#and the fourth is a guy who gave up 150 years ago

[anotheronechicagobog]

Rangers, Lead The Way - Chapter 3 - Kenny with Maggie

written by @anotheronechicagobog

warnings: swearing, nudity, profanity, mention of school shooting, guns, weapons, I’m pro gun control (even though I’m Canadian) and this kinda reflects that, mention of PTSD, child neglect, also I fucking hate nazis

When someone called before seven in the morning it was work, a death notification, or one of his fellow trio of lovestruck fools. So when the annoying ringtone Hana installed as a prank and he couldn’t figure out how to remove started blasting on his nightstand at 2:17 in the morning, he was more annoyed than apprehensive. “Crosby.”

“Hey man, sorry to call you so late, but it’s about Maggie.”

“What’s going on?”

“One of her first arrests as an FBI agent just broke out of prison, and she’s been temporarily assigned to the unit being tasked with finding him. Yours. I expect you’ll be getting a call in the next five minutes or so. Maggie can take care of herself, I know that, but...”

“It’s hard when you’re not there to watch her back. Don’t worry, I’ve got her.” 

“Thank you. So much. I appreciate this, so, so much.”

“Hey, a couple of months ago I was you. I feel you man, don’t worry. She’ll be fine. Listen, I’d love to keep talking but I’ve got another call coming in and it looks like that work call you were warning about. Talk to you later.”

“See you on the flip side, man.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jess stood in front of everyone with that look on his face that vaguely reminded Kenny of his stern ex-navy fourth-grade teacher. “Everyone, this is special agent Maggie Bell, you may remember her from when we worked with her unit on a couple of cases, but this time it’s just her joining us. Is there anything you’d like to add, Bell?”

“I’m excited to work with you all, but please, call me Maggie.”

“Alright, let’s get to work, then. Maggie, Jason Anderson was one of your first arrests with the bureau, can you brief us on that case and highlight any details you think may be pertinent?”

“Definitely. Well for starters, Anderson is a cheating scumbag and it only gets worse from there.” Maggie’s bluntness broke through the formality that was stifling the bus, smirks and chuckles abound, and it seemed that only he didn’t have the sense to at least try and hid his amusement. An understanding but disapproving look had Kenny composing himself to speak up. “Well then, let’s jump down this rabbit hole.”

Maggie was sitting next to Hana, giving details about the fugitive they were currently after. He was one of Maggie’s first arrests as an FBI agent, so the bureau thought it would be beneficial to have her work with the team. So here she was, dressed in jeans and a sweater as opposed to her usual suits, combining her razor-sharp intelligence with Hana’s. They’d commandeered the top floor of a police station in Boston and were relying on Maggie and Hana’s wit to find out where he was. Jason Anderson, 42, was an illegal weapons dealer. He’d previously been put in prison for distribution and possession of prohibited firearms, and for giving an AK-47 to a school shooter. He was being transferred to a higher security prison because it came to light that he was continuing his business from behind bars, but the security team had been too small and unprepared for the escape plan pulled off by a team of eight. Those eight men were their biggest clue oddly enough, as they’d been dropping like flies since the escape. Michael Howard, 40, was Anderson’s ex-brother-in-law. And the connection between all the, now dead, prison breakers. Unfortunately, Howard’s sister, and Anderson’s ex-wife, had cut contact with both of them along with the rest of their families after Howard introduced Anderson to his mistress and encouraged an affair that created two children. The mistress, Bethany Karnstein, had gone AWOL hours ago when she left her job in the middle of her shift and didn’t pick her kids up from school. 

The kids were safe with Anderson’s parents, but they couldn’t answer their questions when they asked where their mother was. The kids did identify Michael Howard as one of their mom’s friends though, he’d come to watch them while their mother was in the hospital about six months prior. They didn’t look shocked that FBI agents were asking about their parents, but they still didn’t know anything. 

At the moment, they were splitting up. Jess and Barnes were headed to follow up with Bethany’s clueless boss, he and Clinton were about to go follow up on a possible sighting, and Hana and Maggie were staying on the bus. Thankfully, since Kenny was stressed out enough at the prospect of having to watch out for Maggie on top of worrying about Hana, them being assigned together eased his mind. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was around midnight when he and Clinton were finally able to rendezvous with the rest of the team. There was no sighting, Bethany had one of her affair partners call in a false tip, and when he and Clinton had quickly sussed that out it lead to a shootout and car chase. Jason, the dumbass stupid enough to commit six different felonies for a woman who has two kids with a violent arms dealer, was lying in a heavily guarded ICU bed. They’d managed to get his cell phone but he was beyond unconscious when they’d finally managed to get him to stop shooting at them. “Hey Hana, I brought you something.”

“Jason’s cell?”

“That too, but I was actually talking about this.” He held out a large coffee that she desperately needed if the way her eyes lit up was any indication. “Thank you.” Hana let out an over-dramatic groan as she downed the first sip. “Hey Crosby, thanks for my coffee too.” He looked at Maggie sheepishly, realizing that he’d only gotten two, one for himself and the other for Hana. “I was the one who drove to and then parked in front of the coffee shop while he went and got those, how do you think I feel?” Clinton’s playful jab caused a round of giggles but the knowing look from the older man made Crosby a little nervous. He was sure his feelings towards Hana weren’t super well-hidden, but he really didn’t need anyone on the team tipping Hana off. “Anyway, here’s Jason’s cell. Do you think you can crack it?”

“Normally with this many characters I’d say no... But, his password is seven characters long and his lock screen is Bethany, so... There we go, unlocked.”

“... That was a really poor choice of password.”

“And girlfriend.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After working for fourteen hours straight they were all spent and headed to the hotel that the FBI had secured rooms at for them. Jess, Barnes and Clinton were all in one car that was headed straight to the hotel to get everyone checked in. Kenny, Hana, and Maggie were in the other car that was making a detour on the way to pick up Thai food. Hana and Maggie were chatting amongst themselves, but Kenny was still kicking himself for the slip-up he’d made while placing the order over the phone. 

“Hi, can I place an order for pickup? Great. The name’s Kenny and the phone number is 123-456-7890. Okay, I’ll get two orders of shrimp rolls, one vegetable pad Thai, one pork Mee Khob, one chicken pad Keeng, and two orders of chicken Kao pad puk, hold on one second- Maggie you want green curry, right?”

“... Yeah, how did you know?” I’ve heard your partner talk about you almost non-stop since he met you because he’s head over heels in love with you, but I can’t say that, can? Especially because you, Hana, and Hailey don’t know that OA, Jya, and I know each other... For some reason, so sorry Maggie, Hana but I’m going to have to lie my ass off here. “Uh, sorry, I thought I heard you mention it earlier, plus you look like a green curry kind of person.”

“Ha, alright, yes I’d like some, thanks.”

“- Sorry about keeping you on hold, I’ll add one green curry to that order. Do you want me to pay over the phone or is it okay if I pay when I get there?”

“Kenny!”

“Sorry, what’s up?”

“Our exit is coming up in... 150 metres, you need to turn right.”

“Shit, thanks, Hana.”

“Are you okay? You seemed like you were in your own world there.”

“I’m fine, I was just thinking. Where do I go next?”

“Go straight for another 700 metres, it’ll be on the right.”

“Got it.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Alright everyone, the food’s here!” They’d all decided to gather in one of the meeting rooms the hotel had to the left of the lobby, Kenny had admittedly bellowed a little loud, but it brought all of his straggling coworkers into the room from their various spots in and around the lobby.

“Finally, what took you guys so long?” He knew that Jess was just hangry, and frustrated that they hadn’t caught the fugitive yet, so he let the snappy comment slide.

“Crosby almost missed the turn.”

“You let Crosby drive? Rookie mistake” He gave Hana a teasing look of betrayal before turning to Clinton. “I’ll have you know I am an excellent driver.”

“You’ve driven into a lake.”

“That was one time three years ago! And we were in a high-speed chase with a guy on a BMX bike who made a sharp turn near a kid’s birthday party, I didn’t exactly have many options.” He sounded more upset than he actually was. Moments like these were nice, where they got to hang around each other and just be friends, and Maggie was fitting in wonderfully with everyone but especially Hana, who sat in between him and Maggie as she started telling a story about OA with her face absolutely glowing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jason’s cell proved to be far more useful than he was. Bethany had been texting him from a rural address that turned out to be a cottage rental that was supposed to be vacant. The owners had a basic security system that had alerted them that someone was in their cottage, when the local LEOs investigated they immediately recognized the suspect but were able to play it off as having gotten a noise complaint, before going back to their vehicle and calling the FBI, while hiding their vehicle so that they could keep watch over the cottage. There was always a tense atmosphere when people were getting greedy for a raid, Kenny supposed the fresh air and appealing scent of pine trees eases tensions slightly, but not by much. Everyone knew that the worst could happen. That their loved ones could get an overly formal call at an unholy hour, telling them that the worst would happen. Everyone always did their best to try and prevent that, but there was only so much that they could keep out of fate’s unforgiving hands. His heartstrings pulled slightly as he flicked his eyes over to Hana. She was his special someone, even if she didn’t know it, and for a brief moment, he wondered what it would be like for her if he- No. Nope. You can’t think like that, especially not before a raid, and especially not about a woman who was only supposed to be your friend. The final preparations were complete and they were getting in position to breach. Hana still hadn’t been cleared for the field yet, so in the back of his mind, he was appreciative that there was one less person to worry about, with her wirelessly monitoring their body cams and coms. Although that was kind of moot point honestly, because Maggie was with them, in fact, Maggie had taken Hana’s position behind him. “You ready Maggie?” She put her hand on the back of his vest as the SWAT leader started counting down. “Always.”

The door was busted down and all the FBI and SWAT agents funnelled into the house through the three entrances. The sliding glass back door was where Jess was entering, the side door was for Clinton and Barnes, and He and Maggie were going through the front door. The front door went straight into the family room to the right, the eat-in kitchen was on the left, and directly across from the sliding glass door. Flashbangs went off as everyone started shouting, announcing themselves. There were screams and cries of panic, something not unusual in their line of work, what was also not unusual was finding Bethany naked on her knees with Michael Howard standing in front of her dressed in the same manner. Michael’s eyes went wide, and his thought process played out like an open book.

Shit. Feds.

Get gun.

... Gun is not in my holster because I’m not wearing clothes.

Run.

... Can’t run cause Bethany is clinging to my legs.

Kenny had to give the guy props for trying to tackle him linebacker style naked as the day he was born as he stood firm and checked him, sending him flying onto the ground. “Turn onto your stomach, now!”

He writhed around, trying to resist arrest, shouting “SUCK MY DICK YOU PIGS!” And trying to thrust his bare nether regions at everyone, Kenny in particular. “Howard Michael, you are under arrest, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you acknowledge that your rights have been read to you?”

“FUCK YOU!”

“I’m gonna take that as a yes.” One of the SWAT officers approached them with an itchy-looking wool blanket and took their suspect into custody. Maggie and Kenny shared a look before making their way to the two bedrooms that were to the left of the kitchen, they hadn’t been cleared yet and now they were trying to move fast to make sure that no other accomplices got away. Kenny took the right door, Maggie, to the left. “FBI! Freeze!” Kenny was met with the disturbing sight of a dead body on the bed. His throat and wrists had been slit and he was surrounded by lumped together blood-soaked sheets. He immediately recognized the dead body as the last remaining accomplice in the breakout. “Hey, Crosby? I need your help in here.”

“What’s up Maggie?” When he entered her room he stopped in his tracks. There wasn’t a bed, instead, there were two cribs for two babies, both of whom were in an equally freaked-out Maggie’s arms. “Here, let me help you.” Kenny helped lighten her load by taking a baby in his arms. “Hi sweetheart, what’s your name?”

“Kenny, these babies can’t be older than six months, you know she can’t respond to you, right?”

“I know, but they’re so little and scared, I want to at least try to comfort them.” The little girl hard curled up into his chest and nestled her face into his neck. “It looks like you’re doing a great job to me.”

“Who’s kids even are these?”

“I’m really trying not to think about it.”

“I’m praying to every deity there is that they’re not Bethany and Howard’s kids.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There had to be thousands of deities, gods, godlings, divine beings, and not one of them could come through for those poor kids? The six-month-old twins Baxter and Hazel were the children of Bethany Karnstein and Michael Howard, who had murdered a man in the room next to their children’s room. The social services department where they were was basically non-existent, so while they waited for a social worker to drive from four and a half hours away they were watching the babies at the local police station while Jess and Clinton were questioning Michael. Baxter was much more social, jumping between the FBI agents, SWAT, and local LEOs, but he was now babbling quite happily on Maggie’s lap, whereas Hazel had immediately taken to Hana and refused to be held by anyone but her and Kenny. He looked at her fondly, Hana was holding the baby close to her chest and humming the tune to a melodic song he couldn’t remember the name of. Hazel looked up at Hana with wide, enchanted, trusting eyes, and all Kenny could do was feel his heart melt. A stray thought placed itself at the forefront of his mind and before he could stop it, he was picturing Hana as a mom, and as captivating as that thought was Kenny had to shake his head to stop it from going too far, they were just friends, it wasn’t Hana’s fault that he’s in love with her. I need to look somewhere else, anywhere else. 

His eye-line shifted to Maggie and watching as she bounced an absolutely delighted Baxter on her lap. He knew that OA wanted a family, wanted a wife and a couple of kids, and looking at the tender way Maggie was holding and entertaining Baxter, he could see her being a mom too. Man, if OA saw this he’d have a heart attack, it’s his dream come true.

Kenny saw Hana shift positions out of his peripheral vision and turned to look at her and was immediately concerned. She had a look of discomfort on her face. “Hana? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Her tone was tense and Hazel immediately picked up on it and made a scared noise. “Are your arms tired? Do you want me to take her?”

“No. We’re fine. Maybe you should hold Baxter instead.” She snapped and finally looked him in the eyes, she was clearly angry and upset, but she seemed betrayed as well. Kenny leaned back into his chair his shoulders sinking in tandem. He was silently thankful that since everyone was milling about and talking it didn’t seem that anyone heard the exchange, though Maggie did look at him with a raised eyebrow. He shrugged his shoulders in response, completely bewildered. Maggie shook her head sharply, rolled her eyes, and scoffed. ‘Men.’ She mouthed. Kenny was completely clueless, had either of them noticed him watching them at they were offended at that? He watches Hana work away on her computer all the time and it’s never been an issue, but then again that was always subject to change. His inner ramblings were cut off when Jess and Clinton came back from the interrogation room. “Michael didn’t talk much, but Hana decrypted his cell and he has incoming and outgoing calls to a recluse retiree Evan DeLuca who lives forty minutes from here. Crosby, Bell go check it out, Clinton and I are going to take a break from interrogating Michael for an hour or so, Gibson and Barnes, you two can interrogate Karnstein, see how much she knows and just how involved is she in all of this. We can watch the babies while you’re in there...”

“Admit it, boss, you want a break just cause you two want to hold the babies.”

“Get moving Crosby, Barnes is already out the door.”

“You got it.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They were twenty minutes into the tense car ride when Maggie finally spoke up. “Just so you know, you’re an idiot.” Flabbergasted Kenny let his mouth fall open and close a couple of times before tightening his grip on the steering wheel only to release it after taking a breath. “You’re probably right, but can you please tell me why I’m an idiot? What did I do wrong?”

“Can’t tell you that.”

“Why not? You were the one who brought it up.”

“Just... Focus more on Hana, okay?”

“Are you sure? I mean, I thought about it, and maybe that’s the issue?”

“Trust me, it’s not. Just focus on her, got it?”

“Okay... I’m confused as hell, but okay.”

“Isn’t that your usual state of mind?” He didn’t have to look over to see the teasing grin, he could feel it. “Woah, low blow, Maggie, low blow.”

“If you want to hear about a low blow, you should hear about how OA and I had to chase a clown fairy princess twelve blocks at two in the morning.”

“Please, go on.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well. That went terribly wrong. As much as Kenny could appreciate the peace and aesthetic of small towns and cottage areas, he hated working in them because there was never any backup! Forty minutes may not seem like a lot of time, but when you’re in a firefight against a man who has access to a seemly endless supply of weapons of war, that was an eternity. He’d literally fired a bazooka at them, how in the fuck did he get a bazooka?! So, the good news about this situation? They’d found Jason Anderson. Bad news? They’d found Jason Anderson with an arsenal large enough and powerful enough to take down a small army. They’d managed to take cover, but Anderson clearly had night-vision goggles because, despite the fact that it was past eleven and pitch black, he always knew where they were. Oh, and Evan DeLuca was probably a dead retiree, not a recluse. That’s just great, another body to add to Anderson’s growing total. Now, all that he and Maggie had to do was not become part of that number. If only it were that easy. They’d managed to get around the side of the house where there were only two medium-sized windows on side of the house facing them instead of a large doorway like at the front and, presumably, the back.

When Kenny got Jess on the phone it was nothing but panicked observations, and the notification that they’d found Anderson, as he and Maggie ran for cover. His phone wasn’t even near his face when he made the call, so he’s not quite sure what all made it through, only that they were still thirty minutes away from the address.

“We need a plan.”

“He can see our movements so we’re going to have to be sneaky about it.”

“I’ll fire on him, cause a diversion, do you think you can try to sneak around back?” 

“Are you crazy?! We didn’t have time to grab our vests, that’s suicide. Besides, how many rounds do you even have left?”

“I’ve got a mag and a half.”

“Really? I thought you fired a bunch of shots at him earlier.”

“I did, but I’ve been carrying extra ammo for this case, I figured I’d need it at some point considering we’re going up against a weapons dealer.”

“Smart-” She was cut off by another several hundred rounds being fired at the, thankfully incredibly thick, tree they were hiding behind. “We don’t have much of a choice Maggie. Head around back, I’ll try to distract him and not get shot.” He knew she’d argue with him, so he didn’t give her the chance to. He ran out from behind the tree and fired through the only window of the two that was open. There wasn’t any light on in the house, so Kenny really wasn’t sure what he was aiming for. After the sixth shot he heard “fuck! Fucking fuck!” And felt a wave of relief; he’d hit Anderson. Hopefully enough to keep him subdued. He ran around to the front of the house only to be met with the sight of Anderson pulling the pin out of a grenade. He ran back out faster than he entered and hugged the outside of the entrance just outside of the doorframe. “GRENADE!” The explosion went off where he’d been standing when he burst through the front door, shrapnel from the grenade exploded through the doorway seconds after he’d gotten out and he could hear some of it embed itself in the interior of the wall behind him.

When Kenny entered through the doorway, they were face to face. Kenny's gun was raised aimed at his forehead, and Anderson stood there weaponless. Pulling the trigger, Kenny made the mistake of thinking that it was over, that Anderson was done for. Click. Horror and vindication simultaneously coursed through Crosby and Anderson. The gun was empty. He'd spent all the rounds. Before he could lower his useless gun Anderson was on him like a feral animal. Despite the gunshot wound to Anderson’s right shoulder, he was just as lethal without a weapon as was when he had one. Anderson had him by the throat up against the wall and was pressing his thumbs into Kenny’s throat. Kenny threw two quick punches to Anderson’s jaw, releasing him and making them stumble away from each other. It quickly turned into a fight on the floor. They were biting, kicking, hitting each other, trying to get the upper hand. Kenny managed to land a solid elbow to Anderson’s head but that seemed to be the tipping point that only enraged him. The next thing Kenny knew Anderon had pushed him up and smacked him on the ground, knocking the air out of his lungs, and started to choke him again. Kenny tried to lay in a punch like the first time, but Anderson saw that coming, just dodged away from the fist and started pushing his thumbs into the centre of Kenny’s neck harder. 

“FBI! Put up your hands!” Anderson growled but did as he was told. Kenny lay there gasping for breath knowing that it was too easy, Anderson had another trick up his sleeve, and Maggie was too smart not to know it too. She stepped closer, her gun pointed to the back of Anderson’s head, one hand reaching to her waist to grab her cuffs... That’s when Anderson made his move, spinning around and grabbing her by the waist, Anderson pulled her to the ground, the force caused her to let go of her gun. She tried to reach for it but Anderson pulled her towards him by her hair and put her in a chokeholdJaytill hazy from the lack of air Kenny grappled at him from behind. Trying to do something, anything, to save Maggie. Whatever he did worked because Anderson turned back to face him only now he had a bruise on the side of his face that was already swollen. Anderson tried grabbing Kenny by the neck again, but it was clear he was low on energy and just trying to fight until his last breath. Too bad for Anderson that Maggie wasn’t going to let that happen. 

Crack.

And then Anderson was unconscious, lying on top of him, and Kenny barely had the strength to move the gun dealing scumbag off of him. “You good?”

“Yeah, thanks.” He looked at the gun in Maggie’s hand and Anderson on the ground. She was holding her gun by the barrel and there was some blood on the handle. “You cold-cocked him?”

“Yeah, I tried shooting him, but I mistook my gun for yours. I told you that you wouldn’t have enough ammo.”

“That you did. Thanks again, for saving my ass.”

“Any time.”

“I’m gonna call the team and let them know they don’t have to come in guns blazing... Especially because we are surrounded by improperly stored weapons and ammo. I’ll probably call for an ambulance too, to come to check you out.”

“What? Me?”

“Yeah, he had you in that chokehold pretty hard.”

“He strangled you, twice!”

“Three times actually, you weren’t here for the first one.”

“Even if you have to be dragged over by the ear, you will be getting checked out by the ambulance too.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I’m going to preface this by saying Maggie’s fine, she doesn’t even have a concussion.”

“... That was the absolute worst way to start this call. Are you aware of that? Oh the heart attack you’re giving me? What the fuck happened?”

“Long story short, we found Jason Anderson and he tried to kill us.”

“And the long version? Actually, wait do I even want to know?”

“Probably not, but you want to know anyway because you think it will make you worry less, even though we both know it won’t, don’t you?”

“... Yes.”

“We got shot at a lot, got pinned down behind one of the massive trees they have out here, split up with me providing the distraction, I almost got blown up, my magazine was empty from providing cover so we went hand-to-hand, the door at the back was blocked by crates of uzis so it took her a while to get back, I got strangled three separate times, managed to land good hits, so did he, he threw Maggie on the ground when she showed up and she hit her head, he put her in a chokehold, I got her out of it by pinching his armpits really hard after punching wasn’t working, he tried to strangle me for the third time and Maggie cold-cocked him with my empty gun cause she couldn’t find hers. The paramedics cleared her, she’ll be fine. I think that Hana’s gonna try to drag us to the local clinic when we get back to town.”

“She’s okay?”

“Completely, she doesn’t even have a headache or sore throat, and she really saved my ass back there. She’s good. She’s with Hana right now actually. Hana was really off when everyone showed up, she’s been pretty worried and she won’t believe me when I say I’m okay but she’ll believe Maggie. You know you could probably call her, check up on her yourself? We were talking with the paramedics and she kept talking about this halal burger place you brought her to and she’d do anything for one of those right now... But from the look on her face when she brought you up, I’d wager she was actually talking about you. She misses you, even spent an hour talking about you when we all got Thai food in Boston.”

“Alright, thanks, man. I don’t know what I’d do if she wasn’t okay.”

“Gee, thanks for showing your concern for me. You know, your brother in arms-”

“Alright-”

“Fellow ex-ranger-”

“Okay-”

“Favourite blonde-”

“I’m glad you’re alright Kenny. I just can’t believe you two went up against Jason Anderson and walked away unscathed.”

“Actually my throat is pretty sore and the paramedics found some shrapnel in my right leg, all of it was shallow but some of it got pushed in deeper during the fight.”

“... Just go to a hospital, man. Seriously. Also, Hailey is my favourite blonde now. Sorry.”

“What?!”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“We have a problem.”

“What kind of problem, Hana?” Jess may have sounded cool, calm, and collected, but anyone who knew him was able to tell it was the opposite. Jess LaCroix likes for things to get done and stay done, according to Tali that’s why he hates doing the dishes, and this threw a serious wrench in everyone’s plans to escort the culprits, and children because children’s aid still hasn’t shown up, back to Boston and then go home to New York.  

“Anderson’s set up a buy, a big one. Everything in that house except for two AK-47’s, ten grenades, and eight rounds of ammo for the AK-47, is for a single buyer, they’re meeting at the base of a hiking trail in two days.”

“Fuck. There were uzis and bazookas, who the hell are these guys.” Anderson was just a weapons dealer, and he was dangerous enough, Kenny really wasn’t looking forward to meeting whoever the buyer was. “I don’t know, I couldn’t find out, but there is some, I guess, good news. They think that he blew up an FBI agent and that that’s who’s in the hospital under armed guard. They think he got away, want to do the exchange earlier than planned, they want to meet in two hours, the same location.”

“Hana, we have the opportunity to also take down some pretty dangerous buyers too, that’s great news, why don’t you think so?”

“Kenny, they don’t know his exact face but they have a description. Six feet tall, blonde, blue eyes, muscular-”

“You think I have muscles?” Kenny realized his attempt at lightening the mood wasn’t welcome when no one chuckled along with him, muttering a quick apology before looking back at Hana, whose face displaced what he could only describe as contained distress. “Kenny, you’re pretty banged up, you shouldn’t be going out there.”

“Hana, I’ll be fine. Everything’s mostly superficial, SWAT hasn’t gone back to Boston yet, and we may not get another chance to get these guys. It has to be done, and quickly. I’ll be okay.” She took a deep breath and looked down at the papers on the table in front of her. She did not like it, that much was very obvious, but she looked frustrated that his logic was right, and that they’d have to go through with his, admittedly not very well thought out, plan. “Alright, I guess I’ll go and get the tech set up.” Jess coughed to draw attention to himself, along with everyone else in the room they’d been ignoring, and Kenny felt his cheeks heat up. “Sorry, is this the plan we’re going through with and should I get the tech together?”

“While I get the local LEO’s to give us some info on the terrain?” Jess looked them both over before nodding. “Sounds like that’s what we’re doing, thanks for doing all the planning guys, everyone, go get prepared.”

“Kenny, can you come and find me after you’re done talking to the LEO’s? I’d like to talk for a sec.”

“Sure thing Maggie.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

His talk with Maggie ended up just being a quick, and confusing, talk.

“I know that it’s been a rough couple of days, but I’m still you really need to be careful.”

“I know, it won’t be like back at the house, there’ll be back up this time, and I’ll have ammo in my gun this time.”

“This isn’t the time to joke but... Okay. And one more thing, be nice to Hana.”

“Aren’t I always nice to Hana? I feel like she’s upset with me but I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.” Maggie sighed before giving him a long look and was clearly debating whether or not to say something. “It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong, it’s just that... current circumstances have been stressing her out. Like me being your partner right now, it’s thrown her off a bit. And she said you’ve been acting strange so she’s worried about you for that on top of your physical safety, and Zadie has been calling and texting her quite a bit asking for updates about you, and it’s just been a lot for her.”

“Why didn’t she tell me any of this?”

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone who isn’t directly involved in the issue. Look, all I’m saying is that you need to be careful, and maybe tell Zadie to not ask about you while you and Hana are working.”

“I didn’t even know she’s been doing that, it doesn’t matter that Hana isn’t in the field, her work is still crucial and she can’t afford to be distracted. Are we good?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

“Good.”

Maggie was still pretty vague, but when Hana was wiring him up, he promised her he would be careful and cautious, that he was sorry if he worried her, the relief on her face made his heart twinge. He hadn’t meant to make her so concerned.

Two sets of headlights drove up the gravel road that leads to town, bring Kenny back to the present. Two men stepped out of each car and he immediately had to stifle a groan. He was now standing alone in a hiking trail parking lot alone, but with back up hiding in the trees, with four nazis. They were all in their fifties wearing blatant white supremacist clothes. He counted a trump shirt, a confederate flag, an all lives matter shirt, and a swastika shirt. “You Jason Anderson?” Confederate spoke first, and his voice was so loud and boisterous it shook his beer belly. “I am.”

