#farmer city illinois

[rabbitmilk]

8.23.23

[applejaax]

Blue Hour

Chapter 1: The Dreadful Implications of a Pizza Delivery Man

Steve dropped his keys on the table when he entered the apartment. Robin was nestled on the couch fast asleep under an afghan, with the tv mindlessly droning on in the background. He took the remote from her hand and turned it off, startling her awake.

    “Ya gotta stop falling asleep with the tv on, Robin. It’s gonna rot your brain with subliminal messages from infomercials,” Steve said sarcastically, dropping the remote down onto the coffee table.

    “Wow those are big words for you, Steve, don’t hurt yourself now,” she retorted, tugging the blanket over her head and rolling away from him.

   “Haven’t heard that one before.” Steve rolled his eyes and went to the kitchen.

   It was a barren wasteland in the fridge besides some fresh vegetables they’d gotten from a local farmers market for no apparent reason, a single jar of jam, and a few beer bottles. He took one and shut the door.

   “Pizza for dinner?!” He called out. Robin’s hand came into view with a thumb up in approval and disappeared again. He laughed and leaned on the counter, sipping from the bottle in his hand.

    For three years, since he moved away from Hawkins, Steve’s been living with Robin in Illinois. She had been accepted and enrolled in some private university. At first he was upset about her leaving him all alone after everything they’d endured. In the end though it was nothing but a blessing in disguise. He pitched the idea of them moving in with each other and how good it would be for them. Robin wasn’t too keen on it at first because she wanted to make new friends, or even meet a girl she could really connect with, and suspected he’d get in the way. That was a pretty deep cut to his ego at first, he wouldn’t lie. However, with much annoying pleading and begging on his end, she eventually agreed.

     His parents had opposed, especially his father on the premise that Robin and Steve were dating. Steve never fully expressed why that would never in a million years happen but all it took was a, ‘she’s not my type, Dad,’ and that was the end of it. His mother had been the one to fully convince his old man that this was a good thing for his son. Somehow, that worked.

   Now here they were. They stayed about 5 miles off campus in a rundown neighborhood. The rent was low and the standards of living even lower. Everything in their apartment was broken. The ceiling leaked, the floors creaked, and the walls were made out of paper machete. Yet, Steve never felt more at home. He’d rather live here in this dump than step one foot back in their hell-bound hometown. In fact, it was his worst fucking nightmare. This was paradise in comparison.

   He worked a pretty simple office job in a marketing company. It wasn’t ideal but it paid well and didn’t require him to have a degree. He’d gotten lucky, he was aware of the privilege that living in the city provided. Also, who his parents were and his surname did help too. Regardless, he no longer felt like a nobody failure the way he did in Hawkins. There were so many opportunities and options out here. He could truly flourish without second guessing himself anymore. Hawkins had nothing left to offer him and all it took was an outside perspective. He was happy he’d left. He hoped and prayed, for whatever reason there may be, he never had to go back there.

  That was wishful thinking.

   About an hour after Steve had called in their pizza order there was a knock at the door.

   “Robin, pizza’s here!” He called from his bedroom down the hall.

   “I’m busy! Get it yourself!”

    Steve groaned, pausing the movie he was watching and rolled off his bed.

   “You’re so lazy!” He threw the front door open. His eyes grew wider than saucers and it felt like lightening crackled under his skin as time seemed to slow.

    A pair of brown eyes like rich soil after heavy rain, brown curly hair to match in contrast to skin as fair as moonlight. A smile with dimples and lines in the cheeks that caused creases under the eyes that made them light up like fireflies. Steve was dreaming. He had to be. No way this was real. He wanted to reach out and touch his soft skin, when he knew he shouldn’t. He needed to ground himself and stop the impending spiral but it proved to be too late for that.

  Oh fuck. This is bad.

   Steve’s brain malfunctioned and he couldn’t form a single coherent thought let alone any words. His mouth moved like a fish out of water as he tried to form a sentence or even a sound. He simply gaped at the person in his doorway for an uncomfortable amount of time.

   “Uhm, sir?” The man waved his hand in Steve’s face. The cadence and pitch in his voice was all screwy. Not right at all. It snapped Steve clean out of this mortifying stupor.

   He blinked rapidly and swallowed hard, throwing the money at him, snatching the pizza, and slamming the door. He turned and leaned on it for support, trying to catch the breath that was steadily running further and further away from him.

   Robin came sprinting from the bathroom with damp hair and a shocked look on her face.

  “What the hell happened?!” She asked, Steve couldn’t respond, he was paralyzed. “Steve?” She approached him slow with her hand out.

   “Robin, he looked like him,” he managed to say around the lump in his throat. “He looked just like him.” He slowly hugged his knees to his chest and fought the tears that threatened to fall.

   This couldn’t be happening. Everything was going so well. Maybe even too good to be true but he didn’t care. There wasn’t a damn thing out of place and this was the landslide he’d been anxiously awaiting to fuck him over. He was cursed, he was sure of that. There was no other rhyme or reason for it.

   They moved to Robin’s room when Steve found the courage to even stand up. They sat on her bed with the pizza box wide open. The smell of cheese, tomato sauce, and garlic nauseated him despite the fact he was starving.

   “I mean, doppelgängers do exist! They say it’s dangerous to come across your own. It’s really fascinating. I guess it makes sense though because how can we have all these billions of people on the planet and not have someone look exactly like us, you know?”

    Steve didn’t say anything. He let her ramble on as if it would help when it certainly didn’t. This dug up memories he’d presumed he’d buried forever. He was certain he’d laid it all to rest along with his dead boyfriend. After this whole hot mess, he felt like he’d regressed to square one and all it took was a similar face. He didn’t want to throw himself a pity party but damn he couldn’t catch a break.

    “Steve…Steve!” Robin flopped on the bed next to him. “Am I doing it again…with the talking too much thing?”

     Steve sighed and picked up a slice of pizza, biting into it hesitantly and watched the cheese stretch.

    “Kinda,” he said with his mouth full.

    “Shit. Sorry. I’m not good with this sorta thing. Comforting people isn’t my forté. But I’m a decent listener…sometimes.”

    Steve stared at her for a moment, then mustered a smile. A mask that was quick to falter and dissolve away at any moment.

    “It’s fine. There’s really nothing either of us can do in this situation.” He set down the half eaten slice of pizza. His appetite was gone. “You’re right about one thing. I guess we’re bound to see someone who looks like someone we know or knew eventually.”

   “Yeah, but…I’m just- I’m so sorry.”

    “Don’t be. It’s nobody’s fault.” Steve could hear the strain in his voice. “Would you mind if I uhh-“ He signaled towards the door and Robin nodded encouragingly.

    In his bedroom, Steve curled up under his blankets and laid there in the dark for what felt like an eternity. The tears that spilled from the corners of his eyes had finally dried but it wasn’t over. Especially since now all he could do was torture himself with nothing else but the thought of Eddie.

    He meant the world to Steve and taught him so many lessons he wouldn’t have learned otherwise. His mind had never been more open than when he was with Eddie. He was someone everyone could rely on but nobody wanted to put their faith in. Steve did and it was so worth it right up until the very end. He still kicked himself for the period in which he regretted even meeting Eddie. Or that he wished they could swap places. It was only because the visceral pain of letting him go and moving on was something he could hardly handle. The wounds tore open so often that he let the memories of Eddie die, too, just to get some release from the heartbreak.

     It was like he didn’t exist anymore in Steve’s world and he preferred it that way as opposed to living the rest of his life in agony. There was no other way to let go besides that. And tonight, that man at his door, instantaneously destroyed walls he’d put his blood, sweat, and tears into building to free himself of Eddie and everything they’d shared. To put it lightly, this was a slap to the face and a boot to the gut. 

     He was gone. He deserved to be here but he wasn’t. He was never coming back. Steve had come to peace with that, and his grief, before he’d left Hawkins. It was one of the things that helped him cope the most. Now he had to pick himself up all over again and he hoped it wouldn’t take as long as the first time around, or both him and Robin were doomed to suffer.

****

    Steve didn’t remember falling asleep. He woke the next morning to a migraine, swollen eyelids, and the phone ringing off the hook. He shoved a pillow over his head and waited for it to stop. He had work today but he didn’t want to go. He felt like shit after last night. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling for a long time until the phone started up again and forced him out of bed.

    “What do you want?!” He answered gruffly. He sounded like garbage and felt even worse. 

   “Well, geez. Hello to you, too.”

    “Dustin!” He sighed in relief. “Wait, shouldn’t you be in school instead of bothering me at 8 in the damn morning?”

    “The city has changed you, Steve. I don’t like it.”

    Steve rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Get on with it.”

    “Okay, okay. I’m not at school right now because I have something important to tell you. I couldn’t wait,” he paused for a beat. “I think he’s back, Steve.”

     Steve’s heart lurched and plummeted hard into his stomach. His sadness was overpowered by fear. His throat tightened up as panic rose. The room started to spin and he lost his balance, stumbling back into the wall.

   “Steve? Talk to me, man! Are you okay?”

    “I’m- good. I’m good.” He rested his head in his palm and slid down to the floor in defeat. “Tell me everything.”

[fatehbaz]

Libby’s canned pumpkin, for example, the largest canned pumpkin producer in the country, calls their product pumpkin instead of squash because the pumpkin means more to the average American consumer. But if you saw the thing, it looks just like squash -- because it is squash [...]. So this is not just a story of myth making, but also one showing the repercussions of these myths for rural economies. [...]

In the early nineteenth century when people were moving off farms and into cities, the smaller and sweeter varieties that we now call squash were available [...]. Zucchini and winter squash, for example, had some commodity status, and were a part of their daily lives. But the pumpkin -- that orange round squash -- was the crop that was left behind on the farm and it didn’t go into the market place. Small-scale farmers kept it in production because it was a substitute for livestock fodder [...]. It started to represent an old-fashioned way [...]. So in the early nineteenth century when industrial agriculture took off, there was no room for the pumpkin in the marketplace. But this was exactly the time it started to appear in Winslow Homer’s paintings and Harper’s Magazine and romantic poems. [...]

---

Morton, Illinois is the location of a Libby’s processing plant. Libby’s controls about ninety percent of the market for culinary pumpkins, and they’ve been around almost a hundred years. In 1970 they tried to have one big corporate-sized pumpkin farm in California, and the plan was to ship the crop back to Morton for processing. So they tried that model but it didn’t work because the market for the pumpkin is lucrative but limited; it could be eaten throughout the year, but it’s not. Ninety percent of the market is from September through January. [...] Libby’s returned to Morton to distribute their seeds [...]. They send this seed to between fifty and seventy small family farms within a seventy-five mile radius of their plant [...]. These farms then plant these seeds on behalf of Libby’s. [...]

