#we are watching chernobyl in science and society class

[ford-pines-lover]

on the topic of things ford would have missed while in the portal for 30 years

i’ve never seen someone mention chernobyl???

dude would have like not loved it but wanted to understand its properties. i’m sure now 40 years after it happened he would still go out there to the site with a special gas mask and find anomalous activity.

[sunaleisocial]

Q&A: The power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/qa-the-power-of-tiny-gardens-and-their-role-in-addressing-climate-change/

Q&A: The power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change

To address the climate crisis, one must understand environmental history. MIT Professor Kate Brown’s research has typically focused on environmental catastrophes. More recently, Brown has been exploring a more hopeful topic: tiny gardens.

Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In this Q&A, Brown discusses her research, and how she believes her current project could help put power into the hands of everyday people.

This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.

Q: You have created an unusual niche for yourself as an historian of environmental catastrophes. What drew you to such a dismal beat?

A: Historians often study New York, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, but if you go to these little towns that nobody’s ever heard of, that’s where you see the destruction in the wake of progress. This is likely because I grew up in a manufacturing town in the Midwestern Rust Belt, watching stores go bankrupt and houses sit empty. I became very interested in the people who were the last to turn off the lights.

Q: Did this interest in places devastated by technological and economic change eventually lead to your investigation of Chernobyl?

A: I first studied the health and environmental consequences of radioactive waste on communities near nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S. and Russia, and then decided to focus on the health and environmental impacts of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear energy plant disaster. After gaining access to the KGB records in Kiev, I realized that there was a Klondike of records describing what Soviet officials at the time called a “public health disaster.” People on the ground recognized the saturation of radioactivity into environments and food supplies not with any with sensitive devices, but by noticing the changes in ecologies and on human bodies. I documented how Moscow leaders historically and decades later engaged in a coverup, and that even international bodies charged with examining nuclear issues were reluctant to acknowledge this ongoing public health disaster due to liabilities in their own countries from the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Q: Why did you turn from detailed studies of what you call “modernist wastelands” to the subject of climate change?

A: Journalists and scholars have worked hard in the last two decades to get people to understand the scope and the scale and the verisimilitude of climate change. And that’s great, but some of these catastrophic stories we tell don’t make people feel very safe or secure. They have a paralyzing effect on us. Climate change is one of many problems that are too big for any one person to tackle, or any one entity, whether it’s a huge nation like the United States or an international body like the U.N.

So I thought I would start to work on something that is very small scale that puts action in the hands of just regular people to try to tell a more hopeful story. I am finishing a new book about working-class people who got pushed off their farms in the 19th century, and ended up in mega cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington D.C., find land on the periphery of the cities. They start digging, growing their own food, cooperating together. They basically recreated forms of the commons in cities. And in so doing, they generate the most productive agriculture in recorded history.

Q: What are some highlights of this extraordinary city-based food generation?

A: In Paris circa 1900, 5,000 urban farmers grew fruits and vegetables and fresh produce for 2 million Parisians with a surplus left over to sell to London. They would plant three to six crops a year on one tract of land using horse manure to heat up soils from below to push the season and grow spring crops in winter and summer crops in spring.

An agricultural economist looked at the inputs and the outputs from these Parisian farms. He found there was no comparison to the Green Revolution fields of the 1970s. These urban gardeners were producing far more per acre, with no petroleum-based fertilizers.

Q: What is the connection between little gardens like these and the global climate crisis, where individuals can feel at loss facing the scale of the problems?

A: You can think of a tiny city garden like a coral reef, where one little worm comes and builds its cave. And then another one attaches itself to the first, and so on. Pretty soon you have a great coral reef with a platform to support hundreds of different species — a rich biodiversity. Tiny gardens work that way in cities, which is one reason cities are now surprising hotspots of biodiversity.

Transforming urban green space into tiny gardens doesn’t take an act of God, the U.N., or the U.S. Congress to make a change. You could just go to your municipality and say, “Listen, right now we have a zoning code that says every time there’s a new condo, you have to have one or two parking spaces, but we’d rather see one or two garden spaces.”

And if you don’t want a garden, you’ll have a neighbor who does. So people are outside and they have their hands in the soil and then they start to exchange produce with one another. As they share carrots and zucchini, they exchange soil and human microbes as well. We know that when people share microbiomes, they get along better, have more in common. It comes as no surprise that humans have organized societies around shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, producing food together and sharing meals. That’s what I think we’ve lost in our remote worlds.

Q: So can we address or mitigate the impacts of climate change on a community-by-community basis?

A: I believe that’s probably the best way to do it. When we think of energy we often imagine deposits of oil or gas, but, as our grad student Turner Adornetto points out, every environment has energy running through it. Every environment has its own best solution. If it’s a community that lives along a river, tap into hydropower; or if it’s a community that has tons of organic waste, maybe you want to use microbial power; and if it’s a community that has lots of sun then use different kinds of solar power. The legacy of midcentury modernism is that engineers came up with one-size-fits-all solutions to plug in anywhere in the world, regardless of local culture, traditions, or environment. That is one of the problems that has gotten us into this fix in the first place.

Politically, it’s a good idea to avoid making people feel they’re being pushed around by one set of codes, one set of laws in terms of coming up with solutions that work. There are ways of deriving energy and nutrients that enrich the environment, ways that don’t drain and deplete. You see that so clearly with a plant, which just does nothing but grow and contribute and give, whether it’s in life or in death. It’s just constantly improving its environment.

Q: How do you unleash creativity and propagate widespread local responses to climate change?

A: One of the important things we are trying to accomplish in the humanities is communicating in the most down-to-earth ways possible to our students and the public so that anybody — from a fourth grader to a retired person — can get engaged.

