#What fundies live in South Carolina

[countingandsnarkingon]

Um…someone tell me that isn’t an engagement ring?

[hislittleraincloud]

You haven't made it in fandom until you've garnered hate, and that's what's happening now under Insomniac's Wenovan story.

Some asshat is spewing the usual garbage about the ship. But instead of sticking to the fiction, the bish went full-on MAGAt and inserted that us 'liberals' are all trying to push an agenda of pedophilia onto people, which to me just screams Warriors for Innocence (and I was waiting for Bible verses...alas, they didn't come).

It's almost like none of Wenovan's critics understand what fiction is.

That, plus MAGAts like that anon who cry about liberals are all ignoring the fact that the vast majority of men arrested for sex or inappropriate relationships with minors have been MAGAt-y right wingy 'Christians'*** and conservatives.

Former youth pastor in Colorado was convicted of sexual exploitation of a minor on October 13th.

Former youth pastor in Florida arrested on October 10th for transmitting harmful material to a minor.

Youth pastor in Ohio is on the run after being charged with 14 counts of sexually abusing minors on October 9th.

Former youth pastor from Duluth, MN charged with sexual misconduct with five teen girls on October 5th.

Former youth pastor in Wisconsin sentenced to 20 years on October 3rd for repeated SA of a teen (and wow, "will also not be allowed to serve as a pastor unless approved by his supervising agent" 💀)

Church youth leader arrested at the end of September for multiple counts of sexual battery (yet some news organizations protect his name because...Florida...but his name is Gregory Norton).

Former youth church leader in South Carolina arrested for criminal sexual conduct with a minor in late September

There's more from September, but I want to end this list on a doozy: a former KINDERGARTEN teacher and SENIOR PASTOR in North Carolina arrested and charged with child sex crimes on August 22nd

Less are the cops, and the rabbis, the Muslim clerics (in this country, at least), and the above list is just a fraction of the 'Christians' arrested within the couple of months. But I also pointed out that a pro-life, anti-abortion pill Texas state Republican secessionist who proposed an anti-drag bill "to protect children" had to resign in May for grooming: he plied a 19-year-old intern with alcohol, raped her, and then drove to a drug store so that she could get that very same Plan B pill that the hypocritical fucker was so against everyone else having.

That's our reality that we live in. But it's not the reality of fiction, where we can explore all sorts of issues and relationships safely (or, at least, we're supposed to be safe here).

You don't have to like Wenovan. In fact, I know that this fandom doesn't like it because this fandom is filled with the Gen Z types who have been indoctrinated to believe that merely writing about something makes you an advocate for what you're writing about. It's a seriously misguided application of identity politics that prevents creative writers (and actors, and producers, etc.) from exploring these issues without guilt or being guilted away from telling a story. It's called censorship, whether it be external or self-regulated...it's censoring what you as a writer and artist want to express through your work.

This is old hat for me. Very old hat. Shortly before I was arrested on that bogus attempted murder charge, I was persecuted in my school for simply writing a poem called "Little Catholic Girl". My English professor thought it was brilliant, and couldn't figure out how I was able to capture Catholic Guilt without being Catholic myself...I didn't have any answer for her aside from me wanting to be a writer and to do that I needed to walk in others' shoes. Plus, that poem was written about my most recent ex at the time, a girl who was quite into me and what we were doing, but was also crazy fundie about Catholicism (having gone to a parochial school before coming to public school like our high school), and more than a few times after she did something she felt guilty over, she would zip into a corner of her room or my room and start praying aloud.

I'm not fucking joking. Not even a minute after an orgasm and she'd be in a corner, crying and praying. Yet she would always be the one to initiate. (We never even got naked...it was all my handiwork.)

But I digress. I had submitted the poem to our lit mag, and someone reported it to the house master (we had houses in our little high school, and I was in the color and mascot equivalent of Gryffindor 🤮), and the next thing I know, I'm in his office and he's red-faced and pacing with a copy of my poem in his hand. He finally says to me, "Do you know what this is about? It's about lesbianism!" I just said, "Uh...well, I wrote it." because I couldn't think of anything else to say without being rude, and I already knew I was in trouble. They ended up pulling the poem from consideration and banning it, telling me that it wasn't allowed to be considered for the lit mag again. They censored me, because I wrote a poem about my short relationship with a crazy Catholic girl.

