#and i know the whole self defense in a wild west world but i think the change of weapons wouldve been a nice thing...

[paradiselostbythedashboardlight]

So it’s kinda like my thing now that whenever I enjoy something with an ensemble cast, I gotta assign each character a song by The Mountain Goats, so welcome to Fire Emblem: Three Houses as Mountain Goats songs. 

Black Eagles

Edelgard: Going Invisible 2 “I'm gonna burn it all down today and sweep all the ashes away.” This song feels like her mantra for defiantly destroying everything corrupt no matter the cost. Also the slow and increasingly intense performance of the song just feels exactly how her plan unfolds. 

Hubert: Genesis 30:3 “Open up the promise of the day, drive the dark things away. I will do what you ask me to do because of how I feel about you.” I know this song is about having a baby, but the absolute yet tender loyalty feels perfect for Hubert. 

Ferdinand: Sicilian Crest “Look to the West, look to the man bearing the Sicilian crest.” This song captures the exuberance of Ferdinand while also being about blinding overconfidence and hey! It has the word crest! Fun!

Bernadetta: In the Craters of the Moon “If the strain proves too much, give up right away. If the light hurts your eyes, stay in your room all day.” Honestly, TMG is a very Bernie band what with all the paranoid isolation and abusive fathers, but I like that this one captures her sense of epic-level dread over even small interactions. 

Dorothea: Linda Blair was Born Innocent “Hungry for love, ready to drown, so tie down the sails, we're going downtown.” For a girl who just wants love, a song named after a movie about the exploitation of teen girls. 

Linhardt: Sourdoire Valley Song “Dream the pleasant dreams that people dream when they grow up down here.” A weird song about peaceful Paleolithic life that seems to align with the peaceful, sleepy world Linhardt prefers. 

Caspar: For Charles Bronson “Set you sights on good fortune, concentrate, pull back the hammer, try to hold the gun straight.” A song about giving your all, earning your place, and having the heart of a champion despite everything. 

Petra: Deuteronomy 2:10 “I have no fear of anyone, I'm dumb and wild and free. I am a flightless bird and there'll be no more after me.” This ode to a captured animal who is the last of its kind seems to align with Petra’s existence as a sort of exotic hostage in the empire. 

Blue Lions

Dimitri: Maybe Sprout Wings “I thought of old friends, the one's who'd gone missing, said all their names three times. Phantoms in the early dark, canaries in the mines.” This is just the most heartrending song about waking at night from a dream of people who are now dead, just as Dimitri is haunted by his own ghosts.  

Dedue: Sax Rohmer #1 “I am coming home to you, with my own blood in my mouth.” Loyalty, but this time with Dedue’s penchant for having to fight through literal hell for Dimitri in every route. 

Felix: Spent Gladiator 2 “Stay alive. Maybe spit some blood at the camera. Just stay alive, stay forever alive.” Since Felix is committed to fighting for survival rather than heroic sacrifice, this furiously defiant song about continuing to live despite terrible odds seems appropriate. 

Ashe: Sept 15 1983 “Try try your whole life to be righteous and be good. Wind up on your own floor, choking on blood.” A song about an unjust killing for Ashe who has to reconcile his noble ideals with the unjust death of his adoptive father. 

Sylvain: No Children “And I hope when you think of me years down the line you can't find one good thing to say. And I'd hope that if I found the strength to walk out, you'd stay the hell out of my way.” I mean come on! The title, No CREST BABIES, also its like the ultimate anti-love song for the ultimate anti-love guy. 

Mercedes: Unmasked! “And by way of honoring the things we once both held dear. I will reveal you. I will reveal you.” I imagine this being sung both to Jeritza, masked both literally and metaphorically, with all the kindness mixed with brutal honesty that is Mercedes. 

Annette: Genesis 3:23 “Living room to bedroom to kitchen, familiar and warm. Hours we spent starving within these walls, sounds of a distant storm.” A song about breaking in to your old house aligns with Annette’s own troubled memories of a childhood marred by paternal abandonment. 

Ingrid: Age of Kings “Wolves in the hallway gaining ground. Reach down to the moment when I should have said something true. Shadows and their sources now stealing away with you.” A song about the loss of a heroic past for the idealistic girl who lost her fiancé and watched her own father try to marry her off for money. 

Golden Deer

Claude: Heel Turn 2 “Spent too much of my life now trying to play fair. Throw my better self overboard, shoot at him when he comes up for air.” Claude is so interesting as both a brutal pragmatist but also a dreamer. I really like how he can always survive the game if you let him, despite the compromises he has to make. 

Hilda: Riches and Wonders “I am healthy, I am whole, but I have poor impulse control. And I want to go home, but I am home.” This one is hard since Hilda is a pretty low angst character, but I feel like this song walks the line between her love of the finer things in life versus her eventually learning to stand on her own. 

Leonie: The Legend of Chavo Guerrero “And I need justice in my life: here it comes. Look high, it's my last hope. Chavo Guerrero, coming off the top rope.” Replace Chavo with Jeralt and we have a perfect song about hero-worship and how it can get us through hardship. 

Lorenz: The Mess Inside “Tried to find the creeping sense of dread with temporal things, most of the time I guess I felt alright.” This was another hard one, but given Lorenz’s persistent failure as a lady’s man it seems right that he would just be enjoying luxuries to distract himself from his lack of love. 

Raphael: Animal Mask “That was when we were young and green, in the dawning hours of our team. Some things you will remember, some things stay sweet forever.” One of the few genuinely sweet and happy TMG songs for a sweet and good boy. I am conceptualizing this as being about his childhood friendship with Ignatz and his role as a protector to his sister. 

Ignatz: Unicorn Tolerance “Get a momentary chance to see the thing I've been trying to beat to death, the soft creature that I used to be.” A song about forcing yourself to seem tough when you actually love unicorns, just as Ignatz tries to be a knight for his family, but he just loves art and semi-horny religious iconography. 

Marianne: In the Hidden Places “I turned my face away and I shut my eyes tight. Dreamed about the flowers that hide from the light, on dark hillsides, in the hidden places.” A song to sum up Marianne’s desire to keep herself away from anyone she might endanger. 

Lysithea: The Autopsy Garland “You don't wanna see these guys without their masks on, or their gloves.” This is more metaphorical, but the song is about the abuse of Judy Garland throughout her childhood, which parallels Lysithea’s experience with TWSITD. 

Ashen Wolves

Yuri: Fire Editorial “Lord of the hidden pocket knife. Tawdry dreams all come to life. Save yourselves, save this town, save everything not nailed down.” If anyone deserves to be called the lord of the hidden pocket knife, it’s Yuri. Also, the repeated chorus to save the town aligns with his savage defense of Abyss.

Balthus: Color in Your Cheeks “Come on in, we haven't slept for weeks, drink some of this, it'll put color in your cheeks.” A welcoming yet rowdy song for the rowdiest of boys. Also he is like an actual adult so he can serve liquor. 

Hapi: Possum by Night “All your pack dogs have your say. Let me just find my own way. Moon in the trees my guide. Walk with my jaw hinged wide.” Hapi with her prickly attitude and forced loneliness seems right for this heroic little possum. 

Constance: Game Shows Touch Our Lives “Our house sinking into disrepair, Ah, but look at this showroom filled with fabulous prizes.” The feeling of a little brightness in the despair of something fallen makes sense for Constance’s efforts to reclaim the glory of her house. 

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

I wrote this a while ago (4 months?) . Sorry it’s so long, but that’s the drawback of insomnia and no one to gush about a movie to...

Short verson? Unexpectedly I really liked an obscure old western called To the Last Man, basically because the romance at it’s center really connected with me. 

It’s interesting when a movie takes you by surprise.

I’ve been watching a a DVD set Pop fished out of a $5 bin a very long time ago. It’s one of those “20 movies crammed onto two discs, and how watchable the image and sound are doesn’t matter” kind of things. And geez, some of these look horrible. In the case of one movie there were times I couldn’t even tell which character was on screen. These are the sort of churned out discs where the just throw whatever they can get a hold of onto it, quality be damned.

 Not being a huge western fan, and having recently endured a similar set of early John Wayne films Pop had * I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. Still, it was the last of the unwatched movie DVDs so I figured I might as well play them.

Turns out they have been a facinating variety of westerns, covering at least 40 years. For instance one film was a a spaghetti western that actually involved a circus ** and a film next to it was a pilot to a 1970s tv show set in 1914 with the heroes traveling the west in a car. 

Which leads me to the biggest surprise so far, a barely movie length film from 1933 called To the Last Man. 

Now I went into it expecting very little. It was one of those movies so short it wouldn’t be considered feature length now, a western staring Randolph Scott who always seems to fade from my memory as soon as I finish a film. *** Even after it started it seemed to be a Hatfield and McCoy style family fued migrating west, with an already old fashioned silent era quirk of putting the names of the character and actor on screen when they first appeared. And then they added a Romeo and Juliet to the story…

Again I had low expectations, When they introduced the girl, daughter of the baddie family, I thought I knew exactly where it was going. Once out west the girl is a bronco busting, sometimes trouser wearing despite being the 19th century, kind of gal. I liked her, which made me dread the romance ahead.

See stories have traditionally had problems with romances involving  non-traditional women. 

In some stories the woman will be there for the fella, saving his life or something like that, but whatever affections he may have for her the love will be unrequited. Sometimes she dies, sometimes she gets a supporting character love interest, but always the hero goes off with the traditional princess type girl.

 In the stories where there is dainty, aloof beauty for the hero to moon over instead, they go a different route. Those are the stories where women are tamed. The hero often mocks and teases the woman for her non-traditional ways, even outright bullying her and accusing her of not being a “real” woman. She goes through an awkward phase of attempting to be properly feminine, to humorous effect, before eventually transforming into what a woman is “supposed’ to be for the love of her man.

I hate those, both of them. With the first,  I find myself grumbling the gal is to good for him if he cares more about a proper bit of styling and pretty face than courage or kindness. With the second, it’s even worse. Love does NOT demand that the person you love deny their nature and remake themselves to satisfy your tastes. If they have to change into something else to earn your love then you don’t love them at all. 

Anyway, I was sure how this was gonna go, especially with references in the conversation between the father and his thug pal about her wildness. This was gonna be a taming. I liked her as she was, and they were going to break her…

But I was wrong! 

The initial “meet cute” involved her swimming (naked…it was1933) and being harrassed by the thug until the hero rides up and intervened. When afterwards they chatted I was surprised. Sure it was flirty and established their attraction, but in more authentic way than I expected. When he refered to her as a lady and she assumed he was mocking her, in most movies there would be truth in her belief. But not here. To be honest I was as thrown as she was by his sincerity.

Later she talked to one of her father’s men, trying to figure out how a lady would dress because she wanted to dress that way before heading out to find the hero. I thought, “oh no, here it comes”, but again I was wrong. The conversation was sweet as the guy used his mother as an example and offered to help the girl go shopping, only to have her say she couldn’t wait that long. The hero would be camping for the night nearby, so she would have to go find him wearing her usual ratty clothes. She did NOT do the comedy attempt to fancy up!

And then we get to the campfire scene.

They may have met while she was swimming, but he has a body too. She surprises him as he shirtlessly shaves, so there is a bit of admiring the male form, complete with her saying she would think he was “soft” (for shaving so often in her rough world) if it weren’t for the fact she could see his strong arms. Even now too many movies don’t do something as simple as this: Let the man be physically admired by the woman.

During their conversation after he dresses, for all her attraction she is also self conscious of her rough around the edges appearance. When he notes her bare feet must find the mountains painful, she is defensive, expecting it to be a slight. But he quickly reassures her that no insult was meant, and it’s true. He didn’t. Not once in that scene, or in any scene, did he ever belittle her or tell her that she is somehow wrong for being herself.

When he was ready to say goodnight she announces she is staying. While she does tell him he must treat her “like a man” for the night, it’s still a woman boldly telling a man she’s spending the night with him whatever ended up happening after the fade out.

Now next morning she fixes him breakfast. In most movies this would either be the comical “non-traditional woman inept at proper womanly skills” or it would be the “non-traditional woman embraces properly womanly role because of love”. It was neither. She fixed him breakfast, an affectionate gesture to be sure,  but no fuss was made of it. She cooked it skillfuly and he didn’t seem astonished. It was just….breakfast.

Naturally as they are now head over heels for each other, this is when they find out each other’s family names, with the expected emotional turmoil. Now you would expect a few hostile scenes between them before they get over the whole feud thing, but they actually get over it quickly. By the time he buys gifts for his reunion with his family, he buys one more gift for her. And sure, when he leaves it where she can find it she at first angrily tosses it in the fire…before fishing it out. The fact is they are still in love, family war or not.  

About that gift..yes, it is a dress, but it doesn’t feel like a judgement or a nudge but a gift given with love of something she desires. He doesn’t know that when her father got out of prison he commented on her shabby dress,which she explained was her only dress after the hard life she’d had to live. He does know she was self conscious about the dress she wore when they met. It feels like a thoughtful gesture.  

The next time they are together, her family has stollen his family’s horses and she is joyfully riding the horse his brother had recently given to him. This would be a  moment for a lot of shouting and protesting that their own families were in the right. Instead we see little of the encounter except from the viewpoint of the distant thug. Considering the couple kiss and he smilingly sees her off on what had been his horse, I really don’t think there was much shouting.

Naturally the thug, who has designs on her,  tells her father abouther romance. The dress she’d hidden away is dug out as proof. She defiantly says she intends to wear the dress at her wedding to the hero, and her father lashes her. It’s off camera but we see him swinging the whip, so whoa, horrible daddy there! 

Stuff happens with the feud, which I’ve almost totally ignored**** despite it being the main plot, which culminates in the thug engineering a rock slide. The only survivor of the men folk from both clans is, of course, our hero. As he staggers to the girl’s home he seems horribly injured and dazed almost to senselessness. There is no sudden miraculous recovery for the sake of love scenes, fights or plot.  This is convincing the way 99% of all action movies ever aren’t when it comes to traumatic injuries. He needs care..

So here comes the thug. The girl quickly hides the hero in the loft and goes to work to deal with the villian. She has to feign normalicy, then react as he would expect her to react, while he makes clear she is to be considered his property and she has to figure out how to play that considering she is trying to hide her beloved. The dazed hero can hear what’s going on, tries to aim his gun, and drops it. The villian know the hero is there, so it’s time for a fight scene..l.

And the fight is between the villian and the girl!! And this is no dainty girly crap like so many movies have thrown at us. 

Mom and I used to have this thing of yelling at the screen “Hit him!!!!!” whenever heroes and villians would fight and the love interest would stand by looking helpless. I mean, I dunno about you but if someone is trying to kill someone I love they are gonna find themselves fuckin’ fughting TWO people!

And here the girl was doing some serious full body, roll on the floor punching and biting fighting. This wasn’t damsel in distress “You brute!” thumps at the chest or gingerly smashed vases on the head. She fought like she was trying to save the life of someone she loved. Which should be expected, but isn’t when watching an old western.

Alright, so the hero does finally do in the baddie by dropping down with a knife…but now that I think about it maybe SHE was the hero of the movie anyway.

Well, maybe to me she was because she was my identification character. Most of these westerns haven’t had women I could relate to at all, and here was one I related to on some very deep level. I got her. 

Now my family was nothing like hers, not only in the lack of violence (with the ones exception of a relative you can guess) but that they were hardly uneducated (say hello to the ONLY relative I even know of that didn’t graduate college…that would be me BTW) Heck, Pop was a total sweetheart.

And yet I got her. 

An unconventional woman type myself, I never learned the girly stuff. Partly that was accidental and partly it was impractical for the life we lived. I did have to be willing to be rough and tumble, with no line between guy stuff and girl stuff. When I was a kid I was also the only girl in a neighborhood of boys where being a sissy was the worst insult and you had to be ready to fight. I was the girl that swam in the river and played in the woods. And for various reasons ( would take a while to explain) I’ve spent most of my life in worn out work clothes. 

Actually that’s an aspect that makes her resonate even more: clothes. 

I don’t dress like her, but I have my own version shabby woods girl going on. As I write this I’m wearing one of my father’s old t-shirts with holes in it, jeans worn at the knees, a broken hair barrette in my hair, and steel toed men’s work boots on my feet. 

Now there are reasons for all of these. The practicalities of farm amd woods life, being poor enough I’d have to choose between new clothes or things like books, a childhood trauma that gave me a lifelong desire to dress for fight or flight, not having a social life so 99% of the time no human sees me, living in a rural area with no credit card for onlinr ordering and, in the case of the boots, just the fact they are all I can find locally that work with the ankle braces my flat feet force me to wear.

But notice what is missing from all these reasons: fashion. I almost never get to wear clothes I actually like. I’d flip through catalogs or wander stores and imagine wearing this or that. I have strong feelings about clothes I like or don’t, but no real chance to express it. I actually fantasize about that, living the sort of lifestyle where even if you are adventuring you get to pick clothes you want to wear.

Somewhere along the line people started assuming I what I wear reflects my taste, or rather lack there of. I used to ask my cousin at Christmas to please give me something pretty. She couldn’t understand it as a request, but folks just never thought of me as wanting pretty things. What would it have been like, just once, to try to be pretty. 

Actually I’d probably have been laughed at, a comedy buffoon, the hideous lady trying to look cute, the ugly step sister. Just as well life never gave me a chance to try. 

So being self conscious about my appearance is normal for me. I know how I look to people. I also know from experience that people can be cruel, and have taken my share of insults and mocking. In her position I would have thought he was making fun of me too and reacted almost exactly like her. In fact, I have. 

Here is a heroine I can relate to, and she gets the fantasy too. The fella falls in love with her, and loves her as is, not as a fix it upper. He loves her and doesn’t tease her about things where she is sensitive. He gives her a gift of something pretty just because he thinks she will like it. She gets to admire him (and his strong arms). She even gets to fight the bad guy to save him! 

Geez, of course I ended up loving the movie!

Never saw that coming, a Randolph Scott film I will actually remember! But the question is, will I finally remember his face or just his arms?

*NOT  a John Wayne fan, and these were some sort of 1930s filler less than an hour formula stuff.

**I REALLY enjoyed this one, but of course I have a thing for circuses. Woody Strode as a trapeze artist gunfighter and Victor Buono as the big bad were nice bonuses.

***That’s always puzzled me. I usually have an excellent memory for faces from movies, but I forget his instantly.

****Also forgotten, Buster Crabbe, Shirley Temple and the rest of the costars. 

[meetnategreen]

By

Glenn Kessler

Oct. 22, 2019 at 12:00 a.m. PDT

We originally had planned to offer a deconstruction of one of President Trump’s Four-Pinocchio tweets over the weekend, as an example of how many things the president can get wrong in fewer than 280 characters. 

But then the president had his wild Cabinet session with reporters, and we shifted course.

So please watch the video above for the deconstruction of the tweet. Below is a quick roundup of some of the more notable claims the president made to reporters.

#1) “I don’t want to leave troops there. It’s very dangerous for — you know, we had 28 troops, as it turned out. People said 50. It was 28. And you had an army on both sides of those troops. Those troops could have been wiped out.”

It was Trump that had said 50 troops. But these tiny numbers belie the fact that Trump ordered the withdrawal of about 1,000 U.S. troops from northeastern Syria from about a dozen bases and outposts scattered across the region, where they worked alongside Syrian Kurdish partners. The hasty withdrawal, prompted by Trump’s decision to let Turkey invade, meant many of these bases had to be quickly abandoned.

#2) “I always thought if you’re going in, keep the oil. Same thing here. Keep the oil. … We’ve secured the oil.”

Trump appears to be talking about a plan to leave a few hundred troops along the Iraqi border area, to prevent the Islamic State from reestablishing its self-described caliphate in the area. That would also help the Kurds keep control of oil fields in the region. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper hinted at such a move when he told reporters over the weekend that all forces would be removed from Syria in the coming weeks “except for — the president has approved the — keeping some forces at Tanf garrison in the south.”

But the plan still has to be put into action. Trump’s language suggests the United States is taking control of the oil. But the U.S. military does not seize foreign oil because it’s against international law “to destroy or seize the enemy’s property.”

#3) “We have a good relationship with the Kurds. But we never agreed to, you know, protect the Kurds. We fought with them for 3½ to four years. We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives.”

