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speedyposts · 11 months ago

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South Carolina primary set to test Biden’s support among Black voters

United States President Joe Biden has been campaigning in South Carolina like his political life depends on it. Longtime analysts say it might.

Despite being all but assured of winning the state’s Democratic primary on February 3, Biden has made South Carolina a focal point of his early reelection efforts, in an attempt to recapture the momentum he enjoyed in the last presidential race.

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But to do that, experts say he has to show that he has delivered for the state’s Black residents, who comprise an estimated 26 percent of the population. South Carolina’s Black voters lean overwhelmingly Democratic: The Pew Research Center found that 78 percent identify with the party.

Biden, however, has seen his support slump across the board, including among Black voters nationwide. Experts warn those drooping poll numbers could spell trouble in November’s general election, where Biden is expected to face former President Donald Trump once again in a tight race.

Lawrence Moore, the chair of Carolina for All, a social justice organisation in South Carolina, said Biden needs to find a way to excite Black voters about the policy gains made during his tenure.

“We don’t have a person like [Barack] Obama” on the ballot, Moore explained, referencing the US’s first Black president, a charismatic figure who inspired historic voter turnout among minorities in 2008 and 2012.

“Nobody’s tripping over themselves to vote for Biden”, he said, “so it will have to be about the issues”.

South Carolina first emerged as a pivotal battleground for Biden in the 2020 primary season, when he was one candidate in a packed field of Democratic hopefuls.

At the time, Biden’s campaign appeared to be sputtering to an ignominious conclusion. He placed a dismal fourth in the Iowa caucuses, then slipped to fifth in the New Hampshire primary.

Media outlets had already begun to write him off as a “distant also-ran”.

But that year’s fourth primary contest — South Carolina — would turn Biden’s hopes around. He rocketed to first place, scoring 48 percent of the vote, far out of reach of his next closest rival, Bernie Sanders, at 19 percent.

Biden’s resounding victory in the state sent his idling campaign into overdrive and solidified his standing as the party’s nominee-apparent. Biden acknowledged as much at a January event hosted by the South Carolina Democratic Party.

“You’re the reason I am president,” Biden said bluntly. “You’re the reason Kamala Harris is a historic vice president. And you’re the reason Donald Trump is a defeated former president.”

Much of the credit for Biden’s dramatic turnaround fell to South Carolina’s Black community. A Washington Post exit poll found Black primary voters favoured Biden over Sanders by about four to one — a significantly wider margin than he had among white voters.

South Carolina has since taken a more prominent place in the Democratic primary calendar.

Last year, the Democratic National Committee approved a plan to make South Carolina its first contest of the primary season, citing the fact that the state is more representative of the country’s diversity than traditional early-voting states like Iowa or New Hampshire.

Biden himself pushed for the switch-up. “For decades, Black voters, in particular, have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” he wrote in support of the change.

LaTosha Brown, the co-founder of the nonprofit Black Voters Matter, said her group was likewise concentrating on South Carolina to kick off its nationwide voter mobilisation drive.

“By starting in South Carolina, we wanted to lift up the significance of Black voters not just in the state but in the nation,” she told Al Jazeera.

But Brown warned that voter turnout might be depressed by a sense of disenchantment with this year’s slate of candidates.

“Across the board, people are frustrated with traditional politics,” she said.

Already, poll numbers indicate less momentum for Biden than he had four years ago. A December poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs showed just 50 percent of Black adults said they approved of Biden, down from 86 percent in July 2021.

A recent NBC News poll echoed that finding. Biden’s net approval rating among Black voters tumbled nearly 20 points last year, down to 61 percent.

Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the left-leaning Working Families Party, which endorsed Biden in 2020, credits the drop in support to a “historical lag” in the Democrats’ campaign machinery.

He explained that Black voters are often seen as a sure thing for Democrats and are therefore not courted in the same way as white or independent voters.

Democratic officials, he added, “have not appreciated the work that needs to be done if Black voters are to turn out at the scale that you want them to”.

Mitchell called on Democrats to make “a more intentional, explicit appeal to the broader range of issues that Black Americans are facing every single day”.

“It’s not relegated simply to, like, criminal justice and civil rights,” he said.

By way of example, Mitchell pointed to the growing outrage over Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 26,900 Palestinians so far.

Polls have shown widespread discontent over the war and Biden’s unequivocal support for Israel. A higher percentage of Black voters support a full ceasefire in Gaza compared with white Americans, Mitchell noted.

“The issue is a relatively new dimension in the race but one that’s pretty salient, especially with young voters of all races,” he said.

Biden attempted to appeal to Black voters earlier this month with a visit to the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Gothic-style church, with its white steeple and towering stained glass, is a site of great significance for the Black community: It was founded by Denmark Vesey, a celebrated Black leader who was killed in 1822 after allegations emerged that he was planning a rebellion against slavery.

One of the oldest Black churches in the US South, Mother Emanuel was also the site of a racist mass shooting in 2015 that killed nine worshippers.

Standing at the pulpit on January 8, Biden became the first sitting president to address the church as a candidate. He started his speech with a bowed head, acknowledging how the “poison” of “white supremacy” had touched the church.

But Biden proceeded to play up his platform, touting the country’s economic gains, lowered Black unemployment and his efforts to build clean energy, strengthen Medicare and protect voting access. He also reiterated his gratitude to the largely Black audience.

“It’s because of this congregation and the Black community of South Carolina — no exaggeration — and [Representative] Jim Clyburn that I stand here today as your president,” Biden said to a peal of applause. “That’s a fact. And I owe you.”

But Maurice Washington, who served as the first Black chair of the Charleston County Republican Party, questioned whether Biden’s messaging to Black voters has been too narrow and too focused on race.

“Things like white supremacy and voter suppression, those kinds of race-based narratives are no longer working,” Washington said.

He too credited Biden’s dipping poll numbers among Black voters to a lack of emphasis on the economic hurdles they face.

“That percentage drop is Black Americans who are truly taking a look at the bottom line where $100 is bringing home less groceries, $20 is putting less gas in the car, healthcare costs are up, interest rates are up,” he said.

For its part, Biden’s team has made efforts to show his administration is addressing both civil rights issues and economic ones.

Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager for the Biden campaign, told ABC’s This Week in January that he hopes to send two messages to the Black community.

“One, we don’t take them for granted,” he said. “Two, we recognise that we need to earn their support in this campaign.”

In October, the campaign launched a national television advertisement touting the Biden administration’s support for Black farmers, a historically overlooked group. Months earlier, the Biden administration had announced plans to provide $5.3bn to farmers who had faced past discrimination in federal lending programmes.

The Biden campaign has also highlighted “historic” multi-billion dollar investments in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

And in a December speech, Biden said he oversaw the “fastest growth in Black business ownership in over 30 years” and a 60-percent jump in Black wealth since the days of the pandemic lockdown.

“No administration has done as much for the African American community as President Biden and Vice President Harris,” Fulks told ABC’s This Week.

But voters will turn out based on their “lived experience, not on the messaging”, according to Catherine Fleming Bruce, a South Carolina activist who ran for the Senate as a Democrat.

“You may have people knocking on your door and phone calls and text messages and all of these things,” she said. “But these are things voters have seen before, and many feel like there’s no real change.”

Bruce personally gave Biden mixed marks on his policies so far. She applauded his appointment of the first Black woman to the US Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

But she questioned his failure to engage meaningfully with issues like criminal justice reform, gun control and reparations for the descendants of enslaved Black people.

Meanwhile, Biden’s struggle to pass a new voting rights act — one that would safeguard against discriminatory practices — has hit close to home for South Carolina voters.

Black voters and the state conference of the NAACP, a civil rights organisation, are challenging Republican-drawn congressional districts, arguing the new map intentionally dilutes their voting power.

“There has been a lot of disappointment on voting rights,” Bruce said, referencing Biden’s failed efforts to limit gerrymandering and ease election access.

“Those kinds of protections — we really spent a lot of time fighting for and that did not come to fruition.”

Experts say Biden’s true test may ultimately not come in party primaries like South Carolina’s, but rather in November’s general elections.

As a rematch with Trump looms, Mitchell from the Working Families Party warned that any dent in the “diverse coalition” of voters Biden relied on in 2020 could determine whether he wins or loses in 2024.

“When you think about each segment of the coalition — young people or Black voters or Muslim-American voters in Michigan — each one of those pieces of the coalition were essential to the victory,” he said. “Both their presence in the coalition and the rate at which they turned out to vote.”

If 2020 is a harbinger of this year’s presidential election, the race could come down to just a few key battleground states where Biden’s ability to turn out Black voters proved to be a key factor, Mitchell said.

Those states include Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and, perhaps most notably, South Carolina’s southern neighbour Georgia.

The US South has leaned to the right since the 1960s, in large part as a reaction to the country’s civil rights movement. But in 2020, Biden notched a razor-thin victory in Georgia, winning by just under 12,000 votes out of the nearly 5 million cast.

Black voters, who make up a third of the electorate in Georgia, were credited with tipping the scales. Biden’s win in the state was the first by a Democrat since 1992.

South Carolina has an even longer history of tilting rightward: The last time a majority of its voters backed a Democrat for president was in 1976, nearly 48 years ago. Experts acknowledge it is unlikely Biden will flip the state in 2024.

Still, the turnout at the state’s primary may serve as a bellwether for Black support in the US South overall. Biden faces two distant challengers — Congress member Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson — in Saturday’s party race.

Brown, the Black Voters Matter co-founder, described the early primary season as an opportunity for Biden to better attune to Black voters both in South Carolina and beyond.

“This is the time to learn and to listen to the voters and to really shape yourself as a North Star,” she said. “And it starts with South Carolina.”

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antoine-roquentin · 4 years ago

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The Fed said that the 2 percent target was symmetric. But in practice, the Fed’s reaction function was asymmetric. The asymmetry of the Fed’s response was so strong that it generated a systematic bias in the Fed’s forecast and actual inflation. While the technocrats at the Fed have persistently expected long-run inflation to be 2 percent, actual inflation has undershot the target in 80 percent of all quarters since 1995. But the problem went even deeper than the asymmetric response function of the Federal Reserve.

Long after its demise, the technocrats continued to believe and rely on the Phillips curve model of inflation which said that we should expect inflation to rise whenever labor markets tighten sufficiently enough. This theory of the inflation process was baked into every single quantitative model of the economy ever considered by the central bankers. But the inflation process had transformed out of recognition by the system-wide buildup of overcapacity and the rise of global value chains. What has determined inflation since at least the mid-1990s is not the tightness of domestic labor markets, even in the world’s largest economy, but the degree of slack in the global production system as a whole:

Where there should’ve been a new theory of the inflation process, there remained a mental rigidity acquired when the central bankers had been in graduate school at Berkeley and MIT in the 1970s.

These three rigidities of the mind structured the Fed’s reaction function, the logic of financial discipline to which all economic actors were subjected, and the possibility space contemplated by political authorities. This was the process of structuration that generated the secular downward cycle of the past fifty years. What has happened since the financial crisis is the process of destructuration whereby these intellectual rigidities have been abandoned one by one.

The first to go was the belief in the wisdom of financial markets. This was a direct consequence of the global financial crisis. Wall Street’s pretenses of being the smartest guys in the room were irredeemably destroyed when the market-based credit system erected by the dealers endogenously generated the greatest risk to economic fortunes world-wide since the 1930s. Despite suspicions that nothing much had changed at all, the megabanks were, in fact, tied down with a whole series of regulations that gave the Fed authority to directly control their capital ratios, liquidity ratios, and even decisions on whether and how to reward their shareholders. Anyone who doesn’t understand the scale of the transformation of the goings-on at the banks has not been paying attention. What we had in 2006 was unfettered global finance; what we have now is global finance closely supervised and controlled by technocrats at the Fed, whose authority has increased in leaps and bounds. We are very far indeed from high neoliberal global financial intermediation. So a central structural feature of neoliberal political economy was unmade quite early on after the financial crisis.

For a few years, this seemed to be enough. The political authorities and the technocrats came to believe that the Band-Aid was enough to restabilize the system. This was the ‘false dawn’ of the 2012 election that Adam Tooze wrote of in Crashed. In reality, the process of destructuration was far from complete. This was the risk of writing contemporary history for Tooze. Just as he began writing the conclusion to Crashed, the stable world that the Obama-era elites believed they had achieved began to unravel at the hands of forces that they were completely unaware of.

They knew that the neoliberal institutions had destroyed the working-class. The New Economy that obtained with the capitulation of social democracy had led to the rise of an overbearing class of prestige-schooled meritocrats who began to claim a larger and larger share of the income, esteem and even work. What obtained then was an ‘hourglass’ occupational structure where most of the new jobs created were either for the highly-skilled meritocrats who run everything from the New York Times to Goldman and Google, or for unskilled day laborers at fast-food chains and grocery stores. This dual economy echoed the Lewisian model in monstrous reverse: instead of workers leaving the traditional low-productivity sector for the modern high-productivity sector, working-class breadwinners were pushed out of middle-skilled occupations that vanished from the industrial sector and into either the low-productivity sector or to the margins of employment and a life of dependence and indolence.

The New ‘Hourglass’ Economy undermined the reproduction of the working class family, even as the middle class family was restabilized with divorce rates and child out of wedlock-rates falling for the latter but not the former. The unraveling of working-class families and communities led to an epidemic of ‘deaths of despair’ starting in 2000. Yet, for 15 years no one even noticed. It was only in 2015 that Case and Deaton would document the wholly exceptional rise in ‘deaths of despair’ among whites without college degrees — the bulk of the American populace.

Elite-mass relations began to break down almost immediately as anger among ‘the losers of neoliberal globalization’ began to grow. The blame was not placed on the owners of capital and corporate power of the Marxian imaginary, but rather on the new class of meritocrats who began to dominate the airwaves over ‘flyover country’ in a one-way traffic of symbolic production emanating from the coasts. The hated ‘coastal elites’ in turn began thinking of working class whites as stupid racist bigots who didn’t know what was good for them — this was the development that Thomas Frank described in his 2004 polemic, What’s the Matter With Kansas?

Even as working class whites increasingly abandoned the Dems for the GOP, the latter continued to espouse free-market orthodoxy and cultural hot-button issues that did nothing at all to address the elephant in the room — the decline of working-class families and communities with the vanishing of broad-based growth. The brutal process of downward mobility was accompanied by the demise of institutions that intermediated between the working-class and the political and economic elites, that Putnam has documented. All organic connections between elites and masses were thus severed with ‘the big sort’ whereby the social classes became geographically segregated from each other over time.

