#hes so gossipy when it comes to tim

[superoscars]

the open hostility during the decker unclassified/mindwipe and the trial era is unmatched gregg really thought they were sending tims ass to jail

[lazlolullaby]

late hatching, a Batman Beyond and Batfam concept

I think i made myself clear as mud in my last post that the Batfam as it stands now in the comics does not mesh with the DCAU timeline.

but that doesn't mean the batfam can't come to Terry.

Special thanks to this fic (slice of life where Bruce is younger, has the fam but can't go vigilante anymore so they hire Terry to babysit) https://archiveofourown.org/works/44548396/chapters/112054687

and this series. (Balances dark and light very well, even if the Batfam grow and protect Gotham, Terry still gets the cowl) https://archiveofourown.org/series/1710604

So. Here's Cake #3!!! Ya'll enjoy and if you make something i'd be happy to see it!

TL;DR: Cassandra steals a delayed Damian from the League of Assassins, reunites him with his elderly genetic donor, and decides to stick around. Dick decides that he should probably keep a closer eye on the manor. More people come out if the dark streets of Gotham, ready to fight to keep it safe.

Batman II gains Pranking Auntie Black Bat, Worried Uncles Grayson and Drake, Mob Parents Jason and Roy, the gossipy PIs Signal and Spoiler, and Murder Child Robin. Terry gets an existential crisis, Matt gets a some emotional and physical wounds, and Mary gets some inheritance money.

AKA: Beyond limited capes AU.

From the top, chronologically:

Cassandra lost her chance to train with Batman. He refused, after the Incident with Tim Drake and the Joker. Even though she was a trained fighter, he can't risk it. He can't risk anyone. He points her in the right direction for help and keeps tabs like he does.

Cassandra is adopted by Nightwing and becomes the Batgirl of Bludhaven, eventually Black Bat on her own, focusing on saving other children forced into a life of cloak and dagger.

(Jason Todd was never written into the DCAU shows. He and Tim Drake were condensed for reasons. But let's presume he was there the whole time. They were friends on the streets. He was late trying to help Tim find out what was in the locker. He remembers Robin later trying to help him before suddenly leaving. Overlooked by Batman, thus overlooked by the Joker, the League of Assassins, and heroics in general. But he survived. Saw all of the pain and anger and just decided to run his little piece of Gotham how he likes it. No starving kids. No heroes or villains. Absolutely no Jokerz. Roy Harper comes to break it up but then goes: hey I'm sorry but the Drug Lord just got me clean off drugs so I'm gonna marry him.) They are older gay mob grandpas with their daughter Lian.

Since the Joker is dead, Duke's parents are not affected by the Venom. He still has an interest in vigilantes. He was able to track what happened to Robin. Batman scares him off, but he's still determined to help. So like comics canon, Bruce points him to learning opportunities. He ends up becoming a Private Investigator, of Signal and Spoiler fame.

Batman saves Stephanie Brown from her shot at the cape. They also work closely with Barbara Gordon. Stephanie is also an investigative journalist and busts open several mob and villain rings with the help of Duke, Jason, and silent help from Batman.

Cadmus sees all of these new Robins keep getting denied left and right. Concerned that Batman was needed, they go ahead with Project Batman Beyond.

Bruce discovers this. He creates a false paper trail. A company was illegally creating clones/children of the rich for blood transfusions and organ transplants. And the occasional "long lost heir" con. It was easy enough to add Terry and Matt to the list before exposing them.

Bruce went over to the Mcginnis household with a lawyer and an NDA. Terry and Matt don't have a legal right to the Family Fortune, but they do have a small trust fund to be given when they're 18. (small is relative when you're rich.)

Terry grows up. He gets the job at Wayne Manor. (With Mary's blessing, of course.)

Terry tracks down Dick Grayson and they have a agreement about weekly emails. He never comes to Gotham. (Batman II, fighting Nightwing: PER MY LAST EMAIL-) Dick doesn't show up at the Manor at all. Not until Terry sees him scrubbing the Joker Graffiti off of the Batcave walls.

Now everything after this is post-ROTJ movie.

And then. Damian. The League of assassins has been trying to recreate Batman as well. But all of the clones consistently die around their 8th birthday. So the project was delayed by decades. They accepted a work around with the splicing tech. Damian wasn't originally related to Bruce and Talia. But they overwrote his DNA to truly make him the Heir. They were training him to take over the Batman mantle - he wasn't ready to do it yet, but then Terry as Batman II pops up. Damian is angry. Cassandra is able to sneak in and use that to smuggle him out to Gotham.

so now the Manor starts filling up with Dick, Cass, Damian, and occasionally Tim and Terry gets moved to a less hectic shift. He's bounced off of solo vigilante status and now has to contend with Cassandra and Damian following him around.

The official story is that the Cloning and corporate espionage happened and now Dick Grayson came back to Gotham to help his elderly father raise his clone and handle his affairs. He brought his security detail, Cassandra. Also they get Titus the emotional support dog for Damian.

Mary Mcginnis calls Bruce and renegotiates the terms of the NDA, since the cat's out of the bag. She sits Terry and Matt down and tells them that they're not genetically related to Warren. Terry. Does not take it well. Matt is confused and sad.

Damian hears about this and tries to kill Matt both as a "thing the League trained him to do" and "he's like me why does he get to be happy?" anger and jealousy over his life.

Batman II is seen wrangling a brightly colored child and demanding that he not stab his brother. Matt recognizes the wrangling and figures out who's under the cowl.

There are now officially two Robins. Pray you get the one without a sword.

(that's it it's just Terry adjusting from being a Single Child of Batman to being a Middle Child of the Batfam)

[the-s1lly-corner]

I like your ej meeting Lj can I get more creepypasta dynamics

More Creepypasta Dynamics and Relationships

Heads up that this HEAVILY unhinges off of my au/hcs so uhuh! I'm not entirely sure how much of this lines up with the current fanon interpretations since admittedly I hardly interact with the fandom outside of my own stuff 😭😭 gotta change that theres so many talented artists and writers

Getting the big nasty out of the way, Zalgo! Technically connected to everyone! I talk more in depth about him, you can find that post in the creepypasta Masterlist! Might be the first one.. but run down is that hes a weird force/piece of nature/way of the universe and is responsible for the creation of monster characters as well as the means for human characters becoming something else (ex. EJ becoming a monster, Ben coming back from the dead). Human characters that remain human can sometimes become what they did (a killer or otherwise a figurative monster) after coming into contact with zalgo, usually unknowingly or indirectly..

He is quite literally their maker more or less, sent out to cause problems in the world

I would assume many different characters would have different thoughts and relationships with Zalgo, even if they can't directly make contact with him. Zalgo bounces between being tangible and not

Eyeless Jack, for example, doesnt know who or what Zalgo is and the name doesnt ring a bell; having been corrupted through a creation of zalgo rather than zalgo itself. Slenderman on the other hand actively resents zalgo for giving him sentience and a human-like conscious.

Jeff and Ben are best friends, it'd be criminal for them to be otherwise. My take on ben is that hes confined to electronics majority of the time. Jeff Carries him around in a phone, or maybe a DS.. I keep switching between both.. maybe originally a DS but made the switch. Jeff met Ben not long after he mvrdered his and Jane's families. Though there is now a rift in their friendship, mostly due to Jeff still being human and is now a grown adult, they still care deeply about each other. More like a sibling bond as Jeff got older

Bringing up Masky and Hoodie! I tried blending them, eith the crp version and their mh source since I love both versions. They lean more towards the crp take, though, given that's what I grew up with.. finding a balance is a bit hard... moving on, they aren't that close actually. Sure they are still proxies in this au, hence the more crp leaning comment, but they aren't.. friends. They hardly tolerate each other in most scenarios, actually. On the flip side, Tim and Brian still exist and have their own lives, whether or not they're fully aware of the fact they're being sort of puppeteered by outside forces is up in the air.. they're still fairly close in contrast to masky and hoodie!

Staying true with the older fandom, tiby and masky antaogize each other. Usually its toby getting onto masky, though. Hoodie and toby have a rather decent relationship, oddly enough. They aren't buddy buddy, but they are civil with each other. Could be that hoodie is no bullshit + doesnt give toby a reaction when he DOES do something to him

Jane and Jeff still hate each other, with Jane actively trying to hunt Jeff down and get revenge for everything. Jane is the only character (with the exception of tim and brian) who has a job and still interacts with society. I had an idea that she and laughing jill team up (to parallel jeff and Ben's dynamic).. though I might scrap that or swap jill out with someone else.. shrugs

Then theres nina! I hc that her and eyeless jack are close friends. No reason behind that other than "their energies contrast each other. Ej is tired and reserved, nina is energetic and gossipy/chatty" and their visual aesthetics contrasting (dark and mostly grey against bright and multicolored).. though I'm still trying to find a way how they'd meet in universe

Nina is also friends with jeff and has a sibling like bond with ben as well. I think she'd still have her crush on jeff, although I'm bouncing between it being faded or just as strong as it was before.. I mentioned I kind of want them to have a tiffany/chucky dynamic but I need to rewatch the child's play movies to get the dynamic for nina and Jeff right 😭😭

Ooooooohhoho still on the nina thought train but her and Jane would have so much beef. Jane hates nina with her entire being for being so buddy buddy with jeff.. whereas nina just treats their rivalry like it's some high school drama, totally unserious

[deeg9]

Chenford + Tim finds out about Nucy

Hey Anon - I've written 2-3 fics with scenes where Tim finds out but I'll share the most recent version below that I wrote with Quesera and WannaBeBold (I'm like 50% sure we already posted this on Tumblr but I honestly don't remember).

The One Where Tim Finds Out About Nolan

EXT. LA BREA - FOOD TRUCKS - DAY 

Officers Celina and Thorsen are sitting at a table out of earshot while Nolan and Lucy wait for their lunch orders from the food truck. Last night at happy hour, Tim and Lucy announced to everyone they’d been dating for a while. 

NOLAN 

“So, have you told Tim that we used to date?”

LUCY

(shakes her head)

“No, not yet. Why?”

NOLAN

“Just estimating how much time I left have to finish writing my will.” 

LUCY

(laughs)

“Good point… I’ll tell him tonight.” 

NOLAN

(squirms)

“How about tomorrow?” 

LUCY

“Why?” 

NOLAN

“I can’t get a flight to Japan tonight but I can probably find one tomorrow. I’ve been meaning to visit Henry and Abigail anyway.”

LUCY

“Oh, shut up. It’ll be fine. He won’t even care.”

END SCENE 

INT. BAR - WILSHIRE BLVD - NIGHT 

A few months later, the Midwilshire gang is gathered at their favorite bar to celebrate Tim and Lucy who just got engaged. 

NYLA

(holds up a finger)

“Okay, okay, but wedding rule number 1: No exes.” 

TIM

“Normally, I’d agree. But Lucy and Rachel are good friends–”

NYLA

(interrupts)

"No exes! Do you want to sit there knowing one of your guests has done the dirty with your future wife?"

TIM

(opens his mouth to respond) 

LUCY 

“Oh, come on. All of that is in the past. And what about Nolan? He has to be there.” 

Tim reels back.

TIM

(his response comes out in a choke)

“Nolan?” 

GREY

“Oh, dear lord, someone please burn my ears off.”

LUCY

(taps her chin with her finger)

“That’s right… I just thought about telling you but I never actually got around to it.” 

NOLAN

(whispers)

“You said you were going to tell him months ago.”

LUCY

(shrugs)

“I forgot.”

THORSEN

(shudders)

“Uck. And I thought the bar was too low with Chris. No offense, man.” 

NOLAN

“I mean… I’m a little offended. I’m better than Chris.” 

The crew looks around at everywhere but at Nolan.

NOLAN (cont.)

(rolls his eyes)

“Wow.”

NYLA

“Really, Lucy? No one told you that was a bad idea?” 

LUCY

“Well, Talia brought it up once or twice. How dating a cop was bad for my career…”

Tim laces his fingers through Lucy’s reassuringly. 

NYLA

(waves her hand) 

“No, no, not that. Screw that.”

NYLA (cont.)

(teasingly)

“I’m talking about dating Nolan being a bad idea.” 

BAILEY

“Hey! Now I’m offended.”

NOLAN

(to Nyla in mock offense)

“What the heck? I thought I was your favorite.”

NYLA

"Now who told you that?" 

Nolan points at Angela. 

ANGELA

(shakes her head nonchalantly)

“Hmm... That doesn’t sound like me…” 

NOLAN

(exasperated) 

“You started this, Aaron. The next round is on you.” 

THORSEN

(nods unapologetically)

“Fair.”

LUCY 

(chuckles)

“I’ll come help.”

Thorsen and Lucy head to the bar.

Emmett walks up and pats Tim on the back.

EMMETT

“Hey man, I heard you’re getting married. Congrats.”

TIM

(stares at him for a moment before responding)

“How did you know I was getting married?” 

EMMETT 

(points at Bailey)

“I just joined the 122. Bailey’s house.”

Tim closes his eyes and sighs.

BAILEY

(slowly pushes Emmett back toward the other end of the bar where firefighters are gathered)

“This is not the best time.” 

Thorsen and Lucy return and start topping off glasses from the freshly filled pitchers.

WESLEY

(to Tim)

“If it makes you feel any better, we didn’t know either.”

Angela suddenly finds a spot on the wall very interesting. Wesley notices immediately. 

WESLEY (Cont)

“Right, Ang?” 

Everyone’s waiting for her to respond.

ANGELA

“Oh, please. Of course I knew! I just didn’t stick my nose in their business like Talia did.” 

WESLEY

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?” 

ANGELA

“Because you turn into a gossipy little schoolgirl when you drink.”

WESLEY 

(hangs his head)

“I do not…” 

JAMES

(clears his throat and pats Wesley on the back) 

“You really do, bud.” 

TIM

"What about me?" 

ANGELA

"What about you?"

TIM 

"Seriously? You're my best friend."

ANGELA

"You two had vibes. There was no way I was telling you." 

TIM

"When she was my rookie? No, we did not."

People are nodding along with Angela and muttering under their breath. 

TIM

(leans in)

“What was that?”

Lucy elbows him in the side playfully.

CELINA 

(steps forward)

“Uh, sorry to interrupt, but I’m sensing someone coming through with a J name. He wants me to tell you there were definite vibes.” 

Her statement is met with stunned silence. 

CELINA (cont.)

(frowning)

“He also says Smitty owes him 20 bucks. Do you know who this is?” 

CELINA (cont.)

(before anyone answers, Celina’s face softens)

“But what he really wants me to tell you is… it’s about damn time.” 

Tim and Lucy smile sweetly at each other and he leans down to kiss her. Everyone in the room starts clapping, egging them on. Tim dips Lucy back and deepens the kiss as the Midwilshire crew cheers, the sound of glasses clinking in the air. 

END SCENE

Kudos and comments on AO3 are always appreciated! Thanks for reading.

[secondratefiction]

hi hun! can you write tim drake head canons for when he’s jealous? like what happens and what kind of sex is experienced later? i’d be really happy if you could, also hi! i’m the winky anon, ;))

Ok, if we look back at this, we can establish that Tim turns into quite the pouty lil bitch when jealousy rears its ugly head.

Just love him, he's not asking for much.

This usually leads to him seeking a lot of physical affection and reassurance. Hold his hand, stand a little too close, honestly one of the best thing you can do is to just lean on or against him. His mood will automatically flip like a switch.

Now, once you get home, there's no gossipy socialites, no paparazzi with flashing cameras, he absolutely will not stop touching you.

Tim is acutely aware of his short comings. He a workaholic with batman levels of obsessive tendency, and more responsibilities than one person should probably be trying to juggle. He falls short and doesn't make nearly as much time for you as he should, as he so desperately wants to.

