#maybe jay can come from a european origins

[homochihuahua]

Fem!Jay x Dick give the vibes of a bisexual European couple who saw you from across the bar and are willing to buy you a drink. Except they don't have a threesome with you. Because while Jay may indulge her Sub, she would never share him with anyone ;) plus the serial monogamist Dick would never crave anyone other than his Dom '3'

[daggerzine]

R.E. Seraphin molds tiny shapes into big songs.

Though he’s been on the scene for a while now (with different bands) I hadn’t heard the music of Bay Area musician R.E. “Ray” Seraphin until this year via a cassette called Tiny Shapes via Paisley Shirt Records (more on the label below). His first real band was Talkies, which he discusses below (and I have enjoyed), but he seems to have really come into his own this year with that cassette and a new EP, A Room Forever, which came out just a month or so ago. In his music you’ll hear influences of 80’s jangle pop as well as some deeper post-punk stuff (and for more current stuff I hear whispers of Dean Wareham and his bands and Wild Nothing). Reading below he seems very well grounded and seems to have a great attitude about everything (even not being able to play shows during a pandemic or being in a writing slump). I think once this is all over this guy will go on 5-year tour and gain lots and lots of new fans. In the meantime do check out his stuff, you won’t be disappointed.

   Where did you grow up?

Berkeley, CA. The area I grew up in was filled with Victorian homes and dilapidated industrial warehouses. My family home was walking distance from a lagoon and an old, rusty set of train tracks. I felt I lived in an unremarkable college town. There wasn't much activity outside of the school. I discovered Berkeley’s storied political and musical history much later in life. Now, of course, there are many books written about Berkeley, but I thought it was a kinda nondescript city as a kid.

 Do you remember what band made you fall in love with music?

Dating myself hard here, but I remember being floored by The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl” video when I was 11. The Top 40 music making the rounds on VH1 and MTV at the time was beyond dreck — a lot of Train, Staind, Matchbox 20. The White Stripes were the first band I was exposed to that made succinct, catchy, no-frills music. I was genuinely enthralled. Plus, the Lego animation in that video still holds up.

 Was guitar your first instrument?

I started on bass. My first instrument was an extremely cheap, pointy BC Rich knockoff monstrosity. I believe I was 13. I had no idea how to play and little interest in learning. For the first year, I putzed around with a Pro Co RAT, a wah pedal, and a tinny-sounding Crate practice amp. I just tried (and succeeded in) being as obnoxious as possible. When I started writing songs, I eventually graduated from playing bass poorly to playing guitar poorly.

 Tell us about your first band.

My first band that played shows was called The Phil Spector Shotgun Experience. That was primarily a cover band I put together with my high school buddies and my mom. We covered Radio Birdman, the Pink Fairies, and the MC5; we also had an unwittingly hilarious original called “Nitroglycerin Man” — the first song I ever wrote (maybe I was subconsciously inspired by Wages of Fear). At some point, we kicked my mom out of the band and started playing as the Impediments. That band kicked ass — we made pridefully dumb American punk music. That was also my only band to sign a record contract, so it’s quite possibly been downhill from there!

 Tell us about The Talkies (unless that was your first band mentioned above).

Talkies (no article!) was a group I started in 2014 as a vehicle for my songs. My previous bands had been more of a shared vision, so Talkies was my first foray into being the lone genius of a group. The sound was mostly drawn from what is disparagingly known as power pop. Basically, I was heavily into the band Shoes for a few years.

We released a few albums and EPs. Did a couple short tours. During that time, the project was dragged from the Bay Area to Austin and back before I finally, mercifully pulled the plug last year. It was time.

 When did you transition from Talkies to the solo stuff you’re doing now? Did it feel comfortable?

Talkies had run its course, but I had a smattering of songs leftover from that project that I wanted to record. Around that time, I learned my good friend Jasper Leach (Burner Herzog) was getting ready to skip town. I had always wanted to work with him and, seizing my final opportunity to do so, we banged out my début, Tiny Shapes, last summer. The whole experience was fairly serendipitous. The stars aligned for that one.

I wouldn't say the process was comfortable. Recording the album felt necessary, urgent — almost compulsory at times. My heart was ready for a new project and I truly wanted to center myself for the first time. I’m glad I did. This is the happiest I’ve been musically in some time.

 “I think therefore I am”

I love the songs on A Room Forever. How did they come together?

So glad to hear that! I got asked to contribute to a compilation back in April. With the deadline approaching and inspiration still eluding me, I took a glance at my bookshelf, noticed a particular Carson McCullers title, and whipped up “Clock Without Hands.” After my trusty collaborator Owen Adair Kelley added his parts, I felt we had stumbled upon a great sound. I tried to harness the creative spirit and pushed myself to finish a few ideas buried deep in the recesses of my Voice Memo app. I got friends Matt Bullimore (The Mantles) and Yea-Ming Chen (Yea-Ming & The Rumors) involved, and that was that. No great origin story — just pure American ingenuity and elbow grease.

 Tell us about Paisley Shirt Records. Who runs it and how did you hook up with them?

Paisley Shirt Records is simply the man, the myth, the legend — Kevin Linn. He is a San Francisco-based musician and artist who records as Sad-Eyed Beatniks.

I met him when I was looking for someone to release my album, Tiny Shapes. He had just put out a tape by Hits — a great local band featuring some friends of mine — and I felt a kinship with his roster. So, I reached out to him. Foolishly, he agreed to put out my album and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Solid dude. High marks.

 Have you done any solo tours? If so where and how did they go?

Ha! No. I had only notched two shows as R.E. Seraphin before the pandemic hit. Likely not doing anything beyond the odd live-stream show for a while. That said, if any tastemaking European touring agencies are reading this — give me a ring!

The latest EP

 What are your top 10 desert island discs?

Ah, jeez. This question. I’ll just say these are 10 (plus one) that I come back to quite often. In no order:

 Marquee Moon by Television

The Everly Brothers’ Best

Forever Changes by Love

Let it Be by The Replacements

Third/Sister Lovers by Big Star

The First Songs by Laura Nyro

16 Lovers Lane by The Go-Betweens

In a Silent Way by Miles Davis

A Different Kind of Tension by Buzzcocks

Something Else by The Kinks

Old No. 1 by Guy Clark

 What are a few Bay Area bands that we should know about.

This is a golden-era for weirdo pop music in the Bay. To name just a few: Galore, Cindy, The Umbrellas, Tony Jay, Flowertown, Healing Potpourri, Latitude, Cocktails, The Reds, Pinks, & Purples, Yea-Ming & The Rumors, Anna Hillburg, the 1981, Toner, Frank Ene, Neutrals, Owen Adair Kelley, April Magazine, Telephone Numbers, Hits, Sad-Eyed Beatniks. Essentially every act associated with Paisley Shirt Records and/or Mt.St.Mtn. My bias is strong.

 Do you feel that the pandemic has helped your songwriting or hindered it (if either)?

A li’l column A, a li’l column B. I’m a natural procrastinator, so I’ve definitely savored the lack of band practice and shows (things that often necessitate new material). That said, I doubt I would have finished A Room Forever had I not been quarantined at home. Without having many obligations and without being able to leave my house, music definitely became my raison d’être for the first time as an adult. I was fortunate to not be deemed an “essential” worker and to be able to focus energy on my passion momentarily. Silver lining.

 What’s next ? A new record by the end of the year possibly?

Hopefully continuing to promote my music and play shows on the ol’ webiverse. A Room Forever will be receiving a small vinyl and tape pressing at the end of September via Mt.St.Mtn. and Paisley Shirt Records. So, looking forward to that.

I was creatively tapped for a few months after A Room Forever. While a new album is possible, it’s not probable. I am plugging away at a few tunes, but I tend to conceptualize albums as a thematic whole and not as a collection of songs. Haven't stumbled onto my next Big Idea yet. Don't count me out, though. I could see myself dashing off a covers album for sure.

 What is one song you wish you’d written?

Too many to name! I’ll reframe that question to mean a great song I could see myself capable of writing in an alternate time, place, or dimension. Maybe one of Peter Holsapple’s songs from The dB’s — “Black & White” or “Neverland.” Also: anything by Wreckless Eric or Martin Newell.

 Final thoughts? Closing comments?

Just finished reading an interview with the great James Purdy, and thought this quote summed up iur current political climate well:

“You go out into the world and no one knows you, you can be ruled because you’re programmed. Everything is stamped, put on the shelf, described, thrown out into the garbage. It’s a political process, and behind that an economic process. But to be nothing, that is the worst of all possible things.”

   www.reseraphin.com

www.paisleyshirtrecords.bandcamp.com

[raevenlywrites]

Happy STS! ❤️ I really love so much all the lore/worldbuilding things you post about your wips... Like Tybee's puzzles, and that story about the stars, and this other story about the goddesses too... Can I have anything more about it? Any kind of lore or worldbuilding facts? Thanks, I'll love it -chauceryfairytales

Here is an old file I found called “A bit about shapeshifters”. I hope this fits the bill @chauceryfairytales

A bit about shapeshifter races in Asylum

A preface: All modernday shapeshifters share a common origin, long lost to ancienthistory. The magic that forged them drew inspiration from thenaturalized world, from the fey creatures that arose from theElements. While modern peoples neither know nor care about theseorigins, it is worth keeping in mind that not every shapeshifter iswhat it seems, or thinks itself to be. Those with fey origins, nomatter how remote, are subject to different realities about magic.Those of the common shapeshifter ancestry have lost much of theirmagic over the generations, and now, most individuals are “normal”,outside of carrying a second animal soul.

Serpents: venomous(cobras, vipers) and non-venomous (pythons, and boas)

The venomous lines tendto have powerful magic, usually mirroring the color of their scales.Pythons and boas usually do not, though some interesting individualshave popped up here and there. In ancient times, cobra magic usuallydominated anyone of split parentage, and venomous tended to rule outover non. It is possible to be born split formed or blended form,displaying the talents and scales of both parents. Usually, suchpeople still only have a single serpent form, but there are rumoredto be some who call two entirely separate sets of scales.

For various reasons,serpents are often hit hardest during times of fear and war. Many ofthe lines known in ancient times are long lost, and with them, themagic they carried. Stories remain, but to most, they are just that:stories.

Avians: raptors (owls,hawks, eagles, and falcons) and passerines (basically any bird thatisn't a predator) *and corvids

Divided into twoclasses, the raptors and the passerines, based loosely on the birdtype they call. An ancient legend says that the first passerine wasborn when he lay down his magic willingly, to foster peace in awar-torn world. In our modern world, it is true that passerine typesalmost never have any magic, but even in the raptor types, magic isless and less common. Those raptors who do possess magic tend to bevery old, and very secretive. This may be due to the still lingeringdistrust of the griffics, a legendary nation of chimera: gryphons,hippogriffs, and wyverns. Even though nothing but rumors remain ofthe nation today, their reign was so absolute, fear of winged magicis hard to forget.

*Crows, ravens,magpies, and jays make up an outlier group known as crovids. Magiccan be found in their ranks, but not often. Some of these shiftersare of a similar background to the first passerines, while otherscome from more fey-like origins. The legends and superstitionssurrounding these groups are as varied as the cultures they findthemselves struggling to be a part of. In Riverside, most of thecorvids live uptown with the raptors, in a loose alliance with thewitch community. But it is equally common for corvids to integratewith passerine groups, or, in large enough numbers, to form their ownunits.

Felines: nations(tigers and lions), families (leopards and panthers), and solitaries(any) *and foxes

Like most of thepredator races, felines are better known for their martial prowessthan magical. Aside from the lions and tigers, felines tend to besolitary creatures, forming small familial bands, if anything. Eventhe great tiger nations are made up of smaller tribes, operating asindependent war-bands unless called together by their overlords. Somefeline forms also crop up in mixed species family groups, especiallyin remote and wild places like the North and the West, where magic ismore common, and unpredictable. Such peoples almost never ventureinto the more modernized lands, and so little is known about them.But, presumably, they feel the same nomadic urge common to otherfeline types. Like the cat types they call, feline magic tends to befickle, and it is not uncommon for a first shift to occur as late asearly adulthood, though it can occur much younger.

