#part of the reason is that i also have a half white half apache + native latino parent so it’d just be easier on me

[fatglrlfall]

thinking changing buggie’s heritage a bit. i might just have her mom be the arawakan one while her dad is half apache half white…smile. so her mom would be from cuba but her dad is born in new york and he meets her mom when her mom immigrates to new york. then when they have buggie they move to maryland because it’s cheaper to raise a large family there than new york. yeah

[komkommertijd]

F1 2020 Grid as German rap songs

Since the 2020 season has come to an end, I thought it might be a good idea to finally share this thing that I’ve been working on since June. I have no idea as to why or how I had this idea, but I’m sure I’m not the first one to do this, anyway. I’m sorry to all my fellow Germans in advance <3

Disclaimer: I translated all of the lyrics myself so some things might not be completely accurate, for which I can only apologize. I do not agree with the way some rappers portray women, so I made sure to steer clear from those lyrics.

(post under the cut because it got kinda very long whoops)

Lewis - Vintage (RIN)

Oh Lord, wo soll das Ganze enden? Fahr' so schnell, ich wechsel' jede Woche Bremsen

[Oh Lord, where is this supposed to end? Driving so fast, I’m changing brakes every week]

It’s a song about being a champion, living a luxury life, nice clothes, and well...driving fast cars. Any more questions? Rin is one of my favorite German rap artists, so I just had to include his songs, and this one makes you feel like a real badass, just like our king Lewis 😌

Valtteri - In meinem Benz (AK Ausserkontrolle, Bonez MC)

Du siehst mich im Benz sitzen, so wie Lewis Hamilton

[You see me sitting in a Benz, just like Lewis Hamilton]

It’s kind of obvious why I chose that song, right? Other than that specific line there are some more parts about how much the rapper apparently loves his Mercedes and this song just screamed Valtteri to me.

Charles - NENENE (Fero47)

Sitze bald in roten Ferrari Geben Gas in der Hood Ruf' ich danach, "C'est la vie!"

[I’ll soon sit in a red Ferrari Rev up in my hood Shouting “C’est la vie!” afterward]

Ignoring the entire part about Monte Carlo and all the French words, this specific part just always reminds me of Charles when I listen to the song. More badass vibes but less seriously so because I can’t take Fero’s voice that serious at all, which fits Charles.

Sebastian - Ferrari (Eno, MERO)

Roter Ferrari Ich gebe Gas in einem Ferrari Roter Ferrari Yeah, ich sitze tief in einem Ferrari

[Red Ferrari I rev up in a red Ferrari Red Ferrari Yeah, I’m sitting deep inside a Ferrari]

There’s a part about “rolling with [a] bro in a white Mercedes” and my brain said Sewis rights. Other than that, this is once again a rather obvious choice, if not all that up to date anymore. Some lines about racing on the German highway, so of course I had to go for Sebastian with this one.

Max - Fame (Apache207)

Die Rapszene ist nur ein Affenzirkus In dem kleine Kinder gern mit Waffen hantieren Ich steh', wo ich steh', weil ich bin, wer ich bin Und nicht weil hier irgendjemand Apache platziert

[The rap scene is a madhouse Where little kids like to make use of guns I stand where I stand because I am who I am And not because someone places Apache]

This simply gives me Max vibes, I don’t have much more to say as an explanation. It just feels right, with criticism towards mentally “weaker” individuals and the confidence in making a name for oneself based on own achievements and hard work. Also, Apache has become a rather popular musician in the past year(s) (especially to obnoxious 5th graders, all tea no shade), which is just...Max, I won’t elaborate.

Alex - HONDA (Ansu)

Hold on, kommt was Schnell – Konter Dreamer, besonders – Willy Wonka Auto – Honda

[Hold on, there’s something coming Fast - Counterattack Dreamer, special - Willy Wonka Car - Honda]

I mean, it’s a song about a Honda driver? I struggled quite a bit with finding a song for Alex, but when I first listened to this song, my mind threw his name at me in blinking neon letters, so this is the vibe we’re going with - a funky fast Honda driver <3 (PS: I have no clue what the Willy Wonka thing is about but....why not)

Carlos - Habibi (Casar)

Sie schreibt: "Habibi", denn sie vermisst mich Ich fahre weit davon mit mein'n Hermanos

[She texts me “Habibi” because she misses me I drive far away with my hermanos]

I can only listen to the word “hermanos” so many times without my mind associating it with Carlos, so this one was a rather obvious choice for me as well. Also, there are some parts about Spain in this song so I had to be lame and do the obvious with this one.

Lando - 500 PS (Bonez MC, RAF Camora)

Ich drück' aufs Gas, hör' die 500 PS Fahren durch die Stadt, GTA Los Angeles

[I step on the gas, hear the 500 HP Cruising through the city, GTA Los Angeles]

This one’s a solid mainstream German rap song (not that I’d call Lando a mainstream person), liked to some extent by most people, and it gets you moving, which reminds me a lot of Lando. Cars and mentions of a video game make for a hit and Lando unites just that in person as well.

Daniel - Emotions 2.0 (Ufo361, Céline)

Baby, nimm einen Schluck Dom P. für die Emotions Ich erhöhe deine Dosis So viel Schmuck Mehr Drip als ein Ocean

[Baby take a sip Dom P for the emotions I’m increasing your dosage So much jewelry More drip than an ocean]

A bittersweet love song with rich boy summer vibes and one of my favorite German songs to be released this year, in fact, it’s my most listened to song on my phone, make for a combination that just screams Daniel to me. This song hits different when driving into the sunset in a fancy car or when biking through town at 1:30 am on three cans of Red Bull (believe me, I tried), and always reminds me of better times. It’s the ideal song to sing and rap along to, so that matches Daniel just fine.

Esteban - Einsneunzig (Brown-Eyes White Boy)

Bin fast einsneunzig, stell' mich auf die Bündel, das' ein Weltrekord Lass' die Zeit Revue passier'n, selbe Jungs und selber Ort

[I’m almost 1.90, stand on a wad of cash, that’s a world record Let’s recall the past, same guys and same place]

1.90 meters as a reference to Esteban’s height, obviously, simply made sense to me, once again. The second line reminds me of his feud with Pierre, so I had to choose this song. It’s better than Ratten im Hof (rats in the yard), and this reminds me of a wannabe gangster, which just screams Esteban to me, I’m sorry <3

Pierre - DAS RENNEN (RIN)

Ich hoff', eines Tages, wir gewinn'n das Rennen Wie bei Red Dead Redemption Irgendwann der Letzte wie Shanks Spinner Rims glänzen

[I hope one day we win the race Just like in Red Dead Redemption One day the last like Shanks Spinner rims are shining]

I know no one will believe this story but I started working on this post like half a year ago and I chose that song for Pierre back then and uhm, manifestation worked, I guess? Once again, I’m a big fan of Rin’s music, so choosing this song for Pierre is a bit like selfcare. The lyrics mention changing the world and well, so far Pierre has as least changed my world 😌

Daniil - One Night Stand (Capital Bra)

Ty moja ljubimaja Takaja diwnaja, krasiwaja-ja Sprawjedliwaja, njepobjedimaja Ty moja-ja, Baby, ty moja-ja

[You are my darling Such a wondeful, beauty Fair, invincible You’re mine baby, you’re mine]

I really hope I got that translation more or less right but other than that, I didn’t simply choose that song based on the Russian part. It’s a song we used to listen to a lot a few years ago and one of those from the days where Capital Bra was famous but less so than he is today. It reminds me of simpler times and it’s a pretty vibey song that, if you allow it to, draws you in and makes you dance. I have a soft spot for Daniil and the song reminds me a bit of him.

Lance - Bronx (Veysel)

Du musst doppelt zahlen, deshalb krieg' ich es umsonst Audemars, Yves Saint Laurent, eine Villa irgendwo Audemars, Yves Saint Laurent, ein paar Villen irgendwo

[You have to pay double that’s why I get it for free Audemars, Yves Saint Laurent, a mansion somewhere Audemars, Yves Saint Laurent, a few mansions somewhere]

This is a song that you have to listen to on high volume in a fast car, one that once again has really badass vibes. It’s nice to rap along to and hard not to move to. The rich boy vibes in the chorus that I’ve included in this post are pretty inevitable and logically, I had to associate that with Lance. When I turn this song on, everyone enjoys it, and I think Lance deserves to evoke that emotion in everyone as well.

Sergio - AVENTADOR (Dardan, Eno, Noah)

Roll' im Aventador Ich fahr' grad vor Gebe Gas, sag': "¡Adiós!"

[Roll in an Aventador I hit the road Step on the gas, say “¡Adiós!”]

I mean yeah, I could have chosen that song only because of the Adiós but that’s a bit lame even for me. Instead, the entire fast car vibe reminded me a lot of Checo. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for him and this year he once again showed people ([coughs] my brother) that he’s been severely underestimated. So stepping on the gas and outpacing everyone else felt like the right vibe.

Kimi - Sorry Not Sorry (Monet192, Takt32, badmómzjay)

Was du für Karriere machst, mach' ich als Hobby Was du für Probleme hast, interessiert keinen

[What you made your career, I do as a hobby What problems you have, no one cares]

The title itself embodies Kimi and so does the entire song. The not giving a shit vibe, paired with the mention of the hobby thing as an indirect reference to the famous Kimi quote about seeing his job more as a hobby, are just 100% Kimi. I really couldn’t have found a better song for him. 

Antonio - Maserati (RAF Camora)

Capo dei capi Trip noch im Alfa, doch bald Maserati

[Capo dei capi Trip still in an Alfa but soon in a Maserati]

I did very much not choose the song because “capo dei capi” (the boss of bosses) is a mafia related thing, but because of the Alfa part, duh. Roadtrips in an Alfa along the Adriatic coast are cool and all but a Maserati is obviously the main goal, and that reminds me of Antonio quite a lot ~for some reason~. The entire part about making it far in life without a “serious” job is just very F1, so the vibes are there. Happy very belated birthday Toni <3

Romain - HOCH (CRO)

Alles holt dich down, lass es einfach los Und die Dinge unter dir sind gar nicht mehr so groß Ich schau' nach oben und auf einmal geht's hoch

[Everything drags you down, just let it go And the things below you are not as big anymore I look up and suddenly it goes upwards]

This song is just very peaceful and calms my mind when I listen to it, which radiates the same comforting vibe as Romain. The topic of rising despite things dragging you down are a very prominent topic here and reminded me a lot of him, especially with him leaving Haas and everything around that. It just feels nice to listen to a bit of an uplifting song once in a while, and this one does it in a way that still allows you to feel calm and safe, which is something I associate with Romain a lot.

Kevin - Vorbei (Nico Rosseburg, Sierra Kidd)

Sag mir bitte, wie passe ich die Zeit? Der Augenblick war schön, doch es ist vorbei

[Please tell me, how do I pass the time? The moment was nice but now it’s over]

With Kevin leaving F1, I had to go for this song for him. It’s a bit more of a sad topic (so am I with the knowledge of him not being there next year) but without making the entire thing sound melancholic. I only really learned to appreciate Kevin this year and I’ll miss having him around, so this song kind of fits that idea for me.

