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antoine-roquentin · 5 years ago

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In 2009, when the world was falling apart, a lot of people were asking new President Barack Obama to turn to Paul Volcker, the tall and prestigious former central banker whose reputation was of near God-like stature. Obama did, asking Volcker for advice. But Larry Summers, key advisor to Obama, sabotaged the relationship. Volcker encouraged Obama to stop banks from gambling with internal hedge funds, but Summers wanted banks to keep gambling with internal hedge funds. Summers won the bureaucratic fight.

Volcker’s titanic reputation was by then decades old. But so too was Volcker pursuing honesty in finance, and getting pushed out because of it. In 1986, Ronald Reagan essentially fired Volcker from his position as the head of the Federal Reserve because Paul Volcker was trying to crack down on the junk-bond fueled mergers craze that was clearly corrupting America’s savings and loan banks. Felix Rohatyn, a Democratic fixer and Lazard investment banker, pleaded with the Republicans, “if we sacrifice Paul Volcker for the junk-bond mania, we will clearly show the world that we’ve lost any sense of financial responsibility.”

Here’s a story from 1986, at the height of the frenzy.

Volcker lost the battle at the Fed, and ultimately Alan Greenspan, who was on the payroll of one of the largest corrupt savings and loan banks, took over. Volcker, in pursuing financial rectitude, had no allies except the ‘respect’ of the financial world, which, as it turns out, isn’t worth much at all. And the reason, ironically, is because Volcker killed his greatest would-be allies.

I first ran into Volcker’s career while researching Penn Central, the train system that went bankrupt in 1970 in the greatest then-collapse in American history. It was like the Enron of its time. The Nixon administration tasked the conservative Volcker with overseeing the fiasco, and he was a fairly honest broker. He tried, not very hard, to get a bailout, but when Congressman Wright Patman said no, that was that.

In 1979 Jimmy Carter nominated Volcker to be the head of the Fed. Carter's advisor warned him that Volcker was the "candidate of Wall Street." In an era of red-hot inflation, Volcker's goal was to cut the growth of prices, with the ultimate end of keeping the dollar strong globally. He had popular backing, Americans saw inflation as the most pressing economic problem. Volcker went straight at the auto sector, the unionized pace setting industry which set the informal wage growth patterns of the entire country since the 1950s.

His goal was to crush wages, straight out. To give you a sense of how strongly he felt about this goal, consider that during this period, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Volcker walked around with a card of union wages in his pocket to remind himself that his goal was to crush the middle class. Volcker even angered Reagan officials by keeping interest rates too high for too long. When they complained, he would pull “out his card on union wages” and note that inflation would not come down permanently until labor “got the message and surrendered.” Volcker said that the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was a "hall of mirrors" and that the "standard of living of the average American must decline."

Volcker was a deeply conservative, but not corrupt, official. I think the speech that best exemplifies how he thought was one he gave in 1981 before the Economic Club of New York, lauding the bankruptcy and turnaround of the city.

Five years ago, when I last addressed the Economic Club, the preoccupation of the day was the acute financial distress of this great City and State. That big black headline in the Daily News—"Ford to New York: Drop Dead"—was not quite accurate. But in its bold and brazen way, it did carry an essential message. Any lasting solution to our economic problems would have to begin, and end at home.

A month or so ago, I was struck by another headline, this time in a Wall Street Journal editorial: "The Supply Side Saves New York." Somehow, in five years, New York had become an example for the rest of the country to follow.”

Volcker, in other words, was an ardent fan of austerity. And in his speech, he explicitly noted that New York City had no printing press to get out of the fiscal jam it had been in. That was, as Volcker put it, “fortunate.” Instead, the city had to slash expenditures, particularly on the poor. Volcker hoped that the America would take this lesson to heart nationally, and since he ran the printing press, that’s what he made sure happened. He also believed strongly in slashing taxes, government spending, and in deregulation, as he said to businessmen in Kansas City that year.

Volcker raised interest rates radically, crushing small businesses, farms, banks, and credit unions. To many of his fans, and even his opponents, this was simply what had to be done to get inflation out of the system. But there was a brief experiment, if forgotten, experiment in trying a different path, In the spring of 1980, Jimmy Carter encouraged Volcker not to raise interest rates, but to place “credit controls” onto consumer borrowing. Credit controls are direct public rules on specific lending institutions that make it more or less expensive to lend or borrow, and were a major mechanism to keep inflation out of the system during World War Two and the Korean War. And the Fed had the authority to make it more expensive for banks and financial institutions to issue credit cards and lend money to consumers.

Volcker used these tools incredibly poor, clumsily even, with some suspecting he was intending to sabotage the use of regulatory tools he didn’t like. Inflation collapsed, as did interest rates and the economy slid rapidly. Within a few months, Volcker and the bankers got rid of credit controls. Inflation and interest rates jumped right back up, and Volcker was able to discredit credit controls. He then inflicted massive pain on the middle class instead of the banking system by using interest rates and monetary policy, instead of explicitly telling big banks to stop lending.

At the same time as Volcker was destroying unions, small banks, small farms, and small businesses, he was structuring the Too Big to Fail model of finance. In 1980, Nelson and Bunker Hunt, two oil billionaire heirs, tried to corner the silver market in league with Arab interests. Volcker organized a bailout. By 1980, Wall Street had gotten the message. Economist Albert Wojnilower explained, “It is now everywhere taken for granted that no monetary authority will allow any key financial actor to fail."

In the middle of the 1980s, Volcker’s strategy looked like a success. Inflation was gone, the economy was growing, technology seemed to be restructuring society, and the workforce had largely been de-unionized. But there was a something of a mirage, as a bubble in financial leverage through savings and loan banks and junk bonds emerged. Volcker tried to crack down on this bubble, to block the use of junk bonds for certain kinds of seedy transactions. He knew a scumbag when he saw one, and the junk bond peddlers and M&A artists were scum. But by then, his allies against financial corruption, notably the small banks, small business, and unions, were dead or dying. So it was Paul Volcker and all his vaunted respect, versus an army on Wall Street.

There was no contest. The predatory bankers won, as they did again in 2009.

Towards the end of his life, Volcker railed against the corruption he saw everywhere. But he never connected the dots between his own actions destroying public institutions and the inability to constrain the financial corruption he despised. Many people in finance have fond memories of an incorruptible Paul Volcker standing up against financial corruption and reigning in inflation. Which is true. But Volcker really wasn't on the side of democracy, and that's why he oversaw nothing but decline.

I ran into Paul Volcker a few years ago at a conference when I was a Democratic Congressional staffer. He harangued me and said 'why are you Democrats so weak?' I wish I had responded, 'because you killed the unions.'

And that is the tragedy of Paul Volcker.

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chiseler · 6 years ago

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The Madness of Ken Russell

Critical thinking in Britain has always taken the view that Ken Russell was a wild, ill-disciplined talent who ultimately went artistically mad: this was also the view in the film industry. The only major disagreement was about when he went from being merely excessive to being balls-out crazy: different parties chose different tipping points.

(WAIT! WHO CARES ABOUT CRITICS?)

(Bear with me: in Russell’s case, the critical consensus serves as a valuable reverse barometer.)

Russell, a suburban boy, former merchant seaman and Catholic convert, made a few brilliant short films with his wife and fellow genius, costume designer Shirley Russell, before landing a job at the BBC’s flagship arts program, Monitor. His stint here taught him to fight, and placed him under the stern patronage of producer Huw Weldon, probably the only authority figure he ever respected. Many good fights were enjoyed. When Russell joined the program, there was an absolute ban on dramatization and re-enactment: the most he was allowed was to show a composer’s hands at the piano. By the time he finished up on the show, he’d managed to twist it out of shape to the point where he’d been allowed to make complete dramatic works in the guise of documentary. These TV plays are highly cinematic, kinetic and bold: like Kubrick, Russell had a love of both stark symmetry and dynamic movement. Control and its opposite.

Russell found actors he liked, including Oliver Reed, with whom he enjoyed a strange kinship: both were heavy drinkers, both affected a casual attitude to their work, though Russell was never ashamed to call himself an artist. Ollie became the John Wayne to Russell’s Ford (in a roiling, nightmare vision of classical cinema).

The point when Russell moved out of TV is the first moment his detractors choose to mark his decline into self-indulgent craziness. He made a modest, eccentric comedy, French Dressing (with mounds of inflatable girls piled up like Holocaust victims) and a wild, idiosyncratic spy movie, The Billion Dollar Brain, a Russophile anti-Bond movie full of flip humor and Eisenstein homages. Critics saw these films as work-for-hire, as perhaps they were, and largely discount them. They are quite brilliant.

Women in Love is counted by others as the last pre-madness film, and its relative sanity can be attributed to the control exerted by its writer-producer Larry Kramer. Russell’s excesses are held in check, it is argued, and the tension between its creators was productive. It’s a very good film, but I find it too sedate in places, though the vivid color and Shirley Russell’s bold designs, and some scenes of genuine wildness and invention stave off actual boredom.

The Music Lovers, his dream project, expanding the TV composer film to the big screen and color, is where a real case for craziness begins to be made: the choice to explore Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality now seems mature rather than lurid, but Ken is undeniably pushing the biopic into unfamiliar terrain: fantasies of decapitation by cannon-shot, a filthy madhouse, a demented honeymoon on a train rocking like the Starship Enterprise, complete with crotch shots. Maybe even worse, from the critics’ viewpoint, Russell, who had directed one TV commercial before walking away from that business in disgust, co-opted the visual language of the shampoo commercial to depict the images conjured by the composer’s music. Russell was in love with romanticism but saw through it too. Ironically, the filmmaker constantly castigated for unsubtlety injected an irony into the film that critics missed, taking the soppiness at face value and not seeing how the concealed satire blended perfectly with the overt caricature and phantasmagoric visions.

Still, the subject was respectable, but with The Devils, Russell managed a film maudit that took decades to be reappraised, and earned him criticism of a uniquely vociferous sort, admittedly in keeping with the hysteria of the film itself. An account – or channelling – of a 16th Century witchcraft trial in France, the movie didn’t so much push as cremate the envelope as far as sex, violence and blasphemy were concerned: Russell, who had converted to Catholicism in his youth, lost his faith while making this one, converting to an animist worship of the Lake District, a religion of his own devising. Well, he did have a substantial ego.

Russell was upsetting: apart from the torture, abuse and madness, the film threw in discordant tonal shifts, creative anachronisms and deployed all of his cinematic influences, which prominently featured Orson Welles, Fellini, Fritz Lang’s German silents, and the musicals of Busby Berkeley, which supplied the top-shots used to depict the rape of Christ on the cross, a scene cut by the censor and lovingly preserved by the director for a future restoration, still explicitly forbidden by the film’s backers, Warner Brothers.

