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[franchisesales]

Details Presentation Evolution Pest Solutions

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[mooncustafer]

Recover, Regroup, Roadtrip

Agent Dale Cooper disappeared in March 1989. The case is still open. Agent Dale Cooper disappeared in October 2016. The case is still open.

for @laughingpinecone  /

/ @countdowntotwinpeaks​‘ WONDERFULXSTRANGE 2021

“Diane, I am uncertain of the date and time, or indeed if such concepts have any meaning in this place. Nor do I have my recorder, but I find verbalizing my thoughts helps me to resist the confusion and lethargy. As for addressing my words to you, even though you’ll never hear them— well, old habits die hard.”

It pleased Wally Brando on a profound level to discover that a few pay-phones remained in Philadelphia, that reaching out was not yet the prerogative only of those who could afford a landline or a mobile. He could also have checked his email on a terminal at one of the city’s Public Libraries, and indeed, made a note to do so within the day so that he might catch up on the news of parents and former school friends. The pay phone was also blessed with both the yellow and the white pages, and the number he sought appeared under “F.” Getting transferred to Dr. Albert Rosenfield was a more complex quest, but he was persistent as well as polite, and after a few minutes he was able to speak to Dr. Rosenfield’s voice mail, if not the man himself.

He introduced himself with salutations, and was about the explain the nature of his request when a beep signalled that the allotted time had run out.

“To listen to your message, press one. To re-record your message, press two,” said the voice of the machine.

Silently cursing his volubility, Wally pressed two. This time he simplified the introduction, and asked if Dr. Rosenfield would be good enough to meet him that evening at the Morimoto Japanese restaurant not far from the FBI offices, to discuss a matter of deep concern connected, he believed, with the little town of Twin Peaks. When the beep came this time, he listened to his message and then, satisfied, hung up. The restaurant he’d named was slightly above his means, but he was meeting a friend of his godfather, and wanted to do justice to the occasion, even if the reason for it was one of peculiar anxiety to himself.

“Diane, I have tried so many times to escape— on the last attempt I really did get out into the world, but my plans, I fear, had dire repercussions for you, and to no end— my course still led me back to the Black Lodge. Some flaw in my own nature keeps trapping me in this loop; perhaps it’s what they sometimes call Saṃsāra.”

It was Agent Tammy Preston’s custom, when scraping the internet for information relevant to one or more recent cases, to check her email inbox every seven minutes— to do so every five minutes would disrupt the flow of her work, but ten-minute gaps might let something important go unanswered for too long. Just now the inbox was due another glance, and switching tabs she saw that two minutes earlier Director Bryson had replied to Tammy’s email of that morning with an invitation to come by her desk at her earliest possible convenience.

Tammy locked her screen, paused ‘Soft Fuzzy Man’ on her playlist and removed her headphones. Picking up the folder marked Missing Persons, 1989– Palmer, she slipped back into her pumps and made for Bryson’s office. The door was open but Tammy stopped at the threshold and rapped on the wall.

“Come in,” said Director Bryson, looking up from a folder. Bossa nova music played softly in the background as Tammy entered and pulled up a chair. It sometimes puzzled Tammy that apart from herself and Director Gordon Cole, no one in this particular division of the FBI seemed to have any interest in music recorded after 1979. (The first few times she’d heard ‘Du Hast’ pounding through the walls of Cole’s office, she’d wondered if this taste for metal was the result, or perhaps the cause, of his hearing loss; but after he’d joked to an unamused Agent Rosenfield about how these were difficult times and difficult times called for Dave Brubeck, she’d looked up the reference in case it was a coded message, and then the next day had overheard Gordon whistling ‘Mister Sandman,’ a song she knew primarily from an internet meme, at which point she concluded that the ear wants what it wants, regardless of demographic.)

“You told me you’d found some serious inconsistencies in the records surrounding Twin Peaks and the Palmer case?”

Tammy nodded, hesitated:

“I believe there may be inconsistencies as well in my own perceptions of the case.”

“Well now, that I find a little harder to believe.” Bryson smiled, but then her voice grew serious: “I’ve looked over the notes you made, and it confirms my own doubts about events.”

“Worse yet— the fact that I truly left the Lodge and then returned to it, will enable the beings that inhabit this place to take another twenty-five year turn in my likeness, unleashing even more evil on the world. The only thing stalling them is the doppelgänger I had MIKE make for the Jones family, but I don’t know if he’s still under the White Lodge’s protection.”

After all these months it still surprised Harry Truman there was so little physical pain, and so much boredom, to dying. Oh there’d been pain at the beginning, when he’d started treatment and had had to stop drinking; the memory of detoxing still made him shudder. But now he only felt a tiredness too huge for sleep to make any dent in it; and since he couldn’t sleep all the time, there were a great many hours during which all he could do was lie in the hospice bed or sit in one of the hospice chairs, and think.

At this point dying didn’t even sound so bad— it wasn’t like the past three decades had been all that great. He imagined going to sleep, just filling up a big bowl of silence and darkness and sinking into it, and then he felt bad for thinking that because Frank had already lost enough people without Harry lighting out too. Anyways, with the things he’d seen over the years he’d be a damn fool to think there was anything peaceful about death and whatever came after. So he’d lie awake trying to find some other topic to ponder, and that’s generally when the boredom set in.

Right now, courtesy of the nap he’d had in the afternoon after today’s treatment had left him especially exhausted, he was lying awake in the wee small hours. 3:52 am, said the clock on his bedside table beside the stack of paperbacks Frank had brought him on his visits— Harry wasn’t afraid of e-readers the way Lucy was of cellular phones, but he found the smell of paper comforting. It reminded him of the Bookhouse. The hospice tended to smell of disinfectants and sweat and soup. The food actually wasn’t as bad as the food at the hospital in Twin Peaks used to be, not that any food could be as bad as the hospital food in Twin Peaks used to be, but it made no difference to Harry, whose appetite had been gone for months. Frank always brought a slice of Norma’s pie too, carefully sealed in an old cookie tin to keep it fresh, but Harry could never manage more than a couple of bites, and they didn’t always stay down.

Being awake in the middle of the night in a hospice wasn’t as bad as being awake in the middle of the night when you were alone at home— the occasional voices or footsteps from the corridors beyond were reminders that whatever might be happening to Harry, life went on for the staff; and the lights from the city outside showed that life went on for others outside the hospice walls. When he’d first arrived, those city lights had made it hard to sleep, but now they substituted for the starry sky above Twin Peaks. There were fewer birds to watch in the city, though sparrows, pigeons or a starling sometimes lit on the ledge outside his window and peered in at him, or maybe at their own reflections. The frequent rain pattering against the glass— well, that sounded the same here as it did in a cabin.

Frank had called to tell him about Margaret Lanterman. Harry sometimes wondered if he should have stayed in Twin Peaks and died in his own home like her, instead of lingering in this hospice like the doomed heroine of some nineteenth-century novel. Or like Annie Blackburn. Or Audrey Horne.

The rain was spattering now against Harry’s window, bending the light from the Japanese stone lantern in the pocket-sized garden below. Harry couldn’t remember what the hospice building looked like from the outside, but he guessed it was similar in style to the mid-century one next door where the day-patients came for their treatments. A flash silhouetted the roofline; five seconds later came the thunder-crack. Harry settled back and closed his eyes.

Sleep pulled him into dreams of an espresso machine, like the one in the coffee place down in the lobby next to the gift shop for visitors. This machine filled a whole room, metal pipes feeding back on themselves like some kind of espressouroboros, neither steam nor coffee escaping from the grotesque contraption. Agent Cooper stood wearily before it with two empty coffee-cups. Harry was just wondering who the second cup was for, when Coop looked up and met his eyes:

“What year is this?!”

Harry sat up in bed, listened intently for two full minutes, but he didn’t hear Coop’s voice again. He sighed. Sometimes the mind pulls imaginary sounds out of the background noise. False pattern recognition or something— Coop would have known a word for it. Harry had little hope left they’d ever find Cooper, or if they did, that he’d still be the man he’d known. Yet he’d carried on, more (he told himself) out of habit than any real hope. He’d kept in touch with Agent Rosenfield, even when it meant letting him know about the cancer— not that Albert would blab the secret to anyone in Twin Peaks.

“Hello?”

“Good, you’re still alive.” Albert’s personality hadn’t mellowed with the years, exactly, but familiarity had worn the edges off his jibes.

“Shut up, Albert. So what have you found?” Albert’s calls generally came every three months, but never at nine in the morning, and he’d last spoken to Harry only two weeks back. Something important must have happened.

“Actually, Sheriff Truman, I’m the one coming to you for information.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not easy to do investigations from a hospital bed. What can I tell you that you can’t get from other sources?”

“I need you to summarize the Laura Palmer case back in 1989, and the actions of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks at that time.”

“Albert, is this one of your damn cognitive tests? You already know—”

“We’re both too tired to argue, just humor me.”

“How detailed do you want?”

“An outline will suffice.”

Harry took a deep breath and briefly listed the finding of Laura’s body, and the living but dazed and injured Ronnette, and the arrival of Agent Dale Cooper to lead the investigation. He skimmed over the crimes of Jacques Reneault and some of the other peripheral drama that had occurred in the town around that time, noted that Leland Palmer had murdered his own daughter, albeit while not fully himself, and was beginning to recount Cooper’s temporary suspension and Windom Earle’s campaign of terror, when Albert interrupted:

“You’ve still got the unofficial version, then.”

“Unofficial?”

“According to FBI records and your colleagues at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office, Laura Palmer is an unsolved missing-person case.”

Harry began to feel sick.

“Goddammit, Albert, you did the autopsy. I punched you and you fell across her body. You found a broken poker chip in her stomach—” Albert broke in:

“I hadn’t disclosed that detail to anybody I’ve questioned about this.” His voice was a little shaky. “Listen, Harry,” he continued. “Last Friday I was contacted by a young man wearing motorcycle leathers and talking like Jack Kerouac on quaaludes.”

“Wally.”

“Naturally I supposed him to be from your iodine-deficient neck of the woods even before he introduced himself as your godson and the offspring of those lieutenants of yours. He told me he’d come because he wasn’t sure where else to turn. Apparently he keeps in touch with his parents as he rides across the continent, but in their most recent conversation he’d noticed their memories of certain events had become confused. I was about to tell him I wasn’t the least bit surprised, when he added that he’d checked with other townsfolk, including your brother, and they all seemed to have had the same— how’d he put it? ‘The walls of their memory painted over like a childhood bedroom converted to a study.’”

”That sounds like Wally, all right.”

”Eventually he got round to explaining why he’d come to me. The message that had prompted him to call home was from Lucy; she said she’d shot a suspect who was attacking your brother Frank. She’d also mentioned some FBI agents arriving a few minutes later.”

Harry swallowed. He tried to imagine Lucy shooting anyone:

“Frank never said anything about this.”