George - 20 Zoll MAE (Celo&Abdi, Bonez MC)

Ich fahr' mit Schrittgeschwindigkeit, so wie ein Don Hättest gerne meine Felgen, aber wirst sie nicht bekommen

[I drive at walking pace like a Don You’d like to have my rims but won’t get them]

Making this solely about driving at walking pace would be a bit mean but there’s a part in the song soon after about looking beautiful in a Mercedes, so that’s pretty much George. The song just carries that fun vibe and the subtle (not really) flex, which makes it great to listen to if you want to get in a happier mood. It’s a song about Mercedes rims, of course I had to choose George 😔

Nicholas - Standard (KitschKrieg, SFR, Trettmann, Gzuz, Gringo, Ufo361)

Treff' mich in Miami, fliege nur noch First-Class Nur noch unterwegs, kriege Heimweh

[Meet me in Miami, only flying first class anymore Only on the road anymore, getting homesick]

More ~rich boy vibes~ and a song that has been playing what feels like 24/7 on MTV Germany the last two years. It got so bad that some people around me still reply in the trademark Gzuz voice when someone uses the word “standard”. Anyway, I associate this song with Nicholas because just like KitschKrieg did with their first “own” song, Nicholas has joined the game and left an impression on everyone, in one way or another, and I’m willing to see/hear more of that :)

[gegenji]

Always Looking for RP - Chachanji Gegenji (Shadowbringers)

General Information ––––

NAME: Chachanji Gegenji NICKNAMES: Chachan, Chanchan, Chach, Chachi, Chan, Cha, Chanji, Bunchan, Chagenji, “Champion” Chachan, and Mallet Masher AGE: 19 RACE: Lalafell - Dunesfolk GENDER: Male SEXUALITY: Heterosexual MARITAL STATUS: Single SERVER: Balmung

Physical Appearance ––––

HAIR: Green with a snowy white patch. Frosting is not dye, but caused due to time spent in training and meditation in an area of highly positive-aspected aether. EYES: Violet, with a slight mirror-y sheen. Effect also caused by training mentioned above. HEIGHT: 2'10" BUILD: Short, stocky. General Lalafellin build but with broader shoulders, bulkier arms and legs, and a bit of visible muscle definition (though he often tries to hide it). Endomorphic musculature. DISTINGUISHING MARKS: Light dusting of freckles over cheeks and shoulders, burly physique, forehead stone with the family seal engraved in it. COMMON ACCESSORIES: Cactuar earring, his (very large) smithing hammer, a worn bokken, various small smithing tools, a pouch full of Yellow Drops, satchel of jerky, canteen of sweetwater.

Personal –––-

PROFESSION: Doman Blacksmith, Armorsmith, and Leatherworker. Seneschal of House Dentra (minor Ul’dahn noble house and smelting guild), Free Paladin of Ul'dah, and Samurai-in-Training. HOBBIES: Reading storybooks, chocobo riding, Triple Triad (both playing and just collecting cards) LANGUAGES: Eorzean, Doman/Hingan, little bit of sign language. RESIDENCE: Usagenji Ironworks (Goblet Ward 11, Plot 15)

Traits –––-

extroverted / introverted / in between disorganized / organized / in between close minded / open-minded / in between calm / anxious / in between disagreeable / agreeable / in between cautious / reckless / in between patient / impatient / in between outspoken / reserved / in between leader / follower / in between empathetic / unemphatic / in between optimistic / pessimistic / in between traditional / modern / in between hard-working / lazy / in between cultured / uncultured / in between loyal / disloyal / in between faithful / unfaithful / in between

Additional Information –––-

SMOKING HABIT: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess DRUGS: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess ALCOHOL: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess

Possible Hooks –––-

Highly Skilled Gegenji Smith - Member of the Gegenji family, which has some fame around Yanxia, Chachanji is extremely skilled at his craft. While he focuses mainly on crafting armor to protect others, he is also able to craft tools, perform all sorts of repairs and maintenance and - should he be properly swayed and convinced to do so - craft very powerful weaponry.

(It should be noted that due to his pacifistic nature, getting him to make or improve weaponry will require a high degree of trust with the individual.)

Seneschal of House Dentra - Through a strange rite of initiation, Chachanji is now the current head of a minor Ul’dahn noble house. House Dentra is most notable for also being the owner of a Smelting Guild, owning various facilities and mines scattered across Eorzea. They also help staff the satellite facility “Three Ingot Outlet” (named after the aforementioned initiation) that opens during the Sultana’s Breath Shopping Arcade.

Mr. Eorzea/”Champion” Chachan - Chachanji has been crowned the victor in two competitions - the Mr. Eorzea competition and the Grindstone. While he has only won each once, these victories somehow remain decently well known - likely due to how much it flusters him - with the latter in no small part due to the sweetwater and fruit juice drink named after him at the Quicksand. Despite this he still tends to pop by the Grindstone itself now and then as either a spectator or a participant for training purposes.

Free Paladin of Ul’dah - While he doesn’t directly work with the Sultansworn, Chachanji has been ordained a proper Free Paladin of Ul’dah by one Coatleque Crofte. He does often take up various levequests to help people under that title, and - more commonly - serves as a regular resource for the Sultansworn to have their regalia repaired and refitted. He also assists the Flames in a similar capacity, so anyone with connections with either group might have seen or heard of the little smith.

Source or First - Chachan is currently on the Source but I do have plans in mind for Chachan to end up stuck on the First thanks to the antics of a Pixie named Gria Gai - and possibly need of help and/or a way back home! When it happens is still up in the air (and probably can be shifted around if needed), but it does mean Chachan could potentially encountered in either Shard. And even if Chachan is still on the Source, he has a Reflection on the First that is still plenty available to be interacted with.

What I’m Looking for ––––

Friends - Chachan is always one to make new friends, even if they seem the sort that most might not give a fair shake to. From Garleans to half-voidsent, if you seem like a decent enough person, he’ll probably be willing to at least try!

Customers - As a skilled smith, it’s nice to actually have Chachan doing his job via RP rather than just saying he does. This extends from armorcraft to repair to possibly even serving a potential source of work at one of House Dentra’s facilities or mines.

Helping People - Chachan likes trying to help people out, so whether for one-shots or in longer arcs, getting to have the little guy help out someone in need would be pretty neat. Just lemme know what the general idea is and we can see if the floofy-haired dork can help out in it!

RP in General - Slice of life, RP events, arcs. Basically I’m just looking to interact more with the various interesting people, places, and occurrences that take place in the world of FFXIV! It’s part of my goal in Shadowbringers to really get Chachan out there a lot more.

OOCly, I am ––––

A contract programmer who is free most evenings, and frequently looking for someone to RP with, just hang out, or even go flail around in Overwatch. Most of my evenings and weekends tend to be open, so I’m looking to fill them with SOCIAL ACTIVITIES.

I will warn up front that I’m the sort that doesn’t like to idle around too much, however. So, if I don’t have anything planned for the day, I’ll often try to entertain myself doing something - whether it be leveling Jobs or Trusts or what-have-you. The thing to keep in mind is that these are usually just my way to waste time, and I would often prefer to do something like RP instead! So please feel free to poke me via /tells or Discord or whatever, even if it looks like I’m busy. I will definitely let you know if I am, but more likely I’ll totally drop whatever I’m doing for something far more fun - like RPing with you!

As for the RP itself... I’m open to try most things within reason. Overly dark or violent themes will likely need to be okayed first (I’m not against them but Chachan’s a cheerful, friendly, gentle sort and that can clash with very gritty stories sometimes!), but I’m willing to give a lot of more lore-bendy ideas and plots a shot if you can sell me on it! I am also open for RP/chatting both in-game proper as well as over Discord (Hamelin#0069).

Additional Plot Hook: Gojirafell ––––

Chachanji - due to a sort of monkey’s paw situation involving a strange snake oil salesman and a modified Gobbielixir potion - has gained the ability to pull an Apache Chief or Ultraman and become quite large. How large is dependent on how much aether he intakes - and thus something he has to watch out for. Overhealing, anything with ether-like properties, and even the aether that Primals use when they seek to temper (which oddly enough makes him immune to that effect) will cause this to happen whether he likes it or not. As such, he tries to avoid situations where the very large cat might be let out of the bag.

This is kept under a Read More mostly because it is a Plot Hook that could fall outside people’s comfort zones where it comes to lore-bending and personal head-canons. As such, it’s something that only will be a Thing in situations where it is clearly identified that it is being used and, more importantly, that everyone involved is okay with it. Otherwise, it will rarely - if ever - be directly alluded to or even referenced. After all, it’s something Chachan would be trying to keep secret about in either case!

As for how someone might come across this odd trait, the events of his trip to Kugane - the rescue of the sinking ship specifically - resulted in a drunken captain and crew spouting tales of a sea giant that rescued them. These were overheard by a Kugane writer and have become the basis of a series of Doman stories and picture books. Not to mention the events of the recently completed Kyodai Hero arc could provide further ways!

Or we could probably manage to manufacture a scene where the secret slips - either just slip of the tongue or witnessing the Gojirafell himself! Especially for any First RP as the Pixie that abducted him is well aware of his ability and gets an absolute kick out of messing with him with it. Both to embarrass him and to glamour his outfit to show off her burgeoning fashion sense on such a sizable canvas (Yes, she takes some cues from Tomoyo from Cardcaptor Sakura)!

[claudia1829things]

"FORT APACHE" (1948) Review

"FORT APACHE" (1948) Review Between 1948 and 1950, director John Ford made three Westerns that many regard as his "cavalry trilogy". All three films centered on the U.S. Army Cavalry in the post-Civil War West. More importantly, all three movies were based upon short stories written by American Western author, James Warner Bellah.

The first film in Ford's "cavalry trilogy" was "FORT APACHE" released in 1948. Starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda, the movie was inspired by Bellah's 1947 Saturday Evening Post short story called "Massacre". Bellah used the Little Bighorn and Fetterman Fight battles as historical backdrop. The movie began with the arrival of three characters to the U.S. Army post, Fort Apache, in the post-Civil War Arizona Territory - a rigid and egocentric Army officer named Lieutenant Owen Thursday; his daughter Philadelphia Thursday; and a recent West Point graduate named Second Lieutenant Michael O'Rourke, who also happened to be the son of the regiment's first sergeant. The regiment's first officer, Captain Kirby York, and everyone else struggle to adjust to the martinet style of Thursday. Worse, young Lieutenant O'Rourke and Philadelphia become romantically interested each other. But since O'Rourke is the son of a sergeant, the snobbish Thursday does not regard him as a "gentleman" and is against a romance between the pair. But Thursday's command style, the budding romance and other minor events at Fort Apache take a back seat when the regiment is faced with a potential unrest from the local Apaches, due to their conflict with a corrupt Indian agent named Silas Meacham. Thursday's command and his willingness to adapt to military command on the frontier is tested when he finds himself caught between the Meacham's penchant for corruption and the Apaches' anger and desire for justice. "FORT APACHE" proved to be one of the first Hollywood films to portray a sympathetic view of Native Americans. This is surprising, considering that Bellah's view of the Native Americans in his story is not sympathetic and rather racist. For reasons I do not know, Ford decided to change the story's negative portrayal of the Apaches, via screenwriter Frank S. Nugent's script. Although Ford and Nugent did not focus upon how most of the other characters regarded the Apaches, they did spotlight on at least three of them - Captain Kirby York, Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Thursday, and Captain Sam Collingwood. Both Thursday and Collingwood seemed to share the same negative views of the Apaches, although the latter does not underestimate their combat skills. York seemed a lot more open-minded and sympathetic toward the Apaches' desire to maintain their lives in peace without the U.S. government breathing down their backs. In the case of "FORT APACHE", York's views seemed to have won out . . . for the moment. As much as I enjoyed "FORT APACHE", I must admit that I was frustrated that it took so long for it to begin exploring its main narrative regarding the Apaches and Meachum. The movie's first half spent most of its time on three subplots. One of them featured the clash between Thursday and the men under his command. The second featured the budding romance between Philadelphia Thursday and Second Lieutenant O'Rourke. Do not get me wrong. And the third featured scenes of the day-to-day activities of the fort's enlisted men and non-commission officers. I must admit that I found the last subplot somewhat uninteresting and felt they dragged the movie's narrative. I had no problems with the Philadelphia-Michael romance, since it added a bit of romance to the movie's plot and played a major role in Lieutenant-Colonel Thursday's characterization. And naturally the York-Thursday conflict played an important role in the film's plot. The ironic thing about "FORT APACHE" is that the plot line regarding the Apaches does not come to the fore until halfway into the film. Due to this plot structure, I found myself wondering about the film's main narrative. What exactly is "FORT APACHE" about? Worse, the fact that the Apache story arc does not really come to fore until the second half, almost making the film seem schizophrenic. There were plenty of moments in the first half that led me to wonder if director John Ford had become too caught up in exploring mid-to-late 19th century military life on the frontier. Many have claimed that "FORT APACHE" is not specifically about life at a 19th century Army post in the Old West or the U.S. government's relations with the Apaches. It is about the conflict between the two main characters - Captain Kirby York and Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Thursday. In other words, one of the movie's subplots might actually be its main plot. Both York and Thursday were Civil War veterans who seemed to have conflicting ideas on how to command a U.S. Army post in the 19th century West and deal with the conflict between the American white settlers and the Apaches, trying to defend their homeland. Captain York had expected to become Fort Apache's new commander, following the departure of the previous one. Instead, the post's command was given to Colonel Thursday, an arrogant and priggish officer with no experience with the West or Native Americans. What makes the situation even more ironic is that while York had wanted command of Fort Apache, Thursday is both disappointed and embittered that the Army had posted him to this new assignment. The problem I have with this theory is that movie did not spend enough time on the York-Thursday conflict for me to accept it. Thursday seemed to come into conflict with a good number of other characters - especially the O'Rourke men and his old friend Captain Sam Collingwood. York and Thursday eventually clashed over the Apaches' conflict with Silas Meacham. And considering that a great deal of the movie's first half focused on the day-to-day life on a frontier Army post and the Philadelphia-Michael romance, I can only conclude that I found "FORT APACHE" a slightly schizophrenic film. Despite this, I rather enjoyed "FORT APACHE". Well . . . I enjoyed parts of the first half and definitely the second half. While I found some of Ford's exploration of life at a 19th century Army post rather charming, I found the movie's portrayal of the entire Apaches-Meachum conflict intriguing, surprising and very well made. Instead of the usual Hollywood "white men v. Indians"schtick, Ford explored the damaging effects of U.S. policies against Native Americans. This was especially apparent in the situation regarding Silas Meacham. Ford and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent made it clear that both Captain York and Lieutenant-Colonel Thursday regarded Meachum as a dishonorable and corrupt man, whose greed had led to great unrest among the Apaches. And yet . . . whereas York was willing to treat the Apaches with honor and consider getting rid of Meachum, Thursday's rigid interpretation of Army regulations and arrogant prejudice led him to dismiss the Apaches's protests and support Meachum's activities because the latter was a U.S. government agent . . . and white. Worse, Thursday decided to ignore York's warnings and use this situation as an excuse for military glory and order his regiment into battle on Cochise's terms - a direct (and suicidal) charge into the hills. U.S. policy in the Old West at its worst. God only knows how many times a similar action had occurred throughout history. I might be wrong, but I suspect that "FORT APACHE" was the Hollywood film that opened the gates to film criticism of American imperialism in the West, especially the treatment of Native Americans. Another aspect of "FORT APACHE" that I truly enjoyed was Archie Stout's cinematography. What can I say? His black-and-white photography of Monument Valley, Utah and Simi Hills, California were outstanding, as shown below:

