#and you go to michigan and then he shows up one day. in san jose. and you're like FUCK!!!!!!!

[teekays]

bordyhenry-ing for my agonies today btw

[nicohischier]

ok well then drop the essay

i think i'm the most normal person ever, to be honest. warning for six paragraphs of absolute nonsensical blabbering if you click read more. sorry.

the player i was thinking of was matthew tkachuk tbh because i like. think about him growing up, and his dad is constantly going from the house to the arena to various road trips until he retires in 2010 and then in 2013 matthew moves to michigan for the usntdp and then brady’s going to play for them too, but now matthew’s in london to play for the knights, and then he’s in calgary for the flames, and then brady’s in boston to play for the university, and then brady’s in ottawa, and taryn is in viriginia and your parents are in missouri and you haven’t spent a year under the same roof as your family since you were 14.

and you get it, you really do, because you’re chasing your dream and brady’s chasing his and taryn’s chasing hers and your parents are letting their children explore the world, but you’re 25 and it’s been a decade since you’ve spent a year with your family. but hockey is about more than just what happens on the ice; it’s about the bonds you forge in the locker rooms, the friendships you build, the brothers you make, the memories you share. but hockey is also built on players being traded and drafted away from each other, and all of a sudden the guys you lifted the memorial cup with and played in the ntdp with are in toronto, arizona, boston, san jose, and you’ll might never play with them again.

so you go to calgary and you make the team in your first year and you sink your roots into the city, the fanbase, the team. you want to stay here, long term. you become teammates and friends and brothers with the guys in that room, and the team changes and players move around but your guys are still there and more guys come in and they become yours too, and you love them you love them you love them.

and then it’s 2022 and your coach has made your locker room toxic and uninviting and it’s never been a perfect coaching situation in calgary but he’s making it worse and you sorta hate it but you love your guys and you want to stay. but then johnny leaves and fuck, maybe he has the right idea. you love your guys but johnny is gone and sean is on the trading block and mikael and elias are probably going to leave soon too and they’re your guys and you don’t want to be left behind entirely.

and now you’re in florida with sam and you love it here. you’re wanted here and, sure, maybe calgary wanted you too, but maybe you outgrew calgary and florida might be smaller than alberta but you can see the ocean and it makes the state feel like the biggest fucking thing in the entire world. and you want to stay here, you want to show that you were worth the investment, so you dig your heels in and you have a career fucking season and you spent the entire all star game making sure everyonep knows why you love florida and you get nominated for the hart trophy and you’re at the front of your team steamrolling their way through playoffs and you’re making history with these guys and you want this team to last.

but you can’t do more than you’re already doing, so you scream your love into bob and alex’s faces and you hug sasha extra hard and you fight to defend your boys and you jump into their arms after goals and you keep fucking fighting to extend your season because you know that when the season ends, the team is going to change and you just want one more day with these guys.

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Offices after COVID: Wider hallways, fewer desks (AP) The coronavirus already changed the way we work. Now it’s changing the physical space, too. Many companies are making adjustments to their offices to help employees feel safer as they return to in-person work, like improving air circulation systems or moving desks further apart. Others are ditching desks and building more conference rooms to accommodate employees who still work remotely but come in for meetings. Architects and designers say this is a time of experimentation and reflection for employers. Steelcase, an office furniture company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says its research indicates half of global companies plan major redesigns to their office space this year. “This year caused you to think, maybe even more fundamentally than you ever have before, ‘Hey, why do we go to an office?’” said Natalie Engels, a San Jose, California-based design principal at Gensler, an architecture firm.

Canada sets record temperature of over 114 degrees amid heat wave, forecasts of even hotter weather (Washington Post) Lytton, a village in British Columbia, became the first place in Canada to ever record a temperature over 113 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday—and experts are predicting even hotter weather to come. The temperature in Lytton soared to just under 115 degrees Sunday, according to Environment Canada, a government weather agency. “It’s warmer in parts of western Canada than in Dubai. I mean, it’s just not something that seems Canadian,” Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips told CTV News on Saturday. Even in the metropolitan hub of Vancouver, parks, beaches and pools have been flooded with residents eager to cool off as the temperature hit 89 degrees at the local airport on Sunday—a record in a coastal city that usually has mild weather. The high temperatures in the region have been blamed on a “heat dome”—a sprawling area of high pressure—now sitting over western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Experts say climate change can make extreme weather events like this more common.

Florida condo collapse echoes tragedies in Brazil, Egypt and India (Washington Post) Around the world, in countries with paltry building codes, little enforcement of existing rules and the proliferation of informal housing, tragedies like Thursday’s building collapse in Florida—where scores of people are still missing—have taken a heavy toll. Among the missing is the first cousin of a former president of Chile, where in 2019 at least six people died when two houses collapsed in the port city of Valparaiso. Others are from Argentina and Colombia, sites of two deadly building tragedies that killed at least a dozen people in each country in 2013. On Friday, five people were killed in the coastal Egyptian city of Alexandria after a five-story building collapsed—an all-too-frequent event in a country where planning permits are often bypassed or violated and makeshift structures house millions of people. At least two people died in Brazil when a four-story residential building crumbled June 3 in a slum in Rio de Janeiro, were organized crime is known to have a hand in shoddy construction projects. In India, buildings are routinely at risk of collapse during the annual monsoon rains. The night of June 9, at least 11 people, including eight children, were killed in Mumbai when a two-story building collapsed on nearby structures, the BBC reported. Local authorities said it was likely due to heavy rains.

New Cuba policy on hold while Biden deals with bigger problems (Washington Post) Five months into his administration, President Biden’s campaign promise to “go back” to the Obama policy of engagement with Cuba remains unfulfilled, lodged in a low-priority file somewhere between “too hard” and “not worth it.” “I would say that 2021 is not 2015,” when Obama reestablished full diplomatic relations with Havana and opened the door to increased U.S. travel and trade with the communist-ruled island, only to see Donald Trump slam it closed again, a senior administration official said. “We have an entire world and a region in disarray,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “We are combating a pandemic and dealing with a breaking down of democracy in a whole host of countries. That is the environment we are in. When it comes down to Cuba, we’ll do what’s in the national security interest of the United States.” But if the current state of the world and national security demands on the administration make addressing the relationship with Cuba one hard problem too many, what makes it not worth the effort is a purely domestic matter. For the most part, it comes down to two words: Robert Menendez. The Democratic senator from New Jersey, the powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is a key player in issues the administration sees as far more important than Cuba in a Senate evenly split along party lines. The U.S.-born son of immigrants from pre-communist Cuba, he is strongly against reopening the door to Havana.

Venezuela migrants cross US border in droves (AP) Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with her fellow migrants, a tearful respite after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing onto someone’s backyard lawn, where, seconds before, she stepped on American soil for the first time. It’s a frequent scene across the U.S.-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration. But these aren’t farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. They’re bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela, and they’re arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America. Last month, 7,484 Venezuelans were encountered by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border—more than all 14 years for which records exist. While some are government opponents fearing harassment and jailing, the vast majority are escaping long-running economic devastation marked by blackouts and shortages of food and medicine.

Peru’s election limbo (Foreign Policy) Supporters of both Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori took to the streets of Peru over the weekend as the June 6 presidential election still does not have an official winner. Castillo’s apparent 44,000-vote victory has been delayed by Fujimori’s accusations of fraud in an election process that international observers, including the United States, have described as free and fair. An electoral jury charged with adjudicating contested ballots resumes its review today, with an official result only possible once the jury’s work has concluded.

Who needs hackers? (Foreign Policy) A spat between Russia and the United Kingdom over a British naval vessel’s transit near Russian-occupied Crimea took a bizarre turn over the weekend when classified documents about the operation were found in a sodden heap behind a bus stop in Kent. The documents, given to the BBC, describe the boat’s journey—which caused Russia to scramble military jets—as an “innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters,” and includes potential routes that would have avoided a Russian response. The British government has launched an investigation into how the documents leaked. Responding to the incident, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova mocked the British government. “Why do we need ‘Russian hackers’ if there are British bus stops?,” Zakharova said on Telegram.

The Far-Right Stumbles in France (Foreign Policy) The French far-right fared poorly in regional elections over the weekend, failing to win control of even one of France’s 18 regions and potentially denting Marine Le Pen’s chances ahead of next year’s presidential contest. Le Pen will hope that the low turnout belies greater support on the national stage. An estimated 34.5 percent of French voters cast a ballot on Sunday.

Spain, Portugal further restrict UK travelers (AP) Spain and Portugal have placed new restrictions on U.K. travelers. Portugal says they must go into quarantine for two weeks unless they have proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 finished 14 days earlier. The policy took effect Monday. The government says people can quarantine at home or in a place stipulated by Portuguese health authorities. Arrivals from Brazil, India and South Africa come under the same rule. All others entering Portugal must show either the European Union’s COVID Digital Certificate or a negative PCR test. In Spain, beginning Thursday, people arriving from the U.K. in the Balearic Islands will have to show they have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or have a negative PCR test.

India Shifts 50,000 Troops to China Border in Historic Move (Bloomberg) India has redirected at least 50,000 additional troops to its border with China in a historic shift toward an offensive military posture against the world’s second-biggest economy. Although the two countries battled in the Himalayas in 1962, India’s strategic focus has primarily been Pakistan since the British left the subcontinent, with the long-time rivals fighting three wars over the disputed region of Kashmir. Yet since the deadliest India-China fighting in decades last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has sought to ease tensions with Islamabad and concentrate primarily on countering Beijing. Over the past few months, India has moved troops and fighter jet squadrons to three distinct areas along its border with China, according to four people familiar with the matter. All in all, India now has roughly 200,000 troops focused on the border, two of them said, which is an increase of more than 40% from last year. China is adding fresh runway buildings, bomb-proof bunkers to house fighter jets and new airfields along the disputed border in Tibet, two of the people said. Beijing also adding long-range artillery, tanks, rocket regiments and twin-engine fighters in the last few months.

U.S. targets Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Syria strikes (Washington Post) U.S. forces launched airstrikes on facilities on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, the Pentagon said Sunday, in response to recent drone attacks on U.S. troops in the region carried out by Iran-backed militias. Two militia locations in Syria were attacked, along with one in Iraq, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a statement, which described the strikes as defensive in nature. Officials have said militias employing small, explosive-laden drones to attack regional U.S. personnel is one of the chief concerns for the U.S. military mission there. Syrian state media said, without providing evidence, that U.S. strikes hit residential buildings near the border around 1 a.m. local time, killing one child and wounding three residents.

Palestinians protesting against Abbas (AP) Thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets in recent days to protest against President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, whose security forces and supporters have violently dispersed them. The demonstrations were sparked by the death of an outspoken critic of the PA in security forces’ custody last week, but the grievances run much deeper. Abbas’ popularity plunged after he called off the first elections in 15 years in April and was sidelined by the Gaza war in May. The PA has long been seen as rife with corruption and intolerant of dissent. Its policy of coordinating security with Israel to go after Hamas and other mutual foes is extremely unpopular. Protesters at the Al-Aqsa mosque on Friday accused the PA of being collaborators, a charge that amounts to treason.

Ethiopia declares immediate, unilateral cease-fire in Tigray (AP) Ethiopia’s government on Monday declared an immediate, unilateral cease-fire in its Tigray region after nearly eight months of deadly conflict as Tigray forces occupied the regional capital, soldiers retreated and hundreds of thousands of people continue to face the world’s worst famine crisis in a decade. The cease-fire could calm a war that has destabilized Africa’s second most populous country and threatened to do the same in the wider Horn of Africa, where Ethiopia has been seen as a key security ally for the West. The declaration was carried by state media shortly after the Tigray interim administration, appointed by the federal government, fled the regional capital, Mekele. Meanwhile, Mekele residents cheered the return of Tigray forces for the first time since Ethiopian forces took the city in late November. Ethiopia said the cease-fire will last until the end of the crucial planting season in Tigray. The season’s end comes in September.

After pandemic free-for-all, parents struggle to reinstate screen-time rules (Washington Post) The week after Rebecca Grant took away her kids’ video games for a month, after a year of relaxed pandemic rules, her 10-year-old son was livid. The ban wasn’t an easy decision for Grant. The 46-year-old mom of two from Fremont, Calif., did hours of research and read multiple books from parenting experts. She joined Facebook groups for families in similar situations and closely watched her children’s behavior, which had been worrisome for a while. “He was really not taking it well,” Grant said. “In a way, it reinforced my decision. He’s just so attached to this [video games], he’s not rational.” After 15 months of various levels of shutdowns, families in the United States are trying to come out of a tech-filled haze for summer. It’s a chance to swap out Xbox time for bike rides with friends, or Zoom school for summer camp. But parents are discovering that subtracting screen time is much harder to do than adding it. They are facing resistance from kids accustomed to their freedom or just struggling to find alternatives to fill the time before a more normal fall school semester begins.      While some parents just want their kids to be social or active again, many have noticed personality and behavioral changes in their children. They’re irritable, argumentative and have poor focus. Some have become anxious or depressed, or throw more tantrums and fly into rages. “Having all that screen time all day for a whole year, their nervous system is really disregulated, and those symptoms need to be reversed,” said Victoria Dunckley, a child psychiatrist who studies the impact of screens on children and the author of “Reset Your Child’s Brain.” “All this overstimulation is putting them into a state of stress.”

[dailyaudiobible]

05/24/2020 DAB Transcript

2 Samuel 4:1-6:23, John 13:31-14:14, Psalms 119:17-32, Proverbs 15:31-32

Today is the 24th day of May welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is wonderful to be here with you today as we reach out our collective hands and twist the knob and open the door and walk into this brand-new week together. Everything is out in front of us. We have this reset. This is the last full week of the 5th month of the year. Yeah, a week from today is the last day of this month. So, we are oriented, we are ready to live into this, we are ready to hear what God has to say through His Word into our lives this week as we join our hearts and minds around this Global Campfire. So, we got a brand-new week and we’ll read from the English Standard Version this week and we’ll pick up the story. And at this point the story is highly focused…well…on somewhat the tumultuous times as King Saul has died and King David has become king of Judah, the tribe of Judah. And, so, there's kind of all this unrest about who's going to be the king and how and all the intrigue and drama around that and people are watching David, they’re watching what he does, how his posture is. And, so, we continue with that story today, second Samuel chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for this new week that we are walking into and we…we mark this every week by just considering the fact that it's in front of us, it's the future, it's what we are immediately walking into and we…we do this because we don't want to walk into a blindly just kind of floating along. We want to walk into it intentionally with You and we've learned from our reading as we begin this week is that we are to love one another as You have loved us and…oh…that's…in our own strength that is not possible. We can try and try and try and try and maybe make it through a day, but it…without Your Holy Spirit guiding our steps we can't do that, and we confess that. And, so, we see that in order to obey You we need You. And, so, come Holy Spirit we surrender to You and invite You to show us what it looks like in this coming week to love each other as You have loved us. Come Holy Spirit into this we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it’s the website, it’s where you find out what's going on around here in a virtual community. So, stay connected there. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can access most of this stuff as well from within the app.

So, the Daily Audio Bible Shop is there full of resources for this daily rhythm that we have in our lives.

The Community section is where you go to find the Prayer Wall as well as the different links to reach out and interact and connect on social media. So, be familiar with that.

The Initiatives section is what's going on around here. So, certainly be familiar with that as well.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link on the homepage. Thank you, thank you profoundly. There wouldn’t be anything going on around here if we were not in this together. And, so, thank you for your partnership. So, there’s a link on the homepage. If you’re use using the app, you can press the Give button. The mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or encouragement you can dial 877-942-4253 or you can hit the Hotline button, the little red button at the top in the app and share from there.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi DAB family this is Rosie from Spring Hill. I am calling in to Lisa from San Jose. Just wanted to give you my condolences for your husband Craig. I am a hospice nurse. I just started a few months ago so I don’t have a lot of experience but I do know that a lot of times people feel like they don’t do enough or don’t do a good job and I just want to let you know that I know you said that you want to do God’s will and I believe that being there with your husband and spending the time with him and loving him even though it was a scary time and difficult to watch and very sad and emotional you stayed with him and loved him and I think that was doing God’s will. I think that was very Christlike. And I know you said he had a little pain at the end and that it was a little bit better. And I’ve heard it explained to me that it’s kind of like your last struggle or last wrestling with God and I’m glad that he gave you that the gift of him being alert to read Brian’s book Sneezing Jesus together. That sounds special and just something that beautiful that God gave you as a last memory, happy memory together. And I hope that you’re doing well, and I hope that you are feeling God’s presence and His peace and comfort.

Hi it’s Sherry from Kansas and this is for those people who have worked hard and sacrificed to build their own businesses and to make progress toward achieving their goals and now because of what’s happening in the world they could potentially lose their businesses or lose what they’ve worked so hard for. And I know that God knows, He’s seen your works, he’s seen your sacrifice. But I just want to say that sometimes when I’ve felt like I lost everything that I would be worshiping the Lord and all of a sudden it would hit me that I didn’t need anything in this world. I…there was nothing I needed to pray for because I had everything, I needed in Him. So, I just want to say that we need to keep our hearts and our minds set on him and regardless of what’s going on around us He is truly all and everything that we need. [singing starts] turn your hearts upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace [singing stops]. God bless you all. Bye-bye.