So of course I printed the most explicit excerpt of said poem onto a t-shirt with a suggestive graphic and wore it around school the next day. I got many dirty looks from the house master and the fucking bullfrog of a social worker who was also shitty to LGBTQ students, but I never changed nor did I cover up. I was 'outed' by it, but didn't care; it was 1990, so I put up with a LOT of anti-LGBTQ crap at my high school. 🫠✨

I learned at a very young age that there will always be some asshole looking to tell you what you can't write. But I have never listened to them. I have been an artist and writer for as long as I can remember, and what comes out of my creative brain is mine, and I'm not putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to read what I share.

I've also known hypocrisy for as long as I can remember, and it's usually the worst hypocrites who are quick to cast their sanctimonious judgments directly at writers.

If you don't like what we're writing about, why are you even here? Do you see any of us writers hopping on over to your Facebook pages to laugh at and mock your religion? While we should, we just don't have that kind of time. So how is it that you have the time to sit there and whine about something you read--presumably AFTER you read the tags? I'm normal, I read the tags of a story on AO3 and if I don't think I'll like, I ✨gasp✨ DON'T READ IT.

Jesus. Is it really that hard not to read something? I mean, I buy books that I desperately want to read but don't ever get around to it. I'm actually spending money on things I want to read but haven't, yet here we've got Karens who read shit that they'll tell you they don't like.

Anyway. My current depiction of Wenovan is a healthy one (aside from Wednesday's sex addiction). If you think it's unhealthy, it's because you're still stuck in your lens of 2023 reality...when I am writing from a lens of a fictionalized world where your morals don't precisely apply. I could write a different storyline/AU of my own story where she IS groomed or assaulted, but it would look very, very different from what I'm writing here, or what Insomniac wrote. Maybe some day I will take up that lens, but I'm currently not interested.

I'm writing a positive story about a couple doomed to their fates (Donovan, because he is old, and Wednesday because she will lose her greatest love sooner than she should have to). I'm not going to give out too much info right now (except for what I leak in comments and posts here 🤓), but the positivity is that they will weather their political/social storms with the kind of grace that Wednesday is known for, and they will be happy because that's what she wants in the current Afterburn timeline.

No one's censorship should prevent an artist from telling their stories. No one's moralizing comments should prevent an artist from telling their stories, and I sincerely hope that anyone else who would 'dare' write Wenovan (or even Weemsday, when Wednesday is 16/current) can ignore these hypocritical Moms for Liberty-like Karens and publish their work without guilt.

*** Afterburn Wednesday actually addressed this very thing in the text of the last upload I made, in her flashback speech to Mr. Fortunato, her parochial school AP Lit professor. She made him aware that she knew of several inappropriate teacher-student relationships at the school, relationships where the girls were trading sex for better grades.

[statecryptids]

In addition to cryptids, I’m also a huge prehistoric creature nerd. I recently wrote an article for Tracks and Trails, the newsletter of Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut where I work.

It’s (hopefully) the first in a series about prehistoric animals of the East Coast of North America

First a little introduction. In the Connecticut Valley, the majority of fossils are trackways. Bones and body fossils of large tetrapods are quite rare with a few exceptions such as the partial remains of Podokesaurus, a Coelophysis relative found near Holyoke, Mass, and the hand and hip bones of the early prosauropods Anchisaurus and Ammosaurus (there are, however, abundant full-body fossils of Jurassic fish, but that's an article for another time).

 Tetrapod bones have, however, been found in a number of other Triassic-Jurassic rift valleys along the East Coast. Since these valleys all date from the same time period- during the break-up of Pangea- it is highly likely that these creatures also inhabited the Connecticut Valley.

 There are a lot of interesting fossils along the Atlantic Coast, but I only had so much space for the article. So I decided to spread it out into several pieces covering groups of related animals.  This first article talks about the Tanystropheids, a diverse group of reptiles with unusually long necks.

 I also did a couple black-and-white illustrations of the creatures I talk about. It's nice to finally be getting back to some paleoart after such a long hiatus.

 Anyway, without further ado:

 TRIASSIC FOSSILS OF THE EAST COAST: THE LONG-NECKED REPTILES

by John Meszaros

 The Triassic period can be thought of as a time of “evolutionary experimentation”. The preceding Permian Age ended with a massive extinction event- the largest known extinction in Earth’s history, in fact- that wiped out ninety percent of life on Earth. In the wake of this Great Dying, innumerable ecological niches were left vacant. Life evolved to take fill these gaps, often in forms that seem bizarre to us in the modern day.

