#teachout

[seldnei]

“There’s forces gathering all round you and in you, impossible to miss, waiting for their moment. You won’t be able to hide behind your sister forever, not from them or from you.”

Corwyn Teachout has a knack for finding people. Her sister, Gwen, has a knack for hurting them. That should be enough to keep them alive after their mother dies and the orphanage burns down, at least until they’re both old enough to join a gang and start down the long road to ruling the criminal underworld. But the Teachouts live in Cobbler’s Hill: black, withered heart of the city of San Xavier, home to alchemical engineers, witches, gang lords, and monsters both clockwork and flesh. The Hill and its denizens have plans for the girls, from tracking a lost fiancée to fighting the heirs to gangsters’ empires, from becoming the protegees of the Hill’s Old Lady to piecing together the murder of the city’s most notorious gang lord. And that doesn’t even take into account the house that likes to eat people.

It’s possible that becoming legendary is a crookeder path than they expected.

It’s possible the Teachouts are going to make their own.

And now, the Tumblr version ...

Cobbler's Hill: there's a witch and a haunted house and ace and aro and gay and bi characters. Also pirates and gangsters and a hooker with a heart of gold because you always need one of those. Girls beating people up. Monsters. Snark for days.

One line summary of the novel: "god forbid women do anything."

Available from Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, and check your local library's Overdrive/Libby/Hoopla app!

[halberdbooks]

2025 Reading List

book 49

finished 4/11/2025

Cobbler's Hill by Laura E. Price

ISBN 9798227402790

Having previously encountered The Teachout Sisters in one of Laura E. Price's short stories in Fuckit, I was thrilled to discover I could read a whole novel about them. Price's short story experience writing shines through in two main ways. The first: every chapter has a self-contained narrative arc. The second: the book doesn't waste your time with unnecessary exposition and trusts you to keep up. I keep trying to write a longer review that expresses how much I liked this book, but I keep sounding silly. Instead, I will leave it at this:

The world and the characters are so vivid and real, you'll have to remind yourself that blood magic clockwork and houses that eat children never existed, not even in Arizona.

[luxe-pauvre]

This is why so many famous conductors have claimed that the art of conducting cannot be taught. In the deepest sense, they are right. To be sure, it is perfectly possible, as Reiner did, to teach the rudiments of clear stick technique and effective rehearsal practice. But the mystery at the heart of conducting is, indeed, unteachable: One cannot tell a budding young conductor how to cultivate a magnetic personality, any more than an actor can be taught how to have star quality. What sets the Bernsteins and Bogarts of the world apart from the rest of us is very much like what James M. Barrie said of feminine charm in What Every Woman Knows: “If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else; and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t much matter what else you have.”

Terry Teachout, The Art of Conducting

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

*banging tables* SMITH-MUNDT ACT! SMITH-MUNDT ACT! SMITH-MUNDT ACT! SMITH-MUNDT ACT!

[taekwondolifemagazine]

Where to Watch Taekwondo in the Olympics

[offender42085]

Post 1374

Zachary Allen Gaskill, Iowa inmate 6590619, born 1990, incarceration intake June 2024 at age 34, scheduled for release October 2026

Involuntary Manslaughter

In June 2024, an Iowa Judge said it was "not a hard decision" to send the man responsible for Kirk Blunck's death to prison.

Zachary Gaskill, 34, was convicted earlier of involuntary manslaughter for the 2016 death of the Des Moines architect. In Court, he was sentenced to the maximum two years in prison after the Judge found he had showed a "lack of remorse" and that prior terms of probation for other offenses had not changed his behavior.

Blunck, a prominent developer involved in multiple projects to restore historic Des Moines buildings, died Jan. 24, 2016, after he was found injured at the bottom of a staircase in the Teachout building, which he owned. Gaskill, now 34, was charged with second-degree murder in 2022 after prosecutors accused him of assaulting Blunck and pushing him over a railing to fall at least two stories during an altercation.

At his trial, Gaskill's attorneys argued Blunck may have been intoxicated and instigated a fight, and that there was no evidence Gaskill had intended to cause Blunck's death. Prosecutors presented evidence that Gaskill had told inconsistent stories about what happened to investigators and several former girlfriends, including why he was on an upper floor of the building.

The jury found Gaskill not guilty of murder but did convict him of the lesser offence of Manslaughter. Gaskill also was previously sued by Blunck's family and ordered to pay $6.25 million for Blunck's death.

The defense attorney asked the court to suspend Gaskill's sentence and to consider running it concurrently to other sentences he faces, including for perjury during the Blunck family's civil case.