Trump misleadingly frames the agreement as the “rest of their lives.” But the United States had certainly made a deal with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is said to have lost about 11,000 soldiers in defeating the Islamic State, after being trained and equipped by the United States. (Turkey considers elements of this force to be a terrorist threat.) To prevent a Turkish invasion, the United States persuaded the SDF to pull back up to nine miles from the Turkish border. In August, the SDF destroyed its own military posts after assurances the United States would not let thousands of Turkish troops invade. But then Trump tossed that aside.

For context, here’s how Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke of the Kurds in 2018.

Secretary of State Pompeo: "…Syrian Kurds have been great partners. We are now driving to make sure that they have a seat at the table.." @jinsadc

229 people are talking about this

#4) “They’ve been fighting for 300 years that we know of, 300 years.”

Trump frequently and misleadingly frames this as a “hundreds of years” conflict between the Turks and the Kurds. There has been a hundred-year effort to create a Kurdish state in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, with the Kurds frequently manipulated by great powers seeking to flex their muscles against a particular nation, such as Iraq. The United States, for instance, spent $16 million promoting a rebellion in Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1970s, only to step aside when the Shah of Iran (then a U.S. ally) decided to cut a border deal in 1975 with Iraq. “There is confusion and dismay among our people and force,” the Kurdish leadership cabled the CIA. “Our people’s fate in unprecedented danger. Complete destruction hanging over our head. No explanation for all of this.”

#5) “The whistleblower gave a false account. Now we have to say, well, do we have to protect somebody that gave a false account?”

Trump says this repeatedly — he’s already earned a Bottomless Pinocchio — but it’s simply not true. Our line-by-line look at the whistleblower complaint, compared to the rough transcript of the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other information, shows that it was fairly accurate.

#6) “So was there actually an informant? Maybe the informant was Schiff. It could be Shifty Schiff. In my opinion, it’s possibly Schiff. He and his staff, or his staff or a whole group.”

This is ridiculous speculation. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) is not the informant. The whistleblower complaint was investigated by the inspector general for the intelligence community, found to be credible and then submitted to Congress.

#7) “I gave away my salary. It’s, I guess, close to $450,000. I give it away. Nobody ever said, ‘He gives away his salary.’ Now it comes up because of this. But I give away my presidential salary. They say that no other president has done it. … They actually say that George Washington may — may have been the only other president to do — but see whether or not Obama gave up his salary.”

The president’s annual salary is currently $400,000 — and Trump is the third president to give away his salary. Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy, both very wealthy at the time, gave their salaries to charity. Barack Obama gave about $1.1 million to charity during the eight years he was president, according to a Forbes analysis. His presidential salary during that period was $3.1 million, though he made millions more from book sales.

#8) “Best location, right next to the airport, Miami International, one of the biggest airports in the world. Some people say it’s the biggest, but one of the biggest airports in the world.”

Trump defended his now-abandoned decision to hold the Group of Seven summit at the Trump National Doral resort, but he needs to get his airport rankings straight. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is No. 1 in the world by passenger volume, with more than 100 million passengers, but Miami does not even rank in the top 20. In 2017, it ranked 40th, according to the Airports Council International.

#9) “Doral was setting records when I bought it, because I owned it for a period of time. Setting records. It was going to — there was nothing like it. It was making a fortune. And then what happened? I announce I’m going to run for office, right? And all of a — and I say we got to build a wall, we got to have borders, we’ve got to have this, we’ve got to have that. All of a sudden, people — some people didn’t like it. They thought the rhetoric was too tough. And it went from doing great to doing fine. It does very nicely now. It’s actually coming back, I understand, very strongly. But Doral was setting records.”

Trump’s Doral resort has been in sharp decline in recent years, according to the Trump Organization’s own records. Its net operating income fell 69 percent from 2015 to 2017; a Trump Organization representative testified last year that the reason was Trump’s damaged brand since he became president. Trump bought it in 2012 and spent several years renovating it, so it’s possible 2015 was the resort’s best year. There is no evidence as yet that it is coming back “very strongly.”

#10) “I don’t know if you know George Washington, he ran his business simultaneously while he was president. … George Washington, they say, had two desks. He had a presidential desk and a business desk.”

We will leave it to readers to decide if the practices at the nation’s founding are relevant today. Washington was one of the nation’s largest landowners when he became president, though they were of dubious value, and he was a shareholder in the Patowmack Co., which aimed to build canals that would have given his land more value. Some historians have been critical — one wrote that Washington “betrayed private trusts in pursuit of private gain” — but our colleague Joel Achenbach, in his 2005 book, “The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West,” concluded: “There is remarkably little tarnish to be mined in the Washington archive. We can be confident that his reputation as an honest man is not the product of a historical whitewash.”

Achenbach told The Fact Checker: “My thinking is that he did remotely run Mount Vernon as a going concern during his presidency, via letters to his farm manager, but it was a completely different era. Back then he had to borrow cash just to make the trip to get inaugurated.”

#11) “Hey, Obama made a deal for a book. Is that running a business? I’m sure he didn’t even discuss it while he was president, yeah. He has a deal with Netflix. When did they start talking about that? That’s only, you know, a couple of examples.”

In defending the Doral deal, Trump mentions deals that Obama arranged after he left office, speculating without evidence that Obama started negotiating them when he was president.

#12) “I don’t think you people, with this phony emoluments clause — and by the way, I would say that it’s cost me anywhere from $2 billion to $5 billion to be president — and that’s okay — between what I lose and what I could have made.”

The emoluments clause is not phony; it’s right in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8): “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Trump’s net worth is valued at $3 billion, so it’s difficult to see how being president could cost him even more than his net worth. Bloomberg News recently estimated that his net worth grew 5 percent in 2018, following two years of declines, bringing it back to the level calculated in 2016. Forbes calculated that as of September, his net worth is $3.1 billion.

#13) “You could end up in a war. President Obama told me that. He said, ‘The biggest problem, I don’t know how to solve it.’ He told me he doesn’t know how to solve it. I said, ‘Did you ever call him?’ ‘No.’ Actually, he tried 11 times, but the man on the other side, the gentleman on the other side, did not take his calls, okay? Lack of respect. But he takes my call.”

We gave this claim Four Pinocchios in July. There is absolutely no evidence that Obama tried to call North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, let alone meet him.

#14) “I see this guy, Congressman Al Green, say, ‘We have to impeach him, otherwise he’s going to win the election.’ What’s that all about? But that’s exactly what they’re saying. ‘We have to impeach him, because otherwise he’s going to win.’ I’m going to win the election.”

One problem with this complaint: Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) says he never said that. The Texas congressman noted that on Twitter, writing, “It’s no surprise that @realDonaldTrump, who promoted birther conspiracies about President Obama, who claimed there were nice people among the bigots and racists in Charlottesville, and who consistently engages in perfidy, would tweet another untruth. I never said that.”

#15) “They’re interviewing ambassadors who I’d never heard of. I don’t know who these people are. I’ve never heard of them.”

This is false. Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union and a big donor to Trump’s inauguration, testified to Congress on Oct. 17 that Trump in an Oval Office meeting on May 23 directed him, special envoy Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to talk to his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani about Ukraine issues.

“We asked the White House to arrange a working phone call from President Trump and a working Oval Office visit,” Sondland said. “However, President Trump was skeptical that Ukraine was serious about reforms and anti-corruption, and he directed those of us present at the meeting to talk to Mr. Giuliani, his personal attorney, about his concerns. It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the President’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani.”

[darthkvznblogs]

I wrote a Voltron: Legendary Defender X Steven Universe oneshot!

It was supposed to be, like, a 1k word cute little blurb, but it ended up at over 5k because I have absolutely no self-control. Also posted over at:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17733932

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13203652/1/Close-Encounters-of-the-Gem-Kind

Also, this is technically part of a larger gamut of crossovers, but this isn’t really connected to those, so feel free to enjoy this on its own!

It’s kind of funny, how much of a backwater the Milky Way is considered to be. Pidge likes to think so, at least - how many humans throughout history have proclaimed Earth to be the center of the universe? It couldn’t be further from the truth, of course, but that certainly didn’t stop them.

The reality is that galactic civilization is practically nonexistent around these parts. There’s nothing like the ancient Alteans, and certainly not like the universe-spanning Galra Empire here, and it shows; the Milky Way lacks any kind of hub worlds, or even designated hyperlanes. It’s the Wild West out here - or, more accurately, the galactic equivalent of an empty Denny’s parking lot at two a.m.

Still, it’s nice to almost be home again. She didn’t expect to be headed back so soon - heck, part of her didn’t expect to return to Earth at all - but it seems Allura found herself a heart, and is allowing the Paladins of Voltron a brief, week-long window before they really take the fight to the Galra for them to let their families know they’re, y’know, still alive.

For how much longer, Pidge has no idea. They’re Public Enemy No. 1, but like, on an intergalactic level. That certainly doesn’t bode well for their continued well-being.

In any case, they’re a few thousand light years out - they’re doing short jumps, so as to avoid leading the Galra back to Earth - when they catch an urgent sounding alien communication, one that makes Allura frown, and summon the other Paladins to the bridge.

“What’s wrong, Princess?” -Shiro asks once he gets there, all armored up - first as always, if not for the fact that Pidge was already there, analyzing star maps with Princess Allura - confused at her expression.

“The Castle’s short range sensors have picked up what appears to be a repeating distress signal. The language is...familiar, but I can’t quite place it.” -she admits.

Shiro crosses his arms. “Familiar how?”

“Yeah, we’re super far away from ancient Altean space.” -Pidge points out.

“Altean civilization became space-faring almost a hundred-thousand years ago. We explored most of the universe.” -she says, as if it should be obvious. “We may not have colonized much, but we did visit.”

Pidge deals with this mind-boggling fact the same way she deals with most things regarding Altea or the Galra. “...oh.”

Allura looks smug, but only for a second, because Coran pipes up after only absently following their conversation. “Oh! That’s Gem code, Princess.”

Allura raises an eyebrow. “‘Gem’ code?” -she asks, on the verge of recognition.

“Yes! I guess it makes sense that they’d still be around.” -he says, eager. “Gems are inorganic life forms - they don’t eat, sleep, or drink, so they are effectively immortal. They were one of the last intelligent species we discovered before the war.”

The Princess snaps her fingers - a gesture picked up from Pidge herself. “That’s right! I remember my father leaving to meet with their diplomats.”

Shiro interrupts the nostalgia train. “Then let’s take a detour and see if we can help them out. Earth can wait just a little longer.”

Allura doesn’t seem like she appreciates the commanding tone, but she clearly agrees, immediately bringing up the Castle’s controls. “Generating wormhole now.”

Lance, Keith, and Hunk come together into the bridge as the starship accelerates into the rift. Seconds later, they re-enter realspace, only to find themselves staring at an ongoing space battle some two thousand kilometers in the distance.

“Well, that can’t be good.” -Lance says, helmet under his arm. He doesn’t sound particularly worried.

“What the hell are the Galra doing so close to Earth again?” -Keith asks, crossing his arms. He, in turn, does. Angry-worried, at any rate.

Lance cringes. Pidge is fairly certain he didn’t put two and two together. “Oh, yeah, that too.”

Allura immediately takes command. “Coran, jam their comms. Paladins, to your Lions.”

The five of them grimly fall into place, taking the chute to their respective giant mechanical familiars. The Paladins burst out into the void, supernatural roars audible even in the oppressive silence of vacuum.

“What are we looking at, here?” -Shiro asks everyone.

“Hands, mostly.” -Hunk says drily. “It’s not just me, right? Everybody else can see the multi-colored giant hands shooting at the Galra fleet?”

Hunk has a knack for summing up the crazy situations Team Voltron usually encounters, and this is no exception. Indeed, a fleet of massive, human-accurate, hand-shaped warships is trading blasts with a Galra dreadnought and about a dozen cruisers. They’re about half the size of the Castle of Lions each, which means they’re all dwarfed by the Galra capital ships. Pidge can make out green and yellow ones, mostly, but there’s a couple blue ones in there, too. She also notices that, while they���ve obviously suffered some damage, the hand ships are all still more or less intact, while a couple Galra cruisers have already become superheated chunks, slowly falling towards the planet, caught in its gravity well.

Judging by the fleets’ positions - the Galra are sandwiched between the planet and the Gem warships - the Galra got here first, and the hands are reinforcements for the Gems below.

“It doesn’t matter what they’re shaped like. They’re outnumbered and we’re here to even those odds.” -Shiro finally says. “Allura, can you contact the Gems? We don’t need them shooting us, too.”

“I will try. I’m not sure the Castle’s translator software includes Gem language.”

“It included human, didn’t it?” -Lance asks rhetorically. “Er, I mean English.”

“No, it did not. English was just relatively easy to decipher. Gem language, on the other hand, seems to be a combination of computer code and spoken word. We’ll whip up a message, but there’s no telling if they can even recognize it for what it is.”

“It’ll have to do.” -Shiro says as they enter firing range for the Lions’ main cannons. “Lance, Keith, focus on the fighters - try to draw them away from the Gem fleet. The rest of us will take out the Ion Cannons. Stay on your toes, everyone.”

The Paladins split into their respective groups - Pidge feels a bit awkward going with the heavy hitters, but her and Green are probably second worst at dog-fighting, so she gets it - and get to work. The Galra immediately begin attacking them instead, completely ignoring the Gem warships, likely overcome by their desire to please ol’ Zarkon with a nice, Voltron-themed gift basket.

Pidge is pleasantly surprised; they’ve only been at this for about a month - just last week, they saved the Balmera and its rocky inhabitants - but they already fight like a coherent unit. Part of it is the Garrison’s training, sure, but this newfound success is largely owed to the mystical link they all share as Paladins. She’s aware that Keith just melted down a squad chasing Lance, that Shiro just took a Jaw Blade to the dreadnought’s main battery, and that Hunk just spotted a cruiser’s Ion Cannon targeting her. Pidge simply dodges out of the way at the last second, letting the overwhelmingly powerful blast tear through the cruiser behind her and Green.

With the final Ion Cannon disabled, the Castle of Lions moves in. Particle blasts pepper the Galra fleet, which wastes no time in retaliating, but these bolts come from point-defense cannons - they’re meant to take down fighters and other such small ships, like the Lions technically are. The Castle’s barrier holds steady against this attack.

“I am detecting a significant Galra field presence on the planet.” -Allura says. “Several hundred Sentries, at the very least, possibly some Galra officers. They seem to be attacking a major Gem installation.”

“Then we better finish this up quick.” -Shiro says. “Everyone, regroup! Let’s form Voltron!”

The Lions roar in unison, flying towards a relatively safe point in space, and begin the morphing process. Pidge has studied it before from the Castle’s recordings, frame by frame, but in the heat of the moment, she can’t quite tell what’s going on - only that she’s now not quite just Pidge Gunderson, or Katie Holt, but a vital component of the immensely powerful whole that is Voltron. There are no longer five Lions and their respective pilots, there is the titanic warrior and their collectively melded minds.

Well, that’s what it’s supposed to be like, she instinctively knows. Eventually. But they’re all still rather new at it, so they still speak up like they’re separate individuals.

“Form Shoulder Cannon!” -Shiro commands, and Hunk immediately complies. The Cannon materializes, targets the remaining cruisers, and fires, swirling ribbons of deadly light tracing wild paths for a second or two before reaching their marks, burning through thick hulls and the decks within. Cataclysmic explosions tear some of the vessels apart, while those that survive are left like wounded beasts, venting atmosphere and spitting out plasma.

The dreadnought is mostly undamaged still, and its repair crews have managed to get the Ion Cannon somewhat operational again - they probably should’ve ripped it off instead of just slicing at it - and so it fires at them.

Before Shiro can call it out, Pidge is already forming the shield. It’s just in time, too, snapping into place as the beam reaches Voltron. Purple energy flares out around them, dissipating into harmless, free-floating ions a couple dozen miles out.

Voltron’s wings return to their original position, and Shiro bellows: “Form Sword!”

“Wait!” -Allura calls out. “Incoming energy signature!”

They turn, and sure enough, a massive shape warps into the battlefield. It’s a complete yellow right arm, a little longer than the Galra dreadnought, and its fist is clenched. It zips past Voltron at ramming speed, completely heedless of the fact that the dreadnought is charging another shot.

“Why aren’t they dodging?” -Lance asks the question on everyone’s mind.

The answer is apparent as soon as the beam washes over the yellow hull, and does absolutely no damage.

“Jesus.” -Hunk says. “What the heck is that arm made of?”

The arm then smashes into the bow of the dreadnought, sending it backwards in spite of its powerful engines trying to compensate. Voltron boosts towards the two warships, but stops in its tracks just as they’re about to reach them, as what looks like a large, yellow bubble - about the size of Black’s protective particle barrier - sprouts from the arm’s surface.

“Is that a woman?” -Lance asks, dumbstruck, as the bubble disappears, leaving behind its single occupant.

Pidge is not as impressed by the person’s apparent gender, as she is by their sheer size - they’re about as tall as the Black Lion while sat on its haunches. Their skin and helmet-shaped hair is the same yellow shade as the arm ship, and they’re wearing what looks like a short tailcoat, olive pants, and brown boots. A square, equally yellow gemstone about as tall as Shiro protrudes from their chest - and, strangely enough, it’s the only part of their body showing up on Green’s sensors.

“I...I guess that’s a Gem.” -Shiro says, his usual stoic composure broken up a bit by the sheer awe this being provokes. Judging by the off-the-charts telemetry Green can make out on them, Pidge is more inclined to label them as some kind of pseudo-divine being.

The giant person spares a brief look for the stunned Voltron, before becoming enveloped in a crackling electric aura, raising their left hand, and blasting the Ion Cannon.

The superweapon briefly becomes incandescent, then explodes, and so does the superstructure beneath it. The Gem then leaps, seemingly unaffected by the lack of gravity, and smashes into the burning wreckage of the Cannon, plunging into the dreadnought’s innards.

“Should we help?” -Keith asks, uncertain.

Lance scoffs. “Help!? Let’s throw her at Zarkon!”

Shiro shakes his head as small, fiery holes begin to violently blow through the warship’s hull. “Let’s leave them to it. I know for a fact the Galra don’t have anything inside that can actually put up a fight. Split up and head to the surface, instead.”

Voltron breaks apart into its constituent Lions, which begin the descent into the Gem world. Pidge notes, somewhat uncomfortably, that the hand ships have moved in, literally grabbing onto the wrecked Galra warships. It reminds her of Facehuggers, which, now that she’s an intergalactic traveller on the regular, she can only hope exist solely in movies.

The planet below isn’t really one to write home about; it’s a lifeless rocky world, not unlike a large Mercury, its thin atmosphere is primarily nitrogen-based - but the mixture is unbreathable for most life forms, humans included - and its soil is rich with aluminum oxides. Why the Gems would choose to settle here, Pidge has no clue. Maybe they like inhospitable worlds? They’re inorganic, so...maybe they’re not all that bothered by them?

The atmospheric burn doesn’t last long, even with the added challenge of dodging the falling debris caused by the battle above, and soon they’re diving through the thin cloud layer. Several artificial structures dot the landscape on the way to the battlefield - enormous columns beaming with light, intricate spires reaching towards space, and colosseum-like buildings floating between the clouds. The ground battle is taking place near a massive canyon network, inlaid with Gem machinery. This is where most of the Gems on the planet are concentrated, if sensor data is to be believed. Then again, their sensors can only pick up the individual gemstones on their bodies, so it’s really anyone’s guess.

“So, what’s the plan? A bombing run, maybe?” -Lance suggests.

“Negative. Some of the Gems seem to be fighting hand-to-hand with the Galra.” -Shiro says. “We’d be risking hitting them, too.”

“So, let’s join them. Let’s fight on foot.” -Keith says. Of course he does.

Hunk groans. Pidge winces to herself, too. Neither of them are too into the pedestrian portion of Paladinhood. “Let’s land nearby and try to find their commanding officer. They’ll probably know where we’ll be the most useful.” -Shiro says, finally.

The Lions come in hot, dust blowing as the massive mechs trot to a stop. Pidge readies herself, manifesting her bayard and hoping against hope that she won’t have to use it.