There’s “TECHNOLOGY” in uppercase letters, the kind that is invented and patented in places like MIT. And then there’s technology in lowercase letters, where people are working with things readily at hand. That is the kind of creativity we don’t often pay enough attention to.

Keep in mind that at the end of the 19th century, scientists were sure that the earth was cooling and the earth would all under ice by 2020. In the 1950s, many people feared nuclear warfare. In the 1960s the threat was the “population bomb.” Every generation seems to have its apocalyptic sense of doom. It is helpful to take climate change and the Anthropocene and put them in perspective. These are problems we can solve.

[jcmarchi]

Q&A: Kate Brown on the power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/qa-kate-brown-on-the-power-of-tiny-gardens-and-their-role-in-addressing-climate-change/

Q&A: Kate Brown on the power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change

To address the climate crisis, one must understand environmental history. MIT Professor Kate Brown’s research has typically focused on environmental catastrophes. More recently, Brown has been exploring a more hopeful topic: tiny gardens.

Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In this Q&A, Brown discusses her research, and how she believes her current project could help put power into the hands of everyday people.

This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.

Q: You have created an unusual niche for yourself as an historian of environmental catastrophes. What drew you to such a dismal beat?

A: Historians often study New York, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, but if you go to these little towns that nobody’s ever heard of, that’s where you see the destruction in the wake of progress. This is likely because I grew up in a manufacturing town in the Midwestern Rust Belt, watching stores go bankrupt and houses sit empty. I became very interested in the people who were the last to turn off the lights.

Q: Did this interest in places devastated by technological and economic change eventually lead to your investigation of Chernobyl?

A: I first studied the health and environmental consequences of radioactive waste on communities near nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S. and Russia, and then decided to focus on the health and environmental impacts of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear energy plant disaster. After gaining access to the KGB records in Kiev, I realized that there was a Klondike of records describing what Soviet officials at the time called a “public health disaster.” People on the ground recognized the saturation of radioactivity into environments and food supplies not with any with sensitive devices, but by noticing the changes in ecologies and on human bodies. I documented how Moscow leaders historically and decades later engaged in a coverup, and that even international bodies charged with examining nuclear issues were reluctant to acknowledge this ongoing public health disaster due to liabilities in their own countries from the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Q: Why did you turn from detailed studies of what you call “modernist wastelands” to the subject of climate change?

A: Journalists and scholars have worked hard in the last two decades to get people to understand the scope and the scale and the verisimilitude of climate change. And that’s great, but some of these catastrophic stories we tell don’t make people feel very safe or secure. They have a paralyzing effect on us. Climate change is one of many problems that are too big for any one person to tackle, or any one entity, whether it’s a huge nation like the United States or an international body like the U.N.

So I thought I would start to work on something that is very small scale that puts action in the hands of just regular people to try to tell a more hopeful story. I am finishing a new book about working-class people who got pushed off their farms in the 19th century, and ended up in mega cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington D.C., find land on the periphery of the cities. They start digging, growing their own food, cooperating together. They basically recreated forms of the commons in cities. And in so doing, they generate the most productive agriculture in recorded history.

Q: What are some highlights of this extraordinary city-based food generation?

A: In Paris circa 1900, 5,000 urban farmers grew fruits and vegetables and fresh produce for 2 million Parisians with a surplus left over to sell to London. They would plant three to six crops a year on one tract of land using horse manure to heat up soils from below to push the season and grow spring crops in winter and summer crops in spring.

An agricultural economist looked at the inputs and the outputs from these Parisian farms. He found there was no comparison to the Green Revolution fields of the 1970s. These urban gardeners were producing far more per acre, with no petroleum-based fertilizers.

Q: What is the connection between little gardens like these and the global climate crisis, where individuals can feel at loss facing the scale of the problems?

A: You can think of a tiny city garden like a coral reef, where one little worm comes and builds its cave. And then another one attaches itself to the first, and so on. Pretty soon you have a great coral reef with a platform to support hundreds of different species — a rich biodiversity. Tiny gardens work that way in cities, which is one reason cities are now surprising hotspots of biodiversity.

Transforming urban green space into tiny gardens doesn’t take an act of God, the U.N., or the U.S. Congress to make a change. You could just go to your municipality and say, “Listen, right now we have a zoning code that says every time there’s a new condo, you have to have one or two parking spaces, but we’d rather see one or two garden spaces.”

And if you don’t want a garden, you’ll have a neighbor who does. So people are outside and they have their hands in the soil and then they start to exchange produce with one another. As they share carrots and zucchini, they exchange soil and human microbes as well. We know that when people share microbiomes, they get along better, have more in common. It comes as no surprise that humans have organized societies around shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, producing food together and sharing meals. That’s what I think we’ve lost in our remote worlds.

Q: So can we address or mitigate the impacts of climate change on a community-by-community basis?

A: I believe that’s probably the best way to do it. When we think of energy we often imagine deposits of oil or gas, but, as our grad student Turner Adornetto points out, every environment has energy running through it. Every environment has its own best solution. If it’s a community that lives along a river, tap into hydropower; or if it’s a community that has tons of organic waste, maybe you want to use microbial power; and if it’s a community that has lots of sun then use different kinds of solar power. The legacy of midcentury modernism is that engineers came up with one-size-fits-all solutions to plug in anywhere in the world, regardless of local culture, traditions, or environment. That is one of the problems that has gotten us into this fix in the first place.

Politically, it’s a good idea to avoid making people feel they’re being pushed around by one set of codes, one set of laws in terms of coming up with solutions that work. There are ways of deriving energy and nutrients that enrich the environment, ways that don’t drain and deplete. You see that so clearly with a plant, which just does nothing but grow and contribute and give, whether it’s in life or in death. It’s just constantly improving its environment.

