#and I have discovered a model in the same gauge of the big boy I have met in person (4018) and I am experiencing Longing

[the-lord-of-the-things]

gotta open up commissions again at this rate so I can become a full Model Train Guy because this is not a cheap hobby to get into jfc

[skygirl5]

12 Prompts of Christmas - #6 Presents

SIX - Presents

Sipping on his third cup of coffee of the morning, Castle sat patiently on the sofa in his office as he watched his sons squeal with joy as they enjoyed their new Christmas presents. Both wore a Batman helmet that came down just over their eyes, giving them the iconic caped crusader look. The helmets were a bit big and bobbled around on their heads, especially Reese’s, but neither seemed to mind very much. And, of course, they had to get two helmets, because all highly desirable items needed to be duplicated or there would be fighting. At least they’d learned that much in five years.

The boys squealed as they chased each other—Jake after Reese this time—and called out “I am Batman!” in the deepest, gruffest voices they could manage. Sensing he should add a little kerosene to their fire, he stood up and said, “It’s the Joker here, and I’m out to get you Batman!” The boys yelped and ran from the office into the bedroom with Castle nipping at their heels. They circled through the living room area, laughing and screaming as they went, and then finally landed back in the office where they dive-bombed their pile of new comic book figurines.

Castle had really only started introducing them to comics about a year earlier, staring out slow, testing the waters to gauge their interest—and making sure he picked as age-appropriate ones as he could. Though he’d tried not to be bias in any way, Jake had really taken an interest in batman, and of course since Reese seemed to want everything his older-by-three-minutes brother wanted, he decided to like Batman as well. Castle didn’t really care which superhero they chose; he was just so happy to watch them discover and explore new things.

While the boys played with their new Batmobile figurines, Castle finished his coffee and then decided to start picking up some of the toy packaging strewn across the room. He grabbed one of the garbage bags he’d previously set out and then crouched down to pick things up, in doing so felt a pinch in his left hip. He winced, stood upright again, and rubbed it with the flat of his hand. It was the same hip he’d been sitting on that morning as they gathered under the tree to open gifts, so he supposed he might have tweaked something. Everyone had warned him that having young kids in his mid-fifties was never going to be easy, and they were right; it wasn’t, but he wouldn’t have given it up for the world.

After gathering up all he could, he carried the trash bag towards the kitchen, catching a glimpse of Kate and Lily playing with her new American Girl doll and accessories. Kate looked up as he passed and he gave her a wink. She smiled back at him and then lifted up one of her hands to feather through their daughter’s hair.

Their older their children grew, the more interesting the Castle family Christmases became. Well, really, it was just the older the twins became; Lily had always been a relatively calm child. Now that the boys were bigger and louder, they would never have a demure Christmas morning again. In fact, if they managed to get all the kids to only open their own gifts and not slap each other around in the process, it was a win.

Mornings like that one reminded Castle just how starkly different his life was then than it had been when he was growing up. When he’d been a kid, Christmas morning generally didn’t happen, because his mother had been out late performing the night before. That was assuming she was actually home with him and not on tour, which had happened a few times. If she was home, Christmas “morning” was more like Christmas “after lunch”. His mother would get up, sometimes with a paramour in tow, and make coffee and some food. Then they’d sit beneath her plastic, table-top-sized tree and exchange gifts. Not to say that he disliked these days by any means. His mother always made it fun in one way or another. There certainly was no other mother quite like Martha Rodgers. Most importantly: he had always felt very loved and cared for, even if there hadn’t been enough money to buy him more than new underwear and socks and a new book or two.

Castle remembered that he was around the boys’ age when he first started wishing that his father would show up for Christmas. At that point, his knowledge about his father was limited. “He’s not a part of our lives,” was Martha’s token line. He didn’t find out any more details surrounding his conception until he was around thirteen. As a young boy with an unusually creative imagination, Castle had already begun to paint various extravagant scenarios about what his father might have been doing that explained why he couldn’t be a part of their lives. Chief among those ideas were: astronaut, rodeo clown, and spy. Of course, he had no way of knowing at the time, but he’d actually been correct on that last guess.

For most of the year, Castle daydreamed about what activities his father might be up to that kept them apart. Around Christmas, however, those dreams turned to wishes that his father might just show up at their apartment one day around the holidays and they’d be able to hang out. All this friends at school talked about what they did with their fathers and he wanted to experience that too. Sadly, that never came to be. Still, Castle couldn’t be upset, because he knew that he was the man he was because of the fact that he grew up without a father.

With that being said, he was so glad that his younger children were growing up with not only two parents, but many other family members who loved them. Especially for his sons, Castle tried to be a strong male role model who taught them to be kind and gentlemanly even from their young age. He planned to always be there for them and never miss one major event in their life for as long as he lived.

“Daddy!” Jake called out, looking over to his father with his sparkling blue eyes. “Will you play too?” he asked holding up one of the Batmobiles.

Grinning, Castle dropped to his hands and knees and crawled over. He gave Jake a tickle at the back of his neck and the boy giggled happily. “Of course, Jakey—I’ll always play with you. Always.”

~

A/N - this concludes the “canon universe” Christmas fic, but dont worry i still have 6 more prompts to go!!

[jkottke]

Building Belonging at Summer Camp

My kids are lucky enough to be at sleep-away summer camp this year. It's their fourth year, and I was a little skeptical about this at first. Sleep-away camps weren't really a thing in Wisconsin when I was a kid and schlepping out to the East Coast was not going to happen, financially speaking. But their mom went to camp and it had a big impact on her life and the kids wanted to go, so I went along.