---

But in the story of how it became an icon, it was really consumers creating the market and the farmers following to meet demand. [...] Farmers would be driving down the highway in a truck full of pumpkins for their hogs and they’d be stopped by tourists on their Sunday drives through the country asking if they could buy pumpkins. Farmers never had the idea that this was going to be a commodity. So then the seed companies started changing the seed to fit the idea that this was going to be an object of display and ornament instead of something to eat.

Today, sixty-five to seventy percent of pumpkin production is for ornamental pumpkins, and they are produced around the country. Most places across the country are conducive for small family farms to produce these -- you can throw in a few seeds and get a pretty good yield. It’s a lucrative but limited market, so there’s almost nobody that ships nationwide but almost everyone ships locally. If you’re a trucker in Nebraska, you basically stick in Nebraska for pumpkins because it just doesn’t pay, especially for the ornamentals. If they get nicked or the stem falls off they’re worthless, so that makes it a local crop too. [...]

---

Words of Cindy Ott. As interviewed and transcribed by Daniel Grant. Published by Grant under the title: “From Jack-O’-Lantern to Pumpkin Pie: The Surprising History of a Favorite Fall Icon.” In: Edge Effects. 27 October 2015. Updated 12 October 2019. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[metalmaul]

PLEASE SHARE!!

Making this post for Illinois residents:

I got a flyer in the mail from University of Illinois & Find Food IL for a website that has a map resource of everywhere that accepts SNAP benefits.

This includes grocery stores, food pantries, schools, meal sites, senior food resources, government offices, and the most exciting to me, farmers markets!!! I've never been to a farmers market before because I didn't think they accepted food stamps.

You can look up your city/town & any other surrounding cities/towns that might be accessible to you. Theres a button that I've circled in red that will show a list of all resources in the area you've chosen. You can also search by resource by clicking on one of these icons I've circled in blue (scroll horizontally for more.)

I'm using the mobile site, so on a computer this might look slightly different.

I would appreciate if, even if you don't live in Illinois, you could share this information. I'm not sure if everyone is aware of it, or if everyone got a flyer for it; I certainly had NO idea and it's really an exciting & life-changing kind of thing to think about being able to get fresh, locally grown food with SNAP.

Obviously, I've yet to actually go & check out my local options, so I'm not sure what the process will be like yet or if there are any limitations. Plus, naturally, everywhere is probably different. However, just to KNOW this exists is important enough to share the information.

The website is:

https://eat-move-save.extension.illinois.edu/

[jurisffiction]

what i personally associate with every u.s. state

alabama: that 'home' song my flatmate had on her driving playlist for years

alaska: airline

arizona: twilight

arkansas: see alabama

california: james blunt song where he sings "californ-i-ay" but not the james blunt song titled "california"

colorado: 'wide lands of the navajo' painting

connecticut: my friend jess

delaware: biden

florida: florida man

georgia: the country

hawai'i: my friend devin

idaho: potato

illinois: illinoise

indiana: west wing episode where they get confused about time zone changes

iowa: caucus

kansas: wizard of oz

kentucky: how to pronounce louisville

louisiana: murder capital

maine: second portland

maryland: cafe i went to in dc that claimed their food was fresh from maryland and served me french toast in some kind of log. may have been founding farmers? Uncertain

massachusetts: social network

michigan: lake

minnesota: canada

mississippi: matilda rhyme

missouri: supernatural character

montana: big sky country hgtv

nebraska: unicameralism

nevada: bad times at the el royale

new hampshire: first in the nation!

new jersey: amanda

new mexico: weird al song albuquerque

new york: they might be giants new york city

north carolina: that bookclub book by that murderer woman

north dakota: fanning

ohio: time i slipped on an icy patch in youngstown

oklahoma: musical

oregon: other portland

pennsylvania: rocky horror picture show. because i learnt "transylvania" before i knew "pennsylvania" existed and always got them confused as a kid

rhode island: taylor swift mansion

south carolina: south carolina on my mind. state song

south dakota: north dakota

tennessee: weird state shape

texas: they killed jfk

utah: mormons

vermont: cheers season 2 episode 18 "snow job"

virginia: jefferson

washington: twilight

washington dc: emissary cafe

west virginia: mcelroy brothers

wisconsin: 70s show

wyoming: demetri martin bit about it being suspiciously easy to draw

[heroes-anthesis]

THE CRISIS: US HISTORY

The Empowered Creation Event, also known as the Crisis, was an event that occurred in early 2018. Humans across the world suddenly found themselves with superpowers. This led to a global rebellion against traditional governments, using the newfound powers as a way to counter militaries and police forces.

The Estimated Territories of Each American Territory during the Crisis.This graphic is a rough estimation.

To date, only the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Ethiopia, Germany, China, and Australia are in control of their original territories. Saudi Arabia, and Scandinavia dissolved entirely, being replaced by either a new government or warmongering states. Russia controls a fraction of it’s land, with the remainder being controlled by a Siberian warlord.

In the United States, an estimated 15% of the population are Empowered, though only 10% are registered in the Empowered Personnel System . This number was decided among think tanks, accounting for similar population densities in other countries. Of that amount, about 2% were responsible for the warlord states, operating as leadership or militia forces.

The rapid formation of the Parahuman Soldiers, founded by Artur Stonewall in New York, gave the United States the manpower it needed to retake its former territory by the beginning of the next year.

Territories

-United States

The United States government, caught off guard by the Crisis, was able to maintain control of all territory from Maryland up to Maine. Within two months of the Warlord period, the US Army began testing the Parahuman Soldiers, using government aligned Empowered (Via military, police force, or general patriotism) as a counter force to the Warlords.

-The Neo Confederacy (Colloquially the Mississippi Khans)

The first “Warlord” group to rebel, prompted by a Black senator being killed in an Empowered attack. Following this, multiple other politicians were attacked and executed by a radical group, who then took control. Their territory covered North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.

-New Vegas

Mob bosses within the Western hemisphere quickly took control, utilizing Empowered force and gambling debts to create a fighting force. The area was lauded as a safe haven for Empowered, who were welcomed indiscriminately provided they provided their services. Territory included Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana, and everything West of those states.

-Farmer’s Alliance (Colloquially Oz)

Due to the already sparse population density, the number of known Empowered in the region was low. Following the Crisis, many Empowered fled to The Midwest Alliance was created by a union of Unempowered farmers and hunters, citing claims against both New Vegas and the United States government. The territory included Dakota (Formerly North Dakota and South Dakota), Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota.

-The Northern Group (Colloquially, the Windies)

Local gangs were joined into one army, under the command of Antony “Windy” Lawrence. Though his power is unknown, it is believed that he had some form of mind control power. The gangs spread out, becoming the local police force in the area. Unempowered were forbidden from leaving their cities, and made to work manual labor. The territory included Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia.

-Republic of Texas

Immediately following the creation of the Midwest Alliance, the Republic of Texas claimed independence from the United States.This new nation was the last one to be reclaimed; following the fall of the Northern Group, Texas made an alliance with Mexico, becoming a vassal of the nation in exchange for protection and resources.

-Lost Territories

Due to their distance away from the Continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii were taken by foreign nations. Alaska was taken by Siberia (Formerly Russia), Hawaii by China. Their distance, along with continued unrest within the continental states, has made recapture a low priority. Representatives of the government claim plans for recapture, but have noted worries of war with neighboring countries.

Timeline

January 1, 2018-People across the globe begin developing powers. These powers vary in strength, range, and effects. Government and Media Organizations label those people as “Empowered”.

January 15, 2018- The CDC and WHO label the sudden appearance of powers as a possible pandemic. Citizens are urged to isolate themselves from people who display powers, leading to a wave of unemployment of Empowered people due to the lack of a protective class status.

January 22, 2018-Prompted by a sudden spike of crime, the US Congress passes the Limitation of Powers Act, which makes the unauthorized usage of powers a felony. Additionally, this act creates the Empowered Personnel System, a list that all Empowered are legally required to register to on the first sign of superpowers.

February 7, 2018- The President of Russia is assassinated by an Empowered. That same day, an empowered man in Tupelo, MS, inspired by this event, attacks and kills a local State Senator.

February 12, 2018- A registered hate group, known as the Mississippi Khans, take over the Mississippi State Capitol, claiming secession from the United States. Armed service members are called back to the United States. On arrival, many eventually defect or go missing.

February 13, 2018-Riots begin within the Southern United States. The National Guard is deployed to Atlanta, Birmingham, and Tupelo, but are routed by Empowered Militia operating under the Mississippi Khans. Their leader, Jeffery Palmer, officially claims Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia as territory of the Neo Confederacy. Politicians and unempowered citizens flee the region.

February 22, 2018-In an unseen assault, multiple members of the United States Armed Forces defect, attempting to take control of the available weapons and vehicles. The attack fails, and the remaining members of the coup flee throughout the country. Many leave for the Neo Confederacy.

March 15, 2018- A coalition of gangs working under Antony Lawrence launches a sudden invasion based out of Chicago, Illinois. Damage done by the Assault of the Mississippi Khans prevents the National Guard from properly mobilizing. The coalition, under the name of the Northern Group, launched a sudden invasion of neighboring states.

April 8, 2018-The Northern Group officially stops their invasion after taking Virginia. In response, important members of the federal government flee to New York, establishing it as an emergency Capitol. Martial Law is declared within the remaining territories under US control. Congress labels all of the rebelling territories as enemy nations, and declares war. That same day, Command Sergeant Major Artur Stonewall receives the green light to begin a program for training Empowered humans.

April 9, 2018- The United States Congress unanimously votes to give President Maxwell Harrington emergency powers to deal with the situation, dubbed by historians as the Crisis. He declares martial law across all US territories along with dubbing any defectors as enemy territories. The Armed Forces are restructured into the United States First National Guard.

April 15, 2018- Mafia bosses who fled to Las Vegas, Nevada, initiate a hostile takeover of the city. Utilizing their manpower, connections, and powers, New Vegas is established, claiming dominion of a large portion of the Western United States. A broadcast is sent out to the rest of the nation, offering shelter for all Empowered in exchange for their labor.

May 3, 2018- Stonewall begins training the first class of Empowered soldiers, later dubbed Parahumans, in the Empowered Training Facility in Trenton, New Jersey. The Prepared Parahuman Program utilized an Empowered person’s instinctual ability to use their powers to provide an accelerated training. Leader Lawrence calls for a fortification of the Northern Border.