Q: How do you unleash creativity and propagate widespread local responses to climate change?

A: One of the important things we are trying to accomplish in the humanities is communicating in the most down-to-earth ways possible to our students and the public so that anybody — from a fourth grader to a retired person — can get engaged.

There’s “TECHNOLOGY” in uppercase letters, the kind that is invented and patented in places like MIT. And then there’s technology in lowercase letters, where people are working with things readily at hand. That is the kind of creativity we don’t often pay enough attention to.

Keep in mind that at the end of the 19th century, scientists were sure that the earth was cooling and the earth would all under ice by 2020. In the 1950s, many people feared nuclear warfare. In the 1960s the threat was the “population bomb.” Every generation seems to have its apocalyptic sense of doom. It is helpful to take climate change and the Anthropocene and put them in perspective. These are problems we can solve.

[theculturedmarxist]

     By    Andrea Peters    

       15 June 2019  

The recently released HBO-Sky UK miniseries Chernobyl is a valuable recounting of the nuclear disaster that occurred at a Soviet power plant near the Ukrainian-Belorussian border in April 1986.

Swedish-born director Johan Renck and creator-scriptwriter Craig Mazin effectively capture the terrifying reality of the explosion that tore open the facility’s nuclear reactor core and spewed radioactive material over large swathes of the western USSR and Europe. The film’s generally sympathetic portrayal of the Soviet people is notable, particularly in the present climate of anti-Russian hysteria, although Renck and Mazin are in over their heads with regard to larger historical questions.

Chernobyl opens with Soviet scientist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) making preparations to commit suicide. We learn that Legasov played a leading role in managing the response to the near-meltdown of the reactor. He leaves voice recordings of his memories of the events, stores them for safekeeping and then hangs himself two years to the day after the nuclear disaster. He is being watched by the Soviet secret police.

Chernobyl then travels back in time and takes the viewer through the events that led to Legasov’s tragic end, starting with the horror of April 26, 1986. That night, a long-postponed and poorly designed safety test at the power plant sets off a series of system failures that blow apart the reactor core.

The personnel cannot comprehend what has just happened at the power plant. Their boss Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) arrogantly and stupidly issues commands that result in workers’ deaths. Firefighters are called in without any warning that they are dealing with a nuclear explosion, much less any protective gear. Acute radiation sickness begins to hit the residents of the nearby city of Pripyat, home to 50,000. The hospital is overwhelmed. Officials will not admit what has taken place. The situation is on the edge of spinning out of control.

Finally, Soviet higher-ups mobilize resources, even as they seek to conceal the true scope of events. Suspicions over what has occurred arise in the West due to the drift of nuclear fallout over Western Europe. Legasov, a prominent inorganic chemist and member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, as well as others are brought in to deal with the still uncontained radiation erupting from the exposed reactor core. Hiroshima-sized radiation releases are going off every hour. Extraordinary and heroic measures are taken, largely by ordinary men and women, to save millions of people. Officials continue their efforts to cover up the causes and consequences of the accident. Lies and deceit abound. Chernobyl is a crime, not just a disaster.

No one who watches the miniseries will take a light-minded attitude towards nuclear Armageddon, which US politicians today threaten and promise as a necessary consequence of American foreign policy. In this respect alone, the filmmakers have made a contribution. The miniseries sensitizes the viewer to some of the horrifying reality that would accompany a nuclear war.

Chernobyl, drawing heavily on a documentary account published by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, effectively portrays different aspects of Soviet life as well as the nuclear calamity. We see the city of Pripyat with its apartment complexes and gardens, and its residents who wish only to enjoy the spring and who look forward to the future. Their lives are destroyed. Smug bureaucrats who could not care less about ordinary human beings alternate between bullying, indifference, conceit and scrambling to deal with the catastrophe, which the viewer senses is largely of their own making. There is something terribly wrong with the Soviet economy. The explosion is partly a consequence of cost-cutting measures. A design flaw that contributed to the disaster was known years earlier, but kept secret. Nothing can be fully admitted on the world stage, and so the country is unable to get adequate aid from abroad.

And yet, this crisis-ridden society somehow manages to carry out a massive clean-up operation. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of tons of containment materials are dispatched. Six hundred thousand so-called human “liquidators” are sent into the evacuated fallout zone. Miners work naked around the clock, exposed to atomic radiation, digging tunnels equipped with only shovels to prevent a complete nuclear meltdown. (It is too hot in the tunnels for them to wear clothes.) Recruits physically destroy irradiated household pets. In one of the most frightening scenes, soldiers working by hand remove radioactive rubble from the roof of the destroyed power plant.

The filmmakers clearly have an admiration for the Soviet people, whom they generally portray as self-sacrificing victims of an undemocratic political system. There are moments, however, when the miniseries plays with—and to—anti-communist stereotypes. A tottering, aged bureaucrat in Pripyat declares his commitment to “Leninism” and demands the city be sealed off so no one can get out and supposed “misinformation” is contained. Soldiers, speaking a bit like automatons, declare their undying commitment to the Soviet cause, even as they are dispatched without adequate protection to deal with the radioactive mess. Rough-talking miners make quips that imply their situation is equivalent to that under the Tsar. An elderly peasant woman forced to evacuate draws an equivalence between Bolshevism and Stalinism, which are allegedly the same in their persecution of the population.

At issue here is not in and of itself the veracity of these particular episodes—according to historical accounts, some are true—but the way in which they are presented. They give the viewer the sense that there is a straight line between 1917 and 1986. This is false. The Chernobyl disaster did not have its roots in the 1917 Russian revolution, during which the working class overthrew both capitalism and feudalism in an initial effort to liberate all of humanity from the exploitation of man by man. Its origins lie in the betrayal of that revolution led by Joseph Stalin, who systematically exterminated the Left Opposition and all those committed to the egalitarian principles of international socialism.

