#but they always invest money first in Dutch and then the rest

[purgatorygrl]

Parallels between Jamie and Arthur

The relationship between what happened to Jamie with The Chelonia cult and Arthur's situation with the band seems to me to be quite similar.

Jamie came from a family that was quite dysfunctional, his mother had died and his father treated him badly and constantly despised him, so he needed to find a place where he was validated and felt accepted. To do this, he joined The Chelonia cult, where they told him what to think, what to say, what to do, and they took his money for the supposed "donations." Jamie knew that they were manipulating him and that everything about the cult was a lie, but he still stayed there because it was the only place where he felt accepted and where people treated him well.

Like Jamie, Arthur did not have a structured family and was alone since he was little until Dutch and Hosea adopted him and he began to be part of the band. Dutch made sure that Arthur had the same ideals as him and at all times he told him how to do things and what was the correct way to think and act. Arthur had his own way of seeing things and he didn't always agree with what Dutch said and did but he always gave in and in the end he ended up doing what Dutch wanted even though it wasn't what he wanted, partly because of Dutch's manipulation and the need for validation and because he felt like he owed him his life. He always saw Dutch deteriorating more and more but he never left the band, first because it wasn't that easy but mostly because it was the only family he had and the only people who had accepted him and that was the only life he knew.

"They're using you, they're telling you what you want to hear" In the end, Dutch used emotional manipulation to control people, especially Arthur, spontaneously giving him validation and calling him son so that in the end he would do the things Dutch wanted.

I love how Jamie asks him "and what do you know about that, Arthur?" I would say quite a bit, taking into account the dynamics of the Van der Linde gang and Arthur's relationship with Dutch.

[skellymom]

Possible "Vagabonds" fan fic future excerpt

With a eulogy to "Tiggy" the Space Doggo

For reference, this might possibly fit in a future installment for my ongoing series "Vagabonds" To read for more context:

https://www.tumblr.com/skellymom/738467105361494016/vagabonds?source=share

There is an extremely personal message at the end of the excerpt. Been sitting on this news for several weeks and needed to get it out. Opened my word document to find this excerpt. Had written it MONTHS ago. So here goes:

Warning: Very brief violence and talk of death.

Background: Wrecker and Tech are on the Marauder with the newest group of child refugees they rescued from the Empire. Unfortunately a nosy pirate looking for a bounty reward sneaks aboard. (Hunter and Echo are away on the Dread Beldame with Mad, Sil, and Love.)

The pirate advanced on the crew of the Marauder, pointing his weapon and threatening everyone aboard.  Several of the children started to cry out of fear. 

“Ehh, you’re scarin’ the kids!” Wrecker angrily pushed back. 

The pirate smiled creepily, licking his lips. 

Tech kept his cool, quietly watching the situation.  He looked like he was waiting for...something. 

“Whattaya lookin’ at, ya goggle eyed Gungan?”  The pirate snarled. 

“Your speedy demise.”  Tech sassily quipped. 

The toddler pointed to the dark brindled shadow quietly creeping up behind the pirate, “Tiggeee Goggeee.” 

Tech stoically gave the command: “Ra’mor!” 

She was upon the pirate in a flash. Took him down by the back of his neck, shaking furiously. He didn’t last long. Wrecker grimaced and grabbed the toddler in his arms while pushing the rest of the children behind him, shielding them from the sight. 

“Let slanar!” Tech barked.  

Tiggy released the mangled pirate.  

“Briik laam.” 

Tiggy immediately ran to and healed at Tech’s left side, clacking her pearly teeth excitedly. 

“Jate Tiggy. Wrecker, please dispose of the body immediately. As far away from the ship as possible.” Tech held his hands out for the toddler, which Wrecker dutifully handed over. 

“Awww...I ALWAYS get the dirty work!” 

“Wrecker, you are the best man for this job. Remember, no shallower than 6 feet. We don’t want his companions to find him. Come children...we are safe now.” 

"Tiggy" was based on my Amish rescue "Petunia" I obtained from work. For those of you who don't know, I am a certified veterinary nurse and work at a 24 hour veterinary ER. She came to us sick and injured at 4 WEEKS old.

Attacked by her own mother and possibly needing corrective surgery for necrosis of that wound, it looked dire. The Amish don't spend a lot of money if they don't think they can recoup the investment. Her heavily infected wound burst open all over my scrubs. She was TINY and helpless. I couldn't say no.

We kept her until she was a year: paid for medical care, orthopedic surgery, vaccines, meds, training, spay surgery, the works. Unfortunately, due to her being a high drive Dutch Shepherd, we could not keep her. This breed is known for their mercurial nature and sometimes aggression. I knew there was a VERY slight chance we could keep her, especially with 2 geriatric dogs in the household. She wasn't my first rescue, either. Petunia spent time at a shelter for police and military dogs, and was evaluated for bite work. Unfortunately, she passed from the wave of respiratory "Doggie Covid" that is sweeping the US right now. With some dogs medical treatment works...with some...they don't rally from the infection. We feel sick about this and sadly miss "Looney Petunia."

She now lives on in a galaxy far, far away. Love rescued her and she fiercely defends that Force sensitive teen, their family, and The Batch. She will forever track prey with Hunter, ride on Wreckers shoulders, snuggle with Omega, lay at Crosshair's feet while he polishes his rifle, listen dutifully to Tech's commands...and steal Echo's prosthetics.

She LOVED to watch TV too!

PLEASE like, comment, and/or REBLOG!

IF YOU WISH TO BE ADDED OR DROPPED FROM MY TAG LIST, PLEASE MESSAGE ME! Don't just comment as I might miss it. Thanks!!! <3

[shinobufied]

one thing I dislike about the take that Dutch has ~always been that way~ and just kinda acted sane (as far as that works) for +20 years is that it paints Hosea as a complete fool.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Hosea is completely untouchable, out of this world, a god amongst humans but he isn't stupid. As far as we are concerned he is a master at seeing through people, he reads them and tricks them like no other.

He's very smart and observant, often the one to take a step back and think things through thrice before investing into them and somehow you want to tell me he looked at loud, boisterous, energetic (supposedly manipulative) Dutch at the very beginning and thought "my god this guy is full of shit"?

Now, we don't really have any insight on how they really were before Blackwater or even years back when they took in Arthur but I truly and utterly believe that Dutch was making a real effort to do good, from the bottom of his heart, that he really tried to be better and ultimately failed. (and yeah, surely partly bc it stroked his ego but nonetheless)

Like, the first time we see, or rather hear that Dutch may be a little silly is in Colter, right after Blackwater when it was revelaed that he killed an innocent woman. This was also the very first severe stress situation we have "seen" Dutch in. He got lead on, maybe even set up after what sounded like a long period of luck and success and now him and everyone tagging along is in danger and everything has gone to shit.

The one that then seemed increasingly concerned and insisted on knowing what happened was Hosea. My thoughts are that Hosea knew that Dutch tended to act rash in stressful situations and that there was something nagging on his conscious, telling him that something went horribly wrong. Because he knew Dutch.

Dutch on the other hand started to grow desperate. He didn't just lose a ton of money and got the law after them all once again, but he also lost 3 members of the gang. 3 people to who he promised freedom and a good life gone just like that + he also started to feel the others losing hope and maybe he was confronted with the idea that maybe what he was doing wasn't as good and great as he has thought throughout all these years.

So he grows defensiv and even reckless because no, it can't be, him facing the fact that his time was not only over but he probably wasted all these years was a tad too painful, both for his ego but also for his being.

As time goes on he keeps slipping more and more since everything he does just seems to blow up right back into his face. The more he tries to fix the more to shit it goes and the desperation just seems to grow and grow.

So he clings to every little thing that keeps on making him believe that his cause is still good, that he's still doing right so he comes up with nonesense plans like Tahiti.

But most importantly, his probably biggest reminder still was Hosea. As long as Hosea was still there, still by his side it would be alright. Yeah, Hosea nags him all the time and they bicker and fight all the time, but he's still there, so that means he still believes in Dutch. With Hosea he could do it.

And then Hosea dies.

And the failure at the bank is so much worse than all the ones before because this time it wasn't Dutch that set things up, or Micah, or anyone else but it was Hosea. The very person that grounded him, that he clung to desperately to show him that his efforts are not in vain.

The disaster at the bank didn't only cost him Hosea, his life long partner, the person he trusted the most, but also the trust from the rest of the gang. John was already doubting him for some time now and now the others started to, too.

And maybe, maybe him doing all this what he thought of good these past years, saving and taking in people, wasn't the best for them at all. Maybe he doomed them more than anything.

But no, Micah is still at his side. And Bill. And Javier.

Well, if there's some people still believing in him then there has to be some truth to it, no?

Maybe Micah is right, maybe John is the rat. Or Abigail. Or Arthur.

Maybe all the others are just ungrateful. Maybe he gave them all and the moment he slips and fails they just leave?

Hosea woulnd't have. Hosea stayed with him.

Micah stayed with him.

And as he was on that mountain, looking at the boy he raised as his own, barely able to breath and all beaten up, telling him "I gave you all I had", that was the first time the realization of him not being as great, as good, as he hoped to be, as he tried to be, fully hit him and now he couldn't do anything but accept it. No denying it anymore, no deluding it. Just the cold truth.

[assless-chapstick]

WAIT NO COME BACK, it's Daddy kink Charles slut again! We can't talk about Arthur's tattooed wedding band without talking about thEIR W E D D I N G. Who proposed? How? How long had they been dating? What was the ceremony like? Since Arthur isn't really religious and I don't /feel/ like Charles is either Can you tell that Charthur is my fave and I'll go down with this ship?

I’m having a rough night feller. Thanks for this!!

Arthur and Charles absolutely had one of those Gay™ moments where one of them starts to propose and the other is like “I was gonna propose!” like

They’ve been ddating three or four years, and they’d talk about it, once or twice; do they want to do the marriage thing, what it means to them, if it’s something they want or if just saying “always,” between the two of them, is enough… but I don’t think they ever decide on like a “yes, let’s.” Just an abstract “some day, yeah.”

So I think Charles waits until he’s finished law school, til he’s got his future locked down and is ready to start his life. He’s almost guaranteed a position, if he passes the bar, so he’s feeling pretty stable and ready to like… have a career and do the real grown up thing.

It’s at the like, party they have, after his graduation. It’s a little garden party, him and a couple of law school buddies all have a garden party, invite family and friends – of course Charles and his crew are the odd ones out, the rest of his friends have that family money – and it’s a nice, classy affair. Charles gets to wear a Nice Suit (the one Hosea tailored for him, cuz god be damned if any young man Hosea knows is gonna walk around wearing an ill-fitting suit), and Arthur dresses nice for the occasion too. Everyone’s there, I think ; John, maybe Javi, Dutch and Hosea, Tilly and Sadie (Tilly is a friend of Charles’s from his undergrad), Susan. Charles’s mom even flew in from Montana to watch him cross the stage.

And Charles has the ring in his pocket, he’s nervous as all fuck – knows Arthur will say yes, but wants this to be perfect… kinda wants to make Arthur cry, say something so touching Arthur cries!! He wants to!!

He’s also told like, everyone that Today is The Day, and they’re all playing it cool, though Dutch is SUPREMELY bad at playing it cool. He keeps like, winking at Charles every chance he gets and giving him thumbs up like “you got this 👍👍👍” and it’s like… jfc Dutch, fucking chill

So they’re hanging around, chatting, eating kosher hotdogs on artisanal gluten-free organic ancient grain buns (Beau’s dad hired the caterer and it’s the fanciest mediocre hotdog Charles has ever had in his life – Arthur’s disappointed that they hired catering cuz he fucking loves to grill), and Arthur is all like, “I’m gonna grab some more champagne, babe, you want some?” and Charles sees the perfect opportunity and he SNATCHES IT and is like “sure!”

And so Arthur turns, walks to the lil table and Charles gets down on his knee, has the little ring box in his hand, he’s fucking primed to strike, when Arthur turns around it’s fucking PROPOSAL TIME BABEYYY

When Arthur does turn around he kinda… jumps, a little, spills a little champagne, and then he’s… fucking laughing?? Laughing hard, like he can’t believe it, and Charles wasn’t expecting that at all… and Charles is like “Arthur Morgan –“

And Arthur is like “Shit!! Shit!!” and he’s still laughing and he gets on his knees, still holding both glasses of champagne, and holds one up for Charles to see and of course, of COURSE,

His cheese all fucking boyfriend stuck a ring in the champagne glass. Was gonna surprise Charles like that.

So then Charles starts laughing, and Arthur is laughing, and Arthur chugs the glass of champagne so he can get the ring, and Charles holds out one hand, and Arthur is like OH and so he chugs the OTHER glad of champagne so he can hold out HIS hand and they both slide the ring onto the others finger and then kind of just like… hold hands, and laugh, and press their foreheads together, and they don’t need to say anything, they just know, they’ve always known –

But then John (who has been dutifully filming the whole thing on his phone, like Arthur asked him to) is like “Well?? Say SOMETHING!”

So Charles goes “Will you –“ at the same time Arthur goes “Charles, I –“ and then they’re laughing again and mumble some nonsense no one can make out and then they kiss, and of course the whole fucking party stopped to watch and they clap and it’s embarrassing and stupid and fucking perfect…

The wedding ceremony itself is pretty low key. Dutch and Hosea are a pair of Old Queens, want something fancy and elaborate, but Charles and Arthur aren’t like that, and they’re not super religious, so they choose to have something secular and small and intimate, close family and friends only.

When Dutch n Hosea retired, they bought an acreage a couple hours outside the city (Dutch insists that land is the best form of capital to invest in or something idk) where they’ve got a couple horses n a lot of room, so that’s where they have the wedding. It’s the summer and the prairie grass is long and the chairs are mismatched, but that’s ok because it’s Charles and Arthur and everyone else they love and it’s perfect.

Of course Dutch and Hosea walk Arthur to the fuckin altar or whatever – Dutch wears red accents, Hosea wears blue, Arthur purple. It’s cute and cheesy and I love it?? Charles has a nice turquoisey pocket square and tie, and Tilly braids his hair for the occasion and he looks so fuckin sexy!!

A friend of Susan’s (Swanson!) officiates, John is Arthur’s best man and Tilly and Sadie are Charles’s maids of honour or whatever?? their vows are short but eloquent, and they agree – “Always.”

The reception is all food Susan and Arthur and Charles’s mom slaved over the day before, and they cut the cake with a fuckin tomahawk. I feel like they also do like, axe-throwing or something as like, a party game or whatever idk

At the end of the day, once the guests are all gone and it’s like 3am and they’re still a little tipsy, Arthur and Charles collapse into bed in one of the guest rooms and Christ, it’s been a long, stressful, nerve-wracking day, they don’t have the energy for wedding sex, they just wanna curl up and hold each other and go to sleep and –

And of course they can hear, real faintly through the walls, John and Javi in the next room, Javi all “quiet, flaquita, I know it’s your first time, you’ve been saving yourself for me, haven’t you? But you have to be quiet, that’s my good girl, love you so much… you’re so tight, darlin', we gotta go so, so slow – you feel that, how tight your virgin pussy is on me? My little bride, my little wife, my good girl, gonna cum in you, gonna make you mine, let your tight pussy milk –“

Arthur and Charles pass out in spite of the noise, and in the morning they wake up before the others and sit and have coffee together and are all “pass me the sugar, Mister Smith,” “It would be my pleasure, my darling husband.”

Arthur almost immediately starts calling Charles “the ol' ball-and-chain” and thinks it’s absolutely hilarious and Charles just rolls his eyes

Thanks for the ask, mister! It cheered me right up uwu

[davidmann95]

All-Star Superman #2

A scant year to the day since part 1!

All evidence to the contrary I actually have always wanted to go back to this, especially since I keep getting asked if I’ll do so and it stirs my omnipresent sense of guilt over my lack of productivity, and also the last year has not resulted in a mass turnaround of people realizing it’s a for-real good book and not just comfort food so this remains necessary. This isn’t going to be quite as in-depth as the first go-around - both that as the introductory issue and that as the introductory recap had a lot of groundwork to lay - but still plenty to cover, as this issue sets up Lois and Superman’s arcs for the series, which is rooted (amazingly, especially right off the bat, given the book’s reputation of being about how amazing Superman is) in how badly Superman’s let his fears and shortsightedness poison the most important relationship in his life.

If the first issue is the big classic Superman material - Superman saving the day from the monster! Lois and Clark and the rest of the Daily Planet crew! Lex Luthor’s sinister schemes! A ticking clock to doom! - this scales all the way down to the uncomfortably, stiflingly intimate. Classic archetypal Superman stuff gives way to the most Silver Age issue: casual huge ideas, relationship drama, misunderstandings, last-minute reveals that recontextualize the entire issue, and baaaarely latent psychodrama bubbling up at the edges. In service of that the visual framing here is not unlike a stage play, a limited set of physically connected locales as a pair of figures bounce off one another. Quitely and Grant’s work is therefore comparatively subdued next to issue #1, keeping to traditional panel layouts and wide or medium shots with a background color palate of mostly blacks and whites and grays with a handful of other colors popping out...until Lois starts to lose her shit at the end of the issue and we get close-ups and full black and white panels and eerie glowing and dutch angles and that unsettling abstract image of her clenched teeth, as the story starts to squeeze us like Lois’s gut.

