#james maxwell research posts

[thameena-mga2024mi5015]

Designing the game map

Mapping out the space

Game Map

Since his photographs are black and white, negative or beige tinted, the environment will also have this colour.

Forgot the flower patches.

Floorplans

House

Shed

Research

Research - House

I wanted to check if my artist used a darkroom for his photographs, and there is indeed a space where he used as his darkroom at the Lionel Wendt memorial art centre.

Lionel Wendt's house

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g293962-d13405841-Reviews-Lionel_Wendt_Art_Centre-Colombo_Western_Province.html

https://ceylon.guide/2020/05/07/lionel-wendt/

Research - Maps

I looked up some examples of maps to see how I can make a map of the house.

CONCEPT ART

[sidewalkstamps]

C. T. Richardson Contractor (Photo taken on January 14, 2024 by Scott Fajack on Calle Rosales & Calle Granada in Santa Barbara, CA).

Actually in the same advertisement as discussed in the last post, C. T. Richardson is surprisingly listed in the Trucking section (Santa Barbara News-Press, Volume 49, Number 83, 27 November 1926, pg. 17, accessed via the UCR Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research CDNC). The subcategories are hauling and excavating.

"Westside History" by Walker A. Tompkins (1980) on Terry Ryken's real estate website states that Richardson "poured the concrete for the 'big glass studio' at State and Mission in 1913" and "got the demolition contract to erase his work in 1948."

According to Find a Grave, Charles T Richardson was born May 21, 1889 and died December 30, 1961 at age 72. He's buried in Carpinteria Cemetery in Santa Barbara County, CA. His parents were Maxwell Thompson Richardson and Francisca "Frances" Rodriguez Richardson. He was married to Hortense Claudia Villalba Richardson. He had two siblings (Anita and Josephine) and six children (Ervin, Charles E., Max, Fred, Charlotte, and James).

[jcmarchi]

Diamonds and Rust Help Unveil ‘Impossible’ Quasi-Particles - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/diamonds-and-rust-help-unveil-impossible-quasi-particles-technology-org/

Diamonds and Rust Help Unveil ‘Impossible’ Quasi-Particles - Technology Org

Researchers have discovered magnetic monopoles – isolated magnetic charges – in a material closely related to rust, using diamond quantum sensing, a result that could be used to power greener and faster computing technologies.

Magnetic monopoles in hematite. Credit: Anthony Tan and Michael Hoegen

Researchers led by the University of Cambridge used a technique known as diamond quantum sensing to observe swirling textures and faint magnetic signals on the surface of hematite, a type of iron oxide.

The researchers observed that magnetic monopoles in hematite emerge through the collective behaviour of many spins (the angular momentum of a particle). These monopoles glide across the swirling textures on the surface of the hematite, like tiny hockey pucks of magnetic charge. This is the first time that naturally occurring emergent monopoles have been observed experimentally.

The research has also shown the direct connection between the previously hidden swirling textures and the magnetic charges of materials like hematite, as if there is a secret code linking them together. The results, which could be useful in enabling next-generation logic and memory applications, are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

According to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, a giant of Cambridge physics, magnetic objects, whether a fridge magnet or the Earth itself, must always exist as a pair of magnetic poles that cannot be isolated.

“The magnets we use every day have two poles: north and south,” said Professor Mete Atatüre, who led the research. “In the 19th century, it was hypothesised that monopoles could exist. But in one of his foundational equations for the study of electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell disagreed.”

Atatüre is Head of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, a position once held by Maxwell himself. “If monopoles did exist, and we were able to isolate them, it would be like finding a missing puzzle piece that was assumed to be lost,” he said.

About 15 years ago, scientists suggested how monopoles could exist in a magnetic material. This theoretical result relied on the extreme separation of north and south poles so that locally each pole appeared isolated in an exotic material called spin ice.

However, there is an alternative strategy to find monopoles, involving the concept of emergence. The idea of emergence is the combination of many physical entities can give rise to properties that are either more than or different to the sum of their parts.

Working with colleagues from the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, the Cambridge researchers used emergence to uncover monopoles spread over two-dimensional space, gliding across the swirling textures on the surface of a magnetic material.

The swirling topological textures are found in two main types of materials: ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Of the two, antiferromagnets are more stable than ferromagnets, but they are more difficult to study, as they don’t have a strong magnetic signature.

To study the behaviour of antiferromagnets, Atatüre and his colleagues use an imaging technique known as diamond quantum magnetometry. This technique uses a single spin – the inherent angular momentum of an electron – in a diamond needle to precisely measure the magnetic field on the surface of a material, without affecting its behaviour.

For the current study, the researchers used the technique to look at hematite, an antiferromagnetic iron oxide material. To their surprise, they found hidden patterns of magnetic charges within hematite, including monopoles, dipoles and quadrupoles.

“Monopoles had been predicted theoretically, but this is the first time we’ve actually seen a two-dimensional monopole in a naturally occurring magnet,” said co-author Professor Paolo Radaelli, from the University of Oxford.

“These monopoles are a collective state of many spins that twirl around a singularity rather than a single fixed particle, so they emerge through many-body interactions. The result is a tiny, localised stable particle with diverging magnetic field coming out of it,” said co-first author Dr Hariom Jani, from the University of Oxford.

“We’ve shown how diamond quantum magnetometry could be used to unravel the mysterious behaviour of magnetism in two-dimensional quantum materials, which could open up new fields of study in this area,” said co-first author Dr Anthony Tan, from the Cavendish Laboratory. “The challenge has always been direct imaging of these textures in antiferromagnets due to their weaker magnetic pull, but now we’re able to do so, with a nice combination of diamonds and rust.”

The study not only highlights the potential of diamond quantum magnetometry but also underscores its capacity to uncover and investigate hidden magnetic phenomena in quantum materials. If controlled, these swirling textures dressed in magnetic charges could power super-fast and energy-efficient computer memory logic.

Source: Cambridge University

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[thisbluespirit]

So it would be flippant and frivolous and maybe untrue to say James Maxwell had a massive crush on Dame Edith Evans, but regardless, let me tell you about James Maxwell’s massive crush on Dame Edith Evans. ;-p

I wondered why he’d left the US for the UK in the first place - his friend & fellow director of the Royal Exchange, Braham Murray, just says that ‘Max’ “fled academia.” I thought maybe it was the general lure of the Old Vic, but Tom Courtenay recalled that, “As a youth he had seen Dame Edith Evans acting in New York and realized he had to come to England and become an actor here.”

Due to WWII putting paid to cross-Atlantic gigs for British actors for a good few years, there’s only one performance by Evans he could have seen at the right age - Daphne Laureola on Broadway in autumn 1950.

Knowing that he started at the Old Vic Theatre School also in autumn 1950, I thought this couldn’t be true, but no!  It was just also a bit more dramatic than I’d imagined...

Daphne Laureola opened at the Music Box on 18th September 1950.  James Maxwell left New York on 21st September 1950.  That’s 2 days, max, from seeing Dame Edith to leaving for England.  For maximum comic effect, we may as well picture him running from the theatre to the boat in full evening dress and wiring home later, with a “btw I’m on a ship to England, see you next summer!”  (Probably not, of course, but it really is that ridiculous.  Assuming he did go home to gather his belongings, what exactly did he tell his family?)

He arrived in Southampton via the Cunard luxury liner, SS Queen Elizabeth on the 27th without so much as a forwarding address to give the port authorities.  He later said that, for him, that moment was a “homecoming.” 

Ironically, while Daphne Laureola had a very successful run in the UK in the previous year, the Broadway version that propelled James Maxwell across an ocean, fell flat with US audiences and critics and lasted only 56 performances.  “The notices were so bad,” joked Joe Murgatroyd (another of the imported Brits in the cast), “I was frightened of opening my dressing-room door on the second night.  I expected to find Martin Miller... lying in a pool of blood with a revolver by his side.”

The play, by James Bridie, centres on a young Polish refugee who becomes infatuated with the middle-aged Lady Pitts, the titular Daphne Laureola. 

What was it that caught James Maxwell’s imagination so powerfully despite the US critics’ disfavour?  Impossible to know, of course, but he wasn’t alone in being so strongly struck by her performance. Director Bryan Forbes (and Dame Edith’s future biographer) saw her in the UK, and recalled the evening vividly: “Nothing I had read about her, nothing I had hitherto seen, had prepared me for this moment.  I suddenly realised what all the fuss had been about...  Here was an actress at her transcendent best in perfect partnership with her material... Her technical commend of Bridie’s invective was a thing of beauty to hear and watch...  Better [not to analyse but] to surrender to the theatrical tides of emotion and drown in happiness.” 

Actor Anthony Quayle wrote to her afterwards: “It was as though you brought to the stage a mastery of your art which has now become so habitual with you that you wore it and forgot it, like a perfect garment.” 

Daphne Laureola’s run in the US was so short that Dame Edith was back in England in time to open the refurbished Old Vic on 14 November - where James Maxwell, now an Old Vic student, must surely have been present to see her.

He got to act with her at least twice on TV, in The Dark Is Light Enough (1958) and again in 1961 in Time Remembered (directed by his friend Michael Elliott) - and he was still quoting her in the early 1970s, in the only proper interview of his I’ve yet found.

 Coincidently, the last play that James Maxwell directed before his death in 1995 was The Importance of Being Earnest for the Royal Exchange - with his wife Avril Elgar as his very own Lady Bracknell!

[Sources: top images - Edith Evans in Daphne Laureola, 1949, National Portrait Gallery & James Maxwell in 1949, Amherst College Yearbook; Braham Murray, The Worst It Can Be Is A Disaster & Tom Courtenay Dear Tom; Internet Broadway Database; ancestry.com Passenger Lists; ancestry.co.uk, passenger lists; www.britannica.com ship image; James Maxwell’s Obit, The Times, 1995; Bryan Forbes, Ned’s Girl; Birmingham Daily Post, 1972 + Playbill image taken from eBay listing]

[petrichor-idyllic]

So, y'all seemed to like my last TMR OC/idea prompt list thing, so I thought I'd do another one.

But actually focus on OC ideas this time.

Okay, so here are some cool OC ideas because there's actually a lot you can do with this universe, but everyone does the same shit.

And I am here to provide:

A transfer character. Can be used for either the books or the movies, but an OC that starts off in one Maze and then gets moved to another with no warning could be an interesting concept. WICKED has made giant simulation Mazes, monsters, flesh eating floating metal balls and teleportation windows- I don't think it's that far-fetched that they could scoop a kid from one Maze and throw them in another.

So, Thomas and Teresa obviously built the Maze, so prodigy characters are a staple of the series. I think an OC that has a lot of knowledge about anatomy and biology, who could work as a Med-jack or a Slicer, who actually designed and made the Grievers, and obviously doesn't remember it, could be a interesting concept.

More male OCs pls. I love seeing these ladies, don't get me wrong because it makes things more interesting. But I think fanfiction can just be for fun and I love seeing some casual normal guy OCs kicking it around the Glade. (Saying this as someone who has male and female characters for this universe.)

I'd also love to see a trans character.

An OC that snuck into the Maze could also be fun. I feel like I need to explain this one more. Picture this: your character is like Teresa and Thomas and has enough of watching their friends be tortured and killed, so they set themself up to go into the Maze early. So they rock up early, like in the middle of two Greenie days and it freaks everyone out. (This could also be an easy way to make it make more sense for fem! OCs to end up in the Glade.)

OC with a cyborg limp of some kind. WICKED could make it happen, don't tell me they wouldn't.

Also, lemme give some names 'cause there was a phase a while back where OCs had the most random names and people completely ignored the fact that all the characters in the Mazes are named after famous people.

(I have used some of these names for my own characters, but I will not be revealing the name of my main OC because she is too precious to me and I am protective over her name. I may one day post about her if people are interested.)

MASCULINE

Otto - Otto Hahn: A German nuclear chemist who is often referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and nuclear fission.

Leo - Leonardo da Vinci: This one is obvious but just in case you don't know; a famous polymath of the High Renaissance who had several talents, including painting, engineering, science and sculpting.