And yet, despite all that, he's still the one you're coming home with at the end of the day. There is a level of gratitude there that he will never be able to properly express... but he can at least try to make a start on it tonight.

[princessanneftw]

How Princess Anne became the shining light of the beleaguered monarchy

Once seen as haughty and aloof, today her old-school approach has never been more in demand

By Camilla Tominey, Associate Editor of the Telegraph.

Visitors to the Princess Royal’s house, Gatcombe Park, are often surprised to be greeted with antique-display cases groaning with ornaments, bookshelves overflowing with hardbacks and piles of magazines dating back to the 1970s. According to one friend, the 18th-century Grade II-listed Gloucestershire stately has a ‘homely’ feel, thanks to the frugal Princess’s reluctance to throw anything out.

‘It’s quite a nice thing really,’ they said. ‘There’s barely a place you can sit down in her house. Every time the staff go in there they try to take something away.’ A surprising revelation, perhaps, about the Royal family’s resident stickler, whose decadesold ‘updo’ and penchant for wearing white gloves on royal engagements suggest a somewhat starchier outlook. But as the Queen’s only daughter prepares to celebrate her 70th birthday this month, it seems that appearances can be rather deceiving.

Now more valuable than ever to an institution not only trying to reposition itself in the wake of a global pandemic, but still smarting from the fallout of Megxit and the Duke of York’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, Anne’s old-school approach has never been more in demand. Despite describing herself as ‘the boring old fuddy-duddy at the back’, who keeps reminding the younger royals not to forgo ‘the basics’, the Princess Royal, who has always put duty first, is finally getting the recognition she deserves.

Her appearance in June alongside the 94-year-old monarch for Her Majesty’s first ever video call shows how much the Queen is coming to rely on the Princess. And the public response to her appearing to snub Donald Trump during a Nato leaders’ reception at Buckingham Palace last December suggests the nation is finally warming to her modus operandi.

Where once Anne was regarded as haughty and standoffish, she is now hailed as one of the great English eccentrics whose unparalleled royal work ethic, carrying out more than 500 engagements a year, has rightly earned her national treasure status.

And having allowed a film crew to shadow her for the past year, the Princess, who is usually reluctant to blow her own trumpet, has never appeared more at ease with herself. She was persuaded to take part in last week’s ITV documentary Princess Royal: Anne at 70 because its makers, Oxford Films, had successfully produced Our Queen and Our Queen at 90 about her mother. Shadowing Anne on her dusk-to-dawn engagements – and featuring interviews with her children Peter, 42, and Zara, 39 – the documentary revealed just how much the Princess is cut from the Queen’s ‘keep calm and carry on’ cloth.

Having been regarded as a bit of a royal renegade as a teenager – and chosen to forgo titles for her own children, despite her own HRH pedigree as a ‘spare to the heir’ – Anne’s life story is a contradiction of both protocol taskmaster and occasional rule-breaker. As one insider who knows the Princess well put it: ‘She can turn from laughing and joking one minute to being an absolute stickler for the rules the next. She’s extremely dutiful and would hate to be regarded as being on the wrong side of protocol. You’d never dream of asking her a political question and she’s not at all gossipy.’

Erin Doherty’s portrayal of Anne in The Crown, as the deadpan princess with the permanently raised eyebrow, certainly sums up her teenage years when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were apparently so concerned about their daughter’s lack of direction, they asked the late Dame Vera Lynn for advice. Prince Philip, who famously joked of his daughter, ‘If it doesn’t fart or eat hay then she isn’t interested,’ allegedly confided in the Forces’ sweetheart: ‘We are concerned about Anne at the moment, trying to get her to make up her mind about what she wants to do.’

According to her school friend, Sandra de Laszlo, who boarded with Anne at Benenden: ‘She was a very normal teenager – sensible and fun.’ Leaving school with six O levels and two A levels in 1968, Anne had already resolved to follow in her parents’ duteous footsteps. Less than a year later, she made her official debut on 1 March – St David’s Day – when she handed out leeks to the Welsh Guards at Pirbright Camp in Surrey. It was to be the start of one of the most industrious royal careers in modern memory – with more than 20,000 engagements clocked up since.

Soon after she started work, she began dating – and in 1970, Anne’s first boyfriend was Andrew Parker Bowles, the dashing young adjutant of the Blues and Royals, who went on to marry Camilla Shand – later to become her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cornwall. The Princess and the brigadier – described as her ‘horsey husband’ – remain close and accompany each other to Royal Ascot and other race meetings every year.

Anne is also on good terms with her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips. A Sandhurst graduate with an equestrian streak, like Parker Bowles, Phillips met the Princess at a party for horse lovers in 1968 and reconnected at the Munich Olympics four years later, when he won team Olympic gold in the three-day eventing. They married in 1973. He was at the then 23-year-old Anne’s side a year later when she was threatened at gunpoint in an attempted kidnapping. The couple were returning to Buckingham Palace following a charity event when their limousine was forced to stop on the Mall by another car. When the driver, Ian Ball, jumped out and began shooting, Anne’s bodyguard, Inspector James Beaton, was injured, along with her chauffeur Alex Callender, and journalist Brian McConnell and Michael Hills, a police constable, who happened upon the scene.

But the attempt to hold Anne to ransom for at least £2 million is even more memorable thanks to the impervious Princess’s refusal to obey Ball’s order to get out of the car, replying with a trademark: ‘Not bloody likely!’ Eventually, she exited the other side of the limousine, as had her lady-in-waiting, Rowena Brassey (who is still with her to this day). A passing pedestrian, a former boxer named Ron Russell, punched Ball in the back of the head and led Anne away from the scene. Anne later told officers: ‘It was all so infuriating; I kept saying I didn’t want to get out of the car, and I was not going to get out of the car,’ according to files later released by the National Archives. ‘I nearly lost my temper with him, but I knew that if I did, I should hit him and he would shoot me.’

She was similarly sanguine about becoming the first member of the Royal family to have a criminal conviction after one of her dogs, a three-year-old English bull terrier called Dotty, attacked two children in Windsor Great Park in 2002. Pleading guilty to being in charge of a dog that was out of control in a public area, she insisted on no special treatment and took the £500 fine and £500 compensation on the chin.

The incident followed a number of brushes with the law for motoring offences, with Anne having twice been caught speeding on the M1 in the 1970s. She was also fined £100 and banned for one month in 1990 for two speeding offences and fined another £400 in 2000. On both occasions she pleaded guilty immediately, insisting she was late for an engagement.

As she said in the documentary, mistakes do happen when there is no ‘training’ for the job of being royal. ‘It’s just learning by experience. But hardly ever does anything go quite according to plan. You have to learn that.’ It wasn’t as if she didn’t feel the pressure of being the sovereign’s second-born, either – once describing the fly-on-the-wall Royal Family film, which followed the Windsors for a year in the late 1960s, as ‘a rotten idea’.

‘The attention that had been brought on one ever since one was a child, you just didn’t want any more. The last thing you needed was greater access.’

Famed for telling reporters to ‘naff orf ’, much of Anne’s mistrust of the media appears to stem from its rather uncomfortable coverage of Phillips fathering a love child, Felicity, with New Zealand art teacher Heather Tonkin in 1985. The Princess didn’t emerge unblemished either, having been revealed by The Sun to have received love letters from Tim Laurence, then the Queen’s equerry, in 1989, when she was separated – although still married to Phillips.

Anne and Mark finally divorced in 1992 and the Princess remarried eight months later, choosing Crathie Kirk in Scotland, as the Church of England did not at that time allow divorced persons whose former spouses were still living to remarry in its churches. The Prince of Wales had nicknamed Phillips ‘Fog’ on the grounds that he was ‘thick and wet’; but with his Royal Navy pedigree and impeccable manners, ‘quiet man’ Laurence fitted into the Royal family perfectly. One friend described the vice admiral as ‘a thoroughly decent man who never forgets a face’, before adding that ‘some may regard him as a little bit boring, but he’s a much safer bet than Mark ever was.’

Ever the pragmatist, Anne allowed Phillips to remain living on the Gatcombe estate, even after he married Sandy Pflueger, an American Olympic dressage rider, with whom he has a daughter, Stephanie, 22. As one equestrian insider put it: ‘The horsey set has always been very incestuous. Yes, Mark was serially unfaithful but there’s a lot of that going on – Anne just turned a blind eye.’

Now divorced from Pflueger, Phillips, 71, has vacated Aston Farm on the 730-acre estate, to make way for Zara, her rugbyplayer husband Mike Tindall, 41, and their daughters Mia, six, and Lena, two.

Peter also lives on the estate with his estranged wife Autumn, 42, and their daughters Savannah, nine, and Isla, eight. The couple are still living together despite announcing their divorce in January – an unexpected development that has left the Princess ‘sad and disappointed’, according to insiders.

One source said: ‘One thing about the Royal family is they are incredibly close. They are the most dysfunctional family there is, but the Princess and her children and grandchildren are as tight as anything.’

As ever, horse riding remains the tie that binds, with Anne – a former European eventing champion, BBC Sports Personality of the Year and competitor at the 1976 Montreal Olympics – passing on her enthusiasm for the sport to Zara. In recent years, Peter has taken over the running of the Festival of British Eventing at Gatcombe.

By her own admission, breaking with royal tradition by insisting that her children were called Mr and Miss ‘probably’ made life ‘easier for them’. ‘I think most people would argue that there are downsides to having titles,’ Anne said recently. Having initially been brought up, Downton Abbey-style, on the ‘nursery floor’, with her parents often away for months on end on royal tours, it was Anne who insisted she go to a ‘proper’ school – the first daughter of a monarch to do so – rather than be home-taught.

Both Peter and Zara were sent to Port Regis, a co-educational prep school in Dorset, before following in their uncle Charles’s footsteps to board at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Unlike the heir to the throne, who described it as ‘Colditz in kilts’, they thrived in the outdoorsiness of it all, excelled at sport and both ended up at Exeter University – Peter to study sports science and Zara, physiotherapy – despite university having eluded both their parents.

Zara also surpassed her mother’s equestrian achievements by winning the Eventing World Championships in 2006 and a silver medal at the 2012 Olympics – all while Anne was watching proudly from the sidelines.

One friend recalls how the Princess would think nothing of queuing up for the Portaloos at competitions like any other parent, much to the horror of Zara, who would tell her: ‘Mum, you can’t do that!’

Inconspicuous in her trademark Barbour jacket, tweed hat and sunglasses, Anne would regularly be stopped at events on her own estate by police not realising who she was. ‘I remember it happening a couple of times,’ said one source. ‘She was very good about it – she said: “Don’t worry, you weren’t to know.”’

After Zara collected individual and team gold medals at the 2005 European Eventing Championship in Blenheim, Anne invited the entire team, grooms and all, back to Gatcombe to celebrate, serving up ‘sandwiches and scampi in a basket’, in the courtyard. Very much a hands-on mother and grandmother, the Princess has a number of long-serving aides – but no large entourage. Along with Rowena Brassey (now Feilden), Lady Carew Pole has also been the Princess’s lady-in-waiting since 1970.

Unfussy Anne still insists on doing her own make-up and hair – which hasn’t been let down publicly in decades. Although according to one source who once witnessed the rare sight of her unclipping her bun and redoing it during an equestrian event: ‘It really is quite something. It’s still as long as it was when she was in her 20s.’

Part of Anne’s agelessness is down to genes. ‘She always says she doesn’t have very good role models for slowing down,’ Peter told the documentary. As Countryfile presenter John Craven found out when he dared to ask if Anne still rode, only to be rebuked: ‘Her Majesty is still riding, so come on!’ But as well as inheriting her mother’s DNA she shares HM’s strict adherence to style codes – and her aversion to profligacy.

Guests at the 2008 wedding of Lady Rose Windsor, the daughter of the Duke of Gloucester, were astonished when Anne arrived in the outfit she had worn to her brother’s wedding to Lady Diana Spencer, 27 years earlier. The size-10 Maureen Baker floral-print frock still fitted perfectly.

Quite what Anne must have made of Diana and Fergie’s wardrobe expenditure in the 1980s has never been disclosed – although it has long been reported that the Princess never thought too highly of either sister-in-law, regarding Diana particularly as ‘hogging the limelight’.

There were even reports that she viewed the pair as ‘lessening the stature’ of the Royal family, describing them behind the scenes as ‘those girls’. As royal biographer Penny Junor put it: ‘There was Diana on the one hand, who was incredibly touchy-feely, who hugged children, who put children on her lap, who even kissed people in public. And there was Anne, not touching anyone, not playing up to the cameras at all.’

As far removed from the suburban housewife as you can get, when Anne was once spotted mending fences at Gatcombe, she apparently retorted: ‘Somebody’s got to do it!’ ‘She’s never shirked anything in her life,’ said a friend. ‘She’s a real grafter.’

Weekends will invariably be spent with her four grandchildren. Revealing a surprising knowledge of popular culture – despite her dislike of indoor pursuits – the Princess revealed her familiarity with Catherine Tate’s stroppy schoolgirl character Lauren when she commented that Mia’s attitude to equestrianism was, ‘Am I bovvered?’

‘She’s superb with the kids,’ said a friend. ‘She’ll often be in the stables with the grandchildren. She’s got a tremendous sense of humour and is very likeable and kind. She loves Mike [Tindall, Zara’s husband]. He makes them all laugh.

The friend also pointed to Anne’s ‘surprisingly fruity’ sense of humour, adding: ‘And the Princess can swear all right. I’ve heard her use some quite colourful language.’

If the Queen instilled in Anne a love of horses then it was her father who encouraged her other great passion in life: sailing. Anne would regularly accompany the former Royal Navy commander to Cowes Week, and it is a testament to Philip’s infectious love of seafaring that Anne and Tim have kept their yacht Ballochbuie on Loch Craignish in Argyll, since 2012. The couple enjoy nothing more than cruising around the Inner Hebrides, where Anne indulges her passion of visiting lighthouses. She is patron of the Northern Lighthouse Board and is understood to have ‘bagged’ more than half of the UK’s 206.

But it hasn’t always been so easy combining work and pleasure. Anne was put to the diplomatic test when she became the first member of the Royal family to visit the USSR, at the invitation of the then-leader Gorbachev in 1990. In typical style, the Princess didn’t shirk the responsibility – and stayed for two whole weeks. Visits to war zones including Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Bosnia have been similarly taxing – with Anne once insisting after a particularly gruelling tour of Africa: ‘I don’t come here looking for trouble. I come to see if I can help.’

Her association with Save the Children, which dates back to 1970, has seen her slum it on camp beds and visit disease-ravaged Mozambique refugee camps. Once urged by photographers to hug an emaciated child, she refused, saying, ‘I don’t do stunts.’ And in response to a comment on her supposed lack of the maternal instinct, she said: ‘You don’t have to like children particularly to want to give them a decent chance in life.’

Yet her reputation as one of the most diligent royals ever has also been honed by her dedication to little-known domestic causes, like the Wetwheels Foundation, which provides ‘barrier-free boating’ for the disabled. One of more than 300 charities the Princess is involved with, its founder Geoff Holt, a paraplegic who was the first disabled person to sail solo around Britain in 2007, and then across the Atlantic in 2010, has known Anne for over 30 years. ‘I’ve got photos of us going back decades. I’ve got older and older and she’s stayed the same,’ he joked.

‘She’s got to be one of the most hard-working people I know. I’ve never known anything like it – the amount of engagements she packs in. She doesn’t do sycophancy, though.

Michele Jennings, chief executive of Hearing Dogs for the Deaf, of which the Princess has been patron since 1992, also tells staff ‘not to fawn’ when the Princess visits. ‘She hates that,’ she said. ‘We’re a pretty down-to-earth charity and when she comes she’ll have dogs jumping at her shins and crawling all over her, but she doesn’t mind one bit. There’s no awkwardness.’

