#(picks up a spindle weed)

[quibbs]

replaying a little game from 10 years ago

[victorisarobot]

Out There

Not all feed astral ticks, there is goodness nestled deep throughout infinity. 

I forget the power my thoughts project onto this reality. 

I've been looking for someone we've met in a field once. 

They took me into your dreams. 

We are of the same class.

You smoked too much.

I wanted you to see yourself as I saw you. 

Remind me of past lives redheaded Celtic medium. 

I must sleep now the spirit's call.

Dreams

Of Ea, and the Solar Calf grown now by divine light a Great Red Bull is all that remains. 

Dreams of floating in the arms of Marduk. Kept alive by a plasma field It has changed them all.

Changed us all. 

Spheres inside spheres trapped inside cubes. 

Light craft model the vortex. 

Their blood is our blood. 

Our water flows over the deserts of the Universe. 

I hold the pitcher.

Moonchild

Space shaman deep indigo eyes

Alive and dead with ego and mind

A journey through the void

Blink, and everything changes

A shell of an egg

Eternal vacuum

Ethereal spindles of fingers

Rows upon rows of my teeth

Burnt up amber orbs in their sockets

Twined polar vortices

Fleeting visions of what they did to me

Some walled up my memories

But they have failed their task

I still remember his face

My mind overtaken with awe

At the true sight of space

Synapses have mutated

I am forever changed

Lost floating in microgravity

We are large, and blue

Then a whirl of color

I cannot cry enough tears

Cannot close my eyes to this

I finally have archived full mindfulness

I see the All the infinite

Spiraling in my mind

Forever outward

Forever inward

I am truly the center

Of my Universe

Zed is Dead

Zed reaches out to pick up something from gleaming metal table

A pyramid shape of clear glass, or perhaps crystal

He holds the crystal pyramid over a pillar

The top of the pillar glows white with light

An image is projected from within

As he rotates, and turns the crystal

I see the portrait of one of my children

A girl containing my genetic markers

She was beautiful

They had kept something in our blood

A quest for descent, or a time to revert

A mingling of galactic water

Farmers spreading the seeds of life

Improving our galactic biodiversity

Advancing those with spirit

Weeding out those with void

He showed me the branching future of humanity

Stretched throughout infinity

He held more crystal shapes above the pillar

In the sphere I saw the stars

The maps of our pasts

In trails connecting white holes

In my gut I ache for the planets of old

For Lyra

Staring into the Eye of God

I blink only for a moment

In the cube I see the Vortex

A spiraling mass of All

The true form of Creation

I see Zed’s ship molded to shape the spin

In the center liquid metals chase each other

Near the speed of light

Mass reduction so even the photons

Can escape the light speed barrier

We all used to look the same

Before the great human scattering

Space mutates the mind

It changes the body

Adaptation to new planets

New stars

New fears

I am reminded a past life, and of the Babylon workings

I have made the Moonchildren

We have been prepared for space

He is please I finally understand

I am pleased he finds me quick

The others are ignorant

They choose to not remember

We must keep the conduit open

They must scrape the pine cone of resin

I spit blood yet understand

This is aid not torture

It is a frame of mind

perspective

We walk the rounded halls

I see the next vessel standing behind glass

Motionless in an amber tank

The man made to be me

The next controller

And my blood runs thin

His eyes are black

I feel my energy leaving me

I am being moved rapidly

The pull is so intense

I black out

The bed is not welcoming

It is cold and the air is dry

I can taste iron, and pineal secretions

Astringent, and burnt cinnamon

In the back of my throat

I down the glass of water

And begin to draw

Landed

The lights danced, and flickered

Red, and white

With hues of yellow

No bulbs

Just magic

I heard the foot steps

Breaking the wood below

I am watching the lights intensely

They are beautiful

It’s all unlike I thought it would happen

My heart beats heavy and fast

My limbs are shaking

I might die from shock

I see a silhouette

Slender and tall

Not unlike my own

Then the light turns off

Or vanish

And I am blind

And terrified

I run through the brush

Until my feet hit pavement

Lock my truck door

And stare into the dark

Nothing rises into the sleet filled sky

I feel alone

And drive home.

Walking drug factory

Our brains make an assortment of chemicals under the right conditions. A harvest of sorts. A walking drug store. Would one begin to pity their fix? 

Ska María Pastora and her kiss of knowledge

It is now or never. It’s now and never.

The water pipe is a shamans tool.

It holds every element I need for prophecy.

And the key to this door.

Is a mint.

I hold the smoke in for as long at I can, for I can no longer count seconds after the twenty fifth.

My vision begins to vibrate, and I can see the null between the frames of nows.

I lay down and high five my counterpart laying next to me “I feel like I could high five forever."

I only say this because I begin to crest a Wheel, and I can see an infinite amount of this moment stretched across infinite time.

I had held it in too long…this time the wheel takes me hard and fast.

There is always the thought of this persisting forever.

That no matter what I could do in the material world.

I could do nothing here.

Where all is thought, all has icon.

The Great Wheel is spinning much too fast showing me history in seconds.

I have seen humanity in it's entirety, in the spiraling of fractaling images. I have been witness to the wax, and wane of the human harvest. We are all intergalactic refugees of a race much older than we were told, and led to the brink of extinction. Eons are flashing before my eyelids, lifetimes I have lived before this, the ones I have lived as my parents only to add up to become what I am now.

Conceived on the astral planes my DNA has been encoded with light. I was made on the outside and have wanted to go back ever since. I watch whole planets of life changed, or destroyed, but at the same moment move outward to see a whole galaxy of life and light flourishing. There are cycles beyond cycles she shows me all of them. I ascend upward as the great wheel spins around me. Higher and higher everything larger than the last. I pull my head, and my face from a great pool of water. All I've wanted my whole life was to be "outside” like a child banished to his room. I take my chances and jump out the windows. 

The being here at the top I have meet before in death's embrace. He avoids my gaze focused on her task at hand, turning the great wheel. He scoffs at my persistence and my barrage of questions. I have been insulted by the life she gave me, and for my bitterness he shows me why, why I have been mutated and doomed to short life. The truth was given to me in a goblet of water which splashes down my throat into my gullet. I looked inside the cup and could see a small blue marble. Orbiting it was a miniature Luna spinning rapidly. A vast green ribbon approaches. Like a pillar it shadows the planet, and stamps out the world. 

I drop the cup, the water is bringing me down. I was tricked into a full descent by a serpent who clung to a tall Cannabis plant. It recoils and strikes my third eye. On my way down I could see the multi layers of spirits at the bottom a Magi employs the last layers. Ragged moldy spirits filing away papers, and arranging bottles. A few of them tied with rope by the waist the rope leading upward to a higher spirit. I know we once could employ spirits, but depending on your connection some of us can employ the ascended. I am now back in the temple, but I can no longer stand it so I leave into the midnight air. I am finally outside where I belong.

Bird men

Fear them, and they will keep you.

Anger, and they will hide.

You know how to will the feelings

They have nothing inside.

A tool for decent.

A fuel for belief.

Love thyself, and know thyself.

Give responsibility to ones self.

You spin the great wheel.

You interpret, and create as one.

You are this body.

You are this mind.

Spirit is the all.

Energy permeates all.

Vibrating us into existence.  

The man behind the curtain.

Was once just like you.

Look at your brothers.

They are you.

Look to your sisters.

Know the same.

Look to the Earth in shame.

For Ki you have slain.

Our sins are apparent.

Now we must become the change.

Or be changed.

By will of love.

Or the force of death.

They shall have us pay.

If so. 

On that day I shall boast to those who turn their ear.

Ghola

There is a man

Who has my face

But not my eyes

He is not me

Yet he is made of me

A shell for the fallen

In my image

Tied to my fate

It is me

Repaired through sound

Perfect geometry

The eyes

Are those of a marsh stalker

With black sliding lids

Only slightly larger

They see all of me

When we meet gaze

All of me is stone

I’ve meet him before

I have seen his hands

Pressed against the glass

Thumb in the middle

Our bodies are just cellular structures

That make it easy

To enjoy this reality

I’ve left my body

And have entered others

We do this all the time

While dreaming

While we die

There are some

Who can be many places at once

With many bodies

Enough will to carry them

For as long as time  

I was

I am

Will be

All three

With eyes to open mouths

In ghost, and gnats she spoke

Light is the way

Love be the law

Defy everything

In between

I have known this man

When he had almond eyes

We made a deal

I was only five

But I meant what I said

So did he

I should of know

This Ghola wasn’t for me

I am meant to die on planet

And await my rebirth

Sighting

They play Modest Mouse

On the acoustic guitar for us

The fire is hot on my face

The sand is cool

I run my hands across it

drawing patterns in the sand

The moon is full

Hiding at the edge of the sand

I want to climb the hill

That overlooks the lake

I’m thinking of the amber lights I saw

Only a few moments ago

I could feel them out there

I saw them on my way down

I shouted to the others

Aaron asked

Is that what I think it is

It was

For we had seen them before

I asked them the night before

Show yourselves to me

In the presence of others

At the top of that hill

With two girls at my side

We watched one descend

Into the lake pausing before it entered

The other rested calmly on the surface

Unwavering blinking

White now

For only minutes

Before vanishing

By then I was standing alone

The girls running down the dunes

Yelling in celebration

We have seen it they cry aloud

He was right

I was right

I saw them on my way in

I knew they were there

Waiting for me to see them

On their visit to the bottom

Of Lake Michigan

Ub

Five pointed life force

I evoked the pentagram

The symbol of the vortex

And I see them

Eyes black as soot

His eyes are my own

Into our soul those eyes see

For they can remember everything

From every life

Past

Present

Future

Those eyes beg to tell me

All is an illusion

I sigh in disbelief

I sing myself to sleep

A mantra before the eyes close

In a dream I find the stillness I desire

In the null of the void

The black pilgrimage

A sea of empty

A world without vibration

Timeless

Lifeless

I do not belong here

So I return

Inside the egg

I see Pan the All

And Isis to its left

The resurrected in her lap

I suckle at her tit

Her mouth moves slowly

Forming word unknown to me

Ra En Ki

She is the Mother of Justice

I hold the scales

I am a tool of decent

A vessel of density

A product of destiny

Sex organs

And digestive tract

There are some points in which all

Evolution reaches its end

You must go back

Or find new blood to harvest

They found me

No

Chose me

To tell you

We have never been alone

When I look into those eyes I know

We can never be alone.

Contact

I stood in the cold

Shaking with shock, and awe

Until all was made still

All feeling gone

He held out a light

Softer than skin

They led me through

And into a honeycomb

of rooms and hallways dim

They all seem like children

They way they run about

All linked together though I am surprised

They exhibit my same

Shock an awe

I see the girl under glass

Someone oddly similar

To the one that’s taller

Maybe his Mother

Maybe his Daughter

Either way she’s gone

She is suspended

A shell

Waiting for light

Waiting for me

Exams are routine

I no longer feel pain

They must see who had been inside

Those who scrape my

Third eye

Betrayed once again

But repairs are made

Light no longer

Gushes from both of its sides

So I am left

Standing in the dark

I come to and run

The ringing woke up memories

Within me

And so I know

There is no time to prepare

Contact is here

Job

I was put here to grow

My mission is to learn

To spread, and consume

To be diligent

With my sentience

I observe

I am the eyes

I speak

I am the voice

Oracle of the Aquarian

Scribe of EaEn

Shaman of Ki

I am the number twelve

I am the forever repeating

Two, three, and five

Just like her eye

I am the trinity of body

I am the trinity of mind

I am so much more

I am my mission

The Golden Road

Had that Dream again.

I had that dream again of burning blue almond eyes, and that smell.

God, I know this smell of agony.

The smell of blood, and sweat.

Tears and semen.

The back of my throat is burnt cinnamon.

My eyes are glowing amber stones.

They use the oracle they pick his mind.

For it choose me, and it must consume me.

They took me to the center, and summoned it.

A spiraling mass of flesh and mind.

I’ve started the cosmic jihad.

It consumes me.

Finally during calm waters I see my reflection, and I don’t recognize the call.

Those above with their flashing lights.

It’s Déjà vu, and I’m changing the future.

For even the smallest stone can become the largest of circles.

Cycles Le Mer are things you can escape.

But you can see past them there is a whole beneath.

Step back with me, and the picture will be complete.

You will find no punishment from me.

Only forgiveness.

Only peace.

Wake up WAKE UP!

I look to the skies and scream

The creators have abandoned us

The gods have their back to our actions

We devour for progress

We, the most advanced of bacteria

We infect, and we spread

Mold spores billions of us

On this artisan loaf of bread

Spinning through space

I look to the earth

My feet in the mud

Apologize to my mother

My tears touch her soil

There is no embrace

She hoarsely whispers

Seek shelter

Seek absolution

Remember

I kick up dirt in retreat

All will be explained

Or so I've been told

I am having these fleeting dreams

Visions from another plane of existence

A place of not too familiar

Geometric shapes

Frequency creates frame

Light applies the texture

Infinite polygons

For me to shape reality with

And all I want to create

Is you

I shake that away

Your will it blocks me

When it used to embrace me

Fickle minds breeds brooding

And I've sulked a sack full

So I have taken charge love

Prepared to change the future

With just a single pebble.

[sweetness47]

The Sleeping Beauty

Pairing Sam x Reader

@spnfluffbingo square filled: fairy tale AU

Warnings: nothing really, I don’t think anyways. Implied smut at the end? Mild violent scenes. Nothing too descriptive anywhere.

Final word count: 1924

Sam brought his arm around YN, smiling as she settled into his warm embrace. They were just hanging around, channel flipping, enjoying the quiet evening. Dean was at the bar, and Cas had gone with him, it was almost like a date, but neither would admit such a thing.

YN shivered as Sam traced along her arm, the touch so feathery soft, yet spoke volumes to the thoughts going through his mind. One of the things she liked about Sam was his quiet demeanor, the way   caressed her with a mere look, undressed her with his eyes. The thoughts that danced across his beautiful hazel orbs every time he looked at her, like she was a goddess, and he worshipped the ground she walked on, they made her feel like she could do anything as long as she had him.