Dalton - John Dalton: An English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He introduced the atomic theory into chemistry and researched into colour blindness (also known as Daltonism in many languages).

Al/Alan - Alan Turing: Cryptanalyst famous for his work during the Second World War.

Micky- Michael Faraday: A philosopher who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

GENDER-NEUTRAL

Clerk - James Clerk Maxwell: Scottish mathematician responsible for the theory of electromagnetic radiation.

Coper - Nicolaus Copernicus: A Renaissance polymath who formulated the model of the universe with the Sun in the middle.

Andy - Anders Celsius: A Swedish astronomer who invented the Celsius temperature scale.

Mo - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Famous composer.

Hol - Andy Warhol: Famous artist.

FEMININE

Mea/Marie - Marie Salomea Curie: A pioneer of radioactivity.

Barb - Barbara McClintock: A famous cytogeneticist.

Emmy - Emmeline Pankhurst: A suffragette and women's rights activist.

Octavia - Octavia Hill: An artist and radical who pioneered affordable housing and can be considered the founder of the modern social network.

Lia - Amelia Earhart: The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Yeah, okay, there ya go, hope some of y'all find this useful, or maybe even interesting lmao.

[gothprentiss]

Writer asks: 5, 10, 17, 21, 27

5. Do you plan? Or do you “wing it”?

……… :(. wing it…….

or like okay. blah blah i’m disorganized i sort of write out from nodes rather than working linearly through anything, but what, for Me, works as planning is setting out a preimposed thematic structure. so for my ongoing bering & wells fic (which i have “not” planned), i have section titles based on james clerk maxwell’s a treatise on electricity and magnetism, which means that i’ve effectively got an outline in the form of the titles i’ve pulled from that.

10. How many unfinished works are in your drafts?

previously answered but i did just find my like, big document of fic ideas. so it’s like, there’s ~9 wips, most of which won’t see the light of day, plus an exorcism/demonology wip that i don’t think i’ll ever finish because writing horror hard :( and it would be super long, and then there’s a like. evil long document which i am afraid to open.

17. What piece of writing are you most proud of?

blah blah yuck annoying answer i’m not really proud of any of them— i’m distinctly UNproud of all the multichapter fics i’ve never finished, to the point that i’ve orphaned them from my old ao3 lol. HOWEVER i’m trying for self improvement SO, back in 2016 i wrote this star wars fic as a birthday gift for a friend (funny story. i’d started writing this as a gift for them, then been like YUCK this is taking so much research i don’t want to do, wrote a criminal minds fic for them, then finished this one over winter break. so they got two fics out of me and also started me on this terrible writing criminal minds fanfiction journey) and especially considering how much reading about star wars i very unhappily and half-assedly did, i think this is probably my best worldbuilding and probably my best, like, narrative idea. also the dream sequence from the opening section of this demily fic— i fondly remember multiple lines from it. too uneven to say the whole thing but i think the tone sometimes hits really where i wanted, and i was pleased when that happened.

21. Do you listen to music as you write?

answered previously but i did also remember— in addition to the coil unreleased hellraiser themes and my big fela kuti playlist, i have a playlist of almost every nick cave & warren ellis movie soundtrack, and that is BANGER writing music.

27. Are there certain types of writing you won’t do? (style, pov, genre, tropes, etc)

answered previously but here, too, i wax on: my fondness for like, parody and experimentation means i’d probably try out many things once, at least for a bit, and many more that i’d be willing to consider if someone was committed enough to pay me. you’d never catch me posting 2nd person pov reader x character fic uncompensated, for example. also you’ll probably never see me post a finished multi-chapter fic but that’s more of a personal failing lol

[bluebellofbakerstreet]

MI6 Cafe Creators Tag Game

(Thank you for tagging me, @3nigm4art!)

We’d love for people to keep getting to know each other after this year’s 007 Fest, so we’re starting this tag game!

Rules: Answer the questions, then tag 3 new people to complete this. Also, tag the person who tagged you and @mi6-cafe so we can reblog your response.

Note that when we say ‘fanwork’ in the questions below, that could mean a fanfic, gif, fanart, headcanon, cosplay, crocheted work---any kind of fancreation counts!

1. What work of yours challenged you when you were creating it?  

My biggest challenge creating for fest was the fact that I had to replace my laptop twice during the whole process. This was more than a little aggravating. So the most challenging thing I did for fest was the Connery Bond Paper Dolls - partly because it was large and complex and involved lots of research - but mostly because I had to do it on three different computers.

2. What is a fanwork you’ve seen which gave you a new headcanon about a character?    

I read so much fic. It is still swirling around in my head like the contents of a snow globe.

So being pretty new, not to Bond, but to the fandom there were a lot of things that made me furrow my brow and do a little research - one of which was James Bond/Q/Alec Trevelyan (And wait - are they pairing up characters that were in movies made 17 years apart?) Absolutely not objecting.

Here are a couple of fics: Food is Love by anyawen, Within Reason by Ceylan

3. Is there a fanwork that you really want to make, but you haven’t started yet?.

So many. The one that actually stuck in my head the most was a set of (Lois Maxwell) Moneypenny paper dolls. I would have designed her a vacation wardrobe, because God knows that woman could use a vacation, and some respect, and maybe some attention from the pool boy.

4. What fanwork of yours surprised you, and how? 

I don't know, maybe Richard ii at Qbranch just because it was so much fun to make.

Or maybe Q tinkering, because it suddenly and unexpectedly dropped into my brain while I was in bed. Good fic will do that to you.

5. What themes/styles/subjects are common across many of your fanworks? 

Character studies/portraits, historical clothing, illustration

And borders and thick black outlines.

6. What other fandoms do you create for, if any? 

BBC Sherlock (including all other Holmes interpretations) is my home fandom. But I have dabbled in a many others, including Good Omens and Our Flag Means Death and look forward to dabbling a little more.

7. Is there an artist that you like to listen to while you create? Or one whose work always inspires you?

Most of the the stuff on my playlist is old, I mean really goddam old. It was old when my parents were young. And I'm old.

8. Share a fanwork that you’ve found yourself thinking about weeks after reading/seeing it.

Gotta go with Harry Potter and the Fucking Audacity by Anyawen and ato-the-bean, in which someone hacks into JKR's twitter account in order to post queer smut. Whatever fandom you're in, even if you couldn't care less about Bond or 00Q, read it anyway. It's very cathartic.

9. Finally, share where you post your works! 

My 007 art on Tumblr

and there are a couple of things on my AO3

Looking forward to next year!

So I’ll tag:@anyawen, @ato-the-bean, @spiritofcamelot

[what-is-your-plan-today]

Leave No One Behind: Meet the Characters

Leave No One Behind- An Ari Levinson fanfic by @what-is-your-plan-today​ and @icanfeelastormbrewing​.

Character Profiles.

A/N- There isn’t much character development really over RSDR, and very little is known about our Characters’ back ground...so we have used a combination of fiction and facts either delivered by the film or what we have found via research on Mossad, the history of the Jewish people in the 40s through 80s and our imagination to bring this to you. It is, historically, as factually correct as we can make it, but if anything is wrong, we mean no offence. Take it as slight creative license...

"For wise guidance, you can wage your war."

All ages correct as of 1979

Name: Ari David Levinson 

Alias: Guy Thomas. 

Age 36-Born in 1943.

Background:  Ari's mother, Amira Levinson was as Holocaust survivor, part of the 4,500 Jewish Immigrants who were carried from France to Palestine in 1947 on the SS Exodus, where they were refused entry. A British Soldier, Steven Thomas, took pity on Ari's mother and she surrendered her son to him for fear he would otherwise die. A year or so later, Steven Thomas met and fell in love with an American Woman, Edith Johnson and they married and moved to America. Ari returned to Israel age 18 to find his roots and embark on his University studies of Anthropology.

Ari has been a Mossad agent since he was 24. He joined in 1967 alongside best friend Sammy who he met aged 23 through Mutual Friends. Ari quickly became one of the most experienced Field Operatives around, specialising in extraction missions and intelligence gathering.

After a will they/won’t they/ they did fling of sorts with Hannah, which lasted 3 months or so, Ari met his wife Sarah in August 1971 and after a whirlwind relationship that left her pregnant, married in early 1972. Their daughter, Maya was born August that year.

Personality Traits: Ari is kind hearted with the desire to help people, but this drive and need to make a difference has made him selfish in some ways and neglectful of his family life, often putting his anthropology and vocation first. He is also stubborn and rarely known to back down when he feels he is right and is most certainly NOT a man with a plan, preferring to fly by the seat of his pants which at times means putting himself and his team in danger at times, although this is never done on purpose.

Simply put he doesn't know when to stop, but will genuinely move heaven and Earth to help anyone in need.

*****************

Name: Hannah Maria Horowitz (nee Navon Garcia) (OFC)

Alias: Rosa-Maria Gomez 

Age 29-Born in 1950

Face Claim- Lyndsy Fonseca

Background:   Hannah was born in Tel-Aviv to an American Jewish Father and a Spanish Catholic Mother, Hannah and Sammy's Mother fled the growing unrest in Spain to New York in 1935 aged 17. There she trained as a nurse and met their father. The two married in 1940 before Ethan was posted to Europe during the 2nd WW. After seeing first-hand the horror his people suffered in the Holocaust, upon his return Ethan became a Conscientious Objector and moved his wife and son to Tel Aviv in 1949, where he took up a post in the Israeli Government looking at how to help fellow persecuted Jews who were scattered across the globe. In 1949 he was one of the founding members of the Central Institute for Coordination which was a central body designed to coordinate and improve cooperation between the existing security services. This later became Mossad.

Following a short battle polio, Hannah’s father died when she was just 5 years old. Both her parents work and desire to help others inspired her to follow in her brother's footsteps and train as a Doctor. Hannah joined Mossad in 1973 aged 23 through as part of her Father’s Legacy and was one of the first Females ever to be deployed into the field. As a Field Doctor she was called to go wherever the need took her, and this includes running a number of operations as part of teams headed up by Ari. Through her links with Mossad she met Andy Horowitz, one of her brother and Ari's protégées and the two married in 1975. Andy was killed on a mission 8 months later in 1976. This spurred Hannah to leave Mossad behind and work at the Surgery her Mother set up in her Father's Memory.

Personality Traits: Hannah is a free spirit, very bohemian with an extremely fierce temper at times and a stubborn streak to rival Ari's. Being somewhat 7 years her brother's junior has led to her being mature beyond her years but also sometimes naive in the way she always tries to see the best in people, even if they possess few redeeming qualities. Hannah wears her heart on her sleeve, and does nothing by halves... including falling in love. The death of her husband left her reeling and for the first time ever questioning her life decisions. 

*****************

Name: Samuel Ethan Navon Garcia (Sam or Sammy)

Alias: Liam Anderson 

Age 36 Born in 1943

Background: Older brother to Hannah, 7 years her senior, Sammy was born in New York and moved to Tel-Aviv aged 6 following his father’s decision to join the Israeli Government. Following the death of his father when he was 12, seeing the care he was given inspired Sammy to become a Doctor and later a surgeon. He met Ari aged 23 in 1966 through mutual friends and the two bonded instantly over a shared desire, vision and passion to help fellow Jews who remained scattered across the globe and still suffering persecution.

Sammy joined Mossad 1967 as a Field Doctor, working alongside Ari on many an extraction mission whilst maintaining his regular role as a surgeon when not away active service. Sammy suffered a severe injury on one mission in 1973 after his right hand was damage by a knife in combat and this left him unable to perform surgery any longer.

Personality Traits: Sammy is extremely similar to his sister in a lot of ways, yet different in many too. Stubborn and opinionated, but more logical, able to let his brain rule his heart. This leads him to clash with Ari on many occasions over missions where he feels Ari is being reckless where he doesn’t need to be. Where Hannah is concerned, he is well aware she can fight her own battles, and for the most leaves well alone. However, when the chips are down the protective big brother rears his head and Hannah can find this overbearing at times, but frankly he doesn't care! 

