Sorry to disturb you, sir.

ASHLAND: Carrier pigeons. Oh -- your flowers.  Yeah, we like them.  

JOSH: I'm dreadfully sorry about that, sir.  

ASHLAND: Oh for God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.  Brady was your age.  Eat your greens.  

TOBY: He was a great man.  

ASHLAND: He was a selfish bastard.

JOSH: You told the President you hope to be replaced by a liberal with the same level conviction that you brought to the chair.  

ASHLAND: That sounds like something I'd say.  

TOBY: Sir, are you familiar with Evelyn Baker Lang?  

ASHLAND: Miss Lang. You've met with her?  

JOSH: Yes sir.  

ASHLAND: How are you going to get her past the pit bulls?  They're not going to like the notion of Miss Lang in Owen Brady's seat.  

JOSH: For your seat, if - if - you were to resign, she'd be Chief.  

ASHLAND: My seat? What about Brady's?  

TOBY: We'd allow the Judiciary Committee to choose someone.  A conservative.  

JOSH: Would you consider stepping down under those circumstances?  

ASHLAND: Sure.  

JOSH: We think it might be a viable option.  

ASHLAND: Go ahead, see who they pick of their favorite sons.  See what segregationist, anti-miscegenationist,  Isaiah-quoting, gay-bashing bastard they come up with. Jed Bartlet from New Hampshire had an idea.  Uh-oh.

ACT THREE

(THURSDAY, LISA WOLFE’S OFFICE)  

LISA: No, I cut this because what he's implying is illegal.  Take it back out. [to Josh] Three times in one week.  In some cultures we'd be married.  

JOSH: Chilling.  

LISA: Is it Shelton?  

JOSH: He's the front runner.

LISA: Good, are we done?  

JOSH: Mind if I shut the door?

LISA: No.  

JOSH: How are you doing?  

LISA: Ah, super!  

JOSH: Feeling good?  

LISA: I got a meeting in 4 minutes.  

JOSH: I'm going to float an idea here that even I can't believe I'm mentioning and my colleagues definitely can't believe I'm mentioning, and the President would probably prefer I drop completely and if I find it in the Washington Post tomorrow morning, I'll march straight out to the Press Room and tell them the idea came from you.  It'll embarrass the crap out of your boss and you'll be on Hotjobs by nightfall.

[THE WHITE HOUSE. TOBY’S OFFICE]  

TOBY: There's someone in my office.  

RINA: I thought it was your ex-wife.  

TOBY: You didn’t want to warn me about that?  

RINA: You asked her to come in.

ANDREA: She's cute.  

TOBY: Late some night, our eyes’ll meet over the maritime commission report. We'll be at the Justice of the Peace before dawn.  You want to talk about this dog and pony show you're attending in Gaza?  

ANDREA: Not really. Bradford Shelton.  

TOBY: He's on the list. You're not going to Gaza.  

ANDREA: I still don't want to talk about it.  

TOBY: You're not attending peace talks with a bunch of Israelis and Palestinians who don't work for the Israeli or Palestinian governments.  

ANDREA: They may generate some useful ideas.  

TOBY: The ideas already exist. The problem is getting the recognized parties to stick to the plan.  

ANDREA: So we sit with our hands folded?  

TOBY: We asked them for democracy. We should maintain some scrap of respect for the guys who are democratically elected.  

ANDREA: If you're really interested in peace, you negotiate with anyone.  You negotiate with the mailman.  

TOBY: Thanks for tee-ing that up. The mailman can't deliver.  

ANDREA: We'll see.  

TOBY: No, we won't see. You're jeopardizing this country's relationship with the Likud party and with the Palestinian authority, and it is not an option.  

ANDREA: Is that all you've got? There’s no “and what about the kids?”  

TOBY: Did something happen?

ANDREA: I'm going away for two weeks.  

TOBY: Will they be...?  

ANDREA: At my mothers...  

TOBY: Good.  

ANDREA: Would you have asked?

TOBY: I figured your mother’s, which is apparently....  

ANDREA: You say you want to be involved. It doesn't come with an embossed invitation. You involve yourself or you don't.  

TOBY: The President would like to remind you that this is a fact-finding mission. Please make it clear to any parties that you meet with that you are not empowered to negotiate for the United States.  

[OUTSIDE C.J.’S OFFICE]  

JOSH: Is she in there?  

CAROL: Hang on. She's getting off....  [C.J. laughs loudly through the door]  the phone.... [into speaker phone] you want Josh?  

C.J.: Lord knows I do! Josh Lyman as I live and breathe!  You want a cookie?  They're from Donna's mother.  

JOSH: I spoke to Lisa Wolfe.

C.J.: What did she say?  

JOSH: I don't want to talk about it. I'm hiding from Toby.  

C.J.: [giggles] Nothing. You're hiding. It's funny.  

JOSH: It's not funny.  

TOBY: Hey  

C.J.: [laughs] see?  It is.

JOSH: I gotta go.  

TOBY: What's going on?  

JOSH: C.J. has the giggles.

C.J.: It's your deal.  I find it elating.  

TOBY: She stoned?  

C.J.: I'm fine. I just didn't get enough sleep.  

JOSH: You were with Ranger Rick weren't you?  

C.J.: Josh spoke to Lisa Wolfe.

TOBY: She give you a name?  

JOSH: You are a faithless wench.

TOBY: What's the name?  

JOSH: Christopher Mulready.  Wait for it....  

TOBY: Christopher MULREADY????!!!!

JOSH: There it is.  

C.J.: He’s not the....  

TOBY: American's Democrats - The triumphant of Socialism.  

JOSH: He doesn't like the name.

TOBY: The man wrote a book that flushes the entire doctrine of un-enumerated rights down the -

C.J.: Toilet.  

TOBY: …garbage disposal. No right to use a condom. No right to get an abortion, certainly. No protection from electronic searches. No substantive due process.  

C.J.: He's what, 48?  

JOSH: I know.  

C.J.: The left's going to blow a gasket!  

TOBY: No separation of church and state.  

JOSH: We got problems on the right too.  Kogan, Howard, Tondello.  They can't vote for a Mulready.  Their constituencies are too moderate.  

TOBY: Get another name.  

JOSH: That is the name.  

TOBY: There are other....  

JOSH: This is the deal. He's what Evelyn Lang is to them. We nominate the patron saint of a woman's right to choose for Chief Justice. We ask them to ignore an incredibly rich piece of her personal history. We take the name they give us.  

TOBY: This isn't going to work.

JOSH: Yeah.  

TOBY: It isn't.  

[JOSH'S OFFICE]  

TOBY: If --- if we were going to try this, what would be the plan?  

JOSH: We give the President and Leo the name. We bring Christopher Mulready in. We bring Lang back in, hopefully the two of them woo the pants off the President. And he agrees to the deal without noticing he's standing in the gaze of history, pantless.  

TOBY: I'll talk to him.  

JOSH: You don't have to talk to him.  

TOBY: You have been on about this. It sounds more plausible coming from me. What are you gonna do about the committee?  

JOSH: Lisa Wolfe’s gonna take it to the Chairman.

TOBY: I mean the Democrats. I need to get Senator Pierce on board or you get nobody.  What are you going to do about Pierce?  

RYAN: (singing)'Won't you stay... just a little big longer... '  

DONNA: Stop.  

TOBY: I thought you were firing him?  

JOSH: If wishing made it so. Donna! Send in Elvis.

RYAN: What's up?  

JOSH: Come on in, take a load off.  I was a little, ah, brusque with you before. I'm sorry about that.  

RYAN: Okay.  

JOSH Your feelings a little hurt?

RYAN: Not at all  

JOSH: Really? Why not?  

RYAN: Would this be easier if they were?  

JOSH: I said I was going to fire you if it wasn't for....  

RYAN: Are you?  Firing me?  

JOSH: No.  

RYAN: Then there's a “sticks and stones” thing that comes to mind.  

[OUTSIDE OVAL OFFICE]

TOBY: Finishing a call. I spoke to Andy.  

LEO: Anything?  

TOBY: No. The National Security Caucus is sponsoring the delegation. We could talk to them.  

LEO: We'll deal with it next week. Don't worry about it.  

TOBY: We got a name for Brady's seat.  

LEO: Somebody workable?  

DEBBIE: You can go in now.  

LEO: Thank you.

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: MULREADY!  

TOBY: That's the name.  

BARTLET: No! Are you out of your bloody mind?  

TOBY: Let's sit down and talk about this.  

BARTLET: The last time I heard Christopher Mulready's name it was in conjunction with a treatise over the rights of incorporation, and some sort of baloney about the stranglehold the EPA has placed on the endangered species list…

ACT FOUR  

(THURSDAY)

[DONNA’S CUBICLE]

JOSH: Ryan in here yet?  

DONNA: Not yet.  

CHARLIE: Chris Mulready?  

JOSH: Yeah  

CHARLIE: Dissented on minority set asides. Struck down hate crime legislation. Went after miranda rights. Feeling pretty good about that?  

JOSH: It's not a perfect plan.  I'm the first to admit.  

CHARLIE: The President wants to reiterate, he’s not spending more than five minutes with this clown.

C.J.: The press room is clear. Carol is going to babysit the filing shop.  But keep an eye out for roving reporters.  

CHARLIE: You're in on this too?

JOSH: We got Lang coming in to meet the President at 7.  Christopher Mulready is at 8.  The press can't see him. We need a clear shot from the Roosevelt room to the Oval.  

DONNA: He's on the short list?

JOSH: He is if she is. We may get both.  

DONNA: Oh my god. You're putting my mother's cats on the Supreme Court.  

C.J.: You're what?  

JOSH: It's just an experiment. She’s on sentry.  We’re good.

TOBY: Hi.  

JOSH: Don't ever tell anyone that story.  

TOBY: We all settled?  

C.J.: Lefty’s got the goods.  Rocko got the call.  Stinky's on lookout.  

DONNA Hey!  

RYAN: Shall we?  

JOSH: Your uncle’s here?

C.J.: Knock 'em dead. Pierce’ll never buy it, will he?  

TOBY: Nope.

RYAN: Remember, he's all bark.  Just let him holler and wear himself out.  He's got the strength. You've got the endurance.  Here.  [hands over bottle of scotch]. Use it wisely and for God's sake, don't try to keep up.  You're way out of your league.  

JOSH: Not necessary.  Thank you.

(MURAL ROOM)

SENATOR PIERCE: Good to see you, Josh.  

JOSH: Senator Pierce, thank you so much for stopping in.  

RYAN: Josh was pretty impressed with your floor speech on Tuesday.  

PIERCE: Josh can kiss up all on his own.  Get back to work.  

RYAN: Yell if you need anything.

PIERCE: My nephew behaving?

JOSH: He's a… treat.

PIERCE: Well, he better be.  Bugged me for two years to get him a job in this place.  

JOSH: Really?

PIERCE: Watch yourself, he's a lean and hungry type.  Have someone taste your food.  

JOSH: Ryan?

PIERCE: So!  Craziest rumor you ever heard running around the committee.

JOSH: Oh, yeah?

PIERCE: Charlie Felson says you want to put Chris Mulready on the Supreme Court. I said anybody who tries is going to find himself in a closed session with myself, the minority leader, and the business end of a two-by-four.  

JOSH: You know, we got a 21year old Glenlivet knocking around here. Can I get you a drink?  

[DEBBIE'S OFFICE]  

C.J.: Lang still in there?  

DEBBIE: Oh, she's a big hit.

C.J.: She has to leave. Her evil twin Skippy is on his way.  

DEBBIE: I did our secret wrap-it-up sign, which is, I knock and say 'The deputy NSA needs to talk about Japan' and he said 'you talk to him, you've been there' which is true. But it makes me think he's forgotten it's a secret sign.  

C.J.: How about "Excuse me Mr. President we need to move on"?  

DEBBIE: If you want the job, you're going to have to work on your typing.  

[ROOSEVELT ROOM]  

TOBY: Apologies.  He's running behind schedule.  

MULREADY: I imagine that happens.  You want to tell me what I'm doing here?

TOBY: Oh, just a hello.  

MULREADY:  I'm not being impeached?  

TOBY: No.  

MULREADY:  This isn’t a not-particularly-subtle form of intimidation about the gays in the workplace case?  

TOBY: That would be illegal.

MULREADY:  My point exactly.  

TOBY: The President will explain....any minute now.  

MULREADY: Hm.

TOBY: But since you mention it, I read your article on Bellington, and I may be out on the fringe here, but I - I don't see how a family values conservative justifies denying committed couples access to the benefits of state sanctioned monogamy.  

MULREADY:  Homosexual couples.  

TOBY: Couples. A couple is a couple.  

[C.J.'S OFFICE]  

JOSH: Hi.  

C.J.: How was Ryan's uncle?

JOSH: He's a blast. Come meet him.

C.J.: He's still here? Oh my God!  You're drunk!  

JOSH: I think I just promised him a pork barrel roads project on an omnibus bill that doesn't exist. Don't try and keep up.  He's got a wooden – a hollow leg. He drinks a lot.  

[ROOSEVELT ROOM]  

TOBY: It's an equal protection violation.  

MULREADY:  Homosexuals are not a suspect class.  

TOBY: D.O.M.A. denies access.

MULREADY:  No.  

TOBY: To over 1,000 federal protections.  

MULREADY:  To what?  

TOBY: Survivor benefits under Social Security.  

MULREADY:  $255.00? I'll write you a check.  

TOBY: Hospital decision making.

MULREADY:  So talk about power of attorney, not marriage. Besides, the fact that D.O.M.A. doesn't restrict access to marriage.  

TOBY: Of course it restricts access. It restricts full faith and credit.  

MULREADY:  So, Vermont gets to steer nationwide marriage legislation? Vermont?

LANG: Well, this is a sight to see! One of the more unlikely meetings in the history of the Bartlet White House.  

MULREADY:  It's good to see you, Evie.  

LANG: You too, Chris.  I came to say goodbye. I wish I had a camera.

MULREADY:  Mr. Ziegler was trying to convince me that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.  

LANG: Oh, D.O.M.A.?  He was trying to convince you?

TOBY: What?  

