#charles he needs to expense a new one through the budget

[snkts]

...

He has thrown his phone off the roof.

[ltwilliammowett]

The Raid of the Medway, 12–14 June 1667

“And, the truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone”

These were the words of Samuel Pepys Chief Secretary to the Admiralty (1633-1703), taken from his diary entry on 12th June 1667, a stark reminder of the victorious Dutch attack launched on the unsuspecting Royal Navy. This attack became known as the Raid on Medway, a humiliating loss for England and one of the worst in the history of the Royal Navy.

The dates here refer to the Julian calendar used in England at that time.

The Prelude

After the end of the first Anglo-Dutch War in 1654, the restoration of the monarchy had taken place in England with the return of King Charles II (1630-1685). The latter needed financial resources for a government independent of Parliament, which he hoped to gain through the spoils of another war against the United Netherlands. He was supported in this by the ambitions of the Royal African Company to damage the Dutch competition. In the spring of 1665, open warfare broke out. After the initial fighting, the Dutch won the Battle of Four Days in June 1666 and thought they had gained the upper hand. A few weeks later, however, the English fleet regained naval supremacy in the North Sea in the "St. James's Day Fight". As a result, the Royal Navy interdicted Dutch shipping and English captains raided places along the coast. The most famous case occurred on 20 August 1666, when Vice-Admiral Robert Holmes (1622-1692) burned down the village of Ter Schelling on the island of Terschelling and sank 140 to 150 merchant ships anchored in nearby Vlie. This event became known and celebrated in England as Holmes's Bonfire. Afterwards, the English fleet retreated to its own waters.

The raid of the Medway, by Willem van der Stoop (–1665) (x)

War weariness grew in the States General as the costs strained the national budget and confidence in the ally France had waned. After the catastrophic losses of the merchant ships at Terschelling, the Dutch opened peace negotiations under Swedish mediation. But English finances were also exhausted. The war had not brought the hoped-for profits, and Parliament refused to grant new funds for warfare after it emerged that some of the money granted had gone to the king's expensive court. Added to this were the losses caused by the severely impaired maritime trade, the great plague epidemic of 1665 and the "Great Fire of London". Against the opposition of Admiral Monck (1608-1670), King Charles II therefore ordered in the winter of 1666/67 that the large ships of the line be dismantled and decommissioned. The war was to be continued only with privateers in order to damage Dutch trade.

Meanwhile, at the peace congress in Breda, the English envoys had been instructed to reach as advantageous a conclusion as possible. Against the background of the last successes in 1666, Charles II dragged out the negotiations in order to end the war with a profit, even though he had had his only means of pressure, the fleet, de-rigged. The United Netherlands were not prepared to make concessions. Soon, however, they came under pressure from elsewhere. King Louis XIV of France (1638-1715) declared war on the Kingdom of Spain in May 1667 and began an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands to appropriate it. The United Netherlands was now forced to bring peace negotiations with England to an immediate conclusion so that it could concentrate on containing French expansionist intentions. To this end, it seemed necessary to Johan de Witt (1625-1672), the council pensioner and head of Dutch policy, to increase the pressure on England by directly attacking the island of Great Britain.

The Plan

The idea of landing troops on the British Isles was not new. Such plans had already been worked out after the victory of the Dutch fleet in the Battle of the Four Days. In the summer of 1666, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter (1606-1676) had taken about 6000 soldiers to the Thames estuary in addition to the fleet, in order to be able to intervene in a supportive manner in the event of a local uprising of the English population against Charles II. But such an uprising failed to materialise, and the transport ships were sent back to Dutch ports after a storm. Only a brief landing on the Isle of Thanet was achieved.

The burning of the English fleet off Chatham, 1667, likely painted by Willem van de Velde the Younger, 1670 (x)

In the summer of 1667, Johan de Witt was well informed by spies about the financial shortages of the English crown and also knew about the decommissioning of most English ships of the line, as well as about the situation of the sailor and dockyard employees who had not been paid for months. Despite his own financial strain, he now prepared the equipment for a Dutch expedition. They were to sail into the Thames Estuary, enter the River Medway and sail to the great dock at Chatham, where many of England's proudest warships lay. Once at their destination, the raiders were to sink or burn as many ships as possible, taking care to capture the best ships as prizes. Such a raid would be a severe blow to the power and prestige of England, for the Royal Navy was the pride of the island nation. Chastened and humiliated by defeat, the English might accept peace on Dutch terms.

The designated contingents of ships were gathered and prepared in various Dutch ports, while in April a squadron under Admiral Van Ghent attempted to enter the Firth of Forth. The main purpose of this enterprise was to provide cover for the main fleet, which assembled at the island of Texel in early June 1667. Admiral de Ruyter sailed along his own coasts, taking in the various contingents as he went. In the end, his fleet consisted of 64 ships of the line and frigates, 15 fireships, 7 escort ships and 13 galliots with a total of 3330 guns and about 17,500 men.

The attack begins

The Assault on Sheerness

The Dutch fleet reached the English coast at Harwich on 7 June 1667. The following day it sailed south along the coast and anchored off the Thames estuary. While doing so, she ran into a storm that forced a large number of ships to cut their anchor ropes and drift. This mainly affected troopships, which were no longer available for the following operations. At a council of war on board the flagship, the further course of action was discussed. Admiral de Ruyter had reservations about sending the entire fleet up the river, as he was not precisely informed about the whereabouts of the smaller English fleet units. Should they return unexpectedly and close the mouth of the Thames, the Dutch fleet would be trapped. Cornelis de Witt proposed that the main force itself should remain off the mouth of the river and a small detachment should guard the English Channel, while a squadron under Admiral Willem Joseph van Ghent (1626-1672) should advance up the Thames. There, this squadron was to attack some West Indian merchant ships at Gravesend, which had been reported by an intercepted Norwegian trader. Admiral van Ghent's squadron consisted of 17 smaller warships, four fireships, some yachts and galiots, and 1000 marines under Colonel Dolman. The squadron set off on the morning of 9 June and initially occupied Canvey Island. However, the wind then shifted and the English merchant ships, which in the meantime had been warned of the approaching Dutch warships, escaped upriver.

Sail to Chatham, Willem Schellinks, c. 1668 (x)

Cornelis de Witt now urged Admiral van Ghent to enter the Medway and attack the English fleet lying there. The entrance to this river was controlled by a fort still under construction at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey. However, to defend this key position, the English had only a weak Scottish garrison, 16 guns, the small frigate Unity and two lightships at their disposal. On 10 June, Admiral van Ghent attacked the fort. The Unity fired only a single broadside and then fled up the Medway, pursued by a Dutch fireship. The Dutch ships took the fort under fire for the next two hours and eventually landed 800 naval soldiers under Colonel Dolman. The fort garrison fled without offering serious resistance to the landing troops and the whole of the Isle of Sheppey was occupied by Van Ghent's forces. The battle for this important position had cost the Dutch about 50 men. The value of the 15 cannons and other goods captured in the process was 400,000 livres or four tons of gold, according to contemporary estimates.

Informed of the events on 9 June, George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle (1608-1670) received royal orders to organise the defence. Monck first inspected the installations on the Thames at Gravesend Fort and on the morning of 11 June went to Chatham on the Medway. There he found virtually no organised defence. At Gillingham an iron chain had been drawn across the course of the river, but it was too low. There were only three smaller ships to protect them: the Unity (44 guns), the Charles V and the Matthias (former Dutch merchantmen Carolus Quintus and Geldersche Ruyter). Otherwise, panic reigned. Of the more than 800 dock workers, almost all had fled or refused to help because of their unpaid wages. Out of thirty boats and ships, only ten were still to be found because refugees had used them to escape or local officials had evacuated their personal belongings on them. The Duke ordered the soldiers and officers he had brought with him to set up two coastal batteries on the shore by the chain, but even for this they lacked the necessary tools. To create further obstacles in front of the chain, Admiral Monck ordered fire ships to be sunk there. Two ships, the Norway Merchant and the Marmaduke, were successfully sunk, but the great Sancta Maria, which had also been designated as an obstacle, ran aground. Also on the scene was the large warship Royal Charles (88 guns), but it was completely unarmed.

Stern decoration of the Royal Charles, anonymous, c. 1663 - c. 1664 (x)

Admiral Monck ordered them upriver to safety, but there were not enough personnel to do so. When the Dutch attack came later, she was still lying unmanned on the shore. Among the more than 1100 workers in the docks at Chatham, there were few willing to help. Their pay was months in arrears, as the King lacked the financial means, and now they too refused to serve.

The breakthrough at Gillingham

On the morning of 12 June, the Dutch units began their advance in the Medway. The narrowness of the channel forced the ships to sail one behind the other in a single line. In the lead was the Vrede under the command of her captain Jan van Brakel. The captain had been placed under arrest two days earlier for allowing his men to plunder on the Isle of Sheppey. In order to restore his reputation, he had now voluntarily taken over the top position. Brakel's ship soon came under the crossfire of the three English defensive ships and the two coastal batteries.

However, he steered straight for the Unity without firing and gave her a broadside at point-blank range. The English crew then fled the ship and left it to the Dutch. Under cover of the powder smoke, the two following brander under Brakel's command also approached and sank the English ships Charles V and Matthias in quick succession. The iron chain was subsequently broken during the first ramming attempt (there are some discrepancies in the tradition here, some historians also think that it was simply sailed over because it lay so far in the water and were actually useless).

From the left ;  "Agatha" , "Beschermer" , "Charles V" , "Propatia"  , The "Royal Charles"  , "Matthias"   and a Dutch Admirals yacht, by Jan de Quelery (x)

The Dutch ships now had free passage up the Medway, because behind the chain there was a wide gap between the sunk English ships, which should have been closed by the sinking of the Sancta Maria. The following Dutch frigates soon silenced the English coastal batteries with their fire, whose fire had been almost ineffective anyway due to structural deficiencies. The biggest prize of the day for the Dutch fleet was the Royal Charles which had often served as a flagship for the English fleet commanders. Btw the Dutch did not take her into naval service because it was considered that she drew too much water for general use on the Dutch coast. Instead the Royal Charles was permanently drydocked near Hellevoetsluis as a public attraction, with day trips being organised for large parties, often of foreign state guests. After vehement protests by Charles that this insulted his honour, the official visits were ended when she was auctioned for scrap in 1673.

Raid at Upnor Castle

Meanwhile, the English were making defensive preparations at Upnor Castle. The Duke of Albemarle and Peter Pett, the commander of the docks, put the castle's guns on standby and set up another battery on the far bank. The attempt to stretch another chain across the river failed. Now they wanted to bring the warships towards Chatham, but again there were not enough men. To at least save the largest warships from capture, the Duke of Albemarle ordered them to be sunk in low water where they could be raised again later.

The Dutch before Upnor Castle, by Jan de Quelery (x)

Late in the afternoon of 12 June, the Dutch advance was halted by the state of the tide. On board the captured Royal Charles, Van Ghent, De Ruyter and De Witt met to discuss further action. These three commanders decided to push further upriver the following day and attack the Chatham Dockyards and the large warships located there. At midday on 13 June, the remaining Dutch braders, protected by four frigates and a larger number of smaller ships, attacked the English positions. They were soon caught in the crossfire between Upnor Castle and the battery hastily raised on the opposite bank of the river. A detachment of naval soldiers landed and moved to attack the English ammunition magazine at Upnor Castle, which they successfully blew up before withdrawing again.

The bombardment of Upnore Castle by Arnold de Lange (x)

In the meantime, the Dutch ships fired on the English gun batteries. While the battle was still going on, a calm set in, forcing De Ruyter and other officers to transfer to longboats in order to direct the actions of their units from them. After a fierce firefight, the Dutch fireships succeeded in attacking the three large warships lying on the shore, Loyal London (92 guns), Royal Oak (76 guns) and Royal James (82 guns). The water in which these ships had been sunk by the English themselves was not shallow enough to offer protection even against an arson attack. All three ships fell victim to the Dutch fireships after their hull crews fled. The Duke of Albemarle, meanwhile, tried to tow the remaining warships upriver under the protection of Chatham's guns. He lined up battle-ready warships on the banks and gathered militia troops to halt the Dutch advance. In fact, the Dutch ships went no further against the stiffening English resistance. Late in the afternoon they retreated with the rising tide as far as Gillingham. There they made the captured English ships Royal Charles and Unity seaworthy and left the Medway on 14 June. The losses from the battle in front of Upnor Castle amounted to about 500 men on the English side, while it is assumed that the Dutch lost between 50 and 150 men.

The aftermath

The Dutch raid on the English ships in the Medway became the biggest debacle of the war for the Royal Navy. It lost more ships than in all previous naval battles combined. The Royal Charles and the Unity had been captured by Dutchmen and the Loyal London, Royal James, Royal Oak, Charles V, Matthias, Marmaduke, Sancta Maria as well as five fireships, two ketches, a fleute and a smaller ship sunk or burnt. In contrast, the Dutch had deployed a total of ten fireships. In addition, there were further indirect losses of the Royal Navy. The Vanguard, for example, had drifted while attempting to ground her and eventually wrecked at Rochester so that she could no longer be lifted. Further north, beyond Gravesend, Prince Rupert had wanted to block the Thames to a possible Dutch advance by sinking the Golden Phoenix, House of Sweeds, Welcome and Leicester there. This turned out to be a sheer waste of important warships, as the Dutch never advanced further than Gravesend. All in all, these losses - especially those of the three large warships - changed the strategic balance between England and the United Netherlands in favour of the Dutch for years to come.