 Although evidence of Triassic life is rare in Connecticut, fossils from other sites along the East Coast of North America allow us to construct a reasonably accurate picture of the animals that would have lived here. Dinosaur State Park’s Triassic diorama and its accompanying background painting by William Sillin depict a few of these prehistoric creatures: the crocodile-like Rutiodon; the giant amphibian Metaposaurus; bearded dragonesque Hypsognathus; pig-nosed Stegomus and the early dinosaurs Coelophysis and Sileasaurus. These are but a small sample, however, of the unique and unusual Triassic beasts lying buried in rocks all along the Atlantic coast.

One of the more distinctive reptiles of the Triassic was Tanystropheus (Greek for “long vertebrae”). Sometimes described as a “living fishing pole”, this creature was characterized by its extremely long neck- at 10 feet, it was longer than the rest of the animal’s body and tail combined. Despite this length, however, Tanystrophus's neck had only 12  elongated vertebrae. The exact reason for this strange anatomy is not known, but since fossils of Tanystropheus are usually found near marine sediments, it is speculated that the animal hunted for fish from the shore by dipping its head and neck into the shallows.

 Tanystropheus bones are known primarily from Europe, the Middle East and China. However, in 2014 paleontologists Paul Olsen and Hans-Dieter Sues described the discovery of a single Tanystropheus neck vertebra from the coast of Nova Scotia along the Bay of Fundy, thus establishing the presence of these reptiles on our side of the Atlantic. This is actually not that surprising considering that during the Triassic the lands that would become North America and Europe were close together within the super-continent Pangea. 

 In contrast to the single Tanystropheus bone from Nova Scotia, fossils of its smaller cousin, Tanytrachelos, are abundant in fossil sites along the East Coast- primarily in the Solite Quarry of Virginia. Nine-inch long Tanytrachelos resembled a long-necked lizard with powerful webbed hind legs that it used to kick-swim in a frog-like manner through the shallow lakes of the Triassic rift valleys. It likely fed on aquatic insects, which are themselves abundantly preserved in fine detail at the Solite Quarry. Tanytrachelos is thought to be the maker of a type of fossil footprint called Gwyneddichnium, found abundantly in Triassic sandstones from Pennsylvania. It is, of course, not possible to determine exactly what creature made these tracks- just as it is not possible to say definitively that Dinosaur State Park’s own Eubrontes tracks were made by Dilophosaurus. However, the foot structure of Tanytrachelos is a close match to Gwyneddichnium, making it- or a very similar reptile- the most likely candidate. 

The same Virginia quarry where Tanytrachelos fossils are so abundant has also yielded fossils of another possible Tanystropheus cousin, the gliding lizard Mecistotrachelos . This creature lived among the boughs of the ancient forests, hunting insects and sailing from tree to tree on wings formed from elongated ribs much like those of the “flying lizard” Draco volans of South-east Asia.

Mecistotrachelos shared the Triassic skies with a number of similar wing-ribbed gliding reptiles, including Kuehneosaurus (known from fossils found in southwestern England) and Icarosaurus (known from a single specimen unearthed in New Jersey). It differed from these other gliding lizards in a few ways. For one thing, it had an elongated neck similar to Tanystropheus- though its neck was much less exaggerated than the “fishing rod” of the latter animal Mecistotrachelos also appears to have had better maneuverability in the air than its contemporaries. The base of the first wing-ribs were significantly thickened- much thicker, in fact, than the leading ribs in other gliders. This suggests that they may have been anchors for strong muscles that would have allowed the creature to flex its wings, giving it the ability to bank and alter its direction as it descended. 

 Mecistotrachelos is notable for being the first fossil to be analyzed with a CT scanner- a necessity since the skeleton was too delicate to be removed from its stony grave through typical paleontological procedures.

 Though none of the species  discussed here have yet been found in the Connecticut Valley, as was said before, the presence of these fossils in other East Coast fossil Triassic river valleys gives good evidence that frog-like Tanytrachelos once swam the waters of our state in the shadows of the predatory phytosaurs whilst wing-ribbed Mecistotrachelos glided through the gingkos and conifers along the shores. And where the rivers met the sea, it is quite possible that there were Tanystropheus dipping their fishing-pole necks into the surf to snap up fish.   

