#they brought tex back. which is like the number one thing they should have never done under any circumstance. leave the poor woman ALONEEEE

[carmarriage]

red vs blue restoration blew such huge chunks im actually mad. like completely enraged. and i wouldnt have it any other way. rest in peace you son of a bitch

[garryspolicememories]

                Policing Memories of           Garry Crawford Circa 1962                          Part XII It was on June 14, 1971. I had just reported to the Superintendent at Sault Ste Marie D.H.Q., dropped off Sergeant Major Orville Waito and headed north on Highway #17 towards Wawa. If anyone has not travelled this section of Highway #17, it is one of the most beautiful scenic highways in Ontario. I remember my excitement growing as I travelled up past the Goulais River and when I first seen the majesty of Lake Superior. The immensity of the lake along with rugged shoreline and background of the mountains was breath taking. I drove by miles of beaches and I was amazed that I did not see a soul on them. The road constantly dips inland for a mile or two then you pop back out to another explosion of scenery at the Lake. Little did I realize that this beautiful country would be our home for the next nine wonderful years! I travelled by Harmony Bay, Batchewana Bay, Pancake Bay, Mamanse Harbour, Alona Bay and finally the Montreal River the half waypoint to Wawa. This was where I later learned the division point was between Sault Ste Marie and Wawa Detachments. At Montreal River the road goes up a steep incline for a mile and a quarter as you travel through an area of hill tops and lakes to Kenny Lake then the road drops down again to the Agawa Bay area where you follow along the great lake again, running inland past Doc Greig Lake, Red Rock until it finally pops back out again at Old Woman Bay. On reaching this point I had already crossed many large rivers. I would later memorize all the rivers and tick them off; in my mind, as I travelled north or south between Wawa and Sault Ste Marie. On crossing the Old Woman River the road took another steep incline and left the lake for a distance passing Baby and Fenton Lake, then over the Michipicoten River and finally the Wawa Detachment on the top of the hill It is on the service road just to the south of the town of Wawa. On reaching Wawa Detachment which is approximately two and a half hours north of Sault Ste Marie. I was greeted by the then Detachment Commander Patty Bingham. I became the third Corporal serving under Patty. The other two Corporals were Bill Duncan and Bill Freeth. Constables that immediately come to mind were Ray Negus, Ed Zelionis, Walter Purdy, Jeff Lamb, Joe Poderys, Spence Coutu, Tim Jones, Don Lewko, Carmen Foster, Tex Luoma, Tom Richber and Ray Rose. There were many others that I remember, however I believe they came later. I took a room at the Beaver Motel the first night and proceeded to orient myself to the Town of Wawa itself. The town of Wawa had their own municipal police force at that time. It was called the Michipicoten Township Police Force and the Chief was Scott McCrae. The Town is situated on a height of land between the Magpie River Valley and Wawa Lake, which lays east of the town for a distance of seven miles. Highway #101 runs from Highway #17 to the Town of Wawa, then east along the south shore of Wawa Lake to Chapleau and Timmins. The Wawa Golf Coarse lies in the Magpie River Valley to the West of the town and at elevation perhaps 200 feet lower. I remember that first night, driving out to the William Teddy Park; about a mile east of Wawa and just off Highway #101. The park was named after a native man who had first discovered gold in the creek that borders the park. I got out of my car and walked over to the shore where the picnic table had been that we used some three years earlier, where I had made a wish to be posted there. I don’t remember expressing that wish to anyone else other than my wife and sister and brother-in-law. However I was so thrilled that luck had brought me there. I looked back westerly at the town of Wawa itself and marveled at is beauty. Almost the whole length of the town has a sand beach at its edge. On reporting for duty the following day I learned, that the Detachment while not policing the town of Wawa at that time, had a very large area. To the east we covered out Highway #101 to the Sudbury Algoma district line, then into the town of Missanabie on the CNR. This patrol also included the mining hamlet of Renabie. This was a distance of approximately 85 miles from Wawa. We were required by agreement to patrol that area on each shift. The town of Hawk Junction is located about 12 miles out Highway #101 on the Algoma Central Railway. There seem to be a large number of occurrences that required our attendance in that area. Our area also went south on Hwy #17 to the Montreal River a distance of approximately 70 miles. To the North of Wawa we were responsible for 30 miles of Highway #17. Michipicoten Township police covered the land area that was included in their Municipal area for a distance of ten miles north of Wawa, our Detachment was responsible for all that other land area. We also initially had the town of Dubreuville. This was later made a one man Detachment. I should mention that following the appointment of the one man Detachment at Dubreuville, I was lucky again and assigned to supervise and monitor it. For the majority of my years at Wawa I had the pleasure of having Bob Pilon as the Constable posted there. Bob required very little supervising and at each visit I made, it was like visiting old friends, it was always a joy. On some occasions my wife made the trip with me and would visit Bob’s wife. One thing that stands out in my memory was the first week I was in Wawa, there were 11 moose motor vehicle collisions on our 30 mile stretch of the North Highway #17 alone. That was not counting those on Highway #101 and many more on the southern stretch of Highway #17. This I learned was quite normal for the area. I also learned that the dead moose provided a ready meat supply for many of the Constables and some of the Corporals. My boys use to tell me: You raised us on steak and weaned us on hamburger. They were not referring to beef steak. These types of accidents would continue all year but were especially bad in the spring of the year. There is some who say the moose congregate at the Highway because of salt used in the previous winter, and also that the flies chase the moose out of the bush to open areas. The fact is they sure like the highways. While the main work at Wawa was traffic enforcement and motor vehicle accidents, there was always a large number of break and enter and theft investigations, as the large wilderness area had very many tourist resorts and camps. We also had many lost person searches, drowning’s and accidental deaths to investigate. Wawa had three air services flying out of Wawa Lake. They were Airedale, White River Air and Watson’s. George Theriault flew out of Hawk Lake at Hawk Junction. I and many of the members of Wawa Detchment flew at one time or another with these services. Sometimes on investigations and sometimes for pleasure. The first month or two at Wawa I was busy obtaining accommodation, for my family and I, plus arranging for the necessary move from Warren to Wawa. We owned our house in Warren and at that time the force only paid for real estate fees. We were able to obtain the services of a real estate company from Sudbury, however they never did bring a customer or help with the sale. We finally succeeded in selling our home by advertising in the Sudbury Star. We found a home at 20 Superior Ave., in Wawa that had been moved down from the Renabie Mine town site, placed on a new basement and completely refinished. The only problem was the home would not be completed for another month. With the home in Warren sold, we arranged with a mover to move our furniture then store it until our new home was available. At that time we owned a Starcraft hardtop pop up trailer, so we moved it to the William Teddy Park on Highway #101. We moved into our trailer in July 1971, with our two boys age 8 and 10 years. My wife was just not quite sure of what I was getting her into. The house was still not completed when the mover finally came, but the builder agreed to let us use the two bedrooms to store all of our furniture while he completed the house. Looking back, it was a really good experience for us camping at William Teddy Park. As I write this article my wife and I have enjoyed a happy marriage for 60 years, however I must admit it takes a very special person to endure some of the things that happen to the spouse of an OPP member, especially during a northern posting. The first year or so at Wawa much of my time was taken up attending further training courses both in Brampton and Aylmer. The first being a Corporal Development Course, followed by a Criminal Investigation Course. During these courses my wife was left in Wawa adjusting to her new home. It was she who made our home a home and kept our family stong. The first winter in Wawa there was very heavy snowfall, if I remember correctly there was a total of 17 feet of snowfall. Highway #17 was closed many times. It was over a hundred and fifty miles to Sault Ste Marie, many of those miles ran close to the lake. Snow effect snow combined with the strong winds would cause complete whiteout conditions. So often when the roads were closed I would get a phone call, the person on the phone would inquire about the road conditions to the Soo. When I advised they were closed, they would argue with me as they wished to take the chance and go. I remember one day taking the family out for a snowmobile run. We stopped in a cleared area and I jumped off my machine, I sunk in the snow to a point where it was above my waist. I was happy the machine I was riding was close enough to me to assist my crawling back up and onto the snowmobile. I will continue this adventure in my next submission. If you wish to read my previous submissions, they are all stored at the following URL: <garryspolicememories.tumblr.com>

§   Added a tag to this post.

§    

[pbandjesse]

Oops I deleted my post. Thankfully I was only talking about last night and hadn't really gotten to write much of the day because I keep getting distracted.

I'm really glad to be in bed. I'm very tired. And I don't feel 100% but I do feel a lot better than I did yesterday. Today was really a good day and I do feel very happy.

Last night was a different story though. I was miserable and I couldn't sleep. I ended up going through Facebook and try and figure out who was married for my graduating class. Because this year is 10 years since I graduated from high school. Which is Wile to think about. I can't believe that that used to actually matter. My people would have reunions and things. You couldn't pay me to go to a reunion for my high school. And then I woke up in the middle of the night with horrible pain. It was like a charlie horse from my side all the way down my leg. I got up a few times cuz I thought I was going to be sick. I was up for a while and eventually I was able to take a Motrin and feel okay enough to lay down. But I was still in pain. James is 1000000 degrees all the time so his body heat lulled me enough to go back to sleep.

I woke up briefly when James was leaving for work. I didn't even feel him get out of bed. But he came and gave me a hug before he left. I really needed to keep sleeping though.

I let myself sleep in until almost 10. And that's been kind of normal right now just because it's cold and I'm tired and haven't been feeling good so I haven't been sleeping well. But it's not like I had a lot to do today. I got up and I got dressed. I had a bagel. I watched videos. I'm most of them watching those SCP read through ones and I've been really enjoying those. They're the perfect amount of Creepypasta but they don't have to have a conclusion which is always the weakness in a creepypasta. So it's been very nice just Mindless sort of creepy and fun.