After this success, the Dutch were able to display their unrestricted superiority. One part of the Dutch fleet took action against the English merchant ships on the Channel coast, while another under Admiral Van Nes continued to blockade the Thames for English shipping. In smaller operations, Dutch troops still landed in some places or sailed warships up the Thames in the following weeks.

In London, the events on the banks of the Medway led to a severe economic collapse and panic among the population. Rumours said Chatham was on fire, as were Gravesend, Harwich, Queenborough, Colchester and Dover. Dutch landings at Portsmouth, Plymouth and Dartmouth were reported, and even claims that the king had fled; the Papists were about to take power. Even an imminent French landing was expected.

After the Raid on the Medway, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, Admiral van Ghent and Cornelis de Witt each received a golden cup from the States of Holland (x)

The Dutch had taken up a position in the Thames by which they cut London off from trade. Coal supplies from the Tyne in particular were failing, and soon the price of coal increased tenfold. The English fleet was weakened by the raid and there was hardly any money available for its replenishment. King Charles II therefore had little choice but to instruct his envoys at the peace conference in Breda to conclude the treaty as soon as possible. The Peace of Breda was signed on 21 July 1667, and on 16 August the Dutch fleet abandoned the blockade of the English ports and the Thames estuary in accordance with the treaty. But England’s desire for revenge helped motivate another Anglo-Dutch War the following decade. But also an upgrade of the Navy as well as a change in the pay and living conditions of the Sailors which laid the foundation for one of the most powerful navies in the world. 

[telling-tragedy]

For Winterpapen, this is a super vague fic idea but maybe it can inspire you:

Basically we all know Richard refuses to ask for money to the point where he’ll risk his own life, and after Henry saves him in that horrid winter he’s obviously aware of his situation. Even though he never addresses it outright and doesn’t mention it to the others, he suspects what is actually going on. So over the ensuing weeks, he tries to help Richard out here and there, paying for a meal or a new shirt (after Richards is ruined because Charles spills wine on him or sth), but he kind of has to push this on Richard because he keeps trying to refuse, so he’ll give him stuff in form of gifts so Richard can’t say no. The others pick up on it and someone jokes about Henry courting Richard (cause they don’t know what’s going on, but also they’re kinda right because Henry has turned this whole thing into a display of affection through gifts instead of words sort of mission), and of course Richard is super awkward about it and tries to avoid the subject.

Then they end up being out for dinner together, not an expensive place of course, but Henry still insists on paying for it and Richard ultimately yields because he’s so very persuasive. But to the waiter it ends up looking like they’re on a date, he lets a comment slide, and Richard again gets super awkward cause he thinks there’s no way in hell Henry would like him and he’s totally straight anyways- right ;)?

Awkward car ride ensues and when Henry drops him off he just asks (in a very Henry-ish, blunt way) why Richard is so uncomfortable with the idea of them being seen as a couple, and Richard stumbles over his own words until Henry kisses him and he can’t help but return the kiss and they admit their feelings and Henry ends up taking him home THE END. / also they agree at some point, either the restaurant or at the end, that Henry will slow down with the gifts, and Richard will ask for help when he needs something or is short on his budget /

oooo this one’s great! i’m in a holiday mood…might try and find a way to combine this general idea with some sort of christmas thing because I think it would go great together—maybe. either way, I’m seeing the vision >:)

[reawritesthings]

Rooftop | JJ. Maybank

gif by @rudypankows​

Summary: When Sarah forces the pogues to go to a Kook party, JJ dips early and notices you on the roof, reading peacefully.

Words: 2.6K

A/N: Thank you all for the support on my other fics, it really means a lot to see the love you give me. If you like me to write for anyone, please send me an ask! thank you all again🦆

                      ☼☼☼☼

"WHY are we even here?" JJ's exasperated tone of words sent the Pogue's including Sarah to eye roll.

"I would much rather be on my couch watching Monster Inc." JJ's childish tone evaporated around the North Carolina frightful breeze that lure them further into the land of predators.

Sarah huffed not wanting to row with the blonde beauty. She frankly understood his anti's of not wanting to prey on the sharks or even share the same air with them, but, Sarah was still a Kook and JJ needed to accept that.

"J, we can just head in there for an hour... drink their alcohol and leave." John B proposed letting his athletic, sternly hands fumble his way into Sarah's palm gifting her with a reassuring squeeze.

JJ's mind was like a cymbal-banging monkey toy that only worked when the indigo eye boy was frustrated and needed leverage, "We are about to attend John B's girlfriend ex-boyfriend's house party because Sarah's ex-boyfriend invited her, and only her." JJ dramatically paused to reminded everyone how fucked up this particular mission is.

"And, here we are, the pogues forcefully dragged by Topper's ex-girlfriend to attend this disgraceful party that could end in two possible ways.."

"Enlighten us." Pope's static tone of sarcasm intrigued JJ to finish his perfectly thought out rant.

"A fight breaks out, or Rafe loses his shit." JJ's arm folded whilst a devilish smile grew onto his bruised porcelain face that everyone admired about the surfer.

"I hate to agree with Scobby but he has a point." Pope's loyalty to JJ never failed him.

Kie and Sarah kept moving forward, dragging their danity flipflops through the frozen golden grains of the earth that held the rich side in place. Being the only two girls of the group they were used to the constant complaints from the men.

"Next time, I'll just invite you Kie." Sarah muttered under her minty breathe. Kiara only nodded in agreement reaching for the handle to enter the shark's den.

"Best behaviour," Kie announced immediately locking eyes with JJ who was infatuated with the silhouette of another human.

"Can't make any promises, Kie." He winked as his eyes were still glued to the frame of darkness that interlocked with his mind that he should be up there and not here.

"Here we go..." Sarah murmured under her breath. "What could possibly go wrong?" Kie shot her eyes back to Sarah who only swung the door opened to be slammed with harsh tones coming from the stereo.

Topper was known for throwing the most extravagant house parties. The music was as loud as thunder; it made the empty beer bottle rattle. Neon lights that were glued to the white walls flashed everywhere like police sirens, but with much more inviting colours.

Over the roar of music, a distant, hazy chatter could be heard. Topper, Rafe and Kelce were chatting up some ladies as there vision was blinded by a bunch of Pogues roaming around like cockroaches.

"What are they doing here?" Kelce mumbled against the illuminated ruby plastic cup that Rafe already broke through his rage.

"Topper is still whipped for my sister." Rafe truthfully announce, causing the blonde short skirted girl to loose interest in his friend.

"Thanks man." Topper's eye rolled extended further as he noticed John B clutching his arm around Sarah's frame, like he used too.

"Anytime." Rafe smirked pulling Kelce's bright yellow polo shirt towards him to confront the intruders. Topper soon joined, staying behind Rafe as he didn't want his perfectly structured face to be bruised.

"What are you rugrats doing here? You aren't allow to be on our turf." Rafe spat not even making eye contact with his younger sister whose frame was hidden behind John B's and JJ.

"We got invited. We just came here to get a little drunk and we will be on our way." JJ broke the silence, squaring up to Rafe's face.

"Don't make me bust your other eye, Maybank." Rafe threatened, clenching his palms ready for another battle.

"Wouldn't dream of it." JJ took Kelce's red cup from his hand drowning the stinging sensation that drew him away from the crowd.

"Where you going?" Pope shrieked as he didn't feel comfortable being left with John B, he wasn't exactly scary like JJ.

"Washroom. I'll be back." JJ reassured his best friend, whose hand was tightly gripped to Kiara's whose face wasn't enjoying the sensation sound of Topper's music taste.

JJ's curiosity always managed to get himself into trouble, whether he was looking for it or not. His mind was reverted back to the shadow of a young female who was on the roof. He knew he shouldn't be preying around Topper's house but, he would of regretted not knowing who that girl was.

His tiny frame ran smoothly around the second floor, each creak that he created with his ripped combat boots made him squint, he noticed a slight acute door open slightly with a streak of light hitting the wooden floors.

The bedroom was furnished on a expensive budget according to the serval layers of blankets that were freshly pressed on the double bed. A messy pile of book were scattered across the white carpet that was caressed with a circular rug that was neatly combed.

He looked up at the walls, admiring the pictures that were taken on a film camera.

"Whose's this girl?" JJ thought as he circled the room, slowly resting his palm on the slik sheets wishing he could have a room like this.

Since JJ was in a trance of what his life was like if he was Kook, he was startled by a soft tune of a sneeze coming from the windowsill. His intrigue body motioned away from the bed, heading towards the half adjecent window that his mysterious girl was resident.

JJ's instincts were never wrong when he assumed the shadow of a girl on the high roof. His head turned towards you, your fully eclipsed body was tainted with a summer dress that fit well on your skin. Under his brief gaze on your exposed skin, you didn't flinch or withdraw from your book. Your shape was already forming into womanhood, yet you were roughly the same age as Sarah: Your twin brother's ex-girlfriend. You revert your attention out of the flood of flowing words and focused them on him, he was something out of a novel you read once.

Dashing, adventurous and fearless. You were polite and offered him a seat next to you, letting the moon expose your vulnerable side which JJ instantly stole as he gently brushes his shoulder against your own.

JJ eccentric side was displayed out in the open and didn't hesitate to make the first move. "What's a pretty girl like you doing on a roof?"

You sauntered in, feeling provocative whilst you brushed your hair from your dainty shoulders, letting his kindly eager cornflower eyes follow your movement.

"I'm not really into the whole drinking vibe... My brother on the other hand is." JJ's pupils grew larger as he pieced the puzzle together, he knew he wasn't the smartest earthling on the island but he just couldn't see the resemblance between you and your brother.

"How is that possible?... Topper has a sister?... Why didn't Sarah mention anything?"

You personally thought his reaction wouldn't be inviting but, his reaction to the news lured you in more like he was siren calling for you. "Well, when my parents had Topper... they decided to conceive again, making me."

JJ nudged you chuckling at your comeback, "I know how sex works. I'm a Maybank."

"Noted." You candid staring at the apex of the deep sliver circle that brought the both of you together.

A heavy silence evaporated over them, thicker than the mucky air making the tension more uncomfortable. Both of your eyes glanced unceremoniously around turning to avoid catching each other glances that happened in the space of a minute.

"What you reading?" JJ noticed an earthy hued of brown colours stuck to her embrace which JJ gazed forced him to stare to create a new conversation.

"Charles Dickens, Great Expectations." He noticed your awkward zoned face shape into a curious, cheeky smile that he first noticed when he intruded.

"Cool. I don't read but Charles Dickens is a great man. One of the best lads out there, wonder what he is doing now?" JJ wondered having no idea that he is in fact six feet under.

You burst out a giggle with a sentiment rosy colour appeared on your cheeks, "Hate to break it to you but the lad is dead. He has been dead for centuries."

JJ was perplexed by your statement. He generally thought he was still alive due to Pope always speaking about him as if he was a local. "I knew that. I was testing your knowledge on Charlie."

You chuckled playing along with his shenanigans but you would be lying to yourself that you weren't intrigued in the fact that he was sitting here when he was supposed to be downstairs. "How comes you are up here? I thought Pogues loved a good party, especially if there's alcohol."

JJ shrugged darting his eyes to meet yours, "Don't take it personally but I'm not a fan of Kooks, especially Topper and his gang."

And this, you thought was going to be the end of your story with the blonde boy. You weren't shocked that he degraded your brother and his friends, you understood the reason.

"I get that. If it makes you feel better, I don't exactly agree with their rules and how they treat you guys. You deserve the same respect we get because one day, Shakesphere's novel of Romeo and Juliet might come true and, I personally don't want to kill myself..." You flirted in a way which the boy would probably take days, in fact, months to work out the metaphor.

"Does that make me Remi?" JJ joked as he kind of liked the way your nose scrunched when he didn't understand literature.

"It's Romeo..." You corrected him again.

"I know. I just wanted to see that little nose scrunch you do when I mess up."

You were stunned that he paid attention to little things about you. It wasn't every day that someone would paid attention to Topper's sister, especially a Pogue. You could sense that he was actually interested in you, and even the novel you were reading.

"Whatcha thinking about, Juliet?" JJ teased letting his hand move the strand of hair from your face, tucking it safely behind your acute ears.

You shrugged, "I just..." You paused, you didn't want to pride your thoughts on the Pogue as you didn't want to scare him away.

"C'mon, pretty girl. What is it?" He interrogated you. He looked down at your fingertips, loosely fighting with each other as you were struggling to form words. He initially engulfed his hands into yours brushing your soft skin to ease your mind.

"You are kind of the first guy to ever notice me, or even pay attention to me... I'm just don't want this night to end." You stutter but with every stroke, he did made your nerves drift away.

JJ instantly brought his broad arms over your waist, pulling your body against his. In seconds your bodies moulded into one. JJ never let another human be so close to him like this, not even Kie. You were different, you weren't like what he thought you would be. There was a purity to you, naivety perhaps, but with a scent of innocent that JJ wanted to protect from the creatures of the night.

You, on the other hand, felt something inside you ignite as his arms firmly were wrapped around your frame. His embrace was like a welcoming invitation to his life, which you would accept in a heartbeat. You didn't really want the party to end nor wanting the moon to disappear as that meant your story was ending.

"You see those two stars that are moulded into one... that's you and i. Whether you feel lost or feel alone, look up into the starry night and call me." JJ managed to sound romantic for a slight second which only made you blush more.