I'm really glad I did. I miss them while they're gone, but they have such an amazing time there, away from their parents, figuring out what kind of humans they are going to be. The staff at Ollie's camp (an all-boys camp for grades 3-8 -- Minna goes to an affiliated camp for girls) sent the parents a letter about some of the principles they use in supporting their campers by building "a feeling of profound belonging". They are super thoughtful in their approach and none of it is mere lip-service. I thought a few of their principles were worth sharing with you. From a section that starts "We shape our program and culture to build belonging by...":

...embodying our belief that there are many ways to be a man. We give boys a diverse array of role models -- men and women in whom campers can see aspects of the selves they seek to develop. When the people around us model the same humility, humor, talent, and compassion that we seek to develop in ourselves, they help us to recognize the sturdy roots of those same virtues within us. In such moments, we know that we are in a place where we belong.

...focusing on what is personal, real, and lasting. Too often children learn to gauge belonging through external signals: the music they listen to, the brands they wear, the devices they own. The result can be toxic, especially for boys, who learn to measure themselves against dangerously narrow standards of masculinity. By embracing simplicity -- in the uniforms we wear, the music we make, the technology we leave at home -- we foster deeper connections with each other and even with ourselves.

...emphasizing honesty as the most direct path towards a life of substance and meaning. Ultimately, belonging is not an external validation, but an authentic way of being. Honesty -- and its companion, vulnerability -- are signs of strength and signals of openness. Honesty elevates relationships beyond the superficial, and invites us towards friendships in which we have the courage to be imperfect and the compassion to accept ourselves anyway. At camp, as in life, there is no more powerful belonging than to each other.

I don't mind telling you that I teared up reading through these. That there are many ways to be a man, that masculinity can be toxic, that vulnerability is strength...hearing these ideas more often would have benefited an adolescent Jason, a shy and sometimes bullied small-town kid who didn't feel like he belonged, truly belonged, anywhere until he went off to college and discovered that the world was full of weirdos just like, and also very unlike, himself. I still feel that little kid's pain, and it makes me very happy that my kids are lucky enough to spend significant time in a place where those ideas take center stage.

[dipulb3]

2020 Land Rover Defender 110 review: Tough guy's got a softer side

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/2020-land-rover-defender-110-review-tough-guys-got-a-softer-side/

2020 Land Rover Defender 110 review: Tough guy's got a softer side

It’ll take you just about anywhere.

Steven Ewing/Roadshow

“I never drove it on pavement.” That’s the first thing Emme Hall told me when she got back from testing the 2020 Land Rover Defender in Africa earlier this year — you know, back when traveling was still a thing. Indeed, Emme’s weeklong safari through Namibia put the Defender’s impressive off-road chops in the spotlight. But as I discovered over the course of a few days at home in Los Angeles, the Defender’s a damn fine SUV for urban life, too.

Like

Unstoppable off-road ability

Classic style with a modern touch

Lots of room for passengers and cargo

Punchy 3.0-liter mild-hybrid I6

Don’t Like

New infotainment tech is still touch-and-go

Vague steering feel

Poor fuel economy

Of course, I’m printing that alongside a bunch of photos of a dirty Defender that were clearly shot at an off-road park. But like, how could I not off-road this thing? I’ll let Emme’s first drive review get into the nitty-gritty details about how Land Rover’s new SUV handles the rough stuff, though I will say the Defender had no trouble handling the same tricky trails I recently drove in a Jeep Gladiator EcoDiesel, and all I had to do was raise the air suspension and shuffle through the various off-road modes.

The first round of Defenders to hit the US will be the four-door 110 version seen here; the two-door 90 arrives in the coming months, and it’ll have a 2021 model year designation. Personally, I’m all about the 90, mostly because I’ve got a soft spot for stubby, two-door SUVs. The 110, meanwhile, is actually bigger than you might think. It has an imposing presence on the street and my first thought upon climbing inside is, wow, this is roomy.

2020 Land Rover Defender 110: On-road luxury with off-road chops

See all photos

The Defender gets Land Rover’s new Pivi Pro infotainment system, housed on a high-resolution, 10-inch display atop the center stack. You’ve got access to all of the Defender’s off-road settings in here, as well as navigation, a Wi-Fi hotspot, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Combined with the digital gauge cluster, the Defender’s tech game is strong. But while the Pivi Pro system is generally easier to use and more attractive than Land Rover’s old InControl tech, it still suffers from the same laggy response times and occasional refusal to recognize my iPhone and load CarPlay.

My Defender SE test car’s cloth-lined seats are super-supportive and great for covering long distances in comfort. Overall, the Defender’s interior is purposeful but nicely appointed, with fabric-lined panels on the dashboard and tough-looking exposed screws on the doors. This durable appearance is a good thing; I feel a lot better about trekking mud inside a Defender than I do a leather-wrapped Mercedes-Benz G-Class. The rubber-lined footwells and cargo area speak to this down-and-dirty nature, too. Sure, you can option a Defender with nicer upholstery like Dinamica suede if you want, but I don’t, so there.

The cabin is handsomely styled, and Land Rover’s new Pivi Pro infotainment tech is housed on a 10-inch screen.

Steven Ewing/Roadshow

You can get the Defender with three rows of seats, something Land Rover calls its “five-plus-two” option. You lose a bit of cargo space if you go this route, but if you stick to the five-passenger configuration, there’s a maximum of 78.8 cubic feet of cargo space behind the first row, though do note that the side-hinged tailgate swings out to the side, so be careful when backing into parking spaces. Speaking of hauling, regardless of wheelbase length or engine size, the Defender can tow 8,200 pounds.