These developments left late-neoliberal elites completely clueless about was happening to the middling bulk of American society far from New York and San Fransisco. So when Donald Trump came down that escalator, he was simply dismissed as a buffoon. No one among the elites saw the threat in real time. But Trump had inadvertently tapped into something altogether bigger than electoral politics. To mix metaphors, Trump was carried along the tide of history by the tectonic forces of class politics. The masses had simply had enough of the fucking technocrats from Harvard and Yale. By 2015, they were ready to burn the world constructed by the elites to the ground.

Even after the shock of 2016, elite resistance to the recognition of political realities remained in place. But the process of destructuration began to accelerate. Elites became more and more convinced that something — anything — had to be done to re-stabilize the system and contain ‘the threat from below’ revealed by 2016 [Richard F. Hamilton, 1972]. Yet, metal rigidities continued to thwart real solutions. Stuck with the old habits of thought, the Yellen Fed began hiking in anticipation of inflation as labor markets tightened in 2016. Democratic primary voters threw their weight behind the equivalent of a safety school despite a charismatic cast of pretenders.

The first intimations of a structural break with the old ways of thinking began to emerge in the discourse of the New American Left. Although it would later be taken over by antiracist activists unconcerned with the fortunes of the working-class, Bernie’s revolution was initially focused on bread and butter issues of everyday people. While Democratic primary voters could not be persuaded to cast their lot with the radicals, the ideas that emerged on the left of the party would strongly condition what was to come later, after the pandemic. What was truly pathbreaking about the new intellectual movement afoot was the complete abandonment of any commitment to fiscal discipline. MMT was only the tip of that iceberg. The general idea gaining adherents on the left was that power was to be taken back from the technocrats by political authority and the state’s capabilities to improve the lives of people was to be reconstructed.

Before the pandemic, this idea of breaking completely with the neoliberal playbook was contained. A half asleep old white guy would be put in the White House by the risk-averse Democratic majority. So it seemed for a while that neoliberalism was to be resurrected. But the Schmittian emergency of the pandemic brought these ideas back to the center of the policy discussion. Power was to be taken back from the technocrats after all. The intellectual revolution within political circles was accelerated by the constraints of the electoral clock. After winning the Senate runoffs in Georgia, the Dems now owned all federal policy. And they had two years to show their work — otherwise they’d lose control of Congress. The idea thus began to emerge among Democrat political strategists that you had go in heavy with all guns brazing right from the start. This is how we got the $1.9 trillion package.

Meanwhile, frustration had been building among the technocrats themselves. With the policy rate close to the zero lower bound, they had been pushing on a string with bond purchases which stimulated asset prices but have only a weak effect on economic activity because the rich refused to spend their capital gains. The desire to effect a handover to fiscal policy thus began to grow. The Fed responded to the pandemic by pulling out the bazooka. But that was not nearly good enough. The desire to handover control over economic affairs to the politicians became all-consuming in 2020.

With the Biden White House contemplating a $1.9 trillion fiscal package, the only question was whether the Fed would play along. Would they start hiking in anticipation and kill the party before it got started? The answer became crystal clear yesterday.

Lael Brainard, the real hero of the story, had been the lone voice at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) arguing for abandoning the old way of thinking about the inflation process in the mid-2010s. Her idea got a shot in the arm when, in 2017, Bernanke presented a proposal to target the level of prices over the cycle instead of the rate of inflation. The proposal contained an implicit but damning critique of Fed policy. What it showed was that the Fed had been wrong to hike in anticipation of inflation — Fed policy, including and especially forward guidance, had been way too tight. Thus began a major rethink among the central banking technocrats. Brainard’s new way of thinking about inflation, supported by research from the Bank of International Settlements and a host of younger economists, began to gain influence within the FOMC.

Even before the pandemic, the Powell Fed had been moving to an empirical stance — actually waiting for inflation to overshoot instead of relying on model predictions ultimately based on the defunct Phillips curve. With the shock of 2016, the technocrats began to pay more careful attention to how their policies affected the fortunes of the working-class. They realized that containing ‘the threat from below’ actually required making progress on broad-based growth — the objective that had been abandoned in 1979. As the evidence began to come in after 2016 that one could run very tight labor markets without inflation reappearing, Brainard’s way of thinking became more and more compelling.

The central bankers had come to realize that the only way to achieve broad-based growth was to run the economy really hot. Only when labor markets get very tight (unemployment below, say, 5 percent) do working-class wages and the wages of minorities start growing as fast as middle class salaries. This idea of running the economy really hot to deliver broad-based growth could only work because, while inflation does not respond to excess demand in the way they had thought it would (the Phillips curve is dead), wages do (the Wage Curve is alive and kicking). That is, they could have their cake and eat it too: they realized that they could run the economy really hot and generate broad-based growth without unnecessarily running the risk of high inflation.

“The key to the whole thing,” as Chair Powell put it yesterday, is that almost no one believes that the Fed can’t tame inflation if it were to reappear — inflation expectations are firmly anchored on target. So they can afford to be very generous in bad times because everyone knows the Fed won’t let inflation expectations get de-anchored ever again — the great lesson of the 1970s’ stagflation crisis. In other words, they had come to realize that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And the systematic policy mistake of the past decade or decades was that they had been unnecessarily pessimistic and cautious.

So when Summers and Blanchard reached for the old ways of thinking, something entirely unexpected happened. Where there should’ve been a loud debate structured by the idea of fiscal discipline, there was one big yawn. The doyens were largely ignored or dismissed by both the technocrats and the politicians. This surprising development revealed that the intellectual revolution among elites, triggered by the Polanyian counter-movement from below that Trump rode to power, had been consummated. Yesterday’s press conference confirmed that the process of intellectual conversion of the technocrats is now complete.

Such were the makings of the perfect storm. With fiscal policy not only revived but virtually on steroids and with monetary policy accommodative for the foreseeable future, we’re now looking at the greatest economic boom in living memory. The Fed now reckons that the US economy will grow at 6.5 percent in 2021. Goldman is more bullish. The 38th floor at 200 West believes that the US economy will grow at 8 percent instead. The strategists are probably closer to the mark.

But this is the short-term conjuncture. Why would I call the turning point of the secular cycle?? The coming economic boom is not enough. The turning points of the secular cycle need not just the destructuation of features that generated the secular downcycle but also restructuration with features that generate the secular upcycle. What has created the conditions for new features to emerge and consolidate is the climate crisis. The success of climate activism has convinced elites that a solution must be found to the planetary impasse. Moreover, elites have come to believe that any solution to the climate crisis cannot come at the cost of the working-class — otherwise the threat from below will threaten the stability of the system as a whole. So the way is now open for at least a decade-long great green boom. The plan is now for the technocrats to handover control over economic affairs to the politicians, and for direct fiscal stimulus to give way to an infrastructure and green tech investment-driven economy. This is probably the only way out of the impasse of American class relations. Even those who don’t get it now will get it eventually.

quibbles with parts, but it’s a good narrative

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fic-al · 3 years ago

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BERNS NIGHT.

This has been a Poplar-on-Tweaven production brought to you by the Crown Inn and sponsored by Mount Busby Farm based on original characters from Call the Midwife.

CHAPTER FIVE: Ae Fond Kiss.

“Who Shall Say That Fortune Grieves Him. While The Star of Hope She Leaves Him?” Ae Fond Kiss, Robert Burns 1791

“I Pictured A Rainbow, You Held It In Your Hands.” The Whole of the Moon, The Waterboys 1985

Bernie grabbed Val’s arm to steady herself. Paddy stood in front of her fidgeting with the cobalt blue fabric with a wide green check overlayed with a thinner gold and black one. His fiddling pulled at the kilt pin, weighing the piece of cloth down at the knee. The tiny silver dagger bearing his clan crest caught the light from the hall where Bernie remained, stood stock still in the doorway.

Paddy then reached for the frilly white lace jabot fastened around his neck, pulling at the lace with one hand, as if it was choking him. The other hand straightened the black waistcoat with the three silver buttons, matching the three on the sleeves of the Montrose jacket. They, in turn, matched those perfectly polished down the front of both sides of the centre of that waist length black jacket.

Bernie’s dropped jaw started to quiver as a chuckle threatened to emerge. Paddy shot a look of accusation at Val, who intern nipped Bernie’s arm. Her friend regained her composure.

“I told you she would think I look ridiculous,” Paddy spat at Val as if Bernie wasn’t in the room. It was however, Bernie who responded as Val’s confidence appeared to waver.

“No, you don’t. It’s just a bit of a shock. I am not quite sure what’s going on.”

“We..well, some people thought it might be nice to put on a Burns Supper. Like we used to…before-” Paddy started to falter as he noticed Bernie’s eyes mist over.

“For your birthday.” Piped in Val, trying to help Paddy out and regaining her confidence. “I will leave you to it. I’ve left Jack behind the bar, and well, he is still pretty green. If anyone asks for a cocktail, we may be in danger of losing our licence.”

On Val’s departure, Bernie moved towards Paddy. The forgotten scarf Trixie had placed around her friend’s shoulders fell to the floor. Paddy bent down to pick it up.

“Oops, be careful, good job there is no-one stood behind you.”

Paddy straightened up swiftly and stroked down the back of his kilt. Bernie allowed a relief filled giggle as she saw Paddy’s frown soften. Taking the scarf from Paddy, she sighed. The pattern matched the tablecloths downstairs. “My mother’s tartan. They haven’t missed a trick, have they?”

“Trixie was most put out when her attempts to discover the Mannion tartan drew a blank.”

“Mannion is an Irish name, sorry.” Bernie wasn’t quite sure why she was apologising for her name, but it felt appropriate.

“We all know that now,” laughed Paddy.

“How did you find the Home clan tartan?”

“Violet and Evie poured over hundreds of samples and narrowed it down to a few, which they matched to old photos of Wilf’s kilt. They figured that was how the wily old bugger had got round it, using your mam’s tartan.”

“Everyone has gone to so much trouble, I feel like such a fraud. I just wanted an evening alone with you in Appleby Thornton.” Bernie blushed, feeling even more guilty.

Sensing her confusion, Paddy cupped her cheeks in his hands. “We can go out any night.”

Bernie raised an eyebrow at Paddy’s optimism. Even though Jack had turned eighteen and could now serve behind the bar, Paddy still found it difficult to let go. Most of their evenings were spent working or propping up the bar.

Any further discussion of their work-play balance would have to wait. The sound of familiar footsteps running up the stairs alerted them their presence was required in the bar. Paddy and Bernie followed Tim into a cacophony of noise, the sound of fiddle, banjo, and accordion mixed with laughter and the pounding of feet on the wooden floor.

Tim grinned and nodded as Bernie asked, “Isn’t that the Bridges that come in on a Thursday night?”

“Apparently, before they were married, they used to go to Scottish dancing on Thursday nights.”

Kevin and the Tweaven Folk band sounded like a group of musicians who were enjoying a successful long awaited reunion, rather than strangers that had only met a few days ago. Apparently, Kevin didn’t just play the Bagpipes but was going to town on the harmonica. Mac had found refuge in Reggie and they had settled on a bench seat with the dog’s head resting on the lad’s lap.

Alan Bridges and his wife Yvonne broke from each other and flew off in different directions to persuade, grab and drag the people sitting at the tables onto the makeshift dance floor. Fred was up first, taking hold of Vi, who had pushed her nose out of the kitchen to sneak a peek at the fun. She protested, explaining she couldn’t leave her post, but Evie chased her onto the dance floor with a tea towel.

Bernie smiled at Patsy and Delia. She had never seen anyone quick step to the Gay Gordons before. Phyllis’ face was flushed as she tried to stay in time, partnered by a very light on her feet, Lucille. Bernie grinned as Paddy dug his son in the ribs and Tim scowled, shaking his head in protest. Her smugness was short-lived when Alan Bridges took hold of her hand and dragged her onto the floor. She groaned to herself, realising she should have seen it coming. But she knew she wasn’t the only one who had been distracted and let their guard down. As Alan swung her around, she glimpsed a determined Yvonne pulling a very reluctant Paddy to the centre of the room. A massive cheer went up, and it wasn’t for his dancing prowess, but the first view of the crowd of Paddy in his Highland Dress.

Bernie couldn’t deny she felt a tingle as the lights dimmed and Paddy stood behind the tressel table. She could see how nervous he was, his thumb working against the forefinger of his left hand, the right hand turning over his phone on the table. Voices were hushed, sensing a level of anticipation in the air. She hoped he could see her reassuring smile. When he returned her wink, she knew he understood.

Everyone instinctively got to their feet as the sound of the pipes flooded the room. Kevin slowly marched into the bar from the kitchen playing, Mac following at his feet, ears pricked. A few steps behind walked Violet, beaming proudly, carrying a silver tray with her pride and joy in prime position. She placed the dish in front of a very pale but focused landlord. Bernie noticed Vi gently touch Paddy’s hand after she had laid down her burden.

Paddy cleared his throat, and everyone sat. Bernie held her breath. She was relieved when he started reading from his phone in his own soft Northern English twang and didn’t attempt a Scottish accent. He did struggle a little with more than the odd word and she noticed it was in parts an English translation of Burns’s Address to a Haggis. She thought her dad would be shaking his head and laughing if he were watching these antics held in his memory. As a shiver left her, she wondered if Marianne was also looking down with pride and amusement.

Bernie bit her lip. This was the difficult bit, if trying to read an 18th century Scottish poem out loud wasn’t hard enough. She knew from years of experience Paddy had to keep reciting while removing the Sgian-dubh from his woolly knee-length socks. He then had to pull the small dagger out of its black leather holder and plunge the blade into the Haggis at just the right moment in the text. She went to hold on to her chair but was surprised when a long, thin hand grabbed hers. Tim’s hand was cold, but sweaty at the same time, and she squeezed it back.

The verbal response of the audience to Paddy whipping the blade out of its sheath made Bernie giggle, and she heard a snort from her neighbour. The following stab and slash into the unsuspecting pudding received equal responses of gasps and murmurs. She felt the boy’s hand slacken in her own and his breath released from his chest at the same time she let her lungs relax. Bernie felt Paddy was doing the same, pausing as the crowd regained its collective composure. He dared to give her a quick glance, and she beamed in approval. She wished she could go over to him and push back the wayward kink of hair that had fallen over his face during the dramatics.

Paddy finished the poem with ease, following the tricky bit. He didn’t seem to mind stumbling over some of the unfamiliar words. It wasn’t like anyone was going to correct him. There was much relief all around when he finally toasted the Haggis, and everyone could raise the complimentary whisky they had been nursing since the beginning of the festivities. Not everyone had been patient, and some found they were toasting with an empty glass, supping air. A nervous Bernie would have been included in this number, but Trixie had passed on her dram so she could at least properly take part in the toast. Paddy received a standing ovation. He didn't appear to be deceived it was for his faultless performance, but more for effort or maybe they were just hungry and glad it was finally over.