She runs out of Green’s mouth, meeting up with the others. All their weapons are out already. Shiro leads the way, approaching a small outpost from which a dozen Gems seem to be observing the nearby battle. None of them have anything she can identify as a gun; she spots some spears, a warhammer, several swords, and a bow and arrow. The weapon selection seems highly paradoxical, given their apparent technological prowess, but, then again, Keith’s bayard turns into a sword, too, and that’s über-advanced Altean techno-sorcery.

The next thing she notices is that the Gems are...eerily similar. Even the Balmorans were easier to tell apart; there are three types, all completely different from the last. The smallest are a head shorter than her, all colored in similar shades of red, with thick but stubby arms and legs, and a sort of blocky afro for hair. Their gemstones are all over the place - back of the hand, knee, chest, forehead, nose. Same goes for the other two kinds; one is about as tall as a full grown Galra, their stone an upright rectangle in the middle of their chest, with a poofy head of cheddar-colored hair, orange skin, a red jumpsuit, white gloves and boots, and a glittery yellow-red cape, and a green colored Gem with a triangular gemstone for an eye, a perfectly square head of light yellow hair, and odd, free-floating fingers manipulating some kind of hard-light screen.

“Greetings. We are the Paladins of Voltron.” -Shiro announces, following protocol because he’s, well, Shiro. “We picked up your distress signal, and have come to help.”

Pidge half expects to hear gibberish back from the Gems, but when the tall, orange one replies, it’s in perfect english. “Oh? Is that so?”

Their tone takes all of them aback. It’s the condescending ‘it’s cute that you think you know better than me’ kind of voice Pidge knows very well from years of...overachieving in academic endeavors. It’s also far from the way you’d expect a Commander in trouble to sound like. “Uh...yes? We’re at your service. Where do you need us?”

They languidly turn to the green Gem. “Peridot, where do we need the Paladins of Voltron?”

Pidge vaguely remembers something about the mineral peridotite coming from the Earth’s mantle. Peridot’s voice is kinda nasal, and she sounds...bored. “Ruby squadron theta is requesting assistance, my Hessonite.”

Judging by the way the small, red Gems worriedly fidget at the mention, they’re Rubies, too. Now the colony makes sense; aluminum oxide forms corundum, a mineral real life rubies - and sapphires, which Pidge is guessing is another type of Gem - are found in.

Hessonite hums. “Well, there you go. Go, go! I’d love to watch.”

The Paladins look at each other in confusion, but silently decide not to think about it too much. They rush towards the nearest fight, which is definitely going in the Gems’ favor.

The Rubies may lack any sort of projectile weaponry, but they don’t seem to be fazed much by the Galra Sentries’ laser blasts. They wince and yelp when hit, but otherwise continue charging. They’re also surprisingly strong, taking down the drones in a single punch more often than not. Still, the Paladins join in, blasting and slicing away at the robots. Again, their teamwork has experienced a marked improvement. They’re hardly commandos, but they cover for each other’s weaknesses fairly well. Most of the Rubies ignore them, but a couple of them cheerfully greet and thank them - with the absolute cutest voice ever - before moving on to the next skirmish.

That’s when the first Galra tank pops up over a nearby ridge, points at the departing Rubies, and shoots.

The plasma burst explodes at their feet, and when the smoke clears, one lays groaning face-down, while only a circular, soot-covered gemstone remains of the other. “Lance, Hunk, cover fire!” -Shiro barks out. He dives to cover the Ruby with his body, while the Paladins distract the tank. Pidge and Keith follow suit, bringing up their particle shields, since a squad of Sentries has taken aim at them.

“I’m...sorry about your friend.” -Shiro says, gravely. A large, striped, yellow-orange Gem with a mane of white hair roars past them, and absolutely demolishes the Sentries shooting at them. It’d be funny, if someone hadn’t just died before her eyes.

The Ruby - her gemstone is on her right knee - seems very confused. “What? She’s fine, she’s right there! Not even chipped or anything.” -she says, all earnest and adorable, pointing at the gemstone on the ground. “Haven’t you guys ever seen a Gem poof before? It happens to us Rubies all the time…”

Ah. Pidge thinks she gets it, now. That’s why Green’s sensors and her armor’s onboard systems can’t make out anything but the actual gemstone: the humanoid body is some kind of light construct. The gem is the Gem.

The Gem blanks out for a second, then looks at them with guilt. “Um, listen, I have to go.” -she say. “We’ve been ordered to defend the western entrance to the Kindergarten.”

Keith balks. “You have children here!?”

The Ruby doesn’t seem to understand that word. “No? We have a vein of potential Sapphires, though, so we can’t let the organics anywhere near there.” -she explains, then grabs the other Ruby’s gemstone from the ground and hands it to a very surprised Shiro. “We’re supposed to leave poofed soldiers behind, but...she’s my friend. Just...take care of her until she reforms, please?” -she pleads.

Knee Ruby doesn’t wait for an answer, just bolting - well, more like hup-hup-hup-ing - towards the western side of the canyon network. Hunk and Lance return, fresh from taking out the Galra tank. “Oh cool!” -Lance says, catching the glint of the scarlet gemstone. “That’s gotta be worth like, a cool million.”

“This is, apparently, a person.” -Pidge says, rolling her eyes.

“Wait, what? I thought they were just really into body mods.”

Keith shakes his head. “Were you not paying attention to your Lion’s sensors?”

Lance scowls. “Don’t sass me, Kogane. I’ve got Earth on my brain right now and not much else.”

Shiro puts his flesh and blood hand on Lance’s right pauldron. “We all do, but we need to focus for now.” -he says, understanding, rising as he cautiously pockets the gemstone. “Let’s try to find the Galra commander.”

Pidge pipes up. “Oh, let me.” -she says, then closed her eyes. She finds that thread in the back of her mind and pulls on it, grabbing Green’s attention. Their connection is nowhere near as good as it could be, one day, but this is more than enough for now.

Green is more in tune with life than any of the other Lions - as in, she can sense living organisms better than any of the others - so Pidge asks her to scan the horizon for living Galra combatants. Green roars, and a quick scan later, the actual Galra on this world are marked, and their location relayed to the Paladins. Disturbingly, Green detects none in orbit.

Shiro takes a moment to strategize. “Okay. There’s three groups of Galra soldiers. One seems to be established at their FOB, and lightly guarded - Pidge and Lance, you take those out, and see if you can figure out why the Galra are so close to Earth in the first place. Another squad is establishing static defenses nearby - Keith and Hunk, that’s you. I’ll join the Gems in taking down the ones fighting alongside the remaining Sentries.”

Pidge grimaces. She’s no stranger to taking lives by now - Galra warships may be mostly crewed and defended by robots, but there’s still an organic element in command, and she’s taken down several - but killing up close is an entirely different matter. Something tells her that her mantra of ‘one less Galra is one less obstacle between me and my family’ probably won’t cut it this time around.

Goddamn it, she’s fifteen.

Lance winks at her. Pidge doesn’t think much of it, considering he flirts with pretty much every being that could be argued to be sapient. “Think you can keep up, Pidge?”

“Doesn’t sound like I have much of a choice.” -she replies, deadpan. Pidge turns to Shiro. “I might not be able to interface with their tech without your arm, just so you know.”

“Try it anyway. If you can’t, just destroy their outpost.” -he says.

They split up, and head towards their targets. It’s a short hike, made only a bit sluggish by the debris from the battle. Pidge spots several dormant gemstones among the broken Sentries.

“So, why do you think they all look like girls?” -Lance asks.

“Let’s not assume their gender.” -she says. “We don’t even know if they have one.”

“No, I get that. I’m just saying, they do present themselves as feminine, more or less.”

“Well, it’s not like we’ve met them all. Maybe those Sapphires the Ruby talked about look different.”

Lance hums. “And the big one? What kind of Gem do you think she is?”

Pidge jet-boosts past a Galra hovertank that looks like it’s been physically crushed. “A Topaz, maybe? I don’t know that many yellow gemstones. Could be a Yellow Diamond too, I guess.”

“Yeah, that sounds pretty regal.” -he says. “She’s gotta be like, their queen or something, right?”

“If they’re the leader of Gemkind, fighting on the front lines would be a very poor judgement call. There’s a reason Zarkon’s lived to rule ten thousand years. He just spits out orders from his throne room.”

“Well, that plus magic, right?”

She sighs. As much as she’d love to say that ‘magic is just really fancy tech they don’t understand yet’, she’s seen enough weird Altean and Galra bull to recognize that the phrase is worthless in reality.

“...yeah, that too.”

Her HUD flashes red in warning, just as they’re about to crest the hill overlooking their target. She looks up, and sees a fragment of burning Galra hull falling towards their general vicinity.

“Uh...Pidge? Is that headed for…?”

“Us, yeah!” -she screams, grabbing his arm and punching her thruster pack to the max. They zoom away just in time, as the artificial meteor slams into the hill, the shockwave sending both of them careening across the landscape. The come to a tumbling stop a couple hundred feet away, groaning. The Paladin armor takes the worst of it, for sure, but Pidge is already dreading the bruises she’ll find when she hits the showers later today.

“Are you okay?” -Lance asks.

She shakes her head, more to check for concussions than to say no. “I’m alive.”

He steps into her field of view, offering a hand. She takes it and rises. “Are we still keeping score after this? I’m pretty sure the save is worth a lot.”

Lance smirks. “No, no, I’m pretty sure this just makes us even.”

“What? For what?”

“Sendak, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess that’s true.” -she says. If not for his clutch save, the cyborg might’ve taken them out, instead of the other way around. “I’m pretty sure the game is over anyway, they’re probably all dead by now.”

Lance raises an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”

“The fragment that almost hit us, it exploded in midair. The other piece should’ve landed right on top of the Galra base.”

As if to confirm her hypothesis, an explosion shakes the ground on the other side of the hill. Lance winces. “Alright, let’s go check it out.”

They nearly crest the ridge, before they’re stopped in their tracks. A Galra soldier pops over the hill, running towards them. Pidge brings her bayard to bear, but it’s ultimately unnecessary. It’s the briefest of moments, and the most terrifying sequence of events she’s witnessed in this little space opera she’s on: a blinding light appears behind the Galra, catches up to him, and consumes him. As in, when the glow subsides, the alien has completely vanished. Disintegrated, presumably.

“Oh my God.” -Lance says. Funny, Pidge didn’t peg him for a God-fearing man. Teenager. Yikes, she’s already rambling.

The Galra’s killer soon becomes apparent, as the massive yellow Gem they’d seen in space nonchalantly walks toward them, each step shaking the ground beneath their feet. Pidge can’t quite nail why it’s so different from staring up at the Lions; the height is similar after all, but the approaching Gem is so much more intimidating. Maybe it’s the humanoid shape. Maybe it’s their irritated frown.

It’s probably the fact that their electric aura still crackles as they approach.

“I had not realized that humanity had achieved spaceflight.” -they say. Their voice is definitely feminine, their tone that of someone who knows themselves to be superior. There’s an undercurrent of weariness, too, but Pidge is all but certain it’s not of the physical kind - they move like they’re on a leisurely stroll, as if they hadn’t just dropped from orbit and atomized someone. “With the amount of technology Homeworld left behind, it’s a wonder it took so long.”

The being squints at them. Pidge notices that their irises - yellow, of course - have diamond-shaped pupils.

Ah. Yellow Diamond, then.

“Then again, that armor is hardly of Gem make. Too...flimsy. Much like the rest of you organics.”

Well, that certainly sounds like an insult.

“Not just any organics.” -Lance says. He’s afraid, and covering it up with bravado. Classic Lance. “We’re the Paladins of Voltron, ma’am.”

Yellow Diamond seems...unimpressed. “Is that what you call the waste of quintessence I saw in orbit, Blue Paladin?”

“What do you mean waste? Voltron is like, the most powerful weapon in the universe!” -Pidge says. So she’s feeling defensive of Green and her little found family. So fear makes her lash out a bit. Sue her.

“I mean that the amount of quintessence powering your so-called Voltron would create enough Gems to conquer every planet in every galaxy. And yet, its makers chose to concentrate all that power into five vulnerable little puzzle pieces, and then put them in the hands of humans.”

“Jesus, lady. Calm it down, will you? We wouldn’t even be here if not for your distress signal. We came here to save you from the Galra.” -Lance says. Pidge isn’t sure if it’s intentional, but he’s protectively stepped in front of her. Not that it’ll do much good once Yellow Diamond tires of this conversation and vaporizes them, but it's, y’know, a nice gesture.

“I assure you, your assistance was neither needed nor wanted. These Galra may be a threat to your kind, but as you can plainly see, they are mere annoyances for Gemkind.”

Pidge grabs Lance’s arm. “It’s okay, Lance. Maybe we should just go back to Shiro and the others.” -she suggests, rather urgently. “We’re obviously not welcome here.”

“Good. I thought perhaps I was being too subtle.” -Yellow Diamond says, disdainful. “Take your mechanical pets and leave my world, Paladins of Voltron. Return to that doomed mudball you call the Earth.”

The Gem’s aura subsides, and they turn to leave. Pidge breathes a sigh of relief because yeah, Yellow Diamond was definitely considering offing them. Green and Blue fly towards them as the massive arm ship pokes through the clouds above. The Gem matriarch leaps onto its palm, and disappears into its depths. The ship then points towards the sky, elongates impossibly, and disappears in a vortex of warped space-time.

“Yikes.” -Lance says.

“Yup.”

“That could’ve gone better.”

“Could’ve gone worse, too.” -she points out. “We’re not exactly great at diplomacy.”

“True.” -he says, as their two Lions land beside them. “Hey, what do you think she meant by calling Earth doomed?”

Pidge shrugs. Her nerves are a bit too frayed to really think about it. “Global warming? I dunno, Lance. I just hope we never get to ask her. At least, not in person.”

“Yeah, no argument here.”

They board the Lions, and head towards their fellow Paladins. They’re already taking off, and it’s not hard to figure out why.

“Gems are nuts, you guys.” -Hunk says when they join them. “Like, not even the fact that even their tiny Ruby guys could toss me around like I weigh about half a Pidge…”

“Hey!”

“...they turned on us the moment the Galra were done! We didn’t even have a chance to give them their buddy back!”

Pidge’s eyebrows shoot up. “You kept the Ruby!?”

“I did.” -Shiro says, gravely. “Which means this won’t be the last time we deal with the Gems. We’ll have to figure out a way to approach them safely, now that we know that they aren’t exactly friendly.”

“Earth first though, right?” -Lance asks, hopeful, then amends himself. “I mean, I don’t know about you, but I desperately need some strictly human comforts. Pizza, videogames, beautiful human women…”

Pidge laughs to herself. Trust Lance to ruin a somber moment, even if it’s his own. The internal laugh is, admittedly, a little hysterical - they did just meet a space goddess, after all.

Shiro smiles. “Earth first, Lance.”

[sigritandtheelves]

Worth Its Constancy

Rating: M (bordering on explicit?) 

Timeline: Missing Scene from “The Truth” (9x19-20) 

Tags: MSR, Angst, Motel Sex, Missing Scene

Summary: Mulder and Scully have not been alone together for a very long time. What happened when they stopped at their first motel on the way to New Mexico?

Note: This is a stand-alone story (in a possible series of vignettes) exploring moments from the series post-Requiem. Canon, for me, ends after season seven, but there’s a lot that I love and want to explore from the material that came after.

tagging: @today-in-fic

_+_

Their escape was frenetic as they were shoved into an unfamiliar SUV and pointed toward Canada. Mulder’s hard, determined eye did not meet hers as he defied orders—unsurprising—and angled the massive vehicle southward instead.

“Mulder, Kersh told us to go north. You just got on a road going south.”

“That’s right.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see a man about the truth.”

It was late enough that the highway was mostly empty, rather than its usual sea of taillights. The unfamiliar vacancy lent it an alien quality. Scully should have known it would end like this, shooting into the darkness of I-95 in an unmarked car with fake passports and a fistful of someone else’s cash in her pocket. Was that where her compass needle began pointing when she stepped into his office a decade ago?

“Mulder.”

He shook his head, jaw clenched, and refused to meet her eye. He was rigid with tension, surely traumatized by his time in that filthy cell, but forever unwilling to do anything but launch himself deeper, headlong and screaming into the monsters’ lair. Her Mulder, blindly fumbling toward answers with both arms outstretched, heedless of everything else around him.

She’d been here before. She knew now was not the time to push. But she was not untraumatized herself, and she needed, suddenly and desperately, for him to look at her. “Please, Mulder.”

He must have heard the desperation in her voice; his grip on the steering wheel loosened slightly and the sound of his deep inhale lowered the tension inside the car. “We can’t go to Canada, Scully.” He swallowed, and finally turned to look at her. There was a wildness in his eyes that she recognized. A dangerous wildness. Panic took hold in her then, the same terror that had gripped her when Doggett recounted the phone call in her apartment. Mulder had readied himself for death, and was not yet willing to let it go. He looked away.

She forced herself to breathe before speaking. “Can we stop soon?”

A quick furrow of his brow: irritation. “We just got started. You need a break already?”

“No, Mulder, we need a break.” She reached out a hand to his forearm where she could feel the strain of his muscle, his slight flinch when her skin touched his.

“We’re still too close to D.C.”

She nodded. “Okay. Let’s get out of Virginia, and then will you stop?”

His chin bobbed, barely, in acquiescence.

_+_

Sharpsburg, North Carolina 3:57 a.m.

It was a dingy motel like any number of others they’d visited, and they took a room with a rear-facing entrance. The smell of stale cigarettes and cheap, all-purpose cleaner. She’d packed both of their bags: practical clothes; a weapon for each of them; a pale blue album with photos of William, half full.

Inside, Mulder dropped his duffel and looked into the bathroom, its overhead fluorescent buzzing to uncertain life. He was calmer now. “I guess the orange jumpsuit stands out a bit.”

She smirked at him, uncomfortable now that they were alone in this sparse room with a single bed that seemed to stare at them expectantly. The air felt dense with tension and with all they needed to say.

“I’m gonna take a shower. It’s been a while.”

Scully nodded and moved to sit on the end of the bed, heart pounding. While he showered, she turned on the TV to distract herself, and found that the rest of the world was still there in all its spectacle-driven stupidity. Slapstick comedies and sappy, unrealistic romances played alongside exaggerated news reports of everyday household dangers. She settled on a Star Trek episode because she found the voices and the sound effects soothing. Mulder would laugh.

Even with the television, the room seemed too quiet.  Scully stared at her fingernails, wondering how she could possibly talk to him in all this silence.

The shower stopped with a clunk of the pipes, and a few minutes later Mulder emerged spiky-haired with a towel around his waist. Her heart thudded in her chest again at the sight of him, not only from nerves, but from the pulse of desire she felt suddenly permitted to feel again.

He noticed her looking and smiled awkwardly. “Forgot my shorts,” he said, turning to dig in his bag. She turned off the TV.

“Mulder, come here for a minute,” she said, voice thick.

He stood up from his rummaging, pair of boxers in hand, and walked over to her. Concern wrinkled his brow for a brief moment until he read what was on her face: a potent combination of anguish and lust.

“You okay, Scully?”

She smiled at him in a way that hurt: her eyes so sad. “You,” she said. She touched his bare chest, let her fingers splay out across his heart. “Mulder, it’s you. You’re here.” Steady thump-thump against her palm; droopy eyes narrowing in concern. That hair, damp and sticking in every direction. Without warning, she was crying, hitching sobs that ached in her chest, even as she found herself wanting him to strip her naked and throw her onto the bed. It was a confusing, overwhelming combination of feeling.

Mulder let the boxers he was holding fall to the floor as he took her in his arms, one hand on her head, the other curled around her hip. She was crying against and kissing his chest at the same time. “You can’t keep doing this to me,” she whispered. “You can’t die again.”

His eyes slammed shut and he grunted as the force of her words jolted against his well-armored defenses. “Dana…” she was melting him. He was afraid to lose his resolve.

“I’ve never wanted your sacrifice, Mulder,” she said. Her mouth moved to his clavicle; small kisses over the bone. His left hand was sliding up under her shirt. “I’ve only ever wanted you.” The wet heat of her tongue, briefly against his neck.