*While foxes are notclassically feline, behaviorally, they fall into this category. Likethe corvids, their ancestry may be common with other shifters types,while other lines descend from fey types. Fox magic, when it cropsup, leans towards illusions and dreams, Fire, or Earth.

Canids The Pack(wolves) and the solitaries (jackals and coyotes) *and The Den(hyenas)

Straight up,traditional Werewolves, without all the moon-gaga, silver-fearingbullshit. Wolves form rigid pack structures, with clear lines ofdominance leading to their absolute Alpha. Occasionally, Lone Wolvesare tolerated within a Pack's territory, either by being minor enoughto ignore, or by paying appropriate tribute. Lesser canids likejackals and coyotes are either ignored, or bullied. Might makes Rightin the canid world, and so the fierce dedication to structure is allthat keeps them from tearing themselves apart like animals. Fiercelyterritorial, the health of the local wolf pack either meansmeticulously guarded Order in their area, or barely contained gangviolence. Thankfully, canid races tend to be devoid of magic. It isalso not uncommon for their shapeshifting magic to be controlled,monitored, or even suppressed by their group's energy until puberty.

*Call a hyena a dog andthey will bite you. Despite, or maybe because of, their similardominance behaviors, hyenas and wolves war nearly every time theyclash. As a general rule, hyenas fight less for dominance, usuallyforming a clear line of command based on experience and age, ratherthan brute strength. In Riverside, the local Den are somewhatmilitant, divided into small bands of four or five that look an olderleader, with those units grouped together to make a squad, squadsinto sections, and so on. Currently, there are five “generals”who form a council under the highest leader, known simply as The Den.

Herd: Horses and Deer*and rabbits

Herd families are adying breed. With the growing sprawl of urbanization encroaching onthe wilderness, wide open spaces are harder and harder to come by.Intimately tied to the land's own magic, fecundity is becomingincreasingly reduced as space is becoming a premium. In today'smodern world, horse families are less and less nomadic, buying up anyland they can and forming homesteads. They live in the most perfectdisguises: as horse farmers and cattle ranchers. Few nomadic bandsremain, serving as caravan guards and escorts in those remote placeswhere civilization refuses to take. Deer families, if they stillexist, are never seen outside of their native forests.

*While not properlyherd, rabbits crop up in those same odd families in the North andWest.

Misc.

Shapeshifter magicreflects the land it comes from. While some elements of form areinheritable, local elements influence the form a child's magic willtake. Nica, for example, is hawk like her father, but being born onAmerican soil, her soul took the form of a Red-Shouldered Hawk whenit reached for a specific shape, while his was something reflectinghis native European land. So, depending on a myriad of conditions, intheory, ANY naturalized animal could potentially show up in ashapeshifter's soul, provided it resonated with the basic type (bird,serpent, feline, canid, herd). Add to it the mingling of fey-typelines into “pure” shifter lines, and the magic becomes even lesspredictable.

[sciencespies]

Smallsat specialist OrbAstro busy building downstream dreams

https://sciencespies.com/space/smallsat-specialist-orbastro-busy-building-downstream-dreams/

Smallsat specialist OrbAstro busy building downstream dreams

Contract with propulsion startup Aliena powers September 2022 launch of OrbAstro’s first 12U microsat

WASHINGTON — OrbAstro, a space-as-a-service startup with visions of flying “tiny satellites in large flocks,” is ready to launch its first half-dozen smallsats in 2022

With a January launch lined up in India, spots reserved on upcoming SpaceX rideshare missions and a launch agreement with an undisclosed third provider, OrbAstro says it has five commercial satellites plus a pilot satellite for an in-house project all scheduled to launch next year. The UK and New Zealand-based company expects to add one or two more missions to its 2022 roster in the coming months.

OrbAstro’s ORB-3 nanosatellite platform is the size of three 10-centimeter cubesats placed end to end. Credit: OrbitAstro

OrbAstro says it has taken deposits for a dozen more satellites slated for launch in 2023-2024. “Many of these are pilot missions for large nanosat [and] microsat constellations,” OrbAstro CEO and co-founder Ash Dove-Jay said in an interview this week.

The 12-person company, which was founded in 2018 by two of the three original employees of Oxford Space Systems, announced Sept. 23 a contract with Singapore-based satellite propulsion provider Aliena PTE Ltd. to fly its all-electric attitude and orbit control system onboard OrbAstro’s first microsatellite scheduled for launch a year from now.

Like Oxford Space Systems, the deployable antenna and space structures company that helped put the UK’s Harwell Space Cluster on the map, OrbAstro has been renting facilities on the sprawling research park near Oxford University to build and test cubesat-based nanosatellites.

Dove-Jay and his two co-founders, CTO Vinoth Gurusamy and head of electronics Kalhana Colombage, have been keeping a low profile as they bootstrap their space-as-as-service venture by building, testing and selling cubesat-based nanosatellites and smallsat subsystems designed in house.

Although OrbAstro has a website that describes its satellite and subsystem offerings, it doesn’t list the company’s leadership team, address or clients. The UK Space Agency, Innovate UK, the European Space Agency, and the ESA Business Incubator Centre UK are named as supporters.

“We secured 4 million pounds, roughly, in government and space agency grants and contracts, [plus] some personal investment as well,” Dove-Jay said. “That’s allowed us to work quietly in the shadows for a while to the point where we are now.”

From contracts to countdowns

Where they are, according to Dove-Jay, is ready to start announcing some of the commercial contracts they’ve been busy nailing down.

OrbAstro’s customers, Dove-Jay said, are a “mishmash” of “one-off academic payloads” and commercial ventures “looking to get flight heritage on their subsystems” or are “piloting a service using our platforms.”

Aliena is combining its MUlti-Staged Ignition Compact (MUSIC) Hall-effect thruster (shown) with Aurora’s attitude control module to provide an all-electric propulsion solution for smallsats. Credit: Aliena PTE

The just-announced contract with Aliena calls for flying the propulsion provider’s hardware in September 2022 on an ORB-12 microsatellite (so named because it’s the size of a stack 12 cubesats, each measuring 10 centimeters on a side). 

Dove-Jay said OrbAstro is not at liberty to disclose the launch provider it lined up for the first flight of ORB-12.

The mission will give Aliena flight heritage for its so-called Aliena-Aurora multimodal all-electric AOCS propulsion system that it developed in partnership with Finland-based Aurora Propulsion Technologies. The system consists of an Aliena-designed MUSIC Hall-effect thruster and an Aurora resistojet attitude control module.

The ORB-12 mission will also be used to test a variety of internally developed OrbAstro subsystems, including an optical transceiver, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload, a compact optical imaging system, an onboard artificial intelligence processing unit, and thermal management and electrical power systems. 

While the ORB-12 mission is the first of several planned announcements, it’s not expected to be OrbAstro’s first launch. 

The company has a variety of 3U- and 6U-class nanosatellites scheduled for launch in 2022, starting with a 3U nanosat that OrbAstro had expected to launch this year  to put its cubesat-derived ORB-3 platform and subsystems through their paces.  That first satellite is expected to launch in January as a secondary payload on an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle carrying the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Oceansat 3. Dove-Jay said OrbAstro made arrangements for the PSLV launch after plans fell through to launch with SpaceX this year as part of Momentus’ still-delayed Vigoride space tug mission.

Dove-Jay said OrbAstro has three SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare missions lined up next year for its 6U-class nanosatellites, the ORB-6.

Downstream dreams

While OrbAstro is keeping busy building nanosatellites, it does not primarily see itself as a smallsat manufacturer. “It’s not the end goal for the company. It’s more of a means to an end,” Dove-Jay said. “We eventually want to become our own customers with these platforms and pursue our own downstream applications.” One of those downstream applications is the Guardian Network, an envisioned 18-nanosatellite constellation designed as in-orbit infrastructure for OrbAstro’s space-as-a-service venture.

Dove-Jay says the Guardian Network will provide two key services for OrbAstro’s customers: in-orbit data relay and semi-autonomous spacecraft management.

Another downstream application involves a smallsat constellation merging optical imaging with high-resolution 3D mapping. Some of the enabling technologies will be hosted on OrbAstro’s ORB-12 mission with Aliena.

“It’s more longer term,” Dove-Jay said of the envisioned imaging constellation, “but it will allow us to de-risk some of these technologies.”

Dove-Jay described the envisioned constellation as “a semiactive, multi-static SAR.”

“It’s effectively one microsat with a cluster of typically a dozen nanosats around it. The microsat transmits and the nanosats receive,” Dove-Jay said. “Because of the different olocations of nanosats from the transmitter, you can effectively create a three-dimensional image of what you’re looking at. The more satellites you’ve got, the [more] power you’ve got, the higher resolution you can get to. And we think within the next four to five years, it’s perfectly viable for us to hit 10-centimeter resolution in Ka-band.”

Banking on growth

In the meantime, OrbAstro has enough satellites to build that it is thinking about larger facilities. “We can, at a push, get a couple satellites through a month right now,” Dove-Jay said. “Over the next year, we should be able to scale that to five or six a month, maybe 10 if we’re lucky.”

Although the Harwell campus affords on-site access to vibration testing and other shared facilities, OrbAstro is setting its sights beyond the research park. “We may shift to Scotland. We’re thinking about New Zealand as well,” he said. 

“We will probably in the next year or two set up a U.S. presence just to open up the U.S. market to us a bit more.”

Although OrbAstro has so far avoided outside financing, that might soon change. In the year ahead, Dove-Jay said, OrbAstro will be looking to raise 2-3 million pounds, preferably in the form of a loan.

“We’re at a point now where demand is outstripping what we can provide,” he said. “So it’s a case of do we limp along for a couple of years until we organically grow to what the market needs, or do we scale up quickly?”

#Space

[alarriefantasy]

I’ve been updating my blog, and some of my fic rec lists, so I figured it’s time I update/do a proper - Enemies to Lovers Fic Rec. I hope you all enjoy this! 

ABO

The Tale of Two Kingdoms by larriebane Words: 24k Tumblr: @larriebane 

ABO-universe with modern language mixed with some new and old traditions, no technology exist (cars, phones, electricity etc.)

Prince Louis of Doncaster finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time as the feared Hijackers from Cheshire come to claim their annual pray of omegas. He is taken away and transported to a strange country that Louis has been taught as the enemies’ land. When unforeseen events take place and even more unlikely savior turns up, Louis’ all previous beliefs are being proved wrong. Will love save the two kingdoms and form an alliance after several centuries of feuds between these bordering countries?

where the lights are beautiful by twoshipsdrifting Words: 31k

Harry wasn’t wrong about that, not in a general sense. Lots of omegas did seek out rich alphas and betas, hoping or planning to go into heat at the right time. Plenty of omegas saw this as their duty, especially if their families weren’t well off. Worse, Louis couldn’t honestly say he’d never thought about it. If that had been his life, his goal, Louis would feel pretty good about himself now. As it is…Louis feels like shit.

.:. .:. .:.

Or the accidental bonding a/b/o fic.

Like Candy In My Veins by littlelouishiccups Words: 31k Tumblr: @littlelouishiccups

“Um…” Harry said slowly after a moment. “Okay. That’s… this is… Let me get this straight.” He lifted up a hand and swallowed. “You told your family that you have a boyfriend… and my name was the first one you thought of?”

“Harry Potter was on TV, alright? It wasn’t that much of a stretch.” Louis pinched the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t believe he was explaining himself to Harry fucking Styles. He couldn’t believe he was stooping this low. “Forget it. I’m sorry I even thought about bringing you into this.”

Harry snorted. “What? Did you want me to pretend to be your boyfriend or something?” (Basically the A/B/O, enemies to lovers, fake relationship, Christmas AU that nobody asked for.)

I'm On the Hunt Now (I'm After You) by AFangirlFantasy Words: 56k Tumblr: @afangirlfantasy

Omegas haven’t been able to shift into their wolves for two hundred years. That is, until Louis Tomlinson changes everything.