May 5, 2018-Due to a lack of effective oversight in the area, the National Guard successfully secures Virginia and West Virginia from the Northern Group. The first recorded assassination attempt on President Harrington’s life was thwarted by an unknown empowered. From then, an estimated two assassins each have allegedly been caught, tried, and executed by the CIA each month.

June 3, 2018- The first graduates of the Prepared Parahumans Program are deployed to Warden, Virginia in an attempt to rout an invading Neo Confederate platoon. The battle goes in favor of the Parahumans, who manage to force the platoon out of the Virginia border. The invading force, which was composed of the Neo-Confederacy’s strongest parahumans, retreated to Tallahassee due to their massive casualties and a misfire of a teleport ability.

July 4, 2018- The second class of Parahumans are sent to New Vegas, using the territory’s Empowered friendly policy to infiltrate the enemy. At the same time, a demonstration in Atlanta led to a large fire that decimated a majority of the Neo Confederacy’s supply of rations.

July 25, 2018- Major leaders of New Vegas are assassinated during a strategy meeting. The offending parahumans are apprehended, and held hostage. The second in commands immediately declare an invasion of the Farmers’ Alliance, citing a food crisis as the motive.

August 1, 2018-Citizens of the Neo Confederacy, both Empowered and Unempowered, riot following a revelation that the Khans were hoarding food and medicine. Many of the rebelling faction’s officers, including the President, Secretary, and Head Judge, are decapitated in a public execution.

August 15, 2018-The New Vegas Militia successfully capture a major farm in the territory of the Farmers’ Alliance. Despite a lack of an official surrender, the group claims control of the territory.

August 16, 2018- Neo-Confederate Vice President Humphrey Hitchcock surrenders at the border of Virginia. He provides key information about the Neo-Confederacy’s military in exchange for immunity. His safehouse in Maine is later destroyed in a claimed freak Empowered accident.

September 22, 2018-A group of unempowered within Chicago successfully manage to capture the main headquarters of the Northern Group, where leader Antony Lawrence is captured and executed. Using weapons found in the headquarters, the group manages to force a retreat of many Empowered soldiers of the faction, who flees to the Neo Confederacy and New Vegas. The First National Guard successfully annexes the territory, where a new base of operations and Parahuman training facility is established in Lexington, Kentucky.

October 30, 2018-A team of 50 parahuman soldiers Invade Tennessee from Lexington. With a strategy of killing every citizen, the state is captured by the team in two days.

January 2, 2019- The first recorded Empowered with Nation Level powers, Coraline Daniels, uses her power FIREBALL on the still independent Texas.75% of the population, including about 10 miles of neighboring Mexico, are completely destroyed. New Vegas and the remnants of the Farmers’ Alliance officially surrender later that day.

The Second Reconstruction

Following the surrender of New Vegas, the National Guard was deployed to every major city center in the country. All active Parahumans were called back to New York for additional training. In April of 2019, all remaining police forces, along with the Prepared Parahumans Program, were merged into the National Guard.

Due to outstanding service, Director Stonewall created the Warden Elite Team, consisting of high performing Parahumans within New York and Washington DC. These teams were designed to be extremely competitive, with the worst performing member demoted to Parahuman at the beginning of each month. Additionally, the Sovereign Guardians were also created, composed of ten Parahumans with nation level powers.

President Harrington, during his 2019 State of the Union speech, requested for his emergency powers granted to him by Congress to be kept, citing foreign enemies and possible sedition from disgruntled politicians. That week, a majority vote by Congress approved his request for another year. Since then, Congress has approved the retaining of President Harrington’s emergency every year since, along with a suspension of presidential elections and term limits.

The establishment of the Seer Department, spearheaded by the Original Seer, created a system of surveillance throughout the United States. Utilizing Empowered with temporal and spatial observation powers, the Prepared Parahuman Program created buildings known as Superhuman Oversight Bureaus in major city centers, as both a way to keep an eye on criminals, and serve as bases for Parahumans and Wardens

Within the first few months of 2020, President Harrington created new classifications, vigilantes and villains. Vigilantes, by definition, were known as Empowered who attempted to take the law into their own hands. Vigilantes apprehended by the police or Parahumans, were sentenced to life imprisonment without a trial. Villains, by definition, were regular criminals who used their powers to commit crimes that were not classified as vigilantism.

Complaints and Criticisms

One of the key issues during the Crisis was the role of the Empowered Personnel System established by the Limitation of Powers Act. While the system aimed to regulate and monitor Empowered individuals for security purposes, it also led to discrimination and stigmatization against those who were Empowered. Many Empowered individuals were given a status below that of a protective class, leading to widespread unemployment and isolation.

The use of Parahuman Soldiers, trained Empowered individuals working for the government, was also a topic of contention. The establishment of the Prepared Parahumans Program provided additional manpower for the government in their fight against the Warlord factions. However, the program also raised concerns about the line between using superpowers for national defense and exploitation of Empowered individuals.

The handling of the Neo Confederacy, a Warlord faction that claimed secession from the United States and controlled multiple Southern states, was also heavily criticized. The National Guard's inability to properly mobilize against the group allowed them to capture key states such as Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. In addition, the group's founders were allegedly associated with a hate group, and reports of food and medicine hoarding further made them unpopular among their own citizens.

The creation of the Vigilante and Villain classes are attributed to the rise of violent crimes. Experts claimed that while the change did help to hasten the justice process, innocent people had been imprisoned and killed unfairly, leading to those caught taking more radical actions against the government. This issue also went along with the creation of the Seers, where the lack of supposed privacy had a direct correlation with crime.

[rabbitcruiser]

Snack a Pickle Day

Snack a Pickle Day is a day for snacking on pickles. Pickles, which usually mean pickled cucumbers when spoke of in the United States, are preserved in a brine or vinegar solution, and flavored with herbs and seasonings. The word “pickle” is derived from the Dutch word pekel, which means brine. The pickling process was invented around 1440, and many people were making pickles in their homes by the 1600’s. This was helped with the invention of the mason jar in 1858. Pickles are a low calorie food and high in vitamin K, but they may also be high in sodium. Each year Americans eat about 9 pounds of pickles.

How to Observe Snack a Pickle Day

The day should be celebrated by snacking on a pickle! Pickles can be eaten on their own or with a meal. They can be put on a hamburger,or chopped into a relish and put on a hot dog. Sometimes they are served on a stick, and sometimes they are even deep fried. There are many types of pickles to try:

Bread and butter—part of sweet family of pickles; has onions and bell peppers; sometimes have a waffle-esque shape; solution of vinegar, sugar, and spices; name comes from Omar and Cora Fanning, Illinois cucumber farmers who started selling the pickles in the early 1920’s and filed for the name in 1923; name derived from how they traded their pickles for things like bread and butter during rough years.

Cinnamon—bright red and flavored with cinnamon; sometimes a Christmas treat.

Dill—made with dill herbs or dill oil; have been served in New York City since at least 1899.

Gherkins—smaller and usually sweeter; made with Burr or West Indian cucumbers; sometimes “gherkin” is a generic term used for pickles in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Kool-aid—soaked in kool-aid and pickle brine.

Kosher dill—dill pickle with lots of garlic in the salt brine.

Polish—somewhere between kosher dill and sour.

Sour—fermented longer in brine, which makes them sourer.

Sour mixed—sour pickles cut and mixed with other veggie such as onions, cauliflower, carrots, and peppers.

Sour relish—made with finely chopped sour pickles with other vegetables; also called “piccalili.”

Sweet—usually made with vinegar, spices, and sugar; includes sliced sweet pickles, or “cross cuts”, which are cut crosswise into chips.

Sweet mixed—sweet pickles mixed with other vegetables.

Source

[rapeculturerealities]

Eliza Bleu’s Own Friends Aren’t Buying Her Trafficking Story

With striking lilac hair and a pugnacious attitude, the anti-sex trafficking activist known as Eliza Bleu has broken into some of the top tiers of right-wing media in just a few years, growing her audience through interviews with popular figures like Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, and Dr. Drew Pinsky.

But in late 2022, Bleu found an even more powerful ally: new Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Bleu, who refers to herself as “a survivor of human trafficking,” has lent the billionaire an unusual form of credibility by insisting that pre-Musk Twitter was overrun with child pornography. Only Musk, Bleu says, has been willing to stamp out the abusive material on Twitter “at scale.” In another tweet, she declared, “The war against Elon Musk is actually a war over your mind.” Musk responded with a bullseye emoji.

Bleu’s praise for Musk comes even as the billionaire has slashed much of Twitter’s staff, including huge numbers of workers responsible for content moderation. For his part, Musk has boosted Bleu’s profile on the site with replies and retweets, helping her earn more than 100,000 new followers in December alone.

“You have a direct line to me on this issue,” Musk told Bleu in a Twitter Space live chat in December.

“When I stepped away from the gang, my traffickers lost money. And they want that money back. ”

— Eliza Bleu

But now Bleu and Musk find themselves embroiled in a Twitter censorship controversy, after multiple critics of Bleu who shared embarrassing images from her past saw their accounts temporarily suspended from the site. Some users suggested that Bleu’s “direct line” to Twitter brass and Musk himself may have led to the crackdown, even as the Twitter owner insists he’s in favor of “free speech” and wide-ranging debate.

Bleu and Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Amid the controversy over the suspended accounts, questions about Bleu’s background have emerged. Her critics have seized on contradictory videos and interviews—and her frequent use of different names online—to suggest Bleu isn’t who she claims to be.

Now two former friends of Bleu tell The Daily Beast that, at best, Bleu is exaggerating her experiences for attention.

“It’s making a lot of her old friends around here really angry,” said Carly Wenzel, a one-time pal of Bleu who has known her for two decades, who added she believes Bleu is “completely lying.”

Bleu grew up in a rural area along Illinois’s border with Iowa known as the “Quad Cities.” She’s portrayed her homeschooled upbringing as an innocent one, albeit one that made her all the more naive about how the world really works.

Despite her claims to the contrary, public records prove that Bleu’s original name was Eliza Morthland. Born in 1981, her father is Richard Morthland, a farmer and former Illinois state representative who ran unsuccessfully on the GOP ticket for lieutenant governor in 2018. Morthland did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2021, Bleu appeared to deny on Twitter that she was Eliza Morthland, but Facebook photos show her standing with other members of the Morthland family. A 2010 newspaper article about Richard Morthland shows a woman who looks just like Bleu standing next to the politician and identified as his daughter, “Eliza Morthland.” Richard Morthland also gave a comment for a 2009 article about a band Bleu worked for under her married name Eliza Siep. And Bleu’s cosmetology license lists Richard Morthland’s farm as her address.

