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buckyskorpion · 4 years

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11 hours - part two

Pairing: Biker!Bucky x Reader

Summary: bucky is the mystery you can’t wait to solve. if you can get out of his bed long enough, that is. a biker au.

Warnings: gang-typical violence, sex scenes, alcohol mentions, probably more to come so stay tuned

A/N: thank you guys so much for the incredible response i got to part one!! it made me so happy so thank you. let me know wha yall think of this bit, we’ve got some plot going on which i always enjoy. i wont be taking tags for this so please dont ask.

title taken from 11 hours by wet | playlist

part one

You don’t hear from Bucky for a while after the party. It’s disappointing - you’re self-aware enough to admit that. But you also aren’t stupid enough to expect anything else. Bucky asked you to that party as a favour, you got a one-night-only special being in his life and you’re not expecting anything else.

You had hoped it wouldn’t have impacted your nightly rendezvous, but those had stopped too. You suppose Bucky decided not to trust you after all.

Almost three weeks later and you’re at work, thoughts of Bucky barely a buzz in the back of your head compared to the job at hand. You’ve always been able to let your work consume you, and it pays off in your line of business. Being a private investigator requires attention to detail, lateral thinking, and a questionable moral compass. Your patented paranoia doesn’t hurt either. Your dad tells you every time you visit that he wishes you’d get into something more stable, something less dirty, but you’re not really good at anything else. Considering the majority of your clients are partners trying to figure out if their significant other is cheating, it also pays well for quite minimal effort.

Quick rule of thumb for aspiring PI’s: they’re almost always cheating.

Today is one of those clients. You’ve tailed the guy in question to a tattoo shop in Red Hook, which is already a red flag. He’s an investment banker and buys Louis Vuitton cufflinks for his ugly work suits. He stands out like a sore thumb in this grungy neighbourhood. You snap a few photos of him outside the store, very obviously checking left and right for a tail before entering the place. People suck at being subtle, you’ve come to realise over the years. And at being observant, because all you’ve bothered to do to hide is sit at the cafe across the road and pretend to be taking photos of the latte art on your coffee.

Entering the tattoo parlour is a no-go, even if your grunge aesthetic would fit in with the clientele more than your straight-laced prey. There are other ways, though. You leave some bills on the table and cross the street into the alley beside the tattoo shop, wrinkling your nose at the dumpster smell. There’s a fire escape which you can reach if you stand on the lid of the offensive dumpster in question, leading to a window you hope will get you some insight into what Mike Shorditch of suspected-cheating fame is up to. Maybe he has a tattooed, lip-ringed young girlfriend he meets here? Or a heavy-set biker boyfriend? Or he just wants a tattoo and his wife is as paranoid as you are.

Squeezed uncomfortably between the bars of the fire-escape, you manage to aim your camera lens at the window and zoom in - jackpot. It’s a small window near the ceiling of the high-roofed shop, letting in minimal light to ruin the dark aesthetic of the place, allowing you a somewhat clear view of the shop inside. It’s really nice, you notice, and they have good taste in music. Slowly Slowly bleeds minimally through the glass and you try focus your lens on the faces inside, catching Mike among them like a unicorn in a goth reunion. He’s talking to someone, waving his hands around dramatically while the guy he talks to towers over him, arms folded over a ginormous chest.

You know that face, you realise as you aim your lens a little higher. The shock burns, almost makes you drop your camera and fall off the fire escape you’re precariously lying on. It’s Steve, blonde head unmistakeable as he glares at your target and dismisses whatever Mike says to him with an eyeroll. Without questioning it, you snap a few photos of Steve’s imposing figure - so at odds with the friendly, downright cuddly man you met at the party a few weeks ago. Just when you thought you’d gotten rid of thoughts about that night, they show up at your work. How is this possible?

None of this sits right with you. This strange coincidence, the weird behaviour at the party towards Bucky and his friends, Bucky’s general evasiveness and the feeling you get of being watched just being around him. Nothing is adding up and you’ve never been the kind of person to leave well enough alone. You snap photos of the shop, as much as you can - Steve’s tattoo sleeve that had been hidden under a jumper at the party, the stencils lining the walls, the locks on the front door, the counter where a scrawny kid in glasses bends over what looks like genuine high-school homework and ignores the adults in the shop. There are too many variables - you have to start making sense of one of them.

The easiest thread to pull is Mike, and he’s the one you’re being paid to solve, so it makes sense to start there. Clearly it isn’t cheating his wife should be worried about, but the meeting he’s having with Steve and the others doesn’t look like a friendly catch up with friends either. His personal cybersecurity is poor enough you figure you’ll be able to solve that particular mystery easy enough.

Bucky and his friends, however? That’s going to take a bit more digging.

***

According to Mike Shoreditch’s bank records, he owes somebody a lot of money. You get this from an account his wife doesn’t even know he has, believing all their money goes into a shared account with a completely different bank. Mike has a lot of secrets but cheating isn’t one of them - the print outs of his secret bank account statements and the pictures of him at Steve’s tattoo parlour would be enough for you to close the case and get your money. But you don’t. Not just yet. You have your own itch to scratch, now.

You’ve taken to watching the tattoo shop’s comings and goings, snapping pictures here and there. Steve comes in at ten in the morning, ready to open the shop up by lunchtime for customers and doesn’t close it until midnight. His customers are the usual sort you’d imagine at a rough tattoo shop in Red Hook - heavy set guys with full sleeves and chest pieces, grungy couples who probably live upstate but are rebelling against their trust-fund parents, random walk-ins who’s nerves you can sense from across the street at what’s become your usual table. There are a few, though, who stand out. Leather jackets and motorbikes they park in the alley beside the shop, using the back entrance you snap a shot of one night once they all went home.

You’re not jumping to conclusions just yet, you’ve learnt the hard way from doing that, but you’re also not stupid. Whatever Steve is into, whatever Bucky is by association a part of, there are some shady looking people involved as well.

It’s one of those days where you’re watching the shop from the cafe, camera left on the table in favour of devouring an almond croissant and cataloguing the people you’ve now dubbed regulars at Steve’s as they enter the shop. You should probably be doing your actual job but you can’t bring yourself to, too caught up in the shady business across the street from you. Absorbed, in fact, so you practically jump out of your skin as your phone rings and you send it flying to the pavement with an errant elbow.

You pick up without checking the ID, and boy was that a mistake. Heart pounding painfully in your chest, you answer, “Hi, hello, hi, this is (Y/n) speaking,” all in a rush.

A familiar, honey-warm laugh rumbles down the phone to you and your previously racing heart all but stops beating. Bucky says, “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

Does he know? Had Steve caught you spying and called Bucky asking why the random girl he brought to a party that one time was stalking him? You glance around the street, half expecting Bucky to be standing behind you and catching you red-handed. He’s not, of course he’s not, you’re just losing your mind a little bit.

“No, no, sorry,” you say, running a shaky hand through your hair. “I’m at work. What’s up?”

“I won’t keep you long,” Bucky says, sounding amused, and you hate how the rough catch of his voice through the phone all but erases the suspicions you have for him, warning you to stay away. You had missed him, is all. He says, as if plucking the thought from your brain, “I was missing you.”

“Yeah?” you ask, glad he can’t see the grin you send to the table. “That why you disappeared after the party?”

“Let me explain over drinks?” Bucky asks, dodging your jab with ease. No, no, no, don’t be stupid, he’s bad news and you’ve got the proof, don’t-

“You’re paying,” you say instead, silencing the smart side of your brain.

“Always do,” he says, which is blatantly not true but whatever, “Nine at Joey’s?”

“See you there,” you say, and hang up before you can do anything else stupid.

You bury your hands in your hair, leaning your elbows on the table and letting out a frustrated sound probably inappropriate for a public place. How are you going to go meet Bucky and pretend you aren’t, essentially, investigating his best friend? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you use this to get more answers, full-stop some of the question marks that have been playing havoc with your head all week.

And sex. You’re not going to pretend you won’t be ending up in Bucky’s bed again, shady secrets be damned.

***

Joey’s is a divey, underground bar you absolutely adore, and you’ve met Bucky here multiple times. He introduced you to the place, actually, a week or so into meeting up him. He’d laughed at how excited you were over the movie posters they used as decor behind the booths, the bartender who squeezed fresh apple juice into your shot of Jameson, the dirty bass-heavy music you eventually convinced him to dance with you to. Bucky is clearly trying to win you over by meeting you here, and you can’t say it’s not working. Just a little bit. You’ll still make him work for it.

Bucky’s got a booth at the back when you arrive, two whiskey apple’s already waiting on the table as he stands up to greet you. He pulls you into a hug, not letting you set the tone at all, but you can’t find it in you to mind as you’re crushed into his chest and he rests his stubbly chin atop your head. He smells nice, reminding you of spiced rum or something else warm and comforting, and his hands feel real nice as they dip under your top to press against your bare skin. Had you really missed him this much? You squeeze him tightly, ignoring the thump of your heart as he starts rubbing circles into your back, and you stand there in his arms for far too long to be appropriate.

Pulling away, though, feels like you’ve lost something.

Across the booth from you, now, Bucky slides a drink towards you with his usual cheeky grin. You roll your eyes at him, popping the straw in your mouth and looking out at the bar so you can pretend not to pay attention to him. He bumps your foot under the table but you ignore him, hiding your smirk in the rim of your glass.

“Doll,” he says, exasperated, and reaches across the booth to place his giant hand on the arm you have resting on the table. You look at him then, scrunching your nose up at the pet name which makes him smile. His eyes crinkle up at the sides, all soft and blurry blue, and you feel yourself forgetting why you’re supposed to be mad at him in the first place.

“What,” you say, mimicking his tone just to watch his jaw clench. His frustration is hot, what of it? You love winding him up like this.

“Brat,” he retorts, and oh, that makes you feel something you probably shouldn’t, all low and coiled hot in your belly. “Did you think I was avoiding you?”

“You were avoiding me,” you correct, raising your eyebrows at him. He hasn’t let go of your arm, now taking to rubbing his thumb back and forth across the leather of your jacket. You refuse to let it melt you.

“I was away,” he says, eyes sparkling. He’s practically laughing at you, which is- rude. You huff, barely believing him, and he says, “I was! Did you want me to tell you I was going or something?”

“No,” you say, rolling your eyes at him. You sigh - he’s right, what did you expect? Nothing, and yet you were put out anyway, but that’s a problem you’ve got to deal with on your own. Bucky doesn’t owe you anything and he knows it. You relax, finally, putting your drink down to cover Bucky’s hand with your own. You smile, say, “I’m just messing with you, Bucky.”

“Sure you are,” he says easily, but you know he doesn’t believe you. It’s dropped, then, forgotten as you sit there staring at each other in the dim light of the bar. You really had missed him, even if you still barely knew him. His stubbly jaw, the close-cropped sides of the new haircut he’d gotten since you’d last seen him, the glint of his dog togs against tanned skin disappearing under his t-shirt. The swirl of his chest piece peeking out from the neckline, and you can fill in the blanks because you’ve seen what’s under that t-shirt. You’ve traced your tongue over it, as well as every other inch of him you’re trying to memorise in case another month passed before you saw him again. If you ever saw him at all.

“What?” you ask when you realise he’s starting to smile at you, holding back a laugh. He shakes his head, looking down to pick up his drink and take a sip. You lean back, retracting yourself from his grip and folding your arms across your chest - he’s making fun of you, you know it, but you don’t know why. He does laugh then, also leaning back in his seat and regarding you with that head tilt that infuriates you.

“Nothing,” he laughs, eyes saying the opposite. “It’s just- it’s nice to see you.”

“You going soft on me, tough guy?” you tease, but he sobers at your words, the smile dying on his pillow-plump lips. He stares you down, that deep thing that reminds you how easy it is to get lost in him (if you aren’t already).

“Maybe I am,” he says, and that surprises you. You had been joking, but the heady way he’s looking at you turns it serious. “Would that bother you?”

You shake your head, not trusting yourself to say the right thing. You don’t even know if that’s a good response or not, but you’ve done it now and Bucky nods, downs his drink, all without ever breaking eye contact with you. You get the distinct feeling you’ve just agreed to something you don’t entirely understand, entangling yourself further into Bucky without even trying to. Given what you’d been uncovering about his friends the past week, you should know better. You should leave.

But you don’t. You lean across the booth, coming to him this time, and peel his hand off his glass to entwine your fingers with his. The cool metal of his signet rings offsets the warmth of his palm against yours, and the way he grips your fingers tightly signs the deal. Bucky is too enticing to stay away from, and you are too tired of trying to.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” you ask, but it’s not really a question. You watch his eyes dart across your face, tongue flicking out over his lips, stalling for time. You wonder what he’ll say. My friends run dodgy business deals out of a tattoo parlour? I’m involved in that, too? I’m dangerous, I’m a liar, you should stay away?