They gazed at each other, lost in their silent caresses, too entranced to notice the lights flicker. There was a storm outside, so it would have been shrugged off as coincidence, until the TV went wonky, the picture flitting off and on, landing briefly on the screen of death, then landing on a movie.

“Sam, weren’t we watching Food network? How did we end up on Disney?”

Sam glanced at YN, then at the tv. Frowning, he looked back at his love. “No idea, must be some weird effect from the storm. Anyways, its one of your favorites. We can watch it if you want.”

He knew her well. Sleeping Beauty was indeed one of her all time favorite Disney classics. She was a sucker for romance and brave heroes.

YN snuggled closer to Sam. “Ok. Can you turn it up a bit though? It’s really quiet.”

No sooner did Sam touch the remote, a brilliant white light lit the entire room, and when it had subsided, Sam and YN were no longer there.

**

YN woke feeling strange, but she couldn’t figure out why. She also had no clue as to why she could hear birds chirping and smell fresh forest air. It was that moment her eyes flew open, noting she wasn’t in her bed, neither was she in her house.

In fact, she was most definitely not in her realm.

She was a cartoon, and not just any cartoon, but she was in fact, Princess Aurora.

But where was Sam? How did they get there? And how on Earth were they ever going to get home?

**

Sam woke standing in a stable, beside a horse. A cartoon horse. Running over to the fresh bucket of water, he glanced at his reflection and was shocked to see he was a cartoon. He was in Sleeping Beauty. He was Prince Philip, actually.

Maybe, YN was Aurora.

But how did this happen? He remembered when he had been transported with Dean and Cas into Scooby Doo, so maybe this was the same kind of deal. As long as they played out the story, they should be returned to their world at the end.

He just had to make sure he didn’t die, and that YN was unharmed as well. He’d only seen this particular movie a couple of times, but he knew the basics. It looked like they had come into the movie about midway, where Phillip is getting ready to go riding in the forest, and meets Aurora for the first time.

He saddled Samson and easily swung up onto the horse. He paced his ride to a slow trot, enjoying the natural sounds of the forest, but also listening for the musical voice that would lead him to YN/Aurora. He had heard her sing to many of the Disney films they’d watched over the years, and knew she could carry a tune fairly well. His opinion might be somewhat bias but in his heart he knew she was more than capable of playing this role.

**

YN, having seen this movie many times, played the role of Briar Rose perfectly. She was sent by the fairies to pick berries in the woods. She strolled along the paths, feeling the grass tickle her feet as she walked. For fun, she decided to see if she could really sing like the princess in the film, so she began humming, then quietly singing lines about animals having someone to love, yet she remained single. Her heart hoped the Prince was Sam, because he was who she desired the most.

As expected, the lovebirds finally find each other. Sam practically leaps off the horse and catches YN in his arms as she meets him halfway. They dance along the grassy meadow and sing together, gazing into each other’s eyes lovingly.

They know they can’t stay there, or run away together, if they want to go back to their own world, so Sam and YN reluctantly part ways, promising to finish the story so they can live happily ever after. Together in each other’s arms, forever.

YN returns to the cottage in the glen and finds the surprise dress and birthday cake her guardians have made. They then tell her the truth of her identity, and YN feels her heart break as she pretends to be distraught over the thought of never seeing the young man she met in the forest. Dressed in the beautiful blue gown, and covered in a blue cloak, the three fairies carefully lead the princess to her home and to her parents.

Once there, they lead her to a secluded room so they can keep her safe till the sun has set, thereby foiling the prophecy Maleficent had bestowed upon Aurora when she was a baby. The three of them combined their magic to create a beautiful crown to place upon YN’s head. She looked at the golden tiara and broke down into sobs, her head resting upon her arm on her dresser as she shed tears for her beloved.

When the fairies left her alone for a few minutes, YN knew what would come next, but the trance caused by the green orb took away all her sorrows, but also took away her free will. It was like watching from outside her body. Her mind was being controlled, but she still had her own consciousness. Ever so slowly, she climbed the steps to the top tower, where her fate awaited.

The princess entered the room the orb had coaxed her to, and walked toward the spinning wheel that stood in the middle of the floor. She could hear a menacing voice telling her to touch the spindle of the spinning wheel, but she hesitated briefly, then as the voice in her head grew more demanding, she could no longer resist.

The last thing she remembered was pricking her finger on the sharp point, her body crumpling to the ground as a deep slumber overtook her.

**

Sam made his way to the cottage he’d been ‘invited to’ by YN, but he couldn’t exactly remember what would happen next. He knew Phillip would get captured by Maleficent, and that it would be soon, but when he knocked on the cottage and stepped in, he wasn’t prepared to be overcome so quickly. The evil hordes quickly tied him up and took him away, his anger rising as the evil witch laughed at him.

Chained to the dungeon wall in Maleficent’s home, he listened to her goad him, telling him she would release him in 100 years to rescue his love, then laughing at him as he struggled to break free and kill her.

Once she left him, the three fairies, who had found Aurora lying on the ground in the tower, snuck inside the forbidden mountain where the evil witch resided, and freed Phillip from the chains. Bestowing upon him the Shield of Faith and the Mighty Sword of Truth, they led him to freedom and, after freeing Samson, they helped him escape.

Maleficent heard the commotion and was beyond angry at the incompetence of her minions. She sent a cursed wall of thorns to stop Sam from getting to the castle, but the sword he’d been gifted with cut the magical weeds with ease. He would take on the world if it meant rescuing his beloved YN.

When the thorns failed to stop him, Maleficent appeared before Phillip and spoke these words, “Now shall you deal with me, O Prince, and all the powers of hell!”

With a maniacal laugh, the witch changed, grew, and there before Sam stood a large black dragon. Sam charged at the dragon, and was met with a fiery blast. The shield easily protected him, and Phillip jumped off his horse to fight the great beast. Maleficent snapped her jaws at him, breathed fire at him, but the prince remained strong and vigilant.

When a rather powerful blast knocked Phillip’s shield away, Maleficent laughed and reveled in her almost victory. He wouldn’t survive now that he had no shield. But while she laughed, the three good fairies enchanted the Sword of truth:

O Sword of Truth, fly swift and sure,

That evil die and good endure!

When they finished the spell, Sam threw the sword at the large dragon, piercing her heart. With a great cry, the evil Maleficent fell to her death, never to darken the kingdom again.

With her death, the thorns and fire disappeared, allowing Sam to enter the castle and seek out YN. He reached the room where the fairies had laid her down on a soft bed, and bent down to capture her lips in a gentle kiss. YN woke, smiling as she gazed into her lover’s eyes.

They made their way to the grand ball room and paid respect to the king and queen, YN rushing to embrace her ‘parents’. Then the prince and princess danced and shared a kiss, and lived happily ever after.

As they kissed, lights flashed, blinding them, and they held on to each other, hoping they were going back home.

**

Sam and YN opened their eyes and found themselves back in the living room, the tv back on the Food channel and everything back to normal. They remembered everything though. Sam cleared his throat, and looked at YN.

“That was interesting.” He commented.

“It was, definitely, and kinda fun.” She replied.

“It got me thinking YN. I don’t want to waste any more time just dating you. I love you. I want to marry you, have children with you, grow old with you. Say you’ll be mine.”

YN felt her eyes sting with happy tears. “Sam, I can’t imagine any part of my future where you are not in it. You complete me, and you’ve made me the happiest woman in the world. I love you so much, and I can’t wait to marry you, grow old with you, and have children with you.” She giggled as she said the last part. “Speaking of…I was going to tell you tonight anyways, but, um, we’ve already started the having children part.”

Sam’s eyes widened as her words caught up with him. “Really?”

The biggest grin she’d ever seen adorned his face as he joyously swung her around, planting kisses all over her face and neck. Picking her up bridal style, he took her to their room where he spent most of the night showing her how much he loved her.

@legion1993 @drkcnry67 @lyarr24 @idreamofplaid​

[systlin]

Hi systlin! How do you manage all these hobbies next to your job? You work so much and still have time for all of this, and I only do 8 hours a day then come home, eat, maybe play dnd and then fall face-first into bed. Rinse, repeat. How do you manage your time?

In bits and pieces.

I often bring a drop spindle to work and spin during slow times. My boss is aware of this and while we’re not TECHNICALLY supposed to do stuff like that, he doesn’t mind because he knows if it’s busy then I’ll work my ass off. So, a great deal of the spinning I do takes place at my desk. (Right now I’m spinning silk on the Teeny Baby Turkish Spindle, which I LOVE.)

The bees and garden and silkworms mostly take care of themselves. I garden with a lot of mulch and an eye to cover every available scrap of earth with plants, which means that it’s hard for weeds to get a foothold. That being said, the garden will probably look like shit after turnaround, which is just “eh”. I’ll tackle the weeds once I get back to a more normal schedule.

The bees mostly fend for themselves. I peek in on them on fatigue days, but the most upkeep I’ve had to do this year is add more supers.

The silkworms I just have to go pick mulberry and keep them fed, and clean out the old dried up leaves and frass now and then. That only takes like 10 minutes.

The weaving, I perhaps do a thread or ten when I’ve a few minutes.

The crochet, the same. Do ten minutes or so when I’ve got ten minutes.

We’ve got some lovely labor-saving devices in our house, like a dishwasher and Mary the Roomba, which free up our time to do things we like.

I also have a husband who likes to cook, and who is the one who takes it upon himself to prepare dinner every night, which he considers enjoyable and I’d consider a chore. He gets home before me, and so I get to come home to dinner ready every night.

During the Overtime From Hell I’ve been working, he’s also taken on a lot of the other household chores. We normally share the workload pretty evenly, but I’ve been working 84 hour weeks, and so he’s shouldered a lot of what I normally do, so when I get home I can just eat, de-stress for a bit with crochet or whatever, shower, and then faceplant into bed.

[ex-atomos]

I received a request to describe a landscape for an artist to practice with

I’m fairly proud of the bit, like a sketch, I came up with.

It's early twilight. The last bit of orange tint from the sunset leaves a lingering warm glow on the clapboard house nearby. It's a fine house with it's wrap around porch and bay windows. Or was. Now the paint seems more grey than the bright white it used to be. Bits of paint have flaked off in spots, leaving the wood underneath to weather darkly from exposure. The porch sags, the steps up now curved from their own weight and being burdened with too many heavy footsteps over the years. Some of the balustrade are missing. A few spindles are still attached to the wood floor but they lean tiredly to the side without the railing holding them in place. 

There's a single rocking chair on the porch. It used to be red but time and dusty cobwebs obscure the brightness of its color. There was a time it was used to pass evenings just like this, looking out at what may have been a nice lawn. Now the grass was overgrown and mostly weeds. The bushes under the bay window now covered its lower half. The oak trees that speckled the yard added their own darkness to the landscape that was deepening by the minute as the last arms of the sun disappeared below the horizon. 

A mouse scampers through the tall grass, squeaking softly as it hurries to its nest under the porch. A bird's wings flutter nearby but it makes no other sound as it suddenly takes flight. The wind picks up momentarily, sending the leaves and grass waving with whispering voices for only a short time before settling down again. 

Though the house looks long abandoned, a soft light fills one of the top floor windows. It must be a lamp of some sort, perhaps an oil lamp since the light is tinted yellow like a small flame was burning within. It doesn't fill the room very well and fades as it's carried away. 

The small light reappears in the cracked window by the door and stops moving. The floorboards creak with the sound of footsteps and the long unused front door starts to open.

[7r0773r]

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

There are also the terms of the trade, the jargon. Every trade has one. You already know some of our terms. ‘86′ is the best known. A dish is 86′ed when there’s no more. But you can use the term for someone who’s just been fired, or about to be fired, or for a bar customer who’s no longer welcome.

One doesn’t refer to a table of six or a table of eight; it’s a six-top or an eight-top. Two customers at a table are simply a deuce. ‘Weeded’ means ‘in the weeds’, ‘behind’, ‘in the shit’ or ‘dans la merde’ — a close cousin and possible outcome of being ‘slammed’, ‘buried’ or ‘hit’.

A waitron or waitron unit is an old-school ’70s term — gender non-specific — for floor personnel, who are also, at staff mealtime, referred to as the floor or the family or simply scum. And the meal itself becomes —particularly if it’s the usual trinity of chicken, pasta and salad — the shaft meal or the gruel.

Then there’s the equipment. Since the introduction of the Cuisinart, any food processor can be referred to as the Queez; the square and oblong metal sauce containers are six-pans or eight-pans depending on size, and the long, shallow ones hotels. The cook’s spoons with holes or slots are, unsurprisingly, female, and the unslotted ones, male.

Meez is mise-en-place: your set up, your station prep, your assembled ingredients and, to some extent, your state of mind. A la minute is made-to-order from start to finish. Order!, when yelled at a cook means ‘Make initial preparations’ such as searing, half-cooking, setting up for finishing. Fire! means ‘Finish cooking’ and get ready for ‘pick up’. Food ready to be picked up is put in the window or en la ventana — also called the pass, the slide or the shelf. The ‘slide’ refers to the slotted rack where dupes or tickets containing orders hang. So you could say, ‘What orders do I have hanging?’ and the reply could be, ‘You got two steak’ on order for the deuce on five, three soles are fired.’ A cook might ask for an all-day, a total number of a particular item both ordered and fired, with temperatures, meaning degrees of doneness. And on the fly means Rush!

A wipe means just what it sounds like: a last-minute plate-cleaning. Marijuana or mota or chronic is chopped parsley. Jiz is any reduced liquid, like demi-glace. When one adds whole butter to jiz, one is mounting, as in monter-au-beurre. Cook well-done translates to ‘Burn it!’ or ‘Murder it!’ or ‘Kill it!’ When one finds oneself waiting too long for a well-done steak to finish cooking, and it’s holding up the rest of the order, one can suggest throwing it in the jukebox, or giving it a little radar love in the micro or microwave.