***************

Name: Maxwell James Rose (Max)

Alias: Irving Wilmington

Age 34 Born in 1946

Background: Max was born to Jewish Immigrants in Queens, New York. Best friends with Andy Horowitz (Hannah's husband) since childhood, the 2 joined the army once old enough and were later head hunted for a number of  one-off specialist missions by Ari after they came to his attention when the US army provided back up on a few of his operations. They joined Mossad full time in 1972 and were as inseparable then as they had been all their lives. When Andy died in 1976, Max continued to run a number of missions before leaving the service in 1978 and becoming a Mercenary, working for whichever intelligence agency wished to hire him. He considers Hannah one of his best friends, and she does him.

Personality Traits:  Max is quite similar to Hannah in that they both live life to the full and take no prisoners. He is, however, a lot more placid but that means when he does lose it, it is done in spectacular fashion. His good humour and overall placid nature mean he is often able to diffuse many a situation and therefore is often the peace-keeper of the group, even if this role is unintentional. His one weakness, however, is food…and if you want him to do anything for you, he will in exchanged for a decent burger or sandwich.

**************

Name: Rachel Reiter 

Alias: Angela Bluchel

Age 31 Born in 1948

Background:  Born in Munich, Germany, Rachel is the only child of 2 German Jews. After hearing her parents stories of the Holocaust, Rachel desired to also make a difference. As part of the recruitment drive in the early 70s, Rachel joined the Israeli Government and moved into Mossad in the same training intake as Hannah, the two of whom were the first ever women agents to be deployed. She married Brandon Cole, an American, in 1974 an had two children, divorcing in 1979. She remained part of Mossad, however opting to run low- key missions to minimise time away from her family.

Personality Traits:  Rachel is your typical matriarch and being a mother has fallen into that natural role within the group. Old before her years she is logical, kind but also possesses a wickedly fast and logical brain. Alongside Max she often finds herself keeping the peace, specifically between Hannah, Ari and Sammy the three of whom seem to cause her a constant tension headache. 

**************

Name: Jacob Thomas Wolf (Jake) 

Alias: Luca Morano

Age 32 Born in 1947

Background:  Jake is the only one of the group with no specialist Mossad Intelligence service training. Jake was born in Jerusalem to native parents and joined the Navy aged 20. A specialist Diver, he was hand-picked to run a few missions with Ari when required before leaving the Navy in 1976  to become a diving instructor in Central America.  

Personality Traits: Jake embodies what everyone thinks of as they typical 60s spirit. He is laid back, willing to go with the flow, but possesses a very analytical eye which can enable him to see the bigger picture where often others can't. Often found topping up his tan in-between diving sessions, Jake has a dirty sense of humour, and absolutely no sense of when it is appropriate or not to use it. 

*********

Name: Ethan Levin 

Alias: N/A

Age 54 Born in 1925

Background: Ethan joined Mossad aged 26 in 1951 after being spotted by Ethan Navon, who became his Personal and Professional Mentor until his death. Ethan fast rose through the ranks and is now the Head Intelligence Officer within Mossad, and the long suffering boss of Ari Levinson. Reporting directly into the Mossad Chief, Ethan is responsible for the coordination of the Key Undercover Operative Team, of which Ari is a member.

Personality Traits: Ethan is clever, logical and attempts to keep the rabble in check by obtaining a level of control of Ari, and commanding their respect. Having known Hannah and Sammy's dad, he is naturally a little protective over the two of them, well as much as he can be without showing direct favouritism. Despite his crisp exterior, Ethan cares and believes intently in the job his team are doing, and will back them as far as he is able. He sees Ari as a potential replacement to take his mantle when the time is right.

And there we have it!! Keep your eyes peeled for our first Chapter which is coming in the next few days!! As always, any asks/tag requests gratefully received...

[lichen-soup-scribe]

LIFE! ON! VENUS!... maybe

Y’all, this article on EarthSky got accidentally posted a day early, deleted and rediscovered in the cache... and folks, it sure looks like Cardiff University and MIT just discovered really, REALLY convincing evidence of microbial life on Venus.

(Part of an announcement video also leaked; you can view it here.)

I highly encourage you to go read the whole article, but to sum it up... Some scientists have speculated that if life existed on Venus, it’d have to be in the atmosphere, where there’s a band of temperate pressures and temperatures. Maybe it could be the last remnants of life from 1-2 billion years ago, when Venus is believed to have been much more Earth-like, with oceans and everything.

And some other MIT scientists (including one of the authors of this study) have previously argued that if we found this compound called phosphine on a rocky planet, it’d be a “sure sign of life.” That’s because it can only be generated in one of three ways: in a lab, in certain extreme conditions on gas giants like Jupiter, and “by certain kinds of microbes that live in oxygen-free environment.”

To quote a 2019 article from one of the researchers: “If we find phosphine on a rocky planet in the habitable zone, where it has no false positives, we will have found life.”

So! This group was using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile to analyze Venus’s atmosphere, and they found phosphine. LOTS of phosphine -- way too much to be produced by anything BUT microorganisms:

William Bains at MIT, who led the work on trying to assess other natural ways to make phosphine on Venus. Some ideas included sunlight, minerals blown upwards from the surface, volcanoes, or lightning, but none of these could make anywhere near enough of it. These kinds of sources could only make, at most, one ten thousandth of the amount of phosphine that the telescopes saw. So something is producing a lot more of the gas.

They did their due diligence: confirmed that they were indeed seeing phosphine and went through all the possible alternative explanations. A couple factors make microbes the most likely explanation:

On Earth, phosphine is produced by microbes that don’t need oxygen. They absorb phosphate minerals, add hydrogen, and ultimately expel phosphine gas. Since Venus has virtually no oxygen in its atmosphere, that’s another similarity suggesting the gas actually is coming from microbes.

Microbes in the atmosphere would also explain previously observed odd dark streaks in the atmosphere full of bacteria-sized particles.

And that phosphine isn’t just anywhere in the atmosphere: it’s located right inside that temperate zone.

So -- no one has directly observed life on Venus... yet. But this is a fantastic and significant clue, and it has me more excited and happy than pretty much any other science news this year. And there’s plenty more scientists can do to investigate! I’ll leave you with another quote from the researchers:

“It’s very hard to prove a negative. Now, astronomers will think of all the ways to justify phosphine without life, and I welcome that. Please do, because we are at the end of our possibilities to show abiotic processes that can make phosphine.”

[gadgetgirl71]

Amazon First Reads for April 2020

Here we are again, it’s time to choose one of eight books that Amazon First Reads lets Amazon Prime Members download for free. At the moment I seem to be downloading more free books than ever. I wonder if it’s my mind trying to get off what is happening around the world, lets just hope that I start to read more quickly.

This months book choices are:

Psychological Suspense

What we Forget to Bury by Martin Montgomery, Pages: 439, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

synopsis: Truth and deceit blur as one woman’s desperation twists into another’s desire for revenge in this mind-bending psychological novel.

Charlotte Coburn has a tragically dark past. But she’s safe now. She lives in a gated community, protected from danger. When teenager Elle knocks at her door looking for shelter during a particularly severe storm, the woman can’t help but think how lucky Elle’s been to have found someone as friendly as her. Except Elle chose her door on purpose…

She knows all about Charlotte’s secrets because they ruined her family and her life. And it is time that everyone else knew. But Charlotte’s past has left a dark void in her life, so she is concocting her own vicious plan, convinced that Elle can help fill that void.

As events unfold, the truth unravels and pulls both women into a dangerous game that will leave you wondering, Who’s the villain?

Contemporary Fiction

Little White Secrets by Carol Mason, Pages 33, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

Synopsis: A daughter pushing the limits. A marriage ready to crack. A secret that can break them.

For Emily Rossi, life may not be perfect, but it’s pretty close. She has a great career, a house in the country, a solid marriage to Eric and two wonderful children—tennis superstar Daniel and quiet, sensitive Zara. But when her fourteen-year-old daughter brings home a toxic new best friend, Emily’s seemingly perfect family starts to spiral out of control.

Suddenly Zara is staying out late, taking drugs and keeping bad company. And just when Emily needs Eric to be an involved father, he seems too wrapped up with his job in London to care. What’s more, he’s started drinking again.

When a dark secret from the past emerges, Emily’s life is turned upside down. Struggling to protect the people she loves, can she save her damaged family? Doing so may mean keeping a secret of her own…

Thriller

The Girl Beneath the Sea by Andrew Mayner, Pages: 328, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

Synopsis: For a Florida police diver, danger rises to the surface in an adventurous thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Naturalist.

Coming from scandalous Florida treasure hunters and drug smugglers, Sloan McPherson is forging her own path, for herself and for her daughter, out from under her family’s shadow. An auxiliary officer for Lauderdale Shores PD, she’s the go-to diver for evidence recovery. Then Sloan finds a fresh kill floating in a canal—a woman whose murky history collides with Sloan’s. Their troubling ties are making Sloan less a potential witness than a suspect. And her colleagues aren’t the only ones following every move she makes. So is the killer.

Stalked by an assassin, pitted against a ruthless cartel searching for a lost fortune, and under watch within her ranks, Sloan has only one ally: the legendary DEA agent who put Sloan’s uncle behind bars. He knows just how deep corruption runs—and the kind of danger Sloan is in. To stay alive, Sloan must stay one step ahead of her enemies—both known and unknown—and a growing conspiracy designed to pull her under.

Science Fiction

A Girl from Nowhere by James Maxwell, Pages: 442, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

Synopsis: Surrounded by fire, a girl with mysterious powers and a young warrior search for safety.

Life in the wasteland is a constant struggle. No one knows it better than Taimin. Crippled, and with only his indomitable aunt to protect him, Taimin must learn to survive in a world scorched by two suns and frequented by raiders.

But when Taimin discovers his homestead ransacked and his aunt killed, he sets off with one mission: to seek revenge against those who stole everything. With nowhere to call home, his hunt soon takes a turn when he meets a mystic, Selena, who convinces him to join her search for the fabled white city. Taimin and Selena both need refuge, and the white city is a place where Taimin may find someone to heal his childhood injury.

As they avoid relentless danger, Taimin and Selena attempt to reach the one place that promises salvation. And they can only hope that the city is the haven they need it to be…

Romance

Love on Beach Avenue by Jennifer Probst, Pages: 310, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

Synopsis: True love is in the details for the Jersey shore’s premier wedding planner in this heart-swooning series about big dreams and happy endings from New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Probst.

Avery Sunshine might not have a soul mate of her own, but she still believes in happily ever after—for her clients. Making dreams come true is her business at Sunshine Bridal, which she runs with her two sisters. When her best friend announces her engagement, Avery is thrilled to take charge of the giddy bride-to-be’s big day. Less thrilling? Her best friend’s arrogant and demanding brother, who just so happens to be the man of honour.

Carter Ross’s first instinct: call 911. He promised to always take care of his impulsive little sister, and he honors that vow. Even if it means taking over her wedding, where he is sure Avery will fail. At best, Avery is unpredictable. At worst, if she’s anything like the spitfire of a college girl he remembers, the main event could run wild.

With Avery and Carter wrestling for control, tempers heat up. So does the spark of attraction they’re fighting with every kiss. As the wedding draws near, it’s time to reconcile a rocky past and make a decision that could change everyone’s lives. Because what they’re rebelling against looks a lot like love.

Contemporary Fiction

Stories We Never Told by Sonja Yoerg, Pages: 328, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

Synopsis: From the Amazon Charts and Washington Post bestselling author of True Places comes a suspenseful novel of love, secrets, and obsession.

Psychology professor Jackie Strelitz thinks she’s over Harlan Crispin, her ex-lover and colleague. Why should she care if Harlan springs a new “friend” on her? After all, Jackie has everything she ever wanted: a loving husband and a thriving career. Still, she can’t help but be curious about Harlan’s latest.