“And when Wally called home, Andy and Lucy not only denied it had happened, they had no idea what he was talking about, not that I’d guess that to be an unusual state of affairs. Anyway, after I sent your godson away, I began to have contradictory memories myself of what Cooper had told me about the case. I remembered the poker chip after waking in the middle of the night from the worst dreams I’d had since medical school. I’ve been telling myself it was a false memory, maybe a composite of all the young female murder victims I’ve had to examine in my career, but I told myself I’d make one more phone call, just to check. And now you confirm it. Also, in my recall you knocked me across Leo Johnson’s body. Thanks for the correction. Are you still there?”

“Yes,” Harry answered, glad he was already sitting on his bed.

“Now that that’s established,” said Albert’s voice on the other end of the phone: “here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: when do you remember Agent Cooper disappearing?”

“March 1989.” Harry tried to keep his voice steady, as though he was giving evidence in court. He briefly explained about the Black Lodge and Coop’s reappearance and unsettling behaviour and how he’d checked himself out of the hospital and was never heard from again. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “Are you still there, Albert?”

“According to FBI records and, up until two days ago, my own memories: Coop disappeared this past October while driving to Odessa, Texas for a case. The last record of him was a credit-card charge at a motel just outside the city.”

“What was he investigating in Odessa?”

“Missing person. I’ve tried looking into that case, but it seems to be a dead end, especially since Coop never seems to have arrived at the diner where the man he was looking for had allegedly been running drugs.”

“Sounds like the kind of establishment where nobody’d admit anything. Maybe Coop did get to the diner.”

“Gee, you’ve cracked it Sheriff, we would never have thought of that. The diner was old-school, but not so old-school they didn’t have a security camera trained on the front counter. We went over three days worth of footage. I admit we can’t be sure he didn’t slip in through the back for some reason; but you knew Coop— can you honestly picture him entering a diner and not ordering a coffee?”

“Not the Coop I knew, but— I already told you he was acting pretty erratically just before he took off.”

Harry heard Albert sigh.

“I’ve been checking with a few of my colleagues who were involved in the original Palmer investigation. I think Gordon knows something, but being Gordon he’s saying nothing, and as loudly as possible. Denise— Director Bryson, now— remembers the unofficial version, and according to her so does Agent Preston— oh right, you never met Agent Tammy Preston, the poker-faced glamazon computer hacker— I’m not sure she was even born yet in 1989, but she was on a case in Twin Peaks in October 2016, and during the course of the subsequent paperwork, she started noticing a lot of records and statements didn’t match up, and then she realized her own memories didn’t match up. Which brings up another problem with trying to reason this out by conventional methods: something in that Salem’s Pacific-Northwest Lot of yours is rewriting memories, documents, maybe the facts themselves. But so far it’s predominantly affected the people who were on the spot this past October.” Albert’s voice rasped a little from the long phone call, and he paused to clear his throat. “Unfortunately, that also means the people most likely to remember the original version of events are people who weren’t in the Sheriff’s Office during the incident that seems to have triggered the change. At the risk of sounding like one of those bullshit shows on the History Channel, we may never know exactly what happened that night.”

“Wait, what even was the case that brought you all back in 2016?”

“That’s the problem— I’m one of the people who was there, and I only have vague and disconnected memories of a British man with a gardening glove, the chorus of Guys and Dolls, Agent Cooper leaving the room with Diane, his secretary who quit the FBI decades ago, and Gordon, and only Gordon coming back.” Albert paused again. “It goes against my personal feelings and medical opinions, but would you be willing to let me visit you in person? I’ve some vacation time and enough frequent-flyer miles that the trip will probably cost less than the long-distance charges if we continue this conversation.”

Harry opened the drawer of his bedside table and took out the key to Coop’s old hotel room:

“Yeah, come by.”

“Diane, I am currently alone. I realize that statement implies that I’m not always alone here, and indeed I sometimes have a companion, who I still think of as Laura Palmer, though I don’t know if that’s her identity anymore; I’d hoped, after my last attempt, that Laura would no longer be in this place at all. She comes and goes, or perhaps we both come and go and our orbits occasionally intersect. I’ve tried to find some pattern to it, but with no reliable way to measure time, I’ve had little success.

The last time we met she told me about a room she hadn’t seen before, all white walls, in which a dark-haired woman was contemplating a mirror with a puzzled look. I can’t help but feel this parallels my own situation.”

“Frank sent me this last month. But when I thanked him the next time he called, he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.” Albert hesitated before taking the room key:

“Great Northern Hotel,” he read, turning it over. “Twin Peaks. Isn’t the front desk going to want this back?”

“Unless I miss my guess, it’s from 1989 when Coop was staying there.”

Albert’s ears stuck out more noticeably, or perhaps it was his face that was thinner. He’d spent the first part of his visit scrutinizing Harry and questioning him about his case and what the doctors were doing for it, until Harry told him to quit it or he’d run out of time to discuss Coop’s disappearance before visiting hours ended, and anyway weren’t Albert’s patients usually dead to begin with?

The trouble with the subsequent discussion was that it went in a circle— the people who’d been present for the 2016 Unknown Event had uncertain memories of what had actually happened; and the people who clearly recalled the 1989 Palmer case as a murder hadn’t been present for the Unknown Event. The one thing that seemed likely was that there was some connection between the 1989 case and the 2016 case, particularly since both had been followed by the unsolved disappearance of one Agent Dale Cooper.

“I hate to say it, Albert, but I’ve given up hope on ever finding Coop.”

“What’s hope got to do with it?” Albert asked. His tone was not sarcastic.

“Diane, I’ve decided that, if only to keep my mind occupied, I will go looking for the white room and the woman with the mirror. I’d feel happier if I had a ball of twine or some breadcrumbs to leave as a trail back to the waiting room, but I’m coming to terms with the idea that’s there’s no advantage to remaining or returning here— it’s not as if I need food or drink in this place, and I cannot be any more lost than I already am.

So far, I believe I’ve walked down five identical red-curtained hallways, and turned left five times. It therefore seems likely that I’m following a counterclockwise, roughly spiral path, although I’m uncertain if I’m proceeding inwards or outwards.”

“If this search is going to require juggling two sets of memories, then I’d better come along so you don’t get brainwashed again.”

“Sheriff Truman, if you haven’t noticed by now, you’re in a cancer hospice.”

“I just finished a round of treatments, I’ve got a couple of weeks free.” Albert snorted and Harry added: “You can monitor my health while we’re on the road.”

“I’m already thinking of your health. You’re immunocompromised, travel is too risky.”

“We’re crossing a few state lines, not going to the other side of the world.”

Albert pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Fine. I’m driving. Which also means I get to choose the music.”

In fact, they went most of the way by plane, after Albert weighed the odds and decided five hours in a tube of recycled air would still be easier on Harry than a two-day road trip. Some of the passengers threw suspicious looks at Harry’s N95 mask, but they’d cleared it in advance with the airline, and Harry had briefly removed it when he went through TSA, and Albert was prepared to flash his FBI badge, but the flight crew were understanding.

They picked up a car at Midland International. Someone, presumably an employee of the car-rental company, had left a bundle of tourist-attraction pamphlets on the front passenger seat.

“According to these, Odessa has replicas of the Globe Theatre and Stonehenge,” Harry observed once he’d got himself settled.

“Why?” Albert asked.

“Got me there. The pamphlets don’t explain the motivation.”

Albert reached up and pulled down the car’s sunshade on Harry’s side, though the Sheriff insisted his cowboy hat was protection enough for his pale scalp:

“We’re not in the northwest where it rains every fifteen minutes,” he muttered, “and I’ve been looking up the side effects of your meds— you sunburn easily now.” Albert’s driving skirted the city, and they did not pass the Globe or Stonehenge.

The Pearblossom Motel, last recorded location of Agent Cooper, proved to be closed down. They’d noticed the papered-over windows as they pulled up, the sign unlit, not even to say NO VACANCY, but Albert got out to knock anyway. Harry watched him from the car; eventually he clambered out and slowly walked over to join him.

Albert was peering through a spot where the paper had torn away behind the window-glass. He stepped aside for Harry, and the sheriff took a look into the motel’s dim interior. He saw an ordinary, rather old-fashioned registration office, wood-grain panelling on the walls along with a few faded posters for local attractions. Rows of keys still hung on a board behind the desk, and a daily calendar read October 15, presumably the date the motel had closed, or the approximate date— Harry could imagine a concierge might not bother to keep tearing off the pages if they knew it was their last week on the job.

“I now realize that despite everything, I’ve still been harbouring hopes of finding my way back to the waiting room, hence my continual choosing of left-hand turns, as if attempting to mathematically navigate a maze. I must make a true leap of faith if intuition is to guide me, so I’ve closed my eyes and spun around several times in this corridor, first clockwise and then counterclockwise.

Now that I no longer can tell which direction I’ve come from… Diane, can you hear that? Of course you can’t, I don’t really have my tape recorder. I’m going to fall silent and listen for a bit.”

There seemed little else of interest at the motel (Harry, feeling a bit silly, had even tried the Great Northern’s room key on all the doors), so they turned back towards Odessa to look for the diner Cooper had been investigating. The motel was only a mile behind when they saw, ahead of them, a tall woman walking along the highway, her fire-engine-red hair, black t-shirt and pencil skirt out of place in a locale that was rural to the point of emptiness. Albert swore under his breath.

“This can’t be a coincidence,” he told Harry. “Roll down your window, I’m pulling over.” But the woman only threw a glance at the car as it slowed, flipped them the bird, and kept walking, though she stepped gingerly and Harry noticed she was barefoot on the asphalt. Albert leant across him and stuck his head out the window:

“Diane!”

“Fuck off, guys. I’m not Diane, and whoever she is I bet she’d tell you the same.” Harry gently pushed Albert back and leant out the window himself:

“Sorry, ma’am, mistaken identity. Are you all right though? I see you’ve mislaid your shoes.”

“Looks like somebody ran off with them,” the woman answered, her tone mocking despite the tired set of her shoulders. “I haven’t been up to anything illegal, officer. Just a bit of fooling around.”

“We can give you a ride into town,” Harry offered. “If it helps, you’ll be alone in the back seat— means you can get the drop on us if you start to feel nervous.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at the offer, then abruptly barked out a laugh and opened the back door of the car, took a seat and folded her long legs in after her. “Only because I need a lift,” she insisted, rubbing her bare feet. “I knew office romances were a bad idea, but he didn’t have to be a dick about it. Nothing to do now but go home and drown my sorrows in Hallowe’en candy.”

“You’ve still got candy left over from Hallowe’en?” In the mirror above the dashboard, Harry saw Albert raise an eyebrow and the woman in the back seat frowned, insulted:

“No! I may not have a maternal bone in my body, but I’m not going to give the trick-or-treaters candy that’s a year old.”