The assembled guests ate their fill of Scottish Fayre. The whisky sauce may have proved more popular than the spicy offal and oatmeal pudding. Although Violet did remark that Poplar’s vegan population had seemed to increase dramatically overnight. Buckle’s Breweries Burns Bernie Beers proved very popular. Ale Fond Kiss, Red Red Rose Ruby Ale and Auld Lang Stout all sold out.

The dancing recommenced to the Tweaven Folk band and its newest member. The Bridges and the lead singer tried to engineer a ceilidh of sorts. This resulted in a room full of mostly English people flinging themselves and each other about in an attempt at the longest communal twizzy world record. The highlight being every time Paddy spun around in his kilt, a large cheer went up as it splayed out.

Eventually he refused to dance and Bernie gave up, too. She found him outside smoking one of her roll-ups. She just grinned, knowing he deserved one. Bernie hugged Trixie’s scarf around her.

“Aren’t you cold in…erm that?”

Paddy smoothed the kilt under him, between his bare legs and the cool wood of Peggy and Frank’s memorial bench. Bernie grinned and went back indoors.

She returned with two Abhainn Dearg malt whiskies and one of the tartan tablecloths. She wrapped it around Paddy’s shoulders before perching herself on his chilly knees, flipping his sporran up out of the way. Paddy took over the blanket duties and wrapped the cover round her.

Cold fingers fumbled over sharing the dying cigarette and they sipped from the same whisky tumbler. From where she had placed them, Bernie could only reach one glass without leaving the warmth of the tablecloth and Paddy’s arms. Paddy had long since dispensed with the faffy lace ruff and wore a cream open neck Jacobite shirt, again courtesy of connections of Patsy. As Bernie playfully twisted the string ties around the fingers of one hand. She slowly ran the fingers of her other hand along the hem of the kilt.

“Is this Turner tartan, then?”

“No, the Turners are from Liverpool, probably some Irish in there somewhere too, but my mother’s family hailed from Fife.” Paddy softly answered.

Bernie wriggled on his knee, trying to gain a bunch of the fabric of the kilt in her hand, as the band broke into Deacon Blue’s Dignity.

“So which clan…ayyyyyeah!” She quickly jumped up, vigorously rubbing the flesh between her boot and the hem of her dress on her right thigh. Paddy stared at her in confusion and concern.

“Something bit me.”

“It’s January.”

“Am I bleeding? Is there a bump?” Bernie turned her back to Paddy and lifted up her skirt. Paddy started to wonder whose birthday it was. He used his phone as a torch and took his time giving a thorough examination of her right thigh. The eventual diagnosis was no injury to her person, but there was a nasty snag in her new-on tights.

Paddy also identified the culprit, pointing to the clan dagger attached to the front of his kilt. “I think you sat on this?”

“You stabbed me.”

“You stabbed you.”

She leant down and carefully unfastened the pin from the front apron of the kilt. She recovered her position now free from hazards. Scrutinising the tiny weapon in her hands under the light of Paddy’s phone,

“Aww, the crest is the world below a rainbow between two clouds. What does the motto say?”

“At Spes Infracta.”

“Oooh, you’re getting the hang of these ancient tongues, aren’t you?” Bernie giggled, “what does it mean in boring old English?”

Paddy, who had been laughing with her, fell serious.

“It means, Yet My Hope is Unbroken.” He gently tipped her chin forward with his thumb and forefinger and kissed her.

“That’s beautiful.” Bernie caught her breath. “What was your mam’s maiden name?”

“Hope.”

“Home and Hope,” smiled Bernie, partly to herself.

Paddy reached inside his sporran and handed Bernie a small tartan box with a gold bow on top.

“But, this was my present.” She smiled, pulling on his shirt strings.

Paddy shone his phone torch on the box as Bernie opened it and carefully took out a silver brooch. She got hold of Paddy’s hand and shone it on a silver V bending inwards to make the shape of a heart with an emerald at the base just below the Home clan crest.

“That is a very fierce-looking lion. Why am I not surprised.” Bernie didn’t need the torch to see the glint in Paddy’s eye as he spoke. “I nearly got you the Hope rainbow one instead….but I wasn’t sure.”

Bernie smiled, “Maybe next year?”

“You are still very presumptuous after all these years. This was a one night only kinda thing,” Paddy choked, then swiftly changing the subject, “I liked the motto on the Hume crest, anyway.”

Bernie was impressed with his correct Scottish pronunciation of Home. She read aloud the words around the lion’s head A Home, A Home, A Home, that is the slogan, but the motto is actually True To The End .”

“Well, I think the matriarchy has it tonight.”

“Do you know Robbie Burns was a great supporter of women’s rights as well as being a romantic? He wrote a poem about it.”

“From what I’ve heard, he was very fond of women indeed. Counting the number of children he fathered.”

“Yes, that as well,” muttered Bernie, “but just for tonight I am going to be Shelagh Bernadette Mannion-Home and you can be Patrick Turner-Hope.

The traditional music of the Corries was now interspersed with more recent Scottish poetry, as the band played tunes by the likes of Travis and Franz Ferdinand. The Proclaimers, I’m Gonna Be 500 miles, filtered through the door leading to the beer garden. The accompanying laughter, the sound of leather and man-made sole stomping on polished oak convinced the two in the beer garden they weren’t being missed.

“One thing I can’t get my head around is how Val convinced you to do this?”

“She just reminded me of every time you have stepped out of your comfort zone for me. How many times you have had to embrace a part of yourself that you didn’t know existed or had thought you had left behind.”

Bernie rubbed her thumb over the slogan on her new brooch as Paddy continued.

“Basically how many times you have put me, us, our hope of a life, a home together before the person who you thought you were and believed yourself to be.”

“Val said that?”

“Sort of, maybe a bit more colourful, and there was some violence involved, but I did agree with the sentiment.”

“I think our mams would have approved of Val.”

“Are you true to the end, Shelagh Bernadette?”

“Well, you just better hope this isn’t the end, Patrick.”

The sounds of Auld Lang Syne filled the night and Paddy leaned forward for another kiss, suddenly aware Bernie had very cold hands had chosen not to replace the kilt pin.

#call the midwife au fic #berns night #crown jewels series #till next year

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just-a-poor-boy-queen · 3 years ago

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I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad day. I hope this makes you feel a bit better 💜

Part 20 of Jimercury Kid series

‘I’m going to die.’ Freddie whined dramatically from the sofa, arching his back as Jim walked through the door with a tray of tea and biscuits, carefully setting it on the coffee table in front of the singer. ‘I’m not sure how much more of this pain I can take, darling.’

‘I know, love.’ Jim replied softly, placing another pillow under Freddie’s head. ‘But that’s what happens when you decide to do acrobatics on stage when there are wires lying around.’

‘It was entirely Roger’s fault.’ Freddie huffed. ‘He could have warned me that his drumkit was a danger zone.’

Jim chuckled and kissed his husband’s forehead. ‘The doctor said you’ll be right as rain in a few weeks, so long as you get plenty of rest and keep up the physio.’

The Persian grumbled, ‘I hate rest.’ Then he looked up at Jim with an accusatory glare. ‘And I can’t believe you’re abandoning me to galivant off and cut people’s hair! The audacity.’

Freddie hadn’t been all that pleased when Jim announced that he had accepted a weekend job at the barber shop down the road. The Irishman had befriended the owner, Carl Pritchard, in a bar a few months ago and while he had declined the offer of a full-time job (he still had the garden to think about and Khaleel to look after when Freddie was at the studio,) he was more than happy to lend Carl a hand every Saturday, when the shop was at its busiest.

Khaleel hadn’t been too happy about it either; he was used to Jim being around 24/7 and the sudden change of routine caused him a great amount of stress. Jim was almost late on his first day of the job because his son had cried and refused to let go of his leg. But eventually, the boy begrudgingly accepted it and Jim was able to pacify his separation anxiety with the promise of bringing home a treat when he was finished at work.

‘You’re just saying that because you’re jealous.’ Jim teased, dodging as Freddie attempted to swat his backside. ‘You think I’m going to fall head over heels for Carl’s dashing good looks and run off into the sunset with him.’

Freddie pouted like a child and crossed his arms. ‘So, you do think he’s good looking.’

Jim chuckled and dropped a kiss into his husband’s dark head of hair. ‘I’m old enough to be his dad, sweetheart. Besides, he’s really not my type.’

‘I wasn’t your type either and you still went for me.’

‘Well, how could I possibly resist? Have you seenyour arse?’

He roared with laughter as Freddie attempted to swat him again, but this time the singer grabbed his hand and pulled him down to kiss his lips.

‘Do you love me?’ he whispered once they had parted, brown eyes staring into Jim’s own almost fearfully. They had been together for almost ten years now, and yet he still needed that reassurance.

‘To the moon and back.’ Jim replied, leaning down for a much deeper kiss. He could have stayed like that all day, but a quick glance at his watch told him that he was already pushing it for time.

‘I’ll be back about six.’ He placed one final kiss against Freddie’s forehead before heading to the hallway to grab his coat. ‘I’ve left the shop’s number by the phone in case there’s an emergency. Try not to have too much fun without me.’

‘Very funny.’ Freddie sniggered as Jim blew him a kiss and turned the keys in the door. ‘Have a good day, darling. Don’t snip any ears off.’

The last thing he heard was Jim shouting goodbye to Khaleel up the stairs – which was quickly followed with a cheerful, ‘bye Daddy!’ – before the door was pulled shut. Freddie sighed and stretched his sore back, wishing he could at least hobble over to the piano and belt out a few show tunes to take his mind off the pain. He hated being alone; Phoebe was in town with friends and Khaleel had been colouring upstairs for most of the afternoon. He knew that colouring was one of the ways his bijou coped with Jim’s absence, so he didn’t want to disturb him.

Well, since he was bedbound (or in this case, sofa bound) he might as well catch forty winks. After finishing his tea and munching on a biscuit, he plumped up his pillows, propped his feet up on the armrest and did his best to ignore the constant throbbing in his lower back as he slowly drifted off to sleep.

Freddie was awoken by the sound of the phone ringing in the hallway, and he groggily rose from the sofa to go and answer it.

‘It’s Bernie, Bernie Morris.’ Said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘I know you usually have your physio on Sundays, but my 2 o’clock just cancelled and I don’t have any other appointments today. Would you like to take the slot?’

‘Oh darling, that would be wonderful.’ Freddie sighed in relief, rubbing his back as he spoke. ‘It’s really acting up today. I could use your magic hands.’

Bernie chucked jovially. ‘Alright then, see you in twenty.’

Bernard Morris was a tall, broad, cheerful man, recommended to Freddie by Doctor Atkinson after he had his accident. The vocalist had been apprehensive at first, thinking he could simply deal with the pain on his own; but he eventually relented when it became unbearable and had agreed to six weeks’ worth of sessions, so long as he could do it in the comfort of his own home. So far, Bernie’s methods had proved remarkably effective; Freddie’s back still hurt like hell, but he always felt slightly more relieved once he had been stretched and bent over a few times by a handsome looking man.

‘Thank you so much for this, darling.’ Said Freddie, as Bernie laid the exercise mat out on the floor and shifted the coffee table over to give them more space. ‘I was doing well for a couple of days but last night it started hurting like a bastard. I made the mistake of lifting Khaleel up too quickly during playtime.’

‘It’s no bother at all.’ Replied Bernie. ‘How’s the family? I still have yet to meet your little man.’

‘He’s very shy, our Kenny.’ Freddie chuckled fondly. ‘He’s been a bit clingy lately because of this new job Jim has taken up. He’s not used to him being away and he’s finding it hard to understand.’

‘Poor thing.’ Said Bernie sympathetically. ‘My little girl was the same when I started working full-time. But they get used to it eventually. Now,’ he cracked his knuckles, ‘shall we get started?’

‘Abso-fucking-lutely.’ Freddie said with a laugh and carefully laid himself down on the mat.

Khaleel let out a soft yawn as he finally finished colouring in Goliath’s bright yellow eyes and carefully added the picture to the pile of cat drawings he had been working on all afternoon. He didn’t like it when Daddy went to work; he was used to Baba being away, even though he missed him, but Daddy was always there and suddenly not having him around all day made Khaleel confused and scared.

His tummy began to rumble, so he hopped off his bed and carefully climbed down the staircases to tell his Baba that he would like a snack. But when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard a strange noise coming from the lounge. The door was open a crack, so Khaleel peeped through curiously.

Baba was lying on the floor and a strange man was sitting on top of him, pulling on his leg. Baba was moaning in pain, his arm flying up to cover his eyes as the strange man continued to push on his leg until his knee reached his chest, before stopping and doing the same with the other one. Baba started to cry a little, and the man said something, though Khaleel couldn’t hear what it was. The boy felt his tiny heart racing. There was a strange man in the house, and he was hurting his Baba. Daddy and Uncle Phoebe weren’t here to protect them. He wanted to run into the lounge and jump on the horrible man, but his feet were frozen to the floor, unable to move.

Then he remembered the phone. Daddy and Baba had taught him how to use it, though he was only supposed to use it in emergencies, and he was never to call 999 unless he really needed to. Daddy had left his work number beside the telephone in the hall, so Khaleel quickly hurried to it and stood up on his tiptoes to grab the handset. He stared hard at the numbers on the little piece of paper and slowly began pressing the buttons. (1/2)

Jim had to admit that it felt good cutting hair again.

Pritchard & Sons was nothing like the Savoy; it was small and intimate, with a far more welcoming atmosphere and friendly regulars who were always happy to make conversation. He instantly felt at home in the place and found himself actually looking forward to working on a Saturday; despite his full-time commitment to the garden, he had been longing for a change of scenery as of late, and this job offer was exactly what he needed.

He was busy brushing away the stray hairs from the shop floor when the telephone at the front desk began to ring. Carl was nowhere to be seen and his two co-workers, Simon and Neil, were busy with clients, so he set his broom against the wall and crossed over to the desk, picking up the handset before it could ring off.

‘Pritchard & Sons, how can I help you?’

‘Daddy?’ Came a small voice from the other end of the line.

Jim was taken back a second, as if he was hearing things. ‘Kenny? Is that you? Kenny, you shouldn’t be calling Daddy at work, he’s very busy.’

‘Daddy, I need help.’ The little boy whimpered in response.

‘Sweetheart, if you need help with something, ask your Baba-’

‘There’s a strange man in the house.’ Khaleel started to sob, his voice a terrified whisper, as if he was worried about being heard. ‘There’s a strange man and he’s hurting Baba.’