“I’m a mechanic,” he says. You try not to show your disappointment, but still, this is information you didn’t have before and you’re greedy for anything. “I have my own shop in Queens. Natasha helps me out, helps me run it. I’ve been obsessed with cars and bikes and shit since I was five.��

You smile at that, imaging little Bucky running around a car yard trying to convince his dad, or whoever, to teach him how to drive even if he couldn’t reach the pedals yet. You imagine him now, the hand you’re holding all greased up and elbow deep in a car’s guts, maybe with his shirt off and sweat dripping down his back. You’ve got to see that one day before you die, you decide right then. That’s too hot to just stay in your brain.

“Your turn,” he says, shit-eating smirk in place like he can read your mind. You blush, despite yourself, and scramble for something to say that’s not I’ve been investigating your friends all week and it’s not looking too good for them.

“My dad,” you blurt out, and Bucky give you a funny look like he thinks that’s your fact - you have a dad, isn’t that something. You curse yourself for starting this, you could’ve gone with anything and you said ‘my dad’? But you’re here now, so, “He raised me on his own, like, I don’t know my mum at all, but he always said he wanted me to have something of her so he taught me Russian. She taught him, apparently, and he taught her English. Now it’s like our secret language.”

“Russian, hey?” Bucky asks, and he seems far too surprised for the anecdote you’ve just given but you suppose it is the first actually personal thing you’ve told him. He doesn’t seem off-put by it, though, like you have expected him to be because you don’t do personal. In fact he just leans closer, almost unconsciously, baiting you to tell him more.

“Yeah,” you say, compelled to keep going. “We’d leave each other notes around the house in ‘code’, y’know, but it was just in Cyrillic. Thought it was so cool.”

“It is cool,” Bucky says, smirking at you again, “You’re cool.”

“Fuck you,” you laugh, kicking his ankle under the table but immeasurably grateful for the tone change. You don’t know why you’ve just told him that. You don’t know if you’ve ever told anyone that - Russian isn’t exactly a handy language to know. You feel drunker than you should be after a tiny bit of whiskey, high on the rush of unleashing a secret. Drunk enough that Bucky unlatching his fingers from yours to grip your wrist tight, a bit bruising, tugging you close, makes you flush from your scalp to your toes.

Bucky looks at you, dark and heavy, and asks, “Want to?”

You nod, throat suddenly very dry, and Bucky tugs you out of the booth without another word. Usually you wait a bit longer before getting on Bucky’s bike, have a few more drinks, maybe dance a bit if you can coax Bucky into it. Not tonight. You’re both on the same page - it’s been too long and you need his mouth on you about five days ago.

He pushes you into the apartment by the shoulders, rough enough you stumble but you’re quickly righted as he strides through the door after you and grabs you by the hips. Bucky crushes his mouth to yours, swallowing your needy whine with soft lips and velvet tongue as you fist his t-shirt and drag you both backwards, going and going until your back hits a wall. His palm slams into the drywall by your head but you don’t flinch, only groan as he smudges his spit-slick mouth across your jaw and down your neck. Bucky bites down, sharp teeth on soft skin, and you rake your nails down his stomach as payback for the mark you’ll have later.

“Off,” Bucky grumbles as he shoves at your jacket, getting it stuck at your elbows and trapping your arms by your sides. He seems to like like this, eyes flashing something dangerous in the dark of his hallway. You hold his eyes, heart thrumming something wild in your throat at being caught, pinned, vulnerable. With Bucky, though, you like that.

You want to reach for him but you can’t, so you wait for him to come to you. Kissing you breathless, hand fisted in your hair, other undoing the front of your jeans. God, you wanna touch him so bad but Bucky has you in his grip, yanking your head back to kiss that same bruised spot. He sucks another under your chin as you cry out, pinpricks of pain-turned-pleasure bursting at the base of your scalp.

He gets his hand in your jeans, in your panties, runs two fingers down your cunt so easy with how wet you are already before rubbing bruising, slow circles on your clit. Your whole body jerks against Bucky’s hold on you, his thighs bracketing your body into the wall and his hand still fisted in your hair. Your mouth drops open in a soundless moan and you feel, rather than hear Bucky laugh against your throat. All executive function has diverted to the radiating ache of pure pleasure from Bucky’s fingers on you.

Bucky lets go of you hair only to press his hand on your throat, cold rings digging into your burnt-up skin and pressing you back into the wall. Long fingers tilt your jaw to look at him, increased pressure warning you against looking away, but you don’t want to anyway. Bucky’s eyes are dark like a sea storm, molten blue, and he squeezes his grip just once before saying, “Still think I’ve gone soft?”

Jesus christ, but you can’t answer him like this - not with your pulse thundering against his palm and the way he picks up the pace on your clit, making your thighs shake with the effort of holding yourself up. Bucky grins, boyish and crinkly, and it’s so at odds with the way he slides his two fingers down and pushes into you, twisting to the knuckle, that you think you might be losing your mind. Unravelling, Bucky pulling at the threads, and the only thing holding you together is his hand on your throat.

“Bucky,” you say, his name a broken breath as you start to lose focus. Everything’s hazy, glassy, your toes are going numb and tingly so you know it’s coming, building tight in your stomach as he rubs his fingers back and forth inside of you. At his name Bucky makes a sound almost like a growl, pressing his body against yours and somehow further into the wall. You need that contact, the press of his muscles holding you up as it gets harder and harder to breath with the heat coiling up inside of you. He presses his forehead against yours so all you can see is blue edged out by black, claiming your every breath and moan, drawing you in deeper and deeper because you’re his, now. There’s no way back from this.

He presses his thumb to your clit, thrusts his fingers deeper into you, mouth parting with yours as you moan as if he means to swallow the sound. You’re there, you’re right there, and then he kisses you so soft you might’ve imagined it and you’re coming, your whole body clenching up and whiting out while he finger fucks you through it.

Trembling muscles come to leant against the wall, barely holding yourself up as Bucky extricates himself and allows you room to breath. He gently tugs your jacket all the way off, freeing your arms to come up sluggish and heavy around his neck, holding on. He laughs, just quietly, letting you nuzzle your way into the side of his neck and breath in that warm honey Bucky smell as you try and regain mental functions. It’s hard. You think Bucky’s just blended up your brain with a swizzle stuck and sucked it out through a straw.

“C’mon,” he says, gravel rough, and nudges his nose against the side of your head. “Not done with you yet.”

“Hmph,” you say, but let yourself be picked up under the ass and wrap your legs around his waist as he carries you to his bedroom. You press a kiss to the skin of his neck you can reach with every second your body comes back online, digging your teeth in a little when he squeezes your ass as he walks. You’re both still fully clothes, basically, but you don’t plan to be for long. You’ve got tattoos to kiss and a dick you want anyway Bucky’ll let you. You’ve got all night, after all.

***

It’s late, you should be going, but you steal a few more minutes lying on Bucky’s chest. He’s sat up against the headboard, trying to braid little pieces of your hair with the cutest look of concentration on his face. The way he goes from dirty to dork always makes your heart do complicated things in your chest. You’re drumming your fingers on his chest, right next to his dog tags, and before you can overthink it too much you pause your drum solo to pick them up.

Bucky doesn’t pause in his hair-braiding but you can feel him watching you as you turn the worn metal over in your fingers. They’re well loved, a bit bent in places and the letters starting to rub flat but you can still read it. His birthday, March 10th, and his name. You’d never thought to read these before - they always seemed part of Bucky’s past, something you weren’t allowed into yet. But tonight has made you bold, and you run your thumb over the letters of his name so you can memorise the feel of them.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” you mumble, words half said into his skin. Bucky hums but doesn’t respond, so you say, “I always knew no mother could look at their newborn child and call it Bucky.”

“Watch it,” Bucky warns, but without any real heat. You don’t ask what the tags mean, which war he fought in, when he got back. You lay them back on his skin carefully, straightening out the chain, before turning in Bucky’s arms to prop your chin on his chest piece and look at him.

“I should go,” you say, as you continue to lie there with legs tangled and Bucky’s hand now resting idle, cupping the back of your head. He bites his lip, strokes his big hand down the back of your hair and making you close your eyes for a second. You’re enjoying his touch too much, you’re getting too close for a man you don’t know. A man who you know has secrets you probably don’t want to uncover, but you can’t stop yourself.

“You could stay.” Bucky’s words hang there, suspended in the space between you. He’s never said that before. You never thought he would say that, ever. Bucky looks at you, face unreadable, and you don’t know why you feel sick to your stomach all of a sudden but you do. There are lines being crossed that you can’t backtrack from. You’re not ready to make that step yet.

“Not tonight,” you say, and it’s not a no but it’s not what Bucky wants to hear. He withdraws his hand from you, letting it drop uselessly to the bed beside him. You take that as your cue to go, rolling off the bed and dressing silently with Bucky’s eyes burning a hole in your skin.

You’re pulling away, trying desperately to regain some distance and control from his man who already has you swallowed whole, he just doesn’t know it yet. Even still, you can’t stop yourself crawling back on the bed and straddling his lap, holding his face in your hands as you kiss him. You want him to remember this - not you saying no, but the way your body will always say yes to him as he holds your hips and keeps you there, kissing you back as desperate as you feel.

But now you know you have reason to climb through the laundry room window that night and sneak away from Bucky’s apartment building, that you’re not just being paranoid because you’ve got photos to prove it. It’s that thought alone that makes it bearable to leave him, even if your heart is begging you to stay.

Part 3

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dietsauthority · 4 years

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The Best Workouts For Weight Loss

Have you place on a little as well much vacation weight?

We've all been there at some time in our lives! You eat healthy and balanced, function out right, and also think you should have a rip off dish, and also two weeks later on you are knee deep in delicious chocolate wrappers, residing on cake, pizza, and also pudding.

Okay, that could have been a real-life example. It happened to my friend.

Yes, by 'my pal' I mean me. No, I'm not honored. It occur, okay!

I'm only human.

Anyhow, allow's talk shedding all that weight, despite exactly how you put it on. You'll have to promise me that you will not inform any individual, it's a secret.

I'll tell you concerning the finest exercise for weight loss! And I assure you, you'll appreciate all it!

Keep checking out to understand more about this little secret.

A Little Concerning Cardio and also Weight Training

Wait, what?

Did you believe I would certainly just distribute the secret !? Well, it's coming.

But initially, I want you to know something important regarding these 2 types of exercise. After all, you know just what they say:

" You provide a pauper a fish as well as you feed him for a day. You show him to fish and also you give him an occupation that will feed him for a life time."

Let's learn how to fish!

Cardio: Infant You Make My Heart Beat Faster!

So, allow me just begin by stating that you're living under a rock if you haven't heard words cardio before!

But what are cardio exercises?

Let me inform you ... you ready for some truths? Allow's go!

Well, cardio exercise is any type of exercise which enhance your heartrate. And also, no, checking out your crush doesn't count as cardio! Just what makes your heart race? Well, there are numerous tasks that do! Like running, cycling, rotating, etc.

Yes, there's a reason I'm telling you all this. Cardio is possibly the ideal way to lose fat. That's why they inform individuals that are fat a little plump to opt for a run/swim/jog etc. And also of course, zumba and all that exotic things likewise comes under cardio.

But, did you understand that it's simply not cardio that actually assists you shed weight?

Weight Training: What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger!

Weight training or strength training is often related to that closed 'weights area' in the gym from where all those unacceptable grunts come from.

When I speak about weight training, individuals generally consider a person like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you understand, a body builder with a muscle body. However in fact, weightlifting is important for everybody, not just the bodybuilding enthusiasts. Particularly if you wish to shed weight.

What!? Ain't no means I'm mosting likely to lift weights!

Actually, you should reevaluate that. Why you ask? Well, there's an additional side to this story. As well as no, it does not mean you'll obtain those balloon muscles.

Your Tendons, Bones, Tendons and also Joints As well as Why You NEED Weight Training!

Let's discuss the four points first, your tendons, bones, tendons and joints. I make sure you might have found somebody in your life who was a 'fitness' enthusiast. I claim 'physical fitness' due to the fact that all they ever before did was cardio ... allow me share something with you.

My aunt had constantly been on the much heavier side, and also in a bid to drop weight she did just what any individual would have:

She went on a diet plan and signed up with a gym.

But, she never ever entered the 'Narnia' -is exactly what I want to call it-of the health club, the weight area. Obviously, all she ever before did was most likely to the fitness center as well as run/cycle/ or just do the crossrunner. And one great day she took a light loss from the treadmill and also tore her ankle ligament!

No, I'm not completely offering you off cardio, there's a moral to my story. Hear me out.

This occurred because aunt completely neglected strength training. You may think my insurance claim is as well bold, but it's really not. You see, my auntie had quit all kinds of workout for many years before she joined the health club. Which means, that she had shed all of lean muscle mass that she had when she was energetic, as well as her tendons. bones, ligaments and also joints had ended up being weak!

Meet Your New Love: Stamina Training

So, how does toughness training come into play?

Well, consider it this way, if cardio helps you obtain quicker, after that, toughness training helps you get more powerful. If you also educate your body once a week, chances of injury reduction dramatically.