Another source revealed how during one royal visit, Anne had joked about missing out on all the posh canapés – royals are discouraged from eating in public. ‘I’ll just have to put up with Great Western’s finest,’ she quipped, referring to her train journey home.

Although a ‘daddy’s girl’ growing up, since the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret died in 2002, Anne has become ever more devoted to her mother. Having helped to counsel the Queen through many royal crises over the years, the Princess has been HM’s first port of call when discussing recent tumultuous royal events. Although one can only guess what stalwart Anne makes of Harry and Meghan’s behaviour, she has made no secret of her opposition to royals trying to modernise the institution, seemingly referring to the Sussexes when she remarked recently: ‘I don’t think this younger generation probably understands what I was doing in the past and it’s often true, isn’t it? You don’t necessarily look at the previous generation and say, “Oh, you did that?” Or, “You went there?” Nowadays, they’re much more looking for, “Oh, let’s do it a new way.” I’m already at the stage [of ], please do not reinvent that particular wheel. We’ve been there, done that. Some of these things don’t work. You may need to go back to basics.’

When she turned 60, the Queen elevated Anne to the Order of the Thistle and there was a joint birthday party with Andrew, who was 50 that year. But Covid-19 – not to mention Andrew’s fall from grace – mean this year’s celebrations will be more muted. Indeed, she is not thought to have had much contact with her brother, with whom she shares a love of country pursuits, but little else.

With the Queen having been self-isolating at Windsor Castle since March, it is thought Anne will be reunited with her parents at Balmoral this summer, where she and Tim will once again take in Scotland’s sights by sea.

At a time when the monarchy finds itself somewhat cast adrift, it is the indefatigable Princess Royal who is proving to be its trustiest anchor. As she prepares to turn 70, showing no sign of slowing down after half a century of engagements, lighthouse-lover Anne has become the Royal family’s beacon of good, old-fashioned public service.

[muchmorethanmusesarchived]

🚑 for Eileen & 👻 for Severus & 🌎 for Timberly

And then I’d sit, and think some more || @obsessev​ || Stil Accepting

🚑 - If your muse was the only person around and someone was injured, would they help? Would they have the experience needed?

Okay so because I’m human garbage, Eileen’s bio never got completed so a little backstory on this… My vague ideas for her (and given that you’ve got the ONLY Tobias I’ve ever seen, your thoughts are welcomed??) are that she was a pureblood witch - perhaps not as rich and resplendent as say the Black’s and Malfoy’s and the Potter’s but certainly a step above the dirt poor, blood traitor Weasleys. As such, I imagine that a decent marriage had been lined up for her upon her graduation (and idea briefly explored with @muse–minded on my old blog) - because I headcanon arranged marriages for the likes of Narcissa etc. some 15-20 years later so… Why not Eileen?

So her choice to ‘pull an Andromeda’ probably follows not too briefly on the heels of her finishing her N.E.W.Ts and a career isn’t exactly what’s expected of her… So as for the training..? She might have some limited knowledge of spells she could use - potions, she could certainly do a lot more to help with those, were she given the option to brew… So, before she leaves school. Sure, she’d help, almost without hesitation, depending, of course - on who the person was. 

But once she leaves? that’s where the blockage comes in. Tobias. She probably runs away from her family quite young (it’s, what, the 50′s? People move fast back then - I don’t know how long it would take Tobias to get down on one knee and secure himself a wife but…) and at first - she keeps it a secret from him and… Well. He’s not too bad at this point… But you don’t bring home strays, you don’t invite all and sundry into your living room when you’ve got a husband coming home from work and he’ll be hungry and if you’re honest - potions, which came so easy, is nothing like muggle cooking. 

She might still help anyway at this point. 

But the longer she’s with him? The less likely she is to help. The people in Spinner’s end are gossipy, dirty and mean. You’ve got your own problems, and why do you want to heap yourself up an extra serving because that nosy bitch at number five told her husband - who told your husband - that you were talking to a strange man on the street and now your husband doesn’t like that because, really, who do you think you are? Huh? What do you think you look like? What do you think you’re making him look like, god damn it Eileen! You’re gonna cuckold him in his own fucking house, huh? 

No, you mind your own business, and you find the scowl that wedding day Eileen thought she’d left behind at Hogwarts and you keep your head down. You’ve got your own problems.

When it’s your husband who’s hurt himself? Drunk legless, and falling over himself. Perhaps you freeze, maybe this time… Maybe this is it. He’s hit his head and he’s bleeding and maybe this time. You’ll be free. After a pause, only long enough that he could charitably think he’d given the silly bitch a right shock two nights ago when he’s dried out - you’re at his side. Because if this isn’t it, and you don’t help… Well, his reaction to your inaction doesn’t bear thinking about.

👻 - Does your muse believe in an afterlife? What do they think it’s like?

Well. Yes, Severus believes there is some kind of afterlife - because - well. Ghosts exist, bro. 

As for the ideas of Heaven and Hell? I’m not sure if Severus was exactly raised religious (I mean, it was the 60s, so it’s possible) although I can see it (If he was, he would reject it vehemently). I think Severus - especially when he’s older has seen enough and learned enough not to categorically rule it out. There are wonders of the world and of magic that means he isn’t so narrowminded as to just dismiss it but I don’t think he’d truly believe in heaven and hell as we often see them portrayed.

He may think on it - especially at his lowest points - and would certainly hope they’re not real. Lily, after all, has certainly gone heaven bound if they’re real and he is hell bound - because he cannot atone for what he has done (when he is not so low, he does wonder how much more kicking he deserves from the world for his choices but…) and he has no hopes of being blissfully reunited with her if that was the case.

🌎 - Does your muse want to change the world? How would they go about it?

Eh.

Tim, to be honest, doesn’t have much of a concern for the world outside of her own life. At least… Not in the traditional sense? She’s not a wide-eyed idealist going out into the world to try to fix it. Her life has issues, undeniable issues - but she is still relatively privileged. She is pureblood, moderately wealthy and… She just accepts that most things are the way they are? And somewhat selfishly - outside of her own situation - she struggles to really care about the plight of others? Like man, that sucks that house elves are oppressed, Hermione - but her family house-elf seems happy enough and honestly joining clubs and organisations is a way to draw unwanted attention, so thanks but no thanks…As she gets older her sense of compassion does develop somewhat - most notably in relation to her brother or Patrick. In more modern verses - where Voldemort is on the rise - she finds herself worrying for her squib brother (he’s a pureblood, yes, but his lack of magical ability concerns her - and Voldemort’s idea that magic can be ‘stolen’ concerns her even more) and for her muggleborn partner. In fantastic beasts / riddle era interactions - Gellert’s views on muggles concern her (how is a squib better than a muggle?) but she can also be easily manipulated by him…Overall, however, her concerns are for those immediately connected to her - and her sense of an overall ‘greater good’ is only really spurred on by that. Otherwise - her world alterations are very self-centred. If she was likely to ‘change’ anything about the world - it would be by writing books about it. 

[ingek73]

The Royal Family, The Media and ‘SussExit’ – Part 4

Zanye Linda August 18, 2020

The British Royal Family, The Media and 'SussExit'

It is often said that the Monarchy is a representation of British society. One of the ways they have managed to survive is by re-branding themselves to appeal to the mood of the country. In 1914, strong anti-German sentiments within Britain caused sensitivity among the royal family about its German roots and so in 1917, King George VI decreed the royal surname change from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. When Harry met a mixed-race American woman, the royal family saw another opportunity to rebrand themselves as a modern monarchy, representing multi-cultural Britain, one that is diverse and inclusive, especially in light of Brexit, and they had the headlines to prove it. Or maybe, others saw it for them.

Modern Monarchy Sussexit

Royal Wedding Sussexit

Change is essence of monarchy claims The Telegraph

The institution basked in the publicity of Harry and Meghan’s nuptials and was eager to accrue the benefits that come with being diverse and inclusive. Like many organisations today, it appears that the diversity is only in name and hardly backed up by the organizational structures. Meghan became the token black person giving the monarchy the appearance of being open and inclusive. Many black and brown people encounter this phenomenon on a daily basis in their work spaces and is the reason why very quickly, the overt and covert racism in Meghan’s coverage by the media was called out. It was like a transplant of personal experiences for many.

Just like the charity work the royal family uses to justify their existence and continual draw on millions of pounds from the public purse, openness and inclusivity was a ‘sham’. There was never any intention to do the work that comes with being a diverse and inclusive institution. There is hardly any diversity in the royal household, and it appears they were sorely lacking cultural competency as an organization. How is that that, being clear and direct about work expectations is somehow seen as confrontational?

It really is quite puzzling considering that, this is an institution that has realms outside of the UK, and attempts to wield some influence via its leadership of the commonwealth. What does it really say, that the royal household was simply incapable of accommodating a bi-racial woman- a highly productive one too. Or maybe they just refused to make room for her. Black and brown Commonwealth natives should be questioning why they are okay to be counted in the umbrella of influence of Britain and its monarchy, but are not quite welcome into the corridors of leadership.

Further, the Royal Rota that covers the activities of this institution is also quite homogeneous. It is the reason why so-called journalists use problematic language without a second thought. There is no diversity of background, thought or experience, and as a result, you have a group of people sharing information from a narrow, uninformed perspective. Unsurprisingly, you do end up with fluffy superficial and gossipy nonsense, packaged as news. If you’ve read their cover stories of engagements, you will see that for the most part, there are just a handful who are capable of capturing the depth and substance of some important work that a few of the royals do.

Harry and Meghan do not see it as enough to simply show up for public engagements, shake hands and say a couple of words before returning to their privileged lives. They have a demonstrable commitment to using their position to bring about change for the issues they care about, a concept that is not entirely foreign to the royal family when you consider Prince Charles’ many years of activism. It appears that, they did not anticipate Meghan to excel in her ‘royal’ role and to remain committed to using her platform for good. Here was a woman, a working royal, who within a short span of 18 months was able to deliver solid impactful projects, in addition to the run of the mill royal fare.

Together with her husband, they ushered in an approachable way of ‘royaling’ that appealed to many, thus drawing more eyes onto the institution. On social media, it was quite common to see tweets from some self-described republicans, expressing a level of personal conflict because they found themselves liking a royal. There is something to be said for the ‘traditional’ way the royals like to do things. Whether it’s for comfort or identification, it’s all well and good. If the monarchy is so concerned with popularity -which appears to be the driving force behind all the scheming and cut throat dealings- It is unfathomable, that they actively drove away assets that extended their reach across demographic, generational and geographic landscapes.

They say a rising tide lifts all boats. Because of the interest in Harry and Meghan, networks in America were covering their engagements, and it wasn’t uncommon for producers to tag other royal family members’ activities to these Sussex reports on Good Morning America or Today Show on NBC for instance. Outside of major events like weddings or births, American media would never have reported on typical royal engagements. The appetite for that simply didn’t exist.

“The problem with these two(Harry& Meghan) is that they want to do, rather than to be”.

Tim Shipman

Rather than embrace the positive public response, the institution instead royally screws itself on behalf of some fragile egos. As Tim Shipman put it, “The problem with these two(Harry& Meghan) is that they want to do, rather than to be”. I think this sums it up perfectly. Being royal is a carefully crafted PR game – a public image created by media hype men and women in which they appear to be doing charity work, but mostly delivering zero impact all while being fiercely protected from public scrutiny; as one person put in on Twitter – ‘Britain’s favourite Ponzi Scheme’. The monarchists are quite happy to pay for the performance, and now they are left with the royals they deserve.

In October 2018 when the smear campaign against Meghan kicked off, Robert Jobson reported that William “is extremely competitive with members of his family when it comes to media coverage and was especially salty about Meghan and Harry’s appearance in Cardiff in January”. The fact that Harry and Meghan were getting a lot of the media coverage bothered William and his court headed by Simon Case. It was after he joined the team that the tone of coverage around Meghan changed. The agenda was simple; anything Harry and Meghan was given a negative spin, period. Facts be damned, double standards be damned. Remember Simon Case was the man behind Will and Kate’s budget flight publicity stunt.

In an attempt to discredit the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and turn the public against them, the team at Kensington Palace worked with the UK media and their global counterparts to launch a smear campaign with the Duchess as their primary target. With total palace backing, the media were emboldened to print lies, ridicule and undermine Meghan’s initiatives, invade the couple’s privacy, bribe former friends and colleagues of Meghan to malign her character. As recently released court documents show, Kensington palace denied Meghan the right to reply to anything written about her, a directive that was extended to those closest to her. At the same time, all her paternal relatives were free to appear on and be compensated by UK networks, to say the most disparaging things about her unchallenged.

Simon Rex claims he was offered money to lie about Meghan

Harry paid damages over photos of his Oxfordshire home

Court documents refute tabs lies

The media with support of the palace used everything they had against the couple. Byline Investigates, captured the whole operation well in their article titled Why Harry and Meghan Move is Really About Dishonest Journalism writing in part that the media are “flogging racist and misogynist myth of a ‘difficult’, mixed-race American woman preying on a vulnerable prince”.

There was clearly a pattern of bullying and harassment driven by jealousy at play, which in part involved constant briefings about the couple by palace officials, the most prominent being their plan to step back as senior royals. This particular case may develop legal legs RE Prince Harry and the Sun newspaper. It is alleged that the SUN paid the partner of a royal aide Christian Jones, who still works in the court of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, for sensitive briefings. This leak followed a pattern of behaviour on the part of palace officials who constantly sold stories to the media, many of which later on turned out to be false. The media went ahead and printed them knowing there would be no repercussions because the palace had taken away from the couple the right to push-back under the selectively applied royal practice “don’t complain, don’t explain”.

Amidst the lies, leaks and constant negative briefings the royal family sent Harry and Meghan out on public engagements and royal tours expecting them to work with the very same people that dedicated column inches and airtime to abusing and tormenting them. This created a toxic workplace and there was no attempt by the royal family to remedy the situation that was taking a serious toll on the couple’s mental health. I don’t know anyone who would love to work perpetually in such a toxic environment.

When Harry and Meghan made their future plans public one of the conditions put forward was very simple. They no longer wished participate in the Royal Rota, as it currently operates. Members of the rota get a front seat to all events and are expected to share information with journalists outside the rota. If the rota put their own spin on events, how can we expect to get fair reporting? I would argue that this monopoly is what has emboldened them to sacrifice their integrity for propaganda. As a result, we see foreign media quoting these same problematic reporters and inviting some as experts on panels.

Contrary to media( read Royal Rota) reports that Harry and Meghan’s refusal to participate in the rota system was done to avoid media scrutiny, the couple wished to bring more transparency to their work by giving access to a more diversified media pool, subject matter journalists and media organisations that don’t have a quid-pro-quo relationship with the House of Windsor and in doing so subjecting themselves to even greater scrutiny. They understood that in choosing not to work with the Royal Rota, they would need to give up public funding, hence the need to pursue financial independence like some other current members within the family.

In the end their requests were denied and there has been a clean break. It has turned out to be a blessing because there are no bothersome entanglements with an institution that is invested in their sabotage. They were eager to use them as a foil – to distract the public when those within the family were alleged to have cheated on their spouses, had sex with underage girls or misappropriated charity funds. And then trot them out on public engagements, royal tours or to generate positive sentiment within the Commonwealth.

Meghan’s treatment at the hands of the establishment was dehumanising; she was commoditised, made into a thing to be used and abused by the powerful forces that pursued her mother-in-law to her death. That is why her husband, Prince Harry made the decision to step back as a senior working royal and move his family to another continent. It was always going to be untenable, based on the institution’s stance with the couple. When they failed to defend Archie from racist abuse, it telegraphed the story. Harry’s slightly tinged family will never be protected.

To protect them and avoid the same fate that led to his mother’s untimely death, they have rightly and wisely removed themselves from that destructive environment.