Jim felt his blood run cold. ‘W-what do you mean? Where’s Baba, Kenny?’

‘In the lounge. The man is on top of him, and Baba is crying.’

Oh Jesus. Jim began to shake, sweat beading his forehead as a million images flashed before his eyes. He knew he couldn’t let Khaleel hear the fear in his voice, otherwise it would just panic the little boy further. ‘Sweetheart, listen to me. I need you to go upstairs into your bedroom and hide under your bed, okay? Daddy’s coming, everything’s going to be okay.’

Khaleel continued to sob. ‘Daddy, please hurry.’‘

‘Please, Kenny, do as I say. Hang up the phone and go upstairs as quietly as you can. I promise I’ll be home soon.’

There was a loud sniff, before Khaleel mumbled, ‘hurry, Daddy,’ and the line went dead.

‘Tell Carl there’s been an emergency!’ Jim yelled over the counter to Simon, as he raced to the hat stand and grabbed his coat, racing through the door before he even got a response. He cursed as he fumbled with his car keys, almost dropping them into the gutter as his hands trembled violently; as soon as he was in the driver’s seat, he slammed his foot on the accelerator and sped down the road.

-----

As soon as he reached Garden Lodge, Jim immediately went around the back entrance, not wanting to alert the intruder by ringing the bell. As soon as he had turned the key in the back door, he immediately called for Freddie, feeling his heart sink when he didn’t receive a response. He slowly walked down the hallway, glancing into every room in case someone leapt out and attacked him, until he reached the kitchen and quickly armed himself with a large knife that had been left sitting on the counter. He prayed that he wouldn’t have to use it.

‘Freddie!’ he cried out again, almost in tears, the hand holding the knife shaking so hard it was a miracle he didn’t drop it.

The kitchen door suddenly swung open behind him, and he yelled in surprise, whipping round, knife clasped in both hands and pointed straight at his would-be assailant.

There was a high-pitched shriek and a crash, and only then did Jim realise it was Freddie, clad in one of his silk kimonos and surrounded by broken teacups. They both stood there, frozen, as Jim looked his husband up and down; Freddie appeared unhurt, though shell-shocked, the tray he had been carrying now lying at his feet amongst shards of china.

‘Jim!’ Freddie screamed, once he had overcome his initial shock. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing?!’

Jim didn’t respond. He dropped the knife immediately, letting it clatter against the kitchen tiles as he ran to Freddie and scooped him into his arms, hugging him fiercely. His husband let out a surprised squeak as he was suddenly lifted off the floor and he quickly wound his legs around Jim’s hips before the younger man dropped him on his arse. It felt like Jim stood there forever, holding onto Freddie tightly, swaying back and forth like he did when soothing Khaleel to sleep.

‘Darling?’ Freddie finally whispered into Jim’s flushed ear. ‘Darling, what’s going on? What was all that about?’

Jim finally released his husband, brushing away the tears that had fallen down his cheeks as he cupped Freddie’s face and looked desperately into his eyes. ‘Are you alright? Are you hurt?’

Freddie looked baffled. ‘Hurt? Of course not! Why would I be hurt? And what are you even doing here? I thought you didn’t finish work until six.’

The Irishman’s heart finally began to relax as he took a moment to process this information. ‘Khaleel called the shop. He said there was a man in here and he was hurting you. I got here as fast as I could.’

Freddie stared at him with wide eyes, looking like a deer in headlights. ‘Oh my God…Jim, that was Bernie. Bernie Morris, my physiotherapist. He’s in the conservatory, I was just about to make us some more tea.’

Jim looked like he was about to collapse to the floor. He leaned back against the counter, colour finally returning to his face as he realised that Freddie and Khaleel had never been in any danger. All the horrifying scenarios that had been playing in his mind finally ceased to be.

‘Oh God…’ he covered his eyes with his hands, taking deep, uneven breaths, ‘I thought some psycho had broken in, I thought…’ He cut off, not wanting to even consider what could have happened.

Freddie carefully stepped over the mess on the floor, careful not to cut his bare feet as he approached him and put his arms around Jim’s neck, gently kissing his forehead. ‘You really would have killed a man just to protect me?’

Jim removed his hands from his eyes and replied without any hesitation. ‘Absolutely. The bastard wouldn’t have known what hit him.’

Freddie chucked softly, ‘my knight in shining armour.’ Then suddenly his eyes went wide. ‘Kenny! Where’s Kenny?’

‘I told him to go upstairs and hide under his bed.’ Replied Jim. ‘Come on, let’s go and get him. He’s scared out of his wits.’

-----

It had taken a while to coax Khaleel out from underneath his bed. But his parents eventually managed to convince him that the mean man downstairs was actually a very nice man, who was helping Baba get better, and the only reason Baba had been crying in the lounge was because his back hurt so much. They praised him for being such a brave boy and using the phone to call for help when he thought it was needed. Khaleel eventually crawled out and let Freddie carry him downstairs.

He hid in face in Freddie’s shoulder when he saw Bernie, his body trembling in fear. But he gradually looked up when Bernie started chatting to him, realising this strange man wasn’t really that scary up close. By the time Phoebe arrived home from town, Kenny was sitting on Bernie’s lap, giggling as the man held one of his soft toys, pretending to make it talk in a deep gruff voice.

‘What happened here?’ Phoebe asked as he walked into the kitchen to see Jim sweeping up the broken china into a dustpan.

‘Long story.’ Was all the Irishman said in reply. (2/2)

--------------------------------------------------

Aww an extra long update! I loved it😊 It was exactly what I needed after the exhausting day I've had, thank you for making me smile with this part (and all your stories everyday).

I was happy to see Jim take up a part time job of a hairdresser. I've often wondered about that in Freddie!lives scenarios. I think one of the reasons why Jim took up the job of the gardener at GL is to be close to Freddie who had received his diagnosis by that time, if I'm not wrong.

And aww, baby Khaleel being so smart and calling up his father when he saw that his baba was in danger. And ofc, Jim being ready to do absolutely anything to keep his family safe... my heart.

And lol, I can see Phoebe rolling his eyes in the kitchen like, "I take one day off..."

(More drabbles by writer anon)

#ask response #jim hutton #freddie mercury #anon writing #freddie and jim and their baby

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mommymooze · 4 years ago

Text

Battle Drill

Featuring the Black Eagles Strike Force

The monastery is mostly dark and quiet at 4:30 in the morning. Hubert checks his watch, readying the stopwatch. “And now!” he grins.

The dark mage sets a flare off into the air. Suddenly the shrill blasts of horns break the silence of the night in the monastery, ruining the peaceful sleep of its inhabitants and causing some to shriek in horror as their blissful slumber is disturbed. Rooms light up in quick succession, their occupants scurrying feverishly.

Silently he purposefully marches to the front entrance of the monastery, perched at the top of the stairs like a vulture waiting for its next meal to die. He raises his cup to his lips, the nearly boiling hot liquid slides down his throat, filling him with acidic bliss and adds to his own bitter and acidic attitude.

Edelgard is the first to arrive, of course. She stands to his left, Amyr in hand and absolutely prepared. (Nobody will ever know that he woke her 30 minutes prior to sounding the horns and assisted her with getting her hair ready and placing the crown upon her brow.)

Bernadetta, Dorothea, and Petra arrive next. Petra looks wide awake and absolutely ready for battle as she tweaks the fit of her swordbelt and checks her bow and quiver. Dorothea’s hair is not quite perfect and she is yawning profusely, leaning against Petra slightly. Bernadetta is dressed, however she buttoned her blouse one button off and has a terrible bedhead. The terrified archer is visibly trembling with anxiety and shivering in the low light of early morning.

Ferdinand’s armor announces his approaching presence, followed by his voice. “It is a glorious day for a battle. Bring them here and let me strike them down. All for the glory of the Empire!” He is way too loud and cheerful for this time of day. He has been beckoned from his bed nearly one hour prior to his normal arising, where he begins each day with a morning trot upon his faithful warhorse, Cinnamon.

Caspar finally trudges to the already assembled group of the Strike Force. He carries Linhardt piggyback. The healer has his robe pulled onto his back, with his nightgown still on underneath it, the robes flailing in the breeze behind his noble steed.

As Caspar takes his designated position, Hubert clicks the stopwatch. “Sixteen minutes. Much improved. Thank you everyone, back to your whatever…” The tall dark mage waves them off as if he is shooing a cat from his vicinity.

“Why are you making us do this again?” Caspar groans, Lin still sleeping on his back.

“We must always be prepared for the next battle! Who knows when the church will strike again! Ever vigilant, ever ready!” Hubert declares, trying to sound encouraging, however it always sounds more like a threat.

Bernie hightails it back to her room three times as fast as when she came out. Dorothea convinces Petra to carry her back and call it strength training. Ferdinand bursts into song and heads for the stables.

Notes:

I work in a large company and we are forced to have random fire drills, multiple times a year. Rain or shine. Snow or blazing heat. Everyone must gather outside of the building in their designated areas, be counted and account for their property. We must undock our laptops and drag them with us, and our purses/keys/etc. So if the building was on fire and we had to work from home, there is nothing preventing us from doing so. Except it the alarms always go off when you are on the phone with a customer or in a meeting and once you undock your laptop everything would freeze and it would take 30 minutes to restart the dang thing and try to remember where you were. Certain “emergency monitors” had megaphones, bright orange hats and reported who could be missing (“trapped” in the burning building! Egads!)

#fe16 #fire emblem three houses #feth #fe3h #Black Eagles #firedrill

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weshallc · 4 years ago

Text

Thank you so much for putting up with me, I feel back in a Bernie state of mind now (I was far too chilled). Let’s see where we go from here.

BERNS NIGHT (revisited)

This has been a Poplar-on-Tweaven production brought to you by the Crown Inn and sponsored by Mount Busby Farm based on original characters from Call the Midwife.

CHAPTER FIVE: Ae Fond Kiss.

“Who Shall Say That Fortune Grieves Him. While The Star of Hope She Leaves Him?” Ae Fond Kiss, Robert Burns 1791

“I Pictured A Rainbow, You Held It In Your Hands.” The Whole of the Moon, The Waterboys 1985

Bernie grabbed Val’s arm to steady herself. Paddy stood in front of her fidgeting with the cobalt blue fabric with a wide green check overlayed with a thinner gold and black one. His fiddling pulled at the kilt pin weighing the piece of cloth down at the knee. The tiny silver dagger bearing his clan crest caught the light from the hall where Bernie remained stood stock still in the doorway.

Paddy then reached for the frilly white lace jabot fastened around his neck, pulling at the lace with one hand, as if it was choking him. The other hand straightened the black waistcoat with the three silver buttons, matching the three on the sleeves of the Montrose jacket. They in turn matched those perfectly polished down the front of both sides of the centre of that waist length black jacket.

Bernie’s dropped jaw started to quiver as a chuckle threatened to emerge. Paddy shot a look of accusation at Val who intern nipped Bernie’s arm. Her friend regained her composure.

“I told you she would think I look ridiculous,” Paddy spat at Val as if Bernie wasn’t in the room. It was however Bernie who responded as Val’s confidence appeared to waver.

“No, you don’t. It’s just a bit of a shock. I am not quite sure what’s going on.”

“We..well some people thought it might be nice to put on a Burns Supper. Like we used to...before-” Paddy started to falter as he noticed Bernie’s eyes mist over.

“For your birthday.” Piped in Val, trying to help Paddy out and regaining her confidence. “I will leave you to it, I’ve left Jack behind the bar and well he is still pretty green, if anyone asks for a cocktail we may be in danger of losing our licence.”

On Val’s departure, Bernie moved towards Paddy. The forgotten scarf Trixie had placed around her friend’s shoulders fell to the floor. Paddy bent down to pick it up.

“Oops, be careful, good job there is no-one stood behind you.”

“Trixie was most put out when her attempts to discover the Mannion tartan drew a blank.”

“Mannion is an Irish name, sorry.” Bernie wasn’t quite sure why she was apologising for her name, but it felt appropriate.

“We all know that now,” laughed Paddy.

“How did you find the Home clan tartan?”

“Violet and Evie poured over hundreds of samples and narrowed it down to a few which they matched to old photos of Wilf’s kilt. They figured that was how the wily old bugger had got round it, using your mam’s tartan.”

“Everyone has gone to so much trouble, I feel like such a fraud. I just wanted an evening alone with you in Appleby Thornton.” Bernie blushed, feeling even more guilty.

Sensing her confusion, Paddy cupped her cheeks in his hands. “We can go out any night.”

Any further discussion of their work-play balance would have to wait. The sound of familiar footsteps running up the stairs alerted them their presence was required in the bar. Paddy and Bernie followed Tim into a cacophony of noise, the sound of fiddle, banjo and accordion mixed with laughter and the pounding of feet on the wooden floor.

Tim grinned and nodded as Bernie asked, “Isn’t that the Bridges that come in on a Thursday night?”

“Apparently, before they were married, they used to go to Scottish dancing on Thursday nights.”

Kevin and the Tweaven Folk band sounded like a group of musicians who were enjoying a successful long awaited reunion, rather than strangers that had only met a few days ago. Apparently Kevin didn’t just play the Bagpipes but was going to town on the harmonica. Mac had found refuge in Reggie and had settled on a bench seat with the dog's head resting on the lad’s lap.

Alan Bridges and his wife Yvonne broke from each other and flew off in different directions to persuade, grab and drag the people sitting at the tables onto the makeshift dance floor. Fred was up first, taking hold of Vi who had pushed her nose out of the kitchen to sneak a peek at the fun. She protested, explaining she couldn’t leave her post, but Evie chased her onto the dance floor with a tea towel.

Bernie smiled at Patsy and Delia. She had never seen anyone quick step to the Gay Gordons before. Phyllis’ face was flushed as she tried to stay in time, partnered by a very light on her feet Lucille. Bernie grinned as Paddy dug his son in the ribs and Tim scowled, shaking his head in protest. Her smugness was short-lived when Alan Bridges took hold of her hand and dragged her onto the floor. She groaned to herself, realising she should have seen it coming. But she knew she wasn’t the only one who had been distracted and let their guard down. As Alan swung her around, she glimpsed a determined Yvonne pulling a very reluctant Paddy to the centre of the room. A massive cheer went up, and it wasn’t for his dancing prowess, but the first view of the crowd of Paddy in his Highland Dress.

Paddy cleared his throat, and everyone sat. Bernie held her breath, she was relieved when he started reading from his phone in his own soft Northern English twang and didn't attempt a Scottish accent. He did struggle a little with more than the odd word and she noticed it was in parts an English translation of Burns’s Address to a Haggis. She did think her dad would be shaking his head and laughing if he was watching these antics held in his memory. As a shiver left her, she wondered if Marianne was also looking down with pride and amusement.