The Soviet bureaucracy lived as a parasite on the conquests of the working class, feeding off the latter until it destroyed them. Their parasitism, privilege and self-promotion were an enormous tax on the Soviet economy, infrastructure and social resources. Guided by the nationalist policy of building “socialism in one country”—which was both impossible and reactionary—the Stalinists pursued industrial development on the basis of national autarky and under the pressure of capitalist encirclement. They played fast and loose with nuclear power in an effort to meet the country’s energy needs.

Of course, an important dimension of the Chernobyl disaster, with which the miniseries does not and probably cannot deal, is what followed it. By the end of December 1991, there was no Soviet Union. The Stalinist bureaucrats and KGB agents, whom the miniseries shows so doggedly trying to prop up a political set-up collapsing under the weight of lies and crimes, dissolved the USSR. In the process, they stole everything that was not nailed down and much that was.

In short, the crime of Chernobyl was followed by an even greater crime—the liquidation of everything that the Soviet working class had fought for over seven decades. The result was mass unemployment, the shuttering of industries, the depopulation of the countryside, a huge spike in alcoholism, falling life expectancy, a massive growth in social inequality and widespread human suffering. The Soviet bureaucrats restored the market and transformed themselves into the proprietors of post-Soviet capitalism before the working class was able to assert its political independence and defend its own interests.

The miniseries concludes with a court scene in which Legasov and fellow scientist Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) indict not just the power plant’s operators (Dyatlov and several others eventually went to prison) but the Soviet system. While the trial did happen, its content, by the director’s own admission, is not accurately portrayed in the miniseries. There was no final reckoning with the Soviet leadership over Chernobyl, nor could there have been without a political confrontation between the Soviet working class and the bureaucracy. The apparatchiks and secret agents who appear in Chernobyl, in many cases, continue to occupy the Kremlin today as servants of a capitalist regime. They also continue to feel threatened by what happened in April 1986. The HBO miniseries has garnered sufficient interest that there are now plans to release a Russian-made miniseries about Chernobyl that blames the disaster on an American agent working at the power plant.

By way of artifice, the filmmakers unsuccessfully try to hand over to a couple of individuals the task of exposing Stalinism. The character of Ulana Khomyuk is created for this purpose. A nuclear researcher, Khomyuk defies Soviet officialdom, confronts bureaucrats, asserts the superiority of science and uncovers secrets. The unconvincing presentation of this figure, created by the filmmakers as a stand-in for the hundreds of scientists who actually mobilized in response to the Chernobyl disaster, is a flaw of the miniseries and one of its weakest elements.

Through Watson’s character, the film falls back into a tale of an individual crusader speaking truth to power, which is something of a disservice to all those who worked to save humanity from Chernobyl’s consequences. Capturing cinematically the involvement of the Soviet—and international—scientific community in the Chernobyl response would have been valuable, albeit challenging. Given the wholesale destruction of Soviet science as a result of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, it would have also imbued the viewer with a much deeper sense of what has been lost.

On the whole, Chernobyl is worthy of the interest and enthusiasm it is garnering.

[tothelasthoursofmylife]

Modern Day 4

And here’s the end of it! Hope you had fun with it.

Chapter Four: The Countess, Fearsome

“To make the deal complete, it was necessary to become someone else.”

London, England, United Kingdom ‒ January 2016

Originally, my plan had been to return to my lovely manor in the countryside after wrapping up the case with Ronan Parrish. But while I was having breakfast in my bed ‒ and watching The Descent Into Hell is Easy, it had gotten a bit too late yesterday –, my butler, Alfred Newman, came to me with a silver tray, carrying one single letter. Right after taking a glimpse at it, I knew that my stay in London would have to be expanded for an unknown amount of time.

I took the letter from Newman and read it, sighing that I had been right like always, and Her Majesty hadn’t just sent me an amicable letter. Was asking for a day off too much? But, of course, I couldn’t decline a request by the Queen. However, she had written that the completion of this case wasn’t very urgent, so I decided, after finishing breakfast that I would let it be for today at least and spend my time with something else.

“You are late,” Cloudia told him when he entered her private chambers through the balcony doors.

Last night, I had made a deal with an actual Grim Reaper. After we both had agreed to work together, the following conversation happened:

“We need a way to communicate,” I had said.

“I have two skull pendant necklaces which allow the wearers to communicate telepathically as long as they touch the pendant,” the Grim Reaper, Cedric Rossdale, had suggested with shining eyes. “I never got around to try them out ‒ this would be the perfect opportunity to finally get to use them.”

“Don’t Grim Reapers have mobile phones? I mean, you talked about googling people, so you have at least a computer.”

“We do have mobile phones ‒ we always get the latest smart phone models.”

“So why don’t we just exchange phone numbers? Or is the Grim Reaper telephone network wiretapped?”

“No, it’s not ‒ we live way too long to want to listen to boring and silly conversations 24/7. Would you like to be assigned to some kind of ‘Wiretap Division’ where you have to listen to Betty and Veronica’s ‘Did you see the latest Lagerfeld collection?’-or-‘Twilight is waaaay better than Hemingway’ -conversations for all eternity?”

“Hell, no.”

“See?”

“So we can just exchange phone numbers. Why don’t we do it then?”

“First of all, magical skull pendant necklaces are awesome.”

“You sound like a eight-year-old kid ‘Walkie-talkies are life,’” I interrupted him.

He ignored me. “Second,” he continued. “my mobile phone bill would get too high. Interdimensional calls cannot be cheap.”

In the end, he had given me a necklace with a skull pendant before Newman had finally arrived and we could dispose of Parrish’s corpse.