Asides from his crisis of faith and crises in his marriage and his dealings with the studio, Russell was also knocking back the wine. “Better before lunch,” was his prop man’s characterization of the director. Production designer Derek Jarman recounted Russell asking him, “What can I do that’ll really offend the British public?” “Well you could kill a lot of people,” mused Jarman, “but if you really want to upset them you could kill some animals.” A plan was then devised to have King Louis with a musket blowing the heads off the peacocks on his lawn: the birds were to be fitted with explosives at the neck, like Snake Plissken, but Russell backed away from this extreme, even by his standards, approach, and instead had the target practice performed with a man dressed as a blackbird, and the King saying “Bye-bye, blackbird,” and Peter Maxwell-Davies’ remarkable score quoting the popular twenties song, and that infuriated the critics just as much as actual bird-blasting would have.

Less amusingly, Russell was also guilty of unsafe practices involving the naked girls and rowdy extras: the stories here get really dark. As does the film: a demented masterpiece that shows Russell for once engaging with the political: a film about corruption that uses physical disintegration alongside social and spiritual rot.

Just to confuse us even more, Russell made The Boy Friend the same year, an epic music and a miniature at the same time, allowing him to recreate Busby Berkeley’s pixilated fantasias in a seedy English theater. It’s light and charming, but Russell’s version of these qualities was not recognized by the critics, and it’s true that his wit is clodhopping, his whimsy grotesque, everything is overplayed, in your face: but you have to climb aboard the film, get into its spirit, and then it really is a very lovely reversal of the usual nightmare.

The seventies brought more composer films, Mahler and Lisztomania, and also the rock opera Tommy, which earned Russell slightly better reviews as his boisterousness was judged more in keeping with the material (critics, it seemed, could not stand the idea of a filmmaker responding to classical music for its passion and energy, its rock ‘n’ roll qualities, rather than for its assumed civilising effect). Russell got away with showing Ann-Margret humping her cushions while slathered in feculent chocolate sauce, shot Tina Turner with a 6mm lens to uglify her as she thrashed around a steel sarcophagus studded with hypos, and put Elton John on ten-foot platform shoes.

Lisztomania is another movie that’s seen as marking the decline into lunacy: its producer, David Puttnam, hugely impressed by Russell’s flare and his ability to shoot Mahler after half the budget fell through, felt that ultimately the relentless negative press knocked his enfant terrible off-balance. Instead of rolling over in submission, Russell perversely doubled down on the excess and became a parody of himself. And he had already been a parody to begin with (but a parody without an original, unless we take him as a combined burlesque of all his cinematic influences). I’ve always adored Lisztomania, which knows it’s going too far, knows its japes and conceits are ludicrous and indefensible, knows it can’t get away with Roger Daltrey as Liszt and Ringo Starr as the Pope. And just. Doesn’t. Care.

Valentino, which marked the end of the Russell marriage (there would be a bunch more), was dismissed by Russell as the fag-end of his first British period, “everything about it was bored and boring, including me,” but it’s actually rather good. Nureyev as Valentino (well, he was used to being called Rudolph), Russell as Rex Ingram wielding a megaphone the size of a cannon. The twenties, as lived by Rambova, Dorothy Arzner, Fatty Arbuckle, or as dreamt by Mad Ken.

Russell had made his career in Britain at a time when the industry was in collapse: he largely missed the explosion of energy that marked Swinging London, the British new wave, and the only kitchen sink he liked was the one he was always throwing in. Now, the domestic business seemed to have expired of ennui, senile dementia and blood poisoning, but Hollywood beckoned. Russell was bottom of a long list of directors who all turned down Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, a late-mid-life crisis film about sensory deprivation tanks and psychedelics which takes John C. Lilley and fuses him with Dr. Jekyll. Russell took it on despite being forbidden from changing a line of dialogue, but got his revenge by having his actors speak fast -- like Jimmy Cagney fast, not so much throwing away their lines as firing them like tennis balls. And by having them eat at the same time. And by expanding the hallucination sequences until they took over the movie, so that they were all anyone talked about. Druggie audiences would hang out into the lobby, Russell gleefully reported, posting a sentry in the auditorium who would yell “Hallucination!” whenever one was starting, and everyone would rush back in to get a hit of audiovisual delirium.

A bit like Women in Love, Altered States benefited from the creative clash between director and writer (who took his name off the script in protest at Russell’s backhanded fidelity), but the reaction among respectable types was mainly a theatrical eye-roll: the maniac was up to his old tricks. Crimes of Passion, starring Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins, was next, with she as a Belle de Jour career girl by day, working girl by night, he as an insane sex-obsessed preacher, some forgettable soap opera type as leading man, the whole thing soaked in neon colors and spliced full of Bearsley and Hokusai, whom the American censor duly deleted in horror. “They cut out anything to do with art,” observed the filmmaker.

And that was it for America, save occasional pieces for HBO, progressively more televisual, the locked-off symmetrical winning out over the kinetic. Russell returned to the UK to make theatrical features, and again you heard the cry off “Whatever happened? He used to be good!” Gothic dealt with Byron and the Shelleys and the birth of Frankenstein, and was fruity, literate, dirty good fun. The Rainbow was a return to Women in Love territory, on a lower budget and with less energy and star wattage: Russell declared it his best film since that imagined zenith, and a few critics wanly agreed. The Lair of the White Worm was another journey beyond the pale, thrusting some of the same actors into a ludicrous vampire and snake goddess phallic farrago with Hugh Grant and a kilted Peter Capaldi attempting to snakecharm with bagpipes. A vampirized policeman gets his head impaled on a deco sundial. Marvelous. And the sequence was rounded out with Salome’s Last Dance, which stages Oscar Wilde’s biblical wet dream in a Victorian brothel, an inspired no-budget solution and a film which, unlike Altered States, really respects its words, lingering over them, rolling them salaciously over its tongue. Add in also Ken’s episode of Aria, in which he stages Nessun Dorma as an accident victim’s operating room hallucination, with porn mag model Linzi Drew, a new Russell favorite, in the lead.

Time was running out, the budgets shrinking like a Fu Manchu death chamber, the ceiling pressing down and clearly constraining what Russell could achieve, despite his continuing ambition. Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the BBC scored huge ratings, and he was never asked back. Commercial television’s top arts programme, The South Bank Show, run by Russell’s old screenwriter from Women in Love, Melvyn Bragg, kept him going with more-or-less annual commissions: he’d come full circle, or did when he moved back to home movies, shot in his garden or in his favorite Soho pub, which he hoped to “flog on the internet.” The symmetry of the career, its ourobousness, is more pleasing to contemplate than it must have been to live, though the last marriage lasted and was happy, and the ever-moving critical pendulum had reached the place where people were starting to say that The Devils and some of the other seventies work was really good, actually.

I can admire everything up until the final home movies, and maybe I’ll come round to them: Russell was right to admire all his earlier films. He spent decades more or less brushing off French Dressing, then saw it on TV and thought, “This is a masterpiece!” which it is. But only a minor one compared to what was those around it. Seaside-postcard humor, musical comedy performances, pop art imagery, Wagnerian and Stravinskian soundtracks, a defiant rejection of subtlety. “I don’t believe there’s any value in understatement […] This is the age of kicking people in the balls and telling them something and getting a reaction […] Picasso was not restrained, Mahler was not restrained!’” His detractors thought he should be, possibly in a straitjacket and with megadoses of Thorazine, but Russell was a volcanic eruption in cinematic form, a purple-faced tyrant of the Stroheim school, a demonic force driven to possess reels of celluloid and make them glow in the dark with a sugar rush radiation that has yet to decay. He was too big, too vulgar, too beautiful, too nasty and too beautiful for a national cinema mired in lethargic literary-theatrical respectability. “The visual arts have never had a foothold in England,” he sneered.

Ken!

Life is not a Ken Loach movie. It is a Ken Russell movie.

by David Cairns

#David Cairns #The Chiseler #Ken Russell

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the-record-newspaper · 7 years ago

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“The Evil that Men Do…”

Unsolved: Murder at Jumpingoff Place - Part X

Richard Lynn Bare

By LARRY J. GRIFFIN

Special Reporter for The Record

Richard “Lynn” Bare stood at a 1,200 foot precipice near Jumpingoff Place on the Parkway. He held—in his clutches—a struggling, dazed, terrified 24-year-old woman. In that moment, life and death were suspended in a delicate balance.

Rarely, at 19-years-of age, does a teenager on the threshold of adulthood make an impulsive decision that defines the rest of his life. Yet, young Lynn peered into the face of just such a defining moment, and it unremittingly stared back. His next move would seal the fate of Sherry Hart—and his.

Richard Leon Bare and his wife, Lorene had already been parents three times when their fourth and last child, Richard Lynn was born in Ashe County Memorial Hospital (ACMH) on July 6, 1964. Ms. Bare was first a mother at 22-years-of-age when she gave birth to her first child—a daughter, Brenda Kaye, Friday, August 24, 1951, at 5:47 p.m. Brenda would eventually marry Raymond “Ray” Bare and moved to Cabarrus County. In fact, at one time, her brother, Lynn, lived with them when the couple resided in Kannapolis.

Lorene had her second child, daughter Linda Gay, 11 days shy of Daughter Brenda’s fourth birthday. But Linda was not the first baby to be born to Richard and Lorene that early Saturday morning, August 13, 1955 at ACMH. Lena Ray arrived at 3:50 a.m.—five minutes before her identical twin, Linda Gay’s, first breath. Lena was declared “stillborn”—an “obstructive cord circulation” cited as the cause of her death. Notably, Linda’s birth weight was exactly the same as her twin sister’s—5 lbs. 1½ oz.

Just over two-years later and after a 35 week pregnancy, 5 lb. 2½ oz. Bobby Gene was born—Sunday, September 22, 1957, 1:50 a.m.—at ACMH. Like Sister Linda, he was not the first to be delivered that day—he also had a twin. Birthed 20 minutes before Bobby, 8 lb. 1 oz. Jimmy Dean was declared “stillborn” by the attending physician. No immediate cause of death was identifiable; however, an antecedent cause noted was “ruptured membranes.” For the second time—in as many years—Lorene Bare had given birth to a set of twins. And in each instance, the first infant did not survive.

It would be almost seven-years before a fourth and final child was added to the Bare family. Now 35-years old, Ms. Bare gave birth to a 7 lbs. 10 oz. boy at 12:40 p.m.; Monday, July 6, 1964. And they named him, Richard Lynn, whom they called “Lynn.” Just like his oldest sibling, Brenda, Lynn’s was a single birth; but, there were two other interesting similarities. Unlike Linda and Bobby, Brenda and Lynn were both born in the afternoon in lieu of the early morning; they arrived on weekdays and not weekends.

