#also looking up my first & last name brings up a newspaper article from when j was like 9 with my photo in it 😭

[johnwicklover1999]

im gonna be real i lowkey don't mind my deadname At All and it's pretty fucking sick but the spelling is not standard and i wouldn't surprised if i was the only one in the world with my exact spelling. uniqueness is a bitch of a security risk 😭

[skylarmoon71]

Raphael x Parker Reader- Chapter 2 -(TMNT 2014/2016)

"Oww."

You rubbed your head, squinting as you looked over at the clock. You barely remembered falling asleep, much less on the ground. At least you'd woken up in time for your night job. Grabbing your glasses, you rolled your shoulders getting up. Picking up your phone you shoved it into your pocket, hoisting your bag up as you headed downstairs. May was sitting reading the newspaper on the couch. You took an apple from the counter, tucking it into the backpack.

"Honey, I don't like you working these night shifts, they're dangerous." you shrugged off the comment. "I'll be fine Aunt May, besides I'll be graduating in a few years. All of this is going towards my college fund. "

"That doesn't mean you should kill yourself working, what about your GPA."

"My GPA is fine. I'll have to get used to it when I go away. So I'm preparing for it now. " pulling the bag unto your shoulder, you took off your glasses, wiping it slightly before placing it back on your face.

"I don't think Ben would have liked the way you're overworking yourself." That statement made your body stiff.

"He's not here." you replied coldly. Gripping the strap on your bad tighter, you turned, heading for the door.

"Don't wait up." You were out the door before anymore words could be exchanged. Why did she have to bring up his name?

Agitated, and a bit frustrated, you just head for the night job. Most people hated janitorial jobs, but the one you snagged paid pretty well. You guessed it was because of the hours. Night shifts were the worst, but it was the best distraction from all your problems. You needed to say active. Continuously occupied not just at school, but work too, it probably wasn't the healthiest thing, especially since you'd passed out after your school trip at that genetics lab a few weeks ago. Since then you'd been feeling like crap.

You scratched the red bug bite on your hand absentmindedly. You should have gotten it checked out, between the headaches and chills, you just crossed it off as a bug or infection. You really thought it would have passed by now. Constantly working your body maybe wasn't helping either.

"You deserve this, it's your fault."

You grimace, trying to rid your mind of that inner voice.

