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Fan Fic Tributes, con'd

 “Jimjeran” @betweenscenes writer captures the carnal glow of the first weeks of marriage between two Peace Corps volunteers, a 27-year-old nurse whose fiancé broke their engagement in a letter that arrived two weeks after she did on a Pacific atoll (bad Frank) and a 22-year-old teacher who is a virgin, who marvels at the love, carnal and otherwise, they’re experiencing. He tells Claire, an overthinker given to pangs of doubt, “You don’t know how much sweetness you’ve brought into my life.” How could Frank let her go, when she’s a revelation as a sexual partner, Jamie asks? Claire wants to say: I wasn’t like this with Frank, you brought it out in me. But she doesn’t want to dishonor Frank in honoring Jamie.

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Lefties, let's give ourselves credit

The rightwing opposition trumpets its false triumphs “We passed a massive tax cut! Trickle-down effect! [aside; never happens, but anyway…,] Don’t you hate to pay taxes?” We dissect everything, our successes and our failures, loudly, in public, forgetting to first broadcast the message: THIS WORKED. Or worked in part, Excuse shouting. 

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just add Ginger

Fred Astaire, May 10, 1899 – June 22, 1987.

Martin Munkácsi, Fred Astaire, 1936.

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BREAKING: Renowned business expert Scott Galloway hammers Donald Trump as "stupid" and says that he's "blackout drunk" at the "wheel of the global economy" as his tariffs destabilize the entire world.

He also alleged that Trump's sudden tariff reversal enriched his MAGA cronies in the "greatest day of insider trading and grift in history."

This is one rant that every American needs to hear...

During an appearance on The View, Galloway — who is a successful entrepreneur and a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business — was asked by co-host Whoopi Goldberg about Trump's recent behavior.

She slammed him for having "wreaked havoc on the global economy since his so-called liberation day last week with massive tariffs" and pointed out that he backtracked and lowered his tariffs on most countries to 10% while imposing an effective tariff rate of 145% on China.

"It would be hard to think of a more elegant way to reduce prosperity this fast," said Galloway.

"Let's talk about Apple," he continued. "The notion was we're going to bring back all of those great jobs? The average Apple assembly person in China makes $500 a month. The average Apple employee focusing on more high-value things like design, store management, makes $200,000 a year here."

"We want to wear Nikes. We don't want to make them," he went on. "We have outsourced low-wage jobs overseas such that we can create more profits, more investments, and create higher wage jobs."

"If these tariffs hold, your iPhone's going to go from $1000 bucks to $2,300," he explained. "To make an iPhone in the U.S. it would cost $3,500. As a result, the threats of these tariffs take Apple's stock down the value of Walmart in three days."

"If these tariffs hold... 80% of toys under the Christmas tree are from China," Galloway continued. "So 90% of U.S. households are budget-constrained. So we're talking about half the number of toys."

"We're talking about a destruction in shareholder value such that your parents can't retire as quickly and we're talking about the entire world rerouting their supply chain around 'brand America,' which, quite frankly, right now is toxic uncertainty — so they can bypass a series of unpredictable, epileptic, sclerotic decisions," he stated.

"What we finally need to acknowledge: We have someone at the wheel of the global economy that is blackout drunk right now," he continued.

Later in the segment, Galloway dismissed the idea that Trump's policy is setting the stage for the "economy of the future" by bringing jobs back.

"First off, America is the second largest manufacturer in the world," he said. "And the Cato Institute — we romanticize manufacturing — the Cato Institute did a survey, 80% of us believe that we should have more manufacturing but only 20% of us want to work in manufacturing."

"There is no line to get in and have work at an assembly plant in Lansing, Michigan," he continued. "What we want is high-paying jobs. Quite frankly, if this president cared about young men and trying to up-level people we'd go to a minimum wage of $25 a hour."

"And by the way, if minimum wage had kept pace with productivity and inflation it'd be somewhere between $23 and $27 an hour," he explained. "This is nothing but in my view—"

"Do you realize that yesterday about ten minutes before he put a pause on the tariffs and Apple skyrocketed, the market went up 2000 points, there was huge activity in the options market," he went on.

"Yesterday will go down as the greatest day of insider trading and grift in history," said Galloway. "Someone knew what was going on and made a lot of money and it wasn't us and we're going to find out about this."

"If you want to go back — he talks about the great era of the late 19th century — guess what? When we didn't have indoor plumbing? Where we had child labor? I'll take Netflix and novocaine," he said.

"We have a habit because of social media to talk about how terrible America is," he went on. "There are [one hundred and ninety-five] nations, they would all trade places with us."

"Do we have income inequality, we have polarization, do we have struggling young people? A hundred percent," he said. "But guess what? This nation is less bad than any other nation except if you want to take us back to the past. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever."

Galloway was then asked about America's image around the world under Trump.

"We have the greatest inflow of capital which drives our stock up which lets us borrow money at a lower cost," he explained. "We have the greatest inflow of human capital. What do the best and the brightest in the world have in common? They want to come to our universities, they want to live in America."