Gaskill addressed the court to describe change's he's made in his life, including stopping drinking after Blunck's death and working to improve his mental health. He spoke about his love for working with dogs at the Animal Rescue League and with clients as a personal trainer, and about improving his ties with his family. He told Gogerty he wanted Blunck's family to have closure.

"Every time probation is granted, he goes back to committing crimes, and he was on probation when he killed someone," the DA said. "... Every day this individual is not on the street is a day he can’t take from someone or hurt someone."

And while the defense argued he'd turned a corner, the Judge she saw the record differently, noting multiple criminal charges and parole violations since Blunck's death. The latest, a failed drug test, occurred just a week before his sentencing. And the Judge pointed to Gaskill's actions throughout the case, including celebrating in court when he was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.

The Judge ordered Gaskill be sent to prison for up to two years, running consecutive to two other criminal sentences for a total of 12 years.

5j

[eternal-echoes]

“So this is the fifth key feature of our common national life today: malice wrapped in the language of tolerance, sensitivity, and rights. It consists in an appetite to use power not simply to prevail in political debate, but to humiliate and erase dissent, and even its memory, in reworking the cell structure of society.

Examples range from the strange to the bitter. They include efforts to scrub Confederate public monuments from the South, and "progressive" academic attacks on American Founder Alexander Hamilton (of Hamilton Broadway musical fame). They include companies like Apple and Salesforce.com that attack religious liberty legislation in states nationwide and "use economic threats to exercise more power over public policy than the voters who use the democratic process." And they include selective shaping of the Advanced Placement U.S. history framework by the College Board, controversial efforts to "fix" democracy by major philanthropies, and bitter posthumous attacks on "unprogressive" public leaders.(31)

There's more. In 2011, the Obama administration stripped funds from the U.S. bishops' Migrant and Refugee Services anti-human-trafficking program. MRS was a highly regarded leader in its help to victims of sex trafficking. But it was defunded because the bishops declined to provide abortion and contraceptives as part of MRS services. The money was reassigned to groups ranked lower in quality, but more ideologically compliant, by the same White House.

The same intolerance marked the administration's fight to coerce abortion and contraceptive services as part of national health care. It tenaciously refused reasonable compromise on exemptions for religiously affiliated providers and organizations and deliberately sought to break any opposition-prompting a sardonic Wall Street Journal editorial renaming the Little Sisters of the Poor "the Little Sisters of the Government."(32)

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

—

(31) Regarding Confederate monuments, see Cain Burdeau, "Monumental Fight," Philadelphia Inquirer, March 27, 2016. On Alexander Hamilton, see Terry Teachout, "Rapping the Legend," Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2016. On corporate political activism, see Monica Langley, "Tech CEO Turns Rabble Rouser," Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2016, quoting Georgia State Senator Josh McKoon. On American history, see Lynne V. Cheney, "The End of History, Part II," Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2015. On philanthropies and democracy, see James Piereson, "Philanthropies Target Democracy for 'Saving. Watch Out," Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2014. On attacks on the insufficiently progressive, see Lloyd Cohen, "The Posthumous Attacks on Scalia Begin," Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2016; note that in the case of George Mason University's law school, the attacks failed. Note also the similar spirit directed at the (still living) Justice Clarence Thomas in the HBO film Confirmation; see Stuart Taylor JI., "The Hollywood Hit-Job on Justice Clarence Thomas," Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2016.

(32) Editorial, "Little Sisters of the Government," Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2015.

[symptomofloves]

"The final track [of And His Mother Called Him Bill] was a hushed solo version of 'Lotus Blossom' that he [Duke Ellington] tossed off while the musicians were putting up their instruments at the end of a recording session. The engineers had the good sense to keep the tape rolling, and you can hear the men in the studio stop packing their horns and fall silent as their leader runs through the song that Strayhorn had loved to hear him play. It is an unutterably poignant moment."

—from "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington" by Terry Teachout

[seldnei]

Cobbler’s Hill and The Stars; The Silence on Sale!

I feel like this might be a great weekend for my US readers to get lost in a book and ignore the news, social media, the world … so from 1/17 to 1/21, the ebook versions of both my books are on sale for .99! (Sorry, non US-ians, this one’s just for Yanks. Also just the ebook.)

[fadingsunsjvj]

Will the Democrats finally realize that Big Tech is not an ally? | Zephyr Teachout

Will the Democrats finally realize that Big Tech is not an ally? | Zephyr Teachout https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/27/democrats-tech-google-apple-musk-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

[wutbju]

Ruth Leisure, BJU Class of 1964.