"Get to work." As soon as you got there, everything would be better.

~~~~~

You clocked in with the security guard, waving at the man as you pushed the bucket.

"It's Friday night, what are you doing, go and do teenage stuff kid." you shook your head.

"No can do Mr. Reese, gotta put the hours in." He shook his head with a smile. "Enjoy life now, trust me. There's nothing wrong with being driven, just don't let it be all that you're about. You feel me?"

"I hear you!!" clicking the elevator, you entered pressing the button for the top floor.

Two hours into your cleaning, and you were actually starting to feel a tinge bit better. You scrubbed and wiped every surface. At one point you'd stopped to watch the view. This particular building was one of those publishing departments. Scandalous articles were usually thought up and printed in this room. You gazed over at the desk.

Journalism was somewhat intriguing to you. But science would forever be your first love.

The clicking of a lock behind your back made you flinch. You spun around.

"J-John?"

Not a sound.

You squinted, eyes zeroing on the door. You were pretty sure no one else but you were scheduled to work on this floor, and John checked the halls every thirty minutes, he'd buzz by not too long ago, so it couldn't have been him. Your brows furrowed when you heard another unfamiliar sound from ahead.

You approached cautiously, looking around the room. There was nothing but computers and monitors in here. The flickering of the lights ahead didn't do much to calm your nerves. As you rounded the corner, your stomach dropped at the sight of John ducked taped and lying on the floor, blood running from his forehead. His eyes caught you, orbs widening as he tried to move upright. He thrashed about, groaning and trying his best to scream over the tape on his lips. The clicking of a gun behind stopped you in your tracks.

"What do we have here, so the old man was lying, I knew there was someone else here." your heart was racing. "Turn around slowly, try anything and I'll blow your head off. " you swallowed, raising your hands slowly as you turned. Now facing the man you could make out his features. Early thirties, dirty blond hair, dark eyes and a malicious smile on his lips.

"L-Listen h-he's got kids, please. Whatever you need I can get it for you, just leave him alone. "

The smile on his face got wider. "I'm impressed, I thought for sure you would beg for your life. You got guts, I'll give you that. " he pointed the gun at John, and you panicked, stepping in front of it. John couldn't do much but watch helplessly. You could hear him sobbing in the background as you blocked his way.

"P-Please."

"Sorry kid, nothing personal. I already got what I came for." He flashed the flash drive in front of your face, tucking it into his pocket.

"Unfortunate for you, I can't have any witnesses. Went through hell to disable all the camera's on the floor. Can't have you both snitching on me." He fires a shot, and you jumped as it broke the glass behind you. You could hear it shattering in the background, and he let out another laugh.

"Bad shot, sorry. Don't worry, I'll make it quick." your eyes hardened. He was enjoying this. He took a step forward, placing it right over your heart, and John closed his eyes, resting his head on the floor in defeat. You however weren't planning to give up that easily. You screamed unexpectedly, throwing him off slightly. The action gives you about a millisecond to direct the gun away from your heart. You slapped his hand sharply, and he gritted his teeth, firing. The bullet went off ahead, and the gun flew out his hands a good distance away, and you shoved him, rushing to grab it before he could get a hold of it.

"BITCH!!"

He sprinted after you, and right as you dove to get the gun, his body collided with yours. The scream that releases from you this time is very real, because of your close proximity to the glass windows, your back hits the flat surface.

The cracking echoes in your ears, and before you know it your free falling, so is your assailant. In your haste to grab something solid, you end up pulling him. Both of you are free falling. Tears build up behind your eyes, and one last attempt to grip something, your hands skid on the edge of the building, except now, you're no longer moving, or falling for that matter. Your eyes are still tightly shut, and you're wondering if maybe you're already dead. If so, that was fairly quick, painless. But that isn't the case. You can still feel the wind.

"Wind?"

You crack an eye open. They both spring open when you look down.

"SHIT!!" your locked unto the side of the building still, how? You have absolutely no idea. Your head turns, and your fingers are stuck to the glass like a suction. You blink a few times, heart still hammering. The vicious male who attacked you is also alive, but he's in a very different situation. Unconscious too from what you can tell.

There's a long metal chain hanging from the top of the building, wrapped around his ankle. You track it to the top, and your eyes meet with a pair of emerald ones. The figure there makes you question a lot of things, and he's staring at you with the same level of shock. Possibly because you're stuck to the side of a twenty story building like it's nothing. He's not human, not even close, but you're starting to wonder if that's maybe your brain trying to make sense of all that's going on.

"Raph!"

The scream catches his attention and he yanks the chain roughly, hoisting the male into the air like he weighs nothing.

You're still partially paralyzed, and it dawns on you that whatever is going on, you should get a move on before the effects wear off and you fall to your death. So very cautiously, you inch up the building. You're moving slowly, calculated.

Making out the broken opening your bodies made, you hoist yourself into it, dropping down back first on the ground with a sigh of relief. You don't even pay mind to the clear cuts on your palms from the glass. Must be the adrenaline.

All you know is, something has definitely changed.

[chaoskirin2]

As a long time Queen fan, is there anything you know about John Deacon that most fans are unaware of or forgotten? Any misconceptions? There is a lot about him but I hear all sorts of rumors like the stripper story.

I wish I could answer this with actual information. It would be great if I had something to bring to the fandom. Cool facts. Amusing anecdotes. But I don’t.

What I can say is this:

You can sense a lot about a person by how they present themselves. I think on some level, everyone has an empathic connection with the people they admire. Sometimes we find kindred spirits or people we look up to. We always want to say “My fave would never!” but the truth is, the people we look up to are human, too. They have their flaws and vices just like everyone else does.

Because people aren’t just black and white. We’re not all separated into “hero” and “villain.” There’s no alignment chart that encompasses whole populations. Sometimes bad people do good things. And sometimes good people do bad things. We should always look at the whole, and see any individual as a complete, balanced person.

We can identify and praise the good, but we can also examine and denounce the bad.

It’s important to not turn a blind eye to the bad things. But I think we also have a responsibility, before we attack, demean, or cast someone out, to verify that those things about them are true. The internet brings us into a world where published accusations have no filter, reach masses, and spread like wildfire. Before rumors can be contained and lies extinguished, too many people get absorbed into a groupthink mentality and lock themselves in an echo chamber where reality doesn’t shine.

I looked into the story of John and the adult club with an open mind. I knew I might find that it was all true in the end, and that would have been disappointing. But the important thing is that I didn’t trust the writings of an infamous, sensationalist tabloid and did the necessary work to uncover its veracity. I didn’t want to pry into John Deacon’s private life, but I think as his fans, we owe it to him not to spread false information.

And it wasn’t an easy process. In my original conversations with Sophisticats, I was told they wouldn’t talk to me unless I was seeking an audition. In fact, I didn’t hear back on the answers to my questions until months later, long after I published the original debunking. (I’ll post that under a read more below.)

In the end, I think Deacon has given us an indescribable part of himself that can’t be quantified or be given a price tag. And we owe him his privacy. We also owe him the courtesy to not seek out scandal just because he is a quiet, private man.

My original debunking of the Sophisticats Bullshit:

After carefulconsideration, I've decided to fact-check the story about John Deacon's forayinto strip clubs, titled "Queen's Boring Bassist," published in theDaily Mail on January 30, 2005.

 First, looking at theDaily Mail's track record, it is considered to be an unreliable, far-right(conservative) newspaper. According to readers on Quora, it "has zerocredibility" and is "sensationalist nonsense." User GraemeShimmin states that he uses the Daily Mail as a reverse fact-check: "if the Daily Mail says something is true thenI assume it is untrue."According to Media Bias/Fact Check (mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/) thepaper has a "poor track record with fact-checkers.) The Wikipedia articleabout the Daily Mail states that it is unreliable and biased, and has also beencriticized for instances of copyright violation.

 It has also come underfire in the past for its powerful bias. In the 1930s, the Daily Mail ranseveral articles praising Nazism and Fascism. Virgin Trains recently stoppedstocking the Daily Mail due to its strong-right stance as beinganti-immigration and anti-LGBT, among other things.

 Most notably, severalcelebrities, including Diana Rigg, Elton John, and J. K. Rowling, have brought successfullawsuits against the Daily Mail for publishing false information. Of particularinterest, and almost directly related to the subject matter of this fact-check,Melania Trump received a settlement based on allegations published in the DailyMail stating that she had been an "escort" in the 1990s.

 Wikipedia will also notallow the Daily Mail to be used as a source.

 The article itself ispoorly-written, is riddled with grammatical and punctuation errors, andcontains a general lack of impartiality. Any publication with integrity willhave a preference for neutral language which does not lead its readers to aparticular conclusion. It also contains heavy speculation pertaining toDeacon's decision to not tour or give interviews related to Queen.

 It makes the medicallyinaccurate statement that Freddie Mercury "died of AIDS." (it isimpossible to die from AIDS. People who suffer the disease die due tocomplications from AIDS' attack on the immune system. In Mercury's case, hepassed away due to bronchopneumonia related to AIDS.)

 Lastly, there are nocorroborating sources - no other articles in any publications mention that JohnDeacon ever visited a strip club or had an affair. Compare this to theextensive coverage of Brian May's marriage problems with his current wife,Anita Dobson. Needless to say, it is extremely important that multiple sourcesverify any information for it to be considered true. Of note, other far-rightsources that publish articles with no corroborating sources include BreitbartNews and the Westboro Baptist Church.

 It was very interestingthat the Daily Mail has a quote by Opposition dancer Jenny Fewins, but it isnot attributed. I found the quote's source by accident, when looking forinformation about her and her credibility. The quote in the Daily Mail wasstolen from a book called Queen: TheEarly Years by Mark Hodkinson, with no credit given. This was a surprising,but welcome, confirmation of the sources that state that the Daily Mail hasbeen cited for copyright infringement. The part about Freddie Mercury arrivingat the wedding wearing a feather boa, as well as Roger Taylor's assessment ofDeacon's personality, are also from the same book, and also uncredited.

 Both anecdotes are alsotruncated and incomplete, and spliced with false paraphrasing. For example,Roger Taylor did not say, "We were so over-the-top, we thought thatbecause he was quiet, he would fit in with us without too much upheaval."The correct quote from the original source is, "We thought he was great.We were all so used to each other, and so over the top. We thought that becausehe was quiet, he would fit in with us without too much upheaval. He was a greatbass player, too -- and the fact that he was a wizard with electronics was alsoa deciding factor."

 I cannot find any sourcefor the quote by Robert Ahwai, nor much about him, other than the fact that itseems he is a real person. His quote in the article, if it is real, is alsospeculative, and from a person who only knew Deacon from college and had noassociation with him at the time of Freddie Mercury's death.

 Unfortunately, whilesearching for information about whether or not Deacon's relationship withdancer Emma Shelley was, indeed, an affair (as well as whether or not sheexisted) I had to compare information about the affairs of Brian May and RogerTaylor. The reason behind this endeavor is to set the bar for how much information ispublished about the personal lives of Queen members. In my search, I foundseveral articles about May's affair with secretary Julie Glover, as well as ahandful of candid photographs. I also found a few articles, and one picture,about Roger Taylor's affair with Fay Lawrence. Despite celebrities' attempts tokeep extramarital affairs secret, there are always a few photographs thatappear, especially in the UK, where tabloid press is viciously always on thelookout for gossip. Paparazzi can earn quite a bit of money from an exclusivephoto.

 When Simon Langer and hispartner, John McKeown, took over the Sophisticats strip club in 2001, heestablished several club rules, which directly conflict with information fromthe article. First, that clients in the strip club are not allowed to have anycontact whatsoever with the dancers. The article states that Shelley was a"lap dancer," which would, of course, require some pretty close contact.

 Second, dancers are notpermitted to accept addresses or phone numbers from clients. Clients whoacquire personal information are not permitted back into the club, and thedancers are terminated.

 I attempted to findcontact information for Mr. Langer or Mr. McKeown, however, I was unable tofind any current addresses or phone numbers. In hopes that an email would reachthe proper entities, I sent a message to the account set up for bookings andauditions, which was the only email address listed on the site.

 I wished to ask about howstrictly the rules are enforced. I also found it odd that apparently Mr. Langerhad no problem with giving out client information to the Daily Mail,specifically stating that he knew Deacon visited the establishment. Even more shocking,he gave out information about his employees - someone named "Olga"with no last name given, as well as Emma Shelley. This seemed like a breach oftrust to me.

 The strip club that Johnis said to have attended, Sophisticats, does indeed exist. As Sophisticats hasno contact information on their website, I messaged their page on Facebook,asking as to whether they employed any women named "Olga" or"Emma Shelley" circa 2000-2001. I also located an email address aftersome extensive searching, and sent the same question to that email, as well.

 Unfortunately,Sophisticats declined comment to my inquiry. The only response I received askedwhether or not I planned on auditioning.

 The strangest thing aboutJohn Deacon's alleged affair with Emma Shelley is that one particular photo isposed, as if taken with his permission. Considering the fact that multiplesources (including the Daily Mail, which published the photo) state that Deaconis secretive and reclusive, he would not pose for a photo with a mistress if hewished to keep the affair secret. This photo is also blurry, which is atechnique of photomanipulators who have severely edited a photo. Had Deaconactually posed for this photo, there would be no need for it to be blurry, asthe photographer wouldn't have had to rush to take it. Interestingly, it isalso impossible to tell whether or not the man in the photo is actually JohnDeacon.

The answer to this point might seem obvious - the photos were taken in secret.However, with the saturation and contrast in these photos (a point I willexplore in more detail shortly) they must have been taken with a flash. Whileit might have been possible to take such a photo with a high ISO, the entirepicture would have been extremely bright and grainy. If you check the photos,you'll see that there is absolutely no grain indicative of a high ISO, nor isthere enough blurriness to support a conclusion that any grain was removed. Thebrightness of the subject matter and the extreme black background can only meanthat a flash was used.

 Which Deacon would havenoticed. As would have the dancer in the photos. The person who took the photoslikely would have had his camera confiscated, and would have been escorted outof the club - they would not have had the opportunity to take one photo, thenmove, and take a second photo.

 And... This is as far as Igot with the research before I stopped working on it. As I was unable to getany further information (including from another club that may have beeninvolved - Stringfellows) I could not continue my research. Take from this whatyou will.Sorry about the incompleteness of this. It's all I was able to accomplish.

[sirenfromthelostcity]

A Cat and Spider Game

A/N: For a really long time i could not get the idea of making a Black Cat Reader x Spider-Man fic out of my mind so i finally decided to make one. Black Cat has really white hair so for the purpose of this fic, when you’re dressed as your alter-ego (Black Cat) you’ll be wearing a platinum white wig. I just wanted to say that from the beginning bc that’s just how Black Cat’s character looks and also i feel like it’d actually help keep your secret identity a secret if you didn’t have platinum white hair on your civilian persona as well lol. When writing this i was thinking about the Marvel’s Spider-Man PS4 game but tbh this can also fit in for Tom’s version of Spider-Man too since they’re both still Peter Parker anyways, it’s just that in this story he’s older. This is also a college AU so all the characters in here are about 20 years old. With that said not everyone you has powers, just you and Peter so far but i guess we’ll see what happens no? This is my first ever Marvel fic so i’d reeeaaalllyyy appreciate some feedback on this and if you’d like a second part just shoot me an ask or like and reblog and whatnot :) 

I do not own Spider-Man’s character or any of these characters (except you i think?). I hope you enjoy!!! <3333

Words: 3.6k+

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Making your way through the cluttered dormitory halls, you sigh in satisfaction as you not only finally reach your assigned suite but are greeted with silence and emptiness. You’ve arrived before any of your other roommates. You actually know who one of your roommates is going to be but only because you’ve dormed together last semester and got along so well that you’ve requested to dorm together again. Still, you’ve always made it a personal mission to be one of the first to arrive on campus on moving in day. Mostly just so you can pick out your room, settle in, enjoy some alone time, and overall begin preparations for the beginning of the semester and your “other” plans. 

A few hours pass and in that time you’ve managed to get a good chunk of your stuff unpacked and set up in your room. Wanda, your previous roommate, also arrived, said hi, and settled herself in. The two of you are still waiting for your third and final roommate to arrive. 

Deciding to take a break, you grab the Daily Bugle newspaper you picked up earlier on the way to the dorms and plop down on your freshly done bed. 

You stifle a laugh as you read the headline in J. Jonah Jameson’s voice. 

“MASKED MENACE SPIDER-MAN STILL TERRORIZING CITY!” 

They bring him back for one piece and of course he decides to make this the headline. 

You continue to peruse the many articles in the newspaper and stop as you find the one you’ve been looking for. 

“No new leads on New York’s newest criminal police are calling ‘Black Cat.’”

Criminal.

By definition according to google, ”a person who has committed a crime.”

Yes, a criminal is technically a bad person. However, you would argue that there are bad people and then there are worse people. Personally, you don’t feel as if you fall onto the worse branch.”

“As if I ever even actually hurt anyone,” you begrudgingly comment to yourself. “Rich people don’t count so, technically, I never did hurt anyone.” 

You haphazardly flip the page of the magazine you were browsing when you hear suddenly hear a knock on your door prompting you to look up.

“Come in,” you say and in enters your roommate Wanda along with another girl.

“Hey (Y/N), this is Gamora,” she gestures to the tall girl next to her, “it’s her first year at Empire State and she’s our new roommate.”

“Oh,” you sit up from your bed and walk up to the two women to properly greet your new roommate. “Hi, I’m (Y/N),” you smile at Gamora as you shake her hand.

“You showed her around the suite?”

“Mmhmm,” Wanda nods.

“Cool. So first year, huh? How you liking the campus so far?”

Gamora hesitates her response, “I’ve seen a lot of it since I got lost finding my way to the right dorm building yet I still don’t think I’ve seen all of it. But, so far it looks really… “

Both Wanda and you interject. 

“Opulent?” 

“Preppy?” 

“Yes, actually. No offense.”

You exchange an amused smile with Wanda, “None taken, this is a pretty preppy and opulent school but it’s got some good people in it. Also some bad people, but that’s everywhere you go really. Luckily for you though, you now have us to navigate your way through Empire State.”

“This is mine and (Y/N)’s second year at here so we know the terrain and its people pretty well,” Wanda elaborates.

“Speaking of terrain, have you had a chance to go to The Cool Bean Cafe?” you ask.

“No, but it sounds like a popular cafe.”

“Unfortunately it is a popular cafe. Not unfortunate for the owners, the sweetest old couple by the way, but kinda unfortunate for us in that it often gets crowded. But y’know,” you glance at your watch, “it’s only one-thirty right now, people ought to be busy unpacking and whatnot at this time. Do you guys want to wanna go now? It’d be the perfect chance to get to know each other better, my treat.”

