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cyarsk52-20 · 1 year

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Vanderpump Rules Reunion Recap: The Trailer Park

Photo: Nicole Weingart/Bravo/Nicole Weingart/Bravo

The second part of this sure-to-be-epic reunion starts off with everyone screaming over #Scandoval and, yes, just as Tom Sandoval says, it has given everyone a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card. No matter what they did this season — heck, no matter what they’ve done in their whole lives — it’s like we’ve entirely forgotten about it because of the awful things Sandoval, Schwartz, and Raquel did to the rest of the cast. When this was filmed, it was still fresh and everyone was reeling, but when Lisa Vanderpump tells Lala that she can sometimes be too aggressive, she looks at Lisa and says, “You need to stop. You need to stop. You need to stop.”

First of all, none of these yahoos would be doing spon-con for Uber Eats if Lisa Vanderpump didn’t get this project in front of Bravo in the first place. Yes, she may be ancillary to the show at this point, but put some respect on her name. Also, Lala tells her what she needs to stop doing is defending Sandoval. I don’t think that Lisa is defending him, but her criticizing other cast members for their behavior — and let’s face it, Lala is way too aggressive sometimes — doesn’t mean she’s letting him get away with his. She can do both.

It’s funny that Lala starts off so hot because the segment they spend focusing on her is the only thing to soften her all season. She talks about her conversation with Ally on the catamaran during Scheana’s 17-day boondoggle wedding for two already-married people. She says that her relationship with Randall so hurt her and she felt like such a fool that she just wanted to protect Ally. That’s the kind of vulnerability we crave from Lala. She’s so busy pretending to be a boss bitch who will take down anyone that crosses her that she never shows us that there is an actual person behind the hair extensions and talons. I think that is really sad and relatable, and she could learn a thing or two from Kenya Moore, whose aggression with her co-stars is often forgiven because we know how difficult her personal and romantic lives have been for her.

Then we switch to DJ James Kennedy, the White Kanye himself, who gets on my very last nerve. When Lala is talking about that conversation, James says he didn’t know about it until he saw it, and it upset him. He says he called Lala to discuss it because she knows “I’m not that guy.” Dude, you are. You are so that guy. You are so much that guy that if life were a game of Guess Who?, he would be the only plastic square still standing while we have to look at the smug crooked grin that he can’t seem to wipe off his face. The reason they were having that conversation is that he was literally that guy the night before, getting into fights with Brock’s random drunk Aussie friends and with St. Ariana at the dinner table.

This is where everyone’s blinders to Sandoval are really going to get me. Sandoval talks about a regular gig he and Schwartz had where they would go to Atlantic City. It sounds like a paid appearance where they would be at a casino or club to lure people from the tristate area into a sinking cesspit in New Jersey. They invited James along one time too. At the gig, which involved them drinking with fans, James got so belligerent that he grabbed a waitress’s ass, had to be asked to leave, and cost the Toms this regular gig.

Sandoval’s point is that, yes, they may drink way too much, but when they do, they don’t assault servers (if Sandoval can be believed, and that is an if bigger than both of Brock’s prominent pectorals), they don’t shout at people, and they don’t lose their jobs. We have seen James do two out of three things on camera. I repeat he is that guy. Just because the criticism of James’s drinking and how his drinking is different from others in the group is coming from Sandoval doesn’t mean it is invalid. Yes, Ariana can shout that instead he fucks her friend, but his awful act doesn’t nullify all the less awful acts that everyone else on these precipitously tall chairs has committed.

Meanwhile, Ally is fully delusional. She says she saw the show, but nothing she saw of James ever made her think she didn’t want to get in a relationship with him. She calls him sweet, which he may be in select moments, but he is also the person who has raged on every single person on the show and said horrendous things to Raquel’s family, whether or not her mom brought up if he was uncircumcised at the family Thanksgiving. (Yes, that’s awkward, but could she have been, I don’t know, joking?) Ally calls this man sweet, and then she says that “fat” should never be used, even though it is always James’s go-to insult. We see him use it multiple times in the flashbacks. We also see him call Sandoval a mustached worm again, so you know he workshopped that one. And, on behalf of all mustached Americans, I would like to say that trying to malign a facial hair style that makes every face 78 percent more handsome (even Sandovals) isn’t the right move.

With that, we say good-bye to Ally and her drop-shipped pink ensemble with boning that is too big and a bra cup that is too small. Get in your car, Ally, and drive away. Drive far, far away from James and this whole mess and live the life of a private astrologer to the stars before you sink any deeper into the tarpit that is the reality television arts and sciences.

Now a word from my husband:

Hey, everyone. It’s me, Christian. I know you don’t often hear from me because Brian usually just steals my jokes and doesn’t give me any credit. I needed to pop in to say that someone needs to ask Katie why the hell she went to Scheana’s wedding, where she didn’t belong and where no one wanted her. If this is not addressed in part three, I will be writing a letter to Andy myself, and I may become so incensed that Brian will have to divorce me, and the emotional spiral will incapacitate him for years and he’ll have to close the Housewives Institute. No one wants that, right? See you all next time Daddy Moneybags Vulture III lets someone recap a reunion (i.e. never).

Thanks, Christian. That was not at all helpful. That was, in fact, about as helpful as Tom Sandoval walking the very long 100 yards from the set to see Raquel in her trailer, where she has to sit so that Scheana doesn’t break the restraining order Raquel took out against her. Tom was especially unhelpful when producer Patrick (remember him from that awful Fire Island show?) told him that if he and Raquel wanted to hang out together, they had to do it on camera. It’s a pretty easy order to understand and also a very reasonable request because if they’re going to plot and strategize about what to say, then we should be able to see it. This temper tantrum of stupidity is the only thing that Tom has said in either of these reunion episodes that I buy.

I take that back! There is one point where Scheana talks about how she had her suspicions of Tom and Raquel and confronted both Ariana and Tom with her suspicions. They were questioning why she brought it up to Tom, and she said, “You at least had to lie to my face,” to which he immediately responded, “I did.” Yes, honey, we know. That’s why we’re all here and the world is watching.

Just as I think that everyone surrounding Andy is an absolute garbage person, we get the Scheana Shay redemption arc that no one sees coming. Sandoval, after a pause longer than the mint green sash on Raquel’s dress, says that right when everyone found out that night on Watch What Happens Live, Scheana called Ariana and said on speaker, “I punched that bitch in the face, and I threw her phone in the street.” I do not believe Scheana said that or that she punched Raquel, but I am choosing to believe she said this to Ariana at the moment. Print it up, put it on a T-shirt, cross-stitch it into a pillow, write it in the sky with enormous balloon letters that will never pop. I think I will get “I punched that bitch in the face and threw her phone in the street” tattooed on my right forearm so that I can point to it whenever I have to punch a bitch in the face or throw her phone in the street.

Scheana was heartbroken and sincere but in the best way possible. She talked about how close she was with Tom and Raquel and how she asked Raquel never to do anything that would make them not be friends and Raquel said she wouldn’t, but she was probably already getting Tom Sandoval in her Most Extra at this point, so it didn’t really matter. But then Scheana ends her time at the reunion with two perfect gestures. She gives Andy a vinyl copy of her certified banger “Good as Gold” (would buy, put a link in your bio ScheSche) because he once joked that in 2023 she’d have a full album. Then she retired to her trailer, put on her comfy clothes, clutched a White Claw, and watched the Vanderpump Rules reunion. Yes, Scheana is all of us, right here on our couches, doing the exact same thing.

Naturally, the episode cuts off just as Raquel sits down in the chair — but not next to Sandoval, where she was originally placed. Her reactions this whole episode, especially in her conversation with Andy, were a little strange. It was like watching someone fully realize what they did and what the consequences would be, but like 19 months later. She says that her entire character is now in question. Um, no duh! You screwed your best friend’s man on local television. (As in, it is only local to women and gays.) What did you think was going to happen?

She also talks about how she regrets filing the restraining order and presents Scheana with a motion to dismiss it. This is like Randall Emmett missing a flight because it is too little and it is far too late. While in her trailer, she says, “As things are unfolding, it’s like more realizations and more regrets.” It’s as if the lightbulb went on that maybe Sandoval and Ariana’s relationship is better than Tom made it out to be, and maybe he didn’t actually ever try to break up with Ariana, as he claimed. She also tells Andy that she thought there was some way that she and Ariana could be friends when she found out about the affair. Does this woman have no idea how people will react to her? Does she not realize the hurt that she was going to cause? No, there is hardly anyone at this reunion that is a good person, but there is clearly no one worse than Tom and Raquel, two insecure people who are also so self-involved they think they can get everything they want without having to pay the price. Well, the bill is due, and neither of them can afford it.