Bernie bit her lip. This was the difficult bit, if trying to read a 18th century Scottish poem out loud wasn’t hard enough. She knew from years of experience Paddy had to keep reciting while removing the Sgian-dubh from his woolly knee-length socks. He then had to pull the small dagger out of its black leather holder and plunge the blade into the Haggis at just the right moment in the text. She went to hold on to her chair but was surprised when a long thin hand grabbed hers. Tim’s hand was cold, but sweaty at the same time, and she squeezed it back.

Paddy finished the poem with ease following the tricky bit. He didn’t seem to mind stumbling over some of the unfamiliar words. It wasn’t like anyone was going to correct him. There was much relief all around when he finally toasted the Haggis, and everyone could raise the complimentary whisky they had been nursing since the beginning of the festivities. Not everyone had been patient and some found they were toasting with an empty glass, supping air. A nervous Bernie would have been included in this number, but Trixie had passed on her dram so she could at least properly take part in the toast. Paddy received a standing ovation. He wasn’t deceived it was for his faultless performance, but more for effort or maybe they were just hungry and glad it was finally over.

Eventually he refused to dance and Bernie gave up too. She found him outside smoking one of her roll-ups. She just grinned, knowing he deserved one. Bernie hugged Trixie’s scarf around her.

“Aren’t you cold in...erm that?”

Paddy smoothed the kilt under him, between his bare legs and the cool wood of Peggy and Frank’s memorial bench. Bernie grinned and went back indoors.

“Is this Turner tartan, then?”

“No, the Turners are from Liverpool, probably some Irish in there somewhere too, but my mother’s family hailed from Fife.” Paddy softly answered.

Bernie wriggled on his knee, trying to gain a bunch of the fabric of the kilt in her hand, as the band broke into Deacon Blue’s, Dignity.

“So which clan...ayyyyyeah!” She quickly jumped up vigorously rubbing the flesh between her boot and the hem of her dress on her right thigh. Paddy stared at her in confusion and concern.

“Something bit me.”

“It’s January.”

“Am I bleeding, is there a bump?” Bernie turned her back to Paddy and lifted up her skirt. Paddy started to wonder whose birthday it was. He used his phone as a torch and took his time giving a thorough examination of her right thigh. The eventual diagnosis was no injury to her person, but there was a nasty snag in her new-on tights.

Paddy also identified the culprit pointing to the clan dagger attached to the front of his kilt. “I think you sat on this?”

“You stabbed me.”

“You stabbed you.”

“Aww, the crest is the world below a rainbow between two clouds. What does the motto say?”

“At Spes Infracta.”

“Oooh, you're getting the hang of these ancient tongues, aren’t you?” Bernie giggled, “what does it mean in boring old English?”

Paddy, who had been laughing with her, fell serious.

“It means Yet My Hope is Unbroken.” He gently tipped her chin forward with his thumb and forefinger and kissed her.

“That’s beautiful.” Bernie caught her breath. “What was your mam’s maiden name?”

“Hope.”

“Home and Hope,” smiled Bernie, partly to herself.

Paddy reached inside his sporran and handed Bernie a small tartan box with a gold bow on top.

“But this was my present.” She smiled, pulling on his shirt strings.

“That is a very fierce looking lion, why am I not surprised.” Bernie didn’t need the torch to see the glint in Paddy’s eye as he spoke. “I nearly got you the Hope rainbow one instead....but I wasn’t sure.”

Bernie smiled, “Maybe next year?”

“You are still very presumptuous after all these years. This was a one night only kinda thing,” Paddy choked, then swiftly changing the subject, “I liked the motto on the Hume crest, anyway.”

Bernie was impressed with his correct Scottish pronunciation of Home. She read aloud the words around the lion's head A Home, A Home, A Home, that is the slogan, but the motto is actually True To The End .”

“Well, I think the matriarchy has it tonight.”

“Do you know Robbie Burns was a great supporter of women's rights as well as being a romantic? He wrote a poem about it.”

“From what I’ve heard, he was very fond of women indeed. Counting the number of children he fathered.”

“Yes, that as well,” muttered Bernie, “but just for tonight I am going to be Shelagh Bernadette Mannion-Home and you can be Patrick Turner-Hope.

“One thing I can’t get my head around is how Val convinced you to do this?”

Bernie rubbed her thumb over the slogan on her new brooch as Paddy continued.

“Basically how many times you have put me, us, our hope of a life, a home together before the person who you thought you were and believed yourself to be.”

“Val said that?”

“Sort of, maybe a bit more colourful and there was some violence involved, but I did agree with the sentiment.”

“I think our mams would have approved of Val.”

“Are you true to the end, Shelagh Bernadette?”

“Well, you just better hope this isn’t the end, Patrick.”

The sounds of Auld Lang Syne filled the night and Paddy leaned forward for another kiss, suddenly aware Bernie had very cold hands and had chosen not to replace the kilt pin.

#call the midwife #berns night revisited #to be continued #soon hopefully #home and hope #bless them

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and-the-world-is-quiet-here · 4 years ago

Text

Live 2020 debate commentary from a salty, disabled, and VERY pissed gen Z

Yall he just said he’s immune

My dad just left the room

Bitch are u saying Johnson and Johnson is going to make the vaccine?

sir that’s the diaper company…..smh

Biden just said its going to be a dark winter

#winter is coming

“virus.....that came from china” -trump 2020

“were learning to live with it”-trump 2020

apparently “Biden lives in his basement”-your president 2020

totally accurate.....obviously

ohhhh biden just said were learning to die with it

trump interrupted biden

Mam I thought you said you were muting them?

biden laugh count at 3

he all about the once percent till its the dead ones

trump interrupting at 3...nvm its now 4

this debate is making my dog sad

interrupting now at 5 for trump

trump saying his young sons illness just “went away”

bitch he’s may age and no it did not just “go away”

he was in quarantine for two weeks

apparently nyc is a ghost town

its not a ghost town trump I live right next to it

loudest neighbors ever

trump don’t call him Anthony

his name is DOCTOR Fauci

treat him with the respect he deserves

Biden looks so sad

nvm he legit looks like the joker right now

HALFWAY MARKKK

why is this at 9?

sir its a school night

I need time to scroll through my feed for hours before collapsing

Biden don’t use the word sovereignty

trump doesn't know what it means

thats discrimination against trumps

ohhh hes attacking hunter (biden) again

so he has a wee drug problem?

at this point everyone got one!

your the one making lewd comments about your infant daughter on national tv

(look it up he talks about his 6 month old daughters legs but and breasts)

get him big b!!

h876689908776- my dog 2020

he wants to express his disappointment

the light boxs is stealing his mother attention

ohh hes being rude to the moderator again

u a strong independent Indian woman get him girll!

mute his mike

prty plz

I am dissapionted in you

he’s saying he’s not allowed to release his taxs

(that is a proven lie)

“i was put through a phony witch hunt”- you'll never guess 2020

hes going after his BROTHER now

how is this allowed?

who decided trumps strategy would be to accuse his opponent of his own crimes?

look at the insults guys its a crystal ball

stay ahead of the scandal's

WILL YOU LEAVE HIS SON ALONE PLEASE

THESE ARE HIS CHILDREN LEAVE THEM ALONE

“i was a business man doing business”-trump 2020

no sir you were another rich white guy taking advantage of tax brakes and cheap foreign labor in asia

#american jobs as long as i don’t have to pay minimum wage

#you know like a DECENT FUCKING PERSON

Trump interrupted again

I lost count a while ago

Biden is staring into my soul

oh Biden just played the middle class childhood card

I haven't heard a single mute so far?

trump just said his bromance with kim jung un saved america from nuclear war

dont through my boy Obama under the bus

and another interruption

my big bro just screamed “MUTE BUTTON MUTE BUTTON MUTE BUTTON”

honestly same

10 more min guys

hang in there

OHHH trump just got MUTEDDDDDD

Biden is now on legitimate policy

ahhh hes proud of his plan

annd trump just interrupted

trump just kissed up to the moderator

trump just said biden’s more liberal than bernie

ohhh

biden just said trump dosent know who hes running against

hes like “this is joe biden”

like I know bro but slick burn anyway

ohhh they muted trump again!!!!

perfect opportunity to mute missed

trump just blamed healthcare issues on nancy peloski

biden says the the republicans wont pass it

(btw hes actualy right)

2 mins left

and trump is speaking through it

1 min left

omg what a waste of air

I really want him to test his “immunity”

preferably during a harsh winter

ITS TEN GUYSSS

there running over

they still haven't covered immigration

shit

I have just learned there is 30 min left

I think I would rather kill myself than watch the rest of this

I’m seriously have a sensory overload right now

I’m doing this for u

“children are brought here by coyotes”-presedentail cown 2020

what a wack ass sentence

hes like ohIi haven't been putting kids in cages

and then just went but I didn't build them they were built in 2014

(contradiction much)

“who built the cages”

yes it was Obama but guess what

THEY WERNT BUILT FOR KIDS

there ment to house animals, evidence, and adult prisoners in emergency situations

THEY WERNT MENT FOR 3 YEAR OLDS

Biden was just like “well no actually kids come with PARENTS”

(kids hardly ever come over with out parents)

and then he was like and also WHO LOST TRACK OF OVER 1,000 PARENTS

(thats 500+ new orphans at the least)

hes saying only the illegal immigrants with the lowest IQs come back after being deported

we said the same thing in december about you but ya’know

my mum was like “anyone eating chocolate” and I was like “im snaking on this ignorance” and she was like “dont do that you'll get indigestion”

“no one has done more for the black community then Donald trump except for maybe Abraham Lincoln”

oh yeah Biden just brought up how trump publicly campaigned for the execution of the central park 5

WHO WERE CHILDREN

AND OH YEAH THEY WERE COMPLETELY INNOCENT

trump just yelled at Biden, got muted, and just yelled louder

trump just said he cant see the audience but hes the least racist person in the room

“Abraham lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents in american history”- biden 2020

biden just went “oh god”

he just said that he used to not support the blm movement because they chanted rude things about police officers

I would like to reiterate that “pigs in a blanket” has never been chanted in a protest or been a prominent statement in the blm movement nor “fry em like bacon” so what trump is saying is factually incorrect

unless hes on some sort of far right conservative twitter feed were he came across a video of some drunk white college kids chanting it

but you know what ever fits you narrative

plus I would be pretty pissed if I kept getting shot at for no reason so....

Biden making more logical decisions

trump was like why have you never done all this stuff when you were vice president

“we had a republican congress” -biden 2020

we have the cleanest air

we have the cleanest crystal clear water

sir, i know you've been to mexico

don’t lie

the waters gorges down there

and not owned by your smug ass

trump just called china filthy

so you know....

*whispers* racism

ok 5 min left

for real this time

trump just went “aoc plus 3: and then hes like she knows nothing about the climate

ummm.... you dont even believe in climate change

bidens like “are....is...is is”

good for you

correcting your grammar

trump just said “the wind kills all the birds” out of the godamn blue

(he means wind mills and its untrue)

“Whats the next question baba”

“the final question is leadership which he doesnt have”- baba 2020

I feel bad for anybody watching this on the toilet

bidens starring into your soul

he knows what your doing

there officially overtime

its 10 33

they haven't even done the last section yet

btw ITS A SCHOOL NIGHT

why do they host these so late

I should be pretending to be asleep right now

this is generational discrimination

plus trumps supporters are so old there asleep by now

ohhhh its over

1036 final time

okay so thoughts....I generally dont like the party system i think its ridiculous the system was not designed for it, and its now more about loyalty then the actual candidates. I also am really hesitant to put another strait white male in the oval office, especially one thats from “the lucky few” I.E. the smallest voting generation in the country and also the one that already holds the most positions. That being said, at this point its really anyone but trump and I think bidens got the experience to turn things around.

I AM IN SCHOOL I CANNOT VOTE. I am relying on all my older friends, followers, neighbors, and community members. To make an educated decision that wont further degrade the once hopeful future my generation awaits. Please if you can vote VOTE the kids are relying on you!

P.S. sorry i wasn't able to edit this earlier i struggle alot with spelling and didnt have the time to edit this because I HAD TO GO TO BED AND THEN GO TO SCHOOL. Why am I more politically active then people twice my age you might ask? Well, thats because adults are lazy and need to get of their gd asses and VOTE. So kids dont have to do the legwork for them.

I have said my peace now, have a wonderful day!

#2020 #election #covid #trump #biden #debate #byedon #flyden 2020

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ris-harp · 4 years ago

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The Rest is Silence: A Deaf Hamlet Story. Chapter 1

Tonight seemed the perfect night to talk to spirits, if Horatio believed the movies. It was just after midnight, and purple-blue fog obscured the full moon and cast a ghostly glow over the land and trees. Hooting owls echoed their chants from the woods on both sides of the narrow cobblestone drive where Horatio stood. The wet began to seep into his five-thousand dollar Don Adriano jacket. He stifled a shiver and continued down the lane. Finally, he reached the end of the road and stood before the black iron gate emblazoned with the rampant lion of the Dane family crest.

Frank’s severe voice drifted out from the guardhouse, barely louder than the hooting owls. “Who’s there?”

“A friend,” Horatio warbled elongated haunting notes back into the darkness.

“Is that you, Rato?” Frank wasn’t laughing. No surprise there, really.

Horatio stepped up to the camera and smiled. “Just his ghost—“

“You’re late.” Frank snapped.

After a moment he iron gates rattled and the door to the guardhouse popped open.

Horatio sauntered through the gate and into the small guardhouse. “Quiet watch tonight?”

“Too quiet.”

Horatio took off his wet jacket, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it on the floor in the corner. Smiling, he wiped the moisture from his glasses with his shirt. “So you haven’t seen the thing again?”

“No.”

“Well, that makes sense.” Horatio scoffed as he put his glasses back on. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. I bet you’re just not getting enough sleep.” He picked a half-finished airline bottle of vanilla vodka off the desk and raised an eyebrow. “Or else you’re drunk on baby liquor.”

“I’ve seen it every day this week.” Frank snapped, ripping the bottle away from Horatio and drinking the contents.

“It’s only Wednesday.”

“Just wait. It’ll show. I guarantee it.”

Chuckling, Horatio shook his head.

A heavy quiet as thick as the fog outside followed. Frank squinted, staring through both.

“You got any more?”

“Huh?” Frank turned his scowl to Horatio.

Horatio signed « alcohol ».

Frank raised an eyebrow.

“Booze, my friend. You really should learn some sign. The basics at least.”

Frank shook his head and opened a file cabinet. He pulled out another tiny bottle. “Since Ham’s been gone, it really hasn’t come up.” He tossed the bottle to Horatio.