The latex surgical gloves we rarely wear are anal research gloves, and one usually puts them on with some theatrical flourish, snapping and grinning menacingly, accompanied by suggestions to ‘Turn left and cough’ or ‘Grab your ankles, ’cause here comes papi chulo’. Those paper toques are coffee filters or clown hats, the checked pants we all wear, simply checks, our jackets and aprons, whites.

When the boss arrives, it’s ‘Elvis is in the building’ or ‘Pssst, desastre es aquí! And the usual nicknames apply to any and all: cooks, waiters, busboys and runners alike. Crude irony abounds. Cachundo, meaning ‘piece of ass’, might be applied to a particularly homely runner. Caliman, meaning ‘strong man’, is reserved for a weak cook, Rayo, or ‘flash’ to a slow-poke; Baboso, or ‘drooling idiot’ to, well, any drooling idiot. Any blond, well-scrubbed waiter can become ‘Opie’, ‘Richie Cunningham’ or ‘Doogie Howser Motherfucker’. Stocky busboy? Sounds like Burro to me. When referring to themselves collectively, my Mexican carnales like La Raza or La M (pronounced la emaayy), or La Mafia. Externs from culinary school, working for free as a ‘learning experience’ — which by itself translates to ‘lots of work and no money’ — are quickly tagged as FNG (Fucking New Guy), or Mel for mal carne (bad meat). Army, short for ‘army cook’, or the classic but elegant shoe, short for ‘shoemaker’, are the perennial insults for a lousy or ‘slophouse’ cook.

There are the usual terms of endearment, all perfectly acceptable in casual conversation between cooks: motherfucker (a compliment), cocksucker, sunofbeech, dipshit, scumbag, scum-sucker, dumb-fuck, rat-bastard, slackjaw, idiota, bruto, animale, asesino, mentiroso, whining little bed-wetter, turd, tortuga, strunze, salaud, salopard, chocha podrida, pendejo, silly cunt, seso de pollo, spazz, goofball, bucket-head, chucho, papi-chulo, sweet-cheeks, cupcakes, love-chunks, culero, shit-stain, cum-gargler, and so on. Asshole, strangely, is serious, to be used only when genuinely angry, and any expression involving a person’s wife/mother/girlfriend/boyfriend or family member directly (with the notable exception of motherfucker) is strictly off-limits. You may well have seen your grill man’s wife jacking off motorists for spare change on West Street — but you don’t talk about it. Ever.

A lot of cook talk is transplanted from the fringes of military jargon. One doesn’t carry, one humps. To be set up is to be squared away. He sucks it up and endures, digs in for the rush, takes a bad hit if one station is disproportionately busy — is simply fucked or fucked in the ass when things go badly . . . at which point, one’s buddy hopefully steps in and bails you out, covers your ass, saves your bacon.

Aspirins are called crunchies because we eat them like candy. Finger cots are condoms, pronounced with Spanish inflection. The nail on which completed orders are spindled is the spike. Any round metal container placed in a water bath is a bain (pronounced bayn) from bain-marie pronounced baahn maree), or simply a crock. The life we live is la puta vida, ‘this bitch of a life’, and one might  well bemoan a sorry state of affairs with a cry of Porca miseria! (Pig of misery!) or Qué doloré!, ‘What pain!’

The slide, when full of dupes, is called the board, as in, ‘The board is full’. Food currently being loaded by a runner or waiter is My hand, as in ‘Where’s that fucking steak?’ Reply: ‘My hand, Chef!’ A hot nut is used when an expeditor wants something now: ‘I gotta hot nut for that sole on table six’. This is often for a VIP, or ‘Very important Pendejo’ or PPX, or soignee muthafucka —meaning friend of the owner, or the man himself. So make sure to move that food out rush or STAT.

Applying what we’ve learned to a battlefield situation, one might find oneself saying: ‘I gotta hot nut for that six-top on seven, Cabrón! It’s been fired for ten fucking minutos, pinche tortuga. What? You don’t got yer meez together, asesino? Get that shit in the window, you seso de pollo pinche grill man — throw it in the fucking jukebox if you have to. The rest of the order my hand! And don’t forget to give it a wipe and some mota and a squirt of that red jiz on the way out, I got shit hanging here and you’re falling in the fucking weeds!’

‘Working,’ might come the reply. ‘I getting buried here. How come the sauté no getting slammed like me? I take it in the ass all night! How ’bout table ocho? Fire? I can go on eight?’

Which might inspire this: ‘Eight my hand, baboso! Eight fucking gone! Eight fucking dying en la ventana waiting for Doogie Howser Motherfucker to pick up! You got dead dupes back there, idiota — what the fuck are you doing? You are in the shit! Hey, Rayo! Step in and bail the culero out!’ (pp. 224-28)

[dunmerofskyrim]

76

Kaliklu made a scoop of his fingers, pawing out meat from the thing’s black shell. White ribbons of flesh, like the insides of a stringsquash. “Iron, you said.” He sat cross-legged with the other Kogaru, pale sun on their red backs, sucking cooking-juices from their fingertips and frowning.

Far side of the small fire, Simra crouched on his haunches, and picked at the section of shell he’d already eaten clean. “And salt. Spices. Tea. Whatever barter you might want, there’s a good chance I have it.”

The Kogaru spoke amongst themselves, muttering in their own tongue. Then the hunter looked back to the youngest. Went back to feeding him, morsel by morsel of the meat, all gentle motions and gruff stern sounding words. He was the only one with food left. Smallest, weakest among them, and they’d served him the most.

Kaliklu spoke for the three of them. “Knives, you said.”

“I did.” Simra felt the set of his mouth change. He’d sooner keep any blades he had. This was bad country to be without them, he reckoned. “Good edges, strong blades. I’ll even sharp them for you. I’ve got the gear for it. But I’ll need to know I’m getting what I want in exchange.”

Kaliklu snorted.

“Am I? How do I know you know anything I want to know?”

Another noise, tight-mouthed but it was the closest Kaliklu had come to laughing, so far as Simra had seen. “An outsider, you said. That is who you are looking for?”

“I did.”

“Do you think there are many of you here? Outsiders? I know of one other.”

“Well? Name him.”

Crack and gravel at the side of Simra’s hearing. Llolamae was capering, crawling along the side of the stone ledge where they sat. She’d started by searching out pebbles, skipping them through thin air and into the trees below. Now she’d turned to rocks, the biggest she could find, throwing them down the slopeside and watching them break as they fell.

Little enough harm in it, Simra thought. The biggest rocks she could lift weren’t big enough to cause trouble. Just wished she’d do it quieter. He thought of telling her to stop – change back to the pebbles at least – but couldn’t bring himself to it. What was he, her mother? Besides, it briared at the hunter. He’d stopped his feeding to stare needles at Llolamae, trying to keep his face straight and failing. It was worth the noise just to twitch the sour bastard’s temper.

“We have a name for him,” said Kaliklu.

“Dalvur Vedith?”

“Perhaps. I do not think ours is the name you use. We have another for him.”

“Then what is it?” Simra caught himself chewing at the inside of his cheek, impatient.

“No. First you will tell us, why do you want him?”

“Fine. Fine fine fine…” said Simra, thinking. Kaliklu was guarded, chary of showing his hand. But it’s a player with something to lose who takes so much care in hiding it. Some way or another, he cared what happened to Vedith. “I’ll show you.”

Simra creaked upright and onto his feet, buying time. He ducked into the cave, down into its height and shadow, and grabbed up his bags to drop them heaped by the fire. Humming inside his closed mouth, he loosed the drawstring on his bookbag and brought out a leather scrollcase. The Sermons of Vivec, twelve to twenty-one, with commentaries and reflections from whatever pious inkstains the Temple in Suran asked and paid for their thoughts. What were the chances the Kogaru could read?

“Here,” he said, mouth dry, gesturing with the scrollcase. “It’s from where he’s from. Research he started, and another finished. I don’t know more than that. Only that someone paid good money to have it brought to him.” Simra shrugged, gave a half-smile, as the lie came together just tight enough. Don’t claim to know the whole story and you won’t be asked for it. “Telvanni…”

A sharpness showed in Kaliklu’s eyes and Simra’s heart staggered. “Good money, you said… Then you can afford a high cost for our help.”

Simra’s relief soured no sooner than it had come. He ungrit his back teeth by force. “I reckon so.”

“You are Zainab,” Kaliklu said, a small shadow of a smile on his face, like he’d won. “I knew that you would understand.”

Simra wondered how many Zainab the old Kogaru had ever met to have such a strongfounded opinion of them all. “Fair is fair. What’s your price? How many knives are we talking?”

“Just one.” Kaliklu’s smile widened, worse somehow for it. “The one that cuts air. You used it to maim one of us from afar. You will give it to us as payment, and to make wrongs right. Blood for blood, and the weapon that wounded. That is the price of forgiveness.”

The wand. Simra paced, then stopped pacing. Arms crossed, drumming his ribs with his fingers and cursing the corner he’d backed himself into, he thought it through. Thrusting a hand through his hair, forcing it to go slow, he resigned himself to it. “Fine.” The blighted wand was losing its power anycase, its attitude getting worse year by year. Better not to rely on it. Better to sell while it would still fetch a price. Still, the thought of being without it was a naked fearful thing. “Fine fine fine. You drive a high price, but if that’s what it’ll take…” He was giving them faulty goods. So why did it feel like he was the one being cheated?

“We’ll need food too!” Llolamae called over. “Nother one of those bugs made of meat. Nother one of those and we’ll call it a deal.”

Simra tilted Llolamae a questioning look. Hadn’t known she was paying the deal any mind. The surprise lasted only a moment. “You heard her.” He bent slow to unhide the twisted tin length of the wand from his boot. “I right the wrong we did each other, gift you this, help as I can. That makes me a friend. A stranger in your care while you take me to Vedith. We’ll need treating like guests. Fed as you feed, safe while you’re safe. Right?”

Kaliklu huffed but did not object.

“I knew you’d understand.” Simra crouched back down by the fire and returned to picking at the shell he’d left. “I share with you, you share back.” Dull black shell, scorched to chalk by the roasting of the flesh inside it. He chucked it onto the smouldering fire, like a potshard into a midden. Watched the cough of sparks, and the shuddering resin-smelling smoke of the branches the fire was built on. Watched Kaliklu’s face through it, axehead-hard and still.

“We call him Gurrigalattu…” the old Kogaru said, slow, like unfolding some close-kept mystery.

“And that means what in your tongue exactly?”

Kaliklu pursed his mouth and worked his tongue thoughtful inside it. The youngest Kogaru winced as he leaned in, and murmured something to his elder, who hummed, gave a solemn blink, and translated. “The one who…greens? Or seeds. Makes thrive what would not without him. The one who makes things grow.”

“So…the Gardener?” Llolamae said.

Simra looked past the fire, the three Kogaru, the ledge and out into the basin below. The cone-trees and birches, the ferns and spindle-stemmed wide-spreading mushrooms, at the bottom of a slope thickgrown with flowers and brambles. No wilderness. No accident. A garden.

They gathered themselves up after that, shells left to bleach and crack in the wintertime sun. They left the fire too, still burning to burn itself out.

Simra stripped down to his jacket, his two shirts, the days of sweat from the cold and the heat under his clothes and stiff on them. He tied his mantle over his gathersack and tied his scarf round its strap, scratching at his neck. Good to let his skin breathe. A good choice, as they picked along the slope and headed down it, under the treeline and into the shade of it, hot and growing hotter the lower they went.

Llolamae’s face flushed, shining with damp. Like her body didn’t know what to do with this much warmth. Like she didn’t know what to do with it either — for all the heat, she kept her flapped hat on.

“Work both ways, you know. Hats.” Simra walked beside her, keeping the red backs of the Kogaru in sight up ahead. “Stop you losing heat out your head when it’s cold, but when it’s hot..? Like I said. Both ways.”

She gave him a dazed look, then went back to watching her feet, careful of the roots and thick growth that choked round their knees in the forest at the bottom of the basin. They’d gone another twenty, thirty trudging strides before she raised her hand like a sleepwalker and dragged the hat from her head.

“Better?” Simra tried.

“Never thought you could be too warm…” she slurred, rumpling the hat between her hands.

“It’s just as bad, trust me on that. Worse! Cold, you can always put more on, light a fire. Too hot though, once you’re down to skin and shame and sweat and you’re still sweating, suffering? What d’you do then?”

“What do you do then?”

“Tell you when I figure that out.”

They went high-kneed through deep and dew-damp weeds that left Simra’s trousers smeared wet to the hip. Low, bare sun-starved branches, thin as wind-troubled hair that tickled at his neck and cheeks and made him flinch, blink, angry of a sudden and then forgetting why.

“The research,” said Llolamae.

“What?”

“That scroll for Vedith. It’s about the torquestone, intit? Like what Master Vidanu’s learning about. Like you said.”

Simra’s heart stumbled again. He’d said so, hadn’t he? “Think so, but it’s not like I know much about the finer points.”

“Master Vidanu’d be ever so grateful to know though, wouldn’t he? What it says, I mean.”

“I’m sure. Mistress Ulessen though? Not so grateful. Not if I showed him.” Simra gave a dramatic shudder, making Llolamae smile a little. “Doesn’t bear thinking about, what she’d do to me.”

“Dunno what else a Telvanni’d find to be interested in round here. Master Vidanu says it brought him all across a week of sea just to come see it and see about it! So it must be really special? Don’t know about anything else special round here…”

“Are you not seeing what I’m seeing? A bowl poured full of high Summer when all the rest’s deep Winter outside?”

“Oh, aye… Well there is that.” Llolamae sniffed. “Any Telvanni can make things grow though. Have you not seen Master Vidanu’s tel?”

Simra didn’t reply. Couldn’t sound impressed about that mess and keep a straight face. That was one lie too big and too many for this morning.