She’s right to be unsettled for that matter; she’s alone on Superman’s turf (the one issue where that’s the case other than #6, and that one’s about how Smallville stopped being his home), the weird antiseptic alien lair of the ultimate super-hobbyist, and all the baggage of their relationship is spilling out into the open as she has less and less reason to think the best of this odd man who’s been lying to her for years. Unlike the Silver Age tales this is referencing, she’s absolutely on the money with her complaints about him: he’s been dicking around with her forever and thinks it can all be okay now (His little “What?” on the second page when she bursts his bubble says it all), and he’s awkwardly overcompensating trying to fix it.

While the Fortress tour serves to peacefully acclimate us to how utterly bizarre Superman’s world really gets past the traditional rescues (the little cubic starfield we don’t know the meaning of yet, trophies are floating rather than physically suspended, the glowing flowers in Lois’s room, “The Phantom Zone map room’s pretty dull unless you can see radio-negative anti-waves”), Superman himself is...humblebragging isn’t the right way of putting it, but it feels like he’s working way, way harder than he ever will again in this book to be cool and impressive and assuring. He’s a dope in love, but he can tell something’s up and that super-brain of his isn’t putting the obvious pieces together, or noticing that this is just putting her off further and further until, like Bluebeard’s wife before her, she stumbles through the threshold of the door she was never meant to, even of course in the end he’s still Superman and there’s a perfectly good reason. Not a good enough reason, however, for her accusations at dinner to not hit home - his mind may be expanding, but he’s still way up his own ass here in a genuinely unpleasant way that’ll be elaborated on momentarily. For now he’s left stammering that she should trust him and it’s limp and phony, especially compared to his big entreaty for someone to trust him in #10 (which’ll be right after he finally comes clean with her); while Superman may not be considered a savior figure by his friends in here the way he often is in the mainline comics Lois seems to be the only one who doesn’t look up to him at least a little bit, but that clarity means she’ll call him out where no one else will.

Across the next two pages it’s all laid out, and we get to the roots of where things have gone wrong between the two of them. Lois is paranoid, certainly, the panels are literally squeezing in on her, but with Superman seeming so out-there and alien like never before she would have every right to be even sans alien chemicals. But notably there remains throughout a part of her assuming the best of him wondering if maybe this is just another big misunderstanding or that he’s simply been mutated by the solar overexposure. And in her heart of hearts, she admits that maybe she wants this to be another big damn trick with a completely sensible justification, because the alternative is that this is the new normal and she has to accept that he’s a flawed mortal man. It’s ugly and it’s mean - especially since she likes Clark - and it’s human as hell in the worst, most understandable way. It’s not going to be until said mortality is staring her in the face that she’ll be able to accept it.

Superman, meanwhile...someone could write a thesis on these panels as an articulation of the Superman/Clark dynamic. The Mirror of Truth is actually preexisting, centerpiece of a Jerry Siegel/Curt Swan joint in Action Comics #269 that was later adapted into the Superman newspaper strip where Lois uses it to figure out Superman is Clark Kent until he tricks her into believing the mirror can lie, after which he tosses it in a volcano; here it’s survived, and curiously shows him as Superman rather than Clark, when in the original tale it displayed Kent even though that was fully the era of Clark as a disguise. In here too it’s Superman who’s the ‘true’ identity of the two and which this time is reflected in the mirror, yet as in #1 it’s Clark who says what he’s truly feeling. In that light, the final panel of the abandoned glasses reads like nothing so much as Superman using the mirror as affirmation that the truth of the solemn, steadfast Superman identity gives him licence to deny the uncomfortable emotions his squishy human farmboy side is dredging up, ‘lying’ to him in a way he had to fake in the source material. Those emotions however knock right on the door of what he can’t grasp here: Clark’s so wrapped up in his own head trying to do the ‘right’ thing that he’s overlooking how his attempts at self-sacrificing selflessness are hurting the people around him. Throughout the series he’ll come to rely on others, first at his lowest points with Jimmy and the Bizarros, until at last he comes to invest true trust in Lois, and the Kandorians, and Leo Quintum, and even Lex.

For now though Lois is deep in a hole, a brief but memorable meeting with the Unknown Superman of 4500AD - everything Superman seems to be becoming to her even before she wonders if it’s literally him, cryptic and masked and with a big ‘ol question mark right on his chest instead of the familiar comforting logo, even his gutbuster of a question reinforcing his distance from a recognizable human experience - leading her all the way to reimagining her Silver Age ideal happy ending of marriage and family with Superman as a Cronenbergian horror. It’s still a Superman story, it turns out he had the very best reason possible for wanting to keep her in the dark, but right through to the end he remains just a little condescending in his reassurance, and his gift of essentially bringing her up to his ‘level’ isn’t going to solve the problem. While the next issue lets us see the two of them properly in love, it won’t be until the elephant in the room comes out that they can come to terms.

Additional notes

* God Quitely is so good. Look at the way the seatbelt curves in the first panel! Lois’s bemused little disbelieving smirk!

* Pages 2-3: Aurora Borealis?!

* Lois is the only character other than Superman who gets to have actual narration (in both cases as looks at their in-text writing), the only one whose viewpoint is thus privileged in the same way as his.

* The key is the realization of this series’ aesthetic in a nutshell: the old-school idea in a sleek, shiny, clever new way that doesn’t take away from the fantastical toyeticness of it all. For that matter, the key is the centerpiece of a later bit with Superman that could be fairly described as the long-term goal of the book book as Morrison’s hoped-for perennial: “One day some future man or woman will open that door, with that key. When they do, I want them to know how it felt to live at the dawn of the age of superheroes.”

* This is A. The first note of a larger DC universe existing offscreen, something that I’ll go into more when discussing #8, B. A brilliant, concise, fun little summation of his place in Superman’s world, and C. Absolutely hilarious given Morrison suggested in his exit interview that this could be seen as much later on in the same universe as All-Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder, which entirely rewrites the tone of that moment.

* Already discussed the key but the muscles in Superman’s hand tensing a bit at picking it up is another great detail.

* The glimpse of the Fortress here is excellent: the statues of his friends and enemies instead of pictures because he does things bigger with the yellow electric something crackling at the end of it, the off-model but curious-looking robot appearing to glance at Kandor (are it and the bigger robot with the seats on top of it trophies, or Superman Robots with different designs tasked for specific purposes?), the classic Bad Penny Good For One Crime, the Legion time bubble that establishes his time-traveling credentials for later, the Titanic where he and Lois will dine when their relationship hits a proverbial iceberg, and most strikingly the space shuttle Columbia, his apparent rescue of which I have to imagine is a reference to Astro City’s Superman analogue Samaritan debuting by averting the Challenger disaster.

* It’s next issue that has my actual favorite Superman/Lois moment of all time, but “When we’re married fifteen years, when I’m sagging and he looks just the same, will he still meet me and say things like...” “These are for you. I picked them on Alpha Centauri 4.” is right up there.

* The technological aesthetic of the Fortress is so different than P.R.O.J.E.C.T., sleek and solid and cleanly-lit and antiseptic, beautiful and advanced but a little cold in its own way. As stuffed with wonder as this place may be, there’s something hauntingly empty about it, suiting both the tone of the issue and as a physical embodiment of Superman’s emotional state. The one part that goes against it is the forbidden room, it even has beakers and test tubes to sell the mad scientist vibe...though if you were to stretch it, it much more close resembles the human technology seen at P.R.O.J.E.C.T., and this is meant as a gift for one.

* The cosmic anvil made it along with the key into the CWverse, Lois used it in Elseworlds! I may not be expecting All-Star quality from the upcoming Superman and Lois, but it’s good to know the powers that be are using it as a reference point (beyond how it inspired Supergirl’s take on Cat Grant, a connection I discussed in a post that seems to have vanished into thin air). The whole page is perfect, Superman at his most joyfully benign and beautiful and godlike; it’s the one bit where Lois’s skepticism cracks a touch watching him feed his adorable little Lovecraftian abomination from beyond the stars.

* While he never appears physically aside from a statue Brainiac hovers over this series from beginning to end in name and deed, the ominous ultimate enemy of Superman’s past, the great trial overcome even as the scars forever remain. Morrison mentioned in the exit interview that he didn’t appear in here because he and Quitely already used him as the villain of JLA: Earth 2, but that if he had it would have borrowed Superman: The Animated Series’ take on him as a Kryptonian AI gone rogue. Personally I like his place in here as-is, a little totem parallel to the Justice League references indicating the breadth of Superman’s history between putting on the cape and Luthor’s final scheme.

* A pair of minor notes: Lois points at Superman with the pointy fork when asking him pointed questions, and while it’s not immediately clear on first read she does in fact ask the Unknown Superman exactly 3 questions (“Kal Kent?” “Will Superman and I ever marry and have children?” “What do you mean?”) before he replies with his own, as promised.

* “Oww.” and “Tickles.” literally could not be more perfect Superman moments.

* Worth taking a moment to marvel at just how many future plot elements are seeded here. There’s the obvious bit of Superman thinking about having a partner setting up the next issue, but we also for issue #6 have our first look at Kal Kent and Lois wondering “What if (the Unknown Superman) was really (Superman)?” when Clark will indeed pose as him, for #10 we get our first look at Qwewq, and for #11 not only is the Sun-Eater introduced but so is Robot 7′s malfunction as a result of Luthor’s tampering.

* The structure of the series according to Morrison is a solar cycle, beginning and ending at midday with nightfall in the center. If last issue was the sun at its brightest we begin the descent here, with Superman remaining larger-than-life and ultimately trustworthy but with his classic persona and habits held to an additional, unflattering degree of scrutiny.

[the-old-dip-and-stir]

So today is the one year anniversary of rdr2′s release

Honestly, I don’t know what I had expected out the game because I never got to play the first one, even though I heard such good things about it. I can say that I’m happy I invested my money into the game because holy shit, it was a wild and amazing ride. The characters and the story is all just so *chef’s kiss*. The actors are amazing and sweet people, seriously, I don’t know it I could’ve asked for better people to work on this project. Some amazing art and writing has come out of it and I’ve met some really cool people from it. So in honor of rdr2, I wrote some hug headcanons for the entire Van Der Linde Gang. Thanks to the Red Dead Discord for inspiring and even helping a little with this cuz even though we are a cursed bunch, we are also very wholesome.

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Arthur hugs are grounding. He doesn’t hug often, but he knows words tend to escape him when he needs them most. A hug can convey what needs to be said. He cups the back of your head and brings you close, cradling you as if you were made of glass. Arthur will rock you both back and forth, swaying side to side in an intimate dance to the comforting, steady beat of his heart. He may slip in a “I got ya,” a “Yer alright,” or maybe a “Won’t let nothin’ happen t’ ya.” He holds you as long as you need, even if it’s for an hour. 

John hugs are spontaneous. He doesn’t really know how to hug, and most hugs he received lasted a few moments at best. When he does decide to give a hug, it’s a quick, in the moment thing. He may look at you for a few moments and then suddenly you’re being jerked into his lanky arms for a bit of a bony, yet meaningful hug. It won’t last very long, but it’ll have one, tight, little squeeze before he lets go. You may even question what the hell it was for and John will just shrug, with a simple “Just wanted to,” or “Felt right.”

Dutch hug are uplifting. He knows life can be a cruel mistress, and she will kick you down even when you’re at your lowest, so he will try his damnedest to keep you from drowning in the harsh sea. He’ll cradle the back of your neck and rest your head on his shoulder, an arm wrapped around your waste and the other rubbing your back. He may talk to you about absolutely nothing or tell you how strong you are. He sees a strength in everyone he loves and wishes they could see it too, but he never, ever minds emphasizing how much his family means to him.

Hosea hugs are comforting. He is fully aware that many adults won’t admit they need a hug, but he’s a sensible man that understands that even those with a strong will need reassurance, so he makes it a point in letting everyone know they can talk to him. If all you need is the hug, he’s more than willing to envelop you in his wispy arms, pet your head, and hold you until you feel better. Any tears shed will be met with an equal amount of understanding. “Kindness isn’t a commodity, child.” Hosea makes it his job to remind you and anyone that being kind is important.

Javier hugs are heartfelt. Physical affectionate is something he usually received from family or a loved one, so he’s not one to give out hugs willy-nilly. He gives them to those he cares about greatly. So say you happen to be one of those people, he won’t hesitate to take you into his arms. He holds you like it’s his one and only job, and he’s gonna make sure he does it right. He may sway, maybe sing you a little song, whatever you need. And he will end it, no matter what, with a kiss on your temple. Doesn’t matter if you’re a hulking figure, you’re his family and he loves you.

Bill hugs are gentle. You wouldn’t think this would be the case, but he prefers a soft hug. The outlaw life is so harsh and wild that he craves something more tame, more tender. He hasn’t been hugged for a long time, but, contrary to his grumpy exterior, Bill adores a good hug. So when you need one, he makes sure to be delicate. He wants it to be sweet and comforting, not some hard and unfeeling thing. He wishes to appear as much as the teddy bear he, not so secretly, is. He won’t have much to say since he’s not too good with words, but he’s hoping you know that he cares.

Charles hugs are safe. He doesn’t come off as the type to hug often, but it’s not that he dislikes touch, Charles respects people’s boundaries. He constantly one step away from hugging others, all they have to do is give him the go ahead and his arms will immediately encircle them. He understands what it’s like to be afraid, so he wants to give others a sense of security. His arms will engulf you, his body swallows you in order to hide you away from your troubles. He’s the barrier that keeps all the bad out, even if it’s just for a little while.

Lenny hugs are friendly. He’s a little on the touchy-feely side. There’s almost always a hand on your shoulder or back. He’ll bump shoulders with you or just stand in close proximity, so it makes sense that his hugs are just a welcoming as his demeanor. His hugs are a little lanky given that he’s still young, but it doesn’t make them any less lovely. You need a bit of bone-crusher? Just want to be held and talk? Lenny’s ya boah, and he will happily do it with a big grin on his face.

Sean hugs are enthusiastic. In fact, he’s almost never not touching you. There’s always an arm slung around your shoulders or a hand sitting on the back of your neck. It’s worse when he’s drunk, but it all done in fondness. So need a hug? No problem! Sean’s always a willing participant in a good ol’ fashioned bear hug. They’re bony hugs, but full of joy and happiness. He practically reeks of glee, and also booze, so it’s nearly impossible for it not to rub off on you. Beware of whiskey breath, though.

Micah hugs are protective. You wouldn’t think the words affection and Micah would go together, but that’s where you’re wrong. He’s not publicly affectionate, it embarrasses him. Now in private? He will hug the shit out of you. The man has been starved of kindness for quite awhile, so if you need a hug, you will get a hug, and, surprisingly, they are very nice, comforting hugs. But there is one case where Micah won’t give a damn what others think of him, if he decides to throw an arm around you. That is when he feel like you are in immediate danger. He likes to make sure that anyone who’s watching knows that if they mess with you, they mess with him.

Sadie hugs are tight. She holds on like it’s the last thing she’ll ever do, for good reason of course. She’ll circle her arms around your waist, pulling you as close as she possibly can, and won’t let go for a while. You’ll feel Sadie bunch up the back of your shirt in her hands, as if to make it harder for anyone to haul you away. You can feel everything she feels, and her you. She needs this hug. You need this hug. You don’t have to hug back just as hard as she does, but if you do, she will most definitely squeeze you tighter. 

Abigail hugs are loving. Perhaps that comes with her being a mother, she knows just the kind of hug you might need. They can be as gentle or firm as you need, and she’s not shy to tell you how important you are. How much you mean to her. How much you mean to everyone. Abigail can almost feel when you need a hug too. It can be the way you say something, a look, or how you carry yourself. She will know and she will provide. She’ll hold you as you cry or if you’re hurt, she doesn’t mind. You need someone and she’ll be there as you’ve always been for her, and for Jack.

Jack hugs are short and sweet. Pun intended and not. A young Jack clings to your legs with a quick “Love you!” before running off to play again. He doesn’t like seeing you sad and his mama’s hugs always make him feel better. An older, more hardened Jack keeps his hugs short as well. Much like his father, he’s not too sure on how to give hugs, even though he’s received quite a few as a kid. That doesn’t stop them from being meaningful in anyway, though. He makes sure he conveys how much you mean to him.

Tilly hugs are special. She more likely to lend an ear than she is to cradle you. Not everyone wants to be touched, and physical affection is harder to come by in a large group of men. So she’s always willing to listen, and asking for a hug, instead of talk, may surprise her. It’s not a bad sort of a surprise, Tilly feels honored that you’re comfortable enough to even want that sort of thing from her at all. When she takes you into her arms, it makes you feel as if you’re the most important person to her. The hug isn’t grand, it’s not absolutely extraordinary, but it sure does make you feel special.

Mary-Beth hugs are sisterly. Most of the gang sees her as a little sister, it’s nearly impossible not to with how she dreams and how sweet she is. The way she hugs is very much how someone would great their family. It’s almost as if you’re a long lost sibling, or her favorite cousin that came over for the holidays. Her embrace screams that you mean the world to her. That she’s so happy that you’re there. Though, be warned, if you have long hair, it may get tangled up in her necklace with how closely she holds you.