I left here around 11:30. I biked over to dickblick to get Sharpies for the kids. Which are way more expensive than I thought they were. But ended up getting a great deal on 12 pen Sharpies for like $7. The woman said they were actually mislabeled because they should have been $12 but I want out in the mist occurring and she still let me have the price.

I left there and I went to 7-Eleven. I got lunch. And then I grabbed the bus to go to work. When I got there I found that a whole bunch of stuff I've been knocked over in our storage closet. I went to go talk to coach Banks who sort of runs lunch time. But parent was yelling at him about her child being suspended. So I noped out of there. I found another t-shirt at all. But I just cleaned it off it was fine. I ended up having a funny conversation with health aid because she wasn't sure if I was a student or a teacher. And I explained who I was. And she was just like I've never seen you here before. It was cute.

I found some new organizational tools for our cart. So now each table has their own basket with their own supplies in it. So there'll be no more arguing. So is very proud of myself for that and then me and Chelsea were able to just chill. There wasn't a lot that we needed to do.

And we had a really nice day. It was really small class today we only had about 11 by the end. Just with the snow that was coming in and there's cheerleading tryouts in basketball practice. I think the robotics team also just started up again. But that was nice. It was nice to just be able to connect with the couple kids that were there on a one to one level. And they made good art and that was really nice to see. We talked about foreground middle-ground and background. And how you can use line weight to show those different distances.

We also have the art store today. And the kids are already raised enough money to have a pizza party. I was very proud of them for donating to each other. And they got to have a cool thing over it. Will probably save it for next week. But I'm so very proud of them.

When I woke up this morning it was very heavy on my heart but I wanted to talk to Damien's mom. When he was brought to our class for the first time. The couple days before. I was warned that he was really tough to have in class. That he was on the Spectrum and that teachers found him very difficult. But his mom is great and that if there was ever an issue she would come and get him right away and not to worry about it. But that's not been my experience with Damien. He's wonderful. He's a sweet loving little boy. Sometimes he has breakdowns. Sometimes he can't focus. But he is always first to help me and he has a really sweet temperament. And so I really felt like I needed to say something to his mom today. She came early to pick him up because his sister was doing some kind of presentation at an event. And I pulled her aside and I was like Hey I just really want to let you know how much I enjoy Damien. And I told her everything and she started crying and gave me a hug. And you can just tell she works so hard with those two kids. She's a really good mom and I'm glad that Damien was able to be in our class. He's a good boy.

We finished up today. We did vocab in Jeopardy Style. Where they had to say the definition and then someone else had to give the vocab word in the form of a question. Only about half of them understand that but it was so fun. We played a game and then we wouldn't have snack and then it was time to go home. Me and chelsi got to get out of there by 5:30 which was awesome.

I got the bus and I was able to get back to my apartment only a couple minutes after 6. I packed up some stuff for dinner and then I went to James's place. He made Tex Mex and use some of the stuff that I brought with me. And we watched videos and we talked. He explained the game he made to me. Which has a whole lot of numbers in it is hard for me to get but seems to have a really nice system of rolling dice that I hope this DND friends enjoy. And we hung out for a while. And we talked. And then he walked me home.

It had started snowing and he likes walking in the snow so it wasn't completely one-sided. We just enjoy each other's company and we talked and had a nice walk back to my apartment. He said goodbye and he went back to his.

When I got here I checked the mail and Not only was my new rabbit phone case here. The old one was very matted and I wasn't able to brush it out like I was hoping. My new reindeer Furby arrived as well. I'm not sure what to name him yet but he's very soft. He doesn't seem to work. His he won't turn on. But that's okay. He's still very cute. He'll probably get packed away with the Christmas ornament ones as well once the winter is over so he'll be a nice new face to have out next year.

I'm in bed now. Just enjoying that it's actually nice and toasty in my bedroom for once. I'm going to plug in my phone though because it's dying. And then I'm going to try to go to sleep. I am working at constellation all day tomorrow and I'm hoping to do lesson plans. And then me and James are going to go see a play about Johnstown. And I am really looking forward to it. Because I love Cults. Especially murder cults.

I hope you all sleep great tonight. I hope that your animals are nice to you. And that you have a really nice day tomorrow. Good night everyone.

[anthropwashere]

@proserpine-in-phases tagged me in a thing about writing, so naturally I’m going to do this instead of write!

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

A lot of my deadfics end up stalling out over research roadblocks. I’ll flub my way through one scene with the intent to come back after I’ve done my Google-fu, and then another, and another, aaaaand that’s now too much work. 

2) what work of yours, if any, are you the most embarrassed about existing?

A JTHM fic I wrote in high school that ended up deadfic because I ran off to BMT. It was well-received at the time but looking at it now? It’s just so ow, the edge. I’ve low-key considered tearing it down and rewriting it, but it’s been ten years and I can’t even recall where I was going with it. 

3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

90% chronological with a lot of snippets for later scenes piled haphazardly at the end of every Gdoc. of all the things that might have been was the big exception. There’s 28k posted and another 50k trapped behind a heap of writer’s block. :C

4) favorite character you’ve written?

Gee, I wonder!

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing?

Winry Rockbell. Not my usual character type to write by far, but she was just as surprisingly fun to write.

6) something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated to change now?

A ton of older fic on AO3 has a lot of weird formatting and grammatical errors. I think it’d be easy to get hung up over changes I’d want to make to various giftfics I’ve written over the years as well.

7) when asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

I can count on one hand the number of real life people who know I write and have fingers left over. I hate talking about my writing face-to-face. 

8) favorite genre to write?

Mmm, suspense/horror? Whatever you call ‘presenting a problem to a character that gets insurmountably worse, and also it would be justified if the character just huddled screaming under a blanket instead of confronting it.’

9) what, if anything, do you do for inspiration?

Read other fics that handle similar topics/ideas. Look through the literal GBs of refs I’ve got saved. Get out of the house and do something even a little bit out of my norm. Get lost on Wikipedia.

10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

Music always, rarely near people.

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

Man, I’ve been writing and posting fics for 15 years now. I have to hope every aspect has improved since I was friggin’ 12 years old writing garbo Mary Sues.

12) your weaknesses as an author?

I can’t concentrate on anything long enough to finish it. More fic ideas than I’ll ever have the energy to commit too. Run-on sentences. I don’t write women almost at all. COMMAS. 

13) your strengths as an author?

I feeeeel like I do a good job of getting the reader into the character’s headspace? I adore limited narrative so when I write a fic I try to commit to that character’s style and personality. I also think I do horror/suspense decently.

15) why did you start writing?

11 year old Lorelei found ffn and went, “Oh shit, this is a thing? Sign me up.”

16) are there any characters who haunt you?

...I’m not sure what this means? 

17) if you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

It’s okay to write positive endings, edgelord. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is good too, but damn girl, tread carefully. 

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?

These seems like a dangerous rabbit hole to fall down, so I’ll just link the most recent fic whose style and impact left me speechless the first time I read it (and envious, and determined, and more than happy to read it three more times).

Divine Right of Kings by Oedipus Tex

19) when it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?

Badly! Which is why I’ve never successfully finished a longfic! But I do try and make outlines or at least a tidy splash of notes at the bottom of the Gdoc. One fic I’m working on right now requires spreadsheets.

20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

Little spurts. NaNo’s been excellent in the past at making me do more than a couple hundred words on a good day. Alas, the last Camp NaNo I signed up for I dipped out of because of my migraines, and I didn’t even bother signing up for July.

21) what do you think when you read over your older work?

For the most part I consider it all passable, as far back as AO3 goes at least. Anything earlier than that I pretend doesn’t exist. 

22) are there any subjects that make you uncomfortable to write?

Intimacy, be it porn or fluff. Anything technical I can’t gloss over with some hastily gathered Wikipedian knowledge. Comedy.

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

I don’t think so? Not much of my personal experience has been applicable to what I’ve written. A bit of geography, maybe?

24) have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

I’d never claim to be an expert on anything, but I do try and do my research for fic. Learning new things is my favorite part of writing.

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

You may have a snippet from my four biggest FMA wips (all of which are over 15k words and nowhere near done, send help).

- We Are Sisyphus (03 fic where alternate Ed lives.)

Other Ed and Alfons are unpacking groceries, picked up on their way back to the tiny flat above not-Gracia’s flower shop that seems all the smaller with a fourth person inside. Gratia’s come up as well, bearing fresh vases of flowers too damaged to sell but still smell just as sweet. It helps to mask Hohenheim’s reek, something he can’t really help with how advanced his decay’s gotten in their time apart. 

“Surprised you even recognized him,” Ed says under his breath, under pretense of showing him some of the notes he’d brought back. He gives Hohenheim a long, quelling glare out of the corner of his eye. “I mean, considering you left when Al was still practically a toddler.”

“There were more recent pictures at Pinako’s house,” Hohenheim replies, apparently uninterested in taking the hint to back off. “But it’s the way you look at Herr Heiderich that made me realize just who he reminded me so sorely of.”

“Oh yeah? And how’s that?”

“Like you’re grieving.”

- your head will lie in dust (Father wins, makes the five sacrifices immortal. AKA, the Hohenheim fic with the group chat that can’t stop, won’t stop.)

“There was a cut on your cheek,” Hohenheim says.

Edward brings shaking fingers to his face. He digs his nails in as if he’ll tear his skin open just to spite Hohenheim on principle. Then he stops. Shuts his eyes. Lets Mrs. Curtis slide from his lap. “I,” he says. “You’re wrong. You have to be.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. He has said this so often now, to so many people over so many years, that the words have lost all meaning. He tongues at the space where regret should be and finds only an empty hole. “Do you hear them?”