And, that doesn't such as a round bum!

Jokes aside, research studies have revealed that stamina training assists you burn extra calories compared to cardio alone.

How, you ask? Well.

It's just simple.

The afterburn.

Did you recognize that you shed calories all day?

Yes, your body makes use of energy to run, similar to your laptop needs battery.

So, you melt calories all the time. Now, the afterburn generally describes the calories you burn after an exercise (du-uh!) as well as studies have actually shown that us people melt even more calories after a strength workout than after a regular cardio workout.

In reality, you shed more calories for approximately 48 hours of a stamina workout!

Pheww..

That was a whole lot to take in, had not been it?

You're a Snow: A General Guideline of Thumb

You must be scraping your head thinking what the hell I am talking about.

I understand why you came below, you wish to know concerning the best exercise there is to reduce weight. I obtain it, I've been in your shoes for the lengthiest time. However, I should admit something.

The fitness industry is pressing many exercises, supplements, as well as wonder drugs. There are many articles available that will tell you about The Very Best means to do this, do that, but there will certainly alway be one point. I'll inform you that in a few.

Let's discuss the 'snowflake' thing initially. Do you understand that no 2 snows coincide? That each snowflake is distinct? Well, so are you.

Yes, I just estimated your mommy. Yeah, I likewise recognize your mama made use of to state that to you in those defiant teen years. However, you understand what they say, Mother recognizes best.

Since you're a special individual, what might be the ideal exercise for me could not be for you. Most of us have our rate of interest, likes, dislikes, etc. Currently, if I were to inform you that the most effective means to slim down is to swim 1 hour a day, and also you have fear of water, would you do that?

A sensible male as soon as claimed that understanding is power, as well as I would certainly favor offering you the best expertise over feeding you a 'tablet'.

So, what's my basic rule of thumb? I'll inform you.

Step One: Discover the Cardio Activity That You Love

Losing weight is not tough when you're learning something new or doing something that you love.

What goodwill going for one place like a hamster provide you?

My absolute suggestion to you would certainly be to discover the cardio activities that fit your life as well as objectives. But, just what could you do!?

Well, a Great Deal Of points! Right here are a couple of suggestions from my side:

1. Join a class

This means you kill two birds from one stone!

This makes cardio even more manageable and also fun!

2. Compete!!

I have no idea concerning you but I'm a Monica Gellar when it involves contending. If you aren't sure that Monica Gellar is then I'm absolutely sorry for you.

Anyhow, completing is the most effective way to obtain the task done. I recognize that I put things off until I have a deadline.

3. Explore

Another thing I would certainly like you to keep in mind is that you discover all the activities that you can. Attempt zumba or FIIT as well as see if they benefit you!

There are a whole lot of fat burning overviews that celebs promise by yet why do something that you recognize you 'd completely despise to reduce weight when you can in fact have a good time with it!

Now, remember that you should do your cardio workout at the very least 3 times a week. I 'd suggest you do your cardio the after your stamina training workout.

Step Two: Get Stronger!

A toughness training workout doesn't truly mean that you'll have to join the gym or buy dumbbells.

What!?

Yes, you review that right! Currently that I have actually opened your mind to stamina training my mentioning the afterburn point, all you need is a great exercise schedule. And also you don't even have to dedicate much time for it! You can do it from the comfort of your home!

You must aim for doing at the very least one stamina workout each week as well as you 'd ready to go!

A Sample Workout Schedule

So, in order to make points simple for you, I made you an example exercise routine for weight-loss exercises.

Let's see!

DAY/WORKOUTMONDAY TUESDAYWEDNESDAY THURSDAYFRIDAY SATURDAYSUNDAY CARDIO----- YES----- YES----- YESBREAK STRENGTHYES----- YES----- YES----- BREAK

If you follow this timetable you will lose weight if you maintained at it consistently!

The Final Words

Yes, I understand that I have actually gone on endlessly rambling on right here however things that I want you to eliminate from right here is that there is no ideal workout for fat burning that can be packaged as well as offered to millions. If that were a case, this would certainly would be filled by individuals with the ideal body. It's not. Keep in mind these things:

Cardio is your BFF

You do not have to withstand cardio like it's your worst adversary, no. Consider it as your buddy. Enjoy cardio, discover something you such as, learn something brand-new, don't be that hamster working on it's wheel!

This is the only method you'll ever before take pleasure in shedding weight!

Strength Training is Important

Strength training is a good idea given that it assists you melt more calories and get stronger and also stay clear of injury.

That being said, I rest my instance. I hope you located this post resourceful. Leave remarks if you assume I have actually covered whatever. If you have any concerns or worries after that I'm right below to assist you via them!

Have a good day!

#diet #diets that work #exercise for weight loss #fitness #for weight loss #lose fat #lose weight #slim down #Weight Loss

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fgrgag · 3 years

Text

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adulting-with-autism · 7 years

Video

youtube

Would you look at that! It’s episode 2!

Transcript under the cut

Nick: Hello and welcome to episode two of Adulting with Autism

Liz: That’s right. We’ve had at least two people say they enjoyed it, so we’re doing another one

Nick: Makes it about twice as popular as my previous attempt at a podcast, so I think we’re onto a winner

Liz: I dunno, I think twice zero is still zero. It’s infinitely more popular

Nick: Infinitely more popular, yes. But, you know, I still think that there’s room for a podcast where you discuss potatoes and time. The concept, not the seasoning

Liz: Although potatoes and thyme is delicious

Nick: That is quite true

Liz: Like, it wouldn’t be my go to but it does go very well

Nick: Know what else is good? Sage

Liz: Ooh and a bit of rosemary

Nick: But that’s not what we do here at adulating with autism we give advice on how to… adult with autism

Liz: But I mean that could involve cooking – it won’t this time but it could do in the future

Nick: My advice this week is if in doubt use sage. For any situation

Liz: Yeah? Unless you’re making a cake

Nick: Maybe don’t use sage on cake – unless you want to but I will judge you

Liz: Shall we do the first question

Nick: Yeah, I think we should

Liz: Ok first question is I think our only non-anon one it’s from I’m going to guess how to say your username, @taka-hardt , who asks “I have a fidget cube but I’m on a computer a lot using both hands so I resort to chewing the inside of my mouth because it feels so nice and makes an interesting.

But is it bad to do? I made a weird indentation on one side of my mouth that rests well between my teeth where my jaw is a bit more slack. Should I invest in a chew necklace?” Short answer yes. Because if you chew the inside of your mouth all the time you are at risk of mouth ulcers as I know from experience and mouth ulcers are not fun

Nick: Nope

Liz: They hurt

Nick: They do. Don’t chew what you use for chewing is a good rule of thumb

Liz: You’re against meta-chewing

Nick: I am against meta-chewing in all its forms. It’s not a stance I expected to have to make clear but that’s where I am, it’s what I believe.

Liz: Okay in terms of where you can get chew necklaces there’s probably multiple ones but one I know a lot of people like is Stimtastic which is run by an actual autistic person and the money goes to autistic stuff and you know that the necklace is made of something that’s safe to chew which is a big thing because a lot of people end up chewing thing that are not a good thing to chew because they might fall apart or contain something toxic

Nick: Yeah like a poisonous… cheek

Liz: What?

Nick: I don’t know…

Liz: Yeah so chew a stim necklace not a poisonous cheek

Nick: Yeah it was the one thing I could think of worse than a cheek

Liz: A toe

Nick: Yup. Before we go through all the things that are bad to chew, we should tackle the next question

L: Okay this is long one but the gist is this person is 19 has only been in 1 relationship which was short and terrible and is just generally struggling with trying to get into a romantic relationship and is worried about being… the phrase they used is alone forever. I’m going to start by saying 19 is really young. You’ve got a lot of time

Nick: You have many time, much time and I’m going to say fairly confidently you probably won’t be alone forever

Liz: Yeah certainly my own experience is you get into a relationship when you’re not looking to do so

Nick: Yup all the best thin s just sort of occur

Liz: Yeah when I met Nick I was in that place. I was 19 I had two relationships in my life which were both terrible. I basically given up on ever being with someone. I resigned myself to this and then I met Nick.

Nick: Yeah the thing is know it can be difficult. You can really get lonely and feel the need to have someone else there and it can be a comfort but the best thig to do when you’re in that sort of place is find a new interest a new kind of outlet. Something new socially or something you do on your own and just distract yourself from those kind of worries and chances are something’s going to come along.

Liz: The important thing is to be in social situations is the key thing, which I know can be difficult

Nick: Even if it’s something you do online

Liz: Yeah you’ve met people online

Nick: Which has gone pretty well on the whole. So yeah just I know it’s tough but hang in there and the important thing is you can feel you don’t necessarily feel you have the social skills, aren’t an extrovert but you meet someone else like that eventually and that’s when you can really relax and go “4eah I’m not good at people”

Liz: Yeah, then you complain about the lack of spring rolls and info dump about pre-Norman feudalism and eventually you get engaged

Nick: Badda bing badda boom. Ok that’s hopefully something like that will happen

Liz: Yeah or substitute your own interest or lack of food. Ok we’re getting through these quite quickly

Nick: I think we are. Shall we have some kind of…I don’t know I feel we should play some sort of interlude, word from our sponsors

Liz: Yeah, this episode is apparently sponsored by my phone which keeps making noises

Nick: It does it does keep making noises

Liz: It’s a pretty good phone. It’s a Samsung something

Nick: We don’t receive any money from Samsung but that’d be nice

Liz: They probably want more information than Samsung something

Nick: Probably yes. If you’re Samsung and you’re listening we would like some free money

Liz: Or a free phone

Nick: Whatever you feel like. Both would be nice

Liz: Also brought you to by the letter E

Nick: It’s a good letter, one of my faves. Top 26.

Liz: I’m going to read the next question. This one is also anon. “Hi my brother has autism and I was wondering how I could help him”. Okay you’ve given us nothing to work with here. Maybe ask your brother

Nick: Yeah unfortunately because you haven’t given us enough information I feel we can’t really speculate in case we lead you astray so instead I’m going to have to riff relentlessly until I come up with a quality goof so thanks

Liz: Or we could say the best thing you can do as the sibling of an autistic person is not to speak over them and find out from them the best thing you can do for them. Because every autistic person is different so the best thing you can do is find out from them how you can help them specifically

Nick: That wasn’t a goof that was legit advice

Liz: I’m very sorry

Nick: You always do this, giving constructive advice on the podcast, which is probably good as that’s what we’re trying to do

Liz: You say always. This is episode 2

Nick: Well I feel like we’re an institution

Liz: I do goofs sometimes. I declared a vendetta on numbers

Nick: Yeah you did. Remember that listeners? I think the show was better in those days, it’s sort of jumped the shark a bit. Change of showrunners, revolving cast members…

Liz: I’ve been played by 3 people this episode alone

Nick: It’s really distracting, all the changes

Liz: We’re in quite a small room so it’s disruptive if nothing else

Nick: Yeah moving furniture around… but I’m a professional, the show must go on. So yeah, talk… maybe look on the NAS website or ASAN. Those two are good bets on info on how to help, but apart from that all you can do is listen to what they have to say listen to those concerns.

If they are someone who has sensory issues, has meltdowns, things like that it would be good to look for those signs if they look like they’re being a bit overwhelmed and work out a signal between you that means “ok let’s step outside” or try to work out something like that. That could be a really good help

Liz: Also don’t be that autism siblingTM who thinks they know everything about autism because they have a brother who is autistic because those people are the worst. Especially, as we keep saying every autistic person is different. If you’ve met an autistic person you’ve met one autistic person

Nick: That’s very true. I have high hopes for you anon. You said “I need advice on autism” and you asked autistic people. That’s a good sign

Liz: But ask your brother as well, that’s the main bit of advice

Nick: Yeah, you me, their brother. We’re the trinity, the triumvirate of your brother’s life. So consult the three of us when you need any kind of brotherly advice

Liz: Yeah. I mean we’re both siblings

Nick: Yeah we have them, siberinos

Liz: Yeah I think that went well. Hopefully you will be of benefit to your brother instead of annoying or anything like that. I think this next one is more for you Nick, as I’m the worst at dating, as you probably know. “I feel like I don’t really know how to have relationships w people online” sorry, not romantic, “I always accidentally say the wrong thing and people get angry, even people in the autistic community. How do I work on not getting so worked up” I’m still going to pass that one over to you nick.

Nick: Ooh that’s a tricky one there could be a whole lot of reasons why people are getting upset. Could be discussing contentious issues or it could be a simple problem with tact which I find is often an issue in these situations. Well I guess if it’s the former it can be sometimes people will get their you know you’ll say something and you’ll get their passions going. People have strong views on things

Liz: Not on tumblr, surely

Nick: Indeed so. Things can get polarised. There’s a place for debates and discussion but sometimes it’s hard to see when somebody’s inviting you to have a sort of philosophy seminar sort of discussion and w2hen they’re more interested in venting about an issue. I often find there’s a bit of a misunderstanding there that can lead to serious arguments.