Ruth Kinley Leisure went to be with her Lord on August 23, 2024 at the age of 79. Ruth was born in Rockford, Illinois on April 7, 1945. Her parents were the late Marian and Delbert Kinley. She married Paul Leisure in Rockford on June 28, 1968.

Ruth was a graduate of Rockford West High School and continued her education at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina(where she met Paul) and Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois. She played the bass both in high school and in the Rockford Symphony Orchestra. Ruth worked as an executive secretary for the Central Illinois Electric and Gas Company and later as an optician at 20/20 Optical Center in the Brynwood Shopping Center in Rockford.

In Illinois, she was a member of the Kiwanis Club of Northern Winnebago County, active in the Winnebago/Boone County Genealogical Society, a friend of the North Suburban Library, and a member of the First Evangelical Free Church.

In Florida, Ruth was a member of Seabreeze Kiwanis, chaplain of the Port Orange chapter of the Daughter's of the American Revolution, a ""scrappie"" with the Scrapbooking and Card Making Club, and a member of the First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach. She enjoyed watching rocket launches in her driveway from Cape Canaveral. Her hobby was to make creative cards as a personal gift to friends and family. Ruth was often found deep in thought doing genealogical research.

She enjoyed travel to Various places as the Soviet Union(during the Cold War); Door County, Wisconsin; and Galena in Illinois. In Florida Ruth enjoyed just walking along the beach, Amelia Island, Jensen beach, and Vero Beach. She had many wonderful memories of travel with the Sensational Seniors Social group to various day trips, cruises, dinner theatres, and other interesting places. her fun overnight retreats with the ""maniac scrappie ladies"" included adventures in Mt. Dora, St Simon's Island, Vilano Beach, and St. Augustine Beach with her dear friend Lucille McDermott.

Ruth is survived by her husband Paul; daughters Amanda Teachout(Dan Teachout) and Erin Leisure- as well as grandchildren Mason Teachout, Teddy Teachout, Andrew Buchstaber, Tyler Buchstaber, and William Buchstaber. Also surviving are brothers Tim Kinley(Pam Kinley) in Rockford Illinois and Thom Kinley (tove Kinley) in Wyoming, Minnesota as well as many nieces and nephews.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

#15yrsago DMCA does not apply to US government, which can crack DRM with impunity https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/08/air-force-cracks-software-carpet-bombs-dmca/

#10yrsago Attacking the popular Kwikset lock: open in 15 seconds with a screwdriver and a paper clip https://www.wired.com/2013/08/kwikset-smarkey-lock-vulns/

#10yrsago Six blatant lies about spying from the NSA up to Obama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eptZuXkUGmI

#10yrsago Prosecutor Stephen Heymann told MIT that Aaron Swartz was like a rapist who blames his victim https://web.archive.org/web/20130804190514/http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/01/prosecutor-stephen-heymann-compared-aaron-swartz-to-rapist/

#5yrsago When Zephyr Teachout is elected New York Attorney General, she’s gonna emolumentize Trump right out of the White House https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/nyregion/zephyr-teachout-is-running-for-attorney-general-but-her-real-target-is-trump.html

#5yrsago When should the press pay attention to trolls, lies and disinformation? https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/0-EXEC-SUMMARY_Oxygen_of_Amplification_DS.pdf

#5yrsago Wells Fargo: we stole houses and we’re being investigated for dirty low-income housing credits https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-03/wells-fargo-faces-u-s-probe-on-low-income-tax-credit-purchases

#1yrago A TRAP for workers: Oops, we re-invented indenture https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

[meret118]

Experts say algorithmic wage discrimination and A.I.-influenced pay more broadly are creeping into a growing number of fields, such as health care, logistics, and tech, and could upend work as we know it.

. . .

“Now you have machine learning trained on identifying the desperation index of workers,” Zephyr Teachout, a professor of law at Fordham University, told me. “When you move to the formal employment context, there is every reason to think that employers who can would be interested in tailoring their wages and using behavioral data.”

The clearest parallels can be drawn in other independent contractor roles, which make uparound 15 percent of U.S. workers. Dubal has found that independent contractors working with Instacart and Amazon are similarly surveilled and receive personalized pay based on information including the times of day and length of time they work, along with the types of tasks they’re willing to accept.

On the flip side, some companies also use our data to determine the most we’re willing to pay for products, and it’s possible that we could soon face eerily hyperpersonalized prices—funeral-goers, for example, could be charged more for plane tickets. This summer, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it was seeking information from eight companies on so-called surveillance pricing.