#and on that note i want to give a special thanks to the u.k for allowing me to study in their constitutional monarchy nation

[belokhvostikova]

After two years of unoriginal insults, unsolicited opinions, unwarranted geography quizzes, and a lifetime of lukewarm beverages, the only way this nineteen-year-old American citizen girlie will be happy about selective service is if we’re fighting some shit-talking Europeans!

And I’m not talking about the Russians, I couldn’t care less about them, they’ve got bigger fish to fry, but Germany?! France?! ENGLAND?! And, hell, throw in Australia in there, too.

I NEED TO BE PUT ON THE FRONT LINES!

Iran, China, Russian… man, whatever. United States’ government, you’re missing who the real enemy is!

[lifeofkaze]

When Stars Ignite - Chapter 10

HPHM Rockstar AU

A/N:

General Warning: This whole fic has a general warning of being NSFW / 18+. We will give specific warnings for every chapter in itself, but several adult themes will be more or less present in every chapter, may it be explicitly or in mention. These include sexual topics, drug abuse, (ab)use of alcohol, smoking and a whole lot of cursing.

Specific Warning: None, wow 😂

~~~

Find the masterpost here, the previous chapter here and the next one here. The songs featured before every chapter can be found on this pretty badass playlist here.

~~~

This work is a collaboration with @the-al-chemist

Taglist: @slytherindisaster @night-rhea @carewyncromwell

I make my livin' off the evenin' news

Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use

People love it when you lose

They love dirty laundry

~ Don Henley - Dirty Laundry ~

Ethan’s plan to raise Equinox’s standing within the record company was very clear. While their nights were spent performing on stage, Ethan had made sure their days were filled with a tight schedule of PR appointments.

Where they’d had plenty of time to relax, socialise and explore on their previous tours, every day was now jam-packed with meet & greets, photoshoots and interviews. Even when they were off duty, Ethan was constantly reminding them to take pictures and film stories to publish on social media.

“People aren’t following you because they like your music,” he never got tired of saying. “They want to see who’s behind their favourite rockstars. Give them a look at your private life and you’ll be everybody’s darlings in no time once again.”

Some of them were more reluctant to put themselves out there than the others. While Lizzie and Skye didn’t mind the odd goofy backstage clip, Lizzie noticed Merula and especially Orion were increasingly drawing back into themselves.

Lizzie and Orion made a point to avoid talking about band business when they were spending their nights together; not that they were talking much at all. But the concerned crease that she could see more often than not on Orion’s forehead these days wasn’t lost on her either.

The worst part of Ethan’s strategy, however, were without a doubt the countless press appointments. All in the spirit of keeping the enemy close, Lizzie had lost track of how many interviews they had given since their U.K. tour had started. The publications they were working with ranged from reputable magazines and newspapers to the trashiest of tabloids. At least, most of the stories those were coming up with were just too hilarious to be actually believable; Lizzie shuddered to think what dirt they could uncover if they’d ever decide to dig for real.

Like on so many days before, Equinox were scheduled for another interview before one of their rare days off. It was for a feature story with a magazine well respected in the industry, all with an accompanying photo shoot and the whole conundrum. It wouldn’t have sounded so bad, had it not been for the journalist who had been chosen to conduct the interview.

Lizzie had met a number of reporters over the course of her career, but none who ground her nerves as Rita Skeeter did.

Beloved by her readers and dreaded by the subjects of her stories, Rita Skeeter was one of the most sharp-tongued critics British journalism had to offer. She had a singular gift - although some called it a curse - to wiggle even the slightest of juicy information out of her unheeding interview partner. Many a career had taken a dive after an unfortunate encounter with her.

If you wanted utmost attention, Rita Skeeter was the right woman for the job; but you had better get your guard up.

The blonde woman was currently watching Andre preparing them for the interview and the shoot afterwards; usually the magazines brought their own stylists, but Ethan liked to keep as many things under control as he could. Having Andre in charge of their looks guaranteed they would give off just the impression Ethan wanted.

Andre was in the process of applying Lizzie’s make up, the tip of his tongue showing between his teeth while he concentrated. She winced as her eyes started tearing up from the wand of the mascara.

“I don’t get why this much makeup is necessary,” she complained, drawing away from Andre to blink her tears away. “I get it with Merula, she’s singing and in focus, but I’m behind the drums, no one’s paying attention to me. Give her the spotlight and leave me in peace,” she added glumly as she saw Andre approach with a curling wand.

Andre tutted as he opened her ponytail and loosened her hair with practised hands. “Stop arguing, you know it’s useless. And besides,” he added with a wink that showed off his glittery eyeliner, “loads of people are paying attention to you; you’re just not looking.”

“I have to agree with Mr. Egwu,” Rita suddenly said. She had been leaning against one of the dressing tables on the set and watched them being dolled up. Andre usually held their wardrobe in dark colours, black and white, so Rita’s bilious green dress stood out like a flare in comparison. She pursed her bright red lips as she looked Lizzie up and down over the rim of her half-glasses.

“You’re a favourite with my readers, Miss Jameson… Lizzie, I may call you Lizzie, right?”

Without waiting for Lizzie’s answer, she continued. “You have a bright personality and some decent looks; you are the little sunshine of this group and everyone likes themselves a good ‘girl next door in the big wide world’ trope.”

She raised her hands at Lizzie’s sceptical look and laughed; it sounded incredibly put on. “I’m not a fan of putting people into drawers either, but it’s what the people want to see.” She tapped her finger against her temple. “It’s how my readers think.”

Skye snorted in the background; she was already done with her styling and sat on one of the tables, legs dangling in the air. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

Rita giggled. “Of course the rebel of the group would say that, I expected nothing else; after all, there’s true rockstar blood running through your veins, Skye Parkin.”

Not wanting to draw any unnecessary attention to herself, Skye fell silent.

When everyone was ready, they moved over to where two comfortable looking sofas and an armchair were set up for them. Lizzie sighed inwardly as she took her place between Skye and Everett. Rita Skeeter was known to make her interview questions up on the spot; Lizzie just hoped they wouldn’t be too off the rails.

Rita leaned back into her armchair facing them and placed a dictating machine onto the small wooden table next to her. It was no secret that the infamous reporter liked to keep her own notes, kept apart from the material belonging to her magazine; she usually kept the dictating device running long after the cameras had turned off.

“So,” she began speaking to an invisible audience with a sickly sweet voice, “I’m honoured to be talking to England’s hottest export when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll - and I mean that in more ways than one.”

She turned her attention towards them. “It’s so good to have you here today, how are you all?”

They all muttered some noncommittal phrases before Rita started with her first question. Like always in the beginning, it was more of a general palaver as both parties were taking the other’s measure.

If the questions weren’t directed at anyone in particular, it was usually Everett answering them. He loved the attention he got from Rita and contrary to the rest of them, he almost seemed to feel comfortable around her. The pictures Lizzie had seen of him and Rita in Skye’s tabloid came to her mind again, and she wondered if that might be the reason for Everett’s talkativeness.

As the interview continued, Rita’s questions were gradually becoming more detailed, focused on several aspects that she deemed sell-worthy. She watched every one of them closely as they answered, and they picked their words carefully.

“One thing I noticed about this last part of your tour is your very increased availability,” Rita said. “I don’t remember seeing you do so much fan service and public appearances before. What’s the reason behind this?”

It was Orion who answered her question. “The most important thing to us is to make sure our fans are having a good time. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are now; it’s not a lot, but this is our way of thanking them.”

“Is this the reason for your upcoming special show tomorrow? Reserved for the indigent foster care children?”

Her eyes flicked between Merula and Orion. “It’s no secret you two have a history with the system. One orphaned at such a young age, the other the daughter of convicted criminals, bound to be raised in the shadows of her parents’ deeds. Two unlikely siblings, not bound by blood but by trauma - how does it feel to risk a look into your own past?”

“It’s a show like any other,” Merula replied bluntly, crossing her arms in front of her chest. She scowled at the blonde reporter. “No need to make a big deal out of this.”

Orion inclined his head in Merula’s direction. “What Merula wants to say is, we make no difference in what good cause we are supporting, as long as we can put a smile on the faces of those who need it, even if only for a little while. We do have our past in the care system, that is common knowledge, but as Merula pointed out already, this is in the past. If you want to continue on your path, it is no good walking with your gaze turned backwards. We live in the here and now, so it’s what’s in front of us that matters.”

The slight twitch around the corners of Rita’s mouth was almost too quick to catch, but Lizzie had seen it nonetheless. Apparently, Orion had given her the exact bridge to her next question she had hoped for.

“If you want to speak about the here and now, I’ll be too happy to fulfill your wish,” she cooed. “Now that we’re speaking on a more personal level anyway, I just have to ask. You guys are living everyone’s wildest dreams, a life all of us mere mortals can only imagine.” Her eyes sparkled behind her glasses. “It’s only us here, you can trust me; what about the juicy stories? Any tales of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll you want to share with the world?”

Lizzie subconsciously bit the inside of her cheek, hoping Rita hadn’t noticed before she got herself under control again; this woman was a bloodhound when it came to scandals. If she ever found out what was going on between Orion and her, Lizzie might just as well bury herself alive.

Luckily, Orion wasn’t fazed by her question. “The only passion we share is the love for our music,” he smiled noncommittally. “As professional musicians we try to keep our public and private lives separated.”

Rita’s eyes gleamed as she leaned forward. “You try to keep them separated?”

Before Lizzie couldn’t help it, her eyes flickered to Orion again.

“We have been friends for years, of course our lives intervene in places. The friendship between us we show to the world is genuine and not for show.”

“Friendship, huh?” Rita’s nostrils flared as her eyes swept the round. “Come on, we’re all adults here. So many gorgeous young people spending their time together all day, everyday? Don’t tell me you’re all staying up drinking apple juice and playing board games.”

Her attention shifted so suddenly that Lizzie was taken by surprise. “What about you, Lizzie? Any stories to tell?” She looked her up and down critically. “If you ask me, you and Jason would make quite the pair. The golden girl and the bad boy? People live for stories like that.”

Everett sighed wistfully. “Just call me Ev, Rita, everyone does. But yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling her for years now, but so far to no avail. Perhaps she’ll listen to you.”

Lizzie was relieved when he immediately started laughing his words off. “I’m joking of course; Orion is right. The band is our job and our management wants us to keep things professional. There’s other ways to live the rockstar lifestyle,” he finished with a wink.

Rita pursed her lips in a knowing smile. “That I believe in a heartbeat. Fill me in guys, between us, how is it with the ladies? The bad guy with an angel’s voice and the soulful songwriter and his magic hands… you must be spoiled for choice.”

Everett grinned and leaned back against the sofa. “I can’t complain, is all I’m saying.”

“How about you Orion? Dark eyes, messy hair, all those tattoos - your fans must love this,” she winked with a sly smile, “At least I know where I would try to go after a show if I was a little younger.”

Lizzie tried very much not to roll her eyes.

“Even if they do, I wouldn’t know of it,” Orion answered serenely. “While I love all our fans dearly, my relationship with them ends when our show does.”

“So no stories behind your many tattoos? No tales of long lost love?”

“I didn’t say there are no stories,” Orion replied, “only that they have nothing to do with any fans of ours.”

Trying to steer the conversation to a less dangerous topic, he started explaining the stories behind some of the less meaningful tattoos on his wrists and arms. Lizzie knew each and every one of them by heart, the pictures as familiar to her as Orion’s smile when she ran her fingers over his painted skin.

What he didn’t mention was the biggest of his tattoos and her favourite one; the giant dreamcatcher running along the whole length of his back. Thinking about the intricate lines made a little smile appear on her face.

She didn’t even notice Rita asking her way through the rest of her friends until the reporter’s attention turned to her.

“All of your friends seem to be quite the fans of body art; what about you, Lizzie? Do you have any tattoos as well?”

Lizzie flashed Rita the brilliant but noncommittal smile reserved for the people she just couldn’t stand. “I do have one, yes.”

Rita raised an eyebrow when she didn’t continue. “And where might that be?”

Lizzie chuckled in response. “That will stay my little secret.”

Her gaze was fixed on Rita, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Orion fighting hard to suppress a grin. Of course, he knew exactly where it was.

Rita blinked, clearly irritated by her answer, the same empty smile that was on Lizzie’s face never leaving her red lips.

“Very well, keep your secret - for now. I’ll find out eventually.”

Her smile broadened, a dangerous glint shining in her eyes. “All secrets have their way of ending up with me, one way or another.”

Rita stood up from her armchair to get herself something to drink. When she turned her back on them, Lizzie slowly breathed out, relieved to have the blonde’s prying eyes taken off her.

As the others got up to leave the set as well, Orion and Lizzie’s eyes met for a moment. A smile was playing around his lips as they dropped to where her tattoo was hidden from everybody else’s sight.

She felt her lips curve into a smile of her own and she crossed her arms in front of her chest, her hand resting over the small spot on her ribcage where the words that resonated with her so much were inked into her skin. Seeing what she was doing, Orion couldn’t contain his grin any longer. Judging by the twinkle in his eyes, the memory of when he had first seen them was playing just as vividly in his mind as it did in hers.

[hlupdate]

Variety’s Grammy-nominated Hitmaker of the Year goes deep on the music industry, the great pause and finding his own muses.

“We’ll dance again,” Harry Styles coos, the Los Angeles sunshine peeking through his pandemic-shaggy hair just so. The singer, songwriter and actor — beloved and critically acclaimed thanks to his life-affirming year-old album, “Fine Line” — is lamenting that his Variety Hitmaker of the Year cover conversation has to be conducted over Zoom rather than in person. Even via videoconference, the Brit is effortlessly charming, as anyone who’s come within earshot of him would attest, but it quickly becomes clear that beneath that genial smile is a well-honed media strategy.

To wit: In an interview that appears a few days later announcing his investment in a new arena in his native Manchester (more on that in a bit), he repeats the refrain — “There will be a time we dance again”— referencing a much-needed return to live music and the promise of some 4,000 jobs for residents.

None of which is to suggest that Styles, 26, phones it in for interviews. Quite the opposite: He does very few, conceivably to give more of himself and not cheapen what is out there and also to use the publicity opportunity to indulge his other interests, like fashion. (Last month Styles became the first male to grace the cover of Vogue solo.) Still, it stings a little that a waltz with the former One Direction member may not come to pass on this album cycle — curse you, coronavirus.

Styles’ isolation has coincided with his maturation as an artist, a thespian and a person. With “Fine Line,” he’s proved himself a skilled lyricist with a tremendous ear for harmony and melody. In preparing for his role in Olivia Wilde’s period thriller “Don’t Worry Darling,” which is shooting outside Palm Springs, he found an outlet for expression in interpreting words on a page. And for the first time, he’s using his megaphone to speak out about social justice — inspired by the outpouring of support for Black people around the world following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May.

Styles has spent much of the past nine months at home in London, where life has slowed considerably. The time has allowed him to ponder such heady issues as his purpose on the earth. “It’s been a pause that I don’t know if I would have otherwise taken,” says Styles. “I think it’s been pretty good for me to have a kind of stop, to look and think about what it actually means to be an artist, what it means to do what we do and why we do it. I lean into moments like this — moments of uncertainty.”

In truth, while Styles has largely been keeping a low profile — his Love On Tour, due to kick off on April 15, was postponed in late March and is now scheduled to launch in February 2021 (whether it actually will remains to be seen) — his music has not. This is especially true in the U.S., where he’s notched two hit singles, “Adore You,” the second-most-played song at radio in 2020, and “Watermelon Sugar” (No. 22 on Variety’s year-end Hitmakers chart), with a third, “Golden,” already cresting the top 20 on the pop format. The massive cross-platform success of these songs means Styles has finally and decisively broken into the American market, maneuvering its web of gatekeepers to accumulate 6.2 million consumption units and rising.

Why do these particular songs resonate in 2020? Styles doesn’t have the faintest idea. While he acknowledges a “nursery rhyme” feel to “Watermelon Sugar” with its earwormy loop of a chorus, that’s about as much insight as he can offer. His longtime collaborator and friend Tom Hull, also known as the producer Kid Harpoon, offers this take: “There’s a lot of amazing things about that song, but what really stands out is the lyric. It’s not trying to hide or be clever. The simplicity of watermelon … there’s such a joy in it, [which] is a massive part of that song’s success.” Also, his kids love it. “I’ve never had a song connect with children in this way,” says Hull, whose credits include tunes by Shawn Mendes, Florence and the Machine and Calvin Harris. “I get sent videos all the time from friends of their kids singing. I have a 3-year-old and an 8-year-old, and they listen to it.”

Styles is quick to note that he doesn’t chase pop appeal when crafting songs. In fact, the times when he pondered or approved a purposeful tweak, like on his self-titled 2017 debut, still gnaw at him. “I love that album so much because it represents such a time in my life, but when I listen to it — sonically and lyrically, especially — I can hear places where I was playing it safe,” he says. “I was scared to get it wrong.”

Contemporary effects and on-trend beats hardly factor into Styles’ decision-making. He likes to focus on feelings — his own and his followers’ — and see himself on the other side of the velvet rope, an important distinction in his view. “People within [the industry] feel like they operate on a higher level of listening, and I like to make music from the point of being a fan of music,” Styles says. “Fans are the best A&R.”

This from someone who’s had free rein to pursue every musical whim, and hand in the album of his dreams in the form of “Fine Line.” Chart success makes it all the sweeter, but Styles insists that writing “for the right reasons” supersedes any commercial considerations. “There’s no part that feels, eh, icky — like it was made in the lab,” he says.

Styles has experience in this realm. As a graduate of the U.K. competition series “The X Factor,” where he and four other auditionees — Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson — were singled out by show creator and star judge Simon Cowell to conjoin as One Direction, he’s seen how the prefab pop machine works up close. The One Direction oeuvre, which counts some 42 million albums sold worldwide, includes songs written with such established hitmakers as Ryan Tedder, Savan Kotecha and Teddy Geiger. Being a studious, insatiable observer, Styles took it all in.

“I learned so much,” he says of the experience. “When we were in the band, I used to try and write with as many different people as I could. I wanted to practice — and I wrote a lot of bad shit.”

His bandmates also benefited from the pop star boot camp. The proof is in the relatively seamless solo transitions of at least three of its members — Payne, Malik and Horan in addition to Styles — each of whom has landed hit singles on charts in the U.K., the U.S. and beyond.

This departs from the typical trajectories of boy bands including New Kids on the Block and ’N Sync, which have all pro ered a star frontman. The thinking for decades was that a record company would be lucky to have one breakout solo career among the bunch.

Styles has plainly thought about this.

“When you look at the history of people coming out of bands and starting solo careers, they feel this need to apologize for being in the band. ‘Don’t worry, everyone, that wasn’t me! Now I get to do what I really want to do.’ But we loved being in the band,” he says. “I think there’s a wont to pit people against each other. And I think it’s never been about that for us. It’s about a next step in evolution. The fact that we’ve all achieved different things outside of the band says a lot about how hard we worked in it.”

Indeed, during the five-ish years that One Direction existed, Styles’ schedule involved the sort of nonstop international jet-setting that few get to see in a lifetime, never mind their teenage years. Between 2011 and 2015, One Direction’s tours pulled in north of $631 million in gross ticket sales, according to concert trade Pollstar, and the band was selling out stadiums worldwide by the time it entered its extended hiatus. Styles, too, had built up to playing arenas as a solo artist, engaging audiences with his colorful stage wear and banter and left-of-center choices for opening acts (a pre-Grammy-haul Kacey Musgraves in 2018; indie darlings King Princess and Jenny Lewis for his rescheduled 2021 run).

Stages of all sizes feel like home to Styles. He grew up in a suburb of Manchester, ground zero for some of the biggest British acts of the 1980s and ’90s, including Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths and Oasis, the latter of which broke the same year Styles was born. His parents were also music lovers. Styles’ father fed him a balanced diet of the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones and Queen, while Mum was a fan of Shania Twain, Norah Jones and Savage Garden. “They’re all great melody writers,” says Styles of the acts’ musical throughline.

Stevie Nicks, who in the past has described “Fine Line” as Styles’ “Rumours,” referencing the Fleetwood Mac 1977 classic, sees him as a kindred spirit. “Harry writes and sings his songs about real experiences that seemingly happened yesterday,” she tells Variety. “He taps into real life. He doesn’t make up stories. He tells the truth, and that is what I do. ‘Fine Line’ has been my favorite record since it came out. It is his ‘Rumours.’ I told him that in a note on December 13, 2019 before he went on stage to play the ‘Fine Line’ album at the Forum. We cried. He sang those songs like he had sung them a thousand times. That’s a great songwriter and a great performer.”

“Harry’s playing and writing is instinctual,” adds Jonathan Wilson, a friend and peer who’s advised Styles on backing and session musicians. “He understands history and where to take the torch. You can see the thread of great British performers — from Bolan to Bowie — in his music.”

Also shaping his musical DNA was Manchester itself, the site of a 23,500-seat arena, dubbed Co-op Live, for which Styles is an investor and adviser. Oak View Group, a company specializing in live entertainment and global sports that was founded by Tim Leiweke and Irving Azoff in 2015 (Jeffrey Azoff, Irving’s son, represents Styles at Full Stop Management), is leading the effort to construct the venue. The project gained planning approval in September and is set to open in 2023, with its arrival representing a £350 million ($455 million) investment in the city. (Worth noting: Manchester is already home to an arena — the site of a 2017 bombing outside an Ariana Grande concert — and a football stadium, where One Love Manchester, an all-star benefit show to raise money for victims of the terrorist attack, took place.)

“I went to my first shows in Manchester,” Styles says of concerts paid for with money earned delivering newspapers for a supermarket called the Co-op. “My friends and I would go in on weekends. There’s so many amazing small venues, and music is such a massive part of the city. I think Manchester deserves it. It feels like a full-circle, coming-home thing to be doing this and to be able to give any kind of input. I’m incredibly proud. Hopefully they’ll let me play there at some point.”

Though Styles has owned properties in Los Angeles, his base for the foreseeable future is London. “I feel like my relationship with L.A. has changed a lot,” he explains. “I’ve kind of accepted that I don’t have to live here anymore; for a while I felt like I was supposed to. Like it meant things were going well. This happened, then you move to L.A.! But I don’t really want to.”

Is it any wonder? Between COVID and the turmoil in the U.S. spurred by the presidential election, Styles, like some 79 million American voters, is recovering from sticker shock over the bill of goods sold to them by the concept of democracy. “In general, as people, there’s a lack of empathy,” he observes. “We found this place that’s so divisive. We just don’t listen to each other anymore. And that’s quite scary.”

That belief prompted Styles to speak out publicly in the wake of George Floyd’s death. As protests in support of Black Lives Matter took to streets all over the world, for Styles, it triggered a period of introspection, as marked by an Instagram message (liked by 2.7 million users and counting) in which he declared: “I do things every day without fear, because I am privileged, and I am privileged every day because I am white. … Being not racist is not enough, we must be anti racist. Social change is enacted when a society mobilizes. I stand in solidarity with all of those protesting. I’m donating to help post bail for arrested organizers. Look inwards, educate yourself and others. LISTEN, READ, SHARE, DONATE and VOTE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

“Talking about race can be really uncomfortable for everyone,” Styles elaborates. “I had a realization that my own comfort in the conversation has nothing to do with the problem — like that’s not enough of a reason to not have a conversation. Looking back, I don’t think I’ve been outspoken enough in the past. Using that feeling has pushed me forward to being open and ready to learn. … How can I ensure from my side that in 20 years, the right things are still being done and the right people are getting the right opportunities? That it’s not a passing thing?”

His own record company — and corporate parent Sony Music Group, whose chairman, Rob Stringer, signed Styles in 2016 — has been grappling with these same questions as the industry has faced its own reckoning with race. At issue: inequality among the upper ranks (an oft-cited statistic: popular music is 80% Black, but the music business is 80% white); contracts rooted in a decades-old system that many say is set up to take advantage of artists, Black artists more unfairly than white; and the call for a return of master rights, an ownership model that is at the core of the business.

Styles acknowledges the fundamental imbalance in how a major label deal is structured — the record company takes on the financial risk while the artist is made to recoup money spent on the project before the act is considered profitable and earning royalties (typically at a 15% to 18% rate for the artist, while the label keeps and disburses the rest). “Historically, I can’t think of any industry that’s benefited more off of Black culture than music,” he says. “There are discussions that need to happen about this long history of not being paid fairly. It’s a time for listening, and hopefully, people will come out humbled, educated and willing to learn and change.”

By all accounts, Styles is a voracious reader, a movie lover and an aesthete. He stays in shape by adhering to a strict daily exercise routine. “I tried to keep up but didn’t last more than two weeks,” says Hull, Styles’ producer, with a laugh. “The discipline is terrifying.”

Of course, with the fashion world beckoning — Styles recently appeared in a film series for Gucci’s new collection that was co-directed by the fashion house’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, and Oscar winner Gus Van Sant — and a movie that’s set in the 1950s, maintaining that physique is part of the job. And he’s no stranger to visual continuity after appearing in Christopher Nolan’s epic “Dunkirk” and having to return to set for reshoots; his hair, which needed to be cut back to its circa 1940 form, is a constant topic of conversation among fans. This time, it’s the ink that poses a challenge. By Styles’ tally, he’s up to 60 tattoos, which require an hour in the makeup chair to cover up. “It’s the only time I really regret getting tattooed,” he says.

He shows no regret, however, when it comes to stylistic choices overall, and takes pride in his gender-agnostic portfolio, which includes wearing a Gucci dress on that Vogue cover— an image that incited conservative pundit Candace Owens to plead publicly to “bring back manly men.” In Styles’ view: “To not wear [something] because it’s females’ clothing, you shut out a whole world of great clothes. And I think what’s exciting about right now is you can wear what you like. It doesn’t have to be X or Y. Those lines are becoming more and more blurred.”

But acclaim, if you can believe it, is not top of mind for Styles. As far as the Grammys are concerned, Styles shrugs, “It’s never why I do anything.” His team and longtime label, however, had their hearts set on a showing at the Jan. 31 ceremony. Their investment in Styles has been substantial — not just monetarily but in carefully crafting his career in the wake of such icons as David Bowie, who released his final albums with the label. Hope at the company and in many fans’ hearts that Styles would receive an album of the year nomination did not come to pass. However, he was recognized in three categories, including best pop vocal album.

“It’s always nice to know that people like what you’re doing, but ultimately — and especially working in a subjective field — I don’t put too much weight on that stuff,” Styles says. “I think it’s important when making any kind of art to remove the ego from it.” Citing the painter Matisse, he adds: “It’s about the work that you do when you’re not expecting any applause.”

[teawizard-n-coffeewitch]

The Staffordshire Spell

1. Spilled Coffee

The actress moves with grace as she proceeds to walk up the stairs and accept her Emmy. The audience clap and cheer as she smiles softly at them. The scene then unfolds to her walking down the red carpet, after the award ceremony and her red dress helping her stand out from all the other celebrities.

"Exquisite footage of Tina Goldstein-- the great movie star of our time -- an ideal -- the perfect star and woman -- her life full of glamour and sophistication and mystery." Newt mutters to himself as stops looking at the shop's teli (television) and continues on his way.

We follow him as he walks down Manor Drive Road, carrying a brown briefcase in one hand. It is spring.

"Of course, I've seen her films and always thought she was, well, fabulous -- but, you know, million miles from the world I live in. Which is here -- Staffordshire -- not a bad place to be..." Newt tells himself, exciting Manor Drive Road and entering Burton Market Hall.

"It's a full fruit market day." Newt thinks to himself, observing the countless of people swarming in both the inside market hall and outdoor market.

"There's the Outdoor Market on Market Place, Burton. Open on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Selling every fruit and vegetable known to man..." Newt points out, as he studies the cabbages when he walks beside the veggie stands.

Existing the market hall Newt notices a man in denims walking out of the tattoo studio. Newt shakes his head solemnly. "The tattoo parlour -- with a guy outside who got drunk and now can't remember why he chose 'I Love Ken'..." The man looks at his arm and has a confused face, and frowns, as if he were experiencing a headache.

Newt continues walking and passes the hair salon. "Ah, the racial hair-dressers where

everyone comes out looking like the Cookie Monster, whether they like it or not..." Newt teases and sure enough, a girl exits the salon with a huge threaded blue bouffant. Newt coughs back a laugh and walks quickly.