Good morning this message is for Chris from Michigan. My name is Christina Rose I’m in Denver right now and I wanted to pray for you about the situation with your teenage daughter who is feeling hopeless. I’m a mom, I have daughters, they’re in their 20s. And storms come and go in this life. Now, I am a survivor of a teenage suicide attempt myself. I went to school in South America and had a class of five people and the isolation was very depressing to me. And fortunately, my mother intervened and…as I’m still here today. I look on that now and remember how painful it was for my mom when she saw what was going on and such a distressing time for parent. Storms come and go. Isolation is the enemy. Even if your daughter can’t be with her friends just do whatever you can to back her up and just…just tell her would she be tempted…I look back and I think…I said I would have missed out on marriage and children and surfing under the Golden Gate Bridge and I mean a million wonderful things if I had just given up in the middle of the storm. And just encourage her to hang on. Things turn around. That is the way of life. We go through storms. Now my dad did successfully take his life and I have to tell you I feel him around me all the time saying he’s sorry and feeling regretful that he hadn’t seen the big picture and if he had he would’ve stayed. That leaving solves nothing and your…your loved ones, you have to watch your loved one’s carry-on without you which is very painful. You can write to at christinarose.org. God bless you and your family, and I pray that every day you would be well.

Hey DAB family just calling to say hi and this is Reggie from Iowa and hi dad if you’re listening. And I’m calling to pray for Chris from formerly New York City who just called in and he said he was healed from an infirmity and was asking for prayer for his…for insomnia. Dear God, I just thank you so much for Chris and this this beautiful community that were all in, the DAB family. Father I pray that You will just touch Chris today Jesus and I pray that You will help them to sleep well at night. God Your word…Your word says that…that those who trust in You will be able to lay down and rest and sleep peacefully at night. I pray God that You will touch Chris in a mighty way, give him Your peace and may all things work together for…for his good and for Your glory God because I know that he loves You. Touch him and his family today in Jesus’ name. Amen. Love you DAB family. You guys are awesome. Thanks Brian and Jill for all you do. Have a great day.

Good morning everybody it’s Susan from Canada calling. I just heard on the daily prayer that Chrissy from Alabama wants us to pray for her friends in Texas whose daughter died in a car accident and second daughter is in ICU. They were hit by a drunk driver. And Lord God, Lord heavenly Father Jesus be with that family. Dear Lord, I know what suffering for Your children is like. And it’s not a good space to be in but we know that You are the Lord, that You are the King of kings and the Lord of lords. We know that You love us. We know that Your comfort will heal us. And I pray Lord over the family, the girl in ICU, __ a healing touch from You. And dear God I pray for the family whose grieving such a huge loss. Lord God just be with each and every one of them as they just have to climb out of this hole that they’re in. Lift them dear God. Lift them high with You where they can soar as eagles’ wings. Of Lord Jesus just be with them and this little girl in ICU dear God. I just don’t know why we have to go through these things but we trust in Your love for us in all things and in all ways. Bless all of us Your God as we travel through these difficult times. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

Hello this is Jackie from Decatur Texas I’m a new DAB listener. It was by the grace of God that I came up upon DAB and was curious about it and…well…now here I am about a month into listening. I love the community and what it offers. I’ve wanted to call in to request prayer, but I lacked the confidence in doing so until now. I was married for 24 years, now divorced for three years. The divorce was ugly, which tore and ripped many things. I currently live with my whole family due to the fact that I’ve recently discovered that I am codependent. I wondered why I felt this need to provide for my adult daughters, their families, my mom and my brother. Our home is an emotional mess right now with disagreement, discord, and dysfunction. I need prayer please. My heart is heavy with the many things the enemy has used against my family. He has attempted kill, steal and destroy. I cry out to Abba, how long oh Lord? I am worn and wary and lacking in my faith. I’m still grieving and hurting over such loss from the divorce. I have no hope and I covet your prayers. Thank you.

[thatsdemko]

☆ Therapy ☆- J.Norris

CHAPTER ONE

A/N: I originally was going to post a different imagine today but I decided I would just post the series instead! Sorry for those who voted for jack I will most likely post that series later on sometime when I finish this series it won’t be right away but it’ll happen I promise you! And my inbox is still open for requests even when I write this series just note I’ll be focused on the series a bit more but will still try to write requests! But anyway, I hope you enjoy this series let me know your thoughts as it goes on!

The nervous look was present as she sat there in the waiting room of therapy while her dad filled out all the forms. There was another boy across from her who had a like injury, from what she could tell on the outside. His mother was also filling out paperwork while he sat there on his phone. She didn’t want to be here as much as the guy across from her, when he walked in he had the most unpleasant look, it could have been from the pain or from being dragged here. Either way, they both felt the same way whether it was shown or not.

“I’m looking for a Megan Jones and Josh Norris.” A lady with scrubs and a clipboard came out and the two of them stood up as her father stopped her, “make sure to tell mom when you’re done, okay? Be careful.” He warned as Megan had already done a whole bunch of stupid things that she wasn’t supposed to do with her shoulder before even coming to therapy, “I will.” She whispered following, who she assumed was, josh down the hall, “you both are going to room two, okay?” She smiled pointing to the left as they both walked further down the hall hearing lots of chatter from, coincidentally, room two. When josh walked in he saw two empty seats next to each other empty in the circle and josh took one while Megan sat in the other as she watched him pull out his phone again going back to whatever he was doing while Megan looked around seeing the injuries all seemed to vary from shoulder to leg and so did the ages.

“Alrighty it seems we have everyone.” A doctor came in with a bright smile on his face and josh turned off his phone shoving it into his coat pocket letting out a big sigh leaning back into his chair as Megan looked at him and then back at the doctor.

“It’s so lovely to see you all! Now the reason we have all you in a group is we are trying out a new kind of therapy,” the doctors smile got wider while pulling up a chair next to josh as he moved as much as he could towards Megan’s chair to make room as did the other person who originally sat next to him.

“You all are a group of athletes and you all seem to have like injuries,” he started out looking over at josh and then around the rest of the group, “we figured that we would pair you up with people who have like injuries and since you are athletes we figured you all knew ways to motivate each other, so up there on the board is all of your names paired with someone, I would like to say you all go up at least one at a time carefully.” He noted as a few people went up checking their names and then meeting the people they were with. There were so many mixed emotions in the room it was almost unsettling. She stood up from her chair going up to the board seeing she was paired with who she came in with. Josh Norris.

She sighed looking back at him and then at the board, “you’re lucky, he’s so fine.” A girl came up beside Megan and she laughed, “yeah but could he look less interested?” Megan asked and she looked over at him once more and then back at her shrugging, “give him time, girl.” She said as Megan walked over to josh standing in front of him, “I’m Megan, we are partners.” She said and he picked his head up from his phone putting it away again nodding his head, “cool, I’m josh.” He said and she smiled sitting down next to him, “how did you get hurt?” She asked and he sighed running his free hand through his messed up hair, “hockey for world juniors, you?”

“Lacrosse.” She sighed looking down at her chipped nail polish, she hated thinking about the way she got injured, and how the doctor told her she may never play the way she did before surgery and that worried and motivated her the most to be here.

“Hey, we are here to get better, I’m sure you’ll be back and better in no time.” He offered some wisdom as seeing the way her mood changed once he asked and she picked her head up giving a fake smile nodding her head, “yeah, and same to you.”

“Thanks, so do you play lacrosse like with a school?”

“Yeah I play for Michigan.” She said and he smiled taking a look at her now and then shaking his head, “no come on I’d have to have seen you, really?” He asked and she nodded her head slowly, “yeah? Why?”

“I play hockey for Michigan. You know Quinn Hughes?” He asked and she shrugged as best as she could, “the name? Yes. Him? No.”

“I play on a power play line with him, I’m his best friend. I play hockey for Michigan, I’m josh.” He said pointing to himself as if he hadn’t established his name already.

“I don’t really watch hockey, I’m sorry—but my roommate might know who you are she loves to watch you boys.”

Josh nodded his head, “yeah no that’s okay, I’m just surprised I mean you go to Michigan?”

“Yeah, do you want to see my student identification?” She asked jokingly and he shook his head laughing a bit, “no well what do you study?”

“Premed, you?”

“That’s why, I’m in general studies because well I was supposed leave after this year,” He flaunted and she nodded her head seeing he was getting a bit cocky about himself—which Megan couldn’t stand, most lax guys were always cocky about their game when they had absolutely none.

“Got you.” She said nodding her head looking back at the circle and then back at him, “where did you get drafted?”

“Originally, San Jose, but got traded. Does lacrosse have a draft?” He asked and she nodded her head, “yeah, but I’m a sophomore usually you wait until you’re a senior to enter.” She said, she ruined her chance to enter early if she wanted to, and she hated that. She loved Michigan, but she wanted to enter early to continue doing what she loved, but the injury cost her everything.

Just as josh was about to talk he got cut off by the doctor standing up handing everyone a time table of their scheduled appointments the person and their partner must report to therapy, “if one of your partners does not show we will reschedule or if they let us know in advance, make sure you all share information with each other so these couple of months together can go smoothly. See you all on your first day! Team work makes the dreams work my fellow athletes!” He cheered walking out of the room as josh pulled out his phone handing it to her, “just for in case.” He smiled and she typed her number in sending herself a text and then making her contact, “there you go, see you next week on Tuesday.” She smiled as they both stood up out of the chairs walking out of the room together.

“Yeah, see you next Tuesday.”

[clarkewilliams-blog]

     hey lads!!! i’m reese ( 21, est, they/them ) and this here is clarke. i’ve played too many versions of him but i’ve revamped him a bit here to make him a slightly better player so he can have the contract that would let him fit somewhat into this rp lmao. all you need to know about me is that i fucking love hockey and my og team fucking sucks so all i’ve done for the past five years is love on prospects and watch them develop and ( sometimes ) make it to the nhl. so i apologize in advance for going absolute ham on the details of clarke’s path to the nhl no one cares abt. clarke’s a mix of some of my fav nhl prospects and players which i’ll list at the end if anyone cares. also i don’t really know anything about the rangers besides lundqvist being the king and how to properly pronounce skjei so bear with me here.

     i’m always super excited to play clarke, so let’s get to it!!!

          gregg sulkin. male. he/him.  ／  clarke williams just pulled up blasting high hopes by panic! at the disco — that song is so them! you know, for a twenty-four year old nyr defenseman, i’ve heard they’re really -private, but that they make up for it by being so +easygoing. if i had to choose three things to describe them, i’d probably say cold lakewater against sweaty skin, the cool shadows around a spotlight, and an easy smile captured by an unnoticed camera. here’s to hoping they don’t cause too much trouble! ( reese, 21, est, they/them)

THE STORY

--- clarke williams was born on the coldest day of december in a snowstorm, it was only fitting then he would love the cold like nothing else. he fell in love with skating long before he did the sport of hockey : he loved how it made him feel, how exhilarating and freeing it was. when he was eight, he picked up his first hockey stick ( a little LATE by some standards ) and fell in love again.

--- he ascended beyond his peers quickly, driving the game from the blue line even at a young age. his high school made a bid for the coveted state championship TWICE : once his freshman year and again his sophomore year. they never did make it all the way and that’s something he wishes he could have experienced. despite not winning it all, he was noticed by scouts and invited to the tryout camp for the us national team development program. he made the program and finished his last two years of high school with the ntdp in ann arbor, michigan with the u17 and u18 teams, respectively.

--- after his graduation from the program, he was selected in the second round of the 2013 NHL draft, 49th overall to the san jose sharks ( IRONICALLY, that draft pick was originally from the rangers ). he was scouted by the university of north dakota, quinnapiac, and university of minnesota; ultimately, he committed to north dakota, the first school to offer him a scholarship. his freshman year he was selected to team usa at the 18u world juniors where they won gold (2014 u18 wjc), and again his junior year to the 20u world juniors where they won bronze (2016 wjc).

--- the end of his junior year he chose to sign his entry level contract with the sharks instead of finishing his final year at north dakota : they made the frozen four all three years of his tenure, finally winning it all in 2016. it seemed like a fitting time to move on. waiting out the full four years of college and going to free agency had never been on clarke’s mind, the sharks were the ones who’d seen something in him, drafted him, and believed in him — he was always going to sign with them. he finished the 15-16 season on a professional try out with the sharks’ ahl team, the san jose barracuda.

—- the next season (16-17) he played for the barracuda and was called up at the end of the season when injuries plagued the team. he played well during the playoffs but was held to no points and the next season despite his best efforts, he was sent down to the barracuda halfway through training camp. that season (17-18) he was called up in january, once again the sharks made playoffs and he played in them, building upon his progress from the season prior. he entered the off-season feeling like he was in a good place and ready to work through the season, determined to make the big club in october.

—- however, that off-season brought chaos. he’d already flown into san jose for training camp when his agent called with news of a trade. clarke was sent to ottawa as one of the many pieces in the erik karlsson trade. but it didn’t end there, he was still packing when news of a second trade hit : he’d been flipped to the new york rangers in exchange for a third round pick.

—- he arrived at rangers training camp with something to prove, determined to show not one but two teams they’d made a mistake in trading him. he still didn’t make the team straight out of camp, but he played a mere three games with the hartford wolfpack before an injury hit the rangers and he got the call to join the big club. determined to not let this opportunity slip through his hands, he played his heart out on the ice, having an impressive breakout season and establishing his place as a talented two-way defenseman. he did not get sent back down that year (18-19).

—- this past off-season, the team took a gamble and signed him to a lengthy contract instead of a bridge deal, 6 years 4.5 AAV. he starts the first year of this contract this upcoming season.

MISC

—- clarke spends his summers in minnesota at his family’s lake house. he 100% has that dumb minnesota energy and posts videos of him wakeboarding all the time. when he’s not training and preparing for the season or playing in da beauty league ( a summer minnesota hockey league ), he’s probably on a boat. he’s most likely just returned to new york very recently.

—- very calm off the ice ; very easy-going and likes to keep things light. it’s his way with dealing with stress and pressure : just pretend it isn’t there and it won’t affect you.— he’s a hella private person but kinda not in an obvious way?? like he doesn’t share much about himself, esp what he’s feeling or even when massive things happen in his life; even his mom doesn’t know a lot of things that happen/happened to him. however, at the same time he’s extremely personable and friendly, which makes it not super obvious to his friends that they don’t really know a ton about him until they really think about it.

— “tough as a junkyard dog” ; “an absolute beast” ; will play injured ( i don’t condone this and no one should but i can’t stop him… ). there’s this large blotchy thing on his neck that kinda looks like a hickey or rash but it’s actually a three a half inch scar he got when he was 16 when a skate slashed his neck. he’s very lucky it didn’t hit his main artery. it runs from about his adam’s apple and extends toward the side of his neck.

—- he lives in an apartment with two of his teammates during the season, it makes the rent a little more reasonable.

—- ain’t no lie, baby. bi bi bi. ( but on the DL obv ).

—- hockey may have been in clarke’s blood; however, his mother knew the merit of clarke being a well-rounded athlete : he ran cross-country and track, played baseball, and lacrosse. he especially excelled at baseball, but he absolutely hated the practices, so his stint with it did not last particular long. but he had a tough competitive streak, doing well in xc and track, and even lacrosse to a degree ( it certainly helped spades with his hand-eye coordination ). he started focuses more on hockey once hitting high school.

—- SEHNSUCHT : it’s a german word that roughly translates to a yearning for the future, and can maybe be considered a rough antonym for nostalgia. it’s rooted in a belief of constant improvement and that perfection is impossible to achieve ( but that it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive for it anyway ). it fits will very well ; he’s not one to dwell on the past and is constantly working to improve himself and his game.

—- he really likes being high up, not because of any sense of ego but actually being high up and looking down at things helps him keep things in perspective ( everything is just a small part of each other ).

—- he hates when people worry about him which is real ironic since he worries about everyone else too much ; be it his team, his friends, or family. it comes with being extremely loyal. on the ice he hates to see teammates pushed around and pretty much will always do something about it.

—- he was raised by a single mother and he appreciates her very much #doubleshifting. it’s given him a humble outlook on life and for a while, he worked as a line cook in a diner to help pay for his hockey equipment. he never wanted to make the nhl for the money or fame, he just wanted to make a living playing the sport he loved. the most he’s made the tabloids was when he briefly dated a model/singer ( possible wc??? ) — they broke up after three months: she couldn’t cope with his schedule and said he was distracted from her.

—- he studied aeronautics in college because besides going into the nhl, the one thing he wanted to be was a pilot.

—- there’s this video of brock boeser where he says “y’know” 45 times in a three minute interview and that’s clarke trying to do media. ( like i said, dumb minnesota energy ).

—- PLAYING STYLE : clarke is an excellent two-way defenseman. his most prominent skill is his ability to skate. he’s very quick and evasive and very good on his edges. he’s good at defensive zone exits and capable of jumping up in the rush, and his speed allows him to get back quickly if he needs to. his slapshot finds its way through traffic and he’s looking to get more minutes on the second powerplay on the point. he can throw big hits when necessary and doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice his body to block shots. he’s good muscle on the ice when scrums break out.

—- 6’3” 201 lbs.

—- PLAY COMPARABLES: brendan guhle ( skating ability and speed ), seth jones ( two-way game ), jake mccabe ( physicality ).

—- PERSONALITY COMPARABLES : brock boeser, will borgen, casey mittelstadt ( just... dumb minnesota energy )

if you actually read all that... i’m very impressed and we definitely need to plot. i’m not one for listing wc’s mostly because i’m bad at them. i’ll be back later after my family thing to read intros, plot, and get interacting with you all!! 

oh also fun fact, i also wrote most of this without brady skjei in mind until i went on campfriendly to find contract comparables and i lowkey kinda accidentally made brady skjei huh.

[racingtoaredlight]

College Football 2020 Season Week 12 TV Watch Em Ups: this is really still way too much football

Would you believe that I am not good at conveying accurate information? I know, it came as a shock to me, too! But it turns out this is week 12 of the college football season. Somebody else can leaf back through these posts but I’m not sure from this distance that I even made it as far as week 1 with the number listed correctly. But I’ve gotta trust what’s in front of me.