Or...an AU where Alpha Harry and Omega Louis have a lot more than falling in love to deal with after The Mating Ceremony.

pray for some sweet simplicity by delsicle Words: 237 Tumblr: @emperorstyles

Louis is the only omega to ever make it in the cut-throat world of competitive motorcycle racing—that is, he would be if anyone actually knew about his identity. Now, his sights are set towards competing in—and winning—the European Grand Prix, the biggest and most difficult race of the entire year, so he can disappear underground for good. He’s close enough, too, until an alpha sports journalist is assigned to follow Louis’s every move as he prepares for the event of his career.

Or, an AU where motorcycle racing is the biggest sport in a heavily divided world, Louis is trying to take control of his own destiny, and Harry is in for more than he bargained for.

Religion

Baby Heaven's in your Eyes by theboyfriendstagram Words: 120k Tumblr: @theboyfriendstagram

Or a sixth form!AU where Harry is the fucked up bad boy with too many problems, Louis is the perfect rich boy with too much money and their schools are right across from each other. They meet at a party and that’s the last (and maybe the only) thing they need.

Turning From Praise (Punk!Harry Christian!Louis) by capriciouslouis Words: 128k Tumblr: @capriciouslouis   

Louis has had a strict Christian upbringing that he never realized he resented until he meets Harry Styles, a boy who lives to rebel and doesn’t give a damn what anyone else thinks. But the better he gets to know Harry, the more he begins to realize that maybe Harry does care. And maybe “the children who God forgot” are closer to God than the devout will ever be.

Shake Me Down by AGreatPerhaps12 Words: 208k

Tumblr: @agreatperhaps12

Harry's new to college, fresh out of Catholic school and conversion therapy camp, and Louis runs the campus LGBTQIA organization.

Royal/Pirate

Sail into the Sun by orphan_account Words: 31k

Prince Louis Tomlinson is sick of the closet. Harry Styles is a con man with a hatred of rich people. Louis needed a way out, Harry needed a husband. It was a mutual agreement. Doesn't mean they have to like each other.

All The King's Men by sacredheart (orphan_account) Words: 39k

Louis is an arrogant, self assured prince who falls in love with a charming thief named Harry during his youth. However, years later, a revolution is sparked amongst the frustrated commoners... and Louis's former teenage romance is leading it.

Liberté by larriebane Words: 64k Tumblr: @larriebane

AU. 1647. “Pretending you don’t have a heart is not the best way to not get it broken. It’s just the easiest.”

Or the pirate AU I always wanted to write

Wear It Like A Crown by zarah5 Words: 141k Tumblr: @zarah5

AU. As part of a team of fixers hired to handle a gay scandal in Buckingham Palace, Louis expects Prince Harry to be a lot of things—most notably a royally spoilt brat. Never mind that the very same Prince Harry used to star in quite a number of Louis' teenage fantasies.

School

A Month With the Tomlinson Clan by Larry_Klaine_Stylinson Words: 14k

Harry and Louis have always hated each other, but when Harry's mum and sister have to go out of the country, Harry needs a place to stay, and Anne decides to ask her friend Jay if he can stay at her place.

18 by aclosetlarryshipper  Words: 15k Tumblr: @thedarkestlarrie

Harry hates Golden Boy Louis and he's pretty sure the feeling's mutual. It's too bad they're forced into parenthood together during the home ec baby project.

Featuring accidental fathers, an improv performance gone wrong, and an altruistic game of spin the bottle.

And I'll judge the cover by the book by harrystylesandstuff Words: 73k

At twenty years old Harry has his life figured out. He’ll graduate from the private University of Buckingham and move to Oxford to study journalism. He’ll meet someone who shares his values and accepts who he is, and apply everything his successful parents have taught him.

At twenty-two years old Louis has no clue what he wants in life. He’s not sure he’ll pass the year and doesn’t know where he’ll go after that. He spends his time smoking away his doubts about himself with his friends and all he cares about is making sure his family doesn’t fall apart.

They don’t belong together.

Or a Private University AU where Harry is a queer posh prince, Louis is a closeted troublemaker, and neither expect to understand each other the way they will.

Soft Hands, Fast Feet, Can't Lose by dolce_piccante  Words: 112k Tumblr: @haydolce

American Uni AU. Harry Styles is a frat boy football star from the wealthy Styles Family athletic dynasty. A celebrity among football fans, he knows how to play, he knows how to party, and he knows how to fuck (all of which is well known among his legion of admirers).

Louis Tomlinson is a student and an athlete, but his similarities to Harry end there. Intelligent, focused, independent, and completely uninterested in Harry’s charms, Louis is an anomaly in a world ruled by football.

A bet about the pair, who might be more similar than they originally thought, brings them together. Shakespeare, ballet, Disney, football, library chats, running, accidental spooning, Daredevil and Domino’s Pizza all blend into one big friendship Frappucino, but who will win in the end?

Unbelievers by isthatyoularry Words: 136k Tumblr: @isthatyoularry

It’s Louis’ senior year, and he’s dead set on doing it right. However, along with his pair of cleats, a healthy dose of sarcasm and his ridiculous best friend, he’s also got a complicated family, a terrifyingly uncertain future, and a mortal enemy making his life just that much worse. Mortal enemies “with benefits” was not exactly the plan.

Or: The one where Louis and Harry definitely aren’t friends, and football is everything.

Supernatural

once upon a dream by thedeathchamber Words: 33k Tumblr: @louehvolution

Louis is psychic and gets caught in the middle of a murder investigation led by FBI Special Agent Harry Styles.

aka. the Medium/Criminal Minds-inspired AU no one ever asked for.

Even Angels Have Their Demons by AFangirlFantasy Words: 52k Tumblr: @afangirlfantasy

Louis is appointed the role of Guardian Angel, and his first mission is a boy named Zayn Malik. Unfortunately, it seems that a certain Demon has gotten to him first.

Or... an Angel/Demon AU where Angel Louis hates Demon Harry, but somewhere along the way that stops being so true.

Luscious blood by Deidei Words: 116k

Louis Tomlinson, a human, has been living in poor living conditions together with his mother since he was born. Ever since he can remember he has loathed the stronger, faster, more developed kind that rule this world; Vampires. But will his opinion change after he meets his soul mate that is an arrogant, royal vampire named Harry Styles…

Run Like the Devil by benzos Words: 138k Tumblr: @churchrat

Harry stops pouting, but his frown is still fixed in place. “Are you sure?” he asks. “You know it’s your soul you’re signing away.” He sounds…sad? No, that’s not right, but there’s something.

Christ. This is the most incompetent demon Louis’ ever met. If he hadn’t seen the red of his eyes he wouldn’t believe he was a demon at all. How’d he get this job if he isn’t trying to convince Louis to deal? Or is it just another trick? A ploy for sympathy?

“I’m sure,” Louis says. “Come over here and kiss me.”

*Supernatural AU. Louis hunts demons; Harry's the strangest demon he's ever met, and he keeps fucking meeting him.

Other

Three French Hems by 100percentsassy, gloria_andrews Words: 19k Tumblrs: @100percentsassy, @gloriaandrews

In which Louis is a designer at Burberry and Harry spends December wearing Lanvin… and Lanvin… and Lanvin.

After Hours by Velvetoscar  Words: 26k Tumblr: @mizzwilde

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are the bane of each other's existences. Unfortunately, they're already in love--even if they aren't completely aware of this minor detail.

[A "You've Got Mail" AU]

Love's Truest Language by summerwine Words: 48k Tumblr: @smrwine

The first part was meant as a joke. He didn't really expect Harry to buy anything. It was just Louis’ way of softening the ‘get the fuck out’ blow.

“Where's your order forms, then?”

“I don't want your flowers.” Louis chided before directing all of his attention to the arrangement in front of him.

Harry laughed under his breath as he stood to his full height, “Who said anything about them being for you, love?”

Taken Over By The Feeling by whyidontknow1 Words: 53k

After almost a year of increasingly troubling behavior, Louis agrees to let his sister live with him. It's a last resort before more drastic measures are taken by their mom.

Harry Styles runs Given A Chance, a program for troubled and disadvantaged teens out of the bakery he owns. He offers the kids in his program what he believes they need to start on a different and better path for their lives.

Louis learns all too quickly that Harry's goodwill does not extend to him. Only because he happens to remind Harry of an ex he'd rather forget. It's not the smoothest of beginnings, but in the end Louis' own issues might be the real problem.

somethin' bout you by missandrogyny Words: 59k Tumblr: @missandrogyny

Of all the government agents in the world, Louis had to go and land the most charming one.

You Drive Me Round The Bend by TheCellarDoor Words: 77k Tumblr: @donotdialnine

In which Louis is a spoilt rich kid who’s always on the phone while he drives and Harry is a struggling musician making his way down the mountain. It’s just a matter of time before they crash and burn.

Hate Me To The Moon by harrystylesandstuff Words: 83k

The last thing Harry wanted was to spend his entire summer stuck with his dad's new fiancée and her kids. He wants no more when he learns she's a very religious dictator, raising a sixteen year old nun and a clean cut potential priest ass kisser.

Everything takes a slightly different turn, however, when Harry finds out his future step-brother is actually the rude stranger he caught sucking off a guy in a pub, far from the reserved Christian his mom thinks he is...

AU where Harry is a sexy nerd, Louis is a great actor, and they both pretend to hate each other's guts to convince themselves they're not feeling things future step-brothers shouldn't feel...

Off The Record by Tomlinsontoes Words: 90k Tumblr: @pianolouis 

Louis is an out of control teen heartthrob, Harry is hired to get him back on track and they both hate each other while they secretly don't.

“I'm not your personal assistant you know,” Harry says once he gets there and Louis lets him in and he shoves the bag into his hands. “I'm your publicist.”

“I know that,” Louis smiles a devilish grin patting Harry in the middle of his chest as he takes the bag, “but look at you personally assisting me,” he says looking in the bag and pulling out the Cheetos. I also know that my PA turns his phone on silent at night, and clearly, you don't. Waiting for a booty call or something?” Louis says turning on his heels and scurrying over to his sofa and plopping down. Harry swears he sees a puff of orange dust soar into the air when Louis opens the bag. He's amazed that couch is as clean as it looks.

Dance to the Distortion by Lis (domesticharry) Words: 96k Tumblr: @domestic-harry

Louis accidentally breaks Harry's camera lens and in order to get it fixed, they decide to participate in a romantic couples study. The only issue is that they are not actually couple. Well that and the fact they cannot stand each other.

more than just a dream by spit_on_me_larry Words: 122k

Louis Tomlinson loves his life, he really does. It's just that he's constantly on the verge of everything completely going to shit. He's disorganized and clumsy and hotheaded and just a little bit ridiculous.

And then he meets Harry Styles. Harry is the type of person Louis hates. It seems like everything comes easily to him. He's rich and brilliant and everyone loves him and he has his life impossibly and perfectly together.

Louis detests Harry Styles. Except for the inconvenient fact that he can't seem to get Harry out of his head.

[wherespaulo]

Hiking the Francigena Way from Siena to Rome

March 3-12, 2019

“You will find where Odysseus wandered when you find the cobbler who stitched the bag of the winds”

Homer

I'd again been hankering for some sort of expedition to get me away from New York City's urban sprawl. Something that might fit into the St Johns University Spring break where I teach organic chemistry and which would hopefully provide some badly needed sunshine. So in early March, 2019, when I hoped the Tuscan hills would be warming up nicely, I planned to hike the last 180 miles of the Via Francigena from Siena to Rome over ten days – this is an old pilgrims route which officially starts in Canterbury and includes walking-on-water over the English Channel. I would, of course, travel alone, and Camino Ways would ferry my luggage from one small hotel/B&B to the next, so I only had my day pack to carry. I've done the 'carrying everything' and 'pitching a tent in the pouring rain and dark' already – now I could afford to just do a physically challenging hike where I could travel light and have wine, pasta and a warm bed at the end of it. To find my way I would use a combination of way markers and maps (old school and electronic) but did secretly look forward to an occasional wrong turn...