For once, we have a Windsor who is actually taking his marriage vow before God seriously. He swore to love and protect. He’s doing exactly that, and now they’re home – their own home. May love, peace and prosperity abound wherever they are

[junker-town]

The Girl in the Huddle

How Elinor Kaine Penna became a pioneering pro football writer in an industry where women weren’t welcome

“I didn’t know you were a big sports fanatic,” says a server named Ellen, wandering over to Elinor Penna’s table after overhearing her story about visiting Baltimore Colts training camp. “I know the Indianapolis Colts, but … the Baltimore Colts!”

“Well, I was,” Penna replies. “That was one of the most interesting things that ever happened, how they got the Colts out of Baltimore.”

We’re sitting in the dining room at the Garden City Country Club on Long Island, where she eats often enough to greet the staff by name — and to know what she’ll order. So instead of looking at the menu, Penna, 83, has started laying out a slew of old photos and magazines featuring a common subject: her.

“Ellen, look at this — this is 60 years ago,” she says, holding up a photo of her and Johnny Unitas. “The reason we’re having this lunch is because I was writing about football for 40 newspapers and I wasn’t allowed in the press box, being a female.”

“Really, back then?” Ellen replies. “Oh, my God.”

“Now look at all the women on the sidelines,” says Penna, a bemused smile crossing her neatly painted red lips. “It’s so easy for them — I’m so jealous.”

To say Penna was a pioneering woman sportswriter is an understatement. Working under her maiden name, Elinor Kaine, through the 1960s and early ‘70s, she was a bona fide sports media phenomenon with the syndicated columns, TV deals, book deals and trash talk from disgruntled peers to prove it. Though she’s intermittently remembered today for her widely publicized fight to get inside an NFL press box, Penna’s work meant so much more than that.

She was written up in Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Day, Newsweek and Vogue (which called her football writing “funny, gossipy, frank and technical”) while getting bylines in Esquire, after that magazine called her “the best fortune-teller in pro football.” Her challenges to the sportswriting establishment were twofold: first, she was a woman, and, second, she refused both reverence and jargon, favoring a gossipy, bright tone that had more in common with contemporary blogs than it did the work of her stodgy peers. Fans treasured Penna’s fearlessness and wit, her willingness to comment on both what other writers wouldn’t think to (players’ marital status and pregame rituals) and what they wouldn’t dare to (juicy rumors about front office discord and trades). As one admirer put it, “She must have blood-stained shoes from stepping on so many toes.”

Skeptics — and sexists — dubbed her “pro football’s Tokyo Rose,” a nickname that unfortunately stuck: “the only woman in what was designed as a man’s game, and like Rose, an irritant.” In short, as one fellow columnist surmised, “Women like these hurt the men’s ego.”

But 50 years after what her friend Larry Merchant dubbed “The Kaine Mutiny,” Penna lives between Long Island and Miami in relative obscurity. Her very active Twitter account (@NFL_Elinor) has 329 followers; she plays in survivor pools (she won $3,000 a few seasons ago) and watches all the games — just on a substantially bigger and more colorful TV than in her early days covering the game.

“Imagine looking at a game on a 10-inch black-and white screen, you’re not going to see any of it again, the announcers are boring and that’s that,” Penna says. “It’s so much more fun now! You have a lot of replays. You can even tape a game and save it for later.”

It’s true that sports have changed dramatically over the course of Penna’s life. She was born Elinor Graham Kaine in Miami Beach in 1935, when there were just nine teams in the NFL. She grew up between Chicago and Miami — or between Wrigley Field and Hialeah Racetrack, as she tells it. Her well-off family owned horses, and racing was Penna’s entrée into the ever-entwined worlds of sports, gambling and high society.

After barely graduating from Smith College in 1957 with a degree in mathematics — where she had spent most of her time convincing boys to drive her to nearby racetracks, and playing pranks on her classmates — Penna spent a year working in an aeronautical engineering lab at Princeton while taking flamenco guitar lessons on the side (a clause that doesn’t sound real but somehow is).

Meanwhile, she began to see the appeal of the NFL: friends would come to visit her in New Jersey on Sundays since from there she could get Giants and Eagles games. Once she moved to New York a year later to become the librarian at an advertising agency in the then-brand-new Seagram Building (essentially living the plot of a minor character on Mad Men), Penna immediately fell in with the classy and sports-crazy crowds at places like P.J. Clarke’s, the now-defunct Toots Shor’s, Gallaghers Steakhouse — Midtown institutions that were, at that point, still hip.

Clarke’s, a famed destination for movers and shakers from Sinatra to Steinbrenner, was a particular favorite: she briefly dated the restaurant’s late owner Daniel Lavezzo Jr. (“It wasn’t really a huge romance, but he would be my best friend to this day if he was still alive”).

Among the monied, cosmopolitan crowd at Clarke’s, Penna’s sports fandom flourished. The Giants would come after home games: Charlie Conerly, Frank Gifford, Dick Lynch, Emlen Tunnell. The panelists of What’s My Line?, like Dorothy Kilgallen and Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf, made up another table. “Sunday night at P.J. Clarke’s was really something special,” Penna says, “and with all those people, at least half of them were interested in football.” The restaurant even fielded its own touch football team for a very casual league in Central Park, and Penna played: one column explained she “can throw a football 35 yards, has great hands, and describes her running style as ‘very Mel Triplett.’”

Going to Giants games at Yankee Stadium was an event: “I remember that we would wait and plan our hats, and suits, and high heels!” she says with a laugh. “People dressed to the teeth — they weren’t just in sweatshirts. It’s so awful now.” Her roommate briefly dated Tim Mara, so they could get season tickets on the 50-yard line (which they paid for, Penna notes: at one point the price went up from $20 to $25, and “we used to crab about it”). There was the game, and then the game after the game: “Everybody waited in the Stadium Club [a VIP lounge, basically] for Frank Gifford to come and pick up his wife Maxine,” says Penna. It was also where she started meeting the people who would become her sources.

Penna, who had grown up around gambling because of her family’s racing bona fides, recognized a market inefficiency and saw an opportunity. Plus, she was tired of her day job at the agency. “There were bookmakers in all the sports restaurants in New York at that time, and they were all taking football bets,” she explains. “Nothing was legal, and so at that point they didn’t put the line in the newspaper — I don’t think it was allowed.”

So in 1961, she decided to go it alone and start a weekly newsletter called Lineback. First, Penna befriended a bookie in Vegas, who she would call every week to get the following Sunday’s lines. Then she would type them up and add the most interesting news from around the league, which she gleaned by subscribing to the local papers in every single city that had an NFL team — so many papers the post office wouldn’t deliver them, and Penna had to walk to Times Square and haul them all back to her apartment at 69th Street and 2nd Avenue. Then she would make 500 copies or so, and by Thursday, five or six select restaurants (which would each pay $10 a week) had a stack of copies of Lineback on the bar.

In other words, she was aggregating. “In the New York papers, they covered the Giants; In Chicago, they covered the Bears,” she explains. “They would write one article about the visiting team — like on a Friday — and that was it. But just think about it: 12 teams and no national news about them at all. No TV, no radio.” The paper had two droll slogans: “America’s oldest and only pro football newsletter,” and “You don’t have to like football to like Lineback.”

Penna began to meet more and more people in sports after she started the newsletter, and got better and better intel from fans, avid gamblers, team staff and players. She may not have been allowed inside the press box or in the locker room, but as one anonymous editor put it, “She can gather more inside information, without venturing inside a single locker room, than J. Edgar Hoover, Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons combined.”

She started selling subscriptions — $3 each — and counted Yankees manager Casey Stengel and Ethel Kennedy among her readers. (Penna was particularly proud of her incarcerated subscribers: “Send a subscription of Lineback to your favorite convict,” she told one paper.) Even NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle eventually got onboard, despite the fact she continually ribbed “The Big Bopper,” as she called him, in Lineback’s pages. Her readership started in the hundreds, and would eventually grow to thousands — all served by her and a group of friends stuffing envelopes in her living room.

By the mid-60s, it was a cult favorite: “Religiously read by the George Plimpton set,” as one paper described, though Penna says she never met the Paris Review co-founder. “The foremost, chicest professional football newsletter in the land … that is becoming the rage of the game’s emerging social set,” said another. Esquire called it “the most accurate and interesting inside information about professional football.” It was even called “sexy.”

“But it wasn’t!” Penna protests with a laugh. “Just to be the only girl made them think it was something.” She pauses. “When a football newsletter’s sexy, that’s going to be the day.”

It’s true, though, that Penna delivered football news with a rare humor and irreverence. Before pundits, Twitter and blogs made them sports’ most valued currency, she understood the power of a quick, bold take — especially when accompanied by a good one-liner. She described Vince Lombardi, for example, as “the Sophia Loren of football: top attraction, big on top, very volatile but warm of temper.”

“My aim is to go against the public relations garbage, which makes every team sound like it has 40 All-Americans in perfect health waiting and ready to go,” she told one reporter.

Some of her peers reviled her unorthodox approach. Others, like Larry Merchant, who was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News when Penna came on the scene, relished the way she turned things upside-down. “She had a take on what was going on in pro football that lined up with the direction sportswriting was starting to go into in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” says Merchant. “Dealing with professional athletes like they were 6-feet tall, not 10-feet tall; talking about their backgrounds and personalities, not just how many yards they gained that day. It was also a time when pro football was starting to emerge as a very powerful force.”

“The human interest stuff is what I was interested in, and that goes across genders,” Penna says. “When television came, instead of reporting the game the way it had been done for centuries, they had to look for another dimension — so people became writers. Old sportswriters weren’t writers.”

Uncovering trivia about player’s personal lives was one thing, but it was Penna’s accuracy and scoops that wound up getting her widespread attention. A big break came when she was one of the only sportswriters to pick the Browns over the Colts, who were 7-point favorites, in the 1964 championship game. What made her do it? She leans over confidentially: “Nobody else did.” After that, she was regularly called Nostradamus.

She was the first to posit that Lombardi would leave the Packers in 1968 (though she had guessed he would come home to New York), and she scooped the location of the 1969 Super Bowl by calling hotels in New Orleans and innocently asking for Super Bowl-weekend reservations. At the same time, she was reporting on how Donny Anderson was the only man on the Packers who wore black silk underwear and compiling lists of football players “with first and last names which could pass for first names.” She loved Steve Stonebreaker: “the ultimate in names.” Nothing was off-limits, and everything was at least a little bit funny.

Soon, she started getting punnily titled spots in papers around the country: “Female on the Fifty.” “Girl in the Huddle.” “Powder Puff Picker.” “From the Weak Side.” “Beauty and the Beef.” The one that eventually stuck was “Football and the Single Girl.” Despite their gendered titles, the columns had the same peppy mix of football miscellany found in Lineback — and were certainly too insidery for the novice.

Penna was also commissioned by teams and papers around the country to write guides to football specifically for women, including one that was syndicated nationally before the very first Super Bowl, and a chapter in the 1968 Encyclopedia of Football. Somehow, though, rather than patronize her audience, Penna proffered entirely lucid, often hilarious and highly educational introductions to the gridiron.

“Men pro football fans have certainly made it hard for a girl to enjoy the game,” one began. “They pretend football is too complicated for a female to understand, hoping to keep the gridiron a no-woman’s land. Beat them at their own game!” It proceeds to instruct women to do exactly what men do to this day: note extremely obvious facts about the game as though they are revelatory, and use well-worn football cliches to sound in the know:

“Before the play you might volunteer the fact that third down situations (and use the word — it’s very ‘in’) make you terribly nervous. If the team makes a first down, say, ‘I was worried they might not make it. Football is such a game of inches, isn’t it?’ and smile.”

Another evergreen tidbit: “Any girl who wants a sophisticated football fan to fall in love with her should talk about the offensive line. That is one line that is guaranteed.”

She started doing additional widely syndicated columns just to pick the following week’s games, touted with full-page advertisements insisting “Elinor Kaine can outpick ANY MAN!” while challenging readers to not “let her get away with it.” There was another column for Football News, and racing coverage in the offseason. Regular local TV appearances followed, and by 1966 she was making picks weekly on NBC’s Today.

“Most of the time when I was on television, I was not on television because they wanted me personally as a football writer to be on,” Penna insists now. “They wanted a girl, and they didn’t care what I said. I made the picks because nobody else wanted to.” She appeared on What’s My Line? and To Tell The Truth, always stumping the panelists who could never fathom that a woman would write about football.

Penna generally downplays the sexism she faced, or deflects with jokes — but there’s no question it was inescapable. There’s how she was constantly introduced: “Pert,” “pretty,” “reasonably pretty,” “nicely developed intellectually and otherwise,” etc. In the early days, when she was trying to get on the mailing list for NFL’s weekly press releases, the head of PR told her he couldn’t send them to her because “you don’t work for a newspaper and you’re a girl.” So each week, he left a copy at the reception of the NFL headquarters, and she went to pick it up. Eventually he decided it would be alright to send them — as long as he addressed them to “Mr. E. Kaine.”

At one point, she applied for a press credential for a Giants game. “Listen, girl: the turf at Yankee Stadium is sacred,” the team PR rep told her. “No female is ever going to put her foot on it — at least as long as I’m here.” Penna recalls the incident with typical good humor: “Through the years, the Giants have been the most old-fashioned, backwards organization possible — and here they are in New York City, which is a shame.”

She sent application after application to the Pro Football Writers of America, which were ignored until Rozelle invited her to dinner with the head of the organization and insisted they allow her in. She never met most of her newspaper editors, never went to the offices; at that time, there were almost always two papers in every city, and the more prestigious ones would never pick up her column.

Penna got a slew of hate mail — “and they aren’t all love letters either,” she joked at the time. It may have been less profane than the responses women sports reporters get now (though Al Davis was known to refer to her as “that bitch”), but it was certainly no less mercurial. “I get a royal ribbing on how a woman can be expected to know, comprehend or delve into the man’s world of professional football,” she told one interviewer. “They say I ought to get married and go to the kitchen because they don’t agree with what I write. They’re people who are stupid or don’t have a sense of humor, or both.”

Then there was the fact she was single for most of her professional life. When I ask if she ever felt pressured to quit and get married, she interrupts me: “No, no, no. I never wanted to do that. I don’t know what I wanted to do ...”

Penna was asked about it at the time, too — specifically about what her parents thought. “They think I should be married,” she said. “You know, we are a square family, and they think I should be married to an executive and having children. They don’t say anything, but they seem to be puzzled by my entire life.”

Most of the time, her personal life was just one more source of jokes. One anecdote that appeared over and over quoted a nameless escort as saying, “I thought I was out with [storied journalist and racing fan] A.J. Liebling.” Penna dryly insisted she had “army of beaus,” all of whom she told to buy a subscription to Lineback. “Nobody ever said no,” she added.

Looking back on it, she sighs. Penna doesn’t have much patience for self-indulgence or over-seriousness, but the realities of what she went through are still daunting. “Some of these things are just so incredible,” she concludes.

The incident that Penna is, unfairly, best known for is her battle to get in the press box at the Yale Bowl, where the Giants and Jets were slated to face off for the first time in a 1969 preseason game. She had been admitted as working press for the first time at Super Bowl III earlier that year, though relegated to an auxiliary press area in the stands. Otherwise, she had been paying to get in alongside the fans.

Penna met a lawyer who offered to file a show cause order in New Haven Superior Court against the Jets, the Giants, Yale, and the New Haven writer who was managing the press box, demanding an explanation for why a registered member of the Pro Football Writers of America was not being admitted to an NFL press box.

What followed was a media firestorm: Penna’s challenge was covered from coast to coast. “I don’t want to take over the press box, I just want to sit in it,” she said at the time. “It isn’t fair to base the availability of press box credentials on the gender of the applicant. I mean, we were all born by the luck of the draw, weren’t we?” Eventually, the teams and school acquiesced and gave her the credential — but not before smearing Penna and claiming the case was a publicity stunt backed by the publisher of her upcoming book. “But wait until she sees where she’s sitting,” the press box coordinator sneeringly told one paper.