Edward flinches in slow-motion, an exercise in arranging the muscles of his face into a tense knot to display his anger, his fear, his grief. Little words for emotions greater than any person should have to bear. Edward flinches and struggles to breathe. He presses his hands over his ears and tilts rigidly to the floor.

- our hands were first to forgive (The Mustang remains blind and gets automail AU nobody asked for.)

It’s unsettling, how easy clapping alchemy has turned out to be.

He’d expected it to be difficult, to be something he’d have to learn through trial and error. He doesn’t know why he thought that. Edward’s never shown any hesitation in the use of it—though when has Edward shown hesitation in anything? Bad example. Not that there are a lot of examples to choose from, and of those he’s only been able to see Alphonse transmute without a circle. That’s a somewhat recent development, isn’t it? Before the boys went up to Briggs. He never thought to ask what had happened to allow Alphonse to abandon circles. It hadn’t occurred to him to think that anything needed to have happened to allow it at all. Knowing the source of clapping alchemy, he doubts it was anything pleasant. One more thing to ask after, once he can see again.

This ability, this… gift? He hesitates to call it that. Unwanted, unasked for, received all the same. Fine. This gift wasn’t learned. It feels grafted into him, weird and rough at its edges, like the scars on his torso his shirts still catch on months after burning Lust to ash. Unnaturally a part of him, but a part of him still. For all the knowledge that was poured into his mind in the Gate, he doesn’t feel like he learned anything.

He feels burned.

- Pour Out Like Light (9 years post-series, Ed finds out Trisha’s illness is hereditary. This absolute bastard of a wip is currently stalled out at over 46k words and nowhere near done.)

He peels a potato, sets it down. A broken, twisted hand reaches over his shoulder to pick it up.

He sets down the vegetable peeler. “Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you tell Granny?”

“Tell Granny what?”

“You knew it wasn’t the epidemic, didn’t you?” He cups the potato in both hands, in the hand he’s always had and the hand he’d traded away and Al had given back. “If you knew, why didn’t you warn her I’d get sick too? Why didn’t you warn me?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead there’s the heavy, loose-limbed thud of a body collapsing to the floor. It has a wet sound to it, a splattering sound. Her death rattle sucks the sunlight out of the kitchen, strangled and thick with fluid. There is almost, almost the sound of his name.

This post is huge now, wow. Um. Never sure who’s cool with being tagged in these kinds of posts. @ladyyatexel @leda-x @haikujitsu I don’t really talk writing much w/ any of you but you’re all fantastic and it’d be cool to hear some of the thought process behind the fics? No obligation, of course.

[vladynews]

just how to look after a dachshund

I have actually been keeping the dachshund for 25 years, so the type's features will certainly be prejudiced. I love these sausages with all my heart. And also not just me. In one Germany currently lives more than a million dachshunds. At the exact same time, their popularity is steady. It does not depend upon the variations of fashion - and also lots of types can flaunt the same?

Dachshund is one-of-a-kind. Little dimension and unpretentiousness in treatment make it a popular friend for residents. At the exact same time, the language does not resort to call the breed ornamental. Dachshunds stay "genuine", serious dogs.

The look of the dachshund

Taxi is one of the most well-known breed worldwide. A long and also short sausage pet dog just looks ridiculous prima facie. Cabs have effective paws and huge breasts. They are not large, yet extremely solid pets - their muscles are well developed. Strong constitution and endurance are a tradition of the centuries-old searching past.

A lengthy head with a smooth transition from temple to muzzle is decorated with huge ears. Brownish eyes always look with interest, in them you can see a remarkable intelligence.

What are the dachshunds

Inside one breed, there is a division by the type of wool and size. Because of this, there is a big variety of tex.

There are 3 dimension groups:

* Rabbit dachshund - weight 3-3.5 kg * Small (small, dwarf) dachshund - weight 4-5,5 kg * Standard dachshund - weight 8-9 kg

By the sort of woollen are additionally distinguished by three ranges:

* Smooth wool; * Long-haired; * Hard woollen.

Nowadays, hard-coat dachshunds preferred as functioning hunting canines: they do not freeze as their smooth congeners. The layer is not confused or unclean, as in the case of lengthy layer dachshunds. Sticker labels have their very own shade, which is called "boar".

Long-haired dachshunds swiftly ended up being ornamental canines due to their amazing appearance. Smooth hairs are just as suitable for searching as well as for home life.

The most typical shades of tex:

* Black-floor; * Red (from dark to intense orange as well as sandy);. * Coffee (chocolate);. * Marble (tricolor).

There are cream, tiger colors.

Character of the dachshund: 7 character features.

Even bunny dachshund is not a decorative "girls'" type. The smallest dachshunds were reproduced particularly for rabbit hunting. With a typical dachshund hunting not just on the burrowing monster (fox, badger) however also any kind of various other video game.

Individuals.

There are a number of kinds of searching dogs (sweetheart, dog, cop, and also others). Most of them work in pairs with a man, waiting on a group from the hunter. But not a dachshund. Regular pet dogs should discover the beast themselves and also get it. Struggle in a slim dark burrow is individually. A person there is no helper to the pet dog.

The first high quality of a dachshund is wilfulness. Dachshund groups are very easy to find out, but every time they assume concerning whether to execute.

Interested.

Once in the brand-new space, the dog will not relax till he examines every corner. A stroll for a dachshund is a real vacation since there is a feast of smells exterior.

Energetic as well as playful.

Brief curves of the legs can deceive the ignorant. Dachshund owners recognize that these pets have incredible endurance. If a dachshund is in great physical form, it prepares to cover a few kilometers on a daily walk.

Dachshunds must be permitted to spray out energy. They happily carry the ball, play with congeners, and also amuse the proprietors with their grimaces. Do not presume that due to the brief legs of the dachshund runs slowly. If wanted, it becomes an actual torpedo!

Tender

Like several hunting pets, dachshunds can completely ignore the owner on a stroll, with the rapture to hurry around the countryside as well as discover their own activities. But what they are really caring! Drinking on your back to scrape a stubborn belly, sticking your nose under your arm, as well as reaching lick your nose is all right.

Those that say "pleased not to buy" have not yet acquired a pup dachshund!

If you win a dachshund, you will not find a more caring pet. Dachshunds love to iron as well as cuddle with the owner in your rest.

Gambler

A lot of dachshunds do not recognize the anxiety - they hurry strongly at the adversary a lot bigger than themselves. If the dachshund wakes up hunting exhilaration, it ends up being deaf to your commands, feels neither discomfort neither tiredness, focusing on the target. Dachshund is exactly the dog that can bark for hrs on a rescued feline from a tree.

Smart

Dachshunds do not join agility and also will certainly not amount to in obedience to pets' official types, but no one will question their knowledge. It is the intellect that provides a dachshund a special appeal and slyness. They are damn ingenious in their tricks, after which they request for mercy so artistically that it becomes difficult to vow, just chuckle.

Vitality enthusiasts.

Dachshunds are not sad, are not annoyed, as well as do not hover with guilt. Searching - with excitement. For me, a dachshund is an endorphin canine!

Even if a pet's back legs fall short, dachshund proprietors usually do not also consider mercy killing. Due to the fact that their dog continues to enjoy life. Caring dachshund assists them leave any kind of condition, billing with positive outlook everyone around.

Dark side of dachshund: 6 unfavorable top qualities.

Since I'm a big lover of a dachshund, any flaws of these dogs seem to me simply cute attributes. If you are not yet struck by taxonomy, pay focus to them to assume about the repercussions before your very first dachshund.

Mania of greatness.

Any kind of dachshund, also a small one, will believe greater than as soon as regarding the question - isn't it the main one in this residence? For this insolent long-nosed pet dog to follow your orders, you will have to inform from the very first days. All your life proves that the owner is the main resource of food, enjoyment, and also enjoyment.

Which you can alter the dachshund, even if you have no time for it now/lazy/you are really worn out/ when can. If you provide the slack, your point of view will certainly no longer be taken into consideration by the dachshund when making decisions.

Arbitrariness, stubbornness, and a propensity to control make a dachshund inappropriate for elderly people or beginners to pet reproduction. Owners who can not place the dachshund in position develop a despot as well as a beast with their own hands.

Loud voice

For seekers, it was very crucial to hear the dachshund providing a voice while in a deep opening. On the other hand - if an animal is not appropriately raised, the dachshund can turn into a bastard.

A separate issue emerges if the dachshund groans and also barks, being left alone. Pets robbed of job do not get either physical or psychological stress and anxiety.

propensity to bite

Numerous individuals take into consideration dachshunds hostile. Typically, dachshunds attack their own proprietors as well as household members - if they consider themselves leaders.

The second reason for bites - if the dachshund safeguards itself, it hesitates. It is not permitted to beat the pet in the process of education or shed. This will not end well, particularly if the dachshund has a remarkable memory. A pet dog can toss on a particular odor, as an example, on drinks.

The 3rd reason is territorial aggressiveness. When I first brought a dachshund to my dacha, it bit my neighbor's leg with blood. She did not bark, just turned up and also barked on the back. It took place when an old lady pertained to our residence. The dog had actually never ever seen her in the past as well as chose that she was an unfamiliar person. It was not simple to describe with a bitten canine! Bite the dachshund as well as neighbor's kids if they were running around our website with squeals and noise.

Zoo aggressiveness.

Dachshund can get along well with cats in the residence - and also selflessly go after strange cats on the road. They need to realize their hunting impulse.

The amount of times I have actually seen the sobbing owners who chose that the hamster in the cage is not endangered with anything. The village dachshund can choke bunnies or hens, so the animal can not be release on a self-guided walk.