Dame Brian Moylan breaks down all the gossip and drama, on- and off-screen, for dedicated students of the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.

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letterboxd · 4 years

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Ghosted Films: A Director’s Nightmare.

To mark a conversation with Peter Medak about his new documentary The Ghost of Peter Sellers, which details a particularly tumultuous early 1970s film shoot, Dominic Corry looks at how the inherently nightmarish pursuit that is filmmaking has informed other movies.

“Every frame you set up references yourself and your entire life, so bits and pieces indirectly of your life go into every movie.” —Peter Medak

On a certain level, filmmaking is an essentially traumatic experience. The extreme number of moving parts, umpteen tiers of variables—both creative and practical—and the cacophony of egos involved all amount to what in the best-case scenario could generously be considered organized chaos.

And for the most part, it all falls on the director’s shoulders. Although the long-prevailing auteur theory is regularly and healthily challenged these days, our default perception tends to be that whatever happens, good or bad, it’s the director’s fault. Some directors process their filmmaking nightmares by writing a review of the film on Letterboxd. But in the case of journeyman filmmaker Peter Medak (The Changeling, The Krays, Romeo Is Bleeding), he chose to process his filmmaking trauma by… making a film about it.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers revisits the making of the 1974 Peter Sellers-starring pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun, an infamous folly of a film that has long haunted Medak. It’s also one of those rare films on Letterboxd: at the time of writing it has just two reviews, and only 26 members in a community of two million have noted seeing it. Giving it one and a half stars, EWMasters writes: “Pretty awful. I mean talk about throwing it on the stoop and seeing if the cat’ll lick it up. There is one very good sequence where the crew goes to town on this big plate of fish and vegetables that’s really well done—but otherwise, this is really only worth the time of a Sellers completist”. (Perhaps the main character’s name—Dick Scratcher—should have sounded alarm bells.)

Medak is not the first filmmaker to spin non-fictional gold out of a director’s nightmare (in this case, his own). His movie follows in the footsteps of legendary documentaries such as Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which revealed the full extent of the already infamous insanity that comprised the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, and used extensive footage shot at the time by Coppola’s filmmaker wife Eleanor (filmmaker spouses are handy to have along for the ride, as Nicolas Winding Refn also knows). And there’s Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 work Lost in La Mancha, which detailed Terry Gilliam’s (ironically?) Sisyphean efforts to film an adaptation of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

In both instances, the films in question were (eventually) made—and released to some acclaim (one considerably more than the other)—but as The Ghost of Peter Sellers shows, the shooting of Ghost in the Noonday Sun was such an epic boondoggle that the unfinished film sat unreleased for years and was much later released to no acclaim whatsoever.

The uphill battle to make his never-released horror movie Northwestern made indie filmmaker Mark Borshadt an unlikely filmmaking hero thanks to the breakout success of Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary American Movie. Like with Ghost in the Noonday Sun, the efforts to make a film proved more interesting than the film being made.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon in ‘The Big Picture’ (1989).

There are several narrative films of note that have successfully captured the specific pandemonium of filmmaking. Richard Rush’s 1980 cult classic The Stunt Man follows a fugitive who stumbles his way into the titular job on a big chaotic Hollywood production (Peter O’Toole plays the Machiavellian director), while Christopher Guest’s under-appreciated 1989 comedy The Big Picture stars Kevin Bacon as a hot young director who is roughed up by the Hollywood machine. It’s a notable and often overlooked antecedent to The Player, and like the Robert Altman classic, is more about ‘the business’ overall than the specifics of filmmaking, although in both cases Hollywood proves itself analogically appropriate.

Playwright, writer and director David Mamet’s own filmmaking experiences obviously inform his 2000 comedy State and Main, in which a Hollywood production takes over and smothers a small town with its singular thinking. It’s not hard to imagine Mamet processing his own filmmaking trauma in State and Main, just as the Coen brothers famously did in Barton Fink, their ode to writer’s block supposedly inspired by the difficulty they had penning the screenplay for Miller’s Crossing.

Charlie Kaufman channeled his own creative struggles into the screenplay for the 2002 masterpiece Adaptation, then built on those themes with his wildly ambitious 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, whose more maddening aspects arguably capture the irrational nightmare that is filmmaking better than any film directly ‘about’ filmmaking.

With her 2018 documentary Shirkers, writer Sandi Tan gained some measure of closure regarding an indie film she had starred in and written in her home country of Singapore, in 1992. The documentary (which shares its name with the original movie) has her revisiting the footage from the never-released film, which was stolen (!) 25 years previously by its director—and Tan’s filmmaking mentor—George Cardona.

Back to Peter Medak. In The Ghost of Peter Sellers, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival in 2018 and has just had its virtual screening release, we learn that Hungarian-born Medak was a rising directing star in the early 1970s in London, hot off the Oscar-nominated Peter O’Toole film The Ruling Class. Unable to resist an offer to work with Peter Sellers, then comedy’s reigning superstar—mostly thanks to Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films—Medak set about shooting a treasure-hunting pirate film on the island nation of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

In addition to the usual production problems associated with shooting on boats, Medak had to contend with the titanically and infamously fickle Sellers, who quickly turned on him and attempted to get him fired. Sellers also antagonized the other actors, then, after failing to get the production shut down, brought in his friend and longtime creative collaborator Spike Milligan to try and salvage the film, but things kept going wrong, leaving Ghost in the Noonday Sun unfinished and Medak with the blame for the production’s troubles.

Director Peter Medak with Peter Sellers (as Dick Scratcher) and Spike Milligan (as Bill Bombay) on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’, finally released in 1984.

Although Medak’s career recovered, he has clearly been carrying around a lot of hurt associated with the experience, and it’s remarkable watching him work through that on screen by revisiting Cyprus, telling the story of the shoot, and talking to some of the people involved. Sellers (who died in 1980) looms large over the film, but it also has interesting content surrounding the great Spike Milligan, who died in 2002.

Why did you decide to revisit this experience with a documentary? Peter Medak: Because it’s been haunting me for all these years. Because it should’ve been a really very successful film and I was blamed for everything going wrong, when in fact it had nothing to do with me. It was due to Peter’s changing mind and state of mind, and all kinds of things had physically gone wrong on the film. It was always easiest to blame the director for everything and my career at the time was very high up after [The] Ruling Class and this should’ve been the icing on the cake and it wasn’t.

It really bothered me for many years afterwards, even though I went on working. I was asked to do it by the producer of the documentary and I originally said “It’s the last thing I want to do”, because it would mean I would have to go back to Cyprus where I shot the original movie and go on the water, and I never want anything to do with water anymore because a lot of the disasters on the film, production-wise, were all connected with shooting at sea, which is totally impossible to do. Then I thought: well, you know, I should just do it and try to explain what happened on the film. And because some of the explanations were funnier scenes than the original film. So that’s why I did it.

Peter Medak fishing for answers in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

In the documentary, you talk about needing to free yourself from the experience by making this film. Do you feel like you achieved that? Well, I think I did because I had a wonderful time doing it. A very sad time at the same time because when you go back to places where you shot 45 years before, it creates a very strange kind of illusion inside your mind, your heart and everything of the time. And having been there then and then being there again, it’s a very strange kind of a supernatural feeling in a way. It felt like you have died and your ghost is actually revisiting all these things you know. I called it The Ghost of Peter Sellers because it sounds good and also because the original film was called Ghost in the Noonday Sun, and this ghostly feeling of mine of revisiting that island after all these years, it’s a very, very strange feeling and somehow the film captures that emotionally.

Do you feel like the large distance from the shoot was necessary to be able to revisit it? It’s not that I thought about it every day of my life, but I talked about it to all the people who I worked with in my following career. When I was doing Romeo Is Bleeding with Gary Oldman, my darling Gary said to me one day, “You know, we are crazy, what we should do is make a movie about your movie, but I don’t want to play Peter Sellers, I want to play you, with your Hungarian, broken-English accent.” We had a script written but we never did it. That was a good 25 years ago.

Peter Medak in front of a promotional poster for ‘Zorro, The Gay Blade’, his 1981 film starring George Hamilton and Lauren Hutton.