It doesn’t matter anyway. The long game for me has always been waiting for the season to be called off entirely and it’s becoming more and more clear that some version of this grotesquerie is going to make its way to the very bloody end of the playoffs. So even in my safest gambling prognostications I am utterly useless and wrong. (Maybe two consecutive days without my pills was a bad idea...) Here’s where things stand at postin’ time:

Saturday, November 21

Matchup                                             Time (ET)                       TV/Mobile

Georgia Southern at Army                12:00pm                        CBSSN

What a miserable way to open a post. Let’s skip this one.

Illinois at Nebraska                            12:00pm                           FS1

Still loling at Penn State. A great capper to Nebraska hanging on to beat Penn State last week would be to turn around and earn Lovie Smith another chance to win four more games in 2021.

LSU at Arkansas                                12:00pm                         SECN

This appears to be a mistake as LSU suspended their football program for the 2020 season.

6 Florida at Vanderbilt                       12:00pm                          ESPN

Florida hasn’t had a complete fuck up yet in 2020. Something seems really off about that.

9 Indiana at 3 Ohio State                   12:00pm                          FOX

Indiana has been the feel good story of 2020 college football so far. Maybe the only feel good story. They’re going to lose this game but show enough pluck and fight and courage to stick pretty close to the top 10 before taking a soul shattering dive at home against Maryland next week. Or they’ll just lose to tOSU by 60.

4 Clemson at Florida State                12:00pm                          ABC

Bobby Bowden built Florida State into a powerhouse by taking road matchups against anybody dumb enough to take that win for granted. There is a whole “sod graveyard” at FSU commemorating the biggest of those wins. So there’s a decent chance the +35.5 line for this game (or +36.5 depending on where you bet) is the most anybody has ever been favored as a road team in Tallahassee. I’ve mentioned before in these posts that FSU is maybe at the lowest point of any of Florida’s big three programs in my lifetime. There is actually no maybe. This program is a total shambles right now.

East Carolina at Temple                     12:00pm                            ESPN+

Eh, sure. Fine.

Arkansas State at Texas State           12:00pm                           ESPNU

Not sure if any of you caught the whole Farhad Manjoo controversy on twitter yesterday but basically he wrote an article for the New York Times about how many people he’s been exposed to in terms of COVID risk lately and how dangerous it could be for him to now fly home to his parents house for Thanksgiving. After going through all of the math and demonstrating pretty well what a horrible idea it would be for him to celebrate Thanksgiving with his parents he concludes by saying that he’s going to go ahead and celebrate Thanksgiving with his parents anyway. This game here, Arkansas State at Texas State, is about the same level of completely worthless risk of death and it’s still going to be played. I might start referencing that dumb Farhad Manjoo article/idea more regularly in watch em up posts.

Appalachian State at 15 Coastal Carolina         12:00pm           ESPN2

Coastal Carolina is going to win a national championship against BYU because every other program is too close to an 100% infection rate to keep playing. BYU doesn’t believe in shit like COVID and Coastal Carolina used up all of their budget fielding a team in the first place.

Stephen F. Austin at Memphis             12:00pm                          ESPN+

There it is, the 100th game to kick off at noon this Saturday! Congratulations, everybody!

Rice at North Texas                               2:00pm                            ESPN3

Rice has had a football program for a really long time for some reason.

FIU at WKU                                            2:00pm                             ESPN3

...

North Alabama at 8 BYU                      3:00pm                        BYUtv/ESPN3

One of sports great rivalry games.

UTSA at Southern Miss                        3:00pm                            ESPN+

Mmm, another classic.

Western Carolina at Eastern Kentucky        3:00pm                   ESPN3

Thank god this one isn’t cancelled.

UCLA at 11 Oregon                               3:30pm                            ESPN2

Chip Kelly is still at UCLA, right? It would be kind of funny if he beat Oregon but also might go more or less unnoticed. Oregon has to be the least hyped team in the country to feature maybe four 2021 first round picks and a clear path to a conference title. The Pac-12 came so close to actually doing the right thing and not playing this year.

Iowa at Penn State                                3:30pm                              BTN

When I said that Indiana is the feel good story of the season so far I forgot that Penn State hasn’t won yet. Rockeye Chalkeye Hawkeyes or whatever Iowa’s chant is. Let’s keep it fucking going.

California at Oregon State                    3:30pm                              FS1

Not a single feeling.

10 Wisconsin at 19 Northwestern         3:30pm                             ABC

For my money this is close to as unappealing as a top 20 matchup is liable to ever be. That’s only partially explained by the sham quality of this season overall.

San Diego State at Nevada                    3:30pm                             CBS

This is good stuff normally but I might just skip this entire day of watching.

Middle Tennessee at Troy                       3:30pm                           ESPN3

{URGE TO DO LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE INTENSIFYING}

Georgia State at South Alabama            3:30pm                           ESPNU

I am boiling over with apathy at the thought of this one.

7 Cincinnati at UCF                                  3:30pm                            ESPN

The people’s champs are not particularly great this year but maybe they can do us all a solid and derail the train that is Ohio State, Jr. The line isn’t crazily tilted towards the Bearcats (-5)  so maybe it’s a real possibility?

Virginia Tech at Pitt                                  4:00pm                            ACCN

Don’t let anybody convince you that the players aren’t wearing masks on the field during game action here. You’ve just gotta believe.

Kansas State at 17 Iowa State                4:00pm                            FOX

I should be interested in this one and yet...

Kentucky at 1 Alabama                            4:00pm                            SECN

For the record I agree that Mac Jones is really good and I also put him at about the 15th best player on the Tide this year. So, no, he wouldn’t be in the lead for RTARLsman 2020 if that were happening.

Abilene Christian at Virginia                     4:00pm                       RSN/ESPN3

UVA is completely inscrutable this year. Even more than usual. But they have been an absolute pleasure to watch in short bursts because their uniform game has been exceptionally sharp.

 Tennessee at 23 Auburn                            7:00pm                           ESPN

Missouri at South Carolina                            7:30pm                   SECN Alt.

The SEC is putting their messiest foot forward in primetime this week.

Michigan at Rutgers                                        7:30pm                     BTN

Great conference matchup between two programs that peaked in the 19th century and will never be national champions again.

21 Liberty at NC State                                     7:30pm              RSN/ESPN3

This Liberty being ranked thing is hilarious but I’ll be pretty happy if NC State wrecks them.

14 Oklahoma State at 18 Oklahoma              7:30pm                     ABC

Bedlam, baby! In primetime! Why!

Mississippi State at 13 Georgia                     7:30pm                     SECN

I don’t root for the UGAs often but I’ll be deeply in their corner this week. I want Mike Leach out of a job by the end of next season.

Arizona at Washington                                    8:00pm                      FOX

Pretty sweet uniform matchup, if nothing else. It is nothing else.

20 USC at Utah                                                10:30pm                    ESPN

I should really want to watch this game but I really don’t.

Boise State at Hawaii                                      11:00pm                  CBSSN

Maybe Boise will be tired from travel but they have no business winning by less than 20. Hawaii is not running that GoGo shit and they deserve to burn for it.

GAMES OF THE WEEK

Charlotte at 15 Marshall                                  Postponed

Wake Forest at Duke                                       Postponed

ULM vs. Louisiana Tech (in Shreveport, LA)    Canceled

Ole Miss at 5 Texas A&M                                 Postponed

Central Arkansas at 24 Louisiana                   Canceled

Michigan State at Maryland                            Canceled

San Jose State at Fresno State                      Canceled

UNLV at Colorado State                                  Canceled

Arizona State at Colorado                              Canceled

Washington State at Stanford                        Canceled

Navy at USF                                                      Canceled

[easyfoodnetwork]

White Lily Flour Has Long Held a Near-Mythological Status in the South. Now It’s Everywhere.

Dannie Sue Balakas/Instagram

While other flour companies have faced pandemic-related shortages, the Southern staple has been quietly filling the void at grocery stores around the country

As many home-bound Americans began baking to feed and distract themselves from the coronavirus pandemic, Schanon Odell of Crown Pacific Fine Foods was making frantic phone calls to every flour mill in the country. Odell’s job at the Seattle-area specialty food distributor includes helping her grocery store clients keep flour in stock, and so she resolved to find anyone that might have it. One day in late March, she spent 10 straight hours calling and calling, only to get the same answer from everyone who picked up: all sold out.

But there was one exception: As she searched the internet for flour mills, “White Lily kept coming up,” Odell says. She was only vaguely aware of the special place that the flour occupies in the canon of Southern baking, but as she worked her way through the company’s phone tree, she focused less on what White Lily was and more on securing 4,000 cases of flour — about 160,000 pounds — to distribute to stores around the Pacific Northwest, like Zupan’s in Portland, Oregon, Kroger’s QFC stores, and independent shops like Red Apple Market on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

The shipment of White Lily arrived at Red Apple Market just in time for Jill Lightner’s husband to replenish the flour stash that Lightner, a food writer, was quickly stress-baking her way through. “I had just been putting ‘buy more flour’ on the shopping list every time he went,” she says. When her husband returned with a bag of White Lily, announcing, “This is all they had,” Lightner, who had gone to high school in rural Virginia, knew what she had lucked into. “Why didn’t you buy 50 bags?” she asked.

The same scene played out from Iowa to San Jose, as White Lily flour appeared mysteriously on shelves far from its usual Southern distribution area. Bakers familiar with the product went to stores braced to find bottom-of-the-barrel flour, only to come upon the brand they had often wished they could get locally. From outposts in the North, Midwest, and West, they posted gleefully on social media. “When you find the flour, you make the biscuits,” said a baker in Wisconsin. In Brooklyn, a shopper wondered, “What is this magic happening with the flour supply chain?”

White Lily declined to comment on the expanded distribution to Eater, but David Ortega, an associate professor in the department of agriculture, food and resource economics at Michigan State University, points out that some of the recent flour distribution quirks can be tied to the significant loss of major wholesale customers like food service and bakeries, combined with high demand at the retail level. “One of the major obstacles to this switch was packaging,” he says over email — which means that any flour company that had recently stocked up on retail-size bags found itself best prepared to meet demand.

“Flour processing is much more mechanized (relative to say meat processing plants), so it hasn’t been affected by processing disruption to the extent that other sectors have,” Ortega adds. “My guess is that While Lily and other companies expanded their markets out of necessity (loss in food industry customers) and, to an extent, opportunity (surge in demand in supermarkets).”

Whatever the reason, it made many home bakers happy. Known for its soft, light texture, White Lily flour has long held a near-mythological status in the South as the secret to the perfect biscuit, much in the same way that New Yorkers believe that the city’s water is the secret to the perfect bagel. In The Gift of Southern Cooking, the renowned champion of the region’s foodways, Edna Lewis, named it as an essential ingredient to great biscuits. On her blog, Southern Souffle, the recipe developer, food writer, and biscuit-pop-up chef Erika Council echoed Lewis’s sentiment, writing that White Lily killed the “hard as a rock” and “difficult to make” biscuit myths.

And yet, despite the ostensible transportability of a bag of flour, finding White Lily outside of the Southeastern United States is normally only nominally easier than getting New York City tap water in Arizona. The only other time Lightner remembers seeing it for sale in Seattle was years ago, when she found a “daintily sized” bag at a Williams-Sonoma holiday pop-up for a premium price. She bought it anyway. When Atlantic writer Amanda Mull, who was born in Georgia, wrote about the brand in 2018, she reported that she couldn’t find any retailers who carried it north of Richmond, Virginia, or west of Oklahoma (though Surfas in Los Angeles does occasionally). You can find it on Amazon, though it’s sold there at about 500 percent of grocery store cost.

The legend of White Lily began in 1883, when it was founded in Knoxville, Tennessee. Its flour’s ethereal nature is partially attributable to the fact that it is milled from soft red winter wheat, which results in a flour with only 9 percent protein — significantly lower than King Arthur’s 11.7 percent or Gold Medal’s 10.5 percent. A flour’s protein content is important because it corresponds directly with how much gluten forms when the flour comes into contact with a liquid. For a strong loaf with structure and chewiness, bakers look for a high-protein flour, like bread flour, which has up to 13 percent protein. But for biscuits, lower protein content, and thus lower gluten, keeps them from becoming too dense.

But plenty of flours have lower protein levels: Pastry flour contains around 9 percent, and cake flour between 7 and 9 percent. White Lily’s true secret, according to a 2008 New York Times story, lies in its milling and bleaching processes. Its all-purpose flour is milled only from the heart of the wheat’s endosperm, the purest part, and is more finely milled and sifted than other flours — its packaging even boasts that it’s “Pre-Sifted.” Unlike many all-purpose flours, it is also bleached with chlorine, which weakens the flour’s proteins. The result is so light that the White Lily website warns that when measuring by volume, rather than weight, two extra tablespoons per cup of flour are required in standard recipes.

“I’ve been so worried I’m going to run out, I haven’t used it for anything but biscuits.”

When the J.M. Smucker Co. bought White Lily in 2007, it closed the company’s Knoxville mill and moved production to the Midwest, much to the dismay of many of the flour’s fans. White Lily had previously gone through more than a half-dozen corporate owners, including national names like Tyson Foods and Archer Daniels Midland. In 2018, Smucker sold it yet again, this time to Hometown Food Company, the parent company of Pillsbury. But despite how often it has changed hands, White Lily has managed to remain quintessentially Southern enough that Lightner compares it to a souvenir: “If I am near a Winn-Dixie or a Piggly Wiggly, I’m going to buy it and bring it back,” she says, “along with a suitcase full of grits.”

For her part, Odell, the specialty food distributor, is surprised to see how well the flour has resonated with retailers outside of the South. “Every day, people are ordering,” she says. “I think people are recognizing it and want to purchase it.”

Dannie Sue Balakas is one them. Born in Tennessee and currently living in West Michigan, she was thrilled when White Lily showed up at her local Meijer, and started buying a bag every time she shopped there. Because shoppers are still limited to one bag per person, she rations it accordingly. “I’ve been so worried I’m going to run out, I haven’t used it for anything but biscuits,” she says, describing those biscuits as “super fluffy and the best I’ve ever had.”

Fear of running out is a legitimate concern: Shelves in the South were also emptied of flour, and while Odell says her supply has been mostly consistent, it hasn’t been seamless. For Dean Hasegawa, the general manager of the Red Apple where Lightner bought her White Lily, the store’s White Lily purchase was a one-time deal so that Hasegawa could cover the flour shortage — and even with it, he still had to re-bag and price out 50-pound food-service bags of other flours into retail sizes. “It’s not something I will normally stock,” he says, and while he heard some excitement over it, he believes that most of his customers were simply happy to see flour.

Still, the customer enthusiasm inspires Odell. Her local QFC stores talked about wanting to keep White Lily on their shelves even as flour stocks normalize, but the Cincinnati-based buyer from Kroger, which owns QFC, insisted that people in the Northwest wouldn’t buy Southern flour. “I’d like to keep it if I can,” says Odell, but first she needs to prove that people care about White Lily and not just flour in general. “Maybe when the dust settles, I’ll be able to tell if it’s a viable product,” she says.

But for true biscuit fanatics, White Lily’s all-purpose flour isn’t even the true prize: In West Michigan, Balakas has “been praying” that stores will start stocking its coveted self-rising flour. But even if they don’t, you can mail order it from Walmart (with free shipping, if you order enough else) or, per White Lily’s website, simply add 1½ teaspoons of baking powder and ½ teaspoon of salt to each cup of the all-purpose flour. While they may be effective, though, neither of those methods have the same magic as wandering the baking aisle expecting nothing and coming upon a treasure — and, in, the process recapturing a tiny fragment of the joy that grocery shopping once held.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Cg2NBT https://ift.tt/2YPfpI0

Dannie Sue Balakas/Instagram

While other flour companies have faced pandemic-related shortages, the Southern staple has been quietly filling the void at grocery stores around the country

As many home-bound Americans began baking to feed and distract themselves from the coronavirus pandemic, Schanon Odell of Crown Pacific Fine Foods was making frantic phone calls to every flour mill in the country. Odell’s job at the Seattle-area specialty food distributor includes helping her grocery store clients keep flour in stock, and so she resolved to find anyone that might have it. One day in late March, she spent 10 straight hours calling and calling, only to get the same answer from everyone who picked up: all sold out.

But there was one exception: As she searched the internet for flour mills, “White Lily kept coming up,” Odell says. She was only vaguely aware of the special place that the flour occupies in the canon of Southern baking, but as she worked her way through the company’s phone tree, she focused less on what White Lily was and more on securing 4,000 cases of flour — about 160,000 pounds — to distribute to stores around the Pacific Northwest, like Zupan’s in Portland, Oregon, Kroger’s QFC stores, and independent shops like Red Apple Market on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

The shipment of White Lily arrived at Red Apple Market just in time for Jill Lightner’s husband to replenish the flour stash that Lightner, a food writer, was quickly stress-baking her way through. “I had just been putting ‘buy more flour’ on the shopping list every time he went,” she says. When her husband returned with a bag of White Lily, announcing, “This is all they had,” Lightner, who had gone to high school in rural Virginia, knew what she had lucked into. “Why didn’t you buy 50 bags?” she asked.

The same scene played out from Iowa to San Jose, as White Lily flour appeared mysteriously on shelves far from its usual Southern distribution area. Bakers familiar with the product went to stores braced to find bottom-of-the-barrel flour, only to come upon the brand they had often wished they could get locally. From outposts in the North, Midwest, and West, they posted gleefully on social media. “When you find the flour, you make the biscuits,” said a baker in Wisconsin. In Brooklyn, a shopper wondered, “What is this magic happening with the flour supply chain?”

