#ben roberts

[forensicated]

05x14 - Cock Up

TW: Racism and men being men of the 80's...!

Reg is dressed in a full referee kit whilst he practises his discipline in the mirror. He pretends to book Bryan Robson (at the time, Robson played for Manchester United and England.) He's the referee for the Inter School's five-a-side challenge which is being supported by Sun Hill as part of a Youth And Communities initiative of Brownlow's.

Bob is amused to find him threatening his reflection with a red card. Alec tells Bob that Reg was spouting off about the Police being society's referee in the canteen. Bob claims Reg is only the referee because he's the only one they know who had his own kit.

Brownlow, Yorkie, Tony and Taffy are also in attendance. Charles is dressed in full uniform for his speech and picture opportunity. Bob's youngest son, Danny, is playing for Medway Comprehensive. Brownlow tell the uniformed officers that it was good of them to volunteer to support the cause. Taffy scoffs as he walks off. "Volunteer? More like pressganged!" Alec can only stay for half an hour because he's promised his wife that he'll put up shelves for her. "You've got more shelves than anyone I know!" Bob laughs. Taffy playfully mocks him for being under the thumb. Alec wouldn't have it any other way. [Gif is Taffy's reaction to Brownlow's speech.]

Burnside is not happy about 'a bunch of louts kicking a bag of wind' meaning that the station has ground to a halt. Tosh claims it's all public relations but Burnside isn't appeased. He says there's a crime committed in London every 7 seconds and public relations will only improve when the police's record for catching criminals does.

At full time, Danny Cryer's team have lost and their supposed top scorer was off his form. As if it couldn't get any worse, Bob is left with the thought of Reg going off to the changing room to rub liniment into his calves. Bob and Reg overhear the Medway Comp boys having a row in the changing room and stop the boys fighting. Danny tells his dad that it was just an argument and not to worry about it but Bob won't let it drop as he heard Danny accuse the so called star player of being on drugs.

Bob takes 'the loud whisper' of information to Derek once he returns to the station. He admits Danny doesn't want to grass on his friend but if there's a chance that cannabis or worse is being dealt in the school then he can't let it drop. His main suspect, Colin Mellor, was clean last time he was raided by the Drug Squad. Derek invites Frank into the chat. Frank knows Mellor as a 'cocky scumbag who isn't known for keeping a low profile.' He agrees with Bob that it's likely he is supplying the drugs at Bob's son's school. He's angry that Mellor got off last time, claiming the Drug Squad cocked up and he had prior notice. Derek reminds them they need evidence. Frank says he'll put the shop under surveillance. Derek promises him he can use who he like from Uniform - just get Mellor and play it by the book.

Alistair sits outside the shop, hidden from view in one of those tents that workmen used to use on the streets. He's really not happy!

He documents Albert Johnson leaving Mellor's shop and meets Frank in a nearby café to update him. Alistair tells him that Johnson was nicked for dealing when he was at West End Central approx 18 months ago.

Reg reads the report of the football match out to the boys, oblivious to the fact they're laughing at him. He's genuinely proud and wants to send a copy of the article to his mother. He doesn't get what's funny.

Frank takes surveillance pictures to Reg for him to use his collator skills to locate the people in them. Reg recognises one as a pupil from Medway Comp who was cautioned a few months ago for possession of cannabis. He does however let himself down however by saying that 'could make a serious mistake with her!' She's 16, Reg! (oh the 80's!). Alistair reports that the girl frequently hangs around the shop during lunchtimes with different friends each time.

Frank arranges to arrest the girl as an inning to Mellor to avoid getting their fingers burnt again should he get wind of what they're planning. Frank and Derek lead a joint uniform and CID briefing to update everyone on Mellor. They're pinning their hopes on the girl having drugs on her - and also informing on Mellor.

Assorted officers get into place outside Mellor's shop and watch him unload a cash and carry delivery. Taffy sits in a lady's house observing Medway Comp's playground and Yorkie and June sit in a van ready to arrest the girl. This time it's Malcolm and Pete sat in the little tent (with Pete accusing Yorkie of brownnosing Bob)

The girls soon appear and Taffy follows them to the shops. June spots Johnson approaching the store too and Yorkie calls it through to Frank. The girls go inside the shop and are out within seconds, heading up the High Street. June spots a problem - a group of teenage boys from Medway School are approaching the girls and calling out to them. Yorkie tries to tell Frank that there's a problem, but Frank won't listen - he orders them to move in and arrest the girls.