I didn't expect to find God since I've never been of the religious persuasion, probably for a number of reasons. Growing up in an English working-class coal mining area the only religions were hard graft and soccer, accompanied by copious quantities of beer and tobacco. Moral codes, such as treating everyone how you would like to be treated and respecting your elders, were deeply ingrained into your psyche through strong role models. And although religious education was compulsory in my comprehensive school, the books illustrating God as a big beardy bloke in a white robe, lounging on a cloud while overseeing his parishioners, and usually with some extra creative graffiti added by a bored student, never really did it for me. And then later in life, after I trained as a scientist, I always struggled with the idea of believing in an omnipotent supernatural being that I couldn't see. Don't get me wrong. I would never be so narrow minded to assume in this vast universe that just because I can’t see something or explain it by science it doesn’t exist. And I've always respected people's belief or not in any kind of God and understand that for many people the community of the church is just as important as the belief. Also, growing up amongst a family of builders, I have an appreciation for beautiful architecture which has been inspired by bygone believers – and this is usually some of the best, so I was looking forward to admiring some of it.

When I'm hiking by myself my mind tends to wander way more than the geographical journey -- I believe my traveling is just a reflection of my mental wanderings. As I strode out easily over the gently rolling Tuscan hills into dazzling Spring sunshine under azure blue skies, through the neat rows of olive and hazelnut groves and vineyards, I considered the inanimate clouds of dust rising from beneath my feet and struggled with a conundrum. How is it that the very same atoms could simply be rearranged to provide a living, breathing, reproducing organism with a life force? Where does this life force come from? Is there something else at work here.

These were all thoughts running through my mind as I started a short climb to the beautiful historic hill fort of Vignoni with its narrow medieval alleyways set within castle walls. 

I surveyed the rolling Tuscan landscape from my elevated position. Medieval hilltop villages like Bagno Vignoni and Radicofani rose from the distant valley like gigantic way markers for the wayward pilgrim, while the neat rows of Italian cypress and umbrella pines lining every vineyard track seemed to be tempting me with diversions.

Having already considered the very nature of life my mind now wandered further to contemplate life’s journey and its many meanderings. At some point in life most of us become lost. Don't we? And as with Odysseus we strive to find a new way home. Wherever or whatever that may be. Life seems to follow a simple route for some. For others we have an occasional unforeseen diversion. Maybe a mid-life crisis where we suddenly realize we're not where we expected to be, no longer recognizing our immediate surroundings. I think that's what happened to my ex-wife – she became lost and didn’t recognize me anymore. Yet others seem forever lost. Some people don't seem to mind being lost. Others do. Some don’t even know they’re lost.

It was shortly after leaving the most beautiful medieval lakeside town of Bolsena that I became lost – did I miss the sign? I wandered back about half a mile to the last way marker I'd seen and wandered back and forth for quite a while, but alas...

     Until 2005 my own life seemed to have been following a well-trod path --             good job with wife and two kids in the English burbs. Then there was an               unexpected detour after missing the signs – a divorce had altered my                   expected route and directed me across the ocean to New York City.                     Although, as with Odysseus, the four winds had now been loosed, an                   interesting job and good social life had tethered me like a kite for nine years.       But that tether was severed in late 2015 when my job was eliminated, and I         saw this as an opportunity to blow to the four corners of the earth. But, as           with Odysseus, I recently seem to have become lost and home seems to be       just an idea.

My favorite much-used advice to my young sons when they thought they'd lost something was “seek and ye shall find”. Of course, they'd always assumed that it was lost as soon as it was out of their sight – they hadn't yet learned that you have to realize you’ve lost something, or realize you’re lost, before you can find something or find your way. And they always did find it after listening to my advice. Always. They are both well along their own journeys now – good jobs in computer science and living with their girlfriends in London and Lyon. And just like they’d done many times while growing up, I did eventually find that way marker post after I’d searched for it -- it had been knocked over and hidden in the grass.

I entered a dense woodland where Spring was already in the air. Colorful European jays, the creepy cackle of the green woodpecker and the sharp floral smell and beautiful white blossom of the hawthorn bush all caught my attention and brought me into the moment. I considered how my mind is temporarily anchored in times like these, when it's not timebound and craving for something from the past or future. Is that why people who consistently live for the day don't tend to feel lost? Erkhardt Tolle writes about this while Siddhartha was the ultimate practitioner.

I walked the last few miles into Rome with a fellow 'pilgrim'. Beatrice was a tall, windblown and sunburned 40 something from the Spanish Basque region and we’d met after she’d appeared from behind a derelict barn while pulling her pants up. She wore a red beret tilted at an angle and smoked like a chimney while carrying a very large full pack, of I'd guess 35 pounds or more. She informed me in broken English, while prodding my chest intensely, that she'd left Madrid at the beginning of November and had walked to Rome via Santiago de Compostela, through the Winter. I felt humbled. After further questioning it seemed she'd been walking almost non-stop for a few years now – with that full pack and while sleeping in a tent. It's a pity I didn't have more time to hear her story as she seemed to have a purpose about her. Maybe she was also on an Odysseun journey to find her way home.

Our first sight of Rome was from the elevated Monte Mario Park – I could make out all the main sights that I’d visited back in 2010 on my way to a business meeting in Ascoli, just east of Rome. The colosseum, the Pantheon, the Alter of the Fatherland. And I considered my lifetime diversions since then - leaving the corporate world to travel, write and teach. But I hadn’t had time to visit the Vatican then and since that was the official end of the Via Francigena pilgrims’ route, this was going to be first on my list.

As I entered St Peters Basilica all my previous experiences of admiring ecclesiastical architecture – the enormous cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame, Canterbury, Seville, Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem – quickly paled into insignificance. St Peters was so much grander and opulent than anything I'd seen before and set a whole new bar. Building had started around 1500 under the power-hungry Pope Julius – it hadn’t surprised me that after demolishing the original 1500-year-old St Peters Basilica it had taken another 120 years to complete this one. And it was just the same as the Louvre’s art paled into insignificance against the enormous Michelangelo and Raphael frescos of the Sistine Chapel.

As I considered the enormity of it all I thought about the many pilgrims over the years who’d viewed Rome with the very same awe after their tiring journey from Canterbury -- and how they too, like Odysseus, had to get lost before they could find their way home.

[hellyescharlesedwards]

The Range in Spades.

By Peter Craven. 

As with everyone, My Fair Lady is an ancient memory for Charles Edwards, who seems to oscillate from the Rex Harrison repertoire to Shakespeare – Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury in the West End and America, but also Oberon to Judi Dench’s Titania, directed by Peter Hall. 

“I was fascinated by it as a child,” he says. “The LP of the original with Rex and Julie [Andrews] I found – I can’t remember how old I would have been, but quite little – but I remember being really fascinated by the wit, even at that stage. I knew it was very clever and very sharp and very English, particularly the way Rex did it.” 

Edwards is the new Henry Higgins in Julie Andrews’ production of My Fair Lady. It’s the Hamlet of high-comedy roles and arguably the greatest of all musicals. So what does he do with Higgins’ sprechgesang? Does he follow the notes or does he do what Rex Harrison did on Broadway in 1956, opposite Andrews’ Eliza Doolittle, hitting a note every so often but speaking his way through? 

“I follow that,” Edwards says, of the latter. “I personally find if you follow the notes in Higgins’ songs, what is revealed to you is that they’re not nearly as much fun. They actually become rather leaden. And what you need with those songs is great lightness and dexterity. 

“I’d been playing around with doing it slightly off the beat, trying to maybe be a little bit clever with it. But Guy Simpson, our brilliant musical director, says it’s much better if you can speak as much as you like but just stick to the beat. It’s more real, there’s more of the character. Higgins knows what he’s saying, he doesn’t have to dither either side of the beat.” Frederick Loewe, after all, wrote it for Harrison, knowing he couldn’t sing. “I think that’s perhaps why if you try to sing more than one should it’s less interesting because it is written for the man who was going to do it like that.” 

Michael Redgrave famously refused the role of Higgins because it meant committing to a long run. How does Edwards feel about a longish stretch of phonetics and feminist musical comedy? “Oh, I could do it for a while,” he says. “I arrived, performed it in Brisbane, and now I’m rehearsing it in a way… for my own satisfaction. Something which would happen in four or six weeks of rehearsal is now happening to me, internally, just myself, finding my way. I feel like I’m still starting out even though the performance is there. I could do it for a bit longer because there is a lot more to explore.” 

I tell him I’ve just watched the recording of him playing Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing – the one role Harrison recorded for Caedmon, which is largely in prose and the Bard’s most Shavian play. “It was really fun,” Edwards says of his stint opposite Eve Best at the Globe in the role with a family resemblance to Higgins. “Julie [Andrews] likes comparing Shaw as the natural successor to Shakespeare in terms of that kind of comedy. I’m very drawn to both of these roles. That was a joy to do.” He adds that he learnt something from the Globe, because it’s rougher, more extroverted theatre. “If it’s done with wit,” he says, “it can be a great crowd-pleaser, without being naff. And I think it has informed my work to such an extent that often since I’ve been told, ‘Just calm down, Charles.’ ” 

When I tell him he was very good as the Tory whip in This House, the parliamentary play by James Graham, done by the National Theatre, he says of the author, “I don’t know how old he is, he’s something annoying like… he’s probably hit 30. I hope he has.” But he adds that at 47 himself he’s probably a bit younger than the received image of Higgins from the film of My Fair Lady, even though Shaw describes him as a pleasant-looking man of 40. It must be odd to inhabit a role with such a powerful acting ghost in the background. 

I once saw Harrison – very, very old – at an airport sweeping past in what looked exactly like the hat and coat he – and Edwards – wears in the opening scene of My Fair Lady in Covent Garden. “There’s a lot, I’m sure, in the production we’ve inherited that he insisted on,” Edwards says. “I’m sure that will be true of the hat … And here we are now, probably wearing the very weave he ordered from a particular tailor.” 

Of course, everyone likes the cut of Higgins’ cloth and would like to make it their own. George Clooney, of all people, is said to have had an eye on the role when Emma Thompson wanted to make a new film of it with Carey Mulligan as Eliza. And with the old George Cukor film, Alan Jay Lerner, treacherously, wanted Peter O’Toole, still in his 30s, rather than Harrison. Like O’Toole, Edwards does both ends of the acting spectrum: the light-as-air prose comedy of Shaw and the poetic majesties of Shakespeare. He worked with Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

“I’ve done quite a lot with him,” he says. “I think I auditioned one year when he used to run the season at Bath and he took a shine and kept wanting me back to do this and that.” His work with Hall included another Much Ado, where he played Don Pedro. “He got it into his head,” Edwards says, “that Don Pedro at the end was like Malvolio or Antonio, the man who gets left alone.” So Edwards’ Don was a bit in love with Claudio and something of “a real devil”. 

His Oberon to Dench’s Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream came from another of Hall’s bright ideas. “Peter put it to me, ‘Look, I’ve got this idea, it’s like Elizabeth and Essex…’ They did a prelude to the evening where the players were assembling to put on a play for Elizabeth I and then Elizabeth/Judi arrives and selects me.” He says that Dench, like Andrews, is great to be with and “just as nervous and scared as the rest of us all are. They’re very great company people; their fun is being in the company.” This was the second time he’d worked with Dench because he’d been her fancy man, Sandy, when she played Judith Bliss in Coward’s classic comedy Hay Fever. He loves the lightness of My Fair Lady and the way it can modulate into the gravity of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to her Face”, with its utterly moody interplay between hilarities of exasperation, and something else, something at the edge of heartbreak. 

Of course, acting careers have their light and dark. Harrison, high comedian though he was, did Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours, that demon study of jealousy. Marcello Mastroianni, in many ways his European equivalent, made some of the more serious masterpieces, everything from 8 ½ to La Notte. And Edwards went straight from acting with Olivia Williams in Harley Granville Barker’s Waste to doing a chocolate-box soap TV drama, The Halcyon, with her. He says Granville Barker stands up very well when you prune him back and you know he thinks this of Shaw, too – the way “The Rain in Spain” crystallises something Shaw takes for granted and talks around – and does so operatically. “I find it very touching, that bit,” Edwards says. “It’s wonderful to do.” 

And he’s at pains to defend Higgins, the man who – at Harrison’s insistence – was given another Act II number, “A Hymn to Him”. “He’s not a snob,” Edwards says. “He’s trying to remove the social gaps. He’s trying to erase them, in a rather perverse way by wanting everyone to speak the same and dismiss regional accents – but he’s not a snob. He’s an egalitarian.” 