Nasira Amari is graceful, smart, and appallingly young. Worse, she’s the newest member of Jackie’s research team. For five years, Harlan enforced rules limiting his relationship with Jackie. With Nasira, he’s breaking every single one. Why her?

Fixated by the couple, Jackie’s curiosity becomes obsession. But she soon learns that nothing is quite what it seems and that to her surprise—and peril—she may not be the only one who can’t let go.

Literary Fiction

Meadowlark by Melanie Abrams, Pages: 238, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

Synopsis: A haunting novel about the lasting effects of childhood trauma and the resulting choices we make for our children.

After growing up in an austere spiritual compound, two teenagers, Simrin and Arjun, escape and go their separate ways. Years later, Simrin receives an email from Arjun. As they reconnect, Simrin learns that he has become the charismatic leader of Meadowlark, a commune in the Nevada desert that allows children to discover their “gifts.”

In spite of their fractured relationship, Simrin, a photojournalist, agrees to visit Meadowlark to document its story. She arrives at the commune with her five-year-old daughter in tow and soon realizes there is something disturbing about Arjun’s beliefs concerning children and their unusual abilities. When she discovers that the commune is in the midst of a criminal investigation, her unease grows deeper still.

As tensions with police heighten, Arjun’s wife begins to make plans of her own, fearing the exposure the investigation might bring for her and her children. Both mothers find themselves caught in a desperate situation, and as the conflict escalates, everyone involved must make painful—and potentially tragic—choices that could change their worlds forever.

Gripping and beautifully crafted, Meadowlark explores the power and danger of being extraordinary and what it means to see and be seen.

Children’s Picture Book

Bear & Fred (A World War II Story) by Iris Argaman, Pages: 47, Publication Date: 1 May 2020

Synopsis: Based on true events and beautifully illustrated, this is the story of a friendship that will last forever—told by Fred’s best friend, his beloved teddy bear.

During World War II, Fred must leave his home and live in hiding, apart from the rest of his family, but he always keeps Bear by his side. Bear knows it’s his job to take care of Fred and make sure he doesn’t feel alone.

After the war, Fred and his family are reunited and leave Holland for the United States. And still Bear is with him. When Fred grows up, he and Bear part for the first time when Bear is sent to Yad Vashem—the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, where this book was first published—to show the power of hope, friendship, and love.

I felt Fred’s small hand grab me. He patted me and whispered, “Bear, I won’t leave you here all by yourself. You are my best friend.”

*** Which book will you choose? I decided to go for Love on Beach Avenue. ***

[ruffiorocks]

James Olsen is a terrible CEO

Sooo i’ve noticed that a few people have said James is justified in exposing Lena. That he has finally remembered what being a reporter is about. But i have a counter argument:

James Olsen to begin with has never been a journalist. He was a photographer. I didnt recall him ever writing an article pre-Cat leaving? Then he suddenly gets propelled from Photographer to CEO of the entire company? Ridiculous! But more than likely done because Calista had to leave. They needed someone to run Cat Co and it couldn't be Kara, it had to be someone recognizable and they really needed to give James a purpose. Snapper Carr would have been the better choice!

Now i said in a post recently that to be a good journalist you need to write both sides. Not just the side you agree with. Kara even said being a reporter is about finding the truth.

Ok so going off of that logic, then sure, James should have written the story about Lena’s experiments from the very beginning. he should have allowed Mackenzie to pursue with her lead instead of lying and squashing the story. But he didn't, why?  Because he supposedly cared about Lena. But now she’s no longer dating him and what? Now she deserves to be exposed?

James is a crap reporter! He is sitting on the biggest news stories of the age and he does NOTHING!

Clark Kent is Superman

Kara Danvers is Supergirl

The Multi Verse theory is real! The Blur/Flash was from another Earth.

The DEO is a thing!

The DEO used to lock up aliens with no trial, no jury and a life long sentence.

The DEO locked up Maxwell Lord.

Maxwell created the Red K and sent Kara off her rocker.

The Daxamites stayed and invaded because Supergirl couldn't bring herself to let go of her boyfriend, so the people of National City suffered.

Supergirls boyfriend was a Prince who refused to go and lead his people, resulting in an invasion.

Time Travel is real!

Sam Arias, CFO of L Corp was Reign

These are just a few of the biggest events that have happened and James/Kara haven't written stories on them. Why? Because they are personally involved and these stories could hurt the people they care about or them themselves.

Also what about the time the gang learned that Cat Grant had a secret son? No one exposed her then did they? Why? Because they had respect for their boss and owner of Cat Co. A privilege that James and Kara have both denied Lena in the past. Just think for a moment what cat Grant would do if James Olsen exposed her using her own company and her own resources? Exactly the thing he is about to do to Lena. Lena is now paying James to expose her and spill all her secrets.

So what about all the stories we havent seen James write about?

Supergirl is alive and kicking, able to keep protecting the Earth because of Lena Luthor.

Lena Luthor is responsible for the future survival of Argo City and the entire race of Kryptonians.

Lena Luthor was instrumental in stopping Reign

Lena Luthor is responsible for the Power Ranger suit Supergirl just used to save the day.

No? Doesnt want to write these stories? Seems Odd doesnt it? Is it because this could mean exposing that Lena has worked with the DEO and the government before?! Well nothing freaking new there then is there?!

Lena is getting exposed for sharing her research with the DEO and the Government?

You mean like that time she shared her research with the DEO and saved Supergirls life?

Or the time she shared her research with DEO and helped to stop Reign?

Or the time she shared her research with the DEO and created a device that could stop the Daxamite invasion?

OK, so will he be exposing Kara, Alex, Winn, Jonn and himself for working with the DEO? No he probably wont. Why? Because he agreed with what they are doing (although not always, but not expose eh?)

James is exposing Lena because he is butt hurt he’s been dumped. There is no ‘realizing im a reporter and need to report the truth’ here. Its ‘I want to write an expose on my boss who just dumped me before i could dump her because i disagree with what she is doing. If i disagree it makes it wrong no questions asked.’

Do we really think that the general public are going to have that big of an issue with the fact that Lena Luthor is helping the government make super soldiers to protect them from alien invasion? Or alien threats? I dont. Even if that isnt what Lena is really up to. Since clearly this government has a lot of  dodgy stuff going on.  I would say Lena is going to be praised and James Olsen will be booed! If this was real life James would be seen as the rejected boyfriend of a billionaire and looking for his 15 minutes. He would be seen as using his position to have revenge for being dumped. Complete unprofessional and a fool. James is a rejected WAG!

James's Headline ‘Luthor joins government to make humans Super!’

Follow up Headlines:

‘CatCo CEO dumped by boss, takes revenge by trying to expose her’

‘Luthor helps to protect Earth!’

‘James Olsen fired by former lover and boss’

‘Former vigilante James Olsen against the idea of humans having superpowers’

‘Luthor tries to cure cancer, discovers she can give Superpowers to humans’

‘James Olsen, best friend of Supers doesn't believe humans should have the same powers’.

‘James Olsen buries then steals huge news story from rookie reporter’.

This also proves that James NEVER supported or Loved Lena.

James: ‘I love you and you love me’

Lena: ‘Get out of my car!’

James not a day or two later ‘Im going to expose her and all her secrets to the world!’

Yeah... that isn't love. You dont love someone one minute then want to essentially destroy them and everything they have built the next, just because they dumped you. Or even because you disagree with what they are doing.

I really hope Alex goes to CatCo and lays into James, yelling at him for exposing Lena, ruining their plans, getting involved in DEO business at all. She then yells at him some more for bringing the super serum to the public and COL attention and the yells a little bit more about how he failed to mention in his article that he went along with Lena the whole time until she crossed HIS moral line. Then she hands over an envelope ‘Lena Luthor sends her regards’. Inside is his pink slip and papers saying he’s been served, not just by Lena but by the Government. We all know Lena can save the world and sue James at the same time.

[powerenergy9]

Mark Edwards Power Efficiency Guide Swindle

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James Maxwell (1831-1879) a Scottish mathematician interpreted Faraday's concepts into mathematical expressions. Maxwell was a single specific inside the best mathematicians in recent history. A maxwell is really a electromagnetic model of magnetic flux, known as within the respect. Nowadays he is broadly considered supplementary just to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein in the planet of research.

[thisbluespirit]

I made a post about the lure of Dame Edith Evans that brought James Maxwell from the US to the UK, but the flipside of that is, of course, to ask what he was leaving behind him.

The draw of the Old Vic was clearly a big one, and once he got there, it wasn’t only the theatre work that kept him in the UK - he met his wife Avril Elgar there and they married early in 1952.  But it does seem that in some way he wasn’t happy in the US - England was quickly home to him, and he didn’t want to go back. According to Braham Murray, his fellow artistic director at the Royal Exchange, "He had disliked America, disliked academia and had fled to England.” 

His friends also noted a deep contradiction in him - that he was highly intellectual and yet hated academia or to be thought of as such, but that he couldn’t help being so “by dint of grey matter.” He was, said Braham Murray, possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and literature and easily the intellectual match of their fellow directors Caspar Wrede and Michael Elliott, though he disguised it “behind a languid and tolerant drawl,” giving “the impression that he wasn't sure of anything much.“ Tom Courtenay, meeting him as a student, felt he was “far more intelligent than anyone teaching at RADA,” and to Caspar Wrede he was “the most cultured, musical and literate friend we all have ever had.” 

His background wasn’t as average as he liked to imply, although in contrast to some of the group he hung around with*, it probably was more regular and stable - and records give the impression of a close family.  (Braham Murray has nothing to say about any issues with James’s family or his father, unlike some of the other people he mentions in his autobiography.)

* [To put in context: He was not, for instance, the seventh son of a Finnish Baron, and didn’t have an uncle who sent female members of the family mad.]

So, why did an otherwise fairly reasonable-seeming son of a US professor come away with such a lifelong loathing for academia and possibly the country of his birth?  Well, that’s a question only he could really answer, but I can at least throw some light on the matter!

While James Maxwell was American - he was born James Ackley Maxwell Jr  in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1929 - both of his parents were  Canadian, so he may easily have felt as much Canadian as American, growing up.  The family returned to Nova Scotia several times to visit relatives while he and his older brother William (born in 1927) were young, and neither of his parents became US citizens.

[Main Street, Westville, Pictou County, Nova Scotia in 1910.]

His father, James Ackley Maxwell Sr, was the son of William Maxwell, a successful coal owner from Westville, Nova Scotia, and his wife Anna Marshall, but his path to academia hadn’t been smooth.  When he reached adulthood, World War I was in progress, and study had to wait on duty.  In 1915, aged 18, he left his post as a bank clerk to join the Nova Scotia Highlanders, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant by the age of 21 and received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for an “extremely high act of bravery” at the Battle of Amiens.  He “carried himself in a magnificent, soldierly manner and displayed the greatest devotion to duty...” inspiring “with confidence all with whom he came in contact. He went from section to section as they held up by his skill and coolness cleared the opposition and made advance of the company possible.”

After the war, James Sr finally got to down to serious study - first at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1919-21), before leaving for the US to study at Harvard (1921-23), where he also gained a Ph.D in Economics (1923-27), thanks to a scholarship.  By that time he was already an assistant professor at Clark University (from 1925), where he would remain until his retirement in 1966.

[James Ackley Maxwell, via SaltWire; background Clark University, from their website.]

He specialised in  Public Finance and Fiscal Policy and was in demand as a public policy adviser to the US government throughout his career.  Outside the US, he acted on various occasions as adviser to the Royal Commission on Provincial Financial Relations in Ottawa, was a visiting lecturer at Melbourne University and National University, Australia, and at the Brookings Institute in Washington, and took part in the International Institute of Public Finance in Istanbul, Turkey.  He wrote several books, including Tax Credits and Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations, Financing State and Local Governments, Tax Credits and Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations, The Fiscal Impact on Federalism in the United States and Commonwealth State Financial Relations in Australia, work that displayed “his command over a most complex and intricate area of public finance.” 

[Conant Hall, Harvard - the post-grads’ hall - where James Maxwell Sr was living at the time of his marriage.]