"Poetic... I like it Maybank." You winked whilst your hands fiddled around with his countless threaded bracelets. "I like this one the most... the colours match your eyes."

JJ immediately took the bracelet off, offering your hand. "You can have it. I've seen you admire it since I got here. I have plenty back at home, so this is my peace offering."

You silently accepted the gift, watching the bracelet fit perfectly onto your bony wrist. "It's beautiful." You muttered to yourself.

JJ curved his lips as he slowly lifted your chin up, to get a good view of your face. He admired every little detail but concentrated on your lips. His head was angled slightly to the side as his lips went closer to yours, lighting pressing a small kiss to your rosebud shaped lips. When he kissed her, her identity fell away. It was slow and soft, comforting for the both of you as your tribes rival melted away. JJ's hand rested below his ear, his thumb caressing her cheek as he kept the flow of their lips going neither of them wanting to stop but, the calls from his friends parted them away.

"I better go... they are probably worried that I've got into a fight or something." JJ's face frowned watching your own do the same. "I'll see you tomorrow night, here."

"Are you sure? I don't want you getting into trouble..." You felt your walls began to build, each brick that layered made it harder for you to think that he would ever get into trouble for her, a heartless Kook.

JJ hooked his arms to your neck, "Don't worry about a thing, pretty girl."

You nodded, letting him steal another kiss from you as you watched his frame leave yours. A gush of emptiness flooded your body, as it called for him but he was already gone, vanished into the mucky air of North Carolina. You rallied back to your book, looking down at the texture smiling down as you saw him leave with his friends.

"JJ, where did you go? We were looking all over for you?" Sarah was the one who instigated the conversation since the rest were zoned out.

JJ kept it at a minimal, he didn't want his juliet to be known especially not to Sarah, "around."

Sarah hummed not believing anything JJ was saying. As they entered the van, Sarah noticed a small figure exiting from the roof, "Is that Y/N?"

JJ looked up, watching as you were clenching onto your book rather than watching your balance. "So that's her name.." He muttered to himself giving his face a warm smile.

Sarah turned hearing JJ's comment but decided to play along, "I wonder what she is holding?"

Without even realising JJ answered, "Charles Dickens. Great Expectations."

Sarah only smirked leaving JJ to slam his palm onto his mouth, feeling the metal sting his bruised chapped lips.

"We're you macking on with my ex-boyfriend's sister?" Sarah interrogated the blonde beauty.

"Let's just say that you need to tell me all the ways to sneak into his house." JJ blushed, letting his left foot bring his body up into the van.

Sarah followed behind, looking up one more time to see you peeping, "You got it, lover boy."

masterlist TAGLIST

tags: @outrbanks, @honestlyimstilllivinginthe90s, @jjjmaybank, @rudyypankow, @prejudic3, @afterglowsb-tch13, @summerintheobx and @void-maybank

[popculturebuffet]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1990 Review: Still Possesses Turtle Power After All These Years

Cowabunga all you happy people! I freaking love the Teenage Ninja Turtles. I grew up with it from Turtles in Time, which was my first video game, to the 2003 cartoon, which I covered the first three episodes of last month, and on to present day as I re-read the idw comics after finally reading the original eastman and laird run of mirage, and impatiently waiting for Shredder’s Revenge to come out after a LONG drout of no good TMNT games. I”m a fan of these heroes four, their dynamic as a family, the endless possiblities that come from it’s long history and ablitlity to go anywhere in any genre, and the wonderful goofy shit that happens when you have a franchise about mutant turtles learning ninjitsu from a rat and fighting a dude covered in knife covered samurai armor. 

So with me finally covering the guys after almost a year last month and with a new movie set to debut at some point this year, I had the bright idea to revisit the FIRST TMNT movie after way too many years of not watching it. This movie is anear and dear to my heart: When I first started getting into the boys big as a kid with the 2003 cartoon, I badly wanted more turtles. But back then it wasn’t nearly as easy to glom onto some more of the sewer shock pizza kings: Streaming sites with all the cartoons on them weren’t all that accesable, dvd’s were expensive for the 87 cartoon, Mirage wasn’t reprinting the comics in any meaningful way and my local comic shop didn’t have any at all and I could only play the SNES when my brother had it set up on occasion like at our Grandma’s farm. 

As you probably guessed though there was one exception: the original 1990 movie, which I got at Walmart for 5 bucks and haven’t let go of since. It was one of my first dvds and is still one of my most precious. Said film hit the spot just right as like my beloved 2003 series, it was a mildly goofy but still fucking cool adaptation that stuck closer to the mirage comics, even more than the 2003 series would, while taking a few queues from the 87 series. This film is as precious to me as the 2003 series and a with a brand new movie coming up, I figured it was the exact right time to dig into this classic: what makes it still good to this day, what’s fun to point and laugh at, and how the heck Jim Henson got involved in this. So join me under the cut as I take a look at my boys first theatrical outing and why I still love watching a turtle. 

No One Wanted To Make This: Before we get into the film itself some background. As usual I struggled a bit, but thankfully found some help in the form of this Hollywood Reporter article.  It’s a fascinating read worth your time, providing an oral history of the film from the people who worked on it. 

The film was the baby of Gary Propper, a surfer dude and road manager for the prop comic Gallagher, aka that guy who used to smash watermelons but now has instead opted to smash what little’s left of his career by being a homophobic douchenozzle. He found an ally in Showtime producer Kim Dawson who’d produced Gallagher’s special. I don’t think there will be more of an 80′s sentence than “Gallagher’s surfer dude agent wanted to make a teenage mutant ninja turtles movie”. Propper was a huge fan of the comics, and with Dawson’s help convinced Laird and Eastman to let them option it to studios. 

It may come as a shock to you but the road agent for a homophobic watermelon man and a producer at a niche cable channel wanting to make a movie based on an underground comic book about masked turtles at a time when the two most recent comic book movies were Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Howard the Duck, did not go well. Every door in Hollywood got slammed in their face, even Fox> Even the eventual backer of the film, Golden Harvest, a hong kong action film studio, took months to convince to actually back the film. 

Things did not get easier from there: The films writer Bobby Herbeck had trouble getting a story agreed on because Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s working relationship had deteroiated horribly from the stress so naturally the two could not agree on a damn thing and argued with each other. Peter Laird  made a tense siutation even worse by constnatly sniping at Herbeck and feeling he was a “Hollywood outsider infringing on his vision and characters”

Granted the script was apparently not great... but Pete still comes off as a pretnetious ass who views his weird indie comic as THE HIGHEST OF HIGH CALLINGS HOW DARE YOU SOIL IT. And continued to be kind of a prick like this throughout the rest of his time with the property. 

Thankfully the film found i’ts voice, vision and director in Steve Barron. Barron was a music video guy who knew the producers and while reluctant, eventually dove into the project rightfully thinking the film would need to be a mix of the mirage comics and 87 cartoon, keeping aprils’ reporter job, the turtles lvoe of pizza and their iconic color coding from the cartoon but adapting several stories from the comics as the backbone of the film. The guys liked barron MUCH better and things ran smoother. 

Barron also brought in one of the film’s biggest selling points and it’s most valuable asset: it’s triumphantly awesome Jim Henson costumes. Barron had worked with good old Jim on the music videos for Labyrinth, and while it took some convincing since the comics were violent as hell and that wasn’t Jim’s style, Barron eventually got him on board. This naturally doubled the budget, but given Henson’s costumes STILL hold up today and look better than the cgi used in the platinum dunes films... it was a good call. And this was brand new tech for jim, having to invent tons of new ideas and mechanisms just to make the things work, and said things still were absolute hell on the actors. Jim later ended up not liking the film for being too violent... which I find hilarious given how many muppets got eaten or blowed up real good on his show but regardless, I thank this legendary and wonderful man as without him this film WOULD NOT have worked. The costumes here look great, feel realistic, and you can’t tell the actors were dubbed much less horribly suffering in those suits. Much like Disney Land. 

The film would get picked up for distribution by New Line, and despite i’ts weird as hell origins and the long shot it had.. the film was a MASSIVE hit at the box office, owing to a combination of Batman 89 the previous year having proved comic book movies can work for audiences, the cartoon’s runaway sucess, and a massive marketing campaign. The film made it’s mark. So now we know how we got here let’s get into the film itself. 

What’s the Story Morning Glory?:

So the story for this one is largely cobbled together from some of the more notable arcs Eastman and Laird did before handing off the book to others full time as the stress of the company and the mounting tension with each other made it near impossible to work together on the book itself. 

To Save time i’m just going through what hte movie takes from the comics plot wise now to save me the trouble later:The movie takes elements from the first issue (The Turtles, Splinter and Shredder’s backstories, Shredder being fully human and the main antagonist, Shredder’s design and the final rooftop showdown that results in Shredder’s death), second and third, (April’s apartment over her dad’s old store and the turtles moving in when their home is ransacked and splinter has gone missing), the rapheal micro series (A tounge in cheek way of cashing in on the Mini-Series craze of the 80s, a one shot by modern standards and something that’s tragically been underused as an idea as only TMNT and MLP have used the idea at IDW, Raph meeting casey and their fight with one another), the return of shredder arc (One of the turtles being ambushed and mobbed by the foot and then thrown though a sky light (Leo in the comic and Raph here), the turtles being horribly outnumbered by them, Casey coming ot the rescue and metting the non-raph turtles for the first time, and them being forced to escape when the place goes up in flames), their exile to northampton (April writing in a journal, casey working on a car with one of the guys and one of hte guys looking over hteir injured brother), and finally, their triumphant return which was very loosely adapted as there are no deformed shredder clones and shredder not being dead yet in this version was not brought back by a colony of super science worms. 

So as for how this all comes together: Our story takes place in New York: A crimewave is high with muggings mysterious. There are a ton of phantom thefts going around and at most people have been seeing teens responsibile. And the police.. are at about this level of useful:

The only person doing something is April O’Neil, played by Judith Hoag. Hoag is easily the standout of the film, giving us a strong, confident woman with a wonderful sense of humor. She honestly might be my faviorite April O Neil, and given we’ve had some great ones with 2003, 2012 and Rise, that’s not something I say lightly. I honestly wish I’d recognized her in more stuff as she was both on Nashville and the mom in the Halloween Town films, and most recently was on the ScFy show the magicians. She’s a talented lady and i’m glad she’s still goin. 

April is a reporter for Channel 3 like the cartoon, though for some weird reason her boss from the cartoon is replaced by Charles Pennigton, played by Jay Patterson, whose currently dealing with his troubled son Danny, played by Micheal Turney. Pennington is horribly useless at both jobs: At work he tries to ease April off calling out Chief Sterns, who refuses to listen to April’s evidence gathered from japanese immigrants that the crimes resemble similar ones in japan in favor of trying to get charles to shut her up. Danny meanwhile is a member of the foot becase his dad thinks shouting out him and talking about him like he’s not there and generally being a dipstick will actually do anything to help him. 

I love the concept for the foot here. In addition to being a Ninja Violence Gang as always, they now recruit new members by finding kids without families or with troubled family lives and giving them a sense of family with the foot, and sweeting the bargin with a giant cave filled with arcade machines, a skate ramp and general late 80′s early 90′s kids goodies. Is it rediculous? Yes. Is it also clever as it gives Shredder an easy army of plausably deniable theives that he can pick the best out of to put in his elite that will be tirelessly loyal to him and him alone? Also yes. 

So April being public about this stuff gets her attacked, which naturally leads to our heroes coming in, first in the shadows and later directly when April wont’ give up on the case and Shredder sends some ninjas to go shut her up.. which he does weirdly as the guy jsut slaps her and tells her to cut it out like he’s on a domestically abusive episode of Full House. Raph saves her, and we get the turtles origin.. though weirdly they cut it in half. We get the ooze portion but Splinter’s past with Saki, Saki’s murder of his master and his master’s partern Tang Shen is left for later in the film and the fact Shredder’s saki is treated as a big twist despite the fact the biggest audience for the film would be kids... and kids would’ve been familiar with the cartoon where the giant brain monster routinely screeches out saki at the shredder. Maybe Barron just thought he was an alcoholic I don’t know. It just would’ve made more sense to have it all at once and let the audeince put it together. 

April becomes good friends with the turtles over a night of frozen pizza and camradrie, but the Splinters return home to find it ransacked, Splinter kidnapped by the foot, and are forced to Stay with april. Charles meanwhile tries to get April to backoff because he made a deal with the police to clear Danny’s record, without TELLING her any of this mind you, but I will save my rage on that little plot point for in a bit as Danny who he drug along sees the turtles and tells the Shredder. 

So we get the return of the shredder arc as Raph goes through a window, our heroes fight valiantly, and Raph’s friend Casey who he met earlier shows up, the two having bonded as all true friends do.. by beating the shit out of each other ending with raph shouting DAMNNNNNNN really big and dramatically into the sky for some reason. The Turtles and friends escape with an injured raph from April’s burning second hand store. She had a second hand store it was poorly established and only there because she had it in the comics. 

Our heroes retreat to a farm April’s grandma owned in Northampton, Massachutes, where Mirage was located at the time the original comics where they were exiled to the place were written and a location that has been a staple of the turtles ever since. The turtles slowly recover, lick their wounds, talk about who hooked up with who on gilligans island etc, before Leo connects with Splinter via meditation, who tells them to come back. Splinter also starts to connect with Danny and convinces him to swtich sides.. or at the very least squat in the boys old home. 

