#Walter is so Rico-coded

[wanderinginksplot]

Honestly, the most intriguing parts of the Roanoke Colony incident happened before and after the colonists 'disappeared'. I'm about to give way too much information, but this incident has always fascinated me!

If you'll indulge me, here some important background information:

In 1578, Queen Elizabeth I gave Sir Humphrey Gilbert the right to colonize North America. The charter was commonly believed to mean that he could claim any land north of Spanish-claimed Florida. When Sir Humphrey died, that charter was given to his brother, Adrian Gilbert, and his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh. The catch was that Humphrey died in 1583 and his brothers only had until 1591 to establish a colony if they wanted the land granted by the charter.

Okay, now to the actual history of Roanoke:

In 1584, Raleigh sent an expedition to explore and find a promising area for a colony. The expedition, made up of 100 men, was led by Ralph Lane and landed on Roanoke Island. (Keep in mind, this is Roanoke, Maryland in the Outer Banks, not Roanoke, Viriginia.) Lane quickly made enemies of every surrounding Native American tribe, so the expedition had to leave because they ran out of food.

Also present on the 1585 expedition was mapmaker John White. White was promised 500 acres of land if he made maps of the area.

Since Lane was such an idiot the first time around, Raleigh put John White in charge of the 1587 expedition and made him governor. Now, John White wasn't stupid and he knew that the Native American tribes nearby would hate any settlers. Roanoke was never the intended destination for the second colony - Chesapeake was.

The interesting thing was that, when the ship stopped in Puerto Rico for supplies, one of the sailors told the Spanish that they were going to Roanoke. There's a theory that Sir Walter Raleigh's rivals sabotaged the Roanoke colony.

The theory goes on to suggest that Fernandes, the captain of the flagship Lion, was bribed. Fernandes was an experienced sailor who was familiar with the area, but took a great deal of time to make basic preparations and took unnecessary detours. The colonists arrived on Roanoke Island on July 22nd, way too late to plant crops like they had intended. (There's also some evidence that there was a severe drought in the area.) Since they were short on supplies and none of the local tribes were friendly enough to trade with, the colonists sent John White back to England to bring back more food and supplies.

John White did leave for supplies on August 27th, as mentioned above, and his return was delayed by the Anglo-Spanish War. He left in 1587 and got back in 1590. But he didn't find bodies, bones, signs of destruction, or even the settlement he had left. The buildings had been taken down, disassembled rather than destroyed. Even the trunks of personal belongings White buried before he left had been dug up and looted.

As everyone knows, the word Croatoan was carved into a tree and Cro was carved into one of the supports on the fort. That's significant for two reasons: First, nearby Croatoan Island was where the Powhatan tribe lived. The Powhatans had been friendly and willing to trade with the settlement after White had done some work repairing relations.

The second reason it's significant is because the 1587 expedition had a code planned out. If the colony came under distress, someone was to carve a Maltese cross into something in the area. If they hadn't carved anything at all, White may have assumed that they were surprised and didn't have time to carve anything before they were taken. But something had been carved and there were no Maltese crosses in the area, so White was understandably confused.

The sailors in the 1590 relief mission pressed White to leave since one of the cables on the ship had snapped and it was down to one anchor - greatly increasing the risk of a shipwreck. With that in mind and a storm blowing in, the group elected to leave, spend the winter repairing the ship in the Caribbean, and return in the spring of 1591. White agreed to this, potentially because they had seen smoke on the island and found fresh tracks, but had never been approached. The assumption was that the colonists would have made contact if they had been free to. Without time to launch a rescue, the group had little choice but to leave.

Unfortunately, the ship was blown off-course and ended up returning to England in late October.

Now, the history around Roanoke is muddy. That's on purpose. Sir Walter Raleigh publicly stated his belief that the colonists were alive, but mostly because his claim to the charter was upheld until someone could prove that the colony members had died. He also claimed to stage at least one search in Maryland for information, but it was a cover story while he searched for El Dorado, then again when he wanted to covertly harvest sassafras. Any further attempts were halted when he was arrested for treason against King James.

We're not even 100% sure where the 1587 colony was. Due to poor record-keeping and changing geography, the original location was unknown even by the early 1600s. (Ironically, we do know where the 1585 colony was.) And yes, while there were plenty of reports of Native Americans with light eyes and hair, no definitive proof of the colonists was ever found. This was especially hard on White, whose family - including his young granddaughter - were among the colony members.

There have been attempts to trace DNA of the lost colonists to see if they really did integrate with nearby tribes. As of this time, the program has not identified any living descendants of the lost colonists, mostly due to a lack of original DNA to use as a point of comparison.