LANG: He doesn't need convincing.

TOBY: I wasn't doing it because...

LANG: He was yanking your chain. He would never uphold D.O.M.A.  He may not love the idea of gay marriage, but he hates congressional overreaching, and Congress doesn't have the power to legislate marriage.  The issue isn't privacy.  

MULREADY: Or equal protection.

LANG: It's enumerated powers. He'll have an easier time knocking down D.O.M.A. than I will.  

MULREADY:  Lack of imagination on your part, if I may be so bold.

TOBY: You were yanking my chain?

MULREADY:  You called me in for a meeting with a Democratic president in the middle of the night.  Are you really going to give me crap about yanking your chain?

LANG: Josh Lyman is gesticulating wildly.  

TOBY: Excuse me.  

[HALLWAY]  

TOBY: Where's the Senator?  

JOSH: He's in with C.J.. He got me a little drunk.  

TOBY: Is he leaving?  

JOSH: I think he's getting C.J. a little drunk. How's it going?  

TOBY: He's striking down gay marriage bans and she's defending him and they're as thick as thieves and he's a fan of chain yanking.  

JOSH: She's defending him?  

TOBY: Down is down, down is up.

LANG: I am not... no I am not rewriting Article 1. What I am saying is that a gun free school zone...

MULREADY:  Is not a federal issue. In Lopez…  

LANG: Lopez overturned 50 years of precedent.  

MULREADY:  Too bad, they ruled a plain text reading of the commerce clause, does not afford Congress...  

LANG: A plain text reading of the Constitution values a “negro” at three-fifths of a man.  

MULREADY:  Hence the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.  

LANG: Oh, generous. Thank you.

MULREADY: The relationship between guns and schools and interstate commerce is... is...  

LANG: You don't think that the quality of education has a direct affect on the economic...  

[DEBBIE'S OFFICE]  

TOBY: Is he?  

DEBBIE: Waiting to meet a man you're holding hostage in the Roosevelt room.

(MURAL ROOM)

C.J. AND PIERCE: Oh and while the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown, the courtroom was adjourned, no verdict was returned…

JOSH: Ok... ok.... Everyone needs to put down their glasses and pay attention.  

[OVAL OFFICE]  

BARTLET: You like him.  

TOBY: I hate him. I hate him, but he's brilliant. And the two of the them together, they’re fighting like cats and dogs, but it works.  

[MURAL ROOM]

PIERCE: You couldn't find a single warm-blooded centrist to put on the court?  

JOSH: We've got centrists. We've got six of them plus two staunch conservatives plus Justice Ashland. The one clarion voice articulating a liberal vision. He's going to go and then what?

[OVAL OFFICE]

BARTLET: Well, send him in....

TOBY: Sir…  

BARTLET: I said I'll listen to him, Toby. That's going to have to do it.  

[HALLWAY]

DONNA: Toby.  

TOBY: What?  

DONNA: Nothing's happening.

TOBY: Hang on.

DONNA: That's him?  

TOBY: Yeah.  

DONNA: No tail.  No cloven hooves.  

[OVAL OFFICE]  

DEBBIE: Judge Mulready.  

BARTLET: Thanks for coming in.

MULREADY:  It's an honor sir.  

BARTLET: Please.  I understand that you and Judge Lang had a bit of a knock-down-drag-out.  

MULREADY:  She wants to federalize law enforcement.  

BARTLET: Yeah.  

MULREADY:  I thought it was hasty.  

BARTLET: Not your brand of judge?

MULREADY:  Quite the opposite.  I haven't had that much fun in months.  

BARTLET: Really?  

MULREADY:  Use her, if you can. I'm not sure what all this is about.  I suppose a number of people are placated by a glimpse of someone like her or someone like me in these halls. I'm most certainly here for that.  But if there’s anyway that you can use her…  

BARTLET: It's unlikely.  

MULREADY:  Who's at the top of the list?   ... If I leaked it, would they believe me?  

BARTLET: Brad Shelton.  

MULREADY:  Really?  

BARTLET: You don't like him?

MULREADY:  He's a fine jurist. And in the event that Carmine, Lafayette, Hoyt, Clarke and Brannaghan all drop dead, the center will still be well tended.  

BARTLET: You want another Brady?

MULREADY:  Sure, just like you'd like another Ashland - who wouldn't?  The court was at its best when Brady was fighting Ashland.  

BARTLET: Plenty of good law written by the voices of moderation.  

MULREADY:  Who writes the extraordinary dissent? The one man minority opinion whose time hasn't come, but 20 years later some circuit court clerk digs it up at three in the morning.  Brennan railing against censorship.  Harlan's Jeremiad on Jim Crowe.  

BARTLET: Maybe you, some day?

MULREADY:  They can't put me on the court, just like you can't put Evelyn Lang on the court.  It's Sheltons from here on in.  

BARTLET: There are 4,000 protestors outside this building worried about who's going to land in that seat.  We can't afford to alienate all of them.  MULREADY:  We all have our roles to play sir. Yours is to nominate someone who doesn't alienate people.  

(FRIDAY)

(PRESS ROOM)

JOSH: Where's Toby?  

C.J.: Can you see this? [pointing to spot on her blouse]  

JOSH: Yeah.  

C.J.: It's water, it'll dry.

JOSH: Okay.  

TOBY: Ready?  

[on the TV in background...]  

REPORTER ... have gathered around..... Ashland having served 32 years on the United States Supreme Court, 12 of them as Chief will officially announce his retirement in just a moment.

ASHLAND: (at podium, on TV) Henry Staub retired, and I received a phone call, you were probably learning to walk. It's been an honor to pause in Henry Staub's chair, a joy to spend...  

C.J.: (to Bartlet) He’ll take three questions at the most, and then we’re off  .  

LANG:[to Lang] you ready?  [Lang is engrossed in Ashland's announcement] [To C.J.] That's a yes.

MULREADY: So, why a racial preference and not an economic one?  

CHARLIE: Because affirmative action’s about a legacy of racial oppression.  

MULREADY:  It’s about compromising admissions standards.  

CHARLIE: That's bull….excuse me. It's about leveling the playing field after 300 years of…

MULREADY:  See, this is where the liberal argument goes off the rails.  You get stuck in the past. Now you wanna comeback at me with grading is based on past performance, but admission should be based on potential on how a candidate may thrive with this sort of opportunity. And studies show that affirmative action admits have a higher predisposition to contribute to society.  

CHARLIE: Hang on, I gotta write this down.  

BARTLET: Ah-ah-ah.  Hand it over. [to Evelyn] Toby has a daughter, Molly, 10 months old. She's a looker and very bright. And someday he'd like to give her this copy of the 14th Amendment signed by the first woman to ever hold this job.  

LANG: Have you got a...  

TOBY: Oh... [hands her a pen] Would you mind adding that title?  

LANG: That's a bit premature, isn't it?  

BARTLET: No.

TOBY: Thank you.

C.J.: Mr. President.  

BARTLET: Shall we? [at the podium]

C.J.: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.  

BARTLET: The honorable Christopher Mulready, nominee for Associate Justice - United States Supreme Court. The honorable Evelyn Baker Lang, nominee for Chief Justice - United States Supreme Court. I look forward to taking your questions.

THE END

[dandart]

I like quizzes...

1. What is you middle name?

Walter. Not kidding.

2. How old are you?

28

3. When is your birthday?

4th June

4. What is your zodiac sign?

Classical: Gemini

Revised: Taurus

5. What is your favorite color?

Deep purple. Also orange sometimes.

6. What’s your lucky number?

4, 16, 64... powers of 4.

7. Do you have any pets?

1 black cat, 2 lutino cockatiels, a venus fly trap and a "puppy" (shytsumiki is my Chise)

8. Where are you from?

Devon, south west England.

9. How tall are you?

175cm (about 5'9" in ye olde measurements)

10. What shoe size are you?

Like 7... ._. That's tiny. It makes it painful to walk. (EU 41, US 9)

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

One that I actually use. But then I occasionally share with my darling Angel shytsumiki, but I also have more impractical ones stashed.

12. What was your last dream about?

Ah fuck now I don't remember... it was interesting though.

13. What talents do you have?

Coding, origami, musical instruments, tech in general and uhmm not a lot else?

14. Are you psychic in any way?

No one's psychic. That's never been proven. I can barely read emotions when I look at faces. I am remarkably imperceptive.

15. Favorite song?

Starset's My Demons, Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb or Focus' Anonymus 2.

16. Favorite movie?

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. But I do also enjoy me some others. Ask for my imdb if you're interested.

17. Who would be your ideal partner?

My babygirl shytsumiki was my childhood crush. No one I have ever met has come close to being so magically attractive to me.

18. Do you want children?

No, I have my babygirl shytsumiki and our pets are our babies.

19. Do you want a church wedding?

Noooooooooooo. One in the dead of night in the woods would be just lovely.

20. Are you religious?

In as much as I occasionally personify the world or the universe, but not seriously.

21. Have you ever been to the hospital?

Yeah. I even stayed overnight but only to stay with my little Angel shytsumiki.

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?

Umm... once as a kid I didn't know how to do anything nor what I was doing, and punched a teacher after she stopped me stealing and eating broken biscuits and had to talk to a policeman. But other than that, not since I was like 7. Gosh I was a horror.

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?

Yeah, I met the Linux Outlaws and co, I've met the Gadget Show crew, I went to see Biffy Clyro live... of all bands... I've spoken to a few coding legends too... erm... tweeted with Carmack, and Akira, that vfx guy for Star Trek...

24. Baths or showers?

Baths are soothing but I usually shower because I haven't always got the patience.

25. What color socks are you wearing?

Nihilism.

26. Have you ever been famous?

I should hope so. I was known as The Cloud Man by LO, got published in Linux Format, once had a thousand twitter followers and had feedback from strangers on my code. I am also in the OEIS, thrice.

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?

Not in the classical papparazi pop star sense, but to be a household name who doesn't have to hide his face in public sounds okay. A legacy would be nice, after all.

28. What type of music do you like?

Uber metal and prog rock, usually. Soundtracks too.

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping?

Noooooooo eww.

30. How many pillows do you sleep with?

Two, but I often share two with shytsumiki and iunno if she counts <3

31. What position do you usually sleep in?

Sideways unless my neck hurts (physiological problem) in which case back or front.

32. How big is your house?

Three bedrooms but still pokey. We have too much stuff.

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?

A nothing sandwich with bread made out of thin air with a side of invisible chips.

34. Have you ever fired a gun?

Only a bb and a fairground one.

35. Have you ever tried archery?

Yeah once and I loved it and want to take it up again.

36. Favorite clean word?

Either discombobulate, defenestrate, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis or jam.

37. Favorite swear word?

Fucknugget? Anything which is half swear and half clean is a winner in my book. Shitsticks.

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

Around 40 hours I should think.

39. Do you have any scars?

Myes. That's a story which perhaps requires a tw...

40. Have you ever had a secret admirer?

How would I know? If it's secret I wouldn't know. My little darling is my exsecret admirer though apparently.

41. Are you a good liar?

Nope. I am forgetful so I wouldn't even be aligned in the answers I was giving. Plus I just don't like it. It makes me too guilty.

42. Are you a good judge of character?

I hope so but haven't had many chances to find that out just yet.

43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?

Sure. It's-a pizza, italiano! But seriously I am okay at some but terrible at others.

44. Do you have a strong accent?

I wouldn't say so but no one would. I would just say "generic Southern English"

45. What is your favorite accent?

Some Southern hemisphere or east Asian I like a lot, also a few European.

46. What is your personality type?

INTP afaik

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

I don't actually know, I don't go for expensive, nor care for my clothes especially.

48. Can you curl your tongue?

Yes.

49. Are you an innie or an outie?

Innie.

50. Left or right handed?

Right.

51. Are you scared of spiders?

Nope.

52. Favorite food?

Sushi.

53. Favorite foreign food?

...sushi. Alright, different answer? Takoyaki?

54. Are you a clean or messy person?

Extremely messy.

55. Most used phrased?

It changes every so often. Dunno right now.

56. Most used word?

Also changes. Still don't know.

57. How long does it take for you to get ready?

For climbing? Jk like a minute?

58. Do you have much of an ego?

Used to, now I don't.

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?

Both.

60. Do you talk to yourself?

All the time. I know, right?

61. Do you sing to yourself?

Yup.

62. Are you a good singer?

Only if I try which is rare and even then rarely.

63. Biggest Fear?

Losing my Angel. Or dying.

64. Are you a gossip?

Nope. Not at all.

65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?

I don't actually know.

66. Do you like long or short hair?

Having? Long. Seeing? Don't mind as long as it's not a buzzcut. So from vaguely short and floofy to massively long.

67. Can you name all 50 states of America?

No I can't, and it would be weird to expect that of me.

68. Favorite school subject?

Maths and physics and IT.

69. Extrovert or Introvert?

Intro now, ex extro

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?

No but it sounds llike good fun.

71. What makes you nervous?

Jealousy and making the wrong moves.

72. Are you scared of the dark?

Nope. Used to be a bit when alone.

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?

Sometimes, less than I used to, when it would be useful.

74. Are you ticklish?

A bit. Less than I used to be since being bigger.

75. Have you ever started a rumor?

Nope

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?

Not official governmently but I have owned projects, and in other places.

77. Have you ever drank underage?

Probably.

78. Have you ever done drugs?

Hasn't everyone done soft ones?

79. Who was your first real crush?

My Angel Baby shytsumiki

80. How many piercings do you have?

None.

81. Can you roll your Rs?“

Yes.

82. How fast can you type?

Reasonably fast I should think.

83. How fast can you run?

Reasonably slow.

84. What color is your hair?

Brown to me, dark blonde to my mum and ginger in an underground coding quiz apparently.

85. What color is your eyes?

Are? Blue.

86. What are you allergic to?

Probably prawns.

87. Do you keep a journal?

No, wish I could remember to.

88. What do your parents do?

My mum's a mosaic artist and my dad's a retired satcom engineer.

89. Do you like your age?

Ummm, it's alright??

90. What makes you angry?

Die hard cruelty and things that make people or animals suffer. Including wars, all of which are inexcusable. Come on people, the best for the most, keep up! I am the judge.