White Lily declined to comment on the expanded distribution to Eater, but David Ortega, an associate professor in the department of agriculture, food and resource economics at Michigan State University, points out that some of the recent flour distribution quirks can be tied to the significant loss of major wholesale customers like food service and bakeries, combined with high demand at the retail level. “One of the major obstacles to this switch was packaging,” he says over email — which means that any flour company that had recently stocked up on retail-size bags found itself best prepared to meet demand.

“Flour processing is much more mechanized (relative to say meat processing plants), so it hasn’t been affected by processing disruption to the extent that other sectors have,” Ortega adds. “My guess is that While Lily and other companies expanded their markets out of necessity (loss in food industry customers) and, to an extent, opportunity (surge in demand in supermarkets).”

Whatever the reason, it made many home bakers happy. Known for its soft, light texture, White Lily flour has long held a near-mythological status in the South as the secret to the perfect biscuit, much in the same way that New Yorkers believe that the city’s water is the secret to the perfect bagel. In The Gift of Southern Cooking, the renowned champion of the region’s foodways, Edna Lewis, named it as an essential ingredient to great biscuits. On her blog, Southern Souffle, the recipe developer, food writer, and biscuit-pop-up chef Erika Council echoed Lewis’s sentiment, writing that White Lily killed the “hard as a rock” and “difficult to make” biscuit myths.

And yet, despite the ostensible transportability of a bag of flour, finding White Lily outside of the Southeastern United States is normally only nominally easier than getting New York City tap water in Arizona. The only other time Lightner remembers seeing it for sale in Seattle was years ago, when she found a “daintily sized” bag at a Williams-Sonoma holiday pop-up for a premium price. She bought it anyway. When Atlantic writer Amanda Mull, who was born in Georgia, wrote about the brand in 2018, she reported that she couldn’t find any retailers who carried it north of Richmond, Virginia, or west of Oklahoma (though Surfas in Los Angeles does occasionally). You can find it on Amazon, though it’s sold there at about 500 percent of grocery store cost.

The legend of White Lily began in 1883, when it was founded in Knoxville, Tennessee. Its flour’s ethereal nature is partially attributable to the fact that it is milled from soft red winter wheat, which results in a flour with only 9 percent protein — significantly lower than King Arthur’s 11.7 percent or Gold Medal’s 10.5 percent. A flour’s protein content is important because it corresponds directly with how much gluten forms when the flour comes into contact with a liquid. For a strong loaf with structure and chewiness, bakers look for a high-protein flour, like bread flour, which has up to 13 percent protein. But for biscuits, lower protein content, and thus lower gluten, keeps them from becoming too dense.

But plenty of flours have lower protein levels: Pastry flour contains around 9 percent, and cake flour between 7 and 9 percent. White Lily’s true secret, according to a 2008 New York Times story, lies in its milling and bleaching processes. Its all-purpose flour is milled only from the heart of the wheat’s endosperm, the purest part, and is more finely milled and sifted than other flours — its packaging even boasts that it’s “Pre-Sifted.” Unlike many all-purpose flours, it is also bleached with chlorine, which weakens the flour’s proteins. The result is so light that the White Lily website warns that when measuring by volume, rather than weight, two extra tablespoons per cup of flour are required in standard recipes.

“I’ve been so worried I’m going to run out, I haven’t used it for anything but biscuits.”

When the J.M. Smucker Co. bought White Lily in 2007, it closed the company’s Knoxville mill and moved production to the Midwest, much to the dismay of many of the flour’s fans. White Lily had previously gone through more than a half-dozen corporate owners, including national names like Tyson Foods and Archer Daniels Midland. In 2018, Smucker sold it yet again, this time to Hometown Food Company, the parent company of Pillsbury. But despite how often it has changed hands, White Lily has managed to remain quintessentially Southern enough that Lightner compares it to a souvenir: “If I am near a Winn-Dixie or a Piggly Wiggly, I’m going to buy it and bring it back,” she says, “along with a suitcase full of grits.”

For her part, Odell, the specialty food distributor, is surprised to see how well the flour has resonated with retailers outside of the South. “Every day, people are ordering,” she says. “I think people are recognizing it and want to purchase it.”

Dannie Sue Balakas is one them. Born in Tennessee and currently living in West Michigan, she was thrilled when White Lily showed up at her local Meijer, and started buying a bag every time she shopped there. Because shoppers are still limited to one bag per person, she rations it accordingly. “I’ve been so worried I’m going to run out, I haven’t used it for anything but biscuits,” she says, describing those biscuits as “super fluffy and the best I’ve ever had.”

Fear of running out is a legitimate concern: Shelves in the South were also emptied of flour, and while Odell says her supply has been mostly consistent, it hasn’t been seamless. For Dean Hasegawa, the general manager of the Red Apple where Lightner bought her White Lily, the store’s White Lily purchase was a one-time deal so that Hasegawa could cover the flour shortage — and even with it, he still had to re-bag and price out 50-pound food-service bags of other flours into retail sizes. “It’s not something I will normally stock,” he says, and while he heard some excitement over it, he believes that most of his customers were simply happy to see flour.

Still, the customer enthusiasm inspires Odell. Her local QFC stores talked about wanting to keep White Lily on their shelves even as flour stocks normalize, but the Cincinnati-based buyer from Kroger, which owns QFC, insisted that people in the Northwest wouldn’t buy Southern flour. “I’d like to keep it if I can,” says Odell, but first she needs to prove that people care about White Lily and not just flour in general. “Maybe when the dust settles, I’ll be able to tell if it’s a viable product,” she says.

But for true biscuit fanatics, White Lily’s all-purpose flour isn’t even the true prize: In West Michigan, Balakas has “been praying” that stores will start stocking its coveted self-rising flour. But even if they don’t, you can mail order it from Walmart (with free shipping, if you order enough else) or, per White Lily’s website, simply add 1½ teaspoons of baking powder and ½ teaspoon of salt to each cup of the all-purpose flour. While they may be effective, though, neither of those methods have the same magic as wandering the baking aisle expecting nothing and coming upon a treasure — and, in, the process recapturing a tiny fragment of the joy that grocery shopping once held.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Cg2NBT via Blogger https://ift.tt/2N7e2ii

[junker-town]

10 takeaways from college basketball’s first full weekend of conference play

Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

The conference grind portion of the 2019-20 college basketball season has arrived.

Conference play is here, which means the beautiful nine-week journey that carries us through the otherwise depressing as hell depth of winter has begun. Let’s talk about the 10 biggest things that happened during the first weekend of the grind.

1. Cassius Winston and Michigan State are “back”

In the middle of a season that has been largely defined by the disappointing performances of the teams that were supposed to be the best in the sport, Michigan State exists in its own category. The Spartans were a near-unanimous preseason No. 1 team that lost three of its first eight games and began the New Year without a single victory over a team in the current AP top 25 poll.

Tom Izzo’s team has now won seven straight, a run capped by Sunday’s 87-69 torching of arch-rival and 12th-ranked Michigan. That decisive win came just three days after Sparty put a 76-56 beatdown on an Illinois team with NCAA tournament aspirations.

At the heart of this turnaround (if you want to call it that) has been senior star Cassius Winston, who has now scored 21 or more points and dished out six or more assists in each of his last four games. He gave one of the best performances of his college career on Sunday, lighting up Michigan to the tune of 32 points and nine assists over 38 minutes of floor time.

While Winston and Michigan State were struggling in November and the first half of December, no other player really stepped up and established himself as the early front-runner to win national Player of the Year. Oregon’s Payton Pritchard, Dayton’s Obi Toppin and Duke’s Vernon Carey Jr. have all received their fair share of love, but it’s been more “if you had to pick someone today” love as opposed to “he’s clearly been the best player in the sport” love.

Despite everything that happened in the season’s first eight weeks, Michigan State still seems like a team that is going to be among the three or four trendiest national title picks come March. And now suddenly, it seems like every postseason national Player of the Year award may wind up going to the same guy who picked up each and every preseason honor.

2. The Big East will be the most competitive conference to follow all winter

The “best” conference debate is always a subjective one, but I don’t think there is going to be much pushback this winter against the notion that the Big East title race is going to be the most competitive in college basketball. Of the 10 teams in the conference, there isn’t one at the moment with a fan base that doesn’t have at least mild hope that their team will wind up hearing its name called on Selection Sunday.

No one doubts the legitimacy of teams like Butler, Villanova and Seton Hall, but it’s the bottom half of the league that sets it apart this season. The Big East team with the worst overall record, 9-6 Providence, suddenly has life after reeling off consecutive wins over Texas, Georgetown and DePaul. The three 0-2 teams at the bottom of the league standings — DePaul, Georgetown and St. John’s — all won 10 or more games during the non-conference portions of their season.

After just one week of league play, it’s already apparent how intense every night of Big East play is going to be for the next two months.

Mac McClung has some words for Quincy McKnight and Quincy proceeds to show him the scoreboard, leading to a little fight by the Seton Hall huddle. pic.twitter.com/Hcjln3LaBs

— CBB Talk (@CBBSuperFan) January 4, 2020

If every Big East Friday night winds up being like the first one, they’re going to be worth canceling plans for.

3. San Diego State is still undefeated and is absolutely for real

One of the most well-known active streaks of futility in college hoops is that no team from the Western United States has won the national championship since Arizona last cut down the nets back in 1997. The program most likely to end this drought has always been one of the top tier teams from the Pac-12 or, in recent years, Gonzaga. While the Bulldogs are the current No. 1 team in America and Pac-12 squads like Oregon and Arizona certainly seem capable of playing deep into March, there’s a new legitimate West Coast challenger in 2019-20.

San Diego State is 15-0 and one of just two unbeaten teams remaining in college basketball. The Aztecs have been at their best when the lights have been the brightest this season, smashing Creighton by 31, beating Iowa by 10, blasting Utah by 28, and most recently going on the road and handling preseason Mountain West favorite Utah State with relative ease.

So how did the Aztecs go from a team no one was talking about two months ago to one that now has people asking whether or not they can enter the NCAA tournament without a loss?

For starters, Washington State transfer Malachi Flynn has been one of the best guards in the country. The junior is averaging career-bests in points (15.9 ppg) and assists (5.1 apg), saved SDSU with a shot at the buzzer against San Jose State, and just lit up Utah State All-American candidate Sam Merrill to the tune of 22 points, five rebounds and four assists.

With Utah State going through a little bit of a 2018-19 Nevada funk, San Diego State has emerged as the Mountain West team most worthy of fear from the rest of the country. The Aztecs play the type of team defense — No. 12 in Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted defensive efficiency rankings — that can carry a squad without an obvious draft pick to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament. They’ve also built a solid first half of the year resume that includes five Quadrant 1 wins, which is currently tied for the most in the country. Oh, and the Aztecs are also No. 1 in the NET Rankings at the moment.

The basketball world scrambling to CBS Sports Net to see whether or not Brian Dutcher’s team can keep the dream of an undefeated season alive has the potential to be one of the more fun (and unforeseeable) storylines of the weeks to come.

4. Penn State appears to be (finally) tournament bound

Pat Chambers is the only power conference coach in America to have gone at least eight seasons at a school without a single trip to the NCAA tournament and to still be employed by said school.

It’s looking more and more like the ninth time is going to be the charm for Chambers at Penn State.

Playing a home game at The Palestra in Philly on Saturday, the Nittany Lions notched a significant early Big Ten victory with a thrilling 89-86 take down of No. 23 Iowa. Penn State also knocked off then-No. 4 Maryland last month, giving them two wins over ranked conference foes less than a week into the new year.

Lamar Stevens (16.4 ppg, 7.0 rpg) has been as good as expected for Penn State, but the difference between this year has been the elevated support the senior guard has received. Sophomore Myreon Jones has taken a massive step forward, St. Bonaventure transfer IZaiah Brockington is also averaging double figures, and senior forward Mike Watkins is nearly averaging a double-double and has clearly saved the best basketball for the end of his college career.

Unless something goes horribly awry over these next two months, it appears Penn State’s patience with Chambers is going to be (finally) be rewarded.

5. North Carolina does not

A disaster season for North Carolina found a new bottom on Saturday when the Tar Heels allowed Georgia Tech to come into the Dean Dome and roll to a 96-83 victory. Considering the fact that the Yellow Jackets led 27-4 at the under eight timeout of the first half, Carolina finding a way to score 83 points may have been the most impressive takeaway from the contest.

That note was small consolation to Roy Williams, who didn’t hold back in his postgame press conference.

“I want to apologize to all the North Carolina fans, the people that care about our basketball program, former players, everyone that cares about us,” Williams said. “We stunk it up tonight, and it’s got to me my responsibility. It’s the most negative I’ve ever felt about myself. The most negative I’ve ever felt about any team. We weren’t ready to play.

“If I had any idea what caused that I would have already changed it. It’s the most disappointed and most upset I’ve ever been in my life coaching a basketball game, and it’s not even close.”

Williams need just one victory to pass UNC icon Dean Smith on the career wins list, a monumental event in Chapel Hill that suddenly seems difficult to predict.

While rumors continue to swirl about Cole Anthony’s immediate future, it’s important to remember that the Tar Heels weren’t overly impressive when Anthony was fully healthy and engaged. Even if that soon to be millionaire chooses to come back and finish his one season of college hoops on the court, it may not be enough to keep UNC from missing out on the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2010.

6. Pacific and Saint Mary’s played the best game nobody saw

The best game of the weekend took place well after most of the Eastern half of the United States had gone to bed.

Damon Stoudamire’s Pacific Tigers outlasted visiting Saint Mary’s in a quadruple overtime thriller that featured a massive second half comeback and a banked in three at the buzzer of overtime No. 2 that extended the game.

In what became the most amazing basketball game I have ever seen in person, the Pacific men recorded their biggest win in years vs St Mary’s 107-99 in 4 OT’s! Here is Gary Chivichyan at the buzzer bank a 3 to send it to Triple OT and the crowd into a frenzy. @PacificMensBB pic.twitter.com/F9NMycdt2k

— kurtriveratv (@kurtriveratv) January 5, 2020

“I don’t think I’ve played in a game like that before and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game like that before,” said Pacific’s Gary Chivichyan, who hit the memorable shot at the end of the second overtime. “That was probably one of the best basketball games I have ever witnessed in my life.”

While Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s and BYU are once again the class of the West Coast Conference, the middle of the league has evolved to a point where games like this one (as well as Pepperdine pushing the Zags to the brink on the same night) are going to become more of the norm.

If the first two months of this season has taught us anything, it’s that West Coast action from the Pac-12, Mountain West and WCC is going to be worth losing sleep for this winter. Not, like, a ton of sleep, but definitely “oh man, I’m moving a little slower than I should be this morning but watching Herb Sendek coach basketball at 1 a.m. was awesome” sleep.

7. Speaking of that ...

As mentioned, Pepperdine pushed No. 1 Gonzaga to the brink late Saturday night. And even when the Zags got things under control, the Waves were able to respond with arguably the best dunk of the weekend.

I did not expect the best dunk of the day in CBB to come from a Pepperdine player, but here we are! pic.twitter.com/KOlrYz7Pft

— Kyle Boone (@Kyle__Boone) January 5, 2020

That’s senior forward Kameron Edwards punching one in right on the head of Corey Kispert. Edwards scored 14 points and snagged 10 boards in the 75-70 loss.

8. This should be the year Duke wins the ACC

One of the more staggering current college basketball facts is that Duke hasn’t even won a share of the ACC’s regular season title since all the way back in 2010. The Blue Devils have been the preseason favorites to win the conference seven times since then and now.

Despite the embarrassing loss to Stephen F. Austin still being relatively fresh in the collective mind of the basketball world, Duke looks a clear cut above the rest of the ACC as we shift into the heart of conference play. The Blue Devils have won their first three league games by a combined 86 points, and two of those contests have been away from Cameron Indoor. They shouldn’t face another significant challenge until Louisville — which looks like less of a threat in the league after it was manhandled at home by Florida State on Saturday — comes to Durham on the 18th.

9. If you’re going to take a bad loss, take it on Friday

The most significant conference upset of the weekend is one that hasn’t warranted a ton of discussion on this Monday. That’s because pretty much nobody was watching it. The lesson, of course, is that if you’re a Big Ten or Big East (or whatever) team looking to bury a woeful performance this winter, make sure it happens on one of those awkward Friday night games on the schedule.

On this most Friday night of the season, Ohio State allowed what had been a super average Wisconsin team to come into the The Schottenstein Center and walk out with a 61-57 upset of the No. 5 team in the country. Buckeye big man Kaleb Wesson was phenomenal (22 points and 13 rebounds), but when Wisconsin committed two or three defenders to shutting Wesson down, no one else for OSU was able to step up as a reliable second scoring option.

Suddenly, an Ohio State team that seemed as rock solid as any squad in the country just a few weeks ago has turned into something of an enigma. They’ll have a chance to answer some of these newly unearthed questions Tuesday night when they hit the road to take on Maryland.

10. The tales of Wichita State’s demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated

After an uncharacteristically subpar 2018-19, Wichita State appears to be back with a vengeance this season. The Shockers destroyed Ole Miss 74-54 on Saturday to improve to 13-1 on the year. Their lone loss is a 12-point defeat at the hands of West Virginia that looks much better now than it did at the time.

With Cincinnati struggling mightily in year one under John Brannen and Memphis losing at home to Georgia and still adjusting to the realization that James Wiseman isn’t coming back, the AAC really needed Wichita State to regain its footing this year. The Shockers are not only stabilized, but they appear to be the class of the conference at the moment.

[auburnfamilynews]

November. It’s a month that sends shivers up the spine of any College Football fan. It’s a month that defines years in ones life. 1996? A miserable year. 1997? The way God intended a year to be. 2014? None of that sir. 2017? All that and twice on Sundays please. November is all of 10 days old and there are some teams that want to have a do-over already. “Who are they?”, you ask dear reader. Well pull up a cha…oh you’re already sitting. Well, sit back and enjoy this week’s BOOM! Roasted!