“Ma’am,” Harry asked, thinking about the calendar back in the Pearblossom Motel office, “what date d’you think it is?”

“Mid-October,” she began. Harry saw her reach into her purse with her black-and-white nails and pull out a mobile phone. Her eyes widened at the date: “No, it’s March. The fuck?—” She ran a hand through her scarlet hair. Harry wondered if it was dyed or a wig. Perhaps she was bald too. “Must be losing it. I was so sure it was October. And it’s not like I’ve could’ve been wandering around this desert for five months.” She tapped her phone screen. “5,230 messages?!” She looked frightened now, raising her head to meet their gaze in the mirror. “Where the hell have I been? And you guys— you’re feds, aren’t you?”

“No,” Harry began.

“I am,” said Albert. “He’s not.”

“Well, can you tell me what’s going on? Or is it classified? God, it’s not aliens, is it? I always assumed alien conspiracies were bullshit to cover up real conspiracies.”

“It’s probably not aliens,” Harry answered, unable to keep doubt from his voice as he remembered Major Briggs, “but I afraid it’s not going to sound any less weird.”

“To start with, we’re in the area investigating a colleague who disappeared in October,” began Albert, “and then you turn up, apparently amnesiac since that date.”

“And with my messages unchecked since then.”

“Yes, but there’s another detail— you look exactly like a former colleague of mine who was close to our missing man. That’s why I called you Diane when I slowed down.”

“I need a smoke.”

“No.”

“Albert,” Harry interrupted, “I’ve already got cancer, what’s the worst that can happen?”

“Do you want me to answer that in detail?”

“No I don’t.” Harry turned to look over his shoulder at the woman in the back: “Just roll down your window first.”

“We’ll pull over and she can step away from the car,” said Albert.

He stopped on a shoulder, and their passenger got out and lit a cigarette. Examining the packet, she called to them:

“Three left. That’s fewer than I remember having on me in October, but not by much.” Albert, meanwhile, had pulled a shopping bag from the back seat:

“You should eat something,” he said to Harry, producing a sealed cup of applesauce and a box of plastic spoons. Between rounds of treatment, Harry’s nausea receded, but his appetite was still pretty weak. “There’s saltine crackers, too.” Harry chuckled in spite of himself as he tore the foil off the applesauce:

“This all makes me feel like I’m home from school with the ‘flu.”

“You’ll have to watch Roadrunner cartoons on your own phone, I’m not paying for the data,” Albert snapped.

“I’m surprised we even get reception out here.” The red-haired woman had strolled back to the car with her cigarette, though she took care to stay downwind from Harry’s rolled-down window. “Guys, is it just me or is this highway really deserted— like, Rod-Serling-voiceover deserted?”

“We were just thinking Roadrunner cartoons.”

“Can’t be, there’s no weird rocks.” She flicked ash onto the pavement, “Though it does feel like if someone painted a tunnel entrance on a wall around here, you might be able to drive into it. If you weren’t a coyote.” She took another drag and glanced at the power lines humming above their heads. “Maybe it’s the hum from those wires that’s giving us brain cancer— oh sorry, dude.” She broke off and looked at Harry in apology.

“It’s all right, ma’am,” he said when he’d finished swallowing his mouthful of applesauce. “I’ve got leukaemia, not brain cancer. And the sound from those lines is unpleasant. Like the whine of mosquitoes in the woods.” As he spoke the hum intensified, becoming a loud crackle. Albert glanced up as a shadow fell over the three travellers and their car.

In the sky a dark, nebulous shape twisted, circled, formed a comma or an apostrophe, and dove towards them.

The first few grackles, out of thousands, came down on the roof and hood of the car. Harry could see one pecking at the windscreen and glaring at him with hard yellow eyes. He suddenly remembered Coop had been afraid of birds; until now, he’d never been able to imagine why. He turned and pushed open the back door as the woman dove inside the vehicle. Around them, the flock blotted out the landscape.

“Hope they don’t scratch up the finish,” Albert shouted over the sound of wing-beats, “or I’m not getting my deposit back.”

“Is this nesting season? I mean, are the grackles round here normally this—”

“Oh fuck, one got in!” came a yell from the back seat. Eardrums ringing, Harry turned to see a small black shape ricocheting around the car’s interior as the woman flailed her long, bare arms. The grackle made for the gap between Albert’s seat and headrest.

And got stuck, its beak not quite touching the back of Albert’s neck.

Harry reached for the little feathered body, thinking of how to pin the wings against the bird’s sides to avoid injury to it or the surrounding humans, but the moment his fingers touched it, it crumbled. At the same time the din outside the car ceased.

“That— that’s not natural.” Their passenger was covering her mouth with her hand. Even Albert looked shocked. Harry stared at the palmful of ash that was all that was left of the grackle.

“Let me get a sample bag,” Albert muttered. He pulled out a small clear plastic bag, and held it out while Harry poured the remains in. Then he handed him a packet of wet wipes. “You all right, Diane?” The woman in the back seat did not correct him on the name this time.

“Couple of scratches,” she said, examining her right arm. Albert passed her a mini first-aid kit. Got to give him his dues, he prepares for everything, thought Harry, adjusting the brim of his cowboy hat.

“Y’know,” he said, “This could be a good sign. In that it’s any kind of sign. There’s nothing worse than working in the dark, waiting for some hint you’re getting warmer or colder— that’s the kind of thing makes you wonder if the thing you’re looking for is even out there at all. But this—”

“Someone tipped their hand, you mean, when they tried throwing a Hitchcock movie in our faces,” Albert cut in. “But what exactly did we do to worry them?” His glance, and Harry’s, moved to the dashboard mirror’s reflection of their passenger.

“You think the birds were after me, or wanted to break up our merry band?” She raised an eyebrow. “Trouble is I know a token effort when I see one.”

“Or a warning.”

“We found the Pearblossom Motel;” Harry thought he saw the woman flinch at the name. “And then left it, to head for Odessa.”

“Are you suggesting we drive around in circles and see if they attack again?” Albert muttered.

“I think that’d be a little unfair to our passenger.” Harry turned to her: “Ma’am, I believe Albert when he says he knows you; but I also believe you when you say you don’t remember him. We can drop you anywhere you like— your call.”

“Give me a few minutes, fellas. Given all the weird shit I’ve just been through, I’ve got to think about whether I’m safer away from you two, or sticking close by. Plus I’ve got messages to check.” She took her phone out again. Without taking his eyes off the road, Albert pulled his own phone from his suit jacket, passing it to Harry:

“You’d better check mine. Maybe Tammy’s got some news—she’s been looking up everyone connected with events in Twin Peaks, but not living in the area. She even emailed some couple in Japan, though I’m still not sure what they’ve got to do with this.”

Harry peered at Albert’s phone screen, occasionally commenting if something looked to be of interest:

“Gordon’s sent a grudging OK, tells you to be careful. Also tells you to look after me. I’d always imagined he’d type in uppercase— didn’t realize it was him at first. Hm. Do you know a coroner?”

“I know lots of coroners, we get together for an annual poker tournament and lucky draw. And when I say draw…”

“Do you know a Dr. Talbot in Buckhorn?” Harry interrupted. “Autopsied a headless body last September that turned out to be Major— wait, he— is this one of those revised timeline things?”

“Not exactly.” Albert brought Harry up to date as best he could on Major Briggs’ disappearance and decades-later reappearance. “I certainly remember meeting Constance,” he added, after a pause, and cleared his throat again. “According to Tammy, I made a favourable impression on her, which is… unusual among my acquaintances, even those who share my profession. So what does she have to say?”

“Something about a wedding ring and Schrödinger’s Cat?” Harry looked at the message again. “She says Tammy spoke to her, and was going to contact you too… a gold ring they found on Briggs… sorry, in Briggs… keeps disappearing from her office’s records and the FBI’s evidence files, then coming back again?”

Albert frowned in thought as he drove: “Does it have anything engraved on it?” Harry tapped a message on the phone screen, CC-ing Constance and Tammy.

Outside the car, suburbs, or at least car dealerships and big-box stores, were beginning to sprout up along the highway.

Albert’s phone pinged and Harry read the message from Constance:

“Yes, scribbled it down last time I could find the record. This ring any (wedding) bells? TO DOUGIE, WITH LOVE, JANEY-E”

“Janey-E,” said Diane from the back seat, and Harry heard her drop her phone. Turning around he saw her wringing her hands, the nails now robin’s-egg blue. “Albert,” she gasped, “Oh, Albert, I was almost lost again.”

“I believe the change in method may have led to a breakthrough: I haven’t found any rooms leading off of the corridor I’m following, but the decor has gradually changed from black-and-white flooring and red curtains, to dark brown linoleum flooring and institutional green walls hung with large relief maps of different parts of the world. The maps appear to have been manufactured some time between 1954 and 1965, as they show North and South Vietnam as separate nations. I’m just passing the continent of Antarctica, now, and… oh. I think there might be…

Diane, I found the white room, and when I call it that, I’m not simply echoing Laura’s name for it. It was like a cross between a sanatorium and a snow cave, if a snow cave had furniture. There was a bed with white blankets and a white metal frame like a hospital bed. Audrey was sitting on one end of it, wrapped in a white bathrobe and looking at a round mirror that stood on a little white table. She turned as I entered, and her face was older, drawn and, for a moment, frightened. Then she looked at me again and relaxed, saying ‘Oh, it’s really you.’ I fear she must have met one of my nastier doppelgängers at some point.”

At Diane’s request, they stopped to eat at a fast-food chain before approaching the diner Coop had been investigating in at least one timeline.

“I’m hungry, but I’d be too nervous to eat at the place where Dale might have… well, if they’re a front for something, then the food’s either spectacular or terrible, and I’m not feeling lucky right now. I want to be someplace as bland and mundane as possible for a while, so I can regroup.”

“Well this place has a twenty-minute limit.” Albert jerked his thumb at the sign.

“That’ll do.” Diane curled up beside Harry in the booth as Albert went up to the counter to place their orders. She still wore her pencil skirt, but on on of their stops she’d purchased tennis shoes and a couple of fresh t-shirts— the one she was wearing at the moment read NOT TODAY in flowery letters. “Now he’s got two of us to worry about,” she said under her breath. Harry decided to reply:

“Someone needs to worry about him.” Diane nodded, and Harry offered his hand: “Sorry, we never did the proper introductions did we? Harry S. Truman.”

“I know.” Her expression relaxed slightly. “I see why he likes you.”

“Not sure Albert likes anybody, exactly—”

“That’s not who I was talking about.”

Albert returned with a eye-searingly-orange plastic tray:

“Mushroom burger, cheeseburger, buttered biscuit for you, Harry, because they can’t just serve toast like a real restaurant and those things they claim are bagels are made out of lies.”

“Don’t worry Albert, I’ll survive a biscuit.” Harry picked up one half of the baked item and took a bite. It wasn’t too bad, actually.