“It’s always a yes from when the cafe is involved,” answers Wanda.

“Doesn’t sound like it could be terrible. I’m in.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Fortunately for all of you, The Cool Bean Cafe is only moderately crowded today so you and the girls were able to find a table to sit at. You spend most of your afternoon chatting with them and, to yours and Wanda’s delight, even witnessed Gamora genuinely laugh a few times. Okay she laughed once and briefly smirked one other time time but it was still silently agreed between you and Wanda that those were some pretty monumental moments shared with your new roommate. You did learn a lot about her too. Apparently it was Gamora’s dad who really pushed her to apply to this school. She wasn’t planning on attending upon acceptance, partly because of the move she’d have to make from Virginia to New York, but she was offered a full scholarship and her dad convinced her to attend. Afterall, Empire State University is a pretty highly esteemed school. It couldn’t be all that bad, she figured. Her major is astrophysics and she’s decided she wants to take on a second concentration but hasn’t decided on one yet.

Gamora learned a lot about you and Wanda as well. She learned that you and Wanda were roommates for your first semester at Empire State. Because there was no other roommate, you two had the whole suite to yourselves and became very close. She learned that Wanda has a twin brother named Pierto but he’s currently playing professional soccer in Sakovia. Wanda is an international student from Sakovia and is pursuing a psychology major with a minor in Sakovian studies. You were born and bred in Queens, New York and your major is journalism but you haven’t yet picked out a second concentration.

Wanda was explaining to Gamora the locations of the buildings in which her classes are going to be held in when you get a email notification from your phone.

“Shit,” you lowly mumble.

“Is everything alright?” Wanda inquires.

“Yeah, it’s just an email from my film studies professor. Apparently he believes that ‘Teamwork makes the dream work’ so as part of our weekly assignments he’s paired everyone in the class into pairs of two to complete the assignments together.”

“(Y/N) loves working with people,” Wanda sarcastically comments to Gamora and to both of yours and Wanda’s surprise, she actually chuckles at the joke.

“Does it say who you’re paired with?” Gamora asks.

“Yeah, he provided a list with the email, I’m checking right now……. Peter B. Parker.”

“Hopefully he’s not an asshole,” Gamora takes a sip from her coffee.

“Fortunately he’s not,” you put away your phone and take a sip of your coffee before elaborating. “I used to go to high school with him. We never talked because I was really busy with stuff at home and our after school activities never collided. He’s super smart though, we had a few classes together and I know he was in the school’s robotics club for a while as well as the academic decathlon team. Trust me, the guy is brilliant. Plus, from what I heard, he’s apparently a total sweetheart. I don’t think I have much to worry about.”

“You sure seem to know an awful lot about a boy you’ve never spoken to,” Wanda complacently coos before blowing at her tea and drinking it.

“Y’know, I have to agree with Wanda there,” Gamora raises her eyebrows.

“Could it be you harnessed a crush for this Peter guy back in the old high school days?” Wanda twirled her cup in hand, smirking but not looking at you.

You playfully scoff, “Y’know you treat your roommates out to one of the finest cafes within walking distance and how do they thank you? Oh yeah they don’t, they interrogate you instead,” you tsk and slowly shake your head side to side. “In all honesty though, no I did not harbor a crush for Peter Parker. Believe me, with the stuff I had going on at that time with my family and myself, boys were the last thing on my mind.”

“I feel that,” Gamora nods. “Also, do all professors send emails days before the first class?”

“Some professors do but not all of them, which is why you have to be really vigilant with your emails. I’ve ignored them for most of my life, but trust me you’re gonna have to pay attention to them from now on.”

Wanda nods as she downs the rest of her tea. “Speaking of vigilance, Gamora, have you yet heard of the masked vigilante swinging through our streets?”

Gamora shrugs, “A little actually. I overheard a few students talk about him when I was looking for the dorm building. Apparently he often literally swings by our campus and goes by…. Spider-Something?”

“It’s Spider-Man,” Wanda chuckles. “There’s some mixed opinions of him in this city but for the most part he saves lives, helps people in need, and fights crime. He’s a hero. Have you heard about the theories?”

“No. There’s theories about this guy?”

“Oh, there are so many theories about his origins and his identity. Some people think he’s an alien who snuck in through the vortex that opened in the 2012 attack here, but others argue that maybe he’s actually just a person with advanced technology. Some people even think he actually attends here because of often he seems to pass through the campus. Personally, I don’t think that’s true. Simply seeing him pass by the school a lot is not enough to support that theory and being in college while maintaining a job is hard enough. I cannot imagine a person trying to maintain a job, along with their grades, and a crime fighting alter-ego on the side. I just think he passes through here as a shortcut to someplace else, we are in a very big city after all.”

“Wow, people seem to be really fixated with this Spider-Guy,” says Gamora.

“(Y/N),” Wanda calls for your attention. “You’ve been awfully quiet on this topic. Don’t you have any theories of your own about the Spider-Man’s identity?”

“Not really,” you lie. “I mean as a journalist major in New York, it’s impossible to not write about him, especially with all the recent crime that’s been going on here, but outside of that I don’t really think much about him.”

“Wait, so there’s frequent crime happening around here? God, I really should’ve done more research before just moving here,” Gamora shakes her head.

You lightly laugh at Gamora’s reaction, “Don’t worry it’s not really that bad. Lately what’s been happening is a string of robberies but whoever’s doing it seems to be targeting the homes of the very rich or the places only the very rich can afford so we have nothing to worry about.”

“It still amazes me that the police still have no lead as to who the thief could be,” Wanda comments. “The investigation has been going on for at least two months now and already four homes have been robbed. Whoever has done that must be very affluent right now.”

You hesitate for a moment but deep down you can’t help but wonder and ask, “Do you think that, y’know whoever robbed those homes, that they earned the loot?”  

Wanda furrows her brows at first but takes a few seconds to ponder her answer, “Well, morally no because stealing is wrong. However, the people this person decided to target, they’re already insanely wealthy with more money than they could ever spend in one lifetime. Not to mention that the thief is so adept at what they do that no one has any clue as to who they could be so… I guess in some ways… yes, I’d say they earned their loot but I still think that stealing is wrong.”

You hum in thought, “That’s a good point. What do you think Gamora?”

“I agree that it’s not morally correct to steal but if this person is as good as you say they are then, I guess they do deserve to have their earnings. It’s not exactly easy to baffle the cops, normally they have at least one clue. But, it also makes me wonder why are they doing this, the thief I mean. Is it because they’re good at it or because they need the money or both? Guess we’ll never know.”

“Those are good questions, though,” says Wanda. “It does make me wonder about the thief’s motives. What about you, (Y\N), do you think the thief earned their prize?”

“Honestly, yes. I do believe he or she earned their prize. I get that it’s not morally right to steal but, according to the reports no one was harmed during the robbery. No one was even aware anything was stolen until the morning. And as you said, Wanda, the targets of this thief have more money than they could ever use in a lifetime so it’s not like the thief is preying on the less fortunate. As for the motive, we really can’t know without directly asking the thief. But my guess would be that it’s a combination of both the need for it and the confidence boost they must get from the police’s frustration at their lack of leads to his or her’s identity. As if stealing from a bunch of rich duds is the worst thing a person can do, though. There’s bigger issues than some rich people missing a couple of priceless artifacts. But I guess that could just be my bias against rich people speaking,” you tilt your head to the side and lightly laugh.

“If I hadn’t already known about your hatred for rich people I sure would know now,” Wanda awkwardly laughs.

“Yeah, I kinda went off on a tangent there. Sorry about that,” you briefly look down before changing the topic. “Hey, do y’all wanna get ice cream and maybe show Gamora around the campus more? My treat.”

“Someone woke up in an incredibly generous mood today,” says Wanda.

“I’m all for the tour of the campus but since you’ve already paid for the coffee you don’t have to buy me ice cream,” adds Gamora.

“It’s not a problem guys, really. My mom got a bonus at her job so she decided to treat me to some extra cash and now I’m deciding to treat you all to some good food. Are we ready?”

Wanda and and Gamora briefly look at each other and simultaneously nod before grabbing their things and exiting the cafe with you.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Much later that day…. 2:15AM ~ Stanlee Co-ed Dorms

Peter B. Parker lays comfortably asleep in bed after an exhausting day of moving into his dorm and of course being the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man almost everyone loves. Peter loves being Spider-Man. While it can sometimes get complicated balancing out the hero life with the civilian life, Spider-Man truly helps people. Sometimes not everyone sees it that way but the good Spider-Man does heavily outweighs the few negative responses he receives, at least to Peter it does.

Yeah, being Spider-Man is great. Peter would never change it for the-

“Peter, wake up!” Ned storms into Peter’s room, effectively and abruptly waking him up.

“AH! WHAT?!” Peter locks sleepy eyes with Ned and then his alarm clock on his nightstand. “Ned, what the hell man, what are you-what are you doing up so late?”

“Binge watching Game of Thrones to prepare for the finale,” he shrugs,” but that’s not important right now. I heard the police scanner say something about an alarm going off at that really expensive wine place on east 98th street near the park. It fits the M.O. of that burglar that keeps getting away.”

Instantly Peter tosses his covers to the side, hopping out of bed and retrieving his Spidersuit from his closet, hastily putting it on.

“It’s a possibility that it could be a false alarm but I have a feeling about this one and it wouldn’t hurt to take a look since we don’t have class tomorrow,” Ned commentates, handing Peter his web shooters.

Peter takes his web shooters from Ned before finally putting on his mask, “Thanks, Ned. Don’t wait up!” With that said Peter swings out of his fire escape window and into the night to potentially catch what even he admits to be a very skilled thief.

“You know I will!” Ned yells out to Peter from the window. “Oh shit,” he quickly pulls himself in, realizing he’s in a dorm building with other people possibly sleeping.

“Go get em, Spider-Man!” he enthusiastically whispers as he exits Peter’s room and closes his door.

Swinging at breakneck speed, Peter makes his way to the location of the expensive wine store, Wine and Spirits Co.. Within four minutes, he spots not only the building but an opened window on the third floor. Quickly, and quietly, he zips through the window. Upon landing, Peter immediately spots the elusive thief simply standing behind a bar counter observing a bottle of wine and a wave of shock washes over him as he realizes he recognizes thief. Donned in an all  black, skin hugging suit laced with white,  small cat ears on her wavy platinum white hair, and a black mask. He never thought he’d see her again.

“I-It’s you,” he mumbles.

You turn around in slight shock but hum in delight at seeing the great Spider-Man himself right before you. “And it’s you. Not many people can sneak up on me and arrive two minutes before the police. I have to admit, that’s pretty impressive.”

“But you h-how are you–– I-I-I saw you-”

“Wow, do you always stutter like this around girls?”

“N-No- Darn it!”

You chuckle as you slip the bottle of wine into your bag that’s already filled with at least five bottles, “Y’know that’s actually kinda cute, but you need to relax more.”

“I’d relax more with some answers,” he starts. “That night- how did you survive the fall? I-I tried to save you-”

“You can’t save everyone, Spidey… I chose to be where I was. The job just didn’t work out as I had planned. It wasn’t your fault. Also in the end it wasn’t really that bad. I mean from your viewpoint, watching that serum practically explode in front of my face and send me plummeting down to what should have been my death probably was bad but… I still have about eight lives left. Why stop the thievery now? Especially when I’m so good at it. ”

“I don’t really think that’s how cats work,” he says, still shocked at the sight of you. “Wait, so you’re the one who’s been behind these robberies all along?”

“Mmhmm,” you hum. “I’m pretty damn good aren’t I?” You hop over the counter and proceed to walk towards the window you used to enter until he halts you by grabbing your arm that holds the bag of wine bottles.

“Look I know this is your first time being caught by someone so you might not be familiar with how things go, but I can’t let you leave.”

You hear the police sirens go off signaling their arrival. Flashes of red, white, and blue begin to sear into the dim wine store and you give him a small smile, “Yes you can. You just won’t.”

You look down as you hear the footsteps of the police ascending the stairs then look back up to Spiderman, “But that’s okay. You’ll have other things to worry about.”

Suddenly the door to the entrance gets kicked in and in enters seven police officers aiming their guns and flashlights at the both of you.

“Freeze, Spider-Man!” yells an officer.

“Call this in, we got Spider-Man here and a potential accomplice,” instructs another.

“Accomplice, really?” Peter addresses the officers.

“Gotta run, Spidey. See you soon,” you say into his ear. Taking advantage of the distraction, you quickly attach a device onto him and jump out the window using your grappling hook to latch onto a roof’s edge and swing away.

Seconds later the EMP goes off, effectively short circuiting Peter’s suit and web shooters. He convulses in pain onto the ground until he manages to take off the device and stomp on it. Peter jumps out the window to follow you but is forced to tuck and roll onto the ground when he realizes you’ve disabled his webshooters. Not one to give up, he attempts to follow you on foot but your trail is quickly lost.

“Systems back online. Sorry about that Pete, she used an EMP device to disarm you.”

“It’s alright Karen. Can you call Ned for me, please?” with everything now fully functional, Peter lunges into the air and begins to swing through the air.

“Of course,” Karen replies. After a few rings, Ned finally picks up.

“Hey, Pete, did you get him?”

“No, but she got me pretty good.”

“She? What happened?”

“Remember the girl I told you about a few months ago, with the robbery?”

“Ohhhh, the one with the chemical explosion who seemingly disappeared after falling from a fifteen story rooftop? Yeah, that’s pretty hard to forget.”

“Yeah, well, it’s her. She’s been behind all these robberies all along and she’s picked up some new tricks.”

“Whoa, what kind of tricks?”

“Well, so far she’s used an EMP device to disable my webshooters and suit, and before she got away I saw her use some sort of grappling hook to swing away and escape, just to name a few. I’m sure she’s got more I haven’t had the chance to see yet but I’m sure I will soon,” he recalls your last words to him.

“No Way! Another super villain! But wait, how did she survive that fall, do you think it could’ve been something in that chemical explosion?”

“She said it was actually a serum but she didn’t specify. Not that we really had much time to talk when the cops stormed in anyways, they thought I was her accomplice!”

“The people know you, though, I’m sure that story won’t stick. Plus, when you catch her, it’ll all blow over quick. Where you heading to now?”

“Back to the dorms, I lost her trail but now that I know that she’s alive and that she’s behind all the other robberies I can probably create an algorithm to try to pinpoint where she might hit next.”

“Alright, well I’ll still be up when you get here. See you soon.”

See you soon

Your words echo in his head. He was there on the night of your apparent death. He tried to save you but failed. It haunted him for some time. Yet now you’re not only alive but back to your old ways. Peter didn’t know you but he still has some questions and, so long as you kept stealing, he knows he has to stop you.

[brightlightsfanfiction-blog]

The Article | Joker Leto x Reader Pt 1.

Request:  Oo what about the reader is in college but works at her school's newspaper but the Gotham paper is doing a contest and she wants to win so she tries to interview Mr. J. (Harley is out of the picture). And he ends up kidnapping her for a week yet allowing her to write about him, and possibly some smexi smut. If you're into it -- @ladylucksposts

Notes: This was way longer than expected, with the backstory, and setting everything up. I decided to make the executive decision to split this into two parts. They should be out back-to-back. The kidnapping isn’t the traditional idea of it, given the way I set it up, but I hope it still satisifes the desire.  Warnings: Kidnapping (kinda?), dark topics, swearing. 

Part 2.

You stood outside of Alibi, one of the busiest clubs in Gotham. It was also the most dangerous. Almost every person inside would be guaranteed to be armed, or accompanied by someone who was.  Mob bosses, serial killers, pimps, and hookers all frequented the club. It was a pretty poorly kept secret if a little girl in college knew about it all... The GCPD probably knew about it as well, but if you had to guess, they and all the heroes of the city stayed far away. Going in there and causing trouble was suicide. GCPD would lose a lot of their officers, and vigilantes would get the brave, innocent (and stupid) bystanders killed, as well as others.

You supposed you couldn’t call the club goers who dared to go for a good time stupid... they were just surrounding themselves with some of the most dangerous people in Gotham, but most of the time, so long as everyone behaved and kept their nose out of private business, it was just a night of adrenaline. Sure, every now and then a shooting would happen there, a deal gone wrong, a misunderstanding, a psycho having an episode...  You, on the other hand, were poking your nose where it didn’t belong. You were there to see the owner and the most dangerous man in Gotham. The Joker. 

The Gotham Gazette was holding a contest for people who wanted to work at the paper, and they were offering a big sum of money for the winner to buy the best story. You were studying journalism, and it was your dream job. Working at the Gotham Gazette was the best job journalism job you could get in Gotham, and then maybe you could get out of the shithole town and do something even bigger. There were a lot of talented writers, and you were sure there would be some pretty amazing entries. The only way to win was to do something daring, and a little -- okay, incredibly stupid. 

The Joker was a household name and struck fear in every Gotham citizen. He was also someone people knew the last amount about... Two-Face was previously Harvey Dent who’d gotten injured and lost his mind, Harley Quinn was formerly a psychiatrist who fell for her patient and then was driven insane.. and a variety of other people with known pasts. The Joker was the biggest mystery, to the point, no one knew his name. All official papers had his real name listed as “unknown” and his alias as the Joker. If you could get anything, and make it available to the public, you’d win for sure. If you survived to tell the tale, though.

You stepped into the club, taking a deep breath. It looked like a pretty normal club inside... music played, people danced and drank, there were cages for people to dance in, and a roped off VIP section. But the energy was different and uneasy. The VIP section was where you’d have to go, and where you saw a bit of green hair poking through the beads. A part of you had considered going undercover, trying to get a story in secret, but that was dangerous from start to end... Lying, sneaking around, and then later publishing a story. If you survived enough to get your name out there, you’d be dead before you could ever enjoy your prize. No, you had to be direct, and hope that bravery (and stupidity) would get you somewhere, and that the somewhere wouldn't be a body bag.

You got a shot, downing the liquid and letting it burn your throat, hoping it would give you some courage. It helped a little bit, and you considered doing another, but knew you had to keep a level enough head. If you tried to approach the Clown Prince of Crime while intoxicated, he wouldn’t take you seriously and may kill you just for being annoying. So with the one shot buzzing through you, you walked straight over to the VIP section. Two bouncers stood by, and you were sure there were more inside. The Joker was insane, but he was also insanely protected. 

“VIP only, miss,” one guard said as you approached. This wasn’t a VIP section where they asked your name and checked a list. The list was exclusive, and they’d know if someone was to be expected. 

“I know,” you assured them, squaring your shoulders. “I was hoping to have a few minutes to talk to your boss. I have a business proposition for him, and this is the only way I know how to contact him,” you said. A business proposition sounded way more official and legit than “I want to interview your boss for a newspaper contest.” 