“You know he just got back into town this afternoon.”

Frank shrugged.

“I think maybe you’re going crazy, Frank. Too much sorority girl liquor.”

Horatio settled into the wooden chair at the back of the guardhouse and drank the vodka in a single shot. The vanilla vodka warmth settled into his stomach. He leaned back with a smile and a sigh.

“You know, Bernie saw it, too. Last week when he covered my shift. He said he saw a bright green light in the west.”

“I went to Arden with Bernie since middle school. He used to say he couldn’t join the lacrosse team because he was too busy playing polo. The guy couldn’t join cause he was on a scholarship. He’s F.O.S. You shouldn’t indulge—“

“Shh.”

“Him.”

“Shut up.” Frank urged in an even more severe tone than Horatio thought was possible. “Get over here.”

Begrudgingly, Horatio roused himself from the surprisingly comfortable wooden chair and walked to the observation window.

“Oh my god, Frank! Look! It’s fog! And more fog! Wow!”

Frank danced into his coat and tossed on his scarf. “Come on.” He pushed past Horatio and went out the door.

“Dude, for real. This is getting silly.”

“Why did you even come out here, Rato? Huh? If you don’t want to see him? If you don’t believe, you could have stayed home.” He didn’t even look at Horatio as he jogged out the door.

“Fine. Show me.” Horatio followed Frank outside. He immediately regretted leaving his jacket on the gatehouse floor.

Horatio shivered.

“Stop here, Rato.” Frank stopped Horatio about ten feet from the gate and took off his scarf. “I don’t think we should get too close.”

He handed the scarf to Horatio.

“Thanks.” He wrapped it around his ears and neck and looked out into the cloud-covered night. “What am I supposed to be looking at, Frank?”

“Ten o’clock. To the west. Toward the family plots.”

Horatio squinted in that direction. It was just fog. Swirling yellow and green glowing fog about fifty feet away.

“Fog, Frank. Seriously.”

The owls fell silent.

Yellow and green?

Horatio rubbed the moisture off his glasses with Frank’s scarf and refocused.

Yes. It was yellow and green.

From the cloudy swirl emerged a vaguely man-shaped figure.

“Very funny, Frank.” Horatio chuckled.

Frank said nothing.

“Bernie! Welcome to the party! Frank’s got lady booze!” Horatio shouted. “How are you doing that glowing thing?”

Bernie didn’t answer.

Horatio turned to Frank. “How’s he doing that?”

Frank gawked, unblinking as Bernie steadily slid closer to the gate.

“Frank?”

Frank was a terrible actor. Commitment to a prank was not something Frank was particularly known for. In fact, Horatio couldn’t remember a time where Frank had ever even made a joke. Unless maybe his whole existence was some elaborate farce.

The obscured person stood maybe twenty feet away now.

The clouds parted.

This glowing, green, gliding figure came into focus. It was too imposing to be short and scrawny Bernie. It must have been over six feet tall with shoulders half as wide. Its tuxedo tails faded to mist behind him.

“Holy f— fog.” Horatio exhaled a puff of curling vapour as he took a step toward the gate. “Who are you?”

The figure stopped its advance.

Despite Frank’s scarf, Horatio’s ears burned in the cold. The hair on Horatio’s bare arms stood on end.

“I command you—,” half-mocking fear cracked Horatio’s voice. “For real. Say something!”

Yellow-green light flashed in a hundred branching lightning bolts. Then steadily the figure in the distance became smaller and dimmer until it looked more like a dying firefly than a man.

The owls simultaneously took up their songs again, and the clouds dissipated. He and Frank stood alone under a full moon and a starry sky.

“He won’t talk to me either, Rato.”

Horatio pretended to listen to the owls for a moment as he searched for his voice. “It looked like Mr. Danes.”

Frank nodded.

“But Mr. Danes is dead.”

Frank nodded again and walked back into the gatehouse.

“Will it be back?” Horatio asked, unable to move.

“Not tonight.” Frank called back from inside the tiny building.

“What—“ Horatio cleared his throat. “What does it want?”

“If I knew, I would have taken care of it myself. He won’t talk to any of us. Not me, not Bernie, not Mark.”

“You think it’ll talk to Ham?”

“That’s actually why I asked you to come. We don’t really know Hamilton well enough to ask him.” Horatio’s jacket smacked him in the side of the head and landed on the ground at his feet.

He turned and glared at Frank, who stood expressionless in the doorway. He picked up his jacket and shook it out. It was buttoned up before he realised he was no longer cold. “You mean, you don’t like talking to the deaf guy.”

Frank didn’t say anything, but Horatio saw shame in his eyes.

“No worries, Frankie.” Horatio snarled. “Are you on duty tomorrow?”

Frank nodded.

“I’ll bring him by.”

“Don’t be late. And bring your own—“ Frank paused and fumbled with his hands until he signed « deaf school ».

Horatio’s chuckle got lost somewhere between his heart and his head.

« Alcohol » Horatio showed the correct sign with a sigh and a shake of his head. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you shouldn’t bother with it.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Horatio studied the spot where the ghost of Mr. Danes had stood only a few minutes ago. He shuddered.

“You gonna let me out?”

The gates buzzed and rattled open. Horatio strode forward down the driveway, giving the spirit’s area a wide clearance. He walked down the lane to his waiting car, all the while wondering if he would sleep tonight.

#ACTOR #asl #american sign language #deaf #deaftlent #shakespeare #fiction #fanfic #fantasy #author #writing #writer #william shakespeare #sign language #hard of hearing #hamlet #the rest is silence

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sounds-like-humpty-dumpty · 5 years ago

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Mistakes (Part 2)

Summary: “"Y/N?" He breathed down the line. His voice unbelieving. "What?" She tried to sound snappy but it came out rather sad than angry. "Fuck, Y/N." There was shuffling on the other end. Then: "Hi. How are you? How have you been? Shit. I can't believe you actually picked up." He had the audacity to chuckle. She could tell he was drunk by the way he slurred the words a little. Y/N remained quiet.”

Angst, Van x Reader

Part 2 of 10

(Part 1)

Y/N

She was sitting in her small single room that she occupied in a flatshare in the east of London. Tapping away on her laptop.

A couple of days after Van left, she managed to form this void inside her. She called it the grey void of nothingness. She could feel neither happy nor sad. She just existed. Numb. It was a coping mechanism.

Every now and then she would slip. The grey turning black and the emotions crashing down on her. Then she would cry and howl and curse the whole fucking world.

But the grey void of nothingness helped her get things done.

Helped her find a flatshare, where she could afford the rent.

Helped her pack her stuff together and leave the house she had called home for years.

Helped her wipe away any traces of her existence in it.

For a short moment when she packed all her belongings into boxes, she thought about leaving all the presents he had bought her. The dress she had tried on during their visit in New York, but after looking at the price tag, decided she would leave it in the store, just to find it in her suitcase after landing back home. The necklace he had given her with his initials as pendants. The cheesy love letter he had written her once after they had a huge fight and she pretended to move back to her parents.

However, she decided that she didn't want him to have those things of her either. So she gave the dress and necklace to charity and burned the letter. The void of nothingness helping her being less sentimental about the memories.

....

She had a good streak that week. Hadn't slipped for four days. Just lived and breathed and worked. Distracted herself from the memories and emotion that lurked behind the thin wall in the back of her mind. They were ready to emerge and overwhelm her whenever she made the mistake of thinking about him. Even if it was just for a second. Last time she slipped was because she was shopping with a friend when she found a jacket. She thought about how good it would look on him and then remembered that it didn't matter because she would never see him again anyway. The emotions came crashing in then and she had to excuse herself and dart to the restrooms so people wouldn't see her crumbling down in public. She cried herself to sleep that night and woke up in nothingness the next morning.

She was sure she would have lasted longer than four days if it hadn't been for her phone ringing. Van's picture appearing on her screen. She couldn't pick up.

——— Van

He rang again. And again after that. And again. He even left a couple of voicemails: "Y/N pick up. I just wanna talk, okay?" "Fuck Y/N. Pick up your fucking phone." He even sent her some texts: "Please, can you pick up your phone? I just want to talk." "Y/N?" "Y/N, please. You don't have to say something. Just pick up yeah?"

He just wanted to know she was there. Wanted to know she still existed. But his texts and calls stayed unanswered.

——— Y/N

Van gave up after an hour. She hadn't turned the phone off. Just cried harder with every call she didn't answer. Like a masochist who couldn't get enough of the pain. Her crying lasted well through the night and into the early morning hours. How easy it would have been, if she could have just picked up. If she could have just listened to what he had to say. But the pain kept her from answering. Fear and a tiny bit of anger, too. What could he have said to make this better anyway? Nothing.

Nothing could make this better. The pain was there, he had caused it and it wouldn't go away. Nothing could make it stop.

——— Van

It's been a month since he came back home to their empty house. His empty house. He had bought it. It was his. And yet it didn't feel like it. It didn't feel like his house or his home. It just felt like another place to stay at. Like one of the houses, he and the lads stayed at while recording their last album. Familiar but not home. Not like it belonged to him. Not like he belonged in it.

He threw himself into work. Wrote song after song. Made the band fly to Berlin and then to Oslo just to write and record a few demos for their new album. Everything so he wouldn't have to spend too much time in that house. But the others quickly grew tired of his relentless work ethics and intervened. Van had no choice but to take a break. He decided to spend it with his parents up north.

However, he already began regretting this decision the first day he went home, as his mother asked him how Y/N was doing. Of course, he lied, said she was doing fine, just busy with work. He couldn't admit that they had split. If he mentioned it, he would also have to justify why. And he couldn't explain why he did what he did. He was too ashamed of it. But his parents could see how restless he was. They wanted to help. When they recognised that Van wouldn't spill what was bothering him, they turned to the only other person who would know. And while Larry didn't want to rat Van out, he, too, was worried about his best friend's behaviour. So Larry, who knew Van had broken up with Y/N, told them just that, hoping Van would finally come to terms with it.

...

Bernie sighed as he watched his son mindlessly strumming on the guitar. He knew Van, knew how stubborn he could be. How easily offended he could get if he felt ganged up on. "You need to talk to Y/N." He said and Van looked up at the mention of her name. Van furrowed his brows, not quite realising that his father knew. "Even if it's just to end things properly. But son, you can't go on like this." Van understood then, that Bernie somehow had found out, and he clenched his jaw. "I tried, yeah?" he spat back. "I fucking tried but she won't answer the fucking phone. I don’t even know where she lives now." Mary, who had listened to their conversation from the kitchen, came into the room and commented "I still don't understand why you did it in the first place. I thought you were happy, the two of you. Last time we saw you, you went on about marrying that girl." Van got up, not caring about the guitar that hit the ground with a painful sounding thump. He wordlessly walked out of the room and towards the front door. He opened and slammed it shut, leaving his helpless parents behind. Heading for the next pub.

——— Y/N

It had been about a month since Van had called her. Two since they broke up. No, since he broke up with her.

Van's name appeared on her screen. This time it wasn't accompanied by his photo. She had deleted it. It was late in the evening and she was watching a movie on her laptop, trying to fall asleep, when he called. She contemplated whether she should answer it or not. But she felt stable enough in that moment. And she reasoned that she could hang up any time if she should need to. So she pressed the green button to accept.

There was silence on the other side. For a moment she wondered if he would say anything at all. She definitely wouldn't make the start. "Y/N?" He breathed down the line. His voice unbelieving. "What?" She tried to sound snappy but it came out rather sad than angry. "Fuck, Y/N." There was shuffling on the other end. Then: "Hi. How are you? How have you been? Shit. I can't believe you actually picked up." He had the audacity to chuckle. She could tell he was drunk by the way he slurred the words a little. Y/N remained quiet. When Van noticed that he wouldn't get an answer, he sobered up a little. "Can we talk?" He asked. "We are talking." She answered. "No. No, I mean face to face." "No." Silence. "I miss you." Now it was Y/N's turn to chuckle. It was cold and sarcastic. Designed to mask the pain she was feeling. "Is that all?" She asked and was glad she didn't choke on the words. There was silence on the other end of the line, only Van's breathing. "I'm going to hang up now." She said and did just that, without giving Van the chance to object.

——— Van

He called her again the next night. This time less drunk. Hoping she would pick up again. To his astonishment, she did. "Hi" he greeted her. "What?" She sighed. "Just wanna talk, is all." He tried to sound nice, unthreatening. "I have nothing to say to you." She retorted. "That’s fine. You don't have to. I can do the talking." "Van, I'm tired." Silence. Van wanted to ask her to say his name again. But he feared she would just hang up if he did. "Ok, you can fall asleep while I talk, just- just don't hang up ok?" She didn't answer but also didn't hang up. "I-" he wanted to apologise. Wanted to tell her how sorry he was, but it just didn't feel right over the phone. "The lads and I were in Berlin a couple weeks back. Remember that time we went together?" He was met with silence but he kept on going. He told her news from Bondy, knowing how well she got on with him. Told her about Larry and Bob and Benji and what they were all up to. He kept on rambling over an hour, always finding new stories to tell her. So much had happened in the two months.

Of course, he left out the stories that happened during the nights when he was drinking too much, picking fights with his friends because he wanted to scream and make them feel as angry as he felt.

When he didn't have any more stories left to tell, he quietly asked into his phone: "Y/N?" She mumbled "Hm?" He knew she was almost asleep, so didn't answer. Just kept quiet and pressed his phone closer to his ear so he could hear her breathing. When it evened out and he was sure she was fully asleep he softly said "I'm sorry, I fucked up." and hung up.

2/10

(Part 3)

#van mccann #van mccann fanfic #van x reader #angst #angsty #catb fanfic #vanmccann #vanfic #mistakes

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bees-tornado · 4 months ago

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finally,,, she is complete,,

#behold my beautiful jpeg wife with a few extra numbers next to her #*immediately collapses like a cartoon skeleton*#fehposting #emergency bernie button

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johnjankovic1 · 5 years ago

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MASON-DIXON 2.0

The open revolt at the behest of Middle America against Wall Street’s day-traders and Silicon Valley’s coders was symptomatic of the brinkmanship across the political spectrum by Democrats and Republicans over many decades. The bipartisanship shown for indexes like the Dow Jones or the S&P 500 and its casual disregard for the tinderbox of America’s Rust-Belt between its unemployment and low wages as open immigration flood the labour market would together inaugurate Donald John Trump who himself became a kind of canary in the coal mine for the Brexit referendum and the West. To confound the measure of GDP with good governance was then shown to be a form of illiteracy for the income inequality, deindustrialization, and poverty rates of a country, nor was it right for demagogues of globalization to confuse less immigration with racist or nativist policy if it adds to wage growth by tightening labour markets. Because Washington DC is among the wealthiest zip-codes according to the US Census Bureau its insularity left it oblivious to the economic insecurities of ordinary Americans. Because the ruling-class is the paragon of dumb they thrashed about the epithet of white-nationalism to explain away populist ideas. Lost on the Establishment was how its own theology of neoliberal-economics was what stoked the ire of people.