Thanks to Ford's direction and Jack Murray's editing, "FORT APACHE" maintained a lively pace that did not threatened to drag the movie. More importantly, the combination of their work produced a superb sequence that featured the regiment's doomed assault on Cochise's warriors. Richard Hageman's score served the movie rather well. Yet, I must admit that I do not have any real memories of it. As for film's costumes . . . I do not believe a particular designer was responsible for them. In fact, they looked as if they had come straight from a studio costume warehouse. I found this disappointing, especially for the movie's female characters. "FORT APACHE" featured some performances that I found solid and competent. Veteran actors like Dick Foran, Victor McLaglen and Jack Pennick gave amusing performances as the regiment's aging NCOs (non-commissioned officers). Guy Kibbee was equally amusing as the post's surgeon Captain Wilkens. Pedro Armendáriz was equally competent as the more professional Sergeant Beaufort, who was a former Confederate. Grant Withers was appropriately slimy as the corrupt Silas Meachum. Miguel Inclán gave a dignified performance as the outraged Apache chieftain Cochise. The movie also featured solid performances from Anna Lee and Irene Rich. John Agar's portrayal of the young Michael O'Rourke did not exactly rock my boat. But I thought he was pretty competent. I read somewhere that Ford was not that impressed by Shirley Temple as an actress. Perhaps he had never seen her in the 1947 comedy, "THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBYSOXER". Her character in that film was more worthy of her acting skills than the charming, yet bland Philadelphia Thursday. John Wayne also gave a solid performance as Captain Kirby York. But I did not find his character particularly interesting, until the movie's last half hour. I only found three performances interesting. One came from George O'Brien, who portrayed Thursday's old friend, Captain Sam Collingwood. I thought O'Brien did a great job in portraying a man who found himself taken aback by an old friend's chilly demeanor and arrogance. Ward Bond was equally impressive as Sergeant Major Michael O'Rourke, the senior NCO on the post who has to struggle to contain his resentment of Thursday's class prejudices against his son. But for me, the real star of this movie was Henry Fonda as the narrow-minded and arrogant Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Thursday. I thought he gave a very brilliant and fascinating portrayal of a very complicated man. Thursday was not the one-note arrogant prig that he seemed on paper. He had his virtues. However, Fonda did an excellent job in conveying how Thursday's flaws tend to overwhelm his flaws at the worst possible moment. I am amazed that Fonda never received an Oscar nomination for this superb performance. How can I say this? I do believe that "FORT APACHE" had some problems. I found the movie slightly slightly schizophrenic due to its heavy emphasis on daily life on a frontier Army post in the first half. In fact, the movie's first half is a little problematic to me. But once the movie shifted toward the conflict regarding the Apaches and a corrupt Indian agent, Ford's direction and Frank S. Nugent's screenplay breathed life into it. The movie also benefited from a first-rate cast led by John Wayne and Henry Fonda. I must admit that I feel "FORT APACHE" might be a little overrated. But I cannot deny that it is a damn good movie.

[drantlers]

Jonah Hex was born to Woodson and Virginia Hex. Woodson Hex was a comic book father, meaning he was either a saint, abusive, or dead. Woodson Hex I as all in on abusive. We’re talking 1800s abusive, where beating your kids and teaching them to murder wasn’t even considered problematic yet. This alcoholic did the staples of violence, insults, malnourishment, and spousal abuse. A true archetypal bad dad. A sort of 1800s Deathstroke.

13 year old Jonah Hex was sold to an Apache tribe in 1851. The wiki indicates that Woodson did this to get safe passage for him and his wife, a transaction so wild that I’m not even sure how to research the plausibility of it. Jonah was worked as a slave for two years. At the age of 15 he saved the chief from a Puma. Apparently the chief then adopted Jonah as a son for the comically short period of less than a year. See, Jonah’s new half-brother Noh-Tante fucking hated Jonah Hex. Partly because he and Jonah were rivals for the affection of a girl named White Fawn, partly because Jonah Hex has never passed a vibe check in his entire life.

During a manhood ritual, Noh Tante betrays Jonah Hex, leaving him for dead with an enemy tribe, the Kiowa. I have no clue how much research the writers did when writing this, but as these comics were written in the 60s and 70s I’m going to assume somewhere between none and not much. I have also not done much research beyond comic synopsis though, so maybe I’m the problem.

Jonah’s imminent death is interrupted by racism, as some white people show up to commit genocide. Jonah, being surprisingly nice for the universes punching bag, tries to stop them from shooting the Kiowa people by getting in the way of the bullets. The white people shoot him in the stomach.

Jonah Hex, left bleeding in the forest, is rescued by a woodland trapper who presumably mistook him for food. After getting patched up, Jonah tries to head back to the Apache tribe only to find that they packed up and left. It is at this point that Jonah Hex heads out to find a job. This is how he ends up joining the confederate army.

Jonah does well for himself in the army, rising through the ranks until… okay this next part is kind of wild so stick with me on this one. Once he’s risen to the rank of lieutenant, he discovers the reason the conflict started; the emancipation proclamation. He just didn’t know about it until now. Jonah, being a former slave, has very strong feelings on slavery(he considers it bad), and so he surrenders himself to the Union. He accepts any punishment they give him for fighting with the racists, but refuses to give up his former comrades because his friend Jeb Turnbull seemed cool for a racist or something. This is a moot point; they check the clay on his horses hooves and capture all of his former comrades anyway.

This next parts a little confusing to me, possibly because I’m not up on my US Civil War History and how they did POW stuff back then. Okay so the Confederate prisoners come up with a plan to escape using a conspicuously placed huge ass tunnel underneath the prison. This however is a trap, and they all die except for Jonah, who manages to escape somehow. The confederacy brands Jonah Hex a turncoat and a traitor. The confederacy only exists for like a few years or so from that point though so that’s kind of like getting blacklisted from a high school discord group.

Jonah returns to his village. Yes the one he couldn’t find before. No I’m not sure what changed. Noh-Tante and White Fawn are now married. Jonah accuses Noh-Tante of betraying him. The tribe doesn’t believe Jonah, which makes sense. He looks like Owen Wilson and accidentally joined the war on slavery on the side of the slavery. He’s either racist or an idiot.

Being indigenous people in a comic book, they decide the best way to settle this matter is via tomahawk fight. Noh-Tante, being a dick, tampers with Jonah’s Tomahawk before the fight. When the head of the weapon snaps off, Jonah, being as previously discussed kind of a dipshit, does not back away and ask for another tomahawk or something. Instead, he pulls a knife from his boot and stabs Noh-Tante, killing him.

The chief, furious over the loss of his son and seeing that Jonah has cheated by using a knife decides Jonah must be punished, but I guess he thought the knife thing was kind of sick so the punishment is not execution. Instead he heats up a tomahawk and places it against Jonah’s face, branding him with the Mark of the Demon. This is why Jonah’s face looks like that.

Jonah Hex. He has lost the only homes he has ever known. Hated by the tribe that raised him. Considered a traitor by the Confederacy that he has come to hate (yes he continues to wear the uniform. No I don’t know why. Yes it exclusively causes problems for him.). Not trusted by the Union. Face looks like melted cheese.

Standing around in some town drunk off his ass, Jonah sees some guy beating his wife. Jonah, having nothing to lose, shoots that guy dead. Jonah Hex, 1800s Feminist. The towns deputy sees this, and compliments Hex on “the fastest draw he’s ever seen” and giving him the massive bounty that the man, Mad Dog Lucas McGill, had on his head. Having been provided the first positive reinforcements of his life, Jonah Hex decides to become a bounty hunter.

Jonah Hex. He has a face like Freddy Krueger’s shoes and he dresses like a racist. He’s a bounty hunter with no super powers or magic that has been king ponged around the time stream and has shot Superman. He gets listed among superheroes. His taxidermy corpse is kept in a cowboy circus.

Having recently discovered a love for his fairly new (2019, created for what by most accounts seems to be a mediocre Young Justice comic) great great granddaughter Jinny Hex, I realized I didn’t know much about Jonah Hex beyond cowboy, scar, bad movie, and awesome cameos. So I started researching.

This characters story is batshit crazy.

[samgibbsfmp]

1969 moodboards and research

Now it is time to look into the final topic which is 1969.Now for 1969 I decided to look into 3 different topics.

1969: Television

Now in 1969 Tv was on the rise a shows such as star trek,sesame street, Monty Python’s Flying circus and doctor who all being aired. Also of course with the moon landing taking place thousands of people rushed out to get tv’s to watch the moon landing being televised.With the moon landing being watched in over 53 million house holds.

Doctor who in 1969:

Many may question why I am discussing doctor who as it was a show which was realesed in 1963. The reason why I am discussing Doctor who is because in 1969 it was a dawn of a new era for Doctor Who as not only did the role of Doctor move onto John Pertwee ( The Third Doctor) and the adventures with Patrick Troughton (The Second Doctor) end. But in 1969 the final episode we have with Patrick Troughton is the last ever episode of Doctor who to be broadcasted in black and white.

With the regeneration of the Doctor we then enter the Era of John Pertwee who’s first episode was the first Doctor who episode to be broadcasted in colour.

Sesame street:

Sesame Street started broadcasting on November 10th 1969. Sesame strett a show which is aimed towards children as entertainment.Now not like the traditional child's tv show which was done through animations. This show is produced with puppets.Here is a video I found about about how its done:

An episode of sesame street taking roughly 6 - 8 weeks to produce which is a lot more than the 8 days of filming and production that it take to produce an episode of star trek at the time. The show also featured 1 hour long episode which worried the producers as they assumed that children wouldn’t have the attention span for such a long episode.