Contrary to fears, dachshunds can quickly quadrate pet cats in the same house. If you take a dachshund to a grown-up pet cat, they will certainly end up being buddies forever.

Without timely socialization, dachshunds barely interact with congeners, especially bigger than themselves. Greater than as soon as, I viewed a tiny "sausage" flick its teeth a centimeter away from the face of a puzzled Labrador or a sheepdog. It only stays to advise maintaining the dachshund on a leash due to the fact that fearlessness will certainly not help her avoid injuries in a battle with a pet dog a number of times bigger than herself.

Gluttony.

When the dachshund is awake, either states is looking for food or consuming. Dachshunds are the masters of pleading, as well as their begging look bumps out the most relentless. Never before have I seen a dachshund hug a lot that she would quit a delicious item.

On the one hand, a dog-leaver is okay, since it makes training simpler. On the various other hand, for a lot of the walk, you will make certain that the family pet does not vacuum from the ground.

Dachshunds are not just begging yet additionally swiping. My rascal as soon as chewed a bag of food, which I thoughtlessly left in the hallway. The dog looked like a globe yet was not mosting likely to pass away.

If you take a puppy to your home, you need to learn to order. You require to hide not just the food however all the potentially hazardous things: dachshunds might discover it edible what you can not think of - lipstick, lotion, made use of baby diaper.

Devastating propensities.

For such a lap dog, the dachshund has exceptionally powerful jaws. As well as paws. And claws. In a word, you must not let such a family pet obtain bored, or you will have a developer repair work in your home. It is simple to dig a couch, playing in the red. It is simple to rip the wallpaper. Grind every little thing, left neglected - why not? The dacha location of the dachshund can destroy the grass, steaming holes in it.

Dachshunds cope with toys from the pet store in a matter of mins, as well as just deals with like deer horns, or rubber rounds can take them for a very long time.

Inquiries of treatment and upkeep of a dachshund.

The popularity of dachshunds was substantially added to their unpretentiousness in web content. They really feel equally confident both in the streets of the metropolis as well as in the town. Cabs willingly eat both healthy food and commercial feed. They do not need to wipe their ears or eyes. The care varies just depending upon the type of wool.

Dachshunds need to be cleaned every time after the walk: their breasts and stomach get dirty promptly. You can show your pet dog to use a water resistant one-piece suit. Clothing will additionally be useful in winter season - smooth wool dachshunds are really cold. They should a minimum of use a coat.

Dachshunds do not like to stroll in the rain. If they do not like the weather condition, the pet will quickly chrome or rest on his back. You will be cursed to drag the "unhappy" on a chain (do not poop in your home), gathering the condemnations of passers-by. When you transform to the residence, the victim will support up as well as rush on all four paws.

All the dachshunds, as well as the hardcore ones, too, like comfort and comfort.

Difficult woollen dachshund need to be cut (plucked undercoat) 2 times a year during the seasonal molting (springtime, fall). Long-haired - regularly combed and also bathed. Smooth haired dachshunds, deprived of undercoat, the most comfy in day-to-day life. They are easy to clean, dry promptly, and also the home's woollen will be couple of. Nonetheless, hard as needles, hairs can purposefully get stuck in bed linens.

All dachshunds expand claws very rapidly, especially on the front paws. They are needed to dig. If the pet dog does not search and also strolls little on the asphalt, the claws grow as well long. They are shortened with claw cutters once a month.

Conditions of dachshund.

The bright side is that the dachshunds describe long-term pet dogs. I personally dealt with a 19-year-old cab. The life expectancy of 15-17 years in these dogs is considered the norm.

intervertebral hernia.

Amongst the public, there is a deliberate point of view that issues with the back of the dachshunds are connected with a disproportionately long body. However this is not the situation. Many cases when the back legs of the taxa stop working are related to hereditary discopathy.

In this situation, the canine has an illness of cells regrowth of the intervertebral disks. They lose their elasticity, and by the age of 4 years, there is a risk of disc herniation (outcropping, tear).

When the disc is sticking out, there is pinching of nerves or spine. Depending upon the rupture's size, this is either uncomfortable or a photo of paralysis (the pet can not lean on his back legs, urination and also defecation are disturbed). Therapy can be both operative as well as conventional. To choose the ideal technique, you require to "see" the rupture - CT or MRI.

A pet older than 4-6 years can prompt a rupture by leaping from heights, injury during energetic games with various other pet dogs. The only avoidance is to maintain excellent physical shape and avoid weight problems.

Supposed chondroprotectors do not influence the procedure of disk devastation. They are not used either for treatment or to prevent discopathy in dachshunds. Genes plays a decisive role: dachshund can live a life without having issues with the back. Or it can for the first time "buckle" at the age of 4, and also with age, the assaults will be duplicated regularly.

Bust gland conditions.

Dachshunds are very caring mothers. Also after the very first birth, they take superb treatment of pups, can embrace other people's cubs, such as kittycats. This is because of the high hormone history. But if the bitch is not decontaminated and also does not bind, there are troubles.

After a leakage, dachshunds often have an incorrect pregnancy and after that an incorrect lactating, mastitis. At an older age, deadly lumps happen on the mammary glands.

Because of this, it is suggested to castrate the bitches that are not associated with breeding, ideally - also before the first leak.

Parodontosis.

Dachshunds, specifically dwarfs, often tend to create tartar. Preferably, a pet dog must be instructed to comb his teeth (brush + paste) from youth. Tartar leads to periodontal disease, bad odor from the mouth, and loss of teeth.

Heart failure.

Type illness tax - mitral heart shutoff failure. In older pets (usually after 6 years) its sashes begin to deform as well as can no much longer close firmly.

Just when the left atrium is currently greatly expanded, owners might see a regular cough, lack of breath, intolerance to physical activity. A senior dachshund needs unique care.

Suppose the dachshund is older than 4 years old. In any kind of case, after 6 years, it is better to inspect the heart frequently.

Verdict.

If you as soon as begin a dachshund, it is likely that from this particular day on, just dachshunds will certainly stay in your home. Despite just how remarkable the other breeds of pet dogs are, they are not dachshunds, which states all of it.

Let such a pet dog needs attention. The moment invested will repay a hundredfold. It is difficult to mope when there is an energised, crafty long-nosed pet.

Comments from dachshund owners.

Why did we pick a dachshund.

Fifteen years earlier, when my child was in elementary school (that is, currently ripe for a pet dog, upkeep as well as treatment), by now my kid had actually reviewed several publications about canines and also enjoyed lots of films on the same topic, and also consequently, there was a passionate wish to obtain a pet dog.

They began to choose a breed for an apartment. We do not have a summertime home. It was not feasible to take a huge dog to the areas. As well as right here, a good friend, who stayed in 2 dachshunds, used this type. In the beginning, I was hesitant. It appeared to me that she was such lengthened as well as brief legs. Yet in the long run, we took a puppy with a common long-haired dachshund.

So this is our initial experience of maintaining a pet. As you create in this short article, dachshunds are unreliable, clever, and also they will certainly follow your order if it coincides with her desires. Now our charm is 15 years of ages. Over the years, she has actually been so mischievous: stripped off wallpaper, ate shoes, telephone and television cable televisions, ate off two males's bags at her spouse, and so on. A great deal of other things. Yet she offered as well as remains to provide us so much positive that thanks to her, we have one more long-haired dachshund (miniature, it is currently 5 years old), and also many thanks to her, we fell in love with this breed.

Exactly how do you agree kids and pet cats? With children, it is terrific. The main thing is to let the dog know that this is our youngster, and you can't injure him. They are hardly ever wise, as well as sometimes it seems that she comprehends the significance of what you have actually claimed. With felines, obviously, they likewise get on quickly. I would like to discuss another such factor. It is a solitary type. There are many similarities. Yet they are so various. Every one is an individuality.

The initial meeting.

That's why we are still ahead of us, however my partner came back from work and also fell for her. Now we discover the very first attributes of her personality. Gina always attempts to visit bed with us if we don't let her begin yelling and barking. She is extremely active throughout the day and also enjoys to play with kids and also cats with whom she ended up being pals very quickly. Currently she is a full member of the family!

This love is for life.

For 12 years, we have actually been living with our preferred dachshund. We have actually started our charm absolutely casually - we searched for a lap dog in your house. There was already a huge canine in the yard, and our grandparents desired a "bell", so your home allows, and we needed a guard inside.

However we did not consider that the old people would certainly not have sufficient toughness to take care of this "battery". We took it to the apartment. Whatever that can be chewed up in the very first days was chewed up, whatever that could be excavated as well as excavated. Most of all, we got winter months shoes, made from real natural leather and also with natural fur - we pulled every little thing up.

I was the just one that went to bed with me. She was not interested in the reality that she can be stuck to her feet - she crept to the pillow during the night, and in the morning, I awakened from snoring and a dachshund muzzle on the cushion. When I had a kid - I did not need a child monitor - dachshund lived under the crib.

Now my boy is 5 years old, and our doggie is the ideal girlfriend in all leprosy. They rest together, as well as frequently the dog replaces the youngster's cushion.

[secretlystephaniebrown]

Time’s Running Out: Juliet

Sorry for the delay; things have been pretty complicated and messy IRL lately, and then I realized that I needed to add in another chapter before we move on. It's a little short, but hopefully you guys can forgive me, because it's time to circle back to the heart of this series for a chapter at least; Tex and York's friendship.

Summary: The Reds and Blues; and their respective Freelancers, find themselves stranded on a strange planet named Chorus. Secrets, lies, and the unexpected seem to lie around every corner, and there might be even larger threats looming over the horizon.

They’re possibly even less ready for Chorus than Chorus is for them.