And don't even get me started on the Dare Stones.

(If you're interested in learning more about the Roanoke Colony, I highly suggest the podcast episode 'What happened to the lost colony at Roanoke?' from Stuff You Should Know.)

not to be a history fucker on main but the whole mystery of the lost colony of roanoke is so fucking funny

[chiseler]

W.R. BURNETT

William Riley Burnett isn't quite as well known as other crime writers like Hammett and Chandler, but the titles of several W. R. Burnett novels and films everybody knows. His career and his influence stretched from gangster novels and movies, which he went a long way to defining, through noir to blaxploitation and beyond.

According to Burnett, a good place to begin his story is in a fleabag in Chicago, when he was a twenty-seven-year-old hayseed from Ohio who in six years had written some one hundred stories and five novels, not one of them published. On his first night in the big city, sleeping in that cheap hotel, he was jolted out of bed by a series of explosions across the street. Rival gangsters had been arguing over the rake in the parking garage across the street. Things got heated and they started throwing hand grenades -- "pineapples," folks called them then. That was Chicago in 1928. "Capone was King," Burnett later wrote. "Corruption was rampant... Gangsters were shooting each other all over town; in fact, I 'heard' one killing over the radio. It happened in a cafe while a dance-band broadcast was in progress. Two shots came over distinctly, the music slurred to an abrupt stop, then the air went dead."

Intrigued, Burnett started hanging out with cops and hoods, taking notes, and ended up writing a gangster novel he originally titled The Furies. The first New York publisher he sent it to rejected it. He gave it a new title and sent it off again. In 1929 it was published as Little Caesar.

Along with Hammett, whose Red Harvest had come out six months earlier, Burnett was fashioning a new class of crime novel as literate pulp, just as the syndicates were emerging and the Depression was about to redraw the entire social landscape. The writing is very spare in a Hemingwayish way, yet vividly descriptive when it needs to be. His characters have names like Scabby and Limpy John and Killer Pepi, and they speak a Chicago gangster patois he'd heard on the streets, full of hard guys pumping lead out of gats and rods, new to most readers at the time but soon universally recognized. They're vain to the point of girlishness, constantly fussing with their hair and fawn-colored spats and diamond stick pins. They're cocky and quick to take offense because they're so insecure. They're far more tender, sympathetic and loving with each other than they are with their dames. "I would not shoot Rico if he shot me first," one says. "Rico is my friend and I love him with a great love." Rico ends up forfeiting his life because he can't bring himself to shoot an old pal. As opposed to:

Olga Stassoff was just putting the finishing touches to her make-up. Joe came in softly and stood watching her. She began to sing.  

"If you're singing for me," said Joe, "you can stop any time."  

Olga turned around.  

"Well, what are you doing here? Broke?"  

"Shut up," said Joe.  

Then he turned and walked out of the room.

Scholars have made much of the homoerotic subtext in all this, but then scholars can see homoerotic subtext in a stick of gum. Probably what Burnett was really picking up on was the peculiarities of Mediterranean masculinity as expressed in the largely Italian milieu of the late-1920s Chicago gangster. Film historian Thomas Doherty points out that "foreign" gangsters -- Italians, Jews -- were still pretty mysterious to a lot of Americans; through the 1920s they'd heard more about all-American outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. The rise of organized crime syndicates -- whom Burnett much later called "just businessmen who don’t abide by the rules" -- was also news to many Americans at the time.

Little Caesar was an instant hit. So of course was the film adaptation. The movie was a huge box office success at a time when the Depression was cutting attendance figures by half, and it made Edward G. Robinson a star. It's not nearly as tough or brisk as the book, though Robinson is great in it. Both the book and the movie had their share of critics who expressed outrage that Burnett seemed to be sympathizing with and "humanizing" his hoodlum characters.

Hollywood called and Burnett answered. For the next forty years he'd be there, writing both novels and films, many of them successful, a few of them classics.

There was The Beast of the City in 1932, with Walter Huston as an unscrupulously tough crime-busting cop who'd later be seen as a pre-echo of Dirty Harry. Howard Hughes called on Burnett to make some sense of more than a dozen draft screenplays for Scarface, based on the Armitage Trail novel published around the same time as Little Caesar. Burnett compiled the best scenes into a master draft, then Ben Hecht applied the polish. The result was the last of the great pre-Code gangster films, a movie much harder and more raw than Little Caesar.