Karen hugs are strong. She’s the type to actually give you a bone-crushing hug. It’s the only hug she’s capable of. Karen is even the type to do a full side hug and trap your arms against your body. If you want a soft hug, the closest you can get is an arm around your shoulders, but everything else nearly bruises. It’s not her goal to hurt you, she really doesn’t know her own strength. She’s really used to being a tough gal, so even her hugs are tough on people. You can’t hate her for it though. At least you know she’s excited to see you.

Susan hugs are motherly. The entire gang is basically her kids, you included. She’s not the type to immediately hold and coddle you. She’ll lend and ear and set you straight, but she knows when to hug you. She knows when words and a firm hand aren’t going to help you. She gently bring you to her breast, as any mother does to comfort her child. She’ll pet your head and listen as you cry or just talk. You need support and she’s giving it all the while. Susan is a force to be reckoned with, but she isn’t one to be harsh when it’s not needed. 

Molly hugs are unintentionally tender. She hadn’t intended to hug you. She had come to you to vent about Dutch, seeing as you were the only one who would listen to her, but as soon as she saw you, any and all complaints flew out the window. You’d been crying, and seeing you so despondent broke her heart. When you saw her, you tried to act like nothing had happened and asked if she needed anything, but she said nothing. She simply approached and wrapped her around your shoulders. It wasn’t immediate, but you eventually hugged her back and started crying again. She cried with you, taking comfort that she wasn’t the only one feeling down.

Pearson hugs feel like home. As much as he likes to talk, Simon is an incredible listener. He also gives really good advice if you need it. Many of the others don’t really like hearing him talk about his days in the Navy, but you enjoy hearing them while you help him. It’s a bit of an escape from the rough life you live. So if he notices that you’re not as into his stories like usual, he’ll ask if you’re alright, if you need to talk. Whether you do or don’t, his arms are quick to open and let you seek comfort from him. They are warm and smell of coffee, and the best hugs you’ve ever received.

Kieran hugs are nervous. He’s unsure if any of it is okay. Are you sure you want a hug from him? What if one of the others gets upset at him for touching you? It’s not that he doesn’t want to, he’s just terrified of doing the wrong thing. Of course, there’s absolutely nothing he can do if you’re the one who engulfs him in an embrace, but the fear is still there. Your hugs are nice, though, and it makes him feel a little less unsafe with you being so nice to him. Although, he’s always embarrassed to hug you because he always seems to be sweaty and smell like a horse whenever the opportunity arises.

Uncle hugs are funny. He’s a jolly person, a little smelly, but joyful all the same. He likes giving hugs, likes to put smiles on people’s faces. So if Uncle ever sees that your down, expect to be scooped up into a big hug, if his lumbago doesn’t act up of course. He’ll twirl you around and tickle you with his beard until he’s got you laughing. He’ll only put you down if he knows your mood is brightened and if that doesn’t do the trick, expect him to bother you for the rest of the day. Nobody’s gonna be sad, not on his watch. 

Trelawny hugs are magical. Much like Uncle, he tries to make you smile, but instead of tickling and twirling, he puts his magician skills to use. He’ll dramatically embrace you, then pull back to tell you how darling you are and-- oh? What’s this? A coin behind you ear? BOOM. MAGIC. He’ll hold you to his side as he examines the coin, rolls in between is knuckles, and-- oho? Now it’s a dove! BOOM. MAGIC. He will take off his hat, as is the gentlemanly thing to do, and-- well, would you look at that. A hare in his hat! BOOM. MAGIC. Josiah gets a kick out of your pure, unadulterated wonder at his magic tricks.

Swanson hugs are mutually beneficial. At first, it’s really just a hug because you need it, but he can’t help but melt into your arms as well. He can’t remember the last time someone held him that didn’t involve picking his inebriated ass off the ground. It’s a lot nicer than he remembers and he accidentally holds on longer than either of you intended. He’ll apologize profusely, but tell you let him know if you need anything else. He cares a great deal, but he’s also hoping maybe he can another hug in as well.

Strauss hugs are a little awkward. He’s not much of a hugger, at most he’ll wrap his arms around you with a pat on the back, but usually it’s a hand on the shoulder or holding your hand softly. He didn’t receive many hugs growing up, and those he did were from his mother a long, long time ago. If he’s unsure of what you need, he will sit with you and listen to your troubles, or sit with you in silence. He’s not very touchy-feely, but he wants you to know he’s there for you whenever and however you need.

[hachibe]

11 questions asked and answered (SKAM edition)

Rules:

1. Always repost the rules!

2. Answer the questions given to you by the one who tagged you!

3. Give 11 questions!

4. Tag 11 people!

tagged by @illgiveyouahint , thanks!!!

1) Favourite remake version of each of the seasons? s1 - none, idk i don’t think any remake has made me like their s1 as much as i like original s1. s2 - DRUCK, I have my problems with it but it's the only remake that took it upon themselves to make that season better not being afraid to change things. s3 - DRUCK as well. the changes in the characters made everything exciting to see. every time they did something different we went

and every time it was the same we went

s4 - since so far france has been the only one who went as far as s4 i have to say none, because i didn't like what they did with it.

2)Which characters do you think would absolutely not get along?

I have no idea, really. Maybe all the Noora’s wouldn’t like each other. The p-Chrises as well. In the other hand I think all the Sana’s would love to hang out together. The Chrises as well, they would totally love each other. 

3)Favourite non-canon mlm ship? Eskild x Mahdi. SRLY, that pic of them hugging in the kosegruppa christmas party had me sending. 

And then we saw them hugging again in the eid party. And some one wrote a beautiful fic of Mahdi realizing he might not be that straight and deciding to try something with Eskild and Isak being pissed at it that I completely love.

4)Favourite non-canon wlw ship? All the wlw ships are non-canon! (sure i’m not considering spain and austin) idk I've been robbed of my Evilde. And I would love for any remake to take notice of this and make it right. Besides that, any wlw ship is welcome.

5)Which character would you like to 👀 guest ⭐ in which remake (other than Eskild in SkamNL)? Anybody in any remake. Wouldn't it be cool if we get random characters in random remakes for no reason whatsoever than our delight? I would love for character to meet. Like maybe take the fact that Matteo is half italian and send him to meet some characters from skam italia. But not Martino, somebody else. Maybe his gradma lives near Silvia's parents or something. With all the Nooras going to Madrid they could meet the spanish people altough i don't care for the spanish people. Maybe someone in skam france is related to someone from SKAM.  Oh!!! Make Arthur be related to Stefan!!!!! And since Matteo and David are currently in/on their way to Amsterdam maybe make them meet some of the dutch kids.

6)What would a remake in your country (assuming it would somehow be possible to make it) look like? I guess it depends on which tv company it gets made. But in my dream world it would not be made by any TV channel we have here, but by some production company that keeps it online but invests heavily in advertising (i think here in Brasil the ads would be super important for spreading it), with the enough amount of money to make it justice.

I would love for it to take place in some capital but like in one of the interior states or in the northeast region. Anything out of São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro/South. Something in nordeste would be so cool! Heavy slang/accent not even the rest of the country understands; beautiful beaches; people taking overcrowded buses, people skipping classes, people drinking way too young, carnaval in nordeste ♥, idek what kind of parties teenagers in nordeste have, but i would like to see. Catholic holidays. Afro-brazilian religions, brown people everywhere! one token white guy, Wilhelm probably. Football!, lots of memes! Trying to incorporate twitter in the narrative. Lot's of dissatisfaction with the current government, especially if it takes place in nordeste. give me money i would do it. and i'll even make sure to put some 'ele não' stickers in every single clip.

7)What would a season based on your life look like? What would it concentrate on? Boring probably. Maybe deal with mental health, growing up in religious household, coming to terms with my sexuality. And how everything intersects.  

8)Do you have a character you headcanon as aro,ace or nb? I must confess I'm terrible at headcanoning. I usually go with mostly established fancanons. Like, I like non binary Mikael, and aro/ace Lin and theirs remakes counterparts (mostly druck because italia doesn't have one and I fucking hate the french one. is Esra Lin? was there one in skam austin? i dropped s2)

9)Assuming you have 👀 original Skam, would you like the cast & crew to come back and do any future seasons/films to update us on the characters? Yes. Years in the future I wouldn't mind to see a special or a film about them and where they are in life. Skins did it and it was amazing. I'm sure if Julie wants it can be done. (i just hope she doesn't half ass some of the characters like she did in those books like 'you, you and you very detailed future and you, you and you *looks smudge in hand* idk kindergarten teacher'.)  

10) What was the order you 👀 the versions in and do you think it influenced you which versions are your favourite? No, I don't think the order in which i watched the remakes has any bearing in my favouritism. But the order I watched it was as they came out. Skam france first, then Druck and Skam Italia. Later then, Skam Austin and Skam nl. It took me a while to watch Skam Spain and I still haven't seen Wtfook. I just got to a point I was so dead tired of seeing the same thing again and again with no significant changes whatsoever.

11) Do you think the fandom is just too negative or do you 👀 it as a valid criticism? I don't like to think about the fandom so generalized like this. I think there can be a lot of negativism but it also there's a lot of valid criticism. And I think both are valid. I mean, and especially with a show with a format such as skam and it's remakes, it calls a lot to instant reactions. A clip drops and we might get mad and pissed by the direction of the plot or characters or whatever, and it's okay. Might we be wrong by tomorrow? Yes. So? ... Like, let people be mad, let people be wrong, let people be happy. You might not agree and that's okay, but let people be. All your sentiments are valid, even if they diverge from other people's. One thing I hate is posts that start like "people need to stop thinking...." or "people need to see....". We need to accept that people are different, people have different opinions, and just because they are different they don’t have a different place in fandom than you. This also leads to people ignoring criticism because if you like something that something must be perfect. And I read a lot of posts with the tone of 'if you don't like it, drop it, stop watching, etc' and I don't think that's the road to go either. So let's be more accepting of each other, i guess.

So, my questions: *i’ll be copying some questions because they are good*

1. What skam and each remake you watched taught you?

2. What would you tell someone to convince them to watch skam and every remake? At least one thing for each one that you’ve watched. 

3. Was there any moments that shocked you?

4. Set you would like to visit?

5. What character would you go for advice?

6. Favourite scene in a remake that wasn’t on the original?

7. If you could go on a date with any character, who would it be?

8. If you could make a season for one character, who would it be?

9. Is there a character you didn’t like in original that you ended up liking in the remakes?

10. If you could watch only one episode for the rest of your life which one would it be? (one for skam and one for each of the remakes, it doesn’t have to be the same)

11. If there was a skam remake but that took place in university with one would you like to see?

I don’t know if I know 11 people! aoidoaijdaosidj So i’m tagging these people but feel free to completely ignore me if you don’t want to do this. @fille-lioncelle @hjertetssunnegalskap1 @smores100 @viro-major @tulaqis @procrastinatingbisexual @ilovenyclife @harryxtimmy ANd hey, if you happen to see this post and wants to do it, just go and do it!!!

[gangofoutlaws]

chapter one

CHASING THE COUNTRY - CHAPTER ONE: VAN DER LINDE GANG APPROVED ( also read here ) 

The early morning sun is shining bright when I wake up at the small creek in Eris Field.  The tent is conveniently set up for a morning bath that I like to begin the day with and get in focus for my daily choirs of hunting. For a week or two, I have been traveling around these parts to conduct my business as a hunter and make money to live on. Mostly I take on paid assignments from locals who for example, don’t have the time to do the hunting themselves or sell hides to stores, artistic people who do god knows what with them and collectors.

A job where I can be in depended and go anywhere I want to be. A free existence.

The inspiration for this line of work is my father. One of the best hunters of the west that traveled overseas to bring back amazing unseen animals that only existed in photographs. It took him a lot of time away from the family, but when he came back with a hundred of amazing stories of what grounds he had traveled, it all made up for it.

With some regular birds and a small deer, I ride myself towards the community of Rhodes where I can sell them to the local butcher.  Usually, not a huge payment as they like to make a big profit by reselling them, but I am not going to complain. Money is tight and I need every penny I can get.

There are already a few people negotiating with the butcher at the time of arrival and I take my time to wait for my turn next to Banshee.

"YOU man, are a thief!" The elder man shouts his finger at the butcher. He turns around, rapidly walking away in heavy paces. By the frustration in his eyes, he is not aware that he will be nearly bumping into my horse during the process. A bit embarrassed he shoots me a smile and then notices the animals on my horse.

"You sell these?" He asks indignantly, touching the coating to feel the quality of the fresh meat.

“I do.” my arms crossed, ready to make a deal “are you interested?”

“Well. That depends, do you sell these for a reasonable price, unlike SOME people around here?” obviously suggesting the butcher overselling his products.

"I think I can make a good price for you," persuasively replying to the demand

"Do you mind bringing them to our camp? I promise it ain’t too far away ..." the man with reddish hair and an accent from across the sea named Sean asks me. He's got a friendly face. His friend is named Pearson, the camp cook... They both look like nice fellas and I accept to help them.

The short but peaceful walk through nature ends at an open place next to the flat iron lake where a pretty big camp is set up.  It is populated with several people who are doing choirs, taking care of the horses and in overall work as a community. There is even a little boy walking around playing with a dog.

It must be nice to be a part of this.

“So you do a lot of this hunting yourself,” Sean breaks the silence while looking how his friend is hanging the deer upside down to prepare for the next meal.

Nodding my head “I travel around and hunt what I can find. Sell them to those who are interested”

“Like if we wanted you to hunt for us, would you do that?” a finger on his chin for having an idea in mind

“I am open for new clients at the moment “

This is precisely the type of offer I anticipate. This camp's capacity will certainly help me with the money I need.

“Wait right here” he walks towards a big tent behind a big tree that is standing in the middle of the camp. There's a dark man with a black mustache standing in front of the tent, a big cigar in his mouth, smoking circles in the air. They talk briefly before Sean brings him up to me.

When the man approaches, the golden chains on his black and red vest and the rings on his fingers are the first things I observe. He makes quite the impression of some sort of leader figure from this establishment.

“My friend here says you are willing to help us” A short and clear inquiry from the man.

“I know I can” a confident response to the potential new client.

He laughs under his breath “Your expertise is hunting… What can you do for us in that department?”    

“I have noticed there are quite a few people around here that need feeding. I work in the area right now; if you’d want I can deliver that service”

“Where are you from miss…?” he waits for me to respond.

“Evelyn and I’m from the west.”

“You're quite far from home then… What is your business all the way over here?” lifting one of his dark eyebrows intrigued but seriously interested in my answer.

“I am not bound to one place, I go wherever they pay me.”

“Smart. Well, I reckon a lady like you…, alone on the road will attract some sort of men” he takes a step closer towards me “It can be nice to rest your head in a place where you have protection. Shelter”

“What are you suggesting?” curious what he wants with this.

“my boys have with other… activities. I need their full attention on those matters, That leads me to consider investing in a person like you.. Now. We are recovering from something we lost previously and we are not in the position that can pay you in full. Not now anyway. So I hope you see our protection as compensation for your hard work.”

“...i do need to make money sir”

“Don’t we all miss.”  He has a big smirk on his face “Listen, you can still have your business from out here. I got plenty of people around here that can assist you if you’d like to take on a bigger assignment or something. I just need you do provide us in the meantime.”

I start to scratch the back of my head and look around the camp. “And I’d like an answer right now” he insists The sudden rush of making a decision makes me a bit nervous and I go over the pros and cons very fast. He hit the spot about being unsafe on the road sometimes… in those areas, I need to rent a room to be safe or catch some sleep… and that cuts deep in my pockets. He does let me do my business from this camp… I think I have to grab this opportunity. I can always leave if it doesn’t suit me, right?

“What was your name?” I have no clue who I am dealing with at this moment and would like to know before I accept the offer.

“I never told you. But you can call me Dutch”

I stretch my hand out to accept this man’s offer and he nods his head.

“Deal”

[synnefo-nefeli]

How about... Klapallo 49?

For this meme and the prompt “coming home”

He’s lost track of all the places he’s lived in his 25 years, although some stand out more than others.

There’s the family manor tucked in the hills of Mittenwald, looming cold and austere on the hillside over the almost fairy-tail like village. It’s where the “commons” his father was oft to remark lived, and considering Klavier had the best tutors and home schooling, money could buy Klavier has few memories in the village town.

The manor is cold and impersonal, and despite it being the ancestral seat of his father’s fathers, Klavier never felt he belonged among the severe and proper halls.  Staff kept the immense galleries and rooms neat and orderly, everything had to be in its proper place.  It wasn’t until he’s older that Klavier realized that while at any point at least four people and a staff of fifteen lived within the house and grounds, the manor never felt lived in.  It was more of a museum to showcase his family’s wealth and past achievements.  The current occupants left to spend a lifetime hoping to find a place among the walls for the future generations to remember them by.

The manor is cold and chilling, and sometimes he can’t believe he grew up in such a place.  

Kristoph however, fit in perfectly.

Themis Academy is the first place he’s lived, after the manor and the first time he’s lived in a foreign country.  

It’s a boarding school and he has to share a room-  it’s and odd thing to have to share your space when you’re twelve (a whole two years younger than most of your classmates) when you’ve never had to before.

He’s not alone per se, Kristoph is an hour (plane ride) away at Stanford. 

His roommate is nice, a foreign student like himself, so they have that to bond over at least.  Joo-won will go on to be one of Klavier’s closer friends at Themis, and years later, Joo-won joins the record label and is assigned to The Gavinner’s legal council.