WILLIE CHAD MORRIS WATCH 2019

Arkansas has had a rough go of it for the past…well for a good while now. Member when BERT had them humming? Don’t worry, their fans don’t either. But Chad Morris came in two years ago with the promise of a HUNH offense that worked (sorta) at SMU and definitely did at Clemson. Well, the rebuild had the look of the movie The Money Pit. Everyone always saying, “It’ll take two more weeks.” More like two more years. We all got to see what I’m talking about a couple of weeks ago when the Auburn offense exploded on the Hogs for 51 points while the defense didn’t give up a point until its was second and third teamers against the Hogs’ ones in the second half. Well this week Arkansas hosted Western Kentucky for Senior Day. And the fan base came out in their finest

And boy did they sure show up for the contest too!

Wow, here's a photo of Razorback Stadium in the first quarter of the Arkansas- Western Kentucky game. Photo compliments of David Bazzel. pic.twitter.com/4kqlyHxkjy

— Randy Stowe (@rstowe1225) November 9, 2019

Well that doesn’t bode well for this watch to last long. As for the game?

This is the kind of day Arkansas is having. Western Kentucky's kicker did this! pic.twitter.com/x1IR60Up5h

— Max Olson (@max_olson) November 9, 2019

Oh good Lord…

The rest of the game didn’t turn out any better as the final gun would sound

Arkansas falls to Western Kentucky 45-19 on Senior Day. pic.twitter.com/0vxUvPhpiq

— THV11 (@THV11) November 9, 2019

Is it just me, or when you see it like that does it make it look even worse? I mean it’s bad, but that way make it even worse right? Well it wouldn’t take long, as one would expect, making this the shortest watch in the history of the Roasted.

Wins under Chad Morris: Eastern Illinois, Tulsa, Portland St. and Colorado St. Losses: Colorado St., North Texas, San Jose St., Western Kentucky AND every SEC game. What a strange year and a half for Arkansas football. https://t.co/MQKJROaaKl

— Jim Joyner (@jimthejam) November 10, 2019

So now we have FSU and Arkansas open for jobs and now the fun really begins as the rumor mill starts in full tilt!

“We’ve already crossed off Urban Meyer; we’ve already crossed off Bob Stoops. Today’s story — which is utterly ridiculous — is they are trying to reach out to Nick Saban to be the next coach at Florida State. The FSU coaching search is already off the rails.”—@ClayTravis pic.twitter.com/BloE3M0XgE

— Outkick the Coverage (@Outkick) November 7, 2019

Yup, coaching moves this year are gonna be stupid.

HAVE A GLASS OF WATER BIG FOURTEEN TEN, YOU’RE DRUNK

So, I sorta shorted you guys last week when I only did two games last week cause I couldn’t find another Boys II Men song that worked for me so I will make up for it here. First off, Michigan State is always known for a stingy defense and a coupe of guys they put out on offense and they sometimes score points, but not often. Well this week they hosted Illinois in East Lansing and it looked to be an easy day for the home team.

Michigan State has scored more points in 17+ minutes vs. Illinois (21) than it did the entire month of October (17). Spartans lead Illinois 21-3 early in the 2Q. pic.twitter.com/lYr16EmPrI

— Chris “Mack” Mackinder (@Chris_Mackinder) November 9, 2019

See what I mean about that scoring thing? Well they would hold a 28-3 lead over the Illini until the last play of the 2nd quarter.

HOW DID BRANDON PETERS PULL THIS OFF? He nearly fumbles before delivering a 47-yard TD strike to @JoshBhebhe to close the @IlliniFootball half: pic.twitter.com/2KZnAVHl0o

— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) November 9, 2019

Ok, so that’s unfortunate but Sparty would add a field goal to make it 31-10 as we entered the 4th quarter of play. Layup win right?

Well…

Michigan State was up 21 on Illinois in the fourth quarter. What a wild day in East Lansing. pic.twitter.com/Tbxxb7iuZo

— Brad Galli (@BradGalli) November 10, 2019

Not good.

UNBELIEVABLE! @IlliniFootball comes back from 25 down to seal the largest comeback in school history. Oh, and they're going bowling. pic.twitter.com/Fp2VhUAPtQ

— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) November 10, 2019

Oofa…

pic.twitter.com/4sHI4YIL4k

— no context college football (@nocontextcfb) November 10, 2019

Yeah, that’s…wow…

Also, it makes Illinois bowl eligible. It leaves Michigan State unable to make plans yet for after November.

And the worst part, this was at home. I am a Falcons fan (I know I enjoy pain but at least we beat the Aints) so I can commiserate with Sparty here but….damn dude, at least we did that to a good team, you did that to Illinois.

In the other half of the fun in the B1G, Minnesota played their first significant game since Roosevelt was in office against Penn State this weekend and the Gophers brought out the big guns to rattle the Nits.

Minnesota put a Gopher on the scoreboard during Penn State's FG attempt pic.twitter.com/EPo9MZQTgH

— SI College Football (@si_ncaafb) November 9, 2019

Well played Minnesota, well played.

As for the game, man was it fun. Back and forth battle where defense was optional but still had some great defensive plays sprinkled in. In the end, this would happen.

And with that, No. 17 Minnesota takes down No. 4 Penn State (via @GopherFootball) pic.twitter.com/lrLHi693MN

— SI College Football (@si_ncaafb) November 9, 2019

Which directly led to this

Absolute SCENES in Minnesota as the No.17 Gophers upset No.4 Penn State. ( : @theothermegryan) pic.twitter.com/9UUHo0EPDs

— theScore (@theScore) November 9, 2019

Good for Goldy, they were starved for a big victory since the last one they really had was Glenn Mason telling Georgia nevermind back after they fired Ray Goff. (YEAH TAKE THAT GEORGIA! A MINNESOTA COACH TOLD YOU NO!! HATE WEEK STRONG BABY!)

LAST ONE FOR THE ROAD

Pac-12 suspends referee 1 game for mistakenly accessing a hands to face penalty on Washington State player instead of Cal player, who committed penalty in WSU-Cal game Saturday. Remainder of officiating crew “downgraded” according to league office

— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) November 11, 2019

SEC fans like to think we have the worst officials on the planet but apparently the PAC-12 asks for volunteers at that booth beside the Credit Card signup station before you enter the stadium. This is the 3rd...THIRD!...instance of the PAC-12 suspending one or a group of refs for making an egregious error during a game.

This is play incorrectly called against @WSUCougarFB’s @hd42___. It was 20-11 Cal at this point. Call resulted in a 59 yard swing against WSU. No one is suggesting the result changes on this call, but it’s another example of the ineptness of @pac12 officials. #GoCougs https://t.co/QzkluqKeQu pic.twitter.com/JO48mUjCpg

— Derek Deis (@DerekKXLY) November 10, 2019

I know its kind of hard to tell from the video but I can tell that only one helmet shot back. Man, I know the gonja is legal out there and all but there ain’t no dang sense in the refs gettin’ in to it in the pregame WEST COAST PAWL!

NOTHING ELSE HAPPENED THIS WEEKEND AND YOU SHOULDN’T SCROLL DOWN ANY FARTHER

I'm happy to bring you the content you didn't know you needed, but love to have. #LSUrep #sadfansaresad pic.twitter.com/IZyFH05CCh

— Michael Cauble (@Cauble) November 10, 2019

Aw, I told you not to! You….you guys….

from College and Magnolia - All Posts https://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2019/11/11/20958556/boom-roasted-week-11

[stfusoren-blog]

INTRODUCING SOREN LUNDQVIST, just your average local, swedish boy trying his goddamn best every single day... also hi i’m hana. pst. she/her.

i wrote his intro post as his wikipedia page which would have all of the public information about soren in it so it’s kinda... long and wordy whoops. but i’ll write a quick bit of basic stuff here for y’all who don’t want to read the whole thing lmao

he is 22 and will be playing noah czerny on nova’s trc adaption (it’s his first major english speaking role)

he is very swedish! his parents kind of have this crazy legacy in sweden and europe and his brother has won oscars for his foreign films and directing. soren is the first to try to do any american projects. so he’s v famous in sweden and europe, just not here. 

he’s spent the last 8 years of his life in michigan for boarding school and college! (go wolverines lmao) he also played lots of hockey. the boy’s got a booty.

soren is very much bisexual but kind of closeted kind of not. meaning he hooks up a lot but he doesn’t really date so coming out isn’t an idea for him at all.

im hockey trash so if you want to know how to say his last name watch THIS

and his accent is faint but it sounds like THIS or if you are also hockey trash, watch this for his natural speaking pattern in english kill me

hmu if you would like to plot!!

anyways

here we gooo

Soren Lundqvist

Born                   Sören Nils Jakob Ekman-Lundqvist

                            July 2nd, 1995 (22 years old)

                            Gothenburg, Sweden

Residence           Los Angeles, California

Occupation          Actor

Years active         2000 – present

Parent(s)               Alicia Ekman (mother)

                              Nils Lundqvist (father)

Relatives               Elias Lundqvist (brother)

                               Maja Lundqvist (sister)

Sören Nils Jakob Ekman-Lundqvist (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈsœːrɛn ˈlɵndkvɪst]; born July 2nd, 1995) is a Swedish actor. He is best known for his roles in his brother Elias Lundqvist’s Academy Award winning films Vaggvisor (Lullabies) and Det Här är Mina Sista Steg (These Are My Last Steps).

In 2017, Lundqvist was casted in the Nova television series adaptation of Maggie Stiefvater’s series The Raven Cycle as Noah Czerny, his first major English speaking role.

Early life

Soren Lundqvist was born in Gothenburg, Sweden on July 2nd, 1995. He is the youngest son of directors and actors Alicia Ekman and Nils Lundqvist. He has two siblings: Elias and Maja, a director and model respectively.

A friend of his mother casted Lundqvist in his first film at the age of five. He played Björn, a young son of an estranged couple in Världen från tre fötter Tall (The World from Three Feet Tall). Already famous due to his family’s legacy, Lundqvist was shy in the eyes of the Swedish media, leading to his parents pulling him from acting after his debut.

After serious acting training under the guidance of his parents and various teachers, Lundqvist returned to acting at age ten, appearing in various Swedish television shows that made him a quick household name.

At fourteen, Lundqvist was sent to study at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan where he played for a nearby hockey club while studying theater. This is where he met longtime friend Benny Jackson.

Career

Sweden

Upon his return to acting in 2005, Lundqvist cameoed in various Swedish television series, most notably Wallander for 12 episodes. Lundqvist was commonly cast in various Swedish BBC series afterwards as recurring characters.

In 2009, Lundqvist and his sister Maja starred in a passion project spurred on by Elias, who had won his first Academy Award two years earlier. Vaggvisor (Lullabies) was inspired by their home, Sweden, and how long the summer days are. Elias’s cinematography earned him another Academy Award in 2010 for Best Director and Best Foreign Film. The filming process really allowed Lundqvist to show off his acting talents. Elias explained in interviews that, “the movie was completely improvised. I sat my siblings down one night and told them about the vision I had and everything just clicked.” The film followed Maja’s unnamed character taking care of her younger, fearless, dreaming brother portrayed by Lundqvist when faced with the sudden responsibility in the wake of poverty, a topic rarely touched on in Swedish films.

In 2011, Lundqvist starred in another one of Elias’s films. Det Här är Mina Sista Steg (These Are My Last Steps), a coming of age film spurred on by Lundqvist’s character creating a new identity in Stockholm while dealing with his sexuality, eating disorders, and abandoning the past. The film created international buzz and was nominated for Best Foreign Film.

That following year, Lundqvist returned to Sweden to film another drama. When interviewed at the premiere, Lundqvist stated that he missed the language after years of studying in the United States.

The United States

In 2017, Nova’s television adaptation of the best-selling book series The Raven Cycle cast Lundqvist as Noah Czerny. Surprisingly, this is Lundqvist’s first major project in English, citing lack of familiarity of the language as a reason for avoiding the projects previously.

Previously, Lundqvist has cameoed in various music videos for American and European artists. Most notable are his cameo in Such a Boy by Astrid and an upcoming video for the Lumineers.

Education

Lundqvist attended Interlochen Center of Arts in Interlochen, Michigan from 2009 to 2013 before going on to attend University of Michigan with longtime friend and current roommate Benny Jackson.

He graduated in May of 2017 with a degree in Drama and minor in Theatre Performance. At University of Michigan, Lundqvist starred in many school productions and musicals while playing hockey for the Wolverines. 

Lundqvist is fluent in five languages: Swedish (his mother tongue), Norwegian, English, French, and German. He has studied Russian in college as well, though he has expressed that he is nowhere near fluency yet.

Personal life

Hockey

Lundqvist played club hockey with the Grand Traverse North Stars while he attended Interlochen Center of the Arts from 2009 to 2013.

In 2012, Lundqvist announced that he was committed to play hockey for University of Michigan. That same year, Lundqvist made his first international appearance for the Swedish International U18 Men’s Team at the IIHF World U18 Championships where Sweden won silver.

In 2013, was drafted in the 117th overall in the Fourth Round of the 2013 NHL Entry Draft by the San Jose Sharks. Lundqvist was projected to go higher than that by scouts, ranked around 20th overall and 18th for North American skaters. However, the uncertainty of whether or not Lundqvist would continue with his hockey career after playing for University of Michigan was unclear for many NHL teams who chose not to waste their draft pick on him, similar to Jamie Benn to the Dallas Stars. Lundqvist appeared again at the 2013 IIHF World U18 Championships where Sweden won silver again.

At University of Michigan, Lundqvist helped the team appear in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2012 in the 2016 tournament with other notable future NHL players such as Zach Werenski and Dylan Larkin on the team.

While in attendance at University of Michigan, Lundqvist has gone on to attend the San Jose Sharks development camps and training camps during the summers. He has been called up to make three appearances in the NHL. Lundqvist has not signed his Entry Level Contract and has not expressed certainty on the subject. 

Despite sharing a surname with famous NHL goalie Henrik Lundqvist and the SHL’s Joel Lundqvist, they are not related. However, there are many stories where Lundqvist pretended to be Henrik’s son while attending New York Rangers games in Detroit in order to sneak into the locker room. The two are family friends.

Family

His parents are legendary Swedish directors. Lundqvist and his siblings were expected to follow in their footsteps and have done so. Elias is an Academy Award Winning director while Maja is a model for brands such as Burberry and Chanel.

In 2013, Lundqvist found his brother unconscious from a drug overdose after coming home from Michigan for the summer. Elias was hospitalized and has not released a film since.

Lundqvist currently shares an apartment in Los Angeles with Benny Jackson. The two met at Interlochen in 2009 where they have roomed with each other since. The two attended University of Michigan together. Benny Jackson has a role on KU’s The Lunar Chronicles.

[racingtoaredlight]

College Football 2020 Season Week 8 TV Watch Em Ups: worst case scenario colored glasses

We all should have realized the end was nigh when Wisconsin finally showed up for the season sporting an honest to god four star QB that they had recruited out of high school.

It’s Halloween, there’s a super full extra bloody moon or some such shit, Trevor Lawrence has COVID, the Dodgers won the World Series and Tuesday is election day. All of these things seem foreboding. Oh! And there’s also an asteroid that might hit us on Monday!

Let’s see how many games I write up before the impending doom takes me out this week.

Saturday, October 31

Matchup                                                         Time (ET)           TV/Mobile

16 Kansas State at West Virginia                 12:00pm              ESPN2

College football is always nonsense but this year is extra nonsensical. Both of these teams kind of suck but one of them is ranked #16. K-State is favored in Morgantown and that just seems iffy.

5 Georgia at Kentucky                                   12:00pm              SECN

We are all shocked that Kentucky isn’t actually any good. Of course they’ll feature in some upset updates this week but that’s just because Kirby Smart sucks.

Purdue at Illinois                                             12:00pm                BTN

The way things are going this could be your last chance to see Rondale Moore as a Purdue Boilermakers so that’s something to watch for.

20 Coastal Carolina at Georgia State            12:00pm             ESPNU

I told you last week that there aren’t ten good teams this year and look at this shit.

Michigan State at 13 Michigan                       12:00pm                FOX

Michigan is favored by 21.5 against a bad Michigan State team. If that’s not the set up for a great punchline, I don’t know what is.

23 Iowa State at Kansas                                  12:00pm                 FS1

How do you even get a 50.5-point line listed? That’s setting aside the oddity of being a 50.5-point home underdog. And all of this is setting aside the near certainty that upwards of 50% of the kids in this game have already tested positive for COVID and just weren’t ever notified because that might make them stop playing football. I’m sure there are kids like that all over the TV landscape today, I just have a gut feeling that these two programs would be among the worst offenders.

Wake Forest at Syracuse                                 12:00pm                ACCN 

ACC football, it’s still crappy!

Boston College at 1 Clemson                           12:00pm                  ABC

With Trevor Lawrence up on the shelf this is your first chance to see DJ Uigaleilei actually running the offense. The little bit I saw of him a few weeks ago didn’t inspire my imagination but he is huge and supposedly has quite the strong arm.

UTSA at Florida Atlantic                                    12:00pm               Stadium

The nation’s leading rusher plays for UTSA and his name is Sincere McCormick. I assume he’s actually a time-traveling cowboy.

Temple at Tulane                                                12:00pm                  ESPN+

Two of my favorite flavors of trash. I might not turn on the TV today, though.

Memphis at 7 Cincinnati                                    12:00pm                  ESPN

Part of the reason I’m not sure about my watch ‘em up consumption today is that Miami is off, part is that I won’t be at home most of the day, and part is that I’m afeared Little Ohio State is going to just thump the hell out of our beloved Memphis Tigers. If I check my phone and see this game is close in the third quarter I may feel compelled to check in on it.