The boys return home, find danny, and prepare, Danny goes back and ends up giving away the Turtles are home.. but the turtles are ready and in an awesome sequence kick the fuck out of the foot squad sent for them with some well prepared steam vents. Casey goes to get splinter since Danny told them and with Danny’s help, finds him, since Danny found out they were gonna kill him. Casey beats up Tatsu, shredder’s right hand man, and they get him out. 

We get our final fight which is awesome up until the climax.. which is splinter casually tripping shredder with nunchucks and thier bloody history being kind of rushed and unsatsifying. Casey crushes shredder with a garbage truck, April gets her job back, more on that in a moment, she and casey hook up, and we end with the fucking awesome song T-U-R-T-L-E Power by partners in cryme. Seriously check it out it’s fucking triumphant. 

The song is just good.. cheesy? Sure but that’s half the fun. It’s the gold standard for movie theme songs for them and stacks up handily with the various animated series themes.. all of which slap. Okay... ALMOST all of which slap. Fast Forwards is aggressively medicore, which is doubly suprising to me since 4kids was REALLY damn good with theme songs. It was one of the three things they were best at along with finding VERY talented voice actors and setting japan based works in america because merica dammit.  

The plot is very solid: It skilfully packed half of eastman and laird’s run on TMNT into 90 mintues while adding things like April’s job at channel 9, the way the foot recurited kids etc. The plot flows well for hte most part and apart from one annoying subplot we’ll get to never has a moment that feel unecessary or dosen’t pay off later. And the stellar plot and fun pacing of it helps boilster the characters that do work... and help paper over the ones that are so thin the’yd fall down a grate...

Our Heroes, Villains and Annoying Middle Aged Guys:

Yeahhhh character is hit and miss here. Some are rather strong, others are the bare basics for the character their adapting and most are just to serve the plot but some work some don’t,  So let’s talk about it starting with our boys:

Raph is the most fleshed out of the turtles, being the main focus of the first 2/3 of the film, and having his anger be part of what SHOULD be a character arc, learning to temper it. And while granted MOST TMNT properties do this, to the point that Rise Raph is so loveable in part because his boisterous bruiser big bro attitude is a refreshing break from the usual grumpus we get. But at the time this hadn’t been done in every version but the 87 cartoon, so exploring it was valid.. but despite saying this should be a thing htey just forget about it and the most plot relevance he gets is going thorugh a window. He dosen’t really get a resolution.. his arc just kind of stops dead for the final half and it’s one of the film’s weaker points, one I only just now noticed on this rewatch. He’s still the most entertaining. 

Leo is the weakest of the turtles. He really lacks a personality here mostly just being leader and while his spirtual side is touched on, it’s  mostly a plot device. He’s just kinda the leader because he was in the comics to the point Partners in Cryme called Raph the leader. His role in getting taken out by the foot was taken by Raph, so he just has.. nothing to do for most of the film other than gripe at raph ocasionally and say orders. He’s probably the worst Leo i’ve seen outside of Next Mutation. I prefice that because after watching Phelous’ review it’s VERY clear those four are the worst versions of the characters, and no personality is still better than either having your team do nothing or yelling at them as your personality. I chalk this up to the Mirage Leo, and the mirage turtles to a poit being kind of bland. Not TERRIBLE characters, especially for the time, but not nearly as fleshed out or individualized as they woudl be in other adpatations, and with most traits LEo DID have, like his badassery flat out gone, he’s just.. nothing here. 

Mikey and Donnie are a double act here with both sharing a brain. Interestingly instead of his normal genius character, Donnie is Mikey’s best friend and the two simply trade jokes and schtick together. The two are interchangable.. but easily the best part of the film and a lot of the most memorable gags and lines, from Ninja Kick the Damn Rabbit! to “Do you like Penicllin on your pizza”, are from them. Thier there almost entirely as comic relief but it works, with both clealry being more modled ont he 87 cartoon turtles, a move that helps lighten the mood in darker moments. Their just genuinely charming and it’s intresting to see such a diffrent version of Donnie, and other incarnations, specifically the 2003 and Rise versions, would retain the sarcastic edge. 

Splinter is splinter. That’s about it, he’s peformed well and the puppet is amazing but he gets kidnapped a half an hour in and outside of influcencing Denny, more on that in a moment, and finishing Shredder he dosen’t do much but spout exposition. He’s not bad or anything, but he’s essentially a rodent shaped plot device. He was also puppeted by Kevin CLash, aka the guy who does Elmo. So there you go. 

April on the other hand.. is truly excellent. This might be my faviorite April. Judith’s april nicely blends the cartoon and mirage versions: She has the cartoons energy and job, but the comics sheer will and casual nature. Judith just oozes personality and her April is just a joy to watch, from her breezy chemistry filled interactions with the guys to her confrntation with Chief Sterns, knowing she’ll get thrown out by the asshole. She’s confident, and even when afraid dosen’t back down to her attackers and even helps out during the sewer ambush. I mean it’s a pot on the head but still it’s neat. She’s easily the best part of the flim and the most fleshed out of the cast. The worst I can say is they kinda shove her store from the comics, Second Time Around, in there for no other reason than it was in the comics: It dosen’t come up until it’s needed for the foot’s assault on her place. But overall.. she’s just fantastic to watch. 

Speaking of fantastic to watch, Elias Koteas is fantastic as Casey. Seriously he’s only second to the 2003 version in my eyes, getting the concept of a testorone filled average guy who decided to just go out and hit people with sports equipment after watching too much A-Team.. I mean that part of it’s not in this version but it’s implied, just right. Like judith, Elias is just really funny to watch and his big scenes, showing up just in time during the foot assault on april’s place and his fight with Tatsu are some of the best parts of the film, the former taken directly from the comics. This version isn’t without problems: His friendship with Raph, his most endearing aspect and one that has been carried throughout eveyr version Casey’s important, with the only exception so far being rise and we have a movie to fix that, is absent here. HE does save the guy, but they don’t really bond or anything. In fact he disappears for about half an hour after his big fight with Raph. But... again he’s just so damn entertaining, down to his JOSEEEEEEEEEEE Conseco bats (There was a two for one sale!).

Shredder is just a LITTLE better than splinter, if only because his actor projects a true aura of menace and I feel this version had some influence on the pants crappingly terrifying 2003 version. And the idea of the foot recurting teenagers like I said is a good one: He gives them home and a cause, they give him plausably deniable backup. And his fight with the boys in the climax is really awesome... the conclusion sucks but otherwise h’es okay. Not the deepest villian, but he has enough presence to be enjoyable.

His right hand man Tatsu, whose been adapted ocasionally since this and reimaigned as Natsu in the IDW comics, a female version, is also fine. He’s your standard grimacing goon but has enough presence to work. 

So that brings us to the penningtons. Charles, april’s boss at the station and his son Danny who’s joined the foot as he feels his dad dosen’t love him. Charles..is about as interesting and likeable as a dog turd and is the worst aspect of the film. No debate there, he just sucks. He sucks so hard he’s classified as a black hole.  The film wants you to see him as a put upon wokring dad whose frustrated with his son’s increased moodiness, skipping school and crminal undertakings and just wants to help him and loves him deep down. The problem is his actor’s delivery instead of concerned.. is just pissed. He just seems pissy and upset about the whole thing and comes off like he’s only mad about Danny doing this because he’s embarassing him and not because you know, it’s bad. When confronting Danny about stealing, he dosen’t consider MAYBE he’s part of a gang or needs help, but just wonders “Why are you stealing when I give you stuff”. Because, Dipshit, sometimes kids do crimes not because they need the stuff but because they WANT to, and because they want to act the fuck out. 

The most he does for the kid is agree to try and get April to back off the police when Cheif Sterns offers to let Danny go and not put him on record in exchange for it. The problem.. is this makes him even MORE unsympathetic. While I do get wanting to help your child, I do and it’s a sucky position... he again should be sympathetic.. but he handles the thing so badly it sucks. He just tells april to ease off, with no reason given, then fires her when she SHOCKINGLY dosen’t give up taking the guy whose refusing to take her hard work seriously or actually solve the crime wave problem to task for his shitty behavior as ANY person facing a shitty, corrput cop would. She just wants to hold him acountable and get him to actually do something. He clearly knows her on a personal level too as he talks about his issues with his son freely with her, something you don’t do with an employee unless their also a friend on some level. 

He could have TOLD april what was going on. She’d be furious at Stern’s naked corrpution and prioritizing shutting her up over actually solving crimes.. and thus put at least some of that energy into shutting him down or finding a way around it, going to the papers or something like that. Even in 1990 pre-internet, there were ways to get around Sterns blackmail and expose him so someone who’d actually do the job could get the job. Instead he just comes off as a selfish coward who rather than try and fight the guy blatantly abusing his power and using Charles own son as  barganing chip, goes along with it because it’s the easier option to simply bow to him instead of TRY and stop this. And it’s not like he’s even going after a beloved public figure or someone who could hide behind his rep: Sterns was blatantly failing a crime wave, April had called him out on his failrues and coverups multiple times. The public was against sterns.. finding out he tried to blackmail the media into shutting up about him would PROBABLY end him... I only say probably not because the public wouldn’t skewer him, but because police tend to escape consequences for blatantly murdering someone on a daily basis and Andrew Cumo is STILl mayor over in new york, the same city this movie takes place, 31 years later, depsite EVERYONE asking him to resign over a long history of sexual harassment and a more recent but still horrible history of hiding death numbers. I don’t doubt people being stupid enough to ignore this or the bilaws with cops being stacked enough for him to get away with it, but just because someone gets away with a crime dosen’t mean you shoudln’t try and go after them in the first place. Fuck. Charles. Pennington. 

Danny on the other hand is FAR more interesting and I think gets way too much flack when it comes to this subplot. Unlike his dad, whose dead weight, Danny is intresting: He provides a POV character for the foot’s MO in the film of taking in wayward teens, and his character arc is pretty engaging, slowly realizing the foot dosen’t care and that hte turtles are the good guys. HIs actor does a great job and while not the biggest presence, he’s not a bad addition to clan hamaoto and I wish other adaptations would find a way to use him. The pull between doing the right thing and his found family is a good struggle. My only real issue with his plot is the moviies flawed aseop about family. It tries to contrast shredder and his using the kids blatnatly with Splinter and Charles really loving their sons. And it works with Splinter and the kids because despite being a tad strict, Splinter clearly loves his sons and works with them to help them. The problem is ENTIRELY with Charles and Danny. As I said Charles love comes off as transasctional: He either thinks he can buy it or just expects it because he shot a bunch of goop into Danny’s mom after two minutes of disapointment. It dosen’t work with them because neither option is good for Danny. His father is neglectful, chooses throwing his jounralistic integrity out the window over talking to his son or his best friend about another way, and abrasive. Danny is no saint, he does do crimes, but it’s clearly a result of a shitty upbringing and the shredder and co actually offeirng him the love he desperatly craves. Danny goes to the foot because his dad is bad at his job but the film never adresses that and just expects Danny to go back to his dad because the plot says so. Danny would HONESTLY be better off with Splinter. No really. Sure he’d have to live in the sewers.. but he did so for a few weeks in the course of the movie. He’s fine down there. Splitner actually cares about him and took an intrest to him and knows how to raise a child. Let him become the fifth turtle. An aseop about family is not a bad thing: Loaded subject that it can be given how many outright abusive families exist, i’m one of the lucky ones who dosen’t have that issue, family is an important thing and can be a source of comfort and support. But this film tells you you should love and respect someone who does not love, respect or value you because he spent a minute in your mom’s vagina and that’s not how family should work and is outright dangerous to kids in an abusive situation. Love the film otherwise but fuck this aseop skyhigh. 

Final thoughts:

Overall though.. the film is bodacious. It’s funny, well paced, has an awesome cast, and outside of a certain bald asswipe... it’s a really good superhero film. Is it the best i’ve seen? Nope. Not even close and character wise most of them are as thin as a wet paper bag covered in ranch dressing. But it’s still a fun as hell with awesome corepgraphy, a killer soundtrack, seriously the soundtrack is damn excellent and only didn’t get it’s own section because I didn’t have enough to say and some of the best effects work i’ve seen in a film in the turtle suits. If you haven’t seen it I urge you to check it out: it’s a breezy 90 minutes, it’s on hbo max and it’s a shell of a time. Will I do the next film? 

We’ll see how this one does like wise and such, but I will be doing the rise film whenever it comes out this year. So look for that and keep possesing turtle power my dudes. If you liked this review subscirbe for more, join my patreon to keep this blog a chugging, comission a review if you have more turtle stuff you want me to cover, and comment on this. What do you think of the movie, what are your thoughts on the review, what can I do better, what other turtle stuff would you like me to cover/ Let me know and i’ll see you at hte next rainbow. 

[thecrownnet]

October 3, 2020

Series four of The Crown takes on Princess Diana: exclusive pictures and interviews Charles has found a wife, Andy’s got a racy new girlfriend and Thatcher’s coming for tea... Megan Agnew gets an exclusive tour behind the scenes of the most wild and lavish series yet

Lasers. That’s what helped Emma Corrin understand Princess Diana in the latest series of The Crown. When the cameras were rolling, she imagined that lasers were pointing at her, as if she were in a spy film or a bank heist drama. It was her way of imagining hundreds of people staring right at her. Lasers helped her with the iconic Diana head tilt. She pretended she was shying away from them.

Corrin could also draw on her own trajectory as a 24-year-old actress. Before landing her part in The Crown, she was an unknown. Suddenly “there’s a huge amount of pressure”, she says.