Klavier remembers being excited for this new chapter in his life, his first adventure, really.  Excited to learn about the Law, eager to explore “LaLa Land” itself and see if he could make his rock-star dreams come true.  He’s prepared himself for the homesickness. 

In fact he’s read up on the feeling and ways to treat the melancholy so he won’t waste a second of this new life missing out on his old.

It’s almost three months into his semester when he realizes, that the homesickness never came.

Tour-busses are an experience all to their own.  The Label has spared no expense on customizing their small fleet of buses to have every luxury and comfort as they spent hours on the road.

It’s somewhere between the lulling bouncing for hours on an airplane and wonder one gets when they wake up in a new port of call, when on a cruise boat.

It’s a surreal experience-  he’s on a bus for hours and days at a time, watching countrysides drift by, but he has a sound proofed room to practice for the next concert and a small state of the art recording booth should the muses deign to visit.

The bands moves around too much for Klavier to get attached to any one place.  He supposes the bus is his home now, considering the hours he’s racked up in his moving living quarters,  but at times Klavier feels the detachedness of the family manor.  The bus is always pristine and nice, and despite who is occupying it, never really has a personal touch other than the Record Label’s branding.

The feeling of comradely, however, is nice. When he’d left Themis to return to Germany for his badge, he’d missed having his friends about him while he studied.  Now he had his bandmates, his closest and creative kindred spirits.

Jam-sessions that are never recorded and only live in their memories, long running games of Spades in his bunk, eating and touring across so many cities and countries, that sometimes Klavier has to scroll back through years of Instagram posts (his personal- not the Label’s- they’d scrubbed a majority of the Gavinner’s posts, especially ones that featured Daryan) to specifically remember  them all.

It’s a nice adventure filled with the warmth Klavier needs after his disastrous debut and to distract him from his nightmares of that case. But he never feels safe.

Each night when he and Daryan bid each other goodnight and climb into their respective buses, Klavier willingly pushes down the nagging sense of fragility of the distraction he’s chosen to take him far away from his brother and Phoenix Wright.

After nearly a decade of being on the road, he comes back to Los Angeles as a prosecutor.  He’s divested himself from any stipends the Label provides, because despite still being a Rock Star, he’s also a public servant.  The waters of the “Dark Age of the Law” churn constantly with scandals and public opinion towards their Justice System sinks lower and lower by the day, and Klavier is loath to add any reason for his peers and public to mistrust him.

“Go in to court with clean hands and all that jazz,” he thinks, “well, as clean as my hands can be…”

Fortunately he’s amassed a nice nest egg through being a world-famous rockstar and his endorsement deals. 

He buys a nice home in the Hollywood Hills…because, well..what else is he to do?  He’s Klavier Gavin after all.

It’s a spacious Spanish-style, with rooms for days, a pool as big as his other celebrity neighbors; high-privacy walls so the celebrity tour-buses won’t see him, with a price tag that will certainly give him an amazing tax-break and justifies the home values of the neighborhood.

He doesn’t balk at the price; it’s a good investment for him.  Other celebrities blow their money on cars, drugs, women, and gambling.  Property no matter what is a good place to put his money (and his guitars) so he doesn’t think it a waste.  

What is a waste, is the interior decorator who is tasked to create the space worthy of “Klavier Gavin’s” flare.  The decorator and his team do and amazing job of it, Klavier figures.

It’s a shame because between being a world-famous Rock Star and a full-time prosecutor, he’s barely lives in the home he’s bought in the Hollywood Hills.

At least the “Hollywood Homes” Tours enjoy it.

Two years since coming back to the courts full-time, he’s moved to Century City.  It’s a duplex- still luxerous to match his tastes, but fits his needs better than the house in Hollywood Hills ever did.  That home he sold and re-invested the money elsewhere, to the frustration of the Hollywood Tourism Board.

He lives in the duplex with Vongole.  It’s closer to work, it’s in a section of the city that lets him have the glitz and glamour but also allows him to hit dive bars and be close to the local-music scene. Sometimes his colleagues come over to work on cases with him, and he doesn’t have to worry if his living space makes his co-workers feel out of place.

It’s a good place to live and he’s happy.  But he can’t shake the feeling that his apartment is more of a means to an end.

The first time he feels it, he’s not at the address of his formally listed residence.  He still lives in Century City, but since his and Apollo’s relationship has become more serious, Klavier finds himself more and more at Apollo’s small studio apartment in Atwater Village.

The day’s weather had been so hot he’d soaked through his dress shirt before he’d climbed all the way up the steps of the court.  The cases he’d dealt with- hellish as if to match the weather.

And despite winning his cases, Klavier’s mood remained sour.  At the office, Edgeworth had given him almost all of Payne’s pending cases, as the man had been suspended (again) by the Chief Prosecutor.

A long day of paperwork, re-filing the cases that his intern had sloppily sorted (because they’d had a hot date that evening and needed to leave early), and the discovery that all of his cases over the rest of the month would take him to court houses on opposite sides of the city daily, Klavier was thoroughly exhausted by the time he parked his motorcycle at Apollo’s building.

It’s when he steps off the elevator on the third floor that he smells it.  Smells the aroma of ground pork and onions; the air spiced with garlic and a feeling that his chasing away his dark mood.

He realizes he knows this smell.  The grocery cart parked outside of the apartment door with a box with a few scraps of corn husks, further confirms his suspicion that Apollo’s cooking.  Tamales, if Klavier isn’t mistaken.

Sure enough when he enters, he’s greeted to the sight of Apollo’s back and the ties of the red apron his boyfriend is wearing.  He’s busy forming the filling mixture with his hands, and on the small stove of the galley kitchen, the heat is rising in the dutch oven to cook off the stuffed corn husks.

When Apollo turn to smile at him, Klavier is drawn to press up behind him. Wrap his arms about the smaller frame and kiss Apollo’s warm cheek.  Apollo smiles and wiggles under the touch; hands are caked in cornmeal and meat and their size difference leaves Apollo with not much else than to say, 

“Welcome home.”

It’s such a normal thing to say.  Apollo’s said it many times before- but tonight’s the first time that Klavier realizes that this is his home.

It’s not Apollo’s key on his key ring, or that Klaiver didn’t have to announce that he was coming over; nor the place he’s standing in at that very moment.  It’s this person, this beautiful human in his arms. Who loves Klavier in all his glimmerousness, whose passion matches Klavier’s own for law and life. This man who smiles at him when he comes through the door and asks him about Klavier’s day, who is cooking dinner for them as if it’s the most normal and expected thing in the world.

He feels warm and safe, and a mixture of so many things at once.  That he is feeling them all at the same time confirms to him, that no matter where work or music takes him, his home and heart is here.  With Apollo.

Klavier’s response is a deep kiss, and a happy sigh.  Apollo flusters, squawks and calls him a “sap”, but Klavier can see he’s smiling and so he does it again.

“What’s gotten in to you?” Apollo breathless, and still covered in tamale mixture, “are you that happy that we’re having tamales for dinner.”

“Ja, it’s an appropriate response given that I am about to have the best in LA,” Klavier grins and enjoys Apollo’s blush.

“Well if you help me, you’ll be able to eat them sooner-”

Klavier smiles and leans over Apollo to wash his hands in the sink before pulling another apron out of the drawer.  Apollo shifts to make room for him at the counter;pushes the bowl of tamale mixture between them for Klavier to access.

May I always have a place besides you, Liebling he thinks and they proceed to ask each other about their respective days at work as dinner is made.

[seedfinance]

FirstFT: Key workers to be exempt from self-isolation, says Johnson

Good Morning. This article is an on-site version of our FirstFT newsletter. Sign up for our Asia, Europe / Africa or America edition to have it sent straight to your inbox every morning of the week

Boris Johnson celebrated England’s so-called Freedom Day by announcing contingency plans to free key workers from the rules of self-isolation that cause economic and social disruption.

The Prime Minister’s decision to lift most of the Covid-19 restrictions was accompanied by an announcement that additional guidelines – such as

The pub groups Wetherspoon and Young’s, the restaurant company Fridays and the fast food chain McDonald’s offered limited promotions yesterday to draw customers back.

But in central London, many stayed at home and prevented rest from restaurants, theaters and cinemas. The FT view states that companies need clarity in managing the record numbers of isolated employees.

When revelers returned to the nightclubs, investors were less pleased: a global sell-off in equity markets unfolded, hitting many of the sectors that had driven stocks higher that year, sending some into correction territory.

Regardless of this, Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi confirmed yesterday that only clinically extremely vulnerable children aged 12 to 17 who were exposed to immunocompromised adults and adolescents within three months of their 18th birthday

Five more stories on the news

1. David Cameron’s “Lack of Discernment” The former UK Prime Minister’s lobbying for Greensill Capital, which collapsed in March, shows “a significant lack of judgment,” a committee of MPs concluded. The Treasury Department’s Special Committee found that Cameron had not broken the rules, but said it reflected “the inadequate strength of the rules”.

2. USA: China mastered global cyber attacks The White House and its Western allies accused Beijing of partnering with criminal gangs to carry out widespread cyberattacks, including one on Microsoft this year that affected tens of thousands of organizations.

Opinion: If China can’t achieve a global military presence that rivals the US, it may have to find a new way to be a superpower, writes Gideon Rachman.

3. Ascend UK “nowhere near” Boris Johnson’s administration is “nowhere near” achieving its ambitious goals to reduce the country’s yawning inequalities deepened by Covid-19, warned Steven Cooper, co-chair of the UK’s Social Mobility Commission.

Opinion: A more permanent strategy to help low-wage workers and the local economy would be to convert “bad jobs” in sectors like maintenance and warehousing into “good jobs,” writes Sarah O’Connor.

4. BlackRock strives for high executive compensation The world’s largest wealth manager increased its opposition to executive salaries in Europe last year and voted against salary packages for executives of listed companies who laid off workers during the pandemic. Critics have accused BlackRock of not doing enough as it claims to be an advocate for ESG standards.

5. Haiti’s interim prime minister agrees to step aside Claude Joseph, who has ruled the country since Jovenel Moïse was assassinated earlier this month, has agreed to step aside under diplomatic pressure and hand over power to a rival.

Coronavirus digestion

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention yesterday urged Americans to avoid traveling to the US United Kingdom. The US experience a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” warned the head of the country’s health department.

Canada will allow fully vaccinated American tourists from early August and vaccinated travelers from other destinations in September.

US companies desperately looking for new employees for fear of Covid, a lack of childcare and the temporary expansion of unemployment benefits. This has given job seekers more bargaining power than they had in decades.

The explosive growth of E-commerce during the pandemic has drawn investors’ attention to the lackluster cardboard business.

Follow our live coronavirus blog and sign up for our coronavirus business update newsletter for more Covid-19 news.

The day ahead

Heavenly Today, the anniversary of the first moon landing, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is flying into space with his younger brother Mark, the 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and the 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen.

Olympic announcement The International Olympic Committee is holding a meeting to announce the host of the 2032 Games.

Merits Streaming giant Netflix, Philip Morris, UBS, Chipotle, Manpower Group, Halliburton, Rémy Cointreau, Electrolux and Volvo announce profits. BHP announces its fourth quarter production report.

Cyber ​​security hearing The US House’s Energy and Trade Subcommittee meets to investigate the ransomware threat the day after the White House accused China of being behind global cyber attacks.

What else we read

Why Gabon wants markets to help combat climate change As the oil reserves are dwindling, Gabon is trying to reposition itself as a “green superpower”. The rare high-income country in Africa wants recognition for the preservation of its tropical forests, the most important forest ecosystem on earth after the Amazon. So how does it plan to attract “natural capital”?

About 85% of the country of Gabon is covered in carbon-absorbing rainforest, an area the size of Great Britain © Amaury Hauchard / AFP / Getty

When the company’s purpose dissolves in smoke Philip Morris International’s “Statement of Purpose” encompasses the tobacco company’s efforts towards “a smoke-free future.” But his £ 1 billion deal to buy inhalation company Vectura has viewers who rate him somewhere between bizarre and completely unacceptable, writes Helen Thomas.

Brazil’s Lula keeps politics a secret Since returning to politics in March, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has proven to be a serious challenger to President Jair Bolsonaro. However, some wonder what a new presidency for Lula might look like – he has admitted that his ideas “change when the facts change” and in 2003 went from socialist union leader to head of a liberal economic administration.

Iran sanctions The US is considering sanctions on Iran’s oil sales to China, the country’s main customer, as negotiators seek to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. (WSJ)

Two big reasons to doubt the global boom Although economists expect the world economy to reopen rapidly, there are two reasons to question its strength and duration: China and the US. The superpowers are the engines of growth, but cracks are emerging in their economic engines, writes Ruchir Sharma.

FT podcast

You can’t always get what you quantify From picking the best stocks to listening to profit calls, AI-powered systems are transforming finance. But how big are the rewards? In the latest installment of Tech Tonic, Robin Wigglesworth explains how AI has been used in investing and what robots could learn from watching children play.

Recommended newsletters for you

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source https://seedfinance.net/2021/07/20/firstft-key-workers-to-be-exempt-from-self-isolation-says-johnson/

[agritecture]

Europe's 'best-kept secret': Its booming bio-economy

CONTENT SOURCED FROM EUOBSERVER

Europe's bio-economy is worth €2.2 trillion and employs 18.6 million people across the bloc, but a third of citizens are unaware it exists.

"People are completely unaware that the EU is number one in the world [for bio-based products] and they don't know it is investing [in the bio-economy]," said Susanna Albertini, managing director of FVA, the Italian partner of the Bioways project, at the first stakeholder forum for the bio-based industries (BBI), which took place in Brussels on 7 December.

The BBI joint undertaking (BBIJU), running from 2014-2020, is a €3.7 billion public-private partnership between the EU and the Bio-based Industries Consortium. EU funding through Horizon 2020 has committed €975 million, with the rest coming from private investment.

So far, for every €1 put in by the EU, €2.59 has been invested by the private sector. Companies outside the EU are "getting interested" in what is going on here, said Philippe Mengel, executive director of the BBIJU. "The EU is back on the map as a place to invest in bio-based industry."

Since the BBIJU started in 2014, 45 new bio-based building blocks have been developed, exceeding the 2020 target of 30, as well as 90 new bio-based materials, against a target of 50.

Some 40 new bio-based consumer products have also been launched (the target was 30).

One innovation with considerable potential – not least given the focus on disposable plastics currently – is PEF (polyethylene furanoate), a bio-based alternative to PET (polyethylene terephthalate).

Around 70 percent of soft drinks are now packaged in PET plastic bottles, but PEF is the "first example of a polymer that's better than the petroleum-based ones", said Tom Van Aken, CEO of Avantium, which has developed the technology.

Stronger and thinner than its oil-based cousin, PEF also has improved barrier properties, said Van Aken, so the shelf-life of products can be extended.

Backed by a €25 million BBI subsidy, the company is part of a consortium developing a supply chain for FDCA (2,5-furandicarboxylic acid), the building block for PEF. Coca-Cola and Danone have also invested in Avantium's research.

700,000 jobs by 2030

For bio-based products, supply chains are critical.

New markets for agricultural and forestry products that are used in bio-based materials could reportedly create around 700,000 jobs by 2030, 80 percent of them rural, and much has been made of the potential in the bio-economy to tick a number of boxes in terms of economic and environmental sustainability.

PEF won't be available commercially before 2020, for example, but it is part of a global bio-plastics market that is set to grow 20 percent in the next five years, according to researchpublished at the European bioplastics conference in Berlin in November.

Asia accounts for the largest share of production (50 percent). Europe represents 20 percent, but this should expand to 25 percent by 2022, thanks to the European Commission's commitment to transitioning to a circular economy model.

A political deal on the circular economy package was struck on Monday (18 December).

A full review of the bio-economy strategy – which is seen as complementary to the circular economy – is planned for 2018, but a progress report published in November has already concluded that "there is great potential in a sustainable circular bio-economy".

With forward-thinking policies in place more investment should follow. As Europe's science and research commissioner Carlos Moedas has said: "Private money goes where stability is and where policies are predictable."

Much less predictable is how consumers view bio-based products. It was through a couple of new surveys with 500 people that Bioways – which was set up to raise awareness of bio-based products – discovered just how poor people's understanding is. "It's a mess," admitted Albertini.

To date, there has been little research on people's perceptions regarding bio-based products.

One of the few academic studies there are suggested a general state of confusion. Researchers in the Netherlands quizzed 89 people from five EU countries (a fair-sized study in qualitative terms) and concluded that a large number of them had questions, felt uncertain or had "mixed feelings" regarding the whole thing.

What does 'bio-based' mean?

"It [bio-based] is very strange. What does it mean?" admitted one of the consumers involved. Others suggested the whole thing could be a "marketing gimmick".

Concerns certainly intensified when the products in question are not 100 percent bio-based (one of the products given to them was Coca-Cola's part-plant bottle), or if they were produced outside the EU in countries (for example, a hemp-based T-shirt from China).

Companies will need to tread carefully when it comes to marketing their wares. Whether it's face creams enhanced by cellulose microfibrils, thistles for compostable packaging or waste milk proteins that are used to make dresses, the message from the study was to keep things simple and clear.