He married Reta Nickerson in 1923, shortly after her arrival in the US.  She was also from Nova Scotia, born in Halifax in 1897.  They must have met before he left for the US in 1921 and probably had to wait on his studies to marry.  James Sr was living in Harvard’s Conant Hall, while she was staying nearby at Hingham.

She had also had a college education and, now as Professor Maxwell’s wife, was involved with campus life at Clark - having students back to the house after the Spring Spree, or attending meetings of the Massachusetts branch of the American Association of University Women, who were at the time, concerned with the experiences of foreign students.  She was a singer and musician, although not, it seems, professionally as such.  She was a soprano and soloist and did sing in public on occasions.  In 1934 she assisted (a friend?) Annie Russell Marble in her work collecting songs of latter-day poets, by accompanying her to talks to sing some of the songs at various places, including the association’s meetings and Boston Public Library.  One of them was “O Moonlight Deep and Tender” by poet James Russell Lowell, to music composed in 1921 by Henry Leland Clarke.

James Maxwell spoke of inheriting his love of music from her, and how he, too, had started out as a singer - as an actor in musical theatre and had considered at first making that his career. 

[2 Stoneland Road, off Main Street, Worcester, close to Clark University.  The Maxwells were living here in 1930, in a flat separate from the main house.  Later that year, James & Reta made a trip back to Canada with their two young sons, William aged 3 and James Jr, 18 months.]

Clark University had been founded in 1887 as a post-graduate research university, with Clark College for undergraduates from 1902.  The two amalgamated under new president Wallace W. Atwood in 1920, a few years before Professor Maxwell joined the staff.  It was one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities (one of three in New England; the other two being Harvard and Yale).  Although female post-graduate students had been permitted since 1907, the undergraduate courses were male-only until 1942.

The campus is on Main Street, and centres around the green.  The Maxwells lived very close to the university in both 1930 and 40, so James and William must have grown up very familiar with its grounds.

[1930s postcard of Clark University, showing various buildings, including the Library.]

In 1938, Professor Maxwell was invited to lecture at either Melbourne University or the National University in Australia, or both - and he took Reta and the two boys with him, so James Maxwell had made a cross-continental voyage long before he left for the UK, and got to see something of a third continent.  I’m not sure how long the Maxwells were in Australia, but they left Sydney for the US on the SS Mariposa on 19th August, arriving in San Francisco on 6th September.  

[5 Shirley Street, close to Clark campus, where the Maxwells where living in 1940s.]

Once back in the US, nine-year old James must have resumed his usual studies - and it’s clear that his friends weren’t exaggerating his intellectual abilities.  His scholastic achievements earned him a place at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, a college prepatory boarding school (boys only at that time).  It currently accommodates 444 students.   The age range was 14-18, so presumably he started in fall 1943 - but he graduated only two years later, at 16. 

His classes included German (which he would later use to translate Buechner & Schiller).  The Academy was founded in 1836 and had several long-standing traditions, some of which continue today. Pupils regularly gathered on the Main Steps to sing, and all students belonged to one of two Literary societies, who competed against each other in a midwinter weeklong competition that could be intense and culminated in a debate-like event known as the Declamation.  James Maxwell belonged to the John Marshall Literary Society and it looks as if he may have played a significant part in the 1945 competition, perhaps as one of the five John Marshall students to give a monologue in the Declamation.  (The yearbook is online, but only as a preview, so I could be mistaken.)

[Mercersburg Academy chapel, 1930s or 40s postcard.]

The school had 300 acres of grounds, plus its own chapel, and doctor - but it was still an institution, and 420 or so miles away from his family in Worcester.  The local doctor’s son, growing up at the same time in Mercersburg comforted himself through a bad bout of scarlet fever that at least he got to be at home, unlike the “Students at the Academy [who], we knew, were removed from the dormitories by Dr. Hitzrot and made to tough it out in a separate building near the Infirmary that we called The Pest House.”

[The 1945 Karux (Mercersburg yearbook) is only partially viewable to  passing Brits who can’t enter their own high school graduation details, but despite the blurriness, you can see a small "JAMES ACKLEY MAXWELL JR.”  He’s signed: “Best of luck [?], James.”]

While he was studying there his family life changed dramatically.

On 1 February 1944, his mother Reta died, aged 47.  James was still not quite fifteen.  I don’t know the circumstances of her death, although the distance from Mercersburg inevitably raises the question of whether or not he was able to be there.   It wasn’t the only family loss that month, although it must have been the most significant for James.  Back in Nova Scotia, his grandfather William Maxwell also passed away on the 13th.

James continued at Mercersburg until his early graduation in 1945, after which he went straight onto Amherst College in Massachusetts.

In 1946 Professor Maxwell married again, this time to Mary Newall.  The couple went on to have three more children over the next few years - Daniel, Anne, and Ellen.

By that time, James Jr had been at Amherst for a year.  He started in 1945, aged 16, and continued to do well, graduating in 1949 magna cum laude (with great disinction).  Amherst was another male-only educational institution, but it allowed him to explore more of his his own interests - after starting out in Glee Club in his first year, he joined the drama club, The Masquers, which was where he first became seriously interested in acting as a career. By his last year, he was vice president of The Masquers, and even got the chance to play Brutus in a production of Julius Caesar recorded at the Folger Library and broadcast on TV.

[James Maxwell, third row, in the ‘Lord Jeff Club’.]

He also avoided joining one of the more traditional frat socities and instead opted for the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club, described in the yearbook as “a new and different kind of social organization on the Amherst campus.”  It was “completely democratic, and no unaffiliated student is barred from membership for any other than scholastic reasons” and they invited faculty members and visitors to lead political, social & economic discussions. 

He graduated from Amherst in 1949, but it was another year before he left for the UK.  I don’t know what he was doing, but Caspar Wrede, who had known him since his arrival at the Old Vic in 1950, wrote that he “studied at Yale.”  A post-grad course of some kind is certainly feasible, given his claim of having run away from academia, and Yale would put him in the right area to be able to see Edith Evans on Broadway that September. 

[Extract from Google Maps, showing (L-R) Amherst, Worcester, Harvard & Hingham (where Reta Maxwell was staying at the time of her marriage).]

So, as to why he was so set against academia, it’s clear that he had already experienced a surfeit of it, from his childhood at Clark, through Mercersburg, to Amherst and maybe even elsewhere, after.  Despite the elegant buildings and privilege of his scholastic institutions and their beautiful surroundings, James Maxwell preferred smoggy, dirty, war-damaged 1950s London - and a theatre school that might be world-famous but was “the aesthetic equivalent of a boot camp.”  One, some, or all of these places left him with his lifelong distaste for academia in the US, even if we can’t know exactly which, while the death of his mother and remarriage of his father may have made it easier to leave than it otherwise might have been. 

Whatever the case, he didn’t leave forever in 1950 - he went back to the States the summer of 1951, after his first year at the Old Vic Theatre School, even if it appears to have been the last time.  The address he planned to stay at was his father’s, despite his dramatic exit the previous year.  He never gave up his US citizenship, either, settling for dual citizenship status through his marriage to Avril Elgar.  And (whether coincidentally or not) their younger son Dan shares the same name as his half-brother Daniel.

He had a gardening anecdote he used to tell Tom Courtenay, on the subject of transplantation - that he had a shrub in his garden, in a spot where it wasn’t getting enough light, but it had a tap root, so couldn’t be moved:  “It will have to stay where it is,” he said.  “It may have to have a less than perfect life.”

[sources: Braham Murray The Worst It Can Be Is A Disaster; Tom Courtenay Dear Tom; The Royal Exchange Theatre Company Words & Pictures 1976-1998; US/Canada Border records, ancestry; Field Family Tree website; irwincollier.com; “Westville’s War Hero Economist” SaltWire; Boston Globe (various, 1920s-1960s); Cambridge Chronicle 1923; Ancestry.com 1930 US census & 1940 census, Maxwell household; Clark University website; Boston Symphony Orchestra 53rd Season 1933/4; Wellesley College News, 1934; The Stage, 1968; Wikipedia; Ancestry US Passenger records; The Karux1945 via Classmates & e-yearbook.com; Mercersburg Historical Society; Findagrave James Ackley Maxwell & Reta Nickerson Maxwell; The Olio 1948, 1949, Amherst College website; Aberdeen Evening Press July 1964; Google Maps; Michael Billington State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945; various images from Google StreetView & Google Images.]

[thevividgreenmoss]

The right has been trying to sell Americans on consumption-based standards of freedom for years. Indeed, the CEA’s report on the baleful impact of socialism makes much more sense when one remembers that the current head of the agency is Kevin Hassett, a longtime fixture at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the foremost think tanks of the American conservative movement. (Hassett’s also the coauthor, with rabid supply-sider James Glassman, of one of the most ridiculous books of all time, 1999’s Dow 36,000.) This is the level of persuasion one expects from a person whose career has largely been devoted to persuading rich people to subsidize the production of dubious research praising the system that allowed them to get rich.

These think tanks specialize in that sort of “me or your lying eyes” approach to selling Americans on American-style capitalism (which you’d think, if it were working correctly, wouldn’t need so much marketing help). That’s why the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the most influential conservative think tank, periodically tells us that there’s no real poverty in America—or at least that while there might be some, it is, all in all, pretty pleasant poverty—in reports with titles like 2011’s “Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?”

…All of these reports—and scores more pieces of commentary making the exact same arguments and citing the exact same figures—were authored or co-authored by Robert Rector, who has been shaping conservative arguments on poverty since joining the Heritage Foundation in 1984. He’s been called the “intellectual god-father” of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform. Considering his part in that triumph of bipartisanship, which really did, as Bill Clinton promised, “end welfare as we know it,” it’s clear why Rector is so invested in the argument that to be poor in twenty-first century America is a cakewalk—he’s responsible for creating a whole new population of poor people.

…The tendency for American capitalism to justify itself by the gadgets it is capable of making affordable is an old one. It was the basis of the notorious 1959 “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which took place at an exhibition of American technological wizardry set up in the heart of Moscow. The American pavilion featured the latest in American time-saving household appliances, and the debate almost immediately took on a legendary character in the United States, where we told ourselves that Soviet citizens were entranced by our washing machines and Polaroid cameras. The Americans faked the automated kitchen, of course—there was a guy behind a two-way mirror making the proto-Roomba move and turning on the “automated” dishwasher, Joe Maxwell, one of the industrial designers responsible for the kitchen, told Gizmodo decades later—as part of the mission was to convince the Russians that things being marketed to middle-class Americans, including things that were years away from any sort of commercial viability, were commonplace in homes across the country. (The Soviet exhibition in the United States, meanwhile, featured a modest three-room apartment. And Sputnik.) While the Soviets were suitably impressed with the quality of our kitchen appliances, this message left in the exhibition’s visitors’ book seems pertinent: “A shortcoming: you show what you produce, but you do not show what you produce it with.”

At the time, the (real, non-automated) dishwashers would have been manufactured in the United States, to be sold to middle-class families to help wives more efficiently carry out their unpaid domestic labor while their husbands were at work manufacturing dishwashers. The government subsidized the construction and (for white families) debt-financed purchasing of large suburban homes so that there would be somewhere to put all the dishwashers—and so that the people who built homes would have enough homes to build to afford their own dishwashers and large suburban homes. This was called “capitalism.” (The Council of Economic Advisers report on socialism quotes the late economist Sherwin Rosen’s dismissive description of Sweden as a place where “a large fraction of women work in the public sector to take care of the children of other women who work in the public sector to care for the parents of the women who are looking after their children.” Just think of all the surplus labor going to waste caring for people instead of being expropriated by the owners of capital!)

Eventually, the sort of people who own household appliance companies saw the return on their investments begin to stall out, due to inflation and labor power, so that system was phased out in favor of one in which many people still got large, debt-financed homes, but there were fewer dishwasher manufacturing jobs. The dishwashers got a lot cheaper, though, to help the new arrangements seem more palatable.