“I know them all,” acknowledged a retired Ashe County educator of over 30-years, who asked to remain anonymous. “Now, I never taught Lorene’s girls—Brenda and Linda. But I did teach the boys—Bobby and Lynn.” Retired, now, as long as she taught for Ashe County Schools, this former teacher spoke of the Bare family as though she was a relative.

“Though I didn’t have her in school, I know Brenda and her husband, Ray Dale. They have done well for themselves, live in Cabarrus County, and have raised three fine sons. I see them (Brenda and Ray Bare) from time to time when they visit; they have a home up here (Ashe County) as well,” she explained.

“Linda lives locally here and owns a couple of businesses (The Winner’s Circle, Blue Ridge Theatre). I didn’t teach Linda either; however I did have her daughter, Angie (Angelia), who works with her at the restaurant. Angie is a talented, intelligent woman—she was even when I taught her,” the former educator affirmed.

Like her mother, Linda, Angelia Gaye Bare Pilar was born early on a Saturday morning—July 17, 1971, at 6:30 a.m. She is the first child of Linda and Richard Bennett Bare—Linda’s first husband—who were 15-years-of-age and 23-years-old, respectively. Two-years, four months later to-the-day—Nov. 17, 1973—the couple added a second child to their family. Named Erik Allen, he was born on a Saturday, just like his sister and mother.

After the birth of their son, Richard and Linda Bare were married for almost eleven more years before they divorced in August, 1984, some seven months after Sherry Hart’s disappearance and death in January. On her brother Lynn’s 24th birthday—July 6, 1988—Linda applied for a marriage license to wed Rock County, Wisconsin native, Richard Allan Copus. (Rock County is SE of the State Capital, Madison.) Fourteen years her senior, Richard married Linda two days later at Obids Baptist Church in West Jefferson. The couple has been married for 29 years, and both are successful Ashe County business entrepreneurs.

“I did have Bobby when I taught at Jefferson Elementary,” the retired Ashe Educator confirmed. “He was a likeable young man, just an average student, but didn’t cause me a minute’s trouble." Acknowledging that she was aware of Bobby’s later legal problems, she quickly added, “He has always—even to this day—been courteous and respectful whenever I see him. And I know his daughter, Summer, who lives and works in the area. I didn’t know his older daughter, Winter.”

On Sunday Oct. 2, 1983 and scarcely 26-years-old, Bobby was involved in a shooting over his 8-month-old daughter, Winter. According to a N.C. Court of Appeals document, dated Oct. 29, 1985, Bobby and a woman named Yolanda Cooley, whom he met when he was working on the San Diego naval base, had a child together—Winter—in February, 1983.

By August of that year, the unmarried couple was living in Ashe County when Yolanda landed an employment opportunity with the Job Corps in Kentucky. So, she signed papers relinquishing legal guardianship of Winter to her paramour, Bobby Bare. He stayed in contact with Yolanda and persisted in attempts to lure her back to Ashe County so that they could be married. Yolanda ostensibly declined.

In October, 1983, Yolanda traveled to Ashe County with her mother, Laticia Cooley, and Matthew Anderson, Laticia’s boyfriend—both of whom resided in San Diego. When they arrived in Jefferson, Yolanda, and her two-person entourage, sought assistance from the sheriff to wrest Winter from Bobby’s custody. The sheriff encouraged her to seek a court order to effect the desired removal. Afterwards, Yolanda met with Bobby at the home of his father, Richard and informed him that she wanted her mother to take their daughter to live in California with her. Bare strenuously objected to Winter being transported to California, and he expeditiously took the baby to his sister’s home.

At his sister’s house, he asked his brother-in-law to loan him a gun; armed, he started to leave in his car. At the end of the driveway, Bobby saw a van with Laticia Cooley and Anderson sitting in the front seats. What happened next, on that autumnal Sunday afternoon, is at best uncertain. But at Bobby’s trial, Laticia testified as follows:

She approached defendant's car and noticed a gun next to his seat. She asked, "What's going on? Where's the baby?" Defendant said no one would take his baby, and Laticia returned to the van. She heard a gunshot and saw Anderson's face covered with blood. Defendant then threatened to shoot her, but defendant's father came and took the gun from defendant without resistance.

Bare maintained that Anderson taunted him, grabbed the barrel of the shotgun, and the weapon accidentally discharged. Regardless, at 3:30 p.m., 23-year-old Matthew Wayne Anderson died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Bobby was charged with first-degree murder, and Judge Ed Gregory refused to set bond, citing a prior conviction record. Later, however, the defendant was able to post bond of $100,000 and was released pending trial.

During this time, a tip from a Californian friend of Bare’s—who was also a former employer—indicated that an attempt would be made on Bobby’s life to avenge Anderson’s death. There was also some reason to fear that Bobby’s younger brother, Lynn, would be targeted as well. According to a couple of news articles from that period, 19-year-old Lynn was placed in protective custody—likely at his older sister, Brenda’s, residence in Kannapolis.

Notably, father Richard Leon Bare told a reporter that there had been an attempt on Lynn’s life—shots had been fired—but would say little else. Ashe County Sheriff Gene Goss, averred that he was unable to substantiate a connection between Bobby’s case and the alleged attempt on Lynn’s life.

Though charged with murder-in-the-first, Bobby was found guilty of second-degree murder by the 12-person jury, and Judge Julius A. Rousseau, Jr. sentenced him to 50 years in prison. He subsequently appealed his case to a N.C. Court of Appeals—an appeal that proved fruitless; so, Bare was remanded to prison.

“Bobby was Lynn’s hero; I knew the he would have an uphill battle in life—he had no good role models,” recollected Wilkes business owner Margaret Cooper, who taught remedial reading to Lynn Bare and Jeff Burgess when they were in the 8th-grade at Jefferson Elementary School. “But, you couldn’t help but like him.”

Ms. Cooper described both Bare and Burgess as typical boys, both very likeable, but not very motivated. “I don’t believe Lynn received a lot of support from home; I don’t think his parents monitored much of what happened in school. However, both Lynn and Jeff were respectful and really didn’t give me any trouble.”

The retired Ashe County educator agreed with that assessment of Lynn. “He was fairly obedient and gave you no trouble. I never saw any animosity or belligerence coming from him….Lynn was just an average student who had some difficulties; he simply was not very enthused. But he seemed happy enough.”

Cooper recalled that Lynn and Jeff were usually seen together at school. And during the interview, she recounted an amusing incident in her classroom between the two boys;

One day, we were sitting around a table and the boys were horsing around, kicking each other under the table. I asked them to stop, and they did. However, a few minutes later, they started up again. Well, I was feeling aggravated with them both and kicked Jeff under the table. He looked stunned; there was no attempt to kick back, and the kicking stopped altogether. A teacher could probably not do that this day and time; however, then, it worked.

“Yes, I had one incident with Lynn that I can recall,” remembered the retired Ashe County Jefferson teacher. “We were on a bus trip to the high school for some reason. As we were traveling, Lynn stood up all of a sudden. I saw him and asked him to sit down, and he did—no resistance. And that was typical of him.”

Both former Jefferson Elementary teachers acknowledged that they had lost track of Lynn and Jeff once they left elementary school; both expressed “shock” when they heard of their indictment in the disappearance and death of Sherry Hart. Those young men were not the boys whom they taught.

Only Lynn Bare knows what thoughts were coursing through his mind as he struggled with a bleeding, terrified, pleading Sherry Hart on a dangerous cliff edge near Jumpingoff Place. And only he knows why he decided to push…

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kiwilesbian · 8 years ago

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fics read in 2016

hello welcome 2 the biggest mess u’ve ever seen

i kept track of all 176 fics i read in 2016 and then i realized i had no clue what to do with them so. i figured i might as well post them

there’s a little bit of a lot of things here, but largely it’s stucky, philkas, and larry. these aren’t necessarily recommendations but i did asterisk my favorites!

one direction

larry

you slow it down

you take me over, you’re the magic in my veins

up the long delirious burning blue

swim in the smoke

even as young as you are

shake me down ****

pressed against the sky

things we shouldn’t do

after hours

an exquisite relic

lonely in a crowded place

you are the blood

empty skies

little secrets

shine

wait up i’m coming home

give me truths

hiding out in the kitchen

to the ends of the earth

my kingdom for a kiss *

plea for you to come home

stuck in the middle with you

i’m a moon at midnight

with love comes strange currencies

reeling through the fall

i’m not calling you a liar

time will tell

paint the sky blue

zarry

if you wanna find love

i guess that’s how i know you

baby be mine

we are spirits of a different sort

ziam

lost for words *

human touch

shaking the sky and i’m following lightning **

other

time and space between us - zouis

the county of the mockingbird - lilo

the louis tomlinson support group - a weird clusterfuck

stucky

just say you do *

when leaves fall

a picture worth a thousand words and then some

i do these things

so tired of eden

zhelaniye

on the other side of a downward spiral *

don’t ask

mistake on the part of nature

united states v barnes

open the door to heaven or hell

4 minute window

thou swell *

three men in a vw

painted in indigo

perchance to wake *

infinite coffee and protection detail

itsy bitsy yoga

collected letters

collected letters sequel (samstucky)

not so covert affair

separating me from you

coffeemaking for dummies

waiting to prove you’re not alone *

till i wake your ghost

starlight

gravitation *

the heart is hard to find

what it is possible to be

i love you like rlb

brooklyn

duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, hand grenade

war, children **

thief

goodbye piccadilly

all over again *

past tense

orders came for sailing

skippy’s list

all the angels and all the saints

slide to answer

angels with dirty faces

lights camera action

six million dollar baby

you and i were fireworks

game changer

philkas (eyewitness)

how to keep breathing

reason to stay

i’m a wolf howling, in the moonlight, calling out *

redemption

our future's certain, i won’t let it fade away

maybe

fools rush in

put a fever inside me *

I want the world to know

feeling it overtake

dark as midnight

parenting

right there

nobody but him

everything comes back to you

love is more than just your name, but i’ll give you mine

big green monster

hey boyfriend

every stumble

wrapping paper

you don’t have to pretend, he’s just your friend

love is sacrifice

the eyes have it

i really can't stay

monster

in the water

my fault

photograph

i lied

the 3 times lukas almost kissed philip, and the 1 time he actually did

please don't hurt me

we'll be fireproof

the untimely death of anne shea

last christmas

your pain is my pain

counting to fifteen

southern sun

only us

just say it

second first time

say that living life alone isnt how the story ends

malec (shadowhunters)

avengers assemble

wrong in the dark

magnus, how long have you been twenty?