So you had considered doing a scripted version of it? Yeah, but I don’t know quite what we would’ve done. I said to Gary at the time: “I never want to go on a boat again”, and so I thought in my mind that the scenes would start each day [with] the characters getting off the pirate ship and they come ashore—that’s where the scenes would begin. I’m sure we would’ve done something quite wonderful, and it would’ve maybe explained the things the [documentary is] trying to explain because I guess that’s what has unconsciously driven me. Because [for the documentary], we didn’t write one word of it, I just completely did it out of instinct. Where I want to shoot, what I want to shoot, and how we should go from here to there. I loved it, so going back on to it was quite easy. It did show me actually what a wonderful medium it is, documentary, because you can do anything with it. It’s a much freer form than scripted movies. Which is rigid. And this is liquid.

Did you have any other documentaries about filmmaking in mind when you went into this? Not really. I knew Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha, because I love Terry and I love his films and we know each other and knew each other. Terry was very fortunate, because he had so much trouble before on Baron Munchausen, that he decided to have a documentary film crew filming the whole process, so he had the material available, which allowed him to make his film. I said to him after [a screening], “You were lucky because you didn’t make the movie. I had to suffer through 90-something days of shooting with Peter [Sellers].” But of course since then, Terry made the film, and he made something slightly different than what he was originally gonna do.

Peter Medak retraces his steps in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

Did any of your subsequent films feel nearly as difficult? Most movies are very difficult to make, and always when you anticipate problems, they never seem to happen. When I did The Changeling, everybody said “George C. Scott is very, very difficult to work with” and he was an absolute angel with me and [it was] the easiest thing to do. It was a wonderful ghost story. I’m very proud of that film. It will live forever. All movies are like your kids, your own children, because you put so much emotion, so much of your soul. That’s what I’m saying to [Ghost in the Noonday Sun executive producer] John Heyman [in The Ghost of Peter Sellers]: the director’s viewpoint is completely different from the producer’s because every frame you set up references yourself and your entire life, so bits and pieces indirectly of your life go into every movie. Because of that it becomes an incredibly personal journey when you put your absolute soul on the line. When it gets criticized or not accepted or whatever, one takes it very personally because the whole thing came from a very personal experience, even though the subject may be nothing to do with you.

Peter Sellers on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’.

Even within the canon of famously difficult performers, Peter Sellers is notorious. How would you describe him to a modern audience? Well he was a genius, there’s no question about it. But he was a manic-depressive person. And it’s a generalization, but most of the great comics are manic-depressive. And he changes his mind all the time. One minute, he loves you, next minute, he hates you. One minute he loves the subject, next minute he doesn’t wanna do it, he wants to get out and all that. So it is very up and down. When you’re running film with a crew of 150 people, and boats on the sea, and weather’s changing and everything, you can’t have that, because you fall behind the schedule and things go wrong.

At one point very early on, all he wanted to do was get off the movie. And then he did everything he [could] to sabotage the film so the film would close down and he wouldn’t have to finish it. But it didn’t just happen on my film, it happened with all his biggest successes, including the Pink Panther movies. Because if you look into Blake Edwards, each one was an absolute nightmare for the director and for the film company, United Artists. And I was gonna include that in the documentary but it had nothing to do with the Ghost in the Noonday Sun so I didn’t. I actually shot some scenes with one of the executives from United Artists at that time who had to deal with the insanity of Peter and also Blake Edwards. I say ‘insanity’; I didn’t want to say it too much in the documentary because I love Peter, even today. And it’s wrong for me to accuse him of those things because it sounds like I’m excusing myself. Peter was crazy. There’s no other way one can describe it. Touched by God. And so was Spike Milligan. But Spike had the love of goodness. Peter had kind of a nasty streak on him when he turned on people.

There’s a moment in the documentary where you suggest that Spike Milligan is more influential than he gets credit for. Do you think he’s under-appreciated? Totally. Totally. Totally. Because his talent was absolutely, monumentally genius. I always say this, but Spike basically created Peter Sellers through [legendary BBC radio programme] The Goon Show. And he also gave him all those various characters and developed those voices for him. It’s all in The Goon Show. The Monty Pythons, they were inspired by The Goon Show and they made it into television. Not story wise, but style wise. That kind of zany, insane humor. Spike was a total genius. Not that Peter wasn’t, but they stood together, completely overwhelmingly wonderfully insane. But Spike was quite something. He was incredibly human, he was incredibly gentle. And incredibly kind. Peter was incredibly combative. And he had that most incredible ego.

But all our lives come from our backgrounds and what our past was and where we come from, and Peter had a very sad upbringing and a very sad life and he was tremendously influenced by his mother. When his mother passed away, he kept on talking to her for ten years. When he came to Cyprus to make the movie, he arrived with big blow-up [photos] of Liza Minnelli—who he’d just broken up with a week before—and his mum. And it sounds terrible when one says it, but psychologically, some of the answers are there. But at the same time, both Peter and Spike, I can’t tell you what a gift it was… I mean the reason I did the film is: who could give up the chance of actually working with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan? It doesn’t matter what the fucking script is, you know? It was a wonderful thing and I would do it all over again tomorrow.

Related content

Our Showdown on films within films

‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’ is screening in virtual theaters now. It will be available via video on demand services from June 23. A list of all the films mentioned in this article can be found here. Comments have been edited for clarity and length.

#peter medak #peter sellers #ghost in the noonday sun #the ghost of peter sellers #filmmaking fails #directing #documentary #filmmaking process #filmmaking #spike milligan #the goon show #monty python #the specific pandemonium of filmmaking #epic boondoggle #letterboxd

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madworldnews · 5 years

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#Chuck Schumer #Coronavirus #Donald Trump #Nancy Pelosi

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stephendavid · 3 years

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Billion Dollar Green Energy Epic Failure The US government flushed $500 Million down the crapper on this boondoggle.

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kflemhealth · 3 years

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Vaccine Passports already a TOTAL FLOP in New York

(Natural News) The Nazi-style “show me your papers” vaccine passport program recently rolled out in New York is an epic fail already, and it smacks of the Obamacare boondoggles that they called the Death Spiral. Current consumers (sheeple) are complaining already that the app is riddled with problems and can’t find your records, and that’s...