“Ah, Scully,” he said.  His right hand joined the left, unconsciously fumbling to unhook the back clasp of her bra. His sacrifice came easy; letting himself be loved did not. Just as he felt the snick and loosening of the fabric, she pulled back to look him in the eye.

“Please,” she said, both hands moving to cup his jaw, her thumbs caressing his lips, only just. “Please come back to me. Please love me.” Her words: hardly a whisper, eyes still shining with tears.

He was gone, then, his resolve in utter ruins at his feet. He nodded against her hands while his own slipped up, up and around under her bra. She arched toward him.

“I can do that,” he said just before his lips collided with hers in a hot storm.

Their coupling was dark and sweet, a testimony of their separation and longing. He made quick work of her clothes; she even quicker of his towel, and then he was backing her to the bed, hands buried in her hair, swelling her lips with the force of his kiss. Her hands wouldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop touching him, grasping as if for dear life, and then she was pulling him, down down into the sheets and into her.

“Now. Please.”

“Yes.”

Then he was so deep in her she swore she could feel it in her ribs; her hands in his hair, her mouth on his neck, his cheek, and then more kisses, lava-hot while he rocked into her again and again. She rolled them over so she could ride him as his fingers bruised her hips with his desperation, his love. There were tears on his cheeks because his heart hurt for her, for this, and the thought that he’d been ready to give it up. It had been almost two years, two years, since he’d touched her like this, felt her swallow him whole with her body, tasted her nipples, touched the slick-hot center of her. He was not dead. The cold ground would not hold him, could not, while this love was here waiting for him. How stupid he’d been to think he could give this up like some self-righteous ascetic, a martyr. But he couldn’t think about that anymore because she was pulsing around him, hovering over him with sex-wild hair and ravenous eyes. He hadn’t seen her like this since before William and he was mad with it.

“Scullyscullyscully oh god Dana, yes.” They fumbled toward each other in the dim light, grasping in the dark and coming hard in the shadowy humid room, together again at last.

_+_

Afterward, he came apart in her arms like wet tissue. He broke, sobbed against her naked breasts for every moment they’d been held apart, for that brief moment he’d spotted her on a train platform with her heart on her sleeve, for the lies he’d had to tell in that filthy jail cell. For William.

She squeezed him to her, so grateful for his tears.

“It’s okay,” she whispered.  “It’s okay.”

When he had spent all the tears he could, he kissed her sternum and raised his head to meet her eyes. “Scully,” he said.

“I’m here.”  

They were drowning in the intensity of their look, taking gulps of each other with their eyes. His thumb came up to graze her cheekbone, palm to jaw. “I missed you.”

She made that expression that was somehow both a smile and a sob at once. “Oh God, Mulder.” Their fingers entangled, then, on the sheets between them, between their not-quite aligned chests. The pillow was damp under his hair, their noses inches apart. “You have no idea.”

He nodded and leaned in to kiss her again. Slowly, sweetly, they came together a second time, drunk with relief and love in the pre-dawn hour. Afterwards they slept, entwined, for hours.

By noon, they were back on the road heading south, then west. They had to see a man about the truth.

-----

End note: the title comes from P.B. Shelley’s short poem “To the Moon.”

Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you think.

[nolondil]

Who Is a Númenórean?

Someone from Númenor, obviously.

In all seriousness, I think that this question is a little less straightforward than it appears at first glance. More than 3000 years after the destruction of Númenor, the term Númenórean was still in common enough usage for Bilbo to use it as the definition of “Dúnedain” when Frodo didn’t recognize the latter term (FOTR, II 1). LOTR Appendix F reaffirms that the two words are synonyms, but it also makes an important note regarding the limitations of the term. Númenórean is not a demonym that can be applied to any inhabitant of Gondor or Arnor. Rather:

After the Downfall of Númenor, Elendil led the survivors of the Elf-friends back to the North-western shores of Middle-earth. There many already dwelt who were in whole or part of Númenórean blood; but few of them remembered the Elvish speech. All told the Dúnedain were thus from the beginning far fewer in number than the lesser men among whom they dwelt and whom they ruled, being lords of long life and great power and wisdom. They used therefore the Common Speech in their dealing with other folk and in the government of their wide realms; but they enlarged the language and enriched it with many words drawn from elven-tongues.

The Númenóreans were a minority group within the realms they controlled, especially in Gondor, which was more populous than Arnor and expanded significantly throughout the first millennium of the Third Age as it established a very large empire in the northwest of Middle-earth. Gondorian monarchs also at times had influence over neighboring peoples such as the Northmen and the Haradrim, but even within “Gondor proper” not all inhabitants were considered Númenóreans, especially in the early period of Gondor’s history. However, the Númenórean worldview was not a static one. Faramir described the state of it at the time of the War of the Ring as such:

For so we reckon Men in our lore, calling them the High, or Men of the West, which were Númenóreans; and the Middle Peoples, Men of the Twilight, such as are the Rohirrim and their kin that dwell still far in the North; and the Wild, the Men of Darkness. (TTT, IV 5)

Tolkien substantially elaborated on this in the essay “Of Dwarves and Men” (found in HoMe XII) which is full of interesting points, but since that discussion is focused mainly on the labels of Middle Men and Men of Darkness I will quote only a few parts:

With regard to Middle Men Faramir spoke mainly of the Rohirrim, the only people of this sort well-known in Gondor in his time, and attributed to them actual direct descent from the Folk of Hador in the First Age. This was a general belief in Gondor at that time, and was held to explain (to the comfort of Númenórean pride) the surrender of so large a part of the Kingdom to the people of Eorl.

…

Thus it came about that the Númenórean term Middle Men was confused in its application. Its chief test was friendliness towards the West (to Elves and to Númenóreans), but it was actually applied usually only to Men whose stature and looks were similar to those of the Númenóreans, although this most important distinction of ‘friendliness’ was not historically confined to peoples of one racial kind.… Also it must be said that ‘unfriendliness’ to Númenóreans and their allies was not always due to the Shadow, but in later days to the actions of the Númenóreans themselves.

The passage goes on to mention the coastal peoples of the Minhiriath (cf. UT, The History of Galadriel and Celeborn, Appendix D) and their Third Age descendants, the Dunlendings, as examples of peoples who by descent should have been considered Middle Men, but became enemies of the Númenóreans due to the abuses perpetrated by the latter. We see this in action in the expulsion of the Dunlendings from Calenardhon when it was gifted to the Rohirrim. Both the Dunlendings and the Rohirrim (then known as the Éothéod) were descended from First Age Edainic peoples, but the Rohirrim were (a) phenotypically more similar to Númenóreans and (b) important military allies, so they were given the more privileged label and the Dunlendings were not.

My hypothesis here is that the label of Númenórean itself was just as confused and politicized as the labels of Middle Men and Men of Darkness. This was not to my knowledge explicitly stated by Tolkien as in the case of “Middle Men”, but I think there is enough evidence that can be gleaned from the Third Age histories, primarily found in LOTR Appendix A, to make a case, though it must remain speculative. The nature of the Appendices’ presentation in LOTR invites critical analysis of this sort because they are explicitly stated (in the Prologue) to be the product of in-universe historians, specifically drawing on sources from Rohan and Gondor. Furthermore, much of Appendix A is printed within quotation marks, indicating ostensible direct quotes from Secondary World historical texts, and Appendix B is an abridgment of The Tale of Years, which is also established as an in-universe text. These works should therefore be understood not as objective accounts but as sources influenced by the cultures and biases of their ostensible in-universe authors.

The significance of the label “Númenórean” was most famously addressed in the case of the Kin-strife, the 15th century Third Age Gondorian civil war. Valacar, the son of King Rómendacil II of Gondor, married a princess of the Northmen, an Edainic people of Rhovanion (Wilderland) who were an important part of Gondor’s defense policy both because of their status as a buffer state between Gondor and the Easterlings and because many Northmen were recruited directly into Gondor’s armies, some of them holding high rank. The civil war began when a significant number of Gondorian nobles and lesser royalty (“the high men of Gondor” and “descendants of the kings”) refused to accept Valacar’s son Eldacar (birth name Vinitharya) as king. Eldacar was deposed for 10 years by Castamir the Usurper who ruled with the support of the coastal provinces, but Eldacar regained his throne with the help of his mother’s people and the inland provinces of Gondor. Eldacar and his descendants were restored to the throne but Castamir and his followers held out in Umbar, which ceased to be part of the Kingdom of Gondor (LOTR, Appendix A).

After the return of Eldacar the blood of the kingly house and other houses of the Dúnedain became more mingled with that of lesser Men. For many of the great had been slain in the Kin-strife; while Eldacar showed favour to the Northmen, by whose help he had regained the crown, and the people of Gondor were replenished by great numbers that came from Rhovanion. (Ibid.)

There is a lot to unpack here. First, it must be noted that the war did not result in Gondor becoming a more racially egalitarian place. The Secondary World historians whose works were the ostensible basis for Appendix A continued to bemoan the loss of pure Númenórean descent in Gondor. The line of kings came to an end after the death of Eärnur some 600 years later because “no claimant to the crown could be found who was of pure blood, or whose claim all would allow; and all feared the memory of the Kin-strife, knowing that if any such dissension arose again, then Gondor would perish.” Because the Kin-strife had already established that partial Northmen descent was not a disqualifying factor, I think the conclusion here is that the lesser royalty of Gondor had been consistently intermarrying with other ethnic groups within the empire, probably including the indigenous and/or mixed descent inhabitants of Gondor proper, but possibly also more far-flung subjects and tributary allies.

It was not until the time of the Stewards that Gondor “recruited the strength of [its] people from the sturdy folk of the sea-coast, and from the hardy mountaineers of Ered Nimrais” (TTT, IV 5). At the time of the War of the Ring the people of Lossarnach and Lebennin “were reckoned men of Gondor, yet their blood was mingled, and there were short and swarthy folk among them whose sires came more from the forgotten men who housed in the shadow of the hills in the Dark Years ere the coming of the kings” (ROTK, V 1). This is contrasted unfavorably with the “high blood” of the men of Dol Amroth but it indicates a significant change in Gondorian policy and self-image since the days of the kings; a change based primarily on the political and military reality that Gondor no longer had enough “pure” Númenóreans under the original definition to remain a viable state. Faramir also noted this as the reason for the Rohirrim being gifted Calenardhon (TTT, IV 5) which, as noted above, also entailed a tweaking of the Númenórean worldview.

Returning to the Kin-strife, it is fairly clear that pure Númenórean descent was not the only or even necessarily the primary factor motivating Castamir’s faction. Appendix A states that “the high men of Gondor already looked askance at the Northmen among them; and it was a thing unheard of before that the heir of the crown, or any son of the King, should wed one of lesser and alien race.” I think that both halves of this statement are of crucial importance: it was unheard for a prince of Gondor to marry a non-Númenórean, but the nobility of Gondor was already displeased with the pro-Northmen policies of Valacar’s father. The rebellion originated in “the southern provinces”, which were all coastal. Castamir “was supported by the people of the coasts and of the great havens of Pelargir and Umbar” and “cared little for the land, and thought only of the fleets, and purposed to remove the king’s seat to Pelargir.” It’s not hard to imagine why the people of these regions, which had been the focal point of Gondor’s power during its zenith under the Ship-kings, would resent a realignment of Gondorian policy towards northern, continental matters; a realignment which gave the Northmen significant power.

(It behooves me to mention that some of these points first caught my interest when reading Chris Seeman’s essay “Rethinking Umbar” and to a lesser extent Codex Regius’ Middle-earth seen by the barbarians, although Codex Regius goes much further into the realm of revisionism than I am comfortable doing and I draw a different conclusion than Mr Seeman regarding whether the Black Númenóreans were fully subsumed into the Haradrim, as I will attempt to explain later in this essay.)

Rómendacil II, by birth Minalcar, was preoccupied with the threat of the Easterlings (his regnal name means “East-victor”) and desired to make the Northmen more reliable allies than they had been in the past. Valacar only met his bride-to-be because his father sent him to live among the Northmen, but he “far exceeded his father’s designs” (LOTR, Appendix A). Looking at Tolkien’s drafts of the Appendices is instructive here, though to be clear as unpublished texts they must be taken with a grain of salt. In a lengthy footnote to one draft Tolkien wrote that Rómendacil approved the marriage because “[h]e could not forbid or refuse to recognize it without earning the enmity of Vidugavia [self-styled King of Rhovanion and father of the princess Valacar wished to marry]. Indeed all the Northmen would have been angered, and those in his service would have been no longer to be trusted” (HoMe XII, The Making of Appendix A). Intriguingly, one version of another text states that after fleeing to Umbar Castamir’s descendants and other minor Gondorian royals who rebelled “married women of the Harad and had in three generations lost most of their Númenórean blood” (HoMe XII, The Heirs of Elendil). This is probably of more dubious reliability but there are a lot of interesting implications to think through here.

At the time of the War of the Ring the Haradrim were an enemy of Gondor and they had been so during the War of the Last Alliance as well. However, after their defeat by Hyarmendacil I of Gondor, Harad became a tributary region of Gondor for 400 years—until after the Kin-strife, when Gondor also lost the province of Umbar directly west of Near Harad. During the tributary period “the kings of the Harad did homage to Gondor, and their sons lived as hostages in the court of its King” (LOTR, Appendix A). Here we are very much entering the realm of speculation, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that the Haradrim played a role not unlike that of the later Northmen. Probably not to the same extent, as the Haradrim were not a buffer between Gondor and other enemies, but there must have been considerable movement of people between Gondor and its tributaries; not only princes but also soldiers, merchants, laborers, and others. We know that there was significant interaction between Near Harad and Umbar throughout much of their shared history, to the point that Damrod (one of the Rangers of Ithilien, who had personal experience fighting the Haradrim in the late Third Age) described Umbar as a “realm” of the Haradrim (TTT, IV 5). I think it is more likely than not that this exchange continued while both were under the sway of Gondor, and from Umbar some Haradrim undoubtedly made their way to the rest of Gondor as well. While it is almost certain that no non-Black Númenórean Haradrim married into the direct line of kings, they could very well have been part of the reason for the overall decline in “pureblood” Númenóreans in Gondor, as mentioned above.

Nor were the nobility of Gondor the first Númenóreans whom the Haradrim had close experience with. For more than a thousand years before it became part of Gondor, Umbar was ruled by the Black Númenóreans: the descendants of the King’s Men faction of Númenor that opposed the Faithful (Elf-friends). The earliest Black Númenórean leaders that we know anything about are Herumor and Fuinur, “who rose to power among the Haradrim” around the time of the War of the Last Alliance. It is often speculated that they were rulers of Umbar because they are contrasted with other Black Númenórean “renegades, lords both mighty and evil, [who] for the most part took up their abodes in the southlands far away” because they were avoiding the power of Gil-galad (TS, Akallabêth; Umbar was as far north as the Black Númenóreans reached). A footnote to Appendix A states that “[a]fter the fall of Sauron [in the War of the Last Alliance] their race swiftly dwindled or became merged with the Men of Middle-earth, but they inherited without lessening their hatred of Gondor.” However, this is contradicted by other pieces of evidence. For one, the Mouth of Sauron is described as Black Númenórean, and he was born almost 3000 years into the Third Age (the evidence does not support the notion that he was born in the Second Age and somehow survived until the War of the Ring).[1] Keeping in mind the ostensible Secondary World origins of The Lord of the Rings in The Red Book of Westmarch, this description indicates the opinion of either Gondorians or Hobbits working from largely Gondorian sources. In either event, it means Elf-friends recognizing the continued existence of a separate Númenórean people outside the Realms in Exile thousands of years after the Downfall.

We could write this off as a case of Tolkien changing his mind and an error slipping through the cracks but I think it is more likely that the two conflicting statement reflect opposing viewpoints held by Gondorians (possibly in different eras) about the status of the Black Númenóreans and/or their descendants. The most interesting piece of circumstantial evidence for this is the case of Queen Berúthiel. The story of her cats is fleetingly mentioned in The Lord of the Rings and elaborated on in Unfinished Tales but it was in a 1966 interview with New Worlds magazine that Tolkien expounded on Berúthiel herself (quoted here):

There’s one exception that puzzles me—Berúthiel. I really don’t know anything of her—you remember Aragorn’s allusion in Book I (page 325) to the cats of Queen Berúthiel, that could find their way home on a blind night? She just popped up, and obviously called for attention, but I don’t really know anything certain about her; though, oddly enough, I have a notion that she was the wife of one of the ship-kings of Pelargir. She loathed the smell of the sea, and fish, and the gulls. Rather like Skadi, the giantess, who came to the gods in Valhalla, demanding a recompense for the accidental death of her father. She wanted a husband. The gods all lined up behind a curtain, and she selected the pair of feet that appealed to her most. She thought she’d got Baldur, the beautiful god, but it turned out to be Njord, the sea-god, and after she’d married him, she got absolutely fed up with the seaside life, and the gulls kept her awake, and finally she went back to live in Jotunheim.

Well, Berúthiel went back to live in the inland city, and went to the bad (or returned to it—she was a black Númenorean in origin, I guess). She was one of these people who loathe cats, but cats will jump on them and follow them about—you know how sometimes they pursue people who hate them? I have a friend like that. I’m afraid she took to torturing them for amusement, but she kept some and used them—trained them to go on evil errands by night, to spy on her enemies or terrify them.

Unfinished Tales specifies that the Ship-king in question was Tarannon Falastur (UT, The Istari, note 7). It has been argued by both Chris Seeman (not in the piece I linked above) and Codex Regius that his quote suggests Berúthiel was from Umbar, which I think is an odd reading of it since Umbar was a seaport and following Tolkien’s analogy with Norse mythology Berúthiel is implied to not have been from a coastal city. On the other hand, if we want to interpret the analogy with a giantess seeking marriage as restitution to mean that Berúthiel and Falastur’s marriage was a political one arranged in an attempt to forestall further conflict (though it clearly failed), then Umbar shoots back up the list of possible origins for Berúthiel since all of Falastur’s wars were “along the coasts west and south of the Mouths of Anduin” (LOTR, Appendix A; his epithet means “Lord of the Coasts”). On the other hand, because we know Harad consisted of multiple allied but presumably independent realms (cf. Damrod’s quote and the mention of multiple kings of Harad sending their sons to the court of a singular Gondorian king), we could suppose that Berúthiel was born in a Black Númenórean realm or city-state in the interior of Harad that nonetheless sent forces to participate in one of the wars with Gondor. At this point we are fully into the realm of speculation, but I find it an interesting prospect to consider.

Another indication that the Black Númenóreans persisted in Umbar can be found in Tolkien’s own out-of-universe notes to himself. Temporarily setting aside the question of Secondary World historiography, the discussion of Gandalf’s travels found in Unfinished Tales tells us that “Harad ‘South’ is thus a vague term, and although before its downfall Men of Númenor had explored the coasts of Middle-earth far southward, their settlements beyond Umbar had been absorbed, or being made by men already in Númenor corrupted by Sauron had become hostile and parts of Sauron’s dominions” (UT, The Istari). The implication here that Umbar, in contrast to other Númenórean colonies further south, had not been “absorbed” by their surrounding peoples is another piece of evidence for a continued Númenórean identity (presumably only among the elite) well into the Third Age, late enough for Gandalf to observe it during his travels.[2]

To attempt to draw these disparate points together, it must also be considered that the exodus of Gondorian nobility and royalty leaving for Umbar may have impacted the remaining Gondorians’ perception of the Númenórean status of their southern neighbors. Appendix A relates that by the time of Eärnur’s death in the 21st century of the Third Age:

Now the descendants of the kings had become few. Their numbers had been greatly diminished in the Kin-strife; whereas since that time the kings had become jealous and watchful of those near akin. Often those on whom suspicion fell had fled to Umbar and there joined the rebels; while others had renounced their lineage and taken wives not of Númenórean blood.