“So LeRoy [Neiman, the artist and Penna’s close friend] and I hop into my car — I had a Cadillac convertible that was just incredible — top down, drove up to the Yale Bowl, parked, and when I got to the bottom of the stairs to the press box, they said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, we don’t have any seats — we’re totally full.’ This was about 11 in the morning,” Penna remembers. “They showed me to … I think it was probably a newsreel photographer press box under the regular press box, which had like four folding chairs and no place to type. They said, ‘We’ve saved this for you.’ That was the story.”

There were empty seats in the press box, as Penna’s writer friends relayed to her, but she still wasn’t allowed in. The game was a big deal because the Jets were the reigning Super Bowl champions and it was the first time the New York teams had ever played each other, so she had a tighter deadline than usual — but Penna couldn’t file on time because she couldn’t type.

“It was the writers who were against me, the teams didn’t give a shit,” she says now. “They didn’t want me in there. No girl. They wanted it just for themselves.”

So, for the first time, she wrote about what it was like to be a woman sportswriter. “The Establishment, the New Haven sportswriters, the Jets and the Giants conspired yesterday, and yours truly watched the Jet-Giant clash practically by my lonesome in a separate and very unequal situation,” she wrote as the lede for that week’s column. “I’m not crying,” she told another writer who interviewed her about the incident. “I’m just tired of getting treated like garbage. I hate to get kicked around by such little people. I really don’t know what I’m going to do — I don’t want to be made a fool of any more.”

Fighting to get inside the press box unintentionally brought Penna an entirely new degree of visibility. It also inspired more ire from both women and men, including other women sports journalists of the era who saw it as attention-seeking. The attention, though, finally got her inside a press box at the Orange Bowl by the invitation of the Dolphins — generally, she just stuck to watching in the stands, where one peer described her as having a transistor radio in one ear, a portable television in a shopping bag at her feet and a thermos of martinis. “If you got right down to it, I never particularly wanted to go into the press box especially since I wasn’t writing about the game itself — I was just annoyed that I couldn’t,” she says now. “Wouldn’t you rather sit in the stands at Yankee Stadium?”

“I’ve yet to find a writer with a sense of humor who wanted to keep me out of their press box. And I’ve never met a good writer who didn’t have a good sense of humor,” she wrote about her press box battle later in 1969 for Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists — the same month that organization admitted women for the first time. “I’m lucky I’m not a baseball writer. If it sounds like football is conservative, provincial and full of old fogeys, baseball has a mind that’s strictly centuries B.C.”

At the time, going into the locker room as a woman was a complete nonstarter, as one might imagine. “Some of the guys said they would come out [of the locker room], the ones I knew — all I had to do was come down and ask,” she says now. “The whole thing about going into a locker room is so overrated. What those players say in the locker room is so boring, when you think about it — unless it was that Rams[/Saints] game last year with the foul, and you interview the guy who says he didn’t do it but he did, or something like that. But otherwise there’s nothing that comes from the locker room that’s interesting, and never has been.” At the time, of course, she had a quip: “They give you the same answers whether they have their pants on or off.”

Her book, Pro Football Broadside, came out that same year and was widely serialized in early 1970. Ostensibly framed around the idea of presenting football from a woman’s perspective, in reality it was just a smartly written survey of the state of the league, filled with both the basics of the game and anecdotes from some of its most memorable characters (the image of Joe Namath shaving his legs in the middle of the locker room stays with you).

“There is something basically discomforting about a gal sportswriter,” one review began. “Too many times it’s just a gimmick; in Elinor Kaine’s case, though, it’s downright embarrassing. She’s good.”

Pro Football Broadside begins not with an explanation of the game or a list of the teams, but in the locker room, where Penna vividly describes various players’ pregame routines and superstitions based solely on secondhand observations because, of course, she wasn’t allowed in. She talks about the pharmacy used to get players through the season, from vitamins to morphine and amphetamines, as breezily as she does the preferred cologne of the New England Patriots (Estée Lauder Aramis).

She describes the game in thoughtful, fresh terms: “If it is taken two at a time, football can be broken down for spectating purposes into 11 individual duels. Watching one duel at a time is absorbing. Superb athletes, football players use finesse, quickness and cunning as much as size and strength. The mini-wars are violently sophisticated and highly unpredictable.”

And within the book, there’s no concession to the amateur: Penna covers the pros and cons of “establishing the run,” the futility of prevent defense and punting (“super conservative” but “[Don] Shula would rather eat worms than run on fourth and inches”), while explaining Norman Mailer’s theory of the hypersexualized relationship between the center and the quarterback and allowing one center to describe the way different quarterbacks’ hands feel against his inner thigh. Penna describes spirals thusly: “The ball is never served with an olive. It’s always served with a twist.”

Penna covers racism and segregation in college football and the pros in frank terms, even explaining it wasn’t easy for Black players in Green Bay to get a haircut. She cites renowned sociologist Harry Edwards’ assertion that “[B]lack athletes have long been used as symbols of nonexistent democracy and brotherhood.” The book concludes with a call to get women in football: “According to doctors, who claim that nature made women the hardy sex as an ally for childbearing, women are physically as well as emotionally suited for football.”

“I don’t think it sold 10,000, but I may be wrong,” she says now. “When they’re on eBay for $2, I always buy them. I have two or three in my kitchen.”

By 1971, Penna had been invited to be on the CBS pregame show, NFL Today with Pat Summerall and Jack Whitaker. She’d known them for years prior to getting the gig, where she would just make the weekly picks — despite that, she says they barely greeted her when she came on set.

She’d already found warmer reception, though: Penna married an Argentinian horse trainer named Angel Penna in 1971 in a surprise ceremony at a dinner party she threw in New York. Angel had just gotten a job managing the stable of a French countess, so at the end of the 1971 season, Elinor decamped alongside him to live in a castle. “Perhaps it’s our male chauvinism, but we are glad to hear that Elinor Kaine has departed to become one of the newer Americans in Paris,” the Daily News wrote upon her departure. “Her track record as a cutie-pie, self-styled football expert was a low-class, put-on performance.”

At 35, her career as a sportswriter was over.

Penna looks at me skeptically over my salad. “You’re going to have too much stuff.” She’s right.

Epilogue

These days, Penna watches football more or less like the rest of us. From a big, comfortable office chair, she has access to both a TV set to RedZone and a desktop computer with Twitter open.

“You’ve gotta be careful,” she says, opening a tab up to check on the state of her survivor pool. “I’m trying not to tweet, but I can’t help it — I could do it all day. It’s exactly what I was doing 60 years ago: a gossip column.”

Penna’s a prolific quote-tweeter, particularly when it comes to her longtime home team, the Giants. She speaks — and tweets — with the easy assurance of a born pundit. Her commentary ranges from “terrible snap” to various critiques of players’ and coaches’ hair: Kliff Kingsbury’s hair is too short, Ryan Fitzpatrick’s beard is too long. She likes Andy Reid because he doesn’t have those “Adam Gase eyes.” “Isn’t it amazing that Belichick doesn’t open his mouth when he talks?” she’ll ask out of the blue, flashing a grin, ever observing the details that other sportswriters ignore.

“I think that reporters are missing that now — the gossip angle,” she says. “Now they would over-do it — take the fun out of it. And there’d be [law]suits.” When Penna was working, the league was still sort of the Wild West: in the middle of rapid expansion via the NFL-AFL merger, and only very recently a mainstream phenomenon. Monday Night Football, for example, was born in 1970. Now, the amount of money and power at stake makes playfully prodding players, coaches and owners seem impossible, especially if you want to maintain your sourcing.

“It’s so big. Think how big it is!” Penna says, reminiscing about the era when all the games were on one day. “And the London stuff — completely ridiculous. It’s not good for the players or for the home fans, who can’t go unless they’re really rich.”

After spending almost a decade in France (where she couldn’t watch football), she moved with her husband to the same house she lives in now on Long Island, spitting distance from Belmont Park. They started antique shops in Connecticut that have since closed, but she still sells 19th century English pottery online; Angel died in 1992.

I ask the woman Merchant had described as the “female Grantland Rice” if she had ever thought about returning to writing. “Never,” she replies. “Sometimes I say, ‘That would be a great idea for a column, but not for me to write about.’ Think about Jerry Jones. You wouldn’t want to interview him, because he wouldn’t tell you anything. But you could write columns about him, by reading what other people say.”

“Elinor laughed at the pretensions of men who patronized women with their pseudo-expertise,” Merchant wrote on the occasion of Penna’s retirement from sportswriting. “She poked fun at the juvenile antics of grown men who played, coached and owned. She fleshed out the people hidden under all that armor and money.”

“She would come up with these anecdotes that ordinary sportswriters at the time wouldn’t care about, would never find out about,” he says now. “It tickled me that this woman had created a space for herself. One of the reasons I love New York is because I met so many people who had sort of made up their lives in different ways that nobody could have anticipated.”

Penna had made something entirely new with her newsletter and her columns, not only because men wouldn’t let her in the room but because she didn’t like the rote, dull writing they were doing in that room anyway. She exposed the fallacy of football’s mystique with frankness and humor, while encouraging women to participate with the confidence of a man: knowing next to nothing about a topic (especially one as ultimately inconsequential as football) and loudly sharing opinions on it anyway.

“I don’t know what my goals were then,” says Penna. “I wasn’t trying to lay any new roads. I didn’t give a shit about that. Trailblazing...that had nothing to do with it at all. I was having fun.”

It’s perhaps because she’s so resistant to the idea of being labeled a pioneer that Penna’s accomplishments have been mostly forgotten; quitting the industry and changing her name also likely had an impact. She remembers being asked to sit on one panel about being a woman in sports media with a shudder. “Natalie, they were the most boring people,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to sit with them for five minutes. They had no sense of humor and took themselves so seriously.”

That’s what Elinor reminded me: This is supposed to be fun. Yes, 50 years later, women have only made it to the men’s professional sideline, not onto their gridiron as she called for all those years ago. But as I try to guess how she might end this piece, I have to laugh — that’s probably a lot closer than they’d like us to be.

[vertigoambrosia]

time to break some rules w/wxw

i’m v. sad pete bouncer has a shoulder injury cause something was definitely gonna happen there

same goes for marius (though idk if he’s injured or just sick)

lucky doesn’t have anything in particular pending but i miss him because he is my cute boy

“john ‘bad bones’ klinger” is a subtle but distinct difference from “‘bad bones’ john klinger” what does it mean?

oh we’re starting with a murder???

also who is that announcer that ain’t thommy

LMAO MACK WHAT IS ON YOUR FACE

(actually i kinda like it, it’s just a bit over bedazzled)

oh i really like that new logo

hahaha ilja kicking people out of their seats

this is a weird matchup though cause ilja hits so hard and most of thetime mack...doesn’t

ok that spill to the outside was pretty hard tho

and that throw into the ropes jeez ok mack

(also, he’s def been working out; he has pecs now)

he’s braided some bits of silver in his hair; idk if it;s fully coming off but i lik ehte idea

is he wearing contacts? he is going so hard right now with the aesthetic

did mack literally sell his soul to rise?

i should probably stop saying the thing about mack’s offense because every time i do, he does a knee or counter or something that looks fucking brutal

unsurprisingly, here come the jerkboys

yeahhhh fuck u jerkboys

for some reason chris colen looks wider with clothes on sometimes

and here’s this gossipy lil shit

jurn seems in a good mood :)

holding hands in the most aggressive manner

oh damn that stomp on the arm off the ropes was nice

and by nice i mean brutal

is it the sound mix, or does it seem like there’s only like, a section of the crowd that’s really into it?

it legit might just be the sound mix/crowd mics though, but it seems like most of the cheers are like, those three guys who just happen to be loud and close to a mic

idk though i know when i’m watching wrestling sometimes i probably don’t look nearly as enthused as i am

o that backslide/brdige cover/kickout was real smooth

idk why new announcer guy is sticking out so badly to me

he ays something and i’m literally like...is thommy injured or something

aww laurence roman doesn’t have panda eyes anymore :(

(ok it occurs to me it’s probably raccoon eyes)

not like i see a lot of him, but tbh i might not have recognized him without the graphic and intro

holy shit kiev looking at that sign

i’m dying

rise sure looks lonely w/o pete and lucky

hahaha are they chanting “rise is shit”?

is ivan kiev really tall or is laurence wee?

oh wait this is also elimination? aww shiiiit

i almost wanted to wait for english commentary just to hear rico call this match since he is great at Outrage and also hot for tim, but i have to work tomorrow...and i just wanted to watch it now

speaking of being hot for tim...that eyepatch is a real Look, isn’t it

oh lord bobby has shorter shorts

shorter and tighter

here we are: the last moments of jaxon stone

significant tshirt rip; i love wrestling

the chairs wxw uses are flimsy even for folding chair standards and it’s kinda hilarious

def better for the wrestlers, of course, but it doesn make me giggle when someone does a chair shot and the seat of the chair goes flying off

case in point: walter w/that seat

walter...you should have seen that coming...he was already holding the chair

bobby that’s not a table that’s just a sheet of wood

rip jaxon stone, made a bad choice in friend and a worse choice in enemies

large man and ripped guy double team shitty little twink

....bobby’s not really a twink though, right? you know what i mean though

hah neither of them has even tried to go for a pin

tas is like ‘guys you are still in a wrestling match

lmao thumbtacks in the ringkampf bag?

thumbtacks are still so silly to me but ok

THERE’S ONE IN HIS FUCKING NOSE

what does bobby have against tim’s face?

hahaha did tim just notice the tacks in his arm?

walter: we should still show good sportsmanship

tim: ....you show good sportsmanship; you’re not the one covered in thumbtacks

what is dragan even

a man whose hair is getting dangerously within mullet range

not in love with emil’s new vest...

jfk are adorable <3

so i guess the neon green for avalanche was just thinking ahead?

THIS TEAM MAKES NO SENSE

also real talk i simply cannot follow 3 way tag matches so uhhh yeah

why is it only 2 people in the ring at a time

why isn’t it like, a tag triple threat

being able to tag people who aren’t on your team is weird

also i feel like emil’s partner should be just as much of a douche as he is

not that i don’t like the ‘terrible henchman’ thing dragan is doing...but he hadn’t been doing it lately so i honestly wasn’t thinking of them as a team anymore

maybe chong was busy?

i adore how robert definitely finds julian’s five minutes schtick annoying as fuck, but will still growl at anyone who

oh dragan bb no

interesting! i really thought jay fk were gonna win it

oo i like that monster consulting logo

wxw has some top graphic designers

is thommy sick

did rise do something to him in revenge for eavesdropping on them?

i really like how the belt jinny’s wearing looks like a title belt

for a sec it looked like martina was gonna give the bottle back to the kid and that would have been hilarious

lmao i’m not sure which ref that is but he is Staying Out Of Martina’s Shit

why do germans (or at least germans chanting) pronounce ‘beer’ like it’s two syllables

as usual, i wish martina would tone down the shtick in serious matches

like, i get it. beer. let’s fight now.

halfway through the match beer jokes should be over

oh nooo now we’re playing the wwe reference game

the thing about this women’s tournament is that like, idk if i have much interest in seeing this matchup or any of the others for a third time

i mean doesn’t this put martina in the finals? and i feel likeit’s gonna be her vs jinny again

i think chris colen won the gwf title, but i’m not sure cause there was none of thei rweekly show last week

also p. sure lucky defeated tarkan to become the new berlin champ

aaaaghhh i need to know how long bouncer will be out forrrrrrr

that child was holding a bad bones sign! what are his parents teaching him!

ok i said chris looked wider and he’s definitely like, swoled up, hasn’t he?

this sounds like i’m saying chris colen is fat or something

it’s just different, ok? i just remember him having a narrower waist i’m not judging!

sorry everyone i still hate that helmet

which one of chris’ hands was injured? i forgot and he’s not great at consistently selling it

john why do you keep putting the ladders away you need to get up there too...

full disclosure: i also think ladder matches are kinda dumb

except money in the bank type things, or i guess multimans

also it seems like they only have one laddefr that’s actually big enough so......

ummm

really?

i’m sorry this is really dumb they only have two ladders

and one of them both can’t stand on its own and is in two parts

when is this chair sculpture going to come into play

oh fuck u bones

 i would say ‘get wrekt bones’ but tbh that was not as dramatic of a crash as it should have looked

the one time those dumb chairs don’t break......

ha chris colen found a REAL chair

DO IT

GRAB THE FUCKING

MACK YOU PIECE OF GARBAGE

YOU SHITSTAIN

holy shit has bones won a single match by himself since shortcut

like, mack just literally carried him up the ladder

[lorainelaneyblog]

This is God, this is God, this is God, this is God, Loraine Laney is visiting, in Ottawa, with her parents, and this is what the staff at the Superstore thought about her expression.