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#IFTTT #NaturalNews.com

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garudabluffs · 4 years

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4 comments

Except the oligarchy was with Lincoln. Both sides lost the Civil War. I don't even need to read this book to know it's bunk. The great historian of the American west, Dee Brown, describes the historical origins of political insider trading in his book, Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads, which was recently brought to my attention by John Denson. The book tells the story of a group of men who might be called the founding fathers of political insider trading, the most prominent of which was Abraham Lincoln. The rest were some of the founding fathers of the Lincoln’s Republican Party; many of them served as generals in the union army. In the mid to late 1850s Lincoln was a prominent railroad lawyer. His clients included the Illinois Central, which at the time was the largest corporation in the world. In 1857 he represented the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, which was owned by four men who would later become infamous as “robber barons” for receiving — and squandering — millions of dollars in federal subsidies for their transcontinental railroad. Granting these men their subsidies would become one of the first orders of business in the Lincoln administration. These men — Thomas Clark Durant, Peter Dey, Grenville Dodge, and Benedict Reed — were easterners from New England and New York State who had “a store of hard experience at canal and railroad building and financing,” writes Dee Brown. And they must also have been quite expert at stealing taxpayers’ money for useless government-funded boondoggles. Prior to the War between the States, government subsidies for railroad and canal building were a financial disaster. So disastrous were these government pork barrel projects that by 1860, according to economic historian Carter Goodrich, Massachusetts was the only state in the union to have not amended its constitution to prohibit taxpayer subsidies to private corporations (Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800—1890, p. 231). In a dispute with a steamship company the above-mentioned men “sought out a first-rate lawyer, one who had a reputation for winning most of his cases,” writes Dee Brown. “They found him in Springfield, Illinois and his name was Abraham Lincoln.” The jurors in the case failed to reach a decision, but Lincoln’s performance “won him a considerable amount of attention in the Chicago press and among men of power, who two years later would push him into the race for President of the United States.” One of those “men of power” was Chicago newspaper editor Joseph Medill, whose newspaper trumpeted the Lincoln candidacy on behalf of the railroad interests of Illinois. This powerful clique of New England/New York/Chicago business interests “aroused the suspicions of the South,” says Brown, since they were so vigorously lobbying Congress to allocate huge sums of money for a transcontinental railroad across the Northern states. Southern politicians wanted the route to pass through their states, naturally, but they knew they were outgunned politically by the political clique from “the Yankee belt” (New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, the upper Midwest). These Northern political insiders, who would form the core of leadership of the Republican Party and later, in some cases, of Lincoln’s army, positioned themselves to earn great riches from the proposed railroad subsidies. John C. Fremont, who would be a general in Lincoln’s army, was a wealthy California engineer who conducted an extensive engineering survey “to make certain that the most favorable route would end up not in San Diego but in northern California, where Fremont himself claimed sizable land holdings.” Another wealthy Yankee, Pierre Chouteau, “put his money into a St. Louis factory to make iron rails and went to Washington to lobby for the 38th parallel route.” Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas “owned enough strategically located land in Chicago to be a millionaire if his favored route westward through Council Bluffs and Omaha was chosen . . .” And “Abraham Lincoln, the future President evidently agreed with his debating partner that the route through Council Bluffs-Omaha and the South Pass was the most practical. Lincoln acquired land interests at Council Bluffs” (emphasis added). A short time later, after the Chicago/New England/New York “men of power” propelled him into the White House, Lincoln began signing legislation giving these men millions of acres of public lands and other subsidies for their railroads. Virtually all of the “leading lights” of the Republican Party got in on the political insider trading game by demanding bribes for their votes in favor of the subsidies. Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens “received a block of . . . stock in exchange for his vote,” but he also demanded “insertion of a clause [in the subsidy legislation] requiring that all iron used in the construction and equipment of said road to be American manufacture.” In addition to being a congressman, Stevens was a Pennsylvania iron manufacturer. At the time, British iron was far cheaper than Pennsylvania iron, so that Stevens’s “restrictive clause” placed a bigger burden on the taxpayers of the North who, at the time, were already being taxed to death to finance the war. Congressman Oakes Ames, “who with his brother Oliver manufactured shovels in Massachusetts, became a loyal ally [of the subsidy-seeking railroad companies] and helped to pressure the 1864 Pacific Railway Act through the war-corrupted Congress.” (It took a lot of shovels to dig railroad beds from Iowa to California). During the post-war Grant administration the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Schuyler Colfax (later Grant’s vice president) visited the western railroad routes to attend a ceremony in his honor but, writes Dee Brown, “he preferred cash above honors, and back in Washington he eagerly accepted a bundle of Credit Mobilier stock from his follow congressman Oakes Ames, and thus became a loyal friend of the Union Pacific.” Another of Lincoln’s generals, General John Dix, was the Washington lobbyist for the railroads who “spent most of his time strutting about Washington in a general’s uniform.” (Dix was the same general who Lincoln ordered in 1862 to shut down all the opposition newspapers in New York City and arrest and imprison the editors and owners). General William Tecumseh Sherman was also sold land at below-market prices and, after the war, he would be in charge of a twenty-five year campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians, which was yet another form of veiled subsidy to the railroad corporations. After the war Grenville Dodge, who was also a Union Army general despite his lack of military training, proposed making slaves of the captured Indians and forcing them “to do the grading, with the Army furnishing a guard to make the Indians work, and keep them from running away.” These men — the founding fathers of insider trading — were responsible for the massive corruption of the grant administrations which was only the beginning of what historians call “the era of good stealings.”

#book review 5star amazon.com Haer That Lonesome Whistle Blow Dee Brown

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cracked · 7 years

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Architect of the Capitol is an overly epic title for the glorified maintenance crew that keeps the U.S. Capitol Building, along with its reflecting pools and grounds, looking pretty for tourists and to provide a gorgeous backdrop for discrete meetings between movie characters embroiled in sprawling government conspiracies. They noticed there was a family of ducks having trouble getting into one of the reflecting pools, so they built a ramp that let the mother and her ducklings easily get in and out of the water.

The ramps were built in collaboration with a nonprofit wildlife rehabilitation organization, so it's not like they were a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle of a government project. The stoner kid who slept through your seventh-grade shop class could churn out that same B-quality work (but his would also be a functioning pipe, so there's that). The whole thing was probably $20 and a five-minute Kool-Aid break. Who could possibly have a problem with it?

Accepting that challenge was The Man, who stepped in swinging his modest dick that he tells himself is so unfathomably large the human mind cannot comprehend it. The dick attached to the dick was Representative Mark Walker from North Carolina's 6th Congressional district. Walker was presumably strolling along the Capitol grounds, taking in the beauty crafted by the Architect of the Capitol, hating everything he saw with the fury of 10,000 suns. When he saw the duck ramp, his bowels evacuated with such force that he rocketed 12 feet into the air and his eyes exploded out of his skull while "America The Beautiful" played in stereo out of his nipples. When he landed, pants torn asunder, still smoldering with rage feces, he tweeted a picture of the duck ramp, adding, "If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it must be government waste."

The only good thing to happen in D.C. in months had been politicized by a guy whose misplaced sense of morality would make him the perfect villain for a 1990s children's movie called Duck Ramp, starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas because Macaulay Culkin was busy.

When Politics Can't Stop The Good Guys From Winning

#Politics #Ducks #Animals #LOL #Mark Walker

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sfmuniverse · 7 years

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Where I once viewed the bullet train as a boondoggle of epic proportions, I now see the California High Speed Rail (HSR) as the single project with the most potential to transform our state for the better.

What did it for author Matt Tinoco was commuting regularly between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I opted, like any good Californian, to drive. On those lonely morning drives, I found myself with only California’s great works of infrastructure to keep me company: the Golden State Freeway, the California Aqueduct, the Tehachapi (water) Lift—all examples of infrastructure our state (and country) has neither built, nor aspired to build in a long time. I thought about those works, and how fundamental they are to our state identity; without aqueducts and freeways, California as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Make California Great Again!

California’s population will continue to grow and demand more from our aging and over-capacity infrastructure. The train would thread together almost every large city in the state, and for the first time easily link the state’s affluent coastal regions to its hardscrabble interior.

Cities like Fresno, which has rezoned its downtown area to accommodate thousands of new homes built close to the city’s future HSR station, and others in the Central Valley are already preparing for the train’s arrival.

It was never just about shuttling people from SF to LA, it puts Central Valley cities like a relatively short trip from a job, concert, show, meeting, a school field trip, fancy dinner, etc. in San Jose or Los Angeles.

Service between Bakersfield and San Jose is projected to start in 2025. Los Angeles to San Franicsco in 2029.

#California #High speed Rail

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thecomedybureau · 7 years

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Here Are Your 2017 Emmys Comedy Nominees

Today, the nominations for the 2017 Primetime Emmys were announced. For comedy specifically, it’s probably what you expected.

Premium cable and streaming services continue to dominate the Emmys with Netflix and HBO coming out strong. FX also maintains its status as a premium cable network disguised as a basic cable network with its handful of nominations for Atlanta, Better Things, and Baskets.

Colbert’s Election special and Sam Bee’s Not the WHCD thankfully were bestowed nominations here as well.

One thing that was a delightful surprise is Lauren Lapkus and Ben Schwartz gaining nominations for their performances in The Earliest Show, a web series that followed a morning talk show with one of the hosts going through all the stages of grief.

Take a gander at all the comedy nominees below.

*All comedy nominees are in italics

OUTSTANDING COMEDY SERIES Atlanta, FX Black-ish, ABC Master Of None, Netflix Modern Family, ABC Silicon Valley, HBO Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix Veep, HBO

LEAD ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES Pamela Adlon, Better Things, FX Jane Fonda, Grace And Frankie, Netflix Allison Janney, Mom, CBS Ellie Kemper, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep, HBO Tracee Ellis Ross, Black-ish, ABC Lily Tomlin, Grace And Frankie, Netflix

LEAD ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES Anthony Anderson, Black-ish, ABC Aziz Ansari, Master Of None, Netflix Zach Galifianakis, Baskets, FX Networks Donald Glover, Atlanta, FX Networks William H. Macy, Shameless, Showtime Jeffrey Tambor, Transparent, Amazon

VARIETY TALK SERIES Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, TBS Jimmy Kimmel Live, ABC Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, HBO The Late Late Show With James Corden, CBS The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, CBS Real Time With Bill Maher, HBO

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES Vanessa Bayer, Saturday Night Live, NBC Anna Chlumsky, Veep, HBO Kathryn Hahn, Transparent, Amazon Leslie Jones, Saturday Night Live, NBC Judith Light, Transparent, Amazon Kate McKinnon, Saturday Night Live, NBC