Before he knows it, it's Saturday and the Weekend Antique Market is in full swing. Newt smiles softly at the smiles of the tourists and locals, all shopping. "Then suddenly it's the weekend, and from break of day, hundreds of stalls appears out of nowhere, filling Burton upon Trent with a frantic crowd in the market... and thousands of people buy millions of antiques, some genuine..." Newt thinks, walking down the stands, studying the antiques.

His eyes settles on a stall selling beautiful stained glass windows of various sizes, some featuring biblical scenes and saints. "... and some not so genuine." Newt thinks, frowning a bit.

As Newt continues his walk, he passes by a familiar door. He smiles proudly. "And what's great is that lots of friends have ended up in this part of the United Kingdom -- that's Jacob, soldier turned baker from New York, who recently invested all the money he ever earned in a new bakery..."

Newt waves at Jacob as he's proudly setting out a board outside his bakery, the sign stating; Today's Special is Pumpkin Juice and macaroons! Jacob waves back at Newt with a huge smile.

"So this is where I spend my days and years -- in this small village in the middle of the U.K -- in a house with a Robin egg blue color door that I bought after best friend left me for a man who looked like Callum Turner back in London. That man being my older brother..." Newt thought to himself before he arrived outside his blue-doored house just off Peel's Cut.

"... and where I now lead a strange half-life with a lodger called..." Newt shuffles his keys back in his pocket as he yells, entering the house, "Credence!" Newt walks towards the large kettle in the house.

The house has far too many things in it. House plants, some dishes scattered, and a few clothes on the floor. Definitely two-bachelor flat.

Credence appears. An unusual looking fellow. He has his black hair in an unusual haircut, and an unusual Welsh accent: very white, as though his flesh has never seen the sun. He wears only shorts.

Credence smiles at Newt. "Even he. Hey, you couldn't help me with an incredibly important decision, could you?"

Newt smiles crouching down and puts on his gloves before he begins petting his temporary companion platypus, named Niffler. "This is important in comparison to, let's say, whether they should cancel third world debt?" he asks looking at Credence.

Credence nods, snapping his fingers happily. "That's right -- I'm at last going out on a date with the great Nagini and I just want to be sure I've picked the right t-shirt."

Newt closes the kettle and nods at Credence. "Alright then. What are the choices?"

Credence smirks proudly. "Well... wait for it..." He pulls on a t-shirt and shows Newt. "First there's this one..."

The t-shirt is white with a horrible looking plastic alien coming out of it, jaws open, blood everywhere. It says 'Avada Kedavra.'

Newt stays silent. Just eyeing the shirt. He smiled awkwardly as he stutters, "Yes -- might make it hard to strike a really romantic note.

Credence hums as he thinks. Nodding, he replies, "Point taken." He heads back up the stairs... and talks as he changes. "I suspect you'll prefer the next one." Newt smiles, intrigued at the next shirt Credence will show him.

He re-enters in a white t-shirt, with a large arrow, pointing down to his flies, saying, 'Get It Here.' Credence has a huge smile as he says smugly, "Cool, huh?"

Newt laughs softly before answering awkwardly, "Yes -- she might think you don't have true love on your mind."

Credence nods, taking Newt's advice. "You are right. Wouldn't want that..." he says and back up he goes up the stairs. "Okay -- just one more." Newt hears him speak loudly.

He comes down wearing the last shirt. The shirt has lots of hearts, saying, 'You're the most beautiful woman in the world.' Newt smiles approvingly.

"Well, yes, that's perfect. Well done." Newt says, holding a thumps up. Credence laughs happily. "Thanks. Great! Wish me luck!" Credence says.

Newt salutes him with two fingers, "Good luck."

Credence turns and walks upstairs proudly. As he does so, revealing that on the back of the t-shirt, also printed in big letters, is written 'Fancy a fuck?'

Newt chokes back a laugh before turning around, shaking his head. He puts on his long blue coat.

Newt then walks up towards a house plant and picks up his pet Phasmid. A green stick insect, whose name is Pickett. He grabs him on his hand and gets his brown brief case with his other hand. "Come along now." Newt tells Pickett as he opens the door and yells a farewell to Credence.

And so it was just another hopeless Saturday, as Newt sets off through the market to work, little suspecting that this was the day which would change his life forever. As Newt walks down the busy street a woman, with short dark hair and a dark long coat, dashes pass him. She covers half her face with her coat and Newt just gives her an odd look.

Finally he arrives. In front of a small corner bookshop. This is work, by the way, Newt's little Zoology book shop...

A few years ago he was a Zoologist at the London Zoo but now he owns his own Zoology bookstore. The reason being was because after his best friend left him he was devastated. Being in London hurt so much he moved far away and kept close to himself. When the opportunity presented itself, a small bookstore just a few houses down his home was perfect.

Thus why a small unpretentious shop... named 'Magical Creature Books' was in the street. The book shop, well, sells creature books -- and, to be frank with you, doesn't always sell many of those. Newt enters and sets Pickett down on the shop's bonsai tree. He studies his small shop. It is slightly chaotic, bookshelves everywhere, with little secret bits round corners with even more books.

Bunty, Newt's sole employee, is waiting enthusiastically. She is very keen, an uncrushable optimist. Perhaps without cause. She's a pretty small young woman with frizzy blonde locks and a sweet smile. Like Newt, she has a passion for zoology as well.

A few seconds later, after Newt has hung his blue coat, he stands gloomily behind the main desk.

"Classic. Absolutely classic. Profit from major sales push -- minus 347?" Newt mutters, punching in numbers on the calculator. Bunty frowns sadly at her boss's sad state. "Shall I go get a butter-beer? Ease the pain." Bunty suggest with a small smile. Newt smiles back.

"Yes, better get me a half. All I can afford." Newt sadly jokes as Bunty shakes her head with a soft laugh. "I get your logic. Butter-beer coming up." She salutes and bolts out the door. As she does, a woman walks in. Newt only catches a glimpse of her.

He continues working before he looks up casually and finally he sees her. His reaction is hard to read as he awes the woman. It's the same woman who dashed past him earlier. She takes off her shades and places them on her head. After a pause... Newt breaths calmly.

"Can I help you?" Newt asks, a bit nervously.

The woman who just entered is none other than Tina Goldstein, the biggest movie star in the world-- here -- in his shop. The most subtle woman on earth in his opinion. Newt is speechless. This cannot be happening. How? Why? In his shop? When she speaks she is very self-assured and self - contained.

"No, thanks. I'll just look around." Tina replies softly, her eyes with a spark of hesitant. Newt nods, "Alright then." He watches as she wanders around and picks out a small book on the coffee table.

Newt doesn't know how or why he did it but as Tina proceeds to open the book and skim through it, he can't help but blurt out, "That book's really not good-"

Tina stops and raises an eyebrow at him. Newt flushes awkwardly as he stammers, "J-Just in case, you...you know, boring turned to buying. You'd be wasting your money." He curses at himself for acting like such a fool.

"Really?" asks Tina, slightly finding Newt's red face amusing.

"Yes." Newt flushes before embarrassing himself more by adding, "This one though is... very good." He picks up a book on the counter.

"I think the man who wrote it has actually studied Komodo dragons, which helps. There's also a very amusing incident with its hatchlings." Newt stutters out, scratching his back neck nervously.

Tina just stares at him before she replies, "Thanks. I'll think about it." Before he can apologize for acting like a fool Newt suddenly spies something odd on the small TV monitor beside him.

He gives Tina an apologetic look as he mumbles, "If you could just give me a second." Newt then walks out of his main desk. Tina's eyes follow him as he moves toward the back of the shop and approaches a man in slightly ill-fitting clothes. She studies at how he'll approach the situation.

"Excuse me." Newt begins, a bit nervous. The man raises an eyebrow at Newt. "Yes?" he asks, giving Newt an odd look. Newt winces, knowing this won't be easy. "Bad news." Newt begins.

"What?" the man asks in an annoyed tone. "We've got a security camera in this bit of the shop." Newt says. The man tries to keep it cool as he shoots back a, "So?"

Newt crosses his arms, trying to act a bit confident. "So, I saw you put that book down your trousers." The man just stares at him.

"What book?" he challenges. Newt sighs. "The one down your trousers." he adds embarrassed.

"I haven't got a book down my trousers." the man snaps to which Newt's ears turn red. "Right -- well, then we have something of an impasse. I tell you what -- I'll call the police -- and, what can I say? Er -- If I'm wrong about the whole book-down-the-trousers scenario, I sincerely apologize." Newt offers to which the man stays silent for a moment.

"Okay -- what if I did have a book down my trousers?" asks the man to which Newt replies, "Well, ideally, when I went back to the desk, you'd remove the Mythologies of Basilisk Snakes from your trousers, and either wipe it and put it back, or buy it. See you in a sec." Newt says before returning to his desk. In the monitor Newt glimpse, seeing the book coming out of the trousers and put back on the shelves.

The man drifts out towards the door. Tina who has observed all this, is looking at the book on the counter, the one Newt suggested.

"Sorry about that..." Newt apologies to Tina as she walks up to the cash register and places the book she was skimming through.

"No, that's fine. I was going to steal one myself but now I've changed my mind." she lightly teases before seeing how the book she was about to purchase had a signature. "Signed by the author, I see." she points out to which Newt replies with a soft laugh, "Yes, we couldn't stop him. If you can find an unsigned copy, it's worth an absolute fortune. That's Gilderoy Lockhart for you."

Tina gives him a small nervous smile.  Suddenly the thief man is there, standing right beside Tina.

"Excuse me." he begins. Tina looks at him. "Yes?" she answers. "Can I have your autograph?" he asks, making Tina look a bit uncomfortable before nodding. He gives her a piece of paper and pen and she gets it.

"What's your name?" Tina asks him boldly. "Tom." the young man replies to which Tina nods. She signs his scruffy piece of paper and gives it to him. He tries to read it before asking, "What does it say?"

"Well, that's the signature -- and above, it says 'Dear Tom -- you belong in Azkaban.' " Tina says without missing a beat.

"Nice one. Would you like my phone number?" Tom asks to which Tina smiles and acts as if she's thinking deeply. "Tempting..." she begins breaking out of her thoughts, "but... no, thank you."

The man, Tom, then leaves, leaving Newt and Tina alone.

"I apologize about that." Newt begins, making Tina shake her head and hold her hand out to stop him from apologizing.

She hands Newt a twenty euros note and the book he said was rubbish. He talks as he handles the transaction. "Oh -- right -- on second thoughts maybe it wasn't that bad.  Actually -- it's a sort of masterpiece really. None of those childish mythology stories you get in so many books these days." Newt word vomits out nervously as she looks at him with a slight smile.

He gives her the book she just purchased with a small smile. "Thanks." Tina says and walks out the shop quietly. And leaves. She's out of his life forever.

Newt leans on his desk, a little dazed. Seconds later Bunty comes back in, with two butter-beers at hand.

She gives Newt his. "Thanks. I don't think you'll believe who was just in here." Bunty's face breaks out with a shock expression as she asks, "Who? Was it someone famous?"

But Newt's innate natural English discretion takes over. He knows better than to expose Tina's whereabouts.

"No. No-one -- no-one." Newt replies causing Bunty to frown. They set about drinking their butter-beers.

"It be exciting if someone famous did come into the shop though, wouldn't it? Do you know -- this is pretty incredible actually -- I once saw Grindelwald. Or at least I think it was Grindelwald. It might have been that broke from 'Pirates of The Caribbean,' John."

"Johnny." Newt corrects Bunty as she snaps her fingers. "That's right -- Johnny." Bunty repeats the name with a smile.

"But Johnny Depp doesn't look anything like Grindelwald." says Newt as he finishes his butter-beer.

"No, well... he was quite a long way away." Bunty points out. "So it could have been neither of them?"

"I suppose so." Bunty says slowly. "Right. It's not a classic anecdotes, is it?" asks Newt. "Not classic, no." she says.

Bunty shakes his head. Newt takes her empty butter-beer cup and throws it in the garbage can, along his.

"Right -- want another one?" Newt asks her to which she nods. "Yes. No, wait -- let's go crazy -- I'll have an ice coffee."

Newt groans but obeys her order. And so be it, Newt sets off to the only place in the street that makes coffee; Jacob's bakery.

Entering the bakery Jacob pulls him into a hug and decides to catch up on their morning. Newt desperately desires to tell Jacob about Tina but in the end, decides to not. Jacob gives Newt two ice coffees and teases him about finally acting like an American. Newt rolls his eyes as he collects his coffee.

He swings out of Jacob's bakery, biding him a farewell and as he turns the corner of the road he accidentally bumps straight into someone.

That someone being Tina! The cold coffees, in its paper cups, fly out of Newt's grasps, soaking Tina.

"Oh Mercy Lewis!" Tina gasps as her white button shirt is soaked in black coffee. She tightens her hands on her brown bags.

"Oh I am so so sorry. I really do apologize!" Newt stutters as he tries helping Tina.

"Here, let me help." Newt offers as he grabs the paper napkins that came with the coffees and tries to clean the soaked coffee off -- getting far too near her breasts in the panic of it...

Tina jumps back as she snaps, "What are you doing?!" Newt jumps back, realizing his stupid mistake.

"Nothing, nothing... I swear! Look, uh..I live just over the street. Uh... you could get cleaned up." he offers awkwardly as she glares at him.

"No thank you. I need to get my car back." Tina replies, trying to wipe the coffee out of her shirt.

"I also have a phone." Newt mumbles. "I'm confident that in five minutes we can have you

spick and span and back on the street again... in the non-prostitute sense obviously."

In his diffident way, he is confident, despite her being genuinely annoyed. She sighs before she turns and looks at him.

"Okay.  So what does 'just over the street' mean -- give it to me in yards." Tina orders, placing her hand on her forehead, as if she were experiencing a headache.

"Eighteen yards." Newt automatically replies, surprising himself. He points to his house's blue door. "That's my house there. The one with the Robin egg blue color door."

Tina's eyes follow his finger and she sees that he doesn't lie -- it is eighteen yards away.  She looks down, debating if she should allow him to escort her or not.

She looks up at Newt and nods softly. He nods and together they walk towards Newt's house.

They pass by many people but no one seems to recognize Tina. She is once again, hiding her face with her black coat and shades.

They both enter Newt's house and stand in the corridor. She carries a few stylish bags. She gives Newt an uncertain look.

"Come on in. I'll just..." he begins and walks in further -- it's a mess. He kicks some old shoes

under the stairs, picks up Pickett's scattered food and hides a plate of Credence's breakfast in a cupboard. Tina enters the kitchen slowly.

"It's not that tidy, I fear." Newt apologizes, as he stands nervously.

Tina doesn't seem to mind and realizing why she's in his house in the first place, he guides her up the stairs, after taking the bag of books from her and settling them down the stairs. On top of a small coffee table.

"The bathroom is right at the top of the stairs and there's a phone on the desk up there." Newt tells Tina as he tries gesturing with his hand where the bathroom is. Tina nods and she heads upstairs.

The second Newt hears the bathroom door close he enters the kitchen and goes mad. He's tidying up frantically; from throwing dishes in the sink, to wiping the long wooden table clean, and sweeping. Then he hears Tina's movement on the stairs. Newt stops and sees as she walks down, wearing a new set of white jeans and a blue silk shirt beneath her black coat. Newt is utterly dazzled by the sight of her.

"Would you like a cup of tea before you go?" Newt asks, trying to cut the awkward silence.

"No thanks." Tina replies.

"Pumpkin Juice?"

"No."

"What about coffee -- oh- er-probably not." Newt says as he moves to his very empty fridge -- and offers its only contents. "Something else cold -- soda, water, some disgusting sugary drink pretending to have something to do with fruits of the forest?" he offers as Tina stares at him.

"Really, no." she insists.

"Would you like something to nibble -- apricots, soaked in honey -- quite why, no one knows -- because it stops them tasting of apricots, and make them taste like honey, and if you wanted honey, you'd just buy honey, instead of apricots, but nevertheless -- um -- they're yours if you want them." Newt stutters holding the glass jar of apricots soaked in honey.

"No." Tina answers, as she observes Newt make a fool out of himself.

There is a moment of silence before Newt, stupidly but boldly asks, "Do you always say 'no' to everything?"

There is a pause. Frankly because Tina did not expect Newt to ask her a question so... striking. She looks at him deep and cocks her head to a side before replying softly, "No."

There is silence again but it's not awkward. It's a moment of peace before Tina breaks it, saying, "I better be going.  Thanks for your help."

"You're welcome and, may I also say... heavenly." Newt says as he closes the fridge door, leading Tina back to the corridor, "It has taken a lot to get this out loud.  He is not a smooth - talking man." Newt takes a deep breath before says daring, "Take my one chance to say it. After you've read that terrible book, you're certainly not going to be coming back to the shop."

Tina looks at him and smiles. She's cool and well amused at his opinion for that book she bought.

"Thank you."

Newt looks down nervously, "Yes. Well. My pleasure."

He guides her towards the house's blue door. "Nice to meet you. Surreal but nice." Newt reveals causing Tina to silently laugh. In a slightly awkward moment, he shows her out the door. She gives him a nod before stepping out. He closes the door and shakes his head in wonder. Then slaps his forehead as he mutters, " 'Surreal but nice.' What was I thinking?"

He  shakes his head again in horror and wanders back along the corridor in silence.  There's a knock on the door. He moves back, speaking up, "Coming."

He opens the door and is surprised. It's her.

[mimzy-writing-online]

I'm incredibly sorry for this ask , but I'd like the opinion of different writers. I have this story I have finished. It's has been re-read, edited, polished. It's technically done. The story is consistent, the pacing is okay. But what I don't like is how the characters are portrayed. They lack life, and I think it may be because during the years I improved my writing, and now I'm sure I'd be able to do better. What would you do? Would you rewrite the story from scratch? Thanks in advance.

First, no worries about asking for advice. That’s legit what I’m here for. And having been in the same position you are now, (twice) I know how impossible it feels.

Off the bat, advice I would recommend: 

Beta Reading: Get some fresh eyes to look at it, ideally someone who 1) reads books in that genre and that age range, and 2) has no obligation to worry about your feelings.

Thoroughly consider why you want to rewrite it: make an actual pros and cons list. It sounds silly, but it helps because you realize what decision you’re arguing for, what your instinct says.

Give yourself a shot at attempting a rewrite. Give yourself a set time limit to try it out. Your current book isn’t going anywhere and publishing takes forever anyway, so what’s another month or another three months?

At the end of this trial run you can ask yourself: Did a rewrite make it better? Do the characters and their world feel more alive? Even if it looks like a mess, given more time to finish and edit, would it look better than the original?

If you find you like the characters better, if you feel like you know them better, then you can consider going through the book and highlighting where they feel out of character compared to your new understanding of the characters

Watch Whispers of the Heart. I mean it! It’s a Studio Ghibli movie, and I swear to god it will inspire you and make this decision a little easier. The whole movie is about developing your creative craft. Its overall analogy is that of a geode. Your craft looks rough and sloppy on the outside, but with time, practice, and love you’ll find the beauty hidden underneath and make it shine. Amazing movie, it will change how you think about writing.

Now, finally, ask yourself: Is this the story I want to debut with? Is this the story I want to begin my writing career with?

This will be when you make your decision.

That’s the most objective advice I can give you. Since you’re asking a lot of writers for their stance, you’ll probably have a few different opinions, but I think running through this troubleshoot method will give you a chance to see for yourself.

My biased opinion?

It comes from my own experience with A Witch’s Memory. 

This is about to be a very long story, fair warning, but it’s my entire thought process over 7-8 years of working on and off with the same project. A big part of the reason why I’m going in depth about the experience is because I keep going back to what you said:

“I think it may be because during the years I improved my writing, and now I'm sure I'd be able to do better. What would you do?”

The same thing happened to be. I started the series when I was much younger, but in the 7.5 years since then I’ve changed a lot as both a person (not adult/not teenager) and as a writer (who’s had several projects since then). I’m gonna walk you through 7.5 years of personal development and how it affected the project.

I joke that A Witch’s Memory has three universes, and those universes are all different rewrites. I first started the series I was seventeen. I finished the rough drafts of three books in the series and got down to full on editing the first book after I graduated high school. Within a year I had a finished novel that wasn’t necessarily polished (not by my standards today) but at the time I was ready to move forward and publish. I sent query letters out to lit agents but didn’t get any bites back. I didn’t get to work at it for long due to health issues, my whole body kind of just crashed so for six months I was too sick to do much of anything, let alone stress myself out over query letters. I started community college the next semester and got more involved in school than in writing.

17 when I started, 18 when I started editing, 19 when I queried and got sick, almost turning 20 when I started college.

I put the book on hold for another year and focused on school. During that time I had a lot of personal development as a person. I got more experience being myself, being an adult who can make decisions for themself.

And I realized that at age 19 I’d developed a lot of insecurities about my book.

In my case, it was the world building. I love my characters, and at their heart they’re still the same, albeit a bit more realistic. I re-examined what about the world building I didn’t like.

It felt too much like Twilight to start, with the way vampires and werewolves were supposed to hate each other, and witches and fairies hated each other, because that just made sense to a 17 year old who had never read paranormal before Twilight changed the direction of the genre.

I didn’t like magic being a secret that no human could know about, so I changed that. I didn’t like my character’s backstories too much, so I tweaked that too. For the best.

At age 20/21 (it was right around my birthday) I rewrote the entire first book. After finishing the rough draft I looked at editing it, looked at starting the rough draft of the second book, and I realized I didn’t like this version either.

So I put it on hold for anther two years. I worked on two different projects, experimented with writing style, got to know myself as a person better.

At 23 I reexamined what I didn’t like about “Universe 2″ and I realized-

I wasn’t comfortable with the way the book was written now. Too many main characters meant to many pov changes and too many personal plot lines to plan. I could see from the beginning how much I favored Anna and Ulric and Felix over my other main characters, so I cut my cast of six main characters down to three, focusing on my favorites. I also saw that the setting wasn’t working for me and it would be a lot less stress for me to chance the setting to somewhere I was more familiar with, setting it mostly in America instead of the U.K.

And I decided to stop worrying about what my past beta readers would think if the book didn’t look the same in “Universe 3″ and to just run with my heart.

(For any wondering, the beta reader in question is my mum, who has been the biggest supporter of my writing since I was 14 and believed I would be published even when I was ready to give up writing and work at a different career. She’s very attached to “Universe 1″ but it’s not where I want to go, and I know she’ll love this new direction when she reads it)

I started the rough draft for Universe 3 in January of 2019 (almost a year ago to the day I’m writing this). I did it on a whim. I had a dream of Anna and Ulric flying to safety from a villain on a broomstick and I asked myself why witches never had broomsticks in my old world, and I was like “why not, let’s add it”

And I just messed with world building. I aimed it for a more whimsical feel than my older angsty versions. I’m gonna blame all the Studio Ghibli movies I saw that year. Some of my local theatres have been doing special weekends where they show the movies, and I’ve gone to see four in the last year or so. I saw Kiki’s Delivery Service a few months earlier with my best friend (A) and then a month after starting the new draft I saw Howls Moving Castle and Spirited Away (same week, I think, all in theatre) and then as I was finishing the rough draft I saw Whispers of the Heart for the first time.

(this was the moment I realized that specific movie would help A LOT on this decision making process, so I included it above)

Anyway, I just gave myself permission to go in a completely different direction with my book.

I should note, that at 23 I had been visually impaired/blind for some 3 years, although it wasn’t medically official until I was 22. I’d also fallen in love for the first time and broken my own heart. I’d also spent the last two years struggling with gender and sexual identity and really starting to understand that part of myself. 

So in general, the whole experience with those last two years of my life really changed the direction I took the book. 

I focused more on internal struggle as well as the outside “main bad guy” I’d always been planning to work with. It 

I kept the heart of my characters the same. Anna is still the kindest person you’ll ever meet, as well as sarcastic and brilliant and studious. Ulric is an anxious mess who is crazy loyal to his friends and who wants to gain his own independence. Felix is still a brat, but a loving one with the dryest sarcasm and a penchant for mischief.

Anna’s more cautious than her original incarnation. Ulric wasn’t disabled in previous versions (but at 23 I was disabled and I wanted to write a blind character, but I didn’t want blindness to be their only trait, so I took my most developed character and made him blind). Some of the characters are POC instead of white, I let myself have multiple LGBTQ characters (because 17 year old me thought the token queer was the norm because I only had one queer friend before that and we weren’t that close) and I changed some origin stories. It’s much better for that.

Growing up taught me how to put more life in my books, how to write more realistically less melodramatically, and what it feels like to have friends. Seventeen year old me didn’t have many friends in life, but 24 year old me has some wonderful friends.

Summary in Short?? (can I even do that?)

This advice post is getting long and I’m feeling bad, so okay, here I am: I’m almost 25 (in March). 17 and 23 year old me were very different people with different priorities and different levels of experience. And if I had to choose which book I would go with? 

I’d stay with Universe 3 (and Universe 1 will just be a thing my mum and I know and keep to ourselves, mostly)

I’m nearly done with the 1st edit. I still have days of self doubt, but they’re nothing like what I had years ago. I’m closer to publishing than I was before, mostly because I have a solid plan now and I’ll be self-publishing, allowing me to publish on my own.

In my case, rewriting was the best decision I could have made. I’m not everyone else though, nor am I you. You know yourself and your story better than anyone, and I know you are the most qualified person to make that decision. I have confidence in your ability.

[crimsonblackrose]

Because Big Bus didn’t open until 9:30am but most museums opened at 9am I decided rather than start my trip off at the Louvre like I had planned I would go to the Palace of Versailles. (This was also done because you can’t just go to the Louvre, you have to make an online reservation, even if you have a Museum Pass.)

Generally from downtown Paris to The Palace of Versailles it would take 1 hour and 2 minutes on the RER C line. However due to the strike this option was not available. So I took a bus to Gare Montparnasse and booked a ticket to Viroflay, only to realize at my transfer in Viroflay that my map had picked the wrong Versailles, at which point I took the bus. It probably took me over 2 hours just to get there. Due to the strikes and the rotation of which lines were running and which weren’t I highly suggest double checking everything on Citymapper. Again I hope everything is resolved by the time this post goes up, but just in case Citymapper gave me multiple routes while Google maps gave me one that I couldn’t use. Oh also, the Paris Pass public transit card didn’t go to Versailles. The Palace of Versailles is in zone 4. Which meant I had to keep buying public transit passes and wasting money when I got lost.

The first thing I did at the Palace was go through security and open my bag and show them what was in it before following people up to the gates and taking pictures. Beyond this was check-in where I scanned and started the 48 hour clock on my museum pass and was told that the palace of Versailles has a free audio guide. I highly suggest getting it if you’re not on a tour. Usually when I’m somewhere I don’t bother with audio guides but if you’ve got the time the audio guide is not only free but informative. And since I was by myself it was really nice to be able to pop into a room, look around while listening and duck to the next room, bypassing large tour groups. I’m sure the tour groups were getting a lot of unique information and any questions they had answered but I was able to get a tour and take pictures and take on the palace of Versailles at my own pace.

The palace was huge. And I was running on a pain aux chocolat, noisette, and a partially crushed croissant I’d bought at a bakery I got in Viroflay to make sure I had enough change for the bus. I stopped for a snack at the Versaille Angelina around 2pm. They had two options a side for snacks and a side for meals. Because I wanted to keep moving I decided to go down the snack route. I got a baguette sandwich and Angelina’s famous chocolat chaud. (A super thick hot chocolate). I will do an individual post on the chain Angelina’s later.

Note that there is not a lot of seating available in the snack section of the Versailles Angelina. If you are a large group and don’t see any available I suggest maybe looking at the menu again and trying the restaurant. When I arrived I was able to grab a seat by myself but in the interval it took me to start my sandwich the place filled up including all the available spaces at my own table.

There were two parts to Versailles that I managed to visit. Pre-Angelina I explored the palace itself. Post-Angelina I explored the gardens.  It took most of the day. If I had gotten their earlier, maybe not, it is possible to make Versailles a half day trip, but to give yourself time and to not stress yourself out because of how immense the grounds and everything is I highly suggest giving yourself a full day. That way if you end early then hooray you have surprise time to do something else. And if you don’t, then you prepared yourself for that.