The Defender’s base engine is a 2.0-liter turbo I4 with 296 horsepower and 295 pound-feet of torque, but I’ve got the upgraded 3.0-liter I6, which uses turbocharging and mild-hybrid electric assist to produce 395 hp and 406 lb-ft. This MHEV I6 is the same one Land Rover offers in the Range Rover Sport and it’s a real peach of an engine, with lots of low-end torque and a refined stop-start system. However, with EPA fuel economy ratings of 17 miles per gallon city, 22 mpg highway and 19 mpg combined, even with mild-hybrid assist, it’s not exactly a fuel-sipper.

Combined with a smooth-shifting, eight-speed automatic transmission and full-time all-wheel drive, Land Rover says the 3.0-liter Defender 110 can accelerate to 60 mph in 5.8 seconds, which is pretty damn quick for a 5,000-pound SUV. You really feel that punch from behind the wheel, too. Lay into the throttle while heading up a highway on-ramp and you’ll be well above the posted speed limit before it’s even time to merge. Not that I’d know anything about that, natch.

Good tires and a nicely tuned air suspension keep the Defender rocking steady no matter the terrain.

Steven Ewing/Roadshow

The standard adaptive air suspension does a great job of soaking up pavement blemishes and keeps the big Defender from feeling tippy or wallowy at speed. There’s not a lot of front-end dive under hard braking, and while I don’t really recommend throwing one of these butch bois into a tight corner, the Defender is surprisingly agile. It’s a nicer highway cruiser than a G-Class, and 20 times better than a Jeep Wrangler. My only gripe is that the off-road tires spec’d to this car as part of the $1,345 Off-Road Pack are a little loud. Give and take, I guess.

A whole bunch of driver-assistance tech makes daily life with the Defender easier. The mid-level SE trim comes standard with a 3D surround camera, blind-spot monitoring, lane-keeping assist, traffic sign recognition and even nifty novelties like tech that’ll tell you if a car or pedestrian is approaching when you’re parked so you don’t inadvertently open your door and cause a crash. Weirdly, full-speed adaptive cruise control remains an option, so be prepared to spend an extra $1,020 if that’s on your wish list.

Pricing starts at $51,250 (including $1,350 for destination) for a base 110 and can stretch into the mid-$90,000s for a fully loaded Defender X. The full range of shorter-wheelbase Defender 90 models will hit dealers soon, and a base, two-door model starts at $47,470 delivered.

Great on-road, great off-road.

Steven Ewing/Roadshow

Land Rover is smartly offering lots of different add-on packages that can make your Defender as luxurious or as off-road-ready as you want, and they’re available across the whole lineup. As tested, my generously equipped 2020 Defender 110 SE costs $72,180 including destination. Considering you can option a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon well above $60,000, that doesn’t strike me as too bad of a deal. The Mercedes G-Class starts at more than $130,000, though it’s much nicer inside while being every bit as capable (perhaps more) off-road. The Ford Bronco will be a worthy adversary for the Defender, too, but it’s still a year or so away from hitting dealers.

I’ve heard people complain that the new Defender’s lost some of the charm of the old versions, but what they really mean is, it’s not a loud, bouncy, pain in the ass to live with on the daily. The new Defender is every bit as capable as its predecessor, but finally goes through finishing school. Even if you never take it off the beaten path, this new Land Rover is sure to impress.

[jackdoakstx]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

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Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from News And Updates https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[laurendzim]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

Related Articles

January 18, 2019 Taos Ski Valley avalanche victim has died, hospital CEO says

January 17, 2019 Win tickets to see Lil Wayne, The Chainsmokers and others at the X Games

January 17, 2019 Breckenridge Ski Resort’s epic winter nears 200 inches for the season

January 15, 2019 Denver man identified as skier who died on Quandary Peak in Summit County

January 13, 2019 Copper Mountain’s American Flyer lift with bubble chairs now running

Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from News And Updates https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[janetoconnerfl]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

Related Articles

January 18, 2019 Taos Ski Valley avalanche victim has died, hospital CEO says

January 17, 2019 Win tickets to see Lil Wayne, The Chainsmokers and others at the X Games

January 17, 2019 Breckenridge Ski Resort’s epic winter nears 200 inches for the season

January 15, 2019 Denver man identified as skier who died on Quandary Peak in Summit County

January 13, 2019 Copper Mountain’s American Flyer lift with bubble chairs now running

Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[jimblanceusa]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

Related Articles

January 18, 2019 Taos Ski Valley avalanche victim has died, hospital CEO says

January 17, 2019 Win tickets to see Lil Wayne, The Chainsmokers and others at the X Games

January 17, 2019 Breckenridge Ski Resort’s epic winter nears 200 inches for the season

January 15, 2019 Denver man identified as skier who died on Quandary Peak in Summit County

January 13, 2019 Copper Mountain’s American Flyer lift with bubble chairs now running

Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[cursetheground]

God’s Eye

  Senior year, Naomi Trazzi became a permanent fixture in the guidance office. Each week, it was something new: threatening a strip tease in the boy’s locker room, acting out an explicit puppet show with the frogs in biology, planting hallucinogenic mushrooms in horticulture’s model landscape. But every week, it was more of the same. She’d sit across from Miss K and whittle away at the desk with a sharpened pencil while her counselor floundered to instill her with some sort of moral consciousness.