If somebody says “I’m really annoyed about this” it’s not always the best idea to say well in my worldview this isn’t a problem it’s not the best way to make friends. But that might not be the issue. It might just be occasionally saying the wrong thing. I think we all do that from time to time

Liz: Part of being autistic really, having terrible social skills

Nick: Yeah that’s often going to happen. The thing is being quick with an apology does help, trying to say “sorry that was a bit thoughtless”

Liz: One thing I’ve noticed some people do on tumblr, starting a conversation with “I’m autistic I might get some things wrong, tell me”

Nick: Yeah it’s not ideal having to prefaced social interactions with that but it can make things easier. People know me well know that sometimes I’m not going to say the right thing.

Liz: Yeah one of the first things you said to me was I’m autistic, so I’d know that things would be a bit different

Nick: One way which might be an odd way of doing it is I sometimes pick up things from films or TV, or used to when I was younger. Like a scene where characters care for each other or help each other out. Not using that a as a blueprint all the time but sometimes seeing wholesome content helped when I was a kid. People hugging and being nice

Liz: It’s scripting isn’t it, I understand intellectually this is how I should interact with people so I will attempt to emulate that

Nick: Yeah developing scripts can really help, just sometimes if someone’s upset about something saying “sorry that sucks”. Sometimes that’s all that the person wants to hear. That sucks would you like a hug.

Liz: Unless you’ve done something wrong in which case that’s the worst thing you can say

Nick: Yeah. If you’ve done something wrong best thing to say is “I’m sorry…”

Liz: How can I do better

Nick: Yeah and if it’s a general thing that’s sucki9ng in their life the best thing to say is I’m sorry that sucks, difficult situation, want a hug

Liz: Anything I can do

Nick: These are good things to say. I hope you manage to develop some scripts or something like that for these situations. It is difficult because I think one of the biggest obstacles is can come across as not caring about people or being disinterested in their lives if you’re autistic when the opposite is true, I find.

Liz: Or you’re genuinely not interested but you need to be polite and you don’t know how to do that.

Nick: It is difficult. Either way you can come across as a bit cold when you don’t want to. But hopefully we gave some helpful tips there and you can find something that works for you.

Liz: Ok we have a few more questions but we’re coming up to about the length of the last one and I want to keep lengths consistent so I think we’ll answer the last ones on the blog, those two.

Nick: We’ll answer your questions shortly

Liz: You’ll probably get your answers before the ones that are answered on the podcast because that’s going up tomorrow

Nick: Yes basically keep sending your questions in, we love getting them

Liz: Remember you can always say you don‘t want this answered on the podcast you can say I want this privately, I want this on tumblr.

Nick: Whatever works for you. We’re just interested in making Adulting With Autism friendly and accessible and open to anyone. We hope that we’ve helped answer your queries whether it’s about diagnosis or day to day coping and it’s been really nice having positive feedback about the blog and about the podcast it’s really encouraging and it makes us want to keep doing it

Liz: And after the feedback on the first one we will be posting transcripts on the same day the podcast goes up in future

Nick: If you have any more suggestions do feel free to send them in

Liz: We’re all about accessibility

Nick: No real point in running a disability themed thing if you don’t make it accessible or it defeats the whole point

Liz: So we’ll be back in a couple of weeks with some more questions and answers

Nick: Yup, both questions and answers

Liz: Are you going to call them dear listeners again

Nick: Maybe, because they are v dear to my heart

Liz: That’s nice

Nick: Yeah I like them they’re my Pals. My special podcast pals.

Liz: Ok

Nick: Goodbye special podcast pals, until next time.

#podcast #episode 2 #autism #actually autistic #transcript

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avanneman · 7 years

Text

Hey, Netflix! “The Crown” sucks!

Is there anyone in the world so pathetic as Elizabeth II? Aside from us 300 million-odd schmucks who will soon be under the thumb of El Hugo Chávez del Norte. But, seriously, one has to feel sympathy for a ninety-year-old broad condemned to wander the earth pretending that she’s important.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. Once Elizabeth was young and reasonably beautiful, and somehow taken “seriously” by millions of people. Netflix, in cooperation with someone or other, is taking us back to those years via The Crown, which, in its first season treated us to a near-granular take on Liz II’s early years on the throne, the “Churchill Years,” more or less, because Winston returned to the premiership in 1951 and managed to hang on until 1955, though he was really too old for the job in the first place.

I have a pretty strict rule against aristocratic shit—I have never watched a minute of Downton Abbey—but with Trump headed for the White House and Pretty Little Liars still on hiatus, I was desperate for distraction. Besides, an intelligent depiction/deconstruction of the decline and fall of an ancient and outmoded institution might have some dramatic possibilities.

Episode 1 gave some hope, though not a great deal. We begin with the old King, George VI (Jared Harris), getting pumped up and girded for battle—actually, Liz’s wedding—by swapping smutty limericks with the royal somebody—probably “Tommy” (Pip Torrens), his private secretary, who will gradually emerge as a major behind the scenes playa in Buckingham Palace intrigue.

But that’s all to come. Right now, Princess Liz (Claire Foy) is marrying Prince Phillip Mountbatten (Matt Smith). It’s 1947, so long ago that the British Empire still looked like the British Empire. India, though clearly departing, would not be gone for another two years. Western colonialism and “civilization” were still considered to be one and the same, and, just as American slave owners were actually surprised when their slaves ran away during the Civil War, Brits believed that everyone, except for a few ungrateful wretches, liked being subjects of the British Crown. Who wouldn’t? We’re so lucky!1

Later, things get a bit ugly when we’re shown George VI undergoing an operation, and a royal lung (the left one, I believe) drops horribly in a pail. George is operating on borrowed time, but nobody does the stiff upper lip thing like the King of England, or so we’re encouraged to believe. It’s time for him to start grooming Liz for the royal responsibilities that will soon be descending on her pretty little head—quite unobtrusively, of course, because no one does “unobtrusive” like a royal. In particular, he shows Liz the royal dispatch boxes, labeled simply, and proudly, “The King”, which the Cabinet carefully packs with royal reading matter. “They put the ones they want me to read on top,” he explains, “and the ones they don’t want me to read they hide on the bottom”, implying that he reads them all.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, this is pure balderdash. George VI, again not to put too fine a point on it, was a dummy, pure and simple. He didn’t read the dispatch boxes. Queen Victoria was famous for it, but George VI was no Queen Victoria. He was, quite carefully but quite deliberately, kept out of the public eye for fear he might say something stupid—which he unquestionably would if allowed to speak at all.

Liz, at this point, has spent most of her time indulging in the most royal of prerogatives, horsing around—though mostly with a royal equerry rather than an actual horse—but the sight of the royal dispatch boxes seems to sober her—though I don’t remember her actually reading anything. Still, she comes through like a thoroughbred when she and Phillip are sent on a royal tour to Africa, wowing the locals, or so we are led to believe, who are of course thrilled to spend hours sweating in the sun in order to watch a young white woman ride around in a big car. The Mau Mau Uprising, the most recent in a long list of rebellions against British rule, was taking place at about the same time, suppressed by British in their traditional ruthless, racist manner, but we don’t get to hear about that.

We don’t get to hear about a lot of things. While The Crown purports to give us the inside story of life at Buckingham Palace2, it’s a gossip’s notion of the inside story, the notion of someone who takes all trappings of royalty seriously, who thinks that all this petty backbiting and maneuver are important because the people involved are “royalty”, or at least “close to the throne”.

To give us a break from all of this, The Crown throws in a good deal of “inside politics” as well, though sucking up pretty fiercely to Churchill, who was well past his prime—77 and half senile when he took office, and in his thinking about half a century out of date. For his service in rallying Britain in the early days of World War II Churchill did as much as any man ever did to “save” civilization, but by 1945 he was a man without a purpose, rather like the royals themselves. And, in the end, rather like The Crown itself. Funny how art imitates life, isn’t it?

Afterwords Frederick Engels, writing in the nineteenth century, predicted that in the event of a general European war, there would be “crowns by the dozen rolling in the gutter and no one to pick them up,” which is exactly what did happen after World War I all across Europe, and what should have happened in Great Britain as well. But, because Britain had been the richest nation in the world, and because she was on the winning side when the general war did come, the British crown “unnaturally” remained intact. And so, for a hundred years and counting, these people have been walking about, riding horses, waving at crowds, living in palaces, riding in yachts, shooting at grouse, as if their lives had an actual sense and purpose rather than constituting a grotesque dumb show—supported largely, I guess, by both the media and the “people” as a sort of sedative against the ennui of actual existence. Perhaps the saddest thing is, this “royalism” is almost as prevalent over here as it is over “there”.

Years ago, Ringo Starr endeared himself to me by saying “I don’t think we need kings and queens in this country any more.” Yo Nextflix! Why don’t you try being as smart as Ringo?

For still more bile, check out Christopher Hitchens, aka “Mr. Bile”, explaining just how big a prick George VI was. And don’t even get him started on Edward VIII! Don’t even get him started!3

This sort of thinking was standard in Britain’s “white” colonies like Canada and Australia, even though they functioned as independent nations. Memoirs of Canadians and Aussies who grew up in the fifties attest to the sense of shame and humiliation they experienced in the sixties when they finally realized how much they had been exploited by the “mother country”. ↩︎

Buckingham Palace doesn’t even look like a palace. There’s nothing extravagant or playful about it. Instead, it looks like the mausoleum of a particularly unpleasant Roman emperor. ↩︎

Eddie, Georgie’s older brother, had to resign the throne because he was determined to marry American slut charmer Wallis Simpson, becoming the Duke of Windsor. As Hitch is pleased to tell you, Winston Churchill made a complete ass of himself defending Edward. The Duke shows up in The Crown rather as the royal family’s acerbic gay uncle, making vaguely smutty wisecracks about this and that and “explaining” that royalty’s “magic” lies in its mystery. The Duke’s “abdication”, as it was called, was “the biggest story since the Resurrection” in the estimation of quintessential newsman H. L. Mencken. Mencken, a bit of an Anglophobe due to his German heritage, must have enjoyed the whole thing enormously. ↩︎

#The Crown #Elizabeth II #tv

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blschaos3000-blog · 5 years

Text

Its 2:09 am

Welcome to “8 Questions with…….”

Imagine being a fan of a sport,band,soccer team for years and suddenly and quite unexpectedly you find yourself in the middle of the action,well if you are Nikita Breznikov,that is what happens when you go from a huge fan to becoming the manager of one of the grestest “heel” (bad guys) pro wrestlers in Nikolai Volkoff. So how does a 27 year police veteran go from busting crime to becoming a pro wrestling manager and later on,a solid character and still find time to write a very well received book about the history of pro wrestling in the years before it seemingly exploded into the public’s eye in the early 1980s? As a lifelong fan of wrestling,to be able to chat with Nikita and listen to some of his own stories as well as many others was a sheer treat. I found myself looking at his Facebook page and reading all the old programs,seeing so many names that I found watching growing up. Nikita’s passion for the history of the sport matches any fans of the so-called legitimate sports and the love comes out in his answers here and also his writing. I really am excited to share this interview with you all….so let’s go ask Nikita Breznikov his 8 Questions……

Please introduce yourself and tell about the current project you are working on.

I have been Nikita Breznikov since 1995 and upon entering the world of pro wrestling by managing the great legend, Nikolai Volkoff, we morphed into the world of acting. I was told by someone that doing wrestling documentaries was actually acting credits. That didn’t interest me as I was still protective of the business and did not want to expand beyond it.

Then one day we were offered a role in a movie called “Terror In The Pharaoh’s Tomb”. It caught my attention because the movie believe it or not had Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Lionell Atwill, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyick and many other stars of past time. The producers were able to obtain permission to use footage of these actors and since the film was shot in black and white, the editing was in sync.

What also caught my attention was the fact that my character was Captain Siodmak. Now being a fan of Universal Monsters for all my life, I recognized that name as the man that penned The Wolfman, Curt Siodmak. One of the producers was surprised to learn that I did recognize that name and in fact the connection actually was a reference, as a tribute to the greater, more famous Siodmak.

From there I did a local cable show in Baltimore called “Top Of The Morning”. I first was a guest on the show, then when the director/producer Loretto Gubernatis, saw that I had the gift of gab, she invited me to be a co-host for one season. I learned a lot from her in the time that we spent together and I am grateful.

From there I worked with Darren Aronofsky on “The Wrestler” which we will address down the list of questions I see.

I also am a retired detective sergeant with 27 years experience with the Baltimore Police Department. That is a story in itself along with finding pro wrestling in the middle of it. At a point in that career I became the domestic violence coordinator and worked with many DV, sexual assault victims. I stay active in those fights working with multiple groups and sources to combat these attacks on women.I am now a published author, with my book “When It Was Real” about the WWWF in the 70’s and how it influenced, we, the fans lives. Actually there is a huge story in all of this.