Monty Pythons Flying Circus:

A comedy tv show which contained 4 seasons. The premise of the show is that it has live action comedy sketches along side animations . I do plan to watch the show to get more of an understanding as to what was found comedic in 1969.

Here is a video of there top 10 moments:

1969 Vietnam:

Quite a few events happened in 1969 to do with Vietnam such as:

The number of American military personnel in Vietnam peaked ( to 543,000)

Over 30,000 Americans wounded or killed

Battle of Hamburger Hill

Operation Apache Snow

Battle of Binh Ba

Operation Camden

Vietnam war in games:

Now of course there are many games based around the Vietnam war such as Black ops 1,Battlefield Vietnam, Conflict:Vietnam and Men of Valor. One I am going to be looking into is Rising Storm 2:Vietnam.Here is the description on steam for the game:

In the game you get to go through similar scenarios and plaes as they would of gone through during the Vietnam war. You also can encounter traps such as trip wires which were used in the Vietnam war. Traps were very common in the Vietnam war and there were many traps such as:

 Punji Sticks:

These were sharpened bamboo sticks which were often covered in urine and faeces in order to cause infections.These were then stood up in pits which were covered in a thin frame to look like a ground. The victim would step on it thinking it was ground and fall into the pit.

Snake pits:

Bamboo pit vipers were commonly carried around in soldiers packs to hopefully kill anyone who searches through them. The snakes would also be tied to bamboo and hide them through their tunnel systems. When the bamboo was released so was the snakes which would attack the enemy.

Grenade in a can:

A grende in a can is mainly a trip wire. You walk through the wire which pulls the pin in a grenade and sets it off.

Flag bombs:

Due to their love of capturing enemy flags. U.S troops would be unlucky to find that some of the flags where rigged with explosives. These were rigged so once the flag was being taken down it would set off.

Cartidge Trap:

This trap is very hard to detect. Basically the trap consisted of a round of ammunition in a shallow hole in the ground ontop of a nail/firing pin and a piece of bamboo. The persons weight on the cartridge would drive the nail into the primmer and fire the bullet up into the persons foot.

All of the information and images of these traps was taken from this website:

https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/8-of-the-most-terrifying-vietnam-war-booby-traps

Of course not only is there games based on Vietnam but there is also Films, The most popular one being Vietnam where we follow the life of Forest Gump as he goes from being a child to football star,Vietnam soldier,Ping pong champion and fisherman.The first clip I am going to show you is when the soldiers are walking through Vietnam,This gives us a small idea on what the scenery and whether is like. This also gives us a small insight to how they travelled about and what they did when they weren’t fighting.

After this part of the film we are then lead into the battle scene of the film when the soldiers are fighting.This shows you what it was like during battle in Vietnam war. With gun shots and bomb being deafening meaning that even some peoples shouting couldn’t be understood. As well as how the forest is a huge obstacle and can also provide many hiding places.In this scene Forest runs away and one major thing in the film is that as soon as he starts running he doesn’t stop. Once he is alone he realises he has left his best friend behind. He runs back in for his best friend but keeps getting preoccupied with saving others.

Forest Gump however is not a film entirely based around Vietnam and only has a section on it.This is why I am going to be also looking into ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ which is a film about how a disc jockey goes and works for the army radio service. This film is a comedy so it does joke about a lot aswell.. Here is a video of some of the funniest moments:

The second half of this is available through this link:

https://samgibbsfmp.tumblr.com/post/610870269733683200/1969-research-continued

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Cosmic Horror, Tom Barber, Casino Royale, David C. Smith

Horror (Bloody Disgusting): The phrase “cosmic horror” conjures up images of massive tentacled beasts that defy all aspects of human understanding. Monsters created by author H.P. Lovecraft, such as Cthulhu, Dagon, and Shub-Niggurath, drive those that see them into madness, driven insane by their pure incomprehensibility. Their massive size, many limbs, innumerable eyeballs, and unnatural forms only amplify their horrific nature, making humans realize their insignificance in the universe. It is a genre that allows for speculation and questions about what it means to be human, especially in the face of these monsters.

  RPG (Brain Leakage): I was introduced to D&D in 1994, during my freshman year of high school. I had no idea what to expect going in. The sum total of my exposure to D&D up to that point was vague memories of the old cartoon, half-remembered rumors about the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s, and multiple viewings of Charles Band’s glorious, b-movie masterpiece, The Dungeonmaster.

  Art (The Silver Key): Last week I had the pleasure of meeting a sword-and-sorcery legend: The talented Tom Barber, perhaps best known for his illustrations of Zebra paperbacks in the 1970s, including a Robert E. Howard title (Black Vulmea’s Vengeance), several Talbot Mundy reprints, and a trio of stunning covers for a Weird Tales paperback revival edited by the late great Lin Carter.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Recoverings): With his hopes of entering the hallowed ranks of the slicks dashed, Ed turned the book over to Munsey and McClurg. Bray was still at McClurg, but Davis was gone and his replacement was Matthew White, 69 years old and the editor for Argosy since 1886. White wanted a shorter title than The War Chief of the Apaches, and suggested, “Apache,” “The Big Chief,” or “The Good Indian.” “Apache” might have confused book buyers into thinking that it was about the notorious Parisian Apaches, muggers and criminal gangsters of Europe. Ed wasn’t happy with any of the alternate titles, for good reason, and The War Chief was finally settled on.

  Clark Ashton Smith (DMR Books): Fans of Clark Ashton Smith have been waiting a long time for a collection of his stories set in the fictional medieval French province of Averoigne. There have been many attempts to collect all 11 stories over the decades, but none of them were able to get off the ground until recently.

  Gaming (Greyhawkery): Greetings Greyhawk enthusiasts! Today’s topic comes with a map of the ENTIRE Flanaess. I was mulling over a subject while trying to banish thoughts of not being at Gen Con 2019 and then it dawned on me, how about a “What If” scenario? I’ve done similar premises in the past, it’s fun to tinker with world-wide events and what was more game changing to the World of Greyhawk than the 2E Greyhawk Wars! For those who don’t know the events an geo-political changes that happen post-wars and through 591 CY then check out this timeline. Surprisingly the “Greyhawk Wars occurred in a short span (582-584).

  Gaming (Hack Slash Master): I’ve run. . . a lot of high-level games. The first high-level campaign I ran started in 1984, and involved going through the entire Temple of Elemental Evil and environs in a second edition campaign. I’ve run several high level 5th edition campaigns, including 17 levels of Horde of the Dragon Queen, 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to level 11/12, Pathfinder and 3rd edition, ranging up to levels around 14. My average campaign length is about 50 games, which is approximately 18 months of play.

  Westerns (Brian Niemeier): If you want sterling example of top-down social engineering, look no further than the death of the western. The western genre dominated novels, magazines, comics, and movies for decades. Contrary to common misconceptions, westerns never faded in popularity. One day, the word came down that westerns were over. These days, this once noble genre is a haven for vanity projects by over-the-hill actors. Our overlords hate the western. Gary Cooper’s iconic 1952 film High Noon shows why.

  Cinema (Rough Edges): I suspect this is one of those love-it-or-hate-it movies. I love it. THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT has such a goofy title that you really don’t know what to expect, and it asks the viewer to accept a lot of odd things that are played with an absolutely straight face, but for me, it works.

  Ian Fleming (M Porcius): The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953; I’m reading a scan of a paperback published in 1983 by Berkley.  This isn’t one of the books I tackled as a child, and the only Casino Royale film of which I am aware is the spoof one starring Barbara Bouchet (you loved her in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times), so I have no idea what the plot of this thing is going to entail.

  Comic Books (Porpor Books): In the mid-80s, Eclipse Comics got the rights to reproduce comics from early 80s UK titles, including Warrior. One memorable Warrior entry was ‘Spawn from Hell’s Pit’, the inaugural episode of ‘Father Shandor: Demon Stalker’ which debuted in the very first issue of Warrior in 1982.

  Writing (Pulprev): Much of modern entertainment is a garbage fire.

Many male characters are weak, wimpy and wishy-washy. They exist not as men in their own right, but simply to make the designed Strong Female Character look even more powerful when contrasted against their incompetence. Shounen protagonists inevitably run away screaming at the first signs of romance and emotional intimacy, those that aren’t blank slates for the audience to project themselves into.

  Comic Books (Bookgasm): If you grew up in the ’80s, once you hit puberty and got over the superhero comics that are flooding the big screen, the only magazine left on the rack was Marvel’s gory, black and white, comic-code free “Savage Sword of Conan.” Those busty wenches and barbarians were everywhere in the 1980’s – from album covers to conversion vans. It seems like a different world now.

  Fiction (Smashpages): Will Murray has long been a journalist for Starlog and other publications, but he’s best known as one of the great pulp historians. Murray’s been involved with the recent reprints of Doc Savage, The Shadow and other characters. A few years ago, Murray had two major books published, Writings in Bronze, which collected a lot of his writings about Doc Savage and Lester Dent, and Wordslingers, a book about the pulp Westerns, and more broadly, about what the Western genre was and continues to mean.

  Robert Heinlein (Tip the Wink): Tunnel In the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein. Scribner’s & Sons, 1955. Juvenile novel # 9  Published in both hardcover and paperback that year by Scribner’s as part of the Heinlein juvenile series.

The Plot BACKGROUND: The novel is set in the future, when overpopulation on Earth has been lessened after the invention of teleportation, called the “Ramsbotham jump”, which is used to send Earth’s excess population to colonize other planets. However, the costs of operating the device mean that the colonies are isolated from Earth until they can produce goods to justify two-way trade.

  Author Interview (DMR Books): David C. Smith is one of the most well-respected sword and sorcery authors from the ‘70s. He’s also been a friend and supporter of DMR Books since the beginning, when he wrote the introduction for our very first release, Swords of Steel. He has a brand new story in our brand new anthology Warlords, Warlocks & Witches, so I thought this would be a good time to learn more about his career, as well as his current endeavors (which will be covered in part two tomorrow).

  Sensor Sweep: Cosmic Horror, Tom Barber, Casino Royale, David C. Smith published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[reddirtramblings]

Before settlers crossed the Mississippi River and literally ran for 160-acre plots in one of several Oklahoma land runs in the late 1800s, much of the territory’s western half was covered in mixed prairie grasses.  In what became Oklahoma Territory, the Osage, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche and Apache tribes hunted bison and other animals. Oklahoma’s diverse landscape, including its glorious grasses, made such hunting possible because prairie and forest plants provided cover and forage for animals like bison, elk, bear, rabbits, squirrels, turkeys, and white-tailed deer. On the eastern side of Indian Territory, the land was wooded with blackjack oaks, eastern cottonwoods, post and pin oaks, and many other tree species. Being rocky and hard to develop, much of it is still very wooded today.

1892 Map of Oklahoma and Indian Territories courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I live at the junction between the prairie and the forest in what is now Logan County, a green section at the center of the map above. Each day, I wake up grateful that I own 7.5 acres of land where I continue to work in a garden that’s become a pollinator and bird habitat. Lizards, snakes and frogs like it too. It’s always a work in progress, and that’s what makes gardening such a fascinating hobby. You never run out of things to learn.

And, one thing I’ve learned over the last ten years is that glorious grasses help me build my own little corner of the prairie.

[Click on photos in the galleries to make them larger.]

Grasses and other plants in my garden midsummer of 2013. It looks similar now, but the chairs are painted purple. I could no longer find French blue paint.

Pennisetum purpureum ‘Fireworks’ with Phlox paniculata ‘Bright Eyes’ behind. See how great they go with my purple chairs?

Tallgrass prairie once covered 14 states throughout the central part of the United States.  On November 12, 1996, the Nature Conservancy purchased the Chapman-Barnard Ranch covering 29,000 acres near Pawhuska, Oklahoma. This purchase helped form what is now the 39,650 acres of the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, once part of the Cherokee Outlet and the Osage lands in the above map and stretching into southern Kansas.