 REFERENCES

 Window Into The Jurassic World by Nicholas G. MacDonald

 Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Life In The Triassic by Nicholas Fraser, illustrated by Douglas Henderson

 The Great Rift Valleys of Pangea in Eastern North America: Sedimentology, Stratigraphy and Paleontology (Volume 2) edited by Peter M. LeTourneau and Paul E. Olsen

 Last Days Of Pangea: In The Footsteps Of Dinosaurs by Daniel T. Ksepka and Kate Dzikiewicz

(This is a slim informational booklet to accompany an exhibit on Triassic fossils at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT)

 An article on Mecistotrachelos from National Geographic

 Quantitative Taphonomy of a Triassic Reptile: Tanytrachelos ahynis from the Cow Branch Formation, Dan River Basin, Solite Quarry, Virginia. Michelle M. Casey. Master's Thesis in Geosciences. 2005 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

 Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Paleontology of the Upper Triassic Solite Quarry, North Carolina and Virginia. Cynthia M. Liutkus-Pierce, Nicholas C. Fraser and Andrew D. Heckert. Geological Society of America Field Guides 2014; 35; 255-269

 Stratigraphic and Temporal Context and Faunal Diversity of Permian-Jurassic Continental Tetrapod Assemblages from the Fundy Rift Basin, Eastern Canada. Hans-Dieter Sues and Paul E. Olsen. Atlantic Geology 51; 2015; 139-205 

[faithfulnews]

6 Women of Black History You Probably Don’t Know About—But Should

Some of the inventions and movements we admire so much have been created by black women who weren’t credited for them, and because of that so many black women’s names are lost to the annals of history. This very short list is a small step in remedying that problem. It features political leaders, activists and innovators whose work continues to make waves in society to this very day.

Each black woman on the list is described and summarized very briefly, so don’t be afraid to do more research into the lives and contributions of these revolutionary women who made an indelible mark on this country’s history.

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Ella Baker

Ella Baker was a driving force behind some of the major civil rights organizations of her time: NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Baker started her activism in the 1930s with an organization called the Young Negroes Cooperative League, which worked to give black people more economic power and independence. She helped Martin Luther King Jr. form SCLC and remained there until the Greensboro sit-ins began. Baker saw the potential for change in the young activists protesting at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North  Carolina. SNCC was born out of that.

Baker was affectionately known as “Fundi,” a Swahili word translated to mean someone who passes down a craft or knowledge from generation to generation.

Madam C.J. Walker

Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker became the first black female millionaire in the United States—and a self-made one at that.

Walker was born the child of newly freed enslaved parents, became an orphan by the age of 7, was married by 14 and widowed by 20.

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In her 30s, she started losing her hair and wasn’t sure what to do. She started using homemade products as well as products made by another black woman entrepreneur, Annie Malone. Soon after, she invented her own scalp healing and conditioning product, changed her name to Madam C.J. Walker and began selling the formula door to door throughout the South.

Walker later started a hair school, built a factory for her product, a second hair training school and a nail and hair salon. Walker died as a pioneer in what would become a multibillion dollar industry for black women in this country.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist and Christian who understood what Jesus’ stances on civil rights would be if He were on Earth.

In addition to famously saying, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Hamer also said, “A city that’s set on a hill cannot be hid. And I don’t mind my light shining; I don’t hide that I’m fighting for freedom, because Christ died to set us free.”

Her voters rights activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee put her life on the line and she was jailed, beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted. She was left with permanent damage to her eye, kidney and leg. It did not stop her.

Before her death in 1977, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative of Sunflower County for 1,500 poor families, giving them independence, a reliable food source and some level of financial stability.

Billie Holiday

Known as one of the best jazz singers of all time, Billie Holiday was also a civil rights activist in her own right. Born in Philadelphia, Holiday had a childhood filled with instability and coped with that through song. As she got older, she was popular in New York City’s jazz bars—especially for her trademark gardenias in her hair and way of singing with her head back.

In 1939, she debuted the song she’s most known for, “Strange Fruit,” a striking poem turned song about the rampancy of lynchings of black people in the South:

Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

The song was both critically acclaimed and controversial. It was banned from several radio stations, but that did not stifle its message or its impact.

Patricia Bath

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Patricia Bath is a revolutionary in the field of ophthalmology and her work is relatively recent. In 1973, Bath became the first Black person to finish an ophthalmology residency. Two years after that, she was the first female faculty member in the ophthalmology department at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute. She also co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, which was the first to assert that sight “is a basic human right.”