  Colleges are watching, K would tell Naomi. The choices you make now could affect your future. The rest of your life.

  This week, the charges levied were something to the tune of smoking in the girl’s room.

  “What do you care anyway?” Naomi, bored of her whittling, propped her foot up on the desk’s edge and stabbed the pencil into her boot’s thick rubber heel. “I’m 18. It’s not like it’s illegal.”

  Miss K lunged forward and snatched the pencil. “It’s prohibited on school grounds. Which I’m sure is why you did it.”

  Naomi clicked her tongue. “We can agree this is the tamest I’ve been though, yeah?”

  “If you classify exposing your fellow students to cancerous chemicals as ‘tame,’ then yes.” Miss K slid open a drawer & rifled through its confiscated innards – a crinkled bag of chips that hadn’t been allowed in detention, a Confederate pride pennant, a can of spray paint, a pair of craft scissors – searching for the perfect place to stow the writing utensil.

  Naomi stomped her heel into the desk.

  Miss K startled, dropping the pencil next to a warped tech deck dude and his accompanying board, now little more than spaghettified plastic.  

  Ten minutes after Naomi would leave, River Albright would come to reclaim these items. He’d been bereft of them when he’d “accidentally” launched the miniature skateboard across his chemistry class into a beaker of sulfuric acid.

  Miss K’s eyes fixed on Naomi as the drawer slammed closed. “There’s something else.”

  Naomi’s brow ticked. “Isn’t there always.”

  The counselor braced herself with a sigh. “… We’ve spoken many times about your grades-”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Naomi tore apart the split ends of her lopsided pigtails with chewed fingernails. “Colleges don’t like me. I know.”

  “I’m afraid it’s worse than that.”

  Naomi’s eyes flicked up.

  Miss K wet her lips. “You won’t be graduating.”

  Naomi blinked.

  “You’d have to ace all your finals to pass,” Miss K’s voice quickened, “which, based on your attendance…” She shrugged.

  Naomi withdrew her foot from the desk. She circled her arms around herself. Her gaze retreated out the window.

  “It’s not the end of the world.” Miss K reached out. Halfway across the desk, she realized her arms would never cover the distance. She folded her hands instead. “You’ll have to retake this year, yes, but you’ll have a leg up on the material, and you can take advantage of the extra time to build up your resume…”

  Naomi hadn’t moved. Her mouth hung ajar, tongue paused against the back of her teeth, a girl frozen in time. Some part of her had gone away out there – had slipped through the blinds and taken off running.

  “I know you hate it when I bring this up,” Miss K tried, “but if this behavior is some way of… of preserving Tawna’s memory-”

  “Her memory?” Naomi’s head snapped forward. “Is that how you remember her?”

  Miss K was suddenly overcome with the hollow-boned cold one might feel upon opening the front door to discover a hornet’s nest. She pulled the knit shawl tighter about her shoulders, and she tried.

  “I remember having conversations like this with both of you.” She spoke slowly, using each pause to scan Naomi with an infrared gaze – checking for a tick of the eyebrow, a flinching lid, a tensing shoulder, any gauge of the girl’s temperature. “And I know that one way people sometimes try to process grief is by rooting themselves in old habits-”

  “Bad habits.” Naomi’s mouth hardened into a line.

  Miss K withdrew her hands to her lap.

  “Come on, teach.” A vein twitched in Naomi’s temple. “Say it like you mean it.”

  K swallowed. “One week detention for the smoking, starting Monday. We’ll set a meeting to discuss next year’s course load as soon as I know my schedule.”

  Naomi fisted her bookbag and swept from her seat. Miss K shouted at her retreating back, “I’m always here if you need-”  

  “Whatever.” Naomi didn’t turn her head.

  Her locker got the better of her in her rage. She kept rotating over the digits of her combination: a product of either zeal or trembling hands. The second she finally sprang it, she clawed inside and began scattering books, hurling them onto the floor. When she exhausted her texts, she moved on to her scarf, her gym bag, her coat.

  When the coat hit the tile, it spat up something shiny. The clank of the something cut through the pulse of blood in Naomi’s ears. And when she saw what it was, she threw herself down after it.

  A silver zippo, ferruginous in its old age. On its side, a sticker inspired by a recovered zippo from the Vietnam War.

 Thoe I walk thru the valley  of the shadow of death,  I fear no evil, for I  am the meanest mother fucker in the valley.

                                                  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

  Less than a year ago, Tawna held that zippo to Naomi’s mouth and lit a blunt. They were on their backs on the faux fur rug occupying more than half Tawna’s floor, the rug so soft it felt like the real thing. So soft, you could sink right in.

  Naomi’s head was on Tawna’s stomach, her ear pressed against Tawna’s bottom rib. When everything else in the room was quiet, the quiver of Tawna’s heartbeat rattled Naomi’s eardrum.

  They were decompressing, or commiserating, while Tawna’s father stampeded around downstairs. A rejection letter peeked out at them from the top of the waste bin.

  UCLA was Tawn’as first pick. She was their last.

  “It’s all bullshit,” Naomi declared, waving the blunt idly about. “Art programs aren’t supposed to care about your grades.”

  “They didn’t.” Tawna pinched the blunt from Naomi’s ever-loosening grip. “It was my portfolio. I didn’t make the cut.”

  She took a long drag. Held it in her chest til she choked. When the coughing settled, she passed the blunt back to Naomi.

  “Rhode Island didn’t want me either.” She leaned back. Let her skull knock against the floor. “I’m never getting out of here.”