When I visit the set at Winchester Cathedral, which is pretending to be St Paul’s, the paparazzi arrive to catch Corrin pretending to be Diana. She’s dressed in a replica of the outfit they papped at the actual royal wedding rehearsal almost 40 years ago. Every time she moves between buildings and trailers, Corrin has to be shielded with umbrellas. Life imitates art imitates life.

Almost every person Corrin has spoken to since getting the role has their own “Diana moment” — they might once have waved at her car in the street, been a pupil at a school she visited or knew someone who sat next to her at a dinner. Diana was one of the first celebrities to whom people laid claim. “Everyone has this ownership,” says Corrin. She was, and still is, the People’s Princess. But Corrin is trying not to think too much about it. Public expectation has been “overwhelming since the beginning”, she says. She wants to do Diana “proud”. “I know that’s strange and cheesy, but I feel like I know her.”

Emma Corrin as Princess Diana/ NETFLIX

The first television series of The Crown, which aired in 2016, was at the time the most expensive in history. Each series since has been estimated to have cost upwards of £50 million. The first two covered the first decade of Elizabeth II’s rule to wide acclaim, but series three — in which Her Majesty Claire Foy was succeeded by Olivia Colman — had mixed reviews. “The jewel in Netflix’s tiara has lost its shine,” said one. It was “okay”, said another.

Now, with series four’s reported £100 million budget eclipsing the Queen’s own sovereign grant last year of £82.2 million, The Crown is barrelling straight into the Eighties era of celebrity glamour and modern party politics grit. Peter Morgan, the show’s creator, is taking on two of the most controversial public figures of the past 50 years: Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher. “The word ‘iconic’ is overused, but in the case of these two women quite justified,” Morgan says. Both have passionate fans and detractors. “Writing them was a bit of a high-wire act, but it was exhilarating.”

We meet Diana as a teenager, scampering around her huge family home in Northamptonshire. She is young and apologetic. The Prince of Wales, at that time dating her eldest sister, is rather distracted. A number of years later, Diana is leaving her relatively modest flat in Earls Court and her job as a nursery school assistant to move into Clarence House — but finds herself in solitude. Bored and lonely, 19-year-old Diana rollerskates down corridors to Duran Duran and sits all by herself in her chamber. One night, after finding out about Prince Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, she gorges on puddings and makes herself vomit them back up.

Behind the scenes: the latest series of The Crown/ NETFLIX

*Spoilers*

It is a dark moment that Corrin wanted to get right. She listened to real-life accounts of people who had suffered from bulimia and talked with experts from the eating disorder charity Beat. Diana herself said that it was the most “discreet” way of harming herself: “Everyone in the family knew about the bulimia,” she said in recordings from the 1990s later made into a Channel 4 documentary.

“Drawing on my experience,” says Corrin, “not that I’ve experienced that kind of self-harm, but mental health in general, it can lead you down a very dark path when you’re struggling to cope, when things feel out of control. Diana very much doesn’t have the love and comfort and attention she needs from the man she loves or the family, who aren’t really acting as a family to her. There is a build-up of emotion she can’t deal with and making herself sick is a way of taking back control.”

When Josh O’Connor, who plays the Prince of Wales, first read the script for this series he thought: “Oh God, how can Charles be like that to Diana? But he feels wronged. He feels like she has an addiction to the spotlight,” he says. “I have to feel sympathy for him in that world. This is a family who have an intense inability to be emotional and he has inherited that awkwardness. In this series there’s an awful lot of Charles trying to explain himself and not being allowed to. He’s trying to say that if he can be with Camilla, then at least two of the three people can be happy. As it is, there’s three miserable people.”

The Crown works differently to other shows in that the “writers’ room” is not made up of writers but researchers, who constantly feed back to Morgan, the king of The Crown. It means that for each word eventually spoken on film, there are pages and pages of briefing notes. Annie Sulzberger, head of research, started this series by hiring a young team. “I wanted people who did not grow up believing one or the other [Diana and Thatcher],” she says. “You have to be curious enough and ignorant enough, I suppose, to write the kind of work we need.”

This series will span the Thatcher years — 1979 to 1990 — and will include the assassination of Charles’s great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, by the IRA, Charles and Diana’s wedding, and the Falklands War. Once the team has laid out a timeline, Morgan picks out the events he wants to feature. The research team starts to hone in on each, getting increasingly “micro” in their investigations. In the making of this series, one of the team spent two weeks researching the label on a bottle of wine from which a character briefly swigs.

Dress rehearsal: Josh O’Connor and Emma Corrin act out Charles and Diana’s wedding run-through/ NETFLIX

As the show has progressed, the fact-checking work has multiplied, thanks to the tabloid journalism of the 1980s. “It’s not just about words being printed,” Sulzberger says, “but who wrote it. Diana will become very close with a journalist called Richard Kay and feed him information, and Charles’s team will do the same. So you need to start unpicking the biographies of all the writers in order to know that what you’re doing has some objectivity.”

Did the team speak to any of Diana’s family or friends? “No.” Do the producers give any material to the Palace to see beforehand? “No. We have no connection to them that would result in editorial shifts. These are real people, these are real stories and we are filling in the moments that aren’t recorded — private conversations, moments of reflection, philosophical moments.”

When I ask Morgan if it’s true that he meets high-ranking courtiers four times a year, he is keen to clear up that he doesn’t. “I have never had any discussions with anyone actively working at the Palace,” he says. “The two worlds, the royal household and The Crown, exist in a world of mutual deniability, which I’m sure is every bit as important to them as it is to us.”

Corrin, though, did speak to Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary, who appears as a fictionalised character in this series. “I got a sense of her joy from him,” Corrin says. “He said she was so naturally happy. When she joined the royal family, she had come from living with flatmates in Earls Court and she was a very normal girl. Patrick said she was still full of that girlish silliness, very down to earth.”

The couple themselves at the real thing in 1981 MIKE LLOYD/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX

The executive producer Suzanne Mackie says that “particularly now” The Crown team feels a sense of responsibility “to living people, people’s children, people’s parents. Obviously what we don’t do is engage on a fact level with the royal family. We have a tacit understanding that they need distance from us and we need distance from them.”

It is a cold day in January and I am watching Charles and Diana’s wedding rehearsal in Winchester. About 75 per cent of the show is filmed on location around the world, over the course of seven months. The rest is filmed at the show’s base, Elstree Studios, just north of London.

Today in Winchester Cathedral there is a crew of 78 and a cast of almost 200. The sight is as epic as the show’s budget would suggest. Between takes, Corrin sits on the stone steps by the altar, scrolling on her iPhone with one hand and biting her fingernails on the other. Even before the clapperboard snaps shut, the resemblance between her and the princess is uncanny.

Sidonie Roberts, head buyer and assistant costume designer, has a timeline of photos of Diana covering the wall of her studio at Elstree. Roberts is devoted to the cause. She travels to Paris to buy buttons from the same shop the Queen’s dressmaker uses (it sells more than 30,000 types of button) and to Soho to rummage in basements for fabric. Last year she was in a Bangladeshi fabric shop in Brick Lane, east London, when she saw a roll of material right on the very top shelf. “It was still in its plastic, but I just knew — that’s Diana’s colour,” Roberts says. She got a ladder, climbed to the top, pulled down the fabric and bought it for £3.50 a metre. When Roberts got back to the studio at Elstree, she unrolled it and saw a stamp at the bottom: “The Lady Diana Collection, made in Japan.” Roberts did some research. It was real silk, from a collection made in the princess’s honour.

In the corner of the studio an assistant is gluing tiny pearls to Diana’s flat wedding shoes. She has been decorating them, exactly like the originals, for a day and a half. “We’ve had a long conversation about the size of those pearls,” says Roberts. David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who designed Diana’s original wedding dress, donated patterns to the show, which were used to make the new version. With its 25ft train, it took ten people to get Corrin into the dress. In the show it is seen in full, and only from behind, for no more than 15 seconds.

Paying their respects: Olivia Colman as the Queen and the rest of the royal family at the funeral of Lord Mountbatten/ NETFLIX

Corrin is masterful at inhabiting Diana’s coyness — hunching her shoulders towards her ears as she walks, the smirk, her intonation. Diana’s voice was the “polar opposite” of the royals’, says William Conacher, The Crown’s dialect coach. “She moved her jaw twice as much, so her voice was more forward, open, easier to access, and I don’t think it’s especially revelatory to suggest accessibility was her shtick,” he says. “She used a minor key that made her seem vulnerable. Despite the Queen’s and Prince Charles’s accents being ‘stiffer’ to listen to, I think it comes entirely naturally, whereas I find Diana’s voice more studied. I think she spoke to have an effect.”

What sort of research did Colman do for series four’s Queen? “Yeah, I don’t do research,” she says when we speak on the phone in the summer. “The research team on The Crown is a bit like the British Library. It’s extraordinary, and when they kick in, your computer can’t really cope with the amount of stuff they send you.” Was there something in particular that the team sent her that made things click? “No.” There is a longish silence. It seems Colman’s royal duty is waning. “They’ve got every image and film of the Queen ever made. I’ve also got three kids, so I can’t spend all my time going through all of it.”

As she wraps up a second series of The Crown — Imelda Staunton will take over for five and six — Colman knows that she would “really not like” to have the Queen’s job. “There are very few people who are forced into a job and have no choice about it,” she says. “She’s done it with dignity, for decades, bless her. It’s amazing.”

The funeral of Lord Mountbatten took place in 1979 BENTLEY ARCHIVE/POPPERFOTO/GETTY

If there were rumours of Elizabeth II being unhappy about the last series of The Crown, I can’t imagine she’ll be too chuffed about this one. Series four’s Queen is colder and more distant, and the effects of her duty on her children more obvious: Charles is heavy with melancholy, Anne feels unheard, Edward is portrayed as a spoilt bully and Andrew is dangerously arrogant.

Speaking of Andrew, there is a subtle nod towards recent events. At one point the prince discusses a young American actress he is dating. The actress had recently played a 17-year-old who must entertain several “old predators who seduce the vulnerable, helpless young Emily”. The real prince dated the actress Koo Stark in 1981, who had starred in The Awakening of Emily, which had a near-identical plot.

In series four, the pivotal relationship between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher begins well. They are respectful of one another as no-nonsense working mothers, but tensions arise — not least, over tea etiquette at Balmoral.

In preparation for her role as the Iron Lady, Gillian Anderson met Charles Moore, Thatcher’s biographer, as well as secretaries who worked with her. “The only way for me to go about sitting inside of her was to find the reason behind her actions — growing up, what she learnt from her father, how much she truly believed that she was the answer and as long as we all took the sour medicine now we’d be able to turn around this country, completely shutting her eyes to the people that she was turning out on the street.”

Anderson eventually “settled into” the body of Thatcher. “She walked very fast, always up ahead,” Anderson says. “She would power forward in front of presidents. With [Ronald] Reagan she would supposedly be alongside him, but was walking ahead. Always walking ahead of [husband] Denis, telling him to catch up.”

Thatcher’s barnet also features. In one scene she spends an asphyxiating four seconds hairspraying it in preparation for a showdown with the Queen. The hairdo took endless camera tests before Morgan was happy with it. “It essentially meant destroying it so it had an overprocessed ‘frothy’ quality,” says the hair and make-up designer Cate Hall. “To treat a wig so badly was against all of our instincts — they’re so expensive — but I’m grateful now that we went through the process with Peter, with him saying no, more, it’s not right, try again.”

Clash of the titans: Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson, is filmed meeting the Queen, played by Olivia Colman, in a memorable scene from series four/ NETFLIX

Series five will have a whole new cast. Colman says she is “not the sort of person who keeps the shoes of a character they played 20 years ago”. But Helena Bonham Carter is going to miss Princess Margaret. “She does pop out [in everyday life],” she says. “The other day I was at some public event and there was the normal scramble of people and I just told them, ‘No, shut up.’ The finger came out, which is very her, and I said, ‘Shut up and wait. Don’t get hysterical.’ So I’ve got the bossy side of her.”

Originally Morgan said there would be two more series after this one. Then he changed his mind, describing series five as “the perfect time and place to stop”. Now there are two more again (“To do justice to the richness and complexity of the story,” he reneged). The show is creeping closer to the modern day. It is now said to be ending in the 2000s, spanning, perhaps, Charles and Diana’s divorce, the deaths of Diana, Margaret and the Queen Mother, the marriage of Charles and Camilla, and the teenage and twentysomething princes. “I want to end it close enough to present day to feel that we have completed a long journey and distant enough to feel historical,” says Morgan. “I have a specific incident in mind, but until I’ve actually written it and seen if it works, I can’t commit to discussing it.”

On set with Mackie, I mention Harry and Meghan. “Too often,” the couple posted on their Instagram page that month, “we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring.” Is it possible, I ask Mackie, for the royal family to humanise themselves while still justifying their existence as something mightier, more important, regal? “That’s where you go wrong, as a public figure, letting light in on the magic, especially as a monarch,” she replies. “You have to be an ideal. After years and years of that subjugation of self in order to put duty first, you, the essence of you, is buried somewhere. The Queen is a tiny little person inside many, many Russian dolls.”

Series four of The Crown is available on Netflix from November 15

[webuyhousesfortworth]

Sell Your House Fast In Fort Worth – Texas Quick Close, Cash In Your Pocket!