“Diane, the ring that jogged your memory—”

“My half-sister and her husband. Don’t ask me how they’d be mixed up in this though, Janey-E’s aggressively normal.”

“And her husband?”

“Never actually met him. Janey-E and I don’t talk much,” she explained. “But from her comments he’s… passively normal. Works for an insurance company, drinks too much sometimes, the whole man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit thing.”

“I’ve been talking with Audrey, or the version of her that existed in the white room. You’ll notice I use the past tense. Still sitting on the bed, she raised a finger and pointed to the mirror in front of her, saying:

‘The other me— she ran away from home, like she thought Laura had done. I’m amazed she survived her first year in the big city, but look:’

Diane, I saw Audrey searching records online, tailing suspects, testifying in civil and sometimes criminal courts. It’s a life that can make a cynic of the kindest soul, but there are situations the police don’t or can’t investigate, and those were— are, I suppose— Audrey’s bread and butter, in that mirror world. And they seem to pay well enough she can afford to do some pro bono cases.

‘I wish I were out there,’ she said, and the mirror clouded and shifted. She  patted the bedspread, and I sat down beside her. ‘You know how,’ she began, ‘when you’re a kid, and you’re reading your favourite book, and a little after the halfway point, you start to think ‘I’m getting near the end of the book?’ And really, you’re not— there are pages and pages left of scenes and pictures. You’re always surprised just how much more there is. But it’s not enough to shake the feeling it’s putting off the inevitable. Dawdling before bedtime.’ She stood up suddenly, bent and kissed me on the brow. ‘Say hello to the other me, if you ever run into her.’ And then she was gone, Diane. Not in flame or fadeout, just gone.”

I look up, and Laura is beside me.

The diner, when they found it, was not what Harry’d pictured. Instead of a lonely Edward Hopper tableau, or a grimy spoon where toughs whispered to each other along the lunch counter and cast knowing glances in the direction of the men’s room, “Wispy Dreams Cafe” was a blandly cheerful donut shop, the logo rather obviously altered from that of a national chain.

“Looks like they’re under new management.” Diane observed as they got out of the car. “Or else they got tired of paying for the franchise?” The three of them made their way across the parking lot the cafe shared with the landscaping company next door. Inside, the sound of chattering customers and a hum from the coffee machine both soothed and overwhelmed. Harry steadied himself against a gleaming, cream-colored formica counter. The woman on the other side— not a fresh-faced high-school senior or a kindly-faced matron, just a woman with her hair in a ponytail and circles under her eyes, doing her best to smile— threw him a glance and Harry nodded.

“I’m ok. Albert, Diane, what do you two want?”

A couple of minutes later, they sat by the window, feigning interest in their donuts and coffee.

“Well, we’re living the cop cliché,” whispered Albert. “So, what do you think? Soulless suburban hangout, or den of villainy?”

Harry gingerly sipped the brew in his cardboard cup and eyed the other customers. You couldn’t say the place wasn’t busy; the woman at the counter had already served a family of four in the time it had taken Harry, Albert and Diane to seat themselves with their coffees, and another customer had just come in the door.

“That counter’s been installed recently. Deep-fat fryer’s been replaced too.”

“And they don’t know how to use it yet. You could wax skis with these donuts. That’s hardly a crime, though.” Diane looked around at the blue and yellow walls painted with large trompe l’oeil sprinkles. “Doesn’t seem to be anything else funny about the place— I hate to say it but this place might be legit.”

Harry watched the new customer lean in to the counter. Harry couldn’t quite make out what he was saying— presumably the man was placing his order, but it seemed to be taking a while and there was something tense in the woman’s expression. Beside him he heard Diane swear under her breath, and faster than he could turn his head, his peripheral vision took in that she was getting up. She strode towards the counter and Harry had a glimpse of the angry red scratch on her arm as he struggled to his feet.

Diane was leaning on the counter now, trying to insert herself between the customer and the worker.

“What did you just say to her?” she was asking.

“Look, I come in here all the time, we joke around. What makes you think it’s your fucking business?”

“What seems to be the trouble?” Harry loomed up behind the customer— he might have only half his usual strength but he was still a good six inches taller than the other man. Behind him, he guessed, Albert was approaching. Harry knew the agent was unwilling to use physical force and not exactly skilled at defusing situations through diplomacy, so he turned his gaze on the customer with all the quiet confidence he’d used as Sheriff. In his ear Diane hissed:

“It’s nothing to do with the case, this asshole’s just creeping on the staff.” She must’ve locked eyes with the man too, for he was staring at her now, his bland pink features shifting expression from anger to terrified fascination.

Rather an unimpressive face, thought Harry, and then, what’s Diane doing? He turned to look at her sharp, smiling profile, and saw a tear slide from her eye.

“No,” she said loudly and abruptly, and blinked hard. “Do you want us to escort him out?” she asked the woman behind the counter; but the man was already out the door and running for his car.

“Diane,” Harry whispered.

“Diane,” whispered Albert. Diane was passing one hand across her eyes.

“I could have fried him. Just now. Something wanted me to; but I just wanted him to back off.” She beamed at them as Albert held out an arm for her to steady herself. “I think I’m back to normal. Well, normal for me.”

“Are we the only two left here now?”

“I’m not even here anymore.”

“I don’t know how to get back to the waiting room.”

“It doesn’t matter, the coffee’s cold.”

Somehow, the white room has become even more featureless, despite that being both a logical and a grammatical impossibility. Only the bed, the table and Audrey’s mirror remain. A moment in the glass catches my eye, and I look to see— oh Diane, I’m so glad you escaped! I see you travelling with Albert, and… oh, Harry…

…the cafe’s fluorescent lights flickered as the background hum, noticeable since their arrival, now rose to an ear-splitting volume then died away just as suddenly. As the three of them looked on, an old-fashioned hospital bed, its steel frame painted white, materialized between the counter and the booths, replacing two unoccupied tables. At one end of it sat Agent Dale Cooper, fully dressed in his suit and tie, a look on his face of mild surprise that turned to the familiar joy as his gaze met theirs. Coop had grown older like the rest of them, sharper angles in his face, but he looked hale and well, and his eyes did not have the cruel gleam that chilled Harry’s memories of their last meeting.

“Harry,” he said, as though a quarter-century hadn’t passed. In response Harry silently doffed his cowboy hat, revealing his pallor, his naked scalp. Coop’s smiled wavered a little. “I’m sorry I was gone so long,” he whispered, and rose from the white bed. In the background, the cafe staff and patrons continued to chat and serve and drink and eat coffee and donuts as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on right in front of them. Albert made a hesitant noise in his throat and Coop raised his hand in that just a moment gesture he always used to make, and in that moment Harry knew his friend really was back from wherever he’d been all those years.

“Apologies for being brusque,” Coop said, “but there’s a family in Las Vegas who I’ve reason to believe are in danger right now—”

“Janey-E?” Diane asked.

“Right on the button. For personal reasons which I’ll explain later, I can’t get in touch with them myself. The Mitchell brothers might be able to help, but I don’t know how much they’ll be able to recall of our last meeting.”

“Tammy and Constance are already on it.”

“Good,” Coop looked relieved, and Harry stepped forward, shaking a little in spite of himself, and as if the motion had at last given him permission, Coop sailed forward and embraced him— very gently, as if he feared Harry might break. He’s gauging by touch how much weight I’ve lost, thought Harry, but it’s all right. He’d forgotten how warm Coop was. He became aware of Albert and Diane joining in, arms circling his shoulders and Coop’s. If I died right here and now, it’d be all right.

But this embrace was not an epitaph, or an epilogue. Outside, somewhere else in the city, was an imitation of an ancient stone monument; and a copy of an old theatre where real audiences watched real actors. Somewhere the forces that had sent the dark cloud of grackles prepared another attack, and somewhere Tammy Preston was moving to protect Janey-E and Dougie Jones. Elsewhere Audrey Horne walked the mean streets and was not herself mean. This was an interlude, but let them have it for a while.

A couple of patrons turned their heads to smile at the reunion going in their midst.

[rjzimmerman]

Whenever I’m back in Illinois (as I have been since November 2019), I visit restored (or restoring) prairie sites as often as I can. Those places feel like home to me: the wind, the smell, the sudden disruption and noise caused by birds and mammals, the wildflowers. If the prairie adjoins a savannah, or if the savannah is part of the prairie, even better. This story tells us that the prairie is valuable to the Earth, and I agree. We have to reverse the damage done by decades of settlers and pioneers who destroyed the prairies, without realizing what they were doing.

Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:

Scientists say the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by mid-century to avert catastrophic effects from global warming. Carbon dioxide is the most prevalent greenhouse gas; the amount in the atmosphere has been rising as humans burn fossil fuels. Not only must the world stop releasing more carbon, some CO2 already in the air also must be removed, experts say.

That’s where the prairie comes in.

As part of photosynthesis, plants pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their stems, leaves and roots. Unlike trees, grasslands store most of their carbon underground, in their roots and the soil.

And that makes them more reliable “carbon sinks” than forests, according to a 2018 University of California at Davis study. Because carbon is stored in the soil, it is not released back into the atmosphere when grasslands burn, as it is when trees go up in flames.

A pristine prairie can also be home to hundreds of types of plants. Poets and explorers wrote about the spectacular view above ground, but the real magic is what happens below the surface.

“It’s a good locker to put the carbon into,” said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer and Rice University professor. “Carbon will stay in the soil for centuries."

But there are few pieces of pristine land left like Daphne Prairie, untouched by plow or urban sprawl.

[Iowa farmers ripped out prairie; now some hope it can save them]

Less than 0.1 percent, or about 5,000 acres, remain of the original 12 million acres of Blackland Prairie that once spanned from San Antonio to the Red River north of Dallas, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The trend is the same throughout the tallgrass prairie system that runs from the Texas coast north to Manitoba, making it one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America.

To create incentives for landowners to preserve natural land, Blackburn and the Baker Institute at Rice are leading a group of organizations as varied as the Nature Conservancy and Valero Energy to brainstorm ways to create a market for storing carbon in the soil of prairies, farms, ranches and grasslands in Texas and around the country.

Funding is available to landowners for carbon stored in forests, such as California’s cap-and-trade market, and the same should be done for soil, Blackburn said.