  “That’s not all bad.” Naomi lifted her head through a cloud of her own smoke. “Is it?”

  Tawna picked herself up on her elbows. She saw Naomi’s wide, nocturnal eyes, and a smile worked its way through her. “No.” She held the blunt to her lips with one hand and rested the other between Naomi’s topknots. Pressed her thumb into the crease of Naomi’s brow.

  That’s how her father found them: his baby girl’s hand massaging another girls’ scalp, smoking.

  Naomi tried not to think about what came next – the shouting, the slurring, the threatening. She tried not to think about Tawna pushing her father out of the way so Naomi could escape down the stairs.

  She tried not to think about any of it.

                                                 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  “You staging a sit-in or something?” River Albright leered over her, twirling his recovered tech deck like a fidget spinner.

  Naomi stuffed the zippo back in pocket and scrambled to her feet. River offered his arm, which she dodged. He used that same arm to scratch the nape of his neck instead. “So, uh, you comin tonight?”

  “Coming?”

  “Tyler found this place out by Saw Hill.”

  Naomi sucked her teeth.

  “I know you haven’t been since what happened with Tawna.” River stowed the tech deck. I just thought-”

  “You’d think some girl OD’ing at one of your dumbass parties would make you, like…” Naomi’s eyes flicked to the side as she searched for the phrase, “I dunno, not have them.”

  River stepped back. “We look out for each other. You know that.”

  Naomi kneeled to gather her books. He sank with her, tugging her gym bag toward him by the strap. “Tawna was on some other shit. You know that, too.”

  Naomi leaned to grab the bag from his hands, but River swung it onto his shoulder.

  “Look, Ny, we’re just tryna blow off some steam before we get hit by the Great Big Real, alright? You seem like the type who could use that.”

  Naomi ripped the bag off of him. “You can go now.”

  River’s hands went up. “I’m going.” He stood. “But I’m texting you the address.”

  Naomi raised her head to argue, but found herself staring at his retreating Timberland soles.  

  Once that mustard yellow rubber faded from her eyeline, she took out the lighter and turned it over in her hands.

  Tawna gave it to Naomi the night she died. She climbed the tree outside Naomi’s bedroom and asked Naomi to come with her – blow off being grounded, blow off school, blow off the whole town of Bumfuck, Nowhere.

  But Naomi came from a line of college graduates. Had a D in Spanish. Was already on thin ice with her mother for the disciplinary call about her & Tawna skipping class. So Tawna pressed the zippo into Naomi’s palm told her she had to go.

  Like, go go. Like go and never come back.

  Naomi assumed she meant running away.

                                                 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  The place by Saw Hill was about as dingy as anyone who partied in abandoned houses would expect: peeling paint, holey walls, rotting floorboards. Naomi had shown up half a flask deep, and had only sunken deeper.

  Presently, she found herself staring down a patch of floor losing the war against termites. She felt a strong sense of kinship with that patch of floor – with those gnawed edges, and the darkness behind them. Like insects were chewing holes in her, too.  

  “You made it!” A River-colored shape materialized from the din, double-fisting SOLO cups. He passed one behind Naomi’s head, seizing the opportunity to get an arm around her. Naomi nabbed the cup from his hand and emptied it all down her throat.

  “That kinda vibe, huh?” River nudged her.

  Naomi gasped as she came up for air.

  “You might like this, then.” River fished something from his pocket: a tab of acid screen-printed with a cartoon pierced tongue.

  Naomi blinked down at that tab. Reached out to brush it with her fingertips.

  Tawna had a pierced tongue. It glinted every time she laughed.

  Naomi peeled the tab from River’s hand, sat it in her mouth, let her natural acids go to work.

  River’s arm went around her again. He was warmer against her shoulders than the air of the old house. He nudged her in the direction of the basement steps.

  “C’mon,” he egged. “Real party’s downstairs.”

                                                ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Downstairs was a haze of muddy colors and weed smoke. Tyler and the rest of River’s friends filled a wraparound couch in the corner like a booth of mob bosses playing hot potato with a bong.

  Some of them might’ve said of hi to Naomi. Several of them may have even made conversation. She would only hear a phrase or two, then suddenly she’d be on the tail end of it, watching whomever she’d been talking to turn to talk to someone else.

  There were only two constants: River and beer.

  Every time Naomi left the couch to get more of the latter, the former would follow. Then they’d return to the couch, and he’d put his hand on her thigh, only her thigh was a yard away.

  Every now and again he would whisper something in her ear, and it would be the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Then he’d kiss her earlobe, and that’d be funny, too. Then he’d kiss behind her ear, and that’d be funny, then the side of her neck, and that’d be funny, then her collar bone, and that’d be hysterical.

  Then he’d kiss the corner of her jaw, and she’d turn to giggle in his face – only his eyes would be burning. And that wasn’t funny at all.

  He kissed her on the mouth. She didn’t laugh.

  He asked if she wanted to come upstairs.

  She let him lead her.

  The voyage upstairs felt buoyant, like treading water. The waves stayed there, stirring air under her chin until the kissing resumed.

  After that, focus was paramount. River was a moving target – bobbing, weaving. Less than half Naomi’s kisses found their mark.

  River seemed to be having similar troubles. He’d go to kiss her hip, but it wouldn’t be where he thought it was. He’d go to kiss her breast, but it’d be rolling away.

  He had to anchor her to the floor so she wouldn’t drift.

  All the rest was like riding a bicycle: feet here, hands here, sit here. More mouths involved, though. It hurt Naomi’s brain less to let River steer.