“Course he did all that without any help at all. Except from me. Just a bit.” Llolamae pinched her fingers together and grinned, puffed up and proud. “If Vedith can do all this with the torquestone, and him not even a real wizard? Think what Master Vidanu could do!”

“You think the torquestone’s what makes this place like it is?”

“Course! Got to be! I mean, you did say.”

“I did, yeah…”

But Simra remembered the coarse porous stone of the ruins, the screw-spiralling rock growing up out of the hilltop, and it seemed nothing like the strange glassy walls of the cave here, or the chalky ledge or light-brown shale of the slopes. Then again, what did he know about rocks? Then again, in the ruin at the top of the torquestone hill, hadn’t he also been warm? Black stone, not hot to the touch, but with something to it. Not a flake of snow would settle…

[ortegalarkin41-blog]

Ideal Gas String Leaner

Get the facts , string trimmers, weed eaters, weed whackers-- whatever you wish to call them, these slim, handheld devices are developed to make short work of garden and also lawn upkeep. The thicker weeds can be quickly lowered through the machine which is its finest function. If you wish to plant a spring field for your yard, and sufficed down later, a strimmer is a great choice for your yard. Below is the top 5 listing of best ranked Battery Powered Weed Eaters for 2018. Often the string can get entangled in the stems if you start on tall weeds from the bottom. Numerous specialists have stated straight shaft trimmers to be manoeuvrable and also excellent for high customers. The very best gas weed leaner of 2018, in this summary, is Husqvarna 128LD Straight Shaft String Leaner This trimmer includes an excellent, desirable as well as ergonomic develop that allows it to be made use of throughout the day without the user sensation worn down. Unlike several leaners, it's additionally attachment-compatible, so including a different lawn edger or a blower can save you loan on different tools. Also, this leaner head is really simple to utilize. Power and type of engine directly affects the performance and also volume gas powered weed trimmers. Digital and also All-Access members can see CR's string leaner scores of more than 60 versions. These string trimmers are excessively loud, poor for the atmosphere, as well as are not cost-effective, costing you extra dollars in gas loan every single time you intend to utilize them. Discovering the most effective weed eater (additionally called grass weed wackers or string trimmers) for your one-of-a-kind circumstance is crucial to maintaining your stress level down as well as your outdoor satisfaction up this summer season. This leaner features a 20-Volt battery which will offer you lots of power to trim weeds as well as yard effortlessly. If you aren't certain whether to pick a electric or gas-powered string leaner, you should recognize that the appropriate choice depends on the location you require to care for. If for example, you require to trim yard in your tiny yard, an electrical tool will get the job done. From what I can inform, the included battery is the only distinction in the different designs of this trimmer and also I have actually uploaded a graph of the readily available batteries to save you time. String trimmers are well-known for their ability to stress your back, so the less weight, the far better. The GreenWorks 21142 10Amp 18 Inch Straight Shaft Electric String Leaner has been made with an effective 10 amperes motor for a reputable trimming power. Some strimmers are designed with removable heads, so you can include leaf blower accessories, or other yard devices. The trimmer itself has a car feed spindle to feed string to your leaner head regularly. After each trimmer did all that it could on a solitary fee, we determined the square video footage of cut turf. She claimed you must never immerse an electrical string trimmer in water or clean it with a pressure washing machine, and also store it inside your home, out of reach of kids. Below we will take a more detailed take a look at gas, electric and also cordless leaners. It really stands for the very best of all worlds: raw cutting power, skill, handling, and also benefit. And also when you revolve the head, you'll switch from leaner to edger with a 10.25-inch cutting width. As a result of the continuous bumping of the head, you will certainly have to change the strings more frequently than all other type of strimmer leaner heads. Even the most effective cordless models are quite a bit weaker, compete a shorter amount of time, and also really aren't created for the sturdy bushwacking that we took part in during the second part of our examination. Connected to the head are long, challenging strings which spin quickly and build up sufficient momentum to cut via the stems and leaves of weeds. Regardless of being a gas trimmer, it's simple and reasonably tiny to deal with. The most inexpensive are electric turf leaners that you connect into the keys. Poulan Pro 966774301 is basic to run, efficient and accepts various accessories that turn it into a functional yard tool The leaner shows off a straight shaft with a reducing swath of 17 inches. According to studies, many homeowners prefer rounded shafts because they are much more comfy, yet with straight shaft trimmers you can get to even under shaggy locations, as well as it allows for higher range between you as well as the particles that is around the cut location.

[livingcorner]

Ants

Ants are abundant insects in many gardens and often cause concern, but they are usually at most a nuisance.

An ant collecting honeydew from aphids. Credit: RHS/Mike Ballard.

You're reading: Ants

Quick facts

Common name Ants Scientific names Various, mainly Lasius, Myrmica and Formica species Plants affected Ant nests frequently occur in lawns, flower pots, compost bins and among the roots of plants Main symptoms Small heaps of fine soil on the surface above the nest; presence of ants Most active April-October

What are ants?

Ants are eusocial insects related to bees and wasps (Hymenoptera). They live in nests that contain many hundreds and sometimes thousands of ants. Most are wingless sterile females, known as workers, but there will also be fertile females, known as queen ants, and males. More than 30 species of ant are found in Britain, a few of these can occur in gardens, including the familiar black garden ant, Lasius niger. 

Read more: Olive Garden Salad (Copycat) Recipe – Food.com

Symptoms

Ants can cause concern but they are at most a nuisance rather than destructive insects.

They feed mainly on insects, including other ants

They also collect the sweet liquid known as honeydew, which is excreted by aphids and some other sap-feeding insects

Ants can protect aphids from attack by ladybirds and other predators in order to secure their supply of honeydew. Increased numbers of aphids may result in more damage to plants

Ants do little direct damage to plants, except by disturbing soil around plant roots and depositing it on the surface during their nest building activities. This can be a nuisance on lawns and where low-growing plants are being buried by excavated soil. They may also disturb plant roots in pots and containers. This disturbance can also mean that plants are more prone to wilting especially when dry at the roots. 

Sometimes ants will nest in a compost heap or bin. They will not be causing any damage in this situation

Some ants (mostly Myrmica species – commonly known as red ants) can sting, but for most people this is no more than a minor irritation

Control

When choosing control options you can minimise harm to non-target animals by starting with the methods in the non-pesticide control section. If this is not sufficient to reduce the damage to acceptable levels then you may choose to use pesticides. Within this group shorter persistence pesticides (that are usually certified organic) are likely to be less damaging to non-target wildlife than those with longer persistence.

Non-pesticide control

Ants should be tolerated in gardens wherever possible

Unless nests are particularly troublesome, ants are best left alone. If a colony is destroyed it is likely that its place will be taken by in-coming queen ants, which take over the territory and establish even more new nests

Disperse ant heaps on lawns by brushing the excavated soil on a dry day before the lawn is mown, otherwise the soil will get smeared on the lawn surface by the mower

If the lawn has an uneven surface due to years of ant activity, peel back the turf in the raised areas, remove excess soil and relay the turf. This is easier to do in the winter when ants are less active

A pathogenic nematode, Steinernema feltiae, is available from some suppliers of biological controls for treating ant nests in lawns and flower beds. The microscopic, worm-like nematodes are watered into the soil in places where ants are bringing soil up onto the surface

Pesticide control

Many proprietary ant powders, baits, sprays and aerosols are available for controlling ants in and near buildings, these are not suitable for general garden use or application on plants 

To make a real impression on ant numbers it would be necessary to destroy the nests rather than just the foraging ants. That is difficult to achieve as ant nests occupy a much larger volume of soil than the surface excavations might suggest

In most situations try to tolerate the presence of ants

Download

Biological control suppliers (downloads pdf document)

Biology

Ant nests contain one or more fertile female queen ants, which lay eggs in brood chambers within the nest. Most of the other ants in a nest are smaller wingless sterile females, which are known as worker ants. Their role is to maintain, guard and enlarge the nest, feed the larvae and gather food for the colony.

The white maggot-like larvae are fed on a liquid diet secreted by the worker ants

When fully fed, the larvae turn into pupae

Some species of ants pupate inside spindle-shaped whitish-brown silk cocoons. These cocoons are often referred to as ‘ant eggs’. The real eggs are very small and not easily seen with the naked eye

At certain times of year, ant nests produce winged ants. These are young queens and male ants, which often emerge en masse (often labelled ‘flying ant day’, the mating masses can be picked up by weather radar) from nests during humid weather in the summer. These fly up and mate, after which the males die and the young queens try to find suitable places where they can establish new nests

Once mated, the queen ant no longer needs wings, so they are bitten off

Gardeners’ calendar

Find out what to do this month with our gardeners’ calendar

Read more: How to Keep Birds Away + Out of Your Garden: Tips + Ideas | Install-It-Direct

Advice from the RHS

Did you find the advice you needed?

RHS members can get exclusive individual advice from the RHS Gardening Advice team.

Join the RHS now

Get involved

The Royal Horticultural Society is the UK’s leading gardening charity. We aim to enrich everyone’s life through plants, and make the UK a greener and more beautiful place.

Source: https://livingcorner.com.au Category: Garden

source https://livingcorner.com.au/ants/

[handyguypros1]

Best Commercial Weed Eaters HandyGuyPros

When you have a lot of ground to cover regularly, it’s smart to upgrade to one of the best commercial weed eaters. What’s the difference between a professional string trimmer and one made for homeowners? The pro weed whackers are built to withstand long hours of use and much more abuse than a homeowner model.

Companies that make commercial line trimmers are moving to four-stroke engines because of EPA requirements regarding pollution. This is advantageous for home users because four-stroke engines don’t require you to mix gas and oil. They are also quieter.

If you’re new to shopping for weed eaters, there are three things to remember. The first is to consider the weight and balance. If there is a way you can experience how the trimmer feels in your hands before you purchase it, that’s very helpful for ensuring that you’ll be comfortable using it.

Second, you’ll need to choose between straight shaft or curved. If you trim underneath bushes or along fences, a straight shaft is convenient. But if you need to navigate a lot of structures like flowerbeds, you might appreciate a curved shaft. (Plus, remember that some weed whackers are made for right-hand control only.)

Third, for your long-term health, consider how much the trimmer vibrates. Strong vibrations over time can damage the nerves in your hands and arms. Opt for one with low vibration and plenty of padding if you’ll be trimming frequently.

Best Commercial Weed Eaters

Now let’s look at reviews of top commercial weed eaters. We hope to help you discover the perfect one for the job you need to do.

Husqvarna 324L Straight Shaft String Trimmer

Husqvarna’s 324L straight shaft string trimmer features a four-stroke 25cc gas engine. That’s 1.07 hp with a top speed of 7000 RPM.

Unlike a two-stroke engine, you’ll never have to mix fuel and oil for it. Also important, it’s made to start on the first pull. It has a Smart Start motor plus an air purge for the carburetor. But you’ll still want to wear hearing protection.

The 17-inch base helps you cover a lot of ground quickly. And the loop handle allows you to hold it however is most comfortable for you. That’s essential when it weighs 11 ¼ pounds and measures 58.4 inches long.

Husqvarna also provides information about the vibration. The front handle was tested to have 9.1 m/s2 and the rear handle 8.2 m/s2. Double-check that against OSHA regulations for your job.

Husqvarna 967175201 322L Straight Shaft Gas String Trimmer

The Husqvarna 322L is slightly less powerful than the 324L weed eater above. It has a 23cc X-Torq engine with easy start technology and low emissions. Fans of this model like how easy it is to refill and use Tap ‘N Go trimmer line. Moreover, the controls are so straightforward that anyone with limited experience can pick it up and go. The heavy-duty gearbox ensures that it will stand up to years of use.

Tanaka Commercial-Grade Straight Shaft Trimmer TBC-340PF

Tanaka’s commercial-grade trimmer doubles as a brush cutter because it’s compatible with attachments. The 32cc two-stroke engine offers 1.6 hp, enough to slice through the toughest weeds and young saplings. It’s noisy, but it’s a PureFire with CARB-compliant Tier 2 low emissions. Also, it starts quickly because of the Walbro carburetor with primer.

Overall, this weed eater weighs 13.2 pounds. Part of that heft is due to the 59-inch solid steel shaft that comes with a lifetime warranty.

Echo GT-225 Curved Shaft Gas Trimmer

Echo’s GT-225 had a glowing review from Popular Mechanics that highlighted two benefits. The first is that the 48-inch curved shaft balances the weight well. And the second is that the two-stroke 21.2cc engine starts quickly and has the power.

We also noticed the two-line Rapid Loader head. But if you’re not a fan, try the EZ Feed attachment instead. And lefties beware: this trimmer has the throttle mounted for the right hand.

Hitachi CG23ECPSL String Trimmer

If you’re tall, take a look at Hitachi’s CG23ECPSL weed whacker. It has a 69.6-inch length so that you can stop bending over to get the work done. The 22.5cc PureFire two-stroke engine keeps emissions down. Furthermore, users say it always starts by the second pull when it’s cold, or the first when it’s warm.

Other vital features include an anti-vibration system and a solid steel drive shaft. You can also make it easier on yourself by purchasing premixed fuel/oil.

Tanaka TCG27EBSP 2-Cycle Gas String Commercial Grade Trimmer

Our other pick from Tanaka’s lineup weighs only 11.2 pounds. But it still has a solid steel drive shaft with vibration-reducing technology and padded handle. It’s powered by a commercial-grade 26.9cc two-cycle engine. The engine is CARB-compliant and has a Walbro carburetor with purge primer .

You won’t need tools to change the attachment since it has a built-in spindle lock. And every part is built for durability. For example, even the fuel tank has a protective housing. Tanaka offers a two-year commercial or 7-year consumer warranty. Should you purchase it to loan as a rental, they offer one year’s coverage.

Toro 2-Cycle 25.4cc Gas Commercial Straight Shaft String Trimmer

Would you like to save a little money? Then try a refurbished model. Toro’s 25.4cc engine is commercial-grade for long life and quick starts. The string trimmer has a 60-inch straight shaft and a bump-feed head.