After carelessly throwing the Queen’s letter on my bedside table, I continued to watch the second episode of Shadowhunters.

In 2013, a movie adaption to the first book of Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series had come out. It had been okay, but the critics had hated it, and the producers had made the terrible mistake to change important plot elements. For example, the whole brother-sister-drama had been spoiled and demons could enter the Institute. Therefore, the fans had not been very fond of the movie too. The already announced City of Ashes movie had been eventually dropped and a TV series covering City of Bones again had been created instead, in hope to be more successful with it.

The TV series turned out to be terrible though. There were a few good points ‒ Matthew Daddario and Harry Shum Jr. were adorable, Luke being a detective was awesome, some scenes were quite cool, for example the first few minutes of the first episode –, but the bad points, unfortunately, predominated: The drastic change in Maureen’s character, Katherine McNamara’s and Dominic Sherwood’s hair ‒ they needed an appointment at a hairdresser’s as soon as possible –, horrible special effects, whatever Isabelle did in the first episode and her white dress, Raphael, Valentine’s lair in Chernobyl, some actors’ performances...

At least, the show provided a few good laughs. I should show it to Cedric Rossdale someday.

I preferred reading classic literature ‒ nobody could ever dethrone Charles Dickens in my heart –, but two years ago, I had started to read more actual literature. Some Middle Grade books, some Young Adults books. Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters Chronicles were one of my favourite YA books – I liked The Infernal Devices the most and could not await reading Lady Midnight which would come out in two months, or The Last Hours which would come out someday. 2018 or something.

After I had finished breakfast, watching Shadowhunters and reading the newest comments on my review, many book review, blog, I clutched my hand around the petite skull pendant and pressed, signalising the Reaper to come. Right afterwards, I got up, dressed myself in jeans and a flower blouse and went to the little library in my private chamber to wait for him there.

“I had work to do, Countess,” Cedric Rossdale, the Grim Reaper with the long grey hair, explained and closed the balcony doors which she had left open for him, even though it was cold and icy outside.

“Still, this is no excuse for being hours late,” she replied and blinked towards the big, heavy long case clock.

He covered his mouth with one of his overly-long sleeves and chuckled. “My, my, what a funny face you make, Countess. Even though I want to see this face more often, I promise to reap the souls of the dead faster.”

Cedric sat down on one of the large, heavy armchairs, covered in dark green velvet, in front of the chimney. Cloudia had assigned Newman to lit up a fire ‒ there were heaters in the room, but open fires had some charm during winter –, before she had opened the balcony doors, so she wouldn’t freeze to death while waiting for Cedric. She laid down the book in her hands ‒ The Battle of Life: A Love Story – and looked at him.

“I hope you are aware of the reason why I summoned you here?”

“I bet that it has something to do with our deal.”

“Exactly. A brain actually seems to be hiding inside that head of yours.” She leaned forward and smiled her mischievous smile. “If you want to take part in my investigations, in my life, you have to accompany me anywhere. However, because of my social status and the fact that I am of nobility, I can’t let you to be seen with me in public. Not like you are right now. So... ” Cloudia’s smile widened and she closed her eyes and tilted her head. “... today’s topic is to make you undergo a makeover and turn you into a fine British gentleman.”

“So I hope that Grim Reapers get at least basic education?”

After Cedric had agreed to do whatever she wished, Cloudia had started to gather some books from her various shelves. Most of her useful books were in the Phantomhive Manor and not in the townhouse, but the ones she had on site would do the work just fine.

“Before I became a Grim Reaper, I only went to school until I turned twelve,” Cedric told her after a while, and his words caused her to stop and turn around to face him.

“You were something else before becoming a Grim Reaper?”

He nodded and Cloudia frowned. He avoided looking directly at her. “Grim Reapers aren’t born. We all were humans like you before we became Reapers.”

“That’s interesting,” Cloudia said. “And how do humans become Grim Reapers?”

Cedric hesitated for only a blink of an eye, but she still noticed it. “They have to die first,” he answered her.

“Does that mean that every human becomes a Reaper after dying?”

He was strangely silent for a moment. “Only humans who died in a certain way.”

Even though, Cloudia wanted to know how exactly you had to die to become a Grim Reaper like Cedric, she knew that he didn’t like talking about this kind of subject. And because she didn’t want to displease him just now at this early stage of their cooperation, she let it be for the time being.

I would find out how Grim Reapers came into existence. I just needed to wait for the perfect moment to get this piece of information out of Cedric.

I couldn’t await it.

“After being reborn, I had to attend the ‘school’ in the Grim Reaper Dispatch for a while,” Cedric continued while looking directly into the fire in the chimney. “A lot of people who are reborn as Reapers cannot read because of their past, because they, for example, lived in great poverty as humans, so they have a special system to educate new Reapers. A Grim Reaper, who isn’t even able to read a Death Book, would be useless after all.”

“So you can read and write. What else have they taught you?” Cloudia questioned him further. It was fairly interesting to get to know more about the society of Grim Reapers.

“Maths. History. Geography. Foreign languages. Dead, ancient languages. Science. Actually everything human children learn at school.” Cedric suddenly chuckled and stopped being so serious and started being Cedric again.

“Come to think of it ‒ in the last five years in which I’ve followed you, I never saw you sitting in a class and learning with other children your age. Don’t you go to school, Countess? You’re just a kid after all.” He giggled. “Kids should be in school and not murdering people.”

Cloudia scowled at him and he looked up at her, the fire being reflected in his glasses.