“Is anyone expecting you here?” the same security guard asked, sizing you up. You were in clubwear, something low cut and short in hopes to up your chances of getting your foot in the door. You weren’t the hottest girl in the club but hoped it was enough. 

You shook your head. “No, like I said, he’s a hard man to contact. I assure you, it will only take a few minutes. If he can’t meet now, if someone could give me information to contact someone, I can do it another time.” You hoped being as diplomatic as possible would help. You could still see the neon green hair behind them, but not much beyond that. You had no idea if he was already in a meeting or not. 

The bouncers exchanged a look, before the one who had been addressing you turned into the section behind him. “Hey, Frost. Got a girl here who wants to talk to the boss,” they said. 

A third man came over, tall, not bad looking, full beard. He looked you over, trying to figure out who you were and why you were here. “You want to talk to the boss?” he asked, skeptical, confused, and trying to decide what he should do. 

“I do, yes. Just a few minutes, whenever he has some free time,” you answered, looking him in the eyes. 

He glanced between the two bouncers, before back at you. He almost looked amused. “You got guts, kid. Most people are afraid to get anywhere near the Boss,” he acknowledged. “Alright, I’ll give you a few minutes. If we’re honest, it’s only because I’m curious how this’ll go down, and because he’d be more willing to meet with a hot chick than any other random stranger,” he said. So the tiny dress had been to your advantage. 

The bouncers separated, and you followed Frost into the VIP section. Your nerves were going wild, and you felt like you may vomit or pass out. You got the meeting, but that meant you were getting ready to meet the Joker. Face to face. In his own club. No one was here to protect you, and you were on his turf. If you said the wrong thing or caught him in the wrong mood, you’d be dead in two seconds. Frost stopped in front of you and turned to face you, holding up a hand to have you stop as well. You stopped obediently, looking at him but didn’t speak. You’d speak when spoken to, and try to be on your very best behavior. 

“You mind if I give you a pat down? I don’t think there are many places you can keep anything in that tiny dress, but better to be safe,” he requested. With the way he was eying you, you were pretty sure half of it was his own personal desire. Still, you nodded and shifted so that he could do as much. At first, it was a simple official patdown, your sides, back, stomach... then he felt around your breasts, ass, and even between your legs. You were extremely uncomfortable, but it was over quickly. There wasn’t much fabric, so there wasn’t much room to search. “All clear,” he said, giving you a playful wink, before guiding you through the beads. You almost wondered if he had agreed to let you come back here in hopes the Joker would let him have you before killing you. Frost wasn’t a bad looking guy, but it still skeeved you out. 

As soon as he stepped out of the way, you saw the Joker sitting on a white couch, eyes focused on his phone. He almost looked harmless as he sat there, reading through something with slightly burrowed brows (or rather brow bone since there was no hair except for on his head.) You knew better though, and your blood ran cold. There was no turning back now.

“Hey, Boss. This girl wanted to talk to you about something,” Frost said, almost seeming easy around the King of Gotham. It seemed like he was high up in the ranks so it would make sense. But how could anyone get comfortable around a volatile homicidal maniac? 

The Joker’s eyes moved up slowly, flicking to Frost, before at you. Once he took in your appearance, his phone was set aside, forgotten, and you had his full attention. He eyed you, and you saw a bit of his tongue come out to lick his lips.

“Sit,” Frost told you, motioning to the couch opposite his boss. You complied, holding your hands in your lap, and he sat toward the end of the same couch. “Thought if she was insane enough to come to see you, it may be worth hearing her out. Or at least something pretty to look at,” he commented.

The Joker gave Frost a look of mild amusement, a smile coming over his bright red lips, before turning back to you. “What brings you here, Kitten?” he purred, curiosity evident in his grey eyes. 

The nickname made you further uneasy, but this was your one opportunity. You swallowed down your nerves, your mouth feeling bone dry now. There was no going back though. “I don’t want to waste any of your time, so I’ll cut right to the chase. I go to Gotham University, and the Gazette is doing a contest with the school for journalists. Winner gets a job once they graduate, which is my dream job. I thought a good choice of topic would be you,” you said, trying to get it all out without seeming too rushed.

You could see Frost quirk a brow in your peripheral, but your main focus stayed on The Joker. His head cocked to the side as he stared at you, listening and processing to what you’d said. “On me?” he said simply.

“Yes, sir. You’re one of the most well-known people of Gotham City, but very little is known about you. I thought you may have an interest in controlling the narrative and telling your side. Many people talk about you, and write about you, without ever having even seen you in person. This is my attempt to change that,” you explained. Showing a bit of sympathy, as well as what he’d gain from agreeing seemed like the best way to go about doing it. You had to sell this to him and sell it well. 

“So you’re to play Devil’s Advocate, are you now?” he asked. It was hard to read his expression. He had a great poker face. 

You glanced at Frost as if he would provide any answers, but he wasn’t any more helpful, and you turned back to the clown. “If that’s how you want to look at it, I suppose it’s not far off. You certainly have your ways of sending messages to the media and citizens of this city, but this gives you a more drawn out platform. I already have some questions in mind, but we don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to, and if there’s something you want to focus on, then I’m more than happy to let you... steer the bus, shall we say?” 

He kept watching of you, and you could see a million thoughts racing around in his head. His henchman was even watching, curious to see what his boss would do. You couldn’t tell if the thoughts were good or bad, blank face still up. Shortly after, a smile lit up his face, and a little laugh came out that sent shivers down your spine. “You certainly have a lot of... guts,” he said, glancing at your torso as if he was imagining tearing you open to see them. “I’ll agree to it. On one teeny tiny little condition,” he practically purred.

You perked, not believing that this was happening. “Anything,” you said, a little too quickly. Perhaps offering to anything for a man like the Joker wasn’t the smartest move, but had you really been smart these past few hours? 

“You will stay here, with me, for the next seven days. You will not leave. If you have work or class, call it off. You do whatever I say, and I decide when we do work. You can ask your questions, but I’m under no obligation to answer any. Your final draft will be finished and submitted before you leave. No recordings, drafts, photographs, videos, anything of the sort will leave with you. I’m not going to make contingencies for what would happen if you were to not win, because I’m confident what you leave here will be a masterpiece,” he was grinning wider now. “That’s my deal. Take it or leave it,” he said. Something about the look in his eye told you that you didn’t have a choice. If you said no thank you, he’d kill you. But saying yes... saying yes meant agreeing to spend an entire week with The Joker, doing everything he said. You had a feeling there would be things to push you, and he’d try to break you. He did it to Harley and a lot of other people. 

“I don’t have any of my things with me, I even left my phone in my car,” you started, wondering how this would go if you only had one dress and that was it. You weren’t planning on this turning into a long, sinister slumber party. 

“You’ll give Frost your keys and address. He’ll pick up clothes, your computer, and anything else you request of him... within reason,” he stated. 

You looked at Frost at the mention of him, and he gave a small shrug. Taking a breath, you made the decision you’d likely regret for years to come. but at least then you’d have years to come. “Okay. Let’s do it.” 

To be continued...

[chiseler]

The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League Presents “Talent in Exile” (WFKB, 1938)

Alfred Leonard in the studio at KFAC in the 1930s

Courtesy of Eleanor Rubin

One of the nice things about publishing a book (since you ask: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, out this year from Columbia University Press) is that you often get messages over the transom from people who have a personal investment in the subject—and sometimes a personal story and memento to share.  In the book, I made a passing reference to a radio personality named Alfred Leonard, a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of Democracy.  Founded in 1936 and numbering some 5,000 artists-activists from all ranks of the entertainment industry, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL) worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the looming menace of Nazism--holding rallies, broadcasting radio shows, and doing its best to inject anti-Nazi sentiments into Hollywood cinema (no easy task given the obstacles set up by the Production Code Administration,  the in-house censors who always sought to denude American cinema of overt political content).  Leonard was one of the stalwart foot soldiers in HANL’s ranks.  

Recently I got a nice email from Alfred Leonard’s  daughter, Eleanor (Leonard) Rubin, of Newton, MA, a graduate of Brandeis University (I’ve been at Brandeis long enough to know that in any game of Jewish geography no one is more than two degrees of separation removed from Brandeis).  Elly politely informed me that Mr. Leonard was much more than a radio personality; he was also a prominent music critic, symphony promoter, and music shop owner.  In 1933, he fled Hitler’s Germany and made his way to Hollywood.  Three years later, his brother Joseph Leonard, a noted pianist and composer who also happened to be blind, followed.

Elly then made a tantalizing offer: she had in her possession a copy of a radio broadcast Joseph Leonard had made for a show called Talent in Exile, produced by HANL and broadcast over the facilities of KFWB, the in-house radio station of Warner Bros. Pictures. Would I like to have a copy?

Silly question.  While researching Hollywood and Hitler, I had looked in vain for episodes of Talent in Exile, a weekly series of anti-Nazi agit-prop showcasing refugee talent.  Even more than 1950s television, 1930s radio is maddeningly difficult to track down.  Before the widespread use of magnetic tape in the 1940s, radio shows were broadcast live over the airwaves and seldom preserved on a transcription discs (a phonograph record similar to though slightly smaller than a 33 1/3  LP) .  Elly’s family lore on the provenance of the recording was a little hazy: her copy came from a reel-to-reel tape recorder.  I assume a technician at KFWB recorded the show on a transcription disc as a keepsake for the artist; years later, someone in the family must have transferred the disc to magnetic tape.

Radio was an important weapon in HANL’s propaganda arsenal: the group understood that the living room medium of the day provided a loud megaphone for anti-Nazi rhetoric. On November 16, 1936, HANL established a committee to devise ways to permeate the radio airwaves and raise the alarm about Nazi Germany. Alfred Leonard, who then hosted a music-themed interview show for KFAC in Los Angeles, was the natural choice to chair the committee, which also included producer Lester Cowan, set designer Harry J. Zutto, and songwriter Jay Gorney.  “Hitler and his head propagandist Goebbels . . . are adepts at the use of radio in their efforts to fool all the people all the time,” HANL reasoned. “We will try to beat them at their own game. We will try to prove that facts can be just as colorful as fraud and fiction over the air.” [1]

Talent in Exile played a prominent role in HANL’s over-the-air outreach. The idea was to showcase refugee talent and condemn the regime that hounded them from their homeland.  “Germany’s loss was the world’s gain,” declared HANL in announcing the series. “Hitler’s organized suppression of all cultural values has achieved its objective.  Today, none of the famous men and women who helped to establish Germany’s reputation as one of the leading nations in the world can or will set foot on German soil.”   The exiled talent—and their American-born kinsmen-- would decry Nazi intolerance, give thanks to America for offering shelter to the persecuted, and celebrate freedom of expression in the beacon of democracy.  Anti-Nazi consciousness-raising animated almost every aspect of the show’s entertainment line-up--musical performances, comedy skits, and dramatic reenactments.   The hands-on producer for the program was stage, screen, and radio actor Elliot Sullivan. (Like many of the core activists for HANL in the 1930s, Sullivan would be called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the Cold War.  In 1956 he was cited for contempt for standing on his Fifth and First Amendment rights.  In 1961, a federal district court acquitted him of all charges.)

Talent in Exile could certainly draw on a deep well of exiled talent: the influx of artists run out of Nazi Germany had already earned Hollywood the sobriquet “Weimar on the Pacific.” “Many of [the talented exiles] have come to this country, have settled in Los Angeles,” HANL noted. “Talent in Exile will bring them before the microphones as material witnesses for Hitler’s crimes against culture and civilization, as warning examples for all who play with the idea of curtailing free thinking, independent scientific research, and unhampered artistic expression.”[2]   A typical thirty-minute episode might be built around a discussion with German composer Ernest Toch; a profile of novelist Thomas Mann; or a dramatization of Savage Symphony: A Personal Record of the Third Reich, a memoir by Eva Lips.[3]  However, not all the featured talent was in exile.  For one jam-packed show, the screenwriter and wit-about-town Dorothy Parker read an anti-Nazi sketch, soprano Sylvia Bagley sang two songs banned by the Nazis, and League members read a dramatization of the life of the imprisoned Lutheran pastor, the Rev. Martin Niemöller.[4] Another intriguing episode featured a comedy skit by RKO screenwriter Violet Brothers Shore imagining a meeting between Hitler and Mother Goose, followed by a more serious entry set in a Nazi concentration camp for women, featuring the Academy Award-winning actress-activist  Gale Sondergaard in the lead role.[5]

Fortuitously, the Talent in Exile show that Elly shared with me is the premiere episode, broadcast on Thursday at 9:00 p.m. on February 17, 1938.  The guest artist, her uncle, Joseph Leonard, certainly fit the bill.  “After Hitler’s rise to power, Joseph Leonard endured for three years the hardships of living in Germany, the loss of his teaching position, the limitation to play only before the `Jewish Culture Organization,’” reported an article in Hollywood Now, HANL’s the newspaper of  record. “But when at last he was subjected to that final curtailment of cultural activities which prohibited his playing of music by `Aryan’ composers, when he could no longer perform the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, he left Germany and accepted the invitation of a Southern California music conservatory [the Pacific Institute of Music and Fine Arts].”[6]

Given the rarity and uniqueness of the archival find, a play by play account might be warranted. Donald Ogden Stewart, the A-list screenwriter who served as HANL’s chairman, introduces the proceedings. “It is my great pleasure as chairman of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League to offer to radio listeners a remarkable new undertaking of the League, a program called Talent in Exile, which will be a weekly feature over this station.  It will present men of talent who have been driven by fascism from their own countries to find refuge here.  Sometimes, as this evening, you will hear their names and sometimes”—here Stewart’s voice takes on an ominous tone—“their names cannot be known.”

Stewart then turns the show over to the Canadian-born composer and lecturer Gerald Strang, director the New Music Society of California and an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA.  Schoenberg himself, perhaps the most famous of all musical refugees, had fled the Nazis in 1933.  Strang provides the deep background on the show’s design and animating principles::

When Hitler came to power, almost every cultural leader who helped to make Germany’s name respected the world over has either left that country in protest or has been driven into exile.  They are men like Albert Einstein, Nobel prize winner for his theory of relativity; like Thomas Mann, one of the truly great authors of this century; like the dermatologist Wilhelm Frei, the bacteriologist Carl Lange; the biologist Richard Goldschmidt, who now teach at our universities.  Men like Max Reinhardt, the famous theatrical producer, and Otto Klemperer, formerly director of the Berlin State Opera and now conductor of our Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Men like Arnold Schoenberg and Ernest Toch, recognized leaders among the composers of our time.  Artists of the rank of [violinist and composer] Fritz Kreisler and [pianist and composer] Artur Schnabel, men who are today in exile from Nazi Germany, together with the music of Mendelsohn and the poetry of Heine.

Strang makes clear that the guest for the evening has earned his invitation:  

From the ranks of these famous exiles comes the artist whom it is my great privilege to introduce, the distinguished young pianist and composer Joseph Leonard.  His notable record as a concert pianist, composer, and pedagogue was officially recognized by the United States when he was admitted to this country in spite of his blindness.  Thus the energy and high ideals which have guided him on his way to musical fame have helped him in surmounting the last obstacle in his path toward a new life—a life in exile but in a country where freedom and democracy are still considered cornerstones of human society.

Strang’s reference to Leonard being “admitted to this country in spite of his blindness” was a diplomatic way of calling attention to the restrictive immigration policies that, throughout the 1930s, barred so many refugees from Nazism from entry into the United States.  He continues:

Joseph Leonard will first play a work by Beethoven who is not only a musical genius but also a true democrat, a champion of human rights.  In this age of dictators it is well to remember that Beethoven tore the dedication page to Napoleon from his Eroica Symphony when he heard that Bonaparte had made himself dictator of his people.  Joseph Leonard will play Beethoven’s Sonata in G Major, Opus 14, Number 2.

Leonard plays the piece magnificently.  Before his next performance, from the pen of Franz Schubert, Strang asks Leonard to say a few words about the reasons for his selection.  “Well, Mr. Strang, there are two reasons why I have chosen this piece,” he says in accented but perfectly understandable English. “First of all, I think that Schubert belongs to us, the talent in exile, because most of his famous songs are written on Heine poems and therefore can no longer be performed in Germany.”  (Heine’s poetry like so much Jewish art and literature was decreed “entartete  Kunst” [degenerate art] by the Nazis. ) “But my second reason is that I feel free again in this free country to play whatever I please under no punishment.  And so, I happily present to you Schubert’s Impromtu 90, Number 3, in the original G-flat major. “

After Leonard’s performance of Schubert, Strang comes on the air again to introduce the third musical selection, a composition by Joseph Leonard himself entitled Five Small Pieces for the Piano.   Strang notes that “As a composer [Leonard] is in the same boat as [Felix] Mendelssohn, Gustav Maher, Schoenberg, Toch,  [Paul] Hindemith, [Bela] Bartók, and Alban Berg, whose works can no longer be played in Germany  today.” Strang repeats the wry compensation: “Germany’s loss is our gain.” Leonard then plays his own Five Small Pieces for the Piano.

After the final performance, an unidentified announcer wraps up the show with the station’s call sign and a final reminder: “You have been listening to the first in a new series of programs, Talent in Exile, presented by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.”

As a regular weekly program, Talent in Exile only aired for a few months in 1938.  It was an unsponsored “sustaining program” that took enormous time and effort, all volunteer, to mount—hence too why its scheduling bounced around on the dial, from Thursday at 9:00 p.m., to Friday at 6:30 p.m., or at 7:00 p.m., or at 8:30 p.m.  Hollywood Now was often reduced to advising readers “to telephone the League office at Hillside 7391 to find out the exact time” of the broadcast.[7]  As far as I can determine, the last regularly scheduled broadcast occurred on May 27, 1938.  However, HANL kept up its campaign over the airwaves—due to the generosity and staunch support of Jack and Harry Warner--with anti-Nazi news and entertainment shows throughout the 1930s.  Also, the Talent in Exile brand was used other forums, such as a massive “Talent in Exile” benefit held on December 3, 1938, at Philharmonic Auditorium, an event held to raise money for the victims of the Nazi pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, now known to history as Kristallnacht.  

Thanks to Eleanor Rubin, one fascinating episode of Talent in Exile has surfaced.  Perhaps, somewhere out there, another descendent of an exiled talent might have a copy stashed away in the attic?  

by Thomas Doherty

Endnote

[1]“Big Names Set for Broadcasts,” Anti-Nazi News, February 20, 1937: 1, 4.

[2] “Joseph Leonard Opens League Radio Series,” Hollywood Now, February 2, 1938: 1, 3.

[3]  “Savage Symphony Set on Exile Program,” Daily Variety, April 28, 1938: 4.