Butnett's oddball 1935 comedy The Whole Town's Talking is a kind of meta-crime story, with Edward G. Robinson brilliantly playing two roles, sometimes in split-screen, as a meek bank clerk who's identical to a vicious killer. Jean Arthur's great in her snappy role too, but then isn't she always. Burnett's prizefighter novel Iron Man was made into three films, Iron Man in 1931, Some Blondes Are Dangerous in 1937, and Iron Man again in 1951. His novella Dr. Socrates, about the clash of a small-town doctor and a hoodlum on the lam, was first serialized in Collier's, then made into the 1935 film of the same name. It starred the great Paul Muni and Ann Dvorak, who'd been paired a few years earlier as the possibly incestuous Tony and Cesca Camonte in Scarface. It was remade in 1939 as the Bogart vehicle King of the Underworld.  

By his 1940 novel High Sierra, both Burnett's writing and his tough guys had fully matured. His style is more relaxed, still handsomely descriptive but with more psychological depth. Roy Earle in the book is more broken and melancholy than the Dillinger-inspired outlaw Bogart plays in the film, more jittery and uncomfortable in the world after years in stir. He's not thoroughly a bad man, more of a bad-luck stray like the dog Pard. He's weary and lonesome and sick, showing his age in his inability to control either his flashes of snarling violence or his fits of nostalgic longing. The newspapers call him Mad Dog but Old Dog would be more fitting. His affair with Marie, the only other character as tough and savvy as he is, would be totally mysterious to the hard guys in Little Caesar.

The film adaptation came out in 1941, directed by Raoul Walsh, with a screenplay by Burnett and John Huston that's pretty faithful to the book, though they made the necessary Hollywood concessions. In the novel, Velma's not the innocent little hick she is in the film -- she's damaged goods in more ways than the clubfoot -- and it's explicit that Marie starts out "just a lay," as Roy tells her, then worms her way into his heart just like Pard does. Burnett and Huston tacked on the movie's big melodramatic climax as well. In the book Roy makes sure Marie and Pard are well out of harm's way, then dies alone up in the mountains, shot by a gunman he never sees, taking his bullet quietly, almost wistfully. It probably wouldn't have made good cinema but it's a more fitting end for him. This movie would also get remade twice, as a Western in the 1949 Colorado Territory and then as the grimy 1955 I Died a Thousand Times, with Jack Palance as Earle and Shelley Winters doing the Ida Lupino role.

Having helped to invent the modern gangster novel and picture, Burnett wrote some of the darkest, hardest, and ethically murkiest postwar noir, creating a world where it's nearly impossible to tell the good guys from the bad ones because most everybody's tainted or bent in some way. In the 1946 Nobody Lives Forever, John Garfield is both a war hero and a con man. When he comes home from the warfront, like a lot of other vets he tries to pick up his old life, only to find everything's changed while he was gone. It's sort of The Best Years of Our Lives for hoodlums.

In The Asphalt Jungle, published in 1949, the world's gone so dirty and upside down that the supposedly upstanding citizens are actually worse than the bad guys. The cop and the lawyer are more crooked and sleazy than the hoods who pull the heist, and some of them are plenty sleazy. Like Roy Earle, Dix Handley is a throwback, a farmboy operating by a kind of Old West outlaw code of honor he probably read as a kid in pulp magazines. He's pulled down by lowlifes who are thoroughly modern and urban, and as innocent of ethics as rats in an alley. Huston made the film the following year. It reappeared as the forgotten 1963 George Sanders movie Cairo and again in 1972 as the blaxploitation flick Cool Breeze. A tv crime series called The Asphalt Jungle ran for one season in 1961.

Burnett also co-wrote the screenplay for This Gun for Hire, adapted from the Graham Greene novel. He adapted the Eric Ambler spy novel Background to Danger, worked on the anti-syndicate potboiler The Racket and on several Westerns and wartime pictures.

He was still at it in the 1960s, still writing crime novels like The Cool Man, published in 1968. At a time when other pulp writers were cranking out endless knockoffs of James Bond or trying to get with the hippies and drugs, Burnett stuck with what he knew best. Like High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle it's about a big heist gone wrong, leaving some of the crooks dead and the rest spatting over the spoils. Now almost all his hard guys are anachronisms, noir characters who've survived into the Swingin' Sixties by wits, guile or just brute force. They're at the opposite end of life from the cocky young narcissists in Little Caesar, old guys moving deliberately down crooked paths they know by rote, pursuing their agendas -- money, revenge, self-preservation, sex -- by instinct now. When fate throws them curves they take it, like Roy Earle would have, with a resigned shrug. By the end of the book all their machinations have just sort of petered out; a few of them are dead and the rest are stranded like sharks out of water. You have to wonder if Burnett was feeling a bit like that himself by this point.