Yet still, despite the dirt cheap vacuums and flat-screen TVs, something seems wrong. People keep complaining about “income inequality” and writing books about how grindingly difficult it is for an alarmingly large number of Americans to get by.

Conservatives seem to have noticed that their primary argument—why do you feel so poor when you have such a large TV?—has had trouble making inroads among people who actually experience life in the United States and who don’t work within the think tank–lobbying firm–Council of Economic Advisers circuit. They’ve noticed, too, that while TVs, for example, are quite cheap, things essential to live—and things essential to “get ahead” in the United States—are only becoming more expensive.

The American Enterprise Institute even produced a chart illustrating the problem. It shows the prices of things like new cars, clothing, toys, and TVs staying steady or dramatically falling relative to the inflation rate, while food, housing, child care, and—especially—medical care skyrocket in price. If you want an explanation of why non-wealthy Americans feel so stretched thin even in a time of supposed abundance, there it is. They can afford to get their kids toys but not bachelor’s degrees.

…Ex–Cold Warriors still fondly recall the kitchen debate. They still chuckle at the crummy cars and televisions the Soviet citizenry had to endure as Americans innovated cruise control and Betamax tapes. But during the periods when life was stable in the Soviet Union, its people were reasonably satisfied. The years since the end of Communism, on the other hand, have been devastating to a generation of Russians. As Masha Gessen wrote for The New York Review of Books in 2014:

In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.

Many of those deaths were violent or self-imposed. Deaths from injuries and poisoning are five times higher in Russia than in Western Europe. “We would never expect to find premature mortality on the Russian scale in a society with Russia’s present income and educational profiles and typically Western readings on trust, happiness, radius of voluntary association, and other factors adduced to represent social capital,” the economist Nicholas Eberstadt writes. In her review of scholars’ attempts to explain the story of the Russian death rate, Gessen wonders if the problem might be a sort of inherited cultural despair—whether “Russians are dying for lack of hope.”

Millions of former Soviet citizens now have access to the consumer bounty Americans lorded over them during the Cold War. It has not helped them adapt to life without a safety net. However often those notoriously unreliable Lada cars might have broken down, an inferior product line drove many fewer Russians to drink themselves to death than economic shock therapy did.

The year after Gessen wrote that piece, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published their paper showing that, after declining for decades, the mortality rate for middle-aged white Americans had been steadily climbing between 1999 and 2013. They updated their report in 2017, with data showing that non-college-educated white American men were increasingly dying of “diseases of despair,” meaning mainly drug and alcohol abuse and suicide.

The connecting thread in both the Russian and American cases seems to be decline in living standards—not absolute deprivation. By historical and international standards, there are much worse things to be than a member of the stagnant or declining middle class in America, or even post-Soviet Russia—nearly everyone we’re talking about probably has televisions and refrigerators among other cheaply produced pieces of gadgetry. But people seem to choose to obliterate themselves not when their current situation is dire, but when there is no apparent path to a better one.

Non-college-educated white American men are also, we’re told, President Trump’s base. His Council of Economic Advisers would like them to be grateful for all the room our large country has provided for them to park their trucks.

[euroman1945-blog]

The Daily Thistle

The Daily Thistle – Historical and Archeological News From Scotland

Friday 7th September 2018

"Madainn Mhath” …Fellow Scot, I hope the day brings joy to you….  The first thing I will ask you to do, is SHARE this edition of The Daily Thistle as Facebook has restricted me once again from sharing to groups I do not control or am an Admin of… so please SHARE the hell out of this post… on a more Happier note they have been digging up the Queens garden and finding all sorts of stuff and as I get more information I shall let you know.. so read on and enjoy.. I’m going to have another cup of coffee..

QUEEN'S EDINBURGH RESIDENCE YIELDS 800-YEAR-OLD ARTIFACTS…. EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND—According to a BBC report, archaeologists have uncovered artifacts going back 800 years at the Palace of Holyrood House, Queen Elizabeth II's official residence in Scotland. Discoveries include a twelfth-century jug fragment, a horse skeleton, and a medieval shoe, as well as a cache of oyster shells and wine bottles. The latter may provide insight into the diets of courtiers and ambassadors during the reigns of Mary, Queen of Scots, and James VI of Scotland, who became James I after being crowned king of England in 1603. Researchers also unearthed wine and spirit vessels, food remains, and fragments of children's games, which belonged to families living in nearby tenements during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "The survey has provided a unique opportunity to understand more about the fascinating development of the Abbey Strand and its surroundings," says archaeologist Gordon Ewart, referring to the stretch of Edinburgh's Royal Mile that culminates at the palace, "and to explore how the site has been the historic and symbolic bridge between the palace and the city of Edinburgh for centuries."

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY…. This day in 1836 saw the birth of Henry Campbell Bannerman, the British Prime Minister. Born in Glasgow and educated at Glasgow and Cambridge, Bannerman became the Liberal MP for Stirling in 1868, a position he held until his death. He climbed the parliamentary ranks, serving as Secretary for Ireland during Gladstone's administration in 1884 and entering the cabinet as Secretary for War in 1886, before becoming leader of the Liberal Party in 1899. Bannerman became Prime Minister in 1905 following Balfour's resignation, and led his party to a landslide victory in the 1906 general election. His brilliant cabinet included Asquith, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill. Ill health forced Bannerman to hand over the leadership to Asquith, and he died two weeks later in 1908.

GAVIN MAXWELL PASSED AWAY ON THIS DAY…. He lived from 15 July 1914 to 7 September 1969. He was a naturalist and author, best known for his work with otters. His most popular book was Ring of Bright Water, published in 1960. This described how he brought an otter back from Iraq and raised it in Scotland. The otter, Mijbil, was eventually identified as a previously unknown sub-species of the Smooth-coated Otter, since named after Maxwell: Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli. The book went on to sell over a million copies and was made into a film. The sub-species Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli may have fared less well: following extensive drainage of its natural environment in Iraq it is feared to be extinct… I must at this point tell you he had nothing to do with a Silver Hammer..

IN THIS WEEK…. The Shetland Isles were mortgaged to Scotland for 8,000 florins as part of the marriage agreement between the future James III and Princess Margrethe of Denmark.  For the most northerly railway in Britain, go to Thurso. For the "most northerly" of just about anything else, you need to come to Shetland. The name, sometimes in the past referred to as Zetland (hence the "ZE" beginning to postcodes), comes from the Norse name for the islands, Hjaltland. For accommodation in Shetland see the links in the "See and Stay" menu above. See the map below for an outline of Shetland and links to connecting areas. Because most maps of Scotland include Shetland in a box near the top right hand corner, not many people have a strong sense of where this archipelago of 100 islands and islets lies. It comes as a surprise to many to discover it is nearer Bergen than Aberdeen; that it is further north than Moscow or southern Greenland; and that Lerwick is as far as Milan from London. The population of Shetland is around 23,000. Shetland was Norse until 8 September 1468, when the islands were mortgaged to Scotland for 8,000 florins as part of the marriage agreement between the future James III and Princess Margrethe of Denmark. In 1472 the Scots annexed both Shetland and Orkney.

HUGH MACDIARMID PASSED AWAY THIS WEEK IN 1951….Hugh MacDiarmid, was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, who lived from 11 August 1892 to 9 September 1978. He is widely regarded as the most important Scottish poet of the 20th Century. He moved with his wife to Biggar in 1951 and that was where died on 9th September 1978. In all Grieve/MacDiarmid published around 30 books and many shorter works and articles. The poetry he produced in his later life is often viewed as difficult and inaccessible, but brilliant. The two volume Complete Poems, published after Grieve's death, ran to 1500 pages.

On that note I will say that I hope you have enjoyed the news from Scotland today,

Our look at Scotland today is of a peculiar nature or is that, nature at it's most peculiar...?

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Friday 7th September 2018 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus #Scotland #News #Spain

[argyle-s]

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME CHAPTER 21/38

Rating: Mature

Read at Ao3

Start at the Beginning

When Maxwell Lord makes his presence felt, things don't go quite how Kara remembers them.

Note:  I've gotten frequent requests to post more often, so for the rest of this story, I'll be posting Wednesday and Saturday. When I move to the sequel, I'll be going back to my normal posting schedule of one chapter a week.

Thanks to @ifourmindbeso for her great work as a beta. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own.

Chapter 21 –  A Distant Early Warning

Kara soared through the air over National City, soaking in the sunlight and enjoying being able to fly without having to work to stay unnoticed. Sometimes, when she was out as Supergirl, it struck her just how much she’d missed this. The freedom, the peace, the... sound of drone rotors. She turned and glanced at the source of the sound, and sure enough, it was one of Maxwell Lord’s drones.

She reached up and tapped her ear piece. “Alex,” she said as she did a lazy circle around the Wayne Enterprises tower, slowing her flight down a bit.

“Yes,” Alex replied.

“I’ve got a drone tailing me,” Kara said.

“A drone? What kind?”

“Black and gray quad copter. Built-in video camera.”

“You sure it’s following you, and not just out for a spin?” Alex asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Kara said. “Get Susan, Winn and Maggie on the line with us.”

“On it,” Alex said.

“Ms. Danvers,” J’onn said as he came on the line. “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

“I’ve got a drone chasing me around the city. I’m flying in circles right now, and it’s zipping in and out, trying to taunt me into chasing it.”

“Hey, Kara,” Winn said.

“I’ve got Susan and Winn conferenced in now,” Alex said. “Maggie should… and here she is.”

“What’s up?” Maggie asked.

“One second Mags,” Kara said as she started climbing towards the roof tops. “Konex, tie Winn into the data feed from my phone, and give him access to the broadcast functions. Winn, I need you to hack this drone. Once you’re in, kill the camera and mic, then set it to hover, so I can grab it and pull the battery without damaging it. Everyone else, hold on.”

“Supergirl,” J’onn said, “do you mind telling me why this is so important?”

“Not until Winn kills the audio feed from the drone.”

“Got it, Kara. I’ve actually killed the drivers for the video and audio. Drone should come to a stop right about… now.”

Kara smiled as the drone went from climbing after her, to a dead stop.

“Okay, Maggie, I need you to evacuate building fourteen in the Winslow research pack. There might be a bomb in the lab on the third floor in the north west corner.”

“You could have led with that, Kara,” Maggie said.

“If it’s there, it’s not scheduled to go off until tomorrow morning,” Kara said. “It might not be in place yet.”

“How do you know this?” Maggie asked.

“I just do,” Kara said. “Trust me. I’ll explain as soon as I can.”

“I’m on it,” Maggie said.

“Alex,” Kara said as she dropped down and grabbed the drone. She flipped it over and yanked the battery pack. “I’m going to drop the drone at the downtown facility, then head over to the lab I just sent Maggie to. Take a team and meet us there. Once the bomb is disarmed, I want to bring it and the drone in for comparative analysis. Susan, I need you to find anything you can on a man named Ethan Knox. He worked at that lab up until six months ago. Konex will help with the search.”

“Kara,” J’onn snapped, “would you mind telling me what the blazes this is about?”

“A tip from the same source that told me about Astra. I wasn’t sure if the information was still good until I saw the drone.”

“I see,” J’onn said. “The downtown facility will be expecting you.”

Maggie was waiting for Kara when she touched down outside the lab with an unreadable expression on her face.

“Hey, Maggie,” Kara said as she touched down.

“Supergirl,” Maggie replied.

“Everyone out?” Kara asked.

Maggie nodded. “Working on it. The bomb squad’s looking for the device while the uniforms finish clearing the building. Care to tell me how you know there’s a bomb up there?”

Kara nodded. “Yeah, of course, but not here. I’ll bet my Buffy The Vampire Slayer Complete Series boxed set we’re being watched by the person responsible for all this right now. I’m gonna go in and see if I can find it.”

Maggie nodded. “I’ll let the bomb squad know you’re on the way.”

Kara took off, using a burst of super-speed to make it up to the lab, and then using her X-Ray vision to find the bomb, which was inside an equipment locker. She did a quick check to make sure the door of the locker wasn’t wired, then ripped it off so she could see the bomb.