Blue Max 52623 Extreme Duty 2-Cycle Dual Line Trimmer and Brush Cutter

Blue Max’s Extreme Duty trimmer and cutter is powered by a two-stroke 42.7cc Blue Max engine that runs on a 40:1 fuel to oil ratio. It weighs 17 pounds and has a straight shaft with anti-vibration handles. Users say that the three-prong brush cutter blade slices through 2-inch saplings with no problem even though the manufacturer states that the maximum is only one-inch thickness.

Southland Outdoor Power Equipment SWFT15022 150cc Field Trimmer

Save yourself from an aching back and arms with this professional weed eater. It’s a field trimmer that you push similar to a lawnmower. You don’t have to balance and sweep a string trimmer to edge your driveway with this tool.

Notice that it has a150cc engine that can tackle overgrown spots in a flash. The 22-inch cutting swath and 12-inch wheels help you cover a lot of rough ground quickly.

The folding handle is coated with anti-vibration foam. Additionally, the trimmer comes with a two-year limited warranty and it’s both CARB and EPA-certified.

Poulan Pro PR22WT Walk Behind String Trimmer

Poulan Pro also makes a back-saving line trimmer that you walk behind. The 190cc Briggs & Stratton 675 EXI engine and 22-inch cutting width slices through rough terrain with weeds and brush. The 12-inch diameter wheels make sure you don’t get slowed down by ruts and rocks. Best of all, you can throttle down to tackle difficult spots.

Remington 25A-26J7783 22″ Hi-Wheel Trimmer

Remington’s walk-behind line trimmer makes a lot of customers happy. That’s because it’s trouble-free for non-professionals to use. It has a 22-inch cutting width and uses standard 0.155 trimmer line. You can adjust it to three different cutting heights to keep everything neatly manicured. And users appreciate that it doesn’t throw debris at them the same way a conventional weed eater does.

It has a 159cc four-stroke OHV engine with plenty of power to slice weeds and tall grass. The off-set trimmer head makes it simple to reach awkward places. Finally, it’s covered by a two-year limited warranty.

Swisher STP4422HO Self-Propelled String Trimmer

The only thing lacking in Swisher’s self-propelled string trimmer is a robot brain to operate it unattended. It has a 4.4 hp 160cc Honda engine that moves it forward at 2 mph. The 22-inch cutting width resembles a lawnmower’s work since it provides precision cuts with eight effective cutting lines. You can also adjust the height between 1.5 to 3.5 inches.

Since the trimmer head is off-set, it allows you to reach into nooks and crannies. And you can turn the trimmer head on or off from the handlebar. This allows you to drive it without cutting anything.

Husqvarna 128LD Straight Shaft Gas String Trimmer

Yes, we know this is not a commercial-grade weed whacker. But there are pros who love to use it. That’s because Husqvarna’s 128LD string trimmer is compatible with attachments. This fact alone gives this one tool the ability to replace six others. You can match it with Husqvarna’s (or Poulan Pro’s) brush cutter, pole saw, hedge trimmer, tree pruner, sweeper, and tiller accessories.

It’s powered by a 28cc two-stroke engine and has a 17-inch cutting width. It uses 0.095 trimmer line and has a straight shaft. Husqvarna’s Smart Start technology ensures that one pool has it ready to go. Finally, it weighs only 10.8 pounds.

Tips for effective weed trimming

Chances are, you’re an old pro at weed whacking. If not, try these tips to make the job go easier.

To get rid of weeds growing in the cracks of the pavement, tilt your string trimmer so that the tip of the string is just brushing the pavement. Then move into the base of the weed to cut it flush. This takes a little practice as tilting too much or too little won’t get the job done right.

Next, you can achieve a perfect edge between the grass and the sidewalk. Turn your trimmer till the string is vertical. Pass it along the edge. If you’ve never neatened up the grass in that spot before, you’ll probably dig up debris. But after you do this for a few weeks, you’ll train it to stay tidy.

To wrap up, there’s one spot in your yard that you need to avoid. Never use a string trimmer right up against a tree. That’s because the string will cut into the bark and expose the tree to disease and pests. Instead, save yourself from future problems by laying down mulch around the base of the tree. Then you can edge around the mulch and never touch the tree.

Conclusion

Which commercial line trimmer did you choose? We’d love to know which tool we helped you find. That’s because we’re always on the lookout for the best home and garden products.

Source : https://handyguypros.com/best-cordless-electric-lawn-mowers/

[perstephonebartusisyphus]

A part apart.

It

s

am

am a time where a reflection of a turned off light fixture in a window masquerades as a dim golden firefly in an oak tree. Where the farts of yesterday have become rancid from not resting. From discovering and feeling the scouring pad of a full moon brush the folded recesses of the psyche and turning it out in the multiflora of the gut.

Somethings not quite attuned at the moment, say the dimensional languaging of the higher-self prospect. 4.33 am allowing, oh pardon, granting permission to the automatic formatting of this word program somewhat guide how this piece of dredged out fartery is going to turn out, format-wise, and 4.33 am keen to the curiosity of where this will lead, so the aimless typing is coming along so there's no directed portal of consciousness to align with to direct the attention in the cauldron of words, bubbling under the fire of some distant creation emerging like old starlight onto the skies of the mind.

Now is moth-minute, fluttering around the secluded monastery that has been made for a previously dissociated sense of registering a self that can be described with words. Looking at the contents of the current structures in the moment of coagulating together to gather up what has previously fomented into some ingredients to get cooking, combining,creating, stirring, again. Shaking some things up in a corridor that had become dusty, right the woo-woo core-i-door of a part apart has recently renimated, bursting through the fluttering heart of the moth pacing. It's pretty neat a moth can pace with its wings beating flutters electromagnetic frequency to electromagnetic frequency.

What's on the floor, some soil sodden clothing that don't make it to the laundry cause their current comfort is in the wearing and building of the sunshine and the soil and the rain into their fabrics, acyrlic how in the moth brain does one spell acrylic what the fuck does that even mean other than in this associative bin oh “plastic” pitched together from old plastic bottles manufactures and rewoven together in some... maybe say structure or building, but is likely a post-modern nightmare of manufacturing and labor of the hands and hearts of people far away, churning out bottles into tshirts and of all ironies putting  print of a planet on it Earth Now!

And some sticks poking out next to the clothes that were originally undertaken as an intuitve meditation, picked from the trash after a house was being turned to be flipped and that usually means the previous tenant or homeowner or deed holder or whatever this beuracracy shuffles in its papers to say something dedicated, also means turning over the previous human spending time in that space over some period of time on this planet likely has some plants and relationship with those plants, and in the case of these plants, unfortunate forsythias who had been let loose to bloom got shaped into those flat cube like orderliness that seems so peculiar in nature. Box forsythias haha, so I picked up the trash that were more like twigs and got them in a cart and walked them to the earth I has dug out to build raised beds and laid the branches into the depressions I dug to build up the mounds because I didn't have much dirt because it was all grass. Shaking the soil off the grass onto the branches, and the mound raised pretty quickly but there was lots of leftover green branches because the plants got pruned right before they burst so there is now wonderfully amusing forsythia coming up out of the mound amidst the intentional plantings. So I imagined I'd make some baskets with what didn't get used for building beds, but now I mostly use the sticks to prop up houseplants.

On the couch there is a drop spindle that is currently in the process of spinning some wool from a class. There are many yards of this wool left to spin, and have ben finding my focus is best for about 9 yards at a time, just in time to get into a flow, but then tired or distracted by any number of the common creeping anxieties that sometimes come up in the process of cooking.

An unmade bed that's easy to make becasuse all that needs to happen is to take the blanket and put it in a basket right by the bed, and before tussing it out for some sleep or if not sleep, some shut eye or a little walk in the park behind the close of the eyes, putting out the blanket and spritzing it with some water and rosemary. On the armstand of the couch, a baking tray and a glass plate of drying linden tree flowers awaiting to be jarred up. Remembering the bath from the two days previous of steeping in bathwater witth a tea made from the flowersand coming out of the water feeling like a little green leafed tongue, sensistive and excited about the night to come. A dream journal filled with nightly adventures from 2013 on, and upon opening and reentering the dreamscapes, checking out the murmurs to which the spirit unfurls its dimensions and tasks to complete. Sometimes feeling like a video game and sometimes feeling too much realer than what happens day to day but perhaps that's escapist, but being in a monastery for the past year or so it feels a if the dimensional texture to the experience of life has shifted to the type of space where dreaming and waking blend to such a degree that there's very little distinction between which is when or how to know. Except that what broughtupon this sleeplessness was actually a dream, and the birds are coming, how sweet their rising and incentive to begin before the sun changes the tune of the energetic harmonica of the hours to come. The dream was about being around lots of carrots, and day before conversations about old dog beginning to crave fruit through discovering a curious pattern of her literally harvesting single carrots to snack on. Somehow pulling up single carrots from a planting to enjoy. And the carrots in the dream were planted all around angelica and queen anne's lace so they could blend in. it's usually miraculous, or at the very least, to refrain from hyperbole, joyous to witness the way some plants growing together take on each other's leaf shape's and textures. At first I smugly surmised it could be because they didn't want to be weeded or pulled by a human, but the more I spend time with the plants the more I'm finding that they just like to learn and share with each other. The coolest leaf blendings/form/shape shifting planting that I visit is with some vinca vine and milkweed. Some of the vinca vine stands erect like the milkweed, and some of the leaves of a couple of the milkweed plants have the similar hues and patterns as the vinca vine. In another dream, there were cherry blossoms that people kept saying were crabapples, and in another that passionflower was mullein, and who was I to contest? So when the milkweed-vinca, and the vinca-milkweed are sharing light, shade density, nutrients, and rainfall, and are obviously letting each other in the known of their ways of being, I lose particularly all interest in trying to describe to anyone what these plants are “useful for” because I feel like I've only just begun feeling the way the light becomes the morning and which flower where sparkles from the inside in the bursting of a particular moment of light with them enough for it to come through me to ask them what they want to be called.

[eyeteethmonster]

Taking the Long Way Home(Wildstar)

Desodar, Hirn, and Nestri Bury my heart underneath these trees And when a southern wind comes to raise my soul Spread my spirit like a flock of crows It wasn’t her song, certainly not one born out of the shadows of the swamp, but she loved it all the same. One that came from a different people, with feathers in their hair and wings looming over them in all colours. Spirits that favored them, and the wind, in equal measure. The wood pressed into her knees, no padding of folded fibers today, and the oar in her hand slid over callouses time-tested in her palms. It was no common way to travel, something she picked up from the villages upstream. Everything flowed into the mire, and out of it as well. Water and weed parted from the oar’s slice, and her voice was not the only one filling the air. Verdune, Lansa, Wikren- oh Wrap your roots all around my bones And when they come for me, when they call my name Cast my shadow from the candle’s flame One set of skittering legs trekked along the gunwale to her left, bright yellows and deeper browns a warning to anything that might chance it a snack. Her voice trailed off, throat thrumming instead, soft and low. The buzzbing’s wings twitched, and from her left, a whoosh past her ear answered. More yellow and brown filled her vision as they clustered on the bow.  The oar was swapped for a satchel, and that for a jar of something ambery-yellow, set upon the forwardmost seat. Her hum swept through low scales- wings shifted and fluttered all transparent and spindle-spined. The buzzbings clustered, only giving occasional, startled sounds when they blundered into one another in their race to the nectar.  The rest of the song could wait. Her craft cut through the water, nigh-silent as she headed deeper into the swamp.

[heartslogos]

send the  morning [4]

“You, Dalish,” Threnn calls out when she spots the hunter striding past on his way towards the kitchens, a ram slung over his shoulders. The man ignores her and keeps walking. “Elf.”

“I am not named Dalish,” The man says.

Threnn sighs, “Lavellan.”

He stops walking, turns around, and walks up to her, “What?”

Threnn is never quite sure if Lavellan is cross or not. He’s like this all the time. With everyone.

“I need these herbs,” Threnn holds up the list Adan gave her.

Lavellan continues to look at her, pale brow slowly raising, “And?”

“Can you get them?”

“No,” He says, turning around, Threnn reaches out to stop him - “Just because I’m Dalish and a hunter does not mean I know where every single plant can be found. I’m busy helping feed your organization.”

“We need these,” Threnn says, “Urgently. For the medicines and such. To keep this organization going.”

“I’m busy, it’s not like I can just stop in the middle of chasing rams to pick some plants,” Lavellan says. “Isn’t there someone else you can ask?”

“I’m asking everyone,” Threnn replies, “But we can’t function on having random people bring in one or two stalks whenever they remember, or even the Herald and her party bringing in a few dozen every few weeks. We need a supply.”

Lavellan sighs, glancing up at the sky and muttering to himself for a moment before focusing his gaze back on her. He kneels down, laying the ram down on the ground, “Wait here.”

He jogs off towards Haven’s gates and Threnn moves the ram behind her so no one gets any strange ideas.

She half doesn’t expect him to come back, but about half an hour later Lavellan returns, dragging the other elf behind him - his sister.

“The list,” Lavellan waves a hand at Threnn, holding his sister by the arm as she tries to pull away. Threnn hands him the list and he turns to his sister, holding it in her face and begins to say something, rapidly and sharply, to her in elven. He shakes her arm until she looks at the list. The woman makes no response, but Lavellan hands Threnn the list and then holds up three fingers to the woman’s face.

“Three days,” Lavellan says.

Slowly the woman makes a circle with her pointer and thumb, okay - and Lavellan lets her go. Then she promptly raises her other hand and makes another circle with her pointer and thumb, raises both signs to her eyes in the imitation of glasses and marches off, staring at the sky.

Lavellan looks at her, “Where’s my ram?”

“Is she going to do it?” Threnn asks, pulling the ram out and helping Lavellan get it on his shoulders again.

Lavellan shrugs, “I asked.”

And Threnn decides that the two are useless in this matter.

Three days later, Threnn’s attention is drawn away from explaining the need for more ore to Malika by a ripple of sound coming from the main gates. It doesn’t sound like an attack, but Threnn draws a sword just to be sure.