UCF at Houston                                                  2:00pm                    ESPN+

For some reason I was thinking Dana Holgorsen had coached Josh Heupel at Oklahoma but Holgo was actually at Texas Tech with Mike Leach after Leach was at Oklahoma. Oh, well. This poison looks sweet to me.

Rice at Southern Miss                                        3:00pm                    ESPN3

My interest in this post is really starting to wane.

Troy at Arkansas State                                       3:00pm                    ESPN3 

In a non-pandemic year I’d love this game.

Abilene Christian at Mercer                               3:00pm                    ESPN3 

This game should be played in the middle of the night with no crowd and maybe no refs or coaches.

Western Colorado at Stephen F. Austin            3:00pm                     ESPN3

This is a 

17 Indiana at Rutgers                                         3:30pm                          FS1

This stupid year. If Rutgers pulls a second straight upset and Sparty somehow beats Michigan, the Rutgers Hauers will probably be ranked next week.

Northwestern at Iowa                                         3:30pm                       ESPN 

Iowa, as per usual, has like five guys on their team that will be NFL starters and still aren’t worth watching.

LSU at Auburn                                                     3:30pm                         CBS

It’s LSU and Auburn! Expect this one to go off the rails early and often.

UAB at Louisiana Tech                                       3:30pm                        Stadium

Good weird football but it’s on Stadium so I can’t recommend it.

4 Notre Dame at Georgia Tech                          3:30pm                          ABC 

The priest that was at the ACB Super Spreader luncheon is the school president of Notre Dame, right? He probably gave COVID to Trevor Lawrence to give his Fighting Satans a chance in hell against Clemson. What’s that you say? Notre Dame isn’t playing Clemson this week? Of course they aren’t. Notre Dame has this weekend off.

TCU at Baylor                                                      3:30pm                       ESPN2

I just threw my hands up and sighed. I don’t know how to type that feeling other than to describe the physical actions. You know what I mean.

Appalachian State at ULM                                  4:00pm                      ESPNU 

I don’t really know.

Virginia Tech at Louisville                                    4:00pm                    ACCN

These were supposed to be “good” ACC teams this year. They are not good teams but either one or both could still turn out to be good in ACC terms.

Texas at 6 Oklahoma State                                 4:00pm                       FOX 

Oklahoma State is fools gold in the rankings but that very fast Canadian kid is still fun to watch.

Mississippi at Vanderbilt                                     4:00pm                    SECN

There is nothing fun or interesting about this game.

Missouri Western at Central Arkansas              4:00pm                   ESPN3

These schools are both junior colleges.

25 Boise State at Air Force                                   6:00pm                 CBSSN

I don’t care what you lot say, Boise State football is a net good for the sport and I like it when they’re ranked.

New Mexico at San Jose State                             7:00pm                  FS1

This game probably shouldn’t be played at all but it definitely shouldn’t kick off at 4pm local time.

Mississippi State at 2 Alabama                            7:00pm               ESPN

Bama is going to be on cruise control for the rest of the regular season but that doesn’t mean they won’t win a few games by 50+.

Charlotte at Duke                                                  7:00pm            RSN/ESPN3 

Hooray Charlotte, I guess.

Navy at 22 SMU                                                     7:30pm                 ESPN2

I’m really not enjoying Navy’s reliance on throwing the ball this year.

Arkansas at 8 Texas A&M                                     7:30pm                  SECN

Again I say pig sooie.

3 Ohio State at 18 Penn State                              7:30pm                   ABC

There are only a few times where it is generally OK to root for the Buckeyes and playing Penn State is always one of those times.

Missouri at 10 Florida                                          7:30pm                  SECN 

I can’t remember if the Gators are wearing cool throwback uniforms this week or if they already did that last week. Somehow my mind is really rejecting this game in particular and I’m not really sure why.

Louisiana at Texas State                                     8:00pm                 ESPNU

This sucks.

15 North Carolina at Virginia                               8:00pm                  ACCN

Wa-hoo-wa imho.

24 Oklahoma at Texas Tech                                8:00pm                   FOX

FOX ads for this week really made it seem like Oklahoma and Oklahoma State were going to play each other but that is very much not the case.

San Diego State at Utah State                           9:30pm                CBSSN 

Huge throbbing boner at the thought of this game.

WKU at 11 BYU                                                    10:15pm               ESPN

BYU seems to be legitimately good for the first time in a while. I like that for nostalgia’s sake even though I have always hated BYU.

Nevada at UNLV                                                   10:30pm                 FS1 

I think UNLV plays in the Raiders stadium now but they might not yet. I don’t remember. I’d rather this game was still played in UNLV’s shitty old stadium over in Henderson.

GAMES OF THE WEEK

9 Wisconsin at Nebraska                  Canceled

North Texas at UTEP                         Postponed

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Fractured Skulls, Lost Eyes: Police Often Break Own Rules Using ‘Rubber Bullets’

Warning: Graphic images and video below.

Megan Matthews thought she was dying.

“I thought my head was blown off,” said Matthews, 22, who was hit in the eye with a sponge-tipped projectile fired by law enforcement at a May 29 protest in Denver. “Everything was dark. I couldn’t see.”

Matthews, a soft-spoken art major who lives with her mother, had gone to the demonstration against police brutality carrying bandages, water bottles and milk so she could provide first aid to protesters.

“I couldn’t really grasp how bad my injury was,” said Matthews, who sustained injuries including a broken nose, fractured facial bones and multiple lacerations on her face. “So much blood was pouring out. I was wearing a mask, and the whole mask was filling up with blood. I was trying to breathe through it. I kept telling myself, ‘Don’t stop breathing.’”

Megan Matthews was hit in the eye with a sponge-tipped projectile at a May 29 protest in Denver. She sustained injuries including a broken nose, fractured facial bones and multiple lacerations on her face.(Courtesy of Megan Matthews)

Three weeks later, Matthew is struggling with her vision and her doctor says she may never completely heal. Others fared far worse.

In a joint investigation into law enforcement actions at protests across the country after George Floyd’s death in police custody, KHN and USA TODAY found that some officers appear to have violated their department’s own rules when they fired “less lethal” projectiles at protesters who were for the most part peacefully assembled.

Critics have assailed those tactics as civil rights and First Amendment violations, and three federal judges have ordered temporary restrictions on their use.

At least 56 protesters sustained serious head injuries, including a broken jaw, traumatic brain injuries and blindness, based on news reports, interviews with victims and witnesses and a list compiled by Scott Reynhout, a Los Angeles researcher.

Photos and videos posted on social media show protesters with large bruises or deep gashes on the throat, hands, arms, legs, chest, rib cage and stomach, all caused by what law enforcement calls “kinetic impact projectiles” and bystanders call “rubber bullets.”

At least 20 people have suffered severe eye injuries, including seven people who lost an eye, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Photographer Linda Tirado, 37, lost an eye after being hit by a foam projectile in Minneapolis. Brandon Saenz, 26, lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. Leslie Furcron, 59, was placed in a medically induced coma after she was shot between the eyes with a “bean bag” round in La Mesa, California.

Derrick Sanderlin with his wife, Cayla Sanderlin. Derrick, who had trained San Jose police recruits on avoiding racial bias, was hit by a projectile that ruptured a testicle.(Courtesy of the Sanderlin family)

Twenty-seven-year-old Derrick Sanderlin helped defuse a confrontation at a protest in San Jose, California, on May 29. While he was trying to protect a young woman from police, he was hit with a projectile that ruptured a testicle and, his doctor said, may leave him infertile.

With terms like “foam,” “sponge” and “bean bag,” the projectiles may sound harmless. They’re not.

“On day one of training, they tell you, ‘Don’t shoot anywhere near the head or neck,’” said Charlie Mesloh, a certified instructor on the use of police projectiles and a professor at Northern Michigan University. “That’s considered deadly force.”

Floyd’s death sparked the nation’s most widespread street protests in decades, drawing a massive response from police dressed in riot gear. Although many large metropolitan police departments own these projectiles, they had never before been used on a national scale, Mesloh said.

Witnesses say law enforcement in several major cities used less-lethal projectiles against nonviolent protesters, shot into crowds, aimed at faces and fired at close range — each of which can run counter to policies.

Police have said they fired these weapons to protect themselves and property in chaotic, dangerous scenes.

These projectiles, intended to incapacitate violent aggressors without killing them,  have evolved from the rubber bullets developed in the 1970s by the British military to quell uprisings in Northern Ireland. They are designed to travel more slowly than bullets, with blunt tips meant to cause pain but not intended to penetrate the body.

They come in many forms, including cylindrical wooden blocks, bullet-shaped plastic missiles tipped with stiff sponge or foam, fabric sacks filled with metal birdshot, and pepper-spray balls, which are about the size of a paintball and contain the active chemical in pepper spray.

Some are fired by special launchers with muzzles the diameter of a cardboard toilet-paper roll; others can be fired from shotguns.

They can cause devastating injuries. A study published in 2017 in the medical journal BMJ Open found that 3% of people hit by projectiles worldwide died. Fifteen percent of the 1,984 people studied were permanently injured.

“Given the inherent inaccuracy” of the projectiles and the risk of serious injury, death and misuse, the authors concluded they “do not appear to be an appropriate means of force in crowd-control settings.”

Yet manufacturers continue to market them on their websites for that purpose. Defense Technology says its “eXact iMpact” sponge projectile is “used for crowd control, patrol and tactical applications.” PepperBall says the uses for its projectiles include “anti-riot” and “crowd control.”

Security Devices International describes its “blunt impact projectiles” like weapons of war, saying they’re “designed for military, peacekeeping, homeland security, law enforcement, correctional services and private sector security.” It adds, “they are ideal for crowd control.”

The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

There are no national standards for police use of less-lethal projectiles and no comprehensive data on their use, said Brian Higgins, an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Brandon Saenz lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. (Courtesy of Brandon Saenz’s lawyer, Daryl Washington)

So the nation’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies establish their own rules for when they should be used, who’s allowed to fire them and how to hold their officers accountable.

Many police departments don’t require officers to document their use of projectiles, Higgins said, making it difficult to know how often they’re used.

Denver’s policy says officers should use projectiles only on a “combative or physically resistive person whose conduct rises at least to the level of active aggression,” to prevent others from being harmed, or to “incapacitate a suicidal person who cannot be safely controlled with other force.”

Denver also forbids officers from targeting the “head, eyes, throat, neck, breasts of a female, genitalia or spinal column” of a suspect “unless deadly force is warranted.”

Matthews said she was standing 5 feet from other peaceful protesters at the Denver demonstration and nowhere near anyone rowdy. She suspects her shooting was no accident.

“Either they targeted her face or they fired indiscriminately at the crowd,” said Ross Ziev, Matthews’ lawyer. “Either way, that poses a tremendous safety hazard.”

A federal lawsuit accuses Denver police of “targeting protesters, press, and medics” and aiming projectiles “at the heads and groins of individuals, in a clear tactic to inflict maximum damage, pain and distress.”

The Denver Police Department “takes complaints of inappropriate use of force seriously and has initiated Internal Affairs investigations into officers’ actions during demonstrations that may be violations of policy,” a department spokesman said.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

A federal judge in Denver issued a temporary order limiting the use of projectiles and tear gas. Police may use them only with the approval of a supervisor — and only to respond to “specific acts of violence or destruction of property that the command officer has personally witnessed.”

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson found a “strong likelihood” that Denver police violated protesters’ constitutional rights “in the form of physical injury and the suppression of speech.”

The Denver Police Department “has failed in its duty to police its own,” Jackson wrote.

Judges in Seattle and Dallas have issued similar injunctions, and cities such as San Jose, Atlanta and Austin have moved to curb their use.

‘We’ve Opened The Floodgates’

As of 2013, 37% of police departments in the U.S. authorized the use of “soft projectiles,” according to the most recent survey released by the U.S. Department of Justice. That included the largest police departments in the country and more than half of those serving 10,000 or more citizens.

Law enforcement used the projectiles widely during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked by the death of black teenager Michael Brown.

But in day-to-day policing in the United States, kinetic impact projectiles are rarely used, according to a study published in 2018. Fewer than 1% of police use-of-force incidents involved such weapons, researchers found.

Something changed when protests erupted after George Floyd’s death, said Higgins, a former police chief of Bergen County, New Jersey. “It’s almost like we’ve opened the floodgates,” Higgins said.

In general, instructors teach officers to target only people who are “extremely dangerous,” said Higgins, who teaches classes on how to use these munitions.

Projectiles should be “your last resort before you go to lethal force,” Higgins said. “That’s how dangerous they are.”

And officers need to aim shotguns or launchers carefully. “You should never fire indiscriminately into a crowd,” Higgins said. “You should always pick your target.”

Projectiles can be fired directly at a target, while “skip rounds” are fired at the ground in the hope of hitting the target as they ricochet upward. That method of shooting is notoriously inaccurate, Mesloh said.

Mesloh said he has spoken out about the problems with police projectiles for years, to little effect.

There are no manufacturing standards or quality control measures for less-lethal projectiles, Mesloh said.

In field tests, he has found that bean bag rounds can travel far faster than advertised. He focused on rounds that were supposed to fly out of a shotgun at 250 to 300 feet per second, 2½ to 3 times faster than a major league fastball. Several traveled 600 feet per second. One bean bag clocked in at 900 feet per second, about the same speed as a .45-caliber bullet, he said.

Faster projectiles are more likely to kill than slower ones, and they fly straighter. So an officer who expects the projectile will dip and hit a suspect’s leg could end up hitting him on the torso or head, Mesloh said.

Police can also make dangerous errors if they shoot projectiles while wearing gas masks. “The visibility with gas masks is zero,” Mesloh said. “I wouldn’t want to shoot anything while wearing one.”

Leslie Furcron was placed in a medically induced coma after being shot between the eyes with a “bean bag” round in La Mesa, California.(Courtesy of Leslie Furcron’s lawyer, Dante Pride)

Instructors typically get eight hours of training with less-lethal projectiles before they’re allowed to teach others. Their students — regular police officers — receive four hours of instruction, including just five or six practice shots. Bean bag rounds used with shotguns cost $6 each, which limits how many can be used for training, Mesloh said.

Police and their advocates emphasize that officers dealing with crowds must make high-stakes decisions in chaotic situations without time for reflection. Often they fear for their physical safety, said Nick Rogers, a detective and the president of the Denver police union.

“Unfortunately, the narrative of the protests has kind of been hijacked,” he said. “We probably had 30 to 40 police suffering injuries from bricks and rocks. And that’s not being reported.”

Denver police didn’t respond to a request to confirm that.

In San Jose, police Capt. Jason Dwyer said firing projectiles is safer than trying to control a crowd using nightsticks. Dwyer, who was struck by a rock, said at a press conference that police were justified using projectiles and tear gas against the crowd, who turned his city into a “war zone.”

“I’ve been a cop for 21 years, spent about half that time in special operations,” Dwyer said. “But I can tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A South Carolina law enforcement leader defended the response against protesters in Columbia on May 31, a clash that included the firing of projectiles.

“There was no doubt what their intent was, and that was to destroy property, police cars, police buildings, whatever,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said during a news conference. “So we had to stop them. And we did stop them.”

But Patrick Norris, 28, said he was protesting peacefully when he was shot in the back. He and a group of 150 to 200 protesters were met by about 50 officers from the Columbia Police Department, Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the South Carolina Department of Corrections, according to a federal lawsuit Norris filed against the sheriff, the sheriff’s department, the city of Columbia and its police department and unnamed officers with the agencies and the state Department of Corrections. Court summonses have been issued to the defendants, who have not yet filed responses.

Officers carried protective shields and were clad in body armor and riot helmets, said Norris, a truck driver and veteran of marriage equality rallies and gay pride parades.

For about two minutes, the protesters chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” Norris said. Then it appeared that someone ordered the officers to move forward. Almost instantly, the scene escalated into a battle. “They met us with immediate and intense force for no reason,” Norris said. “It was pure chaos, with a large group of armed people unloading on unarmed protesters.”

Local media reported that the protesters had thrown objects at the law enforcement officers and tried to sneak into Columbia Police Department headquarters. Norris scoffed at that.

He said he saw a bright flash, followed by a loud explosion that left shrapnel injuries on one of his legs. “Multiple loud pops were heard,” believed to have been “the first of the rubber bullets fired into the crowd by unknown law enforcement officers,” the lawsuit alleged.

“Officers then began shooting tear gas canisters into the crowd of protestors,” the lawsuit said. Norris, who had turned to run, “was struck numerous times in the back” by projectiles that left red welts seen in photos included with the lawsuit.

The Columbia Police Department policy on the use of force states that less-lethal weapons meant to be fired directly at a target can’t be used indiscriminately against a crowd, even if it’s violent, and “shall not be used for crowd management, crowd control or crowd dispersal during demonstrations or crowd events.”

The use of force policies of the other law enforcement agencies could not immediately be determined. Norris said he doesn’t know who fired at him.

Shot Without Warning

Soren Stevenson, 25, said he was unarmed when he was shot by law enforcement May 31 in Minneapolis.

Protesters were peaceful but unnerved by police in riot gear, Stevenson said. He moved to the front of the crowd, about 30 feet from police, to protect protesters behind him.

Suddenly, officers launched two explosive devices at demonstrators. Tear gas filled the air.

“The police knew it was a peaceful protest,” Stevenson said. “I did not hear any instructions or commands from police. It went from protest to shooting, just like that.”

Stevenson said he was trying to comprehend the explosions when something slammed into his face, knocking the lenses from his glasses and spinning him around.

“I was very confused. I reached up and touched my face, and it was just soft — that whole left side,” he said. “It broke a lot of bones in my face, and my nose was moved from where it belongs to underneath my right eye.”