[curationstationdc]

Woodcuts in suburbia: on nostalgia, melancholy, and resistance

Selbstbildness von vorn, Käthe Kollwitz, 1922-1923. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

I associate woodcuts with a particular aesthetic: they loom from their perch on the bookshelf in the den, next to a collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales, whose worn buckram binding is effusing that sapid antique book aroma which pairs so well with coffee and cake. In the corner of the room, above a worn black leather chair designated for tv-watching and reading, a pathos dangles from its pot, fed by gentle streams of light emanating from the canopy of shade sheltering the backyard garden. On weekends and special occasions, the clinking of cake forks against china is punctuated only by an occasional “delicious!” — direct and accurate. This orchestration produces a distinctly Germanic affect, and one that I associate with the elderly; the particular family room I’m recalling belonged to my next-door neighbors growing up, former members of the Danish anti-Nazi resistance who had emigrated in the early 1960s. While I can’t be sure there was any deeper meaning behind their affinity for the humble woodcut, I do recall the medium’s prominence in their home. For me, something as benign as a flock of birds is represented with a degree of melancholy in these prints’ impenetrable black shadows — an inevitability in this generation’s Weltanschauung, that everything beautiful carries with it a degree of pain, a nostalgia for the idea of a more civil world.

Without Title, Constantin von Mitschke-Collande, 1923 (?) © Oglethorpe University Museum of Art

These beloved octogenarians, Ketty and Eigil, were my first true role models, and I insisted on seeing them almost every day for the first decade of my life. They taught me what hygge was before it became a commodity, when it was an applied wisdom that emanated, more than anything, from common sense. I can still place myself their 1950′s minimal traditional home: running my hands along their walnut furniture as I toddled from room to room, greeted around each corner by the unique tick-tock of an antique clock, my slippers shuffling along the dull, greenish-blue carpet so typical of that era. Nothing in that home was remotely as paired down as today’s CB2 nonsense, and the old neighborhood still retained a smidgen of character unlike the suburbs to which my family would later relocate; lovingly tended beds of roses, pansies, and bleeding hearts grew around coy ponds under the shade of ancient maple and red oak.

​Though they wouldn't have wanted it this way, I found the art in Ketty and Eigil's home to be inextricably linked​ to their brazen defiance in the face of ​Nazi ​terror​. They ​seldom ​discussed their acts of resistance, almost never in front of children, and always with a healthy dose of​ ​embarrassment​. For them, violence, even against evil, was never a source of pride. ​It was the democratic ideals to which they so ​stubbornly​ clung ​that ​were the real source of their identity​: notions like neighborliness and helpfulness, belief in the healthcare and education systems. ​It wasn’t until years after their deaths that I detected any degree of paradox in their suburban American existence​ meshed with Scandinavian socialist ideals​, was able to chuckle at their nostalgia for the old country as expressed in their grocery cart (tubs of frozen Coolwhip to be served generously with home-baked apple cake, slices of summer sausage or cucumber salad served on squares of cocktail rye, a far cry from the bakeries and delicatessens of northern Europe.)

A young family admires their new home. Between 1950 and 1970, America’s suburban population nearly doubled to 74 million. © Camerique Archive / Archive Photos / Getty Images

​My association of woodcuts with Germanic Europe was solidified during my time as a High School exchange student in the rural Rheinland, and again during a semester abroad in Berlin. It seemed to me that, if one was of a certain generation and political bent, there was a good chance one might own such a print. But while I may associate woodcuts with the interior design choices of a singular socioeconomic stratum from the middle of the last century, its origins predate my concept of history. Woodcutting is thought to be the earliest print technique, originating in 9th-century China, and arriving in Europe sometime in the 14th century. Woodcut has been a staple medium for prominent Northern European artists like Dürer since the 16th century. To produce a print, artists carve their image into a block of wood, along the grain, removing the parts that will not carry ink. The surface is then rolled over with a brayer and the image transferred to a sheet of paper through a press. The result in works like Käthe Kollwitz’s Selbstbildness von vorn (1922-1923), pictured above, is nothing short of haunting — well-suited to the violently introspective tone of German Expressionism. Here’s a short demonstration:​

Phil Sanders, Director of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, demonstrates the pressure + ink relief process

[beyondalicerp]

Name: Arielle Thorne Age: 20 Date of Birth: January 17th Gender: Nonbinary Sexuality: Bisexual Residence: Swampscott Occupation: Messenger Species: Weredove Affiliation: Rebellion Face Claim: Amandla Stenberg     Suggested: Arden Cho, Naomi Scott, Chloe Bennet, Ana de Armas                        Conrad Ricamora, Tyler Blackburn, Ezra Miller Played by: Ofir

The Messenger’s mother had a reputation for falling deeply and frequently in love, and so neither they nor their mother have ever known for certain who their father is or was. It wasn’t until late into their childhood when they first shifted that they discovered they were anything more than a regular Inhabitant. It took them a while to figure out their purpose in Wonderland. They wanted to do something that helped others, but the stigma against shapeshifters and magical creatures in general already present in Wonderland made their search difficult. They made use of being a messenger, but that job never had meaning until they met the Welcomer. After joining the Welcomer’s rebellion, the Messenger’s job began to involve more dangerous messages than they were prepared for, many of which could have them sentenced for treason, but they did their job well and they are quite well known to be the one to get the job done, no matter what stands in their way. 

The Fisherman’s Daughter: Quite a nosy thing, they are. The Messenger wonders if they are as nosy with their other patrons as they seem to be with them, what with their constant questioning about their life and travels. The Messenger doesn’t believe they have any ill-intent with their questioning, they seem too naive for that, if anything it’s just annoying at most. With their job becoming more secretive as of late, the Messenger mostly just skirts by the questions with simple nods and one-word answers to keep the bartender appeased. As long as their questions don’t get too intrusive, the Messenger doesn’t mind humoring them, at least for as long as they’ll serve them drinks.

The Hatter’s Apprentice: The Messenger once knew the Apprentice in their childhood; they’re not sure if they would exactly call themselves “friends”, they weren’t very close growing up, but the Messenger did always appreciate their company once in a while. As of late, however, the Messenger has the Apprentice being a bit... peculiar around them. They’re frequently catching them right before they head off to work or right when they get home. They’re starting to wonder if the Apprentice might be watching them when they’re not looking, and if they are, how much have they seen?

The Welcomer: The Messenger fully believes their life did not have much purpose until the Welcomer found them. Delivering letters all over Wonderland, while useful, felt superficial as no one ever really sent messages of grand importance. The Welcomer helped them find value in their job and in themself after they joined their cause, now serving as their messenger between them and their allies across Wonderland. The Messenger truly admires the Welcomer, not just for leading the rebellion, but for their kindness and their dedication to helping others. The Messenger doesn’t know where they’d be without the Welcomer, but they know they’re a better person because of them.

The Messenger is currently TAKEN.

Before The Shift

Arielle could never make sense of the quickness with which their mother fell deeply in love, but it was not something they had initially questioned. By age seven, Arielle had lost track of the men they had been encouraged to call “father.” Still, most men were kind. It was her mother who proved to be too mercurial, her enthusiasm for each relationship phasing out as soon as the honeymoon phase had ended. Arielle couldn’t really figure out why until she was just a little bit older. What she learned was this: her mother craved a sense of adventure and newness, she loved the chase of it all, and she did not know what to do with stability once she had it. It would explain why she liked to move around often, why she got tired of each new trade she tried, why she insisted on seeing the world through rose-colored glasses and resisted everything that threatened to shatter them. In short, her mother liked to free-fall, never thinking about what would happen once she landed.

Arielle adapted by bringing stability to their life whatever way they could. They tried to shut their emotions down in approaching a relationship, not wanting to adapt their mother’s foolhardiness. They tried to keep at hobbies longer after they grew bored. They tried to remember facts and situations exactly as they were. They kept journals of their life, writing down each detail exactly as they remembered it the first time, refusing to note a change in their thought without careful tracking of how they got there. They taught themself a steady determination that their mother couldn’t.

The dullness they invited into their life often instilled into Arielle a sense of meaningless. They never bonded with any paternal figure, thinking that her mother would ditch him as soon as she got bored. They stuck out boring odd jobs to bring in cash that their mother wasted. They held themselves steady until they were old enough into a place of their own – age seventeen, to be specific. What they failed to predict was the sudden change to occur in their life, and they were hardly prepared for the questions should a change would raise.

The First Change

The first change came as an unwelcome surprise. They could not understand, at first, why their organs shifted inside their being, why the world around suddenly seemed to grow, why they could not stop the strange changes seemingly taking over. But in any case, they found themself in the body of a dove, surrounded by their own clothes in a messy pile on the floor.

Worse off, no one told them how to cope, and the King’s ban on inherited magic made them too fearful to ask. What made it worse was the number of questions they had.

Why did the King ban inherited magic? What if many uses of magic - uses that could land a person in prison - were pure accidents? How many others lived in secret, and how many inhabitants were eager to spy and report for the Crimson King? These weren’t questions she had considered before, since her own mother was a regular Inhabitant and, to the best of their knowledge, none of the men she picked ever displayed magical abilities.

And Arielle thought puberty was bad.

For most of this early period, Arielle tried to restrict their shifts, only mastering their abilities in private. Each shift got easier and easier and, after some time, it became second nature. They knew how to think and speak with the brain and mouth of a bird just as they could with those of a human. Still, their ease with the shifts did not assuage with the loneliness that followed.

For a moment, Arielle understood why their mother was so quick to fall, but unlike her, Arielle thought herself knowledgeable and steady enough to take flight.

To Fly, To Fall

The first time Arielle fell hard for someone was when, during flight, a gush of wind had pushed her right into the bedroom of a girl her age. Woosh, and then splat went Arielle onto the hard tile floor, the shock of the impact sending them into a quick transformation. They barely had enough time to cover their body with a bed-sheet before the girl caught them wide-eyed and red-faced.

Luckily for Arielle, the girl was also a late-blooming shapeshifter. Eloise, her name was. A mousy thing with a high pitched laugh, she somehow managed to light a spark within the typically avoidant Arielle. The first day they met, Eloise had given Arielle a quick change of clothes and let them on their way, on the assumption that they would never see each other again. Then, Arielle found her way back. Again. And again. And again. Again she would find her way back, whether it be through a window purposely left open, or straight through the front door, passing herself off as a door-to-door salesgirl of flowers.

Over time, they developed a relationship. Sometimes Eloise would shift into a mouse, and Arielle a dove, and they would take flight. The secrecy of their acts gave them a rush they got from nothing else. Then, around this time, Arielle took up the job as a messenger, sending letters they never opened themselves. Not a fun, meaningful job, but they were good at it. It helped that they could simply fly to their destinations. Not that their bosses or clients knew about that. Sometimes their journeys left them away from Eloise for weeks at a time. When they back, though, they always returned with a gift. And as for what Eloise could give, her companionship was enough.

For all Arielle saw of this world, they could not predict the day they waited and waited on the rail of Eloise’s balcony, only for her to never show. At first, they took this as a rejection. Then, they took this as a reason to worry. So, they scoured Eloise’s room for any sign of where she could be. They took apart drawers, checked every nook and cranny, and pressed their feet against floorboards for anything Eloise kept hidden.