[4] “Dorothy Parker Reads,” Daily Variety, February 22, 1938: 6.

[5] “Hitler, Mother Goose On KFWB Bill--,” Daily Variety,  April 13, 1938: 6; “Air Dr. Mann Career,” Daily Variety, May 5, 1938: 7..

[6]  “Joseph Leonard Opens League Radio Series,” Hollywood Now, February 2, 1938: 1, 3.

[7] “Helen Gahagan, Milt Gross On Air Show,” Hollywood Now, March 26, 1938: 1.

[mcmansionhell]

Looking Around: On Moving; or, The Story of a Little Old House

Author’s Note: This article consisted of two weeks of intense research, involving scouring over fire insurance maps, tables of wages, census records, Sears catalogs, and atlases. Before I begin, I owe some mad thanks to those who helped provide their resources and advice: preservationist Jackson Gilman-Forlini, furniture history guru Susannah Wagner, the nice folks from the Maryland Historical Society, and the research library staff at the Johns Hopkins University.

Anyone who has made copious trips to U-Haul, rendered their fingertips numb after stringing along line after line of packing tape, or spent hours intimately acquainting ones lower back with an ice pack, knows – and loathes – moving.

Moving is stressful. It is a form of migration, itself an immense change. Despite the momentous effect moving has on us, there is little to be found regarding the history of, well, moving. Plenty has been said about techniques of migration, by boat, by horse and buggy, by rail, and by car. 

In novels and movies, from Harry Potter to Doctor Zhivago, there are scenes of train stations, carts with ornamented trunks, and porters donning funny cylindrical hats to haul them. In photographs of Ellis Island complete with their visual narratives of the American Dream, we see thousands of hopeful newcomers cheering gleefully, suitcases in hand. 

As time goes by, the railway porters are replaced with truck drivers; the journey implied by the ocean liner morphs into bucolic images of a smiling suburban family on the island-lawn of their poorly-shuttered idyll. 

Family Moving to their New Home. Washington State, 1935. via Library of Congress. 

Why am I writing about moving? Over the last two weeks or so, I, myself, moved. I moved from a dingy (yet immensely charming) self-constructed room in what used to be a Cork and Seal Factory, to a little 812 square-foot Baltimore rowhouse. 

Each of the times I’ve moved from apartment to apartment (and finally, on this move, to an actual, full-sized house), there have been great difficulties loading and unloading all of my crap – difficulties innate to the houses themselves. These were usually small hardships, involving the clever rotation of a sofa or armchair in order to wrestle it out the door. 

This time, however, I came to a horrifying revelation: None of my existing furniture would be able to A.) fit within the cramped dimensions of the narrow staircase or B.) make it around the corner in the shallow hallway to my room. 

I solved my problem the same way as any reasonable millennial:

Photo by Rainchill. (CC BY-3.0)

Yet, as I loaded up my cart with brown box after brown box, I couldn’t help but wonder: What did people do before Ikea? Why were the stairs so narrow, and more so, what went up them before my trendy flat-packed furniture?

The Little Rowhouse

According to two days of scouring archival newspapers and other primary sources, I could gleam a few interesting things about the little brown rowhouse into which I’m currently schlepping my stuff. 

The Little Brown Rowhouse (center). Via Google Maps.

The rowhouse was built sometime between 1900 and 1902. A Baltimore Sun record from 1898 shows the auction of parcels of land where the house would soon be built: 

EDIT: My colleague, Jackson, has found out that the house was built by a pair of builders named John S. Kidd & William A. Davidson. 

However, the first mention of any of the houses on the row (that is to say, even-numbered houses, as the houses on the opposite side of the street are of a different design), comes later, in 1902, in a divorce notice:

In 1905, the house next door to mine was for lease:

Unfortunately, no searches for C.W. Webb pulled up anything of note. 

I learned some other interesting things during my newspaper dig, (most notably that the folks who once lived a block south from me got busted during Prohibition) - but ultimately, came to a dead end on my original topic: what kind of person moved into my rowhouse first, and how they did it. 

The Process

In order to glean how working people moved back in the early 1900s, I decided to focus on a few key areas of research:

What kind of wages the family would make, what they would spend it on and what kind of local industry they might have participated in.

What kind of stuff was being moved; (AKA what kind of furniture these folks bought and how much it cost)

What the costs were of moving services during this time, and whether they were affordable for the family in question. 

Potential Jobs, Wages, and Expenditures

The best way to look for what kind of industry existed in a certain area at a certain time is through a series of maps by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Co. These maps were used for evaluating fire risk (and therefore how high the premiums should be for fire insurance.)

In the index of a Sanborn Map, there are two parts. First is the list of streets, with a number, corresponding to a plate number. The second is a list of industries along with larger businesses, schools, orphanages, and churches, along with their plate numbers. To find out what kind of industry was near the street you’re looking for, simply look for industries relatively close to the plate number of your street. 

It’s likely that the folks who lived in my house worked in one of two places: as a railworker (at the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad, The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; The United Railroad & Electric Company) or in the stone quarry (Sisson Marble Works, not shown in screenshot). Working class women often worked as well, most likely in the nearby textile mills lining the Jones Falls River.

There are a few smaller industries these folks could have worked in as well, such as the Columbia Motor & Manufacturing Co., The American Can Factory, J. Stack & Sons Lumber, or the Schier & Bros. Dairy. However, it’s most likely that the person who first lived in my house was a stone or rail worker, as the house used to be mere blocks from both the quarry and a massive rail yard:

Image from a 1905 Map. House is in top-right corner, in red. 

Okay, so we know where the head of the household likely worked. How much did they make doing it? 

Were the head of household a worker in the nearby marble quarry, he (women did not work in the quarry in 1900) would have made around $813 a year.

Source: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008319974

Were they a railworker of some sort (the average workweek of railway workers in nearby Pennsylvania was around 62 hours/week in 1901) they would have made somewhere between $420/year as a day laborer and $1350/year as a senior engineer. Source. 

What would these folks spend these wages on? Here are some more statistics (average expenditures) from Pennsylvania (a neighboring state with similar industries.)

Source.

Now that we know what these folks might have made (on average), let’s see what kind of goods they possibly purchased.

Furniture

It’s difficult to know what kind of furniture most working class folks had in their houses. According to my sister (Hi Suz!), who studies furniture history at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, it’s possible that a family working in 1900 bought some pieces of mass-produced furniture, like that sold by Sears Roebuck & Co.

Page from a Sears catalog c. 1900.

The truth is more difficult, because much of the mass-produced, inexpensive furniture of the time was made out of cheap materials such as basswood and has not survived. It’s also possible that the family had some pieces passed down from generation to generation, which wouldn’t be accounted for in primary sources from the time. What is true, is that there is a certain amount of furniture most folks need for their homes.

Fortunately for us, there are photographs in the Library of Congress of tenement and other working class interiors, enabling us to get a better picture of what folks had in their homes:

Kitchen of a Railway Worker. New York, 1911. Library of Congress.

Living area of a NYC Tenement. 1912. Library of Congress.

Small interior bedroom of a tenement. NYC, 1912. Library of Congress. 

Descriptions of working class housing from the book Working Class Life: The “American Standard” in Comparative Perspective, show some common similarities between how working class homes were furnished; the most important being that average expenditure on furniture rose when folks were paid more. Often, according to the book, almost $13 per year was spent simply replacing cheap linens, curtains, and cutlery alone, so there was little room left over for additional pieces. (204)

Typically, there was a shared living and dining room, centered around a table, surrounded by Windsor or ladder backed chairs, perhaps a sofa and chest-of-drawers, a few trinkets and photographs, and perhaps a rug.

Most of the time, upstairs rooms were almost unfurnished, having only an iron bed frame and felt mattress. 

Those who made a little extra had more frills: a rocking chair and china cabinet in the front room, and in the bedrooms, mirrors, and bathroom fixtures like chamberpots and washbasins. (203)

This description perfectly coincides with the Baltimore rowhouse, which has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a basement (likely unfinished until much later). The bathroom, like most bathrooms in dwellings built before 1910, was a more recent addition. Therefore, It’s likely that the folks who first lived in the little rowhouse had furniture and rooms like those described above. 

Which brings us back to...

Moving

As far as the answer to the initial question of “how stuff got up the stairs”, the answer is that, frankly, not that much had to go up the stairs in the first place. 

Most mass-produced iron beds could be dismantled and taken upstairs in parts. Felt mattresses were extraordinarily thin by todays standards, and, because they’re stuffed and pliable, the family would have little trouble navigating the tricky corner at the top of the stairs. As for the more luxurious items, mirrors, basins, and chamberpots, all are also easily portable.

The answer to the second question, which was how would a family move from one home to another is, sadly, we’re still not sure. What is certain is that, if they came from another city, they probably didn’t take much with them, as shipping or transferring things by train was extraordinarily expensive by working class standards: the Pennsylvania railroad charged 75¢ per piece (not counting oversized items) - to move one item alone was about a full day’s work for a common day laborer. 

If the family were moving within the city, it’s highly unlikely they used a moving company, as the prices for such were hefty as well at 25¢/piece, as advertised in 1898 by this local furniture mover:

A local anonymous opinion from 1904 corroborates this price range, bemoaning the techniques the moving company used to transfer items:

What’s more likely is that the family either had some way of bringing what existing furniture they had to the new house (usually by horse & buggy in 1900) or they bought furniture either by local/national catalog, secondhand or from one of the myriad small dealers or manufacturers in the city itself, seen here in the 1905-1906 edition of Polk’s Business Directory:

As it turns out, the folks who first moved into this house did so in a way not that different from me. They probably called up some folks to help haul what they could (if they were moving within the city) and what they couldn’t, they bought. 

Besides, what’s Sears if not the Ikea of the past?

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content on Patreon!

Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store will go to help victims of the recent hurricanes.

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs are used in this post under fair use for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email kate@mcmansionhell.com before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

[wordshakerofgallifrey]

original “Found You” beginning

a lovely nonny asked me what the original beginning for Found You was, and I am pleased to say that I did not delete it!

so under the cut is the original beginning before I added Jack’s perspective. there’s a lot from here I really liked, but in the end, I loved the beginning I ended up writing a lot more.

It wasn’t always the same, each life they were reincarnated into.

Sometimes they were royals, forced into an arranged marriage. Sometimes they were both struggling to get by. Sometimes they met as kids and grew up together. Sometimes he found her first. Sometimes she did.

Sometimes they didn’t find each other at all.

 *~*~*~*~*

 What started as a bet between her and Darcy turned into a wonderful, slightly terrifying, discovery.

Darcy had bet she couldn’t name ten women who wrote “real” news before World War one.

“Real news, Darcy. Really?” Katherine crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow at him.

He held up his hands defensively. “I’m sorry, Kath, but it’s just a fact that women in that time mainly wrote society pieces. They didn’t write hard-hitting news. I’m not saying I agree, but…”

“Fine,” she rolled her eyes. “I’ll take your bet. What do I get when I win?”

Darcy considered this. “If you win, I’ll drive you to work for a week—” Katherine raised an eyebrow again “—two weeks, plus bring you coffee every morning. And if I win…” he sat back, eyes narrowing as he thought. “You take all my messages, schedule any of my appointments, and take notes for me in staff meeting. Two weeks.”

Katherine leaned forward on the table. “You play chauffeur, I play secretary?”

He nodded. “But,” he held up a finger. “You only have a week.”

Nodding slowly, she agreed. “Deal.” Katherine spat in her hand and held it out for Darcy to shake.

Darcy wrinkled his nose. “Kath, that’s disgusting.”

“That’s business, Darcy.” She proffered her hand again. “Come on, Darce. You know the rules. Spit shake or it doesn’t count.” They’d been doing it since they were kids, and Darcy always hated it.

But rules were rules, and Darcy was nothing if not a rule-follower. Katherine knew that. Sighing, he, too, spat in his palm and shook her hand.

It seemed so innocent at the time.

 *~*~*~*~*

 The first few were easy. Nellie Bly, Margaret Fuller, Ina Eloise Young. She could name them in her sleep. Eliza Lynn Linton, since Darcy allowed her to include European writers.

That’s when it got tricky.

Katherine managed to get a list of eight women before she went where she swore she’d never go again, not after she finally made it out of the intern pool.

The archives in the basement of the Sun’s office.

It was dark, fairly dusty, and freezing. Boxes stacked up a dozen high with faded labels on the front. About halfway into the room, she found a box with June 1914 written on the front.

“Well,” Katherine muttered. “Have to start somewhere.”

Two hours later, she was hungry, cold, had only found one other name, and was seriously beginning to think that being Darcy’s secretary for a couple of weeks wouldn’t be that bad, when she opened a box that said July 1899.

NEWSIES STOP THE WORLD was the headline on top.

“The whole world?” Katherine asked aloud, disbelieving. Skimming through the article, she caught the name ‘Joseph Pulitzer’. “Oh. The World. Clever.” She moved her eyes back up to read the byline.

Katherine Plumber

“Weird…” What were the odds she’d find a fellow journalist with the same name? “Now, Katherine Plumber, was this ‘real news’?”

She read the article again, something about the newsies in New York going on strike, refusing to sell papers until Pulitzer and Hearst brought the price of the newspapers back down. A group of kids with barely a nickel to their name formed a union to fight against two of the biggest media tycoons of the day.

“I think that counts,” Katherine declared, flipping to the page that was paper-clipped to the paper. “‘Newsies Banner’,” she read aloud. “Also Katherine Plumber. ‘In the words of union leader, Jack Kelly’… Jack Kelly?” Why did that name sound familiar?

Katherine looked back at the stack of newspapers she’d gathered. Flipping through one of them, she landed on a cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt. In the corner, there was a scribbled J. Kelly.

There were a thousand J names, but it seemed unlikely that this was a different Kelly that had been mentioned in the Banner.

“Wait…” Flipping back to her list of journalists, she read the last name on the list. “Katherine Kelly… Any relation?” Looking back at the copy of the Sun, she scanned the photo of the newsies union, wondering which one of the boys could be Jack.

She paused at the young man standing in the middle, glaring at the camera. He had dark hair and an even darker scowl. Katherine was sure she’d never seen him before—how could she, if he lived in 1899?—but there was just something about him…

“Jack?” she whispered.

Suddenly, she was slammed with an onslaught of mental images. Not images, per se, more like… memories.

Crumpled papers fall from above. The start of their strike.

He’s an incorrigible flirt.

She pretends not to love it.

A rooftop kiss, filled with hope for beginnings, fear for endings. She wonders if he’ll leave her.

Victory. They win. He’s staying.

“For sure?”

“For sure.”

Her eyes flew open. “What. The. Hell?” she whispered.

Katherine couldn’t explain the way her heart was pounding, why her hands were shaking, or why she felt such a strong connection to some other Katherine Plumber and this Jack Kelly.

Shaking her head quickly, she picked up the copy of the Sun, the Newsies Banner, a handful of articles she’d found by Katherine Kelly, and shoved them all in her bag, stood and got the hell out of there.

 *~*~*~*~*

 Her deadline came and went without her noticing.

She spent the weekend thinking about Jack Kelly. She just… Couldn’t get him out of her head. Some seventeen-year-old kid, who was alive nearly a hundred years ago. Sure, she supposed he was handsome, but it was more than that. It was like… she’d been missing something her life, and suddenly found it, but didn’t know what it was.

It reminded her of a story her sister used to read her, a story about people who led multiple lives. Who came back time and time again as different people. And, sometimes, they had someone who came back with them. You could never have one without the other.

Could she and Jack…?

Katherine couldn’t shake the feeling that it could be possible.

And it was driving her crazy. 

Finally, Monday rolled around again, and she had to face Darcy.

“Good morning, Katherine,” he greeted her when she walked into staff meeting. “Should I have picked you up this morning, or will you be taking notes for me?”

“Later,” Katherine insisted, hoping she didn’t appear as frazzled as she felt. She pulled her laptop out of her bag. “I have to show you something.”

“Like, my schedule for this week?” He teased, sitting next to her.

“Darcy.” Her tone made it clear this was the end of their conversation. Thankfully, he took the hint.

“Alright, people!” Their boss, Bryan Denton, walked in, calling for order. “Let’s put out a paper.”

After the meeting, Katherine made a detour to her desk to drop her bag and turn on her computer. As her computer booted on, she pulled out the articles she’d—well, stolen, for lack of better word. She was driving herself insane, staring at them over and over. Maybe Darcy could be of some help.

Once she’d logged in and cleared any important emails, Katherine crossed the floor to Darcy’s desk. He leaned back in his chair as she approached.

“Hey, Kath. Are you okay?”

“Look at this,” she placed the paper in front of him in lieu of answering. “Katherine Plumber. Same name.”

“So?” Darcy shrugged. “Is she one of your ten journalists?”

“Well, yeah. But that’s not the point. Katherine Plumber only wrote two ‘real’ articles. But then…” she put down a couple more articles from later editions of the Sun she’d found. “See? Katherine Kelly. She wrote about local unions, a couple of investigative reports.”

Darcy peered over his glasses at her. “I’m still not following, Kath.”

“I think she’s the same person. See, Katherine Plumber was blacklisted for writing the Newsies article. But then, she married Jack Kelly, the Newsies union leader… I think.” She pointed him out in the photo. “Katherine Kelly was never blacklisted, so she published under her married name.”

Instead of being impressed with her findings, Darcy had the audacity to look smug. “Well, if she’s the same person, then you only found nine female journalists and I win—”

Katherine slapped a hand down on his desk. “Darcy! That’s not the point!”

The smug look dropped from his face. “Then what is?”

“Darce… I think she’s me.”

Darcy rolled back in his chair. “You lost me again.”

“Do you think… it’s possible that…” Katherine wasn’t sure how to ask the question without sounding crazy. “Do you think reincarnation is possible?”

 *~*~*~*~*

 Katherine took her lunch early, feeling suffocated in the office. Darcy hadn’t believed her, not that she really expected him to. But she’d hoped for a little support.

He thought she was just tired, overworked. He told her she was reaching. “It’s just a coincidence, Kath,” he said. “You weren’t a reporter in 1899. You didn’t marry this Jack Kelly.” He went so far as to retract the bet. And while she was grateful she wouldn’t have to be Darcy’s secretary for two weeks, Katherine did not appreciate him treating her like a child.

It could be possible, right? That she and… Jack had met each other in different circumstances, in different lives? She couldn’t remember much—the memories from Friday were already fading. Struggling to recall anything, Katherine crossed her arms, and put her head down, taking a left outside the building and making her way down the busy sidewalk.

She’s not sure how long she walked, wrapped up in her thoughts, before she knocked shoulders with someone walking opposite of her.

Turning to apologize, Katherine looked up into the face of Jack Kelly.

“Sorry, miss,” he said, before shoving his hands in his pockets and continuing on his way.

She’s in Medda’s theatre, reviewing the show.

She’s in Jacobi’s, asks him about his union and his strike.

She writes her article, worries it’s not good enough.