say hey if you’re gay

this could be the start

i’m into you

thanks to the full moon in scorpio

set me in motion

when one door opens

in the sin bin *

sanvers (supergirl)

scene of the crime

my words are flying

stay a little longer

taken with each other

phone call

love me now

smitten

five times alex comes out (and one time she doesn’t have to)

lera (supergirl)

bomb reveal

names

wow

heart on your sleeve

inevitable

a mutual friend

merthur (merlin)

onfindan

the truth is you

the pact

all's well that ends well

finding home

jetra (jane the virgin)

blame the stress

how do I love thee

walking the plank

mommy bonding time

zimbits (omg check please)

i never saw the signs

found out

live through this and you won't look back

say it’s been a long six months

evak (skam)

wrong number *

just as you are **

stay

other

where did i go wrong - kurtbastian (glee)

how lucky i ever was to see - mcr

you and i might just be the thing - finnpoe (star wars)

on a clear day - drarry

what would you do - drarry

noisy neighbors - gallavich (shameless)

late night phone call - gallavich (shameless)

little secret - barian (the flash)

changes - barian (the flash)

led home - thomas/edward (downton abbey)

if not, that's okay - jimmy/thomas (downton abbey)

#shieldsharing #thiccmom #louis x harry #philip x lukas #stucky #fic rec #woooo this took like 3 hours organize lmao

9 notes · View notes

placetobenation · 5 years ago

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Alice in Wonderland

Release Date: July 28th, 1951

Inspiration: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll

Budget: $3 million

Domestic Gross: $5.6 million

Worldwide Gross: $5.6 million

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 81%

IMDB Score: 7.4/10

Storyline (per IMDB): Alice is a daydreaming young girl. She finds learning poems and listening to literature boring. She prefers stories with pictures and to live inside her imagination. One day, while enduring just such a poetry reading, she spots a large white rabbit…dressed in a jacket and carrying a large watch. He scurries off, saying he’s late, for a very important date. She follows him through the forest. He then disappears down a rabbit hole. Alice follows, leading her to all manner of discoveries, characters and adventures.

Pre-Watching Thoughts: We continue on through the 1950s with one of the more interesting films in the entirety of the Disney canon. This was one of those films that was not well-received upon its initial release and would end up gaining a cult following in the years that followed, and to this day it is considered one of the best adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s works. This was always one of my favorites growing up as I always thought that it was a fun movie, and we will see if it manages to hold up especially amongst some of the other films in this canon.

Voice Cast: So prior to this film, the number of actors that are involved in the films was fairly small which makes sense given that most of the films didn’t have a lot of characters. However, that changes here as we have a massive cast here to cover a lot of the characters that show up at some point throughout this film. We do have a few returns here as Verna Felton comes back to voice the Queen of Hearts, Jerry Colonna voices the March Hare, Jimmy MacDonald voices the Dormouse, Sterling Holloway voices the Cheshire Cat, Lucille Bliss and Pinto Colvig voice some minor characters, and finally J. Pat O’Malley voices Tweedledee, Tweedledum, the Walrus, the Carpenter, and the Mother Oyster which is quite the feat. Now get ready because we have a lot of new voices to talk about here and we start right off the bat with Kathryn Beaumont who voices Alice, and she does a good job in voicing Alice and it would be one of her two defining roles with the second coming up shortly. We then have comedian Ed Wynn who voices the Mad Hatter and he brings his upbeat energy to that role in a perfect way, and then we have English actor Richard Haydn who voices the Caterpillar and he is solid in bringing that character to life. We then have Bill Thompson who was famous for voicing Droopy the Dog and he voices the White Rabbit as well as the Dodo in a pair of good performances, and we have Heather Angel who voices Alice’s sister and while she doesn’t have too many lines, she does fine in this brief role. We then have Joseph Kearns who voices the Doorknob in a brief role since we don’t see him too often, and then we have Larry Grey who voices Bill the Lizard and one of the playing cards painting the roses red as by this point many of these actors play characters who appear very briefly in the film. One of the last minor roles here is the King of Hearts voiced by Dink Trout in what would be his final role as he had passed away a year before the film released, and finally we had Doris Lloyd who voices the Rose who conducts the flowers during their song. As mentioned, we did have some actors voice characters that appeared for such a brief time like Queenie Leonard who voices the Bird that calls Alice a serpent as well as the snooty flower, and we have the Mellomen led by Thurl Ravenscroft voicing various playing cards along with Don Barclay who also voices a few cards. Finally, we have Mami Nixon who voices all the flowers in the bed that sing with Alice and Norma Zimmer who is the White Rose singing a solo. For as many actors as we had in the film, they all did a fine job in establishing their characters and many of them would provide some memorable moments from the film to help it stand out.

Hero/Prince: N/A

Princess: Alice is a very interesting character in that I was unsure if she belonged in this category or if she was more of a hero, but in all honesty she’s not really a hero because she doesn’t do anything to save anyone. You could even argue that she doesn’t belong in this category, but for those who do remember the original Kingdom Hearts video game she was listed as one of the Seven Princesses of Heart (spoiler alert). When we first meet her, she does appear to live in a castle though this is never confirmed and she dreams of her own world where everything is not what it seems, and this leads her to Wonderland where she discovers that it isn’t all she thought it was and wants to return to her normal life as we find out her adventures were all just a dream. She is one of the more complex characters in that she at times is not very likeable and has a short temper, but other times she is sympathetic when she expresses her desire to go home. Regardless, she is still a pretty memorable character though where she ranks amongst the rest of the princesses will be interesting when we get to that point.

Villain: We have another pretty memorable villain here for this film and while she doesn’t appear until the last part of the film, she still makes it count and I am of course talking about the Queen of Hearts. She has the appearance of a noble monarch though as we see, she has a very short temper and doles out her favorite form of punishment which is beheading as she has the three cards beheaded for painting her roses red after planting white ones by mistake. She then accuses Alice of humiliating her despite it being the Cheshire Cat and after a mock trial where Alice finally lets her feelings loose, the Queen calls for her head though Alice does manage to awaken from her dream. We could also mention her husband the King of Hearts though he is not really a villain since he is clearly the more level-headed of the two, and he simply goes along with the Queen though she does take some of his suggestions including the trial. Again, it will be interesting to see where the Queen of Hearts ranks amongst the rest of the Disney villains, but she is certainly one of the more memorable ones and is one of the highlights of this film.

Other Characters: Okay, I hope you are ready because we have a lot of characters to talk about here as it seems that every turn that Alice makes while in Wonderland, she encounters someone completely different from what she has previous seen. We start off normally has we have Alice’s sister who also acts as her tutor and she is not too keen on Alice’s lack of interest in her studies, and we also have Alice’s cat Dinah though she is of little consequence. We then have one of the main figures in the film with the White Rabbit who is constantly late for something, and we find out that he works for the Queen of Hearts though it is interesting that she never scolds him for being late even though he is freaking out about being late. Alice then meets the Doorknob who is good at making puns and helping Alice learn to grow and shrink in size courtesy of what she eats and drinks, and then she meets the Dodo and the various animals who partake in a caucus race for no reason. She follows that by meeting Tweedledee and Tweedledum who wish to know what she is doing, and when learning that she is curious about where the rabbit is going they tell her the story of the Walrus and the Carpenter where they encounter a group of curious oysters and the walrus ends up eating them. After an encounter with the rabbit and Dodo where she grows inside the rabbit’s house before shrinking to a tiny size, she meets a group of flowers that she starts to bond with before they reject her by thinking she is a weed. She then meets the caterpillar which ends up leading nowhere expect for him telling her that the mushroom can help her grow or shrink, and then she meets the Cheshire Cat who tries to help her by leading her to the Mad Hatter and the March Hare where they are holding a wild tea party. Alice finally has enough and tries to leave though she can’t find her way and encounters various creatures that are part animal and part household items, and then the Cheshire Cat leads her to the Queen of Hearts, her husband the King and their loyal army of playing cards. She runs afoul of them and tries to get out as she encounters the Doorknob again who informs her that she is simply dreaming and she wakes up to return to the real world. It is an interesting dynamic that she dreams of a world of her own where there is nothing but nonsense, but then when she actually goes through it she does a complete about-face though these characters are pretty memorable and fitting for this film.

Songs: On the surface, this seems like a film that would actually work as a musical since many of the poems from the novels are used in this film in song form, and this seems to be true in practice as there was as many as 30 songs written for this film. Now there was a lot of singing involved in the film, but most of it was just for a few seconds so they won’t be included and we will focus on full songs which there were plenty in this film with some even being recorded but never used in the end. Like all the films prior to this, we have a title song for the film which was a good song to open the film amongst the drawings of who we will see, and then we have Alice singing “In a World of My Own” as she sings about her fantasy world in a solid outing. We then have the Dodo and the animals singing “The Caucus Race” as they simply run around the Dodo while getting splashed by water in a silly song, and then Tweedledee and Tweedledum sing the story about “The Walrus and the Carpenter” which sounds nice only to end in a dark turn with the walrus eating the oysters. We then have the flowers singing “Golden Afternoon” which features a lovely solo and Alice cracking her voice in a funny slip-up, and then we have the centerpiece song of the film with “The Unbirthday Song” sung by the Mad Hatter and the March Hare and it is sung repeatedly during the last moments of the film. Alice then sings her lament song “Very Good Advice” as she realizes that she wants to go home, and finally we have the song “Painting the Roses Red” sung by the cards that are actually painting the roses red to try and save their heads. These songs are pretty interesting in terms of their connection to the film and the novels and while it would be interesting to see how the other songs would’ve fit into the film, the ones we ended up getting were good enough though there is nothing that would probably rank high amongst the other songs in the Disney canon.

Plot: It is interesting that this is the first film that its source material is not just from one novel or story, but rather from two as this film draws inspiration from not just “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” but also “Through the Looking Glass” as well. The story is fairly simple as Alice dreams of a world of her own where everything is complete nonsense, and she ends up being drawn into this world by following a white rabbit down a rabbit hole. She encounters various characters and struggles to find acceptance in the world, and she finally decides that she has had enough and wants to head home as she is sent to the Queen of Hearts by the Cheshire Cat. She plays croquet with the Queen until the Cheshire Cat causes mischief which leads the Queen to order Alice’s execution, and it is finally revealed that everything was just a dream as she wakes up back in the real world. It is a very interesting story to say the least as I’m sure that everyone at some point as had fantasies about their own world, and to see it actually play out is pretty unique and also interesting to see Alice discover that it is not what she had hoped when she first wanted it.