But, it seemed there was little sign of her. They went through the house, looking for the typical signs of life in each room, and found nothing. They ventured through the entire neighborhood, asking residents if they had seen a tall, mousy girl with a shy smile and a tendency to fidget with shaky fingers. They asked and asked until a shopkeep had quickly and quietly ushered them in and told them of recent, underground raids against magic users.

Then, in a pained voice, the shopkeep told Arielle that Eloise was among the raided, and Arielle promised themself this: that they would be far more careful than Eloise had, that they would not love so strongly, so as to protect themself from pain, that they would remove all doubt of their own anger toward the Crimson regime, and they would make Eloise’s disappearance (and later, Arielle found out, death) mean something.

Welcome The Messenger

In their search for meaning, they unwittingly crossed paths with the Welcomer, who saw potential in them. It happened when Arielle moved to Swampscott and carried out some deliveries there. At first, they did not deliver anything particularly dangerous from the Welcomer. They simply thought they were in for a change of scenery. But, unbeknownst to Arielle, the Welcomer started to send rebellion-related messages through them. Arielle went for a little while delivering these messages without knowing their content, and through this, they unwittingly learned the best ways to operate in secret.

The Welcomer taught them how to find meaning in their messages. Arielle learned to value the knowledge they picked up along their paths, to value the mystery of an unopened letter, to watch for the expression on each recipient’s face when they received a pretty little envelope. Arielle found meaning in other things, too. They found a certain contentment in being surrounded by fellow magical beings, all of whom partook in magic secretly. They derived a little something about learning of the curious Wanderers, what with their strange stories and technology. More importantly, they found solace in the Welcomer himself. He offered a stability that Arielle had not known in their youth, and Arielle is getting a little used to having a paternal figure around.

Arielle supposed they surprised the Welcomer a little when they started asking questions about his goings-on. After all, they were not supposed to find out. They were supposed to send letters without question, and be able to quickly fly away if things got nasty. But, a delivery had gone wrong. A recipient was not where he was supposed to be and Arielle, suddenly reminded of Eloise’s disappearance, had decided to read the letter. Questions burned Arielle’s mind, Arielle burned the letter, and knowledge burned through the sense of security Arielle once had.

Where security vanished, meaning took its place, and Arielle told the Welcomer they werein.

[eldenmcgrath44-blog]

Passing away To Be Free.

The Giornate del Cinema Muto honours the 50 years life of The Procession's Gone By. British film chronicler Kevin Brownlow's traditional narrative history poll was actually very first posted in 1968. Late in 2014, our company fine-tuned our programs strategy which included playing additional 2D versions of films locally and even more local language smash hits in China, and also our company are actually encouraged by the very early end results at the box office. I believe the intro of Pro Capture Method in the E-M1 Mark II is a dazzling concept, as well as believe me when I state this principle will certainly be actually made use of through various other makers, especially video cameras that may hire electronic shutter (I perform certainly not believe it is physically possible wth DSLR cameras, along with relocating mirror mechanism). Rather than demonstrating how lots of people were in series of any particular bust member, it selects just one "greatest" aim at for the aoe recover. The concern is certainly not along with drug treatment at one location in Kentucky over the stretch of a handful of months. The constructed in video camera 5-Axis Graphic Stablizing device is actually also boosted, making it possible for 5.5 shutter velocity measures of remuneration along with any kind of lense attached on the E-M1 Smudge II. You may get up to 6.5 actions of shutter speed remuneration if you use the brand new Olympus M.Zuiko 12-100mm F4 PRO lens. OK, opportunity to submit the code to your Arduino. I carried out certainly not discover any type of renovation in powerful assortment (if there was, I would certainly believe it is negligible) yet the highlights roll-off is actually better managed in the E-M1 Mark II, along with smoother changes. This Sunday's (7th) Rail Rambler checks out the higher countryside and also storage tanks to the eastern of Rochdale beginning with New Hey. Nevertheless along with the Pro Capture Mode, I handled to save 14 chances taken BEFORE I press the shutter switch, hence I toenailed the precise instant the bird was removing. Regardless of a lack of learns between Bolton & Manchester, twenty people created it to Piccadilly for the other day's strolls. OnlineMoviesCinema additionally possess intriguing, extremely eye pleasant style. Likewise inspect you possess the brand-new model of the screen panel with the potato chips on the back. I remember him as Alonzo Hawk for 3 Disney films, Herbie Rides Again, Son Of Flubber, as well as The Absent-Minded Teacher, through which he participates in an untrustworthy, cunning businessman that will cease at nothing to get whatever it is he prefers. Therefore if you still hesitate regarding seeing films on flow, below is actually some very most usual benefits and minuses: First most evident factor is that you spare opportunity on downloading, other good benefit is instantness, you only must determine what film you will definitely click on and see on play, Web-Beautyann.info one of much bigger minuses in past times was premium of video, but now streaming is on great way to adjust with downloading, and also a lot more websites today is using also HD top quality streams. A leaner, but still muscular, Dolph Lundgren doubled up duties in A Sight to a Kill as well as Rocky IV (both 1985) in to an occupation as a leading man in function as well as straight-to-video films. This is needed to have to to configure the Arduino, and after that as a power top for the time clock. We give workshops all over the world along with a system to introduce their tent-pole franchise business enhancing their movies in to an occasion for moviegoers around the world. Next Area Rail Walk - Tuesday, April 26th - a very easy 5 kilometers coming from Goo Ash, Mellor to Ramsgreave & Wilpshire appointment at Blackburn Sta at 10.26 - see Community Rail Strolls' Page for details.

[mikeyd1986]

MIKEY’S PERSONAL BLOG 83, December 2017

On Monday morning, Mum and I did the annual tradition of visiting the Myer Melbourne Christmas Windows and the Myer Christmas Giftorium in the city. Firstly, we went to have lunch at the 1932 Cafe & Restaurant on Collins Street. The cafe is located inside the Manchester Unity Building which is a throwback to the 1930’s Art Deco architectural style. The service and food at the cafe were both excellent. Mum and I ordered the Golden Gaytime Hotcakes with a serving of rockmelon, strawberries and blueberries. So good! http://manchesterunitybuilding.com.au/...

Next we walked over to the Melbourne Town Hall and saw the incredible (and edible) display that was the Gingerbread Village by Epicure. All of Melbourne’s iconic locations including the Melbourne Zoo, MCG, Luna Park, Albert Park lake, Flinders Street station and Federation Square had been made out of gingerbread in miniature model form. It was very detailed with lots of LED lights and people placed into each location. https://whatson.melbourne.vic.gov.au/...

After this, we ventured onto Bourke Street to check out the Myer Christmas Windows. This year’s theme centered around Elf who is trying to fit in and have the “perfect Christmas” but sadly always seems to be out of place in the world. The story is about being able to embrace and be okay with your individuality and imperfections when it comes to celebrating Christmas. Being a Monday, the queue for the windows was pretty tolerable and we had plenty of time to enjoy looking into each of the windows. https://whatson.melbourne.vic.gov.au/...

Heading up to Level 6, Mum and I had a browse through all the Christmas decorations, ornaments, cards, wrapping and stockings inside the Giftorium. Despite having a 40% off sale, most of the items were very overpriced but being Myer, I was far from surprised. Hence why this is a once-a-year trip because it’s generally out of my price range. However, I did pick up the latest Spirit of Christmas CD featuring all Australian artists including Guy Sebastian, Paul Kelly, Anthony Callea and The Wiggles.  https://www.myer.com.au/c/promotion...

On Tuesday morning, I had to say my final goodbyes to my 1998 Hyundai Excel Glx as I got the car towed away by Metro Car Removals in Dandenong. The worker seemed really disgruntled and annoyed especially when he discovered that my car won’t start at all. To say that I was feeling intensely uncomfortable would be an understatement. He opened up the bonnet to check the oil cap and radiator, shaking his head and giving off negative body language. Part of me thought the worst...that he wouldn’t even bother taking the car away.

He said he could only offer me 50 bucks. I took the offer because I just wanted to get it over with and didn’t have the energy to argue with him. I actually felt a little heartbroken watching my old car being pulled onto the tow truck. I got myself emotionally attached to it because it was part of my life for 6 years. It was just a massive relief that he actually took the car. I didn’t really care about the money so much.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mum and I went down to the Springvale Botanical Cemetery to visit her parents and my grandparents. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 15 years since my Granddad passed away and almost 4 since my Grandma passed away. It really helps to put things into perspective and appreciate how valuable your life is. Mum played a couple of Christmas songs from her phone and we placed two bunches of Dahlias into the plastic floral vases on the marble headstone.

On Thursday morning, I had some last minute errands and shopping to do at Cranbourne Park Shopping Centre and Casey Central Shopping Centre. I swear you really have to be careful driving on the roads at this time of the year especially. Drivers can just be so rude, impatient and careless. And don’t even get me started on shopping centre car parks. People reverse without looking, cut you off, don’t stop or tail gate you. Hence why I purposefully drive cautiously and get my errands and shopping done as quickly as possible.

On Thursday afternoon, I had my last appointment with my counsellor Ruth at Piece Together Counselling in Narre Warren. Today’s session was about reflection and acceptance. The past month has been chaotic to say the least and I’ve had to be okay with many things including writing my car off, dealing with financial issues, opening my first VCAT case, the stress and pressure of retail during the Christmas period and not being able to fit in as many fitness classes as I’d like this week. I think I’m learning to cut myself some slack and realise that I’m doing well when it comes to coping with the above.

Ruth also asked me about my goals for 2018. Honestly, I wasn’t feeling very mindful or focused about it but I do have a few important ones in mind. Travelling is a big one for me, to get out of my comfort zone, gain more independence and confidence, experience the world outside of where I live. In terms of my fitness goals, I’m still uncertain at this point but I do need to find a better sense of balance and figure out which trainer and gym will be a good fit for me. I also really need to buy myself a new car early in the new year.

There’s also the prospect of volunteering at an animal shelter of some kind, looking after domestic pets and getting some hands-on experience. Essentially trying to find what I have a real passion for. My blog writing and reviews could also be explored further next year and hopefully open up bigger opportunities. This year’s been one of experimentation and whilst I’ve made mistakes, I don’t regret any of it because it’s made me stronger, wiser and better.

On Friday morning, Mum and I both had haircut appointments with Katrina at Creative Hair Design in Narre Warren South. We spent about 1.5 hours catching up on the past month leading up to Christmas. Katrina’s dog Austin was boisterous and overly excited as usual but he did like a good pat whilst Tess was content just lying down in the corner near the front door.

Next I had my last appointment for the year with Dr. Yasmin Baliz at CNS: Comprehensive Neuropsychological Services in Narre Warren. Today we discussed options for the Autism Spectrum Disorder services that I could possibly look into for next year. This included several support group with Aspergers Victoria (For Young Adults) in Blackburn who hold meetings every month at a community centre. Yasmin informed me that they also organise social activities such as indoor rock climbing which could help me in the area of social development and self confidence. http://www.aspergersvic.org.au/our-...