91. Do you like your own name?

It's alright. Better than some, not as cool as others.

92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?

Bob Jim Ted because they are hilarious names. Not that I'm using them for anything but fiction.

93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child?

No. I already have my babygirl shytsumiki.

94. What are you strengths?

Code. Logic. Maths and science. Compassion perhaps.

95. What are your weaknesses?

Memory, communication and showing emotion.

96. How did you get your name?

My folks picked it from a comic. "Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future". Middle name from a great uncle.

97. Were your ancestors royalty?

Everyone's were. I haven't traced exactly how but have traced up to 500 years in some places.

98. Do you have any scars?

Yes, you asked that before.

99. Color of your bedspread?

Colour. Currently red and black.

100. Color of your room?

Colour! Well white as are all of them atm.

These are fun. Thank you.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Sun Myung Moon visits Hearst Street, Berkeley, Jan 1, 1976

extract from:

Crazy for God: The nightmare of cult life by Christopher Edwards

Every year, on January 1, the Family celebrated God’s Day. As December drew to a close. Family members whispered and giggled at the expectation of dressing up like adults. Perhaps Omma [Onni Durst] would even let us sleep a few extra hours that night.

I was living full-time in Oakland now with the deli crew, a Family sister named Jennifer, and Dr. Durst’s kids, whom I tutored and fathered when not working on the school project or at the deli. Since Dr. Durst and Omma were the True Parents for all us needy adults in the group, they did not have time to see their own children by Dr. Durst’s previous marriage. In fact, Omma considered these kids so fallen and satanic that she showed disgust when forced to touch them.

On the eve of God’s Day, I zoomed up into the parking lot at Hearst Street—as the lot filled with white vans unloading their troopers.

…

At a nudge by Omma, Oppa exclaimed:

“We have a special surprise for you. We have just received word that Father has flown into Berkeley to visit us on this most special occasion. For the next few hours you must fall into your work crews. Center men will receive instructions from me. Now, everybody lock arms and let’s have a big choo-choo!”

Four hundred voices resounded through the crowded house: “CHOO-CHOO-CHOO, CHOO-CHOO-CHOO, CHOO-CHOO-CHOO. YAY, YAY—POW!”

The morning of Father’s arrival dawned bright and beautiful. San Francisco Bay sparkled in the distance. Mail trucks rattled through the empty Berkeley streets, picking up their bundles at the blue sidewalk boxes. We heavenly children were exhausted. After polishing doorknobs, hanging new curtains, moving Father’s ornate furniture from storage into the living room, we were allowed to nap briefly, then awakened to prepare for the arrival of the Master. Despite my excitement at the chance to see Father in the flesh, I desperately hoped that some way, somehow, I could get another few minutes of sleep.

At the sound of the whistle, everyone jumped with a start. A watchful brother guarding the door popped his head into the hallway, shouting, “Father’s here! Father’s here!”

Omma and Oppa descended from their private bedroom to welcome the glorious Messiah and his retinue. Christine blew the whistle again, and brothers and sisters assembled in rows and columns. Christine started the chant to summon the spirit world. “Glory to Heaven, Peace on Earth, Glory to Heaven, Peace on Earth, Glory to Heaven, Peace on Earth…” The bells in the nearby church tolled six o’clock as two immense limousines pulled up to the entrance of the mansion. Guards in black suits jumped out of the vehicles, speedily opening back doors. Out of the first limousine stepped a short, squat Korean with sparse black strands of hair fringing his smooth, round head. The guards immediately bowed and shut the doors. Several other distinguished-looking Orientals climbed out of the remaining cars.

The man we called our Father marched briskly up the stairs and through the doorway. He rushed down the hall, passing me and the others in line, and burst into the living room as though he owned the entire world. Thirty paces behind him followed his sad-eyed fragile wife. They sat down together at Father’s Table, magnificently laid with silver goblets, Lenox china, and the finest Waterford crystal, which gleamed in the morning sunlight.

The atmosphere was electric. I had never seen Father before, but he seemed much smaller and much harder-looking than I had ever imagined. I marveled at my great fortune. Here I was living at the most crucial moment in history, in the center of the richest, most progressive nation on earth, face to face with the most important man in the history of the universe. As the Family stood at attention, the Messiah sipped silently from his glass, surveying the crowd with indifference.

The room was circled by guards, huge Asians and Europeans in black suits, well drilled in the martial arts. The doors were locked, the windows tightly shut. Christine shouted, “Bow!” and we complied, all four hundred of us simultaneously inclining from the waist for Father. Christine shouted, “Down!” and we immediately sank to our knees, dropping our heads three times for the Master.

The Messiah continued to sip his drink as his faithful translator. Colonel Pak, a former Korean military leader who carried himself like a polished diplomat, stepped up to the microphone. He addressed us softly, saying something like this:

“How fortunate you are that Father has agreed to talk to you today. He wants to tell you he loves you in spite of your fallen nature and even Heavenly Father loves you because you work so hard for him. And now, Master speaks!”

Reverend Moon pushed back his chair and stepped up to the microphone beside his translator. The crowd, sitting in rows, applauded wildly, and everybody rose on their knees to get a better look at their Messiah. The chunky Korean began to scream at the top of his lungs, pausing intermittently for his translator to interpret. I looked on in wonder as Father danced across the room, ranting and yelling. Colonel Pak spoke, and I remember hearing:

“Father asks you what you expect to see in the Messiah. Father wants you to know that he is human, too. Father wants you to know that even he goes to the bathroom. Have you ever thought that the Messiah is that human?”

The crowd cheered and laughed wildly.

“Father says you can be sure that he’s the Messiah because God made him the handsomest man on earth.” The children chuckled. Moon beamed.…

“Now, Father is very tired. He has been praying all night for you, so he has decided he will not speak to you today. You don’t mind, do you?” Pak asked mischievously.

“No, no, let him speak!” we shouted in unison. “We love Father, we love Father… !”

Moon clasped his hands and shouted something in Korean, smiling at us all the while. Colonel Pak translated: “Father loves you so much that he feels he must speak to you. He is willing to sacrifice his meal and sleep for you. God will surely judge you for this, so stay awake and listen to his word. If sleep spirits attack you, you must fight them off.”

Colonel Pak paused, and Father continued to speak, chopping the air with violent strokes, slashing at spirits, wrestling with invisible demons, throwing out kung-fu punches. We watched him with awe and delight. He suddenly twisted around, pulled Pak’s lapels, shook him, pretended to punch the colonel in the abdomen, then pushed his faithful translator away. Pak smoothed his hair and pushed at the bridge of his black-frame glasses, addressing the crowd in broken English.

“Father says that this room is filled with demons. Because his spiritual eyes are open to spirit world, he can see Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and all the sages of East and West struggling, fighting evil spirits trying to gain access to this room. Father explains that this is why he ordered the doors and windows shut. Higher spirits can penetrate windows and walls, but lower spirits cannot. Father tells us that we must keep fighting, for Satan himself is in this room, directing all the evil spirits of the universe.”

Colonel Pak raised his arms and shouted, “Repeat after me: SMASH OUT SATAN! SMASH OUT SATAN! We must drive the demons away.” The crowd screamed their response.

The Messiah leaped into the air, then barreled across the room, waving his arms, shouting in Korean, socking at evil spirits. Once again Colonel Pak translated the Master’s words as I sat spellbound. The words went something like this:

“Tonight I have important news for you. Because of my struggles in spirit world and the success of the Unification Church, a new dimension of spirit world has opened up for us. Good spirits have won many battles against evil spirits. As a result Heavenly Father has cleared a path for more good spirits to act on the physical plane, especially in the political sphere. We call this spiritual path the Principality of Air. Now more than ever, good spirits can work through you in flower-selling and witnessing, in fact in all your spiritual work. You will be successful, thanks to me, Father, and of course, Heavenly Father. Of all the saints and prophets sent by God, I am the most successful.”

The Messiah continued speaking, praising himself and repeating the standard gospel of the Divine Principle, which I had heard from Durst so often, pausing only for Colonel Pak’s translation. Two hours into the lecture I began to feel dizzy, drugged. My stomach was churning and I wondered how much longer I could last. My face burned with heat, and I was suddenly drowsy. Satan must be attacking me! Sleep spirits were attacking me! I must fight them off, for they want to prevent me from hearing the Messiah. My eyes started drooping until the lids finally shut. If only I had a safety pin like other Family members … then I could jab myself to stay awake and really show that snake, Satan!

The Messiah’s face swam before me as I fought my exhaustion. Was this really happening to me? I suddenly wondered. Was this really God’s special agent, my newfound spiritual father, the Lord of Creation and the center of the universe?

How could I love a man I didn’t even know? I asked myself dizzily. I was constantly being told about all he had done for me, but what had that actually been? Who was this man who claimed to be the Messiah, whose mind was one with God’s, this man who wanted to rule the world? Oh, my God. Of course! Satan was attacking me. He was planting evil doubts in my mind. He was destroying my faith. …

As the Master talked on and on, Oppa shifted nervously in his seat, clearly uncomfortable in this panel of holy ones. He nodded from time to time as though he could understand the prophet based on his sparse knowledge of Korean, the Mother Tongue of the Universe. I wondered what his colleagues in the English Department would think if they could see him now. Did they know that the most important American in our history was the same man who taught remedial spelling to their struggling freshmen?

I turned my attention back to Father, as Pak translated. Father was saying something about how he was planting spies in the Soviet Union, how we are steeped in world war, and how it is time for us to build the final phase of the material foundation. I heard him unveil his world plan, frightening us by telling us that God had given him only five more years to win the war. Five more years! If America did not accept the Unification Church, if everybody did not follow Father, God would then leave America once and for all.

I sat dumbfounded. God would leave America and never return? I recalled all the hushed conversations Family members had had with me over the past six months, these prophets telling me that men would crawl like animals over the earth for a thousand years as Satan’s slaves if Father didn’t win. I remembered discussing with older brothers our fantasies about fighting and dying for God, my dream of climbing into a cockpit, decked out in Unification Church army uniform, waving good-bye to my sisters of the Church as I left. Tears came to my eyes as I thought about how many times I had failed God, thinking of sleep in my exhaustion, looking at food during my three-day fasts—oh, my selfishness!

As Father told of his political plans for this country, I was ashamed of how I had doubted former President Nixon as Father came to his aid during Watergate, placing ads in major newspapers for Nixon, sending hundreds of Moonies to fast on the Capitol steps for three days and march with “God Loves Nixon” signs. I thought of how we Americans had persecuted this man even after Father declared him to be God’s choice for America. I thought of Father’s plans to take over New York City, as an older brother had told me once, and I thought of all my tired friends who had been promised they would become senators after only a few more years of grueling flower-selling. I thought of all the political work my brothers and sisters were doing in Washington, Christine and Omma’s secret missions to the Orient, lavish lunches with political power brokers in the Bay Area, rumors of Joey’s plans to run for mayor of Oakland—even talk that God would appoint Dr. Durst as the next President.

And suddenly it was all so clear. God did have a plan and only Father knew it. All we had to do was follow Father— that was it—that was all! The world was turning to Father for help and all the seeds that had been planted would soon be ready. We were buying up land, we were growing, one worldwide Family, and we were already millions strong— millions strong! Father had a timetable for everything, and if we worked, if we worked just a little bit harder … “Push us. Father,” I whispered. “Push us…”

Father began to scream, blood pumping madly through his swollen cheeks. Colonel Pak shouted:

“Heavenly Father will win! Heavenly Father will win! Heavenly Father will win! Repeat it after me!”

“Heavenly Father will win! Heavenly Father will win! Heavenly Father will win!” brothers and sisters shouted in unison. Father stepped back and sat down on the sofa. As he dabbed at his shiny forehead. Colonel Pak spoke once more: “Father is very tired. He has talked for four hours without stopping, showing you his love and heavenly determination. But Father remembers that you love him, too, and Father will show his father’s love now. He has promised to sing you a song, a heavenly song.”

We screamed with joy, jumping up and down with excitement. Father gulped from a glass, then returned to the microphone, slicking back his sparse threads of hair. His fatherly smile melted my doubtful heart. He really loved me. That’s why he was here; that’s why he had spoken. I had been yearning for this fatherly love for so many years.

Father began a simple Korean folk tune. The audience listened breathlessly, young women swooning and sighing. We softly rocked back and forth on our knees in time to the song, our faces beaming, each of us hoping to catch Father’s eye. At the end of the final verse. Father reached toward the sky with his massive hands and gave a shrill Korean yodel. He then sank back in his chair, smiling benignly at his children.

The crowd went wild, whistling, screaming, shouting, waving arms. Tears of joy streamed down our faces as we prayed to Heavenly Father in gratitude. Every heart in the room was touched with Father’s love. Imagine, the Messiah serving me by singing a song just for me! How unworthy I felt of this grace, this blessing from God.

The Master rose, approached the microphone, and shouted a Korean prayer through the crackling, electric air. At the end of each phrase, he paused, and the audience screamed fervently. “Yes, Father,” or “Yes, Heavenly Father.” After about ten minutes of prayer, the Master fell silent. We rubbed our aching necks and looked up at him. Father turned on his heel and headed full speed toward the front door, flanked by his bodyguards and followed by his entourage.

While younger brothers and sisters stood around in the main hall, overwhelmed by the Master’s performance, the older leaders ran out the door and jumped down the steps as the Korean Messiah entered his limo.

“Father, Father, Father, come back! We love you, Father,” we shouted like six-year-olds saying good-bye to their traveling dad after a weekend of ice cream and baseball games, hide-and-seek and hot dogs.

The gleaming cars proceeded down Hearst Street toward the airport, as Father headed off for a secret destination to rest and recover.

We pressed our faces against the front window, crying that our Messiah had left us and hoping that God would bless him on this, the world’s most important mission.