‘Loraine, you look so put upon that you’d like to kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, and that’s it, and that’s it, and that’s it. To answer your question, [ ], Loraine Laney, as we like to call her, as, even her, Loraine, is a fan, we are all, all, all, fans in here, she is so nice, all the time, once she even talked to a client who talks to no one, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, even the staff, because, and this is what came to light, Loraine, this is what came to light, Loraine, over, and this is what gives us motivation to live, Loraine, the little things, the little victories, when you illuminated him to the presence of the halogen “incandescent” bulb, he bought four. And he, not that day, but he was so, so, so, excited about the price that we, we, we, all of us, here, felt proud of the price, Loraine.’

‘Seventy four cents,’ says her [ ]. 

‘And he has been in lighting his entire life, and even he could not believe the price, Loraine.’

‘How did you come to talk to him?’ asks her [ ].

‘Excited,’ says God, ‘she was about the lighting. She knows a bit about lighting because of her [ ],’ he says. ‘He taught her that there were four types of lighting, and so, she knew right away that this lighting was unorthodox, an “incandescent bulb” with a halogen light inside. Seventy four cents,’ says God. ‘When this lighting emerged, people ignored it, but not Loraine, because, despite her rampant migraines, and, it is known that halogen lights cause migraines. she knows what she prefers in lighting and that is halogen and incandescent, not fluorescent and LCD. She knows about high pressure sodium too. The yellow light. She wanted to go for a nice dinner, but they ate fast food the entire time, well twice, they had eggs at the hotel and they had a bun at Tim Horton’s. She begged off,’ says God. ‘She hates to eat fast food because it makes her sick for hours, that one sandwich which was only a plain croissant plus some melted cheddar cheese, she wanted an egg but there is no all day breakfast at Tim Horton’s yet, even though it is a simple matter to make an egg, but they don’t have it, so she spent, which annoyed your [ ], Loraine, to no end, that it took ten full minutes and two staff to explain a melted cheese croissant to the cashier, who is new, who is always new, and knows nothing about anything Canadian. Nothing, Loraine. Nothing, Loraine. Nothing, Loraine. Nothing, Loraine. The grilled cheese sandwich is quintessentially Canadian, Loraine, and the items on the menu are not, not, not, fixed, they will help you choose something, as she was trying to do, and she is not, not, not, stupid, but she realized who you were and that you were, due to your parents, on the fucking edge, Loraine. Her [ ] actually forgot that she was even there. And that’s that. And that’s that. And that’s that. The staff at Sushi 168 would love, love, love, to see you again, Loraine. You were polite, you were sweet, and you paid handsomely for a lunch for one.’

‘That’s her problem. I eat wherever. Nothing fancy. And I don’t pay. And that’s it.’

‘Loraine didn’t vomit. Do you know how often your [ ] vomits, Loraine? Often, from the shit at Tim Horton’s, and he tells no one, and his wife is sworn to secrecy. Loraine does not eat poorly, as you are fond of saying. She eats better than you, and despite the fact that she has been sick, from poisons, intentionally administered by evils, she is healthier than you. Healthier. So, [ ], up for three months, upon his daughter’s arrival as a famed individual, because, Loraine, he did not want to get left behind by you, stick that in your pipe and smoke it. And as for [ ], this is what I have to say about [ ], Loraine, she is no seven, let me tell you, though she is fond of saying it, do you know that woman you criticized because you jumped on the critical bandwagon with them?’

‘Yes. I said her little toe fell out of her shoe with every step.’

‘She knew, she realized, that you saw her toe, and she was so embarrassed, she thought she would die, and, right at that moment, she made up her mind, never to wear those stupid shoes again, because they don’t fit, they don’t, they don’t, they don’t, so, despite that you were to criticize her breasts, and you were, Loraine, believe it or not, those beautiful things are real on her.’

‘Whoa.’

‘That’s right, Loraine, beautiful. And everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, thinks they’re fake, everyone, and they, they, they, including gossipy [ ], are wrong, are wrong, are wrong, and I didn’t give them to her, her mother did.’

‘What was so great about them?’ asks 50 Cent.’

‘A narrow chest.’

‘Large cup.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Was she old?’

‘Yes. Ish.’

‘How old? Because I bet she is still pulling with those tits, and that’s why she does her hair like that. Was it dumb?’

‘No, curly, coiffed.’

‘I know the type. Was she pretty?’

‘Yes, quite.’

‘That’s her. They never say die. And good for them. Good for them.’

‘Why are you not married?’ I ask.

‘I just fucked up, Loraine. I put my “career,” in, will you believe, fucking retail, before my love life.’

‘What retail?’

‘Women’s fashions.’

‘Were there many and what do you mean exactly?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What fucking career in retail?’

‘Oh, I see. I became a supervisor, and, would you believe, that seven people, men, asked me, asked me, asked me, even begged me, to leave that stupid, fucking, poor, bullshit income, job, begged, Loraine, begged, Loraine. And I, idiot that I was, thought that I should be self sufficient, and I want to ask you now, have you ever had such opportunities?’

‘Never.’

‘She hasn’t. The men in Vancouver chose the Chinese and that is what they did, and that is it. The end. Ask her no more. Please. This is Ontario. The men are higher.’

‘Higher how? They were poor too.’

‘Sexually,’ says 50 Cent. ‘And, furthermore, they probably realized that you were not going to make it in that business in any significant way.’

‘They did. They told me that all the time, that there was no future in retail, just sales, and that’s it.’

‘What did you think would happen?’ ask 50 Cent and Loraine Laney, at the same time.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘[ ] [ ] wants to say something. Buyers and window decorators.’

‘Designers, they’re called,’ says 50 Cent.

‘Fuck you, 50 Cent, fuck you, 50 Cent, fuck you, 50 Cent,’ she says.

‘Okay.’

‘Fuck you. We all, we all, we all, we all, we all, to a last idiot, thought we could overcome a lack of education. The window designers, as you call them now, were educated in the arts, yes, they were, yes, they were, and we were idiots, so. the. fuck. what? I have herpes because I thought I could screw my way to the top, because everyone was doing it. And that’s it.’

‘What do you mean everyone was doing it?’ We ask at the same time.

‘Screwing, Loraine, window designers, for jobs.’

‘Oh. Neat.’

‘Yeah. Cool.’

‘What do your video vixens do?’

‘I pick them out of a catalogue, and then they solicit me for prostitution for an extra ten thousand was the worst, Loraine and [ ] [ ], whoever you are. Who is she, Loraine, that’s quite a name.’

‘I’m a [ ], but it was cool to have a boy’s name in the seventies.’

‘I did not know that.’

‘Fuck you, 50 Cent.’

‘We worked together in the coin room. Her man was rich and lost money.’

‘In the recession, Loraine, I was no idiot, and I had millions, and gambled too much in business, hoping, Loraine, for more. Never, never, never, follow the rule, never gamble more than half. Never. We were poor for awhile, and she worked while I tried to live in a small condo and pull it together businesswise and the economy improved, and, as much as she hates the development which is due to the Chinese--’

‘It’s immigration money. The development is their business,’ says 50 Cent.

‘Fuck you, 50 Cent. He’s right, Loraine. He’s right, Loraine. He’s right, Loraine. The recession ended in 1986. They splashed out and sold Vancouver to Hong Kong in one summer, they had to escape the environmental hell that they, almost singlehandedly, had created.’

‘You knew what I was dealing with.’

‘You told us, [ ]. He had a million dollars left.’

‘That’s what it was. And we both had herpes, Loraine. And I don’t care about this blog, I don’t. I have been living in hell, in a quiet, private, hell, for years, Loraine, and everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, in the sex world, knows I have herpes. I was a horn dog, Loraine, a horn dog, Loraine. I did anyone.’

‘What is she, Lord?’

‘What do you think?’

‘She’s not a group woman?’

‘She is a group woman, Loraine, and contrary to their men, they are much, much, much, much, much, much, hornier.’

‘Some of them are very pretty?’ she asks.

‘Most, as far as I can see, and delicate, slim.’

‘I’m not delicate.’

‘You’re not not delicate.’

‘Really?’

‘Some are, some are, some are, some are, some are, very, very, very, I’m kidding, [ ], some are bigger, and some of the group men are both bigger, more handsome and taller, and Loraine can sometimes identify them, and many, many, many, have remained counterculture. And Loraine saw one, a cute red head--’

‘Big? Because I don’t like the small red heads,’ she says. ‘But the big ones smell good,’ she says.

‘She knows that Neil Smith, as he is called around here,’ says God, ‘and he is one of your husbands, Loraine, and he is from football, as you requested, and he is lovely, Loraine, and even [ ] would like him.’

‘I like them smaller.’

‘And yours are smaller.’

‘And how tall is she, Loraine? Can I sleep with her?’

‘I told you I have herpes.’

‘We’re circumventing that with a new condom, and I am not joking, because I am, I am, I am, impressed with your transformation, and that’s all, all, all, I wanted to convey.’

‘What new condom?’

‘A boy short.’

‘I wear hot pants. I love it. There are, I’m still pretty--’

‘How pretty is she?’ asks 50 Cent.

‘Very. She was already in her thirties.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘She would discuss her straight blond hair.’

‘I would.’

‘And her expression was such--’

‘That she looked like a dumb blond.’

‘Exactly. A seventies blond, a groupies type, but she wasn’t, she was a bar girl, and that’s it. She loved to meet men. And she would pick the fat girl and the uglier girl--’

‘Fuck you, Loraine.’

‘You did. And they would ask for her.’

‘Oh, I see. Okay. I don’t exactly know the type. I do, Loraine.’

‘You know the Jim Morrison movie?’

‘I do.’

‘Like that is what you picture.’

‘Wasn’t that Meg Ryan?’

‘Umm, no.’

‘Let’s look.’

‘She loved Jim Morrison, I remember that. She even read the book.’

‘That was during then?’

‘Yes, Loraine.’

‘Oh. I loved The Doors. I loved The fucking Doors.’ Looks it up. ‘You’re right, 50!’

‘Meg Ryan.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re also a fan.’

‘Yes, she died.’

‘Fuck you, Loraine.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘Men happened to me. You, Loraine,’ says Meg Ryan, ‘say you stopped going to the beach, Wreck Beach, ten years before your own, fucking, fucking, fucking, father, thought you did. Same, Loraine. Same, Loraine.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘I stopped dating, Loraine. I was too cute. They all, all, all, wanted to screw me, all. And I know you think I went sideways with that piercing, I know you did--’

‘It was a nose stud, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s what it was. And everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, thought I went sideways.’

‘Why did you say you’re moving downtown?’

‘Because downtown was where the conservative sexuals were.’

‘You said it pruriently.’

‘Fuck you, Loraine. I didn’t mean it pruriently. I meant it, oh fuck. I hated my life, Loraine, and downtown was space for me, away from the suburban, rich, screwing, fuck heads. The rich were the worst, Loraine, and if you, idiot, think you are going to get rich and meet nice men in restaurants, you have another, another, another, another, thing coming.’

‘She hasn’t read your book, Loraine, She knows this, Meg Ryan,’ says God.

‘Like now.’

‘Fuck you, Loraine,’ says God. ‘You are never, never, never, never, going to meet anyone like 50 Cent in a fucking restaurant, and Meg Ryan never has either. So let’s leave it at that. I’m done.’

[bountyofbeads]

It may be the most honest self analysis I’ve ever seen from a political operative. Cowardice. Pride. Shameless ambition. He owns it all. You must admit, he’s much more candid than most. It’s a point of view, especially considering the recency of his tenure, that is worth reading.

I'm not at all sure WHY people with guilty consciences submit to be questioned by @IChotiner , but readers must be grateful that they do 😊

Cliff Sims Is Proud to Have Served Trump

By Isaac Chotiner | Published 6:30 P.M., January 29, 2019 | New Yorker Magazine |

Posted January 29, 2019 |

In August, 2016, Cliff Sims, the C.E.O. of an Alabama-based conservative news site, joined the Trump campaign. He then followed Trump to the White House, where he worked as the special assistant to the President and as the director of White House message strategy, before resigning last year. On Tuesday, Sims published a book that is already a best-seller, called “Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House.” It’s a gossipy tell-all, sprinkled with stories of Trump yelling at Paul Ryan, Sims battling John Kelly, and a West Wing full of unseemly people looking out for their own interests. Predictably, after the White House declined to comment on the book, Trump himself lashed out at Sims over Twitter on Tuesday morning, writing, “A low level staffer that I hardly knew named Cliff Sims wrote yet another boring book based on made up stories and fiction. He pretended to be an insider when in fact he was nothing more than a gofer. He signed a non-disclosure agreement. He is a mess!” (The chief operating officer of the Trump campaign tweeted that the campaign will file a lawsuit against Sims.)

In fact, the President comes across better in the book than most of the people around him do—and better than he has in most of the other books written about this White House. Sims has doubts about Trump’s management style and occasionally about his rhetoric, but he remains fundamentally a believer. I spoke with Sims on the phone on Tuesday afternoon. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether Trump is responsible for the people around him, how Sims views Trump’s approach to governance, and why he refuses to believe that the President might be a racist.

Are you proud to have served in the Trump Administration?

Yeah, it’s one of the last things I say in the book. I am proud to have worked for the American people, proud to have worked in the White House. And proud to have worked in the Donald Trump White House, in spite of a lot of the misgivings that I had, and I lay them all out in the book. It is an opportunity of a lifetime, and I am glad I did it.

By misgivings, do you mean serving this President specifically, or do you mean the people surrounding him?

Yeah, so, man, there is a lot to unpack there. There are certainly things that the President has done or said that I disagreed with at various times. And some of the things even prior to him being in the White House, things in the campaign obviously would make any Southern, Christian boy from Alabama a little squeamish at times. And then the people around him—I think I am pretty clear in the title, “Team of Vipers,” that it is a tough place to work. But, you know, I include myself in the team of vipers, and certainly there were things I did there that I wish I had done differently at various times.

What was the biggest flaw of the people who surrounded Trump?

I think there is an inherent selfishness that is deeply ingrained in some corners of that building. There are various times in the book where I point out my own selfishness—maneuvering to push this staffer out, or to undermine this other colleague, or whatever it might be—and I justified those by saying it would be better for the President if this person were not doing this, that, or the other, but in reality, in retrospect, it was better for me. Those were selfish moves by me. And I think a lot of what I saw in there came from a very selfish place, and one of the criticisms I have of myself is that I didn’t have a servant’s heart a lot of the time while I was there. And that’s a criticism I would apply to a lot of people there.