We also talked about the NDIS (National Disability Scheme) which provides support and funding to those who are formally diagnosed on the Autism spectrum. Yasmin provided me with some information about planning my pathway, goal setting and getting my application ready for next year. The Casey-Cardinia area will be able to access the services by the start of September, 2018. It was all very overwhelming but also very helpful advice as it could help me gain more skills and independence for my future. https://www.ndis.gov.au/about-us/ou...

In the afternoon, I dropped into work for the Team Christmas Lunch. I ended up getting a large bag of Cadbury selected chocolates from our Kris Kringle which I was really pleased about. I also caught up with a few workmates in the tearoom and down in the cafe before heading off to Eden Rise. Sadly, it was far too busy to get a massage done today at Best Body Massage but by this point, I was well and truly exhausted. I could feel that I was burning the candle at both ends and needed to just go home and rest.

On Friday night, I went to the Full Moon Meditation held at YMCA Casey ARC in Narre Warren. If ever there was a time I needed to meditate, tonight was it. The moment my head hit the pillow, I was ready to doze off. Just felt so good being still and doing absolutely nothing for 45 minutes. The music was a mixture of beautiful Zen vibrations and birds chirping which was calming to listen to. Instructor Michelle guided us through the usual deep breathing, deep muscle relaxation and guided imagery of the Japanese garden and temple. https://www.trybooking.com/book/eve...

I hope that everyone has a wonderful time with family and friends on Christmas Day!

“It's the most wonderful time of the year. With the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you be of good cheer. It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's the hap-happiest season of all. With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings when friends come to call. It's the hap-happiest season of all. There'll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting and caroling out in the snow. There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of the Christmases long, long ago.” Andy Williams - It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year (1963)

“And all of this happens because the world is waiting. Waiting for one child. Black, white, yellow, no-one knows. But a child that will grow up and turn tears to laughter. Hate to love, war to peace and everyone to everyone's neighbour. And misery and suffering will be words to be forgotten, forever.” Johnny Mathis - When A Child Is Born (1976)

“Joy to the world. The Lord is come. Let earth receive her King. Let every heart prepare Him room. And heaven and nature sing. And heaven and nature sing. And heaven and heaven and nature sing.” Mariah Carey - Joy To The World (1994)

[timegents]

Zetland Hotel 2017

A working Class Pub

By MICK ROBERTS ©

WALKING into the public bar of the Zetland Hotel, in the southern suburbs of Sydney, it’s not difficult to see that this is a working class pub.

It’s a fascinating tiled, corner pub that continues to be a bastion of the working-class, in a transforming industrialised suburb, rapidly changing as the gentrification of Sydney continues unabated.

The historic terrace homes of Zetland, or Green Square as its new identity now dictates, is falling under the shadow of the urban renewal project, Victoria Park, a medium to high density residential and retail development along South Dowling Street, with its other boundaries along O’Dea and Joynton Avenues.

When ‘Time Gents’ visited the Zetland Hotel on a Sunday afternoon, it was obvious to me that its working class days are numbered. The pub will need to change its tune if it is to survive the tough competitive Sydney pub market. Less than a dozen drinkers gathered in the back “lounge” for its regular Sunday afternoon karaoke, while a handful of fellas took advantage of its TAB facilities in the ‘public bar’.

Without being too critical, the voices of some of the “singers” gave an understanding of why the Japanese perform karaoke in much more private surrounds, away from the ears of the general public. Before you get the wrong idea, I liked the Zetland Hotel.

The unique curved art deco bar of the Zetland Hotel

I like what it represents. It’s a reflection of another time, with its art deco curved-tiled bar, and walls, its frosted glass windows, its drinkers, and its atmosphere. Long-live the Zetland, I say. But like many of Sydney’s pubs, it will be forced to change to cater for new residents – new customers.

The history of the hotel is working class, and hopefully that can be retained and preserved. But the pub needs a little sophistication for its new cashed-up neighbours.

The original Zetland Hotel at the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets in the 1890s

The history of this pub where time seems to have stood still, can be traced back to 1887 when brewers, the Toohey brothers built a three storey Victorian era brick hotel at the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets.

In 1888 the site was purchased by John Thomas and James Matthew Toohey, brothers from Melbourne, who established the Standard Brewery in Surry Hills in 1869, and began to produce beer under the ‘Toohey’ brand name the same year.

As did their main opposition, Kent Brewery (Later Tooths), the breweries started building pubs around Sydney and NSW to exclusively sell their products.

The Toohey brothers employed Andrew Wakely as the Zetland Hotel’s first host. Wakely was granted a conditional license for “premises to be erected” at the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets in July 1887.

Less than 10 months before Wakely gained the first license of the Zetland Hotel, he was put in charge of the nearby Toohey’s owned Mount Lachlan Hotel on Elizabeth Street Waterloo.  This seems to be Wakely’s first pub, where he undoubtedly gained experience in handling the heavy-drinking, working class customers that frequented these inner-city watering holes. The Evening News reported on October 19 1886:

A THOROUGH PACED LARRIKAN: William Quirk, better known as “Crooked Quirk”, was charged with having assaulted Andrew Wakely. The prisoner, with other Waverley and Bondi larrikins, entered the prosecutor’s hotel; a new one just erected, on Friday night, and kicked up “Bob’s a dying.” Though there were seven of them, host Wakely floored the lot, one after the other, and three of them were taken by the police. Quirk, however, got away, but was arrested, all shaven and shorn, having removed his moustache. He was arrested by Detectives McLean and Blackburn. The police said there were over twenty convictions recorded against prisoner within eighteen months. He was awarded two months’ gaol, and a fortnight additional for assault.

Wakely also hosted the Enmore Hotel at Newtown, and the Wharf Hotel in Dowling-street, Woolloomooloo, drinking holes frequented by big-drinking, tough men, The Toohey brothers must have had faith in Wakely’s ability to keep control of these difficult, yet profitable, pubs.

The Zetland Hotel C1930. Photo: Noel Butlin Archives, Australian National University.

Wakely was 44 years of age when he and his second wife, Louisa moved into the Zetland Hotel in 1888. He was granted a “conditional license” license on Tuesday September 4 1888 when the three storey pub was completed. It was an immediate hit for the Toohey brothers, and within a month, Wakely was moved-on to another of the brewery’s hotels – the Terminus at Ashfield.

Wakely’s experience and knowledge of Sydney’s profitable pub industry is proven with his presidency of the Sydney Licensed Victuallers’ Association, which later became the NSW Hotels Association.

Wakely went onto host the Tattersalls Hotel at Parramatta for many years, playing a prominent role in the liquor industry through his executive position within the Licensed Victuallers’ Association. While at the Tattersalls Hotel he was declared bankrupt in 1891 and he moved with his wife and children to Fremantle in Western Australia, where he hosted a number of pubs, including the Swan Hotel. He died on June 16 1922 at the age 76. His wife, Louisa died in 1933.

About the same time Wakely had fled Sydney to start a new life on the other side of the country, the Zetland Hotel’s new host had his hands full managing a pub frequented by gangs, and the heavy drinking men who worked in the factories operating in Waterloo, Zetland and Alexandria at the time. The 1890s were also when ‘The Push’, or gangs of thugs, terrorised the streets of Sydney and its surrounding suburbs. The pubs, including the Zetland, did not escape their wrath. The Sydney Evening News reported on January 12 1891:

The Push on the Warpath.

Yesterday morning about a dozen of the Glebe “push” went out for an airing in a vehicle belonging to, and inscribed with, the name of Doherty. Information as to their earlier movements is wanting, but when they turned up at Currie’s Hotel, Waterloo, there were signs that a fight had taken place, one of the party having his nose “barked”. Here they captured a magpie, but the appearance of a blue uniform made them abandon the bird and take their chariot off at full speed. They then visited Diver’s Zetland Hotel, an obtained admission to the house. The licensee, however, refused to supply them with drink, but they got into one of the rooms, and from thence rushed the bar. They had very poor luck however, for the first thing they laid hands on was a bottle of sarsaparilla before they could annex anything else Mr. Diver produced a revolver. It was empty, but the raiders didn’t know that, and they at once cleared out, with the exception of one, who had to be thrown out. They then fired a volley of stones at the door, one of which broke the fanlight, and went off at full speed, with Mr. Diver in a buggy giving them chase. They drove citywards, and as the vehicles swept by stray policemen and others joined in the chase. The buggy took up a policeman on the way, but he was found to be rather heavy, and as much ground was lost he had to get down again. Meanwhile, the pursued left their chariot one by one. A youth named Thompson ran into a house near Cleveland-street. The house was speedily guarded back and front, and he was captured. The rest of the “push” was luckier, as they were careful to select difficult turnings for their attempts at freedom, and all escaped. The cart and horse was captured at Bay-street, Glebe Thompson was safely celled in the Redfern lockup.

The pub was often in trouble with the law for breaching various liquor laws, with Sunday trading and watering down its liquor two offences that had publicans fronting the courts. In fact in 1895 publican, Frank Wilson was fined £20 for selling “liquor unfit for consumption”.

In 1912, Jack Thorpe, the barman at the Zetland Hotel, was standing outside having a smoke on a Saturday evening when a young man named William McLachlin approached him and took his cigarette case, value 5 shillings. When Thorpe tried to recover his property, the Sydney Evening News reported, he received ��a violent blow behind his left ear instead”. McLachlin was charged with assaulting Thorpe and with stealing his cigarette case. He was given two months gaol for the assault, and one month’s gaol for the theft.

The Zetland Hotel’s reputation as one of Sydney’s toughest pubs continued through the 1920s with a volley of publicans seemingly unwilling to stay at its helm for any great length of time. Frank Chigwidden had been at the hotel less than 12 months when he fronted the courts for trading on Christmas Day. Chigwidden had moved from the country, having previously hosted the Globe Hotel at West Wylong before he was fined £5 for having allowed persons on the Zetland Hotel premises during prohibited hours in January 1927.

CHRISTMAS DAY THIRSTS

MEN IN HOTEL YARD

Inspector Ryan said he saw a number of men loitering about the vicinity. In the hotel yard a number of men were standing. Some of them scaled the fence, and got away, but seven were detained. When the latter were asked what they were doing on the premises, they replied: “It’s Christmas Day and a warm day.” When defendant was questioned, he said: “You know it’s Christmas Day.” Harry Kesher, Robert McKiernan, Harry Emery. William Hampson, Daniel Joseph Quinn, James Taylor, and George Alfred Moore, who were found on the premises, were each fined £2.