There’s no question that Bleu has advocated for trafficking victims, especially on Twitter. But she has offered murky accounts of her own background that leave even her supporters unsure about all but the vaguest details. She can also grow hostile with reporters who ask for basic facts, like the years she was trafficked or the names of perpetrators. For example, journalist Katie Herzog reached Bleu on the phone in December, only to have Bleu become defensive when Herzog raised even the prospect of asking Bleu about her own story.

“Bleu stirred up some controversy of her own with diehard supporters of the band, in online mini-scandals that featured Bleu calling Star the n-word.”

Interviewed on Tim Pool’s podcast, Bleu said she could not offer details about her alleged abusers because of unspecified legal issues. Then she asked why it would be a problem if she was making up her story.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, it is made up,” Bleu said. “What’s my biggest win so far in public? Getting Twitter to address child sexual abuse material and make it a top priority?

“I’m not asking an abuser for money, and I’m not asking people for money,” she added.

The Daily Beast pieced together a rough outline of Bleu’s account of her trafficking experiences based on interviews she’s given to sympathetic media outlets.

Bleu has said that her trafficking spanned two different periods, separated by roughly a decade. In her telling, Bleu was first groomed by a prominent photographer she met at a Warped Tour concert in Chicago when she was 16. A few years later, when she was still a teenager in the late 1990s, Bleu’s father drove her to Los Angeles because Bleu was convinced that an unnamed “high profile musician” she met through that photographer would make her a star.

Instead, she was sexually assaulted within 48 hours of arriving in the city, according to a 2020 podcast interview. Her traffickers quickly hooked her on a drug she knew as “ice”—generally recognized as slang for crystal methamphetamine, though Bleu has said she didn’t know what drug it was.

Bleu claims she was then sold for $500 to a sex-trafficking ring in the Hollywood Hills, where she found herself living with members of a ring that trafficked transgender women.

“I was sold for $500 to a very old gentleman in the Hills,” Bleu said in the 2020 interview.

Bleu claims she struggled to get enough water and food, “because I was on drugs and other substances.” But Bleu was such a handful for her traffickers, in her telling, that they ultimately gave her back to her original trafficker for free. Bleu claims she was hospitalized for a drug overdose before returning to her family farm in Illinois.

“My family didn’t even recognize me when I got off the plane,” Bleu said.

After two weeks on the farm, she returned to Los Angeles to retrieve her car, Bleu claims, but she was once again swept up into human trafficking for an undefined period.

“It’s odd what happens to the trauma brain,” Bleu said on the 2020 podcast episode to explain why she returned to her traffickers, comparing it to Stockholm syndrome.

Bleu’s second trafficking period, in her account, began in roughly 2008 or 2009, when she was living in the Chicago area. In that same 2020 podcast interview, Bleu claimed she was trafficked by a “high-profile athlete” whom she has declined to name. That man and his associates, according to Bleu, put her in a dangerous neighborhood she has said existed on what she called a “gang line”—the violent border where two Chicago gang territories meet.

“My mattress was on the floor because we had so many shootings that year in the area,” Bleu recalled in 2020. “I just didn’t want to get shot.”

Bleu attempted to leave her traffickers in 2013, and, in her account, ultimately succeeded for good in about 2014. Bleu has repeatedly suggested that her former traffickers from Chicago might still be out to get revenge on her and her family members.

“She slept on the floor but by choice, because she was into these floor pillows at the time.”

— A former roommate of Eliza Bleu

“When I stepped away from the gang, my traffickers lost money,” Bleu said in the 2020 interview. “And they want that money back”

Asked in a 2021 interview why she hadn’t pressed charges against the unnamed athlete and her other traffickers, Bleu—appearing on a podcast with more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers—said the men could still track her down and murder her.

“I am terrified that they would kill myself or my family or people that I care about,” Bleu said. “That’s how organized they are.”

Last month, Bleu tweeted that her family knows “every detail” of her story and stands behind her. She then blasted the “corporate media” for asking questions about her past, declaring, “if anyone steps on [my family’s] property or my property let it be extremely clear that we are all armed.”

Wenzel, a one-time friend of Bleu who says she has known the anti-trafficking activist for more than two decades, doesn’t think Bleu’s account is accurate.

Wenzel told The Daily Beast that she met Bleu in the Quad Cities, where both women were partying with musicians. Wenzel was 18, and said Bleu was in her early twenties. The Daily Beast verified Wenzel’s friendship with Bleu through photographs.

In Wenzel’s telling, she and Bleu were both deeply involved in the “scene” subculture of the early aughts—a time of tight jeans, swooping haircuts, and high drama on sites like MySpace and LiveJournal. Wenzel was trying to hook up with a member of one of her favorite bands on a tour bus in Iowa City when Bleu stepped on board. The two young women realized they had mutual friends and a shared interest in music—and the men who made it.

“She said that she was going to be very famous for sleeping with band members,” Wenzel recalled.

Wenzel takes issue with Bleu’s timeline of her first trafficking experience. She claims that she too was at the Warped Tour concert where Bleu met the photographer she claims groomed her. But while Bleu said that she wasn’t even 18 when she met the photographer, Wenzel insists that Bleu would have been in her early twenties—putting the date of the concert sometime in the early 2000s.

“She’s a very powerful, very smart intelligent woman.”

— Carly Wenzel

“Her timeline is just so weird,” Wenzel said, noting she believes that Bleu appears to be “lying about her age in certain articles.”

Bleu moved to Los Angeles, but Wenzel doesn’t remember hearing about her old friend being trafficked. Instead, she said Bleu unsuccessfully tried to convince Wenzel to move in with her in California. She did not recall Bleu calling home to the Quad Cities with tales of being addicted to “ice” or living with a trafficked group of transgender women in the Hollywood Hills.

Wenzel said she “keeps seeing these stories out of L.A.” and believes “that absolutely didn’t happen.”

By 2005, Bleu was back in Illinois and eventually earned a cosmetology license. Bleu began touring as a traveling stylist for musicians, where she received her first taste of internet controversy.

Bleu worked for mega-popular rock band My Chemical Romance as a stylist, going by the hair-inspired name “Eliza Cuts” online. Bleu’s job brought her into a group of My Chemical Romance entourage members dubbed the “World’s Most Hated Crew.” That clique also included future YouTube star and makeup mogul Jeffree Star, who would later be accused of paying out hush money to sexual-assault accusers.

Bleu was closely monitored by the bands’ fans on sites like LiveJournal—particularly after she entered a brief engagement with My Chemical Romance’s heartthrob lead singer, Gerard Way. But Bleu stirred up some controversy of her own with diehard supporters of the band, in online mini-scandals that featured Bleu calling Star the n-word and allegedly authoring a thinly veiled fictional account of her failed relationship with Way.

After leaving the rock circuit, Bleu lived with a friend in Chicago from roughly 2009 to 2011. That’s around the period when Bleu claims she began to be sex-trafficked again by the unnamed athlete in a violence-plagued neighborhood.

But that’s not how her former roommate, who asked The Daily Beast not to use her name out of fear of backlash from Bleu’s fans, remembers it. Instead, she said the pair lived in Wicker Park, an affluent, trendy Chicago neighborhood. The roommate said Bleu’s parents were “always supportive financially.”

“She was not in a precarious situation,” the roommate told The Daily Beast in a text message.

The roommate does remember Bleu sleeping on the floor, though not because of bullets.

“She slept on the floor but by choice, because she was into these floor pillows at the time,” the friend told The Daily Beast, though she added that Bleu “eventually bought a bed.”

Like the ex-roommate, Wenzel scoffs at the idea that Bleu lived in a dangerous neighborhood. Wenzel, who by then was married with a child, said she brought her toddler to visit Bleu and the roommate at their apartment—hardly the front line of a gang war.

“That is so not true,” Wenzel said. “She lived in a really cute apartment. They’re the whitest girls you could ever meet. There was no gang activity.”

Around this time, Bleu resurfaced online as “Eliza Siep” in 2010, unsuccessfully auditioning for American Idol using a surname she had picked up during a short-lived marriage. But she soon moved on to a new name and another position in the music industry. Now she would become “Eliza Knows,” the sultry, self-proclaimed music “video vixen.”

“Donewald defended Bleu from skeptics earlier this month, tweeting that Bleu is ‘the real deal.’ ”

Under her new online name, Bleu began to dance as a “video vixen” in mostly low-budget music videos. A YouTube playlist that appears to have been compiled by Bleu herself shows her gyrating in videos from 2012 and 2013 with song titles like “Feelin’ Myself” and “A Million Ways to Love You.”

In one 2012 video Bleu posted to YouTube, she filmed herself calling her mother to shock her with the news that she’d become a music-video dancer—only to discover that her mother was happy for her. In the video, Bleu told her mother she wanted to become a music-video dancer because of her childhood admiration for the “Fly Girls,” dancers on the comedy show In Living Color.

Bleu also gave interviews about the video-vixen lifestyle. In 2016, Bleu, speaking in a markedly different voice than the one she used in earlier media appearances and the one she uses today, claimed that she had rejected an offer to have sex with a client for $150,000.

“It’s a nice offer, but it’s not me,” Bleu said.

Still, it appears that Bleu may have engaged in some kind of sex work around this time. In one interview, Bleu advertised her account on a now-defunct camgirl website where men could pay money to talk with her.

Around 2016, Wenzel claims that Bleu asked her to join her as an escort, promising that Wenzel could make $500 in a night—an offer that stunned Wenzel and her husband.

“She was absolutely loving it,” Wenzel said. “She was bragging about it, saying she was making so much money.”

Bleu later suggested that sex workers with a pimp might qualify as trafficking victims, though Wenzel said she didn’t meet any pimp or trafficker when she socialized with Bleu, be it an unnamed “high profile athlete” or otherwise.

“She’s a very powerful, very smart intelligent woman, I will not discredit her for that,” Wenzel said. “She knows exactly what she’s doing.”

As proof that she was trafficked, Bleu often cites the organization she says “saved my life”: Eve’s Angels, a Christian nonprofit that serves sex trafficking victims and women seeking to leave the commercial sex industry.