The Palace of Versailles was home to the French monarchy for about 107 years. It lasted from Louis XIII to the French Revolution. Before, the area of Versailles, was a favored hunting ground of the previous kings, until once upon a time one decided to buy land in the area and build a small lodge. Later, after a barely avoided coup, a king decided to make it into a château. After awhile as kings came and passed Louis the XIV expanded it and hired André Le Nôtre to create the immense gardens.

The palace is symmetrical with one wing belong to the king and the other to the queen. The king’s area, much to my surprise was decked out with Roman gods. I had forgotten that Apollo was one of the few gods to not get a name change when adopted by the Romans and kept getting thrown when the audio guide would jump from saying “this room is designed with paintings of Apollo, while the next room had paintings of Mars” (Greek: Ares).

Louis XIV viewed Apollo as his own personal symbol, believing himself to be similar in many ways to the sun god. Each room was intensely decorated. Even if a lot of the actual decor from the time didn’t survive due to various wars and the revolution. The stunning art that remains though, the intricate sculptures and paintings that line every available part of the ceilings and most of the walls is due to Petite Academie, a collection of artists that the royal painter, Charles Le Brun was in charge of. The sculptures in the gardens and on the fountains are also due to him, which means I have him to thank for laughing for a good ten minutes outside one fountain in the garden.

In 1682 it became the kings primary residence and much later after some various changes and wars in 1783 it became the site of the Paris peace treaties where the U.K. signed that it recognized the United States independence. After the French Revolution and the fall of the monarchy, everything within the palace was either sent to the Louvre or sold at auction. All symbols of the monarchy (the fleur de lis) was removed (i.e. chiseled off the walls) and in 1793 it was opened for tours, while other rooms were used as a small art museum, storage and an art school.

Several French leaders thought about living in Versailles but the cost to repair the palace was generally too great to actually accomplish the goal. The 1830 French Revolution brought about a different idea. Louis-Philippe began in 1833 to change Versailles into a French Museum. He created the Galerie des Batailles (Hall of Battles) which is an immense hallway my audio guide called the Hall of Princess. Each side of the wall is filled with enormous paintings showcasing the important battles of France. It’s like a walk through history occasionally peppered with busts and statues of important people. Since then various governments have used it as a base and the current French government meets there for special occasions. It’s seen lots of treaties signed, from the aforementioned one that granted the United States independence to the treaty of Versailles which ended World War I. Many of these are signed in the stunning hall of mirrors.

The hall of mirrors is filled with beautiful chandeliers with one wall of mirrors that reflect the light and show the gardens in their beautiful glory. But also, if you go, a thing I learned early on in France, is to always look up. The ceilings are absolutely intricate and stunning with paintings and sculptures on every available inch. I have never had such a strong desire to just lay on the floor for awhile. But I figured people would look at me weird or security would yell at me so I didn’t.

After wandering the immense palace I headed out to the garden. The gardens are immense. I went with a goal to make it down to the Apollo fountain and back, which seemed like an easy goal but the large groves of trees which had a spooky air to them in winter was very alluring.

The garden is open earlier than the palace, opening at 8am, so one could technically visit the garden first then go back to the palace which is probably a very smart idea. The first thing you run into when you enter the garden is Parterre d’Eau which are two reflective pools surrounded by little maze like grasses with various statues. Down a set of stairs was my favorite fountain.

It’s called the Latona Fountain. There is no audio guide for the gardens which means you don’t get any of the history or stories for what all of the main sights are. Actually make sure you drop off the audio guide before you leave the buildings because they set off an alarm if you leave the building with it.

I found the Latona Fountain funny because from my angle I could see a bunch of regular looking people with their arms outreached above them and then one super buff frog man also reaching above him. Since I didn’t know any history. I just couldn’t stop laughing at the one buff frog man in a relatively normal fountain. But it turns out it’s based off a story, the Metamorphosis of Ovid. (Not to be confused with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis) Apparently in this story the peasants of Lycia insulted Latona (Leto) and it angered Jupiter (Zeus) and so he turned them all into frogs. It seems it really depends on the angle in which you look at it. All six humanoid figures are suppose to be mid transformation into frogs. Just the one I saw was much more frog-like then the others and I found it delightful and confusing.

About halfway through the gardens is the Grand Canal. I didn’t make it that far, utterly exhausted by the point I made it to the Chariot of Apollo which is a large fountain right before the Grand Canal.

Among the tree groves there are various other fountains and spots to visit. However due to winter a lot of them were covered and locked up. Which was a pain since they were such a hike from one another.

I really think during other seasons the gardens must be absolutely stunning. But wear proper shoes and prepare for a lot of walking.

By the time I left the gardens I was in need of another break. Within the gardens themselves there are various places to take a break as well as places to buy a snack but I wanted, at that point, to be out of the gardens and on my way out. So I stopped only because it was on the way out, at Ore, which was having tea time.

Originally I thought stopping for high tea sounded wonderful. Though really all I wanted was water. I’d finished off my water bottle early on in the palace and hadn’t found anywhere to refill it or buy a new one.

The high tea being offered was called La Reine Marie’s Tea Time €35. It seemed like it included too much. And I wasn’t really willing to spend €35. I wanted something smaller and found Marie-Antoinette’s delight with a section called Versailles. I assumed, incorrectly that everything under the header for Versailles was a tea set. It was not. Each item below that header was €10. What I should’ve got was a sorbet or ice cream which was €7. But instead I decided to just pick something random and went with the Versailles delight and a green mint tea.

The Versailles delight was flaky with a thick sweet filling that had a slight nutty taste. I would’ve expected it to be mind blowing seeing as I had gotten flaky pastries about 30 minutes away for about €1.50.  But I also was still within the grounds of Versailles which allows people to hike up the prices, and it was a seemingly high class restaurant. (or do all restaurants in France feel high class????)

The pastry really was good. I just am super glad it fell apart so easily and that I was cutting myself small bite size pieces because there was what seemed like a fancy pastry weight in it. Also shortly after digging the pastry weight out and triple checking it wasn’t some fancy prize that I could eat without breaking my teeth I found a hair. Kinda ruined the lavish vibe the restaurant was giving off. That coupled with having to ask multiple times for water, the whole reason I went in in the first place.

There is a lot to Versailles, and I know I didn’t see all of it. I don’t think I even scratched half of the grounds. It’s busiest from April 1st through October 31st. During which time the palace itself is open from Tuesday through Sunday from 9am until 6:30pm and is closed on Mondays. During the off season from November 1st through March 31st the palace is open from 9am to 5:30pm.

The gardens are open every day from 8am to 8:30pm (busy season) and 8am until 6pm (slow/off season). The park, which I don’t think I saw opens at 7am during busy season and also closes at 8:30pm. During slow/off season the park has the same hours as the garden.

Another area I didn’t get to see was the Marie Antoinette Estate and  Palace of Trianon. These, unlike the gardens, but like the main building are closed on Mondays. They also don’t open until much later at noon for both busy and slow times of year. During the busy time they close at 6:30pm. During the slow time of year they close at 5:30pm.

Other things to note is that there is a high chance that they’ll stop letting you in up to an hour before they close so make sure you are there early. It’s so big that I would try to make sure I got there at least several hours before closing.

There are also various fountain shows and performances, depending on the time of year. None were happening though while I visited.

The Palace of Versailles/ Château de Versailles Because Big Bus didn't open until 9:30am but most museums opened at 9am I decided rather than start my trip off at the Louvre like I had planned I would go to the Palace of Versailles.

[that-shamrock-vibe]

Movie Review: Captain Marvel (Spoilers)

Spoiler Warning: I am posting this review the weekend following the movie’s release in the U.K, so if you have not yet seen the movie then go and see it and then read on.

Stan Lee:

Before going into the actual characters in the movie, I want to briefly talk about Stan Lee and his continuing posthumous tributes from the studio that he built from the ground up. After Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, I did not feel they could top what they did with his cameo in that store selling the Spidey suit to Miles Morales. But here, not only did the many cameos of Stan become the images you see in the Marvel Studios logo with a touching add-on saying “Thank You Stan” which had my audience whooping and applauding but also Stan himself appears on the train scene where Carol is searching for a Skrull and the two simply smile at each other, very touching and very well done.

Characters:

Alright so as per usual in my character analyses, I will be talking about these characters in order of my favourites and...I am quite surprised about the order of my favourites from going into this movie to coming out of the movie.

Nick Fury:

By far and away, Nicholas Joseph Fury, or just Fury, is by far and away the best character in this movie. I love Samuel L. Jackson and he has always been a fantastic supporting and lead actor in whatever movie he is in. Yes he is a supporting character here to Captain Marvel but he supports her so well and does so without pulling focus away from the fact it is Brie Larson’s movie.

The movie does drag a lot towards the start with more exposition than action but it isn’t neccersarily descriptive exposition and is instead “Here’s this character (Carol Danvers) and here’s this character (Yon-Rogg) and now they’re with these characters (Starforce)”. All of that changes when Carol comes to Earth and first interacts with Fury.

As I said in my non-spoiler review, the de-aging technology is in full effect with Jackson and it really pays off because not only do you believe you are looking at a young Fury but also it’s the thrill of finding out just how Fury lost his eye.

I loved the dynamic between the two characters, more-so than I feel any other partnership Fury has been with. I just enjoyed that aliens were still an unknown variable to SHIELD and so Fury was pretty much learning from scratch about how aliens work. From the interaction in the diner about the difference between Kree and Skrulls to the turbulence gag about the reconfigured aircraft towards the end of the movie.

I also found it fun that this wasn’t Director Fury and was simply Agent Fury...to the point where Coulson called him “Mr. Fury”. Yet he still commanded the respect and strategic planning he has in the present day. However, he is shown to make mistakes at the level of agent he is at particularly when he called in Ben Mendelsohn’s human character Keller who at this point in time is the Director of SHIELD and therefore Fury’s boss without realizing that it was in fact Talos in disguise. To be fair I don’t see how Carol can blame him for that as he’s never met a Skrull before this day but I did like it when she confiscated his pager.

Some critics are saying it’s Fury’s interactions with Goose that sold Goose’s performance and in some respect I do see the argument for that, however, I believe Fury’s interactions are simply the reactions to what the cat does. Both in her cuteness but also in what she does and what is revealed from her.

I thought the fact it was Goose who made Fury lose an eye to be absolutely fantastic. Yes, Fury has mentioned before that the last time he trusted someone is when he lost the eye and I do not feel previous stories of the eye loss add up here but I do believe Fury is the type of character to try and save face rather than the embarrassment that a space kitty with infected claws is the reason. It was great

I felt the fact that the movie’s events are what led Fury to create and push forward the Avengers Initiative, to the point where Carol’s nickname of Avenger is what gave him the idea for the name, is something I don’t agree with. Firstly, chronologically Captain America is still the first Avenger so anyone saying this movie creates continuity issues there is wrong, but the fact that the title Avenger...which up to 10 people have shared in present day...comes from a single person rather than just a thought is slightly inconsiderate of the individual team members and instead puts Carol on a pedastool with Fury recruiting these other members to try and reach her power level.

Goose:

Speaking of the space kitty, it is confirmed that Goose is in fact a Flerkin which is from the comics so is authentic. I was happy that being an alien kitty was not so much important to the movie but not just a throwaway aspect and was somewhat a plotpoint to the movie.

I don’t believe Goose was ever Carol’s pet as promoted but instead went from being Mar-Vell’s to Nick Fury’s. Although I am curious to know what happened to Goose from this movie to present day but I do hope Fury actually kept Goose as a pet and not just until she coughed up the Tesseract.

Oh yeah, the Tesseract is surprisingly in this movie and has multiple reasons to be, but I do believe it’s last use in this movie is to give Goose a home at the end of the movie.

The reveal of Goose’s Flerkin tentacles were fantastic. The first time when Goose ate the Tesseract was definitely a shock but the second time when Goose either ate the Kree or simply threw them around...Fury’s reaction said it all and the roar of laughter in the cinema added to the brilliance of it.

Also on a side-note, when the Kree captured the heroes and muzzled Goose in that cute little cat muzzle was both adorable and tragic.

Carol Danvers:

Brie Larson is a very polarizing actress for me in this role. On the one hand, I don’t think she’s a comedic actress and for that matter that Carol Danvers is a comedic character. But on the other hand, this was the first time I was willing an actress to have her moment in this movie where she finally clicked with the audience because, as an Oscar-winning actress, I know she has it in her.

That moment for me came when she found out about her connection with Wendy Lawson and started to regain her identity, because until that point I thought she was slightly robotic and a little bit like Evangeline Lilly as Hope in Ant-Man and the Wasp in that she was being the angry soccer-mom who was ruining Fury’s fun.

That being said, I did enjoy this movie’s take on a fish out of water story. The MCU has of course done this before for male characters like Thor and Cap technically, but to take the journey as a supposed alien with 6 years of military training and therefore knowing how to gather her bearings and track what she needs was very good to see and moved the story along quickly.

Also the fact she pretty much arrived on Earth and the first thing she does is steal a motorbike and clothes because she knows how to blend in is both military survival and reconnaissance 101. By the way side-note, that jerk biker who was leching on Carol is in fact Rob Kazinsky aka Sean Slater from EastEnders, random I know but I was very surprised to learn that.

That’s kind of where my admiration for her character went away though, yes she was funny with her budding friendship with Nick Fury but...not only is she ridiculously overpowered, but she seems to know what she wants and it’s almost as if the movie just gives it to her. There’s no trial and error as we are led to believe in the trailers with that theme of “Getting knocked down but getting back up”, she does do this particularly at the start in her training session with Yon-Rogg but there’s then no learning curve and simply she doesn’t know something and then all of a sudden she can do it.

I didn’t understand her “Kree name” Vers, I get it was taken from the broken dog tag piece she had with her name on it but it really got annoying after a while because I know her as Carol or Danvers or Captain Marvel or Ms. Marvel, I do not know her as Vers. It may have been a ploy by the Kree to say “You’ve always been Kree, this is your Kree name” but come on you have names like Minn-Erva, Yon-Rogg and Mar-Vell but then you have Vers? Not even Dann-Vers?

I did like the reason why she changed the colour of her suit. Yes seagreen is Kree colours and the movie definitely didn’t make the suits look as bad as the set photos lead to believe but when Monica helps her find a new colour theme and she goes through several different options, including Mar-Vell’s colours from the comics, it was a nice sentiment to choose the same colours as Monica’s top so they could basically be on the same team.

The fact her powers, it’s hard to say her Kree side because she was human and then enhanced by the ship core, but the fact these powers came from the Tesseract is something 1) Die-hard fans kind of guessed but I feel before Infinity War fans guessed she’d be powered by the Soul Stone rather than the Space Stone and 2) Was a good shocker moment for the movie because it kind of explains how the Tesseract came to be in SHIELD’s possession because I always thought Steve Rogers had it with him when he was saved from the ocean in present day but in actuality it disappeared when Red Skull did and so must have somehow come into Mar-Vell’s possession.

It does lead to an interesting match-up in Endgame as Carol is now the only living hero with any sort of Infinity Stone enhancement that can combat Thanos but I will be interested to know if the gauntlet is still working will he be able to somehow control Captain Marvel?

I love my special effects and I did think her Binary mode power-set was brilliant to behold however as has been said by numerous people I do think she is overpowered and particularly when it comes to the rest of the Avengers. I don’t see how she can be part of the same team and not simply defeat foes single-handed. Particularly if they reshape the team after Endgame so the roster consists of her, Black Panther, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man and Wasp. I mean yes, Doctor Strange may also hold his own with her but the rest are pretty much enhanced by technology.

I didn’t like the end battle, I thought it wasn’t as epic and grand as it should have been and the fact 1) Captain Marvel was pretty much all the time a CGI construct took me out of the movie and the fact that also 2) She pretty much whooped at the fact she took on missiles was a little bit of a jerk move.

I will also say that in the context of this movie I do understand the origin of the character they’ve told, however I really wish they had showed somewhere in her history that she had been Ms. Marvel, Binary is someone she can easily become as her full powers at the end of this movie have been dubbed her “Binary Mode”, but without being Ms. Marvel it does close a lot of doors for certain stories like, for example, Rogue getting her powers.

Yes they can still do the origin story where Rogue absorbs Captain Marvel’s powers, but if Carol has been off-world since 1995 and only comes back in Endgame, Rogue would have to discover her powers in a present day movie.

I did appreciate the fact that Carol showed a deep appreciation for both her female and male superiors, despite having a type of banter-style relationship with Yon-Rogg he was still her superior and she blindly listened to his instruction until she learned the truth. Then as for her admiration for Wendy Lawson, I mean the Supreme Intelligence takes on the appearance of the person you admire most and it chose her so it speaks for itself.

I will talk about Captain Marvel’s future when I talk about the end-credits scenes but I am both excited and hesitant for her future in the MCU.

Yon-Rogg:

Jude Law;s character has been the subject of much debate since he was announced to be in the movie. At first fans speculated he would be Mar-Vell aka the original Captain Marvel, but then when his name was revealed as Yon-Rogg, despite being a character from the comics, fans thought it may be a red herring for some reason. The fact he was Yon-Rogg and the changes they made to Mar-Vell I think is slightly a missed opportunity for the actor but also this is one of the only occasions where I have seen Jude Law portray a villain.

In terms of his villainy, I thought Jude Law did rather well. He wasn’t a formidable opponent and instead just was the hero’s former mentor turned enemy. He was an MCU standard villain and in terms of good guy turned bad, he wasn’t really ever established as a good guy per say but I’d say he’s on the same level as John Garrett from Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 1 just with a better motivation.

I don’t know much about Yon-Rogg as a character, I know he was Mar-Vell’s commanding officer but when Mar-Vell turned against the Kree he became obviously his enemy. Basically Yon-Rogg’s story here is the same as it was in the comics just with Carol Danvers rather than Mar-Vell, also Mar-Vell was born Kree whereas Carol became enhanced as Kree.

There’s not really a lot to say more about his performance or character here, I don’t know what would have become of him when Captain Marvel took him back to Hala because the Supreme Intelligence is also an enemy but as to whether or not he could come back I would say he could in a future Captain Marvel sequel but we shall see.

Starforce:

Starforce in this movie were about as well developed as STRIKE from Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Both teams were military/law enforcement and both included kind of focussed on secondary characters as well as the main heroes. In this case those secondary characters as Yon-Rogg and Minn-Erva. I mean Korath the Pursuer from Guardians of the Galaxy is also on the team but he is really just there as an Easter-Egg and it isn’t at all established how he ends up working directly for Ronan away from Starforce, unless the Kree soldiers are Starforce.

As for Minn-Eeva, I love Gemma Chan, I think she is a great actress and really lends herself to this type of authoritative role. I know Doctor Minerva in the comics is an enemy of Captain Marvel who sought out Mar-Vell on Earth to mate with him to further the Kree genetic line but I do not see that happening here for numerous reasons, the main of which is that Minn-Erva apparently dies at the end of this movie and unless she has somehow pulled a Nebula I don’t see her coming back.

Talos:

Talos is a conflicting character for me because while I do believe this is the best performance I have seen of Ben Mendelsohn’s I don’t know how to react to the fact that Talos and his Skrull followers are good guys.

I did like the fact he was still shown as an enemy of the Kree, which at the time included Carol, but then when she learned the truth he became quite the reliable ally.

I loved his humour particularly when they were examining Carol’s mind and she had his Kree scientist guy tap her head again like he was adjusting a TV signal, the 90s jokes in this were fantastic. Also when Fury was worried about the turbulance and Talos was the only one to be honest with him about it, this never felt like it was the men supporting the women and simply just bouncing off them well.

Skrulls:

I think the fact Talos has a family, particularly a daughter, raises hope for the future of the Skrulls in the MCU in regards to being a threat and specifically adapting Secret Invasion. In the comics, it’s a female Skrull who leads the way as she adopts the identity of Spider-Woman so it could easily be adapted in the MCU that the Skrull Queen is in fact Talos’ daughter who saw the threat in the world and, despite her parents preaching peace, wants vengeance.

I want the Skrulls to be formidable but to my imagination the Skrulls have usually been footsoldiers or grunts for bigger threats rather than being the big bads unless the Kree have been involved or Secret Invasion is the story.

I still really enjoyed the Skrulls when they were shapeshifting here and particularly the now infamous old lady on the train scene, but come on...no disrespect to the old lady but as soon as she hit the floor you could tell it was a stunt double.

Mar-Vell:

Okay so this was my biggest problem with the movie, some people will say making Mar-Vell a woman is a good and interesting thing for MCU...I say that Mar-Vell in the comics is an underrated superhero and someone whose origins I was hoping to see explored in the MCU. Not only is Mar-Vell a lover of Carol Danvers and how she chose her superhero names in the comics but also he is the father of Young Avengers member Hulkling when he had a forbidden affair with a Skrull princess...again something that could have been explored in a Mar-Vell movie.

Also, like Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne, Mar-Vell could have easily been introduced either in Phase 1 or 2 as a superhero, which would have made only introducing Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel at the end of Phase 3 more organic as she would have been introduced as Carol Danvers in that movie.

Unfortunately though, this is what we have. Now to be fair, Annette Benning was really good in this role. She did fill that Glenn Close, Sylvester Stallone, Beneicio Del Toro role of not being the main villain but also being the big name on the cast list.

As Mar-Vell, I do like the fact they did simply “genderflip” the character by making the alias Wendy Lawson as opposed to the comics-accurate Walter Lawson. As I said with Carol, I did also like how they established her admiration for Mar-Vell before of course realizing who she actually was. I would have loved to have seen her in her orbiting laboratory or obtaining the Tesseract but there was so much in this movie I guess they couldn’t fit it in.

I do however think, as Feige knows how to play the long game with these movies, that if they had introduced the idea of this version of Mar-Vell way back when in a Captain America: The First Avenger post-credits scene, maybe with the Tesseract appearing on a beach or something and Mar-Vell obtaining it, then it would have been more organic than just having her have it here.

Also in regards to Mar-Vell being the personification of Carol’s version of the Supreme Intelligence was rather interesting. Particularly when you consider that when she knew Mar-Vell she had brown hair but the Supreme Intelligence construct quite clearly has grey/white hair.

I did enjoy her dimension as this almost virtual reality setting and the fact she could manipulate quite literally everything was rather cool.

I wish they didn’t destroy her so easily for the pure and simple reason of I feel she has a lot more to give going forward. In the comics she is part of the Intergalactic Council which also features Lilandra of the Shi’ar which may have been a good way to introduce them outside of the Dark Phoenix Saga.

Maria Rambeau:

I wasn’t massively a fan of Maria despite how much she had been hyped up in the promos, I did feel she was more of a gateway for her daughter who will become Photon later in her life.

I did like the actress Lashauna Lynch in the role. I thought she fit the bill of being a sassy, strong-willed single mother and I believed the friendship between Maria and Carol despite the fact we only really see that one scene in flashbacks and then after that it’s Maria coming to terms with how Carol has changed after her Kree enhancement.

I did also rather appreciate the fact we have not yet seen this type of family unit in the MCU before. We had Carol being bullied and neglected by her own family so she was I think taken in by the Rambeaus and she became almost a second mother to Monica as she helped Maria raise her. It did lead to my fiancé constantly saying that Carol and Maria are lesbians and to be fair unless you count the fact that Maria needed a man to create Monica there is no mention of either lady have a male love interest in this movie, but I just love that dynamic of breaking the mold of the typical “Nuclear Family”. Not only does is pave the way for the Fantastic 4 who are one of the most unconventional families in comics, but also it’s another example of female empowerment in not needing a man to raise a child.

As for Monica, I really liked this young actress, Akira Akbar. I liked the fact they had sisters portraying the two different ages because it adds realism to the character. I thought the relationship she had with both her mother and Carol was really well established and, as mentioned, her helping Carol choose her new colours was a rather sweet moment.

I do find it interesting that in Endgame we are going to the future and having an aged-up Cassie Lang as Stature or maybe Stinger depending on where they want to go with the character. So it stands to reason that while Monica is 11 in 1995, she’ll be mid-30s in this future version so could easily been shown as Photon and team-up with Captain Marvel. They made need characters to be in space and the only ones who can possibly survive that unaided are Captain Marvel and Photon.

Agent Coulson:

Oh how far Clark Gregg has fallen, from the comedic string tying all of Phase 1 together to the slapstick leading his own show. I do think there was something missing from his performance here because this is just over 10 years before the events of Iron Man and so either he hasn’t found his comedic niche yet or the actor has just lost what made Coulson such a fan favourite in the first place, either way overall he was disappointing.

Having said that he did have two great moments. The first was the reveal that the Coulson in the car with Fury was in fact a Skrull as the real Coulson was still waiting where they drove off from, that was really cool but I did kind of guess it in the acting because Skrull Coulson felt slightly too rigid. But the second part was right at the end when Fury had lost his eye and Coulson brought that box of fake eyes for him to choose from. Just that one line of “Don’t take too long, you have a big decision to make” was very Coulson and I appreciated he at least ended on a good note.

Endgame:

Alright so the mid-credits scene here is another scene taken from possibly the end of the first act in Avengers: Endgame, think the Ant-Man scene which showed a clip from Captain America: Civil War with Cap and Falcon talking about Bucky. It focuses on Cap, Bruce. Natasha and Rhodey in the Avengers Compound and the fact they have somehow obtained Fury’s pager which has apparently stopped beeping.

I can’t remember if they get it beeping again before the reveal but after Natasha says “I want to know who’s on the other end of that call”, she turns to find Captain Marvel standing there looking slightly flustered and simply asking “Where’s Fury?”.

I have to say, Brie Larson as the character was growing throughout this movie, here she reached her stride in that 10 second shot of her. Seeing Captain Marvel with the Avengers for a start was brilliant but also her hair went from the choppy bob to a more battle-beaten version of Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Obviously this is supposed to be over 20 years in time so while she may not age physically thanks to her Kree enhancement, she does of course change.

Also it is interesting to note that both Natasha and Clint aka Hawkeye soon to be Ronin share the same thought pattern when it comes to mysterious communication devices. In the first Avengers movie when Hawkeye and Fury are talking about the Tesseract acting like a portal, Hawkeye questions where this portal is leading to and here Natasha pretty much questions the same thing. I don’t know if that’s their SHIELD training or just how they both think but it was a nice call-back for me.

It is a scene directly taken from the movie but it is the right scene because it teased so much and just asked so many more questions than I had before. I cannot wait until the end of April.

Overall I rate the movie a solid 7/10, it was by no means a perfect movie as if you want to find problems you will find them easily. Maybe because this is now the 11th year and that the MCU has become so formulaic that it is just so easy to find flaws now but still, the comedy was great, the acting was great. I did enjoy the story, I enjoyed the growth of Brie Larson throughout the movie and I look forward to seeing what happens to these characters next.

So that’s my review of Captain Marvel, what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Marvel Movie Reviews as well as other Movie Reviews and posts.

[thepuckishrogue]

Getting to know you, getting to know a lil’ bit about you~

Tagged by my homegirl @aspiratinganxiety​ Wanted to get this done sooner, but I had some issues with my internet, but that’s neither here nor there I suppose... Anyways! Let’s get into it, shall we?

Star sign: Taurus [How sad is it that I cannot type that w/o thinking of Bring It On? Like I know it’s not the same, but still lmao...]

Put your playlist on shuffle and list the first four songs that pop up:

[Well I’m listening to my electro-swing playlist on YT so....]

Parov Stelar—“Nobody's Fool” (feat. Cleo Panther) The Speakeasy Three—”When I Get Low, I Get High” The Swingrowers—”That’s Right!” 11 Acorn Lane—”Perfect”

Grab the nearest book to you and turn to page 23, what line is 17? [Uhh, this is awkward as I’m sitting next to a bookself lmfao; guess I’ll just close my eyes a pick at random???]

“For all of these reasons, the proposed special-operations team, composed of U.S., U.K, and selected NATO personnel, with full support from national-intelligence services, coordinated at site....“

Ever had a poem written about you? 

A few actually, for various reasons. It was a common practice at damn near every school I went to for them to make us pick a random classmate’s name and write a short poem for them. Also both my mom and one of my aunts like to write as well (they’re actually the reason I write now) and they’ve written cute little poems about me for my birthdays. One of the best ones is this poem/song that an old friend wrote for me our senior year; it’s literally just my name said over and over again to the tune of the Love Boat theme song. Yes, I know that doesn’t really count as a poem, but you tell him that lmao...