“Male Phantomhives attend Weston College,” she informed him. “It’s a prestigious boarding school in the area around London which is only for boys. Female Phantomhives are sent to Miss Peregrine’s School for Fine Ladies. Even if I am the current family head, I cannot attend Weston College like my predecessors as I am a girl and not willing to play being a boy for seven years while going for puberty and sharing a room with other boys. Therefore I should actually go and study at Miss Peregrine’s School for Fine Ladies, but because it’s also a boarding school and too far away from here to go there and come back home every day, I cannot attend this school either. After all, my mother isn’t able to lead the household in her current condition, thus I cannot leave her and the manor alone. Therefore I am home-schooled. I briefly went to a grammar school last year for my GCSE though, and now I attend some classes from time to time because of my A Level.”

Laughing like a lunatic, Cedric fell down the armchair and onto Cloudia’s lovely Chinese carpet.

“Miss Peregrine’s School for Fine Ladies! I can’t hold it! That’s too much! Hahaha!”

She sighed.

If he weren’t helpful in any way, I would have shot him by now and hung him over my chimney ‒ like Mr Crabs had threatened to SpongeBob and Patrick he would in this one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, I would hang Cedric’s head and not his buttocks though –, before continuing to read The Battle of Life: A Love Story while drinking Fortnum & Mason tea. I had gotten it last week from this marvelous Fortnum & Mason shop close to Piccadilly Circus. Of course, on my way there from Piccadilly Circus I had stopped at Waterstones and Hatchards to get myself a couple of new books. These bookstores were just too wonderful not to stop for. Also, nothing was better than new books and new tea.

“Miss Peregrine’s School for Fine Ladies! What a horrible name! Bwahahaha!”

Cloudia kicked Cedric and sent him flying towards the armchair’s heavy legs.

“Stop this nonsense,” she ordered him while looking down at him. He was lying all messily in his black suit which was slightly too large for him in front of her feet and blinking up at her. His glasses were inclined on his nose.

“My, my, Countess, don’t you think that the name of this school is nothing but hilarious? Miss Peregrine’s School for Fine Ladies! What a joke!”

Cedric continued rolling over the expensive carpet, and Cloudia was reminded why she had thought of him as a maniac upon their first meeting.

Actually, the name was really hilarious as it was utterly ridiculous. I couldn’t believe that the girls who were born into the Phantomhive family line had to attend a school with such a name. But, of course, even though it was honestly funny, we, I, didn’t have any time for that kind of stuff.

“Snitchey and Craggs had each, in private life as in professional existence, a partner of his own. Snitchey and Craggs were the best friends in the world, and had a real confidence in one another; but Mrs. Snitchey, by a dispensation not uncommon in the affairs of life, was on principle suspicious of Mr. Craggs; and Mrs. Craggs was on principle suspicious of Mr. Snitchey.”

Because Cedric was still laughing on the floor and seemingly didn’t intend to stop in the foreseeable future, Cloudia had decided to spend the time until he would calm down in the best possible way: with continuing to read The Battle of Life: A Love Story.

“‘Your Snitcheys indeed,’ the latter lady would observe, sometimes, to Mr. Craggs; using that imaginative plural as if in disparagement of an objectionable pair of pantaloons, or other articles not possessed of a singular number; ‘I don't see what you want with your Snitcheys, for my part. You trust a great deal too much to your Snitcheys, I think, and I hope you may never find my words come true.’ While Mrs. Snitchey would observe to Mr. Snitchey, of Craggs, ‘that if ever he was led away by man he was led away by that man, and that if ever she read a double purpose in a mortal eye, she read that purpose in Craggs’s eye.’”

She had just finished page 19 and started page 20. While waiting for Cedric to arrive, Cloudia had read and finished The Chimes, another novella by Charles Dickens, but this time from the year 1844; and because he had arrived when she had just read the very first sentence of The Battle of Life: A Love Story (“Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought.”), she hadn’t arrived that far in the story. Also, even if she had resumed reading after Cedric just wouldn’t stop laughing, Cloudia didn’t get too far either as it was quite hard to read while someone was rolling on the floor and laughing like a psychologically unstable person ‒ and this directly in front of your own feet. Then, finally, Cedric calmed down.

“By the way, what are you reading, Countess?” he wanted to know and sat himself up.

“A Dickens novella,” Cloudia told him, put a bookmark, which her cousin Cathleen had made her when they were just little children, in-between the pages and laid the book down a side table made of dark wood.

“I hope we can finally resume our lesson? We lost plenty of time and have a lot of work to do.”

Of all the Grim Reapers I could have encountered, it had to be the one who would burst into laughter because of every tiny thing.

Of course this could have only happened to me. But because I had proposed the deal, I had to endure it.

Also, I was the Countess of Phantomhive – a laughing Grim Reaper should not drive me crazy even though he was annoying as hell.

“Letting you take a test would swallow up a lot of time, which we simply do not have, so we skip it and go directly to manners and etiquette.”

Cloudia signalised Cedric with a hand wave to sit down at her work table, while she put out some crockery and cutlery, which she had borrowed from the kitchen before Cedric’s arrival, and lined them up neatly on the table in front of him.

“It is quite impossible to avoid dinner or tea parties when you are my associate. Even if we are living in the 21st century and there is no such thing as a ‘Season’ anymore, some high society people and nobles still like to think there is,” Cloudia said. “Which means that you have to be aware and able to implement the rules and manners for meals. Or don’t Grim Reaper have to eat?”

“We have to,” Cedric informed her, eying the strange set-up suspiciously. “Grim Reapers have to eat, sleep, use bath rooms... We are basically like normal humans, only immortal and with enhanced speed, power and endurance. Which means that not even we can watch Netflix 24/7 without dying of starvation, dehydration or due to an explosion of our urinary bladder.”

Cloudia sighed. “Whatever. At least, you don’t have to learn how to pretend that you’re eating.” She picked up the spoon on the far right side and smiled brightly. “Let’s get started. Silverware is to be used from the outside in, but first of all, I want you to become familiar with the individual parts of the basic table set. This, for example, is a soup spoon...”