“Is that FBI agent you blew up dead yet?”

“I really didn’t come here, when the feds are really pissed and packing heat, to make small talk. Are you buying or not? I’ve got them all loaded up in the back.”

“Can we see them first?”

“After I see the cash.” Trump shirt looked at confederate for confirmation before walking to the second pick-up truck, because of course, and returned with two stuffed duffle bags. Kenny unzipped them the second they were in front of him, and sure enough, stacks of $100 bills shoved inside in a disorderly fashion. Kenny pretended to count but he was really biding his time, trying to find ways to get them to spill their guts. “What do you guys want with this much firepower, anyway? It’s a bit much for hunting.”

“There’s an abortion clinic a couple of hours away in Boston, we’re going to teach those whores to respect life.” And here I was thinking that these scumbags couldn’t get any worse. Kenny sighed and popped the trunk, revealing the crates of guns, that all had the firing pins removed making them useless, but assholes one through four didn’t need to know that. “Alright, take a look. What do you think?”

“I think... That we just got an arsenal for FREE!” All four aimed their newly attained weapons and... Didn’t fire. “Really? Did you honestly think I’d put ammo in there? Whatever, FBI YOU’RE UNDER ARREST!” They didn’t even have time to start running before the most wanted unit, Maggie, SWAT, and LEO’s had burst out of the trees, guns raised.

Fucking morons.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Hey man, how’d the bust go?”

“Great, we arrested the head of the local faction of the KKK and his minions, apparently. You know, the second the guns were in their hands they tried to blow me to pieces. They thought we, or Anderson rather, would have them all loaded up for them so they could make away with the guns and the cash. You should’ve seen them when they were arrested, they were genuinely surprised that their plan didn’t work, and that no one wanted to hear their bigoted crap. And Anderson’s ex-wife decided to take in all four of Karnstein’s kids, those he had with her husband and brother, which is great because we were worried about what was going to happen to them, but she said she just wants to keep all the siblings together and that’s an example of sainthood if I ever saw one. And before you ask, yes, Maggie’s fine.”

“I’m getting a little predictable when it comes to her, aren’t I?”

“A bit, yeah- hold on one second... I’m back.”  

“What was that?”

“I got another call.”

“From who?”

“Zadie.”

“The girl you’re dating who happens to be the roommate of your best friend and the girl you’re in love with?”

“... Shut up.”

“Hahaha no. Look, we’re both idiots, all three of us were until Halstead figured out how to get off. I can’t talk to Maggie about how I feel, not yet and maybe not ever. Losing her husband left horrendous scars and she needs me to be her partner and her friend, she doesn’t need to deal with how I feel. But you and Hana? You could happen, you could talk to her, I know that you spoke with her about your PTSD and she’s told you about serious things in her life and herself. Both of you have a trust and bond that doesn’t need to be tested. It’s tried and true. You don’t deserve to be miserable, drowning yourself in distractions and being a distraction. Just promise me you’ll think about it.”

“Okay, I will. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you and Maggie are as far away from each other as you think. She talks about you all the time, she told me so many stories about you two in the field. She trusts you implicitly, and the face she makes when she talks about you... There’s nothing platonic about that. So you need to think about talking to your girl and moving forward too, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Am I really not your favourite blonde anymore?”

“Haha, no you’re not, sorry.”

“You knew her for like three days!”

“Eh, still.”

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t.”

“... No, I don’t. But... Maggie told me about the clown fairy princess and I’m gonna tell Halstead about it the next time I call him, which we’ll be in an hour cause I want to catch him before he goes to work. So, HA!”

“Crosby!”

[johnark]

                                                   PROLOGUE

My name is cut into the sidewalk on the campus of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. I am pleased and proud to say that other members of our family can say the same. When I graduated with a degree in engineering I went to work for a defense contractor with headquarters in Orange County, California. It wasn’t by luck that I went there. I had joined the military during the war with Korea and I spent a week or so in the area on my way to Korea. I discovered the moderate summer temperatures and low humidity and vowed to return after I got my education. So, there I was. As my company was a defense contractor, there were projects all over the country as well as business with sub-contractors all over the country. Family guys viewed these required trips away from family sometimes for a week or two as a hardship. However, being single I had no such reservations; in fact I sought these trips out, especially the longer ones. That way I could take a few days of vacation going to and from the business and drive. I would take one route to the work and another route returning to the plant. I was seeing the world. A sheltered young man from Arkansas was having his horizons expanded. This was Cold War time and we were awarded the contract to design, manufacture and install an air defense system for NATO to protect the West from a hostile air attack from the Soviet Bloc. Now there were opportunities to travel to Europe. I jumped at the chance. My horizons were really expanding now. I was now in European countries as often as I was at the plant in California. Flying back and forth gave me the opportunity to take a few days enroute to and from and visit Arkansas. On these trips my home base would always be at my grandmother’s house in Hope, Arkansas; but I would always spend some time with my mother and sister and her wonderful family in the Hampton, Arkansas area. This was the life – wonderful, enjoyable, adventurous, fun with ever expanding knowledge and possibilities. After 25 years with the company I retired. My wife and I settled first in Europe, then to California, then to Colorado, then to Utah, then to Nevada where we are now. I did not forget my roots, my home, during all this time and continued to visit my Grandmother, Ruth Gunter Johnston; my mother, Mary Frances Johnston McLeod Weisinger; and my sister, Frankie Lou Weisinger Means and her family. These wonderful visits home continued until my health wouldn’t support it any more. My sister, Frankie, and I continued our connection by telephone for quite a long time. Finally we reverted to the USPS, which is where we are now. It was during these letter correspondences that we began to discuss our mother, Mary. In a letter quite a few years ago, Frankie posed the question “I wonder what made our mother so mean and hateful.” I agreed with her assessment, but said that it would take a lot of thought to reach a conclusion. Both Frankie and I agreed that we should have asked both Ruth and Mary a lot of family questions that we did not. Now all the people who know the details are gone and our memories of that time over 80 years ago are fuzzy to say the least. We would have to concentrate on that long ago period and commit to paper whenever some memory was revealed. Then we would have to analyze the information and identify scenarios that could have happened, and then with research and deduction decide the most logical and reasonable scenario that we think could have and most likely did happen. We mulled that around in our minds for several years.  Last year, 2019, Frankie and I began to put it all together on paper. That’s the following narrative, THE MARY STORY. Most of the story takes place at locations on this map. 

I want to clearly identify the principle people named in this essay. The contributors to this narrative are John Charles McLeod, Frankie Lou Weisinger Means, children of Mary Frances Johnston McLeod Weisinger and Melissa Mohon Papineau, daughter of Vivian Jane Johnston Jackson Mohon. Ruth Gunter Johnston was one of ten children of James Henry Gunter and Martha Frances William Buffington who were prosperous farmers in College Hill, Arkansas. This was a sparsely settled area devoted to farming. Many family members, including James and Martha, are buried in Shiloh Cemetery, not far from College Hill. They provided their children with a good education, including arts and culture. Ruth was an accomplished pianist. 

She was teaching at Henderson – Brown University, as it was named then, in Arkadelphia, Arkansas when she married Medical Doctor Charles Bennet Johnston of Warren, Arkansas. They married in 1909 when Ruth was 23 years old and CB was 34. They settled in Harrell, Arkansas probably where CB already had an established MD practice. In 1912 they had their first child, Mary Frances. In 1917 they had their second child, TJ. Vivian Jane was born in 1921. Probably CB began to notice the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in about 1928 or 1929 and he succumbed to the disease in November 1932.  

Alice Ann is mentioned on Page 13. Alice Ann is the first child of Frankie Lou and Allison Means. Cindy is mentioned on Page 15. Cindy is the fourth of seven children by Frankie and Allison. Ryan and Ty, also mentioned on Page 15, are Cindy’s children.  RE is first mentioned on Page 20. RE is the second husband of Vivian Jane and is the father of Melissa. Cindy and Melinda are pictured on Page 30. Melinda is the fifth child of Frankie and Allison. Frankie Lou and Allison’s seven children in order of birth are Alice Ann, Martha Kaye, Thom Allison, Margaret Lucinda, Melinda, Russell Paul, and Kevin Bradford. All except Russell are pictured on Page 32. 

**********************************************************************

                                                                                                                                        THE MARY STORY

Let me start this off by stating what is officially recorded in my birth certificate and what we think to be true. When I was born on 21 September 1931 Frank McLeod was 40 years old and Mary was 19. Frank listed his residence as Banks and Mary listed her residence as Harrell. The doctor who completed the birth certificate was Dr. J.E. Rhine of Thornton. The birth certificate was registered by Ruth Johnston on 24 September 1931. Frank’s trade was listed as ‘ginner.’ Mary’s trade was listed as ‘housekeeper.’ The birth was listed as ‘legitimate,’ which should mean they were married at the time of my birth. 

During a summer visit to Mary and Frank Weisinger when I was in school I asked Mary if she knew where Frank McLeod was. She replied “you have waited too long for that. He is dead now.” I asked her how life was with Frank and she replied “wonderful.”

I asked her where they lived. She said “in the hotel” or maybe she said “in hotels.” I’m not clear on that point. I asked Mary didn’t he want to contact me, to see the kind of person I am? Mary replied “no contact. That was part of the agreement. He never broke it.”

I saw some pictures of Mary and me with Mary in her school graduation cap and gown. I was a toddler. I could walk. The top of my head was about up to her waist. I was maybe 2 or 3? 

These pictures  were taken at the Johnston home in Harrell, Arkansas in 1934 on the occasion of Mary’s Artesian High School graduation.                                                                             

On 21 September 1931, Ruth Johnston was 45, CB Johnston was 56, Frank McLeod was 40, Mary was 19, TJ was 14, Vivian was 10, Frank Weisinger was 19. CB Johnston died on 22 November 1932. The Great Stock Market Crash occurred on 29 October 1929. The country was in the Great Depression with 30% of the work force unemployed until the beginning of WWII in 1941. Mary and Frank Weisinger had their first child, Frankie Lou on 24 February 1935. 

So, on 21 September 1931, Ruth’s husband was dying, Mary was delivering John, TJ was 14 and Vivian was 10. The country was in the Great Depression with 30% of the work force unemployed. 

Those pictures and words are the facts as we think we know them now. I will now raise rhetorical questions, make comments and do analytical research in an effort to determine what the most probable, most reasonable, most logical situation existed at that time. 

Frank was 40, Mary was 19. This fact immediately raises a line of questioning that would be entirely different, if, say, they were both 19. OK? Was Frank married? Divorced? Widowed? Single? We don’t know the answer to any of that and a yes to any one of the four possibilities raises a different set of new questions. How did Mary and Frank meet? Frank was a ginner, the operator of a cotton gin. I don’t recall a cotton gin in Harrell. However, there was a railroad with a depot in Harrell. This would have been convenient for shipping bales of cotton. I do not recall seeing cotton bales at the Harrell depot. The depot was about 150 yards from our house. I searched the Internet for cotton gin locations in Arkansas and found very minimal information. I do know for a fact that there was a gin in Hampton. At that time cotton was transported to the gin in a horse drawn wagon. It was depression time and farmers were still in the horse drawn age for both transportation and work. In 1931 trucks were not a viable alternative. Railroads were needed to transport cotton to the textile mills of the north. Therefore, Harrell could very well have been a hub for shipping cotton. Harrell is 4.7 miles from Hampton. A horse drawn wagon’s average speed is about 4 mph. Therefore, a wagon full of ginned cotton bales could be transported from Hampton to Harrell in 1.5 hours. I notice on the birth certificate that two people using two different pens entered information on the certificate. One person was Dr Rhine. The information entered by the second person is the name of the child, the trade of the father, the middle initial of the mother, the name of the Registrar (Ruth Johnston) and the date the certificate was filed. Perhaps this second person was not familiar with cotton processing and knew only that Frank worked in the cotton business. He could have been in management at the cotton gin in Hampton and traveled to the Harrell Depot to organize and supervise the shipment of the cotton bales to the customers. It could be that travel to customer locations in large cities would be part of the job. The birth certificate lists his residence as Banks, Arkansas. Did he own a home there, or did he live there with relatives (such as mother and father) when there was no cotton to be ginned? How long did Mary and Frank  live together? Were they living together during cotton harvesting season as well as winter and cotton planting season? Where did they live together? Mary told me they lived in hotels or a hotel. How old was Mary when she began living with Frank? According to the Internet the average female in the 1930s was 5’6” and 124 pounds. I remember Mary as that, not small, not tall. So, if we say 5”6” and the top of my head is at her waist in the photo; then I would be about 2’9” in the photo. According to the Internet the average height of a 2 year old boy is 2’10”. So we can say that I am about 2 years old in the photo. (From analysis later in this essay, I am most likely 2¾ years old and Mary is unmarried and pregnant with Frankie Lou in these photos.) There is the nine months of pregnancy, one to two years for nursing inasmuch as formula was not widely introduced until the 1940s. After that Mary could then return to school to graduate, which is what we see in the photo. Her age on the birth certificate is 19. According to the Internet the average age of high school juniors is 16 or 17 and seniors 17 or 18. I was born on 21 September 1931; therefore, I was conceived in January 1931. Cotton is planted in early spring, depending on the weather and is harvested in August and September in this area. Assuming that Frank and Mary met during the harvesting season at the Harrell depot, they probably met in August-September of 1930. This would most likely have been prior to Mary’s senior year in high school. They could have been together from that time through January of 1931 and Mary could have returned home visibly pregnant about June-July 1931. Where did they live during this time? Mary said that they lived in hotels or in a hotel. But where? An alternative time frame would be from August-September 1929. This would mean prior to Mary’s junior year in high school, meaning that she had two years of school to graduate and about a year and a half living with Frank. I think this scenario is less likely. So if they met in August-September of 1930, prior to Mary’s senior year in high school, she would have been most likely 17 or just barely 18. Perhaps she had just turned 18, an adult, and thought she could do as she pleased. Mary said that life with Frank was “wonderful.” She also said that there was an agreement and part of the agreement was no contact from Frank. This tells me that there was a conflict and that the resolution was more or less dictated by someone against the wishes of Mary. If both Frank and Mary were in love, why didn’t they marry and live happily every after? I conclude that Mary was in love, Frank was not. When she became visibly pregnant, he most likely sent her home to have the baby. I think Ruth threatened him with possible incarceration and dictated the terms of the “agreement.” Some of the terms being to marry Mary prior to the birth of the child and cease all contact with Mary or the child. I think he quickly agreed to these terms and went happily on his way. I also think this disappointed and in fact infuriated Mary. She probably wanted Ruth to force Frank to marry her and to live with her. Her dream of life with Frank traveling the world as she knew it was shattered. When I finally got sense enough to ask about Frank, maybe in my teen years, she quickly replied with his status, meaning that she had at least maintained knowledge of Frank all those years. 

So, what do we think we know as fact? Mary dropped out of school and left home with Frank McLeod. She returned home pregnant. She and Frank were married prior to the birth. Frank agreed not to contact Mary or the child. Mary enjoyed her life with Frank and was happy during that time. Mary returned to high school and graduated. That brief summary can be embellished in many, many ways. 

 If cotton was shipped from Harrell on the rail road to market, the bales would not have accumulated on the station platform. Therefore they would not have been obvious to me. The bales would have been stored in a rail road car on a side rail until the car was full and ready for shipment. With the depot so close to the house and with lax supervision due to Ruth’s situation, it would have been easy for Mary to go over to the depot to observe the activity. Ruth was very busy caring for a dying husband, doing all the housework, cooking the meals and therefore attention to three children would most likely have suffered somewhat. The connection between Mary and Frank at the depot could have begun with a simple question such as “where does all that cotton go?” It could have culminated with “come with me and I’ll show you the world.” Or, “take me with you.” An unattached man of that age would have been flattered to have the attention of a young, pretty girl. And we know now that there was a promiscuous element to Mary’s psyche. If this scenario, or one similar to it, was true there would have had to be a great disagreement between Mary and Ruth about leaving. Otherwise, there would have been missing person reports, or even possibilities of kidnapping. When Mary became pregnant, especially visibility pregnant, Frank most likely explained that family life was not for him and that Mary would have to return to Harrell and to Ruth’s care. If this or something similar was the case, Frank would most likely have been elated to agree to marry to give the child a legitimacy with no further contact and no further responsibility. If this scenario or something similar is true, Ruth’s responsibilities and anxieties, cited previously, would have limited her analytical parenting. Therefore, in this case there would most likely have been harsh words at the time Mary left to live unmarried with Frank and at the time she returned still unmarried with Frank’s child. This surely would have been the source of conflict between mother and daughter for the remainder of their lives, and we have evidence that there was conflict. Vivian told me that Charles B. Johnston died of Parkinson’s disease. This disease is a progressive, untreatable, incurable nervous system disorder manifested with movement disorders, autonomic dysfunction, neuropsychiatric problems among others. The end stage of Parkinson’s is an extremely distressing situation. Today hospice takes over at that point. Family cannot provide or endure care at that point. CB probably suffered with incontinence, insomnia, dementia, hallucinations, severe posture issues with back, neck, hips and was surely bedridden. Just think of a bedridden heavy man, drooling, urinating uncontrollably, with diarrhea, depressed, and demented. It would have been impossible for Ruth to have cared for CB alone. However inexpensive, inexperienced assistance could have been available from the black community. Surely Ruth would have expected assistance from her children – Vivian 9 or 10, TJ 13 or 14 and Mary 16 or 17. The situation in CB’s room must have been hell. And probably smelled that way, too. Hell at that point and the future very bleak. The country was in the midst of the depression with 30% of the work force unemployed. Is this the reason that Mary dropped out of school, abandoned her family and ran away with Frank McLeod? What about family loyalty, personal responsibility, conscience? What did Ruth think when her oldest daughter abandoned her in the time of most need? Yes, abandoned. Fled. That’s the way it looks to me. Yes, living with Frank would have been “wonderful” compared to the hell that existed in the Johnston household. Had she stayed with Frank, as it turned out, it would have been a blessing for Ruth. But rather than escape from it, Mary returned just in time to add to that hell and responsibility for Ruth. I was born on 21 September 1931. CB was in the last, tortured year of his life. He died on 22 November 1932. So, in summary, the situation for Ruth at the return of pregnant Mary was: caring for CB in the direst and most demanding period of his declining health, supervising untrained CB care givers, caring for two high school children, managing a household, managing the family finances, and now Ruth has to organize the care of Mary and the child, deal with Frank McLeod and through legal or other coercion convince him to legitimize the child by marrying Mary. This situation would surely have overwhelmed a lesser person. That house in Harrell, still standing in 2020 (Page 25), is a small one and could not physically accommodate all the activity thrust upon Ruth. So, Ruth organized an unknown benefactor in Artesian, Arkansas (Map Pages 33, 34) to take in pregnant Mary and care for her and her child. Ruth organized for Dr. J. E. Rhine of Thornton, Arkansas to deliver the child. Today unmarried mothers is a common situation. In those days there was an immense stigma associated with this. Even divorce carried a stigma. Was the Artesian relocation for Mary to relieve her of the humiliation by her classmates, and perhaps relieve Ruth of the humiliation by her peers in Harrell? I don’t think so. I think it was just a byproduct of the situation; that the relocation was dictated by the turmoil in the Johnston household at the time. It was life and death “crunch time” in the Johnston household and Ruth did not have time for social contemplations. Probably Ruth did not have the time or the inclination to convince Mary that this was the best course of action. She probably just informed Mary that this is what we are going to do and it is not open for discussion. If this is the way it was, and this supposition is logical in this circumstance, then it very well could have been another point of contention and resentment Mary had for Ruth. 

John was born in September 1931, most likely conceived in January 1931. Mary most likely returned to the Johnston household obviously pregnant in June – July 1931 time frame.  Mary was then most likely relocated to Artesian in July – August 1931 to the home of the unknown benefactor. After the birth of the baby, there is the timeline between then and the time the baby returned to the Johnston household in Harrell. After puzzling over this time line for quite some time, the most logical (at least to me) scenario I could come up with has Mary nursing me for nearly two years in Artesian living with the benefactor.  The reason I have her nursing me for nearly two years is this: The scientific study of the human biology indicates that the human body is geared to a weaning time of 2½ to 7 years. In 1931 baby food had just been invented and was not commercially available on a large scale. When it came time to integrate “baby food” with mother’s milk, the baby food was made at home. At that time meat and solid foods were considered damaging to a child’s digestive system. Also, fruits and vegetables were avoided until about age four out of fear of disease. The World Health Organization advocates at least two years of breast feeding. UNICEF also recommends this. So, in 1931 with no commercial formula and no commercial baby food, two years or more of breast feeding for newborns would most likely be normal. So, I chose nearly two years for our timeline. Inasmuch as both Frankie Lou and I have good, strong systems within our bodies – good cardio vascular systems, good immune systems, etc., I conclude that both Frankie Lou and I were most likely breast fed for about two years. And immune systems are key here because biological science indicates that a strong immune system needs prolonged breast feeding. (I think that depending on formula rather than prolonged breast feeding has created so many people with all sorts of allergies in today’s society.) Here is the time line that makes the most sense to me: 

July – August 1931 – Mary is relocated to Artesian to the care of the benefactor. 

September 1931 – John is born.

The unknown benefactor in Artesian could have been a midwife. We just don’t know, but are grateful. The Johnston Harrell household just could not accommodate the needs of Mary and John with Dr. CB in the horrible Parkinson’s disease end of life period as well as all the other responsibilities being born by Ruth at this time. 

September 1932 – John is still in the nursing phase and one year old.

Late summer 1933 – John is relocated to Harrell and to the care of Big. Perhaps this is done to allow Mary to be free to concentrate on her final year in high school in Artesian. Mary told me that I could not stop crying when they took me away. 

I wonder if this separation had any effect on my psyche that I don’t realize even now in 2020.  

September 1933 – Mary enters Artesian High School for her senior year. She meets Frank Weisinger and begins to have casual sex with him. Frank was the most handsome guy in the class. I saw a photo of the Artesian school class that Mary had. 

Frankie Lou had this photo for awhile after Mary died. There were about ten people in this photograph. 

May 1934 – Mary conceives Frankie Lou.

June 1934 – Mary and Frank graduate from high school. We have the photos of Mary in her graduation cap and gown in Harrell with John which were shown earlier in this essay. Mary is pregnant with Frankie Lou in these pictures. John would be two years and nine months old at this time. Mary would be about 21 years, 10 months old. The most logical and reasonable scenario has Mary returning to Harrell to join the Johnston household and to be the mother of John. She soon discovers that she is pregnant. She goes to the Witherington farm to find Frank and to determine if he would marry her.  

July 1934 – Mary goes to the field to notify Frank that she is pregnant. Frank’s older sister, Molly, told Frankie Lou that Frank was working in the field and Mary came there to give Frank the news. Here is the reason that I think that Mary and Frank were having casual sex. If they were in a loving relationship, making plans for the future, Mary would have waited for a more intimate moment to give her lover the good news. However, going into the field to disclose the situation, means to me that Mary has just determined that she is pregnant and is alarmed and distraught, knowing that she is in big trouble if Frank will not agree to marry her. Frank does the honorable thing and they marry and move into a little two room house across the creek from the Oscar Witherington field where he is working and where he and Mary would spend their lives working.  

February 5, 1935 – Frankie is born. Mary, Frank and Frankie Lou live in the little two room house for several years and until the four room house on Highway 167 next to the Oscar Witherington farm land is vacated. This is where Frankie Lou grew up and where I came to visit on my summer vacations. Why wasn’t John returned to the care of Mary after Mary and Frank married? This is an interesting question and I have no answer for it. I have no regrets regarding my life with Big. I have had a wonderful life. I just wonder why the situation was that I lived with Big and spent school summers with Mary, Frank and Frankie Lou? I suppose we’ll never know. 

What was life like for Mary and Frank working the Oscar Witherington 80 acre farm and living in the little four room house on Highway 167?

Both Mary and Frank worked hard making their situation as good as it could be. Mary was much more than just a good and hard farm worker. She was smart, clever, intelligent. She really had a talent as an artist which became known late in her life. Her paintings were becoming commercial quality. She never smoked or drank alcohol except for one instance that Frankie recalls.  Frankie and I can be thankful for the good health and good genes she passed on to us. What contributed to her attitude that dominated her late life? I do not recall anything negative during my pre-teen and teen summer visits with Mary, Frank and Frankie Lou. I enjoyed those visits and had fun. I know I was a burden to both of them. I recall four errors that I made and Frank just laughed them off. I carelessly contaminated a large bin of picked cotton, I nearly wrecked the tractor, I started a forest fire and I flooded a part of a cotton field. They never complained and never criticized me for my errors. They were farming and farm life in that era was very hard. Frank plowed with a mule and horses for most of the time. Tractors came into the picture late. Cotton was the money crop. Picking cotton is hard work. I tried it. They produced all they needed to subsist. They grew fruits and vegetables. Mary maintained a beautiful vegetable garden. They raised animals – chickens, pigs, cattle. They produced food for the animals. They had a small barn for animal food storage. They had a smoke house for preserving food for winter. They slaughtered animals and preserved them in the smoke house. Mary canned and preserved food for winter consumption. They cooked on a wood stove. The house had no plumbing and no electricity. Nighttime illumination was by oil lamp. Water was brought in from the nearby well for cooking and bathing. We bathed once a week. Even a pump for the well came in late. Clothes were washed in a big, black, iron pot in the back yard and hung to dry on clothes lines in the back yard. Frank’s very dirty working clothes were boiled in the pot with a very harsh soap. The pot was heated by a wood fire. The toilet was in the usual small house about 100 yards from the home. Toilet paper was a Montgomery Ward catalog. Mary gave birth to me at 19. She gave birth to Frankie at 23, four years later. There was a nine year gap and then she had Barry Lynn in 1944 who lived six months and Kenneth Wayne in 1945 who was stillborn. Frankie was told that if they had carried Barry Lynn to the doctor immediately when he got sick, that he very well could have survived his illness. Perhaps they didn’t for financial reasons. We just don’t know. The little house was a ‘shotgun house’ with four rooms – a kitchen and living room on one side of the open ‘hallway’ and two bedrooms on the other side with one bedroom actually being the enclosed back porch. Heating was from a fireplace in the living room and from the kitchen stove. Those bedrooms could be very cold even in non-winter times. This was a hard and difficult life. But as I recall during the period of my summer visits there was a very positive, friendly, wholesome atmosphere in this household that was full of work by Mary and Frank every day. Of course I was only there during my school summer vacation. Frankie Lou experienced a side of Mary and Frank, especially Mary, that I never suspected. 