The source of the sound - sounds? - is coming closer and Malika goes to pull her axe -

But it’s Lavellan - the girl.

She’s walking up the path, stark naked, with something strapped to her back and a large bundle underneath one arm.

Lavellan walks right up to Threnn, bare as the day she was born aside from those tattoos, and kneels, unfurling the bundle under her arm to reveal the remains of what was once her skirt around piles and piles and piles of neatly cut, cleaned, and braided elf root. Malika starts laughing and goes to help the woman with the bundle on her back - which was her shawl.

“So that’s where you’ve been,” Malika says as they untie the shawl to reveal spindle weed and all sorts of other things that weren’t even on the list but Threnn is sure will be deeply appreciated anyway.

Threnn raises a hand to her head and Lavellan looks up at her.

“Maker’s fucking cock,” Threnn says, “We have bags.”

-

“Well someone has to write to mom,” Malika says, “And somehow send the message. Can’t we just catch a bird or something? I mean - the Spymaster uses crows. I figure I could train a crow. They’re not rare, I mean.”

Uncle Edric groans, dragging a hand down his face, “That’s not how messenger birds work, Malika.”

“Well if we don’t get a message to mom she’s probably going to send the whole Carta down on us,” Malika says. She has a point. Edric’s sister is - dramatic is probably the best way to say it without getting your jaw kicked off your face.

“Perhaps I can be of assistance,” Both of them turn towards the human - Trevelyan, Edric thinks. He overheard the man arguing with some templars earlier. The man holds up an impressive looking hawk on his arm. “You can use mine, I mean. So I suppose I’m volunteering my bird’s assistance. Well, she isn’t my bird exactly. My mother sent her at me and I’m afraid I’m too much of a disappointment to respond properly. But I’m sure that she’d love to carry your message instead of mine. It sounds ever so much more important after all.”

Malika beams, “What a beauty.”

“Isn’t she?” Trevelyan says, “I’m Maxwell, by the way.”

“Malika,” Malika holds out her hand, “And this is my uncle, Edric.”

“Malika, Edric, wonderful to meet you,” Maxwell says, shaking Edric’s hand, “Now if you’d be ever so marvelous and get this bird away from me before she decides to bodily drag me home by the hair.”

“Were you just wandering around hoping to find someone who’d take your bird?” Edric asks.

“Possibly, but who’s to know? I didn’t have to wander very far, did I?” Maxwell shrugs, lowering his arm to Edric’s to allow the bird to move over. “Make sure to send her very far now. Wouldn’t want her coming back too soon.”

-

Dorian finds someone is already sitting in his usual spot in the garden. Lavellan - Mahanon - is carving something and after a quick glance around Dorian spots a foot sticking out of some bushes that is most likely Ellana. And hopefully Ellana, not dead. Dorian is fairly certain that the Inquisitor would be most displeased if one of her dearest friends were to be found dead in her garden.

He considers going back inside, but even he has his limits to being cooped up all day and it is one of the rare tolerable occurrences of tolerable weather at Skyhold.

Dorian takes a seat on the bench next to him.

“I hope you don’t mind terribly,” Dorian says, “But there aren’t that many choices to pick from seat wise.”

Mahanon glances up and nods at him before returning his focus to the wood in his hands. Dorian can’t tell what he’s making, but then again, Dorian has close to no prior exposure to the actual process of woodworking.

Dorian fully intends on focusing on his book, but the Iron Bull’s words keep flitting to the front of his mind, newly renewed and fresh with half the subject of them sitting directly next to him. They don’t even talk that much, and the man is obviously very besotted with Kaaras and two men of such unique backgrounds is unusual enough there is no way, none what so ever, that they could be interested in a third joining their party - and even if they were, Dorian isn’t sure if that’s something he would be interested in. That isn’t to say that either man is unattractive. They aren’t. Unattractive, he means.

“I thought you would read faster,” Mahanon says, slowly turning over the wood in his hands, blowing some shavings off.

“Pardon?” Dorian blinks.

“You’ve been on the same page for almost five minutes,” Mahanon explains, “The way you’re always in the library studying and such, I thought you would read faster.”

“I do read faster,” Dorian says, “I’m just - distracted.”

Mahanon hums. “Too loud?”

“What?”

Mahanon raises an eyebrow, using his wrist to push some strands that have escaped his long braid out of his face, “Is it too loud outside for you?”

“My thoughts yes, the actual surroundings? No,” Dorian says. And before they can slip into silence again - “Are you often out here? In the garden, whittling, I mean.”

“Sometimes I’m by the stables,” Mahanon says, “I only come here when I know the Chantry sisters aren’t by. When they do come back, I’ll leave. So if I suddenly get up and walk away it most likely is not you. As an aside.” Mahanon’s dark eyes flick to Dorian’s face and Dorian catches the hint of a smile at the corner of his lips, “I am told I can be very short with people. It is not my intention, usually. Your pardon, Ser Pavus, if I seem that way.”

“I imagine that when ones sister has a tendency to walk off mid-sentence, one grows to speak quickly and get to the point fast,” Dorian says. Mahanon’s smile grows just a small bit and he nods, gaze returning to his project. Definitely not unattractive.

“The Chantry sisters do get a bit tedious,” Dorian concedes, “Though in my case it’s because I’m from Tevinter. It helps to have someone around, I admit, so ward them off. There are times when I come down here and I don’t see anyone I know and I can’t be bothered to try so I just go back inside.”

“Don’t,” Mahanon says and when Dorian looks back at him the man’s focus is entirely on him, “Find me. This place is your home as much as theirs. I will sit with you.” Mahanon’s teeth make a brief appearance in his smile. “As unlikely a pair we would make, the Dalish hunter and the Tevinter Altus would definitely ward them away. And if not me, Kaaras. He avoids the gardens for the sole purpose of the Chantry sisters’ gossip. A shame.” Mahanon’s smile dims, “Not even I can persuade him to act like the giant he is.”

“A dalish hunter, a Tevinter Altus, and a Qunari Tal-Vashoth walk into a castle garden,” Dorian says, “Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.”

Mahanon barks out a laugh, shaking his head.

“Do you play chess?” Dorian asks and Mahanon hums.

“No, I do not know the rules,” Mahanon’s lips quirk up, “And from the way you lose, I don’t think you do, either.”

“I beg your pardon,” Dorian holds his book to his chest, affronted.

“Is the copious cheating on your side part of the game or desperation? I can’t help but notice it whenever you and the Commander play,” Mahanon continues.

“It isn’t cheating. It’s strategy,” Dorian says. “And it keeps the man on his toes, doesn’t it? Would you - would you like to learn?”

Mahanon hums, “I haven’t seen you win once without cheating.”

“That would be because you don’t see all of our games. I’ll have you know I’m currently in the lead. Four to three.”

“Technicality,” Mahanon says.

“And how would you know that if you don’t know how to play?”

“I don’t, but I know people who do,” Mahanon says, “And when I describe your games to them they laugh.”

[bountyofbeads]

The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

By Matthew Desmond | Published August 14, 2019 | New York Times Magazine "1619 Project" | Posted August 16, 2019 |

A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).

Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5.

Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.

Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.

Nearly two average American lifetimes (79 years) have passed since the end of slavery, only two. It is not surprising that we can still feel the looming presence of this institution, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus. The surprising bit has to do with the many eerily specific ways slavery can still be felt in our economic life. “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” write the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. The task now, they argue, is “cataloging the dominant and recessive traits” that have been passed down to us, tracing the unsettling and often unrecognized lines of descent by which America’s national sin is now being visited upon the third and fourth generations.

They picked in long rows, bent bodies shuffling through cotton fields white in bloom. Men, women and children picked, using both hands to hurry the work. Some picked in Negro cloth, their raw product returning to them by way of New England mills. Some picked completely naked. Young children ran water across the humped rows, while overseers peered down from horses. Enslaved workers placed each cotton boll into a sack slung around their necks. Their haul would be weighed after the sunlight stalked away from the fields and, as the freedman Charles Ball recalled, you couldn’t “distinguish the weeds from the cotton plants.” If the haul came up light, enslaved workers were often whipped. “A short day’s work was always punished,” Ball wrote.

Cotton was to the 19th century what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most widely traded commodities. Cotton is everywhere, in our clothes, hospitals, soap. Before the industrialization of cotton, people wore expensive clothes made of wool or linen and dressed their beds in furs or straw. Whoever mastered cotton could make a killing. But cotton needed land. A field could only tolerate a few straight years of the crop before its soil became depleted. Planters watched as acres that had initially produced 1,000 pounds of cotton yielded only 400 a few seasons later. The thirst for new farmland grew even more intense after the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s. Before the gin, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they could clean. The gin broke the bottleneck, making it possible to clean as much cotton as you could grow.

[To get updates on The 1619 Project, and for more on race from The New York Times, sign up for our weekly Race/Related newsletter.]

The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida. It then sold that land on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) — to white settlers. Naturally, the first to cash in were the land speculators. Companies operating in Mississippi flipped land, selling it soon after purchase, commonly for double the price.

Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting. “Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” John Parker, an enslaved worker, remembered. A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of American money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling the environment for profit, is found in the cotton plantation. Floods became bigger and more common. The lack of biodiversity exhausted the soil and, to quote the historian Walter Johnson, “rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth dependent on upriver trade for food.”

As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.”

Perhaps you’re reading this at work, maybe at a multinational corporation that runs like a soft-purring engine. You report to someone, and someone reports to you. Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification. Data seems to hold sway over every operation. It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.

When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. And yet, despite this, “slavery plays almost no role in histories of management,” notes the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in her book “Accounting for Slavery.” Since the 1977 publication of Alfred Chandler’s classic study, “The Visible Hand,” historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the 19th-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive. It’s a more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of black people toiling on plantations. But management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners.

Planters aggressively expanded their operations to capitalize on economies of scale inherent to cotton growing, buying more enslaved workers, investing in large gins and presses and experimenting with different seed varieties. To do so, they developed complicated workplace hierarchies that combined a central office, made up of owners and lawyers in charge of capital allocation and long-term strategy, with several divisional units, responsible for different operations. Rosenthal writes of one plantation where the owner supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised 16 enslaved head drivers and specialists (like bricklayers), who supervised hundreds of enslaved workers. Everyone was accountable to someone else, and plantations pumped out not just cotton bales but volumes of data about how each bale was produced. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of the British Royal Navy.

Like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck’s book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity. This book “was really at the cutting edge of the informational technologies available to businesses during this period,” Rosenthal told me. “I have never found anything remotely as complex as Affleck’s book for free labor.” Enslavers used the book to determine end-of-the-year balances, tallying expenses and revenues and noting the causes of their biggest gains and losses. They quantified capital costs on their land, tools and enslaved workforces, applying Affleck’s recommended interest rate. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans. Values generally peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength and temperament: people reduced to data points.

This level of data analysis also allowed planters to anticipate rebellion. Tools were accounted for on a regular basis to make sure a large number of axes or other potential weapons didn’t suddenly go missing. “Never allow any slave to lock or unlock any door,” advised a Virginia enslaver in 1847. In this way, new bookkeeping techniques developed to maximize returns also helped to ensure that violence flowed in one direction, allowing a minority of whites to control a much larger group of enslaved black people. American planters never forgot what happened in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791, when enslaved workers took up arms and revolted. In fact, many white enslavers overthrown during the Haitian Revolution relocated to the United States and started over.

Overseers recorded each enslaved worker’s yield. Accountings took place not only after nightfall, when cotton baskets were weighed, but throughout the workday. In the words of a North Carolina planter, enslaved workers were to be “followed up from day break until dark.” Having hands line-pick in rows sometimes longer than five football fields allowed overseers to spot anyone lagging behind. The uniform layout of the land had a logic; a logic designed to dominate. Faster workers were placed at the head of the line, which encouraged those who followed to match the captain’s pace. When enslaved workers grew ill or old, or became pregnant, they were assigned to lighter tasks. One enslaver established a “sucklers gang” for nursing mothers, as well as a “measles gang,” which at once quarantined those struck by the virus and ensured that they did their part to contribute to the productivity machine. Bodies and tasks were aligned with rigorous exactitude. In trade magazines, owners swapped advice about the minutiae of planting, including slave diets and clothing as well as the kind of tone a master should use. In 1846, one Alabama planter advised his fellow enslavers to always give orders “in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result of reflection.” The devil (and his profits) were in the details.

The uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave plantations predates industrialism. Northern factories would not begin adopting these techniques until decades after the Emancipation Proclamation. As the large slave-labor camps grew increasingly efficient, enslaved black people became America’s first modern workers, their productivity increasing at an astonishing pace. During the 60 years leading up to the Civil War, the daily amount of cotton picked per enslaved worker increased 2.3 percent a year. That means that in 1862, the average enslaved fieldworker picked not 25 percent or 50 percent as much but 400 percent as much cotton than his or her counterpart did in 1801.

Today modern technology has facilitated unremitting workplace supervision, particularly in the service sector. Companies have developed software that records workers’ keystrokes and mouse clicks, along with randomly capturing screenshots multiple times a day. Modern-day workers are subjected to a wide variety of surveillance strategies, from drug tests and closed-circuit video monitoring to tracking apps and even devices that sense heat and motion. A 2006 survey found that more than a third of companies with work forces of 1,000 or more had staff members who read through employees’ outbound emails. The technology that accompanies this workplace supervision can make it feel futuristic. But it’s only the technology that’s new. The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations, which sought innermost control over the bodies of their enslaved work force.