I find this statement interesting: minor Gondorian royalty joined their distant relatives in Umbar or they married non-Númenóreans and thereby removed themselves and their descendants from consideration for the throne (though as noted above I think they must also have married non-Northmen). The implication is that those who fled to Umbar did not “renounce their lineage”. Near the end of his life Tolkien responded to a letter asking if the named descendants of Castamir (Angamaitë and Sangahyando) had taken Quenya names as a way of asserting that their heritage was purer than Eldacar’s or his descendants’. Tolkien replied that “there was no need to assert their royal descent, as that was clear” (Letters, no. 347). As with so many of these quotes there is room for many interpretations. Taken in a vacuum Tolkien’s comment could suggest only that Angamaitë and Sangahyando had no need to impress their followers in Umbar, but taken in conjunction with the Appendix A quote I think it creates an intriguing possibility: namely, that Gondor recognized (at least at some points in history) that there was a distinct Númenórean realm beyond the two established by Elendil.

Also worth taking into consideration is that both the Gondorians and the rulers of Umbar later in the Third Age left the monument to Ar-Pharazôn’s victory over Sauron intact until after Sauron openly declared his return near the end of the Third Age (LOTR, Appendix A). I think this is a strong indication that the rulers of Umbar after its time as a Gondorian province identified with the Númenórean legacy represented by the monument and I think it is unlikely that a fully “Haradrified” population would have done so. Chris Seeman argues in “Rethinking Umbar” that the descendants of the Black Númenóreans had thoroughly merged with the Haradrim but let the monument stand because they identified with Ar-Pharazôn’s adoption of Melkorism. However, I find this argument unconvincing since the monument specifically represented Ar-Pharazôn’s victory over Sauron, whereas dedicated Melkorists considered Sauron a key figure in their religion and I think would have seen the conflict with him as a misguided decision made before the Númenóreans fully realized who the true enemy was, much in the same way that political extremists in the Primary World recast wars in their own historiographies.[3]

In any event, the Black Númenóreans undoubtedly intermarried with their neighbors just as the Gondorians had done. I suspect the same arguments that Faramir gave for an expansive definition of the term “Númenórean” (that the “pureblood” population had become too small to be viable on its own, even as a political elite) would have been made within the Black Númenórean community. What we can consider with slightly more grounding in the text is why the Gondorians appear to have waffled on whether or not they recognized said Númenórean status. We are told that records of Queen Berúthiel were destroyed at the time she was expelled by Falastur (UT, The Istari, note 7) but later scribes who recorded what was remembered of her would have been left to assume that she was of Númenórean descent since, according to Gondorian historiography, no king before Valacar had married a non-Númenórean. Presumably a similar justification would have had to be made at the time the marriage occurred. If it was in fact a diplomatic marriage then mutual recognition of each other’s Númenórean heritage might have been part of the bargain. Likewise, whichever author of the Red Book described the Mouth of Sauron as a Black Númenórean (perhaps Frodo but possibly Findegil or someone at Great Smials where Pippin curated a collection of material focused especially on Gondor) would have been writing in the very late Third Age or the early Fourth Age, shortly after Aragorn “made peace with the peoples of Harad” (ROTK, VI 5); a time in which Gondorians and their allies would presumably be more inclined to be diplomatic toward their southern neighbors.

On the other hand, the footnote in Appendix A disparaging the Black Númenóreans’ lack of purity presumably represents a different, less charitable perspective, though whether it was written in a different era of Gondorian history and was simply transcribed into the Red Book at a later date must remain up in the air. A similar argument can be made regarding the statement in “The Heirs of Elendil” about Castamir’s descendants, though it is probably more parsimonious to regard that as a rejected idea since it was never published by Tolkien himself. In either case, the various uses of the term Númenórean provides an intriguing window into Gondorian society. Discussion of dwindling Númenórean “purity” usually focuses on factors such as height and longevity but, as noted in the passage from “Of Dwarves and Men” quoted earlier in this essay, phenotypes were only one determining factor in the Númenórean worldview and were less important than political realities. That Tolkien left so many clues about the political side of Middle-earth’s history even when they had little direct relevance to the plot of The Lord of the Rings is a testament to the depth of his Secondary World and the scope of his writing beyond what he is usually associated with.

[betsynagler]

Critical Thinking is Hard

I’m lucky: I grew up in a family where thinking was encouraged. My parents treated me and my brother like we were brilliant, which makes you want to be brilliant, and come up with your own ideas. They liked to talk about stuff, and, while they definitely treated us like kids, they also didn’t really shelter us too much. My mother was always ruining TV shows for me by pointing out the sexist moments in television, from reruns of The Brady Bunch and Star Trek, to Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company and, well, it was the 70s and 80s, so pretty much all TV shows. But they still let us watch them, as well as R-rated movies which may not have been age-appropriate, and while they told us not to smoke pot, when we found out that they smoked pot, they gave us reasons for why it was okay for them and not us (since they “weren’t going to have any more children,” which seemed to make sense at the time). Another thing they did was encourage us to take responsibility for our own decisions from a fairly young age, which meant that you could stay up until 10 or 11 pm on a school night if you really wanted to, but it’d be your fault when you felt like shit all the next day. One can debate the pros and cons of this method of child-rearing (pro: de-mystifying drug use and other taboo behaviors to the degree that they actually start to seem uncool; encouraging kids to develop strong ethical compass and think through their actions; con: kids are even more weird compared to their peers, and precociously develop anxiety and guilt about their own actions). Nevertheless, it did start me on the road to learning the value of thinking for myself.

I didn’t really come into my own as a critical thinker until junior high, however, when I spent two years in a program for gifted students. First, isolation from my peers at a time when I was supposed to be learning the social skills of adulthood and the bullying that naturally flowed from that taught me to look for other people’s faults as a means of self-defense. That made me critical, if not necessarily thoughtful. But then I also had two years of Mr. Snyder teaching me social studies. Many of us in the gifted program had all of the same teachers for all of our academic subjects two years running. This meant that we got to know those teachers really well, and, in the case of Mr. Snyder, came to greatly admire and be shaped by his worldview. Mr. Snyder wasn’t an obvious candidate for intellectual guru to early adolescents. He wasn’t particularly handsome, and he’d had polio as a child and walked with a prominent limp. But he was funny and charismatic, gave terrific lectures that were like brilliant comedy monologues or TED talks, and knew how to make his students feel smart and special — in part because we had made it into his class, but still. We liked him so much that several of us would get to class early every day so that we could draw cartoons of him on the blackboard with clever word bubble-jokes, and he loved that. Too see him come into the room and look at our clever depictions of him and smile and make jokes right back at us, to feel appreciated for our intelligence and creativity, a sensation could be hard to come by as a suburban New Jersey youngster, was wonderful. The class was a mutual admiration society and a bit of a cult of personality that I think hugely affected all of us who took it.

I learned a lot there, as we studied political systems, geography and the history of the ancient world, among other things. We were assigned projects that were unlike anything you’d typically get in junior high or even high school, a combination of fun, self-driven exploration, and out-of-control amounts of work. We had to make a map of the world that included every single country, city, major mountain range and body of water, using color-coded overlays — something that I would have enjoyed, and sort of did, except that, since I was in 7th grade, I was terrible at judging how long it would take and left it until the last minute, and had to repeatedly re-letter the smudged plastic to make it readable in my 12-year-old handwriting. The following year, when we did separate units on Greece and Rome, we had to either fill in an entire outline that he provided with a paragraph or more on every subject, or do a handful of more creative projects designed to help us probe the topics in more interesting detail. After choosing to do the outline for Greece, thinking it would be easier, and ending up with several pounds of handwritten paper (I could not type) on everything from Sparta to Socrates to Doric columns that was probably 75+ pages long, Mr. Snyder had stared at the pile and admitted to me that he hadn’t really expected anyone to choose that option, that he’d made the outline so absurdly long to encourage people to do the creative projects. I probably got an A more because he didn’t want to read the whole damn thing than anything else, and on Rome, I did the projects, like going to a Roman-Catholic service and writing about it — which I did by interviewing my Catholic friend, Tara, instead of actually going to the service myself — or going to the Met to observe and then expound upon the differences one observed between the Greek and Roman statues — which I did after 15 minutes of taking furious notes on a Sunday when we arrived just as they were getting ready to close. Just because I loved Mr. Snyder didn’t mean that I, like any other kid, wasn’t always trying to get out of doing homework in any way I could.

The thing I learned and remember best, however, was not the facts, but the method. We had a class about political and economic systems — communism, socialism, capitalism, authoritarianism — and the first thing Mr. Snyder did was define these terms for us, explaining that they weren’t what we’d been told they were. Specifically, “communism,” the way it was looked at in the budding Reagan Era of the early 1980s, wasn’t actually communism at all. Real communism was an economic system that someone named Karl Marx had come up with, in which everyone owned everything, nobody was rich or poor or more powerful than anyone else, and that was, in fact, kind of the opposite of what the Soviet Union had become. This somewhat blew my mind. Here was the boogeyman that everyone talked about as the great evil threatening us with destruction — and remember, in the world of an American kid who had trouble sleeping at night because she obsessed with how we were one button push away from nuclear war, that meant genuine annihilation —  and it wasn’t even what it really was. How was this possible? How was everything that we saw on TV and in the newspapers and at the movies just plain wrong? It turned out that, once you delved into it, the evolution of the term “communism” in the popular vernacular was an education in how concepts entered the public consciousness and then were propagated endlessly in the echo chamber of the media and society until they became something else entirely, usually in the service of some political or social end. Sound familiar? It wasn’t the same then as it is now that we have the Wild West known as the Internet, in some ways it was easier to get an entire culture to basically think one incorrect thing rather than many insane things, but the ability to miseducate a huge swath a people without their questioning it? Yes, that existed, and understanding that was a very big deal to me. It meant that you always had to look deeper than the surface of things to be sure you understood the reality, even when it came to what those things were called.

Why doesn’t everyone get taught to think this way? Well, like most things in life, it gets increasingly harder to learn as you get older. The more set in our ways we get, the tougher it becomes to look at ourselves critically (which is essential to critical thinking, because to truly get that you must dissect and assess the viability of ideas, you have to start with your own assumptions), much less change the way our brains function in terms of adopting new ways of doing anything that’s really embedded in there, much less ways of doing everything, which is kind what it means to change the way you think. Plus, it’s in the best interest of those in power to keep the bulk of the human race from doing it. It’s tough to build an army of people who don’t automatically follow orders, or have a religion made up of people who are always questioning the word of God, or build a movement if the followers are continually asking the leaders, “Is that really true?” And so we’ve arrived at this situation where we have so much information out there now to make sense out of, and the bulk of us without the tools to figure out how to do that — and many who reject those tools because they’re told education is just liberal elite brainwashing. Instead, you see a lot of people turn to a kind of twisted, easy version of “critical” “thinking” espoused on the fringes of the left and right, which disposes with the thinking part and instead just espouses wholesale rejection of anything dubbed “establishment” or “mainstream,” no matter how awful the alternative may be (and at this point we know: it’s pretty awful). Add to that the folks who skillfully exploit the overwhelm of information and lack of analytical skills to support their own greed, lust for power and desire to win at all cost, and you end up with an awesome new and different kind of embedded orthodoxy, that encourages us to silo ourselves within “our” (really their) belief systems, walled in with “alternative facts” and media that support them, and defending it all tooth and nail with false equivalencies that encourage us not to critique thoughtfully based on evidence, but to to pick apart every idea that doesn’t fit or even makes us uncomfortable (“Well, every politician lies” was one of the most egregious ones I heard used recently to defend the president). 

And, when it comes right down to it, can you blame people? Thinking is exhausting, especially in this environment, and even human beings with the best intentions manage to ruin everything good anyway. Like, even though my parents didn’t make us believe their ideas, of course they still managed to inculcate in us their most mundane opinions. My father was particularly good at doing this, particularly when it came to eating (yup, Jews), like how fast food and chain restaurants should be avoided not based on nutrition but on lack of flavor (which I guess is why we still ate at White Castle), or how chocolate was really the only kind of acceptable dessert. It’s amazing that, no matter how far I’ve come as an adult, I still find it really hard to shake these ideas — like I saw a conversation on Facebook about how pie was superior to cake, and I just thought, Huh? But there aren’t any good chocolate pies. Another case in point: by the time I was a senior, Mr. Snyder had moved up to the high school, and was teaching an AP history class that I had the option to take. I decided to take economics instead, because I had never studied it, because one of my best friends was taking it, and, on some level I’m sure, to show that I didn’t need the wisdom of this idol of my 7th and 8th grade self, now that I was all of 16. I heard from people who took Snyder’s class that in his first opening monologue of the year he mocked those of his former students who had decided not to take his class — which I think might have just been me. That wasn’t really an appropriate thing for a teacher to do, especially since I was kind of doing what he’d taught us: to move on, do my own thinking and evaluate him critically. But as a human being, it’s hard to be a charismatic leader and just let that go — which is why the world has so many despots, and celebrities, and despotic celebrities. On other hand, my economics class was a terrible waste of time because it turned out that I didn’t like economics and the teacher was boring, so perhaps my premature rejection of Mr. Snyder and my 8th grade way of thinking, just to prove that I could do it, hadn’t been the best decision either. It’s hard not to wonder if I’d be just a slightly better, smarter person today if I’d accepted one more opportunity to take his class.

I’ll never know, but I guess the fact that I’m telling you this story means I haven’t given up on critical thinking. Maybe it’s because self-flagellating comes naturally to me, but these days, more than ever, I try to employ those skills as much as I can, even as it grows increasingly fucking hard. On top of all that media landscape stuff I mentioned a few paragraphs back, I also have this stupid menopause business I mentioned in my last blog post, which just amplifies all of the emotion that drives me as a human to err on the side of insanity, as if there weren’t already enough bad news, and bad “news,” out there driving a person in that direction. There are so many bad actors with so many tools that can be used to manipulate our fear and greed and lust into steamrolling our thinking these days, and all we have to fight back are these little broken piles of poop in our heads. And yet, we all do have them, aka brains, and so we have the ability to use them. And as one of those cynical-on-top-but-at-bottom-idealistic folks who believes we all also have the capacity to change, no matter how hard it might seem, until the day we die, I think we all have the ability to learn how to use them better. And yes, that means you, and your friends, and your kids, and even your cousins in Florida maybe, if we all just try a little harder.

I’m not sure what Mr. Snyder would say about me now, as I try to get people to think about stuff with this blog that almost nobody reads, but considering how many years he spent trying to teach adolescents about Platonic ideals, I’d imagine he’d approve. So in honor of him, and any teacher you’ve had who inspired you to think more, and more better, let’s advocate in 2019 not just for “our values,” but for the value of intelligent thought, even if we have to do it one mind at a time.

[isthemedia]

So rereading Marvel's EXILES and catching up on One Piece.....and it gets me merging them.

Doubt I'll write/draw anything for it, but here's what's been going through my head for the past few days.

If you don't know what EXLIES is, pick it up. It's like Quantum Leap with superheroes. It deals with alternate universe characters hop from parallel world to parallel world fixing things in an attempt to not only save the multiverse but allow them to get back home.

So...one part in particular had me get the idea. In later issues you find out there is a second group, Weapon X, that is also world hopping. Sabertooth (a good guy-ish from his universe) tell how his team met up. By being tossed in the middle of a body of water and having the Time Broker (the equivalent of Al from Quantum Leap) pulls up to them in a boat tosses them some beers and tell them their mission.

So as I said earlier I sorta merged this idea with One Piece....and came up with a 6 (technically 7) person team for fun.

Charalemenge Furioso-

An Alternate world Donquixote Doflamingo. This one actually wised up to what was going on with what Trebol and his people had in mind. He tried to help his brother in secret by just subtly sabotaging many plans.

When it came to assisting Rule (his world's Law) he and his brother came up with a plan that would have his brother and Rule be able to leave in peace...

It didn't go well. Trebol had a suspicion when things started to get rough. In doing so he shot the three, leaving both Rule and Furioso's brother dead, and tossed Furioso into the seas below.

He washed up on the shore of an island, surviving against all odds. However the guilt and self loathing ate away at his psyche, eventually and unknowing becoming a host for a Kohut (a towering creature that is veiled in a black fog, with inky black skin and red eyes set on thwarting all ambitions). He will change against his will if overly stressed or if if pushed into a deep depression.

This gives him a much more meek and defensive personality.

Jokingly considered "Team's Mom".

Krokodile-

An alternate universe version of Crocodile. In his universe, there are vast desserts rather than oceans. (Think Wild West more than Pirates)

He still has sand manipulation, but instead of missing one hand he's missing his whole arm and one eye.

His universe having more steampunk inspired technology has him with a replacement arm, with a Gatling gun, and a telescoping eye.

When times are serious he's very no nonsense, however he does have a bit of a laxed attitude towards everything else. Resulting in him rarely being the team lead.

(And is the "Team Dad")

Eustalaw-

A merged Trafalgar Law and Eustass Kid. In a similar world to the main universe; wherein Law and Kid formed an alliance and fought against a Devil Fruit user with are merging power.

Once merged, both found themselves blindsided by rage and killed the user only to realize that without them alive they wouldn't be able to unmerge.

In the merging they own powers sorta form an amalgamation. Still able to use the Room and Shamble, but only able to switch around with metallic items, limiting what they can switch with-however they can pull whatever metal into their space if needed.

They have been trying to find a why to unmerge themselves since then. Doing what they can to keep reminding them that they are two people; even though they will slip into on shared voice.

Vivi-

And alternate universe Vivi where the war in Alabasta is still going on...and she is on the side of the rebels after her world's Crocodile usurped the throne.

She is well trained in heavy artiliery and close quarter combat.

She's a bit reckless when it comes to protecting anyone on her side; throwing herself in many near death missions that left her with many scars and injuries; to the point where she is numb to most pain.

Tusopp-

An Usopp from a universe of demons; ironically being a Tengu.

He's almost a mirror of his main universe self in personality, though a bit more inclined to stay in fight then to run and formulate a plan of attack.

In fact it's his weakest trait is that he doesn't have the planning capabilities of his main universe counterpart.

To balance that, he has a full demon mode where his baser instincts drive him.

Nicole Robin-

An alternate universe Nico Robin, and only age 10. She is an actual demon child, however from a higher class.

She has a human form that she hides in, and rarely morphs into her demon form.

With her rank in the demon society, she is actually able to help control both Furioso and Tusopp if they ever go out of control (Furioso when he's in his Kohut form, and when Tsuopp goes to his instincts).

However, in seriously times-or when they in a world that proves to be too dangerous for normal humans to survive in, she will transform for the good of the team.

Rosci-

The somewhat 7th member of the team, and Fuiroso's dog. He was found on the island Furioso washed up on, caught in a hunter's trap.

Furioso helped release him, and had been by his side ever since. 

He isn't the typical dog, in fact he was the island's guardian spirit, and when Furioso is threatened he will revert to his true form, a three headed, flame coated wolf.

Although he is an animal and unable to communicate, there are times where he is given a specific duty by their version of the Time Broker.  

However, unlike the actual Marvel’s EXILES, these guys don’t have a universe to return to. Their Time Broker (who I keep picturing as a sorta Look-Alike to Saiyuki’s Merciful Goddess) pulled them before they could be lost to their world’s destruction. Their task, is to prevent any more worlds from vanishing. 

But wait, how was the whole, how Sabertooth’s team got pulled into being Weapon X the thing that had me putting these two together? 

Well, when they aren’t hopping from world to world, they are sailing the oceans of time....literally. In some insane suuped up Thousand Sunny ship...that gets pulled into whirlpools that act at the doorways to the other worlds. Sometimes their pass through without problems; other times they’re shot up from the ocean floor, and others they are plummeting from the sky. 

But...yeah....TLDR;

I’ve been thinking of a Exlies/One Piece AU. 

[crapfutures]

I ain’t seen the sunshine

... since I don’t know when

- Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

We don’t normally write about our travels at Crap Futures, but last week’s trip to Longyearbyen, Svalbard seems worth a mention. The archipelago lies between Norway and the North Pole, far above Iceland, and at 78 degrees north Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost settlement. There are 30% more polar bears than humans. There are northern lights, apparently. We did not see the northern lights, or any other natural light, during the six days we were there. The conference we attended was called, in all caps, REMOTE.

If you ever get a chance to visit Svalbard, even in January, take it. Despite the 24-hour darkness of polar night, drawn like a heavy curtain over Longyearbyen from October to February, the people we met there were lively and happy, even slightly giddy, drunk on the melting together of night and day. School children wearing reflective vests built snow forts under stark electric lights. People rode past on bicycles even in -20 degree temperatures, or on snowmobiles with rifle mounts. Huskies were tied up outside shops, and you had to check your gun at the door. It all had a Wild West feel about it.