Pairings: Lots of friendships, Suckington, Yorkalina, Chex, eventual Yorkimbalina, possible others.

Start

Previous

Ao3

The worst part was, York knew he deserved it.

Every bit of it; the dirty looks Tucker was sending in his way as he was finally allowed out of the infirmary, the stiffness in Wash’s shoulders as they tried to figure out their plan of attack, and especially the cold and formal way that Kimball said “Agent York”. Like it was a curse, like it pained her to say it.

And every single bit of it, York knew it was earned.

He should have known. Felix and Locus; how could he ever have believed them to be estranged? Like Felix would ever have let that happen, like Locus could ever have turned on Felix. Those two had always been thick as thieves, in a way that India had always disapproved of but had never had the heart to discourage. They’d been brought in as a team, afterall. It wouldn’t be proper to try to separate them.

Those two had been hard from the beginning, but that wasn’t unusual. Most of them had been. You weren’t picked for a squad like theirs without experience, without blood on your hands. Maybe Felix had seemed a bit more interested in assignments dealing with insurrectionists instead of aliens, but York had never thought much about it. Plenty of soldiers hated traitors, and the punishment for defection in a world like theirs was always harsh.

York clasped his hands around the back of his neck, his thumbs tracing circles over the port of Delta’s implants, and tried to breathe.

They’d want him dead. They’d want him dead badly.

He should, he knew, write it all down, so that even if they got him, it would still exist. The truth, about those days, about what he’d done—about what they’d all done. Isaac and Sam and Mason and Foxtrot and—and all of it. Every dirty secret he’d carried with him since long before Freelancer, anything, because there was no way of knowing if any of it was connected to Charon or to Hargrove, anything might be able to give them an advantage over Felix and Locus.

But god. It had been such a long time since he’d thought of those days; his sins during Freelancer were so much more recent, more real, than those distant ones. Freelancer had been meant to atone, for those days. It was supposed to be easy and clean, nothing like the early days. Writing it down would make it real, would be the ultimate proof that they were absolutely right.

Carolina and Tex thought they had blood on their hands, but it was nothing compared to what York had done, what he had failed to do, during those days. They were soldiers, they might have killed more than he had, but—

<York,> Delta reprimanded him, somewhere in the midst of the spiral that York was caught up in.

“Don’t, Dee,” he said. His good eye was closed. “Just… just don’t.”

<York, Agent Carolina is approaching,> Delta said, just a little more forcefully. Quickly, York straightened up, lowering his hands from their position over the back of his neck. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to create that casual but suave look that he tried so hard to maintain. Carolina didn’t need to know that he had been freaking out in a storage room over yet more of his secrets.

Carolina’s movements were also stiff. They were almost wary, which was hilarious, because they both knew she could put him down in a single move if she was so inclined.

“York,” she said. There was that clipped, short tone. It wasn’t the one she used when he’d been talking shit, and had crossed a line. This was something else entirely. York wasn’t quite sure what it was.

He looked at her. “What is it?” He asked. He didn’t stand up. He was too tired for all of this; it felt like it had seeped into his bones, this complete and utter exhaustion that he couldn’t shake.

Everyone around him, everything around him, two people he would have once, if not trusted with his wallet, known would watch his back, wanted to destroy. Felix, who had acted like Kimball’s confidant, wanted her dead. Locus, who had once let the refugee children camped out near their jungle base sit on his shoulders, was willing to kill every child on this planet.

What might York have become, if Delta wasn’t in his head? If Tex hadn’t pulled him out of Freelancer? What lines would he have been willing to cross?

It was a heavy thought and York didn’t like it.

“You never told me anything about special ops,” she said, finally. “Never.” There was betrayal there, implied at least, but this time, York bristled.

“When we—when we started that,” York said. “We said no names, no history, no strings.”

Carolina scowled, taking a step towards him. “Since when did you care about that?”

Most of the agreement had been moot in York’s mind for years. Sometime along the way, casual, blowing off steam had become something more intimate, something real.

Strings had been lost long before they had kissed in the grass in front of blue base, the thrill of mutual survival humming through their veins. He loved her, had mourned her, had lost her, and then found her again. She was his history now, possibly even more so than anything that had become before her.

But he had never told her a name further back than Foxtrot, and that had been a conscious choice. The name from before was burned in every sense of the word, burned and buried and then the ashes scattered to the winds for good measure. None of the people who had once known him by that name would recognize Agent York, even before he had lost an eye. There were virtually no similarities between the kid he’d been and the person he was now.

Carolina had never told him hers, either, or at least not her first name. But he did know her last name, although she had never told him. Tex had been the one to explain it to him, one night behind the waterfall, liquor heavy on his lips as he had curled against her side and cried for Carolina, cried because if he’d just tried harder, explained better, hadn’t been cocky and over-sure, had just tried a little harder to get her to listen—maybe she wouldn’t have gone off that cliff. Tex had been the one to tell him about that all important last name.

Church.

And that name alone told him her history in the broadest strokes possible, even if she still didn’t know his. But she knew that he’d known, and that made this confrontation hurt all the more, because she wasn’t wrong.

York’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t like thinking about it,” he said, finally. “It’s—I didn’t want you to hate me. The things I did—”

“You think I’d judge you?” Carolina said, incredulous. He knew what she was thinking; there was a tower, in a civilian town, a massacre on a highway, a project of friends and family in ashes around them.

York laughed. “Why not? I do.” He shook his head. “That—Felix, Locus, everything I did. That was supposed to be over. They burned my file, Carolina, there’s… there’s nothing less.” Freelancer had burned Foxtrot’s file, which already was cleared out of information of who he’d been before. There were no records at all of who he’d been when he’d joined the army. York was a ghost.

He turned around and walked away.

Carolina let him go.

Tex finally reported to the generals after Carolina told her off for avoiding them.

“Just…” Carolina was tired, Tex could tell. She wasn’t as ragged as she had been in those last days of Freelancer. The edges were still neat, not fraying at the edges. But there were dark circles under her eyes and her skin was pale. She was tightly wound, and Tex could guess that the reason why was a four letter word and her best friend. “Talk to them. You’ll be an important asset in the fight against Charon.”

Tex tilted her head in as much acknowledgement as she was willing to give.

She’d mostly forgiven Carolina for the others nearly dying. She understood, in a way, Carolina’s logic. Tex was a computer, she could do the math. It had made sense to continue their covert operations. And without the information they had gathered, they might not have been able to circumvent the trap that Felix and Locus had created for the Reds and Blues.

She ignored thinking about the Director.

Carolina and Epsilon hadn’t been killing as much, Tex knew that. She’d seen Epsilon’s math, knew he was deliberately trying to leave as many of them alive as possible. Tex wanted to grab them both by the shoulders and shake them. She wanted to scream. Every enemy left alive would come back to haunt them later.

There was no choice for mercy. Kindness was not an option. Felix and Locus and the pirates were trying to wipe out an entire planet. Tex had seen the list of the dead in her exploration of Armonia’s computer files. They had already made significant headway into their work.

It was guilt, Tex knew. It was guilt and this desire to change, to be better. It was the same problem York had, and Tex wanted to scream because those two might get the rest of them killed for their guilt.

Tex walked away from Carolina, towards the room where she would be meeting Kimball and Doyle.

Tex would have to work twice as hard to make sure that the pirates’ numbers shrunk accordingly, if Carolina wasn’t willing to pick up the slack.

She pushed open the doors, and glanced. Two people, both in armor. One in the uniform of the New Republic, one in the Federal Army. They were shouting, too, something about housing arrangements and designated areas. Things Tex didn’t care about, anyways. The Reds and Blues had been assigned a part of one of the smaller barracks, and Tex had already located secondary places to stash things and sleep if necessary. Not that she slept. But she could pass it along.  

Tex didn’t cloak; Wash had lectured her already about not using it openly, especially in front of Feds. She didn’t want to piss off the people who were going to be in charge.

Well. She also didn’t want to be working for people who liked her too much. Not again, at least.

Finally, they noticed her, and the shouting awkwardly tapered off.

Tex nodded. “Agent Texas,” she said by way of introduction.

“Yes,” the woman said—Kimball, that was her name. York and Tucker liked her, which was probably a good sign, even if she thought York might like her a little too much. “Vanessa Kimball.”

“General Donald Doyle,” the man said. “It really is a pleasure, Colonel Sarge and Private Grif have told me a great deal about you.”

Kimball turned slightly, as if wanting to say something. “Yes, well, your reputation has certainly preceded you here,” Kimball says, but there’s a strangled undertone there that makes Tex think she just missed out on some first class passive aggression. She’s almost disappointed.

Tex smirked. “I do what I can,” she said.

“We are, of course, immensely grateful for all of your assistance in helping uncover Locus and Felix’s treachery,” Doyle said.

Tex shrugged. She hadn’t done it for them. She thought about Tucker in the hospital bed, and something dark and angry coiled tightly in her stomach. She’d kill Felix for that alone. They would both die, but Felix especially for that. Slow and painful, like he deserved.

Church had once told her the story of how “she” had beaten someone to death with his own skull. Tex always had wanted to see if she could really do it.

“Only five of you have formally accepted commissions by the armies,” Kimball said, picking up a datapad. “The rest of you are currently… advising, I believe is the term Agent Carolina decided to use.”

Tex frowned. “Six, isn’t it? The five with you and then Sarge?”

There was a stiffness to Kimball’s shoulders, suddenly, and Tex watched, fascinated, as the relatively pleasant woman in front of her became a stiff and angry military leader. “Agent York never accepted a commission during his time with the Federal Army.”