The term 'bio-based' doesn't help in that respect. But this shouldn't stop companies ramping up their efforts to communicate the environmental benefits and functionality of their products.

MEP Lambert van Nistelrooij, the Dutch Christian Democrat member of the Europe People's Party, said Europe's design ability isn't always matched by its selling techniques. He called on the sector to "be visible and be touchable."

Some already are. In a survey of 40 brands by bio-economy communications specialists, Sustainability Consult, published in November, 71 percent said they were already communicating their use of bio-based products externally.

Consumer demand for environmentally-friendly products was the key driver for their investment.

More and more member states have also adopted bio-economy strategies, which will help raise awareness at a national level. And the potential of the bio-based economy will no doubt continue to appeal to a commission that has made jobs, growth and investment a priority.

"I think 2018 is going to be a turning point for the bio-economy as it moves from niche to norm," said John Bell, bio-economy director at DG research and innovation.

At €2.2 trillion and 18.6 million jobs you could say the bio-economy has already arrived – but many people are still waiting for the bang.

CONTENT SOURCED FROM EUOBSERVER

[aion-rsa]

NBA Trading Cards: The Resurgence of Basketball Card Collecting

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Presented by:

April 2020 in the United States was pretty terrible for almost everyone and everything. We all know why. No need to rehash it.

Unless, that is, you sunk your time and money into collecting and selling basketball cards. If you did, you were one of the beneficiaries of the strongest surge for the hobby in its history.

“The month of April was the busiest month that … the basketball card industry has ever seen, and by double,” says Geoff Wilson, founder of Sports Card Investor, which offers advice on investing in the hobby and a data analytics platform. He noted that the previous bests date back to the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Plenty of millennials collected cards as kids back then, when the likes of Topps, Upper Deck, and Fleer were among the dominant brands in NBA licensed trading cards. But, if they were hoping to score cards that would fuel their retirement funds someday, most were left disappointed by the steady decline of the hobby. Brick-and-mortar shops dwindled, with sellers better off utilizing online sales on sites such as eBay. 

That’s what makes the rapid rise of collecting basketball cards—which always trailed behind baseball in popularity, and often after football—is so stunning to observers in the collecting world.

“It didn’t only come back. It is an absolute revolution right now,” said Adam Nowak, CEO of SlabStox, an online sports card trading platform. “I can’t even begin to tell you how many people have come to me in the last six months to a year saying, ‘Hey, I love basketball. I used to love cards as a kid. How do I get involved? How do I start trading again?’”

According to Wilson and Nowak, the COVID-19 pandemic directly contributed to the surge in basketball card popularity. Although already on an upward trajectory the past few years, alongside other sports cards, it spiked while people were stuck in isolation and quarantine. With no major American live sporting events on TV from mid-March through late July, Wilson says they sought out collecting “to keep sports fresh for them.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Also going on in April: The release of the first installments of the 10-part, Michael Jordan-fueled ESPN documentary The Last Dance. As far as sports intrigue went at the time, the series had a virtual monopoly of fans’ attention. According to eBay, Jordan trading card sales increased more than 370 percent following its release, and Jordan cards increased 307 percent on eBay from March to May 2020.

Nowak points to the power of social media as a contributing factor to the general rise that began before “coronavirus” was common vernacular.

“The whole social media and digital age of sports cards is at a whole other level, compared to the past,” Nowak said. “When you were a kid, [there was] no social media. It was all in-person. You’re at shows. You’re at card shops. … But the whole other side of it, the social media side and being able to network with people around the country about cards, even around the world, has taken it to another level.”

If it’s been a few decades since you bought a foil pack of NBA trading cards, you’ll have to be aware of some changes. The exclusive NBA license to print cards rests with Panini, which wasn’t even a player in the hobby during the ‘90s but has been the league’s lone partner dating back to the 2009-10 season. However, on top of the various Panini-branded sets, they do produce brands that should be familiar to veteran collectors, such as Donruss and NBA Hoops. 

And, unlike the overproduction that derailed sports card collecting decades ago, Nowak points out that there is “a supply shortage compared to the amount of people that have come into the industry, which is why we’re seeing the market explode so much.” Wilson added that there were more cards produced this year than in the past, but that he suspects the hobby can remain about as strong as this for the next few years, at least.

Nostalgia among lapsed collectors, of course, plays into the resurgence of the basketball card hobby. Wilson and Nowak agreed that some millennials, with more disposable income than they had as kids and teens, can finally afford to indulge in a hobby that has not always been cheap.

“Now, you can do it at a much more fun level,” Wilson said, “because now you can actually afford the better cards, the nicer cards, the cards of the guys you want to get.”

But it’s not as if these collectors are simply coming back to chase down Jordan cards or collect Kobe Bryant memorabilia, in the wake of his untimely death in January at age 41. They’re also chasing the next wave of stars, looking to capitalize on potential superstars as investments. Per eBay, trading card sales for rookies Zion Williamson and Ja Morant have increased, with Williamson’s spiking 115 percent and Morant’s by nearly 200 percent since the pandemic began. 

Wilson, who said basketball cards are now where he invests most of his money, had invested last summer in PSA 10-graded 2018 Panini Prizm Silver rookie cards of Luka Doncic, the reigning NBA Rookie of the Year at the time. He bought 10 of them at about $520 each. Since the start of the pandemic, those cards reached a peak of $7,500 in value — roughly 14 times what he paid. 

“Those are the types of gains that we’re seeing across the market right now,” he said.

Millennials are key to basketball cards’ swoon, but they’re not the only ones fueling growth. Plenty from Gen Z have found their way to a hobby that was not strong during their formative years. Wilson says these collectors may view the hobby as “a fun side hustle.”

“I think you’re starting to see the younger crowd that has this really good understanding for business, sports and marketing, and they’re taking all that knowledge and dumping it into cards,” Nowak agreed.  

Perhaps a surprising nonfactor in the basketball card renaissance is the NBA 2K video game series’ digital card collecting mode, MyTeam. Both Wilson and Nowak agreed that digital cards, be it in the games or though the attempts over the years by card producers to create a virtual trading card market, have not moved the needle with collectors.

However, Nowak qualified that MyTeam and basketball cards’ growth are simply not intertwined “right now.”

“I think [for] those people, [card collecting is] not even on their radar yet, gamers and esports and all that stuff,” Nowak said. “But I just saw this thing from Nadeshot [Matthew Haag], he’s a huge gamer, the other day that was talking about getting into the box-breaking world. The more gamers and esports people out there that are involved in sports games or FIFA Ultimate Team, they start opening packs of actual sports cards on set as they’re streaming, I think that’s a whole other market that can come someday.”

Basketball cards have surpassed baseball as the top dog in the sports hobby, according to Nowak, a development he says was aided by converts from the sneaker-flipping trade. He feels Panini played a role because of their embrace of “dropping products on their website with Dutch auctions, where people have to buy it at a certain point as it goes down in value.”

Wilson echoed that many former sneaker flippers have migrated to card collecting and selling. 

“They see sports cards as even a better mechanism for being able to make short-term profit by flipping cards,” Wilson said, “and basketball cards, in particular, is where a lot of the heat is.”

Once the NBA bubble in Orlando was created and play resumed on the 2019-20 season, savvy card flippers monitored which players were doing well as a barometer for who to invest in for the short-term, not dissimilar from the how a market investor might buy and sell stocks, according to Wilson. In this case, substitute Google shares for Doncic cards.

“In my opinion, it’s a superior version of fantasy sports and a superior version of sports gambling, kind of mixed into one,” Wilson says.

Head over to eBay to add to your NBA card collection!

The post NBA Trading Cards: The Resurgence of Basketball Card Collecting appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/36mYZvM

[sogivemecoffeeandtvhistory]

The Suicide Of Philippine Lambert

Prologue: “I Want Him To Pay 40 Million Swiss Francs And Go To Jail For The Rest Of His Life”

On August 28, 1997, Philippine Lambert excused herself from the dining room of her family’s apartment, located in one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in Geneva, and walked down the wood-paneled corridor to her bedroom, where, on an empty stomach, she took a small but sufficiently potent overdose of sleeping pills. Her lifeless body was discovered the next morning.

This was not Philippine’s first attempt at suicide, which occurred when she tried to throw herself out of a hotel window while on vacation in Syria in 1993. Nor was this her first attempt with sleeping pills, which occurred shortly thereafter. Having only just turned 20 that June, which she celebrated with family and friends on the island of Capri, Philippine had spent much of the past few years being treated in various facilities in Europe and the U.S. for her struggles with anorexia, depression, and self-harming, which had led to a total of three prior suicide attempts.

This is all to say that this time Philippine knew exactly what she was doing. Her mother, the Baroness Marion Lambert – a redoubtable art collector and wife of Baron Philippe Lambert, a scion of the Belgian Lambert banking dynasty and a cousin of the Rothschilds – discovered not just her only daughter’s body but a note, which included an accusation that made clear the extent of Philippine’s pain and suffering and left no doubt as to what exactly drove her to take her own life. Philippine wrote, in part:

I want Vincent Meyer to pay for having sexually abused me from the age 12 to 14. He kissed me everywhere – he put his sex in my mouth – he touched me everywhere. It happened in Capri, in Crete, in Geneva, in Aix-en-Provence, in Sicily … I want him to pay 40 million Swiss francs and go to jail for the rest of his life.

Vincent Meyer, the accused, had been an involved member of the Lamberts’ intimate social circle for several years. Vincent Meyer is also the scion of an equally prestigious banking family: His grandfather, Andre Meyer, was the legendary founder of Lazard, a mentor to Felix Rohatyn and confidante and adviser to Jacqueline Onassis. Vincent Meyer, whose inheritance meant he never had to worry about work or career, had cultivated a reputation as a patron for the arts over the years, most recognizably as the longtime president of the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra.

The Lamberts turned over Philippine’s note over to the Swiss police, though not immediately. A subsequent search of Philippine’s bedroom led investigators to her diary, which left a more detailed record of the abuse she had suffered from Meyer over several years.

On December 2, 1997, Vincent Meyer was arrested in Geneva on charges of rape, sexual misconduct towards a minor, and manslaughter. Keith Bragg, then-chairman of the Philharmonia, was with Meyer two days before his arrest and told The Mail on Sunday, “There was no suggestion of anything like this – he expected to be in London shortly and was his normal delightful self.” 

I. “That Man Came Into Our Lives With The Furniture”

The Lambert family moved to Switzerland in 1982 when Philippe was appointed chairman of the board of directors of the Swiss branch of the family bank, Banque Bruxelles Lambert. The couple purchased a chalet in Gstaad, where Philippe and Marion first met in the early 1970s around the time of his divorce from Patricia Harris (with whom he had a daughter), the ex-wife of the poet Anthony Hecht. 

The Lamberts quickly established themselves as fixtures of what Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello referred to as “the A-plus list” of Gstaad society. The Lamberts’ social credentials were as impeccable as they come: Banque Bruxelles Lambert had its origins in the banking house established by the Lambert family after Belgium won its independence in 1830. The Baron’s grandfather had advised King Leopold II of Belgium on his finances in the Congo and the family was ennobled in 1897; more recently, Philippe’s brother, Leon, who died in 1987, cofounded the exclusive Eagle Club in Gstaad and was a very prominent art collector. Banque Bruxelles Lambert was a main branch of the family’s holding company, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, which at one point was Belgium’s second-biggest banking and investment group. The Baroness originally began collecting art to furnish Banque Bruxelles Lambert's Swiss offices and ultimately became very widely respected in the art world in her own right for acquiring one of the most valuable and diverse private collections of 20th century art and photography.

And yet, there was an independent streak to the Lamberts, especially Marion, which is particularly conspicuous amidst the clannishness of high society. She once described the dynamic as such: “I don’t play by the rules. I don’t have ladies’ lunches. I have my friends and I stick to them.” (Those friends included Dame Theresa Sackler, of the Sackler family recently profiled in The New Yorker as “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain”.) She has been referred to frequently and euphemistically as “driven”, “forthright” and above all “difficult.” In one revealing episode she recounted in profiles for the Dutch newspaper Trouw and the Swiss newsmagazine FACTS, Marion purchased a series of social and political photographs that were to be displayed at the opening of Mario Botta’s redesign of Banque Bruxelles Lambert’s Swiss offices in November 1996. However, when the bank’s newly appointed CEO expressed concern that the messages about AIDS, violence and sexuality would be too controversial, and made suggestions for a more limited display, Marion instead pulled back the entire collection and purchased it in full with her own money. The provocative episode was covered extensively in the Belgian, Dutch, and French media. The portfolio ultimately became the foundation of a photo collection that came to be known as “Veronica’s Revenge”. Marion explained in an essay that appeared in a book of photographs from the collection that its name came from the story of Saint Veronica, “the woman who wiped Christ’s brow on the way to Cavalry with a cloth that miraculously retained the image of His face and illustrated His suffering. A photograph.” This is to say, art collecting was not merely an idle pastime for the Baroness but a commitment. “Anything that reflects the human condition is a fit subject for photography,” she once observed.

The Lamberts were first acquainted with Vincent Meyer by chance at a luncheon during a 1988 trip to Paris. At the time, Meyer, who was then 38, was at something of a turning point in his life. He was in the process of divorcing his first wife, Laurence, and was frequently apart from their two young sons and daughter, who were all based out of France.

Meyer was accepted so swiftly and uncritically, Marion later acknowledged, because his “family was known to my husband, and we included him in our circle as we knew his background. One is foolishly trusting of one’s own kind.” He quickly impressed himself upon the Lamberts, who in 1989 agreed to purchase his £2 million flat in Geneva, located right around the corner from the site of the Russian Orthodox Church – and he moved into another apartment no more than a stone’s throw away. “That man came into our lives with the furniture,” as Marion later put it.

Marion later lamented that Philippine was “very, very bright, she was kind, she was beautiful and she ended up not being able to live.” In 1989, Philippine turned 12 and began proper schooling for the first time; until then, she and her younger brother, Henri, had been homeschooled by Montessori tutors. 1989 was the year Philippine was first introduced to Vincent Meyer. That was also the year, Philippine claimed, that Meyer first raped her. In her diary, which she wrote in the third person, she claimed that he visited her one night in her bedroom in Gstaad and “undressed her and undressed himself. He held her and spread her legs.”

Marion would later recall that Meyer was “a lonely, almost childish man who filled his life with toys, be it women or planes or vintage cars, and he always seemed grateful to be in the middle of our family and social circle.” Meyer ingratiated himself with the family by drawing them in with his neediness to start. In fact, Marion felt his “shabbiness” and boyishness at first made him seem “sincere” and inoffensive.

Still living in Geneva part time during and after his divorce and eventually receiving dual citizenship in 1993, Meyer was able to spend so much time with Philippine alone and undetected during her most formative years because he was spending so much of his time with the Lambert family, period. He had begun by frequently calling on Marion for help on running a household, hiring help, and picking out antiques and artwork for his various homes, even flying her out on his private jet to attend auctions on occasion. He also frequently invited himself over lunch, and made a point of bringing along his mistress, with whom he had a child out of wedlock, or the children from his first marriage when they were in town. Marion later observed, “It was very clever of him to come over when he knew the kids would be here.”

In retrospect, Marion concluded, Meyer deployed an elaborate grooming campaign to mask his predatory motives. It was always understood that Meyer was close to Philippine but it was considered innocent and harmless, if persistent: He read poems to her on the phone, helped her with her homework and drove her to school, openly admired her looks as a teenager, and slow-danced with her at galas and private events. Philippine initially “loved the attention of a grown-up, of someone who treated her as special,” Marion said, recalling one instance early on in which Meyer inexplicably showed up for lunch wearing a tuxedo, which she later felt was part of Meyer’s pattern of trying to make himself appear sophisticated to draw in Philippine’s attention.

Meyer more deeply involved himself with the family by inviting himself along for weekends, vacations and holiday trips. In her suicide note, Philippine specifically accused Meyer of raping her in Capri, Crete, Geneva, Aix-en-Provence, and Sicily. These locations all have very sad and disturbing echoes. In particular, Capri, where Philippine celebrated her last birthday with her friends and family, was said to be her favorite place in the world and where she wanted to one day have her wedding. The family had a summer house in Crete, where Philippine spent a lot of time in recovery, while Meyer had a summer home in Aix-en-Provence. Photos of Meyer with his arms around Philippine and Philippine sitting on his bed in that house contrast with a diary entry that on one occasion there Meyer “undressed her and was holding her naked body when she woke up” and that when she realized what was happening “she pretended to be asleep.” Meyer flew the family to Sicily on his jet, where they all celebrated Philippine’s 14th birthday. So many of these memories, and of others from the years spent in Meyer’s company, were recorded and entered into the volumes of family photo albums.

Eventually the Lamberts dropped Meyer from their circle, not because of any suspicions of misconduct but because of his neediness (“He was always asking for something. It was a one-way street”) and so there was no particular animus. In any case, this had the effect of cutting off Meyer’s only point of access to Philippine. It was in the spring of 1993 that Philippine first attempted suicide, followed five weeks later by a second attempt, something that her mother said was “a loud cry for help.”

Up until that point, the Lamberts had grown increasingly concerned with the negative changes in Philippine’s behavior, but she could never fully explain her distress. She had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed and developed an eating disorder. Her childhood asthma became more severe. Her grades fell. She was increasingly disconsolate, though she confided in (at least) two of her school friends at the time, including one who was sleeping over the night an assault occurred and another who knew that Philippine was no longer a virgin because of Meyer. It was not quite clear to her family, however, that her problems were far more involved than just the difficulties of being a teenager.