With no choice they get out and identify themselves as police officers (but only verbally - no showing of warrant cards) and ask the girls to step into the van. The boys gallantly step in and tell them to let go of the girls, telling Yorkie and June to show them their Warrant Cards if they're really police. June says they don't have to show them to them. Frank orders Pete and Malcolm to go intervene. Pete literally ends up picking one young girl up to get her into the van as the boys fight against them to get them to let them go. One of the boys snaps 'Coconut' at Malcolm and tells him he's not a police officer. STILL none of the officers have shown any warrant cards to calm the situation down. "Aren't I?" Malcolm scoffs, grabbing him and pushing him into the van along with his friend who protests it. Honestly - they know the scene needs clearing quickly with minimal fuss. It could have been sorted a lot sooner and it shows some usually intelligent officers acting very stupidly!

Johnson is observed watching the van by Burnside who urges the officers to drive off. Thankfully they do but it's not enough, he's rattled and runs to tell Mellor. Bob reports they've been sussed so Frank yells at everyone to get in the shop before they lose potential evidence. The PC is ineffectual at breaking through the shop doors with a sledgehammer so Frank literally snatches it and starts slamming it into the doors himself.

At the station the four teenagers are brought in with the boys still kicking off. Pete pushes one of them into a wall and growls at him to behave. The other shouts at Tom that he'll have them for assault. The girls protest their innocence and claim they haven't got any drugs on them. Tom tells them that they're going to be strip searched and June drag the first girl - the main target - off. The second is obviously quieter and more nervous. She seems a little hesitant of her date of birth too when Tom asks for it.

Mellor is amused as Frank oversees the shop being searched. He claims he's going to see Frank walking the beat after messing up again. Frank snaps at him and sends Alistair out to check his car over.

Viv tells the younger and more nervous girl to 'put whatever she has on the side and just give them a statement'. She doesn't understand and insists she still hasn't got drugs on her. She digs into her pockets and brings out the contents - cigarettes. "We were buying fags, that's all, I swear!" Viv doesn't believe her and orders her to undress. The girls father reports to the front station and is shown through by Tony. He's obviously furious and asks Tom what the hell he thinks he's doing. Tom tells him why his daughter was arrested and that she's being strip searched. Her father is horrified and claims that they need his consent for that. Tom starts to say that his daughter is over the age of consent - but is interrupted. The girl is only 15.

In the FME's room the girl tearfully redresses. "I told you!" Viv snaps at her to be quiet because they know she had been buying dope from Mellor. She protests her innocence again. June knocks on the door and asks Viv if she's found anything - both girls are clean.

Mellor and Johnson continue to enjoy Frank's officers finding nothing in the search. Johnson tells Frank he's going to report him for breeching his civil liberties. "You try stirring things up for me sunshine, you step on the cracks in the pavement and I'll have you inside." Mellor gloats that he has a number of charges he can take up against Frank. Frank almost assaults him with Alistair stepping in and telling him to leave it.

June and Viv feels awful for what has happened to the young girls, telling Pete that the younger of the two lied abut her age because she thought she'd been arrested for buying cigarettes. Pete is unrepentant, telling June it'll teach her for lying. June worries that Brownlow is going to make an example of them because the head teacher has also been on as well as the girls father shouting blue murder. Viv admits that somewhere along the line they were all a bit out of order. "We were all acting under orders!" Pete reminds her.

"It's how you carry the orders out that counts, not who gives them." Yorkie glares at Pete who mocks him for being a suck up to the bosses.

"I was watching you, Ramsey! Don't forget that!"

In CID Frank is fuming about Mellor and claims that in 20 minutes of them leaving he'll be set back up again. He wants Tosh involved too and claims they'll watch him for as long as they need to. Alistair reminds him that there's no way the bosses will allow that. Tosh has to tell him that Derek wants to see him in his office - NOW!

[derekconway]

14.65 Watching the Detectives

[hspn]

Not hurting on that front

Me: Don't we have two gk coaches? Why aren't we trying to get rid of that extra salary?

Brother: I bet Mr. Todd signed Hilário to a 10 year contract and we are trying to get him to leave by making this threat.

Me: I doubt anyone has offered him a contract since he retired. He's just always here like Milton in Office Space. But I do bet we are trying to force him out. I just looked it up. Turns out the other gk coach is the head of global goalkeeping (Ben Roberts). But Enzo brought his own guy, Michele De Bernardin. Plus there's Willy, so it's not like we're hurting on that front.

[tubecinema]

Broey Deschanel: "When Movies Are a Religious Journey"

Directed by Aidan Barnes and Ben Roberts

Edited by Ben from Canada and Aidan Barnes

[randomrichards]

WHITE HEAT:

Mama’s boy gangster

Brings law a hail of bullets

On Top of the world

[kenpiercemedia]

Sumerian Comics and Dillinger Escape Plan Team-Up For Graphic Novel

Sumerian Comics and Dillinger Escape Plan Team-Up For Graphic Novel

The Press Release: Sumerian Comics announced today ONE OF US IS THE KILLER, a brand new graphic novel inspired by the 2013 fifth studio album from mathcore band, The Dillinger Escape Plan and from Rock & Roll Hell creators, Sam Romesburg and Ben Roberts, visionary artist Greg Di Angilla (Rock & Roll Hell), and colorist Warnia Sahadewa (Doctor Who). “One Of Us Is The Killer” Speaking on todays’…