In her telling, Bleu—living in her gangland apartment in 2013 and desperate to leave her traffickers—contacted Eve’s Angels after discovering founder Anny Donewald through a YouTube video. (In another recent tweet, Bleu claimed to have found the group via a web address in a Bible the group left at a strip club.) The group soon spirited Bleu away from her traffickers and into a safehouse “three states away.” In her account, Bleu claims she briefly returned to her traffickers after that escape, but eventually escaped the traffickers’ clutches for good around 2014.

Donewald defended Bleu from skeptics earlier this month, tweeting that Bleu is “the real deal.” But, like Bleu, Donewald’s claims about sex trafficking in her own life have come under scrutiny.

In 2018, Donewald’s parents and brother filed a defamation suit against Donewald and Eve’s Angels. While Donewald and her children were living with her family members in Michigan, Donewald’s parents “confronted her about her ‘treatment of her daughter,’” according to the lawsuit. In response, Donewald and her group accused her parents of sexually abusing and trafficking children, according to a 2022 appeals court opinion.

Donewald took the case to police, leading to a criminal investigation into her parents but no charges. Donewald’s claims fell apart after her daughter told her grandparents that Donewald had told her to fabricate the claims in an attempt to score a “pay-off” from the grandparents, the appeals court opinion found.

The activist was ordered to pay a judgment of more than $47,000, plus legal fees. As of the May 2022 appeals court ruling, the family was still stalled in settlement talks, with Donewald denying the defamation claims.

Donewald did not respond to requests to comment. Eve’s Angels did not return an email, and two phone numbers attached to the charity were either not in service or went directly to a full voicemail inbox.

Bleu emerged as a public “survivor advocate” a few weeks into the pandemic, worrying in an April 2020 article in the conservative The Daily Wire that pandemic lockdowns would worsen sex trafficking. Within two years she would amass a large profile through Twitter and right-wing podcasts, culminating in her alliance with Musk.

In December, Bleu aided Musk in his campaign against Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth—who seemingly angered the billionaire after resigning in November—linking to a 2010 tweet by Roth that read, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?”

“This explains a lot,” Musk replied, and many of his followers took the bait, suggesting that Roth was a depraved “sex criminal.” Amid other attacks, Roth reportedly was forced to flee his home. (In truth, the 2010 tweet merely linked to a Salon article that did not advocate allowing teachers to have sex with minors. Instead, it examined a criminal case against a teacher who had an illegal relationship with an 18-year-old student.)

But now, cracks are starting to appear in Bleu’s online reputation, especially within the right-wing circles she once courted.

The controversy ignited on Jan. 6, when she appeared on Tim Pool’s video stream. During the show, Bleu claimed to represent two anonymous “survivors” of Andrew Tate, the kickboxer turned “king of toxic masculinity” accused—with three other suspects—of sexual exploitation and other heinous crimes. (Tate has denied wrongdoing.)

Some of Tate’s most rabid fans, along with other right-wing users, began scrutinizing Bleu’s backstory. They posted clips from past media appearances to cast doubt on her trafficking claims, and trolled her with screenshots from a racy music video dating back to 2016 that she participated in for WorldStarHipHop in her “Eliza Knows” phase.

“She clung to us all from out of nowhere. She had none of the attributes of an Epstein victim yet insinuated otherwise.”

— Maria Farmer on Eliza Bleu

Bleu’s outfits in the video were provocative, but they didn’t feature nudity or appear to be nonconsensual, and had been on YouTube for seven years. Still, Twitter locked the accounts of several prominent right-wing personalities who cover internet drama after they refused to delete their tweets about the music video.

Bleu, for her part, declared that the screenshots amounted to posting a “non-consensual photo.” In a series of tweets on Jan. 20, she vowed to “escalate to the full extent of the law.”

“Twitter did an outstanding job and they will be excluded from legal action. There won’t be anyone else involved spared. I take things all the way and I have no chill,” Bleu wrote. “I’m a survivor advocate and that doesn’t stop with advocating for myself as a survivor.”

Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety under Musk—who has also previously praised Bleu—defended the suspensions in a thread on Sunday.

“In the past 2 weeks, we’ve suspended multiple accounts and/or restricted content, causing confusion for users,” Irwin wrote. “Unfortunately, we can’t answer questions or share details about specific users and account actions.”

But Bleu’s critics have not been placated, especially after contemporaneous clips of Bleu as “Eliza Knows” celebrating the launch of the WorldStar video surfaced, suggesting that she participated in its creation consensually.

“She once told me there’s three people I would cheat on you with: Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk, and then there might have been one other.”

They’ve also dug up a 2021 interview in which Bleu told right-wing pundit Michael Malice that she was “trafficked” on Twitter when a group of people used her pictures to create social media accounts. At that point, Bleu had escaped her supposed actual traffickers years earlier, and the fake accounts were being used as some sort of ill-defined catfishing scheme, she said. Bleu’s critics have seized on that interview, in which Bleu described a sort of identity-theft as “trafficking,” as proof that Bleu uses an expansive definition of the term.

The expansive definition also didn’t sit right with Maria Farmer, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. From Farmer’s perspective, Bleu’s public posts seem to conflate what it means to be a sex-trafficking victim with sex work. “This woman and her cohorts have effectively bastardized the words trafficking and survivor—we just want to use the word victim now,” Farmer told The Daily Beast.

Since emerging as an anti-trafficking activist, Bleu has crossed paths with Epstein victims. In September 2020, she announced on Twitter that she had “accepted a new position with Victims Refuse Silence,” which at the time was the trafficking nonprofit of Virginia Giuffre, a high-profile victim of Epstein and Maxwell. By November of that year, Bleu tweeted that she had stepped back into a part-time role with the organization. (Corporate records in Florida from 2021 and 2022 list Bleu as the group’s secretary and director.)

Bleu was once featured in videos on the group’s website, soliciting donations, asking people to get involved, and plugging her own Twitter handle as a resource for trafficking awareness. “I firmly believe that anybody that’s helping us in the survivor space should be very thoroughly vetted because we have a lot of nefarious players that just want to be close to victims and survivors,” she said in one video, in which she claimed her former traffickers made a Twitter profile with her name, photos, and videos without her consent.

Teresa Helm, a victim of Epstein and former director of Victims Refuse Silence, said she became friends with Bleu and asked her to join the group before it dissolved. “She’s been almost like a freelancer in the world of advocacy,” said Helm, who now works for National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which was once known as “Morality in Media.”

“She’s nonstop on Twitter which has been wonderful because it has brought to light a lot of things that were happening that people weren’t paying attention to otherwise,” Helm continued, adding that Bleu told her she’s friends with Musk. “She’s been a pioneer in waking people the hell up.”

Asked about Bleu’s doubters, Helm said, “I support her as a trafficking survivor entirely. Nothing in her past makes anything less valuable in terms of her advocacy work. It’s not her job to prove anything to anybody.”

Still, some survivors of Epstein’s sex ring said they didn’t trust Bleu. One victim, who asked not to be named, told The Daily Beast that she shared concerns about Bleu after researching her background and finding ties to right-wing figures and publications, such as Pizzagate-promoter Mike Cernovich and conservative website The Blaze.

“The ability to finally share my story and connect with others was freeing, but it’s not as straightforward as ‘simply going public,’” the Epstein victim said. “Only a strong foundation of therapeutic recovery prepared me for the publicity generated by the salacious facts of this case. However, I was not prepared for my trauma being co-opted for other’s gain.”

Farmer, who tried to report Epstein and Maxwell to the feds in the 1990s, said she had raised concerns about Bleu’s backstory on Twitter, only for Bleu to block her.

“She clung to us all from out of nowhere,” Farmer said of Epstein survivors. “She had none of the attributes of an Epstein victim yet insinuated otherwise.”

Bleu’s critics have also seized on her reality-television appearances in an attempt to poke holes in her trafficking story. Sometime around 2002, for example, she appeared on the dating show Blind Date as a contestant so hostile that the show’s editors kept a running onscreen count of her complaints. In 2012, at the height of what she would later describe as her second period being sex-trafficked deep in Chicago gang territory, Bleu appeared as an amateur model on Chicago-based The Steve Harvey Show, where Tyra Banks judged her performance.

The suspensions have fueled speculation about Bleu’s access to Twitter execs and complaints that Musk’s supposed commitment to free speech only goes so far when his friends and allies are being embarrassed.

David Karpf, an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, told The Daily Beast that the Bleu controversy underscores how chaotic content moderation has become under Musk.

“You can say whatever you want on Twitter, so long as nobody notices and you don’t say mean things to anybody in Elon’s circles,” Karpf told The Daily Beast.

For her part, Bleu insisted on Twitter on Tuesday that she didn’t ask Musk to suspend the accounts that tweeted the WorldStar video.

“If I was going to ask for a favor from Elon Musk, I would ask him to make humans a multi-planetary species,” she wrote.

Farmer told The Daily Beast that Bleu’s support of Musk was a slap in the face to survivors. She points to Musk’s reported visit to Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Maxwell’s infamous photo with Musk at a 2014 Vanity Fair Oscar party. “Elon Musk needs to pull out a little Shakespeare and study it: Thou doth protest too much,” she said, adding that she believes “it’s almost like he’s hired this woman to cover for himself.”

“Anyone who was even remotely affiliated with Jeffrey Epstein is odious at this stage,” she added. In response to some of Bleu’s pro-Musk tweets, multiple users have replied with the snapshot of Maxwell and Musk, with one writing: “thank you Elon Musk (shown here with convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell) for looking out for the children.” (For his part, Musk has claimed he was photobombed.)

Bleu has occasionally raised money online related to her anti-trafficking efforts. In 2020, she raised $1,625 for a vacation, writing that normally “I serve survivors of Human Trafficking, my standard caseload is 20 survivors at a time. During this season I took on an extra 61 survivors via online advocacy.”

She raised another $2,205 the following year to attend the libertarian Freedom Fest conference. Bleu has also indicated that she opened a safe house of her own for trafficking victims. In March 2020, she tweeted that she had opened the facility, called the Humanity House. It is unclear whether the facility is currently in operation.

Bleu’s latest posts, which once attracted praise, are now rife with trolls. One person created an account in her name whose main photo features Bleu bent over alongside the caption, “help im bein trafficked.” Another user remade the Steve Buscemi “fellow kids” meme with Bleu’s face and the words: “Hello fellow survivors of human trafficking.”

“There’s definitely a lot of misogyny and right wing trolls,” an ex-boyfriend of Bleu’s told The Daily Beast. “I don’t think she should have to be dealing with any of that."