"And part of that is that the American brand is risk aggressiveness, it's rule of law, it's consistency," said Galloway. "Rule of law has gone out the window. Right? We've now decided to defy court orders. We're having used car sales on the White House lawn."

"We are rounding people up with the wrong tattoo and shipping them off without due process to essentially hellscape prisons," he continued. "Rule of law is gone. Consistency? The tariffs are on, they're off, the tariffs are on, the tariffs are off."

"We're alienating nations that love us and we love. When did we decide to go to war against Canada!?" he asked. "Canada!? You know what Canada did?"

"There's this great line that the Holocaust survivor talking to Warren Buffet said, how do you judge friends? V'ery simply, I ask a question would they hide me?'" he said.

"Canadians hid us in the [Iran] hostage crisis," he went on. "The Canadian embassy hid six Americans and if they'd been found out they would have been hung by cranes. We're going to war against Canada!? They are our true friends. We can't even articulate why we're angry with them. We are going to war with everyone at the same time."

"The big winner here, if there is a winner, is China over the medium and long-term, who says 'You may not like us, but you can count us,'" said Galloway.

"The damage here... When he paused the tariffs yesterday, he took the knife halfway out of the economy's back, but the injury will take years, if not decades, to heal," he predicted. "The definition of stupid is doing something that hurts yourself while hurting others. This could not be more stupid."

Please like and share!

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like "The Albanian Virgin"...but not

Anna Maria Weems: The Girl Who Became a Boy to Escape Slavery

Anna Maria Weems (circa 1840 to circa 1863) was an enslaved African American woman in Rockville, Maryland, who escaped by posing as a young Black livery man and carriage driver, assisted by the Underground Railroad, in September 1855. She later settled in Canada with other members of her family who had also escaped from slavery.

Weems traveled under the alias “Joe Wright” and, later, “Ellen Capron.” The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it increasingly difficult for escaped slaves (freedom seekers) to remain in free states, as by law, anyone with knowledge of their whereabouts was compelled to turn them in to authorities and assist slave-catchers in hunting them down and returning them to their former masters.

Once Weems arrived in Philadelphia, William Still (1819-1902) sent her on to New York, and from there, she traveled to Canada, crossing on the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, the main route taken by many freedom seekers from the United States to Canada.

Weems is not the only woman to have escaped slavery disguised as a man. The most famous such fugitive is Ellen Craft (1826 to 1891), who, with her husband William Craft (1824 to 1900), escaped from Georgia in 1848 with Ellen posing as a Southern gentleman and William as ‘his’ slave. In 1854, Clarissa Davis (later known as Mary D. Armstead) escaped from Virginia posing as a man and, hidden in a box onboard a boat, arrived safely at the Philadelphia home of William Still.

Weems’ story is not as well-known as Ellen and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or, in some circles, as Davis’s escape, but it highlights the lengths to which enslaved persons went to win their freedom.

Early Life

Anna Maria was born circa 1840 to a free father and an enslaved mother who was owned by one Adam Robb of Montgomery County, Maryland. John and Arabella Talbot Weems had six sons and four daughters, all born into slavery except the youngest, Mary, who was born after Arabella had been freed; all the others were the property of Robb because their mother was enslaved. When Robb died in 1847, his slaves were passed down to his daughters.

One of the daughters, Catherine Robb Harding, struggling with debt, sold the Weemses to slave traders who separated the family. Anna Maria and her sister Catherine were sold to one Charles M. Price. The Weems family’s situation came to the attention of the abolitionist William L. Chaplin (1796-1871), an agent of the Underground Railroad, who helped two sisters escape to the North. With financial assistance from abolitionists in England, Chaplin and others established the Weems Family Ransom Fund to free the rest of the family and reunite them in Canada.

Read More

⇒ Anna Maria Weems: The Girl Who Became a Boy to Escape Slavery

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in the booooooks...

“Canon,” how about that? Diana Gabaldon’s novels, those megalosauruses from “the Island of Misfit Toys” as one blogger characterized the writing of “Herself” (gag me with a spoon). “Canon” it is, though, if we may drain the word of its attendant pomp. It fits, look at how supple the original story is, with a sesquipedalian cast of characters who may be bent to almost any purpose, placed in any world. [a very DG word, “sesquipedalian,” thanks, Roget].

In a huge galaxy surrounding the eternal triangle [virginal/innocent hero, heroine/healer, bad first husband] there are best friends for her (although Gellis occasionally goes full witch) and him (godfather Murtagh plus childhood pal-turned-brother-in-law Ian), his feisty protective sister Jenny, Uncle Lamb, Claire’s kindly guardian…  I fall into the sinkhole of description when I try to understand my great escape.

The thing that needs to be said about “canon” is that the novels veer from exciting to numbing, from gawd-how-many-more-pages to tell-me-more, that the novels need an editor, dammit.