[rober-noir]

Silver Moth - Mother Tongue (Official Video)

Taken from the album "Black Bay" by Silver moth, released 21st April 2023 via Bella Union:

 https://ffm.to/silvermoth-blackbay 

Video directed by Maddie Burton: hotgirlera.com/videos Music by Silver Moth

Silver Moth is a new post-rock collective featuring Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite, singer/songwriter Elisabeth Elektra, Steven Hill, guitarist in Evi Vine along with fellow Evi Vine multi-instrumentalist Ben Roberts, and Vine herself, plus Burning House/Academy Of Sun drummer Ash Babb and Abrasive Trees guitarist Matthew Rochford.

(vía (126) Silver Moth - Mother Tongue (Official Video) - YouTube)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.

How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.

Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?"

Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.

The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes – they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated – track health outcomes – but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight.

But there was one group that loved EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/

The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent…the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased":

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is great at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool – it takes 18 keystrokes just to enter a prescription:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481

Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero."

Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes.

The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event – such as a medical exam – into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time – not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians."

EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/

Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver.

Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity – and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether.

One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data.

But Epic's approach – anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties – is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital – a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach – say, from Uber or a transit system – can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions.

The fact that anonymized data can – will! – be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmit responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated sixty papers in Nature in a matter of months.

Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom – from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels – and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse.

Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something has to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves.

Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[forensicated]

04X40 - The Silent Gun

Malcolm attends a call at a house after a report of a disturbance. However upon talking to the complainants he realises it's much deeper. Bailiffs had been trying to force the door of a bedsit open when the man inside released several rounds from a gun, injuring one of the Bailiffs hands. Malcolm questions why he wasn't told that a gun was involved and the middle class woman admits she was rather flustered to find out her tenant had a gun. She also forgot to ask for an ambulance and to mention that the man with a gun is still inside the house, locked in his room on the top floor.

Brownlow has a holiday that he's just about to leave for as news of the shooting comes in. Malcolm has a look up the stairs but there's no movement.

Bob. Tony and Derek get their guns and bullets signed out to them by Brownlow and Derek is assigned negotiator. Brownlow will be the scene coordinator, Bob is to be his runner and the others are back up.

The woman tells Malcolm that his name is 'Dublin' and she assumes he's Irish because of his name but she's never actually spoken to him. He hasn't paid rent for 6 months and is rather reclusive. She's been through all the legal routes to get him out but he won't leave hence the bailiffs being there.

Jim is sent to try and get access to the house opposite to gain an observation point. A crowd gathers despite Yorkie trying to get everyone to go home and stay inside. Bob and Derek take up positions with their guns with Derek making his way into the house.

Derek slowly starts climbing the stairs. He gets outside the room in question without harm and takes a long deep breath in. "Derek, any sign of life?" asks Brownlow. "Just my guts turning over, sir."

Jim couldn't get in the house suggested as an observation point as the woman he encountered freaked out. He's had to go to the next house along and reports a thick curtain over the window in question.

The firearms boss arrives dressed in a suit and is introduced to Brownlow. Soon after a group of armed police arrive and take over from Bob to allow him inside to assist Derek and Charles. The boss of the firearms is awesome and asks for a canteen van to be brought because he's there to make sure everyone is safe and calm and that the job ends in the same way, however long it takes. If it's not and not everyone is alive at the end - he considers that he hasn't done his job.

Yorkie has to deal with an idiot who wants to leave his house and dodge the police to get to the local shop. He refuses to go out the back, even when Yorkie points out that he's likely to get shot! Thankfully Claire's neighbour is a lot more reasonable and agrees to keep out of the way and in the back of her house.

Derek attempts to make contact with the armed police around him. He asks Mr Dublin if he can hear him and is answered by a toilet flush and Ted making his way out of the bathroom.🤣 Derek tries again but Dublin remains silent. Derek tells him that the bailiff is OK and not seriously injured. He asks him to leave the gun in his room and come out for a chat so he can help him with his problems. Dublin doesn't answer and there's no movement inside. He asks for the man's first name and is still met with silence.

Alec reports to Brownlow that the press would like to come nearer. He refuses and tells Alec to nick them if they try it before muttering to Ted that perhaps they should let them through as the only good journalist is a dead one. The middle-class house owner beams at Charles as she tells him that her brother was a journalist for the Telegraph.

Viv shows Brownlow some post addressed to a Mr Lublin from Poland that haven't been collected. She suggests that the name they've been given for 'Mr Dublin' is wrong and that he's 'Mr Lublin' instead. There's also an old rent book in the same name.