According to the beau, who asked to remain anonymous, the two met in 2019 at an event for presidential candidate Andrew Yang. At the time, he says, Bleu was working in elder care and living on her family farm.

Bleu shared with him that she’d been trafficked in Los Angeles as a teenager; he had no reason to disbelieve her. “It wasn’t like she just randomly came up with like, a trafficking story,” he said, adding that when it comes to her personal life, “She is definitely a very private person, despite how public she is.”

Even back then, however, Bleu told him she wanted to be famous.

“She mentioned how she would love to be on the Ben Shapiro podcast,” the ex said, adding that she also envisioned starring on Joe Rogan’s show. “That was a joke that she had: ‘I’m going to get on Joe Rogan before you.’”

Bleu also joked about the famous men she dreamed of dating, with Musk among them. “She once told me there’s three people I would cheat on you with: Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk, and then there might have been one other,” he recalled.

“The reason this is all funny to me now is because last month she was on Ben Shapiro’s podcast. Her and Elon Musk are in communication with each other,” the ex told The Daily Beast.

“She definitely had these aspirations of being somebody. Her aspirations are kind of going exactly how she wanted in a weird way.”

[teoporiuli]

as a biracial individual with obviously brown skin and non-western features, wolfin/armazi has experienced instances of prejudice and blatant racism both in the past and present. being a second generation immigrant on her father’s side made it even worse. their father spoke some english, but it was slow and his accent made it hard for people to understand. his darker skin and eurasian features, along with his muslim faith, stood out in a small illinois town filled with white farmers and their families. wolfin/armazi took after their father—they inherited his brown skin and his large nose and his coarse curly hair. they eagerly picked up the scraps of his language and culture that he was willing to teach her, though he insisted they focus on english. her mother also experienced some prejudice for marrying someone who wasn’t white and didn't share her irish catholic faith.

wolfin/armazi's experiences as a child were less obvious. they didn’t know enough to look for them, and their parents would deliberately try to shield them whenever they were on the receiving end in public. sometimes her father would get confused looks from store owners whenever he’d walk in or complaints that they couldn’t understand his accent. sometimes there would be whispers about his brown skin or his facial features or his lack of education (he never went to college), or because he was an immigrant.

much of this was echoed with wolfin/armazi. they were always the last team pick for games at recess. kids made fun of their nose and skin or called her “dirty”. they’d mock their dad in front of their face if he had to come to the school for any reason. sometimes even parents would give them condescending looks. they didn’t have a lot of close friends. in high school, english was one of their worst subjects. they didn’t ever fail it, but they maintained a c average. a teacher once remarked that maybe they “struggled with it because of their background.” most of these displays were subtle and belittling, typical of a small town in the midwest. never anything outright or violent.

things got worse when they went to chechnya to fight in the war. both russians and chechnians recognized their skin tone and features as georgian and called them slurs like “xach,” an armenian word meaning “cross” that’s often used to refer to georgians in a derogatory sense, or “black ass”. they were jumped multiple times by people who attacked them just for the color of their skin. they had to learn russian and chechnian by immersion and were mocked for their foreign accent (though it was american, not georgian) and many assumed they couldn’t speak either language at all even once they'd become fluent. that was when they first really realized that people were treating them this way because of what they looked like. back home, their father had always tried to cover up the hurtful remarks, or they brushed them off as having something to do with growing up on a farm or just because of their dad’s accent. they didn’t notice these issues as much because they didn't know to be aware of them.

while abroad, people often mistook them as a different ethnicity than georgian (usually jewish or arabic). they encountered more slurs such as “mutt” and “dog”. then, when they returned to new york city, it was shortly after 9/11. more people jumped them. more people openly berated them with slurs like “towel head” or “hook nose” or “sand n*gger” because it was assumed their features made them arabic. they weren't white enough or they weren't dark enough. they had no community there. it was difficult to find people they looked like, and when they did, those people would look down on them if they found out they were mixed. over the years, they became very defensive of their heritage both as a georgian and as a biracial individual.

[rabbitmilk]

8.9.23

[womanexile]

Midnights album - Farmers almanac- (foreshadowing/prediction/manifest)? Just coincidental, lol- funny though.

NYC Maroon skies "Air Quality Index listed New York City at a rating of over 200 this morning. The index goes from 0–500, with numbers being worse the higher they go, and categories ranging from green (“good”) to maroon (“hazardous”). This morning, New York hit purple (“very unhealthy”), and it’s now well into maroon."

popularmechanics.com/science/health/a44118831/the-sky-is-yellow-smoke-new-york-air-quality-fire/

Space weather event: solar storm (sun flares) caused communication blackout & auroras "The May 7 event has already caused radio blackouts on Earth.""That activity may include supercharged aurora displays. For example, moderate geomagnetic storms can make auroras visible as far south as New York or Idaho, and strong ones can bring them into view for folks all the way down in Illinois or Oregon.""Solar flares that hit Earth can cause communications blackouts, whereas CMEs are associated with the aurora."

space.com/solar-storm-supercharge-auroras-may-2023

Snow in Venice Beach & Hollywood area

youtube.com/watch?v=O0YStzgqAo4

"Snowflakes have been falling in Los Angeles, including around its iconic Hollywood sign, as a winter storm tightens its icy grip on southern California this weekend."On Friday people in the city marvelled at the unfamiliar sight of a snow flurry around the Hollywood sign on Mount Lee."

bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64768453

Taylor is never beating those witch accusations 😂

With how much the fans have listened to the Midnights album we probably all manifested this

[clanwarrior-tumbly]

i was just playing stardew valley and got an idea for the old friends au-

basically replace the villagers of SV with egos. the village itself is kinda how i imagined the place would look like if they ran a city, not a street.

as for the most obvious villagers that are replaced are -

the farmer - y/n

wizard - dark

willy - captain magnum

harvey - dr. iplier

elliot - the host

lewis - damien

sebastian, demitrius or maru - google

sam - bing

haley - actor

mr. qi - wilford

krobus - yancy

gus - chefiplier

and a bonus: emily - benjamin. ik hes not an ego but he definetly helps chefiplier at the saloon and also still lives with actor as a live-in-butler. just like emily >:D

and illinois... could be either gunther, leo, linus, the dwarf, marlyn or professor snail. i honestly have no clue. all of the above, maybe. why does stardew have so many chars that could be him. pain.

i have no clue if anyone here even plays stardew valley but it all really does fit after giving it 2 seconds of thought. rip to damien tho for having to deal with all this bs.

or maybe once they got too many egos living on the street, they just moved to an abandoned town and planned on rebuilding it, so they can get more room for egos there. y/n just arrives on their lil farm, and like 2 months later is seen swinging an unbelievably sharp sword at unimaginable horrors that are within the mines/skull cavern.

half of them would probably have a fucking heart attack while illinois is getting heart eyes instead.

.... yancy living down in the sewers and only moving in with y/n after they're best friends is now a concept i very much enjoy aswell.

also, because tumblr being weird, did you get my request? praying tumblr hasnt eaten it </3

I've never played or watched stardew valley but this is cool 👌

[backyardchickennews]

Can Urban Backyards In Illinois Support Chickens? In the bustling urban backyards of Illinois, a new trend is taking flight - backyard chicken farming. With common breeds like Buff Orpingtons, Barred Rocks, and Australorps proving to be thriving members of the community, residents are reaping the benefits of fresh eggs, natural pest control, and delightful companionship. Despite some drama surrounding the legality of keeping chickens in Urbana, recent changes suggest a sunny-side up future for urban chicken enthusiasts. Health concerns like Salmonella contamination and avian flu risks are not being taken lightly, with officials emphasizing hygiene practices and regular testing for backyard flocks. As the city works to fine-tune regulations and embrace egg-sharing programs, the joys of raising backyard chickens are becoming more accessible than ever. To ensure a healthy and happy flock, the 90/10 rule simplifies the feeding process, balancing commercial feed with natural treats. With a vigilant eye on disease prevention and a commitment to good hygiene practices, backyard chicken farming in Urbana promises a truly rewarding experience for farmers of all levels. So, whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, get ready to embrace the clucking good fun of raising backyard chickens in Illinois. Stay informed, stay safe, and enjoy the bountiful rewards of tending to your own feathered friends. Happy clucking! https://backyardchickennews.com/can-urban-backyards-in-illinois-support-chickens/?feed_id=5089&_unique_id=661580ad88fed

[downtoearthmarkets]

In celebration of Earth Month, we will be sharing a series of recent interviews that tie directly into the environmental mission of Down to Earth Markets. In 1991, our founder Miriam Haas started the company’s first farmers market in Ossining. To kick things off this week, we sat down with Miriam and her husband Jon Zeltsman to learn more about the company’s origins and the work and vision they poured into bringing farmers markets to our local area. 

April is Earth Month and you founded Down to Earth Markets in 1991 based on concerns over the routine spraying of food with chemicals, so the company had an environmental mission from the outset. How did your awareness about this issue come about? 

Miriam: Back in the sixties and seventies, Jon and I were engaged in the counter-culture movement, but not to the extent of “dropping out”. Given our questioning of the mainstream and its social mores, we were anti-spray and have always been interested in the organic movement and gardening. Wherever we lived, we wanted a garden in which to grow food, even when we lived in an apartment.

Did either you or Jon have any background in farming or farmers markets? 

Miriam: My dad always grew vegetables. He spent a lot of time dabbling in the dirt and I followed after him. I was drawn to it and was always putting things in pots and planting things. Jon and I grow a lot of our own food and cook a lot. Recently we took a course on growing saffron which comes from crocuses and now we grow our own saffron and use it to make paella and saffron rice. Between the yield from our garden and what we buy at the farmers market, we don’t really go to the supermarket except to purchase dry goods. 

Jon: My mother was a gardener. I grew up in New Jersey which is of course nicknamed the “Garden State” because of its agricultural heritage and rolling farmland. As a kid we’d go to farm stands which were everywhere selling Jersey corn and tomatoes. When Miriam and I lived in Southern Illinois while I was going to design school, we had a farm that we fertilized with night soil slurry. The plants loved it and grew like crazy. We had basil that was over five feet tall!

How did your interest in organic food lead to the formation of Down to Earth Markets?

Miriam: After moving to Ossining in 1987, I wanted access to organic food. So, I formed a cooperative of fifteen families with young kids in Ossining that we named Families for Safe Food. We arranged for deliveries of organically grown produce from a health food distributor.   

Managing the coop was very laborious as there was no internet back then so everything was done by telephone. Plus, we’d freeze while divvying up crates of food in the barn during the winter, although the kids would be running around having a blast. After a year or two of doing this, I thought to myself “There’s got to be a better way.” So, I approached the Village of Ossining about starting a farmers market. 