Yes, I see how that demand reveals the protective streak that all Outlanders feel for the story. We want to wrap it in a warm plaid and at the same time amputate its excrescences, like the heroine in her WW II nurse uniform, spattered with blood, wielding a scalpel in order to save a life. 

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here in the dark with you …

I have no name

~ Voyager, Diana Gabaldon

Outlander Parallels [ Seasons 1 / 2 / 3 ]

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hear, hear!

“Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”

— Lev Grossman, TIME, July 18, 2011 (via sherlockianfeels)

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAM HEUGHAN!

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Hum

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in praise of fan fic, continued

Helen MacDonald, the author of H Is for Hawk said, “The last writing that made me cry wasn’t technically a book at all, but a work of fan-fiction, a genre that includes some of the most moving works I’ve read over the last few years. It infuriates me how often people sneer at it.” I want to send this affirmation to missclairebelle who wrote the breathless banter of “One Summer”; and to CrossingInStyle who wrote the Tarzan story with the inexplicable title “You’ll Be in Mo Chridhe,”[why Crossing, why? The title makes finding your story so difficult. Nevermind, Jamie-raised-by-gorillas is irresistible]; and to BetweenScenesWriter who came up with the counterintuitive marvel of Peace Corps-volunteers Jamie and Claire, “Jimjeran” in Melanesia; and to PrairieFarmGirl, currently writing an R-Rated “Little House on the Prairie” called “The Proposal”; and to bonnie_wee_swordsman whose “Flood My Mornings” pulled many provocative threads out of the contrast between 1746 and 1945, showing that Jamie is wise enough to know that hot showers are not everything; and to wickedgoodbooks  who gave six-year-old Willie to Jamie and Claire in ”Downhill” on “the Puffin trip” to the outer isles beyond Inverness, leaving behind the most genuine parent-child scenes ever, without neglecting the parents in their private time. Then there’s the foodie universe with endearingly sassy-yet-vulnerable Jamie and Claire in “Market Price” by desperationandgin, and the Charleston SC socialites who behave as though Scarlett O’Hara may waltz into their yacht-club-party in “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by SassenachThroughTime. Scratch Scarlett, it would be mewling Melanie Wilkes who’d waltz onto the social scene that ThroughTime nails with a silver hammer in “LIADT.” Melanie would make friends on the horse farm with meddlesome Aunt Jocasta—enough! 

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At a time when moral leadership has been in short supply in the world — when authoritarians and neofascists are pushing us into darkness — Pope Francis pointed toward the light. May he rest in peace.

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so, early birthday

“The biggest impact on me probably going back to my first ever job, I think, in theater and the director there. I was [in] a play called ‘Outlying Islands’ and I played at the Traverse Theater in the Edinburgh Festival and I got to tour that play. And actually, we toured it not only to England and to Canada, but also all around Scotland. So I got to see a lot of Scotland and I think that’s where I really began to fall in love with the Scottish landscape.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAM HEUGHAN!

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it's Republicans, call them out for collusion and don't give Unmentionable One the satisfaction of hearing his own name

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"Flood My Mornings": an appreciation

The premise is: Jamie goes through the stones. Inadvertently, after the battle of Culloden, so when he turns up in 1950 in a hospital in Inverness, he’s taken for a reenactor, like the characters in Confederates in the Attic who replay Gettysburg and Antietam. “Flood My Mornings” (bonnie_wee_swordsman’s title, from an Edith Piaf song) goes to town with canny observations on mid-20th century modernity through the eyes of an 18th century Highlander. The way the streets have been taken over by cars. The way loud telephones interrupt conversations (and the way Jamie’s classical education enables him to figure out what modern devices do, from their names; tele=distance, phone=sound, ye ken?). The way women have been dismissed from active roles after WW II.

When Jamie goes searching for Claire (in Boston; she divorced Frank, went to America), people react with a sneer to questions about her: “That woman, alone with a child? She worked? She was a nurse? She kept to herself.” No wonder she did. If the terms “single mother” or “working mother” existed at all, they were used as slurs. What was it like then for my mother? 

Another escapist attraction of “Flood” is the father-daughter connection. Jamie is a heartbreakingly attentive father to Brianna, the child he believed he would never see...

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the end of season 5, THAT SHOT

from The Decider Meghan O’Keefe  https://decider.com/2020/04/22/outlander-episode-9-claire-saves-jamie-handjob/

“[Plot summary, love conquers time, witchcraft, etc.] It’s also deliriously fun. But what ties it all together is the incendiary chemistry between series stars Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe. From the beginning, the two of them have tackled intimate sex scenes with the kind of athleticism and fervor that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers put into their classic dance sequences. That is, they have basically given up their bodies for the sake of storytelling, and dear lord, it works.” I know I know, with each fandom immersion, I go too far, but hey, je ne regret

“Season 5 ends on a shot of two naked bodies in bed.” Like the John and Yoko cover for Rolling Stone, nudity evokes vulnerability along with the strength of the couple’s bond.