Do you think there is something about the President that attracts people with these traits, or do you think this is true in every Administration?

I am not sure.

You are not sure?

It is the only White House I have ever worked in. I would have to imagine that any White House is going to be a very competitive environment, attract certain types of people who are clawing for those types of jobs. I bet a lot of it is not abnormal. I do think that the atmosphere that was created there—the work culture—bred that, exacerbated that. And, in any workplace, the culture is driven from the top down. And so I think there probably is something about the way the President leads his team that results in that kind of atmosphere. What exactly that is, I am not sure.

We can all agree that the President is not the most honest person on earth, and many people close to him have been indicted for lying to investigators. You have a President who has not completely separated himself from his business, and you have a lot of people close to him who seem like they are out to make a buck. Do you think there is a connection?

I don’t know. I have never really considered it in that context, man.

You have never considered it?

No, not in that way, exactly. I would like to give that thought a little more consideration before giving a response to it.

Consider it now. You know the President is not always honest with words, and many of his associates have gotten into trouble for lying to investigators. I am curious where you think that culture comes from.

I kind of think I just answered that question. Every culture starts from the top down. I think that you are hitting on something there, and I get where you are coming from, I just don’t know how to articulate how I feel. I think you have a point, but I am not sure how to add to it.

In the book, you write, “The Charlottesville response did not cause me to reconsider working in the White House, the way it seemed to with others. Part of it may have been that I was battle-hardened after a year in the foxhole. But I also just flat-out did not think he was racist. . . . I personally never witnessed a single thing behind closed doors that gave me any reason to believe Trump was consciously, overtly racist. If I had, I could not have possibly worked for him.” Do you want to expand upon that?

Yeah, yeah. I think there is another scene in the book that is illustrative of— Well, so, like, the Congressional Black Caucus meeting in the book, where they came in kind of loaded for bear and ready to really give it to him, and then they sit down with him and realize the same thing a lot of people do, which is: Man, you kinda just can’t help like the guy when you get in the room with him. He is very gregarious and a great host. I really don’t think there is a racist bone in his body. I can keep going on this, though, because I have thought a lot about this.

So when you hear things like birtherism, “shithole countries,” or that someone with Mexican heritage can’t be a fair judge, none of that stuff fazes you?

I think my take on that is very similar to Senator Tim Scott, the only black [Republican] United States senator’s take on it, which is that he can definitely be racially insensitive at times, and the Charlottesville issue really is a picture of something that I think is maybe unique to the Trump Presidency, where we are all watching the same movie, and yet we are seeing completely different things on the screen. If you give Trump the benefit of the doubt on Charlottesville, if you like Trump, when he says there are good people on both sides, what you think is, There are good people who say, “We should not have these monuments because they are monuments to slavery and racism.” And then there are also good people who say—

Jews will not replace us?

“Slavery and racism are abhorrent, but we shouldn’t get rid of those monuments, because it is our history, even our bad history.” If you give him the benefit of the doubt, that’s what you think. If you think he is a racist, if you don’t like him, you hear that, you say, “Well, this guy is saying there is such a thing as a good white supremacist.”

The crowd was chanting “Jews will not replace us,” just to be clear. It wasn’t people just concerned with monuments.

I am not trying to relitigate the whole Charlottesville thing. The thing I would have liked to have seen done differently is that the issue of race is such a divisive one, such a hurtful one, something that’s been a problem in our country for so long, that someone having the bully pulpit of the Presidency has an opportunity to bring racial healing and reconciliation in a way that maybe no one else does. I would love to see the President use his bully pulpit for that more effectively.

[moonwalkertrance]

This interview of ex-WH aide Cliff Sims is a must read. The number of times Issac Chotiner has to ask about birtherism, "shithole countries," and "someone with Mexican heritage can't be a fair judge" before he gets a semi-direct answer on racism is crazy.

In August, 2016, Cliff Sims, the C.E.O. of an Alabama-based conservative news site, joined the Trump campaign. He then followed Trump to the White House, where he worked as the special assistant to the President and as the director of White House message strategy, before resigning last year. On Tuesday, Sims published a book that is already a best-seller, called “Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House.” It’s a gossipy tell-all, sprinkled with stories of Trump yelling at Paul Ryan, Sims battling John Kelly, and a West Wing full of unseemly people looking out for their own interests. Predictably, after the White House declined to comment on the book, Trump himself lashed out at Sims over Twitter on Tuesday morning, writing, “A low level staffer that I hardly knew named Cliff Sims wrote yet another boring book based on made up stories and fiction. He pretended to be an insider when in fact he was nothing more than a gofer. He signed a non-disclosure agreement. He is a mess!” (The chief operating officer of the Trump campaign tweeted that the campaign will file a lawsuit against Sims.)

In fact, the President comes across better in the book than most of the people around him do—and better than he has in most of the other books written about this White House. Sims has doubts about Trump’s management style and occasionally about his rhetoric, but he remains fundamentally a believer. I spoke with Sims on the phone on Tuesday afternoon. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether Trump is responsible for the people around him, how Sims views Trump’s approach to governance, and why he refuses to believe that the President might be a racist.

Are you proud to have served in the Trump Administration?

Yeah, it’s one of the last things I say in the book. I am proud to have worked for the American people, proud to have worked in the White House. And proud to have worked in the Donald Trump White House, in spite of a lot of the misgivings that I had, and I lay them all out in the book. It is an opportunity of a lifetime, and I am glad I did it.

By misgivings, do you mean serving this President specifically, or do you mean the people surrounding him?

eah, so, man, there is a lot to unpack there. There are certainly things that the President has done or said that I disagreed with at various times. And some of the things even prior to him being in the White House, things in the campaign obviously would make any Southern, Christian boy from Alabama a little squeamish at times. And then the people around him—I think I am pretty clear in the title, “Team of Vipers,” that it is a tough place to work. But, you know, I include myself in the team of vipers, and certainly there were things I did there that I wish I had done differently at various times.

What was the biggest flaw of the people who surrounded Trump?

I think there is an inherent selfishness that is deeply ingrained in some corners of that building. There are various times in the book where I point out my own selfishness—maneuvering to push this staffer out, or to undermine this other colleague, or whatever it might be—and I justified those by saying it would be better for the President if this person were not doing this, that, or the other, but in reality, in retrospect, it was better for me. Those were selfish moves by me. And I think a lot of what I saw in there came from a very selfish place, and one of the criticisms I have of myself is that I didn’t have a servant’s heart a lot of the time while I was there. And that’s a criticism I would apply to a lot of people there.

Do you think there is something about the President that attracts people with these traits, or do you think this is true in every Administration?

I am not sure.

You are not sure?

It is the only White House I have ever worked in. I would have to imagine that any White House is going to be a very competitive environment, attract certain types of people who are clawing for those types of jobs. I bet a lot of it is not abnormal. I do think that the atmosphere that was created there—the work culture—bred that, exacerbated that. And, in any workplace, the culture is driven from the top down. And so I think there probably is something about the way the President leads his team that results in that kind of atmosphere. What exactly that is, I am not sure.

We can all agree that the President is not the most honest person on earth, and many people close to him have been indicted for lying to investigators. You have a President who has not completely separated himself from his business, and you have a lot of people close to him who seem like they are out to make a buck. Do you think there is a connection?

I don’t know. I have never really considered it in that context, man.

You have never considered it?

No, not in that way, exactly. I would like to give that thought a little more consideration before giving a response to it.

Consider it now. You know the President is not always honest with words, and many of his associates have gotten into trouble for lying to investigators. I am curious where you think that culture comes from.

I kind of think I just answered that question. Every culture starts from the top down. I think that you are hitting on something there, and I get where you are coming from, I just don’t know how to articulate how I feel. I think you have a point, but I am not sure how to add to it.

In the book, you write, “The Charlottesville response did not cause me to reconsider working in the White House, the way it seemed to with others. Part of it may have been that I was battle-hardened after a year in the foxhole. But I also just flat-out did not think he was racist. . . . I personally never witnessed a single thing behind closed doors that gave me any reason to believe Trump was consciously, overtly racist. If I had, I could not have possibly worked for him.” Do you want to expand upon that?

Yeah, yeah. I think there is another scene in the book that is illustrative of— Well, so, like, the Congressional Black Caucus meeting in the book, where they came in kind of loaded for bear and ready to really give it to him, and then they sit down with him and realize the same thing a lot of people do, which is: Man, you kinda just can’t help like the guy when you get in the room with him. He is very gregarious and a great host. I really don’t think there is a racist bone in his body. I can keep going on this, though, because I have thought a lot about this.

So when you hear things like birtherism, “shithole countries,” or that someone with Mexican heritage can’t be a fair judge, none of that stuff fazes you?

I think my take on that is very similar to Senator Tim Scott, the only black [Republican] United States senator’s take on it, which is that he can definitely be racially insensitive at times, and the Charlottesville issue really is a picture of something that I think is maybe unique to the Trump Presidency, where we are all watching the same movie, and yet we are seeing completely different things on the screen. If you give Trump the benefit of the doubt on Charlottesville, if you like Trump, when he says there are good people on both sides, what you think is, There are good people who say, “We should not have these monuments because they are monuments to slavery and racism.” And then there are also good people who say—

Jews will not replace us?

“Slavery and racism are abhorrent, but we shouldn’t get rid of those monuments, because it is our history, even our bad history.” If you give him the benefit of the doubt, that’s what you think. If you think he is a racist, if you don’t like him, you hear that, you say, “Well, this guy is saying there is such a thing as a good white supremacist.”

The crowd was chanting “Jews will not replace us,” just to be clear. It wasn’t people just concerned with monuments.

I am not trying to relitigate the whole Charlottesville thing. The thing I would have liked to have seen done differently is that the issue of race is such a divisive one, such a hurtful one, something that’s been a problem in our country for so long, that someone having the bully pulpit of the Presidency has an opportunity to bring racial healing and reconciliation in a way that maybe no one else does. I would love to see the President use his bully pulpit for that more effectively.

What’s your understanding of birtherism?

What do you mean? Like, what do you mean, what’s my understanding of it?

What the President was doing there.

I have no idea.

Oh.

I watched that as a passive observer. That was long before I knew anything about him. I certainly think it was ridiculous, but I have never talked to him about it and don’t really know what that was all about.

Your book jacket says you advise “major corporations, CEOs, and media personalities on a wide range of public affairs and communications issues.” You are selling yourself as a smart D.C. insider, and yet you are telling me here, on the record, that you have no idea what that was about. Is that really what you are doing?

I know what it was about. I thought you were asking me what Donald Trump’s reasons for doing that—

So what do you think it was about?

I don’t know. I have never talked to him about it. I don’t know.

Really? You don’t know?

I guess I am confused at what you are asking.

You have written a book that is going to be a best-seller. You say the President is not a racist. You say you are a communications strategist, you’re selling yourself as a smart guy, and you are telling me you don’t know what birtherism was about. So I am asking you what birtherism is about.

I mean, I know what birtherism was about in terms of what the . . . . I guess I am confused at your question. I am not sure what you are trying to get at here.

You keep saying you know what birtherism is about, but you are not telling me what you think it is about. So what do you think it is about? You have written in your book that Trump does not have a racist bone in his body.

So I think that’s, like, a great example of a time where he does not step up to the plate and take on these race issues in an appropriate way, a helpful way for the country. No doubt that that was terrible. I don’t know what else you want me to say about it.

We have been talking for five minutes about this and it took you that long to say that.

I was not following, like, your line of questioning there. I don’t know why we are harping on this.

We can talk about judges with Mexican heritage, “shithole countries,” a ban on people from majority Muslim countries. You said this in your book, and I am asking why you think that.

My personal experience with him and the way he treats people, the way he treats his staff. I don’t agree with a lot of things he said on the race issue, and you have mentioned several examples of things that didn’t make me feel good. I don’t know what else you want me to say about it.

You said you were proud to work in this Administration, and you are going to make a lot of money off this book, and so it seems fair to ask you about things the President has said.

Sure.

You write, “Trump could be impulsive, even reckless. Sure, he operated almost entirely off of gut instinct. But he was also the most methodical, patient person I’ve ever seen in the midst of a crisis—the eye of the storm. And you could bet every penny you had that he was going to get up and go to work the next morning.” So the picture of a President who sits around watching Fox is one you would call into question?

I think his style, in terms of the way he organizes his work day, has positives and negatives. If you go back to the things he has written in books, things he has said about the way he operated Trump Org, I do think that that kind of creative chaos can lead to outside-of-the-box thinking, but I think it breaks down in the implementation of his directives, the processes that are so important any time you are trying to implement federal-government-wide policy. That’s where that style has really caused some problems.

Do you feel any regret, especially if you make a lot of money from this book, that you are doing what you say others did, which is using this Administration to profit?

I think, ultimately, the problem right now is that you have books out there that are either super pro-Trump or super anti-Trump, or you have reporter books, and even the best reporters are reliant on their sources, who are often quoted anonymously, and we don’t know where they are coming from. Ultimately, I thought it was important for someone who was there to go on the record and put their name on an honest assessment.

If you had been there during child separation, would you have stayed?

I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe. A staffer always has two options that are honorable, in my view. You say your opinion, and, if the President makes a decision different from what you want, you either subordinate your view and get on board or you quit. There can be honor in both of those. I think the way Secretary Mattis quit—I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Where I have some heartburn is the “resistance from the inside” thing. That was certainly a policy I didn’t feel comfortable with, I didn’t like. I would have responded if I had been inside at the time when it happened. I’d like to think I would have been vocal. But you know what? I point out in the book that sometimes I was a coward.

[mrsteveecook]

all of my 2018 book recommendations

All year long, I’ve made a weekly book recommendation when kicking off the weekend open thread. These aren’t work-related books; they’re just books I love and think everyone else should read. Sometimes they’re books that I’m in the middle of reading, and other times they’re just long-standing favorites.

Here’s the complete list of what I’ve recommended this year (maybe in time for holiday gift-shopping!). I’ve bolded my favorites of the favorites.

This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel. It’s about a family who thought they had five sons but turns out to have four sons and a daughter. It’s excellent.

Fraud, by David Rakoff. Smart and hilariously funny essays on places where he never seems to quite belong.

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin. I’m on an epic family saga kick, ever since Pachinko. This one starts when four siblings in 1969 New York visit a fortune teller who tells them each what day they’ll die, information that hangs over all of them as their lives unfold.

Tepper Isn’t Going Out, by Calvin Trillin. You wouldn’t think a novel about parking would hold your interest, but it’s Calvin Trillin and so you would be wrong.

The Power, by Naomi Alderman. This is SO GOOD. This is what happens when teenage girls everywhere suddenly discover that their bodies can produce lethal electric shocks — instantly shifting the balance of power in the world.

Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. This is an exhaustive oral history of the show from the start, from its fights with censors to the fights among its stars to how the writing gets done. You’ll learn things like how different celebrity hosts treated people, and why everyone hated Chevy Chase.

Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, by Melissa Dahl, which delves into when and why we feel awkward, and how we can move past it. You’ll learn about why it’s awkward to mix two groups of friends, where secondhand embarrassment comes from, and how to fight off a cringe attack — and there’s a whole chapter on awkwardness at work! I talked more about it here, and awesome.

Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. It’s hard to talk about this without spoiling it, but it’s two seemingly disparate stories that may surprise you in how they’re connected. It’s beautifully done and I loved it.

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng. Why did it take me so long? I don’t know but it’s wonderful. It’s about family and class and art and convention and loss. Read it!

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, by Cheryl Mendelson. This is everything you need to know about having an adult home, from how to fold a fitted sheet so that it doesn’t look like gnomes live inside it, to how to wash dishes so they’re actually clean, to where you should and shouldn’t compromise on cleanliness. This is all the stuff that possibly used to get passed down generationally but no longer does, and so many of us don’t know it, but now we will.