What was the local agriculture scene like when you started?

Jon: Up until the early seventies, you’d see lots of farmers selling at roadside farm stands. The catalyst for the formation of farmers markets largely came about in protest to Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture who favored large-scale corporate farming and was pressuring small farms to go big or get out. At that point farmers markets started to spring up in reaction. There were a couple of farmers markets operating in Westchester, with one in Yonkers run by a church and one in New Rochelle, but New York City remained the central focal point. 

Why is shopping at your local farmers market important from an environmental standpoint?  

Jon: The importance of farmers markets and other venues that sell locally produced food is that it enables agriculture to decentralize. And, from an environmental standpoint and sustainability point of view, decentralization is essential on many levels, from producing lower emissions to ensuring better food safety to providing access to in-season produce. The pandemic really brought to the fore the vulnerabilities in our food supply chain as it all broke down. Decentralization creates a safer, stronger food system with small, local farms as its backbone.

These days, farmers in our region are honing their season extension skills so that they can grow throughout the winter using greenhouses, cold frames, row covers and other technology. These types of advancements make both farming and farmers market shopping in the northeast viable year-round, giving us a reliably sustainable option to commercially grown and industrially produced food. 

Is local OR organic food better for you in your estimation? 

Jon: Because the local farms at our farmers markets are small scale operations, that automatically means that proportionally they are using less inputs such as chemical spraying. The farmers know that the cost of the chemicals is very high, so they really don’t want to employ them unless they absolutely must. There is an economic incentive for our farmers not to spray in the first place. 

Miriam: The main reason I started Down to Earth Markets was to provide access to organic food, which was hard to come by at that time. However, it took about five years to recruit a local farm who was certified organic!  Due to our regional microclimate, there are a lot of challenges with 100% organic growing due to the conditions, which promote fungus, especially with fruit such as apples. Instead, a lot of our non-organic farms rely on surveys by Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to count pests such as the number of insect eggs present on crops to determine whether spraying is necessary in the first place and how much input is needed to fix any issues. With this information, farmers can intervene with as little spraying as possible before the problem escalates. So, if I had to choose between organic and local, I would choose local every time. 

What is the role of farmers markets with all that’s currently happening environmentally? 

Jon: For our farmers and vendors, these markets are their livelihood! So, there will continue to be a niche for farmers markets, especially as problems like climate change escalate. The demographic of people who shop at our markets want to feel empowered to make a difference and supporting local agriculture and small farms is a way to do that.

Miriam: We are happy to have played our role in getting many Down to Earth markets to the point where they are resilient enough to flourish and move forward. 

Over their decades running Down to Earth Markets, Miriam and Jon have started forty farmers markets! Their commitment to the vision of small scale, local food production as a building block of community and environmental sustainability has been unwavering and will continue to guide the Down to Earth team into the future.

[brookston]

Holidays 4.4

Holidays

Antitrust Day

Arrestmas

Art Deco Day

Atlanta Day

Auditory Processing Disorder Awareness Day

Ballroom Dance Day

Basque Day (Spain)

Bee Day (French Republic)

Bewitching Day

Bonza Bottler Day

Calypso Asteroid Day

Cat’s Day (Taiwan)

Chicago Flag Day (Illinois)

Children’s Day (China, Taiwan)

Clear and Bright Day (Farmer’s Calendar; China)

404 Day

Flag Day (Chicago, Illinois; Monaco)

HIE Awareness Day

Hug a Newsperson Day

International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action (UN)

International Day to Defend Amina

International Rock Beat Day

Jeep 4x4 Day

Liberation Day (Hungary)

Maya Angelou Day (Boston)

Microsoft Day

Mourning Day for Covid-19 Martyrs (China)

National Dillon Day

National Horse Rehabilitation Day

National Lunchbreak Day (UK)

National Pansy Day

National School Librarian Day

NATO Day

1984 Day (1984)

Ose Matsuri (Japan)

Peace Day (Angola)

Red Crown Imperial Day

Refugee Rights Day (Canada)

Sarhul (Jharkhand, India)

Square Root Day

Swedish-American Friendship Day

Tell-A-Lie Day

Victims of Violence Wholly Day

Vitamin "C" Day

Walk Around Things Day

Women in Tech Day

World Drummers Day

World Plagiocephaley Day

World Rat Day

World Stray Animals Day

Yukon Gold Discovery Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Chocolate Milk Powder Day (a.k.a. Powdered Chocolate Day)

Homogenized Milk Day

International Carrot Day

National Cordon Bleu Day

National Pub Day (UK)

National Ramen Noodle Day

1st Thursday in April

Glarus Festival (Näfelser Fahrtfest; Switzerland) [1st Thursday] 

International Road Maintenance Day [1st Thursday]

Kid Lit Art Postcard Day [1st Thursday]

National Alcohol Screening Day [Thursday of 1st Full Week]

National Burrito Day [1st Thursday]

National GOOS Paper Day (Canada) [1st Thursday]

RAINN Day [1st Thursday]

Tell a Lie Day [1st Thursday]

Weekly Holidays beginning April 4 (1st Week)

Hate Week [thru 4.10]

National Dental Hygienist Week [thru 4.10]

Independence & Related Days

Chinese Republic in Tibet (Proclaimed; Tibet; 1912)

Jacktoopia (Declared; 2014) [unrecognized]

Senegal (from France, 1960)

Sorrenia (Declared; 2013) [unrecognized]

Festivals Beginning April 4, 2024

Artifact Small Format Film Festival (Calgary, Canada) [thru 4.6]

Art Paris Art Fair (Paris, France) [thru 4.7]

Brussels Book Fair (Brussels, Belgium) [thru 4.7]

Clay County Agricultural Fair (Green Cove Springs, Florida) [thru 4.14]

Diagonale Film Festival (Graz, Austria) [thru 4.9]

Kansas Ag Expo (Hutchinson, Kansas) [thru 4.6]

Mule Day (Columbia, Tennessee) [thru 4.7]

North American Alpaca Show (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) [thru 4.7]

Oklahoma City Farm Show (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) [thru 4.6]

Ozark Mountain Soul Fest (Eureka Springs, Arkansas) [thru 4.8]

Ragnarok Festival (Lichtenfels, Germany) [thru 4.6]

Romics (Rome, Italy) [thru 4.7]

Feast Days

Aequinoctium Vernum VI (Pagan)

Agathopus and Theodulus (Christian; Martyrs)

Ambrose (Christian; Saints Commemoration)

Benedict the Moor (Christian; Saint)

Dabucuri pataub, (Initiation Rites of the Young Men; to Jurupari, South American Guarani/Tupi God)

Dan Simmons (Writerism)

Feast of No Saints Day (Pastafarian)

Gaetano Catanoso (Christian; Saint)

Isidore of Seville (Christian; Saint)

The Kangaroo Rat (Muppetism)

Katori Jingu Otaue-sai (Rice Planting Festival; Japan)

Magna Mater begins (aka Megalesia / Great Mother Festival; Ancient Rome)

Martin Luther King Jr. (Episcopal Church (USA))

Maurice de Vlaminck (Artology)

Maya Angelou (Writerism)

Megalesia (Mother of Gods Festival; Phrygian)

Mahavir Jayanti (a.k.a. Janma Kalyanak; Jainism)

Näfelser Fahrtfest (Glarus Canton, Switzerland)

Pierre-Paul Prud´hon (Artology)

Plato (Christian; Saint)

Portfirio Diaz Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Reginald Heber (Anglican Church of Canada)

Theodisius of Bithynia (Positivist; Saint)

Tigernach of Clones (Christian; Saint)

Lunar Calendar Holidays

Tomb Sweeping Day (掃墳節) [Begins At the Qingming solar term, solar longitude of 15°, 15th days after Chunfen] (a.k.a. …

Ancestors' Day

Cheng Ming (macau)

Chinese Memorial Day

Ching Ming Festival (清明節; China; Hong Kong)

Chungmyung Day (North Korea)

Clear and Bright Festival

Qingming Jie (清明节; China)

Qingming Festival

Shīmī (Ryukyu Islands)

Tomb Sweeping Day (Taiwan)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]

Unluckiest Day of the Year (China)

Premieres

Alice’s Auto Race (Disney Cartoon; 1927)

Aloha From Hawaii, by Elvis Presley (TV Concert Special; 1973)

Anna Karenina (Film; 1997)

The Blow Out (WB LT Cartoon; 1936)

Brilliant Corners, by Thelonius Monk (Album; 1957)

Bye Bye Birdie (Film; 1963)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Film; 2014)

Cat Carson Rides Again (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1952)

Chasing Amy (Film; 1997)

Combatants Will Be Dispatched (Anime TV Series; 2021)

Cool for Cats, by Squeeze (Album; 1979)

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (Anime Film; 2003)

The Double (Film; 2013)

Drum Roll, featuring Hector Heathcote (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1961)

Fiesta Time (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1945)

Finnegan’s Flea (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1958)

Flies Ain’t Human (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1941)

Follies, by Stephen Sondheim (Broadway Musical; 1971)

Fowl Weather (WB MM Cartoon; 1953)

The Good Life, a.k.a. Good Neighbors (UK TV Series; 1975)

Heap Big Hepcat (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1960)

High Fidelity, by Elvis Costello (Song; 1979)

How Right You Are, Jeeves (a.k.a. Jeeves in the Offing), by P.G. Wodehouse (Novel; 1960) [Jeeves #12]

Jonny’s Golden Quest (Hanna-Barbera Animated TV Special; 1993)

Leatherheads (Film; 2008)

Man’s Best Friend (Disney Cartoon; 1952)

Microsoft (Computer Company; 1975)

The Mouse That Jack Built (WB MM Cartoon; 1959)

Mutts About Racing, featuring Droopy (MGM Cartoon; 1958)

Nim’s Island (Film; 2008)

Oliver’s Story, by Erich Segal (Novel; 1977)

The Party (Film; 1968)

Perils of Pauline (Film Series; 1914)

Pink Quackers (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1979)

Rio Bravo (Film; 1959)

The Saint (Film; 1997)

Ship of the Line, by C.S. Forester (Novel; 1938)

Toro Pink (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1979)

Two Little Pups (Happy Harmonies Cartoon; 1936)

Ups ’n Downs (WB LT Cartoon; 1931)

What a Girl Wants (Film; 2003)

Today’s Name Days

Isidor, Konrad (Austria)