After teaching him the names of all different parts of the table set, how to use them properly and how to actually eat effectively with this knowledge, I continued to teach him the rules of picking up food and everything else Cedric needed to know about formal dining.

Then, I worked on his way of walking. He walked without any grace, and then his back wasn’t even straight. I piled the books I had taken from my shelves earlier on Cedric’s head, amused myself with his failure to keep them at place and subtly took a video of him when he wasn’t looking. It would definitely get a lot of clicks on YouTube, and thus it was brilliant blackmail material.

After he finally managed to walk properly ‒ unbelievable that he couldn’t even do that! – I let him sit down the armchair again as we now had to discuss other important aspects.

“Your clothes,” Cloudia started without making a friendly, appeasing introduction.

“What’s with my clothes?”

“Have you never realised that they are just too big for you? You’re basically a blade of grass where a towel was thrown onto. I hope you never thought, that you could accompany me to high society social events and gatherings with such monstrosities you call clothing.”

Cedric grinned cockily. “Then I will have to lie.”

“You are a rather painful creature, aren’t you, Cedric Rossdale?”

“You are a rather stern and serious being, aren’t you, Cloudia Phantomhive?” His grin widened. “I hope you know that I don’t have any other clothing which doesn’t look like the outfit I wear today.”

“Didn’t you wear that yesterday already?”

Cedric held his belly in laughter. “You’re so hilarious, Countess! Even though you seem to be a sadist with making me remember all these spoon names and letting me balance all these heavy books, I think I made the right choice in agreeing on your deal. You frequently give me a reason to laugh! Of course, I didn’t wear this robe yesterday! It possesses a totally different shade of black ‒ ‘A Totally Different Shade of Black’ would be a great book title if this James bimbo ever decides to get herself a swimming pool out of gold through publishing another ‘50-whatever terribly unsatisfied woman with a terrifyingly low IQ writes like a twelve year old kid who just got into puberty’-bullshit load – than the one I wore yesterday! That you don’t even know that, Countess! I’m disappointed! Guehehe.”

Cloudia sighed.

I was Cloudia Phantomhive, the Countess of Phantomhive. I. Would. Not. Turn. Mad. Because. Of. This. Laughing. Maniac.

What he had said about E.L. bimbo James was hilarious though.

“Very well. So you don’t have anything better to wear,” Cloudia said while Cedric whipped away some tears of laughter.

“I hope you don’t suggest to take me shopping. I’m not very fond of shopping.”

“Never heard of online shopping? We go through a few websites ‒ Amazon, Zalando and stuff – and get you ‒ and me – some clothes in a couple of minutes without having to leave the townhouse. It will take a while to arrive though, so we have to find you something else in the meantime.”

Cedric sighed. “Why do I even have to get new clothes? Humans are also running around in suits.”

“But not in suits who are too large for them and not all the time. You simply cannot wear a suit for every occasion. Especially not just black ones. Or do you want to tell everyone you’re a witch from Hooky, a member of the Men in Black or MI5?”

He narrowed his eyes. “I hope you’re aware that I can break our deal every time, Countess.”

Cloudia leaned forward to him, a wicked smile all over her face. “You agreed on the deal, knowing very clearly who I am. You followed me in the past five years, therefore you’re aware of my social position. I am not an ordinary citizen. I am the Watchdog of the Queen. I am a Countess. I am of nobility, and I am rich ‒ I own a very large porcelain company, goddammit. And nobles and rich people are very, very fond of social gatherings. Because I am also part of the high society, I am obligated to attend some of these gatherings, although I’m not very pleased about it.

“Our deal contained you accompanying me during my investigations. And if my investigation leads me to such a gathering, you have to bring a certain degree of decency, manners and grace along. Also, I cannot walk around the streets with a man who wears sack-like clothes and doesn’t even know the basics of the fine etiquette, and therefore, I cannot investigate with someone like that by my side. It would damage my reputation. It would ruin the facade I worked so hard to build up over the past years. It would hinder my investigations.

“This deal is a deal to help the other ‏‒ not to ruin them! You knew absolutely well what would await you if you took the deal ‒ and you still did it. So just stick to the conditions of our bargain.”

Her smile grew wider.

“Also ‒ I don’t know why you agreed on my deal as you’re a supernatural creature after all. But I know that you certainly have a reason. And whatever this reason was and still is, it has to be something so big, so important to you that you simply will not end our bargain right now. After all, this reason let you make a deal with me ‒ a mere human, the head of the Phantomhives.

“So, if you want, if you dare, to threat me again, please do so in a way which builds up on a less obvious lie. If you truly want to work with me, you have to become more sneaky.

“And now ‒ let’s continue, Grim Reaper.”

“I know that you dress up like a man on occasions ‒ but why exactly do you possess clothes for males, which are too big for you?”

I had given Cedric an outfit of mine I thought he could fit into. It wasn’t the newest piece of cloth, but I had only worn it once, so it was still in a formidable state, and due to its fine fabrication and colour scheme absolutely acceptable to wear at all times.

And, naturally, I had been right: Cedric fit perfectly into the clothes as if they had been tailored just for him.

“It’s an old story,” Cloudia answered and watched Cedric how he looked at himself in the mirror as he was looking at someone entirely different.

“One year ago, I received a request from the Queen to investigate a certain person. After I found out that he was illegally creating crystal meth in his basement, I had to eliminate him and his supporters. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do. Just before I eliminated the last of them, he managed to grab my phone and destroy it ‒ only to be shot in the face the moment afterwards. Newman was waiting for my call but without a mobile and money for a telephone cell, I could not call him. And these stupid junkies didn’t even have a phone and I really did not feel like searching for their mobiles on them, so I decided to go to Newman’s waiting point. My clothes were dirty and partially covered in blood though, so it was quite hard for me to walk around without anyone noticing it. At least it had already been dark outside and I wasn’t in the center of London. However, it was November and without a proper coat ‒ I left mine in the junkies’ basement as it was too soaked in blood –, I could have frozen to death.