In contrast, Philippine had once been “so pure,” as one childhood friend later told The Telegraph. Nan Goldin, the photographer and longtime friend of the Lamberts, referred to her as “a princess in the true sense of the word.” (Goldin dedicated the 1999 issue of the biannual international contemporary art magazine Parkett in Philippine’s memory.)

The suicide attempt in Syria in the spring of 1993 was something of a turning point in Philippine’s short and tragic life. She spent much of the next three years in and out of treatment as she more consciously struggled with depression, self-loathing, and self-harming, including cutting her arms. She was treated in New York, Connecticut, Florida, France and Switzerland. While being treated at the psychiatric hospital Silver Hill in Connecticut, a doctor told Marion she thought Philippine had been abused by “somebody close to the family” and later discovered that she had wrote detailed descriptions of the encounters. By process of elimination, Marion quickly zeroed in on Meyer and began to read the literature on anorexia, which is often linked to sexual abuse because it is considered “a way of regaining control over the body that has been appropriated by the predator.” Marion later recalled one instance in which Meyer ran into her on the street and invited her to lunch: “He asked me what anorexia was all about, and I told him it was very often linked to sexual abuse. He changed color and went out of the restaurant in three minutes. I did not hear from him for years.”

The last two years of Philippine’s life were something of a turnaround. There was a third suicide attempt in New York, but Philippine was generally remembered as being happy in Geneva, where she worked at the jewelry department at Christie’s, and in New York, where she studied art at New York University and spent hours of quality time with her family, and her mother in particular. It was during this time that Philippine finally revealed to her mother that she had been raped. Friends and family would recall that during her three-day 20th birthday celebration in Capri in June 1997, Philippine gave a speech thanking her parents for helping her through the difficulties of the last few years and expressed her relief at having put the past behind her.

As it turns out, that was not quite true. On August 21, 1997, Philippine met with Marc Bonnant, a longtime attorney for the family, to tell her story. This was a remarkably significant step. Marc Bonnant is one of Switzerland’s most influential and high-profile attorneys. His other clients over the years have included Lily Safra, in the estate and investigative matters that followed the very unusual death of her multibillionaire banker husband Edmond J. Safra at their guarded penthouse in Monaco, and Elena Rybolovleva, who received a record-breaking (but ultimately scaled back) £2.6 billion settlement in her divorce from Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. Bonnant had arranged to have a second meeting with Philippine on August 29.

On August 26, Philippine finally confided in her mother the full extent of the abuse. She also revealed she was considering legal action. Marion recalled, “She was extraordinarily calm and self-possessed. She said, ‘I want to do this to protect other girls from what happened to me.’ I said I’d do all I could to help her but I warned her that going public would be so hard on her.”

Philippine Lambert committed suicide two days later. In the end, Marion was of the belief that it ultimately “cost her so much to relive the experience” and “she could not bear to go on.”

II. “That’s What You Get When You Put Money And Provinciality Together”

The suicide of the daughter of the Baron and Baroness Lambert of Geneva and the family’s devastation was the type of sensational but discrete high-society tragedy that normally would have been discussed only behind closed doors among the jet-set in Geneva, Paris, London, and New York. But the arrest of Vincent Meyer for what was originally reported as a “sexual problem involving a person under 18 years” brought the scandal into an unusually public view.

At the time of the arrest in December 1997, Vincent Meyer’s station in life had improved considerably compared to where he was when he first met the Lamberts nearly a decade prior. He had remarried and his new wife, Elizabeth Stuart, 30, was pregnant with their first child. Elizabeth, the niece of the Earl of Moray, was an elegant and popular art dealer.

Meyer’s deep-seated and far-reaching generosity in funding for the arts had a particularly strong impact in British high society. Meyer was the president and principal donor of the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra, whose patrons have included Prince Charles, and was held in high esteem for having first contributed in 1985 when the group faced the crisis of sudden underfunding from the Arts Council. Meyer’s philanthropy also included $1 million to finance a Sony Classical recording of the discography of Hungarian exile Gyrgy Ligeti, and an accompanying Philharmonia world tour; £100,000+ in financing for the East Sussex opera house Glyndebourne when it faced funding cuts in the mid-1980s; and a commissioning of Birtwistle’s piano concerto, Antiphonies. A 1996 Telegraph article described Meyer as “shy, serious and gently charming”.

The scope of Meyer’s largesse is worth acknowledging because it meant that when he was arrested, the initial developments were covered extensively in the British press, led by The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and he had a number of admirers ready to speak on his behalf.

The headline of the Daily Mail’s first report read, “Orchestra ‘angel’ and tragic life of a girl aged 12” – and it was a sign of things to come. Until the Lamberts decided to break their silence, details about Philippine and the Lamberts were not included in public reports about the case. Only several details about the victim were reported in the first months: The victim and her family “travelled frequently in Meyer’s company” during “the period in question” and the parents contacted the police after Meyer was named in the suicide note, which is why police were bringing a manslaughter charge, which the family notably did not support. It was also reported that the family was being represented by Marc Bonnant, described in the Daily Mail as a “high-profile society lawyer”, a tipoff to the casual reader this was no ordinary case.

In contrast, Meyer’s friends and family publicly closed ranks and insisted on his innocence with utmost message discipline. Elizabeth never wavered from a one-sentence statement she gave shortly after his arrest: “There is no question in my mind that everything will be absolutely fine.” Meyer’s ex-wife, Laurence, and even his mistress, Magali Miens, with whom he had a child, also proclaimed their support in an unlikely tableau of unity.

While he was held in Geneva’s Champs Dollon Prison, Meyer’s friends and supporters served as character witnesses in the court of public opinion, emphasizing his reputation as a courteous patron of the arts. It took some time for the facts of the case to present themselves – when The Telegraph’s first report on the case was filed, it was not yet clear to the press how old the unidentified victim even was – but stories of Meyer’s munificence and modesty were abundant.

David Whelton, the managing director of the Philharmonia, told the Daily Mail, “Vincent Meyer has been connected with the Philharmonia Orchestra for ten years and we support him one hundred per cent. It is utterly inconceivable that these allegations are true. Vincent Meyer has made an immense contribution to music and what has happened is quite astonishing.” The English composer Frederick Stocken explained, “Since Mozart, young composers and orchestras have relied on rich philanthropists to help them survive. What has happened is extremely sad.”

In a four-hour closed hearing held shortly before Christmas, presided over by the magistrate Claude-François Wenger, Meyer was remanded in custody for three months due to the seriousness of the charges of “acts of a sexual order, rape and manslaughter.” At the end of the three-month period, in March, Meyer was released on SFr 6 million (£2.5 million) in bail for the duration of the pretrial inquiry – a record in Switzerland, if not the 40 million that was part of Philippine Lambert’s dying wish. Wenger indicated the inquiry could take some time to complete because of the nature of the charges.

What came to pass revealed some shocking inequities about the priorities of high society and Swiss law – only some of which would be meaningfully improved with time.

The scandal of the charges against Meyer caused a significant backlash in European society, which was not merely supportive of Meyer but deeply hostile to Marion Lambert and unsympathetic to her point of view. Abetted by a particularly vicious whisper campaign, she was effectively turned into “a social pariah” for so strongly advocating Meyer’s prosecution. The gossip was so pervasive that the handful of society and culture writers who have written about this case have acknowledged it in print, along with the fact that many simply cut Marion off.

The first public hint of the rift this case created was given by Taki Theodoracopulos in his January 11, 1998 column for The Sunday Times. Taki has been one of Europe’s premier society columnists for decades, most notably as the author of The Spectator’s weekly “High Life” column since 1977. He is also a longtime family friend of the Lamberts and a fixture of Gstaad society. (He also has a history of racist statements and none other than alt-right white nationalist Richard Spencer was once managing editor of his online magazine, Taki’s Magazine, but Taki’s prominent role in society in spite of all this is neither here nor there at the moment.)

In an item in his column, Taki wrote, “What outrages me is the reaction of many people with whom I have discussed the case. They call Meyer a music angel and a music lover, a quiet man with a sense of humour, an excellent father. What does this have to do with the alleged sexual abuse of a child for three years? To love music and keep a low profile does not mean one cannot also be a paedophile.” Keith Bragg, the chairman of the Philharmonia who was with Meyer two days before his arrest, said it was “quite unbelievable” and “absolutely shocking” that Meyer had been “kept in custody because of such a letter.” A member of the Philharmonia told New York Post’s Page Six that Meyer is “cultured, private and gentle. I don’t believe he could contemplate such deeds.” Think back to what David Whelton of the Philharmonia told the Daily Mail after Meyer was arrested: “It is utterly inconceivable that these allegations are true. Vincent Meyer has made an immense contribution to music and what has happened is quite astonishing.” What does the first sentence have to do with the second? The fact is it’s quite possible this is only one of Meyer’s different faces. The absurdity of this line of defense would not be fully realized until Meyer was released on bail, when the Lamberts broke their silence.

Philippe Lambert spoke first, showing more than a hint of weary resignation after Meyer’s release in an interview with The Mail on Sunday: “It is unacceptable that he is on bail but there is nothing we can do about it it's just Swiss law. He has been released on the highest-ever bail surety in Switzerland.” The Baron added, “We find it very difficult to talk about and had hoped that Vincent Meyer would remain in jail until a trial and not be walking around free. Although everyone knows about the case and its connections with Philippine’s death, it has never been publicly mentioned out of respect for the family.”

(Incidentally, the scandal had unfolded at a turning point for the Lambert dynasty. One month before Meyer’s arrest, the Dutch financial services conglomerate ING Groep, N.V., launched its takeover bid for Banque Bruxelles Lambert, which at the time was Belgium’s third largest bank. The takeover, valued at $4.6 billion, was Europe’s largest cross-border banking merger at the time it closed in early 1998, though Philippe had long ago sold his stake.)

The real turning point, however, came when Marion Lambert broke her silence – against the advice of her friends, family and attorney Marc Bonnant – in an interview with W Magazine Paris bureau chief Daniel Peres, prefaced with an eight-page written statement she planned to give in lieu of an interview, for an exclusive that appeared in the June 1998 issue, teased on the cover as “High Society’s Sad Scandal” (and with the headline “Death of a Princess”). This was soon followed by a lengthy interview with The Mail on Sunday’s Sharon Churcher. Per Bonnant’s instruction, Marion never mentioned Meyer by name and was vague about many of the details regarding his relationship with the family, but otherwise did not hold back.

Peres described the shockingly ambivalent “prevailing sentiment” of “the gilded salons of Europe’s highest social strata” as being that “since nothing will bring Philippine Lambert back, there’s no point in causing further grief” by going after Meyer and in such an indiscrete and public manner. Taki called it “Geneva society at its most vicious.” Daniella Luxembourg, a former Sotheby’s vice president and Lambert family friend, observed “that’s what you get when you put money and provinciality together.”

Marion Lambert was unflinching in the social cost the case had already exacted. In her written statement, she revealed that no less than Lilliane de Rothschild, who was, until her death in 2003, the matriarch of the Rothschild family and custodian of its name, held the opinion that “we should put all of this to rest and forget about it. She thus joins the 80 percent of people close to us, and we are used to it by now."

Peres also offered some insight into the whisper campaign against Marion Lambert that was being pushed by Meyer’s allies, who implied Lambert’s diary was nothing more than the writings of a very troubled young girl: “One speculated scenario has it that Marion was herself having an affair with Meyer. Another portrays her as a socially ambitious operator who forced her daughter into a relationship with him in the hopes that it would bring financial reward. The third merely depicts the Lamberts as idle jet-setters whose neglect of Philippine led to her instability.” (Another variation later reported in The Telegraph had it that Marion was “incredibly possessive and controlling and complicated” and that she was “unnaturally close” with Philippine.)

Citing her promise to Philippine to “help her any way I could to punish the man that had, in her own words: ‘polluted her life’”, Marion explained that she decided to break her silence because “I do not believe in vengeance, but I do believe in justice and protecting others. It therefore should be known to the public, even if it means exposing our personal life and hers, that nobody’s life can be the excuse for the next one.” At another point, she said of Meyer’s tactics, “They’re all perfect citizens, but it’s their alibi. It’s the cover under which they operate.”

Marion made an interesting observation about the social and class dimensions of the case when she told Peres, “It’s like ‘Dallas.’ It’s all because we’re part of a certain milieu,” she said. “People don’t want to face issues that are uncomfortable. And the fact that it happened within their own surroundings – it’s frightening to them.” (The fact that most of the abuse was alleged to have occurred in Geneva and Gstaad, two respectable and safe cities, must have been particularly jarring.)

Even more interestingly, she said, in response to the criticism from the friends she said have told her they do not understand why she supports “destroying somebody’s life”: “Well, he destroyed my daughter’s life. I don’t think people would question it if this was a poor Moroccan street sweeper. But it’s a clan. And people protect their own.”

The implication of Marion’s point is worth considering – as is its converse. Throughout the investigation, Meyer was insulated by his family’s lockstep support and the willingness of his supporters to serve as character witnesses to the media and friends who were ready to peddle gossip and theories about the Lambert family. (Alec Reymond, one of Meyer’s attorneys, responded on the record for W Magazine with the statement: “Unlike Mrs. Lambert, we do not wish to try the case in the press. The case is in the hands of the Geneva justice system. On behalf of Mr. Meyer and his attorneys, we have no comment.”)

At the same time, does anyone think the case would have reached even this point if the Lamberts weren’t so influential? For a variety of reasons, there are enough challenges in bringing sexual abuse charges in case where the victims are still alive. In this case, the inquiry was going so far as to argue that by subjecting Philippine to sexual abuse in the locations identified in her suicide note, he provoked the depression and disorders that led to her suicide. (Again, this was not a charge the family supported.) To borrow Marion’s example, would the Swiss courts have spent the time and resources to investigate the case if the victim was the daughter of “a poor Moroccan street sweeper” and the accused a well-connected member of high society? Or if the victim was the daughter of “a poor Moroccan street sweeper” and the accused was of the same socioeconomic class? No, this is a case that could only have unfolded this way among the very wealthy. In fact, Richard Johnson later reported in New York Post’s Page Six, Swiss investigators interviewed potential witnesses in New York, Connecticut, and Florida – including Philippine’s therapists – in attempts to verify and corroborate the specific allegations from her diary.

In her interview with Peres, Marion bluntly debunked many of the arguments proffered in Meyer’s defense, most of which do not quite make sense on the face of it. On the speculation that she may have had an affair with Meyer, she says: “First of all, have you seen this man? Look, I’ve been married for 25 years with the same husband. If I was a person who had affairs, people would know.” As to the suggestion that Marion had goaded her daughter into a relationship: “Who on earth would want her 13-year-old daughter to marry a 40-year-old, not particularly handsome womanizer? What was so good about this man? Is it that he was rich? Well, we’re not poor.”

Marion also had a cutting retort to the defenses of Meyer’s character, particularly the repeated mentions of his longstanding patronage of the Philharmonia Orchestra: “This is a person who does nothing. I mean, giving money left and right does not make a good person. Liking music does not make someone trustworthy. Hitler liked music.”

In her interview with The Mail on Sunday, Marion pointed out, in response to the persistent message that she was pursuing some sort of vendetta against Meyer, that the case was instigated by Swiss authorities, who arrested him only after Philippine’s diary was recovered and investigated. In this interview, Marion hinted at her designs for a greater retribution, come what may. On one level, she acknowledged, “What revenge would be big enough?” But, she said, she would be “very civilised and act within the limits of the justice system.” She revealed she was preparing a dossier on the facts about the symptoms and patterns of child abuse culled from expert research for reference in future cases.

III. “What The Lambert Family Have Experienced In Switzerland Is Not Justice”

As it happened, Marion Lambert was left with no choice but to pursue retribution within the bounds of civility, but ultimately not through the standard process. Despite speculation of an imminent trial throughout much of 1998, the indictment was extended in September 1999 to investigate further acts committed in 1992 and 1993, and Swiss prosecutors ultimately announced on December 6, 2000 that Meyer would not stand trial for the charges. The Lamberts appealed to the Court of Appeals, which upheld the decision a few days before Christmas – just about three years after the hearing which remanded Meyer to prison while the charges were investigated. The Lamberts still had the option of appealing to the supreme court of Switzerland and Marion even suggested in comments that she could “prosecute elsewhere.”

The prosecutors ultimately ruled that the statute of limitations had expired on the charges of harm to the sexual development of a minor. More chillingly, the prosecutors also held that not only was the count of rape not sufficiently proven but the direct evidence did not show Philippine had been “incapable to resist” the assaults. The manslaughter charge was ultimately not pursued.

The nuance of the legal situation is worth parsing. As Marc Bonnant pointed out at the time, “The public prosecutor said the charges against Meyer were not inconsiderable. But he said there was insufficient evidence that Philippine was physically forced into a sexual relationship.” (Bonnant also echoed Marion’s comments, saying there are “other countries which have different systems of justice.”)

