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Porsche 356 Limousine Custom 1953. - source Amazing Classic Cars.

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Fremont & Main, Las Vegas, 1959

Via: https://vintagelasvegas.com/

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https://lookout.co/as-downtown-santa-cruz-changes-longtime-residents-fear-soaring-rents-and-loss-of-community/story

It's not just here.

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Santa Monica Pier (1972)

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In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

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The Syndicate

In Malta,” Yossarian corrected. “You buy your eggs in Malta, not Sicily.”

Milo chortled proudly. “I don’t buy eggs in Malta,” he confessed, with an air of slight and clandestine amusement that was the only departure from industrious sobriety Yossarian had ever seen him make.

“I buy them in Sicily for one cent apiece and transfer them to Malta secretly at four and a half cents apiece in order to get the price of eggs up to seven cents apiece when people come to Malta looking for them.”

“Why do people come to Malta for eggs when they’re so expensive there?”

“Because they’ve always done it that way.”

“Why don’t they look for eggs in Sicily?”

“Because they’ve never done it that way.”

“Now I really don’t understand. Why don’t you sell your mess halls the eggs for seven cents a piece instead offer five cents apiece?”

“Because my mess halls would have no need for me then. Anyone can buy seven-cents-apiece eggs for seven cents apiece.”

“Why don’t they bypass you and buy the eggs directly from you in Malta at four and a quarter cents a piece?”

“Because I wouldn’t sell it to them.”

“Why wouldn’t you sell it to them?”

“Because then there wouldn’t be as much room for profit. At least this way I can make a bit for myself as a middleman.”

“Then you do make a profit for yourself,” Yossarian declared.

“Of course  I  do.  But it all goes to the syndicate. And everybody has a share. Don’t you understand? It’s exactly what happens with those plum tomatoes I sell to Colonel Cathcart.”

“Buy,” Yossarian corrected him. “You don’t sell plum tomatoes to Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. You buy plum tomatoes from them.”

“No, sell,” Milo corrected Yossarian. “I distribute my plum tomatoes in markets all over Pianosa under an assumed name so that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn can buy them upfrom me under their assumed names at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day for the syndicate at five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece. I make a profit of three and a half cents a piece, and everybody comes out ahead.”

“Everybody but the syndicate,” said Yossarian with a snort. “The syndicate is paying five cents a piece for plum tomatoes that cost you only half a cent apiece. How does the syndicate benefit?”

“The syndicate benefits when I benefit,” Milo explained, “because everybody has a share. And the syndicate gets Colonel Cathcart’s and Colonel Korn’s support so that they’ll let me go out on trips like this one. You’ll see how much profit that can mean in about fifteen minutes when we land in Palermo.”

-Joe Heller

Catch-22

Chapter 22: Milo the Mayor

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From 1954

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Cocky Conte

I know him, the Omnipotent, and he should know me, too. If by chance we should be following the same pathway his piercing gaze singles me out from afar: he takes the opposite direction to avoid the triple dart of platinum that Nature gave me for a tongue!

-Lautreamont, Conte Maldoror 1868

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Maldoror

I have seen laid out beneath cerements those who had been handsome; those who after death had lost no beauty; men, women, beggars and the illusions of the kings’ sons; youth, skeletons of the aged; genius and madness; laziness and its opposite; those who were false, those who were true; the mask of the proud, the modesty of the humble; vice crowned with flowers and innocence betrayed.”

-Lautreamont, Conte Maldoror

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Agnese Guido - Saturday Night, 2024 - Oil on linen

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I don't think the Chinese are particularly unique in this.

I've said it before. Somewhat ignore the figureheads and pay more attention to the people around them. These are the people influencing and, more often then not, intimidating them.

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Via: https://www.instagram.com/forgottenmadness_la

The "Black Dahlia" stayed here.

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“When the devil pulls the strings, all the world must dance"

-Benjamin Christensen, Danish film director, screenwriter and actor.

The Devil's Circus - 1926

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This blog is my adult version of cutting pictures out of magazines and glueing them on to paper