Random Watching Thoughts: We still have the ongoing theme of having a title song for the film; I still would like to know how much this chorus got paid to do these films; So is Alice homeschooled since her sister is teaching her about history?; Dinah has the look on her face like “I stopped following you during your explanation” while Alice was explaining her world; So the original song Alice sings was called “Beyond the Laughing Sky” before being changed to “A World of My Own”; What happened to Alice’s sister when she walked away to the pond?; If the rabbit is running late for something, why would Alice think that he would waste time and stop to tell her where he is going?; It is always funny when people think that people on the opposite end of the world walk upside down; In the words of the doorknob, nothing is impossible; I love how she just casually mentions someone drinking from a bottle marked “poison” because one would know not to drink from a bottle marked “poison”, not to mention the bottle she’s holding simply says “Drink Me”; Of course he would wait until after she shrunk down that he’s locked; I can’t imagine shrinking and growing that much can be good for her body; You would think Alice’s eyes had turned into faucets with the amount of tears she was shedding; Why would she think it was a good idea to get out of the bottle in the middle of the water with those waves coming at her?; So running around and around is the fastest way to get dry though the Dodo does have a fire to help him; There was a bit of a snafu as Alice was wet when she landed on shore, but then when she gets hit by the waves the other times she emerges completely dry; It is a bit weird when Tweedledee and Tweedledum both speak yet you only hear one voice; So we manage to have a sky that is both daylight and nighttime at the same time; That’s a lot of sand the Carpenter had in his shoe; The walrus is completely submerged underwater yet he can still smoke his cigar; Of all the things to talk about, they want to talk about shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, and kings; That one spot of all the fish following the walrus and the oysters seemed very reminiscent of when Pinocchio was looking for Monstro; The carpenter was able to work fast to get that makeshift restaurant made; That’s a pretty dick move by the walrus to trick the oysters into following him so he can eat them; You can’t say the walrus didn’t have it coming when the carpenter chased after him; So the rabbit was running late yet he was able to stop by his house and spend some time there; It’s funny how the rabbit immediately assumes that Alice knows where his gloves are even though she’s never been to his house before; I know the cookies have phrases like “Eat Me”, “Take One”, and “Try Me” on them, but you figured Alice would have better manners and not just eat someone else’s food without asking them first; That’s a strong house to be able to stay structurally stable even when Alice grows inside it; The Dodo sees how big Alice is and yet is convinced they can pull her out through the chimney; Poor Bill just went flying into the air and we don’t know his fate; The dodo is just willing to destroy someone’s house like that; The dodo just continues on his business to try and burn the house down even after Alice shrinks and chases after the rabbit; So this world has bread-and-butterflies and rocking horseflies; Every flower wants to sing about themselves until the Rose has them sing the song about all of them; I wonder if Kathryn Beaumont was supposed to sing off-key during the song or if it was a genuine slip-up that they just happened to include in the film; They all take turns making fun of Alice expect the one flower who calls her pretty; They were quick to turn on Alice when they thought she was a weed; It seemed pretty controversial that they had the caterpillar smoking from a hookah and blowing the smoke in Alice’s face; Who knew that caterpillars were poets?; If he is three inches high, how much shorter is Alice because one of them is clearly not three inches; That was a quick transformation for the caterpillar to become a butterfly; I wonder who actually spent the time putting all those different signs up; It seems like the Cheshire Cat is here to just confuse Alice and frustrate her; Probably the understatement of the year when the Cheshire Cat says that most everyone is mad; It can’t possible be good to be having that much tea in such a short amount of time; I wonder how many kids would want to celebrate their “unbirthday” after watching this film; The poor Dormouse looks like he hasn’t had any sleep for months; So they move down the table whenever they have clean cups yet they don’t ever seem to have clean cups; The March Hare seemed very disinterested until Alice mentioned Dinah; Of all the things to calm the Dormouse down after he hears the word “cat”, it would take jam on his nose; So why is a raven like a writing desk? Well according to Lewis Carroll in his take on the riddle and I quote, “Because it can produce a few notes though they are very flat, and it is never put with the wrong end in front”; So the Hatter introduces the riddle and Alice says it back which causes them to think her mad, classic pot calling the kettle black; How convenient that they ask about the time and the rabbit just happens to appear; How does a watch end up being two days slow?; The Hatter is wiling to put anything and everything into that watch, but mustard is where he draws the line; They quickly moved on from Alice when she left the party; So Alice wanted her own nonsense world and now that she’s lived it, she realizes it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be and she wants to go home; She wants something to make sense, well she’s in the wrong place; It is weird that the animals disappear when they start crying; That’s quite a shortcut to get to the Queen’s castle; I love how the cards think that painting the roses red will make things better, but what happens when the paint dries and it looks bad on the roses; You wonder how many decks of cards the Queen has since she has a lot of soldiers; The Queen gets a big ovation from everyone while one lone person cheers for the King; So this game of croquet involves the cards, flamingos, and hedgehogs, thank God PETA wasn’t around back then or they would have a field day with this; Alice’s flamingo won’t be too keen to lose his head if it actually happens; The King yells to save the Queen yet all everyone does is surround her so no one sees her; So the March Hare and Mad Hatter were able to take time away from their endless tea party to testify in this trial; Alice is probably thinking “Just cut my head off right now and spare me from this.”; First mental gaffe there by Alice in eating both parts of the mushroom not realizing one will make her shrink; Another mental gaffe by Alice in that they are giving her an out to leave with her life, but she doesn’t take it which costs her when she shrinks back to normal size; The Cheshire Cat was quick to sell Alice out there in the end; If things didn’t already seem like they went off the rails before, they are certainly going off the rails now in this final sequence as Alice tries to escape; I wonder how many audience members rolled their eyes in disbelief at the end when it is revealed that all of this was basically a dream; When her sister said it was time for tea, you almost wanted Alice to say that she was done with tea; I believe this is the first film to have credits at the end of the film.

Overall Thoughts: Overall, the film was pretty solid and was a good entry in the Disney canon though it was a slight step back from Cinderella. This was an interesting film in that it was not very successful when it was in theaters, but it would ultimately benefit from being on television early on and would go onto become a cult classic which solidified its status as a Disney classic. It was also a big moment for Disney as he would see the benefit of television and what it could offer, so while his main focus was on the big screen he was also looking to expand his influence onto the small screen. As for Alice in Wonderland, it is a very solid film and a perfectly fine entry in the Disney canon.

Final Grade: 7.5/10

#IFTTT #Place to Be Nation

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reliableremodeling · 6 years ago

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To injury starts pulled hamstring suffered

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The post To injury starts pulled hamstring suffered appeared first on Reliable Remodeling.

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mechanintendomaster · 7 years ago

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Mario and Bowser: Unused Scraps 1

Mario and Bowser: Unused Scraps (unused works I have, too brief to get it’s own entry)

Compiled: 12/20/17

- Would have been part of the epilogue maybe…

Mitch smiled genuinely. "I'm happy for you, Kylie. You got a real catch." Kylie's frown melted. "Thank..you? Wait, are you feeling okay?" "He is fine, darling. (Jelectro Bond speaking)

- More epilogue stuff. Created May 30 2017? (Yes I had end story stuff planned that early)

"He is legit," Bond assured her. "What??" Kylie blinked in disbelief. "Yeah babe, I can publish a truthful article once in a while! I might enjoy gossip, but I couldn't have everyone killed off by MF!" Kylie huffed. "Well Mitch old buddy, you were a sneaky horrible boyfriend, but I guess you aren't the devil like I thought before, so you got that going for ya I guess." Mitch smirked. "It's alright babe. I've moved on too. Handsome noki you got there, by the way." Kylie scowled. "Don't you dare comment on Bond's looks, ya jerk- wait..." Mitch and Bond shared a laugh, to Kylie's confusion. Mitch noticed her look and pointed to her. "Mitch used confusion! It's super effective!... Ouch!" Kylie punched Mitch, knocking the Toad to the ground. "Calm yourself, Kylie," Bond said playfully, "some of us have too much fun with our gifts." Kylie rolled her eyes. "Sure, whatever. I guess I've learned that the popular choice isn't always the evil one."

-Alternate excerpt from Bridging the Gaps, part 3 (Chapter 22). Made possibly June 21, 2017

The metallic Mario stood behind Dr. Mario in a close protective way. Mario gave them a strange stare, prompting the doctor to shrug. "Sorry you had to see this. He's been with me since the accident and I can't shake em'! So what's with you?" "Too much to go into now. Toad and Daisy in particular have been sick for three days so know there can't be much more time left!" "Well why didn't you say so??" Dr. Mario gasped. "Umm, I did in the letter.." Doctor Mario covered his face. "Of course! I knew that...Let's get started , I just need my lab and my equipment and a good night's sleep and-" "Doc," Mario interrupted, "your lab was rented out since you left us. In fact, you're the one who gave up the lease!" Doctor Mario stared blankly. "Of course! I knew that too..." Mario now had a bad feeling about this. He knew his educated alternate self could be absent minded but...

-How Epilogue 1 was going to end. Made August 15, 2017

Ludwig handed a tattered red notebook to Kylie. “I figured you might want this. It was found after some extensive clean up at the castle.” Kylie graciously accepted the gift. It wasn��t often that you got presents for royalty! But when she looked at the title, her heart skipped a beat. It was titled, “Zoo Diddley’s Diary”...

-An author note to myself and possibly what would have been part of Chapter 25: Escape from Special World Hospital. Edit June 27, 2017, typos intact ^_^

*Ludwig will stand up teh hospital after they refused to hand over the cure. Dr Mario and Metal Mario will assist. * "Well, you are a Princess, are you not? Last I checked, I rule nothign but the underpayed workers my father scrapes up. You on the other hand rule a kingdom somehow." (Ludwig talking to Peach) Peach scoffed. "Some how?!" *Parabilly will return at some point. *

-Author notes from Jun 25, 2017 talking about how Zoo Diddly’s influence affected characters, something I would better address should I do a rewrite.

Mario and Bowser, despite questionable decisions were never affected. Junior and Peach never affected. Peach's suspicion was a natural feeling. Which is why she quickly got over it the second day. Luigi by second day. Feelings before then were natural like with Peach. Z did play on this insecurity. Boo calming him down kelp it in check often. Kamek was controlled full force. Insecurities were played up like with Luigi but unlike Luigi no one kelp him in check and lost of sanity ensued. Iggy was mildly affected before. Z played up to feelings and he became complete insane like Kamek at end. Morton, Roy, and Lemmy. We're passively affected. Ludwig, Wendy, and Larry were at some point before suspicion or some other emotion broke them out. Ludwig and particular caught on. Buckenberry had his anger issues amplified. Toadette was completely sane until the second day were she was put in charge of the hospital. Jimmy was affected by pride, refusing to admit he was wrong. Used as vessel by Z. Rest of MKDCU unaffected.

-Unused Epilogue 1 Dialogue. Last edited August 18, 2017

“Thanks hun, but what sickness?” Kylie asked after she blew over the hot cup.

“The Mushroom Flu,” Bond replied, a rare hint of confusion in his voice.

Her eyes skimmed over a copy of an article she had posted on her cork board. “Oh yeah, excuse the scatter brain. I just have so many adventures, they all kinda blur after a while.”