It’s always a fascinating thing to listen to an actor let his mind roam about the ins and outs, the winding staircase of his career. Charles Edwards went to a preparatory school named Amesbury in Surrey, which he says was “pure Decline and Fall, full of eccentrics, some of them quite dangerous eccentrics”. His salvation was Hamlet. “I was invited by – you know, we all have these teachers who encourage us – his name is Simon Elliot and he’ll still come and see me in shows now. ‘I’d like to talk to you about Hamlet,’ he said. ‘Oh yeah?’ ”

From there, a career. Here he is on Angela Lansbury: “She is in every way fit. In Blithe Spirit she did this extraordinary dance with these jerky movements as she was preparing for a séance. I don’t know what it was but I know every night she loved doing it and changing it.” And on Maria Aitken, brilliant as the wife of John Cleese’s Archie in A Fish Called Wanda, who directed Edwards in The 39 Steps: “With comedy she immediately knows, ‘That’s what I want for this show.’ And that it has to be taken very seriously. She’s the person you need at the centre, taking it absolutely seriously.” She insisted that Edwards – who was the production’s original Hannay in The 39 Steps – had to play the role when it transferred to Broadway. “She was lovely. She fought for me and she said, ‘You need the Englishman. You need the backbone.’ And they brought me over even though the rest of the cast was two Americans and one Canadian. It was great, I was thrilled. But it’s the kind of humour that can tip. It’s got to be tasteful, it’s got to have taste. Taste is the key with humour that involves an audience.” 

All of which brings us round to the ending of My Fair Lady where Eliza comes back to Higgins. She has sung that she can do “Without You”. “Absolutely,” he says, “and this is heightened by the ending, the fact that some people would ask why does she come back to him. But there has to be a meeting of minds, a meeting of souls, and that’s what he realises right at the end. She comes back to show him that she has to be there, but she is in charge. And he sees that and accepts that. And all of that we try to do in three seconds of the show.” 

Edwards laughs. 

So what is it like to work with Julie Andrews as she re-creates the original production of My Fair Lady by the legendary Moss Hart? “It was a real treat, it’s an extraordinary thing and very touching to see her remembering it,” Edwards says. 

Obviously the production is a blueprint, which he had to fit himself to, but the man who is best known here for his stint in Downton Abbey adds, “But you have to imbue it with a new texture.”.

Taken from The Saturday Paper, published Jul 15, 2017.

[buttered-kpopcorn]

I was tagged by @mjleavesmebreathless sdfghfgjjk

Rules: Answer 30 questions and tag 20 people that you want to know better.

1. Nickname: my name’s Alyssa… do I have a nickname… ?? idk my friends still call me Catherine the Great, the horse-fucker, after I did this thing where I had to pretend to be her (I hate it lmao)

2. Gender: female

3. Star Sign: cancer

4. Height: 5′3″ / 160 cm

5.Time: its almost 17:00 / 5 pm

6. Birthday: July 14

7. Favorite Bands: too many… I have a list of most of them in the link in my bio thing but I think the link doesnt always work ??? anyways uh with kpop I stan bts, seventeen, day6, exo, b.a.p, pentagon, got7, and vixx … and then I also love kard, south club, sf9, nu’est, nct, and so so so many more … and with english music my favs are saint motel, joywave, and of monsters and men but I have tons more its just this run on sentence is getting too long haha

8. Favorite Solo Artists: Zico, Jay Park, Dean, Sam Kim, Zion T., Agust D, probably missing some

9. Song Stuck In My Head: Artist by Zico and Feel It Still by Portugal. The Man

10. Last Movie Watched: Stranger Than Fiction

11. Last Show Watched: Voltron: Legendary Defender

12. When Did I Create My Blog: maybe 2 or 3 years ago I’m not sure but it feels like longer

13. What Do I Post: its a lot and you can look at the link in my bio … if it works for you … but its mostly kpop (lots of groups) and shitposts and occasionally some shows and things

14. Last Thing I Googled: “song memes” bc I was thinking of things to play to make my sister laugh

15. Do You Have Other Blogs: I used to but not any more - all my shit goes on here and thats why its such a mess lol

16. Do You Get Asks: as of recently sometimes… but I never used to :/ but hmu with some asks anytime cause i guess im just deep down a massive attention whore and i wanna make more friendsssss

17. Why Did You Choose Your URL: I changed from my original and cringey url to think also cringey url because 1) I wanted to reflect the fact that its all kpop now (didn’t used to be) 2) I like popcorn 3) popcorn … kpop … whoa it combines to kpopcorn 4) just plain kpopcorn and similar things were taken so buttered was added bc butter is nice

18. Following: too many idk if I wanna admit to it

19. Followers: 223

20. Favorite Colors: red, army green, grey, black

21. Average hours of sleep: 6~ish

22. Lucky Number: 3

23. Instruments: … I can play a few dumb easy things on my little keyboard

24. What Am I Wearing: currently? an old orange t-shirt with holes in it and some comfy grey shorts

25. How Many Blankets I Sleep With: just one unless I’m cold and then two (that doesn’t happen much though)

26. Dream Job: don’t ask me this question I have no idea

27. Dream Trip: EVERYWHERE tbh like I know you’re asking for specifics but I just fucking love travelling so much and I want to see the whole world so bad

28. Favorite foods: I really like fried eggs on everything… and spicy food… and I like sushi a lot and also every kind of cheese ever. some salads are gr8 and also noodles and so is good warm bread and I could snack on cheetos and seaweed and popcorn for days. y’know what I always crave… kimchi fried rice … and I’m pretty new to meat bc I live in a very vegetarian household but damn pork is tasty

29. Nationality: boring American with all kinds of western and eastern European heritage… my grandpa’s straight out of Hungary though and he’s great

30. Favorite Song: SONG as in ONE /?? idk man I love love love Zico’s Artist rn though I can’t get it out of my head

again im tired and dont want to spend time deciding which people i can tag without it being too weird so I’ll come back to this in a bit and do that … if youre reading this and we’re mutuals though just like … pretend I tagged you and then do it if you want to

EDIT: BALLS I FORGOT TO SAY TAGGED BY @mjleavesmebreathless thank you love youuuuu sorry it took me ten years to do this I think it’s been over a month and I somehow just missed the notification EDIT EDIT I was also tagged by @sunshiine-kpop to do the same thing

[newtshirtcom]

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[sufredux]

A New Americanism

In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bowtie-wearing Stanford historian Carl Degler delivered something other than the usual pipe-smoking, scotch-on-the-rocks, after-dinner disquisition that had plagued the evening program of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association for nearly all of its centurylong history. Instead, Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation.

“We can write history that implicitly denies or ignores the nation-state, but it would be a history that flew in the face of what people who live in a nation-state require and demand,” Degler said that night in Chicago. He issued a warning: “If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.”

The nation-state was in decline, said the wise men of the time. The world had grown global. Why bother to study the nation? Nationalism, an infant in the nineteenth century, had become, in the first half of the twentieth, a monster. But in the second half, it was nearly dead—a stumbling, ghastly wraith, at least outside postcolonial states. And historians seemed to believe that if they stopped studying it, it would die sooner: starved, neglected, and abandoned.

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, not a historian. But his 1989 essay “The End of History?” illustrated Degler’s point. Fascism and communism were dead, Fukuyama announced at the end of the Cold War. Nationalism, the greatest remaining threat to liberalism, had been “defanged” in the West, and in other parts of the world where it was still kicking, well, that wasn’t quite nationalism. “The vast majority of the world’s nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization,” Fukuyama wrote. (Needless to say, he has since had to walk a lot of this back, writing in his most recent book about the “unexpected” populist nationalism of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and the United States’ Donald Trump.)

Fukuyama was hardly alone in pronouncing nationalism all but dead. A lot of other people had, too. That’s what worried Degler.

Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state. For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry. From George Bancroft in the 1830s through, say, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or Richard Hofstadter, studying American history meant studying the American nation. As the historian John Higham put it, “From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the nation was the grand subject of American history.” Over that same stretch of time, the United States experienced a civil war, emancipation, reconstruction, segregation, two world wars, and unprecedented immigration—making the task even more essential. “A history in common is fundamental to sustaining the affiliation that constitutes national subjects,” the historian Thomas Bender once observed. “Nations are, among other things, a collective agreement, partly coerced, to affirm a common history as the basis for a shared future.”

Officers of the American Historical Association at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., December 1889

But in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession. Most historians started looking at either smaller or bigger things, investigating the experiences and cultures of social groups or taking the broad vantage promised by global history. This turn produced excellent scholarship. But meanwhile, who was doing the work of providing a legible past and a plausible future—a nation—to the people who lived in the United States? Charlatans, stooges, and tyrants. The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence. When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.

Maybe it’s too late to restore a common history, too late for historians to make a difference. But is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history—one that could foster a new Americanism?

THE NATION AND THE STATE

The United States is different from other nations—every nation is different from every other—and its nationalism is different, too. To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”

But in the American case, the origins of the nation can be found in those seams. When the United States declared its independence, in 1776, it became a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, after having waged a war against Great Britain, just about the last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Britishness. Long after independence, most Americans saw the United States not as a nation but, true to the name, as a confederation of states. That’s what made arguing for ratification of the Constitution an uphill battle; it’s also why the Constitution’s advocates called themselves “Federalists,” when they were in fact nationalists, in the sense that they were proposing to replace a federal system, under the Articles of Confederation, with a national system. When John Jay insisted, in The Federalist Papers, no. 2, “that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs,” he was whistling in the dark.

One way to turn a state into a nation is to write its history.

It was the lack of these similarities that led Federalists such as Noah Webster to attempt to manufacture a national character by urging Americans to adopt distinctive spelling. “Language, as well as government should be national,” Webster wrote in 1789. “America should have her own distinct from all the world.” That got the United States “favor” instead of “favour.” It did not, however, make the United States a nation. And by 1828, when Webster published his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, he did not include the word “nationalism,” which had no meaning or currency in the United States in the 1820s. Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called “the age of nationalities,” did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny.

This course of events is so unusual, in the matter of nation building, that the historian David Armitage has suggested that the United States is something other than a nation-state. “What we mean by nationalism is the desire of nations (however defined) to possess states to create the peculiar hybrid we call the nation-state,” Armitage writes, but “there’s also a beast we might call the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter”—not a nation-state but a state-nation.

One way to turn a state into a nation is to write its history. The first substantial history of the American nation, Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and 1874. Bancroft wasn’t only a historian; he was also a politician who served in the administrations of three U.S. presidents, including as secretary of war in the age of American continental expansion. An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world:

The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.

Nineteenth-century nationalism was liberal, a product of the Enlightenment. It rested on an analogy between the individual and the collective. As the American theorist of nationalism Hans Kohn once wrote, “The concept of national self-determination—transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity—was raised as the banner of liberalism.”

Liberal nationalism, as an idea, is fundamentally historical. Nineteenth-century Americans understood the nation-state within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights: namely, that the power of the state guaranteed everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of irrevocable political rights. The future Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner offered this interpretation in 1849:

Here is the Great Charter of every human being drawing vital breath upon this soil, whatever may be his condition, and whoever may be his parents. He may be poor, weak, humble, or black,—he may be of Caucasian, Jewish, Indian, or Ethiopian race,—he may be of French, German, English, or Irish extraction; but before the Constitution of Massachusetts all these distinctions disappear. . . . He is a MAN, the equal of all his fellow-men. He is one of the children of the State, which, like an impartial parent, regards all of its offspring with an equal care.

Or as the Prussian-born American political philosopher Francis Lieber, a great influence on Sumner, wrote, “Without a national character, states cannot obtain that longevity and continuity of political society which is necessary for our progress.” Lieber’s most influential essay, “Nationalism: A Fragment of Political Science,” appeared in 1860, on the very eve of the Civil War.

THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERACY

The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around.