Burnett also co-wrote the screenplay for The Great Escape with James Clavell, his last Hollywood coup. He did some uncredited work on Ice Station Zebra, and wrote episodes for several tv series, including Naked City, The Untouchables and, of course, The Asphalt Jungle, as well as a lot of Westerns. His eyesight failing, he didn't write so much in the 1970s. But he was still able to bring his whole career full circle with his last book, Goodbye, Chicago, set in 1928, the year he got there. It was published in 1981 and he died the next year.

by John Strausbaugh

[wp-yahoo-style-1042-yahoopa-blog]

Think balmy beaches — the best Travel Tuesday vacation deals

Hat Phra Nang Beach in Thailand. (Photo: Getty)

Thanksgiving might be the busiest travel event of the year, but did you know that the best day to shop for travel deals is actually the day after Cyber Monday? This year, it lands on Nov. 27, and it has been dubbed “Travel Deal Tuesday.”

According to Hopper, the popular flight deal app is predicting savings up to 40 percent this year on major bucket-list travel destinations like London, Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Turks and Caicos and more. In 2017, the app saw more flights discounted on Travel Deal Tuesday than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. However, that’s not to say you can’t still score great deals on flights and hotels on Black Friday and Cyber Monday too. According to Skyscanner, the deals fluctuate depending on what you’re looking for, but the bottom line is, there are fantastic deals to be found during these major shopping days.

Many airlines don’t advertise deals in advance; however, to help guide you, Yahoo Lifestyle rounded up the best travel deals that have already leaked and the best travel sites. Make sure to bookmark this page and refer back to it because you don’t want to miss out on booking your dream vacation!

The editors at Yahoo Lifestyle are committed to finding you the best products at the best prices. At times, we may receive a share from purchases made via links on this page.

The Coliseum in Rome. (Photo: Laszlo Szirtesi/Getty Images)

TripAdvisor 

Book flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises and so much more in one place. It’s your one-stop shop for all of your travel needs, plus you’ll have thousands of reviews to back up your hotel choices. Check throughout the weekend and into Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday to snag the best deals.

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Expedia

Expedia.com is offering great deals on hotels, flights, cruises, rental cars, activities and packages Nov. 23 through Nov. 26.

Black Friday: You’ll be able to find coupons and deals at Expedia.com, starting at noon ET on Nov. 23, which will be available for a limited time while supplies last. • $100 off $200 flights • 75% off standalone hotels • $500 off $1,000 vacation packages • $25 off $50 activities • 10% off standalone hotels

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The Red Fort in New Delhi. (Photo: Abbas Idrees/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)

Priceline 

You’ll be able to save up to 99 percent off select hotels and more on Black Friday and Cyber Monday at Priceline. Plus, through their Season of Savings extravaganza, you’ll be able to earn $75 cash back on qualifying stays in Mexico, Hawaii, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. But note, these deals will be available only to email subscribers! So make sure to sign up ahead of time.

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Hotels.com

Find special deals on hotels in Las Vegas and Los Angeles through their special Thanksgiving sale where you can save up to 40 perfect off. But act fast, as these deals will only be available over the weekend from Nov. 24 through Nov. 26. Find more savings across the site in their special Hotel Deals Finder tab.

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Travelocity 

Travelocity has great deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday if you book via your mobile device.  You can save 50 percent on hotels and even more with code FRIDAYAPP18. On Cyber Monday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. save on hotel bookings with code CYBER18. Save even more with their special coupons, but note, you’ll need to book by December 31, 2018.

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Night shot of the London Eye. (Photo: Walter Dall Armellina/ClickAlps/REDA&CO/UIG/Getty Images)

Booking.com

Check the site for the best travel deals worldwide from Rome to Shanghai during Black Friday and throughout Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday.

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Skyscanner 

Find the best travel deals all year, but especially on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday. To find Travel Tuesday specials, simply launch a Skyscanner search; make selections in the “Flights,” “Hotels” and/or “Car Hire” categories; then press Enter or Return on your keyboard.

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A view over Paris. (Photo: Getty)

Travelzoo 

From Waikiki to Phuket, find all the best travel deals at Travelzoo, as they’ll be constantly posting new deals. Plus, they have a local deals section to score big savings on restaurants, spas and more!

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Cat Island, the Bahamas. (Photo: EyesWideOpen/Getty Images)

Cheapflights

Check the site’s special offers section to find fresh new deals throughout the weekend and on Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday to save big on top global travel destinations. 

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CheapCaribbean

CheapCaribbean is offering up to 70 percent off what it predicts will be the top five destinations for 2019: the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Los Cabos and Cancun/Riviera Maya. Through this sale, all-inclusive vacations will start as low as $349. Note, you’ll need to book between Nov. 21 and Nov. 23.

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Cyber Monday and Cyber Week deals are here!

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