Just 13 years after her residency, Bath invented the Laserphaco Probe, which helped patients with cataracts. She patented that device in 1988, making her the first black female doctor to be granted a medical patent.

Lyda Newman

Before Lyda Newman, hairbrushes were made out of animal hair, porcupine quills or shells. Then in 1898, Newman applied for a patent for a more efficient and hygienic hairbrush with evenly spaced synthetic bristles in rows and a compartment for the hair and any other debris to go into—and an opening to the compartment that was easily accessible.

Go to the article

[sudsybear]

Identity Crisis

Does anybody know who I am?

 Half the UofR population was from South of Albany - Yonkers, Westchester, Manhattan, Long Island, Bronx. The whole world was on their islands (Chinatown, Little Italy, “The Village”, Wall Street, United Nations) including American popular culture (Letterman, Saturday Night Live, Broadway, Times Square). They had no need to know what lay west of the Hudson River. Their apathy toward geography was most disconcerting, and I had a huge complex about it.

 For me, geography is a part of identity. Regional accents, regional foods, regional past-times all contribute to who you are as a person. Those who grow up transiently, living in one part of the world for a year, then moving on, learn to appreciate those regionalisms, and their very transience becomes part of their identity. “Worldians” my brother calls them, those who, for whatever reasons, moved frequently during their formative years. Part of getting to know another person includes learning their geography. I felt no one cared about my geography, and so didn’t care about me.

 My parents were both born and raised in West Virginia. My childhood holidays were spent riding along old Route 52 along the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Charleston. As a pre-schooler my family lived for a time in Caracas, Venezuela. The summer of 1982, between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I bought a plane ticket to London. For over a year I saved babysitting money, gift money, “found monies” and put them in my passbook savings account. My brother Jack lived in Berlin for a time, and I had it in my head that I needed to see Europe. I bought a plane ticket and a railway pass. My parents arranged for Jack to pick me up in London, and he and I "did" Europe, in a way. He was producing/directing a play as part of the Fringe Festival in Edinborough, so off we went. We rode the train from London, and spent several days in Edinborough. Jack dropped me off at a tourist site, left to take care of business, then hours later returned to pick me up. We did this sort of thing in Edinborough, London, again in Paris, then on to Strasbourg, and to Jack’s girlfriend’s family’s cottage in West Germany and finally on to Berlin (years before the wall fell).

 I had also been a part of numerous (too numerous!) road trips with my folks across the U.S. As a pre-teen, I rode down the West Virginia turnpike in the backseat of various automobiles to deliver Jack to Wake Forest University in North Carolina. We crossed Paint Creek no fewer than eleven times each trek. As a teenager, I rode trains from Chicago to Denver, Denver to Salt Lake, Salt Lake to Portland, OR. I rode in the back of a car on both the east and west side of the Cascade Mountains. I visited the lava fields of what is now Newberry National Volcanic Monument, saw Crater Lake before the snow melted for the summer, and attended plays at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. I rode the train from LA to Seattle, passing by the devastation of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens, and rode in the back of a car from Salem, OR back east through Idaho, to Yellowstone, then on to Mount Rushmore and through the Badlands. Mom drove right by Wall Drug without stopping, but Dad refused to miss the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD.

 The summer before my sixteenth birthday, Dad flew to Toronto for work, and Mom and I drove up via Niagara Falls. We spent a couple of days at the company apartment in Toronto, and then took the train to Moncton, New Brunswick. In New Brunswick, we stayed at the Tidal Bore Inn and I witnessed the creek reverse its flow as the tidal bore rolled in from the Bay of Fundy. From there we rode the ferry to Prince Edward Island. During my Junior year of high school I spent a long weekend with friends in Chicago. Then in my Senior year I rode on a Greyhound bus from Cincinnati to Chicago and back. All the time I was growing up, my father traveled extensively for his job. When he was home, we pulled out the map, atlas, or almanac as the dinner table discussion required. I know my geography. But I had NEVER been to Boston or New York City.

 I was so frustrated with this prevalent attitude, this oblivion toward anything west of the Hudson, that I was moved to try to educate my ignorant peers. I wanted someone to care about my geography, and hence, about me.