In the antebellum United States, Northerners, and especially northern abolitionists, drew a contrast between (northern) nationalism and (southern) sectionalism. “We must cultivate a national, instead of a sectional patriotism” urged one Michigan congressman in 1850. But Southerners were nationalists, too. It’s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed “illiberal” or “ethnic,” as opposed to the Northerners’ liberal or civic nationalism. This distinction has been subjected to much criticism, on the grounds that it’s nothing more than a way of calling one kind of nationalism good and another bad. But the nationalism of the North and that of the South were in fact different, and much of U.S. history has been a battle between them.

“Ours is the government of the white man,” the American statesman John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting Mexicans as citizens of the United States. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” the American politician Stephen Douglas said in 1858. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.”

Abraham Lincoln, building on arguments made by black abolitionists, exposed Douglas’ history as fiction. “I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln said during a debate with Douglas in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1858. He continued:

I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation.

No matter, the founders of the Confederacy answered: we will craft a new constitution, based on white supremacy. In 1861, the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races”—here ceding Lincoln’s argument—but that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition.”

The North won the war. But the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens. These Reconstruction-era amendments also led to debates over immigration, racial and gender equality, and the limits of citizenship. Under the terms of the 14th Amendment, children of Chinese immigrants born in the United States would be U.S. citizens. Few major political figures talked about Chinese immigrants in favorable terms. Typical was the virulent prejudice expressed by William Higby, a one-time miner and Republican congressman from California. “The Chinese are nothing but a pagan race,” Higby said in 1866. “You cannot make good citizens of them.” And opponents of the 15th Amendment found both African American voting and Chinese citizenship scandalous. Fumed Garrett Davis, a Democratic senator from Kentucky: “I want no negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the white man which our fathers incorporated.”

The most significant statement in this debate was made by a man born into slavery who had sought his own freedom and fought for decades for emancipation, citizenship, and equal rights. In 1869, in front of audiences across the country, Frederick Douglass delivered one of the most important and least read speeches in American political history, urging the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments in the spirit of establishing a “composite nation.” He spoke, he said, “to the question of whether we are the better or the worse for being composed of different races of men.” If nations, which are essential for progress, form from similarity, what of nations like the United States, which are formed out of difference, Native American, African, European, Asian, and every possible mixture, “the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world”?

A statue of Frederick Douglass pictured behind U.S. President Barack Obama at a ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment in Washington, D.C., December 2015

To Republicans like Higby, who objected to Chinese immigration and to birthright citizenship, and to Democrats like Davis, who objected to citizenship and voting rights for anyone other than white men, Douglass offered an impassioned reply. As for the Chinese: “Do you ask, if I would favor such immigration? I answer, I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would.” As for future generations, and future immigrants to the United States, Douglass said, “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.” For Douglass, progress could only come in this new form of a nation, the composite nation. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the sea,” he said, and “all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.” That was Douglass’ new Americanism. It did not prevail.

Emancipation and Reconstruction, the historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois would write in 1935, was “the finest effort to achieve democracy . . . this world had ever seen.” But that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. “We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,” Du Bois wrote bitterly. Douglass’ new Americanism was thus forgotten. So was Du Bois’ reckoning with American history.

NATIONAL HISTORIES

The American Historical Association was founded in 1884—two years after the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote his signal essay, “What Is a Nation?” Nationalism was taking a turn, away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, including in Germany, beginning with the “blood and iron” of Bismarck. A driver of this change was the emergence of mass politics, under whose terms nation-states “depended on the participation of the ordinary citizen to an extent not previously envisaged,” as the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote. That “placed the question of the ‘nation,’ and the citizen’s feelings towards whatever he regarded as his ‘nation,’ ‘nationality’ or other centre of loyalty, at the top of the political agenda.”

This transformation began in the United States in the 1880s, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and with a regime of immigration restriction, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which was passed in 1882. Both betrayed the promises and constitutional guarantees made by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Fighting to realize that promise would be the work of standard-bearers who included Ida B. Wells, who led a campaign against lynching, and Wong Chin Foo, who founded the Chinese Equal Rights League in 1892, insisting, “We claim a common manhood with all other nationalities.”

The uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism.

But the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction. Frederick Jackson Turner drew historians’ attention to the frontier. Others contemplated the challenges of populism and socialism. Progressive-era historians explained the American nation as a product of conflict “between democracy and privilege, the poor versus the rich, the farmers against the monopolists, the workers against the corporations, and, at times, the Free-Soilers against the slaveholders,” as Degler observed. And a great many association presidents, notably Woodrow Wilson, mourned what had come to be called “the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality.

Meanwhile, nationalism changed, beginning in the 1910s and especially in the 1930s. And the uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism. In the United States, nationalism largely took the form of economic protectionism and isolationism. In 1917, the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, opposing U.S. involvement in World War I, began calling for “America first,” and he took the same position in 1938, insisting that “Americans should maintain the traditional policy of our great and independent nation—great largely because it is independent.”

In the years before the United States entered World War II, a fringe even supported Hitler; Charles Coughlin—a priest, near presidential candidate, and wildly popular broadcaster—took to the radio to preach anti-Semitism and admiration for Hitler and the Nazi Party and called on his audience to form a new political party, the Christian Front. In 1939, about 20,000 Americans, some dressed in Nazi uniforms, gathered in Madison Square Garden, decorated with swastikas and American flags, with posters declaring a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” where they denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Hitler, for his part, expressed admiration for the Confederacy and regret that “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.” As one arm of a campaign to widen divisions in the United States and weaken American resolve, Nazi propaganda distributed in the Jim Crow South called for the repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

The “America first” supporter Charles Lindbergh, who, not irrelevantly, had become famous by flying across the Atlantic alone, based his nationalism on geography. “One need only glance at a map to see where our true frontiers lie,” he said in 1939. “What more could we ask than the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Pacific on the west?” (This President Franklin Roosevelt answered in 1940, declaring the dream that the United States was “a lone island,” to be, in fact, a nightmare, “the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”)

In the wake of World War II, American historians wrote the history of the United States as a story of consensus, an unvarying ��liberal tradition in America,” according to the political scientist Louis Hartz, that appeared to stretch forward in time into an unvarying liberal future. Schlesinger, writing in 1949, argued that liberals occupied “the vital center” of American politics. These historians had plenty of blind spots—they were especially blind to the forces of conservatism and fundamentalism—but they nevertheless offered an expansive, liberal account of the history of the American nation and the American people.

The last, best single-volume popular history of the United States written in the twentieth century was Degler’s 1959 book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America: a stunning, sweeping account that, greatly influenced by Du Bois, placed race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of the story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality. Astonishingly, it was Degler’s first book. It was also the last of its kind.

THE DECLINE OF NATIONAL HISTORY

If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.

It had long been clear that nationalism was a contrivance, an artifice, a fiction. After World War II, while U.S. President Harry Truman was helping establish what came to be called “the liberal international order,” internationalists began predicting the end of the nation-state, with the Harvard political scientist Rupert Emerson declaring that “the nation and the nation-state are anachronisms in the atomic age.” By the 1960s, nationalism looked rather worse than an anachronism. Meanwhile, with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of U.S. foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home. “The professional practice of history writing and teaching flourished as the handmaiden of nation-making; the nation provided both support and an appreciative audience,” Bender observed in Rethinking American History in a Global Age in 2002. “Only recently,” he continued, “and because of the uncertain status of the nation-state has it been recognized that history as a professional discipline is part of its own substantive narrative and not at all sufficiently self-conscious about the implications of that circularity.” Since then, historians have only become more self-conscious, to the point of paralysis. If nationalism was a pathology, the thinking went, the writing of national histories was one of its symptoms, just another form of mythmaking.

If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.

Something else was going on, too. Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions. Historical scholarship exploded, and got immeasurably richer and more sophisticated. In a there-goes-the-neighborhood moment, many older historians questioned the value of this scholarship. Degler did not; instead, he contributed to it. Most historians who wrote about race were not white and most historians who wrote about women were not men, but Degler, a white man, was one of two male co-founders of the National Organization for Women and won a Pulitzer in 1972 for a book called Neither Black nor White. Still, he shared the concern expressed by Higham that most new American historical scholarship was “not about the United States but merely in the United States.”

By 1986, when Degler rose from his chair to deliver his address before the American Historical Association, a lot of historians in the United States had begun advocating a kind of historical cosmopolitanism, writing global rather than national history. Degler didn’t have much patience for this. A few years later, after the onset of civil war in Bosnia, the political philosopher Michael Walzer grimly announced that “the tribes have returned.” They had never left. They’d only become harder for historians to see, because they weren’t really looking anymore.

A NEW AMERICAN HISTORY

Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse.

What would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? They might look rather a lot like the composite nationalism imagined by Douglass and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois. They might take as their starting point the description of the American experiment and its challenges offered by Douglass in 1869:

A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.

At the close of the Cold War, some commentators concluded that the American experiment had ended in triumph, that the United States had become all the world. But the American experiment had not in fact ended. A nation founded on revolution and universal rights will forever struggle against chaos and the forces of particularism. A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.

“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They’ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament “American carnage.” They’ll call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They’ll adopt the slogan “America first.” They’ll say they can “make America great again.” They’ll call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.

CORRECTION APPENDED (February 26, 2019)

An earlier version of this article misidentified the U.S. president who began building the liberal international order after World War II. It was Harry Truman, not Franklin Roosevelt.

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

The Family Mechanic

Memories of Town Tire -1965 to 2006

 July 8, 2018

By Stephen Jay Morris

©Scientific Morality

My old neighborhood, which is now geographically labeled, “Miracle Mile North,” was in a quiet suburb adjacent to Beverly Boulevard, a major thoroughfare.  Our house on Martel Avenue was about a mile east of Fairfax Avenue, just south of Beverly. During rush hour, commuters would use Martel as a short cut between Beverly and Wilshire Boulevard to avoid the traffic.   I used to sit on my front lawn and watch all the different vehicles pass by.  I may have been born a voyeur, but I’d play a game with myself, trying to recognize all of the makes of cars that I could.

In the early 60’s there was a preponderance of independent, mom and pop grocery stores.  There were just two large markets in the area, “Marlow’s” on the corner of Hayward and Beverly, and another on La Brea.  This was prior to the advent of the “supermarket.”  My mom didn’t have a driver’s license, so we would either walk or take a bus for groceries.

This part of Los Angeles had a small town ambiance to it. About two blocks west of our house was the northwest corner of Beverly & Gardner, where the closet market to us was.  What was name of this mom and pop store?  What else but “The Beverly & Gardener Market!”  Of course!  What came to be called a “strip mall” occupied this location.  It included that small grocery store, a donut shop, and a shoe repair shop.

It seemed that old European couples owned most of the grocery stores in the area.  I remember walking to the market with my mom, brother and sister.  I didn’t understand why, but strange men would whistle at her.  She was thin with wavy black hair and an average figure.  Whenever they did, she’d just smile and laugh it off.  As soon as we entered the store, the door chime would ring and this old Jewish couple would greet us warmly.  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Morris!” said the vivacious old man.  “What can I get you today?”  He would fetch whatever she wanted without even leaving the cashier area.  I remember ogling the jars of Licorice on the counter.  There were all sorts of flavors like grape, orange, and even green Licorice, each in their respective jars.  They cost just 2 cents a piece!  I remember how our family was always out of milk!  In my fondest reminiscence, I carried the grocery bag home for my mom because I wanted to help her.  I miss that store.  They closed the entire strip mall in 1964.

Back in those days, traditional families formed relationships with specific professionals assisting them throughout their lives. There was the family doctor, dentist, barber, veterinarian, and even the family auto-mechanic.  My dad had a mechanic named Seymour who had a garage on the corner of Oakwood and Fairfax.  He’d take the family car to that garage for tune-ups, oil changes, tire rotations, as well as major automotive needs.  Eventually, Seymour sold his property to a bank and moved to another city.  My dad was stuck with no mechanic.  Until he discovered Town Tire.

Before Town Tire moved to its new location on Gardener and Beverly, it was located at Fuller Avenue and 3rd Street, just a mile away.  In 1965, Town Tire’s owner, Al Hovat, purchased the property and moved to that corner.  The giant mural of a donut above the old donut shop became a giant tire.  Construction crews had gutted all the storefronts and converted them into vehicle work bays.  Each garage was fitted with a hydraulic lift and a deep well to work beneath vehicles.