Stevenson doubled over, but stayed on his feet. He said he didn’t notice blood or pain until volunteers cleansed the wound at a medic station.

Stevenson said there were fractures to his skull, cheekbone, nose and jaw. He also suffered a concussion.

Doctors immediately performed reconstructive surgery. On June 10, surgeons took out Stevenson’s eye. They inserted a prosthetic that is expected to eventually settle with surrounding tissue, and he’ll get a glass lens at some point. But he’ll never again have normal vision.

In three decades as an ophthalmologist, “I’ve seen just about everything bad that can happen to an eye,” said Dr. George Williams, who has not been involved in Stevenson’s care. “I can’t imagine a more effective way to destroy an eyeball than these so-called kinetic impact technologies.”

“Frankly, you’re better off being stabbed in the eye with something sharp that creates a clean, plain wound,” said Williams, clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “This creates irregular wounds where the tissue is just blown out. There is oftentimes nothing left to fix.”

His group and Physicians for Human Rights have called for a ban on less-lethal projectiles, including sponge-tipped bullets, pepper-spray balls and bean bag rounds.

These projectiles “don’t seem to be very effective at crowd control,” Williams said. “All they seem to do is hurt people.”

Frozen With Fear

Nadia Rohr, 24, froze when Detroit police aimed what looked like “a bright-orange Nerf gun” directly at her.

She and her girlfriend were at the front of a group of marchers when they turned a corner and came face-to-face with a wall of police in full riot gear, banging their batons on their shields.

“I locked eyes with a police officer,” said Rohr, who said she was peaceful and unarmed at the May 31 protest. “I was in a direct line of fire.”

Rohr said her girlfriend tried to pull her away, but the projectile still hit her in the back of the head.

According to Rohr’s medical records, the projectile fractured her skull, caused bleeding beneath the outer lining of her brain and ripped a deep gash across her scalp that took nine stitches to close.

The Detroit Police Department didn’t respond to requests to review its policy. Guidelines from 2014 authorize Detroit officers to use less-lethal force only to protect someone from physical harm, stop dangerous or criminal behavior or control someone resisting arrest.

C.J. Montano, 24, has a bruise on his forehead in the shape of a circle — visible evidence of the projectile that caused bleeding inside his brain.

“They shot me directly in the face,” said Montano, a former Marine who was hospitalized in the intensive care unit after attending a May 30 protest in Los Angeles. “It was definitely intentional.”

Montano described a chaotic scene. He and a group of nonviolent protesters knelt on the ground, yelling and chanting, about 5 feet from a line of officers armed with projectile launchers. Nearby, other protesters were throwing water bottles at police — mostly Los Angeles officers, though some sheriff’s deputies were there too, Montano said.

Montano said he told police he would ask the protesters to stop throwing water bottles at the police if the officers didn’t shoot him. He did so, but they shot him anyway with small projectiles, he said.

C.J. Montano, one week after attending a Los Angeles protest where the police shot a projectile at his head.(Courtesy of C.J. Montano)

The police announced they would move forward, and he warned the crowd that they would have to back up.

As the crowd moved back amid tear gas, he and another man were left in a no man’s land, 50 feet from police and another 50 feet away from the crowd, Montano said.

Officers shot again.

“I got hit in the hip and the stomach at the same time with larger rounds,” Montano said. “They shot the other gentleman. Although my hands were up, they shot me in the rib cage. I fell on the ground and moved behind a sign to catch my breath. … Their shots were getting higher and higher every time I stood up.”

Five minutes later, Montano said, he stood up with his hands in the air. He said that’s when he felt a powerful force hit his forehead.

“It was just like a really, really hard thud,” Montano said. “I lost all vision in my left eye, all hearing in my left ear.”

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating 56 allegations of misconduct by officers during the protests that decried police brutality — half of which involved alleged use of force.

The problem with police response in many cities was that leaders assumed crowds would be hostile, said Chris Stone, a criminal justice expert and professor at the University of Oxford. Stone sat on a panel that reviewed the death of a woman in Boston who was shot with a pepper ball in the early 2000s.

Uniform standards for using less-lethal projectiles would go a long way in “strengthening professionalism, strengthening proportionalism and a reasonable response to the protests,” he said.

Officers Violated Rules Against Shooting Nonviolent People

Montano’s description of the shooting appears to violate the Los Angeles Police Department’s policy, which explicitly prohibits police from using pepper-spray balls, sponge and foam projectiles and other less-lethal force against people who passively resist or disobey them.

According to the Los Angeles policy, police should fire projectiles only “if an officer reasonably believes that a suspect or subject is violently resisting arrest or poses an immediate threat of violence or physical harm.”

Demonstrators in Minneapolis, San Jose, Denver and Dallas described being shot with less-lethal projectiles even though those departments don’t allow them to be used against nonviolent people. In some cases, such as in Denver and Minneapolis, law enforcement from other agencies were called in to help and it’s unclear who fired.

!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}}))}();

The Los Angeles Police Department said it’s investigating Montano’s shooting, which occurred “amidst a fluid protest that at times became dangerous for both officers and demonstrators.

“In some cases they devolved into chaos with rocks, bottles and other projectiles being launched at police officers, who have sustained injuries that range from cuts and bruises to a fractured skull.”

In San Jose, attorney Sarah Marinho, who is representing Sanderlin, said that police violated their rules when they shot him, that he was armed only with a small cardboard sign. At the time he was shot, Sanderlin was begging police to stop firing at unarmed people, including women, at close range.

“The facts are not in dispute,” said Marinho, noting that a TV news team recorded the scene. “He was a safe distance away. He was not invading the police officers’ space.”

A San Jose police duty manual states that specially trained officers may fire projectiles against people when suspects are “armed with a weapon likely to cause serious bodily injury or death” or in “situations where its use is likely to prevent any person from being seriously injured.”

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Sanderlin said he stepped between protesters and the police to ask them to stop firing at peaceful demonstrators, including a woman who had been hit in the chest. Police told him to move, he said.

“I shook my head, held my sign over my chest, and thought, ‘I really hope this guy doesn’t shoot me,’” said Sanderlin, who volunteers with a group that trains San Jose police recruits on how to avoid racial bias. “He fired off a rubber bullet, and I realized he wasn’t aiming for my chest. I was hit directly in the groin.”

San Jose police have said they are investigating the shooting; they did not return phone calls for this story.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo tweeted, “What happened to Derrick Sanderlin was wrong,” and he pledged to push for a ban on less-lethal projectiles.

Stephen James, an assistant research professor at Washington State University, said he was disheartened to see countless videos showing “officers appearing to indiscriminately use pepper balls as if they were paint-balling on a Sunday afternoon.”

Police departments have more trouble enforcing discipline with weapons during protests or riots because officers almost never train for those circumstances, may be fatigued and often are fearful, he said.

Though these projectiles should never be used to disperse a crowd, he said, they do have an important role in the law enforcement arsenal. If police are heavily outnumbered in riot or protest situations, less-lethal firearms can be used as a “credible threat” to maintain safety and order.

“I would never advocate for taking them away,” James said. “If you take away less-lethal weapons, then deadly force is the fallback.”

Learning From The Past

For residents and police in Baltimore, Floyd’s killing recalled one of the city’s most painful moments.

Five years earlier, Baltimore erupted in violence after a man named Freddie Gray died in police custody. A Justice Department investigation concluded Baltimore police had routinely violated residents’ constitutional rights, discriminated against blacks and used excessive force.

Baltimore brought in new leadership. Community groups began working with police. Policies changed.

And after video showed a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, a curious thing happened in Baltimore: Demonstrations were peaceful. There are no accounts of police firing less-lethal weapons.

Erricka Bridgeford, founder of the Baltimore Ceasefire 365 anti-violence group, said officers marched and knelt with protesters, prompting cheers from the crowd. “They allowed people space to yell and vent their pain,” she said.

Baltimore now has strict rules governing the use of kinetic impact projectiles. In the police department’s use-of-force policies, the No. 1 principle is the “sanctity of human life.” Whenever a less-lethal weapon is fired in the line of duty, it must be reported and investigated within 24 hours.

Bridgeford said she was heartbroken when she saw police in other cities shooting demonstrators with rubber bullets and pepper-spray balls. She didn’t call them “less lethal,” saying those words make police feel free to open fire.

Those weapons are used to instill fear, she said, “like siccing dogs on people or pulling out water hoses.”

The weapons aren’t “a way to de-escalate. It’s a way to harm people,” Bridgeford said. “Treating a crowd of people like animals? ‘Oh, my God, they’re shooting into the crowd!’ How is that a good strategy?”

Fractured Skulls, Lost Eyes: Police Often Break Own Rules Using ‘Rubber Bullets’ published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Fractured Skulls, Lost Eyes: Police Often Break Own Rules Using ‘Rubber Bullets’

Warning: Graphic images and video below.

Megan Matthews thought she was dying.

“I thought my head was blown off,” said Matthews, 22, who was hit in the eye with a sponge-tipped projectile fired by law enforcement at a May 29 protest in Denver. “Everything was dark. I couldn’t see.”

Matthews, a soft-spoken art major who lives with her mother, had gone to the demonstration against police brutality carrying bandages, water bottles and milk so she could provide first aid to protesters.

“I couldn’t really grasp how bad my injury was,” said Matthews, who sustained injuries including a broken nose, fractured facial bones and multiple lacerations on her face. “So much blood was pouring out. I was wearing a mask, and the whole mask was filling up with blood. I was trying to breathe through it. I kept telling myself, ‘Don’t stop breathing.’”

Megan Matthews was hit in the eye with a sponge-tipped projectile at a May 29 protest in Denver. She sustained injuries including a broken nose, fractured facial bones and multiple lacerations on her face.(Courtesy of Megan Matthews)

Three weeks later, Matthew is struggling with her vision and her doctor says she may never completely heal. Others fared far worse.

In a joint investigation into law enforcement actions at protests across the country after George Floyd’s death in police custody, KHN and USA TODAY found that some officers appear to have violated their department’s own rules when they fired “less lethal” projectiles at protesters who were for the most part peacefully assembled.

Critics have assailed those tactics as civil rights and First Amendment violations, and three federal judges have ordered temporary restrictions on their use.

At least 56 protesters sustained serious head injuries, including a broken jaw, traumatic brain injuries and blindness, based on news reports, interviews with victims and witnesses and a list compiled by Scott Reynhout, a Los Angeles researcher.

Photos and videos posted on social media show protesters with large bruises or deep gashes on the throat, hands, arms, legs, chest, rib cage and stomach, all caused by what law enforcement calls “kinetic impact projectiles” and bystanders call “rubber bullets.”

At least 20 people have suffered severe eye injuries, including seven people who lost an eye, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Photographer Linda Tirado, 37, lost an eye after being hit by a foam projectile in Minneapolis. Brandon Saenz, 26, lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. Leslie Furcron, 59, was placed in a medically induced coma after she was shot between the eyes with a “bean bag” round in La Mesa, California.

Derrick Sanderlin with his wife, Cayla Sanderlin. Derrick, who had trained San Jose police recruits on avoiding racial bias, was hit by a projectile that ruptured a testicle.(Courtesy of the Sanderlin family)

Twenty-seven-year-old Derrick Sanderlin helped defuse a confrontation at a protest in San Jose, California, on May 29. While he was trying to protect a young woman from police, he was hit with a projectile that ruptured a testicle and, his doctor said, may leave him infertile.

With terms like “foam,” “sponge” and “bean bag,” the projectiles may sound harmless. They’re not.

“On day one of training, they tell you, ‘Don’t shoot anywhere near the head or neck,’” said Charlie Mesloh, a certified instructor on the use of police projectiles and a professor at Northern Michigan University. “That’s considered deadly force.”

Floyd’s death sparked the nation’s most widespread street protests in decades, drawing a massive response from police dressed in riot gear. Although many large metropolitan police departments own these projectiles, they had never before been used on a national scale, Mesloh said.

Witnesses say law enforcement in several major cities used less-lethal projectiles against nonviolent protesters, shot into crowds, aimed at faces and fired at close range — each of which can run counter to policies.

Police have said they fired these weapons to protect themselves and property in chaotic, dangerous scenes.

These projectiles, intended to incapacitate violent aggressors without killing them,  have evolved from the rubber bullets developed in the 1970s by the British military to quell uprisings in Northern Ireland. They are designed to travel more slowly than bullets, with blunt tips meant to cause pain but not intended to penetrate the body.

They come in many forms, including cylindrical wooden blocks, bullet-shaped plastic missiles tipped with stiff sponge or foam, fabric sacks filled with metal birdshot, and pepper-spray balls, which are about the size of a paintball and contain the active chemical in pepper spray.

Some are fired by special launchers with muzzles the diameter of a cardboard toilet-paper roll; others can be fired from shotguns.

They can cause devastating injuries. A study published in 2017 in the medical journal BMJ Open found that 3% of people hit by projectiles worldwide died. Fifteen percent of the 1,984 people studied were permanently injured.

“Given the inherent inaccuracy” of the projectiles and the risk of serious injury, death and misuse, the authors concluded they “do not appear to be an appropriate means of force in crowd-control settings.”

Yet manufacturers continue to market them on their websites for that purpose. Defense Technology says its “eXact iMpact” sponge projectile is “used for crowd control, patrol and tactical applications.” PepperBall says the uses for its projectiles include “anti-riot” and “crowd control.”

Security Devices International describes its “blunt impact projectiles” like weapons of war, saying they’re “designed for military, peacekeeping, homeland security, law enforcement, correctional services and private sector security.” It adds, “they are ideal for crowd control.”

The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

There are no national standards for police use of less-lethal projectiles and no comprehensive data on their use, said Brian Higgins, an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Brandon Saenz lost an eye and several teeth after being hit with a “sponge round” in Dallas. (Courtesy of Brandon Saenz’s lawyer, Daryl Washington)

So the nation’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies establish their own rules for when they should be used, who’s allowed to fire them and how to hold their officers accountable.

Many police departments don’t require officers to document their use of projectiles, Higgins said, making it difficult to know how often they’re used.

Denver’s policy says officers should use projectiles only on a “combative or physically resistive person whose conduct rises at least to the level of active aggression,” to prevent others from being harmed, or to “incapacitate a suicidal person who cannot be safely controlled with other force.”

Denver also forbids officers from targeting the “head, eyes, throat, neck, breasts of a female, genitalia or spinal column” of a suspect “unless deadly force is warranted.”

Matthews said she was standing 5 feet from other peaceful protesters at the Denver demonstration and nowhere near anyone rowdy. She suspects her shooting was no accident.

“Either they targeted her face or they fired indiscriminately at the crowd,” said Ross Ziev, Matthews’ lawyer. “Either way, that poses a tremendous safety hazard.”

A federal lawsuit accuses Denver police of “targeting protesters, press, and medics” and aiming projectiles “at the heads and groins of individuals, in a clear tactic to inflict maximum damage, pain and distress.”

The Denver Police Department “takes complaints of inappropriate use of force seriously and has initiated Internal Affairs investigations into officers’ actions during demonstrations that may be violations of policy,” a department spokesman said.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

A federal judge in Denver issued a temporary order limiting the use of projectiles and tear gas. Police may use them only with the approval of a supervisor — and only to respond to “specific acts of violence or destruction of property that the command officer has personally witnessed.”

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson found a “strong likelihood” that Denver police violated protesters’ constitutional rights “in the form of physical injury and the suppression of speech.”

The Denver Police Department “has failed in its duty to police its own,” Jackson wrote.

Judges in Seattle and Dallas have issued similar injunctions, and cities such as San Jose, Atlanta and Austin have moved to curb their use.

‘We’ve Opened The Floodgates’

As of 2013, 37% of police departments in the U.S. authorized the use of “soft projectiles,” according to the most recent survey released by the U.S. Department of Justice. That included the largest police departments in the country and more than half of those serving 10,000 or more citizens.

Law enforcement used the projectiles widely during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked by the death of black teenager Michael Brown.

But in day-to-day policing in the United States, kinetic impact projectiles are rarely used, according to a study published in 2018. Fewer than 1% of police use-of-force incidents involved such weapons, researchers found.

Something changed when protests erupted after George Floyd’s death, said Higgins, a former police chief of Bergen County, New Jersey. “It’s almost like we’ve opened the floodgates,” Higgins said.

In general, instructors teach officers to target only people who are “extremely dangerous,” said Higgins, who teaches classes on how to use these munitions.

Projectiles should be “your last resort before you go to lethal force,” Higgins said. “That’s how dangerous they are.”

And officers need to aim shotguns or launchers carefully. “You should never fire indiscriminately into a crowd,” Higgins said. “You should always pick your target.”

Projectiles can be fired directly at a target, while “skip rounds” are fired at the ground in the hope of hitting the target as they ricochet upward. That method of shooting is notoriously inaccurate, Mesloh said.

Mesloh said he has spoken out about the problems with police projectiles for years, to little effect.

There are no manufacturing standards or quality control measures for less-lethal projectiles, Mesloh said.

In field tests, he has found that bean bag rounds can travel far faster than advertised. He focused on rounds that were supposed to fly out of a shotgun at 250 to 300 feet per second, 2½ to 3 times faster than a major league fastball. Several traveled 600 feet per second. One bean bag clocked in at 900 feet per second, about the same speed as a .45-caliber bullet, he said.

Faster projectiles are more likely to kill than slower ones, and they fly straighter. So an officer who expects the projectile will dip and hit a suspect’s leg could end up hitting him on the torso or head, Mesloh said.

Police can also make dangerous errors if they shoot projectiles while wearing gas masks. “The visibility with gas masks is zero,” Mesloh said. “I wouldn’t want to shoot anything while wearing one.”