Unless capitalism is under the ward of a competent watchman then it appears society will break as economics and culture are so often indivisible. This old wisdom recalls the 1861 Civil War which, like today’s redux feud, followed from manufacturers in the North and farmers to the South. Progressivism north of the Mason-Dixon Line in antebellum America was just and good in its cause to emancipate the Black race whose free labour enriched southern plantations. Ironically these roles of right and wrong between industries have flipped in today’s secularism of the coastal elite and the heartland: (1) Bank of America cut credit to gunsmiths in breach of their 2nd Amendment rights; (2) Delta Airline ceased discounts to law-abiding gun owners; (3) Procter & Gamble in its lunacy removed the Venus symbol from the livery of its tampons as transexuals now menstruate; (4) International airports banned the Christian eatery Chick-fil-A; (5) Nike monetized hatred for America’s flag; (6) Big-Tech deplatformed conservatives; (7) Gillette assailed men for their ‘toxic-masculinity’; (8) Goldman-Sachs divested from oil and gas; (9) Walmart added pronoun buttons of ‘he-she-they’ to store uniforms in conformity with new gender theories, etc. This cultural clash issues from a species of economic globalization that erases Christianity while it serves to belittle those who farm the nation’s breadbasket or who send their sons to die in wars like Afghanistan and Iraq.

While these same ideologues of the Washington Consensus from corporate America sneered at the country’s interior, unbeknownst to them was how their own cosmopolitan truths were being cannibalized. If Trumponomics is indeed the prejudice of white voters what explains socialism’s sudden popularity? Why are liberals sponsoring a doctrine whose tenets are similarly antithetical to free-markets and free-trade? To racialize the phenomenon does not square with a young and multiethnic demography which supports the notion of bigger government nor does the constant refrain of racism explain away the hostile takeover of the Democrat Party by the communist senator Bernie Sanders. The scapegoating of whites by the punditocracy is no longer tenable. What is happening suggests a rejection by the body-politic of an aristocracy which has made Washington the handmaiden to its business through an activism masquerading as philanthropy from a wealthy donor class. When equality of opportunity is defenestrated by means of offshored jobs, wage stagnation, or delayed family-formation from college debt then populism akin to the Right’s Tea Party or the Left’s Occupy Wall Street emerges to undo such market fundamentalism that has precipitated the loss of social mobility.

Passions like these from the electorate will not abate in the foreseeable future since Washington’s abstinence from interfering in markets has left the social fabric in a state of disrepair for two reasons: (1) If the goal of a market economy is to always increase productivity by rationalizing production then it has reached its logical endpoint; (2) A paradox has changed socialism into a luxury of affluence. Number one is the ouroboros nature of markets which discriminates against the sum of humanity through automation, self-driving autonomy, robotics, and 3D printing in blue-collar jobs, followed by Artificial Intelligence, machine-learning, and generative-design in white-collar ones, thus in time no worker is spared from the breadline regardless of IQ or education. Number two is the irony of how the democratization of wealth has led a younger demography to usher in a postmaterialist society through its sharing-gig economy which has become a precursor to socialism. Because Generations Y, Z, and A are the most privileged in the genealogy of civilization they have disavowed Christianity and capitalism in support of socialist policies to appease their own moral vanity after being reared in abundance for so long. The first’s Industry 4.0 and the second’s pampered existentialism ensure that today’s class warfare will not be ephemeral.

Voters of both liberal and conservative stripes have sought a buccaneer to agitate against Washington’s aristocracy whose blinders have ignored the socio-economic implications wrought by free-trade, deregulation, and open labour markets. As America’s GDP skyrocketed since the boom of the business cycle in the 1990s its Gini-Index steadily rose above the averages of other OECD countries. By itself such inequality would arouse some tepid indignation but next to America’s opulence, bailouts for the moral-hazard of banks, the globalization of production with fewer protections because of less unionization, and the two-fold increase of housing costs, a wick for a revolution was primed. Few parents of a household can feasibly raise their offspring in this new economy as mothers and fathers both enter the labour market to make ends meet. The dynamics of family-formation changed overnight as neoliberal-economics pushed birthrates downward and delayed it well past the peak fertility window for the majority of women. Whereas the decline in birthrates during the stagflation of the 1970s was monetary in its causality, today’s identical phenomenon results from a structural change in the global economy where two parents work full-time in half of US households compared with 31 percent in 1970 according to Pew Research.

The integration of economies by big-business with the forfeiture of sovereignty has marginalized the middle-class to the point of becoming a minority group for the first time in 2015. To compound a sense of being alienated this globalization substitutes a mosaic of culture bereft of any single identity for the melting-pot of assimilation which otherwise spurs unity as the true sinews of a nation rather than the many enclaves that sprout from a more heterogeneous society like in the former. Arguing in this case for a monoculture is not at all equivalent to arguing against race. The Christian West is indeed the most hospitable to expatriates despite how such humanity goes unrequited in places like China, Japan, or Iran since the US has been a sanctuary for migrants everywhere. But the sight of labour markets suddenly brimming with an influx of workers from recorded entries and illegal ones exacerbates the anxiety of those who are already beset with stagnant wages. Racist! Racist! Racist! No, you lying demagogue, it is economics. Slower growth provokes mistrust for variables which may suppress earnings further. Of these many grievances two were the bona fide genesis for today’s populism: (1) NAFTA and (2) China’s entry into the WTO. Big-business in the 1990s then began to exploit cheaper labour in Mexico’s maquiladoras and China’s export-economy at the expense of shuttering factories back home.

What has been shown is how free-trade at a certain threshold becomes inimical when imports which are either duty-free or minimally tariffed actually begin to redistribute wealth more so than create it. The most optimistic of studies authored on NAFTA found its welfare gains to be less than 0.08% in tandem with how wage growth fell by 17 percent in certain industries. Economist Dani Rodrik wrote a beautiful synopsis of this effect in ‘The Globalization Paradox’:

To drive the point home, I once quantified the ratio of redistribution-to-efficiency gains following the standard assumptions economists make when we present the case for free trade. The numbers I got were huge—so large in fact that I was compelled to redo the calculations several times to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake. For example, in an economy like the United States, where average tariffs are below 5 percent, a move to complete free trade would reshuffle more than $50 of income among different groups for each dollar of efficiency or “net” gain created! Read the last sentence again in case you went through it quickly: we are talking about $50 of redistribution for every $1 of aggregate gain. It’s as if we give $51 to Adam, only to leave David $50 poorer.

The asymmetry is nothing less than a paradox of tragicomic proportions. If opening markets beyond a certain limit shifts inordinate sums of money to the richest while inflicting penury on the poorest then a welfare state with a bevy of social safety nets ought to be established to keep an economy functional lest it devolve into a matter of Bolsheviks seizing power. The more capitalism is practiced, the more interference is needed unless the intended effect is for populism to be borne of a class conflict. The lesson here really is that free-markets need not be exercised to the point of self-destruction. From this quagmire can the philosophy of capitalism be distilled into two basic questions: (1) What are the hidden costs for creating a finance and digital economy which does not produce anything other than trading securities and codes all day while manufacturers are offshored? (2) Is the raison-d’être of capitalism to produce material things and comforts like imports from Mexico and China or is it to better an individual society by exploiting all human capital within it regardless of IQ or education? This existentialism is scarcely debated although it is paramount to ensure the proper workings of a country.

#trumponomics #economicnationalism #capitalism #AdamSmithbullshit

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mobius-prime · 5 years ago

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139. Sonic the Hedgehog #78

Though it's not really relevant to the plot, this just so happens to be the first issue released in the 21st century! You'll notice the little jokey announcement of this fact on the cover above. It's also worth noting that at this point, it's been just over a year since the first 3D Sonic game, Sonic Adventure, was released in Japan, and several months since its international release… I wonder if this will have any effect on the comic?

Changes

Writer: Karl Bollers Pencils: FRY Colors: Frank Gagliardo

We open with Sonic kneeling in front of the king, who is giving a speech in front of the entirety of Knothole about Sonic's bravery and heroic actions. He touches a sword to Sonic's shoulders, and knights him as Sir Sonic the Hedgehog! Sally gives him a medal and a kiss on the cheek, and amidst the celebration of Sonic's new title the king makes another announcement.

It's about time he officially recognized them! While this is going on, Robotnik seethes in his headquarters in Robotropolis. While he's finally managed to rid himself and his computer systems of the virus Nicole and Sally planted, he had to dump a lot of old corrupted files, including the hidden location of Knothole and start from scratch. This is kind of convenient for the larger plot, seeing as since this is a different Robotnik from the original, it might be too easy for him to concoct a winning strategy if he was able to simply access all the old Robotnik's info from the get go. He vows revenge on Sonic, as he still has millions of roboticized slaves, including Sonic's uncle. Speaking of, Sonic isn't as caught up in the celebratory mood as everyone else. He's quite depressed, actually, as he finds himself having to move all Uncle Chuck's old belongings out from his house for Nate to move in instead. His parents, entering the house, move to comfort him about the situation.

It's been so long since Sonic has had parents to look after him that this is a very sweet sight. Aside from Sonic Underground and an old obscure manga only ever released in Japan, I know of no other Sonic media that actually addresses the topic of Sonic's parents. When the series was rebooted in the future, one of Sega's weird new rules for the comic was that they couldn't include any references to family members that weren't already defined within the games, but I always found that to be restrictive and detrimental - considering Sonic's very independent, cocky, cool-guy persona, it's fascinating to me to see how he ends up interacting with parents who care about him. There's this clash between his rebellious teenager attitude, and the side of him that wants to be taken care of by the parents he was separated from for so long, and I find his attempts to strike that balance very interesting.

Speaking of family and parents, Sally and Elias have joined their father in the building which has been hastily retrofitted to serve as Queen Alicia's new "storeroom" of sorts, the temperature brought down to freezing levels to maintain her cryotube. Apparently Dr. Quack is still trying to work out why, if her past injuries have healed, she's still in her coma, and they all resolve to continue to hold onto hope as a family. They turn away to help Nate carry a Super Emerald (still no real word on what these are or how he came by them, but eh), which conveniently means they miss the queen's hand twitch within her tube…

And here, we have our second space interlude!

Hmmm… who could be in these strange spaceships? Clearly they know where Mobius is…

Back in Knothole, Mina is wandering around, depressed from losing her family during Robotnik's takeover. She actually considers letting herself be captured to be with her family again, but before her thoughts carry too far she finds herself approached by Rosie, who has a special request for her.

As Mina heads over to watch over the children, Bunnie and Antoine pass by, chatting together. Bunnie asks Antoine why he's seemed so distracted lately, and he responds that the knowledge of his father being the roboticized sub-boss of Robotnik in Mercia has been weighing heavily on his mind. As that moment Sonic, Sally and Tails show up, and when Bunnie and Antoine congratulate Sonic on his new title he suggests cheekily that they call him Sir Sonic from now on.

Now this is something I am very pleased to see. This is the moment where Geoffrey starts to become less of an asshole, and become a whole lot more likable. I really prefer his rivalry with Sonic to be more about their respective attitudes toward life, with Geoffrey being all about duty and serious discipline, while Sonic is more of a free spirit who leaps into things without thinking to be a hero. It's much more interesting than the whole love triangle thing Penders tried to push for so long in eras past. They begin to discuss how the king apparently wishes the Freedom Fighters and Secret Service to begin working together more closely, but they're unaware of Elias watching from afar, thinking quietly to himself. Turns out all of this - the reinstatement of the Freedom Fighters and their working together with the Secret Service - was all at the suggestion of Elias to the king, as he sees Sonic as a hero who deserves to be on the front lines after observing him during the mission to rescue Nate. He walks obliviously past a group of heart-eyed girls ogling him (and really, can we blame them? He is very attractive), wishing that he could be more involved in the adventures and dangerous missions the others go on, that he didn't have to be a prince in line for the throne. However, he finds himself shaken from his thoughts when he hears his father and Dr. Quack speaking through the window of the queen's storage building…

Well, that's not good… Perhaps even more concerning, Robotnik back in his HQ has once again turned his arm into a terrifying mass of robot tentacles and plugged it into his now-cleansed computer system, and discovered a tidbit of information that he believes could cement his ability to rule over the planet! What is this information you ask? Well, all we know so of it so far is what's displayed on his screen as he orders his troops to march out - the outline of a continent that looks very much like South America, and the word "Chaos" emblazoned across it…

So you remember how I pointed out how the Sonic Adventure game had just recently come out at the time of this issue? Yeah, I didn't bring that up for no reason - much like Sonic X did several years later, the comics did their own adaption of the game! Unlike Sonic X, however, which was able to follow the script of the game fairly closely with only minor modifications to be made for the setting and characters, the comic adaption differs significantly from the plot of the game due to this world's vast differences from the games' canon - for example, humans and Mobians aren't exactly friendly with one another, the Master Emerald didn't even exist until recently, and perhaps most notably, the history of the echidnas has already been explored in a very different context from how it's portrayed in the game. This was perhaps the thing I was most interested in to see how the writers decided to resolve the discrepancy when I first read the preboot. After all, it wasn't until the 3D games that the Sonic franchise began to expand its worldbuilding and create storylines and characters that had a rich backstory. Up until then, the characters and story were barely given any backstory beyond quick blurbs within game manuals, backstories which were so fluid and indeterminate that they differed greatly between localizations of the games in other countries. Sonic Adventure was the first real attempt to add some depth to the world of Sonic the Hedgehog, and suddenly the Archie comics found themselves having to contend with this new reality being explored in the games, a reality which is extremely different to the one they themselves already created with the limited base they had to go off from the Genesis era. Now, not only do they have to find new roles for all the characters which simply don't exist in the games such as Sally and Bunnie, but they have to find ways to fit even very simple concepts such as Station Square and Chaos into this universe. As we'll see, there were quite a few workarounds implemented in the plot to explain these things away… but it will be several more issues yet until we reach that point, as we have the final arc of Knuckles the Echidna to tackle first!

Tales of the Great War (Part 6): What Really Happened

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Chris Allan Colors: Frank Gagliardo

We're getting close to the end of this arc. We head back to the campfire around which Jules and Bernie are telling their story of the Great War. Jules was on life support due to the extent of his injuries, and Bernie and Uncle Chuck decided to hide this from the infant Sonic for the time being to avoid upsetting him with information he was too young to process. Chuck, with Bernie's blessing, took Jules to his prototype device within the palace lab, unaware that Julian had been making some, let's say, unauthorized modifications.