“Maybe you would have remembered if your paper sold better.. Why are you looking at me like- Help!!-” Kylie grabbed Mitch by the collar in one swift motion.

“Ah, and look who else has arrived!” Bond spoke, turning away from the asault.

A Mega Goomba and Wiggler, both wearing black ties, came from around the corner holding a drink each.

#Mario and bowser #unused content #fanfiction #boomaster-amia

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junker-town · 7 years ago

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A weekend at Army-Navy, college football’s most heated, petty, loving family reunion

Perhaps no rivalry in college football is as historic and meaningful ... nor as polite.

PHILADELPHIA — Army-Navy is college football's best rivalry, because it's historic and petty and exceedingly polite.

The schools have an extraordinary history of mascot thefts. Army fans and cadets mercilessly make fun of Navy’s midshipmen for their lolly-gagging form during march-ons, when the student bodies enter the field and then go to their seats. Navy fans loved to lord their school’s 14-year winning streak over Army fans, until it ended in 2016.

How’s it feel to lose? “It’s like your puppy dying,” West Point class of 2014 grad Danny Little says. He came from Fairbanks, Alaska, for this game. For him, one of the best things about 2016’s streak-breaker win was that “Navy had never known a loss.”

But amid the schools’ desires to top each other is more mutual respect than in any other college football series. Army-Navy goes as hard as any game, but it’s really light on actual fighting — physical or verbal, in the parking lots or the stands.

The most audacious thing I heard anyone say during hours of Saturday tailgating was a Navy fan yelling “Shut up!” at a woman who’d yelled “Beat Navy!” toward his tailgate. Her response was a smiling “That’s very rude! That’s very rude!”

There are crowds where such an exchange would lead to charges of fan incest (Pitt-West Virginia or the Iron Bowl, maybe), NCAA violations (virtually any SEC game), and the like. You don’t get that at Army-Navy. You get something like this:

“There’s always a little battle of one-upsmanship, and whatever that might be,” says Larry Needle, the executive director of PHL Sports, the agency that brings the game to Philly. “If Army’s bringing in a big tank, then Navy wants to bring in their bigger ship.”

At Army-Navy, there are just two things that feel out of place: the forward pass and any serious trash talk.

James Lang-USA TODAY Sports

Philly has this down to a science now. The city has hosted 87 of the academies' 118 games against each other. Needle’s group estimates the city gets an influx of 50,000 people, who take up the majority of the nearly 70,000 seats at Lincoln Financial Field.

"They love to drink," says Jimmy Masiak, the general manager of Tavern on Broad, on Friday night, the eve of the game. "They love to drink. I think that's why they always come to Philadelphia, because we're a drinking city. And they fit right in. They were like locusts last night. They came in and just drank everything."

Masiak's bar required restocks, because an Army-Navy crowd goes through whiskey and bourbon fast; Maker's Mark and Knob Creek, largely. The people who come to town may arrive as rivals, but they're there in the same spirit.

"They're just cutting loose," says David Hall, a Navy vet whose son, Matt, used to play fullback for the Mids. "They're having a good time. They don't get that opportunity. Especially the cadets, they don't get that opportunity all the time."

Army-Navy visitors don’t amount to a full-on takeover in a city of about 1.6 million, but they give businesses a big bump from about Thursday night to Sunday. Wherever they congregate becomes a celebration of college football and common bonds.

These are often the same bars where college kids are showing up in Christmas sweaters to drink and dance to “Jenny from the Block,” while a bunch of Army parents from Massachusetts gather in a corner. Sometimes Army-Navy festivities spill out of the bars, into the streets.

An example: On Friday at 11:19 p.m., a guy sits in the passenger’s front seat of a cab at the intersection of Broad and Walnut streets, outside a Wawa. He yells to a 20-something in an Army jacket, “Nice shirt!”

The red light is just about now turning green, but the guy in the Army gear runs over: “That’s a nice ring!” he tells the guy in the cab, whose driver would very much like to move.

He examines the guy in the cab’s class ring for several seconds, then darts across the road and into the bar, yelling “Beat ‘em! Beat ‘em! Beat ‘em!”

This year’s game is extra contentious because the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy, given to the team with the best record in games between these schools and Air Force, is on the line. That annual series often ends in a tie, in which case the trophy stays with the school that had it the year before. Army hasn’t won the trophy since 1996.

“Of the three, we’re not known for being good at football, so this would be huge for us to take this back and prove to everyone that we are that school who’s best at everything,” Little, an Army captain, says. “Because we’re better than Navy and Air Force at pretty much everything else, but being better than them at football’s what matters.”

The stakes are high, and yet good vibes abound.

“There’s nothing bitter,” says Chris O’Connor, a 1989 West Point grad and Army major who served 10 years. We’re talking at a tailgate the next morning, while some Black Knights play cornhole on U.S. Army boards that are covered in snow. “You look at other rivalries, and they actually get angry. Nobody gets angry at each other, and we realize that after this, you know, we’re together, and we have to kind of go out and fight this fight.

“Brothers in arms, I guess, people have called it.”

That’s the prevailing view among people who make the pilgrimage to this game. “Camaraderie” is the word that comes up most when you ask someone why they’re in Philly.

“We love them,” says Rita, a Naval vet tailgating a few hundred yards away who preferred not to give her last name. “We love the Army, because they are our sister service. But we love the Navy.”

At an Army tailgate, outside Lincoln Financial Field.

You’ll meet cool people at Army-Navy weekend. Here are some I met:

A three-generation military family from Greeley, Colorado. None of the four men had ever attended before. The grandfather is an 87-year old Navy vet, a petty officer second-class named Juils Jorgensen who joined up in 1950 and went to Korea. He’d wanted to make this game since that year, and now he was with his kid and two grandkids, who served in the Marines and the Army. “So yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this,” he said. “Matter of fact, I went to see my doctor and I says, ‘Doc, you’ve gotta keep me healthy for another year.’ He said, ‘OK.’”

Tim and Mary Flynn, a couple from La Plata, Maryland. They’re Army people, ever since Tim went to West Point and graduated in 1985. I met him at a bar and asked, “Navy fan?” because it was dark and I thought his yellow and black rugby shirt was actually yellow and blue. He was gracious, and the two of them invited me to their tailgate the next morning. They insisted I come and eat. Two of their kids are deployed now, one an Army nurse in Iraq and the other a solider in Korea. They put on a tailgate for their family, friends, and some classmates of their son, Tim, the one who’s in Korea. They said I’d fit right in.

I think this is why Army-Navy is the most respectful football game in the world, even on a day when boxed Fireball is flowing by about 7 a.m. It’s fun, and it’s a salute to the academies and service members — absolutely. But it feels like a family reunion first of all, with “family” defined broadly. Typically, nobody’s going to be mean at a family reunion.

“It’s the only football game I’ve gone to where everybody’s on the same team,” says Phil Bedard, an Army dad visiting with a group from Hopedale, Mass. “You’re up in the stands, and you could be sitting next to a Navy person, and you’re all on the same side. You’re all kind of rooting for the same thing. You want Army to win, of course, but there’s a camaraderie here that you don’t get at other events.”

The academies have homecoming weekends during the year. But this game has a very Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving feel to it.

“I mean, I can’t wait to get [inside the stadium], because I’ll run into classmates when I get in there that I haven’t seen in 10, 15 years,” O’Connor says.

Not everyone there is an Army or a Navy fan. A tricked-out Rutgers tailgating truck makes an appearance near the stadium with fans who just wanted to be there, and who had some military backgrounds among their group.

“It’s the best college football game of the year,” says David Levy, a 31-year-old Rutgers law student from Brooklyn. “It’s amazing, ‘cause even though they’re heated rivals, everybody’s pretty nice. It’s pretty calm.”

At 11:03 Saturday morning, I’m talking — tailgate-provided Yuengling in hand — with another Army dad about the triple option. We’re wondering if the snow that has blanketed Philly is going to stick on the grass at Lincoln Financial Field.

(It will. Army will win on a snow-aided missed field goal on a day when its players, in all-white uniforms, are literally camouflaged into the field.)

Mary Flynn holds up a phone of her son, Tim, FaceTiming from Korea.

Mary Flynn brings over an iPhone and introduces me to her son, Tim, who’s FaceTiming from Korea.

“Welcome,” he says.

It’s after midnight where he is, and this is the first year in many years that both he and his deployed sister, Aileena, aren’t at this event. But this is still their tailgate.

I can’t describe how intrusive I feel. This should be college football’s most exclusive game, given what you have to give up to become part of the academies or the military branches they service. But Army-Navy welcomes all. That includes writers who fans meet in bars, and even the people on the other side of the stadium — to a point.

“Everybody coming here, coming together, just being one big family even though it’s a rivalry and we want to win," says Aidan Flynn, Tim’s brother and Mary’s son. "And we desperately want to win.”

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chavighurst · 7 years ago

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Americana Lifetime Achievement Awards 2017

I was once again pleased to contribute program notes for the Americana Honors & Awards Lifetime Achievement winners for 2017. I wanted to give these a permanent home on the web, so to read my short essays on Robert Cray, HighTone Records founders Larry Sloven and Bruce Bromberg, Iris DeMent, Graham Nash, Van Morrison and the Hi Rhythm Section, click through to the jump and scroll. They’re all on one post.

Robert Cray - Performer

On the jacket of the 1983 Alligator Records ensemble album Showdown! a young Robert Cray mimes a guitar jam, standing between blues legends Johnny “Clyde” Copeland and Albert Collins. Cray’s smiling gaze is transfixed by the left hand of his hero Collins on the fretboard. The image symbolizes the hours Cray spent as an aspiring guitarist, studying the Ice Man’s phrases and passionate vibrato.

By that year, Cray had emerged as a favorite in the clubs and theaters of the Pacific Northwest. He’d released two albums on HighTone Records and was being hailed as “a one man Wave of The Blues Future,” as expressed by album producers Bruce Iglauer and Dick Sherman. But even their expectations were exceeded over the next few years as Robert Cray became the only African American blues and traditional R&B artist/songwriter to enjoy massive radio airplay and platinum record sales in his era. His vehicle was the album Strong Persuader and the hit single “Smoking Gun.” His tools were a silky vocal style reminiscent of Sam Cooke, a piquant electric guitar that moved the music in both lead and rhythm mode, and original songs that told relatable stories in fresh, carefully crafted forms.

High profile collaborations further fueled Cray’s prominence, including recordings with Eric Clapton and John Lee Hooker, a slot on the feature documentary Chuck Berry tribute concert Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll and tours with the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt. Steadily and without mis-steps he amassed a deep catalog and nailed down five Grammy Awards.