The day after we arrived a mother polar bear and her two cubs wandered into town and were gently escorted out again in the most Scandinavian way, only to return the following day. The three bears also showed up at our dogsledding camp outside Longyearbyen, news that was conveyed to us by a man with a gun as we warmed ourselves with coffee and brandy in the lodge. (By law you can only leave the city limits with a high-powered rifle, or a guide who carries one.) The exchange between the man with the gun and our guide, who also had a rifle but carried it discreetly and put it in a locker at the camp, went as follows:

‘These people have all signed the waiver.’

‘Ah good, they’ve signed the waiver.’ (The waiver stipulated that if we were eaten by a bear it was not the company’s fault.) 

‘Look – they’re in Philip’s camp, near his tent.’

‘Is Philip there?’

‘Ja, I think so.’

‘Yesterday they scared them away and said everything was okay, but they came right back.’

‘Ja, they must be hungry. They came up here maybe because of the meat.’ 

Then they turned to us and said: ‘So stay with the boss, okay?’

The scary thing about bears wandering into settlements – aside from the obvious menace of a large white bear hiding in a blizzard during the polar night – is the suggestion that something is going seriously wrong with nature; that hungry bears are a visible sign of climate change. Rising temperatures in the Arctic mean melting sea ice, which in turn makes it harder to find food (in the form of seals), and the whole sea ice ecosystem starts to collapse. The desperate mother bear – for what bear in its right mind would go near a place full of dozens of barking dogs, shouting humans, and vehicles – was likely trying to find enough food to feed her cubs.

The Arctic weather was generally cold and clear, with soft, drifting snow, but again, dark. The surrounding mountains and fjord could be glimpsed only in dim outline. The effect of day after day of total darkness is hard to describe. It wasn’t far to reach the end of the road in any direction, and the end of the streetlights – after which there was only an abyss, like falling off the map. Gale force winds whipped up unexpectedly, turning a walk to the pub into a blind life-or-death journey in which your colleagues suddenly disappeared and you were walking down an endless icy road, alone. This made one pub on the edge of town feel a bit locked in, like Minnie’s Haberdashery in The Hateful Eight. On the other hand there was the hygge factor: everywhere indoors, for example, in restaurants and pubs and shops, people padded around in woolly socks; we even presented in socks, which certainly gave the conference room a cosy vibe.

At the conference itself we met Owe Ronström, ethnologist and musician, a warm and generous soul from the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, who gave the keynote (and showed us Don Martin cartoons of desert islands). We sat drinking wine from the Nordpolet late into the night with colleagues like our subversive friend Kirsten Marie Raahauge, from the Design school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. We talked about anticipation and wish fulfilment, needs and desires, the late Zygmunt Bauman and our own beloved Borgmann, as well as more topical questions: What is the best (peaceful) defense against polar bears? What are you supposed to do with brown cheese? How long can a human survive without sunlight? Is it healthy to jump into the snow after a jacuzzi? Credit must go to the organisers, Adam Grydehøj and Yaso Nadarajah, for keeping things running smoothly and losing not a single delegate.

We’ve been to larger events in the past year, but none so remote or intimate. Bringing together an eclectic mix of Island Studies researchers, the presentation topics ranged from medieval Norse-Sámi relations to intercorporeality and islandness to cultural identity and animal husbandry on the Estonian island of Ruhnu (pop. 97). For our part, we spoke about designing energy solutions for Madeira, ending with a video of our first prototype that James cut together on the plane. (We’ll post the video along with the latest project news in the next week or so.)

The theme of our panel was ‘Remote Island Sustainability’, and our talk was about ‘Promise in the Periphery’ – so how did Madeira fit in? In many ways Madeira is not remote or peripheral at all: it is the second wealthiest region in Portugal, it has decent air links to the rest of Europe, a centuries old tourism industry, and historically it was a major stopping point on transatlantic journeys. Nevertheless, it is peripheral in the sense of dependence; that – for example – much of its energy is still imported, along with much of its food and other goods – more than need be the case, given its natural attributes. Why is this? The constraints of infrastructure make it easier and cheaper to buy into the larger grid than to find local solutions. But is it easier and cheaper? What are the real costs of ignoring the local?

Judith Schalansky has a useful description of islands as ‘footnotes to the mainland’: ‘expendable to an extent, but also disproportionately more interesting’. Similarly, after her recent trip to Svalbard, Rebecca Solnit wrote: ‘More than anyplace I’ve ever been, [Svalbard] imposes a dependency…. Which is also an independency, from the rest of the world.’ Being peripheral should not be viewed as an obstacle, but as an advantage and an opportunity.

We’re exploring ideas of dependency and independency in relation to energy – taking the shape of a speculative design approach to energy generation, infrastructure and behaviour in Madeira. In our work we’re seeking to exploit remoteness and peripherality as drivers of creativity, possibility, resilience. In particular we aim to challenge the traditional radial model of centrally generated electricity, with the aim of allowing communities to reclaim ownership of energy generation and storage. We want to create new ecologies of energy relationships among islanders.

Darwin called the Galapagos Islands ‘a little world within itself’. The insulated species he found there – the tortoises and finches – give us an analogy for tailoring solutions to island-specific challenges. Bespoke innovation requires you to see the island as a whole, as a unique, self-contained site. Unlike the finches of the Galapagos, however, we intend that our bespoke energy solutions for Madeira will fly abroad, to be adapted to other Macaronesian Islands – in the case of one of our projects – and places further afield, as in the case of another project we’re developing.

The first line of the Madeiran anthem – Do vale à montanha e do mar à serra (‘From the valley to the mountain and from the sea to the highlands’) – gives a sense of how extreme this landscape is. The highest point, Pico Ruivo, is almost 2km above sea level, and it gets snow in the winter when it is still 20 degrees at the coast (and in the sea).

As a recent BBC documentary on Svalbard states: ‘This is not a place for normal.’ We found this to be true – certainly after a week in the dark – but we also found the potential for experimentation, both in the case of Svalbard and our own remote island. We saw the sun again at last as we flew back to Oslo via Tromsø. That night we re-entered the world just in time to watch Trump’s ‘American carnage’ inauguration speech on CNN. Suddenly the remote expanse of Svalbard looked far less like a hostile and frozen wasteland, far more like an oasis in the midst of a greater apocalypse.

[wendyimmiller]

A Gentle Plea for Chaos

Is there any reason to welcome chaos? It is the inevitable balance to stagnant order. In the Grand Garden, chaos is vitally necessary for life to thrive. Mary Vaananen joins us for her 4th Guest Rant.

Moody chaos in the author’s garden

THE BRITISH AUTHOR Mirabel Osler’s wonderful book was published in the 1980s, a time when British gardening was of a certain tidy proper look. Mirabel’s gentle plea was for gardeners to allow the magic back into their gardens by handing back the reins (just a little or a lot) to Mother Nature.  Self-sown plants weaving a tapestry within garden beds was, to Mirabel, idyllic, unplanned and imperfectly perfect.

Since her book was published in 1989, others have come along speaking the same language. Cultivating Chaos, Sowing Beauty, and Planting in a Post Wild World all look towards making sustainable plantings that are beautiful, with natural spaces as role models. Planting the way nature plants.

Chaos in horticulture is de rigueur these days…on trend as the influencers would point out. Think Oudolf and Lurie. Catch the Dutch Wave! Or prowl the wild artfulness of the German steampunk Landschaftspark. Chaos is cool.

Ms. Osler was a fan of Christopher Lloyd (an original influencer) and perhaps her visits to Great Dixter ignited a love of, or fueled her fires for, the exuberant and (seemingly) only slightly tamed landscape.

I would love to accompany Mirabel on a stroll through the Lurie garden in downtown Chicago. Though not the swooning type, she might have to pause and take a seat to regain her composure. I know I did.

Lurie Garden downtown Chicago summer 2019

Chaos is not a warm fuzzy British grand-mum kind of word. We evolved to remove chaos in our surroundings if at all possible, increasing chances of survival. Like a black walnut tree with its juglone defenses, we tend to keep competition at bay and sight-lines open. As we have evolved, so too have plants developed clever systems of ensuring their survival. They outwit us most times.

Meet Ruellia humilis…WILD PETUNIA…a member of the Acanthaceae family. The Genus was named for Jean Ruel (1479-1537) French physician and botanist. All about Ruel, and Charles Plumier (the monk who became botanist to king Louis XIV of France), who named the plant for Ruel, at another time.

Ruellia humilis

I don’t think anyone suspects chaos in humility. Ruellia humilis…humilis meaning humble or low… has a widespread native range throughout Eastern North America from Pennsylvania to Florida and west from Minnesota to Texas. Its low-ness, about a foot high, makes it perfect as a path edger, in a rockery or front of a sunny border. Bloom times vary with the region, but here in my garden it gives forth its dusky lavender flowers beginning the end of June through September…during the hot dry months when many other plants are finished with their business. Flowers are one and done…open in the morning and are closed and hanging limp by evening. Good thing there are so many.

This humble hardy petunia depends on chaos for its perpetuation. In October, seeds “explosively dehisce” from the seed pods. That’s a new phrase for most of us. Explosive dehiscence characterizes the entire Acanthaceae family (around 4100 species) and is probably the most interesting method of seed dispersal nature has invented yet. Click for a video on seed dispersal

Seedpod of Ruellia ciliatiflora image by Erin Tripp University of Colorado

Triggering the explosions are small, hooked stalks…a modified funiculus (remember Funiculi, Funicula? Click the link for a lively listen) cradling each seed that eject them from the capsule as the seed pods dry. Think Jai alai.

Research done by a trio of undergraduate physics majors on Ruellia ciliatiflora at Pomona College in Claremont, CA worked out what happens in that moment of explosion that launches the seeds so far.  The seeds launch with extreme backspin contributing to the aerodynamics. “It just looks like this gentle, beautiful motion” Dr. Dwight Whitaker Professor of Physics at Pomona, said.

Beautiful, gentle chaos?

After typing the word chaos into Dictionary.com, and yielding

Noun

a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order.

I realize the precision of the Ruellia seed capsule and the synchronization of the seed launch is anything but chaotic. It is elegant indeed. A sowing all-star, this WILD PETUNIA has proven very hardy, vigorous and adaptable. Yes, it will seed around the area…figure a 10 ft radius. I have not experienced it being overzealous. If it appeals to you, site it well and enjoy it here and there.

Ruellia humilis in July

Mirabel wrote:

The very soul of a garden is shrivelled by zealous regimentation. Off with their heads go the ferns, lady’s mantles or cranesbill. A mania for neatness, a lust for conformity—and away go atmosphere and sensuality. What is left? Earth between plants: the dreaded tedium of clumps of color with earth in between. So the garden is reduced to merely a place of plants. Step – one, two. Stop – one, two. Look down (no need ever to look up, for there is no mystery ahead to draw you on), look down at each plant. Individually each is sublime, undoubtedly. For a plantsman this is heaven. But where is lure? And where, alas, is seduction and gooseflesh on the arms?

The bare earth in between plants begs for growth. No matter if you are a proud plant specimen spacer, or rely on mulch (the tinted concealer of the garden world) to fill the void, nature abhors a vacuum.

Happy re-seeding chaos in the author’s garden

You can plant re-seeders or you can let nature take its course (chaos grab bag). Either way, what appears without any creative blurp from me often looks looser and more natural—imperfectly perfect as Mirabel might say. The opportunist has grown into its place.

We know that less tidy gardens are better as habitat for insects and wildlife. When insects thrive, the whole system does. And allowing natural re-seeding keeps the dreaded tedium of bare patches of earth from exposure, drying, and weed takeover. Again, plant the re-seeders (weeds) you want to see.

A little chaos brings something intangible…call it vibe or atmosphere. Maybe don’t call it anything. The buzzing and humming of indigenous garden inhabitants stream an awesome soundtrack, don’t they?

The earth has her chaos, and the natural chaos of tornado, tsunami, earthquake…any of her big acts… inevitably brings change, sometimes big change. I can’t help feeling these current times and events are an act of nature…a seed launch into new territory. Perhaps we need to learn a gentle tolerance for the chaos within ourselves and the world.

Natural chaos.

Designed for change.

[Mirabel Osler was the author of 8 books on gardening and travel. She died in 2016.]

Mary Vaananen shelters in place in Louisville, KY. She is the North American manager for Jelitto Perennial Seeds, headquartered in Germany.

A Gentle Plea for Chaos originally appeared on GardenRant on July 1, 2020.

The post A Gentle Plea for Chaos appeared first on GardenRant.

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[auburnfamilynews]

Time for an embarrassing story. Just for your entertainment.

While we’re all sitting here quarantined, or sheltered-in-place, or whatever you may be doing, we’re all looking for entertainment and content in some form or fashion. There’s only so far you can get into Netflix before kid’s shows and obscure anime start to look appealing, so we’re going to try to regale you all with a story of self-deprecation and a little Auburn football.

Let’s go back to 2009. November 14th. The scene? Athens, Georgia. Sanford Stadium. Kickoff was a 7 o’clock affair between the hedges as Auburn came in at 7-3 in Gene Chizik’s first season. Do you remember the fun of that season as Auburn started 5-0 and rolled into the rankings behind Gus Malzahn’s offense and an opportunistic defense?

2009 began with the Gus offense fooling ESPN cameras with motion, end-arounds, pump fakes, and more as the Tigers dispatched Louisiana Tech and Mississippi State. Game three was the rain-soaked epic against West Virginia, where Auburn came back from an early deficit and forced four fourth-quarter turnovers on the way to a 41-30 victory over Noel Devine and company.

After an easy Saturday night against Ball State, Auburn hit Knoxville for the first road game of the year and a tilt against Lane Kiffin. Auburn controlled the action from start to finish, and the Vols never really threatened, as Ben Tate destroyed Eric Berry’s night and the Tigers improved to 5-0.

Things were great. Auburn was rolling, and the mirth and merry-making that only a successful football can produce were rampant on campus. Unfortunately, since we were less than a year removed from Tommy Tuberville’s reign, some of his tendencies remained in the football program, and we had a stinker against Arkansas the next week. Ryan Mallett tore us up, we limped home, and the hangover lingered for the next two games.

A cold night at home led to a tepid loss to Kentucky (c’mon, guys) and then we couldn’t handle ourselves in Baton Rouge, where Chris Todd threw for only 47 yards and Auburn fell behind 24-0 before giving up and falling 31-10. Things were fine the next week at home in a win over Ole Miss (maybe the most complete win of the season) and then the next week as Furman came for the annual paycheck game.

7-3. Not bad for Gene Chizik’s first year. “We want a leader, not a loser!” had not begin to ring true yet. The airport screamer’s fears weren’t yet realized. Chizik had formed what looked like a great staff, with recruiters and motivators galore, as well as the then revolutionary mind of Malzahn running the offense. We didn’t see the cracks in the staff yet, and we weren’t quite aware of what would bring the team down three seasons later, but in year one, it was pretty good. After the first losing season since Tuberville’s first year, we would take success in any form. Especially since Alabama was sitting at #1 in the polls in Nick Saban’s third season. We needed something, man. Chizik and company began to give that to us.

So, it brings us to November 14th. Auburn hadn’t had an open week yet, playing ten straight games to begin the season. With the year starting on September 5th, teams would only get one off week in a twelve-game season. It was a rough stretch, but with Auburn not having a break yet, the team was likely feeling the bumps and bruises a little more than other schools around the league.

Georgia wasn’t particularly great that season, either. After the year when they were supposed to dominate — 2008 saw the Dawgs sit at #1 before they got whacked by Alabama — they’d been middle of the road in 2009. Mark Richt’s team beat who they should and lost to who they should. In the end, both Auburn and Georgia would finish at 8-5 in 2009. Both schools were sporting serviceable, but not special quarterbacks, very good running backs, and average wide receivers.

The game? Not so exciting, at least not in my unassisted memory. My friends and I climbed to the top of the upper deck — last row — and sat next to a Georgia fan who aggressively did the Shawne Merriman Lights Out celebration with every little victory for the Dawgs:

It was a lot.

I had to find the box score to remember exactly what happened in the game. The only lasting image that came to me was Demond Washington’s kickoff return touchdown —

— that tied the game at 24-all after Auburn initially went up 14-0 and lost that lead. Apparently Caleb King scored twice in the fourth quarter, and Auburn didn’t have the answer offensively afterward. We lost 31-24. Okay. Whatever, that was now four straight defeats at the hand of the Bulldogs. Mark Richt had our number.

So, what do we do after a loss? Well, if the 2009 meeting in Athens was any indication, we meet with the entire population of the whole world in “The World’s Greatest College Town” and go drink. I think I saw everyone I ever knew that night at different bars in Athens, and we were all drinking like it was the end of the world. Keep in mind that I was only born in 1989, so if you’re not a Georgia grad, you can do your math and figure out that I was not yet of the legal age to consume alcohol. More on that in a moment.

When we left the stadium, we had no idea which direction to head to find our friends. This was before the days of smart phones, and you had to rely on getting a signal for a phone call so that you could somewhat coherently describe your location to someone else in hopes of finding them. The plan was to meet downtown for food and some sort of healing dark liquor. Downtown is north of the stadium, so naturally, we wandered south instead.

Here’s our general route:

Eventually, we made it downtown, but not before walking an extra mile or two and complaining the entire way. The memory of the next few hours involves drowning our sorrows at the Boars Head Lounge and then seeing Brandon Cox and telling him that he wouldn’t have lost to Georgia that night. Somehow my intoxicated brain remembered only the 2005 game in Athens — still somehow the last time we’ve won there — and did not remember the eight (EIGHT) combined interceptions he threw in his last two games against Georgia.

Anyway, it made me feel better. Somehow, though, it got to be late! Imagine that. We endured too long drinking, and now we needed to eat and go home. The process was real, Nick Saban would be proud. So, we head down the road, make our way to Lumpkin Street, and start walking back in the general direction of the house where we were staying. I was told that we’d get ourselves some McDonald’s before crashing, but I’d never get to indulge my late-night craving.

We’re walking, and I feel a particular need to relieve a certain biological pressure. Whatever, I can hold it until we get home. How long will that be? Two more miles? Nope, going to have to pull off the sidewalk and find a dark spot to take care of business.

Enter the Zell B. Miller Learning Center and it’s nooks/crannies.

A campus building that won’t have many people around it? Away from the heart of downtown? Perfect. I asked my group of friends to hang on a second and I skipped back into the dark corners, did my business, and came back to the street to find that they had not waited for me. They were at least two hundred yards ahead, not even noticing that I was absent.

I shouldn’t have gotten cocky, but fortune seemed to deal me a hand that should have played out splendidly. We’d been walking all day, and I was still breaking in the new pair of cowboy boots I was wearing, so my feet were a little sore. I wasn’t pleased about the likelihood of having to speedwalk/jog to catch up with them, especially in my drunken state. And what do you know? I was given a gift from the gods.

I look down into the bushes right in front of the Learning Center, and there’s a rusty, derelict bicycle underneath some foliage. In my mind, I’m going to hop on, speed down the sidewalk, catch my friends, perform a fantastic dismount, and continue along the way.

In reality, I picked up the bike, swung one leg over it, and instantly the wash of blue lights came over me. A police cruiser careened across the road, hopped the curb, and hit me with the floodlight and loudspeaker.

“YOU. ON THE BIKE. DISMOUNT NOW.”

For one wild moment, I considered running. I could’ve disappeared into the darkness of campus and I would’ve gotten away...

Instead, I stayed put. They’d been watching that bait bike and had me like they got several other dumb kids that weekend. I let them come up and start the interrogation.

In typical fashion, the officer asked me if I’d been drinking. What did I say?

Somehow, he saw right through that, and he threw me in the cherrytop.

So now I’m on the way to the Athens Clarke County Detention Center. On the ride, the cop proceeds to ask if I went to Auburn (“Yes sir”), and then to tell me all about his wild days when he was at Georgia, and how he probably should’ve been in the back of a cop car multiple times.