Tex wanted to smack her hand against her forehead—better yet, smack it against York’s forehead. York had fucked up here. She could sense it; the raw hurt in Kimball’s voice when she said York’s name was as obvious as York’s crush on the woman.

She had waded into something weird and complicated, and Tex wanted no part of this.

“What does advising mean?” She asked, sidestepping York for now. She would deal with York after she’d plied him with enough alcohol to figure out where his brain was at.

“You’re technically outside of the chain of command,” Doyle said. “Agent Washington is intending to assist with training, but, ah, officially he will not be leading squads into the field, and neither will any of the others who have not accepted a commission.”

Tex sighed. “And what does it actually mean?”

“You still answer to us,” Kimball said. “But insubordination is not punishable, and you’ll operate outside of the formal structure. You’ll have more leeway to take initiative or go off on your own.”

Tex hummed thoughtfully. So… doing her normal thing. She could probably handle that. She would have to ask Church and Kai why they hadn’t taken commissions, though. That seemed like it could get complicated quickly.

Not to mention, it was probably going to drive Church crazy, that Tucker and Caboose outranked him.

“We have, ah… a rough approximate of your abilities from the others,” Doyle said. “An active camouflage unit was mentioned, I believe?”

Tex cocked her head to one side. “I’m stronger than the others, slower than Carolina though. Don’t stay up quite as long as Wash, but it’s harder to hurt me.”

Kimball looked at her curiously. “And York?”

Huh. So maybe York’s crush wasn’t unrequited. Tex stared at her for a beat, then decided that York had this coming, for putting Carolina and Kimball both in such a bad mood.

“I can lie for shit, unlike York.” Then she turned on her heel, activated her invisibility, and left the room.

She found York not long after that; he had broken into the room she was sharing with Church, sitting on her bed.

“Hey,” he said, in that slow, tired way of his that meant he was having a bad day. She was surprised he wasn’t on a roof smoking somewhere, but then she remembered that they were on a planet with limited supplies. Smoking might be out of the question right now.

Tex nodded to acknowledge him, then started taking off her armor, piece by piece. York said nothing, instead leaning back against the pillows that Tex had never touched, fiddling with what looked like the internal motor for a toy car.

Tex didn’t like taking her armor off much, especially not on this planet. It was almost suffocating, just how much danger filled this planet. Mercenaries who could move as freely as she could, and there was no way there weren’t spies and traitors in their midst. Locus and Felix had been integrated in these armies for years. They had to have friends or contacts, people who might think they could win their survival with the right knife in the right back.

Armonia was supposed to be safe. But Tex hadn’t felt safe for a very long time.

“So,” Tex said, after taking her helmet off. “Kimball, huh?”

York didn’t look at her. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

Tex grabbed the pillow out from under his head, sending him falling down. “You’re a terrible liar,” she informed him.

York looked up at her, and god he looked awful.

A part of her wished they’d never left Valhalla. He’d never looked this bad there; even on his worse days, he’d never looked at her like this. Like he was expecting her to tell him to get out of her room.

She hated this planet with every part of her being. It had split up her friends, it had put them in danger, it was a murderous, terrible place, and it had brought up York’s past, a topic so fraught that he had only ever spoken of it to her a few, halting, drunk times.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t pretty, she had known that for years now. Even now, with more pieces of the puzzle, she knew there was more of it. There were things that he couldn’t even say out loud—dark and complicated and messy and much better left forgotten.

“I don’t care about Felix and Locus,” she told him, and it was the truth. York was an idiot, she had known. He also believed in people; stupidly, naively, optimistically, but he did. He had believed the Director when he told York they were going to end the war. He had believed that Carolina would just listen when he tried to tell her. He had believed that Felix was still the guy he had known back during the war. He wouldn’t have seen any of this coming. “So stop looking at me like that.”

A small smile twitched at the edge of York’s mouth. “Thanks Tex,” he said.

Tex rolled her eyes and sat down next to him, sitting down against the foot of her bed, facing him. Their legs met in the middle, giving Tex ample kicking opportunity.

“You really fucked up this time,” Tex said conversationally.

York twisted the machine in his hands. “Yep.”

“Carolina’s pissed.”

“Yep.”

“I heard Tucker got Grif to short-sheet your bed.”

“Yep.”

“I think Kimball likes you back.”

York dropped the motor with a loud yelp.

Tex snorted, tapping her ankle lightly against his knee. “Does Carolina know you’re pining after other girls? Not that I blame you, Kimball seems cool.”

York made a strangled noise, then shook his head. “It’s not like that, Tex,” he said, quietly. “I love Carolina.” There was a heaviness to that sentence, one Tex had heard a thousand times. A longing, a mourning, and then something else entirely.

Tex shrugged.

“Just do what makes you happy,” she said. “Like spar with me.”

“Tex, I love you, but I also enjoy my ribs.”

“What if I promise only to go after your kneecaps?”

“I’m getting old! I need those!”

“Boring,” Tex said, and kept going until she’d cajoled York off her bed, into armor, and towards the training rooms.

Chorus was a shithole, and she hated it.

But at least she had this.

[johnandrasjaqobis]

Ok so for the short fic/numbers post: Tex/Rachel and 1! (Bc tbh 15 is practically canon. Also, I was so tempted to ask you for 32, but 1 is def better!)

Listen do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had emotions about them.I also had to watch chunks of Welcome to Gitmo because I had forgotten a lot of Tex’s intro and I also made the mistake of checking Tex’s wiki for his daughter’s name and now I am very reluctant to finish s3.

ANYWAY

It felt like the clock should have stopped the day the world went to shit. The day they got the call that the virus wasn’t stopping, that martial law had been enacted, that prisons were sort of a moot point now. They’d let the detainees go, gave everyone an equal shot at maybe escaping the constant death that was slipping into even their secluded little island. The world had ended, after all.

And the world ending kind of put a stall on the whole ‘soulmate’ thing, didn’t it?

Tex had never paid much mind to it anyway, a lot of people didn’t. There were plenty of happy marriages that hadn’t stopped clocks, and just because his own had split apart, it had also given him Kathleen. He wouldn’t consider that a failure.

So he hadn’t kept a very close eye on the small numbers on his forearm – his uniform generally covered them anyway – and after the end of the world, well, there were plenty of other pressing issues to focus on.

The former prisoners attacking his men, for example. The constant wire-thin balance between holding ground and retreating to areas where they knew people had been infected. Having to watch as, one by one, their numbers dwindled, until his best friend was left in a car that was rigged as a trap for whatever big ass ship rolled into the docks.

Tex hadn’t really been expecting to get off the damn island alive. He’d planned to enact as much justice as he could before he was either shot, infected, or just starved. Not like he was too fond of boats, but hey, a little easier to watch the end of the world from a fully-armed Navy battleship than some crappy island.

He was met with a general friendly wariness from the rest of the crew when Chandler first brought him aboard, but that was to be expected. Tight-knit group, especially after being out so long, and some random Gitmo guard wasn’t about to be drawn into the fold just because he’d lent a couple of bullets. Tex was fine with that, offered friendly smiles anyway, and let himself be ushered to the medical bay with only a little protesting that there were bigger injuries to treat than a scrape on his arm.

They seemed to agree, at least, and he sat for a few minutes with some other crew members with only minor problems, trying to get used to the very slight yet constant bobbing motion underneath him.

“– pull through just fine,” a brisk voice was saying as the door swung open, and Tex looked up from his examination of the metal floor. “Now that we’re actually well-stocked there won’t be any need for rationing the antibiotics, but tell the Captain that he’s back on duty after I clear it, not before.”

The woman that came in spared a sweeping glance over everyone in the room as she pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. After a short pause she let out a light sigh, letting the bag on her shoulder slip down to her hand. “Alright, no one here is in immediate danger of bleeding out, are they?”

Tex let himself watch her work, coming up with various ridiculous theories as to what a British doctor might be doing on some US Navy battleship. One of the crew called her Dr. Scott, and despite a bit of tension from some of them, Green leaned close when she started checking him over, and there was a sincere sort of gratitude in his eyes even if Tex couldn’t actually hear what he said.

When she reached him, Scott did take a moment to look him over quickly before kneeling down and pulling his arm toward her. “The Captain did say we made a new friend.”

“Well, y’know, Doc,” Tex said with a grin, “you kill some terrorists together, it’s a bonding experience.” He had to hold back a hiss when she ran a wet cloth carefully over the cut on his arm and could’ve sworn Scott rolled her eyes. “I’m Tex.”

“Doctor Scott,” she replied, then paused and amended, “Rachel Scott. Hold this up for a moment.”

Tex propped his arm on one knee, watching her rummage through her bag before he looked over at the half-dried blood. It took him a few seconds to realize what was off, other than the blood itself, and something in his breath caught even as Scott pulled it away again, now with an alcohol-soaked cloth in her hand.

The revelation let him ignore the initial sting at first; the numbers weren’t moving. There weren’t any numbers to be moving, the clock had run down, replaced with the small string of zeros.

He hadn’t noticed it getting that close, but it had still been moving yesterday – he’d seen the flicker of motion when he changed into a cleaner shirt even if he hadn’t paid attention to what the numbers were. That meant it had been some time today.

It made sense, in a weird way, but hell, he hadn’t noticed, and there had been a lot of new people in a very short span of time, so which –

The alcohol was a little too prominent then to ignore completely, and Tex winced as some of the dried blood came loose. “It stings,” he said when Scott just raised an eyebrow at him.

“It’s supposed to sting,” she said, “I’m cleaning it.”

“Don’t need it cleaned.”

“Yes, you do.”

He chuckled, eyes drawn almost unconsciously to the spot on her own arm that was just visible above the glove. Unless it was upside-down for some reason, Scott’s wasn’t moving either. That wouldn’t have been too surprising if it weren’t so easy to see it.