One of the bomb technicians came up next to her as she looked it over.

“That’s not good, ma’am,” the technician said as he looked at the bomb. “Completely sealed. Likely has anti-tamper triggers.”

“Not as many as you’d think,” Kara said. “I’ve seen these before. It’s got a timer and a remote detonation failsafe. The main access point is wired, but this secondary panel here can be pried open. It’s got a lithium ion battery. If we hit the interior with a blast of cold, and drop the battery below negative forty degrees Celsius-“

“The battery will be too cold to discharge. But what if the trigger circuit has a capacitor bank?”

“It does, but the capacitors are Electrolytic. Worse performance in cold than the batteries.”

“That’s brilliant, ma’am. I’ve got some liquid nitrogen down in the van.”

“No need,” Kara said. She knelt down next to the bomb, and pried the side panel off, then leaned down and gave the inside a good blast of her freeze breath. Once she was sure the interior was cold enough, she flipped the bomb up on its end, and ripped the main access panel free, so she could reach inside and disconnect the detonators from the explosive charge. “There. All safe.”

The technician nodded her head and reached up to activate her radio. “Sawyer, this is Griffon. I’m with Supergirl. We’ve located the device, and she’s disarmed it. We’re bringing it out now.”

Kara took a moment to scan the rest of the room and stopped dead when she spotted it. A second bomb.

“Get out,” she said. “Get out now.”

Then she was moving at super-speed. She tore across the lab, grabbing the second bomb, ripping the panel open and hitting it with her freeze breath. It took longer than she liked before she could tear off the main access panel, and disconnect the charge, but the moment she was done, she started scanning again as she yanked her phone out of her boot.

“Konex, jam all frequencies out to five hundred yards from my location for twenty minutes.”

“Yes, Lady Kara,” came the reply, right before the connection went dead. Kara didn’t wait, she was moving and scanning before the line died.

“What the hell happened up there? Where’s Supergirl?” Alex asked as she approached Maggie. The signal from Kara had cut off abruptly, right after they’d received word the bomb had been disabled. What’s more, *no* radio traffic was coming out of the target zone. By the time Alex could get a feed from the DEO satellite, whatever happened had already happened, and the roof of the building was on fire. By the time she arrived, there were four hoses working it.

“She’s fine,” Maggie said. “A little shaken. I don’t have all the details. We got word that the bomb was disabled, then everything went out. Radios, cell phones, everything. A minute later, the bomb disposal tech came running out of the building. He said Supergirl had finished disarming the bomb, then saw something and told him to run. The next thing I know, she shot through the roof of the building carrying a bomb. She made it about a hundred feet up before it exploded. The fireball was huge. It lit the tarpaper on the roof of the building on fire. She landed in the parking lot.”

“Where is she?” Alex asked again. She needed to see her sister.

“She’s in the ambulance,” Maggie said. She reached out and took Alex’s hand, leading her back towards where an ambulance was parked near one of the fire trucks. Kara sat on the bumper, covered in soot, holding a huge bottle of water in one hand, and her phone in the other. Alex was a little surprised when she didn’t look up, but Maggie tapped Kara on the shoulder, and Kara jumped slightly. She looked up at Alex.

“There were three bombs,” Kara said.

“Okay,” Alex said. “You got them all, right?”

Kara shook her head. “No, Alex, you don’t understand. Last time, there was only one bomb. There should have only been one bomb.”

“Last time?” Maggie asked. “What do you mean, last time?”

Kara held up her hand, waving Maggie off. “Something’s changed.”

“Okay,” Alex said, not quite sure what to make of Kara’s mental state. She hadn’t seen Kara like this in a long time. Not since Kara had found the Star Wars DVDs. “The drone. You reacted differently to the drone, right?”

Kara shook her head. “Not enough time,” she said. “The bombs were already in place.”

“Okay, can either of you explain what the hell you’re talking about?” Maggie asked.

Kara looked over at her, as if she’d just realized Maggie was there, which worried Alex a lot more than the fact that her sister had just been blown up, but seeing Maggie seemed to shake Kara out of whatever mental hole she was in.

“Yeah,” Kara said. “Yeah. CatCo in ninety minutes,” she said. “I need to go shower and talk to Ms. Grant.”

“You were just blown up,” Alex said. “I think you might want to take the day off.”

Kara shook her head. “I can’t. If I don’t go in today, Ms. Grant won’t go to Metropolis tomorrow. And we need to tell Winn. And probably James.” She stood up, and started to take off, but stopped, and turned to Maggie.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you all of this weeks ago,” she said. She turned to Alex. “Have Susan meet us.”

She didn’t wait for a reply. She just kicked off into the air and headed home to shower.

Kara stepped out of the elevator and headed straight for Kaldur’ahm’s desk, trying not to smile at the deer in the headlights look on his face.

“How bad?” she asked.

“I’m beginning to reconsider spending time with David,” Kaldur’ahm said. “To say she’s agitated is an understatement. Her mother refused to baby-sit her son, so she can’t go to Metropolis to receive the Siegel Prize.”

Kara nodded. “Call and have the company jet prepped for tomorrow morning. She’ll want to leave after she drops Carter at school, then clear your calendar. I’m going to babysit, and you’re going to be my backup.”

Kaldur’ahm turned and looked at Cat, who sat at her desk, wearing a pair of reading glasses while a second pair sat up on top of her head. “Are you sure she’ll be okay with that?” he asked.

Kara nodded. “I got this. Just make sure the company jet is ready,” she said before walking into Cat’s office.

“Ms. Grant.”

Cat didn’t look up. “I know it’s been four whole days since you were my assistant, Keira, but surely you haven’t forgotten what it looks like when I’m busy.”

“No,” Kara said. “But I heard about the Siegel Prize, and I wanted to congratulate you.”

Cat held up a hand and gave a dismissive wave.

“Come on, Ms. Grant. It’s huge.”

“I hope not,” Cat said. “They might make me pay for shipping. Not that I can’t afford it.”

“You’re not going to the ceremony?”

Cat finally looked up at Kara, then rolled her eyes. “Are we really going to pretend you didn’t already know that before you came into my office looking like a kicked puppy?”

Kara laughed. “Well, I *was*, but only because I didn’t want you to think Jackson called me in a panic.”

“So, why are you here?”

“Jackson called me in a panic,” Kara said. “But to be fair, it’s his second full day on the job, and I told him to call me if he didn’t know how to handle a situation. I figured avoiding another Chipotle incident was in everyone’s best interest.”

“Yes, well, no one has offered me any freshmex today.”

“That’s too bad, it was a really tasty burrito,” Kara said.

“My, you’re feeling cheeky today,” Cat said.

Kara grinned as she walked further into Cat’s office. “Rough morning. I needed something to pick me up.”

“I didn’t know you had rough mornings,” Cat said, reaching up to take her glasses off.

Kara shrugged as she sat on the arm of one of the sofas. “I think everyone does. I mean, Supergirl had a bomb go off in her face first thing this morning. Not a good way to start the day.”

Cat frowned. “Is she okay?”

“Yeah,” Kara said. “Feeling a little humbled, I think. From what I heard, she thought she had the bomb taken care of, but there turned out to be two more. She disarmed the second one, but the third one was tamper proof, so she had to just fly it up out of range of the city.”

“That must have been terrifying,” Cat said. “Did she manage to catch the bomber?”

“Not yet, but she said she’s got people working on it. They should have him in custody soon.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but it just goes to show, everyone needs some help sometimes.”

Cat glared at Kara for a moment before asking, “And just what kind of help do you think I need?”

“I think you need a baby sitter for Carter,” Kara said.

“You have someone in mind?” Cat asked.

“I thought I could do it, Ms. Grant.”

Cat leaned back in her chair. “Are you sure? I know you have a lot of responsibilities with… your new job.”

“I also have a lot of backup. I checked with Jackson, and he’s willing to take over if I need to step out for a few minutes to deal with anything work-related. And Wilma has two kids. I’m sure Carter would love to see the studio. I’ll bet he’ll get along with Winn as well.”

“It’s a generous offer, Kiera.”

“Please, Ms. Grant. You’ve done so much for me. Let me do this for you.”

“I wasn’t going to say no,” Cat said. “I was just going to tell you about Carter. He’s not a normal child, thank God. He’s clever and curious, and like most gifted children, he can be shy… and reserved. He needs special attention.”

Kara smiles so widely it felt like it was splitting her face. “I promise you Ms. Grant, he couldn’t be safer with Supergirl herself.”

Cat laughed at that. “Of that, I have no doubt.”

“Jackson’s arranging the company jet to take you to Metropolis.”

“Oh, I can fly commercial, Keira.”

“Ms. Grant,” Kara said, “I insist. Take the company jet for this one.”

Cat stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

“And thank you.”

“For what? You’re the one doing me a favor.”

“For letting me come in here,” Kara said. “I might not be your assistant anymore, but…” she looked around the office, then back and Cat, “this office always calms me down, even in the worst storm.”

Cat looked back down at her laptop, not meeting Kara’s gaze, and Kara took that for the dismissal it probably was. She stood up and headed for the door, but Cat’s voice stopped her half way there.

“You’re always welcome,” she said.

Kara turned around, but Cat’s gaze was still fixed on her computer screen, so Kara settled for smiling all the way up to the conference room, where she was scheduled to meet Alex, Susan, Maggie, Winn, and James.

Kara was seated at the head of the conference table, next to Susan. J’onn, who’d shown up with Susan, was seated on the other end of the table, letting Alex make the argument for him.

“Look,” Alex said, “I know that they’ve been cleared for DEO business, but this is a lot bigger than just keeping the fact that you’re Supergirl a secret.”

Kara pinched the bridge of her nose as she listened to Alex argue, again, against including Winn and James. A part of her was amused to note that after one night playing pool, Alex had already gotten over any reservations she had about Maggie.

Kara glanced out through the glass window to where Maggie was waiting impatiently alongside a very confused James and Winn.

“You know how many details I left out the story when I told you about the future? Because they didn’t seem relevant, or because I didn’t have time, or because they didn’t make it into the DEO records and after all these years, I just didn’t remember anymore.”

Alex looked at her. “I a lot, I’d guess.”

“About a year from now, Winn went to work for the DEO. He started out working in our IT division. He went into the field the first time in January of 2017. That was your first off-world mission. We all would have died without him.”

“What hap-“

“James will become a vigilante. He’ll call himself Guardian. Winn makes his suit. He saved six hundred lives the day the CatCo tower collapsed. That doesn’t even count the day he stood toe-to-toe with a man infected by an alien parasite and kept him from destroying half the city, buying me the time to get what I needed to end the threat.”

“That’s all very interesting Ms. Danvers,” J’onn said, “but you’re talking about a future that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Right now, J’onn, I’m more aware than anybody in this room of how much has changed. There should have only been one bomb this morning. Something about what I did has made Maxwell Lord take a far more aggressive stance this time around. I don’t know what it was. Maybe last time through, me saving his life when Reactron kidnapped him made him take a softer approach. Maybe seeing Non and Astra at the Gala Friday made him more paranoid. I don’t know. I just know I need them in the game, all the way, because they can help. They may not be the people I remember from that other timeline, but the potential is there, just like it is with you.”

“Can I ask a question?” Susan said.

“Since you’re the one with the deciding vote, I’m pretty sure you can ask all the questions you want,” Kara said.

“Why didn’t you tell us about the bombs earlier?” Susan asked.

“I… forgot,” Kara said. “I’d only been Supergirl for a few weeks when it happened before, and last time, Reactron was a much tougher fight, and then Eliza came to town for Thanksgiving, and there was the whole Livewire thing, and then Red Tornado and the Earthquake.”

“Wait,” Susan said. “Livewire? Red Tornado?”

“Um, Livewire is Leslie Willis.”

“The shock jock?” Alex asked.