  Everything was the same.

  Except, nothing was the same.

  River’s hands were not Tawna’s hands. River’s lips were not Tawna’s lips. River’s tongue wasn’t pierced. Couldn’t do the things Tawna’s could. Naomi reached out to hold Tawna’s head and found her fingers in River’s hair.

  River didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t Tawna. He wasn’t stopping. He didn’t see anything wrong.

  So there wasn’t anything wrong, Naomi decided, and she leaned her head back, and she closed her eyes.She crawled through the edges of that gnawed hole into an all-black world and let herself be eaten.  

                                              ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  

  When the tide went out, Naomi followed it to the bathroom. The porcelain felt heavy underneath her. It had all this gravity that kept pulling her sideways. For a moment after she finished, that gravity become too much for her to move, like she’d lost her own gravity in the go. Like she’d peed all her matter out.

  River was smoking a cigarette when she came back. She joined him at the window.

  That was something, he said.

  She meant to grab his collar, but she reached too far and nudged him instead. Sounds burbled in her.

  Let’s go for a drive, she said.

  They had minimal trouble finding River’s car, but then River couldn’t seem to fit his keys in the lock.

  Ny, he said, I’m too fucked up to drive.

  When Naomi took the keys from him, she let her fingertips linger on his palm. He didn’t argue with those fingertips.

  She let her hair loose as she settled in the driver’s seat. Something about the way the steering column fit between her legs made River’s jaw hang. She shook her hair out, and his jaw plummeted further. Naomi slammed her foot on the gas.

  Within minutes, River’s jaw filled with screams. He screamed out open windows, the air rushing past him. Naomi drove in a straight line, but the road kept curving under her. So of course, she had to swerve to keep up.

  Slow down!

  She almost didn’t hear River shout against the wind: Ny, slow down!

  Naomi didn’t want to slow down.

  Slow felt like sinking into a carpet of plastic fibers. Slow felt like the trickle of Tawna’s fingers on her scalp. Slow felt like bumping into Tawna’s ribcage on purpose just so she could hear the rhythm of her. Slow felt like staring down the barrel of a second semester of senior year with no Tawna, no future.

  NAOMI, River shouted. FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

  But his voice wasn’t his. And he wasn’t the one shouting anymore.

  They whipped around another corner into a pair of oncoming headlights. The lights swelled and melted together. Like staring down the face of heaven.

  One big glow.

  And if Naomi squinted, it was the light in Tawna’s door – the light falling on a man’s face, red and swollen with rage, ready to direct all the kinetic energy building taut in his veins onto the Naomi tripping down the stairs. But Tawna’s body blocked his. Tawna stood stock still before the shadow of death, looked over her shoulder, and told Naomi: Go.

  River screamed something else – maybe a prayer, maybe a warning. His voice was bowled over by the force of the other car’s horn. They sounded the same to Naomi. It was all the same.

  River reached over. Tried to rip the wheel out of her hands. But she was anchored now.

  I have to go, she said.

  And she thought, driving straight through the middle of God’s eye: I’m coming, baby. I’m coming.

This story was published in the 2019 issue of The Underground Pool (link when available). 

[itsworn]

Brothers Resurrect Their Father’s Beloved Wedge-Powered 1965 Plymouth Satellite as Surprise Birthday Present

In the spring of 1964, Jay Passon, 23, returned to his Hazleton, Pennsylvania, home after a four-year stint in the Army. He had been a mechanics specialist at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, responsible for keeping the military vehicles in working order. Not long afterward, he went to a nearby Ford dealership and placed an order for a new British Green 1964 Shelby Cobra equipped with the 427 engine and four-speed manual transmission. It was his dream car and one of the key things that kept him focused during his time in the military.

After four months, Jay visited the Ford dealership to find out the status of his order. He was disappointed to learn the Shelby factory had encountered delays in the production of the Cobra, even more so when the salesperson told him it would be another six to eight months before the Shelby arrived. Waiting a year for the Cobra to be built was out of the question, and he canceled the order.

Jay started doing some research and came up with a second choice. He’d recently read a magazine story about the 1965 Plymouth Satellite with the 426 Street Wedge engine package and decided to order one. He visited two local Chrysler and Plymouth dealerships, but neither wanted to be bothered with ordering high-performance muscle cars. Determined, Jay drove to Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, to visit Maff Motors. There he met owner Tony Maff, Sr., who agreed to place the order.

On November 10, Jay received the phone call he had been waiting for: His new 1965 Plymouth Satellite had arrived. Wasting no time, he made his way to the dealership and remembers it was “love at first sight. The look of the Satellite appealed to me, and I hadn’t even driven it.”

He took delivery the following day. During the drive home, he let the 426 Street Wedge loose. When he looked down at the speedometer, the needle hovering beyond 80 mph, he realized he’d only just put it in Third gear. Amazing! he thought.

Jay is a self-proclaimed lead foot. He says his first time behind the wheel of the Satellite took him to a place where he’d never gone in an automobile. He realized that buying the car was the right choice, even if it had not been the first choice.

Jay drove the Satellite only a short time before putting it in winter hibernation at the end of 1964. When spring arrived, he took it to the Cecil County Dragway and consistently ran quarter-mile times in the high 13-second range on the factory Goodyear Power Cushion tires. Determined to go faster, Jay picked up a set of gently used Atlas Bucron cheater slicks, and the car rewarded him with low-13-second passes.