I am also a prostate cancer survivor and passionately speak about preventing it via early BLOOD testing. Early detection helped not only save my life, but gave me a better quality of life. It’s easy, just a tube of blood, men don’t worry about the standard test, that’s a problem anyway if the prostate feels enlarged. Go for the blood test. Prostate problems are a varied degree, so proceed accordingly, but DO proceed. Ignorance won’t solve anything!

When did you become a fan of pro wrestling? Did you play a lot of sports growing?

I became a fan of pro wrestling in 1970, I was 9 years old. The kids at school were talking about it all the time, so I decided to see what it was all about and BANG! I was hooked from the start. Professor Tanaka was tearing up a jobber on TV. It was just as wild as anything that I had ever seen in my life. But the live shows, man the color, the excitement, that’s where the magic truly appeared, when you saw the TV stars so close that you could actually touch them. I did play lots of sports growing up, Baseball/softball, sometimes the softball was the only game in town. Whiffle ball in the streets when we couldn’t get to the park. I was a city boy so we played in the streets a lot. Rubber balls bounced off a brick wall and fielding them for hours was a ritual. Then we played a game called curb ball. You would bounce the rubber ball off a hard surface and try to get it over or past the opponent.

My best friend and I actually had a walk on major league try out. Man I crawled away, those guys were damn good. We also played a lot of football, both in the park and just throwing the football back and forth. We would play touch a lot in the street. My best friend had a great arm and I was super fast, so we were a natural pairing. But we were always active, boxing, wrestling, just always in some sort of motion. Something I fee that the thumb generation lacks. (The video gamers) We interacted with people. In the summertime, we would be outside until dark, who the hell wanted to be inside. TV was all reruns in the summer, so outside was the place to be.

What was your favorite wrestling promotion? Who was your favorite wrestler to watch?

My favorite, my only promotion available in the 70’s was the WWWF. I’m glad of it. We were entertained by, in my opinion the greatest talent in the world. Bruno as champ for most of that time, then passing the torch to Pedro, Superstar and Backlund. We were lucky.

My favorite wrestler was the colorful, exciting, just down right wild wrestler was the one and only Chief Jay Strongbow. I was fortunate to become good friends with Chief through the years. It was like a dream come true to get to know your childhood idol. Of course the parade of heroes and villains was an endless list of friendships as I became part of the business. It is a surreal experience.

But Chief as a favorite was not just someone that I favored, but many other fans were entertained by him as well. People who look back at his matches don’t get it. But if you lived it, you can’t imagine anybody not being swept up in the emotion of a Chief Jay Strongbow match of the 70’s.

How did you meet Nikolai Volkoff and form your friendship with him?

I met Nikolai by accident, on purpose. I was/am a tape (vhs at that time) collector of WWF matches 70-83. I was a sergeant in the patrol division of the Baltimore Police. I saw a poster in a 7-11 advertising a local show for a boys club.

Nikolai was featured on the card, so I decided to drop by and see if I could talk with him. Now I wasn’t a huge NikolAi fan, I favored the faces, but always respected and enjoyed his work. So I wasn’t interested in just a meeting per say. We did hit it off immediately and when I asked Nikolai about having any matches on tape, he said no but that he would love to have some.

I told him I could do that for him. He offered to pay but I told him it was me paying him for all the years of entertainment in the squared circle. From there we became friends, very close friends, like brothers.

My persistence at him to get in the biz finally yielded results with a cautious Nikolai agreeing to take me on as a manager. Later, years after I learned from him and many legends, that we would become a tag team from time to time.

Can you walk us through a typical day for a wrestler the day of a match?

Let’s proceed by driving, not flight connected. First you want to map out your route, gps may or may not be correct. You can’t risk mistakes. Get your gear, if you are lucky enough to have a travel partner, as I was, drive, drive and drive some more.

Get to the venue as early as possible. Heck I’m with the promoter or booker. Let that person know you are there and healthy. Those are both paramount to the show. Prior to the show, set up a table, sell some photos and do autographs, meet the fans.

Before the show starts, find who you are working with and go over the match. The promoter will have his finish, you work around that. Hang out in the locker room with the boys, then be ready by being in deck. Do your match, get paid and head back home.

What do you personally think of today’s wrestling and is there anything you would different to make for an improved show?

I do not watch today’s wrestling. How can I when I have my own vault of the classics. It’s like going from Opera to rap music. Music it still is, but a vast difference.

I can’t see wrestling, as my book describes “When It Was Real” could ever be viewed in that light anymore. Too many wagging tongues spoil everything, gotta be the first big mouth to tell. So how can you enjoy it other then…. just a performance? In the 70’s and early 80’s it was life and death to us fans. It ran that deep.

You can’t bring that back. Another comparison, like an aging beauty queen. It’s still her, but that which is gone can never be brought back.

How did jobbers approach their roles? Was there any resentment in being asked to lose on a nightly basis? (I always wanted to ask that!!)

As far as anybody not being happy with the promoters outcome of a match, sure you get egos from time to time. But by and large the workers know what the rules are and how things work. If you got enough sense to cross the street by yourself, you won’t cross the promoter. Suggestions can be welcomed, but prima donnas aren’t. You better be one big name to refuse to put somebody over or the angle will be a total “Business Killer”.

You wrote a great book full of fantastic stories called “When It Was Real”? How was the book recieved in the locker room? Were you seen as a pro wrestling version of baseball player Jim Bouton?

No Jim Bouton, my book focuses on what me as a kid, as a fan saw and how those matches effected us. And they did effect us, because, as the title says, “When It Was Real”. Because to us, it was real. I use the term “true fiction”. Some things are…..altered, some are brutally real. But each match on every card and that what we saw on TV was important to us, the fans. It meant something, if you hurt Bruno, Chief etc. you were hurting family Bastard, and you had hell to pay.

My book does not in any way compare, knock or disperse the Hogan era and what came after, but it was the changing of the guard. The old format died. Enjoy it, that’s what it’s all about. I just prefer pre Hogan era wrestling,

The book does not tell all, it tells nothing behind the dressing room doors, not as a revelation. There are some humorous stories, travel stories with Nikolai of course. But NOT anything to disrespect anyone or be controversial. I do go into the explanation of some angles, how they developed. But it’s focus, mission statement if you will, is a look into the squared circle from the eyes of a fan. Then a look through the eyes of someone who got through the door.

What led you into becoming an actor? Was this something you wanted to do or did someone talk you into it?

Wrestling begat acting. I had done a few documentaries. Actually the very first thing that I did in front of a camera was “Wrestling Then and Now”. I was only out of the hospital 10 days from prostate cancer surgery, I am a survivor. when the crew showed up at the door and we shot my and Nikolai’s segment. I still had a colposcopy bag attached to my leg as we shit it. Then a few months later I was shooting another documentary, had some surgery complications, so here I go again, colposcopy bag time again. But… the show must go on. There’s a funny story in there, but that is for another time. Someone told me “those are acting credits”. I didn’t care, I was only concerned with wrestling. Then back in 2005 Nikolai and I were approached to be in a horror movie called “Terror In The Pharaohs Tomb”. My character was Captain Siodmak, based on the man who penned The Wolfman. So bring a Universal Monster fan, I jumped at it. Look it up, it’s unusual and a fun piece. Shot in B&W so as to edit in the acquired footage of Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi and a cast of greats.

Then Evan Ginzburg approached Nikolai and I about meeting with Darren Aronofsky In NY to help him with a project called “The Wrestler”. We met with Evan, Aronofsky and another producer, Scott Franklin. Johnny Valiant joined us and we laid out what this world of wrestling was all about. More below in question 12.

I then started to do some other roles. I moved at that time to the west coast, but was still traveling back east and actually was a co-host for one season for a Baltimore cable show called “Top Of The Morning”. That was directed and produced by a dear friend,Loretto,yes with an O, Gubernatis. She and her husband,God rest his soul, Lou, helped to mold me and showed me so much about what went on behind the camera.

I am a natural, coming from pro wrestling and a good talker, I just needed to be refined, technique, etc.

Then my next quantum leap in acting was meeting Livia Zheng, pronounced (Chung). We became friends after meeting at a directors class at the University of Washington.

From there the movie called “Brush With Danger” came to be. The movie, my greatest role, as Nick Thompson, was a huge success. From there we continue to work together and hopefully will be doing more projects in the future.

What do you enjoy about acting and has anyone recognized you from your days in wrestling?

In acting, you become someone else, the character. You get to put on someone else’s shoes and walk in them. If you do it right, the acting, you absorb the person and portray that in your performance. Yes people do recognize me because it’s my pro wrestling background that gets me into roles. I never, ever did traditional theatre. Not that I was opposed to it, but my background, training ground was pro wrestling.

In my humble opinion, and I had an argument with an LA theatre guru about this, but pro wrestling IS live theatre. It may not involve Shakespeare, but we certainly play out our own version.

What has been your most challenging part so far? Has there been any roles that you struggled with? Which part has been your favorite to play?

My favorite role of course was as detective Nick Thompson, in “Brush With Danger”. I put some of me into it, as learned by studying the Russian great Stanislavsky.

All roles are challenging because of all the reading/memorization that is involved. I not only need to know my lines, but also the person that is in the scene with me. I gotta know not only what to say, but when to say it and make it flow naturally. It’s not hard acting, kids do it, they are the best actors when they are pretending.

It’s the additional technical aspects, the mechanics of it that is the challenge. Like hitting your marks without looking at the actual spot. Having to get from a table and run and be aware of the light or mic just inches from your head.

You appeared in “The Wrestler”,how much did they right about the wrestling world at that stage?

“The Wrestler” was a good portrayal of life after the limelight. I hope that it served as a warning to people in many aspects of sports/entertainment, that the future will be here before you know. One day you turn around and it’s like, shit, that was fast, now what?

There is a favorite line of mine in the movie “Saturday Night Fever”. Travolta’s character wants an advance from his boss who declines for the boys own good. The response was “fuck the future”. The reply: “no the future fucks you if you haven’t prepared for it”. Nuff said.

A lot of wrestlers have met tragic demises after they left the square circle,in your opinion,why does that happen?

I appeared in a documentary called “Legends Never Die”…..seems like a hundred years ago. That movie was showing how many deaths there were in pro wrestling, probably the highest death rate in any other sport. Why? Drugs, abuse, who knows. You gotta walk in those shoes. Pain, and it is prevalent in wrestling, can break you. This is your chosen way of eating, paying the rent, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. So you gotta find a way to get one foot in front of the other and keep it going.

Sometimes we over medicate and the results can be disastrous. It’s not the desired result, but things can go wrong quick. Then it’s too late.

Who is the best performer today in your opinion?

That’s short and easy, The Rock, you can’t get better then the BEST!

The cheetah and I are flying over to watch you film your new film……but we are a day early and now you are playing tour guide,what are we doing?

Well grab that Cheetah and tell him we are going to the beach. It’s bath time. Then we can take a tour of the Boeing plant and the Space Flight Museum. We can view and drive through the breath taking mountains. Then we can grab some fresh crab and eat til we fall asleep to beautiful northwest air.

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I like to thank Nikita for sharing his fantastic stories,as I told him,I could have easily asked him 40 more questions without breaking a sweat. But we will have to save those stories for the next round. And yes,there will be another interview with Nikita coming soon. I like to thank Steve Joiner for setting up this interview as well!!

Nikita has various ways in which you can keep up with him and his career. We recommend following Nikita on his various SM platforms:

Nikita’s IMDb page

For Nikita excellent book on wrestling,please go here.

You can follow Nikita on his Twitter page.

If you wish to surprise a wrestling fan,you can get a personal message sent by Nikita vis his Cameo page.

Thank you all for your continued support and readership. I am very grateful and am really grateful. If you are a wrestling fan…..feel free to drop a comment on who you love to watch,both past and present.

8 Questions with……………….actor/writer/manager Nikita Breznikov Its 2:09 am Welcome to "8 Questions with......." Imagine being a fan of a sport,band,soccer team for years and suddenly and quite unexpectedly you find yourself in the middle of the action,well if you are Nikita Breznikov,that is what happens when you go from a huge fan to becoming the manager of one of the grestest "heel" (bad guys) pro wrestlers in Nikolai Volkoff.

#8 Questions With #acting #Baltimore #cancer survivor #interview #manager #Nikita Breznikov #Nikolai Volkoff #police detective #Pro wrestling #sports #writer #WWE #WWWF

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kylerawcs206-blog · 5 years

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Credit Card Debt Relief Laws - Tips To Take Advantage And Settle Bad Credit Debt

"You're experiencing problems handling your debt load and one or more creditors have offered your debt over to a debt collector.

The term debt collector often strikes worry in the mind of the consumer and we frequently have visions of a thug showing up at our door with a baseball bat to collect the debt or think of somebody calling our company and everyone else we understand, to run us down and exert pressure on us to pay.

What can we do? What are our rights? Or, even better, what can the collector do or not do?