She celebrates their front-page story with the other Newsies.

She encourages Jack to go back to the strike, to not give up, to fight for Crutchie.

She’s in her father’s office, holds back tears when she sees the betrayed look on Jack’s face.

She’s in the basement of the World, printing the Banner.

She’s in Newsies Square, basking in their victory.

And, just like that, every other past life is flashing in her mind’s eye.

 ***

Wanna Razzle?”  

“Razzles are for kids,” she tries to say snootily, but he sees through it.  

“Exactly.” He pours the candy in her hand, and she pops it in her mouth. They stick their tongues out at each other, giggling at the bright red color the candy turned them.  

“Arrivederci.”

“Au revoir.”

*** 

“You’re a regular Prince Charming, aren’t you?”

“I have a name, you know.”

“Nope.” Names are dangerous. If she knows his name, she’ll get attached. She can’t afford to get attached. “Charming suits you.” 

***

“I guess we surprised everyone.”

He laughs. It’s bittersweet. “I guess we did.” She drops her head to his chest. She can’t believe he’s leaving. “I’ll never be sorry,” he says softly.

She looks him in the eye. “Neither will I.” 

***

And a dozen others, flickering past one another, blurring until she couldn’t see straight. Until she could only think one thing.

I have to find Jack.

[upshotre]

Abati, Osun Governorship Poll and the Supreme Court Verdict

By Semiu Okanlawon Rueben Abati is a household name, at least for those literate enough to consume media contents of the print and television channels. And I respect him. He has a rich profile as a writer and columnist of note; rising to stardom as member and later Chairman, Editorial Board of one of Nigeria’s most thriving newspapers, The Guardian; one time spokesman of a Nigerian former president; founder of a blog, www.ruebenabati.com.ng and a regular anchor on one of the most watched television channels in Africa, Arise. With a First Class degree in Theatre, holding a doctorate degree, Abati simply should be one of the most brilliant minds around. Just as many of us, as school boys, ‘worshipped’ the writings of notable Nigerian writers and columnists such Alaba Ogunsanwo, Tola Adeniyi (Abba Saheed), Bisi Onabanjo (Ayekooto), Alade Odunewu (AllahDe) and even much more contemporary ones like Ray Ekpu, Dare Babarinsa, Onome Osifo-Whiskey and that generation of opinion molders, it is obvious that some Nigerian young minds aiming at careers in journalism and writing may have come under the ‘spell’ of their supposed model; savouring his ideas the way kids savour and devour noodle meals. It is not unlikely that within the academic community as well, some budding researchers in stylistics, writings, communications, dramatic arts and other related knowledge fields may have been making his works subjects of their dissertations. Such are some of the additions that fame can bring. The dossier above has necessitated this piece as a response to Abati’s article with the title Osun, Supreme Court And The Violent Senator. In the said piece, Abati had tried frantically to discredit the judgment of the Supreme Court on the Osun governorship poll which declared that Gboyega Oyetola of the All Progressive Congress was indeed the winner of that election. In summary, he posited that the Supreme Court judges were wrong to have relied on technicalities of the law and also said that the verdict runs contrary to what the common man on the streets expected. This must be made clear at this juncture. Abati’s piece could not have been an unbiased, fair representation of the facts as they are on the Osun governorship poll and the attendant legal wrestling that followed. And lest his audience believe the article was one of the numerous interventions on issues of national importance, we must remind them that Abati, far from being a commentator, detached from the emotions and sentiments of partisanship, wrote his piece to protect the interests (wrong or right) of the political party he to which he belongs. Those who may have forgotten should be reminded that the author of this article in question contested election in Ogun State in 2019 as the running mate to the governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Buruji Kashamu. He is not an uninterested party. Now to his bone of contention! The Osun 2018 governorship election has come and gone including the litigations up to the apex court in the land. Expectedly, the outcome of the litigation certainly will continue to be at the centre of political and legal discussions for some time to come. The Supreme Court, on Friday July 5th, 2019 laid to rest all the issues in controversy regarding the said election and affirmed Oyetola of the All Progressive Congress as the Governor of the State. The Supreme Court of Nigeria is the apex court in the land, thus placing it in a vantage position to do and undo. Its finality is much more embedded in Justice Oputa’s dictum in the celebrated case of ADEGOKE MOTORS LTD. V. ADESANYA & ANOR thus ‘’It is not part of jurisdiction or duties of this court to go on looking for imaginary conflicts. We are final not because we are infallible; rather we are infallible because we are final.’’ The finality of the Supreme Court also enjoys constitutional provision. Thus it is the last bus stop for all appeals. Judges of the Supreme Court are human beings capable of erring, since ‘’to err is human.’’ I, however, hold the view that it has demonstrated unusual courage in matters before it. The court’s decision on Rivers and Zamfara states’ congresses, which were nullified are still fresh culminating in victories for the opposition Peoples Democratic Party in those states. In those instances cited above, when the PDP and their allies threw lavish parties and regaled in their ‘deserved’ victories, the Supreme Court did well! Now that the apex court affirmed the position of the Court of Appeal on Osun’s case, name-calling, skepticism as well as implied casting of aspersions on the character and integrity of those judges may not be ruled out. What hypocrisy! It is needless to state that the apex court in adjudicating upon cases before it, has demonstrated an unusual candour and courage to take the best decisions regardless of whose ox is gored. This has attracted commendations and condemnations from political gladiators depending on their sentiments. It is imperative that the court would not act in vacuum in deciding cases but based on established legal and judicial principles. Responding to Supreme Court’s verdict on Osun governorship election, he had argued that the judgment was based much more on technicality as same was hinged on the absence of Justice Obiorah at the February 6 sitting of the election tribunal, which made the Court of Appeal and the Apex court to nullify the majority decision of the tribunal delivered by Justice Obiora J. Wendel Holmes had stated that ‘’life of law is not logic but experience.’’ It is the latter that culminate in sacrosanct doctrine of stare decisis which urges courts not to depart from principles earlier laid down by them. This ensures consistency of principles of law, which is sine qua non to a formidable legal system. The law has been settled by the apex court in KALEJAIYE v. LPDC which is to the effect that where a member of a judicial tribunal did not participate in a trial and thereafter gives a decision in the matter, the decision is nothing but a nullity. That was why Wole Olanipekun SAN, in his submission at the Court of Appeal equated Justice Obiora’s act to judicial hearsay which has no place in our law. I am of the opinion that informed legal opinions even have much more jurisprudential authorities to back this than the case of KALEJAIYE V. LPDC. It is convenient for this writer to amplify alleged intimidations during the rerun election which were never proved but ignore the fact that the PDP candidate could not indeed have come near the votes he scored in the main election had there been credible voting in Ede South, Ede North, Egbedore where the PDP and its candidate and allies perfected their electoral malfeasance. I invite Dr. Abati to place side-by-side the number of polling units where the rerun took place and those in the three local government areas where APC loyalists were locked indoors to avert the bloodshed they had been promised if they ever voted against a “son of the soil?” Abati further raised in his piece, that the apex court did not consider some issues before it. The answer is simple. It is a well-established principle of Appellate Practice that a single issue, well-formulated, germane, successfully argued and considered by an Appellate Court such as the Supreme Court of Nigeria can dispose off an appeal. As disciples of the Realist School of Jurisprudence that believe in nothing but what the law courts say as law, we need not reiterate that the law as it stands today is what the apex court says in the Osun governorship election tussle. The Supreme Court has power to overrule itself when opportunities present themselves. Until then, the court’s verdict on the 2018 Osun election dispute is not only the extant position of the law but a precedent to be followed by the court when cases that are on all fours with the Osun case come before it. Kindly perish the thought that the positions of the dissenting judges both at the Appeal and the Supreme courts would end up being much more useful to justice and humanity than the majority decisions. There is a complex case of self-contradiction if Dr. Abati in one breath argued that “It is not the duty of judges to rely on public sentiments for determining cases” and in the same breath queries “What does the ordinary man think?” If, using his own words, “it seems to me that the ordinary man in this case considers the ruling of the Supreme Court, an anti-climax,” Dr. Abati appears to have arrogated the right to think for the common man to himself. If justice is to be served based only on the opinions and emotions of the common man, the cases in Zamfara and Rivers would most probably have gone in favour of the APC. Let it be said that in spite of the generally widespread knowledge of Nigeria that the elite claim, we must never conclude we fully understand the real, critical issues that determine and sway the psyche of the common man when he is taking decisions such as those he takes when holding ballot papers at polling stations. The point is this: The ordinary man in Osun, in their huge majority with some card-carrying PDP loyalists, would queue behind a Gboyega Oyetola instead and not an Ademola Adeleke. Forget about someone’s dancing steps. That’s not an issue. There are many other critical considerations that set apart these two personalities and those factors are there for all right-thinking people to see especially when it comes to the serious issues of governance. I conclude by stating that every other argument over this matter amounts to mere linguistic gymnastics aimed at some political intrigues. Let Dr. Abati save himself the trouble of compelling the discerning segment of his readers and followers to question the rationales behind his writings on issues of national relevance. My humble advice! *Semiu Okanlawon, journalist, Communication and Strategy Consultant was Special Adviser, Information and Strategy in Osun and writes via sokanlawon67@gmail.com Read the full article

[pipbabi]

Comic Con

Want to purchase X-Males t-shirts online? Whether you have got a love for The Avengers, Fantastic 4, Thor, or X-Males there are lots or t-shirts and other merchandise to own. My childhood included a love for 60s and 70s Marvel and DC comics, and my capability to attract originates in part from learning the tales I read in those days. We labored for a 12 months together on the piece to plan and draw it. Toy corporations like Hasbro and Kenner used to supply thousands of Batman motion determine than is launched every year with some variation in it. Transformers 2, the science-fiction film is the newest sensation, and is the most awaited film of the 12 months. Let's take the movie Avatar for instance. Once in a while I went back to the game to take a number of more screenshots to increase a plot. Inside a couple of minutes, I began making comedian strips. Not like his different comedian strips, in Battling Boy, the hero is a kid, who is on a mission to save town.

In reality, the opposite collection of battling boy turned fashionable. To conclude on this matter, I think it is a fantastic idea to present our youngsters the funny comics created means-again-when, comics out of your and my childhood. To learn a story in adventurous manner is sort of exciting for all the youngsters. You have to overcome the restrictions of speech bubbles and the problem of telling a narrative body by frame. Admit it you've gotten! I’m positive you have heard this standard online retailer. Since Children's Graphic Novels are actually simply an previous thought with a fancy new name, why shouldn't you discover taking outdated successful comicbook concepts and reinventing them for a new generation? The thought was to convey the identical meaning with words that I instructed through colors, textures and images. Popular On-line Comics solidify a which means of a word as a result of footage assist that means to phrases. The nomination was a serious achievement for an artist who had - quite literally -started out small, drawing Post-it word sized comics and hiding them in different people’s work in bookshops. The primary comedian strips appeared in Germany in 1865. It was about two boys who are getting punished for at all times stepping into mischief.

Moreover, if we are sincere with ourselves, we know that a lot of mischief is downright humorous. Why are previous coins worth more than in the present day's coins? Complete collections will fetch too much greater than random particular person comics. Our intention is to give our readers a good piece of entertaining and educational comics on which is able to grow up not one among the future generations. These blockbuster motion pictures performs a very important function in the comeback of comics. Individuals who wish to cherish their childhood memories with the comics; they will easily find cheap comics to start out their comic assortment. In at the present time of "I need the most recent and latest," we really discover that a few of the real treasures are things of previous. Comic books are detailed stories. Aside from conventions, yard gross sales and used guide shops may also be extraordinarily value effective sources for collectible comic books. A comic ebook adaption as well as a novel publication is being performed for the film's promotion. That assumption is incorrect and is an insult to your entire comic guide neighborhood.

These comic guides provide you with the sort of knowledge you want like where to get the uncommon and beneficial comics and the place you may get first difficulty comics as well as the back subject ones as well. By selling and buying and selling comics you can be there were the artwork work is most loved and Flash valued. Moreover, that is the place you get the meet fellow enthusiasts and catch up on the newest within the comic books world; data that can show invaluable. Some comedian books editions are collector's objects and if preserved in mint quality situation. Books are limited as a result of the reader can't bodily see what the writer envisions. Are those behaviors to be condoned? Eyes grow to be circles or dots, mouths are diminished to curved traces, and noses or ft are triangles. Get the newest information. Those who already evaluate vast talents of our webpage, confess that it is basically the most convenient and straightforward strategy to be in contact with the latest innovations of the world of comics.

Well conscious of the benefits that come from studying comics. Which Marvel comics must you read earlier than (or after) Captain Marvel? Repetition. Return to your daily newspaper and look at the comics’ web page. The cartoonist is using repetition to establish the character. Due to this fact, we might say that it has nothing to do with a altering trends, no matter is new and trendy, photo to pop art print stays within the midst of its recognized usability in subject of art. I seemed, and there earlier than me was a pale horse! There really is one thing for everyone. Cosplay also means costume play and the fans typically come to the comic conventions dressed in costumes. Eight delectable Expansions that followed added to the joy of the sport play. Then by all means, use it. By the use of these exaggerations, it doesn’t matter what different particulars I embody. The possessed doll first hit the screens in the 1988 horror traditional 'Kid's Play'. Corey Haim, the lead of the unique horror film, and Corey Feldman, the two Coreys, reprise their unique roles. Nevertheless, in 2003 Hasbro would relinquish management to Batman's rights to Mattel. You additionally get preferential remedy in some circumstances and entry to special occasions and performances.

DC Comics New Line of Titles Going Strong - Now, Bring Back the Justice Society of America! It may have not been planned but many of this week's comics happen to take care of fathers and sons. That might not sound strange but if you consider classic comics there aren't many prominent father figures. Some of the most prominent super heroes don't possess dads. Superman's father is dead, ditto for Batman, Uncle Ben will be the closest thing to a dad Peter Parker had and now we truly realize what went down to him. I'm not even going to go near Silk Spectre's daddy issues. Is there a fundamental reasons why most superheroes will also be orphans?

I have already noted in a very previous article for the blog that the Men In Black will return in a third installment starring of course Will Smith in the role as 'J' as well as a younger version of Tommy Lee Jones by means of Josh Brolin obtaining the role as agent 'K'. The concept for Men in Black was originally pitched as a comic strip series to Malibu Comics fro which Columbia Pictures chose to option and the rest is history.

Fish Smarty is surely an interactive place where they gathered each of the most beautiful games, comic books and drawings for the children, a kind of educational portal for youngsters aged between 3 and 20 years that provides education through fun and laughter. In other words, children think they play, actually what they do, nevertheless, you parents, you can rest assured that playing is in fact pure education.

The last option will seem obvious for some, and not so obvious to others, which is a thrift store. They are also generally known as second-hand stores, plus they will have a wealth of comics at around a few cents each. In fact, a lot of people have discovered hundred dollars comic books for a couple of bucks, and also have gone to sell big around the resell market. Superhero comics have become a fundamental portion of modern pop culture, as well as their popularity shows no signs and symptoms of fading in the near future. As more and more people understand these characters from other appearances in blockbuster movies, the demand for comic books featuring these heroes has risen. With these affordable reprint volumes, everyone can easily catch up on years of their best hero's adventures.

[slendermanlore]

Original Mythos + Literary References

Here’s a compilation of references to (allegedly) real books, movies, online stories and sites, etc. made by contributors to the Original Mythos.

Original Mythos Meta:

Slender Man would make a pretty nice horror novel in the lines of "House of Leaves".

Essentially, make the novel a collection of witness statements, newspaper clippings, pictures, drawings, articles discussing evidence for an against the slender man and, to tie it all neatly together, a few stories of people who want to track the slender man, unravel the mystery,

And the kicker would be the last 20 or so pages would be missing, with only scraps of paper left, arranged as logically as possible, just excerpts, words, rips, ink stains, etc.

Original Mythos Meta:

It's The Rake all over again!

Conspiracies:

When you posted the part about the chest injuries it reminded me of the Dyatlov Pass incident that was posted in the Unsolved Mysteries thread:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident

Wikipedia posted:

and both Dubunina and Zolotarev had major chest fractures. The force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, with one expert comparing it to the force of a car crash.Notably, the bodies had no external wounds, as if they were crippled by a high level of pressure. One woman was found to be missing her tongue.[1]

Original Mythos Meta:

I'm suddenly imagining a Slender Man "documentary," done in a style similar to The Last Broadcast or that old Alien Abduction TV special. Interviews with witnesses of various encounters through the years, investigation into the different events brought up in this thread, and specialists analyzing photographs, intercut around home video footage taken by a missing family, showing them being picked off by the Slender Man. As we get further into the film, we also start to see behind the scenes footage of the making of the documentary, with crew members not showing for work and not answering calls, various production problems… then finally ending with a note that the director disappeared immediately after completion of the film.

Original Mythos Meta:

"Some say that the worst monsters reside in the imagination, drawn from the greatest fears of those who imagine them. I say there are horrors beyond mortal imagining, and they are far worse. And I have looked on both."

Original Mythos Meta:

The backstories have been working well so far because they talk about things without explaining them, it's sort of along the lines of House of Leaves in that way.

Marble Hornets Preamble:

He agreed, but only under the circumstance that I never bring them back to him, and never discuss what was on them with him. He also highly discouraged me from showing any of it to anyone else. I laughed at this, and said that he must have accidentally made The Ring or something with the way he was talking. He didn’t acknowledge this and brought me up to his attic, where he was storing the pile of tapes.

British Myths, Legends, and Unsolved Tales:

Adair, J. (1989) British Myths, Legends and Unsolved Tales, London: Pan Books.

Original Mythos Meta:

Has anyone thought about the possibility that we are creating a tulpa? It's a thought form that is realized through the efforts of a group of people. We might be creating the Slender Man, making him real.