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES Louie Anderson, Baskets, FX Networks Alec Baldwin, Saturday Night Live, NBC Tituss Burgess, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix Ty Burrell, Modern Family, ABC Tony Hale, Veep, HBO Matt Walsh, Veep, HBO

VARIETY SKETCH SERIES Billy On The Street, truTV Documentary Now!, IFC Drunk History, Comedy Central Portlandia, IFC Saturday Night Live, NBC Tracey Ullman’s Shows, HBO

OUTSTANDING ANIMATED PROGRAM Archer, FX Bob’s Burgers, Fox Elena And The Secret Of Avalor (Sofia The First), Disney Channel The Simpsons, Fox South Park, Comedy Central

UNSTRUCTURED REALITY PROGRAM Born This Way, A&E Deadliest Catch, Discovery Channel Gaycation With Ellen Page, Viceland Intervention, A&E RuPaul’s Drag Race: Untucked, YouTube United Shades Of America With W. Kamau Bell, CNN

HOST FOR A REALITY/REALITY COMPETITION PROGRAM Alec Baldwin, Match Game, ABC W. Kamau Bell, United Shades Of America With W. Kamau Bell, CNN RuPaul Charles, RuPaul’s Drag Race, VH1 Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, Project Runway, Lifetime Gordon Ramsay, MasterChef Junior, Fox Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party, VH1

OUTSTANDING CHARACTER VOICE-OVER PERFORMANCE American Dad!, Dee Bradley Baker as Klaus, TBS/20th Century Fox Television Bob’s Burgers, Kevin Kline as Mr. Fischoeder, Fox BoJack Horseman, Kristen Schaal as Sarah Lynn, Netflix F Is For Family, Mo Collins as Ginny, Jimmy Fitzsimmons, Lex, Ben, Cutie Pie, Netflix Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane as Peter Griffin, Stewie Griffin, Brian Griffin, Glenn Quagmire, Fox The Simpsons, Nancy Cartwright as Bart Simpson, Fox

OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM COMEDY OR DRAMA SERIES Brown Girls, Open TV Fear The Walking Dead: Passage, AMC.com Hack Into Broad City, ComedyCentral.com Los Pollos Hermanos Employee Training Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Slingshot, ABC.com

OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM VARIETY SERIES Behind The Voice Epic Rap Battles of History Honest Trailers The Daily Show-Between the Scenes The Star Wars Show

OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM NONFICTION OR REALITY SERIES Creating Saturday Night Live Feud: Bette and Joan: Inside Look Jay Leno’s Garage National Endowment For The Arts: United States of Arts Viceland at The Women’s March

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A SHORT FORM COMEDY OR DRAMA SERIES Ty Burell, Boondoggle Alan Tudyk, Con Man Kim Estes, Dicks Jason Ritter, Tales of Titans Ben Schwartz, The Earliest Show John Michael Higgins, Tween Fest

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A SHORT FORM COMEDY OR DRAMA SERIES Mindy Sterling, Con Man Jane Lynch, Dropping the Soap Kelsey Scott, Fear The Walking Dead: Passage Mindy Sterling, secs & EXECS Lauren Lapkus, The Earliest Show

OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM ANIMATED PROGRAM Adventure Time, Cartoon Network Disney Mickey Mouse, The Disney Channel Marvel’s Rocket & Groot, Disney XD Steven Universe, Cartoon Network Teen Titans Go!, Cartoon Network

DIRECTING FOR A COMEDY SERIES Donald Glover, Atlanta Jamie Babbit, Silicon Valley Morgan Sackett, Veep David Mandel, Veep Dale Stern, Veep

DIRECTING FOR A VARIETY SERIES Derek Waters & Jeremy Konner, Drunk History Andy Fisher, Jimmy Kimmel Live Paul Pennolino, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Jim Hoskinson, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Don Roy King, Saturday Night Live

DIRECTING FOR A VARIETY SPECIAL Paul Pennolino, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Presents Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner Glenn Weiss, The Oscars Jim Hiskinson, Stephen Colbert’s Live Election Night Democracy’s Series Finale: Who’s Going to Clean Up This S—? Jerry Foley, Tony Bennett Celebrates 90: The Best is Yet to Come

WRITING FOR A COMEDY SERIES Donald Glover, Atlanta Stephen Glover, Atlanta Aziz Ansari & Lena Waithe, Master of None Alec Berg, Silicon Valley Billy Kimball, Veep David Mandel, Veep

WRITING FOR A VARIETY SERIES -Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Jo Miller, Samantha Bee, Ashley Nicole Black, Pat Cassels, Eric Drysdae, Mathan Erhardt, Travon Free, Joe Grossman, Miles Kahn, Melinda Taub & Jason Reich -Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Kevin Avery, Tim Carvell, Josh Gondelman, Dan Gurewitch, Geoff Haggerty, Jeff Maurer, John Oliver, Scott Sherman, Will Tracy, Jill Twiss & Juli Weiner -Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jermaine Affonso, Alex Baze, Bryan Donaldson, Sal Gentile, Matt Goldich, Dina Gusovky, Jenny Hagel, Allison Hord, Mike Karnell, John Lutz, Seth Meyers, Ian Morgan, Seth Reiss, Amber Ruffin, Mike Scollins, Mike Shoemaker & Ben Warheit -The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Barry Julien, Jay Katsir, Opus Moreschi, Stephen Colbert, Tom Purcell, Matt Lappin, Michael Brumm, Nate Charny, Aaron Cohen, Cullen Crawford, Paul Dinello, Ariel Dumas, Glenn Eichler, Django Gold, Gabe Gronli, Daniel Kibblesmith, Michael Pielocik, Kate Sidley, Jen Spyra, Brian Stack & John Thibodeaux -SNL, Chris Kelly, Sarah Schneider, Kent Sublette, Bryan Tucker, Pete Schultz, James Anderson, Kristen Bartlett, Jeremy Beiler, Zach Bornstein, Joanna Bradley, Megan Callahan, Michael Che, Anna Drezen, Fran Gillespie, Sudi Green, Steve Higgins, Colin Jost, Erik Kenward, Rob Klein, Nick Kocher, Dave McCary, Brian McElhaney, Dennis McNicholas, Drew Michael, Lorne Michaels, Josh Patten, Katie Rich, Streeter Seidell, Will Stephen & Julio Torres

WRITING FOR A VARIETY SPECIAL -Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Presents Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Samantha Bee, Jo Miller, Ashley Nicole Black, Patt Cassels, Eric Drysdale, Mathan Erhardt, Travon Free, Joe Grossman, Miles Kahn & Melinda Taub -Louis C.K. 2017, Louis C.K. -Sarah Silverman: A Speck of Dust, Sarah Silverman -Stephen Colbert’s Live Election Night Democracy’s Series Finale: Who’s Going to Clean Up This S—?, Jay Katsir, Opus Moreschi, Stephen Colbert, Michael Brumm, Nate Charny, Aaron Cohen, Cullen Crawford, Paul Dinello, Rob Dubbin, Ariel Dumas, Glenn Eichler, Django Gold, Gabe Gronli, Barry Julien, Daniel Kibblesmith, Matt Lappin, Michael Pielocik, Tom Purcell, Kate Sidley, Jen Spyra, Brian Stack & John Thibodeaux -70th Annual Tony Awards, Dave Boone, Mike Gibbons, Lauren Greenberg, Ian Karmel, Ben Winston & Justin Shanes

WRITING FOR A NONFICTION PROGRAM Amanda Knox, Brian McGinn Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, Mark Monroe Bill Nye Saves the World, Prashanth Venkataramanujam, CeCe Pleasants, Sanden Totten, Mike Drucker & Flora Lichtman 13th, Ava DuVernay & Spencer Averick

OUTSTANDING INTERACTIVE PROGAM Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Saturday Night Live Multiplatform Experience The Late Late Show with James Corden The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Get the full list of all this year’s Primetime Emmys nominees, including all of the Creative Arts Emmys here.