Leslie Furcron was placed in a medically induced coma after being shot between the eyes with a “bean bag” round in La Mesa, California.(Courtesy of Leslie Furcron’s lawyer, Dante Pride)

Instructors typically get eight hours of training with less-lethal projectiles before they’re allowed to teach others. Their students — regular police officers — receive four hours of instruction, including just five or six practice shots. Bean bag rounds used with shotguns cost $6 each, which limits how many can be used for training, Mesloh said.

Police and their advocates emphasize that officers dealing with crowds must make high-stakes decisions in chaotic situations without time for reflection. Often they fear for their physical safety, said Nick Rogers, a detective and the president of the Denver police union.

“Unfortunately, the narrative of the protests has kind of been hijacked,” he said. “We probably had 30 to 40 police suffering injuries from bricks and rocks. And that’s not being reported.”

Denver police didn’t respond to a request to confirm that.

In San Jose, police Capt. Jason Dwyer said firing projectiles is safer than trying to control a crowd using nightsticks. Dwyer, who was struck by a rock, said at a press conference that police were justified using projectiles and tear gas against the crowd, who turned his city into a “war zone.”

“I’ve been a cop for 21 years, spent about half that time in special operations,” Dwyer said. “But I can tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A South Carolina law enforcement leader defended the response against protesters in Columbia on May 31, a clash that included the firing of projectiles.

“There was no doubt what their intent was, and that was to destroy property, police cars, police buildings, whatever,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said during a news conference. “So we had to stop them. And we did stop them.”

But Patrick Norris, 28, said he was protesting peacefully when he was shot in the back. He and a group of 150 to 200 protesters were met by about 50 officers from the Columbia Police Department, Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the South Carolina Department of Corrections, according to a federal lawsuit Norris filed against the sheriff, the sheriff’s department, the city of Columbia and its police department and unnamed officers with the agencies and the state Department of Corrections. Court summonses have been issued to the defendants, who have not yet filed responses.

Officers carried protective shields and were clad in body armor and riot helmets, said Norris, a truck driver and veteran of marriage equality rallies and gay pride parades.

For about two minutes, the protesters chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” Norris said. Then it appeared that someone ordered the officers to move forward. Almost instantly, the scene escalated into a battle. “They met us with immediate and intense force for no reason,” Norris said. “It was pure chaos, with a large group of armed people unloading on unarmed protesters.”

Local media reported that the protesters had thrown objects at the law enforcement officers and tried to sneak into Columbia Police Department headquarters. Norris scoffed at that.

He said he saw a bright flash, followed by a loud explosion that left shrapnel injuries on one of his legs. “Multiple loud pops were heard,” believed to have been “the first of the rubber bullets fired into the crowd by unknown law enforcement officers,” the lawsuit alleged.

“Officers then began shooting tear gas canisters into the crowd of protestors,” the lawsuit said. Norris, who had turned to run, “was struck numerous times in the back” by projectiles that left red welts seen in photos included with the lawsuit.

The Columbia Police Department policy on the use of force states that less-lethal weapons meant to be fired directly at a target can’t be used indiscriminately against a crowd, even if it’s violent, and “shall not be used for crowd management, crowd control or crowd dispersal during demonstrations or crowd events.”

The use of force policies of the other law enforcement agencies could not immediately be determined. Norris said he doesn’t know who fired at him.

Shot Without Warning

Soren Stevenson, 25, said he was unarmed when he was shot by law enforcement May 31 in Minneapolis.

Protesters were peaceful but unnerved by police in riot gear, Stevenson said. He moved to the front of the crowd, about 30 feet from police, to protect protesters behind him.

Suddenly, officers launched two explosive devices at demonstrators. Tear gas filled the air.

“The police knew it was a peaceful protest,” Stevenson said. “I did not hear any instructions or commands from police. It went from protest to shooting, just like that.”

Stevenson said he was trying to comprehend the explosions when something slammed into his face, knocking the lenses from his glasses and spinning him around.

“I was very confused. I reached up and touched my face, and it was just soft — that whole left side,” he said. “It broke a lot of bones in my face, and my nose was moved from where it belongs to underneath my right eye.”

Stevenson doubled over, but stayed on his feet. He said he didn’t notice blood or pain until volunteers cleansed the wound at a medic station.

Stevenson said there were fractures to his skull, cheekbone, nose and jaw. He also suffered a concussion.

Doctors immediately performed reconstructive surgery. On June 10, surgeons took out Stevenson’s eye. They inserted a prosthetic that is expected to eventually settle with surrounding tissue, and he’ll get a glass lens at some point. But he’ll never again have normal vision.

In three decades as an ophthalmologist, “I’ve seen just about everything bad that can happen to an eye,” said Dr. George Williams, who has not been involved in Stevenson’s care. “I can’t imagine a more effective way to destroy an eyeball than these so-called kinetic impact technologies.”

“Frankly, you’re better off being stabbed in the eye with something sharp that creates a clean, plain wound,” said Williams, clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “This creates irregular wounds where the tissue is just blown out. There is oftentimes nothing left to fix.”

His group and Physicians for Human Rights have called for a ban on less-lethal projectiles, including sponge-tipped bullets, pepper-spray balls and bean bag rounds.

These projectiles “don’t seem to be very effective at crowd control,” Williams said. “All they seem to do is hurt people.”

Frozen With Fear

Nadia Rohr, 24, froze when Detroit police aimed what looked like “a bright-orange Nerf gun” directly at her.

She and her girlfriend were at the front of a group of marchers when they turned a corner and came face-to-face with a wall of police in full riot gear, banging their batons on their shields.

“I locked eyes with a police officer,” said Rohr, who said she was peaceful and unarmed at the May 31 protest. “I was in a direct line of fire.”

Rohr said her girlfriend tried to pull her away, but the projectile still hit her in the back of the head.

According to Rohr’s medical records, the projectile fractured her skull, caused bleeding beneath the outer lining of her brain and ripped a deep gash across her scalp that took nine stitches to close.

The Detroit Police Department didn’t respond to requests to review its policy. Guidelines from 2014 authorize Detroit officers to use less-lethal force only to protect someone from physical harm, stop dangerous or criminal behavior or control someone resisting arrest.

C.J. Montano, 24, has a bruise on his forehead in the shape of a circle — visible evidence of the projectile that caused bleeding inside his brain.

“They shot me directly in the face,” said Montano, a former Marine who was hospitalized in the intensive care unit after attending a May 30 protest in Los Angeles. “It was definitely intentional.”

Montano described a chaotic scene. He and a group of nonviolent protesters knelt on the ground, yelling and chanting, about 5 feet from a line of officers armed with projectile launchers. Nearby, other protesters were throwing water bottles at police — mostly Los Angeles officers, though some sheriff’s deputies were there too, Montano said.

Montano said he told police he would ask the protesters to stop throwing water bottles at the police if the officers didn’t shoot him. He did so, but they shot him anyway with small projectiles, he said.

C.J. Montano, one week after attending a Los Angeles protest where the police shot a projectile at his head.(Courtesy of C.J. Montano)

The police announced they would move forward, and he warned the crowd that they would have to back up.

As the crowd moved back amid tear gas, he and another man were left in a no man’s land, 50 feet from police and another 50 feet away from the crowd, Montano said.

Officers shot again.

“I got hit in the hip and the stomach at the same time with larger rounds,” Montano said. “They shot the other gentleman. Although my hands were up, they shot me in the rib cage. I fell on the ground and moved behind a sign to catch my breath. … Their shots were getting higher and higher every time I stood up.”

Five minutes later, Montano said, he stood up with his hands in the air. He said that’s when he felt a powerful force hit his forehead.

“It was just like a really, really hard thud,” Montano said. “I lost all vision in my left eye, all hearing in my left ear.”

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating 56 allegations of misconduct by officers during the protests that decried police brutality — half of which involved alleged use of force.

The problem with police response in many cities was that leaders assumed crowds would be hostile, said Chris Stone, a criminal justice expert and professor at the University of Oxford. Stone sat on a panel that reviewed the death of a woman in Boston who was shot with a pepper ball in the early 2000s.

Uniform standards for using less-lethal projectiles would go a long way in “strengthening professionalism, strengthening proportionalism and a reasonable response to the protests,” he said.

Officers Violated Rules Against Shooting Nonviolent People

Montano’s description of the shooting appears to violate the Los Angeles Police Department’s policy, which explicitly prohibits police from using pepper-spray balls, sponge and foam projectiles and other less-lethal force against people who passively resist or disobey them.

According to the Los Angeles policy, police should fire projectiles only “if an officer reasonably believes that a suspect or subject is violently resisting arrest or poses an immediate threat of violence or physical harm.”

Demonstrators in Minneapolis, San Jose, Denver and Dallas described being shot with less-lethal projectiles even though those departments don’t allow them to be used against nonviolent people. In some cases, such as in Denver and Minneapolis, law enforcement from other agencies were called in to help and it’s unclear who fired.

!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}}))}();

The Los Angeles Police Department said it’s investigating Montano’s shooting, which occurred “amidst a fluid protest that at times became dangerous for both officers and demonstrators.

“In some cases they devolved into chaos with rocks, bottles and other projectiles being launched at police officers, who have sustained injuries that range from cuts and bruises to a fractured skull.”

In San Jose, attorney Sarah Marinho, who is representing Sanderlin, said that police violated their rules when they shot him, that he was armed only with a small cardboard sign. At the time he was shot, Sanderlin was begging police to stop firing at unarmed people, including women, at close range.

“The facts are not in dispute,” said Marinho, noting that a TV news team recorded the scene. “He was a safe distance away. He was not invading the police officers’ space.”

A San Jose police duty manual states that specially trained officers may fire projectiles against people when suspects are “armed with a weapon likely to cause serious bodily injury or death” or in “situations where its use is likely to prevent any person from being seriously injured.”

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Sanderlin said he stepped between protesters and the police to ask them to stop firing at peaceful demonstrators, including a woman who had been hit in the chest. Police told him to move, he said.

“I shook my head, held my sign over my chest, and thought, ‘I really hope this guy doesn’t shoot me,’” said Sanderlin, who volunteers with a group that trains San Jose police recruits on how to avoid racial bias. “He fired off a rubber bullet, and I realized he wasn’t aiming for my chest. I was hit directly in the groin.”

San Jose police have said they are investigating the shooting; they did not return phone calls for this story.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo tweeted, “What happened to Derrick Sanderlin was wrong,” and he pledged to push for a ban on less-lethal projectiles.

Stephen James, an assistant research professor at Washington State University, said he was disheartened to see countless videos showing “officers appearing to indiscriminately use pepper balls as if they were paint-balling on a Sunday afternoon.”

Police departments have more trouble enforcing discipline with weapons during protests or riots because officers almost never train for those circumstances, may be fatigued and often are fearful, he said.

Though these projectiles should never be used to disperse a crowd, he said, they do have an important role in the law enforcement arsenal. If police are heavily outnumbered in riot or protest situations, less-lethal firearms can be used as a “credible threat” to maintain safety and order.

“I would never advocate for taking them away,” James said. “If you take away less-lethal weapons, then deadly force is the fallback.”

Learning From The Past

For residents and police in Baltimore, Floyd’s killing recalled one of the city’s most painful moments.

Five years earlier, Baltimore erupted in violence after a man named Freddie Gray died in police custody. A Justice Department investigation concluded Baltimore police had routinely violated residents’ constitutional rights, discriminated against blacks and used excessive force.

Baltimore brought in new leadership. Community groups began working with police. Policies changed.

And after video showed a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, a curious thing happened in Baltimore: Demonstrations were peaceful. There are no accounts of police firing less-lethal weapons.

Erricka Bridgeford, founder of the Baltimore Ceasefire 365 anti-violence group, said officers marched and knelt with protesters, prompting cheers from the crowd. “They allowed people space to yell and vent their pain,” she said.

Baltimore now has strict rules governing the use of kinetic impact projectiles. In the police department’s use-of-force policies, the No. 1 principle is the “sanctity of human life.” Whenever a less-lethal weapon is fired in the line of duty, it must be reported and investigated within 24 hours.

Bridgeford said she was heartbroken when she saw police in other cities shooting demonstrators with rubber bullets and pepper-spray balls. She didn’t call them “less lethal,” saying those words make police feel free to open fire.

Those weapons are used to instill fear, she said, “like siccing dogs on people or pulling out water hoses.”

The weapons aren’t “a way to de-escalate. It’s a way to harm people,” Bridgeford said. “Treating a crowd of people like animals? ‘Oh, my God, they’re shooting into the crowd!’ How is that a good strategy?”

Fractured Skulls, Lost Eyes: Police Often Break Own Rules Using ‘Rubber Bullets’ published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[junker-town]

Which college football team is each AAF team’s counterpart?

These rosters were designed to be quite regional, but let’s find each team’s college counterpart.

The Alliance of American Football should be a fun spring pastime, with lots of players and coaches you’ve heard of trying out a more TV-friendly version of football on CBS platforms. But unless you live near one of the eight cities with AAF teams, you might be unsure which team to claim.

The league did a smart job of making sure each team’s roster includes lots of locals, but we can get more specific. Let’s count up alumni from each roster in order to narrow each AAF team down to a single college, then apply that information as a scouting report.

The Arizona HOTSHOTS are actually UCLA

Arizona State and the Bruins have five HOTSHOTS each, but the head coach is Rick Neuheisel, a former UCLA quarterback, assistant, and head coach. Expect the HOTSHOTS to draft early every year and thus have a roster full of top talent, produce little to show for it, and somehow avoid anyone really noticing that disparity.

Other teams with multiple HOTSHOTS: Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Oregon State, Texas A&M

The Atlanta Legends are actually Georgia Tech

Sadly, the five Jackets won’t be able to stage a coup and install their alma mater’s since-discarded flexbone option offense, as most of them play defense. The Legends might’ve nearly had an offense really heavy on the QB option though, with Michael Vick originally planned as OC (he’s since taken a lesser role) and former Michigan all-purpose QB Denard Robinson on the roster.

Other teams with multiple Legends: Georgia, Georgia Southern, Louisville, North Carolina, Ohio State, Valdosta State, Virginia

The Birmingham Iron are the Kick Six

Bama has a whopping 10 players on the Iron, but the identity of one of Auburn’s five players means we have to provide equal time to this entire video now:

Me, every day at Iron practice as Chris Davis does sprints alongside his teammates:

“He’ll run it out to the 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 45! THERE GOES DAVIS! OH MY GOD!”

Other teams with multiple Iron ........ Ironmen? Ironmans ................... Ironpersons: Maryland (Mike Locksley recruiting connection), Mississippi State, Missouri, NC State, South Carolina

The Memphis Express are actually LSU

With eight big, beautiful Bayou Bengal Tigers on the roster, including QB Zach Mettenberger and punt god Brad Wing, the Express are hellbent on mucking every contest into a 19-12 eye sore that delights only the most hardcore manball appreciators. How will they do this in a league with rules designed to favor the offense? Please. LSU regularly turns five-star receivers into fourth round draft picks. Have a little goddamn faith in LSU.

Other teams with multiple Express ..... Expressionists: Baylor (counting head coach Mike Singletary, another devoted 19-12 creator), Memphis, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Tennessee State, Vanderbilt

The Orlando Apollos are, uh, actually the Florida Gators for real

Seven Gators on the roster, plus Steve Spurrier as head coach and longtime assistant Bob Sanders running the “defense.” Ha! This team ain’t playing defense. It has about 37 wide receivers who stand 5’11, 186 pounds and former five-star SMU QB Garrett Gilbert. I think everyone involved in the AAF knows all people want is Spurrier letting that thing whistle all over the ballyard.

Other teams with multiple Apollos: FAU, Florida State, JMU, Miami, Notre Dame, South Carolina, UCF, USF, West Virginia

The San Diego Fleet are actually San Diego State

Finally, an easy one.

Other teams with multiple Fleets (just Fleets), and this list is more aquatic and Fleet-y than it might appear at first: Colorado (has rapids), Minnesota (has lakes), Pitt (has rivers), Rutgers (near other ocean), San Jose State, Stanford, Syracuse (near waterfall), UNLV (has casino fountains), USC, Washington (fans tailgate in boats)

The Salt Lake Stallions have as many Utah Utes as any other team has anything

This team is going to make you punt your ass off. The AAF is gonna make rules against punting because of this team. If the Utes’ influence continues to permeate this franchise, the entire team and fanbase will look like a front seven. Will the Stallions ever score? Yes, on blocked punts.

Other teams with multiple Stallions: Arkansas, Arkansas State, BYU, Colorado State, Idaho, Nebraska, Temple (Philadelphia is in Utah, this is canon), Utah State, Wyoming

The San Antonio Commanders are Big 12 expansion

Four Houston Cougars and four TCU Horned Frogs. The Commanders have either recently made it into the Big 12 or will forever be teased with membership.

Other teams with multiple Commanders: Baylor (in the Big 12, though no one knew why for a long time), Cincinnati (another longtime Big 12 applicant who’ll never join), Indiana (often loses 41-38, a Big 12 tradition), Montana (has won multiple playoff games this decade, so is not a Big 12 team), Oklahoma (the good Big 12 team), Penn State (the first team to ever screw up the math in a conference’s name — the 10-team Big 12 is just playing catch up to 1990’s 11-team Big Ten), Purdue (Drew Brees is from Austin), Texas (Big 12’s CEO), Texas A&M (HAS NEVER BEEN IN THE BIG 12, DON’T LOOK IT UP), Toledo (also prone to 41-38 games).

Based on all only these college corollaries, let’s POWER RANK the AAF

Birmingham/Iron Bowl

San Antonio/Big 12

Orlando/Florida

Memphis/LSU

Salt Lake/Utah

Atlanta/Georgia Tech

San Diego/San Diego State

Arizona/UCLA

You can also bet actual money on the Alabama team winning it all, which is only feasible because there isn’t a Clemson team.