Benedikt, Izidor, Platon (Croatia)

Ivana (Czech Republic)

Ambrosius (Denmark)

Ambrus, Arbo, Arp, Arpo (Estonia)

Ukko (Finland)

Isidore (France)

Isidor, Konrad, Kurt (Germany)

Izidor (Hungary)

Isabelle, Isadora, Isidoro (Italy)

Herta, Valda (Latvia)

Algaudas, Ambraziejus, Eglė, Izidorius (Lithuania)

Nancy, Nanna, Nina (Norway)

Ambroży, Bazyli, Benedykt, Izydor, Wacław, Wacława, Zdzimir (Poland)

Iosif (Romania)

Izidor (Slovakia)

Benito (Spain)

Ambrosius, Marianne, Marlene (Sweden)

Cedric, Cedrica, Plato, Tiernan, Tierney (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 95 of 2024; 271 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 4 of week 14 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Fearn (Alder) [Day 19 of 28]

Chinese: Month 2 (Ding-Mao), Day 26 (Wu-Xu)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025)

Hebrew: 25 Adair II 5784

Islamic: 25 Ramadan 1445

J Cal: 5 Cyan; Fryday [5 of 30]

Julian: 22 March 2024

Moon: 23%: Waning Crescent

Positivist: 11 Archimedes (4th Month) [Hero]

Runic Half Month: Ehwaz (Horse) [Day 10 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 17 of 92)

Week: 1st Week of April

Zodiac: Aries (Day 15 of 31)

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 4.4

Holidays

Antitrust Day

Arrestmas

Art Deco Day

Atlanta Day

Auditory Processing Disorder Awareness Day

Ballroom Dance Day

Basque Day (Spain)

Bee Day (French Republic)

Bewitching Day

Bonza Bottler Day

Calypso Asteroid Day

Cat’s Day (Taiwan)

Chicago Flag Day (Illinois)

Children’s Day (China, Taiwan)

Clear and Bright Day (Farmer’s Calendar; China)

404 Day

Flag Day (Chicago, Illinois; Monaco)

HIE Awareness Day

Hug a Newsperson Day

International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action (UN)

International Day to Defend Amina

International Rock Beat Day

Jeep 4x4 Day

Liberation Day (Hungary)

Maya Angelou Day (Boston)

Microsoft Day

Mourning Day for Covid-19 Martyrs (China)

National Dillon Day

National Horse Rehabilitation Day

National Lunchbreak Day (UK)

National Pansy Day

National School Librarian Day

NATO Day

1984 Day (1984)

Ose Matsuri (Japan)

Peace Day (Angola)

Red Crown Imperial Day

Refugee Rights Day (Canada)

Sarhul (Jharkhand, India)

Square Root Day

Swedish-American Friendship Day

Tell-A-Lie Day

Victims of Violence Wholly Day

Vitamin "C" Day

Walk Around Things Day

Women in Tech Day

World Drummers Day

World Plagiocephaley Day

World Rat Day

World Stray Animals Day

Yukon Gold Discovery Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Chocolate Milk Powder Day (a.k.a. Powdered Chocolate Day)

Homogenized Milk Day

International Carrot Day

National Cordon Bleu Day

National Pub Day (UK)

National Ramen Noodle Day

1st Thursday in April

Glarus Festival (Näfelser Fahrtfest; Switzerland) [1st Thursday] 

International Road Maintenance Day [1st Thursday]

Kid Lit Art Postcard Day [1st Thursday]

National Alcohol Screening Day [Thursday of 1st Full Week]

National Burrito Day [1st Thursday]

National GOOS Paper Day (Canada) [1st Thursday]

RAINN Day [1st Thursday]

Tell a Lie Day [1st Thursday]

Weekly Holidays beginning April 4 (1st Week)

Hate Week [thru 4.10]

National Dental Hygienist Week [thru 4.10]

Independence & Related Days

Chinese Republic in Tibet (Proclaimed; Tibet; 1912)

Jacktoopia (Declared; 2014) [unrecognized]

Senegal (from France, 1960)

Sorrenia (Declared; 2013) [unrecognized]

Festivals Beginning April 4, 2024

Artifact Small Format Film Festival (Calgary, Canada) [thru 4.6]

Art Paris Art Fair (Paris, France) [thru 4.7]

Brussels Book Fair (Brussels, Belgium) [thru 4.7]

Clay County Agricultural Fair (Green Cove Springs, Florida) [thru 4.14]

Diagonale Film Festival (Graz, Austria) [thru 4.9]

Kansas Ag Expo (Hutchinson, Kansas) [thru 4.6]

Mule Day (Columbia, Tennessee) [thru 4.7]

North American Alpaca Show (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) [thru 4.7]

Oklahoma City Farm Show (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) [thru 4.6]

Ozark Mountain Soul Fest (Eureka Springs, Arkansas) [thru 4.8]

Ragnarok Festival (Lichtenfels, Germany) [thru 4.6]

Romics (Rome, Italy) [thru 4.7]

Feast Days

Aequinoctium Vernum VI (Pagan)

Agathopus and Theodulus (Christian; Martyrs)

Ambrose (Christian; Saints Commemoration)

Benedict the Moor (Christian; Saint)

Dabucuri pataub, (Initiation Rites of the Young Men; to Jurupari, South American Guarani/Tupi God)

Dan Simmons (Writerism)

Feast of No Saints Day (Pastafarian)

Gaetano Catanoso (Christian; Saint)

Isidore of Seville (Christian; Saint)

The Kangaroo Rat (Muppetism)

Katori Jingu Otaue-sai (Rice Planting Festival; Japan)

Magna Mater begins (aka Megalesia / Great Mother Festival; Ancient Rome)

Martin Luther King Jr. (Episcopal Church (USA))

Maurice de Vlaminck (Artology)

Maya Angelou (Writerism)

Megalesia (Mother of Gods Festival; Phrygian)

Mahavir Jayanti (a.k.a. Janma Kalyanak; Jainism)

Näfelser Fahrtfest (Glarus Canton, Switzerland)

Pierre-Paul Prud´hon (Artology)

Plato (Christian; Saint)

Portfirio Diaz Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Reginald Heber (Anglican Church of Canada)

Theodisius of Bithynia (Positivist; Saint)

Tigernach of Clones (Christian; Saint)

Lunar Calendar Holidays

Tomb Sweeping Day (掃墳節) [Begins At the Qingming solar term, solar longitude of 15°, 15th days after Chunfen] (a.k.a. …

Ancestors' Day

Cheng Ming (macau)

Chinese Memorial Day

Ching Ming Festival (清明節; China; Hong Kong)

Chungmyung Day (North Korea)

Clear and Bright Festival

Qingming Jie (清明节; China)

Qingming Festival

Shīmī (Ryukyu Islands)

Tomb Sweeping Day (Taiwan)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]

Unluckiest Day of the Year (China)

Premieres

Alice’s Auto Race (Disney Cartoon; 1927)

Aloha From Hawaii, by Elvis Presley (TV Concert Special; 1973)

Anna Karenina (Film; 1997)

The Blow Out (WB LT Cartoon; 1936)

Brilliant Corners, by Thelonius Monk (Album; 1957)

Bye Bye Birdie (Film; 1963)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Film; 2014)

Cat Carson Rides Again (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1952)

Chasing Amy (Film; 1997)

Combatants Will Be Dispatched (Anime TV Series; 2021)

Cool for Cats, by Squeeze (Album; 1979)

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (Anime Film; 2003)

The Double (Film; 2013)

Drum Roll, featuring Hector Heathcote (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1961)

Fiesta Time (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1945)

Finnegan’s Flea (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1958)

Flies Ain’t Human (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1941)

Follies, by Stephen Sondheim (Broadway Musical; 1971)

Fowl Weather (WB MM Cartoon; 1953)

The Good Life, a.k.a. Good Neighbors (UK TV Series; 1975)

Heap Big Hepcat (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1960)

High Fidelity, by Elvis Costello (Song; 1979)

How Right You Are, Jeeves (a.k.a. Jeeves in the Offing), by P.G. Wodehouse (Novel; 1960) [Jeeves #12]

Jonny’s Golden Quest (Hanna-Barbera Animated TV Special; 1993)

Leatherheads (Film; 2008)

Man’s Best Friend (Disney Cartoon; 1952)

Microsoft (Computer Company; 1975)

The Mouse That Jack Built (WB MM Cartoon; 1959)

Mutts About Racing, featuring Droopy (MGM Cartoon; 1958)

Nim’s Island (Film; 2008)

Oliver’s Story, by Erich Segal (Novel; 1977)

The Party (Film; 1968)

Perils of Pauline (Film Series; 1914)

Pink Quackers (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1979)

Rio Bravo (Film; 1959)

The Saint (Film; 1997)

Ship of the Line, by C.S. Forester (Novel; 1938)

Toro Pink (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1979)

Two Little Pups (Happy Harmonies Cartoon; 1936)

Ups ’n Downs (WB LT Cartoon; 1931)

What a Girl Wants (Film; 2003)

Today’s Name Days

Isidor, Konrad (Austria)

Benedikt, Izidor, Platon (Croatia)

Ivana (Czech Republic)

Ambrosius (Denmark)

Ambrus, Arbo, Arp, Arpo (Estonia)

Ukko (Finland)

Isidore (France)

Isidor, Konrad, Kurt (Germany)

Izidor (Hungary)

Isabelle, Isadora, Isidoro (Italy)

Herta, Valda (Latvia)

Algaudas, Ambraziejus, Eglė, Izidorius (Lithuania)

Nancy, Nanna, Nina (Norway)

Ambroży, Bazyli, Benedykt, Izydor, Wacław, Wacława, Zdzimir (Poland)

Iosif (Romania)

Izidor (Slovakia)

Benito (Spain)

Ambrosius, Marianne, Marlene (Sweden)

Cedric, Cedrica, Plato, Tiernan, Tierney (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 95 of 2024; 271 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 4 of week 14 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Fearn (Alder) [Day 19 of 28]

Chinese: Month 2 (Ding-Mao), Day 26 (Wu-Xu)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025)

Hebrew: 25 Adair II 5784

Islamic: 25 Ramadan 1445

J Cal: 5 Cyan; Fryday [5 of 30]

Julian: 22 March 2024

Moon: 23%: Waning Crescent

Positivist: 11 Archimedes (4th Month) [Hero]

Runic Half Month: Ehwaz (Horse) [Day 10 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 17 of 92)

Week: 1st Week of April

Zodiac: Aries (Day 15 of 31)