Bob pops upstairs. "... Do you speak Polish?" he asks Derek.

Technical Support blunder into the house and ask Derek how he's going. Derek tells them he's asked for an interpreter as there's been no movement or response yet. The armed officer's boss silences them all when he hears movement...

Outside, the canteen van is doing a roaring trade. Taffy asks Claire how you get all the hedgehogs in the world on a single matchbox. Claire has no idea.

The extra we've been talking about, Bryan Jacobs gets to speak in this episode! He says 'not again' and 'he is!' when Yorkie asks him who's winning their game of cards in the back of the police van.

Robin moans about how long it's taking, claiming the sooner it's over the better. Yorkie takes Alec a tea, he pouts because it's not coffee and sends him back to get him a sandwich.

The house owner is starting to get concerned that it won't be over by the time two students she tutors are due to arrive at 8pm. Malcolm and Ken make them all jump - including startling the snoozing Ted - by celebrating as a goal is scored on TV. [Very surprised Brownlow doesn't bollock them given what they're there for!]

Derek gets the interpreter to ask if he'd like a drink, and Mr Lublin continues ignoring them. "Perhaps he's on the wagon." Derek drawls before checking in with the tech guys who tell him there's half an inch to go before their probes are through the wall. "... Let's hope you don't come out behind the wardrobe again." Derek mutters earning himself a glare.

Brownlow talks to the armed officer's boss who tells him it doesn't matter that they've been waiting four hours, he still needs to bring it to a peaceful resolution. Brownlow points out the streetful of people wanting to return to their homes and an MP moaning about overkill.

Yorkie heads to a local shop to buy a packet of biscuits and speaks to the shopkeeper who tells him that he thought the Polish tenant had gone because he hadn't been in for months whereas before he was a regular visitor for his cereal. Yorkie asks if he ever spoke to the man and the shopkeeper says no, there was no point. He's deaf.

Outside the crowd are getting moody and wanting to return to their homes. One man in particular tries to push his way through Alec. He gets rough and ends up getting bundled into a police van to calm down. Another old lady reports her rice pudding that she left on a low flame might be about to spoil so Taffy is sent in to turn it off!

Brownlow speaks to the armed officers and explains that he's deaf and claims that they've wasted time trying to speak to him. The armed officer points out that if he's heard nothing he's more dangerous as he'd panic and fire at them in shock. The police dog barks at Charles as the man walks off like he's telling him off 🤣

Ted goes over to relieve Jim who has needed a pee for an hour. He reckons they should have gone in as soon as they were in place and took him by surprise and the job now has too much heavy thinking.

Tech are now going for their third set of holes after the last set also didn't work. Derek points out it could be a wall-to-wall bookcase but the man insists he knows it'll be right that time. The heat monitor is also not helping as what is seen could be body heat or also could be a fire! "When you join up those once little holes you'd drilling we can lift the roof up and have a look, can't we!?" Derek snarks.

Taffy tries to get into the house of the old lady and ends up breaking the window of her back door as everything else is locked. He's in the wrong house as he's confronted by two men and finds no rice pudding on the stove.

With no further movement, the officers prepare to go in with a police dog. The armed officers and a light are prepared and Viv asks the lady to stay where she is. They break the door in and push through a barricade to get the dog in before pushing in themselves. Inside they find the dog sat beside the old man who has literally curled into a ball with his hands over his head. The gun is on the bed.

With everything resolved and the old man arrested, the specialist forces leave. Derek and the suspect are mobbed by the press. Jim and Ted watch on in silence with Ted turning to Jim.

".... So what was the score?"

[derekconway]

14.39 Shattered

[thejoyofviolentmovement]

New Audio: Silver Moth Shares Gorgeous "The Eternal"

New Audio: Silver Moth Shares Gorgeous "The Eternal" @SilverMothMusic @plasmatron @mogwaiband @elisaelektra @abrasivetrees @matthewrochfrd @BurningHouseMU @BlackBayStudio1 @curlytt

This week will be extraordinarily as I’ll be covering the fourth edition of The New Colossus Festival this week. Look for various portions of my coverage to be coming within the upcoming weeks — including some potential interviews, live concert photography and other thoughts. But I’ll be trying my best to squeeze in my regular coverage of all things within my world — musically and otherwise. So…

[fivesillydandelions]

THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY 1.03 — Extra Ordinary

[jackieblueheeler]

Watch the cast explain to Charlie Vickers what brat means and whether Sauron is brat. Robert and Charlie are lost.

[duckysprouts]

batman’s decline in sanity throughout the movies

[moonpiegirls]

robert sheehan and justin h. min

- [the way they stole their interactions from us]

[1-jar-of-stars]

Do you guys think ghost Ben was erased from existence?

Icarus, The Crane Wives / The Best Day, Taylor Swift / @flooded--skies / unknown (if anybody knows the source please let me know!!!)