How Do I Sell My House Fast in Fort Worth, Texas We Buy Houses Fort Worth, TX. Hi guys, my name is Shannon I with Southern hills and we are a Mesquite real estate investment firm in North Texas, we buy properties all throughout the DFW Metroplex, and we’re looking for more in your area so if you have a property that you have considered selling whether it’s to an investor or listing it on the market with a Fort Worth realtor. We would love to talk more with you about it, we can provide you with a fair cash offer with a closing date of your choice. And with the property as-is meaning, you don’t have to make any repairs updates, or even clean it up. So give us a call or fill in the form today if you have any Mesquite properties that you’re looking to Sell your Fort Worth House Fast For Cash.

A little more about Southern Hills Home Buyers … We are local to the Dallas Fort-Worth metroplex and are family owned and operated. We pride ourselves on our heartfelt desire to help homeowners sell their homes, vacant lots, and other real estate property easily and hassle-free. We have over 7 years of real estate experience in Fort Worth and have seen just about any situation or hurdle come up in the sales process. We are creative and can work through any issue that arises.

If you have a Fort Worth home, vacant lot, or other real estate property you’re considering selling – but aren’t sure you want to sell it through the standard sales process with a real estate agent – fill out the form below and we would love to talk more with you about your property! We Buy Houses Fort Worth Houses Fast For Cash!

Thanks for stopping by! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any interest in selling Fort Worth Houses and Property you own.

We Buy Houses in Fort Worth, TX Many of you may have seen signs like “We buy houses Fort Worth” around town. If you are like most sellers in Dallas, this may be your first experience dealing with a real estate investor. If so, you have come to the right place. There are many benefits to selling your house to a cash buyer like Southern Hills. Here are some of the many benefits of selling your house to a cash home buyerMesquite.

Sell My House Fast Fort Worth Texas A cash buyer will buy your Fort Worth house as-is because he plans to flip the house by making some basic upgrades to the property. You don’t have to repair the house when selling to a cash buyer like us. We buy your house in the same condition it is. You will save a lot of money when you decide to sell the property to a Fort Worth cash buyer.

Selling a Fort Worth house the traditional way is a lengthy process. You need to renovate the house, find a Fort Worth real estate agent, list the property with the agent, allow buyers to inspect the house, and wait until the potential buyer gets the mortgage. The entire process may take between 3-6 months depending on the real estate market in your area. But a Fort Worth cash buyer like Southern Hills is willing to pay immediate cash for your house. We will give you an irresistible offer and close the sale within 2-7 days of your accepting our offer. That’s why you need to sell your house to a Fort Worth cash buyer like us.

You can negotiate with a cash buyer so that you don’t have to move out of the house before you sell it. You don’t need to make the house “show ready” for months on end until you find the right buyer for the property. You don’t have to move out of the house until you sign the agreement when selling it to a cash buyer like us. That’s why you need to sell your house to a cash buyer like Southern Hills Property. We buy houses fast in Fort Worth

Cash Home Buyer Fort Worth We know how important it is to sell your Fort Worth house fast when you are facing a divorce, foreclosure, liens, or need urgent cash for whatever reason. You cannot wait for months under such circumstances. You need a cash buyer who will pay immediate cash for your property. That’s where a cash buying company like us comes in handy. We buy Fort Worth houses fast and close the sale within 2-7 days depending on your requirements. We will complete all the paperwork and let you relax and plan your next move when you sell the property to us. You won’t have to pay any commission to us when you sell the house to us. That’s why you need to call one of our real estate specialists in Dallas to sell your home fast.

If you want to sell your house fast, call us today because we buy houses in Fort Worth!

We Buy Houses in Fort Worth, Texas More Info About Fort Worth, Texas The city of Fort Worth was established in 1849 as an army outpost on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River. Fort Worth has historically been a center of the Texas Longhorn cattle trade. It still embraces its Western heritage and traditional architecture and design.USS Fort Worth (LCS-3) is the first ship of the United States Navy named after the city. Although considered by some to be a satellite city due to its proximity to Dallas, which has held a population majority since the 1950s, Fort Worth has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States in recent years, particularly in the 21st century, and has more than doubled its population since 2000.

Fort Worth is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Texas and the 13th-largest city in the United States. It is the county seat of Tarrant County, covering nearly 350 square miles (910 km2) into three other counties: Denton, Parker, and Wise. According to the 2019 census estimates, Fort Worth’s population was 909,585. Fort Worth is the second-largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area, which is the fourth-most populous metropolitan area in the United States.

Real Estate Stats For Fort Worth, TX We Buy Houses Fort Worth Regularly so have a grasp of the real estate marketing in the area here are some of the stats. Fort Worth is one of the largest cities in Dallas. It has a population of approximately 895,008 people. There are 150 constituent neighborhoods, making it the fifth-largest community in Dallas.

Best neighborhoods and schools in Fort Worth

The most expensive neighborhoods in Fort Worth.

   • Texas Christian U

   • The College of Saint Thomas More

   • White Settlement Rd

   • U of North Texas Health Science Center

   • Bellaire Dr S

   • Byers Ave

   • W Vickery Blvd

Given below is a list of schools that Fort Worth-residents consider are the best:

   • Bishop Elementary School

   • Charles Baxter J H School

   • Dan Powell Int School

   • Everman Academy H S School

   • E Ray Elementary School

   • John And Polly Townley Elementary School

   • Roy Johnson Sixth Grade Campus School

   • Everman H S School

Real estate in Fort Worth

According to the real estate stats Fort Worth, there are 291,739 houses and apartments. Its median cost of a single-family detached home is $187,961. You will find both renters and owners here. In fact, renters constitute 43.90% and owners comprise 56.10%. There are various types of properties available in Fort Worth, such as single-family detached homes, row houses, and small apartment buildings. Here is a breakdown of the percentages of these houses that you will find in this city:

   • Single-family detached homes – 66.94%

   • High rise apartments – 23.35%

   • Smart apartment buildings – 4.74%

   • Row houses – 3.25%

Some of the houses built here go back to 1939. There are both new and second-hand houses available for sale. You can buy one depending on your budget and location of the house.

Home appreciation rate in Fort Worth

The real estate stats Fort Worth suggest that the city saw a 72.30% appreciation rate in the last 10 years. This means there was a 5.59% average annual rate, making Fort Worth one of the cities with the highest appreciation rate in the US.

[nowthisnews]

Coronavirus money tips

The coronavirus pandemic has totally upended normal life, and it’s probably coming for your wallet.

Despite the stressful uncertainty, there are some ways you can take control of your finances. Companies, landlords, and the government have introduced relief measures that might apply to you. 

Here are some answers to common questions based on conversations with financial experts on how to manage your money during the coronavirus outbreak.

How much am I actually spending?

You’ve probably developed feelings about budgeting. But if you wind up in a situation where you need to suddenly cut costs, you should know how much you’re regularly spending. Given you’ve probably been ordered to stay at home — and tons of scheduled events have been canceled — your spending habits have also likely changed. “This is a really good time for anybody, no matter what their age is, to take stock of what they currently have and how they spend,” Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, certified financial planner and president of the Charles Schwab Foundation, told NowThis.

To get organized, you can start by creating a “net worth statement” — or basically adding up the costs of essentials (such as food, housing, utilities, and health care) while factoring in any existing debt and savings. You might also take a close look at how you can cut down discretionary spending, whether it’s a subscription, membership, or other recurring cost.

“Everyone at this point has to make some sacrifices. If you look at what medical professionals have to deal with every day — and people who are delivering and people at the grocery stores, they’re dealing with their lives and their health,” Pari Hashemi Magura, a financial adviser at Wells Fargo in Philadelphia, told NowThis. “If you need to make a sacrifice to cut out your television bill for a few months, that might not be the end of the world.” If you’re completely new to the process, people love apps like Mint or Digit, which can help track major categories you’re spending. You can also check your most recent credit statement for a log of your transactions, and draw some takeaways there.

I have absolutely no savings. Am I screwed?

While advisors will recommend that you have some cash on hand to stave off any unexpected hardship, you may very well not. Even in extraordinary circumstances, you can look to cut areas  of your budget or develop a habit of saving some portion of any income you still have. Automating those deposits to a separate bank or savings account (consider one with a high-yield interest rate) can also help.  “Even if it’s $20 a month, gradually building that up will help you over time,” Hashemi Magura said. “Especially now that you’re not spending as much, you’re not going out to eat, you’re not traveling.”

Should I pay my rent?

If you have the money to pay your rent, advisors have recommended that you do it. If you don’t, some states have ordered that landlords can’t evict tenants who miss rent for a certain period of time; in New York, such a moratorium applies for at least April and May. If you feel uncertain about making rent in any given month, especially if it’s related to job loss, you should absolutely reach out to your landlord directly. Landlords and utility companies have helped tenants defer payments for the short-term (which doesn’t mean that you won’t have to make up those balances eventually).

“Right now organizations that you owe money to understand this current situation and are open to helping individuals navigate payments through this time,” Schwab-Pomerantz said. “It doesn’t behoove a landlord to kick people out right now. It’s not in their best interest.” But still, you should be mindful that not all landlords can afford to go without a rent payment at this time. If you come upon extra money through either unemployment or the government stimulus, Hashemi Magura recommends that you explore how to “divvy up that payment” across May and June for essential costs, including rent. If you’re facing a serious loss of income, advisors recommend you could also consider alternative housing options, whether it’s moving in with family members or seeking out additional roommates — but be sure that’s safe first.

Some entrepreneurs have also been looking for new ways to alleviate the burden of monthly rent. Ankur Jain, co-founder and chairman of Rhino, said he has been working with federal and state lawmakers to activate one solution: cover monthly rent with a security deposit that a landlord already has on hand. “Rent is the single biggest expense that most of us have every month,” Jain said. “If we don’t do something about it, almost every young person is going to fall into thousands of dollars in debt or potentially default on their lease.”

How do I address my credit card debt? Should I keep using it?

While advisors generally stress that you pay at least your minimum credit card payment to protect your credit score, that might be unrealistic during a crisis. Being proactive is your best protection. You should reach out to relevant creditors like your credit card company to flag that you’re worried about making your next bill, and see if you can come to a payment plan or get fees waived or interest lowered (and ensure that plan is in writing).

“Don't hide from creditors,” Schwab-Pomerantz. “Don’t wait until you think you’re headed for trouble. Be proactive and reach out to them because they can't help you if they don’t know.” If you can avoid using your credit card when you’re already in debt to pay for basic expenses, you should “Don’t live off of a credit card. You’re paying such a high interest rate,” Schwab-Pomerantz said. “It’ll put you more in a hole.”

If you can’t come to a healthy place of paying minimum or no monthly payments on your credit card for the short-term, you might also consider looking into a card that offers a 0% interest rate for at least a year. Federal regulators have pressured banks to be more lenient, and many banks are offering some waived penalties and fees on a case-by-case basis.  

What about my student loans? Should I invest now? How can I help others? Read more

follow @nowthisnews for daily news videos & more

[religioused]

Rubber Band Religion

by Gary Simpson

Year A - Sunday, March 29. 2020

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (KJV) The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.

3 And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

5 Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

7 So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.

9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

11 Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.

You may wonder why I am delving into the Hebrew Scriptures. We are in Lent in the liturgical year, and, as a province, as a church we are going through a dry-bones Lenten season. There are also members of our congregation who are going through a personal dry-bones Lenten season. I think Ezekiel speaks to the personal, church and provincial dry-bones season. This passage gives hope. Ezekiel’s vision “speaks to us of a God who can achieve the impossible.”[1]

Ezekiel is an excellent name for this book, because Ezekiel can be translated, “‘God will strengthen.’”[2] Ezekiel can be divided into four sections. This week’s passage comes from the part of Ezekiel that is about the restoration of ­Israel.[3]

I doubt that many people would disagree with those theologians who describe Ezekiel as a street preacher.[4] He may have functioned as a street preacher for 22 years in Babylon.[5] But Ezekiel was far more than just a street-preacher prophet. Ezekiel was both a priest and a prophet.[6] The transformation from priest to prophet is unusual in the Bible. The two roles, priest and prophet, in Biblical tradition are often “antagonistic.”[7]

Ezekiel was an influential personality in the Hebrew Scriptures. Charles Patterson describes him as “often been called the father of Judaism.” Patterson states that for several centuries Ezekiel’s influence on the development of Israel’s religion was “greater than that of any of the other prophets.”[8] In one of my commentaries, a page heading for chapters 25 to 48 is “The Father of Judaism.”[9] Ezekiel is recognized as a prophet by two world religions, Judaism and Christianity. The Christian and Jewish prophet might be the Ezekiel that Muslims also recognize.[10]

Perhaps, God chose a person who could be influential at a time when the children of Israel needed an influential voice to speak to community needs. Commentator Vernon McGee notes that Ezekiel “spoke in the darkest days of the nation.”[11]

The bones in Ezekiel’s vision might have looked like a war had taken place, a war that was so bad there were no survivors to bury the dead.[12] The bones in the deserted battlefield scene could represent both “the extent of the disaster” Israel experienced and the condition of the Jewish exiles.[13] The dead bones can represent those who are spiritually dry or spiritually dead and the dead bones can symbolize those who are “despondent and dejected,” because they have lost hope.[14] Jeremiah’s Jewish contemporaries may have viewed the “land of their captivity as their ‘graves.’”[15]

The historical setting places this story during a time after the children of Israel were defeated. Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, and the people were exiled in 586 BCE.[16] Many Jewish people were scattered from Israel, living in exile. “The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple brought a profound crisis of faith.”[17] The dominant non-Jewish culture threatened Jewish people with assimilation and an “identity crisis.”[18] There could be a second reason why Jewish people had an identity crisis. Until the time of Ezekiel, the spiritual identity of Hebrew people was “linked intimately” to possessing the promised land.[19] Without a direct tie to their country, without having the promised land under their feet, the Hebrews may have felt their identity was extinguished.