 Ken was from Gallup, New Mexico. Like many of us on the floor, he went as far away from home as he could manage. He was from a close-knit family, his parents were traditional to the core, and Ken battled his budding homosexuality all through adolescence. He was anxious to get away and become himself. He needed distance in order to blossom. We laughed a lot together. We were both homesick, both asserting independence. He struggled to establish himself with the campus gay community - a real challenge in the mid-80s. Proverbial closet doors were still firmly shut, and HIV/AIDS was a nasty “gay disease” in the U.S. He and I laughed together about dating and how he would find someone without looking like a total moron. What does a gay person look like, anyway? He was also enthusiastic about the local queen scene, and got the girls on the floor to dress him up for Drag Queen nights at one of the local bars. Also like me, he was annoyed at the attitude of the students from New York. So, he willingly went along with my scheme.

 A system of underground tunnels connects the campus buildings. During inclement weather, this was truly a blessing. One particular tunnel was given over to graffiti. Mostly, the fraternities and sororities painted it to advertise a particular Greek house, or party, or some other social function. But there were few rules and the tunnel was there to be painted by whoever wanted to paint. Enlisting Ken’s help, along with some other friends, I acquired the necessary paint, and painted a map of the United States. It was large – very large – we found a ladder, set it up and climbed up to spray the outline of Maine up near the top of the fifteen foot high wall. Then outlined the coastline south to Florida, brought the St. Lawrence Seaway West into the mitt of Michigan, adding in the Great Lakes. We highlighted the Mississippi from Louisiana on up north, and finally on the West Coast, drew the line from Puget Sound to LA. I noted landmarks as best I could – and included what states I could reasonably reproduce; Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maine. I put a large asterisk at the appropriate bump in my rendition of the Ohio River and sprayed, “Cincinnati, it is a place” across the Midwest. I signed the work with a smiley face and “Allny, Allny, Allny” as an homage to my identity with Ross.

 Amazingly, that mural stayed up for a couple of weeks before some fraternity finally obliterated it. When walking through that tunnel, I overheard students questioning it, wondering why it had appeared. Asking, “What’s ALL NEW YORK?” I wanted to scream at them, “It’s NOT FUCKING NEW YORK YOU SELF-CENTERED BIGOTS! IT’S ALLNY, WITH YOUR TONGUE BETWEEN YOUR MOLARS.” But realized any attempt would be futile, and I’d only alienate myself even more. But, if any students were intrigued enough by my efforts to look beyond the Hudson River, I accomplished something. I find it appropriate that the closest friends I kept since leaving college were NOT from New York City. Instead, they hail from such diverse locales as Albany, Syracuse, Maryland, Eastern Pennsylvania, Eastern Oregon, South Central Massachusetts, even a Worldian, but only one native New Yorker.

 Irony of ironies, David fell in love with New York City. He spent a summer as a bike messenger in Manhattan, and later lived there for several years pursuing a career in video production. He was enthusiastic about life in The City, and left only reluctantly. Ken and his partner live there now, Ken never wants to live anywhere else.

 *          *          *

 My wisdom teeth started coming in. My gums were sore and swollen. My mouth itched like crazy. The bottom teeth erupted first, irritating my gums even more. I called my dentist at home – the one who had fixed my two front teeth just over a month previous – and asked what to do. He checked my records, determined there were no problems with them, they weren’t impacted I had plenty of room for them. “But they itch like crazy!” “Gargle with hot salt water and hydrogen peroxide, and call me back if there are any problems.” So, while I was unlearning dumness, I still was constantly using my tongue to massage my gums. This led to another quote in Stephen Paul’s little black book, “My wisdom teeth came in and it itches, so I play with it.” It seemed everyone else in the dorm endured wisdom tooth impaction and pending extraction. Another rite of passage I missed. No tonsils out, no appendicitis, no braces, no broken bones, and no wisdom tooth extraction. I am still intact today. Even my twins were born without surgery.

 *          *          *

 Roadway construction continued; I couldn’t get over it. One crew finished the piping and wiring and such while other crews worked to replace the curbstones. I was fascinated. First shovels excavated the soil to the side of the new roadway, and then specialty cranes lowered the curbs into place. Using small loaders, the men wrestled the stones to level. I saw one crack, but they salvaged it using some sort of bonding agent.

 After the curbs were set, HUGE dump trucks brought in load after load of gravel to fill in the roadway. Loaders moved the piles around, spreading the gravel as level as possible. Rollers, brought in on flatbeds, ironed the rocks flat smoothing the surface to the necessary grade.

[nerdfundiefollower]

👀👀

Um…someone tell me that isn’t an engagement ring?