Here is what she says about that surprising (to me) experience:

“During the time when I was from about 12 to 16 years old mama and daddy worked the farm all the year except the winter. During the winter daddy worked in construction and mama worked in town. Daddy would be gone all week and returned home for the weekends. I remember a man named Henderson who would come to the house and pick up mama and me and we would go to El Dorado. They would put me in a double feature movie and would return in about 4 hours. He was not from Hampton. Later on she became less secretive about seeing other men. When mama was working at the Drug Store she began to see Gerald Cook. I would wait in the truck while they would go into the bushes south of town. I remember one time we went to a dance in Harrell and mama got drunk. This was the only time that happened. It got really bad when she was working at Clanton’s Café. She would stay out all night somewhere leaving me at home alone. She was gone a lot. When daddy did not come home on the weekend, she did as she pleased and would be gone. One time there was a big snowfall and you couldn’t travel on the roads. Mama did not come home for four days. Thankfully there was butane for heating, but by the end of the four days the food was almost gone. This was scary. All this came to a point one weekend. One time daddy said that he would not be coming home on the next weekend. Mama told me she had to go to Hope to see about Big who was very sick. But daddy did come home and wanted to know where mama was. I told him what mama had told me. He had me call Hope to find out. They said that Big was OK and they had not seen mama. Daddy beat me really bad thinking that I was lying to cover up for mama. My friend Mary Lou Means called me and I told her about the beating. She had her brother, Allison, come and get me. I stayed with Mary Lou then. The police came to investigate, but I didn’t press charges. Mama did not try to see me or to get in touch with me. Allison asked me to marry him and we married in 1951. We moved to Warren where he was employed as a surveyor. We had a good marriage and he provided well for us. Mama or daddy didn’t contact me. I don’t know why mama thought she was so much above the Means but she did. By then we had a baby girl who was Alice Ann. This was in May of 1952. Finally I went to see them and we got along for awhile. Then daddy got sick and he lived for about a year. During the time he was sick and especially near the end, I helped as much as I could. Mama was so hateful and bitter and after daddy died she told me she hated me. I asked her why and she said she didn’t know why, that she just did. I just let it go and still went to see her and drive her places. She told some terrible lies to people that I learned about after she had passed away. Daddy never said a word to me about what he did to me. And to this day I still have a dream about it. I thought he told mama he beat me but she said he did not. I’ve never got over it. I am sorry to say that I do not look back with love for my parents. It has been a hard thing to live with. It seems I was not wanted and you were not either.” 

Now that I know the story, I vaguely recall a couple of hints to this activity that I experienced during my summer visits:

One summer I looked in the magazine rack that was in the living room and was shocked and astounded to find several magazines with naked people in social situations. I was so stunned that I quickly put them back into the rack and never said anything about it. Thinking about it now, probably they were nudist colony magazines. 

Another time on one of my summer visits, we had all just retired for bed and sleeping. Mary said in a voice loud enough for everyone in or near the little house to hear “Oh, Frank!! Your hand is so cold!”

The indiscretion by Mary is a real shocker to me. I never imagined such a thing was going on. And I am really surprised, shocked and dismayed that Frank abused Frankie Lou. I always thought Frank was a very hard worker but an equally gentle person. Maybe Frank was just discovering that Mary was unfaithful and that he was losing her. That sort of thing can drive a loving husband to irrational actions that are out of character and reason. His resort to violence, even out of anger and despair, is deplorable. And against his own child!

Late in my high school years I came to the farm for my summer vacation and Frankie was not there. Mary tried to explain why Frankie was absent. She had a story about a skating rink in Hampton where kids gathered after school. Mary said that she told Frankie not to go there and not to mix with the older boys. She said that Allison Means was one of the older boys who frequented the place. We know now that Mary did not know at that time about Frank’s abuse of Frankie causing Frankie to leave home. Mary just told me that Frankie ran away with Allison, a boy 10 years older than Frankie. Mary ran away from home with a man who was 21 years older than she was. Frankie was born on 5 February 1935. She and Allison married on 3 June 1951. Frankie was 16 at that time. Eleven months later on 2 May 1952 they had their first child, Alice Ann. 

After Frankie left home and married Allison, Mary and Frank continued to work the Witherington farm for quite a while. At this time Frank knew that Mary had not been faithful. Whether Mary continued with her infidelity or had a change of heart is not known. Finally growing cotton on an 80 acre farm was insufficient as a principal cash crop. As I recall, TJ helped Frank get a job in construction with Brown & Root in Texas. Mary also worked in town in the winter. The next significant event was the death of Mr. Oscar Witherington, the owner of the farm and all the property associated with it. It is not known if he had a will, but it is known that Frank received the 80 acre farm, the little house on the highway and all its associated buildings. Thomas, Frank’s brother, received the Oscar vehicles and some money.  Oscar’s wife, Clara, received the big house on the hill and half the big barn and the associated property . She sold her interests  and moved to Hampton to live with her sister. Finally Frank and Mary gave up farming as a livelihood. Frank took a job at Calion Lumber Co. and Mary began to work in Hampton. They also began to raise cattle as another income. This life style continued until Frank began to suffer severe head aches. After suffering for quite a while, he finally was diagnosed with a brain tumor. There was surgery to remove it, but it was malignant and Frank was given six months to a year to live. Mary kept this information from Frank and he thought that he would recover. I did not agree with that decision but did not violate it. It was about one year later that the cancer returned as hundreds of mini tumors throughout his brain. As he lay terminal in the little house by the highway he remarked to me “John, I thought I was going to get well,” and fell into a coma from which he never recovered. 

After Frank died Mary continued to live alone in the little house for several years. Frankie Lou and I exchanged a lot of letters over many months trying to jog our memories about these events, most of which happened about seventy years ago. Here is part of a letter I wrote to Frankie in this regard:

‘I have some questions concerning the situation during and after the time we were young and Mary and Frank were living in the little house on the highway. How is it that Mary and Frank ended up with the 80 acre farm and property that we had always lived in and half of the big barn at Mr. Oscar’s place? It seems that Mr. Oscar’s house and half his big barn and the property it was all on went to someone, and the rest went to Mary and Frank. Was it in the Oscar will? Or was Frank a relative of Mr. Oscar and the land and property went to Frank in that way? The division of the property must have been contentious because as I recall there was a line or fence down the center of Mr. Oscar’s barn meaning that half the barn went to Frank and half went to other family members. Do you know or recall anything about that?’

And here is part of Frankie’s reply to that letter.

‘You asked about Uncle Oscar. There is a story there. He had an affair with daddy’s mother and she got pregnant with daddy and then Uncle Tom. Her husband, Onnye Weisinger finally caught on and left her. So daddy and Uncle Tom were really Witheringtons instead of Weisingers. It was a well kept secret. I did not know it until after daddy passed away. More on this saga later.’

Frankie wrote the continuation of the Witherington – Weisinger saga over several letters. I paraphrase Frankie’s information and combine the several letters into this one paragraph.  Frankie provided the information in her letters to me in 2020. It also repeats previously included information. 

‘Oscar Witherington was a gentleman farmer, meaning he was the owner of the land and he had other people work the land and derive a profit from it. His wife was named Clara. They lived in what was a big house in those days on top of the hill with a big barn adjoining. Onnye and Margaret Lucinda Weisinger lived in the area. We know now that the Weisinger family consisted of the Father and Mother and the children, Bernice, Gladys, Lucille, Mollie, Frank and Thomas. We now know that Margaret gave birth to Frank and Thomas, but Oscar was the father. Onnye discovered Margaret’s indiscretion and left her. It is not known if Clara knew about the indiscretion. Margaret died when Frank was about nine years old. Mollie and Jim Grant, who did not have children of their own, then raised Frank and Thomas. This could have been with the assistance of Oscar and Clara. Oscar and Clara did not have any children. There is much we don’t know here, but we do know that as an adult Frank was working on the Witherington farm and most likely still living with Mollie and Jim. Mary came to the field where Frank was working to inform Frank that she was pregnant (with Frankie Lou). Frank did the honorable thing and they married. At first they lived in a small two room house across the creek from the Oscar farm where Mary delivered Frankie Lou. They eventually moved into the little four room house on the highway bordering the Witherington property when it became available and were the principal workers/managers of the Witherington property. When Oscar died the 80 acre farm and the little four room house and associated buildings went to Frank and Mary. Clara had the big house on the hill and half of the Oscar barn, which she sold and went to Hampton to live with her sister. Thomas and his wife, Dorothy, received the Oscar vehicles and some money. Cotton lost its value as a subsistence crop and both Frank and Mary began other work. Frank began to complain of severe headaches and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. There was surgery, but the tumor was malignant and Frank was given six months to a year to live. In about one year Frank’s brain became riddled with hundreds of mini-tumors and he died at the age of 58. Mary continued to live alone in the little house on the highway for many years. Finally Frank’s half-sister, Dorothy, convinced Mary to move into the Cove Apartments in Hampton. She was living there when she died of a stroke on 31 July 2000 at age 88.

Cindy, Frankie’s daughter, lived in the house with Ryan and Ty for a short time, but the deterioration in the house became so severe that repair was unfeasible and they moved out leaving the little house vacant. The repair and expansion of Highway 167 spelled doom for the little house and its associated buildings. All buildings near the highway like that had to be eliminated. So, finally it and all the buildings associated with it were destroyed. Now there doesn’t seem to be a trace of the joys and sorrows, sadness and happiness, and difficult lives lived in the little house by the highway.’

I don’t know when it started, but Mary developed a very serious negative attitude about most everything later in her life. She could find something negative to say about most everyone and everything. There was a contrary side to her nature which we noted first in this narrative when she didn’t go to Mary Lou Means’ house to discuss Frankie Lou’s situation. She sent the police over there. She never went herself. I encountered a similar contrary attitude, not as serious as this, but certainly contrary. I was just out of high school, one semester in college, when I joined the Air Force and went to the Korean War. This was my first time away from home. I was lonesome and homesick. I wrote Mary weekly with my news and at first asking, then pleading for her to answer with her news. This went on for quite a while and finally I wrote that if I didn’t hear from her I would conclude that she didn’t want to correspond and that I would stop writing. She didn’t write, so I stopped writing. She did not write to me, but wrote to the base commander and complained that I was not writing my mother and got me in a lot of trouble. Also, after graduating from college and traveling the world, I would often send Mary a postcard with my news and return address hoping to hear from her; but I never did. I don’t recall a negative attitude from Mary when I was visiting on my summer vacations. However after I relocated to the US from living in Europe for many years, I would take a trip back to Texas, Arkansas and Kansas every year including an open ended stay with her in her little house on Highway 167 and it was then when this attitude really manifested itself. The visit would be very enjoyable for both of us for several days, but soon she would begin to say negative and derogatory things about people we knew and some I didn’t know. This would also include news events and even news trivia. She would most often start off with Allison, Frankie’s husband. She never had anything positive to say about Allison and would not accept anything positive about him. I reminded her about the time she was in the contested and rotting Oscar barn and fell through the rotted upstairs floor onto the ground below. Allison found her and got her to the hospital. She would not give him credit for helping her, perhaps saving her life. She just said, “well, I would have finally got out.” Mary had some very good friends, Betty Jo (Stringfellow) and Rodney, who lived in a little prefabricated house nearby. For many of my summer visits we enjoyed an evening or two with Betty Jo and Rodney chatting around the kitchen table. It was fun. Finally she gave her thoughts on them directly to Betty Jo rather than behind the back to me – that was the end of that friendship. During my visits, finally her derogatory remarks would get around to me. I would listen to what she had to say and the next day I would be on my way.

Again, I never noticed this attitude when I was a youngster on my summer school vacations with her, Frank and Frankie. There was an emotional conflict between Mary and her mother, Ruth,  that lasted their entire lives probably beginning with Mary’s runaway from home in 1930. There is clear evidence that this conflict existed, but it was from Mary toward Big. Big never indicated anything other than love and care for her daughter, Mary. The first time I became aware of this conflict was after we (Ruth, TJ, Vivian and me) had relocated from Harrell to Hope and a new life for all of us. Mary, Frank and Frankie lived on the farm.

It was a Sunday morning. Ruth, Vivian, TJ and I were living in the Hope house. Ruth was very active in her church, Garrett Memorial Baptist. Ruth played the piano during the service and taught a Sunday School Class. It would be an inconvenience for many people for her not to attend Sunday service. Ruth, Vivian and I attended that Sunday. TJ was not around on that Sunday for some reason. The front door of the house was always left unlocked in those days. We returned home from church services and on the front door was a note. As I recall Ruth uttered a mournful statement and sobbed a bit. We went inside. Later I asked Vivian what had happened. Vivian said that Mary and Frank were coming to visit that Sunday and when Ruth was not there to meet them, they wrote an unpleasant note and left. Vivian also said that they knew Ruth was very active in her church. Vivian also said that they could have and should have just went in, made coffee or something and waited for services to end. Later on, maybe next day, I asked Ruth why we didn’t call Mary and ask why they didn’t wait. Ruth replied something like “ Ooooh! She has a temper!!” I never experienced in person Mary’s temper. Maybe she had it only for Ruth.

Big was in the nursing home in Hampton. I was visiting from Europe. 

There had been a very big disagreement between Vivian, Mary and TJ. I had always thought that it was over the ownership and disposition of the Hope house. However, now that we have been thinking and contemplating about all of this stuff, I think there was more to it than that. Anyway, Ruth was no longer able to take care of herself after suffering the second stroke. So for someone legally to take care of her and her finances, she had to be declared incompetent by the court. The court put Vivian in charge of her finances and put Mary in charge of the person (Ruth). Mary moved her out of the Hope nursing home where she had her church people often visiting her as well as her brothers and sisters and their children. When I heard about the move, I thought it was a mistake, but I had no say in the matter and besides it was done when I heard about it. Mary and I were sitting in her flower shop in Hampton, waiting for closing time with Big in the nursing home. Mary said to me “I told Big ‘you have ruled the roost for these many years. Now you are going to do like somebody else says.’”

On another visit, I found Big without her dentures. I asked Mary about it. She said that Big wasn’t careful with them and they probably were carried out when the sheets were changed. That didn’t sound very likely to me, but I didn’t contradict her. I said “Let’s get in touch with the dentist who made those dentures. He surely has the mold for the dentures and can make another set.”

I asked what a normal set of dentures would cost and gave Mary a check for that amount with the request that she get those dentures for Big. When I was there about a year later I noticed that Big had no dentures. I asked Mary about it. She said “well I didn’t get them. She would have just lost them like the others.” She had the check in her purse and handed it to me. I told Mary “you cash that check and use it to get Big whatever she needs to be more comfortable.”

On another visit, Mary and I were in her flower shop waiting on closing time. Mary was behind the counter. I was sitting on a stool on the customer’s side of the counter. Mary said to me “I told Big that you told me that she taught you not to love me.” The statement hurled me off the stool. I shouted “That’s impossible!! Such a thought has never entered my mind!! That’s a lie!!” Mary drew back her hand to slap me, but didn’t follow through. She just said “well, it’s your word against mine.” I said that I was going over to the nursing home. Mary said that they wouldn’t let me in because it was past visiting time. I said that I would get in and I did. Big was still awake. I tried, in an indirect way, to communicate to Big what had happened. All she said was “She’s my daughter and I love her.” That night Mary had her vehicle and I had mine. I drove to the little house on the highway, collected my things and went on my way. I continued to visit, of course; but that was all that I could take on that visit. 

MARY, MARY, QUITE CONTRARY

At one point in our family narrative, the Harrell property was owned by me, Vivian and Mary. This came to be in the following way. Big had a stroke which put her in a nursing home in Hope (briefly discussed on Page 18). In order to take care of Big and Big’s property she had to be declared incompetent by the court and people designated by the court to take care of all that. There was contention regarding the real and legal ownership of the Hope house and this created severe animosity between TJ, Vivian and Mary – especially between TJ and Vivian. The court put Vivian in charge of the estate and Mary in charge of the person. TJ had paid for the house. The house deed was in Ruth’s name. The court declared that the house was part of Ruth’s estate. Vivian put the house up for sale to pay Ruth’s bills. TJ bought it because that was where he was living, effectively paying for it twice. That is at least one of the contentious points. The Harrell property was by law owned equally by the three children. TJ gave his one third title to me, saying that he did not want to have any further dealings with Vivian. We took turns paying the property taxes due each year, Vivian, Mary and me. One year Mary announced that she no longer would pay her share. Neither Vivian nor I could convince Mary that someone had to pay the taxes or we could lose the property. Finally, Mary gave her one third share to me. So, at that point I owned two thirds and Vivian one third. Events occurred that caused Vivian to want to sell the Harrell house. TJ agreed. We asked him even though he had no legal say in the matter. Mary was vehemently opposed to selling. We offered to give the house to Mary if she would live in it, but she ridiculed the offer and continued vehement opposition to selling. Logic, reason and circumstances would not budge her. Vivian and I owned, so we sold the house and the lot the house was on, retaining the remainder of the property. This was a very contentious point between Vivian and Mary. I wanted to sell all of the property. We had what I thought was a decent offer. However, completely closing the Harrell chapter of her life was too much for Vivian and we retained the remaining property. After the sale was complete in Harrell, Vivian and I got a cool drink at a fast food place there in Harrell and sat on a bench in the shade nearby. Vivian began talking about Mary and suddenly she began to cry and just could not stop. Finally the emotion was overcome and we returned to Hope. I think reflecting on all the difficulties she had had with Mary and the emotion of selling her childhood home just overwhelmed her. 

Some years later, Mary told me on one of my visits that the USPS had inquired about purchasing the lot on Main Street on which Dr CB’s office had stood. At that point RE was the one third owner, so I contacted RE to see if he would agree to selling. He thought we should keep the entire package together to obtain the best price. So I gave a negative reply to the USPS. 

Later Mary criticized and ridiculed me for not selling. She said that she thought it would be nice to sell with the stipulation of placing a plaque or notice of some sort that Dr. C. B. Johnston’s medical office had been on that site. I said “You should have said something at the time. I think that’s a great idea. I’ll contact USPS immediately.” She said that it was too late now. She was right. It was too late. They had all the land that they needed. 

Finally after paying the taxes all those years on the property, RE and I decided to sell. We had great difficulty finding a buyer, but finally did and sold. Regretfully we did not even get enough to cover the property tax and insurance payments that we had made and a survey of the property which the buyer required. When Mary heard about the sale, she demanded one third share in the sale. I told her the sale did not begin to cover the taxes and other expenses that we had paid over the years. She still insisted on a one third payment. So, I gave her a bill for the taxes and insurance she didn’t pay and one third of the survey cost and told her that when I received her check for that I would send her a one third share of the sale. She wrote me a really nasty letter following that. I replied that if she had something positive to say, I would reply, but that I was not going to reply to any correspondence of that nature. I also asked Frankie to relay the message to her in person. I never heard from her again and never saw her again. 

Mary and Vivian traveled together to the site for the wedding of Melissa and Bill. After getting there and helping in the wedding preparation, Mary refused to attend the wedding ceremony. This behavior is bizarre and it distressed Vivian. Melissa recalls Mary complaining about Bill’s ‘bachelor party’ prior to the wedding and a dish Melissa prepared. This shows pettiness as well as contrariness. 

RE was upset with Mary for coming to visit Vivian only once when Vivian was terminal with cancer. Surely RE thought this was not proper conduct for a loving sister. I would speculate that this supports the theory that their relationship had become strained. Could the sister’s alienation stem from Mary’s treatment of their mother after the court’s decision to name Mary as the “guardian of the person?” At this stage of Mary’s life she could always find something negative to say about anyone and everyone and nearly everything, as well. 

The Gunter family wanted to bury Big in Shilo Cemetary at Lamartine, Arkansas where the mother, father are buried. They said they had a plot for Big, putting the family in a row. Mary buried Big in Dickerson Cemetery near Harrell, Arkansas beside her husband, CB. I was there at the cemetery once with Vivian and Mary when we noticed a mistake with the date on one of the headstones. It was decided to leave it as it was. Both Vivian and Mary seemed satisfied and in agreement with this location for Big. 

CONCLUSIONS

Melissa: She was probably a negative person, ready to take offense at anything or anyone. She was probably more cooperative and likeable with non-family people. It is suspected that she had at least major depression recurring. She most likely had a mental illness. 

Frankie Lou: She was hateful and bitter. She told me that she hated me. She told many lies about me that I discovered only after she died. 

John: I would agree with hateful and bitter and add mean. She was definitely hateful and mean to her mother in the nursing home as if seeking revenge. 

FURTHER COMMENTS

While Big was in the Hampton nursing home I tried several times to comment to Big about negative comments and negative actions Mary (the court appointed guardian) had made or taken regarding Big, but Big always cut me short with the simple phrase “She is my daughter and I love her.” I never actually realized and accepted the fact that this wonderful, loving, compassionate woman was tormented by her own daughter in those final times. This makes me so very sad. Big accepted and accomplished without complaint the extremely difficult task of care giving in the final stages of both her husband and her mother. For her to have to endure what she did in her own final stages is a tremendous injustice. One I cannot forgive or forget now that I have thought the entire situation out. I fault myself for not recognizing the situation when it was active and at least trying to do something, although it would have been difficult with Mary having legal guardianship. Did CB and Ruth have big plans for Mary? She was the first born. Ruth’s mother was named Martha Frances. Ruth named her first daughter Mary Frances. So she was Mary Frances Johnston McLeod Weisinger.

Did Mary have redeeming qualities? She was smart, clever, intelligent. She really had a talent as an artist. Her paintings were becoming commercial quality. She never smoked or drank alcohol except for one time which Frankie recalls. Frankie and I can be thankful for the good health and good genes she passed on to us. What contributed to her attitude that dominated her late life? I do not recall anything negative during my pre-teen and teen summer visits with Mary, Frank and Frankie. I enjoyed those visits and had fun. I know I was a burden to both of them. I made errors and mistakes that required extra work by them, but they never complained and never criticized me for my faults. They were farming and especially in that period, farming was a hard and difficult life.  

There is no question that Mary could be a very difficult person late in her life, ostensibly after Frank and Frankie were gone leaving her alone in the little house by the highway. But as I  previously said, I recall during the period of my summer visits there was a very positive, friendly, wholesome atmosphere in the household that was full of hard and difficult work by Mary and Frank every day. 

After both Frank and Frankie Lou were gone and Mary had time to contemplate, rather than being thankful for the wonderful family that she had through Frankie Lou, did she ponder what life could have been if she had not fled the hell in the Johnston household back around 1930? Of course both Frankie Lou and I (and a lot of other people) are glad that it transpired as it did, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. But did she ever think about what life could have been for her if she had pitched in and worked with Big in that household rather than fleeing with Frank McLeod? Surely she did. And what could that have been? In 1939 she and the rest of the family would have been on their way to Hope where many new avenues could have opened up. Would medical school for Mary have been one of the avenues? She was the oldest and that usually meant the greatest opportunity. Could she have become a doctor? Was that what Dr. CB and Prof. Ruth envisioned for her? Vivian did become a registered nurse and had a very successful career. TJ became a saw filer which was the top sawmill technical job. Yes, surely she did contemplate this sort of thing. Did this possible sort of contemplation affect her mentality? What about her promiscuity? Seeking some undefined, illusive happiness? We’ll never know. A lot of this essay is purely speculation. I do not hold any animosity or hate for my dear mother. I see her as a tragic figure, tragic in her own making. Of course, I cannot forget or forgive her for what she did to Big, but I do not hate her for it. I am just so sad and disappointed that it happened. I am also sad and disappointed that Mary could never bring herself to reconcile with Frankie Lou. Mary told Frankie Lou that she hated her. What a terrible statement. Mary also hated her brother, TJ. Part of this could stem from the very contentious situation between Mary, Vivian and TJ revolving around the Big incompetence hearing. On another occasion, I don’t recall the situation, but I do recall TJ’s remarking to Mary “….if you knew how to keep your pants on.” That remark infuriated Mary. Mary also hated Frank’s sisters, probably because they knew too much about her. I seemed to get along with her better than any other member of the family although we had our contentious moments and our relationship did not end well. I recall one time Mary and I were in the field between the Oscar barn and Mary’s house, Mary gave a grand sweep of her arm and said “Some day all this will be yours.” I replied “I don’t want it. Give it to Frankie Lou.” She was stunned and shocked. It showed on her face. As I recall, at her death, she did not have a will and had my name as beneficiary on some of the estate and the rest of it was divided between Frankie and me by law. I signed all my interests over to Frankie. So, finally that loop was closed back to Frankie. I felt that she had earned it. She had lived right there at the Lion’s mouth all those years. So, in the end, it did come back to my dear, little sister, Frankie Lou. Yes, she earned it. Our dear mother, Mary, did suffer. Life on that farm with Frank was extremely difficult. Surely far from what she envisioned for herself before running away with Frank McLeod. I suppose another way it could be said is that Mary suffered so that we could prosper. 

John and Mary in the little house by the highway, Mary in later life, Ruth as a young person.

 The Johnston Family home in Harrell, Arkansas as it is today. Note the blue and white ‘Johnston Avenue’ street sign. 

The Johnston Family home in Harrell, Arkansas as it was in the 1935 to 1939 period. Note the disrepair of the front steps leading onto the porch. This appears to be from years of neglect, attesting to the family financial situation in that period. This is significant. With labor cheap and available, still funds could not be committed to this repair. Times were indeed dire in the Johnston household. The people in the photo are Ruth, Vivian and John. The woman with the hat is unknown.

This is the Johnston family home in Hope, Arkansas. The family moved here in 1939 from Harrell with the aid of Ruth’s brothers. This was then the home of Ruth until she was placed in a Hope nursing home after having her first stroke. She was subsequently moved to a nursing home in Hampton, Arkansas where she died at the age of 93. This continued to be the ‘family’ home until the death of TJ in 1983. 

In the top left photo are Ruth, Vivian, Melissa and Ruth Ann in the front yard of the Hope house after returning home from church. In the top right photo are Ruth, Ruth Ann and John inside the Hope house. In the bottom left photo are Mary, Vivian, Ruth and Melissa in Vivian’s home in Emmet, Arkansas. In the bottom right is John taking a bath in the front yard of the Harrell house about 1933. Yes, in those days everyone took a bath in a tub like that, only not in the front yard. Frankie Lou, John, Mary and Frank, in that order, took a bath in a tub like that in the kitchen of the little house on the highway, all in the same water! Yes. Water had to be brought in from the well and heated on the kitchen stove. No plumbing or electricity at that time in that house. 

Mary was 87 years old, to be 88 on 7 September 2000. She was returning to her apartment in Hampton early in the evening of 9 July 2000 when she suffered a cerebral thrombosis near her front door where she fell striking her head on the concrete sidewalk, injuring her head but not fracturing her skull. She bled profusely from the wound. She lay there undiscovered until about five the next morning. She was rushed to the hospital where she was experiencing paralysis on the right side, had a blank stare in her eyes, could not talk, did not recognize anyone or anything. I do not know when she regained consciousness, but she was conscious at the hospital, but unresponsive. She did not require life support systems, other than the round-the-clock personal care. There was swelling of the brain, but no surgery was done to relieve the swelling. She did take nourishment in the form of food similar to baby food that was spoon-fed to her. She required help with elimination. After a few days she sometimes would slightly move her head to one side (only one side) in response to sound or speech from that side and would sometimes slightly squeeze one’s finger on request. 

The type of stroke that Mary had was a cerebral thrombosis where a clot, or thrombosis, forms in the artery of the brain blocking the blood flow to a portion of the brain. A stroke of this type sometimes begins with a sudden loss of consciousness. This is probably what happened to Mary and she fell to the sidewalk like a rag doll. Probably the head struck the sidewalk in this situation with a whip-like force, making the contact the most severe possible. In the case of a stroke if emergency aid is administered in the first thirty minutes to one hour and if the stroke is not too severe, a high degree of recovery is achieved in about 90% of cases. Otherwise the recovery rate is very low. It is necessary to administer clot breaking drugs and blood thinners in those crucial early minutes to restore blood flow to the deprived brain area. Of course Mary’s treatment was about 9 to 10 hours after the fact and the trauma to her brain was extensive and severe.

The true extent of damage to Mary’s brain is unknown to me and family; but it is known that brain swelling occurred, she was partially paralyzed, she had to be hand fed and helped with elimination, but she was capable of breathing without support. She was not connected to any life support machines. Her level of responsiveness was very low. 