Bill and I have visited the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve numerous times in various seasons. It is a source of respite and inspiration to me in my own garden. I especially notice this In late summer and early fall. Grasses that have been providing background support for the rest of our landscape now take center stage. Ornamental grasses are at their full height and sport fully-formed seedheads. The prairie is a thing of true beauty in any season, but in fall, it is magical. Ornamental grasses breathe life into a garden. Let them breathe life into yours.

Good old Miscanthus sinensis, maiden grass in my garden. It is next to Blush Knockout rose. Although M. sinensis is invasive in some parts of the U.S., it has never moved from this spot in my garden. I also use ‘Adagio’ in another spot.

How can you replicate some of the tallgrass prairie for your home? One way is by strategically planting grasses. Although the Great American Prairie is composed of a multitude of plants, grasses are its living backbone providing structure for three seasons out of the year. The only time ornamental grasses don’t look good is in late winter/early spring when just cut back. However, the plants surrounding them will shelter grasses until they begin to grow. Grasses are relatively unobtrusive unless you have an entire row of a particular grass as I do with my pink muhly grass.

Muhlenbergia capillaris ‘Lenca’ Regal Mist, pink muhly grass, with Salvia leucantha, Mexican bush sage peeking through.

Even then, the grasses don’t look bad. They just don’t look like anything.

Bouteloua gracilis ‘Blonde Ambition’ blue grama grass. I grow it in pure gravel, and only water it occasionally in summer.

Many varieties of grass are simple to grow. In fact, in some climates, they can be invasive, but we haven’t seen that in Oklahoma. You can grow many by seed, or by purchasing container grown plants in the spring or fall. Although I have grown some by seed, I prefer to buy plants to get things more quickly established. Some of the ones I grow are native. Others are not. I tend to choose grasses based upon what I need in a particular space. I then surround them with other prairie plants attractive to pollinators and birds. Although I still love roses and grow them, Rose Rosette Disease wiped out many of my rose shrubs. I will never plant a rose in the same spot for a variety of reasons, and I’ve found grasses are wonderful for rose replacement although I’ve also planted numerous fruiting shrubs for the birds too.

Grasses require some garden work, but it isn’t onerous.

Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Ginger Love’ is a dwarf fountain grass that I love more than ‘Hameln,’ although I grow ‘Hameln’ too.

Grasses come is many different heights. Among the shortest are Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Hameln’ and ‘Ginger Love’ dwarf fountain grasses. I love these small grasses for the front of the garden bed. In fact, I bought two more one-gallon containers of ‘Hameln,’ and I’ve planted them in the front of the garage border. Schizachyrium scoparium ‘Standing Ovation’ is a shorter little bluestem grass. I have trouble growing bluestem grasses, tall or small, in my garden probably because I water more than they like. I use drip irrigation, but I also have years like this one where Oklahoma received tons of rain. Bluestem grasses do not like too much rain or enriched soils. I have both at various times. I also can’t grow Festuca glauca ‘Elijah Blue’ fescue.

No one can grow everything, and that’s okay.

Panicum virgatum ‘Northwind’ up close. See all those shades of yellow?

P. virgatum ‘Northwind’ turning bright yellow.

P. virgatum ‘Heavy Metal’ with a crapemyrtle behind.

I have tremendous success with the native switchgrasses, and I grow several from tall ‘Northwind’ to the shorter ‘Heavy Metal’ and ‘Cheyenne Skies.’ At eight or nine feet, ‘Cloud Nine’ is one of the tallest switchgrasses available. At the present time, panicums are probably my favorite grasses. They’ve performed so well in the garden that I’ve been able to split them several times. All of the switchgrasses turn beautiful colors in the fall with some being more yellow and others more purple. They are perennial.

Rosa ‘September Song’ with P. virgatum ‘Cheyenne Skies’ behind it.

Speaking of purple grasses, for pure theater, I don’t think you can beat Pennisetum purpureum ‘Fireworks.’ I’ve grown this grass in pots on the deck and in the borders for years. I especially love it with coleus and Phlox paniculata ‘Bright Eyes.’ Such a beautiful combination. Purple fountain grass is not perennial in Zone 7, but also check out ‘Princess Caroline’ for a large focal point.

Pennisetum purpureum ‘Fireworks’ with Phlox paniculata ‘Bright Eyes’ behind. See how great they go with my purple chairs?

Pennisetum purpureum with purple heart and coleus at Bustani Plant Farm.

Another view of ‘Campfire’ coleus and purple fountain grass in the terraces. The trees are still small, but they will get bigger each year eventually providing windbreaks and shade.

The very gorgeous Pennisetum ‘Princess Caroline’ is a showstopper next to Hibiscus ‘Maple Sugar’ and Senorita Blanca® cleome.

Dramatic dark grass at OSU Botanical Gardens. Might be ‘Princess Caroline’ or Vertigo.

If you want a nice tall grass with large plumes, consider Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Overdam,’ a variegated selection. If you can’t find ‘Overdam,’ try ‘Karl Foerster.’ I’m growing it along a fenced border in the back garden as a kind of screen. It’s going to take a while to fill in. I like larger grass clumps at the edge of my gardens because they dissuade deer from entering the space. They don’t like the swishing noise or that they cannot see.

Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ with the very late-blooming and tall  Hemerocallis ‘Autumn Minaret’ daylilies.

  Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Overdam.’ In front of the grass is Penstemon smallii ‘Violet Dusk.’ 

I mustn’t forget Mexican feather grass either. Although it is invasive in some climates, it is well-behaved here. I do have to replant it periodically because it tries to die out. I love how the plumes swish with the wind. Is there anything better?

Mexican feather grass and other plants, native and non-native make up a the palette used by Piet Oudolf.

Phlox divaricata, woodland phlox with Mexican feather grass planted in a shallow border. I lined the border with Nassella tenuissima, Mexican feather grass because it softens the concrete.

Nassella tenuissima, Mexican feather grass, planted along the edge of a border softens the concrete blocks.

Side border next to the deck has Tightwad Wad crapemyrtles, Little Lime® and Quick Fire® hydrangeas. There are also daylilies and Mexican feather grass in this border.

Try some glorious grasses in your garden, and you’ll see what I mean.

  Glorious grasses Before settlers crossed the Mississippi River and literally ran for 160-acre plots in one of several Oklahoma land r…

[jackfollmanwriter-blog]

The Phantom

No one knew more about the West Texas Phantom than grizzlymane415.

I exhausted all of the available information online - the Wikipedia page, the citations on the Wikipedia page, the weird blogspots, wordpresses and even a couple of Angelfires back in the day, the annoying slideshows which promised shocking revelations, but delivered none and just crashed my browser - they had all been laid to waste. My last bastion for any good information about the Phantom was an unsolved murder subreddit populated by other lonely weirdos who were probably collecting unemployment checks and ignoring the creepy messages on their numerous online dating profiles.

The group was great for the passionate discussions about the Phantom I could only have with complete, anonymous strangers who didn't assume I was some kind of sociopathic serial killer myself when I wanted to talk about my fascination with the still free killer of more than 20 people who stalked the plains and oil fields of West Texas in the late-80s. The group was also well-stocked with fascinating theories, like how the Phantom may have been a railroad conductor, or how he was a well-known high school football coach named Butch whose crimes were covered up to protect his legacy.

I also relished when some "newb" would wander into the group and start spouting out information we all had already dissected down to the finest molecule. It got to the point where I put a sticky on top of the page which focused on the six principle pieces of information which defined the Phantom and led to  my gang's particular fascination with him. Unless someone had NEW information about any of these principles, any posts about them would be promptly deleted.

The Phantom took all of his victims in broad daylight (whether or not they were killed during the day was up for debate)

All of the Phantom's victims were regular women, not the common prostitute victims most serial killers claimed

He used an 1894 Marlin Model rifle. An incredibly rare and valuable weapon.

It is likely he had a regular, white collar job as his killing sprees tended to take place just once a year in two-week spans.

It is possible he used railroads for transportation as nearly all of his killings took place near rail stops.

Tracks from a 1959 Chevrolet Apache truck were found leaving a few of the scenes.

However, none of this fully-satisfied my appetite for discovery. The only person who was able to do that was grizzlymane415.

It all started when grizzlymane415 posted viciously gruesome autopsy photos of one of the Phantom's first victims. The images were so horrifying I felt I should have put that white powder they use in autopsy rooms in cop shows/movies underneath my nostrils so I didn't vomit all over my keyboard. Full disclosure, about 90 percent of what I know about crime comes directly from TV and movies.

RachWhov: How did you get that?

I couldn't have typed the question fast enough. I never got an answer.

That would be far from the last juicy nuggets grizzlymane415 would post. Within days, he posted a copy of a letter to a news reporter at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. The letter took credit for the first three murders which had been attributed to the Phantom and another I had never heard of which had never been connected to the Phantom.

RachWhov: Where did you get that?

I would get an answer this time from grizzlymane415, but not necessarily to that exact question.

(Note, for some reason, grizzlymane415 always typed in all caps. Sorry, I know)

grizzlymane415: THE PHANTOM LEFT CLUES EVERYWHERE. HE WAS ACTUALLY ONE OF THE SLOPPIEST SERIAL KILLERS TO NEVER GET CAUGHT. SOMETIMES I THINK HE DID IT ON PURPOSE. DID YOU KNOW HE USED TO TAKE MONEY FROM THE WALLETS OF EACH VICTIM AND THEIR JEWELRY TO RAISE AT LEAST SOME DOUBT IN THE COPS' MINDS THAT MAYBE HIS VICTIMS WERE SIMPLE VICTIMS OF ROBBERY?

RachWhov: I never heard that.

grizzlymane415: IT'S TRUE. CHECK ALL THE CASES. DO A LITTLE MORE GOOGLE SEARCHING. YOU WILL SEE SOME OF THE THEORIES.

grizzlymane415 was right. Everything I could find online suggest The Phantom had stolen money from each victim and their jewelry. Reports never seemed to focus on that too much, but it was occasionally mentioned. While it was never really mentioned in the stories, online threads and comment threads on stories frequently pointed it out, sometimes with foolish dissenters chiming in that he was just a random thief or many of his killings were just random robberies in the area which were attributed to him.

grizzlymane415: DON'T BELIEVE THE FOOLS THAT SAY IT WASN'T HIM EITHER. THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. THE COPS KEPT TABS ON ALL THE PAWN SHOPS AND GOLD BUYERS IN TEXAS AND NONE OF THAT JEWELRY EVER WAS SOLD AGAIN. SO IT WAS NOT SOMEONE KILLING FOR A QUICK BUCK.

RachWhov: I believe that, it wouldn't make a whole lotta sense.

grizzlymane415: AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW THE CRAZY PART YET. THE JEWELRY SHOWED UP AGAIN, BUT IT WASN'T SOLD.

RachWhov: What?

grizzlymane415: CORRECT. THE JEWELRY STARTED SHOWING UP ON STATUES AROUND CHURCHES IN TEXAS. ANY VIRGIN MARY STATUES THAT HAD FINGERS WHICH COULD FIT THE RINGS OR NECKS FOR NECKLACES.

grizzlymane415 attached a few pictures of virgin Mary statues with rings and necklaces on them in what looked like Texas settings. The hair on my arms stood at attention. It was enough for me to put the brakes on the forum, and grizzlymane415, for a little while. I slunk back to my other favorite haunts of the Internet – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, OKCupid – for a little while to stay safe and warm.

But I had to go back to the forum. At first I thought I would just ignore grizzlymane415, check out other cases, chat with my other super non-creepy, anonymous Internet friends, but I just couldn't do it. Here was my dream. Someone who could help me solve the crime which had engrossed and haunted me for years and I was going to run away because I was a scared, little girl? Plus, what's the worst that could happen? It was an anonymous board.

I cracked.

RachWhov: Where did you get those pictures.

grizzlymane415: THINGS ARE OUT THERE. HAVE YOU READ ABOUT THE JUDY PARCH AND PETRA HOLLIVER MURDERS?