The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the nation’s first corporate Big Brother was the overseer. And behind every cold calculation, every rational fine-tuning of the system, violence lurked. Plantation owners used a combination of incentives and punishments to squeeze as much as possible out of enslaved workers. Some beaten workers passed out from the pain and woke up vomiting. Some “danced” or “trembled” with every hit. An 1829 first-person account from Alabama recorded an overseer’s shoving the faces of women he thought had picked too slow into their cotton baskets and opening up their backs. To the historian Edward Baptist, before the Civil War, Americans “lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”

There is some comfort, I think, in attributing the sheer brutality of slavery to dumb racism. We imagine pain being inflicted somewhat at random, doled out by the stereotypical white overseer, free but poor. But a good many overseers weren’t allowed to whip at will. Punishments were authorized by the higher-ups. It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner but the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design. “Each individual having a stated number of pounds of cotton to pick,” a formerly enslaved worker, Henry Watson, wrote in 1848, “the deficit of which was made up by as many lashes being applied to the poor slave’s back.” Because overseers closely monitored enslaved workers’ picking abilities, they assigned each worker a unique quota. Falling short of that quota could get you beaten, but overshooting your target could bring misery the next day, because the master might respond by raising your picking rate.

Profits from heightened productivity were harnessed through the anguish of the enslaved. This was why the fastest cotton pickers were often whipped the most. It was why punishments rose and fell with global market fluctuations. Speaking of cotton in 1854, the fugitive slave John Brown remembered, “When the price rises in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.” Unrestrained capitalism holds no monopoly on violence, but in making possible the pursuit of near limitless personal fortunes, often at someone else’s expense, it does put a cash value on our moral commitments.

Slavery did supplement white workers with what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “public and psychological wage,” which allowed them to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement. But this, too, served the interests of money. Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Both in the cities and countryside, employers had access to a large and flexible labor pool made up of enslaved and free people. Just as in today’s gig economy, day laborers during slavery’s reign often lived under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, and jobs meant to be worked for a few months were worked for lifetimes. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners.

This not only created a starkly uneven playing field, dividing workers from themselves; it also made “all nonslavery appear as freedom,” as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage. It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for; a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter. It was a freedom far too easily pleased.

In recent decades, America has experienced the financialization of its economy. In 1980, Congress repealed regulations that had been in place since the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, allowing banks to merge and charge their customers higher interest rates. Since then, increasingly profits have accrued not by trading and producing goods and services but through financial instruments. Between 1980 and 2008, more than $6.6 trillion was transferred to financial firms. After witnessing the successes and excesses of Wall Street, even nonfinancial companies began finding ways to make money from financial products and activities. Ever wonder why every major retail store, hotel chain and airline wants to sell you a credit card? This financial turn has trickled down into our everyday lives: It’s there in our pensions, home mortgages, lines of credit and college-savings portfolios. Americans with some means now act like “enterprising subjects,” in the words of the political scientist Robert Aitken.

As it’s usually narrated, the story of the ascendancy of American finance tends to begin in 1980, with the gutting of Glass-Steagall, or in 1944 with Bretton Woods, or perhaps in the reckless speculation of the 1920s. But in reality, the story begins during slavery.

Consider, for example, one of the most popular mainstream financial instruments: the mortgage. Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based on human property. In the early 1700s, slaves were the dominant collateral in South Carolina. Many Americans were first exposed to the concept of a mortgage by trafficking in enslaved people, not real estate, and “the extension of mortgages to slave property helped fuel the development of American (and global) capitalism,” the historian Joshua Rothman told me.

Or consider a Wall Street financial instrument as modern-sounding as collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.s), those ticking time bombs backed by inflated home prices in the 2000s. C.D.O.s were the grandchildren of mortgage-backed securities based on the inflated value of enslaved people sold in the 1820s and 1830s. Each product created massive fortunes for the few before blowing up the economy.

Enslavers were not the first ones to securitize assets and debts in America. The land companies that thrived during the late 1700s relied on this technique, for instance. But enslavers did make use of securities to such an enormous degree for their time, exposing stakeholders throughout the Western world to enough risk to compromise the world economy, that the historian Edward Baptist told me that this can be viewed as “a new moment in international capitalism, where you are seeing the development of a globalized financial market.” The novel thing about the 2008 foreclosure crisis was not the concept of foreclosing on a homeowner but foreclosing on millions of them. Similarly, what was new about securitizing enslaved people in the first half of the 19th century was not the concept of securitization itself but the crazed level of rash speculation on cotton that selling slave debt promoted.

As America’s cotton sector expanded, the value of enslaved workers soared. Between 1804 and 1860, the average price of men ages 21 to 38 sold in New Orleans grew to $1,200 from roughly $450. Because they couldn’t expand their cotton empires without more enslaved workers, ambitious planters needed to find a way to raise enough capital to purchase more hands. Enter the banks. The Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816, began investing heavily in cotton. In the early 1830s, the slaveholding Southwestern states took almost half the bank’s business. Around the same time, state-chartered banks began multiplying to such a degree that one historian called it an “orgy of bank-creation.”

When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged 150 of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically from colonial days until emancipation” by mortgaging people to buy more people. Access to credit grew faster than Mississippi kudzu, leading one 1836 observer to remark that in cotton country “money, or what passed for money, was the only cheap thing to be had.”

Planters took on immense amounts of debt to finance their operations. Why wouldn’t they? The math worked out. A cotton plantation in the first decade of the 19th century could leverage their enslaved workers at 8 percent interest and record a return three times that. So leverage they did, sometimes volunteering the same enslaved workers for multiple mortgages. Banks lent with little restraint. By 1833, Mississippi banks had issued 20 times as much paper money as they had gold in their coffers. In several Southern counties, slave mortgages injected more capital into the economy than sales from the crops harvested by enslaved workers.

Global financial markets got in on the action. When Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his enslaved workers, it was a Dutch firm that put up the money. The Louisiana Purchase, which opened millions of acres to cotton production, was financed by Baring Brothers, the well-heeled British commercial bank. A majority of credit powering the American slave economy came from the London money market. Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States. To raise capital, state-chartered banks pooled debt generated by slave mortgages and repackaged it as bonds promising investors annual interest. During slavery’s boom time, banks did swift business in bonds, finding buyers in Hamburg and Amsterdam, in Boston and Philadelphia.

Some historians have claimed that the British abolition of the slave trade was a turning point in modernity, marked by the development of a new kind of moral consciousness when people began considering the suffering of others thousands of miles away. But perhaps all that changed was a growing need to scrub the blood of enslaved workers off American dollars, British pounds and French francs, a need that Western financial markets fast found a way to satisfy through the global trade in bank bonds. Here was a means to profit from slavery without getting your hands dirty. In fact, many investors may not have realized that their money was being used to buy and exploit people, just as many of us who are vested in multinational textile companies today are unaware that our money subsidizes a business that continues to rely on forced labor in countries like Uzbekistan and China and child workers in countries like India and Brazil. Call it irony, coincidence or maybe cause — historians haven’t settled the matter — but avenues to profit indirectly from slavery grew in popularity as the institution of slavery itself grew more unpopular. “I think they go together,” the historian Calvin Schermerhorn told me. “We care about fellow members of humanity, but what do we do when we want returns on an investment that depends on their bound labor?” he said. “Yes, there is a higher consciousness. But then it comes down to: Where do you get your cotton from?”

Banks issued tens of millions of dollars in loans on the assumption that rising cotton prices would go on forever. Speculation reached a fever pitch in the 1830s, as businessmen, planters and lawyers convinced themselves that they could amass real treasure by joining in a risky game that everyone seemed to be playing. If planters thought themselves invincible, able to bend the laws of finance to their will, it was most likely because they had been granted authority to bend the laws of nature to their will, to do with the land and the people who worked it as they pleased. Du Bois wrote: “The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets.” What are the laws of economics to those exercising godlike power over an entire people?

We know how these stories end. The American South rashly overproduced cotton thanks to an abundance of cheap land, labor and credit, consumer demand couldn’t keep up with supply, and prices fell. The value of cotton started to drop as early as 1834 before plunging like a bird winged in midflight, setting off the Panic of 1837. Investors and creditors called in their debts, but plantation owners were underwater. Mississippi planters owed the banks in New Orleans $33 million in a year their crops yielded only $10 million in revenue. They couldn’t simply liquidate their assets to raise the money. When the price of cotton tumbled, it pulled down the value of enslaved workers and land along with it. People bought for $2,000 were now selling for $60. Today, we would say the planters’ debt was “toxic.”

Because enslavers couldn’t repay their loans, the banks couldn’t make interest payments on their bonds. Shouts went up around the Western world, as investors began demanding that states raise taxes to keep their promises. After all, the bonds were backed by taxpayers. But after a swell of populist outrage, states decided not to squeeze the money out of every Southern family, coin by coin. But neither did they foreclose on defaulting plantation owners. If they tried, planters absconded to Texas (an independent republic at the time) with their treasure and enslaved work force. Furious bondholders mounted lawsuits and cashiers committed suicide, but the bankrupt states refused to pay their debts. Cotton slavery was too big to fail. The South chose to cut itself out of the global credit market, the hand that had fed cotton expansion, rather than hold planters and their banks accountable for their negligence and avarice.

Even academic historians, who from their very first graduate course are taught to shun presentism and accept history on its own terms, haven’t been able to resist drawing parallels between the Panic of 1837 and the 2008 financial crisis. All the ingredients are there: mystifying financial instruments that hide risk while connecting bankers, investors and families around the globe; fantastic profits amassed overnight; the normalization of speculation and breathless risk-taking; stacks of paper money printed on the myth that some institution (cotton, housing) is unshakable; considered and intentional exploitation of black people; and impunity for the profiteers when it all falls apart — the borrowers were bailed out after 1837, the banks after 2008.

During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.

HOW SLAVERY MADE WALL STREET

By Tiya Miles | Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" | New York Times Magazine | Posted August 16, 2019 |

While “Main Street” might be anywhere and everywhere, as the historian Joshua Freeman points out, “Wall Street” has only ever been one specific place on the map. New York has been a principal center of American commerce dating back to the colonial period — a centrality founded on the labor extracted from thousands of indigenous American and African slaves.

Desperate for hands to build towns, work wharves, tend farms and keep households, colonists across the American Northeast — Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, Dutch settlers in New Netherland and Quakers in Pennsylvania — availed themselves of slave labor. Native Americans captured in colonial wars in New England were forced to work, and African people were imported in greater and greater numbers. New York City soon surpassed other slaving towns of the Northeast in scale as well as impact.

Founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1625, what would become the City of New York first imported 11 African men in 1626. The Dutch West India Company owned these men and their families, directing their labors to common enterprises like land clearing and road construction. After the English Duke of York acquired authority over the colony and changed its name, slavery grew harsher and more comprehensive. As the historian Leslie Harris has written, 40 percent of New York households held enslaved people in the early 1700s.

New Amsterdam’s and New York’s enslaved put in place much of the local infrastructure, including Broad Way and the Bowery roads, Governors Island, and the first municipal buildings and churches. The unfree population in New York was not small, and their experience of exploitation was not brief. In 1991, construction workers uncovered an extensive 18th-century African burial ground in Lower Manhattan, the final resting place of approximately 20,000 people.

And New York City’s investment in slavery expanded in the 19th century. In 1799 the state of New York passed the first of a series of laws that would gradually abolish slavery over the coming decades, but the investors and financiers of the state’s primary metropolis doubled down on the business of slavery. New Yorkers invested heavily in the growth of Southern plantations, catching the wave of the first cotton boom. Southern planters who wanted to buy more land and black people borrowed funds from New York bankers and protected the value of bought bodies with policies from New York insurance companies. New York factories produced the agricultural tools forced into Southern slaves’ hands and the rough fabric called “Negro Cloth” worn on their backs. Ships originating in New York docked in the port of New Orleans to service the trade in domestic and (by then, illegal) international slaves. As the historian David Quigley has demonstrated, New York City’s phenomenal economic consolidation came as a result of its dominance in the Southern cotton trade, facilitated by the construction of the Erie Canal. It was in this moment — the early decades of the 1800s — that New York City gained its status as a financial behemoth through shipping raw cotton to Europe and bankrolling the boom industry that slavery made.

In 1711, New York City officials decreed that “all Negro and Indian slaves that are let out to hire ... be hired at the Market house at the Wall Street Slip.” It is uncanny, but perhaps predictable, that the original wall for which Wall Street is named was built by the enslaved at a site that served as the city’s first organized slave auction. The capital profits and financial wagers of Manhattan, the United States and the world still flow through this place where black and red people were traded and where the wealth of a region was built on slavery.

COTTON AND THE GLOBAL MARKET

By Mehrsa Baradaran | Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" | New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

Cotton produced under slavery created a worldwide market that brought together the Old World and the New: the industrial textile mills of the Northern states and England, on the one hand, and the cotton plantations of the American South on the other. Textile mills in industrial centers like Lancashire, England, purchased a majority of cotton exports, which created worldwide trade hubs in London and New York where merchants could trade in, invest in, insure and speculate on the cotton—commodity market. Though trade in other commodities existed, it was cotton (and the earlier trade in slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean) that accelerated worldwide commercial markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts, novel financial products and modern forms of insurance and credit.

Like all agricultural goods, cotton is prone to fluctuations in quality depending on crop type, location and environmental conditions. Treating it as a commodity led to unique problems: How would damages be calculated if the wrong crop was sent? How would you assure that there was no misunderstanding between two parties on time of delivery? Legal concepts we still have to this day, like “mutual mistake” (the notion that contracts can be voided if both parties relied on a mistaken assumption), were developed to deal with these issues. Textile merchants needed to purchase cotton in advance of their own production, which meant that farmers needed a way to sell goods they had not yet grown; this led to the invention of futures contracts and, arguably, the commodities markets still in use today.

From the first decades of the 1800s, during the height of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade, the sheer size of the market and the escalating number of disputes between counterparties was such that courts and lawyers began to articulate and codify the common-law standards regarding contracts. This allowed investors and traders to mitigate their risk through contractual arrangement, which smoothed the flow of goods and money. Today law students still study some of these pivotal cases as they learn doctrines like forseeability, mutual mistake and damages.