#emmys #2017 #nominees #comedy nominees #primetime emmys #tv academy

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culturalnewstoday · 6 years

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An Epic Heist in Paris, and a Boondoggle in Wisconsin http://bit.ly/2skiIac

#culture news #art news #modern art #culture #cultural news today #cultural world news #Blogger

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rachelerobfit · 7 years

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IRONMAN Texas 2017: Not a Race Report

This past Saturday was Ironman Texas. It would have been my first IRONMAN distance triathlon and the culmination of 5 months of training. Exactly one week to race day I had a bike wreck leaving me with multiple fractures in my pelvis and a fractured rib FTW. I swerved to avoid hitting fresh road kill when my front wheel found a large seam in the road. I tried to regain control of my bike, but it wasn’t in the stars. Texas road kill: 1, Rachele: 0. I was told it was epic (Don’t half-ass anything. Always full ass, always.) with the feet way up in the air, sending my head and right side crashing down into the ground. I was not going to be racing IMTX on April 22nd. It wasn’t only bone-breaking but so terribly soul-crushing. As I sat in the emergency department I thought of ways that I could make it happen (it’s really good I didn’t as I would have been easily destroyed within the first few hundred yards of the swim with a kick to the ribs or any part of the body). All my ducks were in a row. I had my transition and special needs bags packed, hotels booked, dog-sitter arranged, sherpa in order, and family in-bound from New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Because my family rocks, they still came out to spend time with me. Through this whole ordeal my Powerhouse Racing tribe have been so incredibly awesome. So many people reached out in person, text, social media…every outlet possible, and have gone above and beyond any expectation. It has certainly helped to numb some of the physical and emotional pain.

My family and I still planned to head up to The Woodlands to cheer on the athletes but more importantly I wanted to be there to support my teammates as they have supported me.

The days leading up to race day were a bit emotional. I was touch and go for a bit, waxing and waning between anger, sadness, relief (that I wasn’t hurt more). I received even more gestures and messages from everyone. A few seriously made me laugh (it was painful but I laughed my ass off on the inside). I went to Powerhouse Racing for a massage with Lisa. I had no idea that Bobby and Michael along with JZ and Mel and planned a little surprise celebration. Bobby ordered the most spectacularly disgusting but awesome cake: red velvet topped with fresh road-kill (made of rice crispy treats). I love his sense of humor. He gets me. He really gets me. Bobby has been key in keeping my bike together during training. He’s been an ear to listen and a has shared a wealth of knowledge and experience in triathlon.

Ugh! Being immobile makes time…slow...down. These last few weeks before I wrecked were going by so fast. I was nervous about my training. I was worried that I wasn’t ready. I was worried that I hadn’t trained enough. But I was assured by the best, that I was (ready). I did the training. I checked all of the boxes…well majority of them. You see, with Yarzy as your coach you make sure you do the work. I purposely chose Jim because of his personality. I needed someone that would hold my feet to the fire and more importantly call me out on my own bullshit. I knew he wouldn’t be afraid to tell me (when needed) that I was full of shit…and he wasn’t…and he did! He said I was ready. And I was.

Over the past few weeks I had my race strategy and race day nutrition playing in a loop in my head. In my mind I saved visuals of my T1, T2, and special needs bags. Exiting the water, getting on the bike, and wrapping up the run. I visualized running down the chute and hearing…well…you know.

It was Thursday. I had planned on heading up to The Woodlands today to athlete check-in and to do all the things I needed to do before race day. Instead I just lounged around locally. I made myself stay active/limber as the Ohana were in town. We ran some errands, went shopping, Mike took a few on them to tour the NASA Super Guppy. We stayed in rest of the day, binged Scandal and played some maj-jhong. All the while in my head I kept saying by now I would’ve been through athlete check-in…by now I would’ve been to the athlete briefing…by now I would’ve (insert IRONMAN activity here). I got some great messages throughout the day from fellow athletes. They were all nice and heartfelt wishing me well. Steven said, “you will cross the finish line”. He would race with my initials on his m-dot on race day. Dustin said (regarding my crash), “…it was pretty gnarly. You caught some big air. I would’ve been crying like a baby…you’re a champ…easily the baddest bitch I know!”. Ceseilia added “RR” decals on her race helmet. This was cool because although we didn’t really get the chance to train together, we still trained together (and our IRONSHERPA were bonded). Then Johnny posted that he’d dedicate his race to me. That got the waterworks going. I know that JZ had some unfinished business of his own at Texas so this wasn’t ‘just an IRONMAN’ for him. This gesture was pretty amazing and I just can’t thank him enough for this.

Throughout the day I was trying to stay of social media because while I was happy for my teammates, it stung a little. I thought I should be in that water for practice swim. I want to go to lunch with the crew at Chipotle. I want to see my name at the Lulu store. I want pictures of me at bike drop. I want my IMTX swag and a coolio bracelet. The family and Mike did an awesome job of keeping me occupied as I clearly had a case of the FOMO.

It was getting late and again my thoughts wandered… if I WERE racing, I needed to be in bed…like yesterday. After a few rounds of schooling Mike at maj-jhong I finally hit the rack…and/or the meds were kicking in. If I didn’t get horizontal soon I’d have kanji imprinted on my forehead. It was going to be a long day tomorrow- it’s IRONMAN.

Per usual, my body clock wakes me up at around 4-4:30am. Like a meth-head I opened my phone to Facebook. I wanted to send some final well wishes to my teammates and see what was going on. Instead I opened up to the group page with Ana and JT in bodymarking, scribing “R4R” (Race for Rachele) on my teammate’s arms. Que the tears. Ohhh-emmmmm-gheeeee! I wanted nothing more than to race along side all of them. Obviously I couldn’t so this was the second best thing. Ana and JT, your enthusiasm for triathlon and our tribe is palpable and contagious. Don’t stop.

We make our way up to The Woodlands and all those previous thoughts and emotions were stirring. Here I was broken, headed to a race I had trained for over the past five months. I didn’t know how I was going to feel about being on the side-lines. I vented to Michael on the drive up and was quickly reminded that I was going up there to give just as much, if not more support than I’ve received. ‘Nuff said.

The energy at IRONMAN Texas is unreal. We got up there in time to see almost all of Powerhouse at some point starting out or already on the run course. JZ was the first Powerhouse athlete Mike and I saw. He was wrapping up his first loop. He was in the hurt locker for sure. He stopped to for a quick fist bump and he moving. FINALLY got to the tent. You can imagine my pace moving from the parking garage to the tent, scooting me and my little walker along. There has to be a way to rig that thing to go faster. Aero bars, race wheels…something. I’ll have to get with Bobby and JZ on that. I knew I wasn’t going to last very long as I was in a bit of pain, but it felt great to be there. It was the first IRONMAN event that my family had been to and I think they were pumped and are ready for more! I wanted to at least see our athletes once on the course. I stood up to hi-five as runners made their way through the “gauntlet”. As they were hi-fiving back I felt more and more pain through the fractured rib. I tried switching to the other side but most people are right-handed. Whatever… it was worth seeing them all come through, most with smiles on their faces. It was also nice to get hugs (even the schweaty ones) from our athletes and even words of encouragement from them…FROM THEM! They were the ones racing but were giving me love! How freaking awesome is this Powerhouse Racing tribe?!!! By now some of our athletes were through the finish line, new or renewed IRONMAN or on their way. It was time to say good night. Mike was anxious about me coming out and being out on my feet for as long as I was, and with good reason.

The following day Johnny organized a gathering at a Boondoggles. My cousin who came in from NYC, is a runner and dipping into the triathlon world accompanied us. On the ride to the pub he was asking about Powerhouse Racing and what sets it apart from other groups in the area, what was the formula in having almost a spot-on completion rate our athletes. I couldn’t quite explain or put it into concise words. Obviously anyone can write a plan, hand it off to an athlete and be on their way. But that’s not how it’s done at the Powerhouse. Anyone can calculate paces and set training zones for athletes. That’s easy. There’s an app for that. But again, that’s not how it’s done at the Powerhouse. Johnny has definitely set himself and the Powerhouse apart from the rest. Johnny and Melanie, and all the coaches truly have a vested interest and want to see our athletes progress through their training, reach their race goals and finish strong. From a super sprint to IRONMAN distances, it’s no different. Everyone is an athlete and everyone crosses the finish line (Melanie will come find you!). JZ knew what I put into training and how excited I was to do IRONMAN Texas, and he knew how devastated I was not to be able to race. Yesterday at the pub he recognized this and “loaned” me his 2017 IRONMAN Texas finishers medal. He said it was just on loan to me until I finished my IRONMAN. I still don’t think I am doing a good job at putting into words what sets Powerhouse apart. But this. All of these gestures from all of these great athletes and coaches. Putting others first. Humility. Humbleness.