Town Tire was not just about tires.  They provided service for all automotive needs.  By word of mouth, old and new customers came by the carloads.  It was a perfect location, unlike the previous one on 3rd Street.  All types of people brought their cars to Town Tire:  Orthodox Jews, unemployed actors, Accountants, rock musicians, lawyers, and—ultimately—me!  It was a popular place.  Later there was a competing auto-mechanic across the street, next to the Liberace building at 7461 Beverly.  Eventually that garage became a strip mall.

So, why was this particular auto-mechanic so popular?   For one thing, Al Hovat and his Town Tire crew treated their customers with respect, not potential suckers.  I really think Al had a big heart beneath his rough exterior.  He would bend over backwards to work within your budget.  A big part of his clientele was comprised of poor, elderly Jews, just getting by in small apartments.  He wanted to accommodate everybody.

Al was a short, stout, bespectacled man with curly brown hair that he combed away from his forehead.  The subject never came up—and I never asked—but I think he was Jewish. During all of the decades I knew him, I never saw him out of his uniform.  He was a real working class guy.

I think he might have had ADHD, which translates to Attention, Deficit, and Hyperactive Disorder.  He never sat down; he would be here, then in an instant, there, and then everywhere!  The most popular question you’d hear while waiting was, “Where’s Al?  Have you seen Al?”  He must have worn out 20 pairs of shoes a week!  He was a great “Kibitzer.”  For all you Midwest Goys, that’s Yiddish for some one who is a joker or a kidder.  He liked to tease me about my “jalopies” I’d bring to him to repair.  Upon seeing me, he would say, “Oh, your Rolls Royce broke down today?  Does your Mercedes Benz need a tune up?”  That joke never got old.

My first encounter with him was in 1970.  On the corner of the property was the prominent Town Tire sign with its moving parts, all atop a pole of at least 15 feet tall! There were three swirling tires, powered by electricity, which appeared precariously balanced over the sign! Parked below it were always used cars for sale.  I was 16 years old and didn’t even have a learner’s permit, let alone a driver’s license.  My dad had refused to sign for me because he expected that I would steal the family car!  So one day, I passed by that ubiquitous corner and, lo and behold, I saw this beat up car selling for $300.  It was a 1959 Studebaker Skylark.  Now, that was cheap!  I had some money, but not enough, so I concocted this harebrained scheme:  I approached my neighborhood gang and proposed a deal for us to pool our money, and buy and share the car.  

So, the next day, five of us went to Town Tire to see about the car.  Al came out of his office and asked, “What do you rug rats want?!”  Being the unofficial spokesman, I said, “We want to buy this Studebaker!”  Al broke into laughter, “You want to…Ha! Ha!…buy this…Ha! Ha! Hee! Hee!…CAR?!” After Al settled down, he said, “Hell, no!  If one of you Schmucks should get into an accident, your parents would sue the pants off of me!  Here is my advice to all of you: Graduate high school!  Second:  Get a job! Third: Get off my lot, its closing time!”  Well, I did just what he advised and, 7 years later, I brought him the first car I ever owned: a 1967 Chevy Station Wagon Impala. I parked in front of his office and he came out.  He asked me,  “What do you want me to do with this pile of junk?”  I replied, “I just need basic car maintenance service.”  He asked me, with a straight face, “Why bother? Are you planning to use it in a demolition derby?”  I said, “Just to go to work!”  Al said, “Right!”  He then called out, “Hey, Sal!  Do a service job on this car!”  A young Hispanic kid came out and droved the car into a waiting garage.  Al said to me, Come back at 5 and it will be ready. That was the beginning of a long relationship with Al and his garage.  Over the years, there were never any delays or mistakes; Al ran a tight ship.  All work was guaranteed for free.  There were many more satisfied customers than dissatisfied ones.

Town Tire got two writes-ups in the local press and, for some reason, they won a Cleo award.  Al used to show the award to all his customers, including me.  At the time, I didn’t know what a Cleo was, or what it was for.  But, Al was sure proud of it.  He kept the award on his desk for years!

Every time I walked by the place, I could hear air guns blasting, metal tools falling on the cement floor, and mechanics shouting over all the noise.  It was busy place.  I thought it would last forever.

In the 70’s, Town Tire serviced my ‘67 Chevy Impala, and in the late 70’s and early 80’s, it was my ‘63 Dodge dart.  Finally, in the mid 80’s, it was my ‘73 Gremlin.

Then came the 90’s and the face of the Fairfax District was changing.  Most of the past residents had moved into nursing homes or died of natural causes. The original tenants were gone and most of Al’s customers were coming from far away places.  I had moved out of the area myself, to the Antelope Valley.

It was 1999 and, for some reason I visited Town Tire. There was Al, looking very old. He could barely walk and I could see that his memory was going.  He didn’t remember me.  He was in his 80’s.  I think Al loved his business and worked as long as his body would permit him. Finally, in 2006, he called it quits. When Town Tire closed, a giant banner was hung; it read, “Thank you, L.A.!”  A major era ended on that July day.

Now, the automotive places I go to are all commercial franchises.  I sure miss independent businesses like Town Tire.

One more thing:  I didn’t say much about Al.  I never knew if had a wife, a family, or where he lived.  I didn’t know his political views or religious beliefs. Maybe, it was better that way.

P.S.:  The old site is now a nursery.

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

Europe Edition: Zimbabwe, Emmanuel Macron, Jeff Sessions: Your Wednesday Briefing

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Europe Edition: Zimbabwe, Emmanuel Macron, Jeff Sessions: Your Wednesday Briefing

In one village, he found a lone Shiite cleric who was trying to help. “I’m trying to talk to people about God, give them peace of mind — that is all I can do,” he said. “And pray. One can always pray.”

_____

Photo

Credit Pool photo by Ludovic Marin

• In France, President Emmanuel Macron visited an impoverished suburb and a depressed industrial town, promising investment and seeking to dispel jibes that he is the “president of the rich.”

Mr. Macron, along with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, is expected to attend the United Nations climate conference in Bonn today.

There, energy experts are watching to see whether China steps up its climate ambitions in the face of American retreat. (Sign up here to receive Climate Fwd:, our new newsletter.)

_____

Photo

Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

• “It’s been very epic.”

That was President Trump, assessing his 12-day tour of Asia. As one of our accompanying reporters puts it, he treated the trip as a test of his own charisma and stamina, but it’s unclear what he actually achieved on major issues like trade and North Korea.

Another correspondent notes that, while it’s true that he made no major gaffes, his mixed signals fed a sense that China, not the U.S., calls the shots in the region.

_____

Photo

Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

• In Washington, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a House hearing that he could not recall the details of a campaign adviser’s Russia proposals but that he could recall rejecting a proposed Trump-Putin meeting.

Continue reading the main story

He earned praise from Republicans for ordering career prosecutors to evaluate whether a special counsel should investigate Hillary Clinton, a bid that would shatter norms established after Watergate.

Meanwhile, a firm with ties to President Vladimir Putin’s former boss in the Russian spy service has been employed to protect American diplomatic missions in Russia.

_____

Photo

Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

• Republican senators are struggling to figure out what to do about Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate accused by five women of having sought romance or brute sex with them when they were teenagers.

If he’s elected — and many people in his state are standing behind him — they could expel him from the Senate, an action last taken during the Civil War. (Above, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee holding pictures of Mr. Moore and some of his accusers.)

We’d like to hear from readers for whom the recent wave of sexual harassment accusations have prompted frank discussions with parents or grandparents about changing attitudes across generations.

Business

Photo

Credit The New York Times | Sources: The World Bank; McKinsey & Co. Data is latest available, from 2014.

• The end of cash? Physical currency remains the most popular way to pay for things, but China is among the countries charging into the cashless future. (The map above shows the share of adults who made or received any noncash payment.)

• Three Yale professors are racing against Google, IBM and Intel to build the first quantum computer. “It will solve problems we can’t even imagine right now,” an investor said.

• Op-Ed: Some companies are making a fortune by using personal data gleaned from the internet. They would barely notice a 1 percent tax, but it could make a better world.

Continue reading the main story

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

In the News

Photo

Credit Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

• In Saudi Arabia, the risk of a blowback to the crown prince’s brazen seizure of power is growing. [The New York Times]

• A majority of Australians voted “yes” to same-sex marriage in a nationwide poll, paving the way for its legalization in Parliament. [The New York Times]

• A World Anti-Doping committee found that Russia was still noncompliant with the antidoping code, an infraction that could keep the country out of the Paralympics. [The New York Times]

• A gunman rampaged through a small Northern California town, taking aim at people at an elementary school and six other locations. He killed at least four people before he was fatally shot. [The New York Times]

• Republicans think they’ve found another way to finance their sweeping changes to the U.S. tax structure: repealing the Obamacare requirement that most people have health insurance. [The New York Times]

• The Legion of Christ, a Roman Catholic order, acknowledged that it had established offshore companies in Caribbean tax havens in the past. [Associated Press]

Smarter Living

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

Photo

Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

• For those planning to celebrate Thanksgiving, our cooking team can help. And spicy sweet potatoes are good in any case.

• A link between alcohol and cancer is not nearly as scary as it sounds.

• Can ketone supplements rev up your workout? Maybe, if you can stomach them.

Continue reading the main story

Noteworthy

Photo

Credit Santiago Felipe/Getty Images

• “Utopia,” Björk’s new album, is a love letter to optimism.

• The world of Scrabble is in an uproar over a three-year ban of a top British player investigated for cheating.

• In London’s theaters, our critic found himself watching “the English contemplating the demise of England in a very English way.”

• Christie’s is expecting Leonardo da Vinci’s recently rediscovered “Salvator Mundi” to sell for at least $100 million at auction today.

• Denmark’s national soccer team qualified for the soccer World Cup by routing Ireland, 5-1. The U.S. tied Portugal, 1-1, and Germany drew France, 2-2, in friendlies.

Back Story

Photo

Credit Mark Jay Goebel/Getty Images

“The time has come when man can no longer continue using the land, sea and air as his ‘trash basket,’” a New York Times article said in 1966. “He must find ways to cycle his wastes, both solid and liquid, back into the economy.”

It was one of our first front page articles to address the urgent need to deal with household waste.

The report was based on a National Academy of Sciences study sent to Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House. It came as more cheap, plastic goods were entering the daily lives of Americans — and leaving as garbage.

We have come a long way. Today is the 20th America Recycles Day, a nonprofit initiative.

Last year, 1.9 million Americans participated, organizers said, and 63 million pounds of recyclables were collected.

But there’s much work still to be done. A third of U.S. household waste still ends up in landfills.

Continue reading the main story

Sweden could show the way. In 1975, its recycling rate was about on par with America’s now, but last year, only 0.7 percent of its waste ended up in landfills. Sweden even imports waste — to use as a source of energy.

Here are 10 tips to improve your recycling.

_____

Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online.

This briefing was prepared for the European morning. Browse past briefings here.

We also have briefings timed for the Australian, Asian and American mornings. You can sign up for these and other Times newsletters here.

If photographs appear out of order, please download the updated New York Times app from iTunes or Google Play.

What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes.com.

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[rebeccahpedersen]

More MLS Musings!

TorontoRealtyBlog

Maybe my standards are too high.

Maybe that’s it.  Maybe that’s why we keep coming back to this, every 2-3 weeks, looking at what other people post on MLS.

Today, I’ll blame both the listing agents and the home-owners for these bad photos and MLS descriptions, but we’ll also see some work from bad stagers, and bad photographers too…

Advertising is a funny thing.

Since the dawn of print marketing, people all over the world, in every walk of life, have tried to figure out just what image, lifestyle, graphic, colour, or theme works best to attract customers.

Real estate is no different.

But I have to wonder what the listing agent for this property was thinking when he wrote this:

–

I tell you guys this every single week: you get twenty photos on MLS, and one “feature photo.”

This listing agent didn’t just mail it in with one photo, as you can see from the “1 of 14,” the agent used, well, 14.