______________________________________________

The full story:

Crazy for God: The nightmare of cult life by Christopher Edwards

Building the “material foundation” for Sun Myung Moon

Boonville’s Japanese origins

Moonwebs by Josh Freed

Life Among the Moonies by Deanna Durham

Mitchell was lucky – he got away from the Unification Church

[universetwo]

Seventeen as University Students

Monday to Saturday - a comedy au of seventeen mebers’ lives as university students - for a warmup post here is some basic information

Seungcheol - 

He is in senior year majoring in psychology and is in several sports teams at the campus. Occasionally he coaches kids in basketball to earn some money. He is an underground rapper but literally no one knows about it, yet. 

As a student: He is athletic, has a lot of friends, everyone likes him, he smiles a lot, younger friends look up to him, he is not one of the top students but he maintains his grades at a B- level. 

Jeonghan - 

A senior, majoring in Journalism. He doesn't do any university life activities yet he is always tired. But when it comes to collecting stuff for his article assignments he is always up for the tea. He enjoys gossiping around and knowing the best stories about everyone. Occasionally he does modeling for some unimportant companies but he thinks it’s good for building his resume. 

As a student: He is one the laziest ones. But he still aces his tests because he is smart. Occasionally he falls asleep during classes and he had been kicked out before because of it. He is that student who brings snacks to class and annoys his deskmates with his loud snacking time.

Joshua - 

An international student from the US. He is a senior and his major is East Asian Languages and Culture. He started a Christian club at the university. He sometimes has small gigs in the campus café where he sings acoustic songs. He teaches English to people but he gets tired after so many students just randomly ask him for English help. He wants to join a rap club at the campus but after months he is still waiting for their reply if they think he is good enough or not. 

As a student: He can be quite lost sometimes and he often has to ask his classmates about what is the homework or if they have a quiz that day. He has a lot of foreign friends, especially in the Christian club. He is clueless about it but many girls have a crush on him.

Junhui - 

Chinese international student. In his Junior year. He is majoring in Asian Studies mainly Korean. (East Asian Languages and Culture). He tutors Korean students in Chinese to earn some money. Many people start conversations with him because they keep calling him Kim Heechul’s lost Chinese son. 

As a student: At first, he is a very shy student especially because he is lacking in Korean but once he gains the confidence, oh boy, he is going to be very outgoing with his friends and will make a lot of lame jokes. But in class, he is always focused and works extra hard to earn good grades. And he never complains so people can't even see all the effort he puts into them.

Soonyoung - 

In junior year majoring in Media Communication and is minoring in East Asian History studies. He is in a dance crew. He is also on the Newspaper team because there is a girl who he has a crush on.

As a student: He is very focused and hard working and is very respectful with professors. He does a lot of activities and has many classes yet still manages to keep everything balanced. Except for his social life and enough sleep. He is always tired but still keeps on being optimistic. He gets low grades, however, on participation because he is never confident enough to ask questions or give comments. He wants to be punctual but is always late. 

Wonwoo - 

Junior year student majoring in Economics with a creative writing minor. He is actually mainly interested in writing but to his parents' advice, his major became economics. 

As a student: Once he missed his final exam because he stayed up late playing games. He doesn't put a lot of effort into his studies because what he hears once on lectures sticks in his mind. When he gets bored during class, because he has learned already what the lecture is about, he ends up scribbling some of his own lyrics in his notebook. He spends most of his time either in the library or in the internet cafe. Some people think of him as an anti-social person but he is simply just not interested in his classmates. But when it comes to his friends he can be pretty wild with them. 

Jihoon -

In his junior year. He is double majoring in Music and International Business, and he owns his own studio at the campus. He is the president of the radio club where he often invites his friends to host radio shows. Nobody knows but he is in an anime club. He has small producing work for underground indie artists. 

As a student: You just cannot find Jihoon. He is either deep in his studies, or is buried in the studio, or hides away in the anime club. He is always busy and rarely hangs out with his friends but when there is a special occasion he is always one of the first ones to arrive and bring nice gifts while making it seem like it's not a big deal.

Seokmin - 

In sophomore year majoring in Media Communications. He is doing covers on his own. He is part of the student council and wants to be the president of it but there is a girl who always beats him out. He denies it, but it’s pretty obvious that he has a crush on her.

As a student: the Class clown who puts himself in embarrassing situations way too often. But his classmates love him because he can always bring the best out of worst situations. He is trying so hard to win over his crushes' hearts but he is so clumsy in love. But when he sings, everyone falls in love with him. 

Mingyu -  

In his sophomore year with Graphic Design major. He is also in the cooking club next to it where he won many competitions and not once made his own recipe which made his teachers very impressed. He photographs children's birthday parties as a part-time job.

As a student: He is very talented at what he does but he can mess up even by little because of his clumsiness. But the professors love him anyway and always treat him better than the rest of the students.

Minghao - 

Completing his sophomore year. Chinese international student and he is majoring in Film Production and minoring in Photography. Sometimes he gets into trouble when he doesn’t say the proper Korean word but he is cute so people can’t be angry at him and try to understand his situation. Out of the three international students, he misses his home the most. 

As a student: He is shy and always stays in the back; unless he has some sarcastic remarks which makes everyone laugh. He is very artistic and as he becomes more confident in his art, the more people notice his talent. He always doodles something on his notes, sometimes even when he doesn't notice them.

Seungkwan - 

A freshman majoring in Theatre and does wedding singing as a part-time job. He is very outgoing and sassy so people like him a lot. Especially at weddings, he can make some funny remarks to bring up the mood but he gets emotional easily. He never shuts up about him being Jeju’s prince.

As a student: He is seriously every professors' favorite student. He pays attention during class, he asks questions, and he makes everyone laugh. He even asks questions after class and sometimes even stops by during office hours just to ask how the professors are doing. Some students don't like this because they think he is doing this to earn extra credit, but in reality, he is just generally nice to everyone and notices the hard effort professors put into lectures.

Hansol - 

In sophomore year. He is majoring in Psychology but is thinking about changing his major. He is actually confused about life a lot. He never knows what he should do. People often think he is also an international student so it makes him tired to keep on proving he grew up in Korea.

As a student: He is very laidback, he never worries about exams and such. He still nails them. Sometimes he forgets to go to classes. He likes psychology but he doesn't always agree with the way they are teaching it. He is thinking about changing his major into Filmmaking. Many times he is in his own world so when the professors ask him sudden questions he doesn't know what to answer.

Chan - 

A young freshman majoring in Global and International Studies; he is minoring in Japanese language and he is in an underground hip-hop dance group. (at first secretly) He is still getting used to the uni life so he often needs his hyungs’ help to show him around or give him advice about certain classes and professors. 

As a student: Surprisingly as the youngest, he is the best with ladies. He is actually the one who has a girlfriend out all of the boys. He is very hard working and sometimes can get really frustrated when his hyungs don't let him be him or let him be in peace to study. Other times he likes to joke around with them.

Chapter 1. Chapter 2.

[makingnewenemies]

making of the AL video...

There was a time in my life when I swore I wouldn’t make a music video because they “always made the song worse for me”.  Yeah I changed my mind... 

I’m feeling a nice combo of caffinated and nostalgic so I will write write write until it comes times for me to get on a train to Seattle... 

Making the Always Leaving video was one of the most fun projects I’ve worked on, for obvious reasons. I drove from Portland to Orange County by myself in a

 long lunatic drive where I kept screaming “overcome!” to myself when I’d start to doze off at the wheel.  Crawford flew in and we started filming in our hometown of Newport Beach, CA in the early morning, worked our way through LA, quick stop in Carpenteria and Santa Barbara (kinda regretting skipping Ventura), then pulled off and watched the sunset from a dirt road on the crest of a hill where we spent almost an hour trying to film this flying bat in the purple dusk (never got a good shot of it smh a waste of lots of gb’s). We pulled into SLO after dark and parked downtown on Higuera and stood outside the van drinking some of those pocket shots you can buy at the liquor store. After a couple we walked around the downtown bar scene filming myself standing idly infront of all the dressed up college crowd. Scantily clad party girls surrounded me as I stared blankly into the camera and we told them we were filming a video for Plain White Tees. They loved that. Some dude did a backflip. None of this made the video except a brief moment where I stand in bubble gum alley. We parked the van that night in Los Osos on a little dead end road by the bay water. I recall taking a piss in the trees and thinking about how much I miss SLO and how much of a gem this area is, then tried to fall asleep amongst all the camera cords and charging batteries and Crawford sprawling out on our futon bed as if he’s never shared a bed before. In the morning we tried to get drone footage of Montana De Oro at sunrise but the drone that my brother lent to us would come crashing down after a minute in the air and I wasted a beautiful sunrise cursing technology and nursing my bruised Go Pro. We drove over to Morro Bay and at last I got to surf underneath my beloved Morro Rock and the waves were fun that morning and smelled fishy and of course that Morro Bay ocean smell brought me back to my SLO years where I’d sit on my board staring up the coast at Cayucos contemplating Kerouac and Portland. Big Sur was grand of course but it was a hazy cloudy day and we’ve seen it better. Still the video gave us an excuse to explore some side roads and find views that we’d never seen in Big Sur before. Crawford was instagram messaging with some Big Sur instagram famous dharma yogi rainbow warrior and we thought she’d take us somehwere special but alas she stopped responding and we had to get to Santa Cruz. I saw my old pal Kurkjian and his crew in Santa Cruz, and while our shots of the boardwalk are nice they dont represent Santa Crux to me and I wish we’d gone elsewhere for our establishing show like Steamer’s Lane or that Taco Bell downtown that gets rowdy late night. Well that drive on the 1 from SC to SF is awfully gorgeous and we caught some epic norcal coastal sunset footage just north of Davenport, then met up with my brother Riley for some Chinese food in SF. I remember being so exhausted I began dozing off at the dinner table then we went home and filmed an action skit with Nerf Guns only to wake up to some news of a shooting... dont remember which shooting this was...doesn’t matter... Crawford immediately deleted his snap chats of our shoot out. My brother always brags about how he’d bomb the hills of Outer Sunset on his skateboard all the way to the beach so we decided to try it. We skitched on the back of his room mates truck to the top of a hill and down we went with Crawford filming from the truck bed. To my surprise my brother had become a really great skater and it was me who was speed checking every 20 yards or so. We got the shot, and I told Crawford that we’ll have to find a couple second clip where I actually look cool on the board and not constantly slowing down and looking for traffic. I still can’t believe how my brother would shoot through those SF intersections without taking his eyes off the ocean horizon below. Well we got some coffee at this toast and coconut place called like Trouble or something that my girlfriend and I heard about in a podcast. It was a whatever hyped place but a ton of friends came out to meet us and we had a pretty nice morning chatting and enjoying the Sunset district’s chillness. I was being a bit too casual as I suggested we all walk to the Mollusk surf shop and Crawford grew anxious and cranky because, he was right, we needed to get back on the road. So there’s that classic shot of the asian tourists with the selfie stick on the golden gate bridge and we were off into the big question mark of a landscape that is the Cali Coast north of SF! And jesus oliver christ once you get above Stinson Beach that norcal coast is just about as desolate and beautiful as you can get! We got epic shots of the dilapidated Point Reyes ship yard and cemetary at dusk and that shot of the whale mural through the fence is one of my favs (mostly cause of a specific Dick Diver lyric) and we arrived in Mendocino after dark where we took refuge in this mountainy dive bar that had a huge smelly moose head on the wall and uploaded our footage and charged batteries until the staff kicked us out and we slept in the van and woke up to that spanking gold coastal sun and I pissed in the tall green grass I was so happy. Well it was this last section of the trip that truly felt free and American frontier little boy with no rules exploration euphoria. We stopped in Legget at this roadside bar and grill where the custodian (clearly on meth or some upper) showed us around and told us all about the big country festival they have in the summer and how he brings girls back to his RV (covered in moss and parked in the trees behind the property) and how he has 12 different facebook accounts all with different aliases because you never know who is watching you. Then a few miles down the road we pulled the van off by a river and we jumped in naked and I laid out naked on this log that was sticking up and that warm bark on my back just about let me die right there and I jumped back in the water off this log and the footage of that is really not flattering... and on our way back to the van we came across this huge uprooted tree with a sort of hide out built out of it’s underside with all sorts of feathers and crystals and animal skulls aligned in patters like a Pagan shrine or Wicchan execution ceremony and it was legitiately spooky enough that we didnt stick around to get footage I dont think. Anyone who’s driven the 101 up here knows that Big Foot themed pull off with all the giant wood carvings and all sorts of mystical norcal souveniers. It was here I bought my coon skin cap and ya that was the moment I wished we could never go home and just romp around these mountains and coastline looking for adventure forever. I ate that bag of Famous Amos cookies all the way to Arcata where we met up with our wise philosopher friend and girlfriend for some basketball and bison viewing. She took us to some remote beach and for some reason we were all about to get naked but we decided to trek further up the coast to catch one last sunset shot. We stressed hard about that sunset shot when in reality we had plenty of sunset shots already but we needed that ONE GREAT SHOT to finish out the video. We didnt get anything epic except, cleverly I think, we pulled off to some beach and Crawford got that clever shot of my standing on the rock with my homemade alligator bumper sticker in the foreground and BOOM that was pretty much it. From there we took the north east pointing highway (i forget what number it is?) that goes through Cave Junction (spooky interesting place we should go back and explore) towards Grants Pass. We got that final shot of the Welcome to Oregon sign which we needed to conclude the whole vid and we stopped at a Denny’s for dinner around 2 AM. After that I blasted a bunch of old punk records and raced the 5 hrs back up the 5 to Portland to get Crawford to work ontime at his 6 AM radio gig. I dont remember what I did after that but I am assuming I slept and then went to nanny the kids that I was nannying at the time. The end!

[vetivervelvetviolet]

Yuri!!! on ICE Dub Review: a Translator’s (in training) Perspective

As promised, here's my review of the Yuri!!! on ICE dub by @funimation. In case you are new to my blog (which will be 5 years old this July, yay), I'm currently in graduate school for a Master's in Japanese Translation. I've been studying Japanese since 2005, and I've been watching anime and/or reading manga for a little bit longer than that. Some of the points I’m going to make are based on translation theory and practice facts, some are educated guesses about a dubbing process I had no part in, and some are just personal opinions. Please keep this in mind.