I didn’t cross the finish line at IRONMAN Texas. I didn’t even get to start. But had it not been for my tribe, I wouldn’t have even made it this far. From Tammy running with me and being a great motivator on many occasions when she didn’t have to, to the Powerhouse family in the neighborhood (Tammy, Richain, Todd & Ceseilia) setting up aid stations when I did my long run, to Steven finding me on said long run to give me a ‘CAW-CAAAWW’, to the chats with Jason (WtGB), Bobby, Brice, Coach Mel, Coach Russ, to Natalie and Thea, Nicole, Lisa fixing me and trying to keep me together until race day. It sucks that I’ll have to start over, but I wouldn’t do it again with anyone else. I don’t know what the rest of the 2017 season has in store for me. I am hopeful to be able to race and am also hoping to still complete an IRONMAN before the year is out.

#ironman #ironmantri #triathlon #ironmantriathlon #ironmantraining #triathlete

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gagandeepg02 · 4 years

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Jiggle Physics 49: Suicide Squad; Gotham Knights; CoD; Windbound

The gang get up to speed with the Epic vs. Apple boondoggle, then turn their attention to some game announcements from DC FanDome — Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and Gotham Knights. They also preview Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and discuss how the plot is linked to true events, war crimes, …

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation

In November 2011, the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project published a 595-page document that was supposed to finally end a decades-long battle over a highway. The project was a controversial one, to say the least.

At a time when many cities around the country were re-evaluating whether urban highways had a place in their downtowns, Louisville was doubling down. It not only wanted to keep the infamous “Spaghetti junction” where Interstates 64, 65, and 71 meet in a tangled interchange, but it wanted to build more on top of it. In addition, the political alliance behind the project aimed to expand the I-64 crossing to double the lane capacity, as well as build a whole new bridge just down the river—doubling the number of lanes that crossed the river from six to 12—all for a tidy $2.5 billion.

But in order to get approval to use federal funds for this expensive proposition, the project backers had to provide evidence that Louisville actually needed this expansion. Using a legally-mandated industry practice called Travel Demand Modeling (TDM), the project backers hired an engineering firm to predict what traffic will look like 20 years in the future, in this case, by 2030. They concluded that the number of cross-river trips would increase by 29 percent. The implication was obvious: if they did nothing, traffic would get worse. As a result, the project got federal approval and moved ahead.

Two subsequent studies, however, also funded by the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project, came to a very different conclusion.

Two years later, engineering firm CDM Smith looked at what traffic conditions actually had been while the project was seeking approval. It found that from 2010 to 2013, cross-river traffic had actually fallen by .9 percent.

The other study, this one for potential bond-holders, was far more puzzling. It concluded that by 2030, the combined cross-river traffic would be just 132,000 trips, some 15 percent lower than the SDEIS had predicted. Even worse, according to this new study, the combined 12 lanes of river crossings would carry some 4,000 fewer daily trips than just the I-65 bridge did in 2007 alone, completely undermining the argument that Louisville needed these new bridges.

Aaron Renn, an urban policy researcher and frequent critic of the Ohio River Bridges project, extensively documented these shenanigans. “No matter how crazy this project is,” he wrote back in 2013 when that bond-holder study came out, “it always manages to find ways to show that it’s even more wacky than I thought.”

The project is now finished, and everyone in Louisville can see for themselves which prediction was the better one. In 2018, a post-construction traffic study showed that cross-river trips decreased by 2 percent from 2013 to 2018. As a result, the project has been called by Vox, among others, a “boondoggle” of epic proportions.

The Louisville highway project is hardly the first time travel demand models have missed the mark. Despite them being a legally required portion of any transportation infrastructure project that gets federal dollars, it is one of urban planning’s worst kept secrets that these models are error-prone at best and fundamentally flawed at worst.

Recently, I asked Renn how important those initial, rosy traffic forecasts of double-digit growth were to the boondoggle actually getting built.

“I think it was very important,” Renn said. “Because I don’t believe they could have gotten approval to build the project if they had not had traffic forecasts that said traffic across the river is going to increase substantially. If there isn’t going to be an increase in traffic, how do you justify building two bridges?”

Travel demand models come in different shapes and sizes. They can cover entire metro regions spanning across state lines or tackle a small stretch of a suburban roadway. And they have gotten more complicated over time. But they are rooted in what’s called the Four Step process, a rough approximation of how humans make decisions about getting from A to B. At the end, the model spits out numbers estimating how many trips there will be along certain routes.

As befits its name, the model goes through four steps in order to arrive at that number. First, it generates a kind of algorithmic map based on expected land use patterns (businesses will generate more trips than homes) and socio-economic factors (for example, high rates of employment will generate more trips than lower ones). Then it will estimate where people will generally be coming from and going to. The third step is to guess how they will get there, and the fourth is to then plot their actual routes, based mostly on travel time. The end result is a number of how many trips there will be in the project area and how long it will take to get around. Engineers and planners will then add a new highway, transit line, bridge, or other travel infrastructure to the model and see how things change. Or they will change the numbers in the first step to account for expected population or employment growth into the future. Often, these numbers are then used by policymakers to justify a given project, whether it’s a highway expansion or a light rail line.

Although there are many reasons the Ohio River Bridges Project was a total urban planning debacle, one that has not gotten much attention is the role travel demand models played in putting lipstick on the $2.5 billion pig. One potential reason for that is because those who work in the field have come to expect nothing less.

To be sure, not everyone who works in the field feels this way. Civil engineers in particular are more likely to defend the models as a useful tool that gets misapplied from time to time. University of Kentucky civil engineering professor Greg Erhardt, who has spent the better part of two decades working on these models, said at their best they are “a check on wishful thinking.” But other experts I spoke to, especially urban planners, tend to view the models as aiding and abetting the wishful thinking that more highways and wider roads will reduce traffic.

Either way, nearly everyone agreed the biggest question is not whether the models can yield better results, but why we rely on them so much in the first place. At the heart of the matter is not a debate about TDMs or modeling in general, but the process for how we decide what our cities should look like.

TDMs, its critics say, are emblematic of an antiquated planning process that optimizes for traffic flow and promotes highway construction. It’s well past time, they argue, to think differently about what we’re building for.

“This is the fundamental problem with transportation modeling and the way it’s used,” said Beth Osborne, director of the non-profit Transportation for America. “We think the model is giving us the answer. That’s irresponsible. Nothing gives us the answer. We give us the answer.”

In 1953, Detroit-area highway agencies launched the first TDM study to create a long-range plan for highway development. The idea, as recounted in an academic history of TDM, was deceptively simple. In order to execute a massive public works project like a highway system, planners had to have some idea where people will travel in the future. There’s no point, they figured, in spending a few decades building these highways only to find they’re either too big or too small or go to the wrong places.

The Detroit Metropolitan Area Traffic Study, as it was called, conducted 39,000 home interviews and 7,200 interviews with truck and taxi drivers (characteristically for the Motor City in mid-century, public transit was not considered). Using an IBM 407 punch card computer to partially automate some steps, the researchers extrapolated from recent trends to predict future travel patterns in order to build an expressway network that would work for Detroit not just in 1955, when the study was published, but in 1980, too.

“It’s not so much about the measurement being wrong, it’s that the whole underlying thesis is wrong”

This was a novel approach to transportation planning and, given the technology and thinking of the time, right on the cutting edge. Other cities, including Chicago, San Juan, and Washington D.C., adopted it shortly thereafter. And it wouldn’t take long for this approach to be exported to other countries as well and become a common transportation planning tool all over the world.

In retrospect, the concept had some obvious flaws. For starters, the model’s basic approach was to presume what had happened recently would continue to happen. If Detroit’s population was rising, it would continue to rise. If fuel prices were falling, they would continue to fall. But that’s not how the world works. A lot can change in a few decades.

Take, for example, population and land-use patterns, inputs from the first step of the four-step model. They are two of the most important variables in any TDM, since the more people that live in a given area, the more trips there will be, and where in that area they live and work will largely determine travel patterns. Both of these factors would radically shift within the Detroit area. In the 1950s, Detroit was in the middle of an unprecedented urban growth spurt, peaking around 1950 at more than 1.8 million people, according to historian Thomas Segrue’s The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. By 1970, almost one in five people had left thanks in large part to middle class “white flight” to the suburbs. Many businesses moved headquarters or factories outside of the city as well, drastically altering travel patterns. A planner in 1955 would have been hard-pressed to forecast any of that.