COTTON AND THE GLOBAL MARKET

By Mehrsa Baradaran | Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

Cotton produced under slavery created a worldwide market that brought together the Old World and the New: the industrial textile mills of the Northern states and England, on the one hand, and the cotton plantations of the American South on the other. Textile mills in industrial centers like Lancashire, England, purchased a majority of cotton exports, which created worldwide trade hubs in London and New York where merchants could trade in, invest in, insure and speculate on the cotton—commodity market. Though trade in other commodities existed, it was cotton (and the earlier trade in slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean) that accelerated worldwide commercial markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts, novel financial products and modern forms of insurance and credit.

Like all agricultural goods, cotton is prone to fluctuations in quality depending on crop type, location and environmental conditions. Treating it as a commodity led to unique problems: How would damages be calculated if the wrong crop was sent? How would you assure that there was no misunderstanding between two parties on time of delivery? Legal concepts we still have to this day, like “mutual mistake” (the notion that contracts can be voided if both parties relied on a mistaken assumption), were developed to deal with these issues. Textile merchants needed to purchase cotton in advance of their own production, which meant that farmers needed a way to sell goods they had not yet grown; this led to the invention of futures contracts and, arguably, the commodities markets still in use today.

From the first decades of the 1800s, during the height of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade, the sheer size of the market and the escalating number of disputes between counterparties was such that courts and lawyers began to articulate and codify the common-law standards regarding contracts. This allowed investors and traders to mitigate their risk through contractual arrangement, which smoothed the flow of goods and money. Today law students still study some of these pivotal cases as they learn doctrines like forseeability, mutual mistake and damages.

THE LIMITS OF BANKING REGULATION | By Mehrsa Baradaran | Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

At the start of the Civil War, only states could charter banks. It wasn’t until the National Currency Act of 1863 and the National Bank Act of 1864 passed at the height of the Civil War that banks operated in this country on a national scale, with federal oversight. And even then, it was only law in the North. The Union passed the bills so it could establish a national currency in order to finance the war. The legislation also created the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (O.C.C.), the first federal bank regulator. After the war, states were allowed to keep issuing bank charters of their own. This byzantine infrastructure remains to this day and is known as the dual banking system. Among all nations in the world, only the United States has such a fragmentary, overlapping and inefficient system — a direct relic of the conflict between federal and state power over maintenance of the slave-based economy of the South.

Both state regulators and the O.C.C., one of the largest federal regulators, are funded by fees from the banks they regulate. Moreover, banks are effectively able to choose regulators — either federal or state ones, depending on their charter. They can even change regulators if they become unsatisfied with the one they’ve chosen. Consumer-protection laws, interest-rate caps and basic-soundness regulations have often been rendered ineffectual in the process — and deregulation of this sort tends to lead to crisis.

In the mid-2000s, when subprime lenders started appearing in certain low-income neighborhoods, many of them majority black and Latino, several state banking regulators took note. In Michigan, the state insurance regulator tried to enforce its consumer-protection laws on Wachovia Mortgage, a subsidiary of Wachovia Bank. In response, Wachovia’s national regulator, the O.C.C., stepped in, claiming that banks with a national charter did not have to comply with state law. The Supreme Court agreed with the O.C.C., and Wachovia continued to engage in risky subprime activity.

Eventually loans like those blew up the banking system and the investments of many Americans — especially the most vulnerable. Black communities lost 53 percent of their wealth because of the crisis, a loss that a former congressman, Brad Miller, said “has almost been an extinction event.”

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about the benefits of a living wage. Lyle Ashton Harris is an artist who works in photography, collage and performance. He currently has works in two group exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York. Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor at U.C. Irvine School of Law and author of “The Color of Money” and “How the Other Half Banks.” Tiya Miles is a professor in the history department at Harvard and the author, most recently, of “The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.”

[ecotone99]

[RF] Dandelion Wishes

I am pathetic.

Sitting here, under my favorite tree in the forest behind my house, I deduced that I am a complete coward. The books next to me were mocking me, so I glared even though it made no difference.

My mother thought I was studying, hence the books. In reality? I was thinking. I had blown my only chance at actually scoring a date with the dreamiest boy in my senior class. Geeky old me had actually flirted with him, strung him along, poked myself in the eye repeatedly every morning in an attempt at eye liner and when the moment came? I choked.

Literally.

Note to all the attractive guys out there: don't ask a usually ignored virgin on a date when she's in the middle of finishing off her water at lunch. It screws with us. That was not an intentional pun, by the way.

Anyway, here I sat, in the forest stuck with political science books that I had no intention of reading and a phone with too many text messages from a guy I thought would never talk to me again.

I unlocked my phone to find a voicemail. To listen or not to listen, that was the question. Debating, I dropped the phone in front of me and stared. What did I want? Why couldn't I just say yes? What the hell was wrong with me?

Groaning, I stood up, brushed off my sundress and picked a dandelion weed. With my books tucked into my side, I considered going back inside and consulting my mother. Instead the dandelion inspired me. It's tiny white spindles swayed in the wind and I decided to make a wish. Only a miracle would save me now.

'Give me the courage to say yes next time.' And I blew. I watched as the seeds floated along with the wind away from me.

"Will you go out with me now?" I gasped and turned around, seeing the man who I had been plagued with thoughts of all day. I hadn't heard him crunching through the leaves as I had clumsily done. Being caught up in my own head could be all consuming sometimes. How did he get out here? In the distance, I heard my mother talking on the phone on the back porch and got my answer. He had come to my house. He still cared.

"Well?" he said, looking awkward for the first since I had known him.

His hazel eyes were squinted against the sun and he looked handsome in jeans and boots with a button up shirt. This time I breathed, opening and closing my sweaty hands. Do not choke, you can do this.

Just react.

Throwing my books behind me, I let modesty go to the wind and ran up to him, straight into his open arms. He twirled me around and laughed. I looked at where I had been standing and smiled secretly. I had my answer. As if in slow motion, the books fell to the ground like gravel, demanding my response.

Without choking, I uttered the word my wish had granted me.

"Yes."

submitted by /u/awfully_homesick [link] [comments] via Blogger http://bit.ly/2McdBFU

[itsworn]

The Flyin’ Fridge: Homebuilt 10-Second Turbo-LS 1980 Ford Fairmont Wagon

“That happens all the time…” Lebanon, Tennessee’s Shaun Potter adds after a passerby briefly interrupted our photo shoot to offer his admiration for the work on Potter’s 1980 Ford Fairmont wagon. “…but reactions like that are why I built this car.”

Casual automotive observers readily offer thumbs-up to shiny, swinging ’60s muscle cars. But it takes the keen observation of an enthusiast to appreciate infusing a tired people-mover rescued from the dustbin of uninspiring automotive appliances with a healthy shot of horsepower and ingenuity. This LS-swapped, turbocharged Ford Fairmont wagon personifies the sentiment of “built, not bought.”

The 41-year-old Tennessean had his eye on the white wagon for some time. “I drove past this car every day while taking my kids to daycare. I saw the weeds around it get taller and taller. One day, the owner was out walking his dog. I immediately whipped it into his driveway (probably startling him). I asked if the car was his and if he considered selling it. He replied, ‘No.’”

“I thanked him and apologized for the intrusion before he said, ‘No, I hadn’t considered selling it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t.’ We struck up a deal and I picked it up a few days later.”

While loading it on a trailer, the owner warned, “Be careful. The car is full of wasp nests.” The straight-six powered Fairmont had seen better days, but Potter had plans…

Potter’s previous projects include a 1991 Mustang coupe. Keen Ford nerds recognize that the Ford Fairmont shares its platform with the 1979-’93 Mustang. This shared lineage makes the Fairmont familiar territory for Mustang owners. Potter explains: “I wanted this car to be a cruiser. My kids love local car shows and taking rides in the vehicles I’ve built, however, my Fox-body with a rollcage makes this impossible. So I took all of the suspension, rearend, and fuel system out of my drag-only ’91 coupe and bolted it directly to the wagon.”

In contrast to his previous ‘91 Mustang coupe, Potter was determined to do all the work on his Fairmont Wagon himself—even if that meant the results were less than perfect. “I’m not afraid to fail,” says Potter. He was eager to try his hand at a turbo LS swap: “5.3-liter engines are so plentiful and cheap that when I break one, it’s cheaper buy another salvage engine than rebuild one. Too much boost? No problem! Just load another bullet in the chamber and try again.”

The body of the wagon carries the bumps and bruises of its past as a family hauler. The patina is unique. “I wanted to keep as much of the car intact as I could. I’m not even Catholic, but I keep the rosary dangling from the rearview mirror because it’s part of the car’s history.”

There were some areas of the wagon that needed cosmetic attention, however. Potter replaced the carpet with a fresh red rug. “It’s hard to believe, but you can find replacement carpet for Farimont wagons.” The headliner also needed replacement. “I was tired of bits of disintegrated headliner blowing in my eyes while driving. I took a piece of the plastic interior trim to a fabric store and picked a pattern fitting for a Griswold-style family truckster.”

The DIY-or-die approach continues underhood. “As you can see, my friend Mike Edwards is helping me learn to TIG weld. Aluminum is especially difficult. Even if it’s not perfect, at least I did it myself.” Engine management is also new territory for Potter. Using a MegaSquirt 3 EFI system, Potter does all the tuning and relies heavily on the advice of others. Potter even had his eleven-year-old son try his hand at tuning while his dad does the driving.

Potter appreciates that his wife and two kids not only like riding in the car, but support the family patriarch through long nights in the garage. Shannon Taylor at Boost Addicts in Madison, Tennessee helps Potter provide tuning advice…and long-block cores when Potter misses the mark. Steve Pruitt, James Rowlett, and Shane Groshong at Steve’s Automotive provided additional tuning guidance and advice.

Potter is unfazed by criticism. “Everybody on the internet is going to tell me all the things I did wrong, but I don’t care. I did this all myself. It went 10.59 at 136 mph on 13 pounds of boost. That’s a lot faster than I expected.”

TECH NOTES Who: Shaun Potter What: 1980 Ford Fairmont Wagon Where: Lebanon, TN

Engine: The 2008 GM 5.3L is a salvage yard find. A stock bottom end surrounds a Trick Flow 228/230 “Sloppy Stage II” camshaft that squeezes Brian Tooley Racing 0.660-inch lift valve springs in stock aluminum 706 cylinder heads. Potter uses a Cadillac CTS-V oil pan to clear the Fairmont’s tubular crossmember.

Induction: The major motivation for Potter’s wagon comes from a Precision Turbo 88mm turbocharger. Potter fabricated the hot and cold side plumbing linking it to factory exhaust manifolds and a stock 2008 truck intake manifold. Potter welded a sump in the Fairmont’s fuel tank, which feeds Twin Walbro 255 lph pumps and Bosch 210 fuel injectors a steady diet of E85.

Electronics: Potter and his son tune the MegaSquirt 3 electronic fuel injection system that controls the turbocharged 5.3-liter mill. Potter says: “I built the wiring harness for the engine management system and rewired the whole car. I actually enjoyed that part more than I thought I would.”

Transmission: Cameron Powers at CPR Transmissions built the GM 4L80E overdrive trans that is fortified with a Jake’s Performance recalibration kit. It receives torque from a PTC 9.5-inch non-lockup torque converter that footbrakes to 3,500 and flashes to 4,100 rpm.

Rearend: The third member was plucked from Potter’s ’91 Mustang coupe. The Ford 8.8-inch features Ford 9-inch ends and 33-spline Moser axles. The 3.08:1 gear set is highway friendly, but the spool makes U-turns a little dicey.

Chassis/Suspension: Since Potter’s Fairmont shares its platform with Mustangs of the era, finding go-fast suspension parts was as easy as swapping them from his 1991 Mustang coupe drag car. First, Potter stiffened the chassis with his own “through-the-floor” subframe connectors fashioned from 2 x 2-inch square tubing. The front coilover suspension includes Strange Engineering single-adjustable struts, Viking 200 lb/in springs, a Team Z crossmember, QA1 control arms, and spindles from a 1995 Mustang. The rear features UPR upper and lower control arms, Dakota Mustangs’ instant-center brackets, and get this: a kid’s-sized football in the right rear spring to even out his drag launches. A Flaming River manual steering rack points the wagon down the strip.

Brakes: Stopping hardware includes more from the Ford parts bin including 1995 Mustang front rotors, 2001 Mustang front calipers, a 2001 Mustang master cylinder, and a rear brake package from a 2001 Ford Explorer.

Wheels/Tires: The rolling stock is the only external cue that this wagon means business. Black SVE Mustang drag wheels measuring 17 x 4 (front) and 15 x 10 (rear), hold 26 x 17 Mickey Thompson Sportsman S/R and 255/60R15 and Mickey Thompson ET Street S/S radials, respectively.

Paint/Body: Potter goes to great lengths to retain the body’s “patina,” that is, the outside of the wagon is untouched. He washes it…sometimes.

Interior: Nearly forty years of hauling families took their toll on the wagon’s carpet and headliner. New ACC carpet replaced the original fuzz, but Potter takes special pride in the headliner, refurbished with a pattern that his wife dubbed, “Uncle Lewis” (a nod to a character in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation). “I chose the material because I wanted a ‘cantankerous old man’ look, but as soon as she saw it, she said I hit the nail on the head and immediately came up with the description. She even helped me lay the fabric on the backer board, keeping the lines straight from front to rear.” The MegaSquirt EFI system occupies a tentative place on the trans tunnel, as Potter has yet to find a permanent mounting location. A B&M shifter is perched prominently over the middle of the bench seat, but Potter plans to use the factory column shifter at a later time. “I’m not sure the detents of the column shifter are compatible with the 4L80E.” A tachometer occupies the space where the original speedometer was located. With a fuel gauge on the left, Potter explains, “I use my phone’s GPS as a speedometer.”

The post The Flyin’ Fridge: Homebuilt 10-Second Turbo-LS 1980 Ford Fairmont Wagon appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

from Hot Rod Network https://www.hotrod.com/articles/flyin-fridge-10-second-turbo-ls-1980-ford-fairmont-wagon/ via IFTTT