On 18 July, after nine days in the hospital at El Dorado, Mary was moved to the nursing home in Hampton. She continued therapy which was begun in the hospital. The brain may have begun to recover some of its alertness and responsiveness. Also this “recovery” could have been only wishful thinking on the part of the family and care-givers. No clinical repeatable tests and analysis over time to measure this were attempted. It was thought that she would sometimes give a slight smile, a slight curve of the corner of the mouth to something that was said in the room. She also continued to sometimes turn her head in one direction toward sound or speech from that direction, and also continued to sometimes slightly squeeze a finger on request. However, she continued to have to be spoon fed and helped with elimination. 

On Sunday afternoon 31 July 2000 Mary’s lungs filled with fluid and she could not breath. This was a pulmonary edema. The Funeral was on Wednesday 2 August 2000. She is buried in Pickett Cemetery in Calhoun County not far from the little house on the highway with Frank and the two infants. 

Mary Frances Johnston McLeod Weisinger, 7 September 1912 – 31 July 2000, is buried with her husband, Frank W. Weisinger, 5 November 1912 – 7 February 1979, in Pickett Cemetery near Hampton, Arkansas. Their two infant boys are also buried there; Barry Lynn, 9 October 1943 – 9 April 1944, and Kenneth Wayne, 27 August 1945, stillborn. The cemetery is located 7 miles south of Hampton, West of Highway 167 at the junction of Roads 146 and 27. Antioch Church is nearby. 

This is a photograph of many of the family members on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Ruth (Big). The photo is taken in Big’s family home in Hope. From the left: Ruth, Vivian, Mary, Kristie in front of Vivian & Mary, TJ, Melissa, Cindy, Melinda, Frankie Lou, Ruth Ann, Amy in front of Ruth Ann. Melissa and Ruth Ann are the daughters of Vivian. Frankie Lou is Mary’s daughter. Cindy and Melinda are Frankie Lou’s daughters. Kristie and Amy are Ruth Ann’s daughters.

 Some of the Means Family is celebrating a Special Occasion with Mary. Pictured left to right standing are: Tory Walker, Jimmy Wilson, Shannon Means, Melinda Means Wilson, Frankie Lou Means, Alice Ann Means Hicks, Ashleigh Ann Means, Winkie Temple, Margaret Cindy Means Franklin, Kevin Bee Means, Terri Johnson Means. Pictured left to right kneeling or sitting are: Kaye Means Hurst, Derrick Means, Mary Frances Johnston McLeod Weisinger, Andy Jo Hurst, Bradley Cole Means, Thom Means.  

[junker-town]

The Giants’ draft picks, all made by Joe Judge’s very good dog

Photoshop by Morgan Moriarty/SB Nation

Let’s pretend Joe Judge’s dog, Abby, was the one drafting for the Giants this year.

New Giants head coach Joe Judge will have 10 picks to work with in the 2020 NFL Draft. So far, Judge hasn’t revealed much publicly about who he will be targeting. But someone who might know is his very good golden retriever, Abby.

Before the draft, Judge said he’s been prepping with Abby in his basement, and that she probably has the most intel of anybody on what the Giants will do. Look at what a very good girl Abby is being during Judge’s draft prep:

Coach Judge and Abby: Work from home vibes pic.twitter.com/DZpmCn2cur

— New York Giants (@Giants) April 15, 2020

The Giants should just let this very good dog make these draft picks for them, honestly. She probably wouldn’t do worse than Giants general manager David Gettleman.

If Abby got the chance to draft players, who would she pick? Well, probably guys who have names that will resonate with her canine sensibilities. Let’s pretend this adorable golden retriever was making picks for the Giants to see what might happen if so.

Round 1, pick No. 4: Chase Young, Edge, Ohio State

Not only did Abby pick a Chase — given that her favorite activity is chasing squirrels — with the Giants’ first pick, but she selected arguably the best player of this draft class. The Giants are in need of a pass rusher this offseason, and getting Young at No. 4 overall would be an excellent pick. Young, who led the nation with 16.5 sacks in 2019, is a versatile defensive end who can line up anywhere on a defense.

It’s a long shot that he’ll still be available at this spot, but still an A+ start to the draft, Abby.

Round 2, pick No. 36: Trevon Diggs, CB, Alabama

This golden retriever’s favorite activity outside of squirrel hunting is digging massive holes in the backyard, so you can’t really blame her for taking Diggs. Besides, the Giants could use cornerback help, and if a talented player like Diggs is still on the board, it’s an easy pick.

Diggs will be an excellent complement to DeAndre Baker in New York. Diggs, who’s the younger brother of Buffalo Bills receiver Stefon Diggs, had 37 tackles, four interceptions, and 21 passes defended for the Tide last season.

Round 3, pick No. 99: Ben Bartch, OT, St. John’s (Minnesota)

Judge’s dog was sure when she overheard him say Bartch’s name over a phone call in the weeks leading up to the draft he actually said “bark.” Not only is this something that Abby does frequently, but chewing up tree bark in the backyard is this retriever’s favorite way to unwind when it’s a nice day outside.

The good news for the Giants is they desperately need a left tackle to protect quarterback Daniel Jones. The Giants allowed Jones to get sacked 36 times in just 13 games as a rookie. At 6’6, 309 pounds, Bartch already has an advantage size-wise. While he is a prospect that likely won’t come in and start right away, he has some solid fundamentals that can be built upon at the next level with the right development.

Round 4, pick 110: Antonio Gandy-Golden, WR, Liberty

Thinking that Abby could have yet another golden retriever to play with around the house, the Giants get Gandy-Golden in the fourth round. Golden accounted for 3,000-plus yards over his final three seasons, and set a single-season school record in receiving yards in 2019. Golden was a former gymnast, which translates well to the gridiron in terms of body control and footwork. The Giants need to get Jones all the weapons he can get so, sure, good pick, Abby.

Round 5, pick 150: Dane Jackson, CB, Pitt

Judge’s dog met a Great Dane on a walk a few weeks ago she instantly bonded with and was hoping to have the same connection with Jackson. The former Pitt corner totaled 148 tackles, 43 passes defended, and four interceptions during his career. Jackson will add some more depth at the position for the Giants.

Round 6, pick 183: Tyler Huntley, QB, Utah

Abby’s favorite offseason activity is duck hunting, and she kept hearing players from some team called the “Oregon Ducks” being selected. Naturally, it gave her the idea to pick Huntley. The QB threw for a career-high 3,092 yards, 19 touchdowns, and just four interceptions last season. He set a school record for completion percentage (73.1), too. Now that Eli Manning has retired, the Giants could use Huntley as a third-string or practice squad addition.

Round 7, pick No. 218: Eli Wolf, TE, Georgia

Abby heard from a neighborhood dog that wolves are basically dogs that live without human owners and was intrigued to learn more. Wolf accounted for 194 yards and a touchdown during his lone season with Georgia as a graduate transfer. The Giants do have Evan Engram at the position, but he has yet to play a full season in three years thanks to various injuries. Wolf would add solid depth at the position.

Round 7, pick No. 238: Mason Wolfe, OT, Kentucky

After she learned that wolves travel in packs and she could get even more friends, Abby stuck with the wolf trend for the team’s second pick in the seventh round. Wolfe was mostly a backup for the Wildcats, but he appeared in 37 games and didn’t allow a sack throughout his career. Sounds like someone the Giants would benefit from!

Round 7, pick No. 247: Qaadir Sheppard, Edge, Ole Miss

Abby’s friend next door is a German shepherd, and the two get along great. Naturally, the Giants select Sheppard with their third seventh-round pick. Although the former Rebel played outside linebacker at Ole Miss during his senior season, he played two years at defensive end. In 2018, he led the team in tackles for loss, with 10. The Giants can use all the pass rush help they can get, so this is a smart pick by Abby.

Round 7, pick No. 255: Chase Harrell, TE, Arkansas

For the Giants’ 10th and final pick in the draft, Abby got very distracted late into the evening and began chasing her tail to keep herself entertained. So she ended the draft by selecting another Chase since it was fresh in her mind. Harrell had 37 catches for 396 yards and six touchdowns throughout his career, which initially started at Kansas. He would likely make for a decent practice squad tight end for the Giants.

Tired from a long night of drafting, Abby earned herself a brand new bone as a reward for her successful drafting.

The Giants' coaches - and Joe Judge's golden retriever, Abby - are eager to begin the team's virtual offseason program. https://t.co/C0yq2vGPv1 pic.twitter.com/8L5PvwvIag

— Michael Eisen (@giantseisen) April 15, 2020

A very good dog indeed.

[dhofberg]

Where does the money go? 11/26/2027

If you have been following the blog, you have already heard some of the stories of the refugees we meet in the clinic. And a bit about the meetings I have been to for Interagency Communication. So by now you probably get it that the flow of money from the EU to the Greek government for the shelter and protection of refugees ( I have heard the number 400 million Euros), is not a stream that is easy for volunteers or refugees or most NGOs to follow.

There are Greek agencies that are set up to help refugees get registered, have health assessments, set dates for asylum interviews. But they ate woefully understaffed. The office in Lesvos that awards asylum seekers an AMKA ( like a social security number), is open a few hours of the day and can process about ten applications a day. There are between 70-150 new arrivals on Lesvos a day, so we are not even counting arrivals to other places in Greece. The medical clinic run by ERCI in Moria can see about 40 patients a day, and if you don’t yet have registration papers, you might have to wait weeks to be seen in a clinic, unless you are deemed an emergency case. Pretty much everyone who has just been through the traumas of fleeing a war torn country, paying smugglers to put them on a perilous journey across the sea, feel that they have some urgent needs. And most of them have some unrealistic expectations about what life will be like when they reach Europe.

Yesterday we finally went back to Moria camp where we had worked in January 2016. You might remember that that was immediately before the transition camp became a detention center because of the Shengen rules applied to asylum seekers when the borders in Europe were closed. We had been told we would never get in there, they no longer allow small NGOs to walk in, so I devised a plan to get in. Because I have been communicating with a dental relief program from U.K. and also a Palestinian dentist at One Happy Family to develop a small dental education program for the children at OHF, I thought she might be able to get me in to the camp the week that her team was coming to Moria to provide emergency dental care there (toothache=extraction).

It turns out the way we got in, was by walking straight in he gate, right in front of three or four Greek policeman, without hesitation, so basically got in on chutzpah. They didn’t stop Michael either who was walking right behind me, so I suppose we looked like we knew what we were doing?

One doesn’t take photographs in the camp as it can endanger refugees, and also probably the reputation of the Greek police and government. It was shocking to see that this place we felt was grim in 2016, was now holding more than three times the number of people ( between 6-7,000), built up with more ISO boxes ( container housing would be a stretch, especially compared with the ones pictured last year in Bremen), small family tents lining every pathway. Some of the areas were orderly and relatively picked up. But many were on a muddy gravely hillside, hopelessly studded with the refuse of living. The cyclone fencing is where clothes drying happens, of that I did take a few pictures.

We made our way through people living their lives in tents, some smiling kids, women carrying basins of water from the bathrooms to wash clothes. We have heard that the water only runs for certain hours, and the shower is usually cold. I can’t think why this is, there is a lot of water on this island. After a quick walk around the camp, we made our way up to the “fourth level”, where the medical clinic has an office. We were able to speak with one of the volunteers there who explained their triage and appointment process. Communication between the health care agencies is really important. We need to know, in Doc Mobiles clinic for instance, if we can refer a patient to a specialist or not. If Doc Mobile is here long enough, and makes the right connections, they might be recognized enough for KEELPNO to accept their referrals. They do accept some from ERCI, so at present, we might refer someone back to the ERCI Moria clinic to be seen and then referred to KEELPNO, who might then be able to do the needed referral. Can you imagine in an American or British health care system, you go to a doctor and they say, yeah you have terrible psoriasis, I’llrefer you to another clinic, where you might have to wait two months to get in, and then they see you and say, yeah, true you have REALLY bad psoriasis, and we will refer you to KEELPNO and they might give you an appointment with the specialist in a few more months.

I use this example, because the fellow I saw with really bad psoriasis, had arrived here a few weeks ago. But he had no medication, and though he had been seen at Moria, they gave home some ineffective low potency steroid creams, which did nothing, and he was near to be kicked out of his tent because his tent mates ( none of them his family or friends, men traveling alone are often forced to share a four person tent with men they don’t know), thought he was contagious.

Doc Mobile has limited funds, but we are seeing 40-50 patients a day and there are times when we can make something work out for a patient like this man. We bought him some of the medication he needs, and on Monday when the pharmacy opens I am hoping to find him the rest. We are trying to find contacts in Kara Tepe ( the camp for more vulnerable persons), and see if there is any way to facilitate his transfer. He needs to be able to bathe his skin regularly to keep it from becoming dangerously infected. I don’t know if we will be successful in getting him relocated, but I know he will get some help from us, and the day after I first saw him he came back to One Happy Family community center and gave me the warmest smile and thanks. There is a gesture that these people use to thank you, the hand over the heart, that is unmistakable in its meaning. And that afternoon I saw him hanging around the construction of the new greenhouse at the center, and by the end of the day he was helping the crew.

One Happy Family Community Center is run and built by and for refugees with the help of Swisscross, Israid, The Hope Project and others. Yesterday they allowed some journalists in on a Saturday afternoon to do some filming and interviewing. There was a photographer from Hamburg, Where Doc Mobile hopes to do some fundraising. I met for the first time in person, Kai Wittstock, the man who conceived and is the main director of Doc Mobile. A gentle, middle aged German guy, with no medical background ( the story of how he started docmobile included in an earlier entry),he successfully persuaded me to stay and see patients on a Saturday when I had planned to stay home to avoid the film crew. The journalist-videographer also put me at my ease when she assured me no patients would be filmed unless they agreed to be and had this explained to them through a translator. I was also interviewed by a journalist from Chicago, I have no idea what paper he works for. He said he’d send me an email letting me know what he wrote, but so far I haven’t heard from him. It will be great if this results in money for Doc Mobile, One Happy Family, Israid.

For my friends and community who have donated money for refugees, this is where it has gone so far. Doc Mobile for medicines I bought in US at Costco and brought with me . Wish I had brought more Prenatal vitamins, melatonin, throat lozenges, things that make people feel cared for when they don’t really need prescriptions. Humans For Humanity for their work bridging the gaps in feeding and clothing new arrivals before they are registered asylum seekers and for being a happy pleasant place for refugees to come and help. To the independent carpenter gang of three who built the Hope Project’s medical clinic at OHF , self funded and now on their way to Serbia to do more ad hoc construction. As more money has come in from home, by Bob’s report, I will also make some donations to OHF especially it applies to the school and dental education, and perhaps to Bashira for contraceptive information. I am honored that I was trusted with these funds, and I feel certain it will all be put to the best use for the benefit of the refugees. ( Okay, the carpenters might use it to fill their truck with petrol to get to Serbia, and maybe a few beers, but that money came out of my wallet anyway).

So that’s where your money goes, wish I could be more clear about where the 400 million Euros goes. Hope you are enjoying your Thanksgiving weekend and giving thanks for the roof over your head, a warm bed, a hot shower, and your loved ones close by.

[biofunmy]

Bianca Andreescu Wins the U.S. Open, Defeating Serena Williams

If you have been considering active visualization, this seems a fine time to start.

The technique certainly has worked wonders for Bianca Andreescu, a 19-year-old Canadian tennis player, who for years has been closing her eyes and envisioning herself winning the United States Open against Serena Williams.

On Saturday afternoon, with her eyes wide open and her shots so often bold and true, Andreescu went out and did just that.

“For it to become a reality is so crazy,” Andreescu said, breaking down in tears in her post-match news conference. “I guess these visualizations, really, really work.”

Her remarkable 6-3, 7-5 victory, which capped her first appearance in the U.S. Open, thwarted the 37-year-old Williams’s latest attempt to match Margaret Court’s record of 24 major singles titles.

Much more significant to Andreescu’s compatriots was the fact that her victory gave Canada its first Grand Slam singles title in a sport where Grand Slam tournament play began with Wimbledon in 1877. Shortly after Andreescu’s victory, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent her a congratulatory message with the hashtag #shethenorth.

“So many Canadian athletes have paved the way for me when I was young,” said Andreescu, born in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. “Hopefully I can be that person to them.”

It was the latest Grand Slam setback for Williams, who is beyond question the greatest player of this era. But against Andreescu, she made too many unforced errors (33 in all), double-faulted on break points three times to lose her serve, and put only 44 percent of her first serves in play. That was by far her lowest percentage at this Open.

“I love Bianca; I think she’s a great girl, but I think this is the worst match I played all tournament,” Williams said. “It’s hard to know you could do better.”

Williams, who was also complimentary of Andreescu’s game and mentality, has shown remarkable drive and resilience in her comeback to the tour after giving birth to a daughter, Olympia, in September 2017.

She is back in the top 10, back in contention for tennis’s biggest prizes. But for a proud champion who has had long stretches of dominance and has won 23 major singles titles, only one result is cause for genuine celebration.

The bottom line for now: Williams has yet to win a tournament since her comeback and is 0-4 in major finals without managing to win a set in any of them.

She alluded to her struggles at the award ceremony as she thanked her team for being supportive in “the ups and downs and downs and downs and downs and downs and downs.”

“Hopefully,” she added, “we’ll have some ups soon.”

Andreescu has had no shortage of ups and downs in her short career. Her rise has been astonishingly swift. She lost in the first round of qualifying at the U.S. Open the last two years and was ranked outside the top 150 when the season began.

But she has long believed that tennis greatness awaited her. After winning the prestigious Orange Bowl junior title for the second time in 2015 at age 15, she wrote herself a mock check as if she were champion of the U.S. Open and then updated it each year, with the new prize money total.

“Every year,” she said.

But she has been prone to injury, including back problems, and said earlier this season that she had weaknesses in her core that needed to be addressed. After deciding last year with her new coach, Sylvain Bruneau, to focus more on using the full range of her shotmaking and tactics, she broke through in earnest this March by winning the prestigious hardcourt tournament, the BNP Paribas Open, in Indian Wells, Calif.

But she then was forced to miss nearly all the clay-court season and miss all the grass-court season with a torn rotator cuff. Since returning to the tour last month, she has resumed dominating her elders.

Andreescu is 8-0 against top 10 players this year and has not lost a completed match since March 1. She has prevailed twice against Williams in the last month: winning the Rogers Cup in Toronto when Williams retired with a back problem in the final after just four games and defeating Williams on Saturday in the biggest stadium in tennis.

The sellout crowd pulled hard for Williams and occasionally applauded Andreescu’s errors and missed serves, prompting the British chair umpire Alison Hughes to turn “Please” into a mantra as she tried to keep the crowd under control.

Andreescu could so easily have cracked. She started out superbly, striking the ball cleanly even though she admitted feeling intimidated by Williams. “Of course,” she said. “Before the match I was super nervous.”

And yet she danced and sang to herself, headphones in place, in the tunnel leading to the court and then matched Williams’s power and intensity from the start, returning aggressively and breaking her in the opening game as Williams double faulted twice in a row.

Andreescu came up with well-placed serves and groundstroke winners on key points in her own service games and gradually built a 6-3, 5-1 lead and served for the match.

“The game plan right from the start was to make her work for every ball, to get as many returns in the court as possible,” Andreescu said. “I think she was intimidated by it.”

But Williams fought back in that game, saving a championship point with a forehand return winner and then breaking Andreescu’s serve to get back to 5-2. With the crowd a factor again, Williams reeled off the next three games to get to 5-5 before Andreescu steadied herself to hold to 6-5.

She then broke Williams’s serve for the sixth time in the match, closing out the victory with a forehand return winner of her own.

“I know you guys wanted Serena to win, so I’m so sorry,” Andreescu said to the crowd after the match. “Obviously it was expected for Serena to fight back. She’s done that so many times in the past. That’s why she’s a true champion on and off the court, but I just tried my best to block everything out.”

Andreescu, the self-assured daughter of Romanian immigrants, won the U.S. Open in only her fourth Grand Slam tournament. The only other woman in the Open era to have required so few majors to win one was Monica Seles, who capture her first title at the 1990 French Open.

“Bianca played an unbelievable match,” Williams said in her post-match remarks to the crowd and to Andreescu, who was standing calmly beside her. “Congratulations. So proud and happy for you. I wish I could have played better. If anyone could win the tournament, outside of Venus, I’m happy it’s Bianca.

After giving birth in September and enduring potentially fatal health complications that year, Williams returned to competition in 2018. She has had undeniable success since her comeback, reaching four more Grand Slam singles finals, but she has lost all four to much younger opponents and has yet to win a title at any level of the tour during that span.

Andreescu’s victory was a flashback to 20 years ago when Williams won her first major singles title as a teenager, sweeping through a brutal draw at age 17 to win the U.S. Open in Ashe Stadium.

But Andreescu’s victory was a flashback, in some ways but hardly every way, to last year when Naomi Osaka, a 20-year-old playing in her first major final, defeated Williams to win a tumultuous U.S. Open marred by Williams’s clash with chair umpire Carlos Ramos.

Happily, there were no boos in this award ceremony, no tears of dismay from Andreescu. But like Osaka in 2018, Andreescu won the first title of her career in Indian Wells, and then went on to win her first major title at the U.S. Open against Williams.

After shaking Williams’s hand, Andreescu put both hands to her head and then dropped to the blue court and lay on her back, arms and legs spread wide with the last ball used in the match resting nearby. After rising, she quickly climbed into the stands to celebrate with her team, including Bruneau and her parents.

“I’ve always believed in you,” Bruneau said as they embraced.

Andreescu, seeded No. 15 at Flushing Meadows, will break into the top 10 in the rankings at No. 5 on Monday. Williams, the oldest women’s Grand Slam singles finalist in the Open era, will be No. 10 and will turn 38 later this month.

But the number that matters most remains 24, and it remains quite a barrier.

“She needs, on her own, nobody else, to just ask herself: ‘What do you want from the next year and a half, two years of your life?’” said Billie Jean King, the former champion who has mentored Williams. “If she still wants to stay in this and still wants to go for the record, then there are certain things she needs to do. But if she wants to, she can still do it”

David Waldstein contributed reporting.

Sahred From Source link Sports

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2ZYBrGA via IFTTT

[ecotone99]

[SF] Panopticon

Twenty-three hundred days in hell is exactly what you’d think. Well, unless you anticipated screaming, and praying, and begging, and wailing and gnashing of teeth no…hell is nothing like the Old Testament. Hell is an eight-foot-tall, six-by-six cell. Three walls and a ceiling, all made of concrete. That fourth wall however, now I’m betting you anticipate “bars,” right? Seeing as I’ve described hell as a cell? Well here I am to burst your bubble ‘cause hell isn’t a cell per se. The fourth wall is just…open. Completely open to a four-story drop for me, even higher for the boys above me. And if you were to drop, you’d land and shatter your fucking femurs for one, but you’d land on the sandy bottom of a tall, dark, enclosed, circular building in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

The floor of this place is about the size of a football field in all directions and in its center…in its heart. Is the Panopticon. I can still remember the metallic voice over the unseen speakers as we each awoke, drugged, in our cells. It started off with a factoid. The man who first proposed the idea of the Panopticon described it as “A mill for grinding rogues honest.” We were to be the, “First ever maximum-security inmates to be housed within the ULTIMATE STRUCTURE OF SURVEILLANCE!” Like we were supposed to be goddamn excited for it. Like they were selling us something that we should be chomping at the bit to buy.

360-degree view from the tower in the center with about 150 open cells surrounding. No human face though, scowling out at us from behind it’s dark, cold plexi-glass. No human faces EVER. See that was really the thing about hell. I hadn’t seen another human face since the moment that screeching, tinny, robotic voice woke me up to tell me what I’d won, twenty-three hundred days and counting, in hell. The point of the “open cell concept” as I like to call it, is this, we all assume we could be the one being monitored at any given time so now, we self-discipline. No need for bars when we’re met with a bone crushing fall and motion-activated machine guns mounted on every curve of that tower. No sir-e. We’ll be the good little boys our mechanical overlords know we’ll be, because we have no other fucking choice.

Now how can a maximum-security prison operate without any human beings? Much like most things in this brave new, robotic world. Our three-square meals a day are delivered to us through a perfectly fucking sealed square hole in the wall and I know that it’s being delivered on a conveyor belt, assembled and maintained by machines because for the past 6 months my meals have been coming to me with the exact same mistakes, day-in-and day-out. If that doesn’t sound like a malfunctioning robot, electronic, or machine to you than you haven’t spent a lot of time depending on one. My breakfasts used to be nice and portioned off on the tray. The scrambled eggs had their square, the toast had his, and my orange slices had theirs. Now every single morning the eggs are no longer scrambled, they’re runny as hell and I hate runny. But what’s more is my orange slices are placed right in the center of that disgusting, thick soup o’ eggs. Like two orange, radioactive islands floating within a sea of yellow shit. And my dinners no longer include any meat, just the gravy for the meat. So, I’m just getting potatoes and steamed veggies every night for the past 6 months with nothing but the idea of meat.

It used to be that once a month a palm-sized touch pad would come through the food slot and you could make selections on any malfunctions or problems you’d been experiencing under certain categories and then back through the slot it would go and within a day or so the problem would be resolved. So, once upon a time I could rectify these mistakes or at least be given the illusion of having a voice. But I haven’t seen a touch pad come through the wall in well over 3 years and I don’t expect I’ll be seeing one ever again. I mean my lunch no longer even comes at all but from the feedback I’ve gotten from the fine gentlemen around me, everybody’s lunch stopped coming about 2 years ago so a certain programed protocol has obviously kicked in. What we all want to know is what it means…

Here’s what I think it means. The people running this place, the human beings meant to give mind to this machine of hell, are all gone. Something very, very bad happened out there in the world and we’re in here completely unsupervised, by man. But now we’re so dangerously supervised by the machines that this really is a hell, and we’ll all spending eternity in this place as more parts and pieces of it fall apart with no human beings coming to put it all back together again, and call the devil back to bed. Plus, the water has started to taste a little like battery acid.

We figured out I want to say two-and-a-half years ago that we could call out to one another and have conversations without anything happening. The first guy to finally shriek out into the abyss was Bluie my neighbor. He’s a totally innocent man and one night right as I was finally beginning to drift off into my version of sleep, I hear the first human voice I’d heard since before my incarceration. It was Bluie. And Bluie yells out,

“Aye, aye RoboCops! Why ain’t ya tuck us in no more!?”

The silence that followed…whew! Could have heard the drip, drip, drip of a robot taking a gasoline piss a football field away. But then…nothing happened. I mean absolutely nothing happened for one minute, then two minutes, then seven. In the hour that followed the event that I’ve so affectionately named, “Bluie’s First Contact” it was truly as if we were in hell, yet this time, we were the demons. The screaming and shrieking, swearing and cursing, the absolute thunderous, bellowing shouts of rage and sound that erupted from all 150 inmates after Bluie’s First Contact was the most hell-ish thing I had ever known. Myself, I just yelled every horrible thing I had ever heard or thought of throughout the entire course of my life until I tasted blood in the back of my throat and no longer had any voice to speak with.

But this ushered in great change. There were conversations for a few weeks. Men confessing, mostly men declaring innocence. Men sharing jokes, men telling stories of all the best and all the worst pussy they’d had before waking up in this place. We were a tribe. But with so many conversations happening all at once we couldn’t keep track of the fractures. The fissures, the silences. And soon there were indecipherable clicks with the tongue, and combinations of words which meant nothing. High and low shouts which gave away no inflection or intention. We all developed our own secret language to communicate with the men we really trusted. We’re split now, divided. Sound is all we have so we use it as secret forms of communication. The acoustics are fantastic in our Panopticon and so each level has developed their own secret means of communication so no other level can understand them. The highest level of cells, near the ceiling are rumored to still be receiving lunch, spring water to drink, and meat with dinner so of course it goes without saying that every level hates them. The bottom level, my level is rumored to have successfully gotten some of our boys out—escape. I know this is bullshit because several months back another guy, real quiet guy likes us to call him G, kicked his pillow right out the opening in his cell. You may have wondered how I knew the machine guns mounted on the Panopticon were motion-sensitive? At least three machine guns locked onto it and shot it as it was falling through the air, and completely eviscerated it once it hit ground. So began the escape rumors. We also know that if we come to close to the opening of our cells the machine guns lock onto us and follow our every move until we step back far enough. Once, I daggled a piece of cloth over the side and a machine gun fired and nearly blew my fucking hand off.