From what he knew, the marks faded after they’d accomplished their purpose. Never truly went away, but after long enough they would be pale enough to barely see. Scott’s was as dark and clear as his, and if what Chandler had said was right –

“How long you lot been out here?” Tex asked, making some attempt at sounding casual. If he didn’t manage it, Scott didn’t seem to notice.

“Nearly five months,” she said, turning to pull out a roll of bandages. “Lucky to get here when we did, or you would all be chewing leaves for medication.”

“So been stuck with just this crew the whole time? No newcomers?”

She scoffed lightly. “It’s a little difficult to find new personnel given the condition of the workforce.”

Meaning he was the first.

Well, shit.

Tex left it at that for now, let himself watch her work. She’d notice eventually. She’d put the pieces together just like he had.

Apparently there were things even the end of the world couldn’t stop.

[biofunmy]

Transgender Opera Singers Find Their Voices

AUSTIN, Tex. — Holding his whiskey in one hand and his Stetson in the other, the opera’s hero — a tough stagecoach driver — offered an unhappy barmaid some advice in a strong, clear tenor voice.

“You could be anything,” sang the tenor, Holden Madagame.

He should know. Mr. Madagame, 28, is part of a new wave of transgender opera singers. Trained as a mezzo-soprano, he risked his singing career when he transitioned several years ago and began taking testosterone, which lowers and alters the voice — a voice he had spent years fine-tuning for opera, where success is measured in the subtlest of gradations.

“A couple of my singer friends were sort of like, you’re ruining your career, you’re ruining your life, the voice is everything,” he recalled recently. “And I thought, it’s not. I would rather enjoy my life, and pursue singing if it happens. I didn’t know if I’d be able to.”

It turned out that he could. Now he is one of several transgender singers who are beginning to make their mark in the tradition-bound world of opera. Some, like him, found new voices, either with the help of hormones or through retraining. Others kept the voices they had built their careers on — even if it meant continuing to perform in the gender they had left behind. Now some are getting higher-profile roles — and upending preconceptions about voice and gender.

Opera itself is beginning to change: The most-produced new opera in North America in some recent seasons has been “As One,” a transgender coming-of-age story. This is happening as transgender rights are being debated by sports officials, in state legislatures and in the armed forces, where President Trump moved to ban transgender troops from serving.

As Mr. Madagame was singing in Austin this spring, a transgender woman, Lucia Lucas, was 450 miles north, at the Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma, rehearsing the title role in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Ms. Lucas retained her powerful low baritone voice after her transition: Estrogen does not raise the voice the way testosterone lowers it.

“It would be great if I could just take estrogen and wake up and sing Brünnhilde,” she said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

In some respects, this generation of transgender singers is adding a new wrinkle to a very old tradition: Opera has been gender fluid since its beginnings. The earliest operas had boys’ roles sung by female sopranos, and both female and male roles were sometimes sung by castrati — men who were castrated before puberty to preserve their high voices.

When that practice ended, the high male roles they had sung were often taken by women. And many great composers, including Mozart and Strauss, wrote “trouser roles,” male parts created for women to sing. One of the most successful European transgender opera singers is Adrian Angelico, a 35-year-old Norwegian who kept his mezzo-soprano voice after transitioning in 2016, becoming one of the few men specializing in trouser roles.

We spent time with four of the artists at the forefront of this new wave.

Going From Mezzo to Tenor

At first, testosterone did not seem like an option.

Mr. Madagame, who was assigned female at birth, moved to Berlin after graduating from the University of Michigan, where he had studied singing, but things were not working out as planned.

“I got massively depressed. I just couldn’t sing,” he recalled. “And I kind of knew that it was about gender, but I didn’t want to admit it.”

By that point, he had put in years of hard work becoming a mezzo-soprano. A whole new voice could jeopardize it.

“Frankly, I did not have any experience with what would happen,” said Stephen West, one of his voice professors at Michigan, who remembered him as an exceptional mezzo.

Opera singers rely on their unamplified voices for their livelihoods, and they spend years perfecting their techniques — so they tend to be wary of anything that might strain or damage their voices. But Mr. Madagame had grown so unhappy that he decided to take the leap into the unknown.

“I decided that if I’m not singing, and the only reason that I’m not taking testosterone is that I want to sing, then I should just take testosterone,” he said.

After the first few shots, he recalled, the timbre of his voice — its overall color and resonance — began to change. “At first, it’s not the actual pitches that are dropping,” he said, “but it’s like the overtones are lowering.”

Then came a period when his voice grew unsettled: “I had no singing voice — I had, like, an octave range,” he recalled. “It was terrifying. I thought, What if it stays like this?”

He felt better emotionally, but grew concerned when he still had trouble singing after the first few months. He began to wonder if he would be able to work again.

“I have no idea: Nobody knows,” he recalled thinking. “So, yeah. Terrifying.”

He returned to some of the easy Italian arias he had learned as a teenager, not too hard and not too high. But they were suddenly not so easy.

“They teach you a lot just by singing them,” he said. “I thought, Well, my voice just needs to be retrained to do these things. But at first I couldn’t even sing those.”

Stephanie Weiss, a voice teacher with a private studio, coached him as his voice settled, and saw him through tough early moments when his voice would crack. Mr. Madagame had a breakthrough while working on a Mozart aria. He was having trouble, as many young tenors do, gracefully reaching the high notes, Ms. Weiss remembered, so she gave him a few tips — including which vowels to hold as his voice climbed into his upper range.

Something clicked.

“He said, ‘Oh my God, I never thought I could make that sound,’” Ms. Weiss recalled.

It helped, she added, that Mr. Madagame had already developed a solid technique. “Now,” she said, “he really has found his voice — in every way.”

Soon Mr. Madagame, who now lives in Görlitz, a German town on the Polish border, began getting small roles with small companies in Germany and the United Kingdom. He was accepted by the Glyndebourne Academy, a program of the prestigious Glyndebourne Festival in England.

He also became an activist, working to educate people about transgender issues. His website includes essays on “Why is it rude to ask a trans* person what their birth name was?” and “The FAQ to end all FAQs,” which includes a series of “questions not to ask but I’ll answer anyway,” including a section explaining which parts of his anatomy he has changed, and which he has not.

He dreams of singing Lensky, the doomed poet in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” but he is mostly working now on smaller character tenor parts, not starring roles. “I’m 5-foot-2,” he noted — another casting challenge.

But it was a lead role that brought him to Austin. He starred in “Good Country,” an opera by the composer Keith Allegretti and the librettist Cecelia Raker that was based on the true story of Charley Parkhurst, a stagecoach driver who lived as a man but was discovered, after his death in 1879, to have been born a woman.

They wrote the part for a transgender singer — and after they cast Mr. Madagame, they tailored it with his voice in mind.

Changing ‘One Little Thing’

She entered the rehearsal room in her street clothes — striped top, silver flats, hair pulled back in a ponytail, a little lipstick on — and began singing one of the most toxically masculine characters in opera: the title role in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

Mozart wrote a number of male roles for women to sing. Don Giovanni is not one of them. But as her booming, powerful baritone ricocheted off the walls, Ms. Lucas, 38, became the character — plotting his next seductions with relish and menace.

Her performances in Tulsa made headlines, and were the latest indication that her career was more than just getting back on track after she risked it by transitioning to female while working as a baritone for an opera company in Karlsruhe, Germany.

“It was always a question of, So, when is my career going to be done, so that I can transition?” she recalled in a recent interview in New York, explaining that she had felt disconnected from her birth gender since her childhood in Sacramento. “I never thought that they would coexist.”

But in 2013, she decided not to put off her transition any longer. She came out at the annual opera ball in Karlsruhe: Her wife, also a singer, wore a tuxedo, and Ms. Lucas wore a gown.

The company was initially supportive. “It was a good case study: Can somebody who is trans have a career in opera?” Ms. Lucas said. “I thought, Can I have a career after if I only change one little thing? It’s actually not something about the stage, it’s something personal. Because I’m going to continue singing baritone; I’m going to continue playing men on stage.”

Since hormones would not alter her voice, and retraining as a contralto seemed impractical, she remained a baritone. Now the vast majority of her stage roles are male — a gender she was uncomfortable with in life. But she said she had made peace with it.

“I’ll just go and put a beard on,” Ms. Lucas said, noting that she impersonates all kinds of characters onstage. “Clearly it is a disguise. It’s not bringing you back to an old life.”

When she had facial feminization surgery, she did not let her doctor do anything to her sinus cavity, nose or Adam’s apple.

“As much as I was putting my transition in front of my career,’’ she said, “I didn’t want him messing with anything that would mess with my voice.”

But after a while, her contract in Karlsruhe was not renewed, and she did not get called to auditions elsewhere that she would have expected in the past.

She grew more determined.

“Clearly my transition was important: It was more important than my career,” she said. “But now that I’ve done my transition, basically everything that I want to do, I’m like, Oh, no, I do love my career. I do want to keep my career. I’m going to fight for my career now.”

New opportunities arose. She got the chance to sing Wotan, the king of the gods, in Wagner’s “Die Walküre.” Next season she will sing at the English National Opera, an eminent company in London, in Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld.”

Her path to the Tulsa Opera began with an email from Tobias Picker, its artistic director and a composer who has written operas for the Metropolitan Opera and other major companies.

Mr. Picker was planning to write an opera based on “The Danish Girl,” David Ebershoff’s novel about one of the first people to attempt sex reassignment surgery, and he was looking for a transgender singer to appear in it. The idea appealed to Ms. Lucas: getting to premiere a new work by an important composer in which she would get to play a trans character.