We arrive at the jail. Washed out floodlights fill the parking lot behind a tall chain link fence. It’s a desolate place. Doors open with a loud clank and a buzzer. The fluorescent lighting reveals bags under every eye inside. A bunch of portly cops shuffle around moving as slowly as possible to start the processing. Fingerprints. Mugshot (it’s probably available somewhere online).

My one phone call. Here’s the secret — you actually get as many phone calls as it takes to get the wheels turning to get you out of jail. They just want your money, they don’t want you there any longer than you have to be there. Not really knowing what to do, I called my parents, at 3 AM CST in Montgomery, Alabama. Surprisingly, the phone only rang a couple times before my dad picked up with a surly “What’d you do?”

After that, I happened to call the first bail bondsmen listed in the directory.

That gave me a chuckle. After confirmation that they were processing me, I got to go sit in the drunk tank and wait.

Concrete walls, concrete toilet, concrete water fountain, and metal benches. They took my boots and jacket, and tossed me in with five other college kids. One guy immediately started crying. Another kept talking about how his dad was going to come beat up the cops. One was passed out drunk and never woke up the entire time. I sat there about two hours before my buddy arrived with the bail bondsmen. After seeing who else had been in jail, I started to believe that I was the toughest inmate in the entire place that night. That was before I walked past the other holding cell, where two 6’6, 250-pound men were pushing each other back and forth in the middle of the cell with several other giant guys egging them on. Reality check.

At this point, the sun’s thinking about coming up. We pay the guy $300, and I’m free. A couple hours later, I’ve showered, washed the jail smell off me, and have my marching orders to return in a couple months to appear before the judge. Fun.

Now, the same night that I had would’ve won me a simple ticket in Auburn, and certainly nothing aside from a small fine. In the end, I paid what amounted to a couple months’ rent in fines to the state of Georgia, had to perform community service, and check in with a probation officer for six months.

That Sunday night when I got back to my apartment in Auburn, someone showed me a news article that said something like 50 college kids had been arrested overall that weekend in Athens. I paid my fine and served my nickel at the humane society feeding puppies and hosing out kennels.

I guess the moral of the story is, go to Athens, and you’ll end up cleaning dog shit.

from College and Magnolia - All Posts https://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2020/3/29/21189219/twelve-hours-in-athens

[biofunmy]

Driverless Cars May Be Coming, but Let’s Not Get Carried Away

“Sometime next year,” Elon Musk says, “you’ll be able to have the car be autonomous without supervision.”

“None of us have any idea when full self-driving will happen,” counters Gill Pratt, an expert in robotics and the director of the Toyota Research Institute.

Beyond Mr. Musk, who has said twice this year that Tesla could have a million “robotaxis” on the roads next year, few experts in autonomous cars believe that the technology is ready to safely chauffeur occupants in any and all driving conditions. And that’s before the regulatory hurdles, including a quaint-seeming 1971 New York law that requires at least one hand on the wheel.

Instead, for the foreseeable future, there are Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Think of them as a co-pilot, not the Autopilot of Tesla’s marketing parlance but a wingman that amplifies human skills instead of replacing them.

These building blocks of autonomy are becoming common on even the most affordable cars: electronic stability controls, certainly, but now radar, cameras and other sensors that perceive their surroundings and automatically accelerate, stop, steer, follow lanes or take evasive action. And every major carmaker in America has pledged to make automated emergency braking standard on all new models by September 2022.

Global giants like General Motors, Toyota, Ford and Volkswagen are fully engaged in the self-driving race against the likes of Tesla, Uber and Waymo, a unit of Google’s parent company, and are loath to be outmaneuvered by Silicon Valley disrupters. But traditional automakers are also hitting the brakes, as premature promises run headlong into reality — what Mr. Pratt calls the current “trough of disillusionment” in autonomy.

A growing consensus holds that driver-free transport will begin with a trickle, not a flood. Low-speed shuttles at airports or campuses may be the early norm, not Wild West taxi fleets through Times Square. Operational boundaries will be enforced by the electronic leash of geofencing.

Toyota is among the many companies backing that more cautious, two-track approach. Mr. Pratt, who ran the vaunted robotics program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, recalls tossing and turning on the night in 2015 when he signed a contract to lead Toyota’s $1 billion research arm for artificial intelligence and robotics.

Toyota’s cars alone, he figured, log perhaps one trillion miles of annual travel around the globe. Making a robocar perform in controlled demonstrations is easy, Mr. Pratt says, such as having it effortlessly avoid hay bales tossed in front of it. Making a robocar so foolproof that consumers and automakers can trust it with their lives, including in one-in-a-billion situations, is very different.

“Ever since, we’ve tried to turn down the hype and make people understand how hard this is,” he said.

That’s not preventing companies from trying. Toyota’s Chauffeur technology fully intends to create autonomous cars for corporate fleets. But using 80 to 90 percent of the same software, its Guardian concept blends inputs from man and machine.

General Motors’ Cadillac is also working to keep humans in the driving loop — even if it requires an occasional slap on the wrist, via the driver-monitoring system developed by an Australian company, Seeing Machines.

Consider Cadillac’s Super Cruise the digital disciplinarian that makes drivers sit straight and keep eyes up front. It is G.M.’s consumer answer to Tesla’s Autopilot, but its approach illustrates the divergent philosophies of traditional automakers and the Valley rebels.

Many experts say Super Cruise, or a system like it, might have prevented the highly publicized fatal crashes of some Tesla Autopilot users, or Uber’s robotic Volvo that struck and killed an Arizona pedestrian in March last year. In the Uber case, police investigators said the human backup driver had been streaming Hulu before the accident. In some Tesla crashes, driver overconfidence in Autopilot’s abilities, leading to inattention, appears to have played a role.

That kind of carelessness isn’t possible with Super Cruise, as my own testing on Cadillac’s CT6 sedan has shown. The optional system will expand to other Cadillac models next year. Unlike Tesla’s current Autopilot, the system is explicitly designed for hands-free operation, allowing people to drive safely without touching the steering wheel or pedals — but strictly on major highways.

Using laser-based lidar, the Detroit-area company Ushr mapped 130,000 miles of freeway in the United States and Canada, in deep detail. That map is stored onboard the car, and updated monthly over the air to account for new construction and other road changes. The maps fix the Cadillac’s global position to within four inches, backed by onboard cameras, radar and GPS.

When I drove the Cadillac outside its geofenced borders, self-driving was strictly off limits. But once on its proper turf, Super Cruise breezed along highways in New Jersey for up to two hours with zero input from me.

It’s an odd sensation at first. But the Cadillac tracked down its lane as if it was on rails — better than the average Uber — so that I quickly gained confidence, eventually leaning back with hands folded behind my head as we zipped between semitrailers.

An infrared camera and lighting pods tracked my face, eyelids and pupils. The system let me look away long enough to, say, fiddle with radio stations. But if I closed my eyes or dared to text, the Caddy flashed escalating warnings. Putting eyes back on the road allowed me to proceed.

Ignore more prompts, and the system shuts down, refusing to work with a distracted driver. If that driver is disabled or asleep, the Caddy can pull over, stop automatically and call for help.

“What I love about Super Cruise is that it’s always watching you,” said Chris Thibodeau, Ushr’s chief executive.

The system also disengaged when it couldn’t confidently identify lane markings, or when it approached construction zones. While those cautious disengagements could be frustrating at times, Super Cruise proved a trusty co-pilot that prevents overconfidence from either party.

“The last thing you want is the machine making a judgment that would be better done by a human,” Mr. Thibodeau said.

Experts add that driver monitoring systems would be a boon to safety even in conventional situations. For one, parents could rest assured that teenagers weren’t texting while driving.

Designing skill amplifiers for automobiles, Mr. Pratt noted, is infinitely complex, in part because of the crowded and varied roadways that cars must perceive, predict and react to: what he calls the “complex ballet” of driving.

It doesn’t help that human drivers can be the weak dance partner. Roughly 1.3 million people die in global auto accidents every year, according to the World Health Organization. Human error is blamed in 94 percent of those deaths.

While Mr. Pratt is a champion of modern robotics, he said artificial intelligence would still take decades to rival some human abilities.

“We shouldn’t have this replacement mind-set to pop out the human and pop in the machine,” he said. “Sometimes the A.I. is better than the human. Sometimes the human is better than the A.I.”

The brain gives people one advantage, in predicting behaviors based on visual cues. Mr. Pratt offered the example of a driver cruising through intersections where various pedestrians wait to cross: an older person, a mother holding a child’s hand or a group of teenagers. A human driver will instantly process the scene and know that the teenagers are most likely to jaywalk.

“The A.I. system, unless it’s fed with hundreds of millions of examples, can’t pick that up, because it doesn’t think. It just pattern-matches,” Mr. Pratt said.

In the robot’s corner, it never gets tired or drunk, and has 360-degree sensor “vision.”

Mr. Musk has dismissed any need for a driver monitoring system on Teslas, or redundant hardware sensors, insisting that its coming “full self-driving computer” will handle any task.

That stance is drawing an unusual backlash against Tesla from industry analysts, from skepticism that Tesla can pull it off, to charges that the company is cutting corners on safety.

My tests of various semiautonomous systems highlighted what experts call a paradox of self-driving: As the technology gets better, it may initially become more hazardous, because drivers are sidelined for longer periods, lulled into a false sense of security.

“It’s a whole new paradigm for the manufacturers: How do I keep drivers engaged, what are the right alerts?” Mr. Thibodeau said.

“People have been trained for years to pay attention to everything on the road. It’s going to be hard to change that behavior and trust the machine.”

For people who envision the government coming for their car keys, Mr. Pratt has a message: The rise of the machines is real, but most people will choose personal autonomy over an autonomous car.

“The joy of driving a car is something that is incredibly innate and precious, and we don’t think that’s under threat at all,” he said.

Sahred From Source link Business

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[nedsecondline]

The craziest things Netanyahu has said this summer, so far

From outlawing foreign funding for human rights NGOs to reviving the death penalty (for Palestinians), to population transfer and more, Benjamin Netanyahu is going a little wild. It probably isn’t unrelated to the multiple police investigations into him and his friends.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the weekly cabinet meeting, Jerusalem, June 25, 2017. (Marc Israel Sellem/Pool/Flash90)

Benjamin Netanyahu has a few things in common with Donald Trump. The two men are known to obsess over loyalty, which invariably leads to nepotism and empowering immediate family members. They both are convinced there is constantly some sort of media conspiracy to topple them from their positions of power — and that they deserve that power. And the more embroiled they and their tight circles become in investigations of alleged improprieties, the crazier and more rash their behavior gets.

[tmwinpost]

Netanyahu and his closest cronies are currently at the center of at least three major scandals being seriously investigated by the fraud and corruption unit of the Israeli police. The investigations range from corruption in the purchase of nuclear-capable submarines, demanding and receiving extravagant gifts from various billionaires who may or may not have received political favors in return, trading legislation to all but guarantee the failure of a major newspaper in exchange for favorable coverage from its main competitor, and more.

In addition to denying all wrongdoing, the Israeli prime minister’s response has been to play to his base with more and more nationalist and radical propositions, statements and stunts, hoping to preempt anyone in his government flanking him from the right while he is vulnerable. To the rest of the world, Netanyahu’s behavior makes him out to be an increasingly unreliable populist politician who doesn’t care what anybody outside Israel thinks about him.

Part of that attitude, of course, comes from the cover he believes he gets from the even-wilder circus camped out on the shores of the Potomac at the moment, and the absence of anybody in Washington who is interested or capable of keeping him in line.

So here’s an incomplete list of the craziest things Benjamin Netanyahu has said and done so far this summer, in no particular order:

Ban foreign funding of left-wing and human rights NGOs in Israel

Anti-occupation and human rights organizations in Israel have been under attack for years, be it via smear campaigns and incitement or abusive legislation that manipulates existing transparency regulations to paint those organizations as foreign agents. Many of those legislative attempts were restrained in recent years by the Obama Administration, which put considerable pressure on the Israeli government over its anti-NGO legislation.

But all previous iterations of anti-NGO laws pale in comparison to what Netanyahu proposed last month: to ban all funding of Israeli NGOs from sources connected to foreign governments. The majority of human rights groups in Israel receive major parts of their budgets from European countries and even the United States. Banning that funding outright, as Netanyahu is proposing, could shut down — or shrivel down to unrecognizable levels — the entire community of human rights groups in Israel overnight.

Israel’s second execution? The last one was Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann takes notes during his trial in Jerusalem. (GPO)

Technically the death penalty exists in Israeli law, but only for crimes against humanity and treason during wartime. Practically, there is no death penalty in Israel. Only one person has ever been handed a death sentence in the history of the country — Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi masterminds of the Holocaust. A pretty high bar, if there ever was one.

Of course, under Israeli military law, which is the law of the land for the millions of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, capital punishment is on the books for far lesser crimes than, say, planning and carrying out the genocide of millions of people. Over the years, a number of populist Israeli politicians have called for the death penalty to be used against Palestinians in the West Bank, usually after particularly gruesome acts of violence. The political leadership, however, usually ignores or shelves such calls until they die down. Not this time.

Following the gruesome murder of three members of an Israeli settler family several weeks ago, Netanyahu unequivocally advocated that Israel carry out its second-ever execution. “[I]f you want to know the government’s position and my position as prime minister –- in a case like this, of a [lowly] murderer like this -– he should be executed,” the prime minister said in a tweet. “He should simply not smile anymore.”

While rarely said explicitly, calls to utilize the death penalty under Israeli military law are almost universally understood to mean a death penalty for Palestinians only. Israeli citizens who live in the West Bank (settlers) are subject to a separate, civilian legal system, which means they face different punishments for the exact same crimes.

Population transfer for Arab citizens of Israel

Finding ways to reduce the number of Palestinians in Israel is far from a revolutionary endeavor. In order to maintain democratic cover for Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state the country’s Jewish leaders have always approached demographic dominance as a matter of national survival, thereby legitimizing almost any means to achieve it. The same idea led a succession of Israeli leaders, including right-wing hawks like Ariel Sharon, to support the two-state solution.

The idea of getting rid of Israel’s Palestinian-Arab citizens, one in five of all Israelis, is also not that novel in the contemporary Israeli political zeitgeist. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman has for years advocated redrawing the borders in any two-state solution so that Arab-majority areas such as Wadi Ara become part of a future Palestinian state — not to equitably compensate Palestine for the land usurped by settlements, but rather to rid Israel of the demographic/democratic burden posed by its undesirable, non-Jewish citizens.

Yet while we have heard talk about mass population transfer in the past, hearing it from the Israeli prime minister is a whole different ball game. When the prime minister — who decides the country’s actual policy and positions in negotiations — declares his willingness to disenfranchise and strip the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Israelis, we have to take it far more seriously than a savvy but ultimately marginal politician like Liberman’s campaign slogan.

A ‘third Nakba’

Speaking of population transfer and crazy things coming out of the Netanyahu camp, it would be remiss to ignore something the prime minister didn’t say. When senior government minister and Netanyahu ally Tzachi Hanegbi threatened the Palestinians with a “third Nakba,” an implicit threat to carry out mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing as a response to Palestinian protests and violence, one might have expected Netanyahu to make a statement.

Hanegbi has been known to be a Netanyahu proxy on a range of other issues, which makes the lack of a public rebuke or rejection all the more troubling. The prime minister’s silence speaks volumes, especially considering his obsession with Palestinian incitement.

The new Jerusalem: Palestinians out, Jews in

A Palestinian man descends into the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina after climbing over the wall from the West Bank village of a-Ram, July 3, 2015. (File photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

A recent Netanyahu-endorsed plan to exclude certain Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem (those on the Palestinian side of Israel’s separation wall) from Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries is a bold step toward removing Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents from the city, and the country. Most Palestinian Jerusalemites are not Israeli citizens but rather hold permanent residency, which is easily and regularly revoked. They are stateless. Israel annexed East Jerusalem but not the people who lived there, and now it wants to get rid of the parts of the city that it views as a threat to Jewish political dominance. The plan is part gerrymandering, part micro-two-state solution, and part mini-ethnic cleansing on a municipal level.

The second part of the plan would see those Israeli West Bank settlements that envelop Jerusalem brought into the municipality, which would effectively — although not officially — annex them to the area Israel already annexed after the 1967 war. The purpose of those settlement-suburbs, some of which like Ma’ale Adumim are full-on cities, has always been to stymie the north-south contiguity of any future Palestinian state. Once upon a time the White House would have thrown a fit over a plan like this. These days — nothing.

A hero’s welcome for a guard who killed his landlord

Compounding the tensions in late July between Israel and the entire Arab and Muslim world over changes to Al-Aqsa Mosque’s delicate “status quo” was a bizarre incident at the Israeli Embassy in Amman, which concluded with an even more bizarre media event back in Jerusalem a couple days later. The story, as far as we’ve been told, goes something like this: a Palestinian-Jordanian furniture delivery guy stabbed an Israeli security guard inside the Israeli embassy compound in Amman. The Israeli security guard shot him to death, also killing the owner of the apartment, a Jordanian doctor, in the process.

Israel insisted that because the guard enjoyed full diplomatic immunity, that he did not need to submit to questioning by the Jordanian police. Jordan refused to let him leave the country until he did. After a not-so-secret visit by the head of Israel’s Shin Bet, the Jordanian police were allowed to listen to the guard’s testimony without questioning him, and everyone was allowed to come home. The whole thing lasted about a day.

All was good and well until Netanyahu held an official reception for the guard in Jerusalem, treating him like a national hero released from the captivity of a vicious enemy. There was no mention of an Israeli investigation into what really transpired, not even with regards to the dead landlord, whom nobody has accused of taking part in any violence. Instead, an Israeli who killed his landlord on foreign soil was celebrated by the prime minister without any semblance of remorse for death of an innocent man.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds a media event receiving an Israeli security guard who killed his landlord and an alleged attacker at the Israeli embassy in Amman, in Jerusalem, July 25, 2017. (Haim Zach/GPO)

Only days later, after Jordan publicly rebuked Netanyahu for his disrespect and demanded a proper investigation did the Israeli Foreign Ministry announce that it would look into the shooting. The idea that the Foreign Ministry does not automatically launch a full-blown investigation any time one of its employees kills a foreign national, or more likely that it wasn’t politically expedient to mention that automatic investigation, shows the absurdity of Netanyahu’s behavior. Of course, the entire incident gave Netanyahu brilliant political cover to implicitly suggest that his hand was forced by Jordan to make a concession on Al-Aqsa in order to get the embassy guard back.

Depriving the natives of hope

At the height of the violence and tensions surrounding Al-Aqsa Mosque, shortly after the gruesome murder of three members of the Solomon family in the Halamish settlement, Netanyahu made a reference that probably went unnoticed by most people. Noting the anniversary of the passing of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the man behind the brand of Revisionist Zionism to which Netanyahu subscribes, the prime minister said: “The Cabinet will make an important decision regarding the preservation of [Jabotinsky’s] heritage, one of the principles of which – as is well-known – is ‘The Iron Wall’.”

The Iron Wall is an idea drawn from several essays by Jabotinsky that start with the premise that: “The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.” Because the native population will never accept a Jewish state on its land, there can be no “voluntary” agreement with the Palestinians, and the only way to get them to accept a Jewish presence is to “teach” them that they have no hope of expelling the colonizers. It is a worldview that sees systematic violence as the only means of achieving peace, and even equality.

It was not a message intended to calm what felt like one of the most potentially explosive moments between Israelis and Palestinians in years.

Like almost every other entry in this list, the Iron Wall statement was meant for internal consumption among Netanyahu’s constantly rightward-drifting base of political support. The more vulnerable the prime minister feels, be it from criminal investigations or the fear of looking weak vis-à-vis the Palestinians, the further and further off the deep end he goes, taking positions usually considered off-limits for somebody in any position of authority.

[wbwest]

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West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 3/31/17

So, as a week has passed, I find I’ve got some more thoughts on Power Rangers. I watched it again (don’t ask me how), and I actually liked it a lot better. The first viewing is pretty jarring, but once you know what you’re getting yourself into, it’s easier to let go and let Zordon.