What I’ve been trying to get my guys on this level to understand, is that there aren’t enough machine guns to handle all of us. If only we conducted more “experiments” really figured out the way they work, even if just one of us could escape that one could go find out what happened to the world. Bring help. But Bluie says this is part of the Panopticon. This is how we’re meant to be kept here, in hell.

“Men built this,” he said, “men want this.”

G thinks what I’m suggesting involves sacrificing one of “ours”. Even if we got the rest of the 147 inmates in on it everyone would scream the same thing:

“The cocksuckers on the bottom have the lowest fall! They should be the ones to distract the guns while others try an escape!”

I think G is probably right. But no one has spoken a real, human sentence in so long, I don’t intend to be the first to break the “silence” and find out. But what I haven’t told you, or told anyone for that matter, is that I’ve been pissing blood for the last 4 months. I got to get up and take a piss at least 12 times a night. I knew I was terminal before they condemned me to wake up here, but I think I must be getting to the end. Yesterday morning I woke up to blood in my underwear, which is new. Bluie’s also changed, he talks about God a lot now and what he’ll do in the Kingdom of Heaven when he finally goes “home.” G hasn’t spoken to us in over a week. I think he may be dead but it’s real hard to cut through the smell of myself and 149 other poorly washed prisoners to detect the scent of death. Plus, I never really knew what cell was his anyway, it’s not like I can crane my neck out with a, “Yooohoooo! Still alive in there?!” and find out. I wonder how hard it would be to convince Bluie to let his body drop to that warm, sandy floor…let him get on “home” then. Or me, what about me? Smear myself in my own dirty blood and go screaming over the side the same way I screamed my lungs out a few short years ago when I knew for certain that this, this was hell, this was going to be the place in which I became a demon. This mill has finally ground me down. I am a demon of the Panopticon.

submitted by /u/PointlessPoem [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2ThLa9e

[olivereliott]

Continental Racer: Sinroja’s Royal Enfield Drag Bike

A couple of years ago, Sinroja Motorcycles were one of the first workshops to join Royal Enfield’s new custom program. They built a couple of bikes, and the relationship went well. So when Sinroja were looking for a brand partner for their latest project, they knew just who to call.

The Leicester-based custom shop wanted to enter the European Sultans of Sprint race series in the ‘Factory’ class. All they needed a factory to collaborate with.

Royal Enfield and their Industrial Design boss Adrian Sellers came to the party with a brand new Continental GT 650, but there was an unexpected twist. By the time everything was singed off, Sinroja had just four weeks to prep the bike.

“Usually we can do aesthetics or performance in that time,” brothers Rahul and Birju Sinroja tell us, “but this project needed both. It had to look good and go fast.”

It certainly needed to be fast. Sinroja’s Continental would be competing with a nitrous-powered BMW 1250, a nitrous-powered Indian Scout ridden by the legendary Randy Mamola, and a supercharged 200-plus hp Harley.

The brothers already had a concept in mind: they would loosely take inspiration from a drag racer Royal Enfield themselves had previously built, ‘The Lock Stock.’

With help from Tamas Jakus at Jakusa Design, they quickly mocked up the design and graphics for ‘Two Smoking Barrels.’

But sharp looks alone weren’t going to cut it. With just 47 hp from its 648 cc parallel twin motor, the Continental GT 650 was seriously outgunned. “The project direction was clear from beginning,” the guys tell us. “We knew we had to go as lightweight and as powerful as we could.”

“When the already naked Continental GT (which weighs 205 kg) was delivered, we were worried. There weren’t any big body panels to strip to lose weight quickly.”

Luckily for Sinroja, performance experts S&S Cycle were in on the project from the word go. They’d previously worked with Royal Enfield and Harris Performance on ‘The Lock Stock,’ and filled the brothers in on exactly what sort of numbers were achievable. That info also helped Sinroja set a competitive target weight for the Continental GT—150 kilos.

S&S Cycle sent over custom pistons and sleeves to bore the twin out to 750 cc. They also supplied new injectors, cams, and an ECU, and built a straight-through twin exhaust system.

That gave Sinroja a great naturally-aspirated base to work from, but they still needed an extra boost. So they called on Trevor Langfield at Wizard of NOS to help them set up a unique dry nitrous system. The system’s neatly packaged underneath the seat, where the GT’s air box and wiring used to be.

With performance sorted, Sinroja started plotting the Continental GT’s diet. Everything was stripped off the bike and weighed, so that they’d know what to keep and what to ditch.

They needed a tight front end, so they dug a modern sportbike front end out of their parts bin, shaving off one of the brakes to keep things light. Danny at Fastec machined up a set of billet aluminum yokes to work with the stock headset. The lighter forks and yokes accounted for almost 10 kg of weight saving.

The rear end received a more radical treatment. Sinroja ditched the rear suspension entirely, then fabricated a new hardtail from Reynolds tubing to save weight and extend the wheelbase. They wanted to swap out the wheels as well, but couldn’t get a set of 17-inchers made up in time. So they kept the stock 18-inchers, wrapping them in Continental rubber.

Weight saving became an obsession. Rahul even recalled a lesson from university, where his professor explained how Toyota shaved 10 kg off a sports car just by reducing the weight of all the fasteners. So Sinroja swapped every last nut and bolt for lighter versions, and trimmed another 2 kilos off.

With the rolling chassis done, it was time to piece everything together. Chris Walton helped the brothers out by shaping an aluminum dummy tank, the tail end of which actually forms the seat pan.

Three fasteners hold down the entire arrangement. Underneath it, you’ll find a two-liter fuel reservoir, a Lithium-ion battery from Antigravity, and most of the electronics. (Towza from Towzatronics built a custom wiring loom at the last minute, trimming a further three kilos from the bike.)

The last few mods included a super-minimal cockpit, and a carbon fiber front fender made from the same mold as the one found on ‘The Lock Stock.’ Glenn at GD Design handled the paint, showing off the English flag on one side, and the Indian flag on the other.

Then Ian Tam, Constantinos Panayides and Tommy Butterworth helped Sinroja setup and tune the bike, along with Royal Enfield’s tech center staff.

On its first outing, ‘Two Smoking Barrels’ took gold at the Punks Peak hill climb at Wheels and Waves. And it came fourth at the last Sultans of Sprint race, narrowly missing the podium.

Not too shabby for a last minute rush-job.

Sinroja Motorcycles | Facebook | Instagram | Royal Enfield product page | Images by, and with thanks to, Marc Holstein

Sinroja would like to thank Royal Enfield, along with sponsors S&S Cycles, Bell Powersports, and Contimoto UK.

[hamiltongolfcourses]

Canadian becomes first Monday qualifier to win PGA TOUR event since 2010

Corey Conners earns first PGA TOUR victory at Valero SAN ANTONIO -- At Kent State University, Corey Conners majored in actuarial studies and as the PGA TOUR media guide points out, he "is a bit of a math genius," the type of guy who kept his own stats long before his strokes gained were recorded by ShotLink. But don't ask Conners to explain his final-round scorecard, one of the all-time rollercoaster rounds you'll ever see, at the AT&T Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio. "It was crazy," said Conners, who made 29 birdies for the week. "I couldn't even tell you what I shot on the back nine." The number geek inside him is going to love looking back and seeing 10 birdies circled, four squares for a string of bogeys on the front nine and just four pars en route to shooting 6-under 66 and a 2-stroke victory over Charley Hoffman for his maiden TOUR title at the Valero Texas Open. The pride of Listowel, Ontario, was the last man to enter the field, surviving a 6-for-1 playoff in a Monday Qualifier to become just the fifth player in TOUR history to go from earning a spot in the field on Monday to champion on Sunday. When Conners arrived a week ago, his clubs didn't make the flight and so he didn't get to play a practice round at The Club at Sonterra, where 73 players attempted to earn one of four spots into the field. It was just another manic Monday for Conners, who for the third time this season made it through the pressure-cooker that is Monday qualifying in six attempts. All he had to do was drain a 20-foot bender for birdie on his final hole to shoot 67 and make the playoff and then can a 6-foot birdie putt to advance. But as his good friend and fellow TOUR pro Mackenzie Hughes noted, "It's not like he's a Cinderella story. He's got TOUR status and had nearly won this season out here." Indeed, Conners had. But he finished No. 130 in the FedExCup standings in 2017-18 as a rookie, and was relegated to playing this season out of the No. 126-150 finishers (category 32a) on the prior season's FedExCup points list. It made it difficult to find any rhythm. Until this week, Conners's season could best be summed up as feast or famine. He finished second at the Sanderson Farms Championship in late October, a week after getting married to Malory, and T3 at the Sony Open in Hawaii in January. But he also had missed the cut in four of his last five starts. With an attitude of nothing to lose, Conners capitalized on his opportunity, opening with 69-67. He chipped away at a 4-stroke deficit at the midway point of the tournament with a 66 on Saturday to trail overnight leader Si Woo Kim by one stroke entering the final round. He also impressed his fellow playing competitor Jordan Spieth. "I thought his game was fantastic," Spieth said. "He came out firing." He continued to do just that on Sunday. After a two-hour weather delay, Conners bolted out of the gate with birdies in four of his first five holes to claim a four-stroke lead. He looked unstoppable, but there was still a lot of golf to be played and by the time he walked off the ninth green with his fourth straight bogey, he trailed Hoffman (15 under) by one. Conners made only one par -- at No. 2 -- on the front nine. "I'm usually pretty good at making pars," he said. But there is a long distance from the ninth green to the 10th tee. It's so far, in fact, that players are required to take a cart. Sitting next to his wife, he used the time to hit the reset button. "I just tried to think back to the last few days," he said, "all the great shots that I've hit and just say, 'Hey, you can do it, just stay aggressive and trust yourself.' " Afterwards, his wife reminded him that she'd given him a pep talk too. "Stay confident," she said. Conners reeled off three birdies to start the back nine, including a 34-foot birdie putt at No. 12. "At that point, I thought, 'We're going to do this, just keep your foot on the pedal,' " he said. Up ahead, others were charging too. Kevin Streelman got hot and made birdie at four of the final five holes to shoot 8-under 64 and post 14 under. His sixth-place finish is his best result this season. But he was soon eclipsed by Ryan Moore, who started birdie-eagle and matched Streelman's 64 for the low round of the day and the tournament. Moore signed for 17 under and finished alone in third. Kim was unflappable for three days but came unglued after his 9-iron splashed in the water at the par-3, third hole and he lost the lead. He carded an even-par 72 and finished T-4 with Brian Stuard at 15-under 273. Conners tacked on birdies on Nos. 14, 16 and 17 to shoot a tournament-record 20-under 268, but noted that the 10-foot par save at No. 15 was critical. TV cameras caught the look of relief on the face of his wife, which soon went viral on social media. "I know her emotions are pretty crazy," Conners said. "She was cheering hard for me. It was awesome to see." Fortunately for her, Malory Conners had James and Kristen Steele of Boise, Idaho, to keep her company. The Steele's originally were the host family for Hughes when he played in the Albertsons Boise Open on the Web.com Tour. When Hughes graduated to the PGA TOUR, Conners took his place. The Steeles flew in for the weekend to watch their two favorite Canadians play. It was only fitting that Hughes, who first met a 12-year-old Conners at the CN Future Links before becoming teammates at Kent State, was waiting at the 18th green with a beer for his friend. Fellow Canadian Nick Taylor and his wife and honorary Canadians Joel Dahmen and Adam Schenk joined in the celebration. Conners finished with a par, just his fourth of the day -- "That's got to be the fewest pars I've ever made," he said -- as he toured the second nine in 30. "I thought shooting 3-under par on the back nine with a one-shot lead might be good enough, but I got beat today and it just happens," Hoffman said. "My hat's off to him. He played his butt off." As soon as Conners pumped his fist in jubilation as the final putt fell, Hughes gave Malory the cue and she dashed on the green and leapt in her victorious husband's arms. "I think the first thing she said is, 'Is this real?' I said, 'Yeah, it's real. We did it,' " Conners said. Conners became the fifth international winner on the PGA Tour in as many weeks and the first Monday Qualifier to win since Arjun Atwal at the 2010 Wyndham Championship. As PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan said at the trophy ceremony, "This is a life-changing moment for you and it was really great to witness it in person." Instead of heading home, Conners is now headed to Augusta, Ga., the last man to punch his ticket to the Masters, where he competed as an amateur in 2015 and missed the cut. He also has a TOUR card through the 2020-21 season, which means no more manic Mondays. "Which is pretty awesome," Conners said. "I won't be feeling as much pressure on Mondays, I'm sure."

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/news-despite-more-leadership-zeke-still-having-fun-now-in-his-third-nfl-season-ezekiel-elliott-dallascowboys-com/

news Despite More Leadership, Zeke Still Having Fun Now in his third NFL season, Ezekiel Elliott - DallasCowboys.com

He is only 23 years old, but already heading toward the latter part of his third year in the National Football League.

Already he has won an NFL rushing title with the third-most rushing yards of any rookie running back in league history, and currently after 11 games in 2018 is in hot pursuit of yet another crown.

He’s already been to the Pro Bowl, just the fourth rookie all time and but the second as a rookie running back.

But deep down, one Ezekiel Elliott, the fourth pick in the 2016 NFL Draft by the Dallas Cowboys, is a kid at heart. “Zeke” still bounces around the Cowboys locker room as if he’s a 12-year-old, causing most around him to roll their eyes. But that’s just him.

He has a grin as wide as that Mississippi River he grew up adjacent to in Missouri.

And get this: For this past Halloween, Elliott, a highly-noticeable personality around the Dallas-Fort Worth area, dressed up as Eeyore, the grey stuffed donkey from Winnie the Pooh, and actually passed out candy to the trick or treaters in his neighborhood.

“I was never really a big Halloween guy, but I decided to pass out candy and dress up a little bit, have my buddies come over. We were Eeyore and Winnie the Pooh,” Elliott admitted during the Cowboys’ bye week that included Halloween. “We had a good turnout, probably had like 100 kids come out.”

And what did he pass out to the kids for Halloween?

“I didn’t have king-sized candy bars, but I let them take however much they wanted so I made sure I had enough,” Elliott said. “And, you know, kids were taking big handfuls.”

Kids will be kids, and Zeke knows that only too well. was

But still, in this his third NFL season, Elliott has taken on more of a leadership role for a Cowboys team void of the likes of Tony Romo and Jason Witten and Barry Church and Anthony Hitchens and Brandon Carr and Doug Free – guys he looked up to when arriving in 2016.

Evidence of that arose right from the start of this year’s training camp. Not only did he jump to the front of the running back line for every drill, he would even suggest to position coach Gary Brown for group do-overs if the drill didn’t seem to go smoothly.

Brown was only too happy to oblige.

Then there was practice. Seemingly on every handoff taken, and no matter where he was touched up – there is no tackling of a Pro Bowl-worthy running back in practice – he would sprint the entire length of the field until reaching the end zone.

He was engaged. He was becoming a leader.

And even more so after Pro Bowl center Travis Frederick was diagnosed and wound up on Injured Reserve with the rare Guillian-Barre syndrome. Other than quarterback Dak Prescott, a leadership void arose on the offense, especially since Witten, the guy Elliott playfully referred to as “old-man Witt,” traded in his cleats for a comfy television booth.

Suddenly, we started seeing Elliott showing up in the middle of the pregame huddle, replacing old-man Witt in pumping up the guys jumping all around him with emotionally fired-up words.

Why, before the Cowboys game at Philadelphia just a few weeks ago, when a little brush-up with the Eagles players occurred on the field near the Dallas bench, of all people, there was Elliott trying to calm things down.

“I’m not a guy who talks a lot of smack, man,” he would say after the Cowboys surprised the defending Super Bowl champions with a 27-20 beating at The Linc. “I don’t do all that talking. We talk with our play, we talk with our pads. We’d just be wasting our time, wasting our energy, yapping before the game.”

A week later in Atlanta, Zeke made sure do a little bit of talking at the end of the game. Just after the Falcons had tied the score at 19 in the final two minutes, the running back found kicker Brett Maher on the sidelines and gave him a quick pep talk to get his confidence back up. Maher had missed an extra point and nearly another one in the fourth quarter but Elliott knew he would get another chance.

He tapped Maher on the chest and helmet and pointed towards the end of the field that he predicted the offense would be. And sure enough, thanks to big runs by Elliott and some timely throws from Dak Prescott, the Cowboys were down there for Maher to drill a 42-yard field goal as time expired.

“As a leader, I’ve got to go out there and do what I’m capable of doing,” Elliott said. “But it’s really the other 10 guys around me who give me the opportunity to go out and do what I’m doing.”

Well, he has certainly let his pads do the yapping, pushing the Cowboys record to 6-5, tied for first in the NFC East with the streaking New Orleans Saints coming to town this Thursday night before again facing the rival Eagles the following week.

Elliott erupted for 151 yards rushing in that win at Philadelphia, just 1 yard short of his season high against Detroit and the fifth time in his three-year career he has topped 150 yards rushing. In addition, he caught six passes for 36 yards.

All told against the Eagles, Elliott produced 187 yards from scrimmage, the fifth most during his short career. And his high of 240 came earlier this season in the 26-24, last-second win over Detroit with 152 yards rushing and 88 receiving. He also became only the sixth Cowboys player during the franchise’s 59-year history to total at least 175 yards from scrimmage and score two touchdowns, joining the likes of Bob Hayes (1965), Tony Dorsett (1977), Tony Hill (1979), Herschel Walker (1986) and Emmitt Smith (1995).

His streak continued, though. He then followed that up with 122 rushing yards and 201 yards from scrimmage in the win at Atlanta before earning 121 and 143 yards, respectively, in the victory over rival Washington on Thanksgiving. His effort after 11 games this season had seen his receiving totals increase to 47 catches, which was already a personal best, for 363 yards and two touchdowns.

 “As a leader, I’ve got to go out there and do what I’m capable of doing,” Elliott said. “But it’s really the other 10 guys around me who give me the opportunity to go out and do what I’m doing.” place

A dose of humility or reality?

“I owe the game I had [against the Eagles] to that offensive line,” said Elliott, knowing not only were the Cowboys still playing without Frederick, but were also missing starting left guard Connor Williams, along with Pro Bowl tackle Zack Martin being sidelined for 13 plays while having his already nicked up left knee braced up again.

But not only that, Elliott of course knew that this line had been taking a lot of grief for a perceived lack of pass protection as well as the brunt of the blame for the Cowboys averaging just 81 yards rushing in their three previous losses.

“I think those guys are jelling up front,” he said. “They were doing a great job getting the plays started and giving me holes.”

Ah, but there was one more memorable play in the game against Philadelphia, one that definitely went viral:

The Leap!

That’s right, Elliott rumbling up field deciding that instead of trying to run through a would-be tackler, he might as well just go over him, knowing he was a decorated track guy in high school at St. Louis John Burroughs, actually winning four first-place medals in a two-and-a-half-hour span at the Class 3A state championships, which included the 110-meter high hurdles and the grueling 300-meter hurdles. There definitely is jumpin’ in his genes since his mother, Dawn, ran track at the University of Missouri, hurdles of course.

She immediately Tweeted out after his hurdle, It runs in the family.

After all, mothers do know best.

At the time, the Cowboys led 3-0 over Philadelphia, facing a second-and-10 at the Eagles’ 40-yard line. The Cowboys ran a zone-read run play, Prescott deciding to give Elliott the ball at the 43-yard line. There was a massive hole, and off he went, the only player between him and the goal line being Eagles safety Tre Sullivan.

Once Elliott reached the 29-yard line, he began preparing to leap over Sullivan, clearing him at the 27. Sullivan was standing up, just bent over from the waist at about a 45-degree angle, and barely grazed his helmet on Elliott, who came down at the 24 on his right foot and bounded forward.

Unfortunately, all of that momentum from the jump caused him to eventually stumble at the 12, then lose his balance at the 10 before he was touched up sliding to a stop at the 8-yard line.

“That could have been one of the coolest plays of my career,” Elliott said, “and it turns out to be one of the goofiest toward the end, tripping on the 10-yard line, yeah.”

And he laughs heartily, you know, that kid in him.

Maybe so, but when he competes, there is no kidding around.

Said Martin, “The more we get him the ball, the better,” and not a bad philosophy to follow. Especially since adding wide receiver Amari Cooper to the offense, who already in his first three games prior to the Cowboys playing Washington had commanded attention away from the line of scrimmage.

As for Jason Garrett, he can’t say enough about his energetic running back.

“He’s a great football player,” said the Cowboys head coach, “and more than anything else it’s his spirit, it’s his competitiveness, it’s his fire. He loves to play. He loves to be in the big moment. He loves to be the guy who’s carrying the load.

“He’s really an inspiration to his teammates and everybody on the football team.”

And so far this season, the fun has returned for Elliott, on the field and off the field. Last year’s suspension, appeals, court cases and further legal appeals became an overwhelming drag. Most weeks he was unsure if he was playing or starting his suspension. He retreated from the media’s attention, knowing anything he said could be held against him in the court of law and public opinion.

And you could tell the ordeal weighed heavily on his soul. Even on his face, that fabulous grin narrowing by the day.

So this season’s Game 10 against the Falcons brought that whole ordeal full circle, since his six-game suspension in 2017 began when the Cowboys went to Atlanta, their playoff hopes starting to unravel that day without Elliott on the field. His suspension commenced then, as did the Cowboys’ three-game losing streak, a 5-3 team looking up three weeks later at 5-6.

“I was home watching it, tough time for me, but I’m glad (I was) out there this year,” Elliott said. “But that’s all behind me.”

He would excuse himself from further discussion of that lost period in his young career, saying, “I don’t want to dwell on last year.”

And why would he?

The suspension he likely feels to this day he did not deserve took something away from him he dearly loves – the game, the joy.

“The one thing you knew about Zeke, right from the start through the draft process, we knew once he got here, he loves football,” Garrett said. “He works hard at it, cares a great deal about it. He wants to be a great player, he wants to help our team. … We feel really good about him, where he is and where he’s going.”

Of course, they do. After those first 11 games, Elliott was atop the NFL in rushing yards, his 1,074 yards slightly ahead of Todd Gurley’s 1,043. Elliott had scored eight touchdowns, six rushing, two receiving, and was on pace for 1,562 yards and 12 touchdowns to lead this Cowboys offense.

And you could see, just in the little time around him in the locker room, that he sure was having fun again, the kid in him resurfacing.

Along with that great, big smile.

Source: https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/despite-more-leadership-zeke-still-having-fun

[goarticletec-blog]

Saints stay atop NFL with win over Falcons, who continue free fall

New Post has been published on https://www.articletec.com/saints-stay-atop-nfl-with-win-over-falcons-who-continue-free-fall/

Saints stay atop NFL with win over Falcons, who continue free fall

Drew Brees threw four touchdown passes to inexperienced receivers and the New Orleans Saints won their 10th straight game Thursday night with a 31-17 victory over Atlanta that eliminated the Falcons from contention in the NFC South.

Tommylee Lewis and Austin Carr each caught their second career touchdown pass, and rookie tight end Dan Arnold grabbed his first, as did rookie receiver Keith Kirkwood. All four entered the NFL as undrafted free agents within the past three years and had combined for zero touchdowns this season before Carr caught the first of his career last Sunday.

“It says a lot about them. It says a lot about taking advantage of the opportunity, and stepping up when we need it,” Brees said of his latest touchdown targets. “It’s fun to watch them grow and gain confidence. We’re building chemistry, which typically takes time, right? But they’ve been thrust into this role.”

Meanwhile, the Falcons (4-7) lost three fumbles inside the Saints 20 — something no team facing streaking New Orleans (10-1) can afford this season.

“The defence played tremendous today against a really explosive offence,” Brees said. “They got four turnovers. That’s a huge stat in the game.”

Atlanta quarterback Matt Ryan was stripped by safety Marcus Williams on a third-and-2 from the Saints 3 and Williams recovered to end Atlanta’s opening drive. Julio Jones was stripped by linebacker Alex Anzalone after a catch on the New Orleans 17, and safety Vonn Bell recovered in the final minute of the second quarter to preserve a 17-3 lead going into halftime.

“Any time you have a turnover when they’re in a threatening position — just do the numbers, do the math,” Saints coach Sean Payton said.

NO defence emerges

New Orleans’ defence, which had a season-high six sacks, continued to come up with big plays in the second half. Anzalone broke up a fourth-down pass in the third quarter and linebacker A.J. Klein intercepted a pass tipped by defensive tackle Tyeler Davison in the fourth.

The interception gave the Saints possession on the Atlanta 22, setting up Kirkwood’s diving 4-yard TD catch.

Just for good measure, Marshon Lattimore stripped Calvin Ridley on the Saints 1 after a 29-yard completion that looked as though it would end with a touchdown with about four minutes to go. Defensive back Eli Apple recovered that one.

“When you have one turnover [in the red zone], it feels like a lot,” Falcons coach Dan Quinn said. “We had three down there and that was the real story of the game.”

Ryan was under pressure all night from a Saints defence that was bolstered by the return of first-round draft choice Marcus Davenport from a toe injury that sidelined him for three games. Cameron Jordan had two sacks, while Williams, P.J. Williams, Sheldon Rankins and Demario Davis each had one.

Ryan finished 35 of 47 for 377 yards, two touchdowns and one interception. But very little came easy. His first TD pass, to Calvin Ridley, came on a fourth-and-goal from the 2 at the end of the third quarter.

Atlanta rushed for just 26 yards, while New Orleans finished with 150, led by Alvin Kamara’s 89 and Mark Ingram’s 52.

Statistically, Brees did not have one of his more impressive games, completing 15 of 22 passes for 171 yards with his second interception of the season. The pick was snagged by Damontae Kazee, his NFL-leading sixth this year.

But Brees’ ability to play to the strengths of unheralded receivers allowed the Saints to cash in on scoring opportunities.

Lewis, a third-year pro, was in his first game back after spending nine weeks on injured reserve and had not caught a pass all season before getting wide open for his 28-yard grab that made it 7-0 on the first series of the game. Carr is a second-year pro who played in only one game without a catch as a rookie. He, too, was wide open after Falcons defenders bit on a fake handoff to Ingram. Kirkwood made his NFL debut three games ago, when Arnold had his first career reception.

“Obviously, Drew is someone who is very confident in the preparation, confident in players around him. There’s a lot that goes into that,” Payton said. “I’m excited for those guys that got opportunities.”

Source link

[flauntpage]

Bird Droppings: Sometimes Ya Gotta Dump

Turdburglars.

That’s the first word that comes to my mind when I think about the game against the Bucs yesterday.

Turdburglars.

The Eagles, in their own right, almost snatched a turd of a win from the jaws of Fitzmagic, but it wasn’t to be. More compelling, however, is that we’ll collectively revel in the shit from a disappointing and unexpected loss to the surging(?) Tampa Bay Bucs, who now own wins over two of the presumed top teams in the NFC.

But I’m going to start this paragraph with a conjunction, because the first four started with the letter T. The Eagles were playing without, arguably, three of their best offensive players yesterday– Carson Wentz, Alshon Jeffery, Darren Sproles, and then add in large chunks of Jason Peters, Mike Wallace and Jay Ajayi. It’s a borderline miracle they were in contention to pull that one out considering what they were working with offensively.