This is such an important problem and if you are among the unlucky ones in this situation, it can toxin your life. When you remain in that kind of a situation, it typically feels as if you're all alone and it just seems that there's nowhere to turn for help. On top of that, some of the financial obligation collectors out there use all sorts of techniques to try and daunt the consumer and, rather frankly, typically do things outside what's allowed by the law, counting on the reality that customers don't understand their rights.

There can be a tendency to just disregard it and hope that it disappears or, to conceal from it completely, but that's definitely the worst thing to do. Take a look at the truths, discover out where you stand, and what are your rights. You just may be amazed.

So, Let's take a glimpse at a few of the main questions individuals ask when they're confronted with this:

1. Are financial obligation collectors subject to any rules? Absolutely! A lot of jurisdictions/countries have laws that define what financial obligation collectors can and can't do. In the US, that law is called the ""Fair Debt Collection Practices Act"" (FDCPA Pinnacle One Funding for short) and it's implemented by the FTC. Some states also have laws, the arrangements of which can vary from those of the FDCPA. What follows are remarks based upon the FDCPA. You ought to check in your area to see if there is a specific law in your jurisdiction.

2. Who's covered? The FCCPA covers anyone that regularly gathers debts owed to others, consisting of collection agencies, attorneys who regularly gather financial obligations and companies that purchase debts and then try to gather them on their own behalf. Among the key phrases here is ""owed to others"". Your bank, for instance, is not covered by this act (they're generally covered by a plethora of other laws, though) but, a debt collector acting on behalf of your bank would be.

3. What Financial obligations are covered by the Law? The FDCPA covers individual debt, good examples being charge card debt, auto loan or home mortgages. The act does not cover the company financial obligation.

4. Can the debt collector call me at any time of the day? Unless you provide the collector a thumbs-up to do so, they can not call you at troublesome times. What's ""troublesome"" undergoes analysis, however it is generally taken to imply before 8:00 am or after 9:00 pm.

5. What about contacting me at work? A collector can not call you at work if you recommend him/her that you're not permitted to receive calls there.

6. Can the collector speak with another person about my debt? A collector can contact your spouse or anybody representing you in this case. A collector might not arbitrarily contact other individuals, except to get your address, telephone number or where you work.

7. What if I don't, or believe that I do not, owe the cash? A debt collector should stop contacting you if you advise the collector that you do not owe any or all of the http://edition.cnn.com/search/?text=https://www.nocomo.org/loans/listing/5b172871df214afe6089a29e6a64d3be/ cash, except, to send you evidence validating the financial obligation. When the collector has actually supplied that show he can then resume contacting you unless you once again dispute that claim.

8. Can a collector take my checking account or salaries? A collector can just do that if it has actually taken court action versus you, has won and, gotten judgment. Whatever you do, don't overlook any notifications of legal action being taken. Act so as to make certain to protect your rights.

9. What are collectors forbidden from doing? In general terms, collectors are restricted from:

- Bugging you

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- Lying when they're attempting to collect a financial obligation

- Providing false information about you

- Utilizing unjust practices

For more information on what is prohibited practices, consult your state's Attorney General's office or the FTC.

What can I do to get more details on debt collection or other credit-related topics or, if you desire to submit a claim? Go to. There you'll discover links to the National Association of Lawyer Generals and a variety of others dealing with debt collection and credit, including some for different sections within the FTC, such as the ""grievance assistant""."

#debt consolodation #debt loan #loan

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doodlewash · 6 years

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Cheers to those who show up to try what’s new to them, even when fear is presenting itself!

On a beautiful sunny August afternoon in Tucson, Arizona, I facilitated an art journaling watercolor workshop and I saw this “trying what’s new” in so many ways. The lovely shop where the workshop was hosted– The Ninth House, was newly opened this year by an inspired first-time business owner. The women who attended the workshop were new to watercolor. It was my first time teaching about anything. A heartfelt thank you to all the friendly faces that showed up!

This article will share a little bit about my experience and observations, go over the supplies, swatches and such, and share a few of the participants’ inspiring work.

What made this workshop special, was that Doodlewash and a couple of companies helped me out by generously sponsoring products. This enabled everyone to take home a fully stocked quality watercolor sketching kit, everything needed to keep keepin’ on with the watercolor adventure.

Rule of Thumb

When considering and buying art supplies, use what you have and buy the best you can afford. If art journaling, sketching, painting and creating is something you want to stick with, purchasing higher quality supplies up front will save you money in the long run. Often, when people buy cheaper and lesser quality, they eventually want to upgrade. Buy the better artist quality from the beginning, and you are all set. Watercolor lasts a long time, a little goes a long way. It’s worth the investment, and so are you. Another point to consider, sometimes people have cheap quality supplies and get frustrated that their watercolor isn’t looking as luminous as they see in other people’s paintings. Some of it has to do with supplies, not just technique or skill. With all this said, always use what calls to you and what feels best!

I believe that you and your creativity are worth investing in.

A Few Things I Learned + Observations

I get so excited sharing about watercolor and supplies! I let that excitement carry me through the nerves of this first-time workshop, because doing this was a big stretch for me. I didn’t really know what to expect, and it ended up not being like any ideal I may have had anyhow. I’m aware of some changes that need to be made that will help me if I move forward with other workshops. Like keep things basic, be super clear about what is being offered, and have people exploring the paint while you are talking. I talked first, then got into the paints, this wasn’t the best way to go. Ten people in a workshop means ten different experiences. People surprised me in a number of ways, filled me with awe with their open-hearted enthusiasm, diversity of vision, how they approach things, and what they find inspiring.

One thing I learned about myself, was how much information I’ve picked up and learned over the past few years by being diligent with this watercolor hobby, and by blogging about it. A huge thing that came out of this experience, is how to take criticism. Respecting other people’s experiences by listening openly. Then taking a step back to consider what was offered and what felt true to better myself and improve what I offer, and throw the rest out. Especially the I’m not good enough to be doing this story in my own head.

It’s good to ask yourself why you want to teach/facilitate anything and be honest about the answers that come up from that inquiry. I checked in with myself about this workshop, and my heart is in the right place. It felt like the right direction to go in for personal growth. You know, giving of oneself, sharing what you know, facing fears, vulnerability and such.

Much like in dreams, I feel that our emotions, intuition, subconscious, larger aspects of ourselves, will speak to us through imagery and artistic expression, and that it is important to allow ourselves to explore creativity. Because we get skilled at stuffing those important aspects of ourselves down, ignoring them, or distracting ourselves. There are many things that will be revealed to us if we allow for creative exploration and pay attention– look deeper. Only the individual can interpret these things for themselves, the answers are within. Creating anything– painting, sketching, music, dancing, writing, sculpture, cooking, knitting, whatever inspires– gets us out of our mundane, everyday thoughts (programs we run) and places our attention into the realm of possibility, in the now— this is where the magic happens. We are naturally creators, every single one of us. I feel a pull to encourage others in their creative explorations. This is part of my why.

Some Other in a Nutshell Thoughts

Fear + heightened interest/passion= DO IT. Overthinking = inertia. Inertia is the killer of dreams. Somebody wants and values what you have to share. Imperfections are gifts in ways we don’t realise. Start where you are, and go from there, one step, one movement, one inspiration at a time. Everything is a process, and it unfolds as we go. These are things we all know, but forget in moments of contraction and doubt. Have faith in yourself and your process. Open your heart.

Bring some candy, or something sweet for people.

In general. Have some fun! Laugh when you miss the mark, or other such things. Like this swatch below that I was using for demo purposes. In my enthusiasm, I kept on stampin’. Give the left brain a rest sometimes, it works so hard. I try my best to rejoice in this kind of thing, because like many of us, I’m prone to too much left brain function, overthinking and things needing to be logical. Thinking things to death does not feel good and sucks the life out of our creativity. Being in enthusiasm and flow feels optimistic, it feels good! Splash some paint around!

Swatching on the first page in a journal is a great way to break it in.

You know it’s a labor of love when you are willing to label, attach magnets (that had to be cut to size), and hand fill this many watercolor pans—and you liked it. Ha! 66 pans. My thumbs were a little sore the next day 🙂

Sponsors + Supplies

Hahnemühle Fine Art provided A6 watercolor books. These are great to sketch in. If they look familiar, Charlie uses Hahnemühle for his daily Doodlewashes, and other Doodlewashers use them too. Here’s a review on their sketchbook, watercolor books, and papers.

Doodlewash provided the waterproof Pigma Micron Pens. And everyone got a Doodlewash button. Love the button.

Da Vinci Paint Co. provided the artist quality watercolors. After a bit of consideration, I chose six colors from a limited palette that guest Doodlewash artist Jane Blundell shares on her blog. There is generous information on her blog about watercolor, swatches and mixing.

The Da Vinci colors used:

Arylide Yellow

Quinacridone Gold

Alizarin Crimson Quinacridone

Ultramarine

Phthalo Green

Burnt Sienna

I loved all the range of greens, turquoise and sky color that this palette mixes.

On a side note, Da Vinci Paint Co. has a 12 full pan watercolor travel tin for $56. I have one of these and love it, here’s a review. The price is great. They also have artist inspired tube sets starting as low as $19.95, you might see some names you recognize!

A big thank you to all of these sponsors for making this workshop possible.

I added in a few other essentials– a natural/synthetic mix round paintbrush, a multi-purpose clip, mixing palette, along with hand poured magnetized full pans in an Altoids type tin and included a swatch card on 90 lb. Arches watercolor paper. All zipped up in a waterproof travel bag. Nice sweet little set up. Plus an in depth reference handout, and some watercolor paper samples for people to explore at home, because paper makes a big difference. I enjoy and find benefit in working with flower essences, so also included a flower essence that helps facilitate the process of creativity. It’s called Creativity Formula and is made by Desert Alchemy flower essences here in Tucson.

A few pictures shared from workshop attendees.

So much diversity of expression! I love these!

A bit more on sharing, inspiration from others and paying it forward.

Part of what makes Doodlewash.com special, is the community of artists and sharing. Seeing Charlie post his Doodlewash everyday, has kept me going. I’ve learned immensely from other people. This has saved me from figuring some things out by trial and error. For some reason, I’ve always found grid type watercolor mixing charts intimidating. Maybe because it seems the ones that I have seen online look huge, with lots of squares. This overwhelms me.

Then I found the perfect mixing chart for this palette. Tonya of Scratchmade Journal shares about a few different sized charts on her blog with instruction on creating a watercolor mixing chart. She offers a free blank printable version of this chart, so that you can print your own on watercolor paper. Super helpful! So, I made my first ever mixing chart to have it for sharing in the workshop. Thank you Tonya! You can find her Doodlewash guest artist feature here.

Chart printed on 90 lb./185 gsm Arches cold press watercolor paper.

If you too are embracing your fears when it comes to expressing your creativity, a great reminder is the Doodlewash Manifesto!

Happy painting and sketching.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Embracing Your Fears Cheers to those who show up to try what’s new to them, even when fear is presenting itself!

#Da Vinci Paint #Da Vinci Paint Co #featured #Hahnemühle #inspiration #watercolor workshop

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buckinheadshots-blog · 7 years

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If Done Righ, web marketing Is Lucrativet

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Chuck E. Cheese’s: Where a Kid Can Learn Price Theory

Chuck E. Cheese’s logo. (Photo Credit: rg-fotos/flickr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Chuck E. Cheese’s: Where a Kid Can Learn Price Theory.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

The pizza-and-gaming emporium prides itself on affordability, which means its arcade games are really cheap to play. Does that lead to kids hogging the best games — and parents starting those infamous YouTube brawls?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted at the end of the transcript.

* * *

[MUSIC: Eric Bolvin, “Nostalgic Love”]

Stephen DUBNER: Hey Levitt, you ever go to Chuck E. Cheese with your kids or maybe on your own?

Steve LEVITT: Well, you can’t go on your own. They won’t let you in if you don’t have kids.

DUBNER: Is that true?

LEVITT: It is true. I’m happy to say I didn’t find that out the hard way. I didn’t actually show up at a Chuck E. Cheese without my kids, but I have heard that they will not let you in without children.

DUBNER: So you’ve been with children?

LEVITT: I haven’t been in a long time, but in the day I used to take my kids there. And you know me, I like the simple things in life, and that means I love places like Chuck E. Cheese. I just love arcade games. They’re fun. They’re a great mix of manual dexterity and little bit thinking.

DUBNER: And have you ever become violent at a Chuck E. Cheese because someone else’s kid wouldn’t, you know, get off the Skee-Ball?

LEVITT: I can proudly say I have never become violent at Chuck E. Cheese; never been tempted towards violence at Chuck E. Cheese.

That’s Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He’s an economist at the University of Chicago. Chuck E. Cheese, if you’re not familiar with it, is a popular family-entertainment spot with pizza and arcade games …

Chuck E. Cheese Commercial: Chuck E. Cheese’s. Where a kid can be a kid.

I was asking Levitt about the potential for violence at Chuck E. Cheese – which officially is Chuck E. Cheese’s, possessive, but most people shorten it to Chuck E. Cheese or Chuckee-Cheese – because that’s what a Freakonomics listener had asked us about.