Chuck, unwilling to wait the time it would take to run preliminary tests on his device for fear of losing his brother, stuck Jules in and hit the button, and was promptly horrified when a mindless, fully-robotic Jules emerged, unresponsive to anything he said to him. He blamed himself and became severely depressed, not realizing that it wasn't his fault at all. Around this same time, the Great War was coming to a close. Julian had suggested something he figured would give him a potential leg up in conquering the world - that King Max should duel the Overlanders' overlord in a winner-takes-all fight to the death, his hope being that whoever won, he could easily take the place of to conquer the war-weary world for himself.

Despite his disappointment in the outcome, Julian was somewhat gratified that shortly thereafter, Chuck left all his equipment to him and resigned from being the kingdom's foremost scientist. Bernie attempted to convince him that it wasn't his fault, and that despite Jules' state she was grateful to him for trying, that Jules would be dead if he hadn't roboticized him. Chuck merely retorted that he might as well be dead with how the experiment went, and despite Bernie still trying to reason with him, he left, leaving her wondering how to explain everything to the young Sonic…

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #sonic the hedgehog #sth 78 #writer: karl bollers #writer: ken penders #pencils: james fry #pencils: chris allan #colors: frank gagliardo

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thecomicsnexus · 5 years ago

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Look On My Works, Ye Mighty...

WATCHMEN #11 AUGUST 1987 BY ALAN MOORE, DAVE GIBBONS AND JOHN HIGGINS

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

Rorschach and Nite-Owl approach Karnak as they discuss about Adrian Veidt's agenda and his unexplained reasons for wanting to destroy the world.

Inside the retreat, Veidt gets up from his bank of television monitors and heads into a control room. He then pushes a button on the console next to a time gauge that reads "Eastern Standard Time: 11:25" before communicating to his associates that his work is done and to meet him in his vivarium to celebrate.

Veidt then recounts, to his friends, his life story. He was born in 1939, the same year his parents immigrated to America. He was a very intelligent young man, but he hid his intelligence from his teachers and parents by deliberately achieving average grades. By age seventeen, his parents died and he inherited their vast fortune. However, he chose to give it all to charity to prove what someone could accomplish from nothing. He idolized Alexander the Great and decided to measure his greatness against his by retracing the steps of his hero in which he traveled throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia. On his return, he adopts the name Ozymandias, the Greek name for Pharaoh Ramses II, and starts his career as a costumed hero to fight all the evils of the world. As Veidt finish his story, he turn to his associates, which he has apparently poisoned, then opens the vivarium dome letting a blizzard of snow into its tropical enclosure.

Rorschach and Nite-Owl finally arrive at Karnak and eventually confronting Veidt. A brief melee ensues, but Veidt subdues both of his attackers with precision. Nite-Owl demand Veidt what he's trying to do. He explains that he realized fighting crime could never rid the world of evil, as he had been fighting only the "symptoms, leaving the disease itself unchecked." Then at the ill-fated Crimebusters meeting, he realized that The Comedian was right when he said it was pointless to form a crime-fighting team when nuclear war was inevitable. With the Cold War escalating and the proliferation of more arms - all of which are exacerbated by Dr. Manhattan's existence, he realized the military deadlock would eventually lead to one final conflict. For the last ten years, Veidt formulated his plan to solve this dilemma by tricking the world; frightening humanity into salvation with "history's greatest practical joke."

Veidt knew that Manhattan has to be out of the way of his plan first. He gave all of Jon Osterman's associates cancer which forced him into his exile. With the new technology that Manhattan had brought to the world, Veidt began to research advancements in the fields of genetics and teleportation on his private island. The Comedian discovered his island by accident while returning from Nicaragua. Initially believing to be a Sandinista base, Blake went to investigate and found a collection of artists and scientists working on a "monstrous new life form." Upon learning the creature's intended purpose, Blake was severely traumatized. But he was too afraid to expose the plot, and Blake only told Moloch, who he knew wouldn't understand. Since Veidt had Moloch's apartment bugged, he personally killed Blake before he could tell anyone else of Veidt's master plan: to frighten the world's governments into cooperation against a false alien threat designed by Veidt.

After killing Blake and ridding Manhattan, Veidt orchestrated his own assassination attempt in order to throw Rorschach's suspicion off of himself. He was also responsible for pushing a cyanide capsule into Roy Chess's mouth after subduing him to prevent him from talking as well. Veidt would finally teleport his life form, whose brain was cloned from a powerful psychic, into New York City. Since teleporting technology was limited, anything living that is transported would die of shock and explode. The ensuing psychic shockwave would kill half of the city's populace.

Nite-Owl is left deeply skeptical of Veidt's plans and asking him when he had planned on perpetrating this outlandish scheme while under the belief that he and Rorschach are here to prevent what he is about to do. Veidt replies that he didn't "do it." He already did it "thirty-five minutes ago."

In New York, the news vendor complains about the loud music being played by the Pale Horse band coming from Madison Square Garden that is being attended by knot-tops. He soon stops his rant when he sees Aline, Joey's ex-girlfriend. Aline ask him if he saw Joey, which he haven't. So she decide to wait outside the Promethean where Joey works. Joey soon steps out and is not thrill to see Aline, whose middle-class lifestyle and mannerism clashes with Joey's. The former couple attempt to salvage their relationship, but only to fall apart; Aline attempt to give her a book about relationships to help Joey understand what happened to them, and Joey complains that she just wanted to go to bed with her one time. Joey angrily tears the book apart and begin to fight Aline.

Meanwhile, Gloria Long meet Malcolm and tries to make amends with him. She admits she misses him, but cannot live with someone who fell driven to help hopeless cases that affect their marriage. But Malcolm then notice Joey's fight and tries to stop what she's doing against his wife's wishes.

The vendor talks to the kid reading Tales of the Black Freighter and is surprise to learn the kid's name is "Bernie", short for Bernard which is also the vendor's real name. But Bernie doesn't care too much since it's a common name. Bernard then notice Joey's fight with Aline. This is also seen by Detectives Steven Fine and Joe Bourquin, who are just passing by in their car. Fine, who has been suspended, stops the car and interfere the fight over Bourquin's objections. The scene also attracts Joey's boss and his brother, the Gordian Knot technician who fixed Dan Dreiberg's lock.

Just as everyone tries to break up Joey from Aline, they pause in stun horror when they see a large bright, blinding light emerge from the Institute for Extraspatial Studies building. Bernard and Bernie are closer to the building in which the vendor attempt to shield the boy from harm as the light engulfs them and everyone nearby.

TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER

The mariner rides into Davidstown and enters his own home, expecting to find pirates occupying it. In the darkness, he attacks a woken figure to be a pirate. But he stops when he is discover by his own children and the figure he was beating is his wife. The mariner reel in horror of what he just done before fleeing from his house and the town. He runs back to the beach as he wonder how he could have mistaken the black freighter's nonexistence arrival. The revelation soon unfolds which he sees the very ship waiting out in the water. The mariner then realizes that the black freighter didn't came for Davidstown at all, but for the mariner himself. He then willingly swim towards the massive ship and joins her crew.

AFTER THE MASQUERADE

In 1975, Doug Roth, a reporter for the Nova Express, conduct an interview with Adrian Veidt at his Antarctic retreat Karnak. Throughout the interview, Veidt recounts his life story from his humble beginnings as a costumed hero to his retirement, his interest in subjects such as futurology and electronic music, and his views on his fellow costumed adventurers. Veidt finish his interview by saying that the public may see him as the smartest man in the world, he "wish it wasn't this one."

REVIEW

I always forget that Veidt has an actual flashback, but because it is narrated by him to others and it is short, mixed with the exposition about his plan, it gets lost. I also think his backstory, while logical, doesn’t have the human appeal of the other characters.

The punchline of this issue is of course, that Veidt already doomed New York on page 7. And with it, the supporting cast of the series that conveniently end up together by the end.

Veidt may not be another Republic serial killer, but he does like exposition. In fact, Gibbons had to ask Moore to shorten the exposition, as his original script wouldn’t fit the pages. Moore accepted the challenge and did that, but you can still see that Veidt talks too much.

The “Hiroshima couple” takes the shape of the two Bernies in this issue and the shape of the blood stain from issue 1 (and the cover of this issue as well).

To be concluded...

#alan moore #dave gibbons #john higgins #watchmen #dc comics #comics #review #1987 #modern age #ozymandias #nite owl #rorschach #the comedian #vertigo comics

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newagesispage · 5 years ago

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JANUARY 2020

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Lots of nominations are out. I do have some faves: The Grammy’s went crazy for Lizzo and Billie Eilish. The comedy recording noms went to Trevor Noah, Ellen, Aziz, Gaffigan and Dave Chappelle.**The Sag’s gave love to Leo and Brad for Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, Of course, Joaquin was nominated for Joker. Most noms went to JJ Rabbit, The Irishman and Bombshell. In TV there was much ado about The Morning Show, The Crown, Barry, Big Little Lies, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Schitt’s Creek.** The Golden Globes which will air on Jan. 5 were full of great choices. Fingers crossed for Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips for Joker, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood and Quentin and Brad and Leo, Knives Out, Kathy Bates, Jodie Comer, Olivia Coleman, Billy Porter, Bill Hader and Henry Winkler and Barry. I hope good things for The Crown, Succession, Patricia Arquette, Helena Bonham Carter, Brian Cox and Kieran Culkin. Ellen DeGeneres will get the Carol Burnett award and Tom Hanks will receive the Cecil B. DeMille award.

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And Hooray to Schitt’s Creek for their PSA at the end of an episode that was about a character coming out to his parents. The promo gave resources to turn to for help.**The crew met up recently at the Paley Fest after the end of the series.

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Finally.. The Pope has abolished pontifical secrecy. It’s 2020 and the church may finally stop protecting predators. The age of consent for their porn was raised from 14 to 18 to keep up with modern times.

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Days of our Lives has been renewed for another year. We are safe until September 2021.**I am really hating Kate right now. I wish Rolf would take them all down. I am quite thru with the ‘acting’ of pushing buttons on phones and computers which leads us to read their messages on the screen. I do not like it in real life and I don’t want to watch it. Boring!!

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The Patriot act has been reauthorized.

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Sara Gilbert has separated from wife Linda Perry.

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Sharon Stone was blocked on Bumble because users thought it wasn’t really her, it was and her account was restored.

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The new film, Linda Ronstadt: the sound of my voice shows just how far her reach has been.

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Kudos to Eddie Murphy and company for the fab ‘Dolemite is my name.’

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I saw that the Bachelor is back. Is that horrid show still on?

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Steve Bullock is out.** Kamala Harris is out. Scary Clown tweeted: Too bad. We’ll miss you Kamala. She tweeted back: Don’t worry Mr. President, I’ll see you at your trial.** Biden is on the No Malarkey tour.

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Willie Nelson has reportedly quit smoking weed.

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Word is that Trump wears Switzerland’s Bronx face makeup for that orange glow.** Have you seen Rand Paul lately. He seems to have taken on a similar look to his President with the big white puffy eyes and that deranged look. What is going on with these people?

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Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux will star in a series about Watergate from the Veep team.

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Billy Dee Williams tells us that he identifies as male and female.

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About 1 million kids are getting thrown off lunch subsidies and other programs.** A recent Rolling Stone article explains the evangelical support of Trump. An early campaign meeting with religious leaders promised to fuck with the rights of transgender folks, abortion rights and to leave climate change alone because of the belief that God will control that. So, with that thinking should we shut down the factories because those are man made? Should we all be Christian scientists and not practice medicine anymore? Word is that the big money donors for Trump are helping to prop up their institutions and charities. **Christianity Today magazine : Trump should be removed from office. To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, remember who you are and whom you serve. ** On Dec. 8, the President tweeted 108 times. So much time on his hands!

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Michael Moore has a new grass roots podcast called Rumble. He will discuss and digest the breaking political news of the day and suggest things that the rest of us can do. He is introducing the Emergency podcast system.

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The last democratic debates of the year were here and again there was not enough time for Andrew Yang. He did well when he got the time and got to promote his book without that sounding too bad after he was asked whet gift he might give another candidate. Warren made a sound bite with her “wine cave” crack which just made her look petty. Biden and Bernie sounded the same as always. Amy Klobuchar had the best night. She was not shaky and seemed so confident. Trevor Noah seemed thrilled that he was mentioned. The sound on the microphones was a bit prickly.

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I really hate advertising for the most part and try to avoid them if at all possible. But it seems these Peyton/ Brad ads are everywhere and they are the most annoying things I have ever seen. Please make them go away.

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Hooray for Kansas City for being the first major city in the country to offer free public transportation.

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The Giuliani’s are divorced.

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Ok.. I’ll hand it to Dolly Parton. She has been putting her story songs on the screen in Heartstrings. They are a little “Hallmarky” so they wouldn’t really be my thing but it’s Dolly so sure I’ll give it a go. They celebrate all kinds of love which is a beautiful thing . One story had a beautiful performance b Gerald McRaney.

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Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally, the broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you. –L.R. Knost

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I was so hoping that Greta Thunberg would be the person of the year for Time. Hooray!!

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Rep. Van Drew is switching from the democrats to the republicans. Um..ok.. what timing.

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Check out Jack’s grandson, Duke Nicholson. He is all the buzz!

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The President was impeached on Dec 18. There were plenty of objections and rants from the republicans like they were children. The idiocy that comes out of their mouths is astonishing. Doug Collins, Deb Lasko and Louie Gohmert just seem insane. I don’t understand why there was not more push back when they kept up their mantra about nothing in the Mueller report when we can all see that there was. We are not all stupid. In the end some sort of consequence was finally brought to the man who has been accused of so much in his life. In formal impeachment proceedings there is no executive privilege. Pelosi is mulling over when to send the case to the senate. It is probably a good idea to let POTUS stew over the holidays.

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If impeachment would overturn the will of 63 million voters and that’s unconstitutional, then what is the electoral college overturning the will of 65 million voters. –Adam Parkhomenko

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Trump fans were upset when Canada broadcast Home Alone 2 with their President cut out. They called it political but it was found that it had been cut for ad time long before his campaign even began.

R.I.P. Irving Burgie, Williams Rucklehouse, victims of the multiple military shooting, Ron Leibman, Marie Fredriksson, the Jersey City , Portland and New Zealand victims, Don Imus, victims of the Vegas fires, Jerry Herman, Alley Willis, Carol Spinney, Danny Aiello, Syd Mead and Neil Innes.

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