Cray’s most recent project saw him return to Memphis where sessions with the veteran studio cats of Royal Studios produced Robert Cray and Hi Rhythm, an 11-song set that underlines Cray’s statesman stature in American music and his enduring fascination with traditional R&B. His success, even in the infertile soil of 1980s pop/rock radio, wasn’t a matter of fortuitous timing but of soul and skill. He’d have been a hitmaker in the 60s, 70s, or 2010s had it worked out that way. He’s that tapped into a timeless firmament.

Larry Sloven and Bruce Bromberg / HighTone Records - Jack Emerson Lifetime Achievement Award for Executive

Several of this year’s lifetime achievement awards are connected by history. Robert Cray was introduced to the public thanks to the vision and risk-taking of Larry Sloven and Bruce Bromberg who made 1983’s Bad Influence the inaugural release of their new HighTone Records. It proved an auspicious start for a company that would enrich and enlarge the very idea of American roots music, with important releases in blues, country, folk and rock and roll. The label produced more than 300 albums over 25 years, including essential discography titles by Bill Kirchen, Dave Alvin, Rosie Flores, Chris Gaffney, Dick Dale, Chris Smither, Tom Russell, Geoff Muldaur, Dale Watson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and 13-time Americana Award winner Buddy Miller.

“Larry and Bruce cared about signing music that was real. They didn’t care if something was making a splash,” Miller says. And across his four solo albums, plus two more by Julie Miller and a duo album, “they gave us complete creative freedom. I’m so glad this award is happening.”

Sloven and Bromberg had jobs in record sales and distribution when they met in the late 1970s, bonding musically over a shared love of Merle Haggard. When they took on the Robert Cray release six years later, it was a side project with little hope of being anything else. But two years in, HighTone Records was a self-sufficient, full time pursuit, based out of Oakland, CA.

Bromberg, a blues maven with a history of producing important artists such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Johnny Shines, was the chief talent scout; he contributed as a songwriter as well. Sloven tended more to the business side of the label with an art-before-commerce philosophy. With the multi-platinum status of Cray’s 1986’s Strong Persuader album, the partners were able to put a firm foundation under the venture and release what moved them. That included a distinguished blues reissue series, spotlights on underappreciated veterans like Hank Thompson and ventures into Latin roots music.

The founders never achieved their dream of bringing Merle Haggard into the label’s fold, but they did oversee a tribute concert and album with Marshall Crenshaw, Joe Ely, Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent and others performing Haggard songs. The resulting Tulare Dust project became the first No. 1 album on the very first Gavin Report Americana chart, making it a signifier and landmark for the new format. Today, any respectable Americana/roots CD collection will have scores of HighTone logos on the shelves.

Iris DeMent - Trailblazer

Few artists have told their roots music origin story in song as clearly and memorably as Iris DeMent did on her 1992 debut album Infamous Angel with the song “Moma’s Opry.” In a proud, plaintive voice, DeMent relates: “I'll never forget her face when she revealed to me, That she'd dreamed about singing at The Grand Ole Opry.”

With a few strokes, the artist conveys how deeply music ran in her heritage, as well as music’s power to widen horizons and inspire hope. Music, she told an interviewer once, “wasn’t a plaything” in her family. “It was something you had to have to live.”

DeMent’s own aspirations were quieter and more personal than being a country star, but she gradually developed a yearning to write and perform. She joined a widening American folk music scene in the 1980s, where her tart, rural diction became a country counterpart to the more urbane sounds of the Lilith Fair era. Fellow Americana Lifetime Achievement Award-winner Jim Rooney championed her music and helped her land on Rounder/Philo Records, where her first album earned such acclaim and success it was picked up by Warner Bros.

DeMent has been more selective and patient than prolific in her creative career, but her work is unfailingly observant, compassionate and relevant. In “Our Town,” one of her earliest songs, she documented rural America’s economic decline before it was a hot national topic. She offered a sort of hillbilly Taoism with “Let The Mystery Be.” And her 1996 anthem “Wasteland of the Free” was a searing and comprehensive indictment of America’s shortcomings that presaged the politics of today.

Iris DeMent has earned the Trailblazer Award for her commitment to making classic folk and country forms relevant in her time.

Graham Nash - Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award

When Graham Nash emigrated to the United States in the late 60s to join Crosby, Stills & Nash, the songwriter wasted no time and minced no words engaging in America’s vital, cacophonous democracy. He wrote “Chicago” about the fraught Democratic National Convention of 1968 and the trial of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and the Chicago Eight. Angry but idealistic, it included the line “We can change the world / rearrange the world.” About the same time, his acerbic “Military Madness” confronted his adopted home country with its violence in Vietnam. That song became the opening track on his debut solo album in 1971. These and other compositions marked the opening salvos in a life devoted to music and change-making, from Woodstock to Occupy Wall Street and beyond.

Nash says he developed his sense of social justice as a boy, seeing how the judicial system in England treated his hard-up father versus its genteel lenience with the upper classes. His music took flight in England as a singer and songwriter with The Hollies. Success with that pop group led him to the US on tour, where he met David Crosby and Stephen Stills. His decision to move – musically and geographically – was inspired by a chance to make music that said something topical and vital at a time of great tumult.

Crosby, Stills & Nash, with and without Neil Young, became one of the iconic folk/rock groups, whose success was fueled as much by its message as by its floating, inspiring harmonies. They helped make Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” a national anthem of the counterculture. They made a hit of Nash’s starry eyed and hopeful “Teach Your Children” only to purposefully bump it off the radio when Neil Young’s hot take on Kent State, “Ohio,” needed to vent anger at the establishment.

Nash’s music-fueled activism extended beyond the quartet and his own musical pursuits. In 1979, he partnered with Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt to create Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) and to produce No Nukes: The Muse Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future. In the summer of 2006, Nash and his old quartet toured behind Neil Young’s angry Living With War album. It was the first time Nash experienced death threats. Nevertheless, he told Jambase: “I was out there doing what I am supposed to do, which is to make music and to a certain degree entertain people, but to a large degree make them think.”

With Graham Nash it was ever thus.

Van Morrison - Songwriter

Where The Rolling Stones helped boomerang the blues of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters back to American audiences during the British Invasion phase of rock and roll, Van Morrison accomplished something similar on behalf of Ray Charles and Solomon Burke. R&B pioneers were linchpins of Morrison’s father’s record collection in Belfast, Northern Ireland. And American roots music informed Van’s development at every level. His first guitar lessons came from a Carter Family folio compiled by Alan Lomax. He formed a skiffle group and then a proto-rock and roll band named after Leadbelly’s Midnight Special. Gradually, improbably, the secondary school dropout built a life in music that took its first public step with Them, a rock and roll band that toured the US in 1966 and left behind Morrison’s widely covered “Gloria.”

Morrison’s solo career began with the R&B flavored “Brown Eyed Girl,” which was part of a small and frustrating record deal in 1967. In near poverty conditions, in the Fall of 1968 in New York, Morrison composed and recorded his masterwork Astral Weeks. While its initial reception was mixed commercially and critically, the album was rather quickly recognized as a profound and iconoclastic statement. When Moondance, the album and single, followed in early 1970, Morrison’s career exploded.

He’s a supple, emotive and attention grabbing vocalist, but his epic output of songs gave that voice wings over a 50-year, 35-album career. He wrote about love, freedom and beauty in “Tupelo Honey.” He wrote unsentimentally but nostalgically about his youth in “Take Me Back” and “Redwood Tree.” He employed dense and cryptic language when it suited him, as in “St Dominic’s Preview,” and yet he could write the breezy and romantic “Moondance” as well. He was ever spiritual and sometimes overtly prayerful, as with “In The Garden.”

With access to a vast range of human emotion, an eye for provocative subject matter and an ear for soaring melodies, Van Morrison would have been a major influence even if he’d only written for other singers. Happily and majestically, this highly controlled and creatively demanding artist has been his own best muse.

Hi Rhythm Section - Instrumentalists

As the mighty Stax Records empire began to unwind around 1972, Hi Records found its footing and became home for a new wave of soul, steered by Memphis lifer Willie Mitchell out of Royal Studios at 1320 South Lauderdale Street. As with Stax and FAME Studio down the road in Muscle Shoals, AL, Hi/Royal developed a sound defined by a cadre of studio musicians. They became known as Hi Rhythm.

Three brothers were at the core of it - Mabon “Teenie” Hodges on guitar plus Charles on organ and Leroy on bass. Drummer Howard Grimes was an alum of Satellite and Stax Records. And keyboardist Archie “Hubbie” Turner was also in the circle. They are the silk purse making the pocket on Al Green's "Love and Happiness," Otis Clay's "Tryin' To Live my Life Without You," Ann Peebles' "I Can't Stand The Rain," Syl Johnson's "Dresses Too Short," O.V. Wright's "Eight Men, Four Women" and many more.

Scott Bomar, founder of the Bo-Keys, in which Grimes and Turner play today, says the Hi Rhythm section followed in the footsteps of the Memphis Boys, Mitchell’s first house band, when they went on to work for Chips Moman at American Sound Studio. Being slightly younger than the Stax team they similarly admired, the Hodges were attuned to the raw energy of rock and roll. “And having three brothers who’d grown up playing music with their father gave them a special feel and bond and chemistry, kind of a telepathy that no other studio group really had,” Bomar says.

The brothers recorded their own work as Hi Rhythm in the mid 70s and regrouped to tour with Albert Collins and Otis Clay. In more recent years, members of Hi Rhythm have played on projects by Melissa Etheridge, Cyndi Lauper, Cat Power and Robert Cray. They’re also prominent in the 2014 documentary Take Me To The River featuring meetings between old and young Memphis talent. Teenie Hodges died in 2014. The rest remain part of the heartbeat of Memphis.

#Americana music #ryman auditorium #lifetime achivement

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junker-town · 7 years ago

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When was the Golden Age for every position in baseball history?

From catcher to DH, let’s look for the best year at every position in baseball history.

Justin Turner is hitting .387 with a .472 on-base percentage. Those are absurd, fan-fiction numbers, suggesting that the Dodgers’ third baseman has found a new gear. He hasn’t made the All-Star team yet.

Kris Bryant isn’t hitting for average, but the reigning MVP is still pummeling the ball, with a .901 OPS to match his stellar defense. He hasn’t made the All-Star team yet

Anthony Rendon is having a career year, with a .947 OPS and more walks than strikeouts. His defense at third is also solid, and he’s ripped 16 homers. He hasn’t made the All-Star team yet.

Eric Stephen doesn’t have a single home run this year. He hasn’t made the All-Star team yet. But he did look at why Turner might not be going to Miami, and he determined that third base is a rough place for a prospective All-Star.

Turner ranks second in fWAR this season, and he’s in the Final Vote, along with fellow third baseman Anthony Rendon (fourth in fWAR) and reigning MVP Kris Bryant (10th). The starter at the position — Nolan Arenado — ranks ninth in the NL in fWAR. That’s rough.