In his March 10, 2001 “High Life” column in The Spectator, Taki wrote that the judicial decision “mocks justice” and “renders null and void the cri de coeur of a young woman from beyond the grave” and concluded:

Meyer may be innocent, but when he is accused in a dying girl’s last words and has admitted having a physical and sensual (though not sexual) relationship with Philippine when she was 14 years old, he must at least be tried. What the Lambert family have experienced in Switzerland is not justice.

Vincent Meyer may have walked away a free man but he was not cleared of the charges, and the decision not to go to trial should not obscure the specific factors that led to that decision.

“What was most important, in my opinion,” Taki wrote, “was that the facts reached the statute of limitations – everything that took place before September 1992 was not permitted in court. The horror of it is that had Philippine died two days earlier, things may have been a lot different.” This was a reference to the fact that, on September 1, 1997, the Swiss penal code was amended to increase the statute of limitations in cases of child abuse from 5 to 10 years, thereby covering the scope of Meyer’s abuse.

A Swiss federal court document, filed April 20, 2001, explains why the decision was upheld on appeal and points primarily to the statute of limitations issue as the crux of the matter, rather than specific issues with the quality of evidence. The investigation was not predicated only on Philippine’s diary but witnesses and expert testimony. However, the court found that the “direct evidence related to facts that had occurred by the summer of 1991 at the latest, and they did not reflect the existence of a threat or constraint”. The Lamberts had filed for an annulment of the ruling and a new referral for indictments but Meyer argued the action was inadmissible, and was backed by the attorney general of Geneva, who argued that the prosecution could not bring charges under the in dubio pro reo principle that doubt favors the accused.

The Lamberts had filed for appeal under the Federal Law on Assistance to Crime Victims, which allows the victims of crime the right to appeal against a classification of a suit (or non-suit) and to assert civil claims against the offender. The Lamberts qualified as victims because they were parties to the proceedings that led to the contested decision, but it was noted that in the “absence of formal findings at the civil level, the appellants must at least indicate what sort of claims they intend to raise with regard to the offender”, especially because they admitted “the causality between the alleged acts and the suicide of their daughter could not be established”.

In their appeal, the Lamberts argued that because there was “sufficient evidence” that the sexual abuse continued until 1993, the statute of limitations should be increased to ten years in accordance with the law enacted on September 1, 1997.

Two separate witnesses testified that contact continued into 1993, with one witnessing Philippine in Meyer’s car in February and overhearing a sensitive phone conversation around the same time. But the appeals court decision argued that the evidence that the abuse continued after September 1, 1992 was not substantial enough and that “in the absence of specific evidence [of sexual abuse after September 1, 1992], doubt should inevitably lead to the release of the Respondent”.

The tribunal not only rejected the appeal but charged the Lamberts a judicial fee of SFr 2000, to be paid to Meyer.

Another matter was the insistence on witnesses to the abuse, as though pedophilia is not conducted in a more discrete and insidious manner than, say, an extramarital affair. As Taki observed in his January 1998 column, “I do not know of any paedophiles who perform their acts in public.” Marion Lambert told Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne, “They say there were no witnesses to the act, as if children are seduced in public.” Marion repeatedly and pointedly criticized the inadequacies in Swiss law on pedophilia and child sexual abuse – although the improprieties of Meyer’s relationship with Philippine did not go unnoticed. Meyer’s own housekeeper testified that she once witnessed Meyer “lying on top of” Philippine while she was sunbathing, a situation she said she found “unacceptable and terribly degrading.” A friend of Philippine’s testified that she spotted the two “French-kissing” in his car. Meyer said little more than that he did not remember the alleged incidents, although he said it was possible he kissed her on the mouth “inadvertently”.

Vincent Meyer’s defense was particularly unimpressive and it leaves very little ambiguity as to the true nature of this “relationship.” Meyer denied sexual abuse or coercion but conceded in his testimony that his “friendship” with Philippine “was not the relationship of an adult with a child.” Meyer and his attorneys referred to the relationship as “beautiful and affectionate”, “physical and sensual” and a “freely consented loving relationship.” He acknowledged that the relationship was also “sensual” for him and “very physical”. Meyer’s defense also argued that Philippine was psychologically unstable and that her memories had been influenced by her years of treatment.

Nevertheless, Marion said she was informed in later years that Meyer claimed he was declared innocent – and that the judge even apologized – when in fact, the statute of limitations was the primary issue in the case’s legal resolution. He was never cleared. Moreover, as it has been repeatedly pointed out, Meyer never took the steps to apply to obtain a full dismissal from the courts. His lawyer, Alec Remond, put it simply in a comment for a November 2001 Daily Mail report: “As far as he is concerned, it is over.”

IV. “You Will Never Have A Moment Of Respite. I Will Haunt You To Your Dying Day.”

It is something of a misnomer to describe Marion Lambert’s support for the prosecution of Vincent Meyer as a “vendetta.” The Lamberts went to the authorities with the information they had regarding the suicide of their daughter and was entirely outside of their control once the Swiss police began their investigation.

What happened after the legal battle ended could perhaps more accurately be described as a “vendetta,” though certainly a defensible one. Marion Lambert had no intention of letting the matter rest, though it is telling that the Lamberts never pursued charges against Meyer in any other jurisdiction.

One of Marion’s primary avenues of retaliation in the years that followed the end of the legal case against Meyer was a series of high-profile, emotional and intimate interviews, including The Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, the Belgian newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen, the German magazine Bunte, and Swiss newsmagazine FACTS (among others), in an attempt to keep awareness of the matter alive as Meyer sought to reintegrate into British high society, where he quickly became involved in patronage of churches and the arts, including the Serpentine Galleries and, of course, the Philharmonia.

Marion continued to study child abuse and pedophilia, consulting with the world’s leading experts on the consequences and effects. Marion intended to write a book and make a documentary, mentioning such projects in several different interviews over the years, but never did, reportedly because of the legal sensitivities. Meyer had indicated that he would take the necessary legal steps and Switzerland has relatively strict defamation laws. For example, the profile in FACTS, which was published in the June 20, 2002 issue, refers to Meyer only as “X”.

Alas, “Who else could have stood up against Meyer?” Marion asked in an interview with Ross Benson, the late Daily Mail columnist. “It takes character, determination – and money. You have to be rich.”

The fact is Marion Lambert had nothing to lose. She may have been difficult, inconvenient, scorned but she had the means to explore her opportunities to go after Meyer. She had been considered “difficult” long before this tragedy and she had no reason to mask her outrage now towards the people who continued to socialize with and indulge Meyer, including their mutual friends and those who accepted his philanthropy and patronage. She continued to be a pariah. It was of little relevance, she told FACTS, because she now knew that she was born and married into a social class whose members are concerned with little more than their immediate self-interest and comfort, regardless of the self-deception that necessitates.

The Lamberts had to have been constantly reminded of Lambert. After his release, he moved into a house next to the Russian Orthodox in Geneva that was only minutes from the Lamberts’ apartment, the one they had purchased from him all those years ago. On rare occasions, Lambert even crossed paths with Meyer, though he was also in the process of moving to England, where he had purchased a house, and eventually took measures to avoid her. When Marion learned Meyer had been using a disguise, she told him, “You will never have a moment of respite. I will haunt you to your dying day.” On another occasion in August 2004, Baron Philippe Lambert ran into Meyer on the street and attacked him. The Baron, at that point, was 75 and in such poor health that he had trouble walking. Meyer’s attorneys vowed to take legal action if anything like that happened again, though not in that instance.

On August 28, 2001, the fourth anniversary of Philippine’s suicide, the city of Geneva was blanketed with hundreds of posters featuring her picture in commemoration. The posters mentioned Philippine’s accusations against Meyer and identified him by name.

In the October 27, 2001 issue of The Daily Telegraph Magazine, Marion participated in a very thorough account by Mick Brown of what happened over the previous four years, in what is considered to be the most provocative of the accounts written about the case. The feature included various photos of Philippine and Meyer from the family’s photo albums. Meyer declined to comment for the article but a friend speaking on his behalf referred to him as “the innocent victim” of Marion’s “manic crusade to pursue him in any court, anywhere, to do anything to hurt him.” Meyer did not pursue any legal action in response to the article. Marion suspected it was because he wanted to avoid confronting specific details in a court of law in the U.K.

Incidentally, Meyer made waves upon his move to the exclusive Kensington neighborhood in West London. Not because of the manslaughter and rape charges, but because his plans to develop a £6.5 million house in Victoria Road involved applying for a permit to cut down a 70-year-old chestnut tree in the garden, which became a subject of significant controversy among the city council and Meyer’s neighbors. At the time those neighbors included Dustin Hoffman and Lord Snowdon, and a preservation order was quickly commissioned for the tree. The years of noise from construction also did little to endear him, especially because, reportedly, there was not “a whisper of apology for the inconvenience”. The neighborhood controversy was covered by The Evening Standard, which noted that Meyer was “recently at the centre of a more serious controversy”, and the Daily Mail, which made the pointed observation that “no amount of patronage can conceal stories of an episode in his past involving allegation of the most sordid crime imaginable.”

In spite of all this, Sarah Oliver wrote in a June 2005 report for The Mail on Sunday, Meyer had been “feted by the city’s artistic elite and welcomed at its finest salons”. Marion said, “I do not hate the people in London who have accepted him but I believe they are fools and moral cowards.” The article recounted one episode in which the Lamberts arranged to have 1,500 homes in Meyer’s neighborhood blanketed with pamphlets outlining the accusations against him in protest of his sponsorship of a church music recital. No less than the church warden chastised the Lambert family “in the street”, telling them that the church was a place for forgiveness, to which Marion reportedly shot back, “In order for there to be forgiveness, there has first to be an admission of guilt.”

It’s far too dismissive to say that it was only a personal animus that motivated Marion. It was her obligation, she felt, to change the way the system works in cases of pedophilia and sexual abuse. What this tragedy taught her, she said, is that “the impulse to molest a child is an illness, like cancer, and like all sexual behaviour cannot be defined by upbringing or intelligence.” She once felt that “people like us” could never be capable of sexual abuse, but came to realize that the perpetrators are “psychopaths living outside of social conventions, and they are also consummate liars” to “the victims, the parents, the courts and even themselves.”

While her plans for a book or document that highlighted Philippine’s tale never came to pass, Marion poured herself into both research and philanthropy, including “full support” for the U.K. charity National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and its mid-2000s initiative to finance 11 special investigation centers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for child sexual abuse cases and support, as well as Human Rights Watch, for which she helped found its committee in Zurich. She spoke poignantly and emotionally of the way child abuse “undermines the foundations of a child” and exploits “all of our fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world.” Her apartment was said to be filled with files of court reports, expert opinions and evidence, academic papers, and textbooks all pertaining to the subjects of abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder raised during the case.

In the end, there has been demonstrable improvement in Swiss law that perhaps could prevent cases like this in the future. Effective January 1, 2013, the statute of limitations was removed entirely for prosecuting and sentencing for sexual or pornographic acts involving children 12 and under.

“A pensioner who was struck by a bus in Oxford Street has died in hospital” was the unlikely Evening Standard headline that first reported the circumstances that led to the death of Baroness Marion Lambert on May 28, 2016, four days after she sustained critical head injuries after a collision with a bus near the Bond Street Underground station.

Once her death was formally announced, obituaries remembered the Baroness primarily as a renowned art collector, with the tragedy of Philippine’s suicide mentioned tactfully and secondarily, although some made the effort to avoid mentioning Vincent Meyer by name altogether. The Times was an exception and it even mentioned Meyer’s admission in court that it “was not the relationship of an adult with a child” while The Sun’s headline blared “HIGH SOCIETY SEX SCANDAL: Tragedy of baroness Marion Lambert, obsessed with punishing ‘pervert’ she blamed for her daughter’s suicide”.

Christie’s Chairman Francis Outred said in a statement that Marion’s “vision as a collector across multiple categories was unparalleled and the photography collection that she built helped to create the photography market we know today.” He described her as “intense, visionary, powerful, and articulate”, “never one to indulge in airs and graces” and “formidable and kind in equal measure.” Mick Brown wrote in The Telegraph she was “quite simply, one of the most extraordinary, and most admirable, women I have ever met” and recalled the Marion once described herself as “a formidable adversary.” In his tribute to Marion in his column for The Spectator, Taki recalled an episode in which he threatened “some EU biggies” staying at the Lamberts’ ski chalet in Gstaad with “physical violence” when “the Lamberts announced that I could do no wrong.” He went on to remember Marion as “a restless soul, curious, involved, oversensitive to perceived anti-Semitism, very brave in the physical sense, and, of course, outspoken.”

Marion’s priorities had changed considerably in later years. A turning point of sorts came with a now-legendary auction held at Phillips on November 8-9, 2004, in which Marion auctioned off her entire personal collection of about 300 photographs, including the original pieces she intended to hang in Banque Bruxelles Lambert’s Geneva branch back in the 1980s. In an essay published as a preface to the catalog, she pointedly wrote, “My daughter’s untimely death, as a result of the devious and criminal acts of a perverse individual (unpunished because of the statute of limitations, but not acquitted) left this collection without a future.” (Marion also took a curious swipe at her husband’s late brother, Leon, in referring to him as “my much-regretted brother-in-law.”) Marion, who did not attend the auction, told The New York Times her son had no interest in art. The lot exceeded even the highest estimates and sold for a total of $9.2 million. Christie’s later held an auction of 306 items from the collection in 2015, and Lambert participated in a BBC documentary on the sale, which ultimately sold for nearly £15 million.

Baron Philippe Lambert died in 2011 and the Baroness spent her last few years in her homes in Geneva and Umbria and continued to scale down her personal art collection, though she remained physically active until the end. In 2012, Marion even helped distribute leaflets regarding the accusations against Meyer in protest of a Philharmonia concert. The Lamberts’ marriage was steadfast and unwavering until the end; Marion once said while Philippe never immersed himself in the literature on child sexual abuse the way she did but “he is a very wise man, because he understood also that it kept me alive – two things, the work and my son.” She was reportedly visiting Henri, the founder of a water-focused investment fund, who lived in central London at the time of her death.

On the day of her death, The Sun reported, Marion had been scheduled to meet with auctioneer Simon de Pury, a close friend who oversaw the 2004 sale at Phillips and the 2015 sale at Christie’s, to discuss how the art world could help the Syrian refugee crisis. 

Epilogue: Cries From An Early Grave

The haunting question of what exactly brought Philippine Lambert to the point where she lost the will to live by the end of August 1997 brings to mind what she is said to have told her mother two days before the overdose, when she explained why she was so insistent on pursuing legal action against Meyer despite the risks: “I want to do this to protect other girls from what happened to me.” Philippine had made so many strides in the last years of life, as she acknowledged in the speech she gave at her birthday celebration in Capri. What happened within those last months that left her with such seeming certitude about litigating the darkest chapter of her life, until the magnitude of what that would mean became too much to bear? Daniel Peres reported in W Magazine that he was first tipped off to Philippine’s meeting with Marc Bonnant about going forward with the charges by “a source close to the family”, which Bonnant then confirmed and Marion affirmed in later interviews over the years. How many people knew about Philippine’s plans in those final weeks? One detail that has never been established is the last time Meyer had contact with Philippine before her death – or, for that matter, the extent of their contact after the Lamberts cut him out of their lives in the early 1990s.

There is the deeply unsettling and unavoidable question of whether Philippine is Meyer’s only victim. Taki very strongly insinuated this is not the case in the pages of The Spectator. In a 2002 “High Life” column that “tread very lightly because of libel,” Taki revealed that “one of my daughter’s closest friends had an encounter with Meyer while in Gstaad a long time ago, and although nothing happened, her mother warned me not to let my daughter near this individual. (Her daughter was at the time very under age.)” In a 2004 column, he disclosed, “Two other mothers had complained to me after my original article about Meyer’s creepy habits of paying attention to their below-age-of-consent daughters. Fear of publicity prevented the women from coming forward, and I don’t blame them.”

Marion Lambert considered herself “morally bound” to honor her daughter’s dying wish of pursuing justice against the man she said “polluted her life.” The legal system failed them, though at least some of the specific failings in the law have since improved. Society failed them, by not only siding with Meyer but challenging Marion’s cause with mean-spirited gossip and innuendo. “There really is no more vicious crime than child abuse,” Marion said. “For the secrecy in which it takes place, for the permanent damage it does and for the disbelief it engenders.” In another interview she said to those who could not believe Meyer was capable of such crimes, “Do they not know that disbelief serves the cause of the child molester?”

Marion sought to warn everyone she could. “People say, ‘How could this man who doted on his own children be a child molester?’ Child molesters are all perfect citizens. That’s their alibi. They cultivate whole families. That’s how they gain your confidence. These are predators at every level of society who very carefully evaluate the situation.” Vincent Meyer, who ultimately had two daughters with his second wife Elizabeth Stuart, continues to be a prominent donor for arts and charity through the Meyer Foundation. Meyer is still a patron of the Philharmonia but no longer a presiding officer, having resigned from the boards of the Philharmonia Trust in 2013 and the Philharmonia in 2015.

Chillingly, the unlikeliness of Vincent Meyer as a predator is something Philippine Lambert addressed in her diary, writing: “People expect the person to look the part. He looked like anyone else.”