More subtly, critics of the typical modeling approach say they don’t align with how humans actually behave. For example, say that you live in Pasadena and your friend in Culver City invites you over for dinner at six on a weekday. Would you go? Or would you tell them they must be nuts if they think you’re going to drive across Los Angeles during rush hour? Odds are, you will opt for the latter—or the invitation would have never been proffered to begin with out of basic human decency—and the trip is never made.

Traffic forecasting doesn’t work like this. In the models, any trip made today will be made perpetually into the future no matter how much worse traffic gets.

Experts refer to this as “fixed travel demand,” which is essentially an oxymoron, because travel demand is almost by definition not fixed. We are always deciding whether a trip is worth taking before we take it. One of the major factors in that decision-making process is how long the trip will take. TDMs work the exact opposite way by assuming that if people want to go somewhere they will. Only then will they calculate how long it will take.

For this reason, some urban planners derisively refer to this approach as “the lemming theory of demand,” said Joe Cortright, an urban economist for the consulting firm Impresa and contributor to the website City Observatory, because it assumes people will keep plowing onto highways no matter how bad congestion gets.

“It’s not so much about the measurement being wrong, it’s that the whole underlying thesis is wrong,” said University of Connecticut professor Norman Garrick. “You’re not thinking about how people behave and how they’re using the system. You’re just saying this is how it happened in the past [and] this is how it will happen in the future, even though you’re injecting this big change into the system.”

The flip side of the fixed travel demand problem is equally pernicious. Let’s say LA somehow doubled the number of lanes on the 110 and 10 freeways, which connect Pasadena to Culver City. Now, going to dinner at your friend’s place might not seem like such a bad idea. Except tens of thousands of other people are thinking the same thing. They, too, will make trips they previously did not make. Over the long run, they may move further away where houses are cheaper because the commute is faster, meaning they’ll drive more and be on the road longer. Eventually, those new lanes fill up and traffic is as bad as ever.

This phenomenon is called induced demand, and it is not merely a thought exercise. It is precisely what has happened in nearly every case where cities build new highways or expand old ones.

“Recent experience on expressways in large U.S. cities suggests that traffic congestion is here forever,” wrote economist Anthony Downs in his 1962 paper The Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion. “Apparently, no matter how many new superroads are built connecting outlying areas with the downtown business district, auto-driving commuters still move to a crawl during the morning and evening rush hours.”

Experts have known about induced demand for generations, yet we keep adding more highways in the Sisyphean task of attempting to build our way out of rush hour traffic. To fully appreciate the absurdity of this quest, look no further than the $2.8 billion freeway project in Katy, Texas that was supposed to reduce commute times along the expanded 23-lane freeway, the widest in the world. All too predictably, congestion only increased, and commute times are longer still.

A 2011 paper called “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion” concluded “increased provision of roads or public transit is unlikely to relieve congestion” because every time new lane-miles are added, trip miles driven increase proportionately. The more highways and roads we build, the more we drive. (The flip side is also true: in the rare cases when highways are temporarily out of commission, such as the case with the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, traffic doesn’t get much worse.) And TDMs have been totally ignorant of it.

“It is well-recognized that the 4-step modeling paradigm developed 50-60 years ago is only a computational convenience that is not behavioral,” wrote transportation planner and consultant David T. Hartgen in 2013, “and does not reflect how traveler decisions are actually made.”

The proof is on the roadways. In his landmark 2007 study of traffic forecasts across 14 nations and five continents, Oxford University professor Bent Flyvbjerg found half of traffic forecasts are wrong by more than 20 percent, a finding subsequently replicated elsewhere. A 2006 study by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program found that out of 15 toll road projects, the actual traffic was 35 percent below the predicted traffic on average. Another study found the error was more like 42 percent on average.

“I think there’s this general consensus that there’s accuracy issues,” said Fred Jones, a senior project manager with the planning firm Michael Baker International. “Sometimes in the order of magnitude anywhere from 30 to 50 percent off.”

Even worse, no one is learning from their mistakes. “Inaccuracy is constant for the 30-year period covered by this study,” Flyvbjerg wrote. “Forecasts have not improved over time.”

It’s not even clear civil engineers or the firms that run these models believe inaccuracy is a bad thing. They’re being asked to do the impossible and predict the future—of course there will be inaccuracies, they argue. It’s like routing a trip on Google Maps. If it’s a 20-minute drive across town, Google Maps will do a pretty good job predicting how long it will take. If it’s supposed to be an eight-hour trip, that's basically a guess, because even Google can’t see into the future to know if there will be a crash in I-95 outside of D.C. by the time you get there in five hours. The legally mandated 20-year forecast, University of South Florida professor Chanyoung Lee says, is a lot like that.

As a result, civil engineers doing the modeling tend to downplay the relevance of the precise numbers and speak more broadly about trends over time. Ideally, they argue, policymakers would run the model with varying population forecasts, land use patterns, and employment scenarios to get a range of expectations. Then, they would consider what range of those expectations the project actually works for.

The problem is, when the results are presented to the public, they lose all nuance and are seized by policymakers as fact. As Cortright put it, “the models are essentially a sales tool for what highway departments want to do.”

As problematic as they have been, the models have gotten smarter. Especially in the last decade or so, more states are working from dynamic travel models that more closely reflect how humans actually behave. They are better at taking into consideration alternate modes of transportation like biking, walking, and public transportation. And, unlike previous versions, they’re able to model how widening one section of road might create bottlenecks in a different section.

Still, experts warn that unless we change the entire decision-making process behind these projects, a better model won’t accomplish anything. The models are typically not even run—and the results presented to the public—until after a state department of transportation has all but settled on a preferred project.

After talking to 10 experts in the field for this story, one thing was clear: the hurdles are not technological, but social and political. After all, the Louisville bridge project did accurately model travel demand for the bond-holders. It can be done. The question is not why the models are wrong, but why the right ones don’t seem to make any difference.

When I asked Renn, who had watched the Louisville project closely, what would be a better way to evaluate how to build a big transportation project, he said he wasn’t sure. “There’s this idea we need to depoliticize questions, that we can reduce political choices to objective decision criteria, when in fact I think many of our debates are driven essentially by rival value systems in our visions of the public good.”

Here, the Louisville case is once again illustrative. In the SDEIS, the engineers estimated a 15 percent population growth in the metro region by 2030. This prediction seems sound; from 2007 to 2020, Renn said, the population in those counties has increased 7.85 percent. But, the SDEIS predicted virtually all of that population increase would occur in the surrounding counties and city outskirts. Thanks to that assumption—as well as a forecasted 42 percent increase in employment—the SDEIS came up with a 52 percent increase in travel times and a whopping 161 percent increase in hours lost due to sitting in traffic delays with the existing infrastructure. These were critical estimates to bolster the case for the two bridges plan.

But these trends are not immutable laws of human existence. “This is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy dressed up as technocratic objectivity,” said Cortright. “The population forecasts assume the indefinite decentralization of households and businesses.”

For this reason, TDM critics say the forecast accuracies—or lack thereof—are almost besides the point, because any project that changes the build environment will alter the way people behave. The question is not whether the predictions of how they will behave are accurate, but what kind of behavior we want to have more of.

“I don’t really care whether the highway model was ‘accurate’ or not,” said Kevin DeGood, director of infrastructure policy at the Center for American Progress and frequent critic of these types of models in highway plans, “because even if the model is accurate the project can be a failure.”

To that end, DeGood added that we need to refocus our goals at the planning stage, away from projected vehicle speeds, traffic flow, and congestion, to different questions, ones that could steer us towards quality-of-life issues. For example, what percent of households live within a quarter mile of high-quality public transit? What percent can commute without using a private vehicle or live near a public park?

Transportation projects cut to the core of what we value in society. Do we want city neighborhoods divided by tangled highway junctions so people can get downtown easily from the suburbs? Or do we want walkable urban districts with cleaner air, quieter streets, and a proximity to jobs and businesses that means people don’t need to own cars if they don’t want to?

The answers to all these questions would result in states spending their dollars very differently. One would result in a lot more projects like Louisville’s. The other would shift focus from road building to public transportation, as well as changing laws to promote density.

To Renn’s point, most American cities are divided on these issues. Perhaps the most useful thing the model does is obscure that debate behind a veil of scientific certainty. Behind hard, solid numbers. “From the standpoint of a citizen, these numbers essentially come out of a black box,” he said. “You don’t have any idea how they generated these numbers, so you can’t begin to critique them.”

In other words, the model shuts people up. It may not be honest, but in the world of transportation politics, there’s nothing more valuable than that.

Follow Aaron Gordon on Twitter.

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