Lamb, the players’ selection at third, ranks 18th in fWAR.

If the top 18 players in the National League according to FanGraphs, five of them are third basemen. I’ve pointed out that this is a golden age of third basemen before, and it doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down. Except that leads me to two questions:

Is it really a Golden Age of third basemen?

When were the Golden Ages of other positions?

I’ll try to figure this out two ways. The first is to search for the seasons with five-win players at the various positions and see which season had the most of them.

The second is to eyeball the lists because I hate and distrust the first way.

C - 1977

Ah, yes, 1977. Star Wars is released. Pink Floyd’s Animals teaches us that rich people are bad. A handsome, nearsighted baseball writer is introduced to the world. And there are catchers, catchers, catchers. Check out the list of catchers in the middle of All-Star-caliber seasons, if not MVP-caliber seasons:

Johnny Bench

Carlton Fisk

Gary Carter

Ted Simmons

Jim Sundberg

Thurman Munson

That’s three Hall of Famers, one should-be Hall of Famer (Simmons), a guy I keep going back and forth on (Munson), and Sundberg, who won six straight Gold Gloves and was generally excellent for about a decade. Bob Boone, one of history’s greatest spoonerisms, was coming into his own at the plate. The perennially underrated Darrell Porter was in his prime. There were other name-brand catchers, too, like Steve Yeager, Butch Wynegar, and John Stearns.

The 1977 season easily passed the eyeball test, too. There was no runner-up.

1B - 1998

This was the turn of the millennium, which is when statheads were firmly ensconced in their “We have absolutely everything figured out, just ask us” phase, and one of the unquestioned tenets of this time was that it was super easy to find first basemen. They’re everywhere! Just grab one!

It makes sense, in retrospect. In 1998, teams were enjoying five-win seasons or better from Mark McGwire, John Olerud, Carlos Delgado, Rafael Palmeiro, Mo Vaughn, Andres Galarraga, and Jeff Bagwell. There were strong seasons, too, from Will Clark, Tony Clark, Jason Giambi, Todd Helton, Fred McGriff, and Jim Thome.

Giambi hit .295/.384/.489 with 27 home runs in a pitcher’s park, and he was the 17th-most valuable first baseman in 1998 according to WAR. Offense was up compared to today, but that’s still ridiculous.

I scoured the list to make sure I wasn’t suffering from recency bias, and while there were strong first base things happening in the ‘30s (Foxx, Mize, Greenberg, Gehrig), and the ‘80s (Hernandez, Mattingly, Clark, Murry, Hrbek), the depth of the late ‘90s won me over.

2B - 1979

According to Baseball-Reference’s WAR, the answer is 2016, when the fancy numbers suggest that each of the following players had All-Star caliber seasons (5 WAR or better):

Jose Altuve

Robinson Cano

Ian Kinsler

Jean Segura

DJ LeMahieu

Dustin Pedroia

Brian Dozier

And that doesn’t include Daniel Murphy, whose defense dinged him, but he shows up on the also-impressive second tier, with Ben Zobrist, Jason Kipnis, and Cesar Hernandez. But the raw totals are going to favor more recent seasons because there are 30 teams with a second baseman. If you go back to when there were 16 teams, you can take Rogers Hornsby, Eddie Collins, and names picked at random to come up with an equally impressive list.

My eyeballs are going to stray, though, and pick a year from the ‘70s. Joe Morgan! Rod Carew! Paul Molitor! Davey Lopes! Frank White! Willie Randolph! I’ll take 1979 so I can sneak Lou Whitaker on there, too.

Plus, as FanGraphs noted, the 2017 crop of second basemen isn’t nearly as impressive this season. Bark beetles, but for second basemen, probably.

SS - 1904

Oh, heck yes. I was worried that my search would be unfairly biased toward the modern player and that one of these years wouldn’t show up. Instead, welcome to 113 years ago, when shortstops were in their prime.

That’s not really true. When the 1904 season was playing, the average height of a baseball player was 5’3” and every single one of them had rickets. Stuff them into a time machine, and they wouldn’t make a D-II roster. But for their time, compared to their peers, it was hard to beat these guys:

Honus Wagner (Hall of Fame)

George Davis (Hall of Fame)

Bobby Wallace (Hall of Fame)

Bill Dahlen (probably should be in the Hall of Fame)

Freddy Parent

Kid Elberfeld

In 1904, all six of them were in their prime and providing gobs of value for their team. There were 16 teams, and six of them had a shortstop of note. That’s a mighty high percentage.

But, fine, if you don’t want to go all the way back to the time when baseballs were made out from the hides of syphilitic armadillos, there are three alternatives. The first is roughly 1999, when Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Nomar Garciaparra, Barry Larkin, and Omar Vizquel were all rolling, with a second tier of Rich Aurilia, Miguel Tejada, and Edgar Renteria doing fine work.

The second is 1982, when Cal Ripken, Ozzie Smith, Alan Trammell, and Robin Yount were all thriving, and it doesn’t matter who else was joining them.

The third is now, right now, because Corey Seager, Francisco Lindor, Carlos Correa, Addison Russell, and Xander Bogaerts are going to define the position for a decade, and there are a half-dozen prospects coming up soon who can add to that impressive list. The Great Wave of Shortstop Hegemony is coming, if it hasn’t swept us away already.

I’ll go with 1904, though, just to even out the final team. They played baseball back in the olden times, too, and they were pretty good at it.

3B - 1982

Not expecting arguments with this one. Not only do you have the best third baseman of all time (Mike Schmidt), but you have George Brett, Wade Boggs, and Paul Molitor, too. That’s four Hall of Famers in their prime, which is a nifty trick for any position in any era. The second tier is vast, and it includes players like Tim Wallach, Gary Gaetti, Buddy Bell, Toby Harrah, Carney Lansford, Bill Madlock, Graig Nettles, Bob Horner ... it just keeps going.

If you’re rolling your eyes at the old man reciting old names, just wait a couple decades and see what the teens say about “David Wright, Justin Turner, Todd Frazier ...” The All-Stars of today will be the Bill Madlocks of tomorrow, and that’s not a bad thing. Just keep it in mind when you’re dismissing the players you haven’t watched.

Doug DeCinces! Rance Mulliniks! Ken Oberkfell! Is ... is that Pedro Guerrero playing third for some reason, well, okay, I’m in! What a fun time for third basemen.

Apropos of nothing, I just found out that Rance Mulliniks wasn’t the first “Rance” in baseball history, and I have to step away from the computer for a bit.

LF - 1993

Apparently, the 2002 season featured the most five-win left fielders. The list included Chipper Jones and Albert Pujols, though, so I’m throwing it the hell out. Fake left fielders! Fake!

So if we’re going to rig this, we’ll have to include either a) Ted Williams, b) Rickey Henderson, or c) Barry Bonds. The correct answer might b) and c). In 1993, Bonds won the NL MVP, Henderson helped the Blue Jays win a World Series, Juan Gonzalez led the AL in home runs, Albert Belle led the AL in RBI, Ron Gant was an MVP contender, and Tim Raines was building on a Hall of Fame career. That would appear to be the winner.

Except in the late ‘20s/early ‘30s, when teams scored roughly 50 runs per game, you had ...

Goose Goslin

Heinie Manush

Lefty O’Doul

Wally Berger

Chick Hafey

Aloysius Harry Simmons (Bucketfoot Al)

While those are four Hall of Famers, and two players with at least a solid argument, I’ll still go with the Henderson/Bonds combo because those are two of the three best left fielders of all time.

CF - 1925

The 1992, 1996, 1999, and 2011 seasons supposedly had seven different 5-WAR center fielders, and, no, I’m not buying any of them as the Golden Age of center fielders. There were 30 teams and 30 center fielders, and a few of them were bound to have some out-of-character defensive seasons that would jimmy with the WAR. Peter Bourjos is one of the center fielders included in the above. Which is swell, but he probably isn’t the herald of the Golden Age.

Not when you could travel back to 1925, when Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Al Simmons, Edd Roush, Earle Combs, Hack Wilson, and Max Carey were all building Hall of Fame careers. If we’re going to give extra credit for fewer teams in the league in previous sections, it has to be considered here.

I’ll be honest: I was planning to rig this for a Mays/Mantle/Snider season, and there were some great players like Richie Ashburn and Larry Doby mixed in there, too. Al Kaline even played center for a couple seasons in that mix, so it’s a strong contender.

In the end, though, we’re talking about seven Hall of Famers — including one of the inner-circliest of inner-circle Hall of Famers — out of 16 starting center fielders. I’ll go to 1925 and regret nothing later.

Give me 1954, though.

RF - 1969

As usual, a random season from the ‘90s snuck with the raw numbers, with 1998 producing eight different All-Star-caliber seasons. The names are fun, too, with Sammy Sosa (in that season), Manny Ramirez, Vladimir Guerrero, Larry Walker, and Bobby Abreu, all of whom have valid arguments for the Hall of Fame.

In 1969, though, with the mounds lowered, pitchers got to face ...

Hank Aaron

Frank Robinson

Roberto Clemente

Reggie Jackson

Al Kaline

Tony Oliva

And Rusty Staub! I was nervous that I wasn’t getting the ‘60s involved (and justifying it by assuming the pitching would be the representative in a future column), so this will do beautifully. Aaron, Robinson, Clemente all in their primes at the same time is all you need to say, really. That’s a Golden Age that will be nearly impossible to top.

DH - 2000

I will pretend that I care about the DH long enough to point out that Frank Thomas and Edgar Martinez were both doing excellent things in 2000, and David Ortiz was just getting started. That’s a Golden Age. Done.

That gives us ...

C - 1977 1B - 1998 2B - 1979 SS - 1904 3B - 1982 LF - 1993 CF - 1925 RF - 1969 DH - 2000

That leaves us without the 1910s (dead ball), the ‘30s, the ‘40s (WWII), the ‘50s, and anything from the last few years (because it’s hard to separate the shooting stars from the celestial bodies without the benefit of hindsight).

I feel guilty about leaving off the ‘50s, and it’s a little weird for the Golden Age of Baseball to be so underrepresented in a list of Golden Ages, so maybe consider center field a tie, and let 1955 or 1956 sneak on there.

This isn’t quite the Golden Age of third basemen, but it sure has a chance to be one. Arenado, Bryant, Josh Donaldson, and Turner are doing amazing things, and Manny Machado, Rendon, and Kyle Seager aren’t far behind. Adrian Beltre is going to the Hall of Fame, and Evan Longoria is going to the Hall of Pretty Great. It’s not not a Golden Age of third basemen.

But now we know when the actual Golden Age was.

Also, Golden Age would be a solid name for a middle reliever if we’re just talking here.

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