RachWhov: Nope.

Tip – don't ever Google the Judy Parch and Petra Holliver murders. It is one of those cases which cues up first-page results of gruesome photos which will cling to your brain like an old stick of gum burned onto the sidewalk of a city street. My search pulled up a black and white photo of two women who I assumed were Judy and Petra clinging to each other in the backseat of a car, a blood-drenched blanket just not quite covering the damage of their faces.

To me, it wasn't even the gore of the photo which struck me so hard. It was the image of these two women who were clinging together like the last thing they wanted to do in the world was let each other know they loved one another before they suffered the world's great insult. They didn't even get the respect of having their final moments filled out with color. Nor, did they get the closure of having their case solved. Which brings me to one of the first major curiosities of grizzlymane415.

The murders of Judy Parch and Petra Holliver had never been connected to The Phantom in any way that I could find. Plus, they were murdered more than 1,000 miles away from The Phantom's stomping grounds of West Texas in Yucaipa, California, 50 miles or so outside of Los Angeles.

Overall there wasn't much information about the murder of Judy and Petra, other than a few archived articles from 1990 in the The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California and some brief cold case pages. Not even a Wikipedia page frustratingly lacking of hyperlinks to other stories to engross yourself in. Their murder was just a little footnote in the murder history of the Inland Empire of California.

RachWhov: There is nothing at all on the Internet which connects The Phantom to the murder of Judy and Petra. Where are you getting this?

grizzlymane415: CHECK THE RECORDS ON THE CASE. OTHER THAN THE LOCATION, IT ALL POINTS TO THE PHANTOM. REMEMBER YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES ON THE TOP OF THIS PAGE.

I did live in California, but hours away from Yucaipa, so driving out there to check their public records search wasn't in the cards. However, my fascination with The Phantom runs deep, and I was able to get in touch with an old high school classmate who lived in Yucaipa who I Paypalled cash in return for wasting a Saturday morning and afternoon going through old murder records for me.

grizzlymane415 was correct, the Yucaipa muders covered all of the bases of my principles except the sixth.

The bodies of Judy and Petra were found just before sunset on a February day, meaning they were murdered sometime during the day.

Both women worked for the school district and were married, with children. They were in no way prostitutes or people who operated in "risky" behavior.

Ballistics showed the women were shot with an 1894 Marlin rifle.

The women's murder occurred in middle of the two-week stretch of The Phantom's last killing spree.

The bodies were found less than a mile from train tracks.

RachWhov: You were right. Everything adds up to Judy and Petra being victims of The Phantom. Why is this not out there anywhere? Couldn't that bring a huge break in the case?

grizzlymane415:

RachWhov: I get it, cops suck, but this isn't right. Have you told the police there?

I didn't get an answer. A week went by.

RachWhov: ???

Another week.

grizzlymane415: I THOUGHT YOU WERE CAPABLE OF NOT NEEDING HAND HOLDING ON THIS, BUT JUDY WAS THE WIFE OF THE POLICE CHIEF IN YUCAIPA. YOU THINK HE WAS VERY INTERESTED IN KEEPING THE DETAILS OF HIS WIFE GETTING MURDERED IN THE BACKSEAT OF A CAR, HALF NAKED WITH ANOTHER WOMAN IN THE PUBLIC EYE? YOU DO THE MATH.

Another curiosity. I couldn't find anywhere, or in anything my friend from Yucaipa sent me where it said Judy and Petra were "half naked" when they were shot. A self-taught expert on my murder myself, I knew this reeked of a detail cops would deliberately leave out of public record to filter out false confessions. Something only the actual killer would know about the murder.

My house grew cold in the middle of an 80-degree day even though I didn't have air conditioning. It's entirely possible grizzlymane415 was completely making this detail up, or it was something he had heard through word of mouth, but those goosebumps upon my arms also knew another thing most self-taught murder experts learn in their 101 class. Murderers love to brag about their work, even though they know it almost always leads to them being caught.

I went over to the front door of my house and checked the lock.

I cut off all communication with grizzlymane415. He probably wasn't really The Phantom, but at best, he was an asshole who was trying to get underneath my skin. I didn't need that. I already had three online dating profiles adept at connecting me with sociopathic beta males who get off on messing with your head.

I remained on the board. I couldn't pass the monotony of semi-employed life and single woman living in a town of just 16,000 without the comfort of faceless online companionship which revolves around the cold murders of human souls.

Things were fine for quite a while, probably a few weeks, before I received another message out of the blue from grizzlymane415.

grizzlymane415:

grizzlymane415: KNOW WHAT THAT IS?

I didn't have to even look it up. I just assumed it was an 1894 Marlin rifle.

He was probably some dumb fuck 15-year-old boy fucking with me who pulled the image off of Google or a gun message board or something, but I can't act like I wasn't totally scared shitless by the thing.

My response came in the form of deleting my account. It may have been the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, but it was all I could do to keep my sanity. It wasn't worth it. Sorry Reddit.

*

Tyler came back in the heat of summer. I flinched when I heard the familiar rumble of his old motorcycle pull into the gravel of my driveway. Tears welled into the corner of my eyes when I walked out onto my rickety porch to see him pulling his helmet off of his shaggy brown hair.

Tyler and I were engaged, technically maybe still engaged. We never officially broke it off.

We met just after college, when both of us were fighting off the adult world by being full-time snowboard bums in Tahoe. We moved in with each other in just a couple of months out of financial convenience, but somehow dated just casually for a few years before we turned up the heat.

Tyler finally proposed about a year before this. That's when things started to get weird between us. I don't think either of us could take the pressure. Engagement meant we were creeping towards adulthood – getting real jobs, paying taxes, moving off the mountain. We decided we would start working on getting "real jobs" in Reno - maybe even Sacramento. We got a rustic rental house in Truckee, California to stay in an earthy little town, but still get a little bit away from Tahoe and try to figure out our lives.

We were in no way ready and took it out on each other. I shocked myself when I discovered I was in no way interested in an office or professional job after a few interviews where I felt I wanted to rip the business casual outfit off of my body and run out into the snow to do what I truly wanted to do with life.

Even more shockingly, Tyler went in the other direction. A quick taste of an internship at a law firm stoked the fire of opportunity which apparently burned inside of him once you got past the haze of weed smoke, shaggy hair and dirty beard.

Tyler came home late from work one night, told me about his plan to move us to the Bay Area where he had a full-time job opportunity lined up and we slowly but surely slipped into a fight which led to him driving off on his motorcycle to go to "San Francisco."

It would be more than six months before he would come back.

I couldn't believe it was him when I saw Tyler walk up the porch, but he didn't let me get a word out before he grabbed me sternly on the back of the head and pulled me in for a kiss. We went inside the house without a word spoken and headed to the bedroom.

We would exchange a few words for the next hour or so, but it would be dark before we had a real conversation.

"How was San Francisco?" I broke the numbing sound of our breathing as we laid in bed.

Tyler just gave a dismissive laugh.

"Not good?"

"No. I was just only there for like three weeks, sleeping on Mike's couch. Couldn't get a job, couldn't afford to live there."

I could tell Tyler was embarrassed when he responded. He knew what question was coming next. He tried to distract me by grabbing the modest engagement ring he gave me months before out of the pocket of his jeans which were sprawled next to us on the bed. He slid the ring onto my ring finger.

"Did you go to your parents?"

"Yeah," Tyler almost whispered his answer before he kissed me behind my ear lobe.

I figured Tyler ran back to the comfort of his parents' five-bedroom house on the coast in Orange County once he said San Francisco didn't work out. I would have done the same, but swap out Orange for Marin.

"What...

Tyler pushed his index finger upon my lips.

"Let's not ruin the moment. Talk about that stuff now. We're just going to get into a fight about it."

"Okay," I agreed, upping the pitch on the second half of the phrase.

"How the fuck is it so hot in here?" Tyler broke the silence and jump up out of the bed naked.

Tyler shuffled over to the large bay window doors of the master bedroom of the house, unlatched them and pushed them out onto the little deck which housed a few pots filled with neglected plants about 10 feet up off of the ground below. I admired Tyler as he stood in the pale moonlight the open doorway let in, his back to me, his arms outstretched. I slipped the ring off of my finger and placed it in a little crystal bowl I kept by the side of my bed.

Tyler yawned when he turned back to me and crawled into bed. He pulled another item out of his jean pocket before I could ask another question.

"You still?" Tyler sheepishly offered up a pipe.

"Yeah, yeah," I took the pipe right after Tyler filled it.

I lied. I hadn't smoked since Tyler left. Too poor. Too depressed and honestly too lazy to go out and get weed myself.

I took a heavy, heavy hit and deflated back down onto the bed. It felt divine.

I watched Tyler take a stiff hit himself. Turned down his second offer.

The hit kicked the malaise and fatigue which was pumping through my veins into overdrive. It wasn't long before I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I could tell I was going to fall asleep before 10 and that was fine for me. I let it come, a cool, gentle breeze drifted through the open bay window doors and gave me a kiss goodnight.

*

I woke up with a calm in my blood I had not felt in quite some time. The comfort of no longer sleeping alone seemed to put my soul at ease. The fresh morning sun of Summer was shining bright through the open door, melting away the refreshing cold of morning. It was just about a damn perfect morning. The kind you would see in a commercial for coffee.

I yawned and looked over to Tyler asleep on his back next to me, the pipe comically rested on his shoulder like the parrot of a pirate. I moved a little bit closer to him but hoped to not wake him at the same time.

My attempt to keep Tyler awake didn't work. He weaved his hand into mine as soon as I slipped over to his side of the bed.

"What happened to the ring?" Tyler said with a froggy, morning throat.

"Oh, uh. I took it off. My fingers swell up in my sleep sometimes, so I don't sleep with rings on. But I can put it back on."

I stretched my body back over across my side of the bed and blindly dropped my hand down into the little bowl. The ring wasn't there. I furiously scanned my hand around the dish a number of times.

"What the hell?"

"What?"

"The ring is gone?"

"You sure you didn't just put it somewhere else?"

"Yes."

I got up out of bed and stood over my nightstand. The ring was not in the bowl or anywhere near it. I dropped hard down to the floor and combed the slick hardwood, looked underneath the bed and behind the nightstand. It was nowhere to be found.

Crawling on all fours, I turned my attention to the floor which led to the open deck door. Quickly stopped dead in my tracks.

Ever-so-faintly pressed into the dust of the floor were boot tracks – the tread of the boots looking like cookie cutter stamps of dog kibble upon the floor.

"Shit."

I traced the tracks to the open door of the deck.

"We didn't just lose a thousand dollars, did we?" Tyler asked from behind.

"That's the last thing I am worried about right now," I shot back. "I think someone came in here and took the ring last night."

It took Tyler a few seconds to reply, but when he did, his voice carried the tenor or building fright.

"Are you serious?"

I turned to see Tyler looking down at me.

"You're joking, right?" He added.

I looked down at the boot tracks one more time.

"Unless you walked around here with boots last night and lost the ring, I'm not."

My mind instantly went to grizzlymane415. I hadn't communicated with him for a while, but he was the last creepy thing taking up residence inside the dark recesses of my brain.

But how the hell could he have tracked me down?

I never shared any personal information with grizzlymane415. There was no information on my profile. I was unsearchable on Facebook and pretty much everything else and he didn't even have my real name. Even RachWhov didn't have a direct connection to me. Rach was short for my middle name and Whov was a play on my last name of Hoover, but the combination of those two would lead nowhere.

Oh shit. Nevermind.

The thought building in my brain shut down every single sense of my body for a moment.

Instagram. Fuck.

My username on the Instagram account I hadn't updated in nearly a year was RachWhov and it was a  picture journal of my life for the past few years, including a fine documentation where I visually bragged about our killer little house in Truckee.

"You think someone climbed up onto our deck in the middle of the night, snuck in here, grabbed just the ring, nothing else, and left without us waking up?" Tyler asked from over by the deck.

"Uh huh. We, were, high."

"Well that's comforting," Tyler snipped before turning back around to me. "Who the hell could have done that?"

"No idea."