In the book of Ezekiel, there is a strong sense that God poured out judgment on the children of Israel. And that God’s judgment was the reason why the children of Israel were in such a bad position. Judgments are also proclaimed against some of the neighboring kingdoms.[20] These neighboring nations are judged because they were “malicious neighbors,” who were “rejoicing over Israel’s misfortune” and were “hoping to profit” by gaining territory from Judah.[21] There is little room for people of faith to rub their hands together in glee when they see others experiencing a tragedy. Profiting from the misfortune of others can be an ethically dubious practice.

God asks, “Mortal, can these bones live?” God's question, “Can these bones live?” might have been a question on the minds of the Jewish people living in exile.[22] And Ezekiel answers, “O Lord God, you know.”[23] I like the way Peter Craigie, author of the Ezekiel volume of The Daily Study Bible, paraphrases the passage. He says Ezekiel’s response to God could mean, “You know the answer to that. Of course, they can’t live!”[24] For me, the dry-bones Lenten seasons of life are times when I want to paraphrase Ezekiel’s response to God, “You know the answer God. Of course, things will never be the same. Things will never be normal again. Dead bones can’t live again!”

Contributors to The Interpreter’s Bible Commentary ask who has not stood by the grave of hopes.[25] As a province, we stand at the grave of our dreams. The price of oil is down. Visions of prosperity, a big home, expensive luxury SUV automobiles, and all of the toys are gone. We are seeing government budget restraint, layoffs in the public sector and in non-profit service agencies. Those who lost jobs may find that our provincial dry-bones Lenten season may change their lives for many years. As a province, we are living through the dry-bones phase – economic stress and strains, and budgetary restraint. And now the world is going through a dry-bones Lenten season – with the worldwide pandemic. Many people are working from home, businesses are closed. There are times when challenging news comes in threes, and it can feel overwhelming.

2 Samuel Chapter 23 mentions that Benaiah killed a lion. [26] That might not impress you, but the lion was in a pit and it was a snowy day. We are not told much about the story, but I have visions of being in a pit, on a snowy day, standing on slick ground, and getting ready to fight with a lion. Some of us may feel that we are sharing a pit with a lion on a snowy day.

In our church, we are living through a dry-bones Lenten stage too. For some of us, the dry-bones experience started about a year and a half ago. A few members of our congregation have come through the dry-bones period. Still others may be living through our community Lenten experience for a few more weeks, for a few more months. I am not sure if there is a more appropriate verse for us to reflect on, especially during the liturgical cycle of Lent.

We do not know what the future holds for our church or for the province. We can be like the rubber band, always fighting to return to its original position. The stress on our lives can be overwhelming when we fight to be just as we have always been. Another option is for us to be more like water. In some respects, water represents resiliency better than the rubber band. Water forever remains water. The shape of the container may change, the volume may change, but water remains water, in the face of changes. The secret to resilience is to be true to ourselves, to be a people of faith, to reduce oppression and inequity, no matter what shape life circumstances give us. Some of us may long for our church to return to the days when we were one of the biggest churches in the city. After the Hebrews returned to the promised land, things did not look just exactly like they did before the war, before the people were carried off into captivity. Our church, when restored might look very different than what it looked like in sixty years ago.

Gaither Bailey was pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Palestine, Texas. He describes the dry bones periods of life as times when “we ask ourselves, ‘Will I ever be normal again? Will my life ever be the same?’” Bailey says these are times when, like Ezekiel, we face “devastation and doubt.”[27] The vision was intended to “cheer up” the captive Jewish people. [28] Ezekiel’s goal is to offer hope to the oppressed people. The hope that Ezekiel offers is that God will not condemn any person who turns to God, regardless of society’s mistakes, regardless of society’s sins.[29] And Ezekiel’s dream can still help give hope.

At rock-bottom, it feels like there is nowhere to go but up, no place to look but up. Ezekiel’s dream gives hope to those who are in rock-bottom places. Commentator Samuel Almada observes, “From the rock-bottom place, a new conscience begins to take root where the impossible is possible; dry bones revive, dispersion changes into community, weakness into strength and widespread pessimism into hope.”[30] Ezekiel’s vision is about a “God who can achieve the impossible.”[31] The dream of giving life to a pile of bones represents God doing what feels impossible to us. “God will see us through the valley of dry bones.”[32] God will see you through the dry valley of the dry bones of your dry-bones Lenten experience.

Notes

[1] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[2] Samuel Almada. “Ezekiel 1-39.” Global Bible Commentary. (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2004), 236.

[3] Merrill F. Unger. Unger’s Bible Handbook: An Essential Guide to Understanding the Bible. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1967), 364.

[4] Ezekiel is described as a street preacher in Bruce B. Barton, et al., eds. Life Application Study Bible. (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Pub., 2004), 1306.

[5] Barton, et al. (2004), 1306.

[6] Samuel Almada. “Ezekiel 1-39.” Global Bible Commentary. (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2004), 236.

[7] Almada. (2004), 236.

[8] Charles H. Patterson. CliffsNotes on the Old Testament. Kindle ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), ebook.

[9] William Neil. William Neil’s One Volume Bible Commentary. (London: Hodler and Stoughton, 1976), 267.

[10] “Prophet Ezekiel.” Muslim Prophets. n.d., 02 Mar 2020. <http://muslimprophets.com/prophet.php?pid=249>.

[11] J. Vernon McGee. Thru the Bible with J. Vernon McGee. Kindle ed. (Pasadena, California: Thru the Bible Radio, 1998), ebook.

[12] NIV Foundation Study Bible. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Pub., 2015), 920.

[13] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[14] NIV Foundation Study Bible. (2015), 920.

[15] A.R. Fausset. A Commentary Critical, Experimental, and Pratical on the Old and New Testaments. Vol. 2. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1995), 346.

[16] Almada. (2004), 236.

[17] Almada. (2004), 235.

[18] Almada. (2004), 235.

[19] Peter C. Craigie. The Daily Study Bible: Ezekiel. (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1983), 6.

[20] Almada refers us to Ezekiel Chapter 25. (2004), 236.

[21] Almada. (2004), 236.

[22] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 266.

[23] Ezekiel 37:3 (NRSV).

[24] Peter C. Craigie. The Daily Study Bible: Ezekiel. (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1983), 260.

[25] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[26] 2 Samuel 23:20.

[27] Gaither Bailey. “Dry Bones.” Sermon Central. 09 Apr 2011, 19 Feb 2020. <https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/dry-bones-gaither-bailey-sermon-on-affliction-155999?ref=SermonSerps>.

[28] A.R. Fausset. A Commentary Critical, Experimental, and Pratical on the Old and New Testaments. Vol. 2. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1995), 347.

[29] William Neil. William Neil’s One Volume Bible Commentary. (London: Hodler and Stoughton, 1976), 266.

[30] Almada. (2004), 243.

[31] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[32] Bailey. (2011). <https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/dry-bones-gaither-bailey-sermon-on-affliction-155999?ref=SermonSerps>.

[cptnsantiago]

take me home 

1/?

~ compulsive

read on ao3

Jake Peralta is a compulsive shopper.

From massage chairs to more massage chairs, if Jake sees something he wants, he gets it. This debt inducing habit lessens when he started dating Amy, but not even her rational thinking effect could stop him at times. Only two months into their relationship Jake had bought an actual lightsaber . Not the fake plastic ones for children, but the ones that look so real that even Amy geeked out a little when she saw it.

Marriage had brought this habit to almost a complete halt. With Amy’s master budgeting, Jake still had a little money to spend on whatever he wanted, but even he had just been putting it into savings for their future .

Their future involving a family, a new house for their family to grow one day. Amy couldn’t be more proud of how he had matured, still managing to keep the goofy personality that she fell in love with. She falls more in love with him every day, and she doesn’t want the feeling to ever go away.

So she thinks her heart might explode the day they figure out she’s pregnant. They had been trying for just under six months, and he had been so involved in her binders and her anxieties. He was there every step of the way, to listen to her fears and discussing the best positions for conceiving before making a very appropriate title of your sextape joke. When she realised they were out of pregnancy tests, he sprinted to the bodega and back in under ten minutes so they could know .

When the timer is up, he’s finally caught his breath but immediately loses it again when Amy is nodding her head frantically, a smile stretched on her face and fat tears falling down her cheeks. He spends some time with her crying on the bathroom floor before he’s rushing to get the pregnancy binder they had been working on together. So they spend the day reading the crap out of the binder, making doctors appointments, more research.

This is when Jake’s dangerous habit makes a comeback.

A bout of sickness had come over her in the late afternoon, leaving her exhausted beyond what she could possibly understand. Except she understood, because of the reading.

Amy last remembers resting her head on Jake’s lap, one of his hands stroking her hair while the other held his phone, still researching while a movie played in the background.

It’s dark outside when she awakes. Jake now has his laptop balanced on one leg while her head still rests on the other. Amy groans, burying her face in his stomach as she stretches her limbs out. “I don’t know if I like pregnancy.”

“It’s only been a day, Ames, give it a chance.” Jake teases, his spare hand moving back to stroke loose strands of hair out of her face. “Good morning, babe.”

“You feel this tired and nauseous for a day and see how you feel.” Amy sighs, a smile still unable to stay off her face at the feeling of his hands in her hair. “What time is it?”

“8:30?” Jake guesses, before looking at his screen and confirming it with a nod. “Yikes, I’ve been on Amazon for three hours.”

“I’ve been out for three hours ?” Amy gasps, “I haven’t napped this hard since I got the flu in college and had to ask for… an extension .”

Jake takes a moment to laugh at how upset she still was about extending a paper all those years ago. “Okay, nerd. You’ve actually been asleep for about four and a half hours.”

“Four and a half hours?” Jake flinches at her screech but quickly recovers. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“It’s been a big day. You needed it.” Jake shrugs with a smile, “Plus I tried. You were passed out . Almost took you to the hospital but your breathing was fine.”

“I love you, weirdo.” Amy kisses him quickly before looking at the laptop screen. “Jake-”

“Now before you say anything-”

“Jake, you have 27 things in your cart!”

“It’s all important, I promise!”

Amy snatches the laptop out of his grip, scrolling quickly through the contents of the list. All baby things. Mostly onesies, but also a few books, a rattle. Amy then looks at the onesies. Novelty ones, of course.

Dad’s a muggle, mam’s a witch.

I still live with my parents.

World’s most expensive alarm clock.

I pooped today!

Yippee ki-yay mother father

Those were her favourites. Amy can’t decide if she’s furious or overwhelmed by love for the worst compulsive shopper she’s met in her life.

“I was gonna get rid of most of them, but they’re all so cute, Ames!” Jake pleads, chewing slightly on the inside of his cheek. “I mean Yippee ki-yay mother father !? That might be the best thing ever.”

“I like the Harry Potter ones.” Amy mumbles, “Although you wouldn’t be a muggle, you’d be a wonderful wizard.”

“ Please , I could kick Harry’s ass any day.” Jake scoffs.

“Okay, sure , you could kick the chosen one’s ass.” Amy rolls her eyes affectionately, messing up his hair up slightly. “Anyway, we can’t get any of this.”

“ Amy. ”

“ Jacob. ”

“Pleeeeease!”

“Jake, you’re spiralling.” Amy says sternly, “We need to have our doctors appointment first. It could be a false positive, an ectopic pregnancy-”

“Amy, you know that won’t happen.” Jake closes the laptop and puts it on the coffee table so he can take her hands.

“It could.” Amy shrugs, “Look, I’m just being cautious. And even so, we’d make a registry so other people can buy us things.”

“Ohh, you’re so smart.” Jake laughs, happy to change subjects. “Let me just get the Die Hard and Harry Potter ones?”

“I don’t want to enable this compulsive shopping habit.” Amy tells him, “We’ll end up with seven different breast pumps.”

“We’re going to end up with seven different breast pumps because of Charles, you know that.” Amy snorts lightly at this, “Ames, I promise you aren’t enabling a habit. Just those two things.”

“Okay.” Amy picks up the laptop again happily, “Just these two things.”

~

Amy was foolish. She was a fool in love with a compulsive shopper.

To be fair, it could be much worse . The big important things, he leaves for the registry. But when it comes to clothes and books, he was out of control. Especially after they find out they’re having a girl.

Amy’s growing love for her husband overpowers her annoyance at the Amazon deliveries every other week. Jake almost always has a shopping tab open on his laptop and his work computer. She knows that Charles also enables it, makes it worse even.

But Jake agrees to run every purchase by her so he doesn’t get anything completely unnecessary. So arriving home early one afternoon she’s surprised (but completely not shocked at all) to see a package she doesn’t recognise in their mailbox. It’s not Amazon.

Strange.

So she makes her way upstairs, collapsing on the couch with her hand resting on her small bump and resting for a moment before picking up the package again. Ripping the package open, a quiet gasp leaves her mouth and she feels herself immediately tear up at the soft book in her hands.

Animal Crosswords.

On the back, the small description tells her the book contained mini crosswords to help toddlers learn their animals while having fun . At the bottom they advertise other books such as Colourful Crosswords and Shape Crosswords .