Kara nodded. “Cat demoted her to traffic. The Cat Copter got struck by lightning, and I caught it, but then I got struck by lightning, and the electricity and my Kryptonian DNA did something that triggered her Meta gene. She gained the ability to control electricity, and could even turn into pure electricity, travel through powerlines. It happened the day before Thanksgiving, but she and I fought a few times, but she ended up on the Waverider with us during the war.”

“Red Tornado?” Susan asked.

“Android currently in development by General Lane’s team. Anti-Kryptonian Weapon. I kicked its ass, but blew out my powers, and didn’t get them back until the earthquake the following Monday.”

“So, this Ethan Knox is behind the bombings?” Susan asked.

“No,” Kara said. “He’s being paid by Maxwell Lord. If you check his daughter’s hospital records, you’ll find that about two weeks ago, she was accepted into a treatment program run by a researcher who’s funded by a grant from Maxwell Lord.”

“Okay,” Susan said. “We read them in, but once that’s done and this bomber business is taken care of, Maggie and Alex are going to debrief you on everything. Be prepared to lose at least a weekend.”

Kara nodded. “Okay. But-“

“No buts,” Susan said. “This is not negotiable ma’am. You’re going to give us everything on the alternate timeline.”

“Fine,” Kara said. “But if you find out things you don’t want to know-“

“We’ll take that risk,” J’onn said. He turned to Alex. “Bring them in.”

“Well, I guess that explains your unreasonable hatred of Doctor Who,” Winn said.

Kara rolled her eyes in a near perfect imitation of Cat Grant. “Really? I tell you the world might end in a couple of years, and that’s what you get out of it?”

“Easy, Kara,” James said. “It’s just… a lot to take in.”

Kara shook her head and looked over at Maggie. Winn and James had been fairly vocal throughout the entire explanation, but Maggie hadn’t said a single word since Kara had dropped the bomb and that worried her. A lot.

“Maggie,” she said.

“The whole thing with you running out of the bar, letting me get a glimpse of you using your powers. That was all a setup, wasn’t it?” Maggie asked.

Kara looked at her for a second, then nodded. “Yeah.”

“Why?” Maggie asked.

Kara glanced over at Alex for a moment, then looked back at Maggie. “For Alex,” Kara said. “I… In that other timeline, you were like a sister to me, but you and Alex… She was better around you. More alive. Happier than I’d ever seen her. But she didn’t meet you until next year, and the war with Cadmus had just broken out. Things got bad, fast, and I knew I was going after Cadmus sooner, this time. I’d originally planned to make contact with you after I became Supergirl, but when you sat down next to me in Girlbar, I just rolled with it. I staged that little scene because I didn’t plan on telling anybody I was from the future until Astra and Non were dealt with, and ‘accidentally’ outing myself to you seemed like it was something easier to explain than deciding to tell you and Winn both.”

“But why tell Winn at all?” Maggie asked.

“Because I told him the first time through and because we need Winn. Alex is amazing with biology and biotech, but Winn is better with computers and general tech. He won two out of three hacking contests against an AI. He made my suit. He made James’ suit. And he’s saved all of our lives, more than once.

Kara took a deep breath, knowing what she was about to say wouldn’t be well received. “If I could have left anyone out, it would have been James.” She looked over at him. “You came here to get away from this and Clark found a way to keep you in the game. It got you killed, in the end.” Kara looked down at the table. “This life killed all of you, eventually.”

“Kara…,” Alex said.

Kara held her hand up. “Don’t.” She shook her head. “Just… I know it’s not my fault, I know I did the best I could, but everyone died. Again. It was like watching Krypton burn again, only it was worse, because it was slow, because I should have been able to stop it and I couldn’t. And now, it’s happening again.”

“No, it’s not,” Alex said. “We’re not going to let it happen again.”

Kara looked up at Alex. “Something has changed, Alex.”

“But that’s the plan,” Alex said. “To change things.”

“But I made them worse,” Kara said. “Before, there was one bomb. Before, Lord was trying to test me, to see what I could do. The parameters have changed. He was trying to kill me this morning.”

“Wait, Maxwell Lord?” Maggie asked. “He was behind the bombing?”

Kara nodded. “He’s blackmailing a former employee into planting the bombs. A man named Ethan Knox. Or he was. Before, in the other timeline. Now, I don’t know.”

“We’ll find out,” Alex said.

“The lab bombing wasn’t supposed to happen until tomorrow,” Kara said. “First thing in the morning. We found a bomb in Lord’s lab a little before noon. Then a bomb at the Lord Air Terminal. Knox was on the Supertrain with a suicide vest.”

“This is why you wanted me to put together a file on Maxwell Lord?” J’onn asked.

“This is just the start,” Kara said. “It gets worse. A lot worse.”

“What happens?” Winn asked.

“Aside from being responsible for Ethan Knox’s suicide, Max kidnapped seven girls and mutilated them in an attempt to map my DNA onto them so he could use them as a weapon against me. Six of them died as a result. The seventh never recovered. He also poisoned me with a type of synthetic kryptonite that stripped away my inhibitions and brought all my negative emotions to the surface.”

“Your negative emotions?” Winn asked. “What did you do? Spit in Ms. Grant’s coffee?”

James laughed at that, but he was the only one and Winn seemed to get that he’d said something he shouldn’t have when Kara looked at him.

“I let a criminal go on purpose, got your girlfriend fired, bruised a couple of James’ ribs, threw Cat off the fortieth floor of the CatCo building and only caught her right before she hit the ground, burned all my clothes, wrecked Noonan’s, punched a hole in the CatCo Jumbotron, torched half a dozen police cars and eight DEO vehicles, broke Alex’s arm, then tried to kill her. I would have killed her if J’onn hadn’t revealed himself as an alien and put me down long enough for Alex to reverse the effects. It’s one of the reasons I won’t go anywhere without my anti-kryptonite shield.”

“Uh…” Winn stammered.

“Yeah,” Kara said. “If you meet a girl named Siobhan Smythe, don’t… Just don’t. That won’t end well for anyone.”

“Kara,” Maggie said.

“Yeah, Mags?”

“Can I borrow Konex for a few minutes?”

Kara nodded, and watched as Maggie took out her phone and dialed.

“Hey, Konex. It’s Maggie. I need you to tap into all the traffic and security cameras in the city, and find a man named Ethan Knox. Agent Vasquez will send you the details. Once you find him, call me with a location, and keep it updated. Thanks.” Maggie hung up and looked at Vasquez. “Can you email Konex the file on Knox?”

Susan nodded and lifted her tablet, keying in a couple of commands.

Maggie turned back to Kara. “Getting Knox into custody should be easy enough. Getting him to flip on Lord is going to be hard, especially if Lord is paying for the kid’s medical care.”

Kara looked over at Susan. “What does she have? I remember that she’s sick, but...”

“It’s been a while,” Susan finished for her. “She’s got Non-Hodgkins lymphoma.”

Kara set her phone on the table and tapped the home button. “Konex.”

“Yes, Lady Kara?” Konex replied.

“Does the medical database include a cure for Non-Hodgkins lymphoma in humans that’s safe for a child?”

“Yes, Lady Kara. I can synthesize a self-regenerating bioactive that will remove all current diseased cells and prevent recurrence of any form of cancer within the host for a period of at least five hundred Kryptonians days.”

“That’s not a lot,” Winn said.

“Kryptonian days are about sixty Earth days long,” Kara said. “The inoculation would last about eighty-two years.”

“Oh,” Winn said. “That’s pretty good.”

“This could work,” Kara said. “Konex, get Bruce on the secure line. Let him know that Supergirl’s calling.”

“Working,” Konex replied. “Connected.”

“Supergirl, to what do I owe this pleasure?” Bruce Wayne’s voice asked from Kara’s phone.

“Hey, Mr. Wayne, you’re on speaker. I’m with some of the people I work with, and I need to ask a favor.”

“Anything for the hero of National City, I’m sure.”

“Did you hear about the bombing incident earlier this morning?” Kara asked.

“Yes.”

“We think the bomber is being blackmailed, Mr. Wayne.”

“That sounds terrible, Supergirl. I’m still confused as to the purpose of the call, however.”

“The person who’s blackmailing the bomber is paying for his daughter’s medical care. She has cancer, and he lost his job around the time she was diagnosed. Given the circumstances, the police are concerned they’ll be unable to get him to give up his blackmailer.”

“You want the Wayne foundation to extend an offer of care to the child in exchange for the bomber’s assistance?” Bruce asked, and there was a sharpness to the tone that indicated he didn’t like what he was suggesting.

“Mr. Wayne, I would never make an offer like that contingent on someone helping.”

“That’s good to hear. I was afraid I was about to be very disappointed in you.”

“You’d have good reason if I ever pulled something like that, and I’d hope you would call me out on it,” Kara said.

“You can be sure I would,” Bruce replied.

“I have access to a cancer vaccine, Mr. Wayne. One that’s good for roughly eighty-two years’ worth of immunity before a booster is required. It’s one of a number of technologies I was planning on offering Wayne Enterprises when we have the sit down we discussed.”

“I see,” Bruce said. “But I’m still not sure where you’re going with this.”

“Mr. Wayne, I can’t simply fly into a little girl’s hospital room, give her an injection, and fly away. First off, there’s an issue of parental consent to the treatment. Then there are also issues with FDA approval, among other things. However, I might be able to get a fast track for human trials on certain types of urgently needed lifesaving medications, if I had a company willing to shoulder the responsibility of conducting and monitoring the trials.”

“And if the girl in question happens to be included in the clinical trials,” Bruce said.

“I was thinking of a slightly different approach,” Kara said. “We announce the details of the bombing, and the bomber’s motivation. And announce that when I heard why he’d done it, I contacted you seeking help bringing Kryptonian medicines to market for humans, on the condition that Wayne Pharmaceuticals distributes the drugs at a reasonable and affordable price and offers the drug at cost to programs which provide indigent care.”

“I think that’s a wonderful idea, Supergirl. Though I think you’ve managed to pick up some of your reporter friend’s talent for self-promotion.”

“I have a degree in marketing Mr. Wayne, so I come by it honestly. And I think we both know that you’re every bit as aware as I am of how useful a tool a public image can be.”

“Fair point. How quickly do you want to announce?” Bruce asked.

“Friday if you can clear it with your legal team that quickly. I can probably have the preliminary FDA approvals by Thursday, but invulnerable or not, I’m pretty sure Cat Grant would find a way to kill me if I made an announcement like this while she was out of town,” Kara said.

“Good,” Bruce said. “I would like to bring in the Artemis Foundation on this, if you wouldn’t mind. They do a lot of good work with low-cost health care.”

“I was going to make the same suggestion,” Kara replied. “I have a meeting with Ms. Prince scheduled as well, but things need to move more quickly than I expected for this to happen. If you could make the arrangements with her, I’ll worry about the FDA clearances on my end.”

“Done. I’ll expect your call.”

“As soon as I can Mr. Wayne.”

“Oh… I almost forgot. Who do you want to tap to cover the announcement? I know you’ll want CatCo involved in the announcement, and I imagine there will be a general press release, but do you want to do a press conference, or an interview with a specific reporter?”

“If you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Wayne, perhaps we could do a press conference at the Wayne Enterprises building here in National City, followed by an interview with Ms. Grant in the CatCo studios.”

“If Ms. Prince is agreeable, I think that will work.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wayne.”

“You’re welcome. And goodbye, Supergirl.”

Kara reached out and touched the end call button on her phone, but before she could tell Konex to place the next call, he spoke up.

“Detective Sawyer, I have a location on Mr. Knox.”

“Thank you, Konex. Send it to my phone.” She looked over at Alex. “You want to come along?”

Alex looked at Kara, and Kara gave her a nod and a wave, and Alex got up and followed Maggie out.

“Are you sure that’s wise,” J’onn asked, “giving out Kryptonian technology to someone like Bruce Wayne?”

“Bruce, Diana and Kal are friends,” Kara said.

“I see,” J’onn said.

Kara glanced over at Susan, and Susan shook her head.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I’m not gonna argue with you curing cancer. I don’t care how it happens. That’s a win.”

“Okay. Then I need to call President Marsdin.”