I lied. I was not yet ready to tell anyone else about my online life and I myself was far from convinced grizzlymane415 was the one who took the ring. It was a pretty outrageous thought that he found my Instagram and was able to find exactly where I lived and snuck into my bedroom and stole the ring.

I logged into my Reddit account to see if I had received any new messages from grizzlymane415.  

grizzlymane415: WHERE DID YOU GO?

grizzlymane415: SORRY IF I WAS A DICK. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SHIT?!?!?!?

What followed was a link to an article detailing a string of three murders which had taken place across the Southwest over the past couple of weeks – one in West Texas, one in New Mexico, one outside of Las Vegas. All three had the calling cards of The Phantom, including taking place in a two-week cluster. Worse yet, they occurred in the order which suggested The Phantom was moving in a Northwest pattern, right towards Northern California.

grizzlymane: HE'S BACK.............

I typed up: Where do you live?

Was about to hit Enter...

"Hey," Tyler's voice shot up from behind me in the living room.

I jumped up out of my seat, scrambled to close my browser.

"You looking at porn?" Tyler quipped from behind me.

"No."

Tyler let out a deep exhale.

"I found something weird in the mailbox."

Tyler pushed a bullet into my face. I don't think I had ever actually seen one in-person so it would have been a jarring vision even if he hadn't explained it was resting in our mailbox.

"It was just sitting in there. There weren't letters or anything else."

"Shit. Shit. Shit."

"What?"

"This just has me totally freaked out."

"Well let's go down and talk to the cops."

Tyler had a good idea for the first time in a really long time.

"I gotta take my motorcycle down to Devin's shop anyways."

He followed it up with a really bad one.

"Just take my car with me. We should go together."

"Devin just texted me. If I don't get it down there in like twenty minutes, I won't be able to get it looked at till Monday and I might need it this weekend. I'll just meet you at the station."

I didn't even want to know why Tyler might need his motorcycle for the weekend.

"Fine."

"Alright," Tyler grabbed his motorcycle helmet before he had even finished the word.

"Wait," I pleaded.

Tyler was already out the door.

"Motherfucker."

I could still see the dust lingering from the tires of Tyler's motorcyle when I walked out into our dirt driveway. I fought the urge to call him. He wouldn't answer anyway.

The morning glow which made the start of the day so glorious was long gone. A hazy sky of moist gray hung above, threatening rain and a cold wind whipped around the side of the house.

I jumped into my battered Ford Focus. Shook my head to myself about Tyler's ridiculous selfishness, wondered if I should just say fuck it and drive straight to my parents' house in Marin, but I couldn't do it. It was only about a 10 minute drive down the highway to the station and I was pretty sure the cops would be able to at least bring me some soul relief for a little while.                             

The road from our house to the main highway was probably the last road I wanted to be on at the moment. It was a glorified gravel road, lined with trees and tree-surrounded little shacks and shanties next to the river. Once upon the road, my eyes lingered on something sticking out of the tall grass next to the road - Tyler's motorcycle, propped up halfway between the road and the woods.

I took my foot off the gas, slowly pushed on the brake, felt the world outside my car window come back into regular speed.

Then I felt something hit my bumper.

What the?

I shot a hurried look into my rear-view mirror to see a black truck stuck onto the bumper of my car. The afternoon haze and the brevity of my glance didn't allow me to see the face of the driver behind the wheel, but I took in the outline of a dark hat and dark gloves draped upon the steering wheel.

Another thud hit hard upon my bumper, pushing me off to the side of the road. I tried to correct, but couldn't pull it off, my car went off the embankment of the country road and rumbled into the tall grass field which flanked it.

It now felt as if I was on some kind of rocky road amusement park type ride. My car bounced up and down, roughly and wildly, everything inside the cab, myself included, thrashed about violently. The seatbelt was the only thing saving me from smashing up against the windshield or the steering wheel.

I had much more sinister fears at the moment than smashing my head against the wheel and there was no way a seatbelt could save me from them. Another look out my rear view mirror while airborne allowed me to see more of the truck which had slammed into me from behind and I recognized it all too well. I knew nothing about trucks, but I could pick out a 1959 Chevrolet Apache in any lineup.

My car finally started to slow as I approached the line of trees which led into the woods. The entire world around me got darker when the front of my car smashed into the light shrubs at the edge of the tree line and started plowing over some of the younger trees. It came to a stop just under the cover of the tall firs.

I wasted no time in ripping off my seatbelt, going for the handle of my car door, but it wouldn't budge. The door appeared to be wedged up hard against the thick trunk of a tree.

I climbed over to the passenger-side door. My eyes threw a glance out the back window of my car and saw the black Apache parked on the side of the road.

"Ah, shit!" I screamed when the passenger-side door wouldn't open either.

I shot another look out of the back window – didn't see any movement, but heard the familiar sound of a truck door closing. I didn't wait to see if anyone was walking out of the truck, dove into the backseat and tried one of the back doors.

The highest I have ever felt in my entire life was when I felt that back door give and open out into the darkened forest. I piled out of it before I even got the thing all the way open.

I dragged my field of vision across the grass between the Apache and the back of my car when I climbed out of the car. The driver of the truck was out of his vehicle, his black cowboy hat obscured his pale face just enough to where I couldn't make it out. He took tall strides around the front of the truck in a long, black trench coat.

I wasted no more moments in observation, turned into the woods and fled, pissed at myself for leaving my cell phone in the center console. It didn't matter now, my only hope was running deeper into the woods, finding a house, the river or something, basically just losing the approaching stranger behind me.

For a second, I thought I heard the rumble of the river coming in front of me, but the sound quickly took a familiar form. It was Tyler's motorcycle. I slowed my sprint, shot a look over my shoulder. At the edge of the trees was Tyler on his motorcycle, he reared back on the cycle, tried to maneuver his way through the brush which served as the doormat for the thicker forest.

"Tyler," I screamed through the trees. "Call the cops. Call the cops."

But he couldn't hear me over the sound of his motorcycle. I came to a complete stop and watched him make his way into the forest where he would have a little bit more space to snake his motorcycle around trees. I tried to also look out behind him, where the truck was parked up near the roadway, but couldn't see that far.

Tyler put the motorcycle into a skid just before he reached me. He killed the engine and jumped off, was  greeted by me screaming out at him over the sounds of his dying engine.

"Where is he?"

Tyler whipped around, looked back through the woods.

"The guy in the truck. He ran me off the road."

Tyler lifted up the belly of his shirt to show a horrible road rash sprayed across his stomach.

"I hid in the woods for a while. I tried to call you, but you didn't answer."

"He ran me off the road too," I screamed in Tyler's face. "Where is he?"

Tyler kept his eyes off through the woods.

"He peeled out and drove off when I got back on my motorcycle. He's gone."

I followed Tyler's eyes through the darkening woods and had to agree. There were no signs of the driver, or his truck.

*

The cops had a really tough time not just believing what I told them happened, but even understanding it. I had to pull up Reddit on one of the officer's computers to show them all what it was and how it worked.

Honestly, it seemed like they all thought we were concocting some kind of elaborate alibi to cover up a domestic squabble and/or drunk driving accident. They basically did the least amount of work they could to document it and stopped returning our calls after a couple of weeks. I told them all of the details about The Phantom of West Texas. They didn't care in the least. I may have well just said The Phantom of the Opera.

Making it a little harder to believe my story, I deleted my account and apparently so did grizzlymane415. There was no record of our conversations, all of our comments within the board said they were posted by [deleted].

I found the generic form email for the FBI and a couple of police departments in West Texas, but I never even heard back from them. Maybe the only people who still cared about The Phantom were me and my weirdo Internet friends. Maybe it was a sign that I should just forget about that kind of stuff. At least that was Tyler's opinion.

We left Truckee that day, took the important stuff out of our house and never came back. We moved to Marin County where Tyler was able to get an entry level job with my dad's company and I could find a real job in the office of the local hospital with some of the friends I grew up with.  

Speaking of growing up, it was officially time to. I left the Internet serial killer groupie community behind me and focused on my job and trying to re-plan a real wedding with Tyler.

The months went by and I had almost completely forgotten about that old life and that horrible cloudy day, or at least I tried to, but I could not fully run away. My blood ran cold when I received a voicemail on my phone after getting a missed call from my former landlord, Dale, back in Truckee.

I initially thought the message would be a scolding for the state we left the house in or bailing on the last five months of our lease, but Dale actually seemed to have a softer tone than he usually used. He wanted to get in touch with me because someone had left what seemed like an important piece of mail for us in the mailbox. He just needed our new address so he could send it to us.

I chewed my nails down to the tender skin the next few days, feveriously anticipating receiving our unopened mail. Dale was polite in insisting he would absolutely not open our mail for us, even if we wanted him to (which I did).

I tore into the little forwarded envelope as fast as humanly possible when it showed up.

I recognized exactly what was in the envelope as soon as I opened it up. It was my engagement ring, the tiny little diamond perched upon the top of it glittering back at me.

A note fell out of the envelope.

It was just a cursive signature written in black ink.

It read: The Phantom.

Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com.

[thegloober]

The Strange, Sad Case of Sunspot, the Empty Astronomy Town

Not far from the test site of the first atomic bomb, high in the mountains above the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, sits Sunspot Observatory. For around 70 years, its telescopes have stared right at the Sun. Normally, that happens without much fanfare. But last week, Sunspot made international news when residents were evacuated—for a week and a half—in response to an undisclosed security threat.

Officials refused to release details. Now, those details are out: An affidavit, unsealed last week, revealed that the FBI was investigating child pornography linked to an IP address in Sunspot, and a suspect seemed threatening. The investigation is ongoing and no one has been charged. That information is disturbing, along with the secrecy surrounding the evacuation.

The FBI had shown up, while the local sheriff didn’t know what was happening. The internet went wild with conspiracy theories—from the usual “aliens!” to the less absurd “spies.” Residents of nearby, unevacuated Cloudcroft, a town of 700, fielded questions and transactions from curious seekers and reporters (hello), determined to decipher the situation.

On the way into town last Thursday night, I stopped at Cloudcroft’s gas station to buy some firewood. The attendant called to me before I walked out the door. “Watch out for deer and elk,” he said. “If it’s dark out there, it’s dangerous.”

The next morning, I set off on a public trail to Sunspot, which sits on Forest Service land. It was just a couple of miles, through forest with greener ground cover than most people give New Mexico credit for, and soon I emerged onto the observatory’s heliport. A little farther on, the cone of the Dunn Solar Telescope poked through the trees. It’s shaped like a beam a kid might draw shining from a crayon Sun, sticking 136 feet above the ground but extending 221 feet below it, containing around 10 tons of toxic mercury.

The trail ran right into the town itself. There was no sign saying “Don’t come in,” and no tape—as there was across the front entrance—forbidding entry. And so I walked onto a road called Coronal Loop, named after the arcs that rise and fall from the Sun as plasma slides along magnetic field lines. From the pavement, I could see the flagship scope, of course, along with historic heliophysics instruments arrayed in an arc on the same hilltop, their more classical observatory domes closed. Farther below were old labs and blocks of blocky houses.

It’s a self-contained science town, the way remote observatories sometimes are: Astronomy has to be done far from humans, and high above the confounding air of the lower elevations. So astronomers build little enclaves for themselves, surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. Sunspot looked like a ghost town, the archaeological remnants of some great enterprise now gone. Yet the truth is that it was kind of a ghost town before the evacuation.

A few years ago, the National Solar Observatory decided to move its headquarters to Boulder, Colorado, as part of a shift toward newer telescopes. Not long after, a review recommended that the National Science Foundation divest the Sunspot facility. The thriving, tight-knit town shrank into a barely populated, bare-bones operation. Underneath that, a sinister crime may have gone down in secret.

Under the shadow of the ongoing investigation and the federal divestment, Sunspot’s observatory will keep running for now, with science leadership transitioning to a private consortium rather than a federal arm. But the town will probably never be what it was.

You can find such stories of lonely astronomical infrastructure across the US. Sometimes the money for their operation dries up. Sometimes people don’t need to keep a telescope company anymore, because it mostly runs itself. The romantic idea of the astronomer, eye at the eyepiece, in a city on a hill, is pure nostalgia—and in places like Sunspot, sometimes the small town that surrounded that astronomer is too.