 When was the last time you played the air guitar? 

Like a day ago. I’m so cool~

One sound you hate and one you love: 

Hate: Any static-y type sound. Love: Rain. Cliche I know, but I love it so damn much. I almost always have a rain video up on YT.

Do you believe in ghosts? 

*nods frantically*

Do you believe in aliens? 

*nodding intensifies*

Do you drive and if so have you gotten in a crash? 

I do, and I haven’t thank god.

Do you like the smell of gasoline? 

I can take it or leave it. Honestly I gives me a headache if I’m exposed to it for longer than a few minutes.

Last movie you’ve seen?

My Big Fat Greek Wedding. One of my top 5 feel-good movies.

Worst injury you’ve ever had? 

I ripped my knuckle off of my pinky finger when I was in the first or third grade (look that was like 20 years ago my dudes, so I really don’t remember which it was lmao)

Do you have any obsessions rn? 

RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2. I have been ruined by those goddamn beautiful ass lookin’, ring-dang-doin’, yeehaw talkin’, no plan havin’, house buildin’ cowboahs and I. Regret. NOTHING. (on that note, expect fics soon 👀👀👀)

Do you hold grudges? 

Not so much the older I get. Like people just aren’t worth you peace of mind, ya know? However, I’m big on ‘forgive, but don’t forget’. People can change, but often times they don’t, so... A little caution doesn’t hurt. Idk if that’s the same as holding grudges, but I don’t think it is. There’s no ill will behind it, I’m just looking out for me...

In a relationship? 

I’m totally the wife Charles finds in Canada. Oh, no, not at all...

Tagging: If you’ve been following me for any amount of time you know I don’t like bothering people so no tags, but feel free to do this if ya want! And do tag me as well; I’m always down for learning more about you lovely people...

[paleorecipecookbook]

RHR: The Truth about Saturated Fat, with Zoё Harcombe

In this episode, we discuss:

Why you need to eat fat

Why the Paleo diet template makes sense

Where these misguided ideas about fat came from

The Seven Countries Study

Zoё Harcombe’s research on fat

Why you should be skeptical of some news headlines

Why dietary guidelines don’t work

The epidemiological evidence

Conclusions about saturated fat

Show notes:

The Obesity Epidemic: What Caused It? How Can We Stop It?, by Zoё Harcombe

“Evidence from Randomised Controlled Trials Did Not Support the Introduction of Dietary Fat Guidelines in 1977 and 1983: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” by Zoё Harcombe

“The Nitrate and Nitrite Myth: Another Reason Not to Fear Bacon,” by Chris Kresser

USDA Food Composition Databases

“Re-evaluation of the Traditional Diet-Heart Hypothesis: Analysis of Recovered Data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–73),” by Christopher Ramsden

“The Challenge of Reforming Nutritional Epidemiologic Research,” by John Ioannidis

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2pzvMar" title="RHR: The Truth about Saturated Fat, with Zoё Harcombe" artist="Chris Kresser" ]

Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. For the past 50 years we’ve been told that eating meat, saturated fat, and cholesterol is unhealthy. Recently, a growing number of people are turning to a vegetarian or vegan diet with the goal of improving their health.

But is it really true that meat and fat are bad for us? And are vegetarian and vegan diets a good choice for optimizing health and extending lifespan? If not, what is the optimal human diet? Join me on the Joe Rogan Experience on Thursday, September 27th, as I debate these questions with vegan doctor Joel Kahn. You can tune in live at 12 noon Pacific Time at JoeRogan.live. That’s J-o-e-r-o-g-a-n.live, or you can catch the recording at podcasts.joerogan.net, on YouTube, or in iTunes or Stitcher.

If you’d like to receive updates about the debate, including links to the recording and new articles and information I’ve prepared on this topic, go to Kresser.co/Rogan. That’s Kresser.co/Rogan and put your email in the box.

Okay, now onto the show.

Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. This week I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Zoë Harcombe as the guest on the podcast.

Dr. Harcombe is a Cambridge University graduate with a BA and MA in economics and math. Zoë enjoyed a successful career in blue-chip organizations before leaving corporate life in 2008 to pursue her passion. Her early career involved international roles and management consultancy, manufacturing, and marketing in global organizations from FMCG to telecoms before specializing in personnel and organization. At the peak of her career, Zoë was vice president for human resources for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Having written three books between 2004 and 2007 while being head of people, Zoë left employment to research obesity full time. This culminated in the publication in 2010 of The Obesity Epidemic: What Caused It? How Can We Stop It?

Zoë returned to full-time education in 2012 to complete a PhD in public health nutrition, which was awarded in March 2016. Her PhD thesis was entitled “An Examination of the Randomised Controlled Trial and Epidemiological Evidence for the Introduction of Dietary Fat Recommendations in 1977 and 1983: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” A number of peer-reviewed articles have emanated from this work, and the first was the 64th most impactful paper in any discipline in the year 2015. Zoë lives with her husband and rescue animals in the Welsh countryside surrounded by food, a.k.a. sheep, hens, and cows.

Now I'm really excited to talk with Zoë because she recently published a paper critiquing the U.S. dietary guidelines and the U.K. dietary guidelines for the lack of evidence behind their recommendation against eating saturated fat or limiting it to less than 10 percent of calories in the diet. And she, as I just suggested with her bio, has probably spent more time looking at this than anybody else. She wrote her PhD thesis, as the title suggests, on the evidence, or lack of evidence, rather, behind the dietary guidelines around total fat and saturated fat. And she went all the way back to the late 70s and early 80s to look at the studies that were used to create the original dietary guidelines. And then the second half of her paper looked at all of the research that has been published since then through 2016.

And as we’ll discuss in the show, the conclusion is that the dietary guidelines never really had any meaningful evidence behind them to justify restricting saturated fat back in the late 70s and the early 80s. And the same is true today in 2018. So I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did, and let's dive in.

Chris Kresser:  Zoë, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. We were just chatting before the show, and I can't believe we haven't connected by now. We walk in many of the same circles, and I’ve followed your work for some time. So I'm really, really grateful that you’re able to join us.

Zoë Harcombe:  Oh, I thank you so much for having me. I’ve just followed you for so long and your “nitrates in bacon” is my just absolute go-to blog. Stop, people, worrying about bacon.

Chris Kresser:  All right. Well, we’re going to talk a lot more about that and there’s so many things we could talk about today. But the main reason that I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about your recent paper critiquing the dietary guidelines both in the U.S. and in the U.K. related to total fat and particularly saturated fat. And everyone who’s listening to this knows that for many, many years, really, I guess about 40 years now, right? It goes back to about 40, 41 years now, we've been told that fat in general, although that's maybe slightly changing in the public perception recently and even in some of the dietary guidelines that fat in general is bad, and particularly saturated fat is terrible.

But as we’re going to discuss in the show, your research has shown that that's maybe not what the evidence actually says. So before we dive into that, why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about your background and how you came to this work.

Zoë Harcombe:  Okay, I’ll do a really quick one because I know you’re not sort of a three-hour podcast man. So I’ll give you a composite history. First fascination came when I was studying at Cambridge University in the late 80s, early 90s and started seeing obesity growing around me. And it was just a fascination to me because it's the last thing that people want to be. People do not want to be overweight, let alone obese, and it was just starting to explode and had already exploded in the U.S. And I was just fascinated.

So I wanted to understand, why do we have an obesity epidemic? When you start looking at why, you go back to looking at when, and you can't help but see, particularly on the U.S. graph, that it just takes off like an airplane at about 1976 to 1980, that pivot point in the NHANES data. And of course, therefore, you go back to look at that period of time. Did anything particularly happen? Did we suddenly start eating 10,000 calories a day and sitting around on our backsides? Well, actually, no we didn't.

Did you grow up hearing that saturated fat would give you a heart attack? You’re not alone. Check out this episode of RHR for an in-depth look at the science surrounding saturated fat with researcher and author Zoё Harcombe. 

And the UK data was particularly interesting. We seem to be eating fewer calories nowadays than we did back in the 1970s, when we were much slimmer. Barely any obesity in the UK by about 1972. And you then start looking at an event called the dietary guidelines, which came in with the Senator McGovern committee in 1977, and of course these were then embedded in the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1980 and then every five years since. And there is debate.

There are people who will say the introduction of the dietary guidelines has nothing to do with the rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes and more beta conditions related to diet and lifestyle. But it at least needs to be looked at. I mean, I say it coincided with the epidemics in obesity and diabetes, and we need to therefore explore was that a coincidence or was it a factor that was material in the changes in our health. And I am one of the people who thinks it is material and that our shift to basing our meals on starchy foods, grains, fruits, vegetables, largely carbohydrates, being encouraged to consume as high as 60 percent of our diet in the form of carbohydrate, the one macronutrient we don’t actually need, I do think it has made a difference. And I’m not alone in that view.

And then of course you look at guidelines and say, well, what were they about? And of course, they were about restricting total fat to no more than 30 percent of calories and saturated fat to no more than 10 percent. And because they were only three things that we ate and because protein is in everything other than sucrose and oil, so it tends to be fairly constant in any natural diet, and the peer study showed this beautifully, nice evidence for this, protein tends to stay constant around 15 percent. So as soon as you set the fat guideline, you’ve automatically set a carbohydrate intake minimum of 55 percent. And that’s what we did.

So I wanted to understand why did we set that total fat guideline. If that was the thing that started everything, why did we do that? And did we get it right or did we get it wrong?

Chris Kresser:  So you have a BA and an MA from Cambridge in economics and math, and then in 2016 you got a PhD in public health nutrition. And what I find really fascinating is what you … tell us a little bit about your PhD thesis.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, so the PhD thesis was using the relatively modern techniques, and they have been around since the 1970s, but we’re really using them a lot now. And that’s the systematic review and meta-analysis. And when we pulled together evidence from randomized controlled trials, ideally, if not from cohort studies, it’s considered to be the pinnacle of the evidence that we could examine. So I approached looking at the dietary fat guidelines in four ways. And one was to say, what was the RCT evidence at the time available to the committee? Had they looked at it back in …

Chris Kresser:  That’s “randomized controlled trials,” for those who are not familiar.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yes. Yeah, so the randomized controlled trial evidence available to the US committee in 1977, and then the UK committee deliberated in 1983, and that allowed one more study available to the UK committee that wasn't available to the US committee, and that was the Woodhill Sydney Diet Heart Study. And also to look at the epidemiological evidence available, had the committee chosen to look it at the time the guidelines were set? So that was the first two papers, the first half of the PhD. And then the second half was to bring it up to date and to say if the committees were deliberating again today and they had all the RCT, randomized controlled trial, evidence available and all the epidemiological evidence available we have today, what would the conclusions be, looking at it in an up-to-date scenario. And that was the four parts.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so you’ve spent, how many years did it take for you to get your PhD?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, three and a half. I did it full time. I just decided to stop everything else I was doing and do it full time. And as anyone who’s ever done one meta-analysis knows, to try and do four …

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s a lot of work. But the upshot here is that you have a PhD in public health nutrition. You spent the better part of four years examining the evidence base for the last 40 years connecting fat and saturated fat to health and disease. And this is exactly why I wanted to have you on the show to talk about this topic because it's one thing if you have a kind of armchair critic who's cherry picking one or two studies to make their point, which often happens on the internet, right?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yes.

Chris Kresser:  It's another thing to have someone who's trained at the level that you've been trained at who spent four years objectively looking at this evidence and then publishing on it and showing where it doesn’t add up. So let's dive into that now.

I want to start by talking about some basics because I think they’re really important. I love how you did this in your recent dietary guidelines paper. Just a few facts about fat that maybe not everyone is aware of or has thought about much.

Zoë Harcombe:  Okay, so I shared these in conference presentations and I was really pleased that when I did this, there’s peer-reviewed study. They didn’t get edited out because I thought they might be a bit chatty, if you know what I mean, for a peer-reviewed paper.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  But I actually had a couple of nice comments in the margin of people saying, “Oh, good point, I hadn’t thought about that.”

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I had the same reaction.

Why You Need to Eat Fat

Zoë Harcombe:  Oh, thank you. So the most important one is that we must consume fat. Human beings must consume fat. We die without consuming dietary fat. We must consume essential fatty acids, that’s why they’re called essential.

“Essential” in nutrition means something that we must consume, not just something that the body needs. And of course we have the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, and they come in foods with fat. And they need fat to be absorbed. So that’s pretty vital. When people demonize fat to the extent that they do, they always give the impression that we could get away without eating this stuff. And we couldn’t. I don’t know how quickly we’d die, but we would. So we need it.

Number two, again, that people seem to realize particularly when they demonize saturated fat is that every single food that contains fat, and it’s actually quite difficult to find a food that doesn't contain fat, sucrose doesn’t. But not much else doesn’t. So every food that contains fat contains all three fats. That’s:

Saturated fat

Monounsaturated fat

Polyunsaturated fat

And only the proportions vary. So again, people talk as if we can avoid saturated fat and only eat unsaturated fat, and that is completely impossible unless you're in a lab and you’re trying to create single fats. It is impossible if you’re going to eat food, which I recommend that all people do.

And then the other interesting factoid, I love playing around on the USDA all foods database and just looking at things that add up and things that don’t add up. And it was a real surprise to me when I first started looking at foods that when it comes to food groups, there is only one food group that has more saturated than unsaturated fat, and that is dairy products. So your struggle to find a meat, and I have not yet found one, that has more saturated than unsaturated fat, typically the main fat in meat is monounsaturated fat. And that goes for lamb or steak or chicken.

Chris Kresser:  Even pork.

Zoë Harcombe:  Absolutely. And therefore lard, which I just love, because people just think lard is pure disgusting.

Chris Kresser:  Saturated fat, yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  Saturated fat.

Chris Kresser:  If you were to put lard or coconut oil together, people would say lard would be the unhealthy choice from a saturated fat perspective. But of course, coconut oil is 97 percent saturated, I think.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yes.

Chris Kresser:  Something like that.

Zoë Harcombe:  And lard is 39 percent.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Zoë Harcombe:  So nowhere near as bad. And that’s not saying that saturated fat is worse than unsaturated fat. It’s just stating a nutritional fact. The only food group that has more is dairy products. And then of course you’re getting to, “Well, are dairy products bad for us?” And it’s really difficult to think that they are when you look at the nutritional profile of dairy products and the bone nutrients calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D. Look at any profile of any dairy product and you can’t help but think …

Chris Kresser:  And the evidence.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yes.

Chris Kresser:  I mean there’s a ton of evidence suggesting that full-fat, but not nonfat or low-fat dairy are beneficial for both cardiovascular and metabolic health. And there was actually a new study recently published, I’m not sure if you saw it. I am less persuaded by it. Or you mentioned it, the PURE Study.

Zoë Harcombe:  Oh, yes.

Chris Kresser:  Because it has within-country or between-country comparisons, which I think we’ll be talking about later, is problematic. That was an issue with the Seven Countries Study. But it does align with many of the other studies that have been done on this topic previously, showing that when people eat more full-fat dairy, that's associated with lower body weight, with lower blood sugar and better glycemic control, and with lower risk of heart disease based on cardiovascular markers. And that's actually the reason that the full-fat dairy works better than the low-fat or the nonfat dairy in that regard because some of the nutrients that are thought to be beneficial for cardiovascular and metabolic health are in the fat.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yes, amazing.

Chris Kresser:  So if you take out the fat, you take out the benefit.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  Absolutely, I’m a huge fan of dairy, personally.

Chris Kresser:  Me too. I mean, of course if someone is lactose intolerant or they’re intolerant of the proteins, it needs to be avoided. But for people who are not, what I always say is at least the evidence that we have suggests that it's healthy when it's well tolerated by the individual.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yes.

Why the Paleo Diet Template Makes Sense

Chris Kresser:  So given this, given that fat is essential, that all foods contain all fats and that saturated fat is not even the highest percentage of fat in any food except for dairy, this leads us to some pretty interesting conclusions. You mentioned in your paper, which I loved, and I loved that they kept it in here too, it’s illogical that the same natural food would be both helpful and harmful. Like you can't eat a steak and eat it so that you're only eating the unsaturated fats and not the saturated fats.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, yeah. There’s no other way of putting that. It just, it doesn’t make sense. Whether your belief system is in God or nature, food is provided around us on this planet, and it makes no sense that in that same food that we need to thrive and survive, something has been put that is trying to kill us at the same time as all the things being there that are trying to save us and enable us to live. And we’ve evolved of course over—I’m reading Sapiens at the moment, so there’s an argument over our heritage—but, I mean, we’ve certainly been around potentially since Australopithecus, Lucy, two-and-a-half, maybe three-and-a-half million years ago. And we’ve done pretty well eating anything we can forage or hunt around us.

Chris Kresser:  That’s right.

Zoë Harcombe:  The idea that they came up with in the last 40 years that this stuff is trying to kill us, it’s just so stupid.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t add up at all.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t add up. So another example you used which I love because it really turns nutrition-dominant paradigm ideas on their head is the olive oil versus pork chop example. Tell us about that.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah. So I have a little postcard that I leave on the chairs at conferences, as well, so there’ll be many around the world. And I put up a picture of a sirloin steak, mackerel, olive oil, and mention the pork chop. And a couple of interesting, fun factoids. One is that the mackerel has twice the total fat and one-and-a-half times the saturated fat as the sirloin steak, which isn’t a problem because both of them are great foods. But of course we’re told not to have red meat and we’re told not to have oily fish. So that’s illogical.

And then olive oil has 14 percent saturated fat versus a typical pork chop might be only sort of one to two grams, but then people say, “Oh, you wouldn't consume 100 grams of olive oil.” No, but a tablespoon of olive oil has more saturated fat than a 100-gram pork chop. And again, we can make a mockery of nutritional advice when you know something about food.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I mean, and it’s easy to see how you could have a salad, if you have a big salad with a couple tablespoons of olive oil and dressing versus a 200-gram pork chop, you’re still eating more saturated fat there.

Where These Misguided Ideas about Saturated Fat Came From

So, I mean, this is so obvious when you look at it this way, and it makes you wonder, how did we get the idea that saturated fat is bad in the first place? I know there are some political and social roots of this, and feel free to talk a little bit about that if you want. But in particular, how did this arise from the evidence? What was your sense of that as you did your PhD and looked deeply at all of this?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, so one of the most important chapters in the PhD is the review of the literature. And you go back in the review of the literature, and of course in this topic area, you’ve got to go back to the Russian pathologists in the early part of the 19th century, when they noticed the cholesterol deposits in the arteries of the autopsies that they were doing. So they started to hypothesize, had these cholesterol deposits actually caused the death of this relatively young person that they were performing an autopsy on, and could they come to any conclusions about those sort of cholesterol stores of fatty deposits?

And many people know this, it’s been said in conference presentations, that at the time they then started experiments on rabbits, feeding them foods containing cholesterol, feeding them purified cholesterol, to try to see if they could mimic the impact that they thought food might be having on the human body. And of course, as some people have worked out, rabbits are herbivores and the only foods that contained artery cholesterol are foods of animal origins. No exception. So you find dietary cholesterol only in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy, which are things that rabbits can't tolerate.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, it’s strange. In a certain way, this almost supports what we were just saying. Eat a species-appropriate diet. The message there is not “don’t eat cholesterol.” It’s “don’t feed cholesterol to an animal that’s not supposed to eat it and don’t feed humans foods that we’re not supposed to eat.”

Zoë Harcombe:  Absolutely. And very interesting. When they fed purified cholesterol not in animal foods to the rabbits, they didn’t have any problems. And when they fed cholesterol foods to dogs, they didn’t have any problems because dogs are omnivores.

The Seven Countries Study

So we then wind forward to the 1950s, and Ancel Keys gets a bit of a bad rap in our world. I like to look on him in quite a more balanced way because he did some brilliant work, like the research starvation experiment. But he did kind of fall by the wayside a little bit on the fat thing.

So his first exploration was with the Russian experiments in mind to try to see if dietary cholesterol impacted blood cholesterol. And he concluded it did not, and he never deviated from that view. And the best quotation I found on that was from the 1954 symposium on atherosclerosis, and he said, “Cholesterol in food has no impact on either cholesterol in the blood or the development of atherosclerosis in man.” Which was brilliant because he had actually exonerated animal foods. But he didn't make that connection at the time. Maybe his nutritional knowledge just wasn't good enough and he just hadn't quite worked out, “If I’m finding nothing when I’m feeding human subjects,” because you could do that then with ethics, “human subjects massive amounts of dietary cholesterol via loads of animal products, they don’t develop any blood cholesterol problems and they don’t develop any signs of atherosclerosis,” he should’ve concluded, “I therefore just exonerated what I’ve been feeding them.” Which would be:

Eggs

Cheese

Meat

Possibly fish

But most likely meat, cheese, and eggs. But he didn’t. For some reason he was convinced that fat was the bad guy. If it wasn’t cholesterol in food, then it had to be fat in food. And yet again, having given his human subjects animal foods, he should’ve said, “What are the macronutrients in those animal foods? Okay, so it’s fat and protein. Dairy products have got a little, little bit of carbohydrate, but essentially what I've just fed them is fat and protein. So I should turn my attention to the one thing I haven't fed them, which is carbohydrate.” But he didn't do that.

So he was convinced that total fat was the problem, and of course we then had the Mount Sinai presentation in 1953, which gave us that famous Six Countries Graph, which has nothing to do with the Seven Countries Study. And then of course there were a number of countries that he'd left out. And Yerushalmy and Hilleboe found this out and unfortunately published a little bit too late, in 1957, saying, “Hey, hang on, you left out all of these other countries. And if you put them all on there it looks a bit like a spider scatter, that the pattern has gone. But the Seven Countries Study had already started in 1956. And Keys seemed pretty determined that he was going to come to the end of the Seven Countries Study and find fat guilty.

Now interestingly, and this is not terribly widely known, he could not find anything against total fat. So when, as part of my PhD, I pulled the epidemiological studies that were available at the time the guidelines were introduced, and of course the Seven Countries Study was one of those, and you’ve got Framingham and Honolulu, Puerto Rico, the London bank and bus study, and the Western Electric study being the others, none of those six found any relationship between coronary heart disease and total fat. So Keys acted. He went in with the total fat hypothesis. He accepted that it was not total fat. Now he had spent so much time and money on this study, he needed to find something. And he could find an association between saturated fat in the different cohorts, and coronary heart disease in the different cohorts. But at the same time he claimed, and this is in the summary paper, “I found no issue with weight, obesity, I found no issue with sedentary behavior activity, I found no issue with smoking.”

So things that we now know he was wrong about, we give him the benefit of the doubt on the one thing that he did find, which was saturated fat. And the other five peer studies, the ones I’ve just mentioned, did not find anything against saturated fat. And of course, they were all in country studies. So they were right, they were in community studies.

So you take Framingham. It’s a small town, it’s looking at people who eat a certain level of total fat or saturated fat versus people who don’t. So you’ve got all the other factors, or many of them, constant. You’ve got the same GDP, the same politics, the same community, the same access to healthcare. Go to Japan in the 1950s versus the US in the 1950s, you’re comparing efficiently.

Chris Kresser:  Completely different.

Zoë Harcombe:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Not even apples and oranges. We’re not even in fruit category there. I just want to pause here and just highlight this for people who are less familiar with research and methodologies. What Zoë’s saying is that if you … the problem with comparing groups of people between countries is that there's so many factors that vary from country to country and lifestyle, physical activity, the type of foods they eat. Saturated fat comes in lots of different types of food. So what kinds of foods are people eating in the US versus in Japan, where saturated fat would be found in totally different type of food? So comparing between countries just makes the possibility of confounding factors and all of the other issues of epidemiological research, it just amplifies them and makes them even more likely. So typically, especially today, those between-country studies are often discounted or taken with a large grain of salt because it's so hard to control for factors even within the population, much less between different populations.

Zoë Harcombe:  Absolutely. Absolutely yes.

Chris Kresser:  Okay, so, I mean, this is … the crazy thing to me about this, Zoë, and I'm sure this struck you at many intervals throughout your PhD, is just how much of a house of cards the whole evidence base is behind the idea that saturated fat is bad for us. There’s this illusory truth fallacy that we were chatting about before we hit the record button, as well, which is the idea that if you hear something repeated enough times, you just start to believe that it's true, whether it has any basis in fact or not. And we think maybe that researchers and scientists are immune to this illusion. But the fact is, they’re not.

John Ioannides, one of the most famous epidemiologists in the world, one of my favorite quotes of his is, “Claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” So, I mean, that sums it. He has all these pithy quotes that just sum it up in, like, 10 words. Which basically means that once you have a certain idea and it's out there because of groupthink and confirmation bias, that idea will often just be perpetuated, even if it was never based in fact in the first place. Because someone will link to that original study that turned out to be erroneous as proof, then someone does a later study and you link to that second study. And then it just becomes a chain of references that all point back to that original study that then it was later shown to be invalid. So it's crazy to me that 40 years of dietary policy has been based on such flimsy evidence.

Zoë Harcombe:  I should declare my own bias, actually, going in, because up until 2010 I’d been a vegetarian for about 20 years. Then my own bias going in was that fat was bad, saturated fat was bad, saturated fat equaled animal fat, which of course I now know absolutely that it doesn’t. All fats are in all foods, especially coconut oil, which is purely vegan. And I believed what I’d been taught at school, that we should be eating low-fat foods and healthy whole grains and plenty of fruit and vegetables. And I believed it too. And I was at a dinner party just a couple of weeks ago, and there were a couple of young people who were engaged and full of life and full of news and full of opinions.

And as we sat down to dinner, they were reliably informing me and my husband that they didn’t eat much meat because it was full of saturated fat, which of course it isn’t, and saturated fat is bad for you, which of course it isn’t. And I said, “You guys work in the finance industry. How did you pick up, how did you become authorities on dietary fat at your tender young years?” We had done a superb marketing job on fat and cholesterol worldwide and people have fallen for it.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, and it’s deep. It’s really a form of conditioning. At least, I’m not sure what’s happening with with kids now, but I grew up certainly at a time where butter and eggs and all those foods were really demonized. And it becomes kind of part of your cultural conditioning, and it's so deeply hardwired in the brain, it can be really hard to let go of it. I, as my listeners know, I was a macrobiotic vegan at one point. So I took it about as far as you could go.

Zoë Harcombe:  Wow.

Chris Kresser:  And I remember in high school, I was an athlete and the whole carb loading paradigm. I was eating, like, bagels with nothing on them, like dry bagels and breakfast cereal with nonfat milk for breakfast, and eating pasta and pancakes before my basketball games because the thinking was that would be good for athletic performance and also good for my health.

So I can be pretty extreme when I go for something. I took it to the extreme and when I started to figure out, I mean, it took a very serious chronic illness for me to snap out of that. And even with that, I remember when I was first starting to eat more fat, I had this distinct feeling, like I was doing something wrong or I should do it behind closed doors, or that something bad was going to happen to me. And it took quite a while for that to unwind. So I think there’s that kind of deeper psychological influence happening here too.

Zoë Harcombe:  I’ve read your stuff on that. You write so, like it just happened yesterday. I mean you just describe it, and you just did it then. I could see you running around the track with your bagel. It sort of stays in your mind, doesn’t it, how we felt and what we thought we were doing when we did all of that stuff.

Zoё Harcombe’s Research on Fat

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit more. Let’s kind of dive in with a little more of a fine-toothed comb on your thesis and your review of the RCTs from 1977, the randomized controlled trials. Which again, if we’re looking at a hierarchy of evidence, it's not that RCTs are perfect or they don't have potential issues, but certainly when compared to epidemiological issues and all of the problems there, which we’ll discuss a little later, they are more reliable. So what did you find in your review of RCTs related to saturated fat and either death from all causes and death from heart disease?

Zoë Harcombe:  So this paper came out in February 2015, and it went nuts. And if you Google it, it was front page in New Zealand and in the UK papers. And I spent the whole day when it came out. The phone was ringing the second I put it on in the morning and it was the BBC, could I come in? And I ended up doing about 20 or 30 interviews that day, just back to back. And it just went nuts. So I think it went nuts because it was the unique part of the PhD that was looking at the evidence at the time. And so people were picking up on the idea that we’ve been eating low fat for 40 years and the evidence wasn’t there at the time to back up the call to do that.