Nathan CORROY: Well, I’m not the type of guy to hit somebody and certainly not a child. But it led me to think it did seem plausible.

[MUSIC: Binary, “Cheeky Motives”]

Today on Freakonomics Radio, we ask a simple question. How does the price of a good or a service effect consumer behavior? Our cast of characters include: our economist…

LEVITT: OK, so the one thing I want to get across is the idea about rivalry.

Our listener …

CORROY: Do I personally feel OK with that? No.

We hear from the founder of Chuck E. Cheese …

Nolan BUSHNELL: It’s an interesting theory.

The current administration of Chuck E. Cheese …

Michael HARTMAN: The first thing I’ll say is incidents at Chuck E. Cheese’s are very rare.

We hear what happens when things go wrong at Chuck E. Cheese:

Larry DEETJEN: What happened is they began pushing and shoving the police officer.

We ask: what’s price got to do with it?

CORROY: I mean, I think it certainly could be.

And we hear Steve Levitt’s brilliant idea for testing this theory:

LEVITT: Maybe I could dress up as a child, you could be the adult. And then we can see how many other parents, if I monopolize a game, end up attempting to beat you into a pulp.

* * *

DUBNER: Levitt, I’ve often heard you say that the one thing that economists are reliably good at doing is setting the appropriate price of a good or service. Can you explain briefly in your economist-speak how you do that?

LEVITT: So essentially the art of setting prices is simply figuring out what price to set so that you have the marginal cost of providing that good equal to the marginal revenue generated by the sale of that good.

DUBNER: So the danger of setting a price too high if you’re selling would seem to be obvious, right? People don’t buy what you’re selling. But what’s the danger of setting a price too low?

LEVITT: The danger of setting a price too low of course is that too many people want to consume the good. If it’s a kind of good where someone takes it and walks out of the store, then you’ll find that the shelves are empty. In the case where it’s not something we actually take out of the store but instead something you experience then what you end up having are long lines of people, all of whom want access to that same good but only a few of whom can actually consume the good.

We’ve talked a lot on this program about how price affects behavior. For instance, one of the most effective tools to cut smoking? Price and tax hikes:

Kenneth WARNER: What we know is that if you increase the price by 10% you will decrease total cigarette consumption by 3 to 4%.

But what about when prices fall? The price of food has generally fallen over the past few decades – which makes it easier for people to eat too much. When the price of gasoline drops, people tend to drive more, which leads to more congestion, pollution, and crashes. If you own a bar and you suddenly drop the price of all beverages from five dollars to five cents – how do you think that’s going to work out? So the relationship between price and behavior, especially bad behavior, can be pretty strong. And that’s what led one Freakonomics Radio listener to put two and two together and come up with a theory.

CORROY: My name is Nathan Corroy and I’m a financial adviser in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Corroy used to go to Chuck E. Cheese when he was a kid. His experiences were always very positive.

CORROY: Oh yeah, very positive, yeah. Absolutely.

Now he’s got kids of his own …

CORROY: I’ve got two sons. One is about three-and-a-half and the other’s four months.

So he thought about taking his older son to Chuck E. Cheese. But he was also a little wary. Because of something he’d seen on the news.

CORROY: Certainly in the Milwaukee area for the past few years there’s been reports of violence always coming up in the news at Chuck E. Cheese locations.

Violence at a restaurant chain that caters to little kids and their families? Yes indeed. If you just Google “Chuck E. Cheese” and “fight,” you’ll find plenty of videos like this one …

youtube

And like this one …

youtube

Now, we should point out: it’s the adults fighting, not the kids. We should also point out that the adults may have been drinking. Because most Chuck E. Cheese’s serve wine and beer.

CORROY: Yeah, it strikes me as pretty odd. Now granted, we’re in Wisconsin, where we would drink beer at church if we could.

Anyway, when Nathan Corroy decided to bring his young son to Chuck E. Cheese for the first time, he wanted to minimize the chance that he would encounter any violence.

CORROY: We went right when it opened in the morning. So we were literally the only people in the whole place.

They had a good time playing the arcade games.

CORROY: And what I noticed after playing a couple of games with my son was that every machine in Chuck E. Cheese costs just one token.

Chuck E Cheese token from 2011. (Photo credit: outletpro/flickr)

Even the games that lasted the longest, that seemed like they should have been more expensive.

CORROY: And that really struck me as being kind of odd that there was no price variance between the games.

Nolan BUSHNELL: You know, this was a subject to debate.

That’s Nolan Bushnell, who founded Chuck E. Cheese 40 years ago in San Diego. The debate was whether to make some games more expensive than others.

BUSHNELL: We felt that since most of most of our revenue really came from kids under eight, I felt that it would be confusing. And we tested a few things and we found that it really didn’t change the revenue that much. What you’re assuming is that we’d make more money if we charge more. It turns out that that isn’t the factor.

Before Chuck E. Cheese, Bushnell co-founded the video-game company Atari. Chuck E. Cheese was a way to maximize his profits from popular games like Pong.

BUSHNELL: In the case of Pong, it was such a hit that you’d sell it for a $1,000. And in its lifetime, it’d make $30,000. It didn’t take rocket science to say, “Hey, I’m on the wrong side of this equation. I shouldn’t just be selling the machines. I should be operating the machines.”

Michael HARTMAN: So we were basically a Silicon Valley startup and we’re going to be celebrating our 40th anniversary in May of 2017.

That’s Michael Hartman.

HARTMAN: And I’m the chief marketing officer at CEC Entertainment.

CEC Entertainment being the parent company of Chuck E. Cheese; today CEC is owned by a private-equity firm called Apollo Global Management. It’s planning an IPO for Chuck E. Cheese later this year.

DUBNER: And was Chuck E. Cheese one of the first what are now known as family-entertainment concept companies, where kids and parents come together to do stuff, have fun, play games and eat?

HARTMAN: Absolutely, we were definitely one of the first family-entertainment concepts. If you look back in terms of what the competition and the landscape was in 1977, it was bowling alleys, dingy arcades, and movie theaters. And what Nolan wanted to do was to make video games more accessible to families and to younger children.

Part of that accessibility is affordability.

HARTMAN: Our guest is very price-conscious. We want to make sure that they can have an excellent experience for a family of four starting at about $30.

Which means keeping the price of games low. The price varies a bit depending on what kind of package you buy but, rule of thumb: each token costs only about 20 cents. Which, believe it or not, is what it cost to buy one Chuck E. Cheese token 30 or 40 years ago! So if you’re ever looking for a part of the modern world that’s somehow untouched by inflation – there you go, Chuck E. Cheese game tokens! And, as Nathan Corroy saw when he took his young son there …

CORROY: Every machine in Chuck E. Cheese costs just one token.

Now that’s not quite accurate – and, as we’ll hear later, change is afoot. But here’s what happened the next time Corroy took his son to Chuck E. Cheese:

CORROY: It was a Saturday. So as we were there it started to get more and more crowded and we didn’t have that free rein of being able to go and play any game we wanted to without waiting. And I was in line with my son, we were going to play one of the smaller basketball hoop shooting games. And there were two kids in front of us that were playing that game. And they were just feeding tokens and not giving up their turn. As I’m seeing them then feed tokens in the machine, I’m thinking, “Wow, it’s costing nothing to do that.” And that was kind of the a-ha moment of “this is the problem with the pricing model and this could be one of the unintended consequences.

The “unintended consequences” Corroy was thinking about were the fights he’d heard about on the news …

youtube

Nathan Corroy wondered if the fights he’d heard about were perhaps the unintended consequence of Chuck E. Cheese’s pricing structure: the games were so cheap to play that you could just camp out for hours at your favorite game and choke off access to everybody else. Which could lead to trouble.

CORROY: Well, I’m not the type of guy to hit somebody and certainly not a child. But it did seem plausible that somebody might start talking to the kids and the kids maybe go get their parents and an altercation would start that way. Or certainly if it was among just adults, if you were there later on a Saturday and everybody’s drinking beer and you’re trying to play the basketball game and there’s a line of adults waiting.

I asked Steve Levitt if he could imagine that the Chuck E. Cheese pricing scenario encouraged violence.

LEVITT: Well, I absolutely could imagine it because when it comes to Chuck E. Cheese, and the product they deliver, they suffer from a very intense form of what economists call rivalry, meaning that exactly one person can play a particular game at a time. And when people all want the same thing there are lots of different dimensions on which they can compete for that thing. And certainly physical violence is one we see. I mean, I’ve studied drug dealing a lot, and indeed, when it comes to the pursuit of property rights in drug markets, violence is the strategy of choice. Now, I have to say I’m a little bit skeptical in thinking that when it comes to queues at the Chuck E. Cheese that violence is usually the likely weapon to which rival parents might turn.

DUBNER: So you’re saying that Chuck E. Cheese customers are probably not as prone to resort to violence as crack dealers?

LEVITT: Well, I think if the stakes were as high, they probably would resort to violence in the same way that crack dealers do. But when you have something inherently low-stakes like whether your kid can play game A or game B at Chuck E. Cheese, I would think that most parents, even most inebriated parents, wouldn’t come to blows.

[MUSIC: Johnny Fiasco, “I’ve Lost My Floppy”]

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: who’s right: our economist Steve Levitt, or our listener, Nathan Corroy? And how are we going to figure it out? But first, a few fun facts about Chuck E. Cheese, courtesy of chief marketing officer Michael Hartman:

KID VOICE: One!

MICHAEL HARTMAN: Ninety percent of families with a kid 3 to 8 within 15 miles of a Chuck E. Cheese has come, and approximately half of those have come in the last year.

KID VOICE: Two!

HARTMAN: On average, a kid requests to come to Chuck E. Cheese’s 11 times a year, and the parents let them come about three times a year.

KID VOICE: Three!

HARTMAN: When you look at a Chuck E. Cheese consumer, we are definitely middle America. We are a $50,000 to $75,000 income, but we have more people below $50,000 into our stores than above $75,000.

One more thing before the break: I’d like to give a quick shout-out to all the public-radio stations around the country who now play Freakonomics Radio . We realize your airtime is incredibly valuable, and we’re delighted you share it with us. So … thanks!

* * *

It’s an interesting theory, is it not? That Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza-and-gaming emporium, prices its games so affordably that it’s easy to hog any one game for hours, potentially leading to arguments that could potentially lead to violence. That, at least, is what Nathan Corroy, a financial adviser in Milwaukee, was thinking.

CORROY: There certainly is evidence of violence at Chuck E. Cheese and I was actually aware of that before we ever went with my son.

Now, given what we know about priming, and how the human mind works, you might suspect that if a guy like Nathan Corroy took his son to a Chuck E. Cheese thinking about the potential for violence, he might have been more inclined to look for a causal explanation for the violence he’d heard about – as he told us earlier:

CORROY: Certainly in the Milwaukee area there’s been reports of violence always coming up at Chuck E. Cheese locations.

There are three Chuck E. Cheeses in the Milwaukee area. About a decade ago, after pressure from city officials, they all stopped serving alcohol to cut down on violence. Even so, the disturbances continued. Which led Corroy to think that maybe the pricing strategy, even more than the alcohol, was the culprit. Sometimes, the violence can really get out of hand. Consider the Chuck E. Cheese in Oak Lawn, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.

Larry DEETJEN: I personally with my children and family have never experienced what I’ve seen has occurred here in Oak Lawn.

That’s Larry Deetjen, the village manager of Oak Lawn. Over the past five years, the police responded to more than 300 calls at the local Chuck E. Cheese, and made dozens of arrests. In one case, there was a shooting in the parking lot. In another, an Oak Lawn cop got dragged into a fight.

DEETJEN: Our officer observed a fight in progress, identified himself as a police officer and gave them the command to stop the fight. Instead, what happened is they began pushing and shoving the police officer, resulting in a call for an officer in trouble.

Deetjen says he spoke with Chuck E. Cheese executives and that the president of its parent company, CEC Entertainment, even flew out to attend an Oak Lawn village board meeting to come up with solutions.

DEETJEN: There was a series of progressive, proactive steps taken.

The company paid to have two off-duty police officers at the Oak Lawn Chuck E. Cheese on weekends. And they tried some other things.

DEETJEN: They re-positioned the games, actually removed some of the games to provide less crowding conditions. We were going to revoke their liquor license, and they voluntarily decided to forego their liquor license.

So was that the end of the trouble?

DEETJEN: Well unfortunately, the disturbances did not end.

After another shooting late last year – this one involved a family that had just driven away from the Oak Lawn Chuck E. Cheese – CEC Entertainment announced that it would close that location. So if you pay attention to these reports of violence at Chuck E. Cheese – as Nathan Corroy did – you might get the impression that violence at Chuck E. Cheese is a common thing. But is it really?

HARTMAN: The first thing I’ll say is incidents at Chuck E. Cheese’s are very rare.

Michael Hartman again, the chief marketing officer for CEC Entertainment.