Sure, you might say that they won the Super Bowl last year without some of those guys, but that doesn’t absolve their absence of meaning. One of Wentz, Sproles, or Jeffery would have been good for an extra touchdown yesterday, which – math – would have led to a tie if you remove ALL CONTEXT and write only in theoreticals. That’s not how things work, and you play the hand you’re dealt, but I find it totally meaningless to overreact about the offense seeing as though it is nothing like it will be in a week or two, personnel-wise, once the gang gets back together and then Howie Roseman gets Josh Gordon. What?

Anyway, the defense was more of the issue yesterday, particularly Jalen Mills. Who…  um… didn’t live up to his pre-game hype:

Jalen Mills @greengoblin hyping up Eagles secondary in team huddle “Put on a bleepin show!”#FlyEaglesFly Earmuffs kids pic.twitter.com/vppedwesGi

— John Clark (@JClarkNBCS) September 16, 2018

Kill that shit today.

Yes, kill it.

I’m not a Mills hater by any stretch, but he did not have a good day. His biggest offense, in my opinion, was his coverage (term used loosely, and in air quotes, with a big fucking sad face next to it) of DeSean Jaccson on 2nd and 13 when the Eagles needed to, well, not do this:

That soft of a cushion is bad for your back. What did Mills think ya boi was going to do here– torch him for another 75 yards with a deep-in-their-own-territory bomb for the jugular? No way. This play was all about the first down. It would’ve been made even worse had DeSean turned around and not run out of bounds for reasons that are completely unknown, but whatever, you do you, D-Jac, you earned it.

We can fault Darby for the missed tackle. We can fault Jenkins for not giving help on the first play. But Mills was the worst yesterday, and this play isn’t getting enough attention. That throw effectively won the game.

  Josh Gordon

Kevin made his case against this, but let me just say that I am firmly in the PRO Gordon camp. Vegas… not so much for the Birds:

Thought this was interesting. Already odds on what team Josh Gordon (if he were to be released & not traded obviously) would sign with, per @betmybookie: NE +150 GB +200 TEN +250 JAX +400 DAL +400 INDY +400 NYG +400 NYJ +500 AZ +600 SEA +600 CHI +1000 PHI +1000 SF +1200

— Matthew Berry (@MatthewBerryTMR) September 16, 2018

There’s a reason why the Patriots are number one here– great teams find value and exploit it. There’s little risk to bringing a player like Gordon into a winning culture. And seeing as though the Eagles are the reigning Super Bowl champs and there’s not an undercurrent of mutiny the way there is in New England – who by the way got pounded yesterday – I see not a better place.

The Browns have enough to worry about that Gordon was no longer worth their time or patience. Teams don’t crawl out of the gutter on the back of a troubled wide receiver. But teams can go from good to great with one.

To be clear, I don’t think Gordon is necessary or will even happen. The Browns will try to trade him before 4 p.m. today and they’re undoubtedly trying to create the market. My guess is it doesn’t take much to land him. Therefore, his services would be low-to-medium risk with a potentially high reward. Let’s take a puff of that shit.

  Two good takes

Zach Berman:

You might think otherwise about the defense after those two big plays, but look what the Eagles did a week and a half earlier against Atlanta. Their home/road splits were noticeable a year ago (they allowed nearly 13 more points more on the road than at home). They need to get to the quarterback more than they did Sunday. Of course, that often comes when playing with a lead, which the Eagles didn’t do against the Buccaneers. But it’s not as if the Eagles are going to give up 75-yard touchdowns every week.

Even more: They’ve faced two of the top wide receivers in the league, and maybe the two best receiving units in the NFC, so things will skew back in their favor against the Cololots and the Titans.

.@Buccaneers #RyanFitzMagic is throwing to the best RECEIVING CORP in the @NFL . Do you believe this? #BaldyBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/IoEto5rVNG

— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) September 17, 2018

Jimmy Kempski:

At the end of the season last year, we determined that the Eagles scored 71 more points by going for it on fourth down than if they had punted (or attempted a field goal).

All season long, Pederson gambled and mostly won. We noted that it was highly unlikely that every Eagles season would have the same level of success on fourth down that they enjoyed in 2017, but that more often than not, going for it is absolutely the right call.

It was the right call on Sunday, too. The Eagles were down 13, they had a manageable distance to go to pick up a first down, and the benefit of scoring a touchdown on that drive outweighed the downside of giving up 35 or so yards of field position to a big-play offense that had already proven it could score from anywhere on the field.

So I’ll just say this. Before you really want to kill that decision, remember how much fun you had at the Eagles’ Super Bowl parade because Doug Pederson has some balls.

Forget about the size of Doug Pederson’s balls for now… as hard as that may be to do… the Philly media usually isn’t smart enough to understand this sort of thinking, but Kempski is. And perhaps the rest of the media is today, too, in the face of how it worked out WELL last year. No issue with any of the fourth down decisions yesterday.

  He sucks

Not sure what was eating Reuben Frank yesterday, but his subtle crusade against Nick Foles was ridiculous. Chew on these tastykakes, er, takes:

Tough day for the o-line. They didn't give Nick a ton of time, but I also felt like he held onto the ball too long too on a number of snaps and got himself into trouble. https://t.co/b2WtVUlgaz

— Reuben Frank (@RoobNBCS) September 17, 2018

Nick Foles once again resembles an NFL quarterback.

— Reuben Frank (@RoobNBCS) September 16, 2018

He had Ertz wide open for a first down. Don't know how he missed him. https://t.co/hsAR1vsUzm

— Reuben Frank (@RoobNBCS) September 16, 2018

That's Nick's first completion of 20 yards or more to a wide receiver in a regular-season game since a 35-yarder to Nelly last year on his only pass against the Broncos.

— Reuben Frank (@RoobNBCS) September 16, 2018

Agholor and Clement both banged up. Just can't throw that pass.

— Reuben Frank (@RoobNBCS) September 16, 2018

WTF? You mean the one on fourth and long with the game on the line when he scrambled around, evaded a sack, bought time, and almost completed a miraculous pass to Corey Clement which would’ve put the Eagles in a position to win the game, that throw? That’s the one he can’t make? OK there, chief, I’ll be sure to note that on his report card and dock him points for “trying to win the game.”

More from Roooooooooooooob:

I’ll never understand Nick Foles. Ever. He can shred Bill Belichick’s defense with 100 million people watching on the greatest stage in sports or he can look like he’s never played the game before. And then he can have games like Sunday where he’s both those guys. I can’t figure him out and I never will. His final numbers look good (35 for 48, 334 yards, 1 TD, 0 INT, 99.5 passer rating), but honestly, he never gave the team a chance to win. Carson needs to get back soon.

Hot take here that he’ll never understand why the backup quarterback is sometimes good and sometimes bad.

Literally the line before this he wrote how you can’t give FITZPATRICK time:

Other than an early Fletcher Cox sack, the Eagles got very little pressure, and when you give Fitzpatrick time, he’s really good. The D-line is the heart of this team, and they have to be better.

While I agree with his assessment of the Eagles’ D-line yesterday (yuckstains), he just described what makes a quarterback a backup. The fact that Foles has band-aided the Eagles to six meaningful wins, including a Super Bowl MVP, is all the more reason we should just slide off his massive dick and thank him for the job he’s done.

Carson now. Frank Reich next week.

The post Bird Droppings: Sometimes Ya Gotta Dump appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Bird Droppings: Sometimes Ya Gotta Dump published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[mikemortgage]

American farmers are losing billions from Trump’s trade war — but they’re still supporting him

U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade disputes with China, Mexico and Canada are already eroding the value of American agricultural production, with soybean growers alone expected to lose at least US$3.2 billion during the next crop season.

But many farmers — including some whose incomes are plunging as exports stall — are sticking by the man they helped vote into office. They’d just like him to win the trade war quickly, before the fall harvest starts compounding the problem in a couple of months — when congressional midterm elections also will be heating up.

“President Trump is a businessman,” said John King III, 57, who raises soybeans, corn and rice with his father and nephew outside Helena, Arkansas, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Little Rock. “He’s making a high-risk business decision that probably should have been made a long time ago. But it’s definitely a risk.”

How tariffs — and they’re not U.S. ones — are already hurting one Canadian company

‘China has crashed the price’: Canadian farmers collateral damage in China-U.S. trade war

American steaks, German cars emerge as early victims in U.S.-China trade war

Agriculture is the third-biggest U.S. export industry and a global juggernaut that’s generated six decades of trade surpluses. It’s also become a flash point in tariff battles with China, which bought US$12 billion of soybeans last year and now is shifting to supplies from South America. Separate duties are affecting sales to Canada and Mexico, which are renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.

Trump’s trade policies already are changing the outlook for U.S. exports and farmer income, mostly because China, Mexico and Canada accounted for 43 per cent of American farm exports last year.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday predicted domestic soybean stockpiles will be 51 per cent larger than expected a month earlier and cut its export forecast by 11 per cent. The USDA also reduced its price forecast by 75 US cents a bushel, citing reduced purchases by China, the top importer. That amounts to almost US$3.2 billion in lost revenue based on the government’s use estimate.

While the situation could get worse if the trade war escalates, the president has urged patience.

“Always thinking about our farmers,” Trump said via tweet Wednesday from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Brussels. “Other countries’ trade barriers and tariffs have been destroying” U.S. farm businesses, he said. “I will open things up, better than ever before, but it can’t go too quickly. I am fighting for a level playing field for our farmers, and will win!”

To be sure, farmers were big winners until recently. High commodity prices led to record net income of US$123.8 billion in 2013, before a global glut sent markets tumbling. This year’s projected net income of US$59.5 billion would be the lowest since 2006, and the average farm business will see a 7 per cent drop in 2018 to US$339,300, compared with US$437,400 in 2013, USDA data show. The country would still have an agricultural trade surplus of US$21 billion.

Because the U.S. exports almost a third of its agricultural production, the industry is a logical target for foreign retaliation. It’s also a key group among voters in rural counties that gave Trump 60 per cent of the vote in the 2016 election. That, in theory, gives trade rivals an opportunity to inflict damage on his political base.

Hurting Sales

Groups representing crop and livestock producers have warned that their industries would be hurt by reduced exports at a time when they already face big inventories and lower prices.

“America’s farmers and families are staring down a dark path, with no signs of relief in sight,” Casey Guernsey, a spokesman for Americans for Farmers and Families, a group of crop and meat producers formed to protect NAFTA, said in a statement on July 6, when China’s retaliatory duties went into effect.

For farmers, the timing is terrible. By September or October, many will need to have unloaded inventories from last year to make room for this season’s harvest.

Soybean is planted in a field in in Harvard, Illinois. Soybean growers expect to lose at least US$3.2 billion during the next crop season thanks to fallout over U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

King, the Arkansas grower, says he sold about 60 per cent of last year’s soybeans for about US$10 a bushel. That’s nowhere near the record of more than US$17 in 2012, but it’s decent compared with about US$8 now. King says he can’t hold onto his remaining inventory once he starts collecting this year’s crop.

The slumping market hasn’t dimmed support for Trump among some farmers.

“The one thing I admire about the guy is that he’s fulfilled or tried to fulfill” his campaign promises, said David Durham, 66, who grows corn and soybeans about 40 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri. “In the long run, this could benefit us” by opening the world to more buyers of U.S. farm goods, said Durham, a fourth-generation farmer who estimates his crop revenue has been cut in half since rumbles of a trade war began earlier this year.

Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, said support for Trump’s actions may boil down to who is most willing and able to ride out the storm. Farmers “are comfortable with the objectives President Trump has laid out,” Hart said. “I don’t think anyone’s considered that they’d change their vote.”

Support Wavering?

That doesn’t mean Trump isn’t losing some votes. The president’s net approval rating in monthly surveys by polling company Morning Consult has fallen almost as much in deep-red, agriculture-heavy states such as Kentucky (down 21 per cent), Montana (21 per cent) and Oklahoma (25 per cent), as it has in the bright blue coastal states of California (15 per cent) and Massachusetts (22 per cent).

And farmers say they’d rather the trade conflict end sooner rather than later.

Don Borgman, a third-generation corn and soybean grower from Buckner, Missouri, said he’s been “hammered” by lower prices but is “refreshed” by Trump’s get-tough approach. The president “is in negotiating mode,” he said. Still, Borgman said he’d be more concerned “if I thought our president was starting a decades-long trade war.”

Truly Catastrophic

Trade impacts on agriculture would have to be truly catastrophic for farmers to turn on the White House, though some defections on the margins could be significant in specific political campaigns, said Harwood Schaffer, a professor of agricultural policy at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

At least for now, support for Trump persists among farmers who have “concern and some worry” about where trade may be heading, said Will Rodger, spokesman for Farm Bureau in Washington. “Donald Trump is president of the United States and he’s the man many of them voted for,” Rodger said in an interview. “It’s not panic.”

That’s King’s approach. Farmers understand why they’re taking a hit, the Arkansas grower said. But if it lasts too long, some may feel the need to re-evaluate the president’s wisdom.

“Time will tell,” King said. “Let’s see what price I get for the last 40 per cent of my soybeans.”

Bloomberg.com

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2LncTka via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[alegendarystudentwonderland-blog]

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

"Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://financeandcreditsolution.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

RELATED QUESTIONS: 

Do you have good Car Insurance Rates?

I was just wondering if anyone out there had advice for some good car insurance rates or coverage? I found this guy who talked about car insurance coverage that was based on your driving behavior... unfortunately I don't live in the area... http://www.sodahead.com/question/271859/car-insurance-rates-based-on-behavior-do-you-have-good-car-insurance-coverage/?link=wenf_ya So you have any suggestions for a car insurance company that has good rates?

Is life insurance for people over 70 available?

Is life insurance for people over 70 available?

""Gas, Home and car insurance in my tax return expence?""

I'm a self employed programmer, I work in my home (don't have office) my question is can I consider my home rent or car insurance-gas as my job expences in tax return forms? I'm useing my car to see some of my customers (not always).""

Car Insurance company asking for dependent's SSN.?

She doesn't have one as she is on H4 visa. she has ITIN. We are in Texas. Is there any way out for this? My wife doesn't drive and is not listed as a driver on the insurance.

My insurance and how it'll go up in September?

I just received insurance. I am a brand new driver 18 in about thirty days. Just now bought myself a car and just now got insured on my Grandparent's insurance.Currently now, it's only $48 a month, but the insurance man said that it'll go up in September. It makes sense, considering that right now I'm only paying a part of the package. So I understand that. With me being a new driver, how much will this all go up? Are we talking about $150? I did not take driver's ed, but I am eligible for the Good Student discount. I know you can't tell me directly, because neither could he. It all changes. But can anyone give me maybe a ballpark? I'm female. Good student. New driver. Thank you!""

Insurance for young drivers?

I just passed my test im 18 tomorrow and i am looking for short term insurance but fairly cheap. I have already tried to look online but most of the insurance company's require the driver to have a years experience on the road beforehand. I desperately need to drive and i desperately need to have insurance. Can anyone please advise on cheap company's plus how to arrange it all?? Thanks

I am learning to drive and want to buy a car. What should I buy and what will the insurance be like?

I am learning to drive and want to buy a car. What should I buy and what will the insurance be like?

What would restitution be when my insurance is paying medicals?

I was hit on my bike by a driver of a car, who has since gone through the criminal court system and restitution has been awarded to me. So far, my own insurance company has been paying for my medical bills. What is my demand for restitution? Is it just the amount that the insurance does not cover (co-pays, etc.) or everything? What if I don't know how much medical help I'll need in the future? Is a restitution award a solid number, or can it be an agreement for the driver to pay medicals into the future, as well? I believe restitution also includes time I have missed from work (lost wages), etc.; Does it also include non-economic damages like pain and suffering? I have a civil suit against the driver, and I am just unclear how restitution from the criminal case works with the damages that I am seeking in the civil suit. Any elucidation would help. Thanks! I know laws can vary; I'm in CO.""

What do you put on a car insurance quote when your penalty has expired?

i had a penalty for 3 years that ran out in 2008 but when i look for insurance they ask for any penalty for the past 5 years. Do i say yes even though it expired in 2008?

What insurance companies are cheap for young drivers that have 6points due to non insurance?

What insurance companies are cheap for young drivers that have 6points due to non insurance?

Car Insurance????

I just turnt twenty..and I was wondering if anyone could tell me where to get cheap car insurance for young drivers as I hear its pretty expensive these days...I want to purchase a 1.7 Ford Puma 2000 or 2002..Thanks

How much higher is insurance for a camaro z28?

i was wondering what the real world difference is between an early model fourth-gen camaro z28 versus a later model more modest car, such as a 2004 cavalier or 1999 acura CL? i have gotten quotes online but there doesnt seem to be much difference and everyone hypes the insurance for these kinds of cars so much. i am 16 and a guy so insurance is high in general. thanks.""

Best insurance company for small startup security training agency and consulting firm?

Starting up in the DC, MD, VA area and looking for an affordable insurance company for a small business training agency. I eventually want to expand into security consulting, but for the time being, it'll be primarily security training. Policy in my area has to be minimum 600k of general liability. Any recommendations?""

I need cheap car insurance in ny?

I need cheap car insurance in ny?

Car Insurance Question?

Hi, im 16 and 17 in August living in Ireland, and i'm thinking of buying either a Honda Civic 1999-2001 or a Honda integra 1998-2001 aswell, i'm a guy and i'm wondering how much it'll cost to insure either one of them, and also what car is better""

Will my car insurance premiums increase?

I just got pulled over for the second time in a 7 month period and was given a citation for turning right on no turn on red . Will my car insurance payments go up? How long does it usually take for the insurance company to find out about the citation?

Do you need proof of insurance to obtain a Florida Intermediate Restricted Driver License?

I live in Tennessee and moving down to Florida in early August and in Tennessee at age 16 you can get a license called Intermediate Restricted Driver License which just has more restrictions then a 17 year old and less restrictions then a 15 year old/permit. I'm not sure if Florida has these type of licenses but at the age of 16 with a Tennessee Intermediate Restricted License, to get a Florida license, must you show proof of insurance before you get your Florida license? The reason why i'm asking this is because obviously in Tennessee you do not need proof of insurance to get a Driver License. Thanks Guys!""

Co-Buyer Auto Insurance?

All, I helped ex GF to buy a car. I thought I was co signing for loan but apparantly I am a co buyer of car. The registration is her or me . I dont mind being responsible for loan. If she messes up loan I will make payments. She tells me she has car properly insured etc. What worries me is if she lets insurance lapse or cause a major accident could I end up in trouble. Can I insure myself against her letting insurance lapse or causing major injury/damage? I currently have no personal auto insurance (have company vehicle). Is there anything else I can do to protect myself? Im very worried about this. Do I need to be or am i overreacting? Pat""

Will my insurance premium increase with no fault accidents?

I met with two accidents in the last 3 mths. Both were ones where the cars hits me at the rear end of my car so it wasnt my fault at all. Both accidents were reported to my insurance company (geico). I have never had any accidents before not have i had any tickets or violations before. I have been with geico for almost four years now. Will my premium go up on renewal? I have also heard that even if my premium may not increase, it will not even decrease upon renewal as it would have otherwise. Is this true? If yes, Is there anything I can do to prevent this?""

Car insurance?

Is there any insurance company ,other than AMI ,that offers a nil excess option. The premium based on an optional excess of nil is obviously higher, which I understand. AMI is okay ...show more""

Individual health insurance with fibromyalgia?

I have fibromyalgia, was diagnosed years ago. I have not had insurance for about half of that time. Does anyone know how to find affordable individual health insurance with a preexsisting condition? I have foun d plenty of plans that will cover me eventually but I cannot afford to pay the insurance premium and my doctors visits and prescriptions while I wait six mths to a year to get covered. Please do NOT suggest e-surance, they do not have affordable plans that cover pre-exsisting.""

Who has the cheapest motorcycle insurance for young people?

im looking for the who has the cheapest motorcycle insurance for young people

""Has any one been quoted 23,000 for car insurance?""

i have just been quote 23,000 for a car insurance am i the only one (vaxhaul astra 1.4)?""

Insurance or not insurance?

hi i had 4 years insurance no claims bonus last april 2011 on my car , i changed it onto a van and drove ir for a year, ... in october i was in court for handling stolen goods ... which i did not disclose to the insurance company at the time because i thought the offence was dropped as it had happened in 2009, anyway in november i had to renew farm insurance with a different company in november and they declined the renewal because of the criminal conviction,.. so i asked the company that my van was insured with for a farm quote and again was declined, i asked about the van insurance being valid and was told to inform them at the renew in april,... in april they declined to renew the van insurance because of non disclosure of criminal conviction,... and told me last years insurance was void and i would be refunded premium and not be intilted to my 5 year no claims bonus,.. two days later they decided not to refund and have gave me my 5 years no claims bonus,.. ??? as the insurance was valid and that they covered me while they knew i had a conviction and non disclosure , do they have the right to refuse me renewal and , why can i not get a quote of them for renewal, the quote i got of some one else is 3 times last years price , need advice thanks""

Who has the auto insurance california ?

I have a car that I want to sell. I only need insurance for about a month.

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

""If i activate the speed limiter on my car, do you think my insurance would be cheaper?""

I have a 1.6 citroen c2 vts, and my insurance is pretty pricey. It has a speed limiter, and i've heard about this before. If i tell my insurance company i have limited the car to 70mph do you think it would be cheaper?""

Can you claim your car insurance if your car needs repairs not caused by an accident?

If you have fully comprehensive insurance can you make a claim even though you have not been in a crash or other accident? The car in question has an MOT however it needs extensive repairs and is not drivable. The repairs are going to cost more than the car is worth and so it really just needs to be scrapped or sold for a ridiculously small sum of money to someone who can fix it up. The problem is that there is still a huge outstanding balance for the loan repayment of the car! Can anyone help please?

Average car insurance cost for a 21yr old?

driving for over a year, with just a small car, any ideas? Cheers""

That great republican healthcare plan of out of state insurance co.?

Like here in California where an Indiana company, Wellpoint, buys out Blue Cross of California, renames it Anthem and jacks up private rates 39%. How is that going to save me money?""

How much would the auto insurance go up if I got my drivers license?

Im about to turn 17 Im not going to get it right now but during the summer when I am 17. And I want a car but my mom says that its too expensive. I wouldnt ask for a car if i didnt need it but I need it for this program at school starting next year that I want to take. So I just want to know How much would the insurance go up. We have farmers auto insurance. so please tell me asap < = \

""How much would insurance be on a 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo, im 16?""

okay how much would first the down payment be? wich my parents will pay for, how much will the monthly payment be when i have nothing on my credit and im 16, and how much would ensurance be ? i live in northern california if that helps near sacramento""

Whats the cheapest way to get car insurance for a 17 year old male?

im a 17 year old boy learning to drive whats teh best car for me to get and cheapest way to insure it cheapest companies best cars for my age to insure thanks

Where in missouri can i get insurance with a suspended license?

i know it all depends on what state ur in and the guidelines, but does anyone kno wher i can get cheap car insurance with a suspended license. i need to get my car registered but cant do it without insurance, plz only answer if u kno insurance companies specifically that will allow me to get it""

Insurance Cost for a 1966 mustang convertible in mint condition?

I'm curious how much, on average, would insurance cost for an 18 year old male driving a 1966 mustang convertible in mint condition be? And if you could explain why too that'd be awesome thanks! :)""

Car Insurance?

I am just trying to get some quotes on maybe what my car insurance would be. I don't have the kind of car that I want yet but I was just trying to get an estimate and check and see what it would be around.. Can I get any quotes without the Vin Number?

Who has the lowest price on car insurance? Please tell me how much you pay and your coverage limits?

Who has the lowest price on car insurance? Please tell me how much you pay and your coverage limits?

""Quick question on car insurance, thanks for answers?""

I am getting my second car insurance, i live in leeds however my parents live in northumberland, would it be legal to put my car insurance ADDRESS as northumberland (half the price). I would still be named driver, and i have all bank details and permenant things such as phone contracts registered to northumberland as i move each year i class it as my permanent address. So i could say the car is kept there but i use it sometimes, as in northumberland is also classed as my address, and i am there quite a lot anyway. Cheers for advice, and if it is legal or questionable, would it still be acceptable if even frowned upon, cheers!""

What is the cheapest auto insurance in general/in NM?

I feel like i'm paying too much for auto insurance (i have aaa) what other insurnce cold I get that will be the cheapest, I don't drive my car all that much, I just want the cheapses rather than nothing.""

Will auto insurance be cheaper If i'm on my parent's plan?

I'm 17. I graduated college early, so i'm now a sophomore in college. I have a job, where I make generally $600 a month. Not much but i'll be graduating soon so I can deal ...show more""

Can i get insurance now?

I recently had my wisdom teeth taken out, and they said i needed to come back and get my teeth cleaned, and they said I'm gonna need some fillings or something, but there wasn't another appointment until June.. well i don't have dental insurance, so i had to pay for this all on credit cards, which is do-able i guess, since we dint use those cards for anything else, but i was wondering could i get dental insurance between now and then? or would it not cover the appointment thats already scheduled? where can i find affordable isurance?""

""Car Insurance Cost, ages 16-22?""

I'm trying to get a rough Idea of what teens -20's pay for car insurance. Please list what company and how mcuh you pay, (*Don't List if your on your parents insurance*). Thanks.""

""If I get liability only insurance, and somebody else crashes into me, will I get my car repaired?""

My grandma recently gave me a 2005 civic as a gift. Its great but comprehensive insurance is $230 a month. Ive looked around and thats about as cheap as it gets (I am a teenage male that's why its so expensive, despite my flawless driving record). I have been considering getting liability only insurance for a month or 2 because I need to get more hours at work to be able to afford comprehensive. If I get into an accident thats not my fault will i be out of luck or will the at fault driver have to repair my car?""

Will homeowner insurance rates go through the roof if Cap and Tax passes through the Senate?

HYPOTHETICALLY............If you are trying to sell a house, you get audited (like it says in the bill) and they say that you have to upgrade a whole lot of stuff that you can't ...show more""

Motorbike insurance confusion?

I'm looking to get a new motorbike in January and am looking at quotes online. Where it says where is the bike kept overnight I have put: on a public road. Then where it says Address where bike is kept overnight I have put my home address. However I want to take it too uni and that's obviously a different address, but it won't let you have two. I have put on the form that my current address is my home rather than uni. Do I need to tell them that it's going to be at uni with or not because it'll be at both places for extended periods of time? It's also 400 more expensive to put address as uni - though cost isn't the problem just confused. thanks. Sorry if it was confusing, if you can't understand then I'll try and make it clearer.""

How much is a doctor visit without insurance?

My friend hasn't been feeling well for a few days now and needs to see a doctor. Does anyone know how much a doctor visit would be if she went to a walk in clinic? She doesn't have any insurance. By the way we live in Miami, Fl.""

What is a good car insurance for someone that is 21?

im 21 my car is insured by my moms insurance but she wants to take me off. What are some good options??i live in california and im a full time student.

Insurance company not paying for car repair that isn't my fault?

I was in an car accident. I was in the right hand side of the parking lot and I was backing out of my parking space. I was in the middle of the parking lot, and a guy pulling out of his parking space on the left hand side of the parking lot. While I was in the middle of the parking lot, the guy back his car into mine (In a hurry). After this accident happened, this guy admitted that he hit me and the accident was his fault. The police showed up and we told our stories and he admit to the police that the accident was his fault and it was on the police report. After the accident, we went our separate ways. I talked to my insurance company and they told me that since the guy that hit me admitted that he caused the accident, I had to take it up with the guy's insurance company. I called the insurance adjuster from the other insurance company and gave my statement and he told me that he viewed the accident as both our faults and would not pay me to have my car fixed. And I told him that his client admitted to the accident and he said it didn't matter. I would have to go to my insurance company to have my car fixed. I have arbitration. Also, the adjuster said that I can go through arbitration. I don't know what to do. What can I do about it?""