So the major findings from that paper were first of all that there were only six studies, six randomized controlled trials that were available to the UK committee. Only five were available to the US committee, and they’ll be pretty well-known to people. It’s like the Rose corn oil, olive oil trial, the low-fat diet; the Leren Oslo Diet-Heart Study; the MRC soybean study; the Sydney Diet Heart Study; and the LA Vet study. And you pull all of those together, there is no difference whatsoever. Not even to just leak the significance, it was actually the exact same number of deaths in the controlled side as in the intervention side. There was no significant difference in coronary heart disease mortality, it wasn’t quite an identical number, but it was something like 221 versus 219, or something. It was so close. It was virtually identical, again.

A really interesting finding, and this just massively undermined the diet–heart hypothesis and was not a finding that we expected to come across. It just came out. We were able to measure the … Across the polled studies, there was a significant difference in cholesterol being lowered in the intervention studies. But of course that made no difference whatsoever between mortality or coronary heart disease mortality. And I then went on to try to understand why it may have been the case that cholesterol had been lowered by the intervention and not made any difference to health benefits apart from the fact that cholesterol is not bad for us. But why didn’t intervention diets lower cholesterol?

And I think it’s because the main intervention was to swap out saturated fat and to swap in polyunsaturated fat. And a lot of the polyunsaturated fats that they were putting in, corn oil, soybean oil, vegetable oils, contain plant sterols. And plant sterol is effectively plant cholesterol, and it competes in the human gut with the human cholesterol and it replaces it, to an extent. So if you take plant sterols in margarines or spreads or in vegetable oils or indeed in some grain plant products, or some people take them from tablets from the health food shop, which is a really crazy … they will replace your own cholesterol to an extent and lower your blood cholesterol. But I’ve looked at the evidence for the end outcomes on heart disease. I’ve got another paper on that that was published in an editorial, and that shows that actually the overall benefit is not there. It’s actually overall harm of administering plant sterols in the end outcomes of heart disease.

But I think that’s why they lowered cholesterol and perhaps the studies weren’t long enough for the harm from that replacement to actually manifest itself in a difference in outcomes. And I would then expect the interventions to have more deaths from heart disease and more deaths therefore from all-cause mortality.

One of the other really big aspects I think that grabbed the media is the point that we made at the end of the paper, saying that these six studies, when he pulled them together, amounted for fewer than two-and-a-half thousand men, not one single woman had been studied, and not one of those men was healthy. They had all had a heart attack already.

Why You Should Be Skeptical of Some News Headlines

Chris Kresser:  So this is just really key here. You cannot generalize, even if the results were consistent across all these studies, which they weren’t, implicating … Or it sounds like they were consistent in the opposite direction that people thought they were. But even if they had implicated saturated fat as increasing total and CHD mortality, coronary heart disease, that would only be applicable to men.

Zoë Harcombe:  Sick.

Chris Kresser:  With pre-existing, yeah, sick men.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Not women and not men that are not sick.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And interestingly not one study called for change, and studies at the time were far more ethical, I think, than they are today. Far less media orientated, far less trying to get a press release. They would just say things how they were. And a couple of them were a bit nervous about potential toxicity of the fish oil that we’d administered, and they’re the ones that were a bit worried about … the corn oil study had more deaths in the intervention group, and said, “We’re worried about the potential harm from the fish oil intervention.” And the low-fat diet study, the last sentence of that study just cracks me up. It just says, “A low-fat diet has no place in the treatment of myocardial infarction,” which is heart attack.

Chris Kresser:  It's interesting to me what you just said that how much the, both the reporting on studies has changed in the media and also even the way that researchers talk about their findings themselves to the media. I think I was reading an article in Science that was published in 1993, and they were talking about relative risks, which we can get into more detail when we talk about epidemiological evidence. But this is the percentage increase in risk from a given intervention, and they were outside of nutrition, still today in any other field, epidemiologists would consider anything below a 200 to 400 percent increase in risk to be indistinguishable from noise, meaning they would consider anything less than a 200 percent increase in risk to be not significant statistically. And in this article, Marcia Angell, who is a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, was quoted as saying that, “They typically didn't really accept a paper unless it had a relative risk ratio of over three for nutrition.” And that just blew me away because today, like IARC's panel about red meat and processed meat causing increased risk of cancer, the percentage increase is 18 percent.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  That’s not even remotely close to the 200 percent which is the lower end of the threshold. And yet the media headlines are not saying indistinguishable increase in risk observed in people eating more red meat. They come out and just claim causality. They say, “Red meat and eating red meat and processed meat is going to kill you.”

Zoë Harcombe:  And as Bradford Hill would say, “There’s nine criteria and that double is just one of them.”

Chris Kresser:  Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  “So hit the double and then you can look at the other eight.” But none of them hit the double, none today get anywhere close.

Chris Kresser:  Nowhere near and yet, and I think this is partly an artifact of the world we live in, just with, like, proliferation of the internet and so many headlines. Everyone's vying to get attention and so you have to … a headline that said, almost insignificant increase in risk observed in people who eat more red meat than other people. But of course there are other diet and lifestyle factors that we’re not considering. That's not to make a good headline, right? Nobody’s going to click on that. And so people want the flashy, clickbait headline saying low-carb diet will shorten your lifespan or eating red meat will give you a heart attack. Even though I would hope that the researchers themselves somewhere deep down know that that’s a gross exaggeration of their findings.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And as for the media, I guess it’s just that we don’t have science journalists anymore.

Zoë Harcombe:  We don’t. I do a note every Monday where I look at a paper from the previous week and dissect it. And you can tell, mostly the ones that get into the media have had a press release. And if you look at the press release and you look at the media article, the media have just taken the press release almost verbatim. The press release provides a couple of quotes, they end up in every single article. Completely lazy journalism. Occasionally they might call in the UK me or Dr. Aseem Malhotra or Dr. Malcolm Kendrick and just say, “Do you want to give an opposing quote?” and occasionally they’ll stick it in.

Mostly they’ll just run off the press release, and the researchers should be challenging the press release. I mean, our paper in February 2015 was press released, and I remember having a few toings and froings because I wanted it to be scientific. It’s a big enough claim in itself to say we only studied two-and-a-half thousand sick men, and then we introduced these guidelines for 250 million Americans and 50 million Brits. That’s okay, enough. We don’t need to sensationalize it anymore than that.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely.

Zoë Harcombe:  So I tried to get it down to the facts that we found and not to put any spin on them.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. Yeah, to your credit, I mean, that's so hard to do in this crazy media environment that we live in now. And to be fair, there are definitely researchers that make an effort to do that. And you still will see that in reports where, I was reading one on, I can't remember what it was, but it actually stood out to me because I don't see it as often as I do. I was impressed by both at what the researchers were saying and that the author of the article. Because they went out of their way to say this is just an association or correlation. It doesn't prove causality, and here are the reasons why it might not be a causal relationship, and why we need more research. But my sense of that is it's almost like when you watch, if you see a commercial for a drug and then you have like the 20 seconds of side effects after the 10 seconds of the commercial. People have heard that so many times they just kind of tune that out and they’re only really still paying attention to the headline.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  So let’s talk. So you went back, you reviewed the RCTs from the late 70s that were responsible for creating dietary guidelines that, as you said, applied to hundreds of millions of people around the world and probably affected many more even just by osmosis. Those ideas becoming firmly entrenched in industrialized society, even if they weren’t part of formal dietary guidelines. And then you went back and analyzed all of the research that had been done from, was it from the late 70s to 2016?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yes, so we then took it up to date. And I actually said in the recent paper that’s just been published by the BJSM, the one on is saturated fat a nutrient of concern, and that’s because the USDA is now looking at it again for the next dietary guidelines. And I actually put in that paper that the day that the paper is saying there was no evidence at the time came out, I was astonished that Public Health England came out almost immediately on the day. I said, “Okay, so maybe there wasn’t evidence at the time, but we’ve got plenty of evidence today.”

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Zoë Harcombe:  I was surprised that they were prepared to concede. I thought they said, “No, no, no, this is ridiculous. The Seven Countries Study was marvelous and that’s all we need. And we can ignore everything else.” But they didn’t. They said, “Okay, there was no evidence, but there is plenty nowadays.” And of course it takes so long to get papers published that with my supervisory team, we’d already moved on to the next step, which was looking at the evidence available today. So we had that paper pretty much ready to go. And of course you keep in the original six studies, then you just add in any other randomized controlled trials that have looked at coronary heart disease, mortality, and total mortality. Those were our two outcome criteria so we wouldn’t lose some RCTs that only looked at events, for example. But then that then brought in the Women’s Health Initiative, the DART study, the STARS study, and the very well-known Minnesota Coronary Survey study.

Chris Kresser:  Zoë, before we go on I want to pause there. Let’s talk about why you chose total and coronary mortality as an endpoint and why that's important—to focus on the mortality endpoints versus just the events.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, I’ve got to credit Dr. Malcolm Kendrick with this, and I am such a Dr. Malcolm Kendrick fan, it’s just not true.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, me too.

Zoë Harcombe:  And I just remember, I mean, I’m fortunate enough to know him and consider him a friend and to meet him on occasions. And just every time I meet with him he says stuff and I'm just, why is this not just the only thing that’s being taught in medical school because it’s so sensible? So he’ll say, “I can guarantee that you won’t die from heart disease by pushing you off a cliff.” And it just, it then sticks in your head. Okay, so the important thing is total mortality because there is no point to reducing heart disease if you increase deaths of something else. So all this stuff going on with statins. Oh, we think we can reduce some events. We could have a whole different program on statins. But would there be any point in making any benefit anyway, even if they could, if they, for example, as they might do, increase your risk of cancer or dementia or mind health, etc., etc.? So it has to be total mortality. The only thing that matters is are you going to help people to live longer, to die later?

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely.

Zoë Harcombe:  That’s what we’re trying to do with health interventions. And so we’ve got to have all-cause mortality in there and then we’ve got to have heart disease mortality and not just events. Because that’s where the dietary fat guidelines came about. They were issued in the name of trying to stop deaths, particularly in men at the time, younger men at the time, from coronary heart disease. So if they’re not going to achieve that, then they’re not even going to achieve what they were introduced for. So why on earth were they introduced?

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, thanks for clarifying, and sorry to interrupt. But I'm banging on this drum all the time. I just want to make sure that people understand it because it's a crucial distinction. You frequently see headlines like “XYZ intervention reduces the risk of heart attack by 20 percent,” which again, as we just said, in an epidemiological study, that's meaningless. We can’t distinguish that from chance anyways.

But even if it's an RCT, then the first thing I’d do is go look at the table to see if they even measured total mortality. Which previously, that was less common. It’s more common now, I'm finding. But then when you look at total mortality, there is often no difference. So that’s where the disease substitution is happening that you were just talking about. The risk of death.

Zoë Harcombe:  A bit of gossip. Malcolm Kendrick wants to die from a heart attack.

Chris Kresser:  Rather than cancer?

Zoë Harcombe:  Exactly. Rather than cancer.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s what I tell people too.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, he doesn’t want to go early, don’t get me wrong. He probably wants to go at sort of 98 drinking a glass of red wine, playing with his grandchildren when he gets them.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. You just have a heart attack in your sleep overnight. You don’t wake up one morning. That sounds a lot better to me than dementia or Alzheimer’s or cancer.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  So you don’t need to belabor this, but it’s really important to point out because I think it's something that people who are less familiar with research may not have thought of. So okay, so you chose total and CHT mortality, and I believe you ended up with 10 RCTs?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah. So the original six and then the Women’s Health Initiative, DART, STARS, and the Minnesota Coronary Survey, pull them all together, there’s no difference in all-cause mortality. There’s no difference in coronary heart disease mortality. Again, there was a significant reduction in cholesterol in the interventions that did not meet any difference in coronary heart disease mortality or all-cause mortality.

So essentially, all we did by adding in the former recent studies was that we increased the number of people studied quite dramatically. It came up into the tens of thousands, not least because the women’s health initiative alone brings along tens of thousands of people to the party. And of course it then became more female than male because of all the women in the Women’s Health Initiative. But we still in those 10 only ended up with one study including both men and women that would be a primary prevention study, so people who had not already had a heart attack, and that was of course the Minnesota Coronary Survey. And this in itself found no significant results at the time of publication and of course we then had that brilliant paper where … it should be on the tip of my tongue, the person who went back to look at this, Christopher, I’m thinking. You know the person I mean, who went back to look at the Minnesota Coronary Survey and also went back to look at the Sydney.

Chris Kresser:  Was it Hibbeln?

Zoë Harcombe:  No.

Chris Kresser:  No that’s Joseph Hibbeln and Christopher, they’re both the guys who have done a lot of the critique of the polyunsaturated fat research, or am I thinking of someone different?

Zoë Harcombe:  Oh, I’ll be kicking myself and don’t worry. Stick it in your show notes. But it’s a very well-known team that went back to look at both of those studies and even thought there was no evidence found against the dietary intervention at the time, they found that there was some unpublished data. And it just made it even more robust that we had been demonizing fat at the time. So all the RCTs as of 2016, and there haven’t been any since, and there’s still no more evidence than we had at the time the guidelines were introduced.

Chris Kresser:  Wow, it’s just, it’s really kind of remarkable, actually. And it’s again just going back to this idea that a lot of this evidence is really based on a house of cards. And as an example of the fallibility of these guidelines, the US in 2015 for the first time removed their advisory that we should not be eating dietary cholesterol. Because they finally acknowledged the cholesterol in the diet does not have any relationship with heart disease. And that was kind of like a pretty major thing that just, like, slipped through.

There weren’t really big announcements or any fanfare around that. Like, “Hey, everybody, we’ve been really wrong about this for the last 30 or 40 years and we just want to bring that to your attention.” And I even remember reading editorials written by scientists who were kind of still anti-saturated fat and cholesterol, and were saying things like, “We can’t really make too much of this because the public is going to lose faith in our ability to guide them with diet.” And I have a sense that the same thing is going to happen with saturated fat in the next few years. And maybe already people know this, but they're just not willing to do it yet because if they do, people will absolutely lose faith in the diet guidelines.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, and they need to.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  I mean, let’s face it, they need to lose faith. The best thing that they could do, the dietary guideline committees, would be to come out and say, “Guys, we were wrong. I’m sorry, we were wrong. And we’re going to get it right from now on.” And that would be the only way that we would start having trust in them again. But all this surreptitious slipping things out, then slipping things in, anyone who’s working in this field is just finding this completely unprofessional and noncredible.

 Why Dietary Guidelines Don’t Work

Chris Kresser:  I mean, this is a whole other discussion, but it’s worth pointing out that the idea of top-down, one-size-fits-all dietary guidelines that will apply to everyone is really not consistent with our understanding, our modern understanding of human biology, biochemistry, and physiology. And I think that this, the whole idea of dietary guidelines that would apply to everyone needs to just die. Because that has led to this reductionist approach, which one researcher calls nutritionism, I like that idea, which is that a nutrient is a nutrient is a nutrient no matter what it's found in.

Saturated fat in candy or pizza or junk food will have the same impact as saturated fat found in a steak or another whole food. And it’s led to this extreme focus on macronutrients and isolated food components rather than looking at the whole context of the diet. And that's starting to change slowly. There have been some pretty good studies in the last couple years. There was one, I’m sure you know which one I mean. It was looking mostly at weight loss and they compared, they designed a study that was comparing the effects of a healthier low-carb versus a healthier low-fat diet. And they found that both were actually pretty effective compared to the standard junk food diet that most people eat.

And we need more studies like that, and if we let go of this kind of one-size-fits-all approach, we might actually be able to start looking at the context of foods we’re eating, and then where maybe one person does need to eat more fat and fewer carbs and another person might do better eating a little bit less fat and more carbs from whole foods relative to that other person. So to me that’s one of the biggest assumptions behind the dietary guidelines that’s not mentioned.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, that was the Gardner study, wasn’t it?

Chris Kresser:  Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  I corresponded that enough.

Chris Kresser:  Yes, the Gardner study.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, very good study, yeah.

 The Epidemiological Evidence

Chris Kresser:  So let's just briefly touch on epidemiological evidence. I mean, there’s so many issues with observational nutrition studies. I don't know if you saw John Ioannidis’s recent review. It was published in JAMA and I’m going to pull up a couple choice … It was called “The Challenge of Reforming Nutritional Epidemiological Research.” And I’m going to read the first two sentences because they’re classic Ioannidis in how pithy and direct they are. It says, “Some nutrition scientists and much of the public often consider epidemiologic associations of nutritional factors to represent causal effects that can inform public health policy and guidelines. However, the emerging picture of nutritional epidemiology is difficult to reconcile with good scientific principles. The field needs radical reform.”

Zoë Harcombe:  Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I just couldn’t agree, I mean, I had the privilege of seeing John present at the Food for Thought conference in Zurich, which was arranged by the British Medical Journal and Swiss Re, a reinsurance company, and he gave the, I guess you’d call it the keynote, after-dinner speech by videoconference into the conference hall where we were in Zurich. And it was uncomfortable, shall we say, for some of the audience.

Chris Kresser:  I could imagine. In an audience full of nutritional epidemiologists, probably didn’t like what he had to say.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, largely. I mean, I sat near Nina Teicholz, and we were absolutely loving it. But I won’t mention any names, but a couple of nutritional epidemiologists did walk out.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah, I’m not surprised. It’s hard to consider, and there are ways that nutritional epidemiology can be done better. We can have more advanced data collection methods and an application of Bradford Hill criteria, which you mentioned, to increase the chance that the relationship between variables is causal. But the way it is now … there’s another critique that I love by Archer and he says, “For results to be scientific, data must be, number one, independently observable. Number two, measurable. Number three, falsifiable, Number four, valid, and number five, reliable. And these criteria distinguish scientific research from mere data collection and pseudoscience.”

And when you look at nutritional epidemiology, they do not satisfy those basic criteria for science because they're relying on data collection methods like food frequency questionnaires, which are just a joke. I mean, they’ve been so thoroughly debunked as a reliable way of assessing what someone is eating. We know that human memory is not an accurate reproduction of past events. It’s just basically a highly edited anecdote regarding what we ate. And we know that these approaches that are used to assess what people are eating in these studies are really not accurate and not reliable and don't fulfill the basic criteria of science.

So, I mean, we could talk a lot more about the problems with epidemiology, but I think let's, given the time constraint, let's just go on and talk with those caveats, those huge caveats. What did the epidemiological evidence suggest if it had been included in the original analysis that you looked at and then also since then?

Zoë Harcombe:  So we covered in some depth at the time that essentially it was just the Seven Countries Study that found anything. None of the six studies found anything against total fat, and then just the Seven Countries Study alone found something against saturated fat. When you bring the epidemiology up to date, and I actually did it, I had to do it in a different way in the fourth part of the PhD because they didn’t have data on current epidemiology and total mortality or coronary heart disease mortality. So there was going to be nothing that I could actually update the original studies with.

So I had to look at different measures of looking at any relationship that I could find with deaths and total fat or deaths and saturated fat separately. Of course they’re not interventions anymore. So you are into just this epidemiological base of looking at the fat intake in different regions or in different studies. So it was slightly different to the other three that were looked at, and they were completely different studies, and probably studies therefore that are less well known to people. They were certainly less well known to me. So things like the Ireland-Boston study, Kushi, the US Health Professionals, Lipid Research study that’s very well known. The Pietinen Finnish counts study, a UK health survey by a couple of people called Boniface and Tefft. She’s not very well known, this new heart study, and then the Gardner Japanese study, which is probably not too badly known within the field. And when you separate it out, look in it, coronary heart disease deaths, so we couldn’t get the total mortality anymore.

But we could at least get the heart deaths and align those to either the total fat, where it was examined, or the saturated fat. There was, again, no significant difference for coronary heart disease deaths and total fat or saturated fat consumption. We were back to a limitation of the pooled studies from those seven that I’ve mentioned being almost entirely male. So 94 percent of the people involved in those studies were male. They were at least mostly healthy. Almost all of them had not already had a heart attack, but there was still no relationship for coronary heart disease deaths and total or saturated fat. So there was then a fifth paper that I published with the BJSM that wrapped up the four studies.

So it went through essentially what we’ve gone through now, which is, what did I do, looking at RCTs then, RCTs now, epidemiology then, epidemiology now? What was found? What wasn't found, which was far, far more. And then an era that I suggest we’ll probably be heading into quite soon was to put what I’d looked at in context of other meta-analyses that had been done. Because I’m a PhD researcher, I was not straight out of finishing my degree. But I’m still just a PhD researcher looking at this evidence fresh in a systematic way.

A number of other people have also looked at the data in this field either for mortality or for events or for interventions or for epidemiology. And I therefore wanted to look at what everybody else had done to say have I found something different. Has everybody found this? Because you have to do that. You can’t come to the end of your PhD and say, “I find if I might drop the toast buttered 100 times out of 100 it falls on the butter on the floor,” if everybody else has found more (audio cuts out 59:06) it doesn’t fall with the butter on the floor. You’ve got to put your own research in context.

Chris Kresser:  That’s another core principle of science. Shapiro, an epidemiologist, said, “We should never forget that good science is skeptical science, and science works by experiments that can be repeated. When they’re repeated they must give the same answer.” So this is another core principle. So what did you find when you looked at these other meta-analyses?

Zoë Harcombe:  So the main ones that were pulled together, and there’s a great table in the paper five, which is one from 2016. I think it's called “Dietary fat guidelines have no evidence base: Where next for public health nutritional advice?”

Chris Kresser:  That’s a pretty straightforward title.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, it is pretty straightforward, actually yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Not beating around the bush.

Zoë Harcombe:  They’re pretty good, actually. They help you with titles. So they come up with catchy ones.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  And I then went through, for example, I got the tape in front of me, so you’ve got Skeaff and Miller from 2009 who looked at RCTs and epidemiological studies. And they looked at mortality and events for total fat. You’ve got a fairly well-known study with Siri Tarino and colleagues from 2010 looking at epidemiology of fatal and nonfatal coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease. Mozaffarian, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Zurich over the summer, and his paper looking at just events, not mortality. We might come back to that one. And then of course you’ve got the two well-known Hooper studies, that’s the Cochrane research, which should be the gold standard, but we can take a bit of a better look at that one. And then you’ve got Schwing, Jacqueline, Hoffman from 2014, RCTs, and my own study. And then of course you’ve got the Chowdhury study that looked very interestingly at the four different types of fats, saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, and they included trans fats in their research looking at coronary disease for both randomized controlled trials and epidemiological studies.

Chris Kresser:  Right, and I’d like to read the conclusion of that one: “Current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats.”

Zoë Harcombe:  Here, here.

Chris Kresser:  So that was the Chowdhury, and then, so there were, I think, 39 total reports.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, 35 non-significant. And we don’t shout that often enough.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  If you stop—and I’ve done this for a Welsh TV program that I was working on—we went to Cardiff, which is the capital city of Wales, and we walked down the main street in Wales and we said to people, “What do you think about fat? What do you think about fruit?” And people would tell you, “We need to eat five a day and fat is bad for us.” So people have got the messages. But what we’re not telling them is when you actually look at all the evidence, 35 out of 39 results were non-significant. No findings. And that has to be the most significant thing that has been found, that we didn't find much. Why don’t we look at that more often? That’s so more powerful to me than the four findings. And if we just whiz through those. In the Chowdhury study that you mentioned, the one finding that they did make was against trans fats, and I don’t think you or I would give them any argument over that one.

Chris Kresser:  No.

Zoë Harcombe:  Mozaffarian, I really liked him in Zurich. But I was involved in a paper that critiqued his 2010 study which said, “You should replace saturated fats and polyunsaturated fats because there’s an impact on CHD events.” And our paper criticized that paper for excluding two studies that were not favorable to polyunsaturated fats, which was the Rose corn oil study and also the Sydney Diet Heart Study. And including, and it’s all bad studies, the Finnish Mental Hospital Study, which was not randomized, not controlled, crossover trial. I mean, just the worst possible trial to try and slip in to pretend it’s an RCT. So we critiqued that paper. I like to think he wouldn't publish that paper if he had the opportunity tomorrow. I can't speak for him, that wasn't right.

And that’s, of course, exactly what the Sax paper did last year, the American Heart Association paper. Again left out two unfavorable studies, the same two. Included the Finnish Mental Hospital Study, they shouldn't have done. And so basically, there were only two findings, and they boil down to one because it was the same research team, Hooper and the Cochrane team, working out of the east of England in the UK. One paper was from 2011 and the other was from 2015. And among 11 known findings for CVD, mortality, total mortality by modified fat, reduced fat, any kind of variation of fat, the only finding they could come up with was for CVD events when they looked at all RCTs for saturated fat reduction intervention. And we can get into that.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I mean, I think we can stop here at least in terms of the actual studies because it's, just to review what we've discussed, the randomized controlled trials that have been done since the late 1970s to today have not supported the idea that saturated fat increases the risk of death from heart disease, or any cause. The epidemiological evidence that has been done throughout that period does not support that hypothesis either. And even if it did, we'd still have all of the issues that epidemiological research, that make it problematic, like the healthy user bias and inaccurate methods of data collection, small risk ratios.

We talked about that earlier, how the increase in relative risk is so low that it doesn't really meet the threshold for assuming a causal relationship in any kind of epidemiology outside of nutrition, and even in nutrition 20 or 30 years ago. Other people who've meta-analyzed these data have come to a similar, if not the same, conclusion as you did in your research and your PhD thesis. And I just want to highlight something that you said about how the Finnish study, which is really not a good study at all, has been included in a number of analyses. And you might wonder why that would happen if the researcher is aware of its limitations and that it's not a valid study to draw any inferences from on this topic, why would it be included?

And again I’d like to turn to a John Ioannidis quote, and he says, “Consequently, meta-analyses become weighted averages of expert opinions. In an inverse sequence, instead of carefully conducting primary studies informing guidelines, expert-driven guidelines shaped by advocates dictate what primary studies should report.”

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Doesn’t that sum it up?

Zoë Harcombe:  He’s so brilliant, isn’t he?

Chris Kresser:  So in other words, we start out with, the way that science should proceed is by doing experiments, and then if any guidelines are made, to make them based on these objective experiments. But the way it actually happens, a lot is we start out with a certain agenda and then we design studies that will return results that support that agenda. And anyone who's worked with data in any capacity knows how easy that is to do.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And it's not even conscious all the time. This is where confirmation bias comes in. It’s very difficult to guard against. I have to, and I’m not 100 percent, I’m not saying I’m 100 percent successful. But I can watch even myself. If I go and look for research on a particular topic and I have a certain idea, it's very easy to just skip the studies that don't support that idea. And that happens among scientists. It's a real cognitive bias that is very difficult to guard against. And I think it has a huge effect on research.

Here's another quote, this is from Casazza: “Confirmation bias may prevent us from seeking data that might refute propositions we have already intuitively accepted as true, because they seem obvious. For example, the value of realistic weight loss goals. Moreover, we may be swayed by persuasive yet fallacious arguments.” So again I come back to psychology. It's a real … we’re human beings doing this work, right? All researchers and scientists are not infallible. They’re human beings as well. Many of them have their own ideas and preferences about diet and nutrition. They’ve been influenced by many of the same things that we as laypeople or myself have been influenced by. And it really, really does affect the outcomes of this research.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, yeah. I would agree with you. I mean I went in with a vegetarian, fat is bad, carbs are good bias. I am aware that I was so shocked by the things that I found when I started researching in this field, even before the PhD, you do then get quite skeptical and quite angry. And I now almost trust nothing. So every week I’m taking a paper from any kind of field, though mostly typically nutrition, and the low-carb study was one that I did recently, and then there was a weight loss drug that came out. And then I looked at red meat, the evidence because that was topical for something. And when I’m going in, I just assume that there’s going to be errors, and I’ve yet to find a published paper that doesn’t have something that you can point out as being really quite seriously wrong or disingenuous or open to interpretation.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  I mean it’s really shocking. I saw on Twitter just a couple of days ago a guy, an academic, got so fed up with all the emails that you do get saying, “Oh, I really enjoyed this paper. Please can you write some papers for us.” Because papers are big spinners for the journals. He got so fed up with all these spam emails that he made up a complete nonsense study using Latin words that made something look really impressive, but it was basically saying something like, “If you do this with excrement, this happens.” I mean it was just, it really was, he was really taking the mickey and it got through peer review and he put it on Twitter. And he said, “I’m delighted to say that my complete nonsense article has just been published by this complete nonsense journal.”