HARTMAN: We believe that it makes for a greater sound bite to talk about an incident at Chuck E. Cheese’s versus anywhere else just because of what our name connotes to folks. But if you think about ball fields and anywhere else where parents and kids are, you’ll hear a lot of talk about those kinds of things as opposed to anywhere else.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? A fight at a family-entertainment place is just incongruous enough that when it does happen, it’s more likely to show up on the news or in your Facebook feed than a fight in a ballpark, or in a bar. On the other hand, Nathan Corroy’s theory – that Chuck E. Cheese’s pricing strategy could be a contributing factor to the fights that do happen – well, even Chuck E. Cheese founder Nolan Bushnell wouldn’t rule it out.

BUSHNELL: It’s an interesting theory. I think it’s something that should be tested because – is in fact the hogging of a game causal? Many of the games are two minutes and so if somebody has got 10 tokens, it’s 25 minutes. That’s probably too long and that could be a problem. But I didn’t necessarily get that as the causal nature of fights.

Okay, so how should the theory be tested?

LEVITT: You could try to run some experiments.

Steve Levitt again.

LEVITT: You know, you and I, Dubner, could go down and figure out what the most popular games are. And maybe I could dress up as a child, you could be the adult, and then we can see how many other parents, if I monopolize a game, end up attempting to beat you into a pulp.

DUBNER: I appreciate your making me the one that gets beaten. But on the other hand I think the likelihood of me being beaten is low enough to enjoy the novelty of seeing you dressed up as a child, whatever that means. So I’m okay with that experiment.

[MUSIC: Steve Rice, “Broad Street Bebop”]

In the end, we opted for something a little less dramatic. Here’s our senior producer, Christopher Werth:

Christopher WERTH: If Nathan Corroy’s theory is true — that prices may contribute to some of the violence at Chuck E. Cheese — then theoretically we should see less violence at similar entertainment chains that do charge more for more advanced games. For example, Corroy suggested Dave & Buster’s, a chain that is more oriented for adults than kids, but does serve food and beer and wine. And it has a big arcade area, where the games do not all cost the same.

CORROY: Each of the games has a different price that it costs to play. So from what I could tell anyways, seems to control the demand for the games because you’re not going to just keep playing the best games over and over again because you’d go broke.

WERTH: I went to Dave & Buster’s just to check it out.

WERTH: They’ve got Jurassic Park. They’ve got Kung Fu Panda. They’ve got Ghostbusters.

WERTH: Instead of tokens, customers purchase electronic payment cards. Those are then loaded up with “chips” that are used to play games. Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Chuck E. Cheese, has paid close attention to this industry. He advised Apollo on its purchase of Chuck E. Cheese. And he says Dave & Buster’s payment cards allow the company to observe player behavior and make small, incremental changes to game prices. Some games cost 2.6 chips, for example, or about 50 cents. Some games cost 13.6 chips, close to $3.

BUSHNELL: Dave and Buster’s. They implement variable pricing extremely scientifically. I have a lot of respect for their analytical ability.

WERTH: What we decided to do is collect police data on the number of violent incidents at Chuck E. Cheeses, and then compare them with Dave & Buster’s. And we should say from the start, the method we’re using here is highly imperfect. For one, we’re not controlling for neighborhood characteristics or anything else. This is just raw data – and spotty data, at that. We focused on three large metropolitan areas: Chicago, Phoenix and Dallas/Fort Worth.

WERTH: Oh hi, I’m trying to reach a media relations person for the police department in Grapevine, Texas… with you regarding a records request for the Phoenix Police Department… we’d like to obtain a list of calls for service to a specific business address, the Chuck E. Cheese in Chandler, Arizona…

[MUSIC: Tango Alpha Tango, “All Mine Blues” (from Black Cloud)]

WERTH: Let’s start with the Chicago area. There we looked at the 13 Chuck E. Cheeses and 4 Dave & Buster’s located within the broad boundary that we drew around the city. We asked for five years’ worth of data on what are known as “calls for service.” Which are these long lists that catalogue each time a call came in, whether it’s a fight or a false burglar alarm. We tallied up all the assaults, disturbances, battery charges etc. And what we found is — as a monthly average — there are slightly more violent incidents at Dave & Buster’s than at Chuck E. Cheese. The data showed one incident occurred at a Dave & Buster’s roughly every two months versus one incident every three months at a Chuck E. Cheese. And we found similar results in Dallas/Fort Worth. On average, the rate of violent altercations and similar types of incidents was higher at Dave & Buster’s. In Phoenix, they were roughly the same. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Nathan Corroy’s theory is wrong. As Nolan Bushnell points out — and as we freely admit — this evidence is far from definitive.

BUSHNELL: I think that you’re almost comparing cheese and chalk.

WERTH: Not only does Dave & Buster’s clientele tend to be older. It stays open later. And while some Chuck E. Cheeses serve beer and wine, Dave & Buster’s has a full bar.

BUSHNELL: The amount of alcohol all by itself changes things tremendously.

WERTH: We wanted to find a company that’s a closer match to Chuck E. Cheese. And that’s when we discovered another pizza chain for kids called Peter Piper Pizza.

Anthony CAVOLO (Clip from 1980s Peter Piper Pizza commercial): At Peter Piper Pizza, you don’t need a lot of dough to afford a pizza. A large cheese pizza is only $3.50…

WERTH: Peter Piper Pizza was founded in Phoenix. And like Chuck E. Cheese, tokens there cost just 20 cents each if you have a coupon. But unlike Chuck E. Cheese, it prices its games from one to four tokens according to how advanced the games are. Plus, Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company, CEC Entertainment, acquired the chain in 2014.

BUSHNELL: The demographic is almost identical with the exception that Peter Piper Pizza tends to skew a little bit lower demographically in terms of income.

WERTH: We collected ten years’ worth of police data. In the Phoenix area, we looked at 11 Peter Piper Pizzas and 5 Chuck E. Cheeses. But again, the numbers just did not support Nathan Corroy’s theory. The rate of violent incidents at Peter Piper Pizza was about 64 percent higher than it was at Chuck E. Cheese. But then, compare that with Dallas/Fort Worth, where we pretty much found the opposite. There we looked at 16 Chuck E. Cheeses, four Peter Piper Pizzas. And as a monthly average, the rate of disturbances and violent incidents was 70 percent higher at Chuck E. Cheese than at Peter Piper Pizza. Although, we should say, we’re talking about fairly low rates of violence overall. In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Chuck E. Cheese averages a little more than one incident every four months. And 22 percent of those were cataloged in the police data as domestic disputes, which is something we heard from a number of the police departments we contacted.

ROBERT MARTIN: A lot of times, when there’s a large family gatherings at a Chuck E. Cheese, it’s for a birthday or a celebration or something.

WERTH: That is Chief Robert Martin of the Susquehanna Township Police Department in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Chuck E. Cheese there had its share of fights, although he says things have quieted down as of late. But what you had are situations where the parents might be divorced. Maybe a new boyfriend or girlfriend shows up.

MARTIN: And all of a sudden, some tensions arise that are already present before the celebration within the family dynamic, and it escalates to the point where we were called.

WERTH: So after filing all those records requests, the data that we have just don’t suggest that prices have anything to do with the violence at Chuck E. Cheese. In fact, what they show is that, even though the fight videos are shocking and dramatic, the rates of violence at most Chuck E. Cheese is actually fairly low.

[MUSIC: Paul Avgerinos, “One Fat Hour”]

That was Christopher Werth. Admittedly, the data were spotty; the analysis more impressionistic than empirical. That said, there was no compelling evidence for the Chuck E. Cheese Theory of Customer Violence Caused by Low Game Prices. A more rigorous way to address the question would be simply to ask Chuck E. Cheese to help us with a big randomized controlled trial. For instance: what if they randomly divided their 500-plus locations, varied the prices in some and left the others low, and then measured how that affects customers’ behavior, including fights? That’s not going to happen – but, as it turns out, there are some related changes already underway at Chuck E. Cheese.

Mahesh SADARANGANI: In late 2014 we started testing an RFID card program to see how our guests and our consumers would like moving over to the card system.

That’s Mahesh Sadarangani.

SADARANGANI: I’m the senior vice president of strategic initiatives at CEC Entertainment.

Since it began, Chuck E. Cheese has used tokens for game-play. But, Sadarangani says, they’ve started the conversion to plastic cards:

SADARANGANI: And the switch over to cards was much smoother than we anticipated. And we’re happy to say that as of the end of 2016 we’ve completed roughly 268 of our stores on the play pass card reader system and we look forward to completing the entire network of our 512 U.S. stores by the end of 2017.

An RFID card allows for a lot of options that old-fashioned metal tokens don’t. Chuck E. Cheese will have better data on what its customers like and don’t like. And it gives pricing flexibility too. While most games and activities at Chuck E. Cheese have historically cost just one token, some longer or more involved games cost two tokens.

SADARANGANI: When you take a game from one token to two tokens that’s a pretty large price increase, 100 percent. And if you if you take it to three points it’s a 200 percent price increase, right?

The new card system allows for more incremental increases.

SADARANGANI: We’ll actually start to test these where we can move to a multi-point strategy and instead of a game being one point or a game being two points or three points, a game can be 1.2 points.

A card system also allows for dynamic pricing, like airlines and hotels do: raising the price during peak demand, or offering discounts at other times. All of which could help alleviate the potential for disagreements among Chuck E. Cheese customers – if, indeed, there are many disagreements among Chuck E. Cheese customers. Which, as we heard earlier from Christopher Werth, it doesn’t seem as if there are that many. We shared the police data with Steve Levitt, asked him what he made of it, especially the data from Chicago, where he lives.

DUBNER: Now, Levitt, you’ve looked at the data. Does roughly one police call every three months to the Chuck E. Cheese universe of Chicago strike you as noteworthy?

LEVITT: No, not really. I think if the police get called to a Chuck E. Cheese once every few months, not that much. And many of the calls are for things like domestic-custody disputes and things, which I don’t think the parents are…

DUBNER: Hard to blame Chuck E. Cheese for that?

LEVITT: Yeah, the parents aren’t fighting over the over the games. They’re fighting over the kids. So I don’t know, it doesn’t seem that bad to me.

One thing did stand out in the data we sent over to Levitt. It wasn’t a Chuck E. Cheese location. It was one Dave & Buster’s location that got way more police calls than any other place in the Chicago data.

DUBNER: Is that really the one where you go?

LEVITT: Yeah, that’s the one I go to all the time.

DUBNER: You go there for the violence, or it’s just coincidence?

LEVITT: Maybe I’m part of the violence. So far I have escaped official statistics, but the Dave & Buster’s to which I go with my kids now turns out to be roughly about four to five times as likely to elicit a police call as a Chuck E. Cheese. And I think that makes sense because it’s not inhabited by five-to-nine-year-olds. It’s inhabited by a bunch of 15-to-24-year-olds. And as we all know if you want to get the police involved, 15-to-24-year-olds are that age group you want to interact with.

(Photo Credit: PRNewsFoto/CEC Entertainment Inc.)

[MUSIC: Christopher Norman, “Can’t Let Go” (from Ep 1)]

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio : research shows that being grateful is really good for you:

DAVIDAI: It’s just amazing how many positive correlates there are to gratitude .

Research also shows that most of us aren’t very grateful:

Tom GILOVICH: It’s so easy for people to feel resentful, to feel that life has made things harder for them than it has for other people.

Why the headwinds of life feel so much stronger than the tailwinds — and what to do about it. That’s next time on Freakonomics Radio .

* * *

FREAKONOMICS RADIO is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Christopher Werth. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Merritt Jacob , Eliza Lambert, Alison Hockenberry , Emma Morgenstern , Harry Huggins , and Brian Gutierrez . This week we had help from Matt Fidler. Thanks to Captain Scott Haynes of the Lewisville Police Department in Lewisville, Texas, for providing insights that helped advance our reporting. Thanks also to all the police departments that responded to our records requests. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on iTunes , Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Chuck E. Cheese and Atari.

Larry Deetjen, village manager in Oak Lawn, Illinois

Michael Hartman, chief marketing officer at CEC Entertainment

Steve Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory

Robert Martin, chief of the Susquehanna Township police department in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Mahesh Sadarangani, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at CEC Entertainment

RESOURCES

News report on Chuck E. Cheese’s decision to close its location in Oak Lawn, Illinois after a number of violent altercations

News report on violence at Milwaukee, Wisconsin-area Chuck E. Cheeses

Another recent news report about two brawls that broke out in one week at a Chuck E. Cheese in Victorville, California

EXTRA

CBS’s Inside Edition news report on Chuck E. Cheese violence

Video of a fight at a Chuck E. Cheese in Bossier City, Louisiana

Video of another fight at a Chuck E. Cheese in Commack, New York

Another fight video from a Chuck E. Cheese in California

Video of a fight at Chuck E. Cheese in Beaumont, Texas

And a fight video from a Chuck E. Cheese in Long Beach, Florida

The post Chuck E. Cheese’s: Where a Kid Can Learn Price Theory appeared first on Freakonomics.

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