Something about it struck me, though: the teens have an odd bloodlust thing going on. They’re really jonesing to kill something/somebody. When they first encounter Alpha, and don’t realize he’s “one of the good guys”, Zack’s immediate response is “We could kill it”. Not “Hey, we should run” or “We need to get away from it”. It was basically “We could end its life”. And while I know kids shows have to use language like “destroy” or “eradicate” or anything that’s not “kill”, I’m not used to applying “killing” to the world of Power Rangers. Even Zordon says that Rita must be “stopped”, and the kids immediately take that as “We have to kill Rita.” Hold your horses, hoss! I know they live in some little podunk fishing town, but have these kids killed before? Will they kill again?!

Also, Brian Tyler’s score needs to be applauded. It’s one basic theme that’s repeated throughout the film, but I didn’t realize how epic it was until the second viewing. Sure, it’s not “Go Go Power Rangers” or any of the show’s songs from Ron Wasserman, but it really conveys that superhero aesthetic the movie is going for.

It’s not all sunshine and roses in the world of Power Rangers, however. First up, original Green Ranger Jason David Frank was apparently kicked out of the premiere of the film because he took out his camera to film the audience’s reaction to his onscreen cameo. If you’re not familiar with his antics, his lives his life online. He thinks he’s giving a ton of access to his fans, so he basically vlogs EVERYTHING. Signings, convention panels, etc. He was a web series called My Morphing Life, so I assume  he was trying to get footage for that. Well, security did what the original 5 Power Rangers couldn’t do, and that was defeat the Green Ranger. They escorted him out and he didn’t even get to see the mid credit scene. They tried to take his phone, which he wasn’t about to let them do, so he yelled “It’s morphin time” and proceeded to beat up a bunch of middle aged men. Well, I don’t know about that last part, but it’s still fun to imagine.

Next up, murderous Wild Force Red Ricardo Medina Jr has been sentenced to 6 years in jail for the 2015 stabbing death of his roommate. Earlier this month he pleaded guilty voluntary manslaughter, and he got the maximum sentence for that charge. While I poke fun at it, the whole matter kinda sucks. I mean, he claims it was in self defense. In this crazy country, if he’d shot the guy, we probably wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Instead, he had to go and use a sword, and the American legal system just isn’t built for that. Here’s hoping he gets off early for good behavior or something.

There was a Justice League trailer released last Saturday, and that’s all I have to say about that. No, I guess I have more to say. Look, if the DCEU movies still get you hard, then more power to you. I’ve been fooled enough by those films to know that they’re more than likely not going to be my cup of tea. I felt like I was in Bizarro World, though, as everyone seemed to love the trailer but hate Cyborg. I was the opposite. I just can’t get excited about these things anymore, but I thought Cyborg looked cool. I’ve been told the CGI is outdated, but I’d rather he look like that than just a Black guy in a silver suit. Anyway, Snyder makes long-form stylized music videos. That’s what Watchmen was, and Dawn of Justice was a darker version of that. Here, it’s business as usual for him.

Speaking of DC movies, apparently Joss Whedon is in talks to write, produce and direct a Batgirl movie. Ya know, until he drops out. I’ve never worshipped at the altar of Joss, as I can see the holes in his whole gimmick. He’s always the go-to guy for “strong, female characters”, but I feel like it’d make more sense to just hire a woman instead of hiring a man who seems to understand women. I think DC is just trying to hedge their Bat bets because they know Affleck has one foot out the door. DC is the KING of announcing shit with nothing to back it up. The only time the MCU did that was with Inhumans, but DC has promised Green Lantern Corps, Black Adam, and  Cyborg films – all of which seem to be in Development Hell. To me, this is just another empty promise. DC is the dad who makes a ton of empty promises because he’s scared you love mom’s new boyfriend (Marvel) more than him. And they’re right. Have people forgotten all the Wonder Woman drama? People act like this is a major heel turn, with Whedon “defecting” from Marvel to DC, but I think the Russo Bros effectively swept away any influence folks thought Joss had on the MCU. Age of Ultron was a bore of a chore, so I’m not exactly jazzed about him crossing the aisle. I also don’t like the idea of a standalone Batgirl film that didn’t organically evolve from an existing Batman franchise. The Batman is falling apart, and instead of fixing that, they move on to Batgirl? Get your shit together, DC!

In the world of TV, Katie Cassidy is reportedly returning to Arrow next season as a series regular. Instead of playing Laurel Lance, however, she’ll be reprising her Earth 2 identity as villain Black Siren. If you remember, she crossed over into our world this season, and Oliver’s determined to rehabilitate her. I’m bored just thinking about it. However, if you know anything about the Arrowverse, you know that “series regular” doesn’t mean much. After all, Willa Holland is a series regular, and we’ve seen Thea how much this season? And Cassidy already had that exclusive Berlantiverse contract this season that yielded few results. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how much exposure she actually gets.

Speaking of the Arrowverse, we finally got our first look at Cress Williams as Black Lightning in the pilot being filmed by The CW. Fox passed on this a few months ago, so naturally The CW came to the rescue. Personally, I don’t think that universe needs a fifth show. They always add a show to the detriment of another. Arrow suffered when Flash came along, Flash suffered when Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow came along. Supergirl‘s still getting used to its new home, while Legends is only just starting to get good. I think they should focus on what they have instead of trying to expand right now. Someone online said that Black Lightning was corny, but so was Static and folks are always claiming they wanna see that character make a comeback. Sure, Black Lightning hails from a different era, and I really hope they just call him Lightning, kinda like how Ollie was just The Arrow in the beginning. The only important storyline I remember featuring Black Lightning was when he was chosen to be the Secretary of Education under the Luthor Administration. Other than that, his daughters have had more page time than he has in recent years. I’d be all for the character joining the Legends team, but I don’t know if there’s enough meat on that bone for a series. And knowing The CW, they’re gonna green light it anyway – not even stopping to think how a failure would devalue the brand.

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

The Big Bang Theory scored a 2-season renewal, which will take it through season 12. Suck it, haters!

Han Solo is not the character’s real name. His birth name was Handsome Solowitz, but his manager made him change it

Adam Sandler inked a deal for another 4 Netflix movies. When, exactly, did he officially become the White Tyler Perry?

In the upcoming film, Jumanji will now be a video game console and not a board game. As someone who never saw the first film, and has never played many board games, this doesn’t bother me in the least

The upcoming Astonishing X-Men comic series will feature a different artist every issue. All I know is that each issue better be a self-contained, done-in-one affair, or this is gonna get messy!

TLC is planning to bring back Trading Spaces. Paige Davis better return to host, or GTFO.

Jack the Ripper time travel drama Time After Time has been canceled by ABC

Bones ended its 12-year run, making it the longest-running Fox drama

AMC has renewed sci fi android drama HUMANS after a blink-and-you-missed-it second season.

Jordan Peele is being sought after to direct the live action Akira movie. Seems like an odd choice, but I guess he can write his own ticket after Get Out‘s success.

Mindy Kaling announced that her series, The Mindy Project, would end after its next season on Hulu.

In music news, I’ve just discovered a new Chinese boyband called Acrush. There’s a catch, however – it’s actually made up of androgynous girls! CRAZY!

Did you see that? I’m just glad Spider-Man is in the MCU now. Nobody does a shared universe like Marvel, so it’s nice to see him come home. It still feels like it’s an Ultimate Spider-Man movie, what with Gank…”Ned Leeds”. Seriously, why would Marvel go to the trouble of clearly putting Miles Morales’ best friend Ganke in the movie but then call him one of the Hobgoblins? Am I really supposed to expect this kid to become Hobgoblin down the road, a few sequels from now? It almost feels like fanservice to give him that name, to make fans wonder what might happen in the future, while never actually delivering it.

Anyway, every announcement about this film just gets better and better. For example, it was announced that it would officially introduce Damage Control to the MCU. In the comics, Damage Control was a construction firm co-owned by Tony Stark and Wilson Fisk (The Kingpin) that was tasked with rebuilding NYC after superhero battles. It’s such a logical concept, but something that gets lost in the suspension of disbelief that comics require. I’ve loved every appearance of Damage Control, so it’s nice that we’ll finally get to see them onscreen. They were actually mentioned in an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., as a division of S.H.I.E.L.D. itself, so it’ll be interesting to see how the movie handles this.

Also, it was reported that Pepper Potts might be making her return to the MCU in the film. I tend to hate Gwyneth Paltrow, but I really like her take on Pepper, as she serves as a good match for Downey’s Stark. If this rumor pans out, I’ll be very happy.

At this point, the only thing I’m not looking forward to is The Vulture. I always thought he was a lame character, but here’s hoping Keaton can do something to make him interesting. I’m as eager for this film as I’m not eager for Justice League. I swear I’m not just some Marvel fanboy, as I’m currently reading more DC than Marvel. That said, Marvel simply makes better movies, and it appears this will be one of them. So, for those reasons, the Spider-Man: Homecoming trailer had the West Week Ever.

[viralhottopics]

The 16 Most Beautifully Touching Love Letters From Famous Writers And Artists

1. Allen Ginsburg to poet Peter Orlovsky:

Dear Petey:

O Heart O Love everything is suddenly turned to gold! Dont be afraid dont worry the most astounding beautiful thing has happened here! I dont know where to begin but the most important. When Bill [ed: William S. Burroughs] came I, we, thought it was the same old Bill mad, but something had happened to Bill in the meantime since we last saw him…but last night finally Bill and I sat down facing each other across the kitchen table and looked eye to eye and talked, and I confessed all my doubt and misery and in front of my eyes he turned into an Angel!

What happened to him in Tangiers this last few months? It seems he stopped writing and sat on his bed all afternoons thinking and meditating alone & stopped drinking and finally dawned on his consciousness, slowly and repeatedly, every day, for several months awareness of a benevolent sentient (feeling) center to the whole Creation he had apparently, in his own way, what I have been so hung up in myself and you, a vision of big peaceful Lovebrain…

I woke up this morning with great bliss of freedom & joy in my heart, Bills saved, Im saved, youre saved, were all saved, everything has been all rapturous ever since I only feel sad that perhaps you left as worried when we waved goodby and kissed so awkwardly I wish I could have that over to say goodby to you happier & without the worries and doubts I had that dusty dusk when you left Bill is changed nature, I even feel much changed, great clouds rolled away, as I feel when you and I were in rapport, well, our rapport has remained in me, with me, rather than losing it, Im feeling to everyone, something of the same as between us.

2. Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera:

Diego:

Truth is, so great, that I wouldnt like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart. All this madness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only confusion. I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. Id like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.

F.

3. Oscar Wilde to Lord Alred Bosie Douglas (Wilde’s eventual muse):

My Own Boy,

Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.

Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first.

Always, with undying love, yours, Oscar

4. Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickok (Eleanor’s long-speculated lover):

Hick, darling

Ah, how good it was to hear your voice. It was so inadequate to try and tell you what it meant. Funny was that I couldnt say je taime and je tadore as I longed to do, but always remember that I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you.

5. Emma Darwin to Charles Darwin:

I cannot tell you the compassion I have felt for all your sufferings for these weeks past that you have had so many drawbacks. Nor the gratitude I have felt for the cheerful & affectionate looks you have given me when I know you have been miserably uncomfortable.

My heart has often been too full to speak or take any notice I am sure you know I love you well enough to believe that I mind your sufferings nearly as much as I should my own & I find the only relief to my own mind is to take it as from Gods hand, & to try to believe that all suffering & illness is meant to help us to exalt our minds & to look forward with hope to a future state. When I see your patience, deep compassion for others self command & above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven for the sake of your daily happiness. But I find it difficult enough in my own case. I often think of the words Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee. It is feeling & not reasoning that drives one to prayer. I feel presumptuous in writing thus to you.

I feel in my inmost heart your admirable qualities & feelings & all I would hope is that you might direct them upwards, as well as to one who values them above every thing in the world. I shall keep this by me till I feel cheerful & comfortable again about you but it has passed through my mind often lately so I thought I would write it partly to relieve my own mind.

6. English poet Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf:

…I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldnt even feel it. And yet I believe youll be sensible of a little gap. But youd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shant make you love me any more by giving myself away like this But oh my dear, I cant be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I dont love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I dont really resent it.

7. E.B. White to his wife on the occasion of her pregnancy, “written” by their dog:

Dear Mrs. White:

I like having Josephine here in the morning, although I suppose I will get less actual thinking done as I used to do my thinking mornings in the bathroom. White has been stewing around for two days now, a little bit worried because he is not sure that he has made you realize how glad he is that there is to be what the column writer in the Mirror calls a blessed event. So I am taking this opportunity, Mrs. White, to help him out to the extent of writing you a brief note which I havent done in quite a long time but have been a little sick myself as you know. Well, the truth is White is beside himself and would have said more about it but is holding himself back, not wanting to appear ludicrous to a veteran mother. What he feels, he told me, is a strange queer tight little twitchy feeling around the inside of his throat whenever he thinks that something is happening which will require so much love and all on account of you being so wonderful. (I am not making myself clear I am afraid, but on the occasions when White has spoken privately with me about this he was in no condition to make himself clear either and I am just doing the best I can in my own way.) I know White so well that I always know what is the matter with him, and it always comes to the same thing he gets thinking that nothing that he writes or says ever quite expresses his feeling, and he worries about his inarticulateness just the same as he does about his bowels, except it is worse, and it makes him either mad, or sick, or with a prickly sensation in the head. But my, my, my, last Sunday he was so full of this matter which he couldnt talk about, and he was what Josephine in her simple way would call hoppy, and particularly so because it seemed so good that everything was starting at once I mean those things, whatever they are, that are making such a noise over in the pond by Palmer Lewiss house, and the song sparrow that even I could hear from my confinement in the house, and those little seeds that you were sprinkling up where the cut glass and bones used to be all starting at the same time as the baby, which he seems to think exists already by the way he stands around staring at you and muttering little prayers. Of course he is also very worried for fear you will get the idea that he is regarding you merely as a future mother and not as a present person, or that he wants a child merely as a vindication of his vanity. I doubt if those things are true; White enjoys animal husbandry of all kinds including his own; and as for his regard for you, he has told me that, quite apart from this fertility, he admires you in all kinds of situations or dilemmas, some of which he says have been quite dirty.

Well, Mrs. White, I expect I am tiring you with this long letter, but as you often say yourself, a husband and wife should tell each other about the things that are on their mind, otherwise you get nowhere, and White didnt seem to be able to tell you about his happiness, so thought I would attempt to put in a word.

White is getting me a new blanket, as the cushion in the bathroom is soiled.

Lovingly, Daisy

8. Charles Eames’ marriage proposal to Ray Eames:

Dear Miss Kaiser,

I am 34 (almost) years old, singel (again) and broke. I love you very much and would like to marry you very very soon.* I cannot promise to support us very well. but if given the chance I will shure in hell try

*soon means very soon.

What is the size of this finger??

as soon as I get to that hospital I will write reams well little ones.

love xxxxxxxxxx

Charlie

9. Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir:

My dear little girl

For a long time Ive been wanting to write to you in the evening after one of those outings with friends that I will soon be describing in A Defeat, the kind when the world is ours. I wanted to bring you my conquerors joy and lay it at your feet, as they did in the Age of the Sun King. And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today Im doing it to feel the pleasure you dont yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much more often than I admit to you, but seldom when Im writing to you. Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love.

My dear little girl, as Ive told you, what youre lacking is friendship. But now is the time for more practical advice. Couldnt you find a woman friend? How can Toulouse fail to contain one intelligent young woman worthy of you*? But you wouldnt have to love her. Alas, youre always ready to give your love, its the easiest thing to get from you. Im not talking about your love for me, which is well beyond that, but you are lavish with little secondary loves, like that night in Thiviers when you loved that peasant walking downhill in the dark, whistling away, who turned out to be me. Get to know the feeling, free of tenderness, that comes from being two. Its hard, because all friendship, even between two red-blooded men, has its moments of love. I have only to console my grieving friend to love him; its a feeling easily weakened and distorted. But youre capable of it, and you must experience it. And so, despite your fleeting misanthropy, have you imagined what a lovely adventure it would be to search Toulouse for a woman who would be worthy of you and whom you wouldnt be in love with? Dont bother with the physical side or the social situation. And search honestly. And if you find nothing, turn Henri Pons, whom you scarcely love anymore, into a friend.

[]

I love you with all my heart and soul.

10. Honor de Balzac to Countess Ewelina Haska (June, 1835):

MY BELOVED ANGEL,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say to myself, Come, I am going there! Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not a life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself She is mine! Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!

11. Napoleon Bonaparte to Josphine de Beauharnais:

I am going to bed with my heart full of your adorable image I cannot wait to give you proofs of my ardent love How happy I would be if I could assist you at your undressing, the little firm white breast, the adorable face, the hair tied up in a scarf a la creole. You know that I will never forget the little visits, you know, the little black forest I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields. Kisses on your mouth, your eyes, your breast, everywhere, everywhere.

12. John Keats to Fanny Brawne:

My sweet love, I shall wait patiently till tomorrow before I see you, and in the mean time, if there is any need of such a thing, assure you by your Beauty, that whenever I have at any time written on a certain unpleasant subject, it has been with your welfare impressd upon my mind. How hurt I should have been had you ever acceded to what is, notwithstanding, very reasonable! How much the more do I love you from the general result! In my present state of Health I feel too much separated from you and could almost speak to you in the words of Lorenzos Ghost to Isabella

Your Beauty grows upon me and I feel A greater love through all my essence steal.

My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid; but that suspicion I dismiss utterly and remain happy in the surety of your Love, which I assure you is as much a wonder to me as a delight. Send me the words Good night to put under my pillow.

Dearest Fanny, Your affectionate J.K.

13. Lord Byron to Teresa Guiccioli (August, 1819):

My dearest Teresa,

I have read this book in your garden;–my love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it. It is a favourite book of yours, and the writer was a friend of mine. You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them,–which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian. But you will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love.

In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours–Amor mio–is comprised my existence here and hereafter. I feel I exist here, and I feel I shall exist hereafter,–to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, eighteen years of age, and two out of a convent. I love you, and you love me,–at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events.

But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us, –but they never will, unless you wish it.

14. Voltaire to Olympe Dunover, written while in prison for their affair:

I am a prisoner here in the name of the King; they can take my life, but not the love that I feel for you. Yes, my adorable mistress, to-night I shall see you, and if I had to put my head on the block to do it.

For heaven’s sake, do not speak to me in such disastrous terms as you write; you must live and be cautious; beware of madame your mother as of your worst enemy. What do I say? Beware of everybody; trust no one; keep yourself in readiness, as soon as the moon is visible; I shall leave the hotel incognito, take a carriage or a chaise, we shall drive like the wind to Sheveningen; I shall take paper and ink with me; we shall write our letters.

If you love me, reassure yourself; and call all your strength and presence of mind to your aid; do not let your mother notice anything, try to have your pictures, and be assured that the menace of the greatest tortures will not prevent me to serve you. No, nothing has the power to part me from you; our love is based upon virtue, and will last as long as our lives. Adieu, there is nothing that I will not brave for your sake; you deserve much more than that. Adieu, my dear heart!

Arout (Voltaire)

15. Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn:

TO MY MISTRESS. Because the time seems very long since I heard concerning your health and you, the great affection I have for you has induced me to send you this bearer, to be better informed of your health and pleasure, and because, since my parting from you, I have been told that the opinion in which I left you is totally changed, and that you would not come to court either with your mother, if you could, or in any other manner; which report, if true, I cannot sufficiently marvel at, because I am sure that I have since never done any thing to offend you, and it seems a very poor return for the great love which I bear you to keep me at a distance both from the speech and the person of the woman that I esteem most in the world: and if you love me with as much affection as I hope you do, I am sure that the distance of our two persons would be a little irksome to you, though this does not belong so much to the mistress as to the servant.

Consider well, my mistress, that absence from you grieves me sorely, hoping that it is not your will that it should be so; but if I knew for certain that you voluntarily desired it, I could do no other than mourn my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great folly. And so, for lack of time, I make an end of this rude letter, beseeching you to give credence to this bearer in all that he will tell you from me.

Written by the hand of your entire Servant, H.R.

16. Leo Tolstoy to Valeria Arsenev (November, 1856):

I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to love in you that which is eternal and ever previous your heat, your soul. Beauty one could get to know and fall in love with in one hour and cease to love it as speedily; but the soul one must learn to know. Believe me, nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings.

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from The 16 Most Beautifully Touching Love Letters From Famous Writers And Artists