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, and I’ve heard other experiments like that that have been done where a lot of stuff like that has made it through peer review. And there have been a lot of critiques of peer review and why it’s broken and the links to the money in the research industry. Marcia Angell, who I mentioned earlier, in the context of the relative risk who was the former editor of New England Journal of Medicine, has famously said that some, I’m going to paraphrase, but “I now no longer think we can believe any published research,” is basically what she said.

So yeah, I mean, I think it doesn't mean that research is not valuable. It doesn't mean that we have to just become, I think you can go too far with this where we just say, “Oh, forget it. There’s no point in even trying. Let’s just discount all research equally.” Because there are differences in the quality of research and there are still studies that are done well even if they're not done perfectly. And it's the best tool that we have, that we’ve discovered today to try to answer some of these questions, at least on a population-wide scale.

 Conclusions about Saturated Fat

So I want to close by just kind of going through some conclusions here. One, we’ve talked throughout that the evidence against total saturated fat is incredibly weak, if not nonexistent. But something we touched on briefly but I want to highlight here is that even if saturated fat were harmful, you have to consider the source of it in the diet. Get away from this reductionist approach where we think that saturated fat coming in different forms is going to have the identical effect. Because we don’t eat nutrients. We eat foods that have nutrients in them.

 And I love how in your paper you pointed out that pizza, desserts, candy, potato chips, pasta, tortillas, burritos, and tacos accounted for 33 percent of saturated fat consumed in the diets of US citizens. A further 24.5 percent was unaccounted for and collated as “all other food categories,” which is almost certainly processed food. And so as a result, only 43 percent of saturated fat came from natural foods like dairy products, nuts and seeds, and burgers and sausages. Although I'm guessing that the burgers and sausages had highly processed buns and sugary ketchup and other stuff on them too. So how can we even look at those things as being anywhere remotely similar, much less the same?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah. I mean I actually took out the processed meat in that section. So I got the natural foods listed down to cheese, nut butter, nuts, and seeds. And collectively together they accounted for 20.8 percent of saturated fat intake. But then I actually made the point it would’ve been ideal for the unprocessed chicken, beef, and eggs to have been separated from the processed meals because they always just lump them together. And they will always put, whenever there’s a study damning red meat, particularly in the US, it will always include hamburgers, which they are very firmly processed food in the UK, but for some reason seems to be considered as some sort of Paleo food in America.

Chris Kresser:  Right, right.

Zoë Harcombe:  And meat-type dishes, or something, which might be a curry.

Chris Kresser:  KFC.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, exactly, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Chris Kresser:  That’s the way most people eat chicken, KFC or chicken nuggets at McDonald’s. There’s your chicken.

Zoë Harcombe:  Absolutely, yeah. Or maybe a curry takeaway ready meal that you pop in the microwave and if it's got a couple of percent of meat in it, you’ve done well. You bought a more expensive one than the average, which doesn’t even bother putting the meat in.

Chris Kresser:  I mean, I’m … yeah, go ahead.

Zoë Harcombe:  No, and that’s the crazy thing because I want us to be able to have heated agreement. I don’t want to be fighting anyone out there. The whole world is much better if we get on and we’re in harmony than when we’re fighting over anything, whether that’s territory or politics or nutrition or anything else. So I would love for us to find a way forward. And I think there could be a way forward by saying, “Guys, can we have a heated agreement that we can demonize processed food?”

And I know there’s industry conflicts all over the place and we have to expose the industry conflicts with the guidelines set in committee in the UK, they are completely dominated by the processed food industry and grocery retail. I mean, it’s just horrific. If somehow we could get the conflicts out of setting health guidelines, which please, for goodness’ sake, must be objective. We must tell people honestly what is healthy. Not tell them what the food industry wants them to believe is healthy. That’s got to be step one.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely.

Zoë Harcombe:  If we can get all of that nonsense out, surely then we could agree that real food has got to be better than processed food. And there might be some debate what’s real food. But if it’s found in a field, it’s found growing on a tree, it’s found in the natural environment … I said to my niece when she was five years old, fish swim in sea, fish fingers don’t. Breaded fish.

Chris Kresser:  If it comes in a bag or box, you probably shouldn’t be eating it.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  I mean, of course, there are exceptions. Butter usually comes in a box, but yeah, that’s a general guideline, right?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, we know what real food is. It’s the best-quality meat, eggs, dairy products, fish you can get a hold of, it’s vegetables, seeds, nuts, fruits in season. There will be some debate over legumes and whole grains and how recently they’ve been part of our consideration set, and I agree with your point, there’s not one diet fits all because some people just cannot tolerate grains and legumes and fibrous products, suffering from irritable bowel syndrome or celiac or other digestive conditions. But somewhere within that real food, total consideration set, surely we ought to be able to set some principles that people can follow that are not based on advice from the processed food industry.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, and I mean, I've said this so many times that Sean Croxton, who used to write in the health space, he came up with a diet advice that was JERF, he called it. J-E-R-F, just eat real food, which is, like, look, okay, we can debate about is it better, like you said, whole grains or legumes, in or out, saturated fat higher or lower, carbs higher or lower within this context of a whole-foods diet. But is there any doubt that if everyone ate real foods, we would decrease the burden of chronic disease and early mortality by something like 60 to 80 percent? I mean, I have no doubt of that.

And that’s again where this reductionist focus on nutrients completely isolated from the context of the foods that they come in has been such a disservice. Because imagine if we spent the last 30 or 40 years just hammering home the message that eating real, whole, nutrient-dense foods is really, like, if you want to simplify it for public health, like, that's the message. Don't even worry about those other finer points. And we would not, well there's a whole other discussion about whether people will actually follow that advice if you give it to them and given the influence of our brains with highly rewarding and palatable foods in the food industry and all of that. But there's no doubt that if people really did follow that advice, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion right now.

The other thing about that is it is possible at least in theory to, like, if we really wanted to answer the question of is saturated fat harmful, the way we would need to do that is we would need to take two groups and they would both have to have the same baseline healthy diet that we’re talking about. Just eating real, whole foods, right? And then in one group, they would eat more saturated fat. And then we would, this is to be a randomized controlled trial, we’d lock them up in a metabolic ward so that we could control all of the variables that we know can influence health, or at least most of them, and then we’d follow them for about 15 or 20 years and see what happens. And the problem is that's never going to be done. I mean, that study would be hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, and no, Coca-Cola's not going to pay for it, right? I mean none of the, no drug company is going to pay for that study. So unfortunately, that study is unlikely to ever happen.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, but “just eat real food” would work as a message until.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Just eat real food, and then we can use other mechanistic studies and other lines of evidence and maybe even shorter trials to try to answer some of the finer points. And those trials should also include individual, should also pay attention to individual factors or genetic or non-genetic factors that might bear on the answer to that question, so that we don't then extrapolate the findings to everybody instead of just one group of people, for example. We know there are genetic polymorphisms that make some people hyper-responders to saturated fat and that can lead to an increase in LDL particle number. And the clinical significance of that is still controversial and debatable. But we know pretty certainly that that does happen.

So, but then if you were to extrapolate those results to someone that didn't have those genetic polymorphisms, that would not be a valid inference. So yeah, it’s just disappointing that, I mean, we know this and yet we still go on doing the same things over and over again. And I have to throw in one last Ioannidis quote which—from that more recent, or I think from one of his previous papers, and I'm going to paraphrase this one because I don't, let me see if I can find it—yeah, “Definitive solutions won’t come from another million observational papers or small randomized trials.” In other words, that was from a paper he wrote called “Implausible Results in Human Nutrition Research.” So in other words, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, right?

Zoë Harcombe:  Absolutely.

Chris Kresser:  So, Zoë, thank you so much for joining me, and I know we went a little long, everybody, but I hope you enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. And I just, I wanted to have one podcast that we could direct people to to really answer this question and look at all the evidence on saturated fat in particular and its relationship with mortality and heart disease mortality. And I think we didn't cover everything, but I think we did a pretty good job of getting the most of it out there. So thank you so much.

Zoë Harcombe:  Oh, thank you. Can I just add one thing, because I think we just about completely nailed everything.

Chris Kresser:  Please, of course. Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe:  When we ran through the 39 results and found that only four were significant, and we dismissed Mozaffarian and we agreed with Chowdhury, and then the two Hooper results, which were just on the CBD events, we can actually put those to bed as well because aside from the fact that they’re events and they’re not mortality and we both agree that mortality is best, the thing that you have to then look at is why did Hooper find something different to all the other people? And when I went in detail, Hooper had actually managed to include four studies which involved only 646 people that were not about cardiovascular disease. And she’d asked the study authors if they happened to have data on cardiovascular disease events. So this was non-peer-reviewed data. That was the first thing.

When, and I owe Dr. Trudi Deakin in the UK, I always credit her for this finding, she spotted in the Hooper paper that when Hooper actually did as she should do, the sensitivity test on that one single finding, it was no longer significant. So the test that had to be done was not just which studies intended to reduce saturated fat or which studies actually did reduce saturated fat.

Chris Kresser:  A key distinction there.

Zoë Harcombe:  That’s really, really important, yeah. So Trudi looked at this and found that it is declared in the paper, but it’s tucked away on sort of page 158, or something.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Zoë Harcombe:  That when the ones that were tested did actually reduce saturated fat only were included, there was no statistical significance and it was not generalizable because again in the whole of the evidence that was looked at by Hooper in either of those two papers, there was no single study of healthy men and women. But I think sensitivity tests apart from non-peer-reviewed data and apart from events, I think we can actually put that one to bed as well. So when you do that, because that’s the one that the other sites still try to hang onto. That’s the one that came up in the Professor Noakes trial when that’s down there for him as an expert witness. They tried to wave that in front of us and said, “Oh, see saturated fat is bad.”

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Zoë Harcombe:  So we hit them back with an, “Oh, no it isn’t.”

Chris Kresser:  What’s the data?

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, we kind of went in on the data. So there just is no evidence, and knowing the facts about fat, it would make no sense if there were.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly. And that reminds me of the recent low-carb study which you and I both critiqued on our blogs. It wasn’t a low-carb study. The people were eating something like 40 percent of calories is carbohydrate, not to mention the fact that they reported a calorie intake that was basically at starvation level, which would invalidate the entire data set. So you don't even need to go any further. I mean we did, but, like, that would've been enough, right? And all it takes is one major error like that, and it casts doubt on the entire data set and makes any kind of inferences that you would draw from it invalid. And I don't think people understand that enough.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, I think critiques, I think the word you used there was quite polite. Actually, I think we both annihilated that study.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, well it was.

Zoë Harcombe:  And a few other people as well, Nina Teicholz and Georgia Ede.

Chris Kresser:  Several, yeah. I mean, it was frankly like shooting fish in a barrel.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yeah, it wasn’t hard, that one, was it?

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, it was not hard. I’m just actually kind of shocked that that kind of study makes it through peer review and gets published, given all of those issues. So anyways, yes, thank you so much for doing all of the work that you do, Zoë. It’s such a pleasure to meet you, virtually, at least, and to be able to really just concisely and comprehensively go through all of these deficiencies in the evidence and to just make it clear for people that this, despite the fact that they've heard this probably for 30 or 40 years, depending on how old they are, and despite the fact that it still forms the basis of our dietary guidelines, there really is no evidence to support it.

Zoë Harcombe:  Yep.

Chris Kresser:  Fantastic. Well, where can people find more about your work, Zoë?

Zoë Harcombe:  Just ZoeHarcombe.com. So my surname is H-a-r-c-o-m-b-e. So that’s ZoeHarcombe.com. And as I say, I blog every week. That’s my sort of business model. So if anyone wants to sign up and get the newsletter, there is lots of stuff on open view. But if you do that, then you support what I do and you help me to stay independent because I don’t take any money from anyone for anything in any circumstance.

Chris Kresser:  Key. Absolutely.

Zoë Harcombe:  I just work away and come up with what I want to find. And I know some people are on the email list who are quite fans of whole grains, for example. And I know every time I write a newsletter saying I looked at this whole grains study and it really didn’t stack up, I know that I’m upsetting some people who are subscribing, but I have to go with where the evidence takes me and I have to report as I find. So that’s what I do.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I’m disappointing my readers all the time with my opinions and it’s important, I think, to stay true to what the data is showing and be as objective as possible about it. You’re one of the few people that I do follow regularly. I love reading your stuff, so everyone who’s listening to this, go check out the blog. It’s one of the most thorough and insightful sources on all of these topics that we discussed today.

And Zoë, we didn’t get a chance to go into much detail on red meat above and beyond its saturated fat content, which as we know is less than its polyunsaturated fat content. But Zoë has recently tackled that, the evidence behind red meat being associated with high risk of heart disease and death. And i'd really recommend checking that out too, because that's another persistent myth that continues to this day.

Zoë Harcombe:  Indeed.

Chris Kresser:  Okay, everybody, thanks for listening. Continue to send in your questions at chriskresser.com/podcastquestion, and we’ll talk to you next time.

The post RHR: The Truth about Saturated Fat, with Zoё Harcombe appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com September 25, 2018 at 07:12PM

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

Switchblade Romance: Looking Back at Alexandre Aja’s HIGH TENSION 15 Years Later

There is a certain sub-genre of horror out there that’s earned some notoriety since its inception in the early-’00s. It’s called the New French Extremity movement, and it typically refers to French-produced horror films with a certain level of violence and savagery. The kind of movie that slaps you in the face with its visceral nature, and leaves you telling all your friends about it for years to come. Fifteen years ago, on June 18, 2003 one of the subgenres most notorious entries was released: Alexandre Aja’s High Tension.

Officially titled Haute Tension in its native France, and released in the U.K. under the slightly cheekier title Switchblade Romance, the film’s brutal nature had people talking from the get-go. Even 7 years after the fact, TIME Magazine named it one of the ‘10 Most Ridiculously Violent Films’ in September of 2010.

    [Please Note: This article discusses in detail the film’s notorious twist]

Marie (Cécile de France) and Alex (Maïwenn) are your run-of-the-mill college students on a road trip to Alex’s family’s home in the French countryside. The reason for the trip, of course, is to buckle down and study their butts off for impending exams. They arrive late at night after the house has gone to sleep, save for Alex’s father whose stayed up to greet them (Dads, right?).  Alex gives Marie a brief tour, and the two decide to turn in for the night. Marie puts her headphones on and decides to – ahem – release some tension (she masturbates), when a big surly dude in a beat-up truck pulls up to the house.

Already, this guy’s problematic with his incessant doorbell ringing at an ungodly hour of the night. Marie is in her room in the attic, wondering what in the fresh hell this bozo could want, while Alex’s poor dad answers the door. Surprise: his intentions are not good.

Long story short, some blood is shed and The Killer (Philippe Nahon) takes Alex with him on his merry way. Marie, having eluded him thanks to some quick and clever thinking, is now tasked with freeing Alex from his grubby clutches. (I mean literally grubby, as this fellow clearly washes his hands with dirt.)

    Bloody Hell

    Now let’s go over the film’s few kills. Becuase what it lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. Spoilers obviously follow.

The first, as you may have guessed, is dear old dad. The old man gets cut in the face with a knife before getting his head pushed between the banisters on the stairs, and promptly lopped right off his body with the aid of a nearby bureau. And reader, when I tell you the blood that comes shooting out of his neck is plentiful, I mean plentiful. We’re talking Kill Bill Vol. 1 levels of blood. Alexandre Aja and special makeup effects artist Giannetto De Rossi apparently consulted with a coroner when deciding how much blood to shed, and therefore stand by their choices.

Next there’s the mom, who gets her throat cut right in front of the slatted closet door that Marie is hiding behind. In the unrated cut on the DVD release, the killer pulls her head back making the wound gape open for a second, before the delayed gush of blood kills any appetite you may have previously had. And if explicit gore wasn’t enough, the film has the balls to kill off Alex’s kid brother. It thankfully isn’t shown, but the gunshot is more than enough to make you queasy.

After a forgettable axe to the torso of a gas station attendant, Marie tries to enlist some extra help. After a tense cat-and-mouse game between her and the killer in the woods, he briefly outsmarts her and pins her down, suffocating her. Not one to go down easily, Marie knocks him over the head, grabs a previously fashioned barbed wire-wrapped post and knocks the sh*t out of his ugly face. Over, and over, and over, and over again. It’s a scene harboring such carnal catharsis any horror hound would drool for, and culminates in a guttural scream from Marie, letting out everything she was keeping at bay in order to save the day…

    Twist and Shout

    And then comes the infamous twist. The one that either makes or breaks what has essentially been a pretty straight-forward film up until this point. And yes, even more Spoilers abound.

Earlier in the film, after the carnage at the house, Marie sneaks into the killer’s truck where Alex is. And because even killers gotta get gas at some point, he stops at a station. In one of the film’s best and most suspenseful scenes, we only hear the clicking of the pump as Marie sneaks out and slowly makes a break for the station door. She pleads for help from the attendant, before hiding in the store when the killer comes in to shop around a bit before taking an axe to the attendant.

Fast forward back to the end, and we see two officers pull up to the gas station. They go through the CCTV footage from the security cameras to see Marie...and no one else.

    Turns out Marie is in deep, tragically unrequited love with Alex. To the point where she finally snapped, creating a psychotic identity to kill off anyone who might stand in the way of the two of them being together. “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore” is what she whispers to Alex over and over again at the end of the film, when they have their final confrontation.

Now, this brand of twist has been done plenty of times in the last 15 years since the film premiered in France, so the modern viewer would be forgiven for their fatigue toward it. But back then this was still a relatively novel idea. However, that didn’t stop people from crying ‘It makes no sense!’ or ‘It’s totally pointless and out of nowhere!’

BUT! If you pay close attention to the very beginning moments of the film, it shows a beat-up looking Marie in a hospital gown, hunched over and whispering to herself, “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore” over and over. The camera glides up her slashed back and we reach her hea. In the blurry background in front of her sit two men and a camera. Are they recording? she asks, and the film begins.

An epilogue masquerading as a prologue.

    As such, everything we see up until the point where she finally “kills” the killer, is just her own story that she’s feeding to the police. The kills are included, and everything else is just how she’s made sense of it in her head to support the theory that there really was a different killer. Therefore rendering almost every “it doesn’t make sense” argument all but moot. Because whatever you saw that “doesn’t make sense” was just a story after all.

The only two sustaining arguments I have found are in regards to a particularly confusing severed head, and a car chase in which Marie and the killer are driving separate vehicles until one crashes in the woods. But that could just be lazy lying on her part. And piggybacking off of that argument, where did the truck even come from in the first place? But that’s a plot hole closed by the director’s commentary, where Aja states there was originally a brief moment where Marie catches a glimpse of the truck on the edge of the cornfield early on. Which would suggest she simply highjacked it.

    And as far as the twist being out of nowhere, it’s actually alluded to in many ways throughout, sometimes quite poignantly. In fact, The Killer shows up when Marie is masturbating, thinking of Alex (presumably). And the scene in the gas station where she runs to hide in the bathroom, there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hesitation before she chooses whether to go into the Men’s room or the Women’s. She chooses the Women’s, but then sneaks over to the Men’s. A metaphor perhaps?

One I didn’t even notice until this re-watch; after the killer leaves the bathroom, Marie bends down and rinses her face off. Anyone who’s seen a horror movie can tell you she’s probably going to stand back up and see him in the mirror behind her. And here the music does swell as expected, but gets perhaps a touch more foreboding when she stands up and only sees herself.

Who would’ve thought that a French Extremist horror flick with a superficially silly (and admittedly problematic) plot twist could house such weirdly nuanced metaphors of struggling with your own desires?

Where you surprised by High Tension‘s infamous plot twists? Are there any other subtle allusions to Marie‘s psychosis that you caught on a reent re-watch? Let us know in the comments below, on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and in the Horror Fiends of Nightmare on Film Street Facebook group!

      The post Switchblade Romance: Looking Back at Alexandre Aja’s HIGH TENSION 15 Years Later appeared first on Nightmare on Film Street - Horror Movie Podcast, News and Reviews.

from WordPress https://nofspodcast.com/high-tension-anniversary-alexandre-aja/ via IFTTT

[johnboothus]

EOD Drinks With Steven Grasse Founder of Quaker City Mercantile

In this episode of “End Of Day Drinks,” VinePair’s editorial team is joined by Steven Grasse, founder of Quaker City Mercantile — an independent advertising agency and distillery that specializes in strategy, marketing, design, and branding for the alcohol industry.

Grasse’s time working in the tobacco industry provided him with the knowledge and experience to launch two of the world’s most successful spirits brands: Hendrick’s Gin and Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum. Tune in to hear about Grasse’s extensive work rebranding some classic beer labels, as well as his latest venture, the experimental Tamworth Distilling.

Listen online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

Tim McKirdy: Hey, everybody! This is Tim McKirdy, staff writer at VinePair, and welcome to the “EOD Drinks” podcast. Joining us for today’s episode, we have Steven Grasse, founder of Quaker City Mercantile and the brains behind some of the world’s leading spirits brands. Welcome Steve, and thanks for joining us.

Steven Grasse: Glad to be here.

T: As always, I’m pleased to also be joined by members of VinePair’s editorial team, including executive editor Joanna Sciarrino, senior editor Cat Wolinski, associate editor Katie Brown, and assistant editor Emma Cranston.

All: Hey, everyone. How’s it going?

T: Steve, your track record shows that if I were launching a spirit brand tomorrow, you’d be the guy that I come to take that brand viral and ultimately make it a huge hit. Your previous or ongoing hits include Sailor Jerry, one of the world’s most successful and best-known rum brands, and Hendrick’s Gin, the label that pretty much ushered in what we might call the ‘Gin-aissance’ and the huge popularity the category enjoys today. Before we discuss those stories, I’d love for you to tell us how you got involved in the booze business and explain exactly what Quaker City Mercantile is?

S: Sure. We’ve been in business for 31 years. Prior to 2008, we were Gyro Advertising, Gyro Worldwide, and we got our start in the tobacco business. For about 20 years. Gyro was the agency for Camel, Winston, Salem Kool, and American Spirit. We were pariahs in the advertising business. We never entered advertising award shows, so we used our excess money to create our own brands. One of those brands we created was Sailor Jerry. We created Sailor Jerry as a T-shirt company. One of the few clients we had besides R.J. Reynolds Tobacco was William Grant & Sons, and we worked with them on Glenfiddich and they came to us and said, “we’d like you to create a gin and a rum for our portfolio.” We came back to them with Hendrick’s for gin, and for rum, we came back with Sailor Jerry. I thought creating a rum brand called Sailor Jerry would help sell more T-shirts. It’s interesting because we were smart enough to own the rights to Sailor Jerry but Hendrick’s we did work for hire. We’ve been with Grants now for, I think, nearly 28 years. We’ve been with him ever since. Even after we sold Sailor Jerry in 2008 to Grants, we’ve remained with them doing all the marketing for both Sailor Jerry and Grants and almost every other brand that Grants have.

T: That’s so interesting as well because it’s only 2021. I think that we’re almost in an era where we completely have forgotten about the tobacco advertising industry. I imagine there were some crazy budgets and a lot of things that you learned during that experience and influenced your later work. Is that the case, or am I completely wide off the mark with that one?

S: Well, we always say that tobacco was like the marketing Marine Corps, because you couldn’t use any traditional marketing or advertising. You had to find ways to get your name out and do things in a very non-traditional sense. I think with the tobacco industry, it was like being a pirate in the sense of having crazy budgets for photo shoots, and half the stuff they would never use. It was a very interesting time. One of the reasons why we stopped working with R.J. Reynolds was towards the end, after we sold Sailor Jerry, tobacco had rightfully gone under FDA controls. And all those crazy “Mad Men” days, prior to FDA involvement, it just became a game, basically working for a pharmaceutical company.

T: You caught the tail end of the Don Draper days of tobacco.

S: It was also the other movie. “Thank You for Smoking” is very similar to that, too. It’s interesting. It was morally ambiguous to do work on this, but at the same time, we learned how to get brands or get the word out without any visible means of support by being in the tobacco industry. The other client we had besides Grants and R.J. Reynolds was Puma sneakers. We took them from being a $30 million, nothing brand up to the point where they sold to Gucci for $7.8 billion. They were a brand where we could do anything we wanted, but they had no money.

T: It was the opposite of the tobacco industry.

S: Yes. We had to find ways of creating excitement and drama for Puma without having the advantage that Nike had. Tons of television, an outlet.

T: I was just going to say it sounds like you have both ends of the experience there, almost the yin and yang of advertising. No money, but you can do whatever you want, and all the money in the world and you can do nothing. It’s a very formative experience for a professional.

S: We are the Harry Houdini of marketing, because we could escape out of anything to get anything done without having to ever do television or print.

T: That’s awesome. I want to talk not exclusively about Sailor Jerry and Hendrick’s. But for me as a drinker and someone who loves alcohol, from a branding standpoint, they seem like two very different concepts. I was wondering if you can give us an idea of the timeline and a bit more in-depth info on how both of them came about. It’s my understanding that Sailor Jerry was first. Is that correct? Also, how did you really grow that brand in the beginning?

S: No, they were created, literally presented, the same day.

T: Oh, on the same day. Wow.

S: We presented them both on the same day. I think it’s interesting when we first launched Sailor Jerry, it hit with a magnificent thud. It did nothing. Even to the point where Grants was going to kill it and hand it back to us and say “this brand isn’t doing anything.” However, what happened with Sailor Jerry was interesting. Pre-internet, we also had the clothing company, and we would have all these bands stopped by our store. We would load them up with cases of rum, and they would drive to the next city and spread the word. That was always a very early form of viral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing. What also happened with Sailor Jerry, which was really good timing, was Diageo was being formed at this time. When Diageo formed, Schieffelin & Somerset and Paddington forming together, there was suddenly a bunch of distributors that lost the distribution rights for Captain Morgan. Suddenly, all these distributors were hungry for a replacement, and Sailor Jerry happened to be there, ready to go. Usually, brands grow in New York City, San Francisco, the places where the influence is, but Sailor Jerry grew spontaneously out of Madison, Wis. It was our first big city where it exploded. Things don’t really explode in Madison, Wis., but it gained a foothold. Then, it spread through Minnesota, the Dakotas, all the Rust Belt areas. Even to this day, I think 98 percent of Sailor Jerry’s sales are off-premise. It’s a very different business model than the rest of Grant’s portfolio. That’s the story of Sailor Jerry. Do you want to hear more about Hendrick’s?

T: I think Joanna is going to jump in now with a question.

Joanna Sciarrino: I am going off with what you said about Sailor Jerry and how you presented both Sailor Jerry and Hendrick’s on the same day. They clearly had success with different markets. Was that your intention when you presented those brands?

S: No, I would say what’s interesting is, I don’t think there is any intention. I think the ideas were very strong. Hendrick’s launched first in the U.S. before it was in Europe. Again, it was met with mild success in the U.S., but where the brand took off was in the U.K. For brands to work, you need to find a champion within the organization who really takes it under their wing. With Sailor Jerry, for instance, when I said it took off out of Madison, Wis., that’s because there was a salesperson at a brand and a distributor in that region that really embraced the brand and took it over and said yes. That’s what happened with Hendrick’s in the U.K. At the time, there was a brand manager named June Hirsch, who really took Sailor Jerry under her wing in London and pioneered a lot in taking our brand world that we created and bringing it to life with these outrageous experiential events. The brand started taking over. The brand was created in the U.S. with Scottish provenance, but it became big in London and then came back to the U.S.

T: I think that’s incredible to note as well because it definitely feels within that time the gin category has really evolved. Can you recall what it was like back then and maybe even gin’s reputation? I feel Hendrick’s really played a role in making gin more accessible to people or changing the image where people previously had notions of it. Gin and tonics weren’t even that popular back then. Is that something you can remember?

S: Oh, yeah. Back then it was just Beefeater and Tanqueray. That’s all that was on the market. Hendrick’s, it’s interesting because obviously the liquid magic of Leslie Gracy, the master distiller for Grants, mixed with our naivete about what gin should be. I think Grants wasn’t in the gin business, so they were very open to it being something different. But when it hit the market, there was nothing else like it. It was totally unique.

T: Can you tell us as well — because I know you have a great story about how the idea for that brand was born and a specific trip to Scotland that you took yourself? I think that’s fascinating and also speaks to the kind of the work that you do in launching brands.