During 1935, Toohey’s brewery had the three storey Zetland pub redeveloped. The tender of architects J. E. and E. R. Justelius and builder, A. F. Webb, were accepted to transform the Zetland Hotel in November 1935. During 1936 the top storey was demolished, making the building two storey hotel, and a parapet wall with Art Deco motifs constructed. The pub’s cellar was extended, and the ground floor refurbished, internally and externally in Art Deco style. This work was done when one of the Zetland Hotel’s best known publicans was at the helm.

The remodelled Zetland Hotel in the late 1930s. Photo: Noel Butlin Archives, Australian National University.

Bernard Fallon was the licensee of the hotel from 1930 to1954. He was an SP bookmaker, and well-known within the local community for making financial donations to the Mt Carmel Catholic Church, hosting annual functions for the local Labor Party branch, and for donning his “red suit as Santa Claus and the children would eagerly follow him down the road, receiving sweets and gifts” every Christmas.

After Fallon’s death in the 1950s the hotel’s license was inherited by his three daughters, one of whom is the current licensee’s mother, according to the book, “Histories of Green Square, Waterloo, Alexandria, Zetland, Beaconsfield and Rosebery by Anna Gauchat.

Toohey’s brewery sold the pub to Zetland Pty Ltd in 1959 and it passed out of the family’s hands until the 1990s when Darlene Hagan, Fallon’s grand daughter re-purchased the license.

What impresses me most about this pub is its unspoiled public bar-room. The pub is heritage listed as the interior of the hotel shows “a high level of craftsmanship and most elements from the 1936 renovation remain intact”.

The Zetland Hotel is well-worth a visit, with a reasonably priced eatery, a friendly atmosphere, and plenty of interesting historic features to keep those interested in Sydney’s historic pubs lingering for another schooner or two. That fantastic curved tiled bar, just must be leant on. If changes are around the corner at the Zetland to cater for the suburb’s gentrification, that bar should be jealously guarded at all costs – it’s a ripper.

A four schooner glass out of five rating from Time Gents.

© Copyright Mick Roberts 2017

Zetland Hotel Licensees 1887-1954

 1887-1888: Andrew Alfred Wakely

1888-1891: John R. Justin

1891-1893: John L Divers

1894-1896: Francis J Wilson

1897: John Copes

1898: James T Ray

1899-1908: Murdoch A Wagschall

1909-1920: Henry Benson

1921-1923: William A Collie

1924-1926: James McAteer

1927-1929: Frank Chigwidden

1930-1954: Bernard Fallon

  Zetland Hotel, Zetland Zetland Hotel 2017 A working Class Pub By MICK ROBERTS © WALKING into the public bar of the Zetland Hotel, in the southern suburbs of Sydney, it’s not difficult to see that this is a working class pub.

[yourpestassassin]

Effective Pest Control Services in Preston and Blackburn

Dealing with pests can be a frustrating and challenging task, especially when infestations disrupt the comfort of your home or business. In areas like Preston and Blackburn, professional pest control services are crucial to maintaining a safe and hygienic environment.

Why Pest Control is Essential

Pests such as rodents, insects, and birds can cause significant damage to properties and pose health risks. They often find ways to invade homes, restaurants, and offices, causing structural issues and spreading diseases. Regular pest management ensures these problems are addressed promptly, preventing long-term damage and expensive repairs.

Trusted Pest Control in Preston

When it comes to Pest Control Preston, reliable services ensure that infestations are dealt with efficiently and effectively. From dealing with rodents in residential areas to eliminating cockroaches in commercial kitchens, expert pest control teams in Preston provide customized solutions tailored to each client’s needs.

Comprehensive Pest Control in Blackburn

Similarly, Pest Control Blackburn services focus on eradicating pests while implementing preventive measures to ensure they don’t return. These professionals use advanced techniques and eco-friendly solutions to keep your premises pest-free without causing harm to the environment.

Benefits of Professional Pest Control Services

Expert Knowledge: Professionals have the training and expertise to identify the root cause of infestations.

Safety First: High-quality pest control services use safe methods to remove pests without endangering humans or pets.

Long-term Solutions: They provide preventative measures to stop future infestations, saving you time and money.

Peace of Mind: Knowing that your property is pest-free allows you to focus on what matters most.

Conclusion

Investing in professional pest control services in Preston and Blackburn is essential for safeguarding your property and health. Whether you are facing a minor issue or a severe infestation, trusted experts can provide the solutions you need.

To learn more or book a consultation, visit the dedicated pages for Pest Control Preston and Pest Control Blackburn today.

[yourpestassassin]

Effective Pest Control Solutions in Wigan, Preston, and Blackburn

If you're dealing with a pest infestation, it's important to act quickly. Whether you're in Wigan, Preston, or Blackburn, professional pest control services can help you manage and eliminate unwanted guests, ensuring the safety and hygiene of your property. Here’s how expert pest control services in these regions can benefit you.

Pest Control in Wigan: Your Local Solution

Dealing with pests in Wigan? Pest infestations can pose serious health risks and damage property. Wigan is home to many pest control services that specialize in identifying and eradicating a variety of pests, including rodents, insects, and birds.

Expert Assessment: Pest control services in Wigan begin with a detailed inspection of your property, identifying the type of pests and determining the best course of action.

Safe Solutions: With a focus on eco-friendly and humane pest removal, Wigan-based pest control experts ensure that both residential and commercial properties are protected without harming the environment.

Ongoing Support: Many Wigan pest control companies offer ongoing maintenance plans to prevent future infestations.

Pest Control in Preston: Fast and Reliable Services

If you reside in Preston and need pest control, time is of the essence. Pests like rats, mice, ants, and wasps can multiply quickly, causing damage to your home or business.

Swift Response: Preston pest control services are known for their quick response, offering same-day service in many cases. This ensures that infestations are controlled before they get out of hand.

Custom Treatments: Professional pest controllers in Preston tailor their approach based on the specific type of pest and the severity of the infestation, ensuring long-lasting results.

Prevention Measures: Pest control in Preston often includes advice on how to prevent future problems, such as sealing entry points and maintaining cleanliness in high-risk areas.

Pest Control in Blackburn: Comprehensive Care for Every Situation

Blackburn is another area where pest infestations are common, particularly in the warmer months. Whether you're dealing with a small ant problem or a larger rodent issue, pest control in Blackburn offers comprehensive services to meet your needs.

Wide Range of Services: From wasp nest removal to rodent control, Blackburn pest control services handle all types of pests, ensuring a safe and healthy environment.

Experienced Professionals: Blackburn pest control experts have years of experience, allowing them to quickly identify the most effective treatments.

Long-Term Protection: Many pest control companies in Blackburn offer long-term contracts that include regular inspections and treatments, ensuring that pests don’t return.

Why Choose Professional Pest Control?

Whether you’re in Wigan, Preston, or Blackburn, choosing professional pest control services ensures that the job is done right. Here are a few reasons why you should always opt for a licensed pest control company:

Safety: Pest control chemicals can be hazardous if used improperly. Professionals ensure that all treatments are safe for people and pets.

Expertise: With years of experience, pest control specialists can quickly diagnose issues and use the most effective methods.

Efficiency: DIY pest control methods can be time-consuming and ineffective. Professional services save time and deliver better results.

Conclusion

When it comes to keeping your home or business free from pests, you can't afford to take chances. Whether you're in Wigan, Preston, or Blackburn, local pest control experts are equipped to handle any infestation swiftly and safely. Don't wait until the problem worsens—contact a professional pest control service today to protect your property.

For expert Pest Control in Wigan, Pest Control in Preston, or Pest Control in Blackburn, make sure to choose a reliable service provider that prioritizes your safety and long-term peace of mind.

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Apple Contents On Engadget.

The Giornate del Movie theater Muto honours the 50 years presence of The March's Passed. English movie historian Kevin Brownlow's classic narrative history study was actually very first released in 1968. Although the E-M1 Mark II's general concept is actually quite similar to the much older E-M1, the E-M1 Mark II has a number of huge enhancements in terms of functional designs, design for comfortable hand-holding as well as additionally far better positionings of dials and buttons. Total details of strolls as well as opportunities on the applicable page. The parrot tries has diminished or even even gotten rid of lots of hesitations regarding convenience of that electronical shutter capacities and the rate genuinely is fantastic, magnum opus that Olympus has actually done. About 5 photos were actually clearly indistinct, though C-AF of E-M1 Smudge II carried out an excellent work at recouping focus relatively swiftly. , if you can't join our team on Wednesday why not happened along this Sunday( 4th) for our Rail Rambler to the Peak Area with 2 strolls - the much longer one starting from Hathersage and also the shorter one beginning with Grindleford. This is a new feature that allows forecast of finest achievable target for aoe spell based upon range computations. If you can not join our team on Wednesday why not come this Saturday( 4th) for our Rail Rambler to the Height District along with 2 walks - the longer one beginning with Hathersage as well as the briefer one beginning with Grindleford. Lancaster is our next Rail Rambler location this happening Sunday with the briefer walk absorbing a few of Lancaster's ideal landmarks featuring its Roman Catholic Sanctuary, Williamson Park and also the Ashton Remembrance plus the Lune Acqueduct. This Saturday's (7th) Rail Rambler looks into the high country side and storage tanks to the east of Rochdale beginning with New Hey. Nonetheless along with the Pro Squeeze Setting, I took care of to save 14 chances taken BEFORE I press the shutter switch, as a result I nailed the accurate minute the bird was actually removing. He left Daytop and then transferred to Chicago, where he functioned in hygienics aiding to oversee a selection of medicine therapy plans including ingenious ones that included a softer variation of the healing area" along with methadone routine maintenance. 5. b- Mixture mode: keeps randomizing every 2nd, utilizing debug, the changeable mins was actually certainly not right, either empty or has the inappropriate min, so I modified the for loophole to be rtc0 == 59" rather than mins!= rtc1", which appears to have actually fixed the trouble, having said that the day of full week was still trash given that it was actually certainly not prepared, thus i changed the selection along with months, it works fine by doing this, nonetheless as quickly as how you can help go back to an additional method, you discover that the time has actually been embeded the past and also did certainly not update, the only way to receive it back to work is to prepare the time once again making use of example code. Seeing this TV course, I wondered whether the French media reporters possessed on their own maneuvered the discussion of the Site or whether this organization, worshiped as "life altering" through a lot of experts and partners I knew in the US, was actually truly the amazing remedy they stated: a three day workshop that may jump-start a brand new life. Hitler's Prepared Death squads: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) is actually a manual through Daniel Goldhagen showing the premise that the German country hence was actually made up of prepared executioners of the Jews as a result of an one-of-a-kind eliminationist antisemitism" in the German people, along with long historic origins. Our team offer centers all over the world along with a system to release their tent-pole franchises improving their movies in to an activity for spectators worldwide. Next Neighborhood Rail Stroll - Tuesday, April 26th - a simple 5 kilometers from Goo Ash, Mellor to Ramsgreave & Wilpshire meeting at Blackburn Sta at 10.26 - see Area Rail Strolls' Webpage for particulars.