It was perfect. Amy didn’t bother to stop the tears as she flipped through the book.

One across, an animal that goes ‘oink’ . Four down, an animal that goes ‘baa’ .

Amy loves Jake, so much . Jake loves their kid, so much . She can barely comprehend every emotion she’s feeling, and it’s not long before she’s sobbing.

This was easily Jake’s best purchase. Everything he bought was less compulsive and more thoughtful. The massage chairs back when they weren’t together were still compulsive, but it had transformed. It transformed into thoughtful, wonderful, adorable purchases. Amy was so lucky, and so was their baby.

Amy calms down to soft hiccups by the time Jake walks through their front door a half hour later. His panic has him immediately on his knees next to her, wiping the dried tears off her cheeks and frantically asking if she was okay. This starts a fresh wave of tears, but she’s almost smiling and giggling which changes his concern to confusion.

Being the detective he is, he soon spots the book in her hands and groans, “Damn it, I was gonna surprise you with that. I know I didn’t approve it w-”

Amy interrupts him with a kiss, his cheeks and mouth soon soaked with the tears that just don’t stop coming . “I hate hormones.”

“They’re definitely weird.” Jake chuckles nervously, “Do you like it?”

“I love it.” Amy laughs, wiping her cheeks again. “Where did you find this?”

“Etsy .” Jake tells her, “Homemade crafts and shit, Rosa told me about it. I suspect she sells jewellery on there.”

“Oh definitely .” Amy agrees, “I’ve been looking for it for a year.”

“Anyway, I just got one for now because I wanted to know what you thought about it.” Jake’s hand moves to her stomach as he speaks. “I know it’s not very useful for her for a little while but she’s half you so she’s destined to be a bit nerdy like her mom.”

“I love it, Jake. It’s so thoughtful, that’s why I’m so emotional.” Amy runs her fingers through his hair, smiling again when he presses a kiss to the top of her stomach.

“Also hormones.” Jake teases, another kiss to the side of her belly where they could both feel her kicking. “I’m glad though, because I contacted the account about making a spanish version for her.”

Amy whimpers as she tries to stop more tears from falling. “Really?”  “Of course, it’s a great way to teach her I thought. And Rachel, the creator, agreed.”

“How l did I get such a perfect husband?” Amy drags him to eye level so she can kiss him softly. “And the perfect dad already, she’s not even born.”

Jake shrugs, poking her nose and her bump. “Being the perfect husband is easy. Because you deserve the world. Both of you. My girls.”

[amoralto]

The Lennons were still maintaining separate living quarters and separate interests when they heard the news, late that spring, of Paul McCartney’s arrest. Paul had been arrested for trying to smuggle marijuana into Japan while visiting there to perform in a concert tour. The illegal product had allegedly been discovered in his suitcase, and he was taken into custody immediately. His wife, Linda, and the rest of the company were allowed entrance without incident. Yoko worried that the news of Paul’s arrest might throw John back into the old depression. But when I talked to him over the phone one afternoon a few days after the incident, his voice held no depression, only righteous indignation and sympathy for Paul. “It’s lousy, Charles. Typical, but lousy. Some petty official probably needed a promotion and set Paul up to get it. Not that I have any great love for the man, you understand, but this sort of thing is just somebody’s cheap trick. If he really wanted his smoke, you know he wouldn’t have had to carry it on his person. The mere fact that he was checking in his own luggage tells you that he wasn’t carrying anything. Usually all that star carries in is an overnight bag. The rest of his stuff is checked through as equipment and costumes. Paul’s smart enough to now that. He’s known how to handle this sort of things for twenty years, just like I have. If you want to smoke, you say to your producer, ‘Hey, where’s the grass?’ and poof, magically it appears. You don’t have to buy it. It’s all budgeted into a show as entertainment or transportation expenses. Take care of the star’s head, fill his lungs, or his nose, or his veins, or whatever. No, no way do I believe that Paul was carrying. He was set up and that’s the long unfortunate short of it. Some little creep wanted to make a name for himself like all little creeps do, and he used Paul to do exactly that. “Just how hard do you think it is for a Customs official to lay his hands on some grass? Not that hard. He had it all along under the counter or something, and the minute the Beatle steps up, it’s presto! Headlines. “Stars are victims like that, very vulnerable. The pity is that Paul wasn’t expecting it. Nobody is busting stars for drugs anymore, so he didn’t take precautions, you know, like having Customs waived because he’s a star or something like that. “Paul’s been busted before, you know. This is only going to make life more difficult for him. Not that I care, but it’s just the meanness of the thing that irks me. When I was busted, it was the same sort of crap. I was sounding off a little more than the government liked, and poof, there’s a drug bust. Police, dogs, cops, the works. As if I were the only kid on my block to have a little stash. But they wanted me, see? And they got me. The bastard who busted me couldn’t have been more smug. Certainly made his day. “Paul’s getting more press out of this than he has since the sixties, which just lets you know where the press is at. They love this sort of thing. The worst part for Paul is that they’ve got him in jail. Do you believe that? They know how much money they’re costing him. A whole fuckin’ concert down the drain. Promotion wasted, transportation wasted, tickets to be returned, the whole thing’s a waste. And all for what? In the world of rock and roll you won’t lose any fans or sales because of a drug bust. At worst it makes you controversial, and that’s a plus. So what are they holding him for? That’s just the work of some power-mad little creep showing off to the world, knowing that the longer he holds Paul the longer he’s important.” “For someone you claim not to care about you seem awfully upset.” “It’s the injustice of the thing that upsets me. If Paul were just some nobody, the Customs agent would have pulled the grass out of his bag and said, ‘Don’t be stupid, son, just throw this away over there,’ and what would have been the end to it. I’ve heard stories like that. But because he’s a star he gets set up instead. That’s injustice and it would bother me if it were Shirley MacLaine, Baryshnikov, or the Muppets. Maybe it affects me a little more because it’s Paul and I know him and he’s a musician, but I doubt it. It would bother me no matter who they got.” [...] The constant appearance of Paul’s name in the press began to unsettle John. It recalled memories that he would have preferred to let sleep. “You don’t think they’re mistreating him, do you, Charles?” “Aside from the fact that they are holding him in a jail cell, I doubt that there is any mistreatment.” “That’s good. Not that I really care, you understand, but I wouldn’t want to think that they were abusing him in any way.” “You keep telling me how much you don’t care. I begin to wonder if it’s true.” “Of course I care! Not that I want to, but you can’t know a person as long and as intimately as I’ve known Paul and not care. I’m pissed at him and have been for years, but that’s my private war with the man. It has nothing to do with the way I feel about his having this happen to him.” [...] Two days later Paul was released. The concert had been canceled and he and Linda left Japan immediately. John greeted the news with a great sigh of relief. “I’m glad that’s over. I feel like I’ve been keeping a vigil for him. Not that I care, you understand.”

John Green, Dakota Days. (1983) [Note: John Green was the Lennons’ tarot reader, and his credibility is dubious, to say the (very) least. John’s depicted vacillations and utter emotional transparency may have a ring of truth to them, but one should nonetheless take this all with a grain of salt.]

[orbemnews]

Larry Summers Warned About Inflation. Fed Officials Push Back. Federal Reserve officials pushed back on Thursday against concerns raised by two prominent economists — Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, and Olivier J. Blanchard, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund — that big government spending could overheat the economy and send inflation rocketing higher. Those warnings have grabbed headlines and spurred debate over the past two months as details of the federal government’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill came together. Mr. Summers in particular has kept them up since the legislation passed, saying it was too much on the heels of large spending packages last year. He recently called the approach the “least responsible” fiscal policy in 40 years while predicting that it had a two-in-three chance of precipitating either stagflation or a recession. But two leaders at the Fed, which is tasked with using monetary policies to keep inflation steady and contained, gave little credence to those fears on Thursday. Richard H. Clarida, the central bank’s vice chairman, and Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, both responded to questions specifically about Mr. Summers’s and Mr. Blanchard’s warnings. “They have both correctly pointed out that the U.S. has a lot of fiscal support this year,” Mr. Clarida said on an Institute of International Finance webcast. “Where I would disagree is whether or not that is primarily going to represent a long-term, persistent upward risk to inflation, and I don’t think so.” Mr. Clarida said that there was a lot of room for the economy to recover — some 9.5 million jobs that were lost during the pandemic are still gone — and that the effect of the government’s relief spending would diminish over time. He also said that while spenders had pent-up demand, there was also pent-up supply because the service sector had been shut for a year. “At the Fed, we get paid to be attentive and attuned to inflation risks, and we will be,” Mr. Clarida said. But he noted that forecasters didn’t see “undesirable upward pressure” on inflation over time. Mr. Evans told reporters on a call that he wasn’t sure what “overheating” — the danger that top economists have warned about — actually meant. “First off, there’s a conversation of is this the best way to spend money,” he summarized, adding that he didn’t have anything to say about that. “But then there’s sort of like, ‘Oh, this is so much that it is going to overshoot potential output, and there’s a risk that we’re going to get overheating, and then inflation.’” He continued: “What is the definition of overheating? It’s a great word, it evokes all kinds of images, but it’s kind of like potential output is always a strange concept anyway. Can output be too high?” Mr. Evans has been concerned for years that inflation is too tepid, rather than that it might pick up too much. Superweak price pressures can cause problems by risking price declines — which encourage saving and harm debtors — and by robbing the Fed of room to cut interest rates during times of trouble. “I kind of remember the ’70s, too,” a decade when inflation spiraled up and out of control in America, Mr. Evans said. “This isn’t the ’70s. We’ve had trouble getting inflation up.” Inflation has been weak in the United States, and in advanced economies broadly, the past two decades. To try to keep that from turning into a bigger problem, the Fed has been working to “re-anchor” consumer and market expectations to prevent inflation slipping lower. The central bank announced last year that it would begin to aim for 2 percent annual price gains on average over time, allowing for periods of greater increases. Still, no Fed policymaker wants inflation to suddenly spike, eroding consumer purchasing power. If that happened, the Fed might have to lift interest rates rapidly to slow down the economy, throwing people out of work and possibly causing a recession. That’s what Mr. Summers and Mr. Blanchard are warning about. Frequently Asked Questions About the New Stimulus Package How big are the stimulus payments in the bill, and who is eligible? The stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more. What would the relief bill do about health insurance? Buying insurance through the government program known as COBRA would temporarily become a lot cheaper. COBRA, for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, generally lets someone who loses a job buy coverage via the former employer. But it’s expensive: Under normal circumstances, a person may have to pay at least 102 percent of the cost of the premium. Under the relief bill, the government would pay the entire COBRA premium from April 1 through Sept. 30. A person who qualified for new, employer-based health insurance someplace else before Sept. 30 would lose eligibility for the no-cost coverage. And someone who left a job voluntarily would not be eligible, either. Read more What would the bill change about the child and dependent care tax credit? This credit, which helps working families offset the cost of care for children under 13 and other dependents, would be significantly expanded for a single year. More people would be eligible, and many recipients would get a bigger break. The bill would also make the credit fully refundable, which means you could collect the money as a refund even if your tax bill was zero. “That will be helpful to people at the lower end” of the income scale, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. Read more. What student loan changes are included in the bill? There would be a big one for people who already have debt. You wouldn’t have to pay income taxes on forgiven debt if you qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation — for example, if you’ve been in an income-driven repayment plan for the requisite number of years, if your school defrauded you or if Congress or the president wipes away $10,000 of debt for large numbers of people. This would be the case for debt forgiven between Jan. 1, 2021, and the end of 2025. Read more. What would the bill do to help people with housing? The bill would provide billions of dollars in rental and utility assistance to people who are struggling and in danger of being evicted from their homes. About $27 billion would go toward emergency rental assistance. The vast majority of it would replenish the so-called Coronavirus Relief Fund, created by the CARES Act and distributed through state, local and tribal governments, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That’s on top of the $25 billion in assistance provided by the relief package passed in December. To receive financial assistance — which could be used for rent, utilities and other housing expenses — households would have to meet several conditions. Household income could not exceed 80 percent of the area median income, at least one household member must be at risk of homelessness or housing instability, and individuals would have to qualify for unemployment benefits or have experienced financial hardship (directly or indirectly) because of the pandemic. Assistance could be provided for up to 18 months, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Lower-income families that have been unemployed for three months or more would be given priority for assistance. Read more. The $1.9 trillion measure that the Biden administration ushered through Congress added to a $900 billion relief package enacted in December and a $2 trillion package last March. Mr. Blanchard, in a March 5 post on Twitter, compared the fresh government spending to a snake swallowing an elephant: “The snake was too ambitious. The elephant will pass, but maybe with some damage.” He more recently said that he had “no clue as to what happens to inflation and rates” but that there is a lot of uncertainty and that things “could go wrong.” Mr. Summers, who led the Treasury Department from 1999 to 2001, wrote in a Feb. 4 Washington Post column that, while it was hugely uncertain, “there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” He said in a Bloomberg Television interview last week that “we are running enormous risks.” But Fed officials don’t think big government outlays will be enough to rewrite the world’s low-inflation story. And if it does stoke a slightly faster pickup, that might be a welcome development. Mr. Clarida acknowledged that price gains were likely to speed up over the next few months, but said he expected most of that “to be transitory” and for inflation to return to “or perhaps run somewhat above” 2 percent in 2022 and 2023. “This outcome would be entirely consistent with the new framework we adopted in August 2020,” he said. Source link Orbem News #Fed #Inflation #Larry #Officials #Push #Summers #warned