S: I was asked to go to Scotland with Sir Charles Gordon Brown, the owner of Grants, and he wanted me to come to see his gin palace. I’m thinking it’s going to be a palace, right? We fly to Dufftown, see the Glenfiddich Distillery. Then, I drove with him in a camper van through Scotland to Girvan. Girvan is an industrial town on the outskirts of Glasgow. We get there, and it’s the dead of night, I’m sick as a dog, right? He’s kept me up every night eating haggis.

T: That wasn’t making you feel better?

S: I’m like, “OK, so show me this gin palace.” It’s a little garage with these two ancient stills in it. So it’s not a palace at all. I guess it’s what they call it, where they make gin. With these two ancient stills, the Carter Head and the Bennet still over in the 1840s. I see it, and I instantly think of Jules Verne. This starts a whole stream of consciousness with Jules Verne equals Victorian apothecary, Victoriana. That then sends us on a stream of consciousness where I sent my assistant to go find antique poison bottles, because we knew that we wanted it to feel like it came from an apothecary shelf rather than being a spirit, based on the idea that it felt like a Jules Verne story. It’s how we create all of our brands. It’s inspiration, story, stream of consciousness that somehow all end up making sense in the end.

T: That Hendrick’s bottle is just very iconic and really does stand out on the shelf, and I’m sure even more so then than it does now.

S: We also create very intuitively. It’s informed intuition, meaning that I spend the majority of my day researching arcane information. I’m a total history nerd. All the ideas that we pull from come from me reading old books and things like that. For every client we work with, the ideas don’t come from trends. We don’t follow what’s going on in the market. We really create things based on this notion of history and informed intuition.

Katie Brown: Going back to what Tim mentioned earlier about how iconic the actual bottle itself is, especially for Hendrick’s. In your opinion, how important is design aesthetic for the actual bottles that you’re creating? You once said that you like to make things ugly on purpose. I’m curious as to what that means to you, and why is that? Do you still feel that way?

S: Oh, totally. We purposely don’t enter awards shows, because it influences the work you do. I think you end up creating things for your peers, rather than creating something that is authentic to the idea of the product. Again, something like Hendrick’s, the idea was when I thought of Jules Verne and Victorian apothecary. This is pre-internet, so doing research was a little more difficult. I also spent a lot of time in antique stores going through and finding old bottle forms and knowing what their intended use was. Also, when we created Hendrick’s, I didn’t know how gin was made. I asked Sir Charles, how do you do it? Well, there is this basket, and botanicals go in there. It really gives you this idea of, when you think about it, apothecaries. And the origin of spirits were therapeutic. It starts leading you down this stream of consciousness where it led us to Victorian poison bottles. The idea of the Hendrick’s bottle fits the idea of the brand. It becomes the epicenter, a nucleus from which the rest of the brands pours out. That’s always the key. The bottle needs to be the epitome of the brand idea. When I say it’s ugly on purpose, it needs to fit the overall concept of the brand. And to achieve that authenticity, it can’t be trendy. It can’t be of the moment. It needs to be of the period that it emanates out of, if that makes sense.

K: When you mention brand authenticity relating to the bottle itself, I’m so curious because Sailor Jerry is sourced from the Caribbean, right? But the bottle itself has a Hawaiian feel.

S: Yes.

K: What’s the story behind that? Do you still feel that that brand is authentic?

S: It’s authentic to itself, because the whole thing started as a clothing company. I always like to talk about bands, because I always market myself, my agency, and my brands as if they’re bands. I’m a big music freak, but if you think about it, I always like to bring up the example of Led Zeppelin. Their music is more or less Southern blues, but then they start singing about Tolkien, Gollum, and dragons. And somehow it all makes sense, it all works together. It’s this weird mash-up of different influences that create something totally unique. Sailor Jerry’s totally that, because Norman Collins was the godfather of American tattoo, tattooed the entire Pacific Fleet during World War II Hawaii. On top of that, we layer all of this punk and garage music. The whole thing doesn’t quite make any sense, but it totally does when we mash it up into something totally unique. It’s authentic to itself, and to its intent.

T: Some of the other work that you do, beyond creating brands, is also what you would describe as resurrecting brands or rebirthing them. Can you tell us about some of the work you’ve done there and what that looks like as well? Because you’re not starting from a blank canvas in that instance.

S: Our greatest example is Narragansett Beer. It’s funny, my client from Puma, Tony Bertone said, “you need to meet this guy, Mark Hellendrung, who’s trying to resurrect Narragansett.” We all met together in Boston, and in the course of a two-hour lunch at Legal Seafood, we mapped out the entire brand. The trick with resurrecting an old brand is you can’t make things too authentically “old” all the time. When I talk to my wife about history, I literally see her eyes glaze over, and she fades away. If I’m really interested in the book I’m reading, I know I can’t talk to her strictly about the book. I need to bring another element into it. With Narragansett, for instance, the lager can, which feels like it’s always been around, it’s actually a mash-up of two or three different areas of Narragansett classic packaging. We tend to take things from the past, mix them up, and it’s all authentic, but it’s still new at the same time. I think that we make history digestible for the average person in a way that intrigues them and brings them into it, as opposed to scaring them away.

T: Let’s talk about some of the other work that you’re doing now. You have another distillery project that is far, in some respects, from the mainstream. Some of the things that you’re doing there might not strike someone as something that’s going to be this incredible hit like a rum brand or a gin brand. Can you tell us about the work that you’re doing at Tamworth?

S: Yeah, so Tamworth, is it a business, or is it a performance art project? I mean, it’s profitable, so I think it’s a business. In Tamworth, what we wanted to do was — after we sold Sailor Jerrys — I wanted to not just be a guy who creates brands and then finds a distiller who has to make it for me. I wanted to actually own my own distillery and create things, meaningful things, from scratch. Tamworth is actually a larger experiment. The big idea in Tamworth is, can a small distillery revitalize a small rural community? Tamworth, N.H., is in Carroll County, N.H., which is I think one of the poorest counties in all of New Hampshire. Tamworth Village itself is very small, and they’ve always had a problem keeping young people staying in town. The first chance people would run away and go live in the city. In Tamworth, I think, we have 20 employees, and they’re all from the town of Tamworth or adjacent towns. We’ve also been able to work exclusively with local farmers to supply our grains and botanicals. We always say it’s a test kitchen for our bigger clients and projects. So up there, we’re really experimenting with how far we can take things with them. We’ve done things like Deerslayer, which is a venison-infused whiskey. We’ve been working with creating gins using wild hops and all sorts of interesting ingredients. We have a whiskey made of beaver castoreum, which is the anal gland of the beaver. We have a cordial made of black trumpet mushrooms and blueberries. Here at QCM, we have full-time historians who work with us, because we’ve learned a lot about the TTB rules. And there is something called the GRAS list. What’s interesting about spirits versus other categories, even beer, there are very few ingredients on the GRAS list. Our experimentation is limited by what the government says we can and can’t put in spirits. When we have a full-time historian on staff, if we can prove ethnic or historical usage of an ingredient, then we can lobby the TTB to allow us to use it as a flavor. There are all sorts of weird things that we do to try to see how far we can push where the realm of spirits can go.

T: I definitely think the venison-infused whiskey is not the average spirit that you come across on the market. You said you run a profit, so it’s a business. But ultimately, you also mentioned that it’s a think tank for your bigger projects. Is that the end goal, or is it a more creative outlet? What do you see as the end goal there?

S: Well, it’s interesting, because it seems weird to say we’re not driven by profits, because we are. There’s a much bigger component for us because we’re enjoying the ride, the story, and the ideas that we create. Creativity is why we do it. It makes money because we enjoy doing it. I guess I could build a giant rectifying plant in Tamworth and then source the liquid somewhere. But really, we’re having a lot of fun. What I think is amazing is, I really thank the Grant family for giving me this opportunity for 28 years of that stability. I think when we sold Sailor Jerry, it gave us the financial stability that we can do a project like Tamworth, and really enjoy where it’s taking us. There is a burden to make a profit up there, but the greater burden is to have a fantastic story to tell in the process. That’s really the purpose. I gladly work for my corporate clients in Philadelphia to be able to do what I’m doing. That’s what motivates us.

J: Steve, to that end, Aaron Goldfarb recently mentioned in an article that Tamworth produces the most gins of anyone on planet Earth. With all of these experiments and all of this creativity, how personally invested or attached are you to these creations?

S: I’m very invested in the ideas and stories, and it’s so fun for us to come up with a concept of it. They’re led by a story I want to tell or they’re led by an ingredient or a process. I’m an enlightened despot, so I allow other ideas in, but ultimately, it’s going to be what I approve of. I think we’re very aggressive in what we’re doing, because again, we want to see how far we can take it. I only get frustrated that we can’t be faster with far more ideas than we have to pass through.

J: Just a follow-up to that, then. I know you’re motivated by profits, of course, but also by creativity. Is the goal to have any of these ideas catch fire?

S: In Tamworth?

J: Yeah.

S: No. We purposely set up Tamworth in a control state. It’s counterintuitive, but we’re big fans of control states. Because I have one buyer, and that one buyer has a local mandate to buy my product. So I want to be the biggest thing in New Hampshire, which I think is the third or fourth biggest buyer experience in the world. Well, I’m already the biggest. Eventually, the other thing that’s interesting with this is, I’m a creative risk-taker, but I’m financially risk-averse. We don’t borrow money. To build the entire distillery, we did not borrow a single dollar. To take this to the next step, we’re currently scouting more land because we need more barrel houses. We need a place to build a bigger strip still. We have scouting land, and then we’ll buy it in cash and then we’ll build with cash. Again, the Grant family is a good teacher. They’ve been doing it for generations. I think that what I am attracted to by the spirits category is that they take a generational approach to it.

T: That’s wonderful. To the Tamworth end looking forward, Steve. You mentioned that you have some of these positions on staff that are historians. I don’t know whether most distilleries would have them on staff, maybe some that have stretched back longer. I think some of the bourbon distilleries do because they want to know more about their own brand history rather than ingredients. I remember having spoken to you before, you mentioned these TTB guidelines, and maybe the ultimate goal is to one day have a distillery in a country with no laws, so that there are no limiting factors. I’m not sure whether that is a possibility. But as a final question, I wanted to ask you, what does the future look like? What’s on the horizon for you, for Tamworth, and new projects coming up?

S: I think it is funny. What if you built a distillery in a country that allowed you to use different ingredients? It’d be very interesting. For the future? I mean, we look at things for so long. Sailor Jerry was fascinating when we did that because every year my account would say “shut it down, you’re losing money.” I would say “one more year, one more year.” It’s interesting because, with Tamworth, there’s no exit strategy, because we don’t want to sell it. We just want to keep going with it. I think the future would be repeating the experiment I’ve had with Tamworth in other communities. Because the transition of positive agricultural-based jobs and tourism has had a profound impact on this small, rural town. Wouldn’t it be great if I could do this in other communities? I noticed Bill Gates, you are now America’s biggest farmland owner, give me a call and we could do something together.

Cat Wolinski: Hi, Steve, this is Cat. I know that you have written a few books and you mentioned being a bookworm earlier. What’s happening with your next book, and why are you writing it?

S: We have two books coming out. One is a cocktail book for Art in the Age and that one has just been put to bed and looks fantastic. That’s called the “Cocktail Workshop.” I wrote that one with Adam Erace, who’s a writer in Philly, and Lee Noble, who was my star mixologist. That was going to be based around the Art in the Age brand. Then, the second book is called “Cultivating Curiosity.” I’m working on that with Aaron Goldfarb. I met him when he wrote an article about how to make sports brands go viral.

C: Wasn’t that for VinePair?

S: Yeah, I think it was. It’s interesting, I made good use of my time during Covid because at first, I said “I’m going to work on another book.” I wrote a proposal, and then I handed it to my agent. She said, “Who would you like to work on with this?” I said “I think I’d like to work with Aaron.” I do weekly calls with Aaron, I just got off the phone with him to talk to you guys. I think we’re almost towards the end of our process.

C: Wow, that’s awesome. He must have been a very charming interviewer.

T: Aaron Goldfarb, for those folks listening who may not be familiar with the name, is a regular VinePair contributor, writer-at-large. Check out his work, it’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to reading the book myself. Knowing Aaron and hearing a little bit about how you work, Steve, I’m sure it will be fascinating.

S: Our creative process is interesting. We’re not a typical ad agency or marketing firm. We approach things in a very organic, artistic way of working. I’ve always said there are only so many people in the world that will ever hire me, because who will understand me? Right? My job is to find every single one of them. The book with Aaron is my attempt to explain that. To go through and try to articulate this process that’s been very successful, what it’s been.

T: From the conversation today, it sounds really fascinating. Looking forward to reading more there.

S: When we get hired by people, we don’t really pitch anyone. We don’t do pitches. You give me the gig, and then you understand that I’m going to create something for you.

T: I believe your mantra is to “say yes to everything.”

S: Within reason.

T: Yes, within reason. Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining us on the show today and giving us a glimpse behind the scenes at the creative process of these brands that I’m sure so many people have enjoyed and know. It’s been really fascinating. Thank you so much for your time today.

S: Sure thing, thank you. Thanks for arranging it.

T: Also, thank you everyone for joining us on the show today.

The article EOD Drinks With Steven Grasse, Founder of Quaker City Mercantile appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/eod-drinks-steven-grasse-quaker-city-mercantile/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/eod-drinks-with-steven-grasse-founder-of-quaker-city-mercantile

[storm-of-aegis]

Student Council leads

I’ll be using this far more in the weeks/ days to come. I’m coming up with the characters and backstories of important characters the player will be able to interact. The histories of most characters will be pivotal to optional “friendship” quests that could have over reaching impacts to the story as a whole. The following descriptions will be for the Student Council.

Name: An Dung Hoang Age: 17 Nationality: Vietnamese Year: Junior Ability: Super Strength Gender: Male Club: Student Council Bio: Born in Ho Chi Minh City, An was raised very strictly. His father expected excellence and discipline from him in all aspects of his life. Raised to be the best in academics, athletics, as well as mental proficiency. He attained the Student Council Presidency as a Freshmen, a feat beforehand that was completely unheard of. He has personal history with the Arbitration League, and especially their leader Trent. This year, the 2 will definitely come to a head.

Name: Aadarsha Anand Age: 17 Nationality: Indian Year: Junior Ability: Force Manipulation Gender: Female Club: Student Council Bio: Aadarsha is the twin sister of Bhakti Anand. But their similarites are only found skin deep. Raised in Bangalore until her parents’ divorce when she was barely 4, she largely grew up in the U.K., moving from place to place as her mother’s work always kept her on the move. Her only consistent friend being Bhakti, who she talked to almost daily. But as they neared their 11th birthday, Bhakti became harder and harder to reach. Aadarsha’s loneliness began to grow, fearful of losing the one person left in her life who cared about her completely. Eventually, Aadarsha learned why Bhakti was harder to reach, her new little sister needed everyone’s attention. Her father had remarried, and his new bride had a daughter from a previous relationship. Feeling replaced, Aadarsha stopped talking to Bhakti. Eventually she began to find ways to add people around her, never really making them friends per se, but at least giving her a group in which to be around.

Name: Vicente Cabral Age: 16- 17 Nationality: Spanish Year: Sophomore Ability: Gravitas-Kinecis Gender: Male Club: Student Council Bio: Born in a small town near Madrid, Vicente is the third child of Miguel and Josefine Cabral, the owners of a leading pharmaceutical company. Vicente was a happy child, made friends easily, loved by his family and never wanted for anything. Closer to his mother, he gained a fondness for flowers and dancing, something he also shared with his older sister. However his older brother shared a special affinity with him, fore they were the only 2 in their family born with abilities. As his brother possessed Super Speed, he could manipulate the force of Gravity itself. Always gave his mother such a fright when he’d jump off of something high only to levitate just off the ground with his powers. She’d always act concerned, and he never knew how his brother was always ready to catch “Osito” should he forget to use his power. But tragedy eventually hit when his father, Miguel passed away suddenly. He had been hiding his own illness as to not burden his family, hoping that his company could find a cure before his own condition got worse. In a letter posted to his family upon his mother going through some of his fathers’ belongings, he explained his situation and assured the family that anytime they’d see a doctor, he’d see if they inherited it from him. Every time they would come back negative, something he thanked his wife for. He wrote how he always loved the garden his daughter set up, and how he wishes for her to bring him a few Gazania’s to his grave on his birthday, so he can enjoy them in memory of his Abuela. Fore his oldest son never forget to look after his siblings and mother, and to never forget to slow down and enjoy his life, not just move quickly to the next thing. Fore his wife to always dance early on Sunday morning, and how he regrets not dancing with her more when he had the chance. And for Vicente, to never forget to be himself, and to never feel like he is unable to love who he wants to love. The weight of the world will try to push down on you, but you of all people will be able bear it. Time passed on as it always does, and Vicente went off to High School and joined the Student Council. In memory of his father, Vicente wears a Gazania on his lapel whenever he goes wears his uniform.

Name: Nils Rasmussen Age: 17 Nationality: Danish Year: Sophomore Ability: Telekinesis Gender: Male Club: Student Council Bio: Nils was born in Copenhagen, shortly before his mother gave birth. Shortly thereafter his father went out into the military. As his mother and her inlaws did not get along very well, she returned to her family home near Odense. She kept in contact with Nils’ father for several years. Every time she would ask if he had finally been granted housing for them to live on base with him, and every time he would say he wasn’t in a position to request a personal housing unit. Years went by, and the only time Nils remembered seeing his father was when he wanted “something” from his mother. Around the age of 6, Nils’ mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. It was aggressive and relentless, claiming her life just before Nils’ 9th birthday. His father claimed Nils and brought him to live on the base, being told to keep his life with his mother and grandparents quiet. And that he’ll explain later. Upon reaching the base, Nils found out why his father never moved his mother in, and that’s because his father already had a wife living with him. A woman who spoke very little Danish, and he didn’t speak the language she did. Nils demanded to return to his grandparents house within days of living in this horrible revelation, he was the product of an affair, and his mother died waiting for a lie she foolishly wanted. Several months passed, and Nils found out that his new “mother” was a French woman. She and her son began teaching Nils French and English to go along with his school studies. Close to a year passed, and Nils finally learned enough French to carry out the plan he and his maternal grandparents came up with. So, on his 10th birthday, his grandparents came to visit just off base. Waiting just outside the gates. As his new “mother” presented a cake, Nils asked her if she would like to see his mother. Nils’ father tried to interrupt saying that we need to live for the now and not the past. Nils pulled began to pull out a photo as his father jumped forward demanding Nils’ goes to his room. Nils defiantly looked and him, pulling the photo and handing it to the woman. Quickly she grabs it as Nils’ father tried to wrench it from her. Curiously, she asked who the woman was, and why she was with him. Nils’ father tried to explain how she was a girl he met on leave who got pregnant, and how she passed away and wanted to bring his son home since her passing. Seeing how she was starting to soften, Nils’ yelled defiantly saying he’s lying, because anytime to left the base he came to see her and not his son. He used to tell her that he was waiting to find a time to move her onto the base with him as a way to string him along. Nils’ father and his wife began to argue as Nils’ scampered off, tossing a bag out of his window just to run back into the kitchen. Nils yells at his dad that he wants to go home and that he hates him and this house. Demanding that he be allowed to live with his grandparents. In a fit of rage, his father ordered to leave and to live on the streets. Nils left, ran around to the side of his window, grabbed his bag and left to meet his grandparents. They raised Nils from then on. His father never speaks to him, but he does try and speak to Catherine, and even has a bit of a relationship with his half brother Julien. But he’s not spoken to his father since that day.

Feel free to leave any feedback or notes. I am from the US, and only have a vague notion of other countires, so if you’re more familiar, or even from these countries, please feel free to offer any feedback to help make characters more believable.

[pourdecisionsblog]

Breaking the Ice(wine)

It’s officially Autumn guys, the nights are drawing in and we’re flirting with turning the heating on. We’re craving comfort food and wooly jumpers, and we’re moving away from the white’s and rosés of the Summer. It’s time for a more indulgent tipple, and today we’re learning about one of the most luxurious wines on the market. Yes, it’s time to pop the cork on a very special bottle of Ice Wine (or Eis Wein if you want to be official about it).  

Ice Wine is a beautiful dessert wine originally hailing from Germany. However due to the consistent winter temperatures and predictable freeze over, Canada has now overtaken Germany to become the principal supplier of this variety of wine. 

This is a late harvest wine, meaning the grapes are left on the vine for an extended period of time, often deep into the winter. This allows the water in the grapes to freeze, leaving the sugars and solids to do their thing and make some sweet sweet wine. To be officially considered an Ice Wine, grapes must be frozen naturally, with no artificial enhancements. Harvest will often take place overnight and in temperatures of -7/-8C, the cellars have no heating and picking usually takes place in one hit. These guys are hardcore! 

Unlike other sweet dessert wines such as Sauternes and Tokaji, there should be no Botrytis present on the grapes. The aim is to allow the grapes to freeze before the rot has chance to develop. They need to be healthy and hardy enough to last deep into the winter and remain in tact on the vine. This also makes for a high acidity level which balances out the sweetness, and makes ice wine fresher than other dessert wines. 

(Image: Andrew MacFarlane on Flickr)

A quick note on fermentation: because of the incredibly high sugar levels, fermentation takes much longer than normal. The process for ice wine can take months rather than days or weeks and there even needs to be a special kind of yeast involved that can withstand the elongated fermentation period.

Finally, Let’s talk about the beautiful grapes that give us this delicious tipple. The two main varieties used for ice wine are Vidal Blanc and Riesling.

Vidal Blanc:

A winter variety, Vidal Blanc has a tough outer skin that makes it ideal to withstand the tough growing conditions. The grape produces high sugar levels with a moderate to high acidity. On the palate, we’re talking tropical fruit notes such as Grapefruit and Pineapple.

Riesling:

Originating from the Rhine region of Germany, Riesling gives us aromatic, floral notes and high acidity. The grape itself is terrior expressive, meaning that it adopts the characteristics and flavour profile of the area it’s grown in. Depending on where they’re grown, Reisling grapes can take on totally different flavours. 

Wines made from this grape have excellent ageing potential, which makes them ideal for ice wine production. The naturally high acidity compliments the sugar in the grape, preventing it from creating intensely sweet wine.

Riesling grapes give us peachy flavours complimented with apple and honey. Delicious!

Ok, so what are the key takeouts about this wine? Luckily for us, the wonderful Wine Folly have put together this very handy fact sheet!

Low Alcohol, high sweetness

Expensive

Medium bodied (thanks to the high acidity that stops it becoming syrupy)

Low Tannins (Ice Wine is rarely oaked)

Flavour Hitlist: pineapple, lemon, apricot, honey and marmalade with potential for floral notes)

Foodie friend: soft cheeses (hello Brie & Camembert!) and fruit tarts.

Ice Wine is generally difficult to pick up, especially in the U.K. and is one of the pricey-er varieties of wine because of the relatively low volume of production and the intense harvesting process. I promise that it’s worth springing for if you come across it though. The low yield of grapes means that ice wine is usually sold in in half (375 cl) bottles. I’m thinking that it would be awesome to serve at Christmas as a special treat with the family, especially alongside a delicious cheese board!

Salut!

[monstrousthingsrp]

Time Period Quick Reference:

Courtesy the lovely Erin (@incre-et-painture) we now have a handy-dandy little reference to help us all “flow with the times” without having to struggle between either spending precious time researching or winging it and hoping for the best! She actually lived in England during the period in which our game is set, so if you have additional questions about the setting she’ll be happy to help you out--

Although keep in mind that this is an alternate universe. As such, specific individual facts and historical events may be different. So don’t worry about getting bogged-down in the details; after all, this is a world in which The Cold War was replaced by The Worldwide Witchunt Wars. There probably was no Cuban Missile Crisis; there may not have even been a Space Race! We’ve left particular historical details vague enough that we can tailor them to suit whatever plot-points we all decide to develop.

So just as with the timeline, view the following as a reference guideline, not a checklist to obey!

Technology:

This is probably the most important one for us, as unlike most Potterverse games we’re actually playing in a world where your character very well might have access to the sort of technology that we take for granted in our current lives -- albeit several generations older than what we’ve got on hand now!

Most computers operate using ethernet cords to connect to the internet, laptops weigh an extremely portable 52 pounds, basically, and camera phones are cutting edge technology. The pictures taken with them are notoriously grainy at this stage and definitely not the crystal clear video we’re used to.

Most mobile phones operate on a “top up” method where you pay for minutes. They’re called track phones in the U.K. Also, most people are paying per text message sent, but it’s still a popular method of communication. You can top up your minutes in most convenience stores and by calling into your provider’s number. There aren’t any smartphones, apps, and other things like that. Public payphones still exist, although they are fading out by this point.

Travel is done by taxi, bus, and tube. Lyft and Uber do not exist. Londoners love the Tube and definitely travel that way frequently. For frequent travelers, Oyster cards are refillable cards that are similar to the Metro cards we use in the US. In fact, 2004 was the first year that Oyster cards existed. They can also be used on the bus and train, but not on taxis.

Please also remember that trains are a popular method of travel for Europeans. They’re also very reliable and a great way to get around. (As for whether people would be comfortable sharing a carriage with someone who’s got stars by their eyes, well...)

Pop Culture: Sport

As much as it breaks my heart, Manchester United won the FA cup in 2004. (Mod Note: her Erin, maybe in this messed-up world West Ham isn’t a total lost cause? I mean, sport doesn’t have to have happened the same as it did in reality, and we’ve got so many crazy things going on here already -- wealthy Weasleys, werewolf-friendly Blacks, a living Regulus...stranger things could happen, right?)

For those of you interested in talking football, here are the league tables for that season. Please keep in mind that different teams are in different leagues so, if your character follows a team, make sure you know who they play. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004%E2%80%9305_Football_League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004%E2%80%9305_FA_Premier_League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004%E2%80%9305_Football_League_Championship

Pop Culture: Telly

The Television lineup in Britain in real 2004-2005 contained the shows:

Little Britain

Spooks

Eastenders

Still Game

Dr. Who (the new series had just started, but the reruns were still extremely popular and well-loved by a majority of British people)

Casualty

The Doctors

Holby City

River City

Blue Peter

Strictly Come Dancing

And news is broadcast on the BBC News

For a comprehensive list, please see this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_programmes_broadcast_by_the_BBC

Please pay attention to the years listed for each program to make sure that it’s applicable...and feel free to make up shows of your own that might exist in this reality! Just keep in mind that TV in England was a much smaller, lower-budget, more contained entity than the overwhelming glut of channels going on in America.

Pop Culture: Music

This will be a painful trip for some of us. After all, I think we’d probably all rather forget that Kelis ever proclaimed that her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. However, it’s a sad fact that she did, and this is the time when it happened!

Now again, we are living in an alternate reality here, so feel free to make up other songs and singers and groups -- both mundane and magical; maybe the Weird Sisters and Celestina Warbeck don’t exist here (and maybe they do) but there are surely still some magical musicians (maybe some taking advantage of the “dangerous” aura their magic grants them, while others might try and downplay it) so please, let your imaginations run wild! Maybe this Brittany Spears never sang Toxic but rather Cursed...maybe this Goldie Lookin Chain wrote Wands Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do. Who knows, have fun! The following list is for reference so that you know what kind of music and what kind of bands (probably) exist in this world and this time. And, maybe, to give you all a trip -- pleasant or otherwise -- down nostalgia lane. Enjoy!