The Toronto Society for Psychical Research did this with an entity called "Philip" in the mid-70's. There was a book written about it, called "Conjuring up Philip." "He" was a fictional person, knowingly created by the group. It was all fun and games until "Philip" started to take on a mind of his own. "Philip" became real, as far as any paranormal thing could be said to be real. So take all this with a big grain of salt.

Original Mythos Meta:

Now go watch Aphex Twin's 'Come To Daddy' video. Take careful note of the inhumanly tall, emaciated figure the children gather around.

Original Mythos Meta:

The Slender Man, to date, is the only thing to creep me out worse than the Black Eyed Kids… of course, not all the missing children were recovered… who knows what happens to them when the Slender Man is finished?

Original Mythos Meta:

After all, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Original Mythos Meta:

No, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he DID exist.

Small Findings:

I have this coffee table book of photos from Life magazine. The pictures go back to the late 1800s.

Imagine my surprise when I took a closer look at this photo of Yosemite Valley from the 1870s.

Not only did I see our mysterious boogie man

But also the skull and rib cage of some unfortunate soul.

I can’t say for sure that the remains are one of its victims, but I’d be willing to bet on it.

Conspiracies:

XI 20: He who several times has Held the cage and then the woods, He will return to the first state His life safe shortly afterwards to depart, Still not knowing how to know, He will look for a subject in order to die.

Original Mythos Meta:

"There are those who believe they can be "one" with those who are not of our world. These people often think that somehow they have some kind of mental or "spiritual" link. Oftentimes these people will go out into areas that have been reported to be the hunting grounds of said creatures. These individuals are often more dangerous than the creatures that they worship/are in love with. When faced with the choice between the reality of the creature not existing or staying in a fake world they will choose, sometimes to the bitter end, the made up world.

In a somewhat ironic way, those who believe themselves to be the worthy follower/lover of these beings are in fact far removed from the "ideal" being the creature would choose!"

Edvard Tobin "Humanity and the Supernatural: A Dangerous Combo" Pub: 1994

Original Mythos Meta:

In reading this thread, I'm struck by one behaviour of Der Ritter in particular, that of its impaling its victims in a tree, while removing and reinserting their internal organs. It's remarkably akin to the feeding habits of shrikes, also known as butcherbirds.

See, what a shrike will do is capture a smaller animal - anything from a cricket to a smaller bird or mouse - and kill it. Shrikes are songbirds, and their musculature is pretty lacking compared to a straight-up raptor like a hawk or owl, so their kill is messy and inefficient, consisting of many pecks and bites to the head and neck. This continues until the prey animal is either dead or too tired to fight. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that as weak as their jaws are, their claws are weaker, and they wholly lack talons. They're built to perch. So, what a shrike will do, is it will take its prey to a thorny tree, or bush, or even barbed wire, and it will ram its prey down on a spike so that it won't move when the shrike tears it apart.

It's a songbird that's learned to kill, and it does so far more cruelly than any raptor.

Anyone ever hear the Slender Man sing?

e: Wikipedia on Lanius excubitor, the Great Gray Shrike: "This species will lure birds closer by mimicking their calls."

Original Mythos Meta:

I'm still REALLY seeing Slender Man as being related to Shadow People and, now, the hat man. http://www.thehatmanproject.com/

I have this vision of Slender Man coming up to you and Shadow People just… gurgling out of his shadow. As if he creates them.

Original Mythos Meta:

Slender Man is like that stupid game where you lose as soon as you think about it.

If you think about him, he knows. If you fear him, he comes. The only way to escape the Slender Man is to not know about the Slender Man.

Conspiracies:

In 1977, as Led Zeppelin embarked on their tour of the United States, Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult and addiction to heroin were at their peak. His playing was spotty at times, his weight had dropped considerably, and his focus was clearly elsewhere. His delving into the supernatural spirits made him lose sight of the goal of the band, with Zeppelin’s lights manager later remarking that singer Robert Plant would often have to snap Page out of his between-song trances, with Page not remembering how their own tunes went. Page also grew increasingly paranoid in an infamous incident prior to an interview with Cameron Crowe where he ripped a phone out of the wall because he felt that someone was spying on him. It was as if a force he tapped into was corrupting him.

Original Mythos Meta:

I wonder perhaps if Slenderman's name is Zoso, but he would come for anybody who figured it out, which is perhaps why Jimmy Page has been so secretive about exactly where they got their symbols for their IV album.

Hang on guys, I think there's somebody standing in front of my house…

Ghost Stories of the American South:

So once the Slender Man began popping up in this thread, I could have sworn something about it seemed familiar. I’m an amateur folklorist, so I had a few source books lying around. It took me a while, but I finally found something in W.K. McNeil's Ghost Stories of the American South. Most of the tales collected are transcripts of recordings other folklorists made, but McNeil compiles them and offers notes. A really handy book. So anyway, this particular story appears in the book’s seventh section, “Other Supernatural Creatures.”

Original Mythos Meta:

Wasn't there an artist who painted a picture—supposed to be really famous, its in all the big fancy art books. Isn't called "The Scream" or "The Screamer" ? It showed an elongated person with its hands besides its head or doing like the microphone around its mouth.

[...]

Hasn't ANYONE seen the movie "Mimic" ? The Judas Bug. It EVOLVED to look like the prey that it hunted. Now, i understand that this doesn't fit every story (like the wood carvings, But it does rather fit the Woodcarving with the skeleton with the arm-spear, It looks human)

Nathaniel V:

From a grimoire of sorts I picked up at a used book store.

Called The Observations and written by someone calling himself Nathaniel V. I don’t know if that is a letter “v” or a roman numeral 5.

Original Mythos Meta:

I think I mentioned this before--but the original Slender Man pics associated him with fire, as in preceding or instigating fire. Dissection and other means of destruction came later--not that I'm complaining. As Call of Cthulhu d20 once said, a beastie can have a thousand legs today and no legs next time, so long as it makes each encounter more horrifying.

[phawareglobal]

Maleen Fischer - phaware® interview 191

At the age of three, Maleen Fischer was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and, as there was no treatment for this fatal disease at the time in Austria, doctors sent her home. Her life expectancy was only a few years. Now, 20 years later, Maleen discusses early diagnosis, the joy of graduating college and the importance of global awareness.

My name is Maleen Fischer. I'm from Vienna, Austria. When I was very little, my mom, early on, she noticed when she was breastfeeding me - she just described it as thinking that I was out of breath, and she kind of from the get go, after I was born, she knew something was up. We hurried from doctor to doctor until I was diagnosed (with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension) when I was around three years old.

Back in Vienna, at that time, nobody really knew what to do with somebody with that diagnosis, and so they would just kind of say, “Well, you would have to see how it goes,” but they did not give me a very long life expectancy. My father, as determined as he is, and was specifically at that time, he found a very good hospital in New York that was working on treating pulmonary hypertension, and we went there, and we met with a wonderful doctor (Robyn J. Barst, MD) that has since passed away, unfortunately. She put me on an IV treatment that I'm still on to this day.

Now I'm 23 years old, my birthday was in May. I'm doing very well, so I can be very thankful for my family who really didn't want to give up. Now, when I still think back to New York, it's a very hate/love kind of relationship to just think back to that time.  On one hand, it's a beautiful city, and I was always so impressed with everything. My parents, obviously, also tried to make it a great time, always. And, on the other hand, having the doctor's visits, being put on a pump, on an IV system, and I just remember when we were picking out the first bags and backpacks to put the pump in. This kind of journey, to kind of adapt to a whole new lifestyle.

I find myself, in this situation, very lucky that I was diagnosed so early on, so I could get used to this lifestyle for many years. I would assume it's very difficult to be diagnosed at a much later age. I must say I'm very lucky, I've always had friends that were really respecting and accepting of the whole situation. My neighbor, we kind of grew up together, and she knew me even before the pump, as little babies.

I did not go to Kindergarten. I was homeschooled throughout those years and then all the way to high school. And then, what I did in high school was I went, for the first time, into a real school, because with pulmonary hypertension we take into account how many steps we walk during school, and also how young the children are and how understanding they are of not ripping away a backpack. When high school time came around we said, “Okay, this would be the time where we could try out to actually go to a school." I went to a very small school in Florida, and it was completely flat, so no stairs and a very small amount of students. This was the first time I was actually in high school and experiencing other teenagers. It was kind of funny because it really incorporated all the high school drama, first boyfriend love story, whatever, in a very short amount of time. I actually felt very normal during that time, I have to say.

When I was diagnosed, this disease was not known, and so my dad and I, we really did a lot of awareness work; and it started just right after I was put on that pump. We did all types of newspaper reports on it, or documentations. Always my goal was to really get the word out there about this disease, because during our time of working in awareness, we've had so many stories of people coming to us saying, “Because of you, because I saw this show, or because I saw this report, or this news article, I went to the doctor and I actually have pulmonary hypertension”.

When I went into my teenage years I thought, “What can I really do to kind of emphasize that even more? What could give people hope at the same time as kind of give other people a perspective of what pulmonary hypertension really means, and what it does to a life?” From the good parts to the bad parts. That, in the end, was essentially how I ended up writing a book. It really also shows my journey as a person, because the book changed drastically when a few certain situations happened within those, let's say two and a half to three years I was working on it. When it started out, I was speaking about how it was like to go to New York, being put on this medication, living with this medication, going through high school with this medication.

I believe it was in my last year of high school, I had an extremely bad case of an appendicitis and it was overlooked. I can't really figure out, or can't remember the medical term for it, but I had an abnormal appendix so you could not see it on an X-ray and I was sent home with antibiotics, and a day later my appendix ruptured. I was intubated, which we all know is really bad for pulmonary hypertension patients, anybody but specifically us. I was just doing really bad. I barely remember that time, to be honest. I had a sepsis, of course, multiple blood transfusions. This was a time where, of course, throughout my lifetime there was always a lot of uncertainty; but at this point you could really feel, “Okay, I am definitely not invincible, and things happen and things can get really bad.”

I somehow recovered from that, and then, what you have afterwards, the effects, trying to bring your saturation up again, trying to be able to breathe comfortably and with enough saturation, without oxygen masks and the compression masks. And this was really the turning point where I figured, “Okay, this is where I add on to the book, and this is also my way of coping.”

After I finished high school in Florida, and I also did my tests and certifications in Austria, then I looked at colleges. I looked at options that I had, and I wanted to stay in Vienna just because I had a good net of doctors here, and I felt very comfortable here also with my friends and family, and so I found a great college here. This was also the first time that I was a little more detached from my parents. It felt very nice. I know a lot of people say that college is the best time of your life. I don't know about that exactly, but it certainly was a wonderful time and I met so many great people.

It had the same effect to me as high school did, a little bit. It made me feel very normal. In between that, I had some issues with my condition and with the pump, all sorts of things, random things you can think about; but then I also had normal problems like studying for tests, or just mundane things that you really appreciate more, I feel like.

In May, I had my graduation. I was very happy I could graduate with a lot of my friends, actually. My best friend that I had known also still before the pump, and she has a very similar name as mine, it's Marlene, and mine is Maleen, so people would always just call us “M&Ms” instead of having to say the whole name. It was very nice because we would joke around as kids that we would graduate from the same college, and we did. We ended up doing that, and it never even seemed like that was an option.

I worked very hard for those four years, I was very ambitious, and I figured, “If you go on this journey, you're going to college, you might as well just try your best.” Generally, I have this type of personality that I just need to at least try as much as I can in order to feel like, “Okay, if I give it my all if it doesn't work out then I guess it wasn't meant to be.” Luckily, it was good. I graduated with high honors and we had just a great time graduating all together and it was a really, really nice experience. I smile back just thinking about it, and I'm really also just going to miss the whole experience, but I think grad school is definitely going to be a new chapter. Also, at one point, I want to hopefully be working more. I'm looking forward to that.

The advice I would have for somebody that would be newly diagnosed, walking out of a doctor's office, I would say sometimes not everything that doctors tell you has to be taken exactly word for word. Prove them wrong, and so if you get a bad diagnosis you don't have to take it as it is. Don't put your life to a complete stop. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the time a little bit to figure out what to do next, but keep going with the things that you want to do. Not everything might still be an option for you, but there are things that you can still do.

Everybody has so many choices in life. That's a beautiful thing about life. You have so many choices, and if one thing doesn't work out, it doesn't mean that that is the only thing you need to limit yourself to. You can find an alternative. Just go for it, and do it, because even if you feel bad sometimes, that success, or sometimes just doing something that makes you happy, it will make you feel better.

It's always so important to create awareness, and awareness does not need to be going on national television or doing crazy things. You can just simply, honestly tell people that you meet about this disease. Bring it to the attention of other people, and that can already make a difference. That will also make it easier for them to understand, because people are just naturally curious.

And, the second thing would be, if you find yourself in a hole or you think that something's wrong with you because you're just super depressed and other people that you see are coping with the disease so well... It's like Instagram, honestly, most of the time you see really positive things about other people, and even people that have been diagnosed will maybe just tell you the positive things, or tell you that they're coping well.  If people feel like they're not doing well just because sometimes they're depressed or sometimes they don't really know what to do anymore because of the disease, I think everybody feels like that every now and then. Just never feel like an outsider because of that.

My name is Maleen Fischer, and I'm aware that I'm rare. 

Learn more about pulmonary hypertension at www.phaware365.global. Never miss an episode with the phaware® podcast app. Follow us @phaware on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube & Linkedin Engage for a cure: www.phaware.global/donate #phaware 

Listen and View more on the official phaware™ podcast site

[ormlacom]

Follow the Local SEO Leaders: A Guide to Our Industry&rsquo;s Best Publications

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by MiriamEllis

Change is the only constant in local SEO. As your local brand or local search marketing agency grows, you’ll be onboarding new hires. Whether they’re novices or adepts, they’ll need to keep up with continuous industry developments in order to make agile contributions to team strategy. Particularly if local SEO is new to someone, it saves training time if you can fast-track them on who to follow for the best news and analysis. This guide serves as a blueprint for that very purpose.

And even if you’re an old hand in the local SEM industry, you may find some sources here you’ve been overlooking that could add richness and depth to your ongoing education.

Two quick notes on what and how I’ve chosen:

As the author of both of Moz’s newsletters (the Moz Top 10 and the Moz Local Top 7), I read an inordinate amount of SEO and local SEO content, but I could have missed your work. The list that follows represents my own, personal slate of the resources that have taught me the most. If you publish great local SEO information but you’re not on this list, my apologies, and if you write something truly awesome in future, you’re welcome to tweet at me. I’m always on the lookout for fresh and enlightening voices. My personal criteria for the publications I trust is that they are typically groundbreaking, thoughtful, investigative, and respectful of readers and subjects.

Following the leaders is a useful practice, but not a stopping point. Even experts aren’t infallible. Rather than take industry advice at face value, do your own testing. Some of the most interesting local SEO discussions I’ve ever participated in have stemmed from people questioning standard best practices. So, while it’s smart to absorb the wisdom of experts, it’s even smarter to do your own experiments.

The best of local SEO news

Who reports fastest on Google updates, Knowledge Panel tweaks, and industry business?

Sterling Sky’s Timeline of Local SEO Changes is the industry’s premiere log of developments that impact local businesses and is continuously updated by Joy Hawkins + team.

Search Engine Roundtable has a proven track record of being among the first to report news that affects both local and digital businesses, thanks to the ongoing dedication of Barry Schwartz.

Street Fight is the best place on the web to read about mergers, acquisitions, the release of new technology, and other major happenings on the business side of local. I’m categorizing Street Fight under news, but they also offer good commentary, particularly the joint contributions of David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal.

LocalU’s Last Week in Local video and podcast series highlights Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling’s top picks of industry coverage most worthy of your attention. Comes with the bonus of expert commentary as they share their list.

TechCrunch also keeps a finger on the pulse of technology and business dealings that point to the future of local.

Search Engine Land’s local category is consistently swift in getting the word out about breaking industry news, with the help of multiple authors.

Adweek is a good source for reportage on retail and brand news, but there’s a limit to the number of articles you can read without a subscription. I often find them covering quirky stories that are absent from other publications I read.

The SEMPost’s local tab is another good place to check for local developments, chiefly covered by Jennifer Slegg.

Search Engine Journal’s local column also gets my vote for speedy delivery of breaking local stories.

Google’s main blog and the ThinkWithGoogle blog are musts to keep tabs on the search engine’s own developments, bearing in mind, of course, that these publications can be highly promotional of their products and worldview.

The best of local search marketing analysis

Who can you trust most to analyze the present and predict the future?

LocalU’s Deep Dive video series features what I consider to be the our industry’s most consistently insightful analysis of a variety of local marketing topics, discussed by learned faculty and guests.

The Moz Blog’s local category hosts a slate of gifted bloggers and professional editorial standards that result in truly in-depth treatment of local topics, presented with care and attention. As a veteran contributor to this publication, I can attest to how Moz inspires authors to aim high, and one of the nicest things that happened to our team in 2018 was being voted the #2 local SEO blog by BrightLocal’s survey respondents.

The Local Search Association’s Insider blog is one I turn to again and again, particularly for their excellent studies and quotable statistics.

Mike Blumenthal’s blog has earned a place of honor over many years as a key destination for breaking local developments and one-of-a-kind analysis. When Blumenthal talks, local people listen. One of the things I’ve prized for well over a decade in Mike’s writing is his ability to see things from a small business perspective, as opposed to simply standing in awe of big business and technology.