After one season of drag racing, Jay relegated the Satellite to a less rigorous routine, using it for dates and Sunday cruising. He turned the muscle car into a fair-weather cruiser only driven on nice days and dry pavement. (To this day he says the car has never been rained on.)

In August 1971, his first son, Jeff, was born, and the car was stowed away and rarely driven. By the time Jamie was born in April 1975, the Satellite had turned into an afterthought, as maintaining a family was priority one.

From 1971 to 1978, the Satellite was stored in a dirt-floored barn owned by Jay’s parents. In 1978, the car was moved from the barn (as it had started to fall apart) to a new location a half-block from the Passon residence.

Youngest son Jamie recalls riding his tricycle around the car as a toddler. Several years later, during a family visit, he took notice of the Satellite sitting in the barn. He didn’t give the car much thought. Little did he know that things would change for him and his brother when they reached legal driving age.

In 1990, nearly 12 years after the Satellite had last moved, Jeff approached Jamie with an idea to resurrect their father’s car as a surprise for his upcoming 50th birthday. From June to October, they went over every detail of the car to make sure it looked just as it had when their father picked it up. The brothers were careful not to cross paths with their unsuspecting father while they worked on the car where it was stored, less than a block from the family home.

Bob Mathuse worked with Jay and was instrumental in helping the sons get technical information from their father on how to approach each of the car’s issues as they discovered them, without tipping him off. The process started out on the wrong foot when they could not open the driver-side door. Jay had hidden the keys, and asking for them would have spoiled the surprise. A coat hanger unlocked the door. Then the door panel was taken off, the lock cylinder removed, and a new pair of keys made. At the end of the day it cost Jamie the last $80 in his wallet.

“It took all the money I’d saved doing odd jobs,” he says. “Since it was for my father, I never gave it a second thought. I wasn’t going to let a locked door stand in our way.”

The locked door turned out to be the least of their worries. “The engine had seized while sitting idle in storage,” Jamie says. Feeling dejected and overwhelmed, they asked each other, “What do we do now?” Overwhelmed, but not defeated, they continued the evaluation of the car.

While going through its contents, the brothers came across an aerosol can of Yield penetrating lubricant in the trunk. (For some unknown reason their father stowed a can of the penetrant in the car.) After doing extensive research on how to free up a seized engine, they put a plan in place to awaken the locked-up 426 Street Wedge.

The Yield was sprayed into each of the eight spark plug holes and left to penetrate overnight. Then WD-40 was sprayed into each of the spark plug holes every day. After spraying the penetrant into each cylinder, Jamie would sit in the driver’s seat with the car in first gear and clutch engaged. Jeff would push him out of the garage, and once the car went over the edge of the gutter, Jamie would let out the clutch. Then he’d get out and they’d push the car back into the garage and repeat the process. They did this about 30 times per day for about a week before the engine finally broke free.

The boys could not have pulled the resurrection off without the help of Louie Mope, who worked alongside them.

In October 1990, the Passon family had a special unveiling for their father’s birthday. With the help of their mother, Joan, and friends Louie Mope and Bob Mathuse, they pulled off the event. Long before Overhaulin’ made it trendy, Jay was tricked into believing someone had broken into the storage area where his Satellite was stored and he needed to go there right away to see the damage. Panicked, Jay darted to the garage, mumbling his fears that the car he’d bought more than 25 years ago had vanished. He soon reached the building and anxiously opened the door, half-expecting to see a clearing of dust where his Satellite had been. Instead, he was shocked by the sight of his Satellite looking factory new again, this time with a red bow on the hood.

“I feel it was meant to be,” Jamie says, recalling the unveiling. “We finished the car literally the day before his birthday.”

The process of reviving the Satellite forever changed Jamie. The time spent researching and performing the actual hands-on work opened his eyes to a world he’d never dabbled in before. Prior to working on his father’s car, he had never been interested in them. After completing the resurrection, he walked away with a new career path.

In 1993, he launched Passon Performance, specializing in hand-built high-performance transmissions. His transmission of choice is the A-833 four-speed, which happens to be the same model originally installed in the Satellite. Jamie is now considered a top expert in the A-833 four-speed manual transmission.

During the photo shoot, Jamie got behind the wheel of his dad’s Satellite and positioned the car as needed. Later, I asked Jay and Jamie about the experience.

“It looked stunning and made me feel like it was 1964 again, and I was looking at it for the first time,” Jay said. “I could not believe it.”

Jamie might have put it best: “Whenever I sit in the car, the smell from the original interior is unlike any other. It’s kind of musty and intoxicating in a good way. Then to drive it during the photo shoot gave me butterflies. As the photo shoot progressed, my father and I stood back, stared at the car for a while, then looked at each other with big smiles on our faces. I said to myself, ‘That’ll be the last car to ever leave our family.’”

At a Glance

1965 Satellite Owned by: Jay Passon, Sugarloaf, PA Restored by: Unrestored original Engine: 426ci/365hp Street Wedge V-8 Transmission: A-833 4-speed manual Rearend: 8 3/4 with 3.23 gears and Sure Grip Interior: Black vinyl bucket seat Wheels: 14×5.5 steel Tires: P215/70R14 Laramie Premium Touring

Jay Passon ordered his 1965 Satellite in the fall of 1964 after learning he would have to wait a year to take delivery of a Shelby Cobra. Jay is now thoroughly convinced his second choice was the right one. He says, “Things happen for a reason.”

Jay with his Satellite soon after taking delivery in November 1964.