Car insurance question about my 17 year old.?

I want to get a second car and let my 17 year old drive it. I am trying to find a car insurance company that will let me have every thing in my name and have her as the principal driver of my second car. The problem I am having is she is moving down the street. I can not find a car insurance company that will let me have what is called a different garage adress on the car I am wanting to let her use. I am in the state and I have tryed all most all the car insurances companys around here and online. I have even tryed to have things put in her name but it would cost her around 300$ dollars a month to insurance it. And that is just the basic insurance. That is why i want to just keep everything in my name Any idea's would help. And not I not going to lie and just have her drive it and move and not let the insurance company she is driving it.

Motorcycle insurance quote - Progressive?

I only need insurance on my bike for like a week and progressive only gives me the option to either pay the full 12 month cost ($255) up front now OR 2 payments a year which is $135 up front right now. Im not paying $135 when im only going to be riding it for a week...?

How to cancel car insurance after paying ?

Hi everyone, I've just bought a car insurance from Access Insurance Company this morning for a period of 6 months. The effective day will be from 11/20/2012. But suddenly there's some reason that I change my mind to use All State Insurance. So, is it possible for me to cancel Access and get a full refund ? It's been 4 days until the effective day.""

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

Would it be against the Law if you don't have this Obama Health Insurance?

Will you be put in jail or a fine if you don't have this proposed Health Coverage? What if someone is homeless which is alot of people with this economy, do we pay for them too? Who is this for anyway? Do you think the Insurance Co.'s will make it affordable because I seriously doubt that with the Government in their pocket!!?? If it passes would this be a huge windfall for the Insurance industry or what?? First the Banks and Now the Health Industry?""

How much will a Toyota Spyder increase my insurance?

I'm looking to buy a 2000 Toyota Spyder. But i'm only 20 years old, so i'm questioning whether or not it is a good idea! Its will cost me about $10,000 after tax + the insurance. I'm not so worried about the actually cost of the car, because I can make about a 60% downpayment, and take out a small loan for the rest... But the insurance is the big issue...""

Car insurance rates in Ontario for new driver?

I plan to import my '01 Camry from USA to missisuaga. How much shd I expect to pay p.m. in car Insurance rates ? I have 3 yrs clean driving history in USA.Will my driving history in USA help with getting a better rate in canada ? Initially I will have only a US drivers license.Pls help shed light on my doubts ..

How much is a doctor visit without insurance?

My friend hasn't been feeling well for a few days now and needs to see a doctor. Does anyone know how much a doctor visit would be if she went to a walk in clinic? She doesn't have any insurance. By the way we live in Miami, Fl.""

LEGAL!? Can I be added into my friend's car insurance?

Hi, gentlemen. I got my driver license(in CA) and a used car the other day, and I have to get my car insurance. Here is the question. Is it legal for me to be added into my friend's insurance(AAA)? He told me that I would save money if did so. Is it legal to do so even though I'm not his siblings or relatives? I'm an international student, so I wanna save money as much as possible. Thanks for reading. Every answer helps!!!""

Motorbike insurance?

motorbike insurance

How good is USAA auto insurance?

I heard about a company called USAA for auto insurance yesterday. I think it's a website for military officers, and ex-officers or enlisted people. My dad was in the Air Force and I think that qualifies, but I dont know how good this company is or how well they deal with claims. Please tell me about your experiences with them.""

How much would it cost for insurance on this car??

Ok so i'm about to go for my license in december and my awesome brother is generously giving up his 96 Toyota Supra. As of now I have 1 job that gets me 300 every other week. And I'm poor and I have a cheap prepaid phone and cheap clothes. My question is will I be able to pay for my insurance on this salary. And I have like 3000 saved up. could I just pay for insurance for a whole year?

How much does commercial auto insurance cost?

I just recently got a job delivering pizza's at papa johns and know that neither the store or my current insurance will cover me if I get into an accident while on the job. Is comm insurance worth it? I heard it was expensive. And would I be covered if another car hits me while I'm on the job?

Car insurance payment?

I would like to get the car insurance for my used car, and it is my first car. If I buy the insurance for 6 months, should I pay all the 6 months insurance at one time, or pay month by month? Thanks.""

How close is Geico's quote to what you actually get?

I will be purchasing insurance from geico and was wondering how close their quote is to what you will be paying? The sales guy told me it might be higher or lower than the online quote. Has anyone had any experience with this? What are the factors that would cause either an increase or decrease in the online quote when you're actually purchasing? The online quote seemed like it asked for your social security so it clearly did a credit check too.

Insurance cost for a 2001 Range Rover?

What would the annual cost be to insure a smart teenager on a 2001 range rover hse? just a ballpark works... Thanks

Can i take out two seperate care insurances for two different cars?

im looking to insurance another car in my name, but looking i have found cheaper quotes, i was wondering if i can have two different cars, on two different insurance poilcys? many thanks.""

How much is insurance for a 2001 mercury cougar. If I am 16? (EST.)?

Hello. I am looking for my first car. I am looking at a 2001 mercury cougar not the S series just the 3 door coupe.. Now the qoute gieco gave me was $325.01 a month. I live in Minnesota and I am a 16 year old male. I don't have anything on my record at all. I was wondering if 325.01 a month sounded right because I dont think so. That's like $4,000 a year and the car only costs $5,999. Also would it be better to go on my parents insurance plan with State Farm? Or to get my own? Thank you very much for helping me with advice with this.""

""I want to start trying for another baby by August, but I don't have medical insurance....?

My husband makes too much for me to get on Medicaid. I want to get a good insurance. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on what to do.

""Anyone bought a trampoline, put it up and then have an insurance company demand you take it down or drop you?""

Insurance company has demanded trampoline come down. Saftety nets, adult supervisor followed to a T . Spent good amount of $$$ on it! Been up for less than a year. Under warranty. Anyone have any suggestions?""

Something in lieu of insurance?

I have been working part-time for a company and about to become full-time. One of the concerns that was raised is that insurance will be expensive. He pays 100% of everyone's insurance for their families. I suggested that we can revisit the insurance in a year and do something else in lieu of the insurance. Less costly. He also pays for parking for the employees. I'm not sure of what to ask for though. I was thinking a gas allowance but I wanted to have a few ideas to present in case he shoots one or more down.

Do older cars cost more for insurance? I was thinking of getting a bmw m3 2002 or 05.?

or for my 1st car should i just get a infinity? cus someone told me for those cars insurance is like 220 a month!!

Occasional Driver Insurance.?

My had has 02 Mazda under his name as a First Driver and Insured. I got my G2 License Dec 11 and i have been using the car ever since ~ 40-100KM a week. I am not insured in any way. I got a Left-Turn Signal Ticket and the COP did not say anything. I got stooped 2 other times driving a work car not in my name and they did not say anything. Is it safe for me to drive like this. I have been told by some family member that i have to be listed as a Second Driver. Whats the benefit on this? I am 22 years old. Would it cost a lot to get Insured?

Would insurance on a corvette be too expensive for someone 19 years old?

I am 17 now, but in a couple years I will have enough money to buy an older corvette. I am looking at either a C5 corvette (97-04) or a C3 corvette (68-82). I am leaning more toward the C5 but since it's a newer car, I would think the insurance would be more expensive, even though the car might only cost 12 grand. The C3 would be cheaper in price, and i heard insurance is really cheap for classic cars too. So, in your opinion what do you think?""

Car insurance black box (auto saints)?

I am going to have my car insured with a black box soon from auto saints, because it's much cheaper than any other insurance that I have looked at. My question is, after the second year does the insurance go down a lot with a years of no claims bonus (my friends say it doesn't) . So is it worth it? and do I have to keep the black box for the second year as well or is worth it changing insurance company after the second year?""

""To obtain my permit in the state of California, do I need to have my parents get insurance for me?

Or when I apply do I have to show proof that my PARENTS have insurance?

How much higher will my insurance go up with a point on my license?

How much higher will my insurance go up with a point on my license? I got pulled over for not stopping at a stop sign completely... this is in california. My insurance is like 300 every 6 months typically.

Approximately how much would car insurance cost for a teenager in NJ?

Approximately how much would car insurance cost for a teenager in NJ?

How much would insurance be on property based business?

i have a few acres and was wondering what the insurance would be if i decided to open up a atv/rv park on my land~i would have a waver that made sure all that rode would be rideing at their own risk etc.plus any other limations you could think i might come acrross~

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

Grace period on car insurance in nyc?

dO WE HAVE GRACE PERIOD ON EXPIRE CAR INSURANCE IN nyc

What is the cheapest way to get insurance on my first car.?

I am 18 and am buying a 1.2 corsa. I need to know the cheapest way to insure it. Even if I have to go on a relatives insurance. Please help

Car Insurance Issue's? HELPPP!?

I lost my job so I couldn't pay my car insurance for about 3 months. Then it got expired my license also got suspended because of no car insurance:/. But right now I'm back on my feet and I want to get my license reinstated and get car insurance again. I want to know how can I do that? And do I have to pay the amount I owed back to my other car insurance company or can I go to another and not pay them back? PLEASE HELP ME!

Will I have a surcharge on my auto insurance policy if I let the policy lapse even without a car?

At the moment I have decided to hold off on purchasing a new vehicle. My previous car was a lease, the lease expired and at the moment I do not have a car in my name. My independent insurance agent is telling me that if I do not keep up a policy at even a low rate, when I do get a car (whenever that might be) and then get a new policy I would be subject to a surcharge. For this reason we are doing something very basic to keep a policy in place. This seems really strange to me and raises a question why do I have to have car insurance if I do not have a car? Why should I get a surcharge when I do get a car at a later date? This almost seems like once you're in the auto insurance system, you cannot get out without penalties. Seems a lot like the insurance industry is trying to get everyone to pay into the system with or without a car. And if that's the case this sounds awfully like the auto insurance industry has already set precedent on the health insurance industry. What am I missing?""

What is the minimum pricing for teenage car insurance?

ok, my car is a 1978 Ford Fairmont. I am 17, the car's previous coverage was basic liability. the limits i want for the car is just pretty much basic liability. i just want to be legal on the road. no fancy extras added to the policy, just basic coverage. the car so far hasn't gotten into any car wrecks. it's practically in perfect condition. this is my first car and i just got my license. I'm not aware of my credit score for i've just started working part-time. Also, i'm a very good student. My current GPA is 3.57and i'm still in high school, 12th grade. and yes, i've finished drivers education coarse. Please, if anyone can help me in finding a good car insurance company for my beautiful Miss Daisy, and the possibly price of how much it will cost for basic liability i would greatly appreciate it.""

Cheap car insurance company :D?

Guys I am a newly driver and looking for a cheapest car insurance company for my car (Cheap car insurance) :D as I spend too much money for my driving lessons I wanna save money now :D , anyone know please help me to sort it out as soon as possible. thanks""

Car insurance for 2 people in 2 places...?

My father is going to add me to his auto insurance. He lives in the the Bronx, NY and currently I go to school in upstate New York and is where I will be using the car and I know car insurance is cheaper upstate New York. With that being said is it possible for his part of the insurance to be filed in New York City and my part to be filed through the upstate location? While still having him receive the bill for both... Thanks in advance!""

Car insurance claim against me?

Hi, I have received a letter from my insurance company stating that i have had an insurance claim against me, and i asked them for more detail, the time and date. They gave me the place and date, and i was there at the time of the incident, but i did not hit the car that they stated. I was parked (front of car) against a metal barrier, spaces either side of me, but someone went and parked behind me. i got my friend out the car to guide me back as i did (sort of a 3 point turn) to get out sideways. I did not hit the car. Someone was approx 50-75 feet away and they must have taken the reg plate. There was noone else around at the time, otherwise i would have asked them to move their car. Please help!!!!!!!""

Cheap car insurance for teens?

I'm 17 and interested in either a Clio, Punto or Polo. I've looked everywhere!""

How is the government going to make insurance premiums more affordable?

I keep hearing how Americans need more affordable health insurance, but I have yet to hear how they are planning to do this or what results we can expect. Does anyone know how they are going to achieve this for us? How much can we expect our premiums to go down as a result of the reform? Do you think it will be more than what we will pay in increased taxes?""

Why will small businesses be affected if the health insurance mandate passes?

Research paper. Thanks for the help

""In Connecticut, Return Licence plates first? or end car insurance first?""

ANYONE WHO KNOWS ABOUT CONNECTICUT DMV & POLICIES! HI, i'm trying to take my car out of my insurance, do i return the plates to DMV or end insurance first???? helppppp""

How much car insurance does a 18years old guy has to pay per month in UK??

I am 18years old i wanna buy a car..lets suppose if i buy a cars that worths about 5000pound how much insurance will i have to pay per month?

Is what my car insurance company doing legal?

I am in the process of purchasing a house. I received a quote from the insurance company I picked. And they said they could lower it even more if we add our 2 cars on. So they checked, and their offer for insurance on our cars was lower then what we are paying now. So saving us even more money. I went in, signed the papers for both auto's and the homeowners and was happy. They cancelled my previous auto insurance policies, and charged me my first month. Now, a week later, they are saying due to my previous car being stolen two years ago they can no longer offer me my 100 comprehensive deductible. They can only offer me a 1000 dollar deductible and if I choose not to accept they will cancel my auto insurance. This if frustrating considering my other insurance which wasn't bad to begin with has already been cancelled and I have already been charged my first month so if I don't accept I will have no insurance and my homeowners policy will go up in price. Sorry for the long explanation. I just don't think they should be able to get you in then change things up on you. Is there any law against that? Thanks for your help!!!""

Will my insurance go up for my speeding ticket?

I just recently got a speeding ticket or doing 46 in a 30. (which wasn't possible) I'm only 16 and it is my first ticket. My parents will kill me when they find out. We have stated arm insurance and only liability on the car but will the insurance go up and/or cause my parents to fin out?

Geico car insurance !?

i have car insurance with Geico, on the policy was said Effective date : 12/20/2009 ... ( just bought insurance from Geico on 12/29/2009 ). i got accident today,( 12/22/2009 ),a deer jump into the front of my car and the front bumper messed up really bad... i know on the policy its said the effective date is 12/20/200/9 but still i wonder am i cover when i just recently bought the car insurance from them ( for 1 day and a half i guess ) ?!!! am just so ... panic and .. confuse right now !""

What is the cheapest and most affordable auto insurance?

i live in illinois

Do South Carolina auto insurance laws require me to carry my own liability insurance when driving a rental car?

I don't currently own a car and so haven't had a need to carry my own liability auto insurance in quite awhile. Is it legal for me to drive a rental car or even a car owned by my sister who does have insurance in South Carolina? Will I have to purchase my own liability insurance to legally drive anyone else's car in South Carolina?

Health insurance question?

i am going to see a doctor tomorrow for something that has been bothering me for 2 years but ive only had my insurance for 1 year but before i had my insurance i did not see a doctor for the problem i had.... so what im asking is if i tell her i have been having the problem for 2 years will my insurance not pay for it since they consider that preexisting even though i have never seen a doctor for it before my insurance i have bluecross blueshield ppo plan

Does your car insurance premium rise after a heart attack(UK)?

my parents are wondering what happens after you have been discharged from hospital, and the 4 weeks or so passes, will the premium for domestic car insurance rise or stay same or what? anyone know ?thanks""

To buy or not to buy: car insurance?

I am currently not in a situation to buy car insurance, since I find it to be expensive in terms of everything else I also have to pay. What are some of the consequences of not getting a car insurance? Do you see any benefit to it?""

Buying Car Insurance for a new car?

I am on my parents policy right now and plan on buying a new car , along with the new car new insurance. My question is, do you buy the car insurance before or after you buy the car. Logic would say before since it is illegal in my state to drive without insurance, but I could be wrong Can someone clarify?""

Am i insured if driving without a licence?

my friend was in a car accident although she is insured her driving licence had expired

How to get health insurance?

I am an 18 year-old independent, (due to marriage) diabetic. I can't get approved for health insurance because you have to be 19 and I won't be 19 for two months. I don't have enough medical supplies to last for two months or more. Medicaid denied me and none of the clinics in my area help with Type 1 diabetes. My parent's don't have health insurance at the moment, so they can't add me. I am not a full-time college student either. I work full-time, but the insurance through my work are too expensive. How can I get health insurance immediately?""

""Totalled vehicle+switched over insurance to new car, old car's registration now suspended...Help!?""

Soooo I lived in Maryland and had a Nissan, someone hit my Nissan and it ended up being totaled. This happened the end of July and a few days later, I moved to Virginia to attend school. I ended up getting a Corolla. I switched my insurance from the Nissan to the Corolla thinking the insurance company would pick up the Nissan shortly after that. Well we are in November and the insurance company took 4 MONTHS to process my claim. They are FINALLY picking up the Nissan tomorrow. I just got a letter from MVA saying that my Nissan's registration has been suspended and that I have to return my plates. It also said that a penalty fee will be assessed for $150 for the first 30 days the Nissan hasn't been insured, plus $7/day for every day thereafter. I did the math and that's about $660! I do not think I should have to pay all this money because the insurance company screwed me over by failing to put my claim through. My claims agent even said that he forgot about my case! I haven't been driving the Nissan this whole time. Do you think that if I provide proof that I had been driving another car (Corolla title and insurance policy info), I will not have to pay these outrageous fees? I also have to submit a letter from the insurance company saying that the vehicle was totaled and the date of the accident, so they would know how long it hasn't been insured for.""

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

Gordon West Virginia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 25093

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laporte-minnesota-cheap-car-insurance-quotes-zip-56461-mia-hobbs/"

[thrashermaxey]

Ramblings: GAME 7!; Sergachev; Vrana; Kane; Armia; Power-Play Defencemen – May 24

We had a very spirited start to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Final. It really, really was a great series, honestly. Both goaltenders were excellent, the action was back and forth, and, of course, it gave us a Game 7.

Not that it should shock anyone, but Alex Ovechkin got the scoring in this game. Just over a minute in, he unleashed a rocket from his office but for a chance of pace, it was at five-on-five:

.@ovi8 with a rocket to give the @Capitals an early lead. pic.twitter.com/G5YosWs5wx

— NHL GIFs (@NHLGIFs) May 24, 2018

The rest of the first period saw some good chances for both teams but the needle leaning to Tampa. We even got a good bout between Braydon Coburn and Tom Wilson.

Andre Burakovsky made the real difference in the game in the second period. Lightning defenceman Dan Girardi flubbed an aerial puck that led to a Burakovsky breakaway, one which he promptly converted for a 2-0 lead. With under four minutes left in the frame, Burakovsky got another breakaway off a bad change by the Lightning blue line and he again converted to make it 3-0. A good time to get your first two goals of the playoffs, to say the least.

At that point, with Braden Holtby locking things down in goal, it was all academic and Washington advanced to their first Cup Final in 20 years.

It was a great moment for Ovechkin, a guy unfairly maligned by media and fans for years, finally getting his crack at hockey’s Holy Grail. Also a great redemption for Holtby, who’d not played well at times this year and wasn’t even the starting goalie for the Caps at the beginning of the postseason.

On the Tampa side, this is a team built to be Cup-or-bust. Considering how hard it is to win it all, losing a Game 7 of a Conference Final seems hardly like a bust, but they are truly among the elite in the league. Like Winnipeg, this team has all pertinent players locked up for next year and guys like Sergachev and Point will only get better. We’ll hear from them again next playoffs.

Kudos to the Caps and their fans. The last decade has been torturous considering how elite the teams have been in the regular season only to be followed consistently by playoff letdowns. They’ve earned this moment and it sets up a wonderful Cup Final.

*

The impending Evander Kane extension is an interesting case in this sense: can he stay healthy?

Being able to stay on the ice is important, especially for fantasy. Having to replace a 30-goal scorer with a waiver wire replacement once in a while is fine. Having to do it for a dozen games can be an issue unless you strike lightning in a bottle. His 78 games last year are a career high. Over the last five seasons, he’s missed 23.7 percent of games, which means he’s averaged about 63 games played over those seasons. That’s not nearly good enough. If he can play 80 games, playing with a top-tier centre like Joe Pavelski or Joe Thornton (or both!), then he’s 30 goals and 60 points in the making. If that’s 65 games? Not so much.

Given how well he played with San Jose after the trade, both regular season and playoffs, he won’t be a sleeper at the draft table. We’ll see where his ADP falls, but I’ll probably be out on him for 2018-19. 

*

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Jakub Vrana’s individual expected goals per 60 minutes these playoffs (going into Game 7) is 0.91, 10th among forwards with 150 minutes at five-on-five. That mark is ahead of names like James Neal, Jonathan Marchessault, and Rick Nash. The problem is he’s shooting 3.85 percent at five-on-five so the actual production hasn’t been there.

Just add this to the mounting evidence that Vrana will be (or already is) a pretty good player. Upside is capped without the top power-play minutes but he is a guy who will litter my fantasy rosters come September.

*

Heading into Wednesday night’s Game 7, there were 93 forwards with at least 100 minutes of five-on-five ice time in these playoffs. Any guesses on which of those 93 forwards had the highest rate of shot attempts per 60 minutes?

You’d have to guess about 50 players. It’s Winnipeg forward Joel Armia.

Not that there could be much fantasy relevance next year. Barring injury, Winnipeg’s top-9 forward mix could be Connor-Scheifele-Wheeler, Laine-Little-Ehlers, Perreault-Lowry-Roslovic. Not much space for Armia to break through. It’s easy to forget that he was a mid-first rounder and will just be 25 years old next year. Maybe he can move up the lineup if there’s a serious injury or two but I just found it curious he had such a high shot rate in the postseason. That fourth line for Winnipeg played pretty well, which is good news for next year.

*

An interesting note from Dimitri Filipovic of Sportsnet with regards to controlled zone exit percentage in the Conference Finals among blue liners:

It's only a handful of games worth of data, but for those that are interested here are the updated zone exit numbers for defensemen in these Conference Finals. pic.twitter.com/feYbtmGmcq

— Dimitri Filipovic (@DimFilipovic) May 23, 2018

Mikhail Sergachev: hoo boy.

This is a guy with a 40-point season as a teenager while putting up top-10 shot rates among defencemen. His future is incredibly bright and it’s good to see the pressure of the playoffs isn’t getting to him. He’s still playing his game and playing it well.

*

My last several Ramblings have been discussing shot rates. This whole series really goes back a month or so, but this last 10 days has been focused on changing shot rates at five-on-five and on the power play. Here is what has been covered so far:

Shot distribution from defencemen at 5v5

Shot distribution from forwards at 5v5

Rise in shot rates at 5v5

Decline in share of goals by defencemen on the PP

Decline in share of TOI by defencemen on the PP

There are a couple things worth discussing now: shot rates and assist rates among defencemen on the power play.

As noted in one of the links above, power-play minutes allocation to blue liners has declined with the rise in four forward/one defenceman PP units. With it has been a commensurate decline in shot totals and goal scoring. There are fewer shots but are the defencemen who are given power-play minutes shooting less? And if they are, does that make them facilitators rather than the triggermen? Let’s dive in.

First thing to point out: defencemen are shooting more on the power play. There was a huge jump in shot attempts per 60 minutes on the PP back in 2014-15 and then small increases every season since:

Power plays at the team level were kind of the mirror opposite of what happened with defencemen. Rather than a jump in shot rates a few years ago with steady increase the last few seasons, there was a steady increase a few seasons ago and a big jump last year. This is what the trend looks like for shot attempts per 60 minutes at the league-wide level on the power play since 2013-14:

What does this tell us for defencemen? That even though league-wide shot attempt rates on the power play rose, on average, by 4.4 percent, the average shot rates from defencemen only rose by 0.4 percent. While defencemen in 2017-18 are shooting a lot more than they were in 2013-14, compared to just last season, their involvement with putting pucks on net for the power play specifically has declined. Keep in mind that this isn’t total shots; we know that with more teams moving to a setup with four forwards and one defenceman that total shot rates would decline. This is the average shot attempt rate by a given defenceman on the power play. Even though goals per 60 minutes by teams on the power play rose 7.2 percent between 2016-17 and 2017-18, goals per 60 minutes by defencemen on the power play rose just over 1 percent.

So we have defencemen playing less but shooting more in the minutes that are given, yet not shooting as much as the increase in league-wide trends. It’s the forwards shooting more often on a rate basis. Does that mean defencemen are becoming less important on the power play? Not at all, really.

Here are primary assist rates per 60 minutes on the power play by defencemen in every season since 2013-14. It’s… something:

The primary assist rate on the power play for defencemen in 2016-17 was 1.35 and that exploded to 1.67 in 2017-18, an increase of a whopping 23.7 percent. When you think of a 4F-1D, 1-3-1 setup, it makes sense: it’s not really a setup for defencemen to bomb shots from the point. It’s a setup to give the defenceman options, which truly makes him the PP quarterback. He can look for the bumper in the high slot, he can look for a one-timer from either circle or a winger climbing down from the half-wall depending on handedness, or he can look for the low man like the Penguins do with Sidney Crosby. A shot from the defenceman in a 4F-1D, 1-3-1 seems like a last resort in an ideal world.

For fantasy owners, what do we do with this information? As I’ve stated in a Ramblings before, it’s hard to rely on any defenceman for PP goals anymore. In fantasy leagues that counts power-play goals as a category, you’re better off looking for undervalued forwards. There were 55 forwards with at least eight power-play goals this year. Why is that important? There were only 45 the year before and 44 the year before that. Why is eight power play goals an important number? Seth Jones, Roman Josi, Shayne Gostisbehere, and Tyson Barrie tied for the league lead among defencemen with seven.

With the changing nature of the power play, getting power-play points from blue liners should be easier. It is and it isn’t. There were 18 defencemen with at least 20 PPPs in 2017-18. The thing is, that’s as many as there were in 2015-16 even though 2017-18 saw a full 130 more power-play goals in the league. With the changing nature of power-play setups league-wide, there isn’t the abundance of top-tier power-play production there should be when considering the rise in PP goals due to changing setups. That’s what makes the sure-fire top PP dmen coveted. Guys like Victor Hedman, Brent Burns, Tyson Barrie, Shayne Gostisbehere, John Klingberg, and Torey Krug (among a few others) have that top PP slotting locked down, and it’s on a heavily-used unit. Other defencemen, like Dougie Hamilton, Seth Jones, and PK Subban have had the top PP spot at times, other times they have not. Once you get past the guys that are locked into that role, you’re really rolling the dice with the whims of the coach. Every fantasy owner has a different risk tolerance when it comes to that sort of thing. Are you fine using a third-round pick on someone like Gostisbehere or are you willing to roll the dice on a fifth-round pick on someone like Jones? Fantasy owners allocate draft capital and prioritize differently.  

*

As mentioned before, if you want to read further on the 4F-1D setup teams are employing, read Tyler Dellow’s work over at The Athletic (for those subscribed). There was a good article a couple days ago specifically on scoring sequences.

from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-game-7-sergachev-vrana-kane-armia-power-play-defencemen-may-24/

[jeremyhodge2]

Report From Dera’a, Cradle of the Syrian Revolution

The Nation: Sept. 20, 2017

By Jeremy Hodge

Syria’s southern provinces are unique among opposition-held areas in having limited the expansion of Islamist extremist groups. The Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL), Ahrar al-Sham, and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), successor to the Al Qaeda–linked Jabhat al-Nusra, maintain only a modest foothold at best in the region, compared with the much larger, more influential “Southern Front” coalition, made up of moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions that support democracy.