Strengths

Overall I was truly impressed with this dub, especially given that the episodes would have been translated, subtitled, and re-recorded on relatively short notice, and that there would have been increased pressure on the actors to get their lines in a few takes since the episodes were being released on Crunchyroll only a week after they premiered in Japan. Josh Grelle was an excellent voice match for Yuuri and carried this show, Jerry Jewell's Viktor was charming and funny, and Micah Solusod did an admirable job as Yuri P., doing what I think might have been his first Russian accent (at least as far as I have seen), and generally playing the motivated little asshole part very well, once again proving that sweet guys tend to play the best douchebags.

The side characters also had very good English voices, in terms of suiting the character type. I'm in love with Joel Mcdonald's Phichit; his voice is 110% believable coming out of Phichit's mouth. Joel seems to have the "kindhearted boy voice" corner covered. JJ's voice actor was great, and conveyed the character's outrageousness over to English superbly. Lastly, I love Chris Sabat's Christophe. I love him. That is my boy right there. Sorry haters, you can't change my mind. I hope Christophe gets some more backstory next season. In all, the choices of actors in the dub were excellent.

・The Asian characters didn't have accents. This subtle decision was a very thoughtful move in terms of maintaining how Yuuri, a Japanese person, would perceive his fellow skaters in an English-dubbed environment. You know how people talk about "a director's director" as someone who makes movies that appeal to directors, this was a translator's translator’s decision.

In Japanese culture, Chinese and Korean people are not considered gaikokujin, per se, despite being foreigners from a legal standpoint. These countries and cultures have heavily intertwined histories, so it makes sense that Japan would consider them sort of in-group. In recent years, too, perhaps as a result of globalization and increased contact, this foreigner-but-not-really-a-foreigner status is also sometimes given to Southeast Asian people. Europeans, Africans, Pacific Islanders, people from the Americas, and people from the Middle East are still gaikokujin, and are seen as Other from a sociological perspective. Although I obviously wasn't in charge of translating the Japanese script, writing the English script, or hiring the actors, this is the only logical reason I can come up with for why Phichit, Guang-Hong, and Seung-Gil didn't have accents, but everyone else (save Leo who is American) does. JJ even said "eh?"  and pronounced his vowels a little differently in the first episode he appeared in, just in case you didn't catch that he was from ~Canada~. Intentional or not, I was really impressed by this decision and hope it is a sign of movement towards more nuanced dubbing.

・No one's name was gravely mispronounced *is still not over the D. Gray-man dub*

・Yuri P. was adequately rude; he didn't sound toned-down or forced (like how I felt about some moments in the Attack on Titan dub) 

 ・I think Minami sounded equally gender ambiguous in the English dub as he did in the original. Apparently his seiyuu was the protagonist in Haikyuu. I have not seen that series, but I can say from what I have seen of the art that that character is much more obviously male, and perhaps people who were familiar with Haikyuu and that actor knew right away that he was a guy, but it was not obvious to me in the the original! Minami’s character design is not terribly masculine, nor is his behavior, and if Trina Nishimura hasn't dubbed him, I honestly would have expected Greg Ayres, what with that hair, personality, and snaggle tooth.

Weaknesses

・Why did Celestino have an Italian accent? Even his Japanese Wikipedia description clearly says he's イタリア系アメリカ人, which means he is an American of Italian descent, as in, his parents/grandparents/etc. were from Italy. He is not an Italian immigrant/expat who lives in America. 

 ・I think Stephane Lambiel's guest appearence was handled clumsily in the dub. Considering how thoughtful the American crew seemed to be in regards to dubbing just about everyone else, I couldn't understand why they didn't either 1.) Keep the original audio of Lambiel, himself, speaking his few lines, or 2.) If that wasn't possible, record someone else speaking his lines in French. There were only a few, and with no lipflap to match, it seemed doable for someone who isn't necessarily a professional voice actor, but is either French or speaks French fluently. Granted, if they had re-recorded French audio, they would have needed to overlay English subtitles around or over the already-present Japanese ones which would be visually awkward, butttt... which for some odd reason they still had in the dub??? I don’t doubt that they --the dub crew-- probably also thought that this was less than ideal, having two sets of subtitles on the screen simultaneously, but I found it supremely distracting, for one, and absolutely unnecessary in the case of the English ones, since the dub actor was already speaking in English.

・One of the international skaters (either Guang-Hong, Emil, or Leo, I can't remember which), in his first appearance, was clearly dubbed by someone using a completely different mic or recording system than the majority of the cast. I lack the proper technical terms to describe his voice for those lines, but it sounded fuzzy or clouded, not like someone was speaking to me in real life. By no means did this ruin the entire episode or something for me, and it was probably a result of the time crunch ("you can't make it in today? okay, sure, you can record from home and send it in, so long as we have it by the end of today"), but it was noticeable.

Addressing some issues and qualms brought up by other fans

・"Jerry Jewell's Russian accent wasn't flawless/he sounds like Gru from Despicable Me". I know next to nothing about Russian, so maybe it was horrible, but it wasn't so horrible that I could tell. But more over: TIME CONTRAINTS. Funimation had to find a veteran voice actor who could reliably get lines done in a few takes (given not just the time contraints, but the fact that Viktor speaks a lot in every episode) and could also do a passable (to Americans) Russian accent. I cannot imagine that there are too many people in the Forth Worth-Dallas area who meet both of those requirements. Second, if you can sit through the Minions, you can suck it up and deal with a just-okay Russian accent. 

 ・Which brings us to my next point: the time element. You cannot reasonably expect something, any sort of product for consumption, to be flawless, fast, AND cheap/free. Going too fast in translation, including subtitles, almost always results in errors. Hence there were minor flaws in the subs (as @fencer-x has noted; she has better listening comprehension skills than me, and I trust her ear) , and since the dub script was not terribly different than the subbed script in this series, I'm going to guess that those errors carried over. I don’t have time to go back and analyze the places where the mistranslations occurred, though, so I am not 100% sure. They did not affect the plot or the characterization of the characters, though, so I do not consider them serious. 

 ・Some time ago @fencer-x responded to a comment about jokes/references/lines being moved around. I don't remember what she said, but here are my two cents:

Moving around jokes/references/lines is normal in translation, especially when you need to match lipflap. There may be many reasons why, and they will vary depending on language pair, but they can all be said to be necessary to meet target culture norms, and in the the case of dubbing, meeting target culture mouth movements. Although technically up for debate in academia, I am of the persuasion that some loss of linguistic and cultural content is inevitable in translation, even in literal translation, sometimes (linguistic relativity). A good translation attempts to make up for some of that through "compensation", though. This could explain why some characters reactions or quirks (*cough*Christophe*cough*) are more extreme in the English dub than they appear to be in the original. I for one found the humor funnier in English, and the touching moments, like the ring exchange, more touching in the dub.

・I get the sense, not just from this particular dub,  but from the dub vs. sub way of thinking of some fans have in general, that there is a severe misunderstanding about subtitles and their relation to translation and language. Also, that some people do not understand that what is being said, as in literal words being used, is not the same thing as what is being conveyed/what they meant by those words....

SUBTITLES =/= EXACTLY WHAT IS BEING SAID IN JAPANESE, BUT 'JUST IN ENGLISH'

Subtitles are not literal (hopefully) or "pure" translations. There are no such things as "pure" translations. Subtitles are not necessarily any closer to what is being said, or what is being conveyed in Japanese (or any source language for that matter) than dubbed scripts. Subtitles are not magic language decryption.

・For example, subtitles, like any translation, frequently make use of techniques called transposition and modulation when going from Japanese to English. Transposition is "a change of one part of speech for another (e.g. noun for verb) without changing the sense" {Introducing Translation Studies, Munday}. Modulation is a change "in the semantics and point of view of the [source language]". In many cases, when coming from a language so linguistically different from English as Japanese, using these techniques is basically mandatory if you want the resulting English to sound 'normal', or as we say in academia, unmarked. Combined with the concept of linguistic relativity, the moment you translate even quite simple sentences, phrases, or words from Japanese to English, you have irrevocably changed them. Theoretically speaking then, no matter if the subs or the dub say "My name is Meghan" or "I'm Meghan", they are both 'correct' translations, but entirely DIFFERENT THAN "メーガンです". 

 ・Subtitles often include adaptations of what is being said in Japanese on screen. This means that cultural references, in-jokes, and the like are changed to be relevant to English-speaking audiecnes. This is an instance where what is being conveyed outweighs what is literally being said in importance. That is, if the translator or script writer didn't change them, the joke or reference would be meaningless, and thus, pointless, supposing the necessary cultural information doesn't also exist outside of Japan.

In conclusion, I was very impressed with the Yuri!!! on ICE dub. I am definitely going to buy it on DVD. As a longtime fan of anime, I appreciate quality dubs, and can relate to fans who want to see dubbed episodes as soon as possible. I am also, unfortunately, familiar with how a poorly chosen cast can ruin a show--which obviously did not happen here. However, as a translator, I am now more aware of what goes into the translating and dubbing process, and I firmly believe that the dub crew gave it their all here. I also have the firsthand experience to say that, hell yes, being rushed sets you up to make mistakes, which seem to have happened in some places in the translation process of this series. However, as I said earlier, those errors did not affect the plot overall, or the characterization, or my understanding of the story, so I can still confidently give the dub a thumbs up.

See you next level!

[drtanstravels]

In my last post, all of our time in Israel was spent in Tel Aviv, looking around Jaffa, wandering around the Sarona shopping district and the beach, and trying to figure out what we could actually do on the Sabbath. Now it was time to do and see some of the things that anyone would want to experience while in Israel. Prepare yourself for a ton of information and a bunch of photos.

Sunday, November 3, 2019 Anna was back at the hospital for her International Retinal Panel course and I had to meet her there at around 11:00am. That wasn’t a problem, I was awake early and was incredibly hungry; on our first night in Tel Aviv I threw up everything I had eaten that day due to drinking far too much pomegranate juice. The following day was Shabbat so I was limited with what I could eat during the day and then when it came to dinner, the staff at the restaurant kept forgetting our food, ultimately serving us over-fried fish scraps that weren’t particularly appetising so that had all left me a little peckish. I gave myself plenty of time to meet up with Anna and I’m not a big fan of hospitals so I found a cafe for a real coffee, not the “very weak coffee” I had received the previous day, and I also grabbed a couple of buns and kicked back in the cafe until Anna and the rest of the Retinal Panel crew were ready. The next stop was the Ein Kerem campus hospital of the Hadassah Medical Center. The Retinal Panel would be taking a tour of the facilities while I just spent some time walking around the gardens that overlooked Jerusalem, just sitting back and admiring the city from a distance while anticipating our tour until everyone was ready to move on from being taken around the hospital. After a couple of hours it was about 3:30pm so we had less than 90 minutes of daylight remaining when we were back on the bus, headed for Jerusalem. One of the organisers of the training seminar, Tamir Weinberg, was a wealth of information on the subject of Judaism and the history of the area, providing more information than we were able to take in, a pattern that would repeat itself with all tour guides throughout this region, and answering any and all questions while we were making our extremely slow bus ride through the almost stationary afternoon traffic. Probably the best question came after he mentioned how the Mount of Olives is the most expensive place for Jews to be buried, due to the belief that it was where Christ ascended to heaven and the location where the ascension at end times will happen once again. Anna curiously asked, “How much are the grapes there?” Tamir was clearly confused, but Anna tried to clarify, pointing out that he said that it was home to the world’s most expensive grapes. Nope, he had been talking about graves, leaving Anna disappointed at not being able to purchase high-end grapes during our visit.

Now, I’ve mentioned several times in this blog that I’m not a religious or even spiritual person, however, I do believe that there was probably some guy called Jesus Christ walking around this part of the world and preaching to people that he was the son of God — You can walk through Central Park in Manhattan on any given day and encounter multiple people who will tell you that they are indeed a direct descendent of the Lord too. But I can’t buy the stories of the virgin birth, the performing of miracles, the resurrection, or even the existence of a God for that matter. On the other hand, I was extremely interested in exploring and seeing for myself this ancient city, the history of which shaping so much of humankind, causing both unity and conflict, as well as influencing so strongly the way billions of people think, speak, behave, and act toward others. The majority of people are probably aware of the basics of Jerusalem, but here is a crash course anyway:

Jerusalem is a city in the Middle East, located on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the oldest cities in the world, and is considered holy to the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority claim Jerusalem as their capital, as Israel maintains its primary governmental institutions there and the State of Palestine ultimately foresees it as its seat of power; however, neither claim is widely recognized internationally.

During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, and attacked 52 times. The part of Jerusalem called the City of David shows first signs of settlement in the 4th millennium BCE, in the shape of encampments of nomadic shepherds.

According to the Bible, King David conquered the city from the Jebusites and established it as the capital of the united kingdom of Israel, and his son, King Solomon, commissioned the building of the First Temple. Modern scholars argue that Jews branched out of the Canaanite peoples and culture through the development of a distinct monolatrous — and later monotheistic — religion centered on El/Yahweh, one of the Ancient Canaanite deities. These foundational events, straddling the dawn of the 1st millennium BCE, assumed central symbolic importance for the Jewish people. The sobriquet of holy city was probably attached to Jerusalem in post-exilic times. The holiness of Jerusalem in Christianity, conserved in the Septuagint which Christians adopted as their own authority, was reinforced by the New Testament account of Jesus’s crucifixion there. In Sunni Islam, Jerusalem is the third-holiest city, after Mecca and Medina. In Islamic tradition, in 610 CE it became the first qibla, the focal point for Muslim prayer, and Muhammad made his Night Journey there ten years later, ascending to heaven where he speaks to God, according to the Quran. As a result, despite having an area of only 0.9 square kilometres (0.35 sq mi), the Old City is home to many sites of seminal religious importance, among them the Temple Mount with its Western Wall, Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Outside the Old City stands the Garden Tomb.