“Fortunately, I came across a little tailoring. I broke into the shop, and changed into some dry clothes. But because I was in a hurry ‒ nobody should catch me after all; also I had to go to Newman as fast as I could or someone could have gone into the basement and found the corpses and the meth and run away with it or something like that –, I just took clothes which fit together and didn’t check their sizes. I disposed my own attire and went to see Newman, so he could drive me to Scotland Yard.”

Cedric chuckled. “My, my, you gave me a stolen outfit!”

“But it fits you, and you do not look particularly horrible in it, so you can use it until we have time to get you some more clothes. You need a lot of attire, if you’re with me. Also, I left money in the tailor’s shop for the clothes.”

Cloudia rose from her emerald-green armchair and walked towards Cedric. She touched his hair. “We need to comb it. Have you ever thought about cutting it shorter?” She chuckled. “You could be mistaken for a hippie after all.”

If she let her black hair, which was usually in a braid or a high ponytail, fall loose, it would be around as long as his.

He firmly shook his head. “No,” he answered. “I like it as it is right now.”

She nodded. “Then you have to comb it neatly, and arrange it into a ponytail with a ribbon which you tie into a bow. You will look more classy like that. It’s also good that you have black glasses with a thin frame. They will harmonise nicely with all colours, so we don’t have to worry about that.

“Now, please sit down again. Before Newman comes and tells me that dinner is ready, we have to discuss a few other things.”

They sat down in front of the chimney again. The fire inside was still dancing and trying to escape from its prison made of stone. It had shrunken a while ago, but Cedric had lit it up again, so the fire could continue its struggle.

“We need a new name for you,” Cloudia said straightforward. “A new identity. If you have already lived once under the name of Cedric Rossdale, you could be tracked by my enemies and some nasty people who become suspicious of you. It would cause too much trouble if anybody found out that you actually died once. Also, if you take upon a new identity, it’s easier for you to get accepted into the high society. We could come up with a fake title, a fake background and lineage for you, and say that you come from far away and didn’t inherit the title or wealth until a while ago. They will believe that, and if they try to track you down under this false name, they will only find the lies we have positioned in front of their feet. Like that we wouldn’t have to rewrite the history of Cedric Rossdale, but to create someone entirely new. And this would certainly be easier.

“Don’t you agree, my dear Undertaker?”

Cedric frowned. “‘Undertaker’?”

She shrugged. “Aren’t you one?”

“I’m a Grim Reaper, Countess. I’m not an Undertaker at all.”

“But don’t you think that Grim Reapers and undertakers are quite similar? The work of both starts when someone dies after all. And both hold the responsibility to bring a living being to a rightful and peaceful rest. Another similarity is the fact that both get to work because of me. Also, I think the nickname ‘Undertaker’ suits you quite well, doesn’t it?”

Cedric leaned back. In his new attire ‒ the dark trousers, the polished black shoes, the starched white shirt and the dark blue waistcoat – he actually looked good. Like a grey- and long-haired version of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Finally, Cloudia was able to see his figure which was so, so thin and fragile-looking. But because he had been able to lift a huge scythe and she hadn’t been able to free herself from his grip yesterday, and because he had told her that Reapers were physically stronger than humans, his outer appearance was nothing more than deceptive. And you had to be deceptive to survive the life of a Phantomhive.

“So – how should we name you? What title should we grant you, Undertaker?”

I didn’t like calling him “Grim Reaper” at all. But if he just called me “Countess,” I guess “Undertaker” should work just fine for him. Also, I liked the sound of it. Undertaker. It was a much nicer word than “mortician,” even though “Mort” ‒ like the mortician from UndeadEd! – would have made a good nickname too.

Cloudia tilted her head, an idea appearing in her mind. “What’s your middle name, by the way? I know it starts with a ‘K,’ but I don’t know the full name.”

“It’s ‘Kristopher,’” Cedric told her and she smiled.

“Then we have a first name for you, Kristopher...” She thought for a moment. “... Underwood.”

He frowned. “‘Underwood’?”

“It’s the most similar name I could think of to ‘Undertaker,’ and I think that both names fit perfectly together. Kristopher Underwood. It’s sounding like the name of someone important, but it’s not too extravagant simultaneously. It’s perfect, don’t you think, Undertaker?”

Cedric gazed at Cloudia and folded his arms in front of his chest. “I guess it works,” he said after a while. Then, he started to giggle.

“You’re someone who has to plan everything frantically in detail, aren’t you, Countess? Manners, clothes, name. You’re just hilarious.” More giggling.

Cloudia ignored his remark. “Fantastic. And now, a title! What title of nobility do you want to have? You don’t necessarily need a title as we could make your alter ego just ridiculously rich, but it’s much nicer that way.”

“Viscount Kristopher Underwood,” Cedric tried. “Marquess Kristopher Underwood. Baron Kristopher Underwood. Hm...” He giggled and covered his mouth while doing so. However, this time, he couldn’t do it with his sleeve and had to use his hand.

“Duke Kristopher Underwood sounds quite good.”

Probably, he just wanted to suit a noble rank above mine.

“Very well,” Cloudia said. “This is settled then too. I will work on the rest.” She stood up and went to her desk. She opened one of the drawers and took out the letter from this morning. The red wax signet was already broken. Cloudia handed the letter over to Cedric who took it with a raised eyebrow.

“The last topic for today: Queen Elizabeth gave us our first assignment as a team today. We will start investigating tomorrow, so please, do not be late.”