BrightLocal’s surveys and studies are some of the industry’s most cited and I look eagerly forward to their annual publication.

Whitespark’s blog doesn’t publish as frequently as I wish it did, but their posts by Darren Shaw and crew are always on extremely relevant topics and of high quality.

Sterling Sky’s blog is a relative newcomer, but the expertise Joy Hawkins and Colan Nielsen bring to their agency’s publication is making it a go-to resource for advice on some of the toughest aspects of local SEO.

Local Visibility System’s blog continues to please, with the thoughtful voice of Phil Rozek exploring themes you likely encounter in your day-to-day work as a local SEO.

The Local Search Forum is, hands down, the best free forum on the web to take your local mysteries and musings to. Founded by Linda Buquet, the ethos of the platform is approachable, friendly, and often fun, and high-level local SEOs frequently weigh in on hot topics.

Pro tip: In addition to the above tried-and-true resources, I frequently scan the online versions of city newspapers across the country for interesting local stories that add perspective to my vision of the challenges and successes of local businesses. Sometimes, too, publications like The Atlantic, Forbes, or Business Insider will publish pieces of a high journalistic quality with relevance to our industry. Check them out!

The best for specific local marketing disciplines

Here, I’ll break this down by subject or industry for easy scanning:

Reviews

GetFiveStars can’t be beat for insight into online reputation management, with Aaron Weiche and team delivering amazing case studies and memorable statistics. I literally have a document of quotes from their work that I refer to on a regular basis in my own writing.

Grade.us is my other ORM favorite for bright and lively coverage from authors like Garrett Sussman and Andrew McDermott.

Email marketing

Tidings' vault contains a tiny but growing treasure trove of email marketing wisdom from David Mihm, whose former glory days spent in the trenches of local SEO make him especially attuned to our industry.

SABs

Tom Waddington’s blog is the must-read publication for service area businesses whose livelihoods are being impacted by Google’s Local Service Ads program in an increasing number of categories and cities.

Automotive marketing

DealerOn’s blog is the real deal when it comes to automotive local SEO, with Greg Gifford teaching memorable lessons in an enjoyable way.

Legal marketing

JurisDigital brings the the educated voices of Casey Meraz and team to the highly-specialized field of attorney marketing.

Hospitality marketing

Acorn Internet Services’ blog speaks directly to those in the competitive hospitality field, offering blog posts, webinars and more.

Independent businesses

The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes great videos, reports, and podcasts for independently owned businesses and their marketers.

American Independent Business Alliance runs a Twitter profile I follow for its highlights of Main Street revitalization and the Buy Local movement. Inspiring for independent businesses and their marketers.

Link building

Nifty Marketing’s blog has earned my trust for its nifty local link building ideas and case studies.

ZipSprout belongs here, too, because of their focus on local sponsorships, which are a favorite local link building methodology. Check them out for blog posts and podcasts.

Schema + other markup

Touchpoint Digital Marketing doesn’t publish much on their own website, but look anywhere you can for David Deering’s writings on markup. LocalU and Moz are good places to search for his expertise.

Patents

SEO by the Sea has proffered years to matchless analysis of Google patents that frequently impact local businesses or point to future possible developments.

Best local search industry newsletters

Get the latest news and tips delivered right to your inbox by signing up for these fine free newsletters:

Streetfight newsletter

Moz Local Top 7

Tidings Minutive

Local Search Association newsletter

SterlingSky newsletter

Phil Rozek's newsletter

Whitespark Local Pulse newsletter

Follow the local SEO leaders on Twitter

What an easy way to track what industry adepts are thinking and sharing, up-to-the-minute! Following this list of professionals (alphabetized by first name) will fill up your social calendar with juicy local tidbits. Keep in mind that many of these folks either own or work for agencies or publishers you can follow, too.

Aaron Weiche Adam Dorfman Andrew Shotland Ben Fisher Bernadette Coleman Bill Slawski Brian Barwig Carrie Hill Casey Meraz Cindy Krum Colan Nielsen DJ Baxter Dan Leibson Dana DiTomaso Dani Owens Darren Shaw Dave DiGreggorio David Mihm Don Campbell Garrett Sussman Glenn Gabe Greg Gifford Greg Sterling Jennifer Slegg Joel Headley Joy Hawkins Mary Bowling Mike Blumenthal Mike Ramsey Miriam Ellis Phil Rozek Sherry Bonelli Thibault Adda Tim Capper Tom Waddington

Share what you learn

How about your voice? How do you get it heard in the local SEO industry? The answer is simple: share what you learn with others. Each of the people and publications on my list has earned a place there because, at one time or another, they have taught me something they learned from their own work. Some tips:

Our industry has become a sizeable niche, but there is always room for new, interesting voices

Experiment and publish — consistent publication of your findings is the best way I know of to become a trusted source of information

Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, so long as you are willing to own them

Socialize — attend events, amplify the work of colleagues you admire, reach out in real ways to others to share your common work interest while also respecting busy schedules

Local SEO is a little bit like jazz, in which we’re all riffing off the same chord progressions created by Google, Facebook, Yelp, other major platforms, and the needs of clients. Mike Blumenthal plays a note about a jeweler whose WOMM is driving the majority of her customers. You take that note and turn it around for someone in the auto industry, yielding an unexpected insight. Someone else takes your insight and creates a print handout to bolster a loyalty program.

Everyone ends up learning in this virtuous, democratic cycle, so go ahead — start sharing! A zest for contribution is a step towards leadership and your observations could be music to the industry’s ears.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

[newssplashy]

WASHINGTON — Rep. Jim Jordan is facing the kind of slowly percolating scandal that would bring down other politicians in other times.

But like the man Jordan doggedly supports, President Donald Trump, the Ohio Republican has the kind of stalwart supporters who do not lose faith easily, and they are already defending the conservative powerhouse, saying he is the victim of the same “deep state” conspirators.

Liberal bureaucrats embedded in the government — who are trying to bring down the president.

Jordan, a 54-year-old congressman in his sixth term, was defiant Friday night on Fox News, in his first extended response to the emerging charges. He disparaged some of the former college wrestlers who have come forward to say he knew of allegations that the team doctor, Richard H. Strauss, had fondled them. He said he could not explain why other more friendly wrestlers had leveled similar charges.

“I never saw, never heard of, never was told about any kind of abuse,” said Jordan, whose in-your-face brand of politics has made him the choice for speaker of the House by an array of conservative groups. “If I did I would have dealt with it. A good coach puts the interests of his student-athletes first.”

When the show’s host, Bret Baier, read a quotation by a former Ohio State wrestler and Ultimate Fighting Championship star, Mark Coleman, that Jordan would have to have dementia to have forgotten what happened, the congressman offered little explanation.

“I feel sorry for him,” he said of Coleman. “It’s just not accurate.”

Instead, Jordan continued to fan conspiracy theories connecting the emergence of the charges to his aggressive questioning last month of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, the man many Trump supporters hold responsible for the Russia investigation.

“I think the timing is suspect when you think about how this whole story came together after the Rosenstein hearing and the speaker’s race,” he said.

Next week will be another big moment for Jordan: He will be front and center in joint House hearings with FBI agent Peter Strzok, the man in the middle of what some see as the federal law-enforcement plot to take down Trump.

Ahead of that moment, the president weighed in with his unqualified support. “Jim Jordan is one of the most outstanding people I’ve met since I’ve been in Washington,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “I believe him 100 percent. No question in my mind.”

Jordan served as an assistant coach on the Ohio State wrestling team in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which time Strauss is accused of showering with athletes and touching them inappropriately. The university announced in April it had begun investigating the allegations against the doctor, who killed himself in 2005.

Coleman and four other wrestlers have now said Jordan was aware of the abuse but did nothing to stop it. Another former Ohio State wrestler, Mike Schyck, said in an interview Friday that he and other former team members planned to “collectively say some things together,” adding that the scandal is not about Jordan.

But even as more wrestlers step forward, Jordan’s base has mounted a defense. The conservative news media has questioned the motives and truthfulness of his accusers.

One of those accusers, Mike DiSabato, scoffed at suggestions that his motivation in calling out Jordan was political or part of a personal vendetta.

“There were two choices for Jim when he was asked about this situation: He could have told the truth that he saw it, he was there, he was in the showers and saunas with us,” DiSabato said. “He could have told the truth and stood with us, or he could have played politics.”

DiSabato said he was saddened by the congressman’s response.

“I’m sorry, I love Jim Jordan, but he doesn’t get to call me a liar to the entire world,” DiSabato said. “He doesn’t get to call the victims of systemic sexual abuse liars. He doesn’t get to act like he wasn’t in the sauna with us every day being subject to voyeurism.”

The allegations have cast a cloud over the congressman at a time when he is ascendant. Jordan has emerged as one of the president’s staunchest defenders, helping to lead a Republican counterinvestigation of FBI and Justice Department officials who are looking into potential connections between the Trump campaign and Russian election interference. A founder of the House Freedom Caucus, Jordan has also been floated as a possible successor to Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has announced he will retire at the end of the year.

Some of his backers have suggested that Jordan’s accusers are also part of a “deep state” conspiracy to derail his political future.

“Jim Jordan goes against the powerful interests at the FBI & deep state to expose them & hold them accountable for their crimes,” tweeted Mike Tokes, a founder of The New Right, a conservative political organization. “Now all of a sudden there is a concentrated smear campaign against him in a deliberate attempt to discredit his work? The American people know better.”

Jordan’s supporters have tried to amass evidence of that conspiracy. One of the leading talking points, which Jordan referenced Friday night, is the choice of the investigative law firm retained by Ohio State in the Strauss matter. The firm, Perkins Coie, worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and helped to pay for a dossier of unconfirmed accusations linking the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence.

The Daily Caller has also encouraged its readers to question the accusers’ motivation and scrutinized their “sketchy history,” reporting that one of the accusers served an 18-month jail sentence for a fraud scheme.

Jordan has tried to discredit his accusers, especially DiSabato, and his office has sent statements to the press from figures in the wrestling world defending the Ohio Republican, including from the team’s former coach.

In one email, a former Ohio State wrestler’s widow condemned DiSabato as “vindictive and manipulative,” citing a dispute she had with him over a memorial fund set up in her husband’s name.

“I voice my truth, to defend the service of Jim Jordan — including his family — and all that they have given and stood for in this country,” the statement said. “I question the intent, the authenticity, the verity, that Mike DiSabato shares in ANY of his words or actions.”

Other Republicans have taken a cooler tone, either staying silent on the allegations or offering muted statements. “The university has rightfully initiated a full investigation into the matter,” a spokesman for Ryan said in a statement. “The speaker will await the findings of that inquiry.”

As Congress prepares to return to Capitol Hill next week, Jordan indicated Friday that he would continue to maintain his innocence.

“What bugs me the most,” he said, “is that these athletes who you spent so much time with are saying things that just are not true.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Catie Edmondson © 2018 The New York Times

via Latest Nigerian News Online-Nigerian News,World Newspaper

[schrodingerswordsmith]

Jeff Schmalz- An Inspiration in the Face of  a Crisis

      It takes a special kind of bravery to report and research a disease as you are actively dying of it. Jeffery “Jeff” Schmalz possessed this bravery. Schmalz was a New York Times reporter who wrote political articles until the rise of the AIDS crisis. 

      AIDS, an acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, first appeared in 1981 and displayed symptoms of a type of rare lung infection. It was given the name AIDS by the CDC on September 24th of 1982, and went on to devastate many families and communities. AIDS begins as HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, and is incurable. At the time, there was no way to put the virus at bay before it could progress to AIDS. 

      Needless to say, this disease swept through the United States, although perhaps San Francisco and surrounding areas were hardest hit, and journalists were at the forefront providing the latest news, updates, and obituaries. One of these journalists was Jeff Schmalz. Before the crisis struck, Schmalz remained closeted from the newsroom management which included homophobic executive editor Abe Rosenthal. 

      The town of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania served as the town where Schmalz was born and raised. He grew up with his mother and his sister Wendy Wilde past the age of two, as his parents divorced. His father, an alcoholic, died when Schmalz was just a teenager, which prompted him to qualify for a fatherless son scholarship which allowed him to attend Columbia University in 1971. 

      Interestingly enough, Schmalz studied economics and considered attending law school before he eventually began working at the New York Times at age eighteen as a copyboy. He grew to love this job, and after he was promoted to the position of copy editor he dropped out of Columbia to work at the Times as a full-time job. 

      Schmalz became part of the national staff in 1988, and there he worked as bureau chief in Miami. Two years later, he returned to New York as deputy national editor. To preserve his position, Schmalz remained closeted from most of his superiors. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, coming out as gay at the Times resulted in at least some sort of punishment or setback. This occurred to Schmalz in 1983, after he was diagnosed with AIDS and his secret was out. He was passed over for an important promotion and instead was given an entry-level reporting job that he had accumulated far too much experience to logically do. However, Schmalz did come out to his colleagues and those below him, including journalist Samuel G. Freedman. As he wrote in his article “The Man Who Transformed How The New York Times Covers the Gay Community”, “Jeff gave me a field assignment. I would cover the Gay Pride Parade. I understood his agenda right away. Already in my brief time on the Times, Jeff had told me he was gay, the first person in my life to make such an admission. Somehow, in spite of my overall ignorance, he’d sized me up as someone capable of being sensitized to the reality of gay existence and of doing some small part to personally improve the Times’ coverage of it.”

      On December 21st, 1990, Schmalz experienced a grand mal seizure while sitting at his desk and editing an article. His left eye had been twitching for weeks, and he had been experiencing vision problems. Accounting it to stress, he took ten days off and went to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands to relax and hopefully cure his eye twitching. The twitching didn’t stop, and shortly after he returned to work he had the seizure. Many people from the newsroom rushed to his side, and Dr. Lawrence Altman was called from the science desk to assist the situation. 

      A month later, Schmalz tested HIV-positive. His body had already been destroyed by the virus, and his T Cell count measured just two. At first, it was believed that he could be affected by toxoplasmosis, which is a deadly brain infection. A spinal tap showed no instance of this infection, and the doctors decided that they wanted to perform exploratory brain surgery. It turned out that he had a fatal brain disease known as Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy. This is when he informed the paper of his condition, as he himself said, “I just went in and told them that I had AIDS.” He had a warm friendship with Max Frankel, and he said that “Max cried. Lelyveld cried. They were just so deeply and genuinely moved. They told me that the Times would do anything it could. Historically, the Times has always rallied around employees who are sick and has always treated people exceptionally well, including people with AIDS.” 

      Shockingly, Schmalz responded well to Azidothymidine, also known as AZT, and became healthy enough to return to work by 1992. He began by covering the 1992 presidential election and eventually began to report on AIDS. In his article “The Prism of AIDS”, published in December of 1992, he wrote, “Now I see the world through the prism of AIDS… I feel an obligation to those with AIDS to write about it and an obligation to the newspaper to write what just about no other reporter in America can cover in quite the same way.”

      When Schmalz interviewed people affected by AIDS, he informed them that he had it as well. “To be sure, that is an interview ploy; I'm hoping the camaraderie will open them up,” he wrote. “But there is more to it than that: I want them to take a good look at me, to see that someone with full blown AIDS can carry on for a while, can even function as a reporter. Much of the time, it works. Their faces light up. There is hope.”

      In his last three years of life, Schmalz pressed the Times to change the way that they covered members of the LGBT community and, most specifically, gay people. As Freedman wrote, “Jeff burned for the Times to cover gay people and issues in a way that wasn’t exotic or judgmental, and he knew the newsroom politics well enough to recognize that such change would not happen easily. Young, straight, sympathetic reporters like me were Jeff’s stealthy emissaries.” He also wrote about how the Times forbid the use of the word “gay” in all instances except as part of direct quotes. 

      Near the end of his life, Schmalz utilized dark humor to describe his condition. When his declining T Cell count reached the single digits, he joked about naming them. He used his disease as a tool to bring attention to it and to put a human face to it, instead of just lines of words covering pages that describe the deaths of thousands upon thousands of multifaceted people, many in the prime of their lives. “I have a voice that needs to get out now,” he said, “AIDS is not just a disease. It is a revolution in your life.” 

      On November 6th, 1993, Jeffery Schmalz died at the age of thirty-nine in his home where he resided in Manhattan. He leaves behind the legacy of promoting tolerance and acceptance in the New York Times, and providing a voice to those who suffered alone during the crisis. He was a major journalist and was at the face of the crisis via journalism.

     In December of 1992, in a personal article, he wrote, “To have AIDS is to be alone, no matter the number of friends and family members around.”

Citations:

Frankel, Mark. "When Gay Journalists Were Closeted: A History of AIDS Coverage at 'The Times'." Columbia News. Columbia News, 23 Dec. 2015. Web. 11 Sept. 2017. 

http://news.columbia.edu/content/when-gay-journalists-were-closeted-history-aids-coverage-times

Freedman, Samuel G. "The Man Who Transformed How The New York Times Covers the Gay Community." Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia Journalism Review, 30 Nov. 2015. Web. 11 Sept. 2017. 

https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/jeff_schmalz_sam_freedman_new_york_times.php

Martin, Justin. "Remembering Jeff Schmalz, Who Reported On AIDS While He Fought The Disease." KERA News. KERA News, 30 Nov. 2015. Web. 11 Sept. 2017. 

http://keranews.org/post/remembering-jeff-schmalz-who-reported-aids-while-he-fought-disease

Meislin, Richard J. "Jeffrey Schmalz, 39, Times Writer On Politics and Then AIDS, Dies." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Nov. 1993. Web. 11 Sept. 2017. 

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/07/obituaries/jeffrey-schmalz-39-times-writer-on-politics-and-then-aids-dies.html

Signorile, Michelangelo. "Out At The New York Times: Gays, Lesbians, AIDS And Homophobia Inside America's Paper Of Record." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 28 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/new-york-times-gays-lesbians-aids-homophobia_n_2200684.html

WNYC. "Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeffrey Schmalz." WNYC. WNYC, 14 June 2017. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/dying-words-aids-reporting-jeffrey-schmalz/