Our time was going to be spent within the walls of the Old City area (highlighted, above) so once inside we had a tour guide ready to show us around, spouting endless knowledge while using a green laser pointer to draw attention to important details, even from a distance. One of the first things I encountered that I simply wasn’t expecting was a man delivering a washing machine on a hand trolley. This town may be ancient, but it’s a little more high-tech than I had anticipated. It was now getting dark and one of the organisers asked the guide to stop talking so we could enter. To begin with we wound our way through buildings and markets stalls, most of which were selling awful tourist paraphernalia, particularly a wealth of terrible t-shirts. I even saw an overly loud American woman wearing a t-shirt which said ‘Jerusalem’, the ‘USA’ in the middle of the city’s name in the pattern of the American flag, although I still fail to see the connection. Whenever we visit foreign countries, for some reason I have a tendency to buy traditional headwear, some examples being that I have a hat that I bought at Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, a traditional woollen face-mask from Colta, Ecuador, and a fez from Kuşadası, Turkey. Because of this it made perfect sense that I buy a yarmulke while we were in Israel and it turned out that it wouldn’t be a matter I’d have a whole lot of choice in. While walking through the market I saw a store with yarmulkes catering to tourists so I snapped a photo of them, instantly pissing off the store owner, who followed me for a bit and angrily insisted I buy one as sort of fee for the photo. I was planning on getting one at some stage anyway so I figured that this would be the best opportunity, he clearly needed the cash, so I randomly chose a hilariously bad Homer Simpson one and when I asked how much it was, the store owner told me 150 shekels. Somehow this made me a little confused; I had been doing fine at mentally converting in my mind Israeli shekels to Singapore dollars up until that point, but for some reason on this occasion I converted it in the way you would in many South-East Asian countries, multiplying the number by three or four and removing a zero or two. “About six bucks,” I thought to myself. “Thats Okay.” It turned out to be far from okay, because a Singaporean dollar currently equates to about 2.58 shekels so in reality my poor quality Homer Simpson yarmulke that you will see later in this post set me back S$58.00 (US$42.70)! Anyway, here are our first views of Jerusalem:

The Old City of Jerusalem from the carpark

Panoramic shot from outside

Upon entrance

I don’t remember seeing any appliance stores in there

Walking past a food street

I regret not buying that ‘Guns & Moses’ shirt

Walking around another area

Into the market now

Another part of the endless market

The rip-off yarmulke store. I should’ve got the Spongebob one in hindsight

After the market, our first real stop on the tour was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, also called the Church of the Resurrection or Church of the Anastasis by Orthodox Christians, is a church in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The church contains, according to traditions dating back to at least the fourth century, the two holiest sites in Christianity: the site where Jesus was crucified, at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha, and Jesus’s empty tomb, where he is said to have been buried and resurrected. The tomb is enclosed by a 19th-century shrine called the Aedicula. The Status Quo, an understanding between religious communities dating to 1757, applies to the site.

Within the church proper are the last four (or, by some definitions, five) stations of the Via Dolorosa, representing the final episodes of the Passion of Jesus. The church has been a major Christian pilgrimage destination since its creation in the fourth century, as the traditional site of the resurrection of Christ, thus its original Greek name, Church of the Anastasis (‘Resurrection’).

Upon entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre you are forced to navigate your way through throngs of people up a stairwell, past some impressive mosaics, until you reach the Calvary, which has traditionally been regarded as the site of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, although this has long been debated, but therefore the home to the Altar of the Crucifixion. The Rock of the Calvary, believed by many to be the exact site of the crucifixion, is directly beneath the altar, but only visible on each side where it is housed in glass cases, and it is possible to touch it from beneath through a hole in the floor under the altar. After seeing the Calvary, we squeezed our way back down the stairs to see the Stone of Anointing (seen in the featured image for this post), allegedly where Christ’s body was prepared for burial. When we got to the stone, people were weeping and throwing themselves on it, others were pouring water over its surface, but the first thing that stood out to me was how small Jesus must’ve been. The stone wouldn’t even be 1.5 metres (5′) long so unless his head or a portion of his lower extremities were hanging over the ends while being embalmed, Jesus Christ couldn’t have been a whole lot taller than Danny DeVito! Our last major stop inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was inside the Rotunda that contains the Aedicule. I was taken to church and Sunday School as a child and taught that Jesus’ body was placed in a cave with a boulder rolled in front of it. I understand that some details can be lost over time and that mistranslations are inevitable, or maybe the priest wasn’t using reliable sources, but Aedicule was no cave. Rather it was an ornate two-room building, the first holding the Angel’s Stone, a fragment of the stone that sealed the tomb, the other containing Christ’s alleged resting place for a few days following his death. If the cave story is factually correct and the Aedicule was built over the site afterward, I figured this would be more common knowledge, or maybe it’s just a result of my own ignorance of the topic. Either way, It was all impressive to see:

Outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Inside, looking toward the Stone of the Anointing

Upstairs in the Calvary

The ceiling is beautiful

Looking toward the Altar of the Crucifxion

A mosaic of Christ being crucified

The Altar of the Crucifixion from the side

Some priests doing their thing at the altar

The Rock of Calvary

Another mosaic, this time of Jesus’ body being taken down from the cross

A mosaic near the Stone of Anointing of Christ’s body being prepared for burial

The Stone of Anointing from a distance

People were just throwing themselves at it

Lighting candles

The Aedicule

The Dome of the Anastasis above the aedicule

The side of the Aedicule

After the Church of the Holy Sepulchre we walked to another market area that mainly sold food and spices to stop off for some traditional cheesy snacks. I have no idea what we ate, but it was damn tasty. Next we were taken through another indoor area with broken columns that was once a marketplace, now resplendent with a mural of how it used to look back in the day. Once we had exited, we walked past a synagogue that overlooked the Mount of Olives and were soon at the Western Wall, more commonly referred to as the Wailing Wall, although that is considered a derogatory term:

The Western Wall, Wailing Wall, or Kotel is an ancient limestone wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. It is a relatively small segment of a far longer ancient retaining wall, known also in its entirety as the “Western Wall”. The wall was originally erected as part of the expansion of the Second Jewish Temple begun by Herod the Great, which resulted in the encasement of the natural, steep hill known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount, in a large rectangular structure topped by a huge flat platform, thus creating more space for the Temple itself and its auxiliary buildings. For Muslims, it is traditionally the site where the Islamic Prophet Muhammad tied his winged steed, al-Buraq, on his Isra and Mi’raj to Jerusalem before ascending to paradise, and constitutes the Western border of al-Haram al-Sharif.

The term Western Wall and its variations are mostly used in a narrow sense for the section traditionally used by Jews for prayer; it has also been called the “Wailing Wall”, referring to the practice of Jews weeping at the site over the destruction of the Temples. The term “Wailing Wall” is not used by Jews, and increasingly not by many others who consider it derogatory.

There is a much publicised practice of placing slips of paper containing written prayers into the crevices of the Wall. The earliest account of this practice is attributed to Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, (d. 1743). More than a million notes are placed each year and the opportunity to e-mail notes is offered by a number of organisations. It has become customary for visiting dignitaries to place notes too.

The wall has separate prayer areas for men and women, both of which have large bird’s nests jutting out, and I am unsure if this is common or not, but people praying on the men’s side were sparsely spaced out when compared to the women’s side, which would’ve been at least 20 metres (65′) deep with women waiting to pray. We’ve been attempting to sell our apartment in Singapore in order to buy a larger one with very little success so Anna wrote “Sell our house” on a piece of paper she tore off an old brochure and went down to the wall to place it in a crack while I stayed upstairs to take some photos and video. I’m unsure if it was intentional, but the layout of barriers and scaffolding makes it almost impossible to get decent access to take photos of the women’s portion of the wall.

Spices in the market

About to have a snack

Tasty!

Walking through the food market

Now where the ancient market once stood

One of several mosaics that line the walls

A painting of how the market once looked. Apparently a common tourist thing to do is stand on that pillar for a photo so it looks as if you are in the market

The synagog

Overlooking the Mount of Olives

The men’s prayer section of the Western Wall

Those aren’t plants sticking out of the wall, they’re enormous bird’s nests

Getting a little closer

You can see all of the prayers in the cracks of the wall

Even women in Israel have to do compulsory national service

Anna and myself near the wall

The photos only give a rough idea of the Western Wall so I took a couple of short videos, the first from a distance to show the size and the second one closer to see the actions of those praying:

We left the Old city at around 8:30pm and went to a nearby restaurant where the organisers had made a reservation and some great food was passed around with free flow wine. I donned my $60 yarmulke, attached it to my head with Anna’s hair-clip, and this led to an interesting question — You see a lot of jews keep their yarmulkes in place with hairpins, but how do bald men do it? A suction cup? Glue, tape, or any other adhesive? Some sort of natural vacuum with the skull? I never got an exact answer, but one of the local doctors made the motion of just licking it and slapping it on his crown. We all had a great time at dinner and the next item on the agenda was to visit a decent drinking spot in a nearby market. As we entered we came to a place where some locals, as well as a couple of tourists, were just sitting around with beers, some smoking a shisha, just kicking back and listening to music. Someone thought it would be a brilliant idea just to stop off for some shots along the way, but we never ended up moving on. Initially, everyone was taking a while so I bought a beer, figuring I could just chug it when we had to leave, but then the music got cranked, everyone started dancing, and others began to get drinks as well. Next thing I knew, what was usually a small hangout in a market in Jerusalem had been turned into a party, Anna’s scarf being used for a limbo competition by some nearby Israeli guys that decided to join in. Two mind-blown Belgian tourists that were sitting nearby with a shisha asked at one point what had just happened. I had to explain to them that a bunch of eye surgeons from around the world that had barely known each other for a day or two had decided to hit the town and accidentally ended up taking over the place! I don’t dance so I at one stage got talking to the ambassador for Equatorial Guinea, his wife, and their older Israeli host who had only a few minutes prior been sitting around having a quiet drink. Anna was getting a bit thirsty so she kept coming over to have a sip out of my beer so I just eventually bought her one to make things easier, which she almost immediately spilt on me. This must’ve given the Israeli man, who had to be in his mid-60s, an idea. Anna soon came over and he introduced himself, leading to a conversation between the two of them that, although not verbatim, went very closely along the lines of this:

Older Israeli Man: “Is this your first time in Israel?” Anna: “Yes, and I love it here!” Older Israeli Man: “Where are you staying?” Anna: “In Tel Aviv.” Older Israeli Man: (Attempting to hand Anna his phone number) “Well, next time you’re in Israel I can be your private tour guide. Who are you here with?” Anna: (Putting an arm around me) “Oh, my husband.” Older Israeli Man: “Oh… Do you have a sister?” Anna: “No, just three brothers.” Older Israeli Man: “Oh, sorry…”

We both immediately cracked up laughing at how absurd it had been that a possible retiree had just assumed that Anna was some party girl who flirts with guys by randomly walking up and taking sips from their drinks and then resorted to asking if she had a sister when he found out she wasn’t available. It was a brilliant night and a sleepy bus ride back when we left at around midnight to make the one-hour trek back to our hotel.

Leaving the Old City

The view inside the restaurant from our upper-level tables

My terrible $60 Homer Simpson yarmulke on my greasy hair

Eating and drinking

Entering the market

We wouldn’t make it past there

Things getting loud

We needed to cover up to be in Jerusalem, but this was the only long skirt Anna had, making her look like a five-year-old who dressed herself for school and wanted to go as a ballerina

Monday, November 4, 2019 We were leaving for Singapore that day, but that’s not the reason we were up early. Instead, we were doing a tour of Masada and then going out to float around in the Dead Sea and we had to be in the hotel lobby at 7:20am for the bus. As usual we got stuck in traffic on the way, there were some really annoying people in our tour group, and the seats on the bus weren’t made for people my size so my back got quite painful over the course of the drive. One thing I wasn’t aware of was that we would be driving through Palestine on this particular day, however, we wouldn’t need passports, because nobody can really give a clear answer on what constitutes Palestine:

Boundaries of the Roman province Syria Palaestina, where dashed green line shows the boundary between Byzantine Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Secunda, as well as Palaestina Salutaris   Borders of Mandatory Palestine  Borders of the Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) which are claimed by the State of Palestine as its borders

Palestine is a geographic region in Western Asia usually considered to include Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and in some definitions, parts of western Jordan.

Situated at a strategic location between Egypt, Syria and Arabia, and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. The region has been controlled by numerous peoples, including Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites and Judeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenids, ancient Greeks, the Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom, Romans, Parthians, Sasanians, Byzantines, the Arab Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Mongols, Ottomans, the British, and modern Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians and Palestinians.

The boundaries of the region have changed throughout history. Today, the region comprises the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories in which the State of Palestine was declared.

Yeah, I don’t really get it and this map (above), with the different borders colour-coded, doesn’t offer a whole lot of help, either. In fact, I didn’t even realise we had been in Palestine until I saw the location on some of the photos I had taken in the middle of nowhere while we were on the bus. Whenever you hear about Palestine on the news it’s never anything good, because all of that information generally revolves around the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but apparently we were there and didn’t even know it! Our trip took quite a while, but our driver, who was also our tour guide, was funny as hell and we ultimately made it to Masada in the end. The only problem was that not only was this another situation where there was simply too much information to take in, but he also spoke in a very monotone voice so you just kind of tuned out after a while. Never fear, here are the basics about Masada:

Masada is an ancient fortification in the Southern District of Israel situated on top of an isolated rock plateau, akin to a mesa. It is located on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea 20 km (12 mi) east of Arad.

Herod the Great built two palaces for himself on the mountain and fortified Masada between 37 and 31 BCE.

According to Josephus, the siege of Masada by Roman troops from 73 to 74 CE, at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War, ended in the mass suicide of the 960 Sicarii rebels who were hiding there.

There are two options for hiking to Masada, which is about 300m (980′) in elevation, but it is quite long and steep and it can get very hot there so we opted for the two-minute cable car ride to the top. Out one side of the car you could see the desert and the Dead Sea, out the other side, this:

Once at the summit we were taken on a rather lengthy tour beneath the desert sun and this is a sampling of what we saw of Masada, there are only descriptions for the parts I know or could find information about:

Waiting for the cable car

Looking over the Dead Sea into Jordan

Here comes our cable car

Some crazy people hike this!

Approaching the fort

A mosaic floor

A “caldarium” (hot room) in the Roman-style public bath

A better look at the caldarium

Looking into the Synagogue

Finally some shade!