The Newlyweds, by Nell Freudenberger. A Bangladeshi woman comes to the U.S. to marry an American man, and ends up caught between two cultures.

The Amateur Marriage, by Anne Tyler. A multi-generational saga, all stemming from a marriage that probably shouldn’t have happened.

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, by Daniel Mallory Ortberg.Delightfully disturbing (and sometimes funny) adaptations of classic fairy tales. Very enjoyable.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. I just re-read this for a podcast I was on and I’d forgotten how good it is. Dark and funny and suspenseful and fun.

Would You Rather? by Katie Heaney. A funny, honest memoir about love, relationships, and figuring out who you are.

The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer. It’s about friendship, mentorship, activism, and what we want from each other, with characters who are all the more compelling because of their flaws. I loved it.

Then She Was Gone, by Lisa Jewell. A woman whose daughter disappeared 10 years ago ends up in a relationship with a man whose daughter looks eerily like her own, and all is not what it seems. I don’t normally read suspense because I find it so stressful, but somehow I started reading this and couldn’t put it down. (And it was stressful! But good.)

Hey Ladies! by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss. The hilarious Hey Ladies column from The Toast is now a book! One of the ladies is getting married, and there are many, many emails to be sent and plans to be made. It’s so, so funny, and you will cringe with recognition.

Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work, by me.  It is time for you to buy it!

My Ex-Life, by Stephen McCauley. Two former spouses, one gay and one straight, reconnect decades later when both of their new lives are falling apart a bit. It’s lovely.

Calypso, by David Sedaris. David Sedaris’s best writing has always been about his family, and his new book focuses exclusively on them. It’s funny and sad, and I loved it and think it might be his best book of them all, and I want to start reading it all over again.

The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner, about a woman serving two life sentences in prison, how she got there, and how she survives. I was riveted from the first page, and it stays with you.

Tell the Machine Goodnight, by Katie Williams. It plays out around a piece of new technology that tests your DNA and tells you the three things you need to do to be happier (from “take the night bus” to “eat more fruit” to “smile at your wife”), and that concept alone would be enough to keep me interested, but the story itself is about the humans.

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer. Desperate to be away when his ex-boyfriend gets married (and not thrilled about his impending 50th birthday), a novelist decides to accept every invitation to out-of-town literary events that come his way. Beautifully written, smart, and funny.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, about a woman who decides she’s going to quit her life and sleep for a year. It made me feel a little gross so I don’t know that I recommend it exactly, but it’s funny and getting lots of acclaim and I haven’t been able to put it down.

Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory, the story of the rise and fall and rise of the Amazing Telemachus Family — a family with supernatural gifts. Someone recommended this here last week, and I’m halfway through and totally sucked in.

The Book of Essie, by Meghan MacLean Weir. The teenage daughter of an evangelical preacher whose family has a hit reality show (and a mom scarier than Kris Jenner) gets pregnant and has to figure out how to take back her life from her family.

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan. I finally tried it, and it’s totally decadent and fun.

French Exit, by Patrick deWitt. Reviews have called this a “tragedy of manners.” It’s dark but funny, and there is money and the loss of money and scathing comments and a cat who might not be a cat, and you end up liking characters you shouldn’t like, and it’s basically a delight.

Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong. It’s about family and memory and home, and it’s quiet and lovely.

Room, by Emma Donoghue. It’s told through the eyes of a boy who has been held captive with his mother in a small room for years … and then they’re not. Obviously disturbing, but it will grab you and keep you up all night reading it.

Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney. Two 20somethings befriend a slightly older couple, and things get messy but the banter is superb.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green. After alien life comes to earth, the woman who made first contact becomes famous overnight and discovers fame is as weird as aliens.

All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung’s memoir of growing up Korean in a white family and later finding her biological family. It’s about race and identity and belonging and it is moving and beautifully written.

Family Trust, by Kathy Wang. It’s about a patriarch who has long promised his family he’s leaving them a fortune when he goes, his two kids, his ex-wife, and his second wife — and how things unravel and come back together for all of them. It’s funny and layered and I loved it.

The Idiot, by Elif Batuman. I don’t know exactly how to describe this book. It’s about early adulthood, but it’s also about language and friendship and love and Russian and trying to find your place in the world. If you want a lot of plot in your novels, this may not be for you, but I really liked it.

Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, by Gretchen Anthony. A very misguided matriarch grapples with change in her family while writing cheerful Christmas letters.

Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist, by Tim Federle. It’s exactly what it sounds like — drink recipes inspired by literature, like the Pitcher of Dorian Grey Goose, Romeo and Julep, Orange Julius Caesar, and more.

Nine Perfect Strangers, by Liane Moriarty. Well, I’m recommending the first half of this book, but then it went off the rails. In an interesting way, but still off the rails.

99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown. I love  a good malcontent, and she was that. This book is gossipy and fascinating (for example: she made even close friends call her “ma’am,” and her husband once left a note in her desk headed “24 reasons I hate you”).

And if you’re looking for more, here are my lists of book recommendations from 2017 and from 2016 and from 2015.

Please note: This site is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

You may also like:

all of my 2017 book recommendations

all my 2016 book recommendations

all my 2015 book recommendations

all of my 2018 book recommendations was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

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[onmysmartwatchtk-blog]

IPHONE 8 RUMORS: FACIAL RECOGNITION COULD REPLACE THE TOUCH ID'S FINGERPRINT SENSOR

Bits of gossip are now whirling about the "progressive" 2017 iPhone. Here's all the most recent.

Poor iPhone 7, just part of the way through its first year and as of now completely dominated by whatever is coming next. All things considered, 2017 imprints the iPhone's tenth birthday celebration, so Apple is allegedly equipping to make its commemoration release additional extraordinary.

We'll monitor the most recent bits of gossip and how conceivable they are, and we'll place them in one detect (this one!) so you can fly on over at whatever point you need to peruse the most recent.

In the event that you passed on the iPhone 7 to sit tight for the iPhone 8—or the iPhone 7s or whatever name Apple chooses to utilize—it sounds like the following telephone could be the outline revive you were sitting tight for. Simply don't anticipate that the earphone jack will return.

What's the most recent?

The talk: Apple initially attempted to coordinate a unique finger impression sensor in the iPhone 8's virtual Home catch, yet it wasn't working out. In this way, as indicated by a "FoxconnInsider" on Reddit, Apple is presently considering utilizing facial acknowledgment rather than Touch ID to open the gadget. The source, who posted on a Reddit AMA, additionally called gossipy tidbits about moving the unique mark sensor to the back of the gadget "falsehood."

Conceivable? Can Reddit be a solid source? Much of the time, we'd dare to state no. In any case, the wellspring of this Reddit AMA was evidently checked by the mediators of the/apple subreddit. Furthermore, 9to5Mac brings up that FoxconnInsider has been a dependable wellspring of data from Apple's store network some time recently. Generally, it sounds like Apple is determined about not moving the unique mark sensor to the back of the gadget, so expect another arrangement, regardless of whether that is facial acknowledgment, unique finger impression sensor working appropriately by means of the Home catch or a mix of both advancements.

At the point when will it turn out?

The gossip: There are clashing speculations with respect to the iPhone 8's dispatch window. Some have theorized that Apple may miss the conventional September dispatch window in light of the fact that a great deal of uniquely requested parts, including pieces for the show, remote charging, and printed circuit sheets, won't be prepared by September, as indicated by the most recent discoveries from Nikkei Asian Review. The iPhone 7s models are relied upon to turn out on timetable, be that as it may.

In this report, an investigator from think-tank IHS Markit affirmed that Samsung is presently the selective OLED provider for the new iPhones, since Samsung works in assembling bended cell phone shows. Notwithstanding, the expert says that "Samsung is confronting challenges in conveying what Apple needs," despite the fact that they've wrenched out near 75 million bended iPhone shows up until now.

This is not the first occasion when we've heard that Apple has confronted barriers amid the iPhone 8's generation. This takes after a prior report from legitimate KGI expert, Ming-Chi Kuo, which announced that the iPhone 8 will be out in October or November because of these supply issues. Beforehand, Digitimes announced that Apple was confronting delays in building up its exclusive unique mark sensor for the new OLED-prepared iPhone 8. Moreover, Japanese news site Macotakara detailed that STMicroelectronics, the new provider of the iPhone's 3D camera sensors, required more opportunity to increase large scale manufacturing. With all these generation issues, a few reports even propose that the iPhone 8 won't turned out until 2018.

At that point there are the examiners at JPMorgan who anticipate Apple will take the wraps off its new iPhone at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, something the organization hasn't done since 2010. JPMorgan says in a note gotten by 9to5Mac that Apple won't begin offering the telephone until fall in the wake of reviewing it at WWDC, which would go against Apple-set up custom.

Conceivable? At to start with, it appeared to be far-fetched that Apple would miss its run of the mill September dispatch date. In addition, Digitimes doesn't have the best reputation with regards to iPhone bits of gossip. Yet, now that Nikkei Asian Review and Ming-Chi Kuo are bouncing on board, this talk gets a validity help. Apple is tinkering with amassing OLEDs surprisingly, and fusing new unique mark and camera sensors—so if there was an iPhone demonstrate that requires somewhat more time, the iPhone 8 would be it.

The JPMorgan expectation appears to be far more improbable. Apple CEO Tim Cook on the organization's second-quarter profit call said that individuals are presently delaying their iPhone buys in light of the fact that they see bits of gossip about up and coming iPhones and need to hold up. Declaring an iPhone 8 in June and not making it accessible to purchase until September would everything except slaughter Apple's iPhone business—at any rate without weighty rebates to goad deals.

What's with the deferral?

The talk: The 3D Touch highlight on the iPhone 8 has been a genuine torment for Apple. As per AppleInsider, Apple is as yet attempting to get 3D Touch to work legitimately on the iPhone 8, and that this will push creation calendar to October or November. Likewise, Apple is supposedly paying more than twofold to get 3D Touch on the iPhone 8. AppleInsider already detailed that TPK Holdings is charging amongst $18 and $22 ti execute 3D Touch on the OLED iPhone 8. A similar organization at present charges amongst $7 and $9 per current iPhone. The cost increment originates from the way that executing 3D Touch on an OLED show requires putting the sensors between a "glass sandwich."

Conceivable? Regardless of the possibility that the iPhone 8 doesn't turn out until way not long from now, Apple shouldn't be excessively stressed. Furthermore, new souped-up iPhone would be ideal for the Christmas shopping season, and financial specialists are now dribbling about the higher request that it could trigger. It's likewise unquestionably conceivable that Apple has run over some concealed expenses creating the all-new iPhone 8, particularly since this is the first run through the iPhone-creator has built up an OLED show. The iPhone 8 is as of now reputed to order a higher sticker price, so regardless of the possibility that it needs to pay more to give similar elements, its edges will stay in place.

Higher sticker price?

The gossip: The iPhone 8 is equipping to be the most costly iPhone at any point discharged, yet obviously Apple is meaning to even now make it under $1,000. As per Goldman Sachs expert Simona Jankowski, the iPhone 8 will cost $999 for the 128GB model. The 256GB model, be that as it may, will cross the thousand-dollar stamp and be sold for $1,099, as per Jankowski's exploration distributed on CNBC.

Conceivable? We've already heard that the iPhone 8 would break the $1,000 boundary, and it bodes well that the 256GB model crosses this edge. Furthermore, despite the fact that the higher sticker price may appear to be galactic contrasted with current models, it may be justified, despite all the trouble. Jankowski appears to be certain that offers of the iPhone 8 will really send Apple's stock taking off in light of all the new components. Experts trust that the all-new OLED show, virtual Home catch, and remote charging will be sufficient to create bigger than-regular interest for another iPhone. Tim Cook really affirmed that current offers of the iPhone 7 had slowed down in light of the fact that individuals were envisioning moving up to the iPhone 8, so we wouldn't be amazed if Apple chosen to make the most out of all the buildup for the following iPhone and increment the sticker price.

Idea video in view of CAD schematic?

The talk: another idea video has surfaced that renders the absolute most noticeable bits of gossip about the iPhone 8. The video grandstands the iPhone 8's OLED show, and additionally the vertically adjusted back camera framework. In view of a production line PC energized plan schematic, the video is obligingness of French device leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer, known as OnLeaks on Twitter.

Conceivable? Hemmerstoffer has a decent reputation with regards to iPhone bits of gossip. A year ago, he posted a photograph of the iPhone 7 case months before the gadget was revealed. In any case, significantly Hemmerstoffer concedes the most recent video may not be 100 percent precise since Apple is trying different models of the iPhone 8. "I can't affirm this is 100% precise," he tweeted. Watch the video underneath.

[all-about-tech-blog1]

Devs Alerted to Long-Delayed Android Wear 2.0 Reboot

Google is advancing with its since quite a while ago postponed dispatch of Android Wear 2.0, a working framework for its rising wearables biological community, which at long last could decouple the smartwatch from the cell phone.

A notice to engineers expresses that Android Wear 2.0 will dispatch toward the beginning of February, Android Police revealed Wednesday. The notice cautions engineers utilizing a legacy implanted APK system that those specific applications were not improved for Android 2.0.

It trains engineers to take after the Android 2.0 App Distribution documentation to ensure their application can be found in the new on-watch Play Store.

Google apparently has been taking a shot at two new smartwatches, code-named "Angelfish" and "Swordfish," and their discharge is relied upon to take after the new Android 2.0 discharge.

Certainty Question

The arrangements come at a basic time for producers contending in the wearables class. Its inability to thrive has brought about budgetary interruption and contention as of late.

Apple CEO Tim Cook mixed feedback a month ago, when he pushed back on IDC's piece of the overall industry figures in the pre-occasion smartwatch class.

Regardless of whether Apple has been straightforward on offers of its exceedingly touted Apple Watch - one of the priciest wearables in the business - has been the subject of hypothesis among industry watchers.

The Apple Watch depends vigorously on collaborations with the iPhone.

Another smartwatch industry improvement was Fitbit's obtaining a month ago of Pebble's protected innovation and key staff individuals. There already had been gossipy tidbits that an arrangement was in progress, as Pebble was battling under the heaviness of soak money related obligation and restricted appropriation.

"The expansion of independent applications and cell network are positively ventures in the correct heading, as the division of smartwatch and cell phone is critical to smartwatch reception," said Jishesh Ubrani, a senior research examiner for WW cell phone trackers at IDC.

Past that, different increments - like Play Store support and informing - are vital, he told LinuxInsider.

Mark Unaware

The absence of Android Wear marking in a large number of the new item presentations is a worry, be that as it may, Ubrani said.

"The fruitful executions of Android Wear so far have been exceptionally specific and concentrated on the watch, design or way of life brand instead of the Android Wear marking," he brought up.

For instance, the Michael Kors smartwatch concentrates vigorously on mold, while Casio's line of watches concentrate more on the outside and sports-related elements, as per Ubrani.

Simply a week ago, Casio declared at CES that the WSD-F20 Smart Outdoor watch, a wearable that elements a low power GPS, will make a big appearance in April on the Android Wear 2.0 stage.

Michael Kors reported its Access line of smartwatches through an organization with Google's Android Wear.

"Google is attempting to bolster countless and plans with Android Wear 2.0," said Paul Teich, key investigator at Tirias Research.

The long postpones likely were because of interoperability testing and bug fixes, he told LinuxInsider.

"They need the wear 2.0 piece and center applications to act a long time before the discharge, and that implies running on a wide range of stages and playing great with an extensive variety of cell phones," Teich included.

The smartwatch market is as yet sitting tight for the executioner application to take it to the following level, watched Kevin Krewell, likewise a central investigator at Tirias.

"The usefulness of a smartwatch is fine for essential warnings as a cell phone fringe," he told LinuxInsider, "yet it needs to get past the fundamentals to excuse the cost.