Here are the Top 100 Songs of 2004 in the UK:

01 Eamon ~ F**k It (I Don't Want You Back)

02 Eric Prydz ~ Call On Me

03 Anastacia ~ Left Outside Alone

04 DJ Casper ~ Cha Cha Slide

05 Usher featuring Lil' Jon & Ludacris ~ Yeah!

06 Frankee ~ FURB (F U Right Back)

07 Kelis ~ Milkshake

08 Mario Winans featuring Enya & P Diddy ~ I Don't Wanna Know

09 3 Of A Kind ~ Baby Cakes

10 Michelle McManus ~ All This Time

11 Britney Spears ~ Everytime

12 Michael Andrews featuring Gary Jules ~ Mad World

13 Destiny's Child ~ Lose My Breath

14 The Shapeshifters ~ Lola's Theme

15 Outkast ~ Hey Ya!

16 LMC vs U2 ~ Take Me To The Clouds Above

17 O-Zone ~ Dragostea Din Tei

18 The Streets ~ Dry Your Eyes

19 Busted ~ Thunderbirds / 3AM

20 Usher ~ Burn

21 Britney Spears ~ Toxic

22 Natasha Bedingfield ~ These Words

23 Ozzy & Kelly Osbourne ~ Changes

24 Boogie Pimps ~ Somebody To Love

25 Kelis ~ Trick Me

26 The Rasmus ~ In The Shadows

27 Band Aid 20 ~ Do They Know It's Christmas?

28 Nelly ~ My Place / Flap Your Wings

29 D12 ~ My Band

30 McFly ~ 5 Colours In Her Hair

31 Girls Aloud ~ I'll Stand By You

32 Cassidy featuring R Kelly ~ Hotel

33 Jamelia ~ Thank You

34 Peter Andre ~ Mysterious Girl

35 Maroon 5 ~ This Love

36 Eminem ~ Just Lose It

37 Rachel Stevens ~ Some Girls

38 Khia ~ My Neck My Back (Lick It)

39 Christina Milian ~ Dip It Low

40 McFly ~ Obviously

41 JoJo ~ Leave (Get Out)

42 Deep Dish ~ Flashdance

43 Lemar ~ If There's Any Justice

44 J-Kwon ~ Tipsy

45 Will Young ~ Leave Right Now

46 Sean Paul featuring Sasha ~ I'm Still In Love With You

47 Brian McFadden ~ Real To Me

48 Girls Aloud ~ Love Machine

49 Katie Melua ~ The Closest Thing To Crazy

50 2Play featuring Raghav & Jucxi ~ So Confused

51 Twista ~ Sunshine

52 Sam & Mark ~ With A Little Help From My Friends / Measure Of A Man

53 Robbie Williams ~ Radio

54 Blue ~ Breathe Easy

55 The Black Eyed Peas ~ Shut Up

56 Twista ~ Slow Jamz

57 Busted ~ Who's David

58 Ice Cube featuring Mack 10 & Ms Toi ~ You Can Do It

59 U2 ~ Vertigo

60 Girls Aloud ~ The Show

61 N*E*R*D ~ She Wants To Move

62 Christina Aguilera featuring Missy Elliott ~ Car Wash

63 Nina Sky ~ Move Ya Body

64 Anastacia ~ Sick And Tired

65 Maroon 5 ~ She Will Be Loved

66 Ja Rule featuring R Kelly & Ashanti ~ Wonderful

67 Goldie Lookin Chain ~ Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do

68 The 411 ~ Dumb

69 Usher ~ Confessions Part II / My Boo

70 Special D ~ Come With Me

71 Kelis featuring Andre 3000 ~ Millionaire

72 Keane ~ Somewhere Only We Know

73 Duncan James & Keedie ~ I Believe My Heart

74 Jamelia ~ See It In A Boy's Eyes

75 Natasha Bedingfield ~ Single

76 The 411 featuring Ghostface Killah ~ On My Knees

77 Franz Ferdinand ~ Take Me Out

78 Gwen Stefani ~ What You Waiting For?

79 Basement Jaxx featuring Lisa Kekaula ~ Good Luck

80 George Michael ~ Amazing

81 D12 ~ How Come

82 Kylie Minogue ~ I Believe In You

83 4-4-2 ~ Come On England

84 Jay Sean featuring The Rishi Rich Project ~ Eyes On You

85 Avril Lavigne ~ My Happy Ending

86 Rachel Stevens ~ More More More

87 Enrique featuring Kelis ~ Not In Love

88 Ultrabeat ~ Feelin' Fine

89 Jennifer Lopez ~ Baby I Love U

90 Green Day ~ American Idiot

91 The Streets ~ Fit But You Know It

92 Sugababes ~ Too Lost In You

93 Victoria Beckham ~ This Groove / Let Your Head Go

94 Ronan Keating ~ She Believes (In Me)

95 Shaznay Lewis ~ Never Felt Like This Before

96 Britney Spears ~ My Prerogative

97 Ashlee Simpson ~ Pieces Of Me

98 Busted ~ Air Hostess

99 Outkast featuring Sleepy Brown ~ The Way You Move

100 The Black Eyed Peas ~ Hey Mama

For the rest of 2004 in music in the real world, please go to this wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_in_British_music_charts

Random Stuff:

Since the standard closing time for a pub is 11 PM, that’s when “Needles” closes. There are after-hours nightclubs, and people probably go to them, but Needles does its last call at 10:45.

Prostitution is not illegal in Britain, but running a brothel is. Basically, a person can sell themselves, but you can’t sell other people. (I just feel like this is useful information.)

Gun Control Laws had banned both automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Rifles were still allowed for those with hunting permits.

Courtesy Millie @theinvisibleboi: 2004 is also the year Facebook launched (although at that point it would have still been restricted to school e-mail accounts) and the Olympics were held in Athens, in case anyone wanted to feel old! (Probably wix would not be allowed to compete...but if anyone wants to create some kind of controversial Olympics history or event for this world, or otherwise alter history to conform to to AU, please feel free!)

Again, please use this wonderful collection of data that Erin has so helpfully provided us with for as general reference, not uncompromising and stone-set facts that you must know, utilize, and memorize! None of us are expert historians and unless you do something really obvious like reference an iPhone or One Direction, we aren’t going to call you out on it -- especially when an “error” might just be a difference between this world and our own. This is just to help you get in the “vibe” of the time period, not information that you’ll be tested on later. So don’t panic, stay loose, and feel free to get creative!

Thanks once more to Erin for putting this together for all of us, and remember that if you have questions about anything else regarding England in 2005, please feel free to message her and she’ll help out as best she can!

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/technology/entertainment/11-memorable-grammy-awards-performances-throughout-the-years/

11 memorable Grammy Awards performances throughout the years

For 60 years, we’ve witnessed some of the most talented and celebrated artists take the Grammys stage to perform, and pick up an award or eight. You can bet that there will be a few surprises this year as The Recording Academy gears up to honor musicians for artistic excellence in a variety of categories.

Count down to music’s biggest night with 11 performances from the past that we’re still talking about today.

The 61st annual Grammys will air live on Sunday, Feb. 10 on CBS at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PST from the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

Beyonce, “Love Drought” and “Sandcastles” (2017)

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for NARAS

Beyonce performs onstage during The 59th GRAMMY Awards, Feb. 12, 2017 in Los Angeles.

In 2017, the Grammys promised a Beyonce performance “that would have everyone talking.” As we all know, she delivered on that promise — exceeding expectations and defying gravity with one of the most memorable performances in Grammy history.

Her nine-minute, jaw-dropping visual spectacle — made more impressive by the fact she was pregnant with twins Sir and Rumi — arguably set the bar for which all future awards show performances will be compared. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the performance is among “the most ambitious and logistically complex live segment the Grammys, or any other awards show, has attempted.”

Adele, “Hello” (2017)

It would be nearly impossible to discuss the 2017 Grammys without mentioning Adele. Along with the nearly 25 million viewers who tuned in that night, she had us at “Hello,” opening the show with her No. 1 single that spent 10 weeks in the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

Later that night, she paid tribute to George Michael with an equally memorable, stripped-down version of “Fast Love,” in which she bravely asked to start over mid-song, announcing, “I can’t mess this up for him.”

And if her performances weren’t enough for the books, Adele took home five awards, including Album of the Year, to which she replied, “I can’t possibly accept this award.” Instead, she used her acceptance speech to celebrate Beyonce’s “Lemonade.”

Mariah Carey, “If It’s Over” (1992)

In the early ‘90s, the world was blessed with Mariah Carey’s voice, and her live performances at the 1991 and 1992 Grammys in which she effortlessly showcased her five-octave vocal range. Although both were stellar, we’re focusing on her phenomenal performance of “If It’s Over.”

Carey takes her time, carefully singing every note of the ballad to ensure you feel “emotions” as the song builds. At the time, Carole King — who co-wrote the song with Carey — said, “She’s very expressive. She gives a lot of meaning to what she sings.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Michael Jackson, “The Way You Make Me Feel” and “Man in the Mirror” (1988)

Michael Jackson only performed once at the Grammys — during the 30th annual event in 1988 — but he made it count, performing a medley of his No. 1 singles “The Way You Make Me Feel” and “Man In the Mirror.” Both songs appear on his album “Bad.”

Jackson opened his performance in silhouette, allowing the audience to focus on a few of his signature moves. When the curtain rose, he began singing a stripped-down version of “The Way You Make Me Feel” before kicking things up a notch. Without stating the obvious, the choreography is incredible, and that’s only partially due to the fact that the spin and the moonwalk are incorporated. When he shifted into “Man in the Mirror,” the focus is on his vocal talent, eventually accompanied by a gospel choir as he wholeheartedly convinces us to “make that change.”

Whitney Houston, “Greatest Love of All” (1987)

Clive Davis, who signed Whitney Houston to his record label at 19, recalled when he first heard the future superstar sing a cover of “Greatest Love of All” at a club in New York City. “Whitney sang the song with such fervor, with such a natural vocal gift, with such passion, that I was stunned. I knew really right then and there that this was a special talent and I was blown away by her. There was no hesitation. I wanted to sign Whitney.” The song would eventually make it onto her debut album and spend three weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart.

Her Grammys performance is timeless and flawless — and the way she holds the last note will give you chills. She deservedly received a standing ovation.

Christina Aguilera, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” (2007)

M. Caulfield/WireImage/Getty Images

Christina Aguilera performs during the 49th Annual GRAMMY Awards in Los Angeles, Feb. 12, 2007.

In 2007, Christina Aguilera brought down the house with her rendition of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” In fact, her tribute to the late “Godfather of Soul” is often referred to as one of the best live performances of all time.

Aguilera’s performance was also praised by Patti Smith, who called her rendition “one of the best performances that I’ve ever seen … at the end, I just involuntarily leapt to my feet. It was amazing.”

Aguilera later included the spellbinding cover on her 2018 Liberation Tour set list.

Amy Winehouse, “You Know I’m No Good” and “Rehab” (2008)

It was undeniably Amy Winehouse’s night at the 50th Grammys in 2008, where she took home five awards (Best New Artist, Best Pop Vocal Performance, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, Record of the Year and Song of the Year), setting a record at the time, and earning an entry in the 2009 edition of the “Guinness Book of World Records” for Most Grammy Awards won by a British Female Act.

Since Winehouse had recently been released from rehab and denied a visa to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles, she performed “You Know I’m No Good” and “Rehab” from her critically acclaimed album “Back to Black” via satellite. It was around 3 a.m. in London when Winehouse took the stage, and since her tragic death in 2011, her performance and achievements that night have become part of her legacy. Her heartfelt reaction to winning Record of the Year (announced by her idol Tony Bennett) is also captured in the 2015 Grammy award-winning documentary “Amy.”

Lady Gaga, “Born This Way” (2011)

Lester Cohen/WireImage/Getty Images

Lady Gaga performs onstage during The 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards, Feb. 13, 2011, in Los Angeles.

To say there was buzz surrounding Lady Gaga at the 2011 Grammys would be an understatement. How’s this for an entrance: she arrived on the red carpet in the midst of a metaphorical rebirth, carried in an incubating vessel (which she claims she stayed in for three days prior as part of the creative experience) before “hatching” out to perform her No. 1 single “Born This Way.” By doing so, Gaga gave us her version of “An Actor Prepares” — demonstrating her undeniable passion and dedication to her craft.

Beyonce and Prince, “Purple Rain”/”Baby I’m a Star”/”Crazy in Love”/”Let’s Go Crazy” (2004)

Even music icons like Beyonce get starstruck working with their idols. Looking back on her performance with Prince in 2004, she recalled, “I was on the stage with Prince? Are you serious? I still can’t believe it.” She added, “Of course I was terrified to be working with him … I was overwhelmed and nervous and starstruck.”

The two opened the show with a medley of four songs, and the energy between them was electrifying. If the experience of performing with one of her idols wasn’t enough for Beyonce, she also took home five awards, the most of any artist that night.

Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (1984)

In 1984, the Eurythmics were up for Best New Artist, which was bestowed onto another ’80s favorite from the U.K., Culture Club. During his acceptance speech, Boy George thanked America for having taste, style and “knowing a good drag queen when you see one,” which he later recalled had people “freaking out” at the time. “Look,” he added, “sometimes the world just isn’t ready.”

Ready or not, that same night, Annie Lennox dressed in drag to perform Eurythmics’ No. 1 single, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The performance is so iconic it arguably inspired future superstar Lady Gaga, who opened the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards as her alter ego Jo Calderone.

Madonna and Gorillaz, “Feel Good Inc./Hung Up” (2006)

The Grammys pushed the envelope in 2006 when animated band Gorillaz performed its hit single “Feel Good Inc.” as 3-D holograms. Hip-hop trio De La Soul (in the flesh) joined in for their part in the song, and yet, there was one more surprise in store.

A Madonna hologram emerged on stage and began singing her hit dance club anthem “Hung Up” as one song blended into the other. And for the grand finale, the “human” version of the queen of pop transformed the Grammys stage into a full-blown disco dance party.

[beatricethecat2]

if/then (2.0) - 4

Snow day here in NYC!! So I snuck chapter 3 up a few days ago and promised a swift chapter 4, so here it is. It still needs tweaking but I think is good enough to go for now. A big thanks to those of you still reading, I really appreciate you being along for the ride! Edited a bunch 4/1.

Previously: part 1, part 2, part 3

Read first if you are new! gutted/sorted and wax/wane…if/then is a continuation of those two.

//////////////////////

An arm stretches across the bed as a low murmur nudges Myka awake, but cold, wrinkly sheets greet her where Helena once lay. Her ears perk up further at a shuffling sound behind the door, and she smiles at the hint of bacon in the air; Helena and Christina must be preparing breakfast, just like old times.

Taking a rare moment for herself, she rolls onto her back and closes her eyes, calling forth pleasant memories from last night. Aggressions immediately fell away as the desire to touch and be touched grew; hands and mouths wandered eagerly, rousing tender spots left unattended for so long. It's heartening beyond measure their bodies knew what to do; if intimacy proved as difficult as everything else lately, she'd be at a loss for a remedy.

Her muscles groan in protest as she slides out of bed, last night's activities and her lack of sleep catching up with her all at once. She throws on a loose t-shirt and pajama bottoms then slowly opens the door, pausing at its threshold to assess the scene.

Helena stands in the kitchen, facing the stove, spatula in hand, humming softly, while Christina’s positioned to her right, popping bread into the toaster, teetering precariously on several books. After a few moments of lurking, Myka pads quietly across the room and snakes her arms around Helena's midriff, brushing her nose against Helena’s ear.

"Good morning," she says, almost as a whisper.

Helena leans into Myka's arms and turns until their lips touch, initiating a steamy good morning kiss. A crackly pop breaks their connection, and Helena turns back to her task; Myka rests her chin on Helena's shoulder and pulls her close.

"I thought it fitting we cook at least once while you're here," Helena says with a hint of excitement in her voice.

"We went to the offy!" Christina says, out of the blue.

“The what?"

"Off license. Corner shop. The bodegas of the Great Britain, “ Helena explains. “We decided an English breakfast was in order, but our options were limited at the shop. Luckily this flat provided many essentials already."

Myka looks towards Christina, eyes lingering on item next to her on the counter. “What are you up to over there?”

“I’m making toast for the toast rack,” Christina says cheerfully. She catches a slice as it pops, slathers butter on its surface then cuts it in half before placing it vertically in the rack.

“Standard fare for B&B’s across the U.K. As are tea cozies,” Helena says nodding toward the table.

Myka looks over her shoulder and snickers at the duck shaped lump of fabric surrounded by a sea of condiments.

“Christina wants one in the shape of a cat,” Helena says with a smirk.

“I’m sure they exist,” Myka says, eyes the searching the counter.

“No coffee?”

“Strong tea. The owners of this flat seem to ascribe to a certain sense of Englishness.”

Myka withdraws her arms and takes a step back, pouting as Helena looks over her shoulder.

“It's not proper.”

“I'll get coffee on the way to work.”

Helena grimaces, lips pressing together tightly as she turns back to the stove. “Exactly how long will you be today?”

“N-not long. A few hours. Then I’m free.”

“Free,” Helena repeats, the word sounding like a puff of air.

Helena’s shoulders droop, spatula stilling over the frying pan and Myka scrambles for an out before Helena’s lost contemplating a deeper meaning of the word.

“Is that Marmite?” she says, walking briskly towards the table, plucking the jar from the spread.

“A British staple. Have you tried it?”

“Yeah. At your old apartment. It’s awful.” Myka sticks out her tongue and scrunches up her nose.

“It’s an acquired taste. Christina's quite fond of it, aren't you, love?”

“Yum!” Christina says, licking her lips, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, nearly slipping off the pile of books.

“She is her mother’s daughter.”

“She’s quite fond of you as well,” Helena says, coming up beside Myka, setting a plate on the table, then giving her a warm, wet kiss on the cheek. “Sit. Eat. You must be ravenous after last night.”

Myka’s cheeks warm at Helena's suggestion; she sits as instructed and pours herself some tea.

“Christina, toast,” Helena says, then strides back to the stove.

Christina lifts the overly full toast rack off the counter and carefully carries it to the table, smiling winningly as she sets it down without a hitch. Helena slides a steaming plate in front of her and she hops on a chair, lunging across the table to grab the Marmite.

Helena remains stationed behind Christina, hands gripping the back of her seat, watching closely as she struggles to twist the jar open. Christina squeezes her eyes shut and clenches her teeth, small hands grappling with the lid, grunting adorably to signal her effort.

Myka watches the pair closely, thinking it's odd when Helena doesn’t move to assist. She's tempted to reach over and help, but Helena's body language gives her pause; eyes focused yet somehow distant, fingers digging into the back of the chair, Helena's clearly lost in something beyond the task at hand.

“Mom, can you open this?” Christina asks.

“Certainly,” Helena replies, springing automatically into action. She removes the lid with a minimum of effort then sets the jar in front of Christina; Christina eagerly dips her knife into the condiment.

"Where'd you go?" Myka asks, looking worriedly at Helena.

Helena looks at Myka, her murky eyes clearing as their gazes meet.

“Ghosts of English breakfast’s past, I suppose,” Helena says, quietly, her attentions returning to Christina spreading the dark brown substance over her toast.

“The Marmite,” Helena continues, "When I was a child we had a ritual of sorts. If anyone interfered with my quest to open it, I'd make a fuss. They learned to ignore my efforts until I asked for help. Even Charles..."

Helena’s eyes glass over as she watches Christina eat; Myka tries but fails to come up with a comforting response. Helena smooths down Christina’s hair and gives her shoulders a light pat, then steps off toward the stove.

Myka pushes her chair back slowly, eyes following Helena, rising after glancing at Christina is ensure she's immersed in her meal.

“Are you ok?” Myka asks as she comes up behind to Helena.

Helena lowers her head.

“Talk to me,” Myka says, noting a glimmer of moisture gathering at the corner of Helena’s eye.

“I'm afraid...” Helena begins, turning to face Christina, “afraid I won't survive her departure."

Myka’s chest aches at Helena’s admission; she knew this was coming, it was a just question of when. Moving quickly to quell Helena's fears, she sweeps a dark lock behind Helena's ear and kisses her softly on the cheek.

“We'll be back. Really soon. So soon, you won't even know we’re gone.”

“I wish that were true,” Helena says, lips tightening as they strain to form a small smile. She rests her head on Myka’s shoulder and slips her arms around her waist.

"If we've stolen off by morning, know we've gone to the Black Mountains until she's grown."

Myka snickers, once, then circles an arm around Helena’s shoulders and pulls her close. She kisses the top of her head and looks toward Christina.

“Why isn’t anybody eating?” Christina says, her gaze vacillating between Helena and Myka. "The toast is getting cold."

“Fair assessment,” Helena says, raising a brow at Myka.

“On it,” Myka says, kissing Helena briefly on the lips before joining Christina at the table.

------------------

As the train lumbers forward, Myka sits quietly, smiling at the appropriate times, half listening as Helena indulges Christina in an abridged history of the Tube. They’re taking "public transport" for “authenticity’s sake;” Helena planned a special trip today, though their exact destination has not been disclosed.

As Helena’s tale segues into the War, Myka tunes out; mind drifting through the ups and downs of the last twenty-four hours. She silently thanks Christina for charming the waitstaff last night, her levity more than welcome after another questionable afternoon.

She smiles remembering their high spirits post dinner; Christina was served a special dessert and repeated its name over and over in the cab, spurring an impromptu rhyming game between herself and Helena. "Aam Shrikhand" morphed onto “yam treacle” but “ham sandwich” won as the favorite of the bunch and will no doubt become shorthand for the evening. Back in the flat, after a giddy tickling match, Christina, for once, was easily coerced into bed.

After tucking Christina in, Myka followed Helena like a puppy to the bedroom; clothes were shed and kisses initiated without a word being spoken. All seemed to be forgiven, but yesterday afternoon still haunts her thoughts; she hopes to smooth things over before their flight home later today.

“You look pleased,” Helena said as Myka strolled out of the gallery.

“I am,” Myka gushed, grinning as wide and bright as could be.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Private sale.”

Helena raised a brow and tilted her head.

“Something big.“

“Do tell.”

“I…" Myka began, her smile shrinking at the tightness in Helena’s eyes. “...can’t."

“Mom, can I run to that tree and back?” Christina asked, tugging on Helena’s hand.

Helena glanced at the tree, then down at Christina. “Go.”

Christina hopped once, then took off across the sidewalk.

“A covert sale,” Helena clarified, looking straight at Myka.

“Just…discreet. I’m doing research, nothing glamorous."

“You’ve been removed from the Italian account?” Helena's eyes followed Christina as she whizzed past.

“No. In addition to. But it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

“They always are,” Helena said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

“Hey. This is a big deal for me,” Myka countered, crossing her arms over her chest.

“I understand, but these sorts of sales are questionable at best.”

A wayward giggle broke the tension, and all eyes followed Christina as she circled around, a hand grazing both Helena and Myka's legs as she passed.

“It’s Mrs. Frederic. She’s reputable,” Myka said as Christina ran back towards the tree.

“Do you recall Denver? Your motives were honorable but the situation not as such.”

“This is different.”

“Exactly how?”

“Because it’s not a—” Myka stopped herself, her stomach knotting at consciously withholding information; she wished she could tell Helena, she really did. “Do you want me to not do it?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“What are you saying?”

“You’re already overtaxed.”

“This could easily be my ticket to a job here. And the commission…”

Myka trailed off as Christina crashed into her Helena's leg and, panting heavily, wrapped her arms around her thigh. Helena looked down at her and smiled, placing a hand on her head.

“I didn’t realize you could be bought,” Helena said, angling her eyes up at Myka.

“I…” Myka started, eyes flicking towards a wildly grinning Christina. "We’d fall on our feet.”

Myka held Helena's cool gaze, eager for approval, but was met with a wary lowering of a brow.

“I’m hungry,” Christina said.

“As am I,” Helena answered. “Fish and chips?”

Christina nodded.

“All change,” Helena announces, kicking Myka out of her introspective haze. She grabs her bag and rises, hurrying to follow Helena and Christina out of the train car.

Christina hops up the stairs, one at a time, counting as she goes; Myka and Helena trail behind.

“Are you alright?” Helena asks. “You’re rather quiet this morning."

"Just thinking," Myka says, putting thoughts of yesterday away. "I wish we weren’t leaving today.”

“Likewise,” Helena says, threading her fingers through Myka’s and squeezing tightly.

They emerge from the Tube onto a narrow but busy two-way street.

“A few blocks this way,” Helena says and chases after Christina, who has taken off down the street. She grabs hold of Christina's hand, and when Myka catches up, they all turn at an intersection.

Myka sizes up the neighborhood as they walk; it’s a commercial street with a smattering of touristy shops, but the overall tendency caters to a slightly upscale, eclectic crowd.

“Unfortunately, the market’s not on today, but the shops are open,” Helena says.

Myka spies a street sign and her face lights up. “This is where you grew up,” she says.

“Mum’s stall was right over there.” Helena points a finger and releases Christina, who has been straining to break free.

“You remember?"

“Little outright, but there were photos. I was younger than Christina when we left.”

“Mom!” Christina blurts, pressing her face to the glass of a nearby shop. As Myka and Helena approach her, Christina steps away, revealing a fuzzy ball sleeping inside the window display.

“Can we go in? I miss Dewy.”

“On our way back,” Helena says and takes hold of Christina’s hand again.

They saunter down the street, searching for felines in random windows, then turn a corner into residential territory. Helena stops in front of a three-story Victorian row house.

“This is where we lived, in the bottom flat. Quite modest with a lovely back garden.” She surveys the block, her eyes lingering on a new building across the street, its modernist style incongruent to the rest. "The area was a mite scrappier back then, or so I’ve been told."

“By who?"

“Neighbors. And other vendors. When I returned from Europe to finish school, I rented in a flat nearby and sought out anyone who remembered my parents. I’m sure they’ve all gone by now.” Helena scans the street again, this time as if looking for familiar markers.

“You never know,” Myka says, linking her arm through Helena's, drawing her close. Helena lays her head on Myka's shoulder and closes her eyes.

“Jungle gym!” Christina shouts, running toward Helena and Myka while pointing at the end of the street.

Helena lifts her head and smiles, glancing sidewards at Myka. “Righty-ho, then,” she says, and tugs on Myka’s arm.

Christina runs off.

“You like it here, don’t you?” Myka says as they amble toward the park. "You seem…relaxed."

“That may be a result of last night,” Helena says, leaning into Myka.

Myka pushes back, gently, and smirks.

“I suppose I do,” Helena says, looking around.

“Maybe we can live here."

Helena scoffs. “Far too pricey for the likes of us these days.”

“But this sale will lead to bigger opportunities,” Myka says, with genuine optimism.

“I might be convinced if you'd tell me what it’s for,” Helena says, elbowing Myka in the ribs, blinking coquettishly.

“Helena, I…"

“No matter,” Helena says, squeezing Myka’s arm with her elbow. “Let us not count on such tentative bounties.”

“But I want to set us up for the future.”

“That’s a tall order. It shouldn’t all be on you."

The conversation quiets as they stride into the park, and they stand watching Christina play in silence. When Helena starts to worry her locket, Myka stills her hand; Helena turns to look Myka in the eye.

“Claudia asked if you’d had any unpleasant dreams while you were here.”

“Stress dreams,” Myka says, drawing back her hand but keeping hold of Helena’s gaze. "I told her not to say anything.”

“Why ever not?”

“You have enough to worry about.”

Helena looks down, lips puffing out as she lets out a long exhale. “You haven’t visited the site of the fire yet, have you."

“I-I haven’t had time.”

“You must.”

“I will. But being here will help."

“Temporarily,” Helena says, swinging around to face Myka, taking hold of her hands. “With so much of your life up in the air, you need closure. Make a plan; ask Claudia or Abigail to accompany you."

Myka lowers her head and nods; Helena’s serious if she’s suggesting Abigail. She frees her hands from Helena's and laces their fingers together.

“Thank you for bringing me here. I love learning about your past.”

Helena rubs her thumb over Myka’s knuckles. “Yesterday’s breakfast left me feeling sentimental.”

“Mom! Push me on the swing,” Christina commands, barreling towards them from the jungle gym. She grabs hold of Helena’s forearm and tugs.

“Yes, ma'am,” Helena says, hands slipping from Myka’s as she's dragged towards to swings.

Myka smiles at the sight of Christina egging Helena on, swinging higher and higher, shrieking in delight as her tolerance tops out. As the spectacle subsides, her gaze wanders across the park, toward the three-story terraced houses lining the street. She imagines living there; soft light illuminating well-worn rooms through tall picture windows, Christina playing safely the garden, Dewy snuggled under the duvet in her and Helena’s room. How uplifting calling somewhere home will be, she thinks; this is her goal, this is where they need to be.

When her attention returns to the swings, she finds Helena staring back at her. Her stomach flutters at the bright smile growing on Helena’s lips. She grins back, crookedly, her cheeks warming the longer their eyes stay locked, dumbfounded by how fiercely the affection in Helena’s gaze tugs at her heart. All the messes made on this trip are wiped clean in this moment; she’s certain, no matter how complicated things get, she’ll do whatever it takes to make this work.

-TBC-