Jackie Diehl, though, remembers Sunspot’s heyday well, and fondly. She spent 15 years there from 2002 to 2017, and she became a fixture of the community. Diehl ended up, she says, serving as the mayor of a place without a mayor.

For much of her time there, the town had 65 or 70 residents (employees at the site and at nearby Apache Point Observatory), plus the interns and grad-student fellows who descended upon the town in the summer. But it was actually pretty cosmopolitan, with scientific staff from all over the world. Monthly potlucks were themed to the cuisines of different countries, often those from which the residents hailed. Volleyball games bounced around thrice a week. Card games came on the regular. “It was a work site. We were all very serious about our jobs,” she adds. “But by gosh, we would have a great time.”

The town came together, though, not just for fun. Residents were volunteer firefighters; they cleaned up the 18-mile stretch of highway between the observatory and Cloudcroft. When Diehl had a breast cancer scare, she wasn’t sure how she’d make it from Sunspot to chemotherapy on the winding, wintry roads. “As a single person, the first thing that came to my mind was ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’” she recalls. “The women took me aside, and said ‘Look, if this is the case, you don’t need to worry. We’re going to get you back and forth.’” The scare stayed a scare, but when other women were diagnosed, the same commitment stayed true.

Diehl became close, in particular, to a group of other Sunspot singles. One of those was John Barentine, a former telescope operator at Apache Point and current director of public policy at the International Dark Sky Association. Barentine lived in Sunspot for five years in the early 2000s. Diehl, he says, was their “den mother.”

Life in Sunspot was sometimes difficult for the young Barentine—isolating, especially since he often worked the night shift. But he loved the work (he learned more running telescopes, he notes, than he had in graduate school) and the strange nature of the community. “We used to joke that, other than maybe Los Alamos, there were maybe more PhDs in Sunspot than anywhere on Earth,” says Barentine. Perched solo on mountaintops, observatories are a little like medieval monasteries: “These were isolated, cloistered communities. They were 100 percent devoted to what they did.” The implication being, of course, that so are the astronomers concentrated in Sunspot.

Around 2012, things started to change. For one, the National Solar Observatory was ramping up its work on a fancy new telescope in Hawaii and wanted to ramp down work at older telescopes, and it decided to move the headquarters to Colorado and took many workers with it. The National Science Foundation determined that it could not continue to run all its existing facilities, support new projects, and provide project money to scientists with budgets the way they were. The foundation eventually decided to pull back from a number of its commitments—including the National Solar Observatory site at Sunspot.

In what Diehl calls “bursts,” staff began to move to the new National Solar Observatory headquarters in Boulder, from where they would run the future megaproject—the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. “It wasn’t so bad at first,” says Diehl. “But the more people that moved, the dynamics of the observatory changed.”

Rather than reapplying for her job (which she’d have had to do) and moving to Colorado, Diehl resigned and moved down to Alamogordo, where she now works in the school system. She didn’t move all at once, and one day when she returned to pack up her remaining belongings, someone had stolen a TV, speakers, and a gaming system.

That wouldn’t have happened before, she says. When the place was crowded, “you never really worried about security issues.”

Sunspot Solar Observatory has just nine people working onsite these days. It continues, for the time being, to do astronomy thanks to something of a rescuing proposal from New Mexico State University. The university believed it could get good solar science out of the instruments, and gathered a consortium to take over. There were some hiring delays and questions about whether the money would come through, making for a slightly difficult transition—but, at least until this criminal investigation, things were looking up.

James McAteer, head of the consortium and a solar physicist at New Mexico State, is excited to use the telescope daily. The team will watch solar filaments, the curves of plasma that often arc over sunspots. They’ll stare down active regions that might soon spit out solar flares. They could monitor the center of the Sun’s disk, or do deep studies of the magnetic fields at its poles.

McAteer and the Sunspot Solar Observatory Consortium expect to run the site’s science and outreach till at least 2021 (although currently the team is working under a shorter transitional award. “We don’t plan on stopping then,” says McAteer. “We’ll see what we can do to reinvent it again.”

This kind of private coup has become commonplace in astronomy. With the spate of recent divestitures, the NSF has helped observatories find partners—like the New Mexico State collaboration—to fuel them. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, once the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, is now run by the University of Central Florida. Green Bank Observatory, once part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, became its own entity. Caltech and NASA have pitched in at Kitt Peak in Arizona.

The reason for the coups—trouble—is also a trend, federally and for universities. UC’s Lick Observatory, looming over San Jose, has previously found itself in peril. The University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, flanked by ornate pillars and gargoyles, will cease astronomical operations on October 1. As of a few years ago, Mount Wilson Observatory was pretty unpopulated.

No matter what scientific strategy the US employed for its facilities, all telescopes cannot exist forever, nor should they. But the strategy it is employing—focusing on a small set of ride-or-die megaprojects—might be dicey. What if Congress doesn’t fund one, or defunds one during construction? That saying about eggs in baskets exists for a reason.

Plus, scaling down means fewer people get direct experience building and using hardware. And, from such sophisticated scopes, astronomers often get prêt-à-manger data, delivered to their inboxes. “They’re observational astronomers, and some of them have never been to an observatory,” says Barentine.

Lots of sunstronomers, though, have been to this observatory. “Somewhere along the way, if you are in solar physics, Sunspot touched your career,” declares Diehl.

Standing on the hill, next to the Dunn telescope and its mercury, I knew nothing of what the “security threat” would turn out to be. But like any abandoned area, the air was suffused with a sense of the sinister, of something bad waiting to happen, or something bad that already had.

I could see in the buildings’ shadows the bustling monastery they used to make up. Surely, back then, bad things also went on behind the scenes, between people, behind curtains. Small group dynamics, if nothing else, are a bitch.

It wasn’t all “lend you a cup of sugar” and neighborhood watch. Still, there was a lot of that. “It was just this quiet, serene place that was such a world away from what most people experience, especially people who live in cities,” says Barentine. “And I’m sorry to see that it’s gone.”

The town itself isn’t gone, to be sure—just the town Barentine knew. Someday, though, it could actually disappear. Assuming New Mexico State gets a contract that goes till 2021, the site’s ultimate future may still be in flux. The National Science Foundation presented four potential ending options, and their impacts, earlier this year. Alternative Four is “demolition and site restoration.”

“There one day might not be anything to see,” adds Barentine. “It might literally all be gone. You wouldn’t know that anything had ever happened there.”

When scientists turn telescopes to space, they see the past. Even the light that arrives from the Sun shows how it was eight and a half minutes ago. No matter what Sunspot becomes, when astronomers turn their minds toward that peak, more than a few of them will still see it the way it used to be.

More Great WIRED Stories

This robotic fly dips and dives like the real thing

Inside the all-female trek to the North Pole

How a domino master builds 15,000-piece creations

The educational tyranny of neurotypicals

Google wants to kill the URL

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss our latest and greatest stories

Source: https://bloghyped.com/the-strange-sad-case-of-sunspot-the-empty-astronomy-town/

[brucecsnyder]

Sorry Raymond

Developmental psychology tells us that there is a period in childhood when kids can imagine a scenario, but cannot foresee the implications of acting on that imagined scenario. They just don’t have enough life experience and still are stuck intellectually between reason and make-believe. I remember this period of time in my life very well when I was growing up in the suburbs of Alexandria, Virginia in the 1950’s. My best friend at the time was a freckled-faced kid named Raymond Quigley. He reminded me at the time of the child actor Spanky McFarland of the Our Gang comedy series which existed in perpetual reruns on Saturday mornings in the 50’s on the 8 X 8 inch screen of my parents’ Zenith TV. A television set looked a little different in the middle of the 20th century than it does today in the second decade of the 21st. This was a time before stamped circuit boards, transistors, and silicon computer chips. The cabinet holding the cathode ray tube with the 8X8 inch screen was almost as wide and a little taller than a three drawer bedroom dresser. Inside that cabinet was a circuit board into which were snapped several tubes about the size and shape of a large salt shaker. Occasionally one of these salt shakers would overheat and blow out. My father would send me on my bicycle to People’s Drugstore and the tube tester. The tube tester was also in a cabinet about the same size as my folks’ television. The drug store cashier had to carefully snap the tube into the circuit inside the tube tester; if it failed to light up, there were replacement tubes for sale in a drawer of the testing machine. Then I’d ride home. Dad opened the back of the TV, snapped in the tube and after a silent prayer on my part, the cathode ray would usually glow, and the black and white picture would designate renewed electronic health. Raymond and I were each six years old in 1955 and engaged in epic backyard heroics, mostly protecting his home from attacks of Apaches on the warpath or Nazis who had a machine gun nest near the forsythia bush up the hill near the fence line. One assault required that we bombard the Nazis with dirt clod grenades acquired from Mrs. Quigley’s freshly spaded garden. There was a shed just past the garden that became our HQ and hospital. Nazis stormed HQ and it became necessary to loft grenades over the shed’s roof. The Allied Forces had them on the run, around the side of the house. The only thing protecting the godless Krauts was a thick impenetrable hedge six feet in height. Allied forces grabbed what was available to lob over the hedge, using echo location to home in on the heathen Hun. Dirt clods were replaced by round, smooth decorative stones at the base of the hedge. Stone grenades were falling all around me. I needed to return fire or all would be lost. I picked up a smooth light brown grenade, flatter but having about the same heft as a baseball. I pulled back my arm and let it fly into the blue sky so that it would clear the hedge and fall directly on the enemy. I heard the sound of a hollow clunk from the other side of the hedge and Raymond scream. Oh my God, they got him! I ran around the hedge and there lay Raymond, in the grass, next to the sidewalk running beside the hedge, crying his eyes out . Somehow that last stone I threw hit Raymond right on the top of his head. What a combination of good and bad luck happening at exactly the same time. There was no blood, but Raymond had a lump already rising on his poor battered noggin. He was a mess, crying so hard he was out of breath, while tears and mucous gushed down his dirt- smeared face. As it slowly dawned on me that I may have had something to do with Raymond’s injury, the large shadow of Mrs. Quigley crossed the body of her son lying on the ground. When Raymond saw his mother, the volume of both tears and screaming increased three fold. I looked up into the eyes of Raymond’s mother and realized she held me totally responsible for this unintentional injury brought about by friendly fire. Then Mrs. Quigley did something to me no one had ever done before. She grabbed me by the ear. It was an effective hold and one I could not escape. The harder I resisted, the more the ear felt it would be torn from my head. Raymond’s lament ceased immediately and I swear I remember him smiling as his mother dragged me the block and a half to see my mother. Mrs. Quigley wore an apron that had pictures of chickens on it and images of hens having their heads chopped off filled my brain. I had no idea what my mother would do, but this was a bad omen. My mom was in front of our house watering the window box flowers as Raymond’s mother hauled me up the three stairs to our front sidewalk. Mrs. Snyder, she shouted on the way up the walk , your son hit my son in the head with a rock! I did not resist in the last fifteen feet of the brief journey from the stairs to where my mother was standing. Resistance was futile and maybe compliance would buy me some mercy. She didn’t understand. It was the Nazis. No I didn’t, I shouted at the top of my lungs. Then my mother did something to me no one had ever done before. Two firsts in one day! She hauled back her arm and slapped me so hard my ears rang. That action seemed to satisfy Mrs. Quigley and she released me immediately. I stood in shock. Too late to run now. The worst had happened and I was still alive. We walked Mrs. Quigley back to her home. I was told to apologize to Raymond which I readily did and to Mrs. Quigley, who smiled with satisfaction. She stalked back into her house taking Raymond with her, and my mother and I walked back home. Mom told me to sweep off the front walk and the steps and went inside. The storm had passed. Just about the time I got to the end of the walk, Raymond came whizzing by on his bicycle, riding up the hill. He usually did a U-turn at the top of the hill then used the hill to increase his speed as he descended. As he approached I had the thought: I wonder if I can throw this broom like a spear through the spokes of his front wheel.