But WHY in the world is a half-made bed with a clothes-rack in lieu of a bedroom closet the feature photo for a $700,000 listing?

–

I saw this listing hit MLS earlier in the week, and I was rather impressed.

Not only was I interested to see what a “European Layout” was, but I was also dying to see a 3D bedroom!

Have a look:

So I went to the condo, expecting to see something like this:

But upon stepping into the unit, I realized that this actually represents the fourth dimension.

The third dimension is what we live in now, every day, all of us.

So this “3D Bedroom” was just another crappy condo…

–

So now let me get to a few MLS photos that I just can’t figure out.

In some cases, I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.

In other cases, I can’t figure out why this was the way the listing agent wanted to market the property.

And in most cases, it’s both.

I’ve never been a fan of the attempts to be “artistic” with photos on MLS, and frankly, this staircase photo makes me dizzy, and after trying to figure out whether this is looking up or down, I basically give up and stop looking at the house:

–

This makes no sense to me.

It shows zero floor area.

It makes the room look small.

And most importantly, it looks like the photo was taken from the eye level of somebody passed out face-first on the kitchen island:

–

Remember last week’s game, “Urinal or Sink,” which led to “Bedroom or Kitchen?”

I enjoyed that.

Well how about this one: “Which closet would you rather sleep in?”

Because don’t forget – that door on the right can be removed.

Did anybody say twin single beds??

–

At first glance, this looks like your average, ugly, ornate bathroom.

Have a look, and let me know what you see:

Do you see?

This bathroom has been blessed by the brand-name Gods, just like every spoiled 17-year-old with divorced parents, and a father trying to buy back her love.

This bathroom, which may as well say “Nike,” has tile brought to you by………………

–

Time to put your thinking cap on…

Do you:

a) Run back to Home Depot and buy more of the same flooring b) Use what you had from the job down the street and hope the home owner doesn’t notice?

I know, I know, you’re thinking “Notice what?”

It’s not obvious, but in that photo above, there are two different kinds of flooring.

Right?  RIGHT???

You barely noticed.  Cool.  That just reaffirms that this was the correct decision…

–

Most listing agents don’t bother with “bathroom shots” unless you’re looking at a spa-like, 6-piece in a luxury home.

A 2-piece powder room is rarely photographed for MLS.

But what about when you shoot it once, and then again, but change your angle about 6-degrees?

You’re with me, right?

You’re thinking, “I wasn’t convinced this was ‘the bathroom for me’ after the first photo, but after the second, I’m ready to call it ‘home.’”

–

Who?

Him?

Don’t mind him…

That’s just Eddie.  He’s not really a part of this sale.

And no, I didn’t have the required six seconds to take another photo for MLS, that didn’t have him in it…

–

You know it’s a true fire-sale when they strip the built-in appliances out of the kitchen:

But hey, at least they left the toaster oven!

Grilled Cheese, anyone?

–

Hurry!  Hurry!

Take the photos for this listing!

We have to shoot this house in fifty-six seconds!

Don’t even slow down, stop walking or pause to take that backyard shot!

It’s fine.

People will just have to assume this house is tilted at a 45-degree angle, and thus the photographer did a bang-up job!

–

And last, but certainly not least, I think we’ve found an answer to Toronto’s rental crisis.

Just because you think you can’t put a basement apartment inside 200 square feet, and combine the kitchen with the furnace-room, doesn’t mean you can’t put a basement apartment inside 200 square feet, and combine the kitchen with the furnace room….

Have a great weekend, everybody!

The post More MLS Musings! appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

Originated from http://ift.tt/2yNNaiK

[rebeccahpedersen]

More MLS Musings!

TorontoRealtyBlog

Maybe my standards are too high.

Maybe that’s it.  Maybe that’s why we keep coming back to this, every 2-3 weeks, looking at what other people post on MLS.

Today, I’ll blame both the listing agents and the home-owners for these bad photos and MLS descriptions, but we’ll also see some work from bad stagers, and bad photographers too…

Advertising is a funny thing.

Since the dawn of print marketing, people all over the world, in every walk of life, have tried to figure out just what image, lifestyle, graphic, colour, or theme works best to attract customers.

Real estate is no different.

But I have to wonder what the listing agent for this property was thinking when he wrote this:

–

I tell you guys this every single week: you get twenty photos on MLS, and one “feature photo.”

This listing agent didn’t just mail it in with one photo, as you can see from the “1 of 14,” the agent used, well, 14.

But WHY in the world is a half-made bed with a clothes-rack in lieu of a bedroom closet the feature photo for a $700,000 listing?

–

I saw this listing hit MLS earlier in the week, and I was rather impressed.

Not only was I interested to see what a “European Layout” was, but I was also dying to see a 3D bedroom!

Have a look:

So I went to the condo, expecting to see something like this:

But upon stepping into the unit, I realized that this actually represents the fourth dimension.

The third dimension is what we live in now, every day, all of us.

So this “3D Bedroom” was just another crappy condo…

–

So now let me get to a few MLS photos that I just can’t figure out.

In some cases, I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.

In other cases, I can’t figure out why this was the way the listing agent wanted to market the property.

And in most cases, it’s both.

I’ve never been a fan of the attempts to be “artistic” with photos on MLS, and frankly, this staircase photo makes me dizzy, and after trying to figure out whether this is looking up or down, I basically give up and stop looking at the house:

–

This makes no sense to me.

It shows zero floor area.

It makes the room look small.

And most importantly, it looks like the photo was taken from the eye level of somebody passed out face-first on the kitchen island:

–

Remember last week’s game, “Urinal or Sink,” which led to “Bedroom or Kitchen?”

I enjoyed that.

Well how about this one: “Which closet would you rather sleep in?”

Because don’t forget – that door on the right can be removed.

Did anybody say twin single beds??

–

At first glance, this looks like your average, ugly, ornate bathroom.

Have a look, and let me know what you see:

Do you see?

This bathroom has been blessed by the brand-name Gods, just like every spoiled 17-year-old with divorced parents, and a father trying to buy back her love.

This bathroom, which may as well say “Nike,” has tile brought to you by………………

–

Time to put your thinking cap on…

Do you:

a) Run back to Home Depot and buy more of the same flooring b) Use what you had from the job down the street and hope the home owner doesn’t notice?

I know, I know, you’re thinking “Notice what?”

It’s not obvious, but in that photo above, there are two different kinds of flooring.

Right?  RIGHT???

You barely noticed.  Cool.  That just reaffirms that this was the correct decision…

–

Most listing agents don’t bother with “bathroom shots” unless you’re looking at a spa-like, 6-piece in a luxury home.

A 2-piece powder room is rarely photographed for MLS.

But what about when you shoot it once, and then again, but change your angle about 6-degrees?

You’re with me, right?

You’re thinking, “I wasn’t convinced this was ‘the bathroom for me’ after the first photo, but after the second, I’m ready to call it ‘home.’”

–

Who?

Him?

Don’t mind him…

That’s just Eddie.  He’s not really a part of this sale.

And no, I didn’t have the required six seconds to take another photo for MLS, that didn’t have him in it…

–

You know it’s a true fire-sale when they strip the built-in appliances out of the kitchen:

But hey, at least they left the toaster oven!

Grilled Cheese, anyone?

–

Hurry!  Hurry!

Take the photos for this listing!

We have to shoot this house in fifty-six seconds!

Don’t even slow down, stop walking or pause to take that backyard shot!

It’s fine.

People will just have to assume this house is tilted at a 45-degree angle, and thus the photographer did a bang-up job!

–

And last, but certainly not least, I think we’ve found an answer to Toronto’s rental crisis.

Just because you think you can’t put a basement apartment inside 200 square feet, and combine the kitchen with the furnace-room, doesn’t mean you can’t put a basement apartment inside 200 square feet, and combine the kitchen with the furnace room….

Have a great weekend, everybody!

The post More MLS Musings! appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

Originated from http://ift.tt/2yNNaiK

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

On Baseball: Punishment Falls on Yuli Gurriel, but Not the World Series or the Astros

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/on-baseball-punishment-falls-on-yuli-gurriel-but-not-the-world-series-or-the-astros/

On Baseball: Punishment Falls on Yuli Gurriel, but Not the World Series or the Astros

“Obviously,” Manfred said, “World Series games are different than regular-season games.”

Among the other reasons Manfred cited for delaying the suspension, this stands out: “I felt it was unfair to punish the other 24 players on the Astros roster,” he said. “I wanted the burden of this discipline to fall primarily on the wrongdoer.”

Denying Gurriel a chance to help his team in the World Series would have severely impacted him. It also would have allowed a fleeting gesture — an ugly one, for sure, but one that was done off the field and did not appear to be premediated — to unduly influence the World Series.

And yet, given that reasoning by Manfred, these tough words from him on Saturday seem somewhat contradictory: “There is no place in our game for the behavior or any behavior like the behavior we witnessed last night.”

However, Manfred was right in saying that World Series games are far more significant than a midseason game for the Oakland A’s or the Toronto Blue Jays. Maybe that sounds crass, but there is no disputing it. And while Manfred would not declare five games as the new standard for intolerant words or actions during a season — he said he would deal with each situation on its own merits — the penalty for Gurriel does exceed all recent punishments, including the three-game ban given to Yunel Escobar, then of Toronto, for wearing eye black inscribed with an anti-gay slur in 2012.

Gurriel, for his part, said after Friday’s game that he was surprised by the furor over his gesture. He mentioned his experiences in Japan — he played for the Yokohama BayStars in 2014 — and said that he respected Japanese people.

“I did not want to offend anybody,” he said through an interpreter.

As for his characterization of Darvish as a “chinito,” a word that can be demeaning to Asians, Gurriel said that in Cuba, the term applies to anyone who is Asian, not just to Japanese people.

Photo

Darvish after Gurriel’s home run. He lasted only one and two-thirds innings in Game 3, allowing four runs. Credit Tannen Maury/European Pressphoto Agency

Even so, he added that he understood he was wrong. In a statement on Saturday, Gurriel apologized to Darvish and called his gesture “indefensible.”

Continue reading the main story

“We support everything that’s right about this game, and we’ll move forward, if everyone will allow us to,” Astros Manager A. J. Hinch said. “Knowing Yuli, knowing what he will do to convince everyone that this incident was not in his heart, will be key.”

Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts, who was born in Japan and whose mother is Japanese, said he approved of the way Manfred handled the incident. Hinch put Gurriel, who is batting .340 in the postseason, in the No. 5 spot in the Astros’ order for Game 4 on Saturday night.

Gurriel has delivered on his promise since the Astros signed him for five years and $47.5 million after he defected last year. He made a smooth transition from third to first base while batting .299 with 18 homers, 75 runs batted in and 43 doubles this season.

“He’s a great hitter,” said Jose Altuve, the Astros’ star second baseman, “one of the best I’ve ever seen, to be honest with you.”

It was, officially, Gurriel’s rookie season. But at 33 years old, after playing professionally for 15 seasons in Cuba and Japan, Gurriel is a rookie in name only. He comes from a prominent baseball family in Cuba, and spent most of his prime years there.

“I could have left at 22 or something like other players and spent their entire careers here and maybe that would have been better,” Gurriel said in Spanish at a workout in Los Angeles on Monday. “But no, I don’t regret it. I had the chance to play my entire life in Cuba and enjoy those great moments, and the chance to play in Japan. God wanted me to be here in this moment now, and I’m enjoying this.”

The Astros have such a deep offense that their leader in runs batted in, Marwin Gonzalez, batted eighth in Game 3. That suits Gurriel, who said he felt pressure to carry his Cuban teams but does not have the same feeling here.

“In Cuba, if I didn’t hit, I lost,” he said. “If I did hit, it was normal and what I was supposed to do. So it was really hard to please people. It’s been different here in this lineup.”

At the same group interview in which he made those comments, Gurriel was asked a question by a Japanese reporter. He answered with a few words in Japanese before continuing in Spanish.

“I identified a lot with the Japanese public,” Gurriel said. “It was a really great experience.”

Continue reading the main story

Yet with one gesture on Friday, Gurriel turned what should have been an experience to celebrate into something much different. And left Manfred to untangle it.

Continue reading the main story

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