The Assad regime nonetheless continues to label many factions of the Southern Front as “terrorists” and to violate the de-escalation brokered in July by the United States and Russia.

This letter, written in July and August, is part of a project that draws on citizen journalists to depict daily life in war zones where much of the world press cannot travel due to threats from the warring parties. The project, based at Stony Brook University’s Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting, is funded by the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation. New York–based freelance journalist Jeremy Hodge, a former editor of the Yemen Times and Syria Direct, edited. As Hodge notes in his accompanying piece, here, the author of the article below, Khaled al Zubi, was killed, along with his 1-month-old son and brother, by a roadside bomb soon after filing his article.

Dera’a—In July, in one of President Trump’s first foreign-policy advances, the United States, Russia, and Jordan brokered a cease-fire between the Syrian regime and opposition forces in the country’s southern provinces along the Jordanian border. The deal raised many people’s hopes that a new era had begun, one that would rein in Bashar al-Assad’s military operations against his own people. That’s not the way it worked out.

Several weeks ago, I awoke late at night to the whizzing sound of regime aircraft circling the skies above my village, Muleiha Sharqiyya, and my 1-month-old son, crying. It was his first experience with warplanes in his short life, and no doubt scary. I rolled over and quickly scanned my phone; friends on WhatsApp were saying that several hundred Syrian and Russian forces were gathering outside Sama Hneidat, just east of Muleiha Sharqiyya, in apparent preparation for an assault. Not more than 15 minutes later, FSA rebel convoys carrying reinforcements could be heard passing down the main road heading east, toward the regime buildup.

Muleiha Sharqiyya is part of a string of towns in Syria’s southernmost Dera’a province that collectively form a sort of border between regime- and opposition-held territory. Our hamlet of 6,000 faces several regime-held towns located just under two miles east, well within range of small artillery. A few miles south looms the sprawling Tha’la military air base, where Assad’s forces regularly assemble before launching assaults on cities and towns in east Dera’a.

I got up and texted Yasser, a colleague who worked the nearest checkpoint through which the convoy was undoubtedly passing. “It’s nothing, inshallah,” he wrote, “but some of the guys think they [the regime] might wanna take the reservoir before the winter.” This was a reference to the water reservoir in a nearby village, which serves both regime and opposition farms.

“There’s foreigners with them,” Yasser added, which usually meant Iranians, Afghans, or even Russians.

By the end of the night, the FSA mustered a big-enough show of force to deter the pro-regime forces without firing a shot. It’s a testimony to the organization and readiness of opposition forces here and the popular support they enjoy.

The Syrian revolution began in Dera’a in 2011, and what transpires here is crucial to the viability of a political solution to the Syrian conflict. It was in Dera’a city that Syrian youth sprayed “The people want the fall of the regime” on walls and were arrested on March 6 of that year. The first mass protest against the regime—the so-called “Day of Rage”—occurred on March 15. On March 24, Dera’a saw the first massacre of the revolution, when security forces killed more than 200 civilians just outside the Omari mosque in Dera’a’s Old City. [The Nation could not independently verify this figure and therefore does not endorse its authenticity. International reporting at the time of the event placed the number killed there, on that day and in the days afterward, at anywhere from 5 to 150.]

Perhaps because the revolution began here, its spirit has been preserved in its purest form in the south. Unlike other liberated areas—such as Idlib in the north and East Ghouta in the Damascus suburbs, which are dominated by Islamist military factions—FSA factions here, collectively known as the Southern Front, have successfully prevented the spread of such groups. Both a free press and civil society thrive here, along with independent civil courts that resolve disputes between individuals. If the Assad regime can’t preserve a fragile peace with the Southern Front, it’s unlikely to do so elsewhere.

The fact that the Southern Front factions are committed to the principles of democracy has a downside. This region has historically enjoyed more support from the United States, Britain, and other sectors of the international community than other FSA factions and has been spared the grinding poverty in besieged parts of Syria where Islamists or other radical forces have sway. On the other hand, much of what goes on in our province goes unreported, both internationally and in the regional press. When violations occur, they often go unnoticed.

That is not to say that locals are uninformed. The near-clash in my area took place in late July, just over two months after the fourth round of talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, in May, where Russia, Iran, and Turkey came up with the idea of implementing “de-escalation zones” across Syria. But neither those talks nor the US-brokered cease-fire has stopped regime aircraft from regularly bombing Dera’a city, the large provincial capital. Nonetheless, on this particular night, in Sama Hneidat, regime forces may have figured that it wasn’t worth violating the cease-fire over a battle they were likely to lose.

“Putin’s playing with Papa Trump,” a neighbor, Abu Faysal, told me the next morning, over coffee. “Everyone thinks Trump is crazy and that Putin—guided by logic—is pulling the strings,” he added. “What they don’t realize is that Syria makes everybody crazy.” Abu Faysal was convinced that the regime buildup was a Russian attempt to intimidate both the FSA and the United States to gain leverage for the next round of talks, whenever they would be. “Trump tried to show Russia he was the worst by bombing Assad,” a reference to the April 6 US airstrikes on Syria’s Shayrat air base after Assad used chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun. “Now Putin’s saying, ‘I can be crazy too, but a different kind of crazy.’”

BEGINNINGS

When the “Day of Rage” protests began, I was an economics major at Tishreen University in the northwest province of Latakia. Dominated by the Assad family’s minority Alawite sect, Latakia has always been loyal to the regime, and Tishreen University was no different. When I and other students organized a march in solidarity with Dera’a, most of the student body watched from the sidelines as we entered the main quad, to be detained by school security.

By April 2011, many of the Tishreen students were labeling the protesters in Dera’a as radical Sunni jihadists. The regime had already adopted the slogan “us or the terrorists.” The university paper published articles claiming that intelligence had been intercepted demonstrating that “calls for help” had been made to international jihadists like Al Qaeda.

It was shocking to hear what was being said about my distant home province. The mood on campus was becoming so different from what I was hearing back home that I decided to leave university, return home, and join the protesters, or at least comfort my family. In the end I did both, as I learned soon after that one of my cousins, Ahmed, had been shot and wounded by security forces during a demonstration.

Shortly after my return home, six friends and I, armed with just two AK-47s and several hunting rifles, set up our town’s first neighborhood watch along the road leading south toward the Tha’la air base, which we would man at night. It was a modest effort, but our ranks would slowly grow, and to our surprise, we got support from sympathetic army officers, many of whom would later defect and join the opposition.

One such person was Zakaria, a sergeant from the northeastern town of Qamishli who was stationed at the 52nd Brigade base located just west of Muleiha Sharqiyya. Zakaria often frequented the mobile-phone shop my family owned, initially to buy credit for his phone. As time went on, Zakaria became more and more friendly with me and our staff, and ultimately began to speak about his desire to defect, saying that he feared what would happen to his family if he were killed.

One day Zakaria gave me his phone number and told me to call if I needed anything. I wasn’t sure if he was aware of my nighttime activity manning an armed checkpoint to deter his security forces. However, several weeks later, it was Zakaria who reached out to me, and it was clear from our conversation that he was privy to what I was up to.

“Security forces are going to launch night raids tonight looking for Khaled, Fadi, and Maher,” he said, referring to another volunteer named Khaled. “They’re going to charge them with engaging in terrorist activity.” I forwarded the message, advising all three to leave town. I also advised the other guys manning the checkpoint to stay home. Sure enough, the raids were launched, but the security forces came up empty-handed.

“Whoever saves one life—it is as if he had saved all of mankind,” I told Zakaria the next day, citing a well-known passage from the Quran and Talmud during a phone call thanking him for his help. He later defected from the army while on leave in Damascus. Before doing so he introduced us to other sympathetic army officers who would continue to help us stay several steps ahead of the regime. The last I heard, Zakaria was dead, killed while fighting the regime alongside an FSA faction in the eastern Damascus suburb of Qabun.

As the months went on, I switched from carrying a rifle to a camera. As the armed-insurgency phase of the revolution intensified, more and more Syrian army officers defected to the opposition who were far more qualified than I to provide security for our town. Furthermore, working at my family’s mobile-phone shop afforded me more experience than most people in my area working with computers, cameras, and other forms of technology.

My experience with Zakaria and other army officers who would later defect also meant I was uniquely placed to coordinate with the armed factions and track developments through the course of the revolution. I dived headfirst into journalism and activism and haven’t looked back. My work has taken me to front lines all over the south, where I’ve been able to witness FSA losses and gains and had the privilege of developing ties with other like-minded activists. Our job is to use our cameras to document regime war crimes and tell individual stories of triumph, failure, and perseverance that collectively make up the ethos of resistance in the south.

My work allows me to see firsthand the solidarity among the southern factions that characterize our region. Unlike in other parts of the country, where individual groups lay claim to specific towns, regions, or swaths of land, in many parts of the south armed brigades and factions share territory and come and go between different front lines, as the situation requires. This freedom of movement extends to myself and others, and is a testament to our region’s success: Though I pledge allegiance to no faction, my work on behalf of the Syrian revolution ingratiates me with the Southern Front factions, whom I call my brothers.

PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

Ever since the fourth round of Astana talks in early May, when de-escalation zones were first broached, Syrian regime forces have adopted a series of new tactics in the Dera’a countryside that appear to be aimed at provoking a violent response from FSA opposition forces, while allowing the regime to maintain plausible deniability.

The first incident occurred between May 28 and 30, when, similar to what happened in Sama Hneidat, hundreds of pro-Assad Iranian, Afghan, and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters mobilized with dozens of tanks and heavy artillery over a period of three days outside the town of Khirbat Ghazala, six miles northeast of Dera’a city. The show of force was interpreted by FSA artillery units stationed in the area as a direct provocation.

Muhammad Badr al-Izra’i, an FSA commander stationed with a local artillery brigade, told me regime columns were approaching from two different directions, one from Damascus and the second from the front lines in Dera’a city.

Al-Izra’i was convinced the regime would claim it was implementing the terms of the Astana talks by de-escalating the fight in Dera’a and then, after the fact, send in the second column the next day and commit a massacre in Dera’a city. “They wanted to hide this fact from the international community, so they withdrew some forces first, in order to provide cover,” he said.

To preempt an ambush of FSA forces in Dera’a city, al-Izra’i’s unit leader decided to fire on the regime forces approaching from Dera’a. Regime ranks took heavy losses, scattered, and withdrew in different directions. “Our actions that day are what showed the regime we’re not willing to stand for such trickery,” he said. The FSA stand at Khirbat Ghazala may explain why pro-regime forces stood down later in Sama Hneidat after the FSA mobilized its own reinforcements.

Since then, regime forces have avoided clashing directly in the open with FSA factions in the Dera’a countryside, choosing instead to launch air strikes or quick hit and-run artillery attacks. The regime, it seems, is changing its tactics. Throughout June and July, regime forces have used airstrikes or hit-and-run artillery against the towns of Sayda, al-Na’ima, al-Laja, and the al-Nasib border crossing with Jordan. As it launches airstrikes, the regime claims it does so in response to the movement of terrorist groups, knowing that moderate FSA forces dominate opposition areas.

One of those killed in a June 22 air strike in al-Na’ima was a close friend, Mustafa Abd al-Nur, a civilian who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Syrian regime jets dropped their bombs. Regime violations of the agreed-upon de-escalation zone aren’t as bad here as they are in other areas—in particular East Ghouta—but innocent people are still being killed due to the regime’s failure to live up to its promises.

Most southerners are skeptical of Russian and regime intentions in the de-escalation zones. No one believes that Assad or his allies seriously intend to let the Syrian opposition maintain control of any part of the country in the mid- to long term. The Southern Front in turn has not abandoned its aim to defeat Assad militarily or force his government to dissolve.

However, many here support de-escalation zones—but on the condition that Jordan and Russia, not Iran, serve as guarantors. That will allow the Southern Front time to redress problems within the region that have undermined the progress of our revolution for several years—in particular, rooting out what little remains of ISIS, HTS, and other extremist factions. I expect the regime would also like to take advantage of the calm to carry out a bit of spring-cleaning on its side as well.

For now, the Assad regime is likely to try to sabotage and weaken the FSA in the south. Late at night on June 28, my own home was shot up by unknown assailants as I was sleeping next to my wife, just five days before the birth of our son. Luckily, no one was hurt, and we left to stay with family members in the town of Sayda, a safer spot deeper in opposition-held territory. My son, exposed to the sound of gunshots before his own birth and the sound of warplanes within his first month, will undoubtedly grow up fast, and will likely become desensitized to the sounds of war before he’s able to walk.

As of now we don’t know who is responsible for the shooting. It could be elements of the Assad regime infiltrating behind enemy lines in order to kill those of us who are most active in the media. Or it could be the HTS/Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), whom I’ve been outspoken against since their arrival in the region back in 2013.

Luckily, the south hasn’t fallen under the sway of radical jihadists as in other parts of the country, such as Idlib, East Ghouta, and Qalamoun. This stems partially from the social dynamics of the south and partially from luck. When the revolution began, many radical groups focused their efforts around Syria’s urban enclaves, such as Damascus, Hama, and Aleppo, ignoring the south. By the time Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS, and others sought to penetrate the region, the social, democratic, and military infrastructure in place was strong enough to resist their spread.

This infrastructure was undergirded by resilient communal ties that have evolved and intertwined since the earliest days of the revolution, when individuals such as myself and others took the initial risks that were needed to inspire others and instill in them a sense of purpose. The south’s status as the birthplace of the revolution means we have had more time to evolve and strengthen these ties, building trust between individuals, communities, and towns that have in turn provided fertile ground for the development of grassroots, democratic reform.

Many have died defending the south, and I expect many more will. However, military power alone hasn’t got us where we are.

Activists and journalists such as myself aren’t doing it for salary or some messianic ideology full of empty promises. We fight for our families, our homes, and the dignity of our towns. The civil, social, and political infrastructure is the bedrock that holds our foundation in place, even if soldiers die in the fighting. We think our model is an example, and we trust that our allies abroad won’t abandon us. I believe the south will prevail.

[junker-town]

How will 2017 Pitt football follow up on beating Penn State and Clemson?

The Panthers are progressing nicely, but this season is probably a bump in the road.

In my North Carolina preview, I mentioned how Larry Fedora had the unstable program achieving at a strangely normal rate. The Tar Heels are now recruiting and playing at a top-30 level. They cannot be called underachievers.

Narduzzi has pulled off a similar feat.

It felt like I was bringing it up in the Pitt preview every year just to twist the knife: the Panthers had, over the course of two decades, experienced brutal close-game luck.

Since Johnny Majors retired and Walt Harris took over, Pitt has had a winning record in one-possession games just five times and has been at least two games under .500 in such games nine times. In this nearly two-decade sample, the Panthers are 35-53 in these contests, a 0.397 win percentage.

The Panthers have managed to attend 13 bowls and share two conference titles in these 18 years. If these demons that have taken over Heinz Field ever relinquish their powers, Pitt could easily become an annual ACC Coastal contender.

I wrote in 2015 that bringing in a guy who helped kill the “Sparty, No!” meme was a deft one.

Baggage: shed. Sort of. Narduzzi is still struggling to get his classes balanced and takes on a massive rebuild of the two-deep, but not only have his Panthers reminded everyone of the program’s upside, they’ve finally won their share of close games.

Pitt is 7-7 in one-possession finishes over the last two years. For this program, that feels like 14-0. Last year they beat two Power 5 champions — Penn State early and national champ Clemson in November — by a combined four points. They were two of the most exciting, symbolic Pitt wins of the last decade. They survived shootouts with Georgia Tech (37-34) and Syracuse (76-61) and finished 20th in S&P+, their best finish in seven years. They fielded maybe their best offense since Dan Marino was quarterback. They took on a brutal schedule, one featuring six S&P+ top-25 teams, and landed punches.

There were still regrets, though.

There was the 45-38 loss to Oklahoma State, which could have been a win with one fewer deep-ball breakdown.

There was the 37-36 loss at UNC, in which the Tar Heels scored the winning touchdown with two seconds left.

There was the 39-36 loss to Virginia Tech, which could have flipped if the Panthers had managed a minus-2 turnover margin instead of minus-3.

There was the 31-24 bowl loss to Northwestern, which could have flipped had the Panthers held NU’s Justin Jackson to 150 rushing yards or so instead of 224.

2016 was huge. But the Panthers still left wins on the board, and despite the top-20 S&P+ finish, they ended 8-5. The demons aren’t vanquished just yet, and last year’s pangs might feel a little stronger as Narduzzi attempts a third-year rebuild.

Pitt has to replace star running back James Conner, quarterback Nathan Peterman, tight end Scott Orndoff, All-American guard Dorian Johnson, all-conference tackle Adam Bisnowaty, four of five defensive linemen (including Ejuan Price and Shakir Soto), three of four linebackers, and three of five defensive backs. Plus, Canada leaves Watson with nearly impossible expectations.

The Panthers are not without star power; dynamic rusher/receiver Henderson is back, as are leading receiver Jester Weah, cornerback Avonte Maddox, and, of course, 2016 Piesman Trophy winner Brian O’Neill. And if some high-profile transfers find niches, Pitt will have more than enough talent to challenge good teams.

Still, it’s going to be nearly impossible to match last year’s upside, and Pitt’s success might end up defining how we look back at 2016. Was it the year a corner was turned, or was it a year of dramatic upside and too many missed opportunities?

From a symbolism standpoint, you could do worse than this:

Narduzzi is 16-10 after two years, ranked 20th in S&P+ in his second year. He faces a third-year setback.

Mentor Mark Dantonio at Michigan State: 16-10 in his first two years, 23rd in S&P+ in year two, and 6-7 in year three.

Beginning in year four, Dantonio went 65-16 over his next six seasons.

So there’s that.

2016 in review

2016 Pitt statistical profile.

The offense was not only good; it got better against better teams. Unfortunately, the defense was demonstrably worse.

Pitt vs. S&P+ top 50 (3-5): Avg. percentile performance: 68% (80% offense, 36% defense) | Avg. yards per play: Opp 6.6, Pitt 6.5 | Avg. score: Opp 40, Pitt 36

Pitt vs. everyone else (5-0): Avg. percentile performance: 78% (60% offense, 54% defense) | Avg. yards per play: Pitt 7.0, Opp 4.9 | Avg. score: Pitt 50, Opp 28

Against top-50 competition, the offense averaged just 0.4 yards per play fewer than it did against lesser squads, but the defense allowed 1.7 yards per play more. As a result, Pitt games were virtually guaranteed shootouts; only the first and last games of the season finished with fewer than 70 combined points. Not what one would expect from either Pitt or a Narduzzi team.

Offense

Full advanced stats glossary.

The most encouraging thing I can say about Watson is that Canada hadn’t proved himself before coming to town either. In nine seasons as a coordinator, Canada had never fielded an Off. S&P+ top 20 offense, and his average finish was 51.9. His first Pitt offense was 46th before his second surged to fourth.

Watson’s track record hasn’t been sterling either. Including his time at Texas — even though he was technically QBs coach and associate head coach, he was at worst a co-coordinator in Charlie Strong’s strange arrangement — he has spent 15 years as an OC with an average Off. S&P+ ranking of 45.7. Since ranking in the top 10 in 2007-08 at Nebraska, that average has ballooned to 64.9. At Louisville, with Teddy Bridgewater at QB, he peaked at 47th in 2013.

Narduzzi and Watson worked together at Miami (Ohio) 25 years ago, and apparently the bond was a good one.

For his struggles as an OC, Watson is still regarded as a good quarterbacks coach. In Peterman’s absence, the Panthers turn to either USC grad transfer Max Browne or sophomore Ben DiNucci. Whereas Peterman averaged 15.4 yards per completion in last year’s explosive offense, Browne and DiNucci combined to average just 8.6. And creating explosiveness will be a key now that Conner, a wonderful grinder in the backfield, is gone.

Photo by Justin Berl/Getty Images

Quadree Henderson

Then again, you don’t have to throw deep to Henderson for him to end up going deep. The 5’8 junior was one of the most thrilling players in the country, gaining 631 rushing yards in just 60 carries. One in five carries went for at least 20 yards, and while he lined up all over the field (he was also targeted with 42 passes), it appears he will begin as Pitt’s No. 1 receiver.

That leaves relative unknowns at running back, but there’s size and upside. Sophomore Chawntez Moss (5’11, 210) and juniors Darrin Hall (5’11, 220) and Qadree Ollison (6’2, 230) combined for 111 carries and 514 yards in 2016. That’s an average of just 4.6 yards per carry, 0.5 below Conner’s pace, but while Conner was far more explosive, this trio was actually more efficient. Plus, two incoming freshmen — Todd Sibley Jr. (5’9, 215) and A.J. Davis (6’0, 205) — are four-star prospects per the 247Sports Composite.

There’s quite a bit of potential in the backfield, and there’s even more up front. Losing Johnson and Bisnowaty hurts, but Piesman-winner O’Neill was a third-team all-conference selection, guards Alex Officer and Alex Bookser have combined for 51 career starts, and size won’t be a problem: the 10 players on the OL two-deep average 6’5, 319. Combined with the bigger backs, that’s quite a bit of meat.

Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images

Brian O'Neill

The receiving corps could be a thrill as long as Weah and Henderson don’t get hurt.

Weah’s return gives the Panthers one sure big-play threat. He was one of the nation’s most underrated receivers, combining a 24.2 yards-per-catch average with a 51 percent success rate. He caught fewer than three passes per game but still nearly finished with 900 receiving yards. Henderson was a nice possession option near the line of scrimmage. The tight end position, meanwhile, has quite a bit of potential as well between four-star sophomore Chris Clark, senior Devon Edwards, Rutgers transfer Matt Flanagan, and incoming four-star Charles Reeves Jr.

Size isn’t an issue here either. Weah is 6’3, backup sophomore Aaron Mathews 6’4, and Reeves is listed at a whopping 6’5, 280.

A single injury could be devastating, though. After Weah and Henderson, Mathews, sophomore Maurice Ffrench, and junior Rafael Araujo-Lopes combined for just nine catches last year.

Defense

The offense has potential, but there’s almost nowhere to go but down. That means the defense will have to pick up the slack. Easier said than done.

A Narduzzi defense is nothing if not aggressive. He is willing to give up big plays in the name of making some. He wants to force college players to make plays college players typically can’t, and that’s great as long as he has the personnel. But his first two Pitt defenses ranked just 50th and 62nd in Def. S&P+. Last year’s Panthers made plays up front but gave up too many big plays; meanwhile, the pass defense was strangely conservative (and still gave up too many big plays).

Pitt allowed 213 gains of 10-plus yards (120th in FBS) and 24 of 40-plus (121st). And that was with Price and Soto up front. That duo combined for 33 tackles for loss and 17.5 sacks, and of the nine players to record at least 4.5 TFLs last season, six are gone.

Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

Rori Blair

The end position still has plenty of potential. Rori Blair and Allen Edwards combined for seven TFLs as complementary pieces, and four-star Tennessee transfer Dewayne Hendrix had a good enough spring to be listed as a starter. But there’s a massive void at DT, where the three leading tacklers are gone.

Shane Roy and Amir Watts combined for 6 tackles, and that’s the extent of your experience in the middle. Big things are expected of four-star redshirt freshman Keyshon Camp, but he’s still a redshirt freshman. There’s still plenty of size here, thanks to players like junior Mike Herndon (6’4, 315) and incoming freshman Jalen Twyman (6’2, 315), but there are no proven pieces.

There aren’t many at linebacker either; junior Oluwaseun Idowu is the only of last year’s top four tacklers to return, though senior Quintin Wirginis and sophomore Saleem Brightwell showed some potential in backup roles.

Vincent Carchietta-USA TODAY Sports

Avonte Maddox

Last year, opponents had to be wary of the run defense and took to the air. They ran just 49 percent of the time on standard downs (123rd in FBS) and 24 percent on passing downs (126th), a sign that there wasn’t much fear of the secondary. Maddox took advantage of the extra attention, combining for 8.5 TFLs and 11 passes defensed, but opponents still completed 64 percent of their passes with a 143.6 passer rating. Pitt basically turned every quarterback into Washington State’s Luke Falk (145.6).

Opposite Maddox will be some combination of sophomores Dane Jackson, Damar Hamllin, and Malik Henderson, junior Phillipie Motley, and redshirt freshman Therran Coleman. Blue-chip freshman Paris Ford could help, but he needs to secure his eligibility first.

Safety was less of an issue last year, but it remains unsure. Free safety Jordan Whitehead returns, and junior Dennis Briggs had 2.5 TFLs and a breakup and might be a play-maker. But once again, if someone gets hurt, there’s almost nothing proven after them.

Special Teams

Chris Blewitt made the biggest field goal of his life against Clemson but still left something to be desired from a consistency standpoint. Pitt ranked just 85th in field goal efficiency, and while punter Ryan Winslow’s leg was strong (42.6 average), the Panthers ranked just 103rd in punt efficiency because of an eight-yard return average.

When you grade poorly in those, you’re going to grade poorly in Special Teams S&P+. Pitt ranked 81st, losing about 0.4 points per game, despite Henderson’s superhuman averages (30.5 yards per kick return, 15.8 yards per punt return, four combined touchdowns). Winslow is back, but Blewitt is replaceable, and Pitt isn’t likely to fall further here.

2017 outlook

2017 Schedule & Projection Factors

Date Opponent Proj. S&P+ Rk Proj. Margin Win Probability 2-Sep Youngstown State NR 25.0 93% 9-Sep at Penn State 8 -16.0 18% 16-Sep Oklahoma State 22 -2.4 44% 23-Sep at Georgia Tech 31 -3.3 42% 30-Sep Rice 120 24.6 92% 7-Oct at Syracuse 60 2.3 55% 14-Oct N.C. State 27 0.9 52% 21-Oct at Duke 65 2.9 57% 28-Oct Virginia 70 10.7 73% 9-Nov North Carolina 38 3.8 59% 18-Nov at Virginia Tech 25 -5.7 37% 24-Nov Miami 18 -3.2 43%

Projected S&P+ Rk 33 Proj. Off. / Def. Rk 13 / 78 Projected wins 6.7 Five-Year S&P+ Rk 7.8 (35) 2- and 5-Year Recruiting Rk 33 / 41 2016 TO Margin / Adj. TO Margin* 1 / -0.4 2016 TO Luck/Game +0.5 Returning Production (Off. / Def.) 44% (44%, 44%) 2016 Second-order wins (difference) 8.2 (-0.2)

Ten years ago, Pitt pulled one of its biggest upsets ever, when a team that had lost seven of its last nine games went to Morgantown and took down No. 2 West Virginia, 13-9.

It was the biggest possible rivalry move — we can’t make anything of our season, but we’re going to destroy yours — and it was a springboard. Pitt went 19-7 over the next two seasons, their best two-year win total since 1981-82.

It’s hard to imagine that happening again following last year’s PSU and Clemson wins. The Panthers just have too much to replace. And that’s fine — sometimes it takes a while to get your classes balanced, and Narduzzi’s mentor experienced a third-year blip before he got rolling at Michigan State.

But as with UNC, newfound normalcy will be tested by a 2017 blip. If Pitt manages a top-40 performance and wins seven or eight games, that could set up a nice run in 2018 and beyond. This team doesn’t have many seniors, after all.

In the increasingly talented ACC, a top-40 performance could take on a lot of looks in the win column. S&P+ projects Pitt 33rd, which means three likely wins (Youngstown State, Rice, Virginia), one likely loss (at Penn State), and a whopping eight relative tossups with win probability between 37 and 59 percent. Pitt has played 14 one-possession games in two years; unless the Panthers fall further than expected, that average probably won’t go down.

That means 4-8 and 10-2 are technically on the table, depending on the bounces that eluded the Panthers for so many years.

Team preview stats

All power conference preview data to date.