Roman siege camp F and a section of the Roman circumvallation wall

Panoramic shot of the Dead Sea

Not a whole lot out there…

Token Selfie

Another mosaic floor

Part of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Anna and myself

Once we had finished looking around Masada we were back in the bus to go to the Ein Gedi region by the Dead Sea. By this time the pain in my back was unbearable so I was hoping that floating on water would be able to provide some relief, but before we could go in, we went to get lunch. The restaurant we were taken to was connected to a gift shop, a place I’d need later, but first we had to eat and despite having a sign saying something to the extent of “Best Food at 430m Below Sea Level,” it was shit! Perhaps it was because it was the only food option there and when there is no other, you become the best by default. It was like going into a school canteen; there was a bain marie section with pre-cooked food, you could choose one meat, two vegetables, and one carbohydrate, essentially just a choice of pasta or rice, and an all-you-can-eat salad bar. We had our crappy lunch and then it was to the gift shop. Anna wanted to buy some presents for people, things such as Dead Sea salt and body lotions, and I needed to buy some shorts, because I had forgotten to pack anything for swimming in Israel. The choices of patterns were horrendous and although I bought an XL, they were still quite small. Anyway, I donned my hideous, newly acquired swimming attire and it was time to float around in the Dead Sea:

The Dead Sea is a salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west. It lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, and its main tributary is the Jordan River.

Its surface and shores are 430.5 metres (1,412 ft) below sea level, Earth’s lowest elevation on land. It is 304 m (997 ft) deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. With a salinity of 342 g/kg, or 34.2% (in 2011), it is one of the world’s saltiest bodies of water – 9.6 times as salty as the ocean – and has a density of 1.24 kg/litre, which makes swimming similar to floating. This salinity makes for a harsh environment in which plants and animals cannot flourish, hence its name. The Dead Sea’s main, northern basin is 50 kilometres (31 mi) long and 15 kilometres (9 mi) wide at its widest point.

The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean Basin for thousands of years. It was one of the world’s first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from asphalt for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilisers.

We were given advice on what we should and shouldn’t do when in the body of water, the main points being not to roll onto your belly, because your feet will rise and increase the possibility of drowning, as well as avoiding getting the water into our nose, mouth, or ears. The smell of sulphur hung thick in the air as we waited for a tractor to take us to the shore and once there we saw people covered in mud, just laying in the sun, while others floated on their backs. Getting into the water was difficult, because the crystallised salt along the shore and on the seabed made it similar to walking across a field of Legos in order to enter, but once in it was the most peaceful I think I have ever felt, besides the fact that any cuts and scratches initially stung like you wouldn’t believe. We were with one of Anna’s Thai cohorts from the Retina Panel as well so they both also decided to get all muddy, but I was content just floating:

I said the shorts were ugly… and small!

We laughed when we first saw her

But then we realised everyone was doing it

I don’t mind the beach too much when it’s neither sandy nor crowded

Salt along the shoreline

Just floating around

Not a care in the world

Anna joining me

It gets very painful walking over this

It also gets a bit warm, too

Anna and her colleague, all muddy

She was kind of proud of being this dirty

I also got Anna to take a video of us so you can see how buoyant you become, but you’ll have to deal with random zooming, because she was still trying to figure out how to use the video function for the camera on my new phone:

When we were out of the sea I showered, but I bite my nails and it occured to me that it was going to take several more showers for my fingers to stop tasting so extremely salty. I also realised two other things:

I had completely forgotten to bring a change of underwear — I had prepared a pair and put them in a bag, I just didn’t bring said bag.

If I hadn’t got changed so quickly in the first place and had examined my new shorts a little closer upon purchase, this wouldn’t have even been an issue, as they had built-in underwear.

My boys need a home, but that wasn’t going to be the case on the bus ride back to the hotel. Add to this the increasingly worse lower-back pain from the indented curve in the small bus seats and it wasn’t a pleasant journey back, but at least my skin felt super soft. To further compel our problems, Anna had done some research before we came to Israel, reading that security out of the country can be tough, and had somehow come to the conclusion that we needed to be at the airport four hours before our 9:30pm flight back to Singapore. The problem with this approach was that we had left the Dead Sea at 4:30pm and, factoring in the distance we had to travel, as well as the traffic we had to make our way through, it was getting close to 7:00pm by the time we were back, Anna completely on edge. Once we arrived at the hotel I knew exactly where my spare underwear was so I had the intention of dashing into the bathroom to give myself a feeling of security again, but Anna deemed it simply not an option, due to the potential for the entire process to waste around 30 valuable seconds. Our taxi got us to the airport with about two hours to spare and there were a few extra questions asked, such as when the guy at immigration asked our connection. “Oh, we’re flying to Istanbul, have a 90-minute layover, and then we continue on to Singapore,” was our reply. “No, I mean between the two of you.” We told him we were married, then he still wanted me to confirm I was Anna’s husband, moving on to ask me the origins of my surname, but overall it wasn’t as difficult as we had expected. The true terror, however, struck when I reached the metal detector. I took my wallet, phone, and hat, put them and my bag in the tray and walked toward the metal detector. “Are you wearing a belt?” the operator asked, not a question I was hoping to hear. I took my belt off, put it in the container with my other items, held onto my shorts, and waddled over to the detector. Once through I still had to stand with my arms outstretched for the frisk and scan, but fortunately my shorts didn’t slip down to a level that could get me arrested. Security wasn’t the nightmare Anna had anticipated so we had plenty of time to go up to the lounge, put on some undies, and have a bite to eat before our flight.

Israel was definitely a surprise; we had heard great things about Tel Aviv and how it was a party city so seeing that for ourselves was fun. I already knew that there was nothing besides physically witnessing a 100 percent indisputable act of divine intervention that could make me a believer in any form of religion, but it was still incredible to visit those holy sites in Jerusalem, and as you can probably guess, floating in the Dead Sea is a really weird, but cool feeling.

Also, yet again something terrible happened in Israel as soon as we left, a trend that is really beginning to get a little disturbing, although not surprising in this part of the world.

Exploring Jerusalem and Masada, as well as floating in the Dead Sea In my last post, all of our time in Israel was spent in Tel Aviv, looking around Jaffa, wandering around the Sarona shopping district and the beach, and trying to figure out what we could actually do on the Sabbath.

[eastbridge-sb]

MLS Asian Total Goals Match Previews – 17th August Saturday

New York Red Bulls v New England Revolution 

The Red Bulls just can’t get any consistency going at the moment. Their last 10 results read LWLDWLWLWL and it seems they go from one extreme to another. 

For the most part, home results have been quite good but poor on the road. Chris Armas’ men are still situated inside the playoff positions of the Eastern Conference but are starting to drift compared to the likes of Philly and Atlanta. 

This division is wide open and there for the taking but the Bulls need to string a bunch of wins together if they are to challenge for honours. New York have the third best home record in the East having won 8 out of 13 contests. 

It’s staggering that they’ve suffered 4 defeats at the Red Bell Arena though, which is a really high amount compared to previous seasons. There is too much inconsistency with team selection and they appear lopsided with too many attackers on the roster.

New England Revolution have been completely transformed ever since they sacked Brad Friedel. After his departure, they went on a fantastic 11 match unbeaten run and new manager Bruce Arena has totally re-energised this team. 

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the turnaround is that Arena has hardly changed the squad. It’s pretty much the same bunch of players that Friedel had under his disposal. It just shows what some good coaching can do to transform a side. 

The Revolution have been good both at home and away but the general philosophy is to attack under ‘Bruce’.The legendary MLS coach always likes his sides to carry some sort of threat in the final third. 

Carles Gil and Teal Bunbury have been two of the more stand out attackers in recent weeks whilst new playmaker signing Gustavo Bou has also looked quite impressive. 

New York Red Bulls are -0.5 Asian Handicap favourites for this match around the 1.80 mark. The problem is that New England have regularly covered as an underdog in recent weeks. Montreal, LA Galaxy, Colorado and Seattle all failed to beat the Revs as odds-on favourites so this should send a word of warning to potential Red Bull backers here. 

The pick I prefer to take is over 3 goals. A staggering amount of MLS games have ended at least over 2.5 in recent weeks. The total % on the season is nearly 59%, slightly down on last year but it’s a figure I expect to rise as the season progresses. 

Most of the goal lines in MLS these days are at least 3. But taking that line in games that involve generally attack-minded teams and you won’t lose many times in my opinion. Both of these sides will certainly have a go in what should be an end to end type encounter. 

Asian Total Goals Betting Recommendation: Over 3 goals at 1.86

FC Cincinnati v New York City FC (Saturday 17th Aug)

A fairly rare event happened last week, FC Cincinnati picked up a point! It was nearly even better for them but they blew a 2-0 lead away at Columbus Crew. 

Still, FCC will take a draw (2-2) considering it ended a poor run of four consecutive defeats. In total, the new MLS franchise have lost 15 of their last 19 matches which is obviously a horrible return. 

A combination of factors have attributed towards these results, but MLS teething problems in addition to a bad injury situation are the main reasons. Cincinnati have a new head coach, Ron Jans. The ex PEC Zwolle manager is quite attack-minded and the aim for the rest of the season is to entertain the fans and try to be as respectable as possible.

 It’s highly likely that FCC will be picking up the wooden spoon this year but it’s about getting fans interested in their product and something on which to build for 2020.

New York City FC have much more lofty ambitions. They currently sit fourth in the Eastern Conference but have three games in hand on most of their rivals. If they won all of those then NYC would actually top the East. 

They have to be considered as a major contender for overall MLS Cup glory and will aim to finish as high as they can before the end of season playoffs. Only LAFC have lost fewer games than Dom Torrent’s men although 3 of their 5 defeats this year have come in recent away games. 

Perhaps the one thing NYCFC still lack is a top quality #9 type striker. Let’s be honest, they still haven’t properly replaced David Villa. But with guys like Mitrita, Heber and Maxi Moralez a strong degree of attacking threat is still offered.

The previous meeting between these two sides ended 5-2 in the Big Apple. It’s no surprise to see NYCFC as -0.5 Asian Handicap favourites here. It’s not too often I would advocate backing an away side to win in MLS but the visitors should be prevailing in this instance. 

However, Cincinnati have been more competitive since Jans took over at the helm. They were unlucky to lose at home to Vancouver recently (1-2) before being competitive at the Crew last week. FCC have signed a lot of new players in the recent transfer window so could be improved in the remaining part of the season. 

I don’t think they have enough to avoid defeat this weekend but a safer bet is over 3 goals. A staggering 11 of the last 14 Cincinnati matches have all ended over 2.5 goals and the three matches that didn’t all ended 2-0. 

They can’t defend very well but are willing to have a go themselves. New York City need to be winning this sort of game so should be quite attack minded. 10 of the last 11 NYC fixtures have all ended over 2.5 as well, so all things are pointing towards a high scoring contest.

Asian Total Goals Betting Recommendation: Over 3 goals at 1.95

Preview by: @meatmansoccer.

Make the most of Steve Wyss’ selections for New York Red Bulls v New England Revolution through Eastbridge’s Skype betting service or through VOdds.

The post MLS Asian Total Goals Match Previews – 17th August Saturday appeared first on Eastbridge.

source https://eastbridge-sb.com/mls-asian-total-goals-match-previews-17th-august-saturday/

[junker-town]

Sony Open in Hawaii 2018: Results, scores, TV/live stream info for Jan. 11-14

A low-key Sony Open got a little zany on Sunday and it had little to do with the actual golf, which Patton Kizzire played best to win in an interminable playoff.

The PGA Tour hops from Maui to Oahu this week for the first full-field event of the year: the Sony Open.

The annual stop at Waialae may tumble to the furthest recesses of your mind by the end of the season, but it has become a highlight of the early-season schedule for the hardcore golf fans. There are stops on the upcoming West Coast swing that will get much more love, but the Sony is a great combination of rookies and vets grinding for solidified PGA Tour card status on a course with a ton of history.

It’s also an opportunity for more prime-time golf following up last week’s little 34-man party that was the Tournament of Champions. I thought the ToC fizzled a bit on the weekend, despite the fireworks from the eventual winner and world No. 1 Dustin Johnson. It was great to watch PGA Tour golf again, and Kapalua was as beautiful as ever. But it ran out of juice in my very subjective opinion.

With a full field and a course that can yield some crazy low numbers, maybe we get a better show this week. Here are some reasons to watch as well as the nuts and bolts for the Sony. We’ll update this as a hub of sorts as the tournament progresses.

Results

It was a weird, interminable final round Sunday at the Sony Open. Perhaps the biggest news of the day came when it was still dark out in Honolulu and most were still sleeping. A little after 10:30 a.m. ET, news of a labor dispute between Golf Channel and its live tournament technicians surfaced. We got word that camera operators, audio techs, and others involved in the production of their tournament coverage, had walked out and we’re not going to work on Sunday. It dramatically impacted the Web Tour coverage at 11 a.m. ET and while we didn’t know what to expect hours later at the Sony, we knew it would be odd and completely different than what we were used to from GC.

This is not a good situation for all parties involved. These technicians grind their ass off to bring a broadcast each week, and are legitimately great at what they do. Golf Channel obviously works to try and bring the best, most golf to the people who want it. I know little of the origins of the dispute, but obviously everyone would like to see it resolved as soon as possible.

So with no real crew working at Waialae, the broadcast was obviously thrown into a bit of chaos. What Golf Channel put out was impressive, all things considered. George Savaricas called the entire final round from back in their Orlando studios, with analysts Billy Kratzert and Jim Gallagher at the desk. They patchworked together a few people to operate cameras, many of whom were obviously not the pros that do this. One was even Jerry Foltz, the former PGA Tour player turned on-course reporter. He was up in a tower behind the 16th hole.

Haha, Jerry Foltz is running one of the tower cameras. What a time to be alive. http://pic.twitter.com/OsKhGI2TcA

— D.J. Piehowski (@DJPie) January 15, 2018

The camera work was, as you might expect, not particularly strong. They were set up on only the last few holes at Waialae. There was no audio from the course. Graphics were minimal. There were blimp shots — lots and lots and lots of blimp shots. The whole thing was just surreal. It was an admirable effort given the circumstances, but also made you appreciate what we get each week and what those who were on strike actually provide.