The 426ci Street Wedge was rated at 365 hp, breathing through a single four-barrel carb and a cast-iron intake manifold. With 465 lb-ft of torque spinning Bucron cheater slicks, the Wedge could send the Satellite through the quarter-mile in the low 13s.

The original factory interior, with black vinyl bucket seats and a Hurst shifter coming out of a center console, shows no signs of wear. It is a testament to how well Jay cared for the car.

While this isn’t exactly a day-two car, look close and you can see that Jay added a tachometer and an oil pressure gauge to keep tabs on the Wedge motor.

The Satellite’s paint, grille, and trim (including the grille’s tri-color insert) show no signs of wear or fading.

Jay and youngest son Jamie proudly pose with the Satellite.

The post Brothers Resurrect Their Father’s Beloved Wedge-Powered 1965 Plymouth Satellite as Surprise Birthday Present appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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[viralhottopics]

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing American computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the worlds press before him and told them they were liars. The press, honestly, is out of control, he said. The public doesnt believe you any more. CNN was described as very fake news story after story is bad. The BBC was another beauty.

That night I did two things. First, I typed Trump in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasnt how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of Go Donald!!!!, and You show em!!! There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the FAKE news MSM liars!

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what Ive been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled mainstream media is And there it was. Googles autocomplete suggestions: mainstream media is dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media we, us, I dying?

I click Googles first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: The Mainstream media are dead. Theyre dead, I learn, because they we, I cannot be trusted. How had it, an obscure site Id never heard of, dominated Googles search algorithm on the topic? In the About us tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is Americas media watchdog, an organisation that claims an unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding more than $10m in the past decade from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trumps single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money $13.5m of it behind the Trump campaign.

Its money hes made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called revolutionary breakthroughs in language processing a science that went on to be key in developing todays AI and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees money, is the most successful in the world generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns all Republican and another $50m to non-profits all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trumps presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich mans plaything the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trumps campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting liberal bias is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercers money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. Its bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. Its the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had to take back the culture. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UKs forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front in our current cultural and political war. France and Germany are next.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercers name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in election management strategies and messaging and information operations, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as psyops psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on peoples emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so Id read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercers money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Googles search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites strangling the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters its USP is to use this data to understand peoples deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a propaganda machine.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica is a US company based in the US. It hasnt worked in British politics.

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EUs affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farages trip to Trump Tower the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. Thats the one I took, he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the bad boys of Brexit a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EUs co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from peoples Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analyticas and SCLs employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EUs launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook like, he said, was their most potent weapon. Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trumps chief strategist, is an associate of Robert Mercer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

It sounds creepy, I say.

It is creepy! Its really creepy! Its why Im not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, Oh my God! Whats scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

They hadnt employed Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. They were happy to help.

Why?

Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, Heres this company we think may be useful to you. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldnt you? Behind Trumps campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were the same people. Its the same family.

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than 7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? Its certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioners Office said: Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge Universitys Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles especially peoples likes could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centres lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someones personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves, says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the universitys model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centres director? Certainly not from us, he says. We have very strict rules around this.

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesnt know where Kogans data came from. The evidence was contrary. I reported it. An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. But then Kogan said hed signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldnt continue [answering questions].

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the universitys inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a friend of the Mercers. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. Its what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. Its how you brainwash someone. Its incredibly dangerous.

Its no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People dont know its happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities. But in many ways, its what Cambridge Analyticas parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but its SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatchers image, says Briant, and the company had been making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but its all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population 220 million people and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trumps administration. It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if its the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear, says Briant.

Its the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. How is it going to be used? he says. Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just dont understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we cant see, and that is working on us in ways we cant understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. Its totally covert. And people dont realise what is going on.

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You dont have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the militarys or SCLs playbook.

But then theres increasing evidence that our public arenas the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. Its a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: information warfare troops.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institutes computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated bots accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection Russian bots, organised by who? attacking Paul Nuttall.

Politics is war, said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

Theres nothing accidental about Trumps behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. Theres feedback going on constantly. Thats what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, its all about how can you use these trending words.

Wigmore met with Trumps team right at the start of the Leave campaign. And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.

Who did?

Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. Its all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called cognitive warfare. Though there are many others: recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism, explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives, says one US state department white paper. Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.

Yet another details the power of a cognitive casualty a moral shock that has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or fake news. Or as it has now become: FAKE news!!!!

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like liberal media bias, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the failing New York Times! what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannons media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercers money. Mercers daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. The modern economics of the newsroom dont support big investigative reporting staffs, Bannon told Forbes magazine. You wouldnt get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. Were working as a support function.

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google cant find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAIs president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you weaponise the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clintons cash did. Like Hillarys emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. Strategic drowning of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldnt take Bill Clinton down becausethey wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, theres a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether its Mercers millions or other factors, Jonathan Albrights map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. Its clearly being led by money and politics.

Theres been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but its Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. NickPatterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that hes a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how its been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the blackest box in finance.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: hes done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. Society is driven by emotions, which its always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes weve had sudden huge drops in stock prices indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.

The other people interested in Bollens work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollens research shows how its possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institutes Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? Theres not a smoking gun, says Howard. There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.

Look at this, he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like hes a consensus.

And that requires money?

That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are whats legitimate. You are creating truth.

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of sleeper bots theyve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

Like zombies.

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

Were not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become FAKE news!!! But were almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. World War III will be a guerrilla information war, it says. With no divisions between military and civilian participation.

By that definition were already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technologys disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July

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from Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media