[lastbaff]

Cost of Flight from Nigeria to Canada 2019

When it comes to travelling by air, things can be a little daunting. From preparing a rather long list of travel documents to showing up to check-in your luggage, air travel isn't really the simplest way to travel. Canada is unarguably a choice tourist and investment destination. If you are planning a family vacation, business trip or social event in Canada, I've put together prices of flight tickets from Nigeria to Canada and some other tips you might find handy.   Canada Visa Requirements Whether it's your first time travelling to Canada or not, you'll definitely need to present a valid visa before being allowed to enter the country. To acquire a Canadian visa, you'll need to provide the following documents: A completed Visitor Visa and family information forms A Nigerian passport valid for at least six months beyond your planned date of return with at least two blank pages for visa stamps Two passport-sized photographs Proof of application processing and biometric fee Proof of sufficient funds for the entire duration of your visit ( e.g three months bank statements). If someone else or any institution will be sponsoring your trip, you will need a letter from the person or institution and any relevant additional documents (e.g a copy of your sponsor's passport and a bank statement proving they have sufficient funds) Proof of ties to Nigeria Copy of your itinerary (plus return ticket) Proof of good health Previous passports showing travel history if any A self-addressed return courier envelope Persons under the age of 18 travelling alone will need a letter of authorisation signed by both parents or legal guardians. Those travelling with one parent will also need to present a letter of authorisation from the non-accompanying parent or legal guardian. You'd be required to provide an invitation letter from relatives if you are travelling to visit a relative in Canada. You'd also need to provide an invitation letter from a business organization in Canada if your purpose of travel is for business   Prices of Flight Ticket from Nigeria to Canada Air France from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦500,000 to ₦880,000 Business Class –₦1,800,000 to ₦2,000,000   Egypt Air from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦500,000 to ₦680,000 Business Class –₦800,000 to ₦1,200,000   Ethiopian Air from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦590,000 to ₦800,000 BusinessClass –₦1,600,000 to ₦2,000,000   United Airlines from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦550,000 to ₦900,000   Lufthansa Airways from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦800,000 to ₦980,000 Business Class –₦1,600,000 to ₦2,100,000   Delta Airlines from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦480,000 to ₦550,000   British Airways from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦550,000 to ₦800,000 Business Class –₦1,700,000 to ₦2,200,000   Turkish Airlines from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦700,000 to ₦1,000,000   KLM Royal Dutch from Nigeria to Canada Economy –₦500,000 to ₦900,000 Business Class– ₦1,800,000 to ₦2,400,000   Choosing the Right Airline from Nigeria to Canada It's advisable to weigh available airline options carefully before booking your flight. Whether you have a blissful or crappy trip also depends on your airline.   Reviews For starters, you can check online for reviews of different airlines flying to your desired destinations. Apart from being able to spot better deals, you'll be able to figure out the different amenities provided by different airlines. Pay special attention to details like weight limits on a traveller's baggage, meals offered onboard, friendliness of flight attendants and the ages of planes in the airline's fleet. However, like the wise men always say, do not believe everything you read online. Some of the reviews you may find are paid reviews. These reviews are made by people paid by different airlines to hype or advertise their brand. It's important to try to avoid these types of review as they may be misleading. Instead, look for reviews by actual travellers on reputable travel sites. Reviews by actual travellers are first-hand experiences and are closer to what you may actually obtain when flying with the airline.   Weight limit While some airlines have check-in baggage limits of around 25kg per passenger, others have smaller weight limits. This means you may have to pay extra if you need to travel with items that are more than the airline's weight restrictions for each passenger. Similarly, while some airlines allow heavier cabin luggage, others have stricter rules that allow plus-sized baggage below 7kg only. That said, you need to compare baggage weight limits for different airlines before booking your flight.   In-flight entertainment If you get easily bored even on short distance flights, things can get even more boring on long haul flights. The key to killing boredom is good in-flight entertainment. Before booking your flight, do well to confirm whether or not your airline and, particularly, flight offers in-flight entertainment. Do well to check what type of entertainment is offered. Some airlines provide details of movies or TV shows that will be shown while onboard. Different airlines offer different forms of in-flight entertainment; checking them out preflight isn't really a bad idea.   Comfort You might also want to compare seats before booking your flight with any airline. Different airlines offering same flight prices may have different seat configurations offering different degrees of comfort. While you can make do with a small leg room on a short distance domestic flight, you'll definitely appreciate more leg room on long haul international flights like when flying to Canada. Sleeping while flying can sometimes be unavoidable even though it's advisable that passengers rest well before boarding their flight. If you've flown before and sleep onboard most of the time, you might want to seek out an airline that offers comfortable sitting arrangement, especially, one that favours sleeping. You should be able to get seats that metamorphose completely to a bed when you want to take a nap, depending on your airline and the travel class.   Price Don't let safety concerns scare you away from flying with low-cost airlines. Patronizing a low-cost airline is a good way to save money if you are working with a low budget. Most low-cost airlines have comparable safety policies to those of the more established legacy airlines. However, with low-cost airlines, you might have to forfeit some juicy perks you get when flying premium airlines. You might have to make do with less yummy meals, lower weight limits on baggage or less leg space onboard.  Ultimately, the key to choosing an airline to travel with is a careful review and selection process. Read the full article

[iancny]

Mississippi Delta

The Mississippi Delta is just not a place I was ever gonna wind up. A lot of places you figure a chance might come up to go there. Like: “Maybe I’ll get to Vegas one day, maybe I’ll go see the Grand Canyon too, it’s not so far”. Well that wasn’t gonna happen for me and the Mississippi delta. If I didn’t go there, I wasn’t gettin there.

I went to Clarksdale MS in particular to get to Red’s Lounge, which may be the last old school juke joint still doin weekly shows in the delta. Other spots open periodically it seems, but Red’s might be the last regular one still around. Juke joints were places for black sharecroppers and cotton pickers to have a drink, dance, and hear some music when segregation was more profound in the South, and black people were not allowed in white establishments. These were important foci of the community up into the 1980s by my understanding, but things change. Juke joints were also the places where the Blues grew up and took hold with people like Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House, etc.  What I can say about the blues is: if I met someone who told me they DISLIKED like the blues, and we couldn’t talk through it to reconcile that fact, then we probably wouldn’t have much to talk about at all.

Well on my way to Clarksdale I stopped out of my way to go to Oxford TN — home of Ole Miss, home of William Faulkner. I went to William Faulkner’s home. He had outlines for one of his books written on his bedroom walls. A worthwhile stop for the literary interested. I bought an Ole Miss college t shirt in downtown Oxford. First souvenir of the trip. I always loved their logo and how the school just goes by the name Ole Miss. 

Rowan Oak, home of William Faulkner, Oxford, MS

I drove on to Clarksdale. Through the dark and rain. I used to not think twice about this. Now driving at night into a unfamiliar place, and when it’s raining... kinda sucks. (I remember when “sucks” was like a bad word. I wonder if adults still go around telling kids not to say it, or society has green lit that one now.) 

First night in Clarksdale, Red’s had no music. The place had no cars outside, but a strand of Christmas lights were lit up. I parked the car and walked up. Door was open. I look in and there’s a man in the opposite corner watching TV. He didn’t hear me come in. “Hey! No music tonight?” I said. The man half turns from TV. “Na, tomorrow be some.” “Alright, I’ll see ya tomorrow.” Think I met Red. 

Ten years or so ago a few investors (one being Morgan Freeman) opened a place called Ground Zero in Clarksdale to carry the legacy and get the blues onstage every night. I ended up going there and the music was good, no doubt. I later found out they get some of the same performers at Ground Zero and Red’s too. So the difference is effectively one place being where the baton is carried, and one being where the baton was forged. I hadn’t planned to stay two nights in Clarksdale but the myth of Red’s being the last juke loomed to great for me. 

The following morning I saw Clarksdale in the sun. Downtown Clarksdale had obviously not seen much new investment in probably 50 years, and probably seen as much departure of people and money in the same time. All its buildings were mid century and earlier. I’ve been through West Virginia and central Pennsylvania towns where all that’s left is a gas station, everything else empty, hardly a car, hardly a soul — I’d call that a shell of a town, and Clarksdale wasn’t that. Clarksdale I’d call a skeleton. Some amputated appendages, general atrophy, but hangers on too, and a few fresh ideas. I feel like Clarksdale will persist. 

From Clarksdale I took county roads to see the smaller delta towns like Bolivar, Duncan, Greenville, etc. I followed signs along the Delta Blues Trail, marking sites, events, and people significant to the early Blues history. The delta is Flat-Flat Dead-Dead Country-Country. Rows of soy stretched out so far that if you flipped em vertical they’d be taller than the Burj Khalifa. You gotta figure some of those towns ain’t gonna be around for the next generation. You see big agricultural firms signs speckled along the roads. Delta Plastics — saw that one over and over over. I saw Bunge which I’d seen before just outside of the train station in White Plains, NY. I think it’s a Dutch food and agriculture conglomerate. I would pass that sign outside their White Plains building daily and one day I googled it out of curiosity. I thought it was funny to see Bunge elsewhere, the Mississippi Delta of all places.

Empty MS Delta country

I drove straight down to Vicksburg that day and my god that is a war memorial to put all the rest to shame. Hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of placards and monuments marking the regiments, their movements, their leaders, their losses, the dates. A passionate student of the war could visualize the whole campaign at Vicksburg. On July 4th 1863 confederate forces surrendered at Vicksburg, which was their last stronghold on the Mississippi River. This is considered the critical turning point for Union dominance in the war. 

 Vicksburg downtown and memorial at Vicksburg battlefields

My second night in Clarksdale I saw Bill Howl-N-Madd Perry play at Red’s Lounge and it did not disappoint. I surreptitiously got a few pics and video, as Red is particular about no cameras. I talked with Bill for a bit and bummed him my lighter when he stepped outside. He got to tellin me a story about the worst lighter thief he’d ever known, Carolyn Franklin, “Aretha’s baby sister”. 

Bill Howl-N-Madd Perry and daughter Shy at Red’s Lounge, Clarksdale, MS

[fairylights101writes]

So @seijouho and I were talking about matsuhanaiwaoi things and I was like “okay, but lemme write some headcanons” aaaaand here we go. The rest are under a read more!

The four moved in together after college (Makki and Oikawa went to the same university while Iwa and Mattsun went to different ones, but they all maintained a long-distance relationship throughout their college years) and with the amount of money they had they went ahead and bought a house - a small fixer upper, but theirs nevertheless

Mattsun landed a job as an editor in the city and writes in his spare time - he often gets inspiration from his boyfriends. Makki is a beauty vlogger and within a year actually managed to get a big following and a couple of sponsors, but he still works in a local coffee shop for extra cash. Iwaizumi is a physical therapist, typically for athletes, and Oikawa is on the professional volleyball team

They don’t always get to spend a lot of time together, but in the beginning it was Mattsun who decided that they needed at least one day a week to spend time all together to relax and make sure everything was okay. That started in the first year of college (typically happened with a group Skype call), and continued at the house. They typically curl up in the living room and watch TV or movies, and they rotate who’s turn it is to pick movies

Sometimes they go on dates though - they’re really fond of picnics and walks at the nearby park, which also has a lake that they can go swimming in when the weather is nice. Mattsun likes to make crowns from dutch clovers for them, which he’ll place on their heads with the sweetest pecks and eskimo kisses, which make the boys (especially Iwaizumi) blush and stutter. Makki is the baker, so he’ll make all sorts of sweet treats for them to eat there (he likes to hand feed them like a dork), and Iwa cooks them food

Oikawa likes to playfully complain because “Haji! Hiro! You’re going to make me gain too much weight with all your good food! Then my coach and trainer are gonna get mad!” They just swat him and tell him to suck it up - plus he never gains the weight he complains about, and they do try to make him nutritious things

Mattsun on the other hand

Mattsun gets a little pudge because he quit playing official team volleyball and instead played with the far less competitive club, rather than the team at university, and after graduating he stopped altogether. Sometimes he feels bad about how he’s put on a little weight, but the other three love him for his extra squish (“Shush Issei, you’re not even that big” “Yeah, you just aren’t ripped like Hajime, but that’s okay, but no one is ripped like Hajime!”)

Oikawa comes home from practices, games, and tournaments with lots of aches, especially in his right shoulder and knee, so Iwaizumi will give him rubdowns and massages (and then the others too so that they aren’t left out). Iwaizumi has “magic hands” according to them, and they pay him back with lots of smooches and hugs

Their best investment though was when they got their custom-made bed two years after moving in. The previous bed was nice, but cramped and hot. The new one though - oh, that was a dream

The bedroom is longer than it is wide, not by much though, and one end has a pretty wide window, and so they had the bed built there so that it spans from wall to wall, and it has a headboard with sliding doors that hide cubbies, which they can put things into (usually lube, condoms, so on). The bed is covered in pillows (no fewer than five normal pillows), a bunch of blankets (themed ones for each too - a volleyball and galaxy one for Oikawa, a Godzilla one for Iwaizumi, flowers for Hanamaki, and dogs for Mattsun). It’s wide enough that they can sprawl out and move so they don’t get overheated at night, which is a blessing, and makes them infinitely more likely to all sleep in the same bed

They can usually find Oikawa napping there after early morning practices, and whoever is free will probably curl up with him (this has led to everyone having numerous pictures of Oikawa sprawled on the bed with at least one other person cuddled up beside of him)

Holiday meals are a riot because they try to fit four sets of parents into one house, as well as assorted siblings and their children, but they manage, and Iwaizumi and the parents always cook enough for an army while Makki and Oikawa’s sister are in the back whipping up all sorts of baked goods for the families

None of them are big on drinking, but sometimes Makki will pour himself a glass or two of wine, turn on some music, and lounge on the couch until someone with some free time comes in. That usually results in slow dancing, even if it’s the complete opposite of slow dancing music. Makki tucks his head into Mattsun and Oikawa’s shoulders, or settles his chin on the top of Iwa’s head, and he’ll hold one hand while he wraps his arm around their waist and holds them close and spins them in slow, lazy circles. Sometimes the other two will come in and stop if they’re home/not working/not tired. Sometimes they join in. If that happens they usually end up changing partners and all drink a little wine, and they end up giggling into kisses and being so, so very happy

On the other hand, Makki still loves to joke and prank, so using his very limited French knowledge from uni, he’ll go up to the others occasionally, purr “I want to touch your baguette,” and grab their crotch. This has led to slapped hands, deadpan stares followed by “are you fucking kidding me?” and, sometimes, actual “baguette” touching

Mattsun is the one who goes out and gets the first pet. Is it a cat? No. A dog? Not even close. A fish???? No - he decided to get a hedgehog, which he called “Iwa”. Oikawa literally fell to the ground laughing when he found out. Hajime sat down and took several long, controlled breaths (secretly because the damn thing was so cute that he was low-key dying). Makki joined Oikawa on the floor, wheezing

Later they ended up with two cats (both long haired and black, much to Oikawa’s grief since he loves to wear white or bright colors). They’re called Alexander (the Great) and Pawley

Makki keeps a garden in the backyard and grows lots of things!! Iwaizumi made fun of him for growing morning glories (“you do realize those are weeds, right?” “Shush, they are beautiful and they are my children!!!” “... right.”), but he also grows roses, sunflowers, and more! The boys tend to get home grown bouquets from him

Iwaizumi likes to curl up on their bed surrounded by pillows and with a cat on either hip (and the hedgehog on his chest) as he catches up on his reading, though he tends to fall asleep like that, and his glasses end up skewed on his face. The others have many pictures of this, and they like waking him up with kisses. Or screaming if Mattsun pile drives Makki onto the bed

Oikawa. Fucking. Tooru. He tries so, so very hard to be romantic, but he tends to miserably fail. Books them a table at a really nice restaurant? Food ends up shitty and kinda ruins their date night, though they make up for it at home. He tries to make them breakfast in bed as thanks for dealing with all his volleyball stuff? Burns half of it, sets off the smoke detector, and ends up waking everyone up on accident. Get them flowers and nice things for the anniversary? The flowers somehow end up broken or wilting before he can get them safely into his boyfriends’ hands. He’s a walking romance disaster, but they love him for it

He also tends to forget anniversaries because he’s always extremely busy with volleyball, and whenever he has to be out of town or the country for tournaments, especially when he makes it to the international/Olympic team, he always ends up crying after he calls them for birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays

Makki and Mattsun 100% walk around the house sometimes with their hands stuck through their shorts, and they’ll come up and grab Oikawa, Iwa, or each other on the ass, which will usually result in a race around the house and lots of laughing

Fixing up the house together, one step at a time. One of the first things to go is the positively atrocious paint job in the bedroom, and they all end up covered in turquoise paint with handprints on their butts and smears on their chests from where they pulled each other in for kisses

Building furniture was somewhat of a fiasco because someone usually tears the directions in frustration and someone else usually accidentally hammers their finger, but all ends well. Eventually. After lots of trial and error. Thank God for Iwa and his higher than average comprehension of putting things together

But he totally fails when it comes to picking things that match. It’s a miracle if he’s not walking out of the house with three different kinds of stripes, and an even bigger one if he picks something on the first try that the others approve of. He just doesn’t understand why he can’t put color X with color Y or design A with design B. But he doesn’t complain too much

Basically they’re just super fucking happy living together in their cozy little fixer upper that they painted a soft pink and filled with lots of plants, and eventually a dog joins the picture, and then a kid, and when a second kid comes into the picture they move into a bigger house, and have their damn happily ever after