As for the actual golf, well, the GC crew back in Orlando didn’t exactly get a quick and tidy one to call on Sunday night. A playoff between Patton Kizzire and James Hahn went a slogging six holes, going almost to 11 p.m. ET. It finished as sunset in Honolulu was minutes away, with Hahn bogeying the par-3 redan 17th hole. Neither played particularly well, but Kizzire emerges with what is already his second win of the season. He won the Mayakoba back in November during the “wraparound” portion of the schedule.

So it’s just the second week of January and Kizzire is almost locked up for a spot in the final 30 at the Tour Championship in Atlanta about 9 months from now. He’s No. 1 in the FedExCup Standings, which doesn’t mean much, but means something — he should stay in the top 10 for the next several months barring a total collapse.

Kizzire is a horse, a player who can go on streaks, as evidenced by his lights-out season on the Web Tour. The big Auburn product could be an outside contender for a Ryder Cup spot too if he keeps the pedal down and accrues enough points early in the season (he doesn’t get anything for his win in the fall). Despite the weirdness of the day, we got a good winner at the end of it. Here are your final results from Waialae:

Why Watch

1) It’s pretty. This is simple. I won’t try to expound much beyond telling you that this Waialae Country Club layout is easy to look at. The media center is basically on the beach — not that I know from experience; one day, perhaps.

The course runs right up and almost onto the beach — so close that a couple of certain pros going out for a kayak ride in the ocean were easily caught by the golf course cameras and documented in a suffocating barrage of content last year. And you mayyyy see a shot or two of the infamous “W” shaped palms lording over the 18th green.

Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

2) Raynor. I will never pretend to be a golf course architecture expert, although I appreciate those who are and love following the topic. It’s a topic that’s taken on increased interest and debate, thanks to a handful of intelligent voices in social and digital media shining new light.

Waialae is one of a too-small handful of PGA Tour courses with Golden Age roots as it was one of Seth Raynor’s last projects in the 1920s. Raynor has been a poster boy for the increased discussion and appreciation from the aforementioned group on social media. He’s a cult hero for many.

Now, the Waialae of 2018 is different from Raynor’s original intent but there are still elements that make this worth watching, especially with Tom Doak, a modern day architecture cult hero, slowly putting some restorative efforts into the historic course. The redan 17th hole should be the most noticeable change and throwback this year.

I think this is a fascinating topic worth diving into and for more, go to the actual experts. Andy Johnson at The Fried Egg, one of those ascendant golf architecture experts I mentioned, hosted Doak on his podcast this week. They went through some of the original Raynor intent, the restoration efforts, and how the course plays for the best pros in the world on a week like this.

3) #58Watch. Breaking 60 has become somewhat passé, but it’s still an accomplishment that gets you to change the channel to golf once murmurs of a pro going super deep start rumbling on Twitter and elsewhere. Waialae is one of the better opportunities for a pro to break 60 and maybe even match Jim Furyk’s ridiculous 58 from the Travelers a few years ago.

It’s a par 70, and the present day big hitters are taking some ridiculous lines off the tees — nothing that Raynor could have imagined back when it was originally designed. We saw this from Justin Thomas last year when he torched the place for a 59 en route to his second win in the first two weeks of the 2017 season. It’s likely we’re back on #59Watch or maybe even #58Watch again this week.

4) Rookies. With this being our first full-field event of the new year, it’s also a great opportunity to get a good look at this year’s rookie class. Of course, those rookies get some much-needed starts during the wraparound schedule in the fall. But some of these early year events are major chances for them to make hay and solidify their status for the rest of the year, or at least before the priority rankings reshuffle. The Sony Open is one of their best chances to accrue some FedExCup points, with some of the upcoming West Coast swing events having smaller fields that don’t provide starts for rookies with lower priority.

We’ve seen a rookie win this event recently, with Russell Henley going low in 2013 to win the Sony in his PGA Tour debut. There’s a boatload of rookies playing this week — they’re all worth watching but some of the bigger names that may get some love are Peter Uihlein, Tom Lovelady, Aaron Wise, Stephan Jaeger, and Austin Cook, who already won during the wraparound schedule.

You’re going to get plenty of chances to watch the top players in the world rankings in the coming months. This is a good opportunity to see some of the best young up-and-comers — the players who aren’t household names but are worth rooting for and could become one soon.

How to Watch

This is really the last opportunity to watch prime-time PGA Tour golf until the fall, when the Asian swing returns during the wraparound portion of the schedule. The upcoming West Coast swing does allow for some golf to go past dinner time on the East Coast, but not by much given the limited daylight hours this time of year.

The only real options for prime-time golf would be a West Coast venue at either the U.S. Open or the PGA Championship. The USGA is fond of getting the national championship on the West Coast during the longest days of the year, allowing for finishes as late as 11 p.m. ET. But this year, we’re about as far away from the West Coast as possible with the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. So this is it really. Take it in because from here on out, your weekend finishes on the PGA Tour will all slot in during daylight hours.

Like last week on Maui, Golf Channel will have exclusive coverage of the entire tournament over the next four days. It’s that time of year when CBS is still occupied with football on the weekends, and these events aren’t necessarily big enough to get the bump up to NBC. And Golf Channel is plenty capable of just running with the coverage throughout, as we see during the fall series too.

It will, however, be down a man at times this week. Jim “Bones” Mackay (Phil Mickelson’s former longtime caddie, if you’re completely golf ignorant) has become one of the best parts of the Golf Channel/NBC coverage. But this week, he’s picking up the bag again and looping for Justin Thomas, whose regular caddie has to take a few weeks off due to plantar fasciitis.

Bones is going to do double duty, putting on the headset and working as a walking reporter when Thomas is not playing. But given that the defending champ tore this course up last year and will likely play well again, Bones could be on the course as a caddie and not a TV reporter during the late weekend broadcast times.

Here’s your media schedule for Sunday:

Sunday’s final round coverage

Television:

6 to 10 p.m. — Golf Channel

Online streams:

6 to 10 p.m. — Golf Channel simulcast stream

Radio:

5 p.m. — PGA Tour Radio on SiriusXM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)

Photo by Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

Jordan Spieth is back for the second straight year at the Sony.

Tee Times

This is the first full field event of the year. That little party on Maui last week featured just 34 players and was obviously easy to schedule over four days with a ton of flexibility. Now we’re back to the grind of sending two waves off split tees for the first 36 holes.

The original 144-man field has been cut down at the customary 36-hole mark, but that doesn’t mean they will now send them off in twosomes all rolling off No. 1. They could do that, starting at about 8 a.m. local time. But, as the AP’s Doug Ferguson explains, this is a solid for the volunteers who have been grinding through the first two sun-up to sun-down days.

We often see the Tour put them off two tees in groups of three on a weekend when severe weather threatens the schedule. This allows them to condense the entire field down into about a two-hour window. It’s exactly two hours this week in Oahu, where the first group on Sunday will not go until after 9 a.m. local. That’s about two hours earlier than Saturday’s schedule, but still gives the volunteers and tourney staff some extra cushion on Sunday morning.

The TV coverage runs until 10 p.m., but the final group should be putting out on the 18th green well before that — sometime around 9 p.m. unless there’s a dramatic pace of play issue.

UPDATE: It turns out the tee times for Sunday were moved up because of Golf Channel technicians’ strike. Unionized employees, such as camera operators, went on strike and walked out on Sunday morning, leaving Golf Channel scrambling to put together makeshift crews of contractors to broadcast their Sunday events on the Web.com Tour, PGA Tour, and Champions Tour.

Earlier start today at the Sony is because of a strike. No, not a missile. Camera/audio techs that do GC events walked out today over contract negotiations.

— Doug Ferguson (@dougferguson405) January 14, 2018

It’s a very odd situation, which we went through here with comments from one camera operator who walked out at the Web Tour event.

Here’s your full tee sheet for the third round.

Sunday’s tee sheet (all times ET!)

Off No 1 tee:

2:20 p.m.: Lanto Griffin, Kevin Kisner, Austin Cook

2:30 p.m.: Jason Dufner, Stewart Cink, Jordan Spieth

2:40 p.m.: Matt Jones, Nicholas Lindheim, Xinjun Zhang

2:50 p.m.: Corey Conners, Keith Mitchell, Jonathan Byrd

3 p.m.: Daisuke Kataoka, Gary Woodland, Jerry Kelly

3:10 p.m.: Chez Reavie, Emiliano Grillo, Ryan Blaum

3:20 p.m.: Ryan Armour, Zach Johnson, Scott Brown

3:30 p.m.: Ben Martin, James Hahn, Nate Lashley

3:40 p.m.: Talor Gooch, Scott Piercy, Rory Sabbatini

3:50 p.m.: Sam Saunders, Webb Simpson, Brian Stuard

4 p.m.: Ollie Schniederjans, Cameron Smith, Justin Thomas

4:10 p.m.: Kyle Stanley, Chris Kirk, Russell Knox

4:20 p.m.: Tom Hoge, Patton Kizzire, Brian Harman

Off No. 10 tee:

2:20 p.m.: Brandon Harkins, Adam Schenk, Charles Howell III

2:30 p.m.: Daniel Berger, Dominic Bozzelli, Tony Finau

2:40 p.m.: Wesley Bryan, Harris English, Xander Schauffele

2:50 p.m.: John Peterson, Tyrone Van Aswegen, Marc Leishman

3 p.m.: Jason Kokrak, Keegan Bradley, Brian Gay

3:10 p.m.: Conrad Shindler, Ryan Palmer, Jonathan Randolph

3:20 p.m.: Sam Ryder, Matt Every, Seamus Power

3:30 p.m.: J.J. Spaun, Hudson Swafford, Roberto Diaz

3:40 p.m.: John Oda, Kevin Tway, Andrew Putnam

3:50 p.m.: Si Woo Kim, Shugo Imahira, Stephan Jaegar

4 p.m.: Blayne Barber, Vaughn Taylor, Steve Allan

4:10 p.m.: William McGirt, D.A. Points

4:20 p.m.: Colt Knost, Joel Dahmen

Scores

Round 1 scores

The wind was down a bit in the first round, and while we got a couple low scores, it was not the birdiefest you might be accustomed to at the Sony Open. And we sure didn’t get anything approaching the 59 that Thomas posted in the opening round last year at Waialae. Your leaders are Chris Kirk and Zach Johnson, who was all over the flag with his irons in the afternoon wave. This is a classic setup that should, traditionally, favor the ZJ game and he opened his year with an impressive 63.

Jordan Spieth somehow finished in the red despite posting a snowman 8 on his penultimate hole of the day, which included four shots hitting four trees en route to the green. Not good! But Spieth piled up a bunch of birdies elsewhere and is still in okay shape at 1-under.

I think the most fascinating thing to watch in these early rounds is how some of the classic and restored holes are holding up in a pro event. The redan hole at the 17th, this year’s most dramatic change for the Sony, was worth watching all evening on the Golf Channel broadcast. The Fried Egg picked up on the new challenge.

This year vs last year on the redan hole. Today the tour played the tees up 15 yards and there was little to no wind. The hole played tougher with a larger shot dispersion than last year when the green was flat. Proof that the best way to test players is with quality architecture http://pic.twitter.com/AdUwy1ngha

— the fried egg (@the_fried_egg) January 12, 2018

Spieth will be out in the afternoon wave and in the TV window on Friday. This is a really cool early-season test and I thought Thursday’s opening round was more entertaining than any day last week at Kapalua.

Round 2 Scores:

Brian Harman, perhaps the hottest player on the PGA Tour, backed up his opening round 64 with a 63 early on Friday morning in Honolulu. Harman has been a stud since his junior golf days, but may be settling in now for a sustained run on the PGA Tour. He beat out Dustin Johnson last year at the always tough Wells Fargo Championship for his second career win. He contended on Sunday at the U.S. Open. He finished the the year with seven top 10s.

Harman began 2018 playing in the final Sunday pairing alongside DJ in Maui. People are jumping on the trendy Harman bandwagon and a win this week will only make it more crowded. This Waialae course is perfectly suited for his precision game but he’ll need to keep the pedal down and keep posting rounds in the mid-60s to stay on top of the leaderboard.

That’s because there’s always a mega-low round available out here. We’ve seen players come from way down the board with a 9-under round of 61. We know Justin Thomas can go low after his 59 last year. JT is still well within striking distance, tied for 17th at the midpoint. Jordan Spieth is probably too far gone at just 3-under but he can at least play his way into a late Sunday tee time.

Round 3 Scores:

There were low numbers available out there again on Saturday, but we still have yet to see the one player go crazy low and push 60. The round of the day belonged to Webb Simpson, who matched the round of the week with a 7-under 63. Simpson jumped 39 spots up the leaderboard and into the top 10 for the final round. He doesn’t have much of a great chance of winning, sitting still six shots behind the leading number. But it shows, as always, that big jumps can be made from deep down the leaderboard and I still think we could get a 61 before this Sony Open is over.

The man sitting atop the board with that leading number is now Tom Hoge, who was a shot shy of Simpson’s mark with a 6-under 64 on Saturday. Hoge has never won on the PGA Tour, but has seven top 10 finishes in a youngish career. Now he’s one ahead of Patton Kizzire and Brian Harman, two studs, who are in form, and won last year. It’s likely Hoge will need yet another mid-60s round on Sunday to stay on top and clinch that first career victory. He’s stayed in the range all week with a 65-65-64 run at Waialae, but the odds aren’t exactly on his side with just a one-shot cushion at a place that has seen some leaderboard volatility.

Tom Hoge takes a 1-shot lead into the final round in Honolulu. Since 2013 season began, players with a 1-shot lead through 54 holes win 25% of the time on the PGA Tour (17-for-67).

— Justin Ray (@JustinRayGC) January 14, 2018

The biggest name within striking distance is probably defending Sony Open champ and reigning player of the year Justin Thomas. He’s also six shots back at 10-under but certainly has the firepower to go low and chase them down. We’re set up for a strong Sunday at the Sony.

[iloveilovetoo-blog]

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