But when Ms. Lucas came to New York to audition, and sang an aria from Verdi’s “Otello,” Mr. Picker decided to hire her for something much sooner.

“The Verdi was so astonishing that I thought, Well, it’s time to start casting ‘Don Giovanni’ anyway — so I asked her to do it,” Mr. Picker said.

Her appearance in Tulsa was an event. When an excerpt from a documentary that is being made about her was screened at a local art house, the Circle Cinema, Ms. Lucas told the audience that much of her work aimed to show people that being trans was not a big deal.

“I’m trying to show that being trans is not the story,” she told the crowd. “It’s sort of like anti-advocacy.”

Choosing to Wait on Hormones

“ID?” a transgender character asks a police officer in “Stonewall,” a new opera about the raid that helped spur the modern gay rights movement.

“I’d love to have an ID!” the character continues. “But the powers that be won’t give me one — at least not one that represents me.”

The line resonated with Liz Bouk, the mezzo-soprano singing it. Mr. Bouk is a transgender man who had only recently gotten a new driver’s license listing his sex as male.

“I felt like a teenage boy when I got that driver’s license,” he said. “After getting the driver’s license I went out and bought a pickup truck and learned how to drive stick shift.”

But Mr. Bouk’s transition, which came just as a hard-won career as a mezzo was finally beginning to blossom, involved difficult trade-offs. As much as he has sometimes longed to take hormones, he fears what they could do to his voice. So he decided to forgo them, and to keep playing what he calls “fiery women” and trouser roles on stage.

“If I’m working, if I’m singing,” he said, “can I stand the dysphoria of being in the wrong body, and being misgendered at the grocery store, or by people I don’t know?”

He changed his name from Elizabeth Anna to Liz (friends call him “Mr. Liz”) but put off a future change, possibly to John, so as not to confuse casting directors. He wears his blond hair long, but not as long as he used to. And he brings two head shots to auditions: one in a suit, labeled “Liz Bouk as himself,” and one in a dress, labeled “head shot for female roles.”

Since coming out as a man, he said, and feeling more at peace, his voice has improved. He has been working on shows about his journey. And he keeps getting work — and good reviews. But he sometimes has moments of yearning offstage, when he looks in the mirror.

“It would be great,” he said, “if my outsides matched my insides.”

Pushing Higher

“Please rise and remove your caps for our national anthem,” the announcer said shortly before the start of a 2015 Oakland A’s baseball game, “as performed by San Francisco Conservatory of Music graduate Breanna Sinclairé.”

Ms. Sinclairé raised a microphone and became what is believed to be the first transgender woman to sing the anthem at a major league game.

It made news around the world, and showed how far she had come since her darkest days, when she was briefly homeless and subjected to attacks on the streets of New York.

Ms. Sinclairé said that it was her earliest conviction that she did not feel comfortable in her body. That feeling carried into her singing, too.

“People kept pushing me to be the tenor, because I was tall,” Ms. Sinclairé said. “And I’m like, I don’t want to be no damn hero! I want to be the damsel in distress!”

After an unhappy stint at a bible college in Canada, she was admitted to the California Institute of the Arts — and saved enough money cutting grass to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to make the trip.

She decided to transition in her senior year at CalArts, and one of her teachers, Kate Conklin, encouraged her to try singing mezzo-soprano repertoire.

“We were working with what was already there.” Ms. Conklin said, noting that Ms. Sinclairé could already sing quite high.

Next came San Francisco, and its conservatory.

“We had never had anyone come in and audition for us who was transitioning,” said Ruby Pleasure, her teacher there. “And it was obvious that she was a diamond in the rough.”

Last New Year’s Eve, she appeared with the San Francisco Symphony. She continues to study, and is expanding into higher soprano roles. Next spring she will return to Canada to sing in an opera at the Against the Grain Theater in Toronto.

“I’m going to be in Toronto as my true self,” she said. “Singing soprano.”

Sahred From Source link Arts

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The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town

By 1923 moral outrage was the American way of life. The country was three years into the nationwide prohibition of alcohol which had been forced through by the po-faced campaigners of the temperance movement. Yet it was also an age of excess, of decadence, and paradoxically a period in which boozing was more prevalent than ever. The sport of boxing was experiencing success that it never had before and flying in the face of these same moral crusaders. Professional fist fighting has always been on shaky ground morally—even the most eloquent supporters of the sport must admit that they do enjoy watching men try to knock each other unconscious—but the increasing amount of money sloshing around this leisure activity was drawing unwanted attention.

In New York State, prize fighting brought in over five million dollars at the gate through 1922 and at the heart of that was George ‘Tex’ Rickard with his Madison Square Garden Corporation. In 1910 Rickard had promoted the Fight of the Century between black champion, Jack Johnson and returning "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries, but the resulting race riots and ban on fight film had destroyed boxing’s image. Rickard had to rebuild boxing from the ground up and much of this work was done with Jack Dempsey. Where Jack Johnson had driven crowds mad with his slow fighting style and fast mouth, Dempsey fought like a wild man between the ropes, and was the perfect gentleman the moment the fight ended. Dempsey was a box office sensation and when the wily Rickard matched him against the French war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921, the pair were able to produce the first ever million dollar gate. By 1920, Rickard was able to acquire a two year long lease on Madison Square Garden, by 1925 he had moved the Garden to its third site where it would remain until 1966.

But for a brief period in 1922, Rickard was sent reeling. Several girls— young girls—were brought forward who could attest to Rickard taking them to various apartments around New York, giving detailed and accurate descriptions of the interiors of his office and various addresses amid their allegations. A jury found Rickard innocent of any wrongdoing, but he was shaken and his public image had been smeared. Shortly afterwards in February 1923, the head of the New York State Athletic Commission, William Muldoon, tore through Rickard’s earning potential by announcing that no heavyweight title fight would be held in his jurisdiction unless promoters stopped paying those damn fighters so well and opened up more seating to the common man. The idea that top fighters are pampered and that money is ruining the game has been a fixture in fighting from the beginning, and sportswriters are always recalling a romanticized earlier time, but this might be the only recorded instance of an athletic commission turning down a fight for being too profitable.

This left Jack Dempsey and his manager, Doc Kearns, with no meal ticket. By the start of 1923, Dempsey had been inactive for 18 months. Since he blasted Carpentier, he had been living the good life—traveling overseas, visiting various U.S. cities in the capacity of a beloved celebrity—but he had not been putting in the rounds. There is a ticking clock on any fighter who makes it big and Kearns knew this far better than his fast living young charge did. Entertaining any offer that crossed his desk, Kearns managed to book Dempsey into what has to be regarded as the most fecklessly handled fight in the history of the heavyweight championship.

The Shelby Board of Fight Promoters

Shelby, Montana was famous for nothing. It was a junction on the Great Northern railway that the construction team named after Montana Central Railway manager, Peter Shelby. Shelby, not quite flattered by this honor, insisted that it would never be more than a God-forsaken mudhole. In 1921, the vast Kevin-Sunburst oil field was discovered and the town seemed on the verge of a population boom if they could just make the world aware of this opportunity. The wealthy landowners and oil prospectors in Shelby figured that a heavyweight title fight was a magnificent way to get national attention.

James Johnson, the mayor of Shelby, owner of one of its two banks, and one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, led the group. Shelby saw fit to offer Doc Kearns and Dempsey the princely sum of $200,000 to fight in the town. In some retellings the intention was simply to gain national attention by making the offer, and that the Shelby money men could never have imagined Kearns would jump on it. In other retellings the group intercepted a Montana based manager and promoter named Mike Collins, who was barnstorming through the state with several of his fighters at the time, and asked him to approach Kearns on their behalf. This second version of the story is more fun: the businessmen lost faith in Collins and sent state American Legion commander and pilot, Loy Molumby on an aerial pursuit of Kearns across the United States. Either way, it was Molumby who ended up negotiating with Kearns and who was talked up to $300,000. This was to be delivered in thirds: the first on signing the contract, the second in June, and the third on the 2nd July, two days before the fight.

Doc Kearns is universally recalled as unpleasant, and when the respectable Tommy Gibbons was picked as Dempsey’s opponent, things faltered again. Gibbons’s manager was just one of many men that Kearns had made an enemy. Gibbons and his manager wanted the fight, but neither would be in the room with Kearns for the negotiations. Even Dempsey didn’t enjoy Kearns’s company, but he had come along just as Dempsey had needed him. As a young man, Dempsey had travelled to the boxing centers of the U.S.—New York and San Francisco—and still found himself a no-namer with no prospects. After returning to his family home in Salt Lake City, Dempsey received a timely letter from Kearns, who had managed one of Dempsey’s opponents. Kearns found Jack at rock bottom, but after Dempsey gave Kearns a chance things started to turn around for the young Mormon slugger. Kearns was in it for the money but his fate was tied to Dempsey’s success. When the contract for the Gibbons fight was signed Kearns had $100,000 in hand, the promise of $200,000 more, and the opportunity to walk out of the fight with whatever he already had should the Shelby men fall even a cent short of their promise.

As the fight neared, Dempsey took up residence in Great Falls, a couple of hours' train ride out of Shelby, and seemed delighted to be back in action. The sparring sessions were frequent and brutal but the visitors to his camp were a constant stream of star struck well-wishers. Dempsey loved the public and he loved the wilderness. It was a change of pace to be out of the city come fight time. But the mood of the public began to sour as Shelby’s financial drama began to play out in the newspapers. When the time came for the second payment, James Johnson confessed that the group of backers had only been able to stump up the underwhelming sum of $1,600. Kearns was irate, but the Shelby men had already hired a small army of carpenters to build them a fifty thousand seat arena. Johnson and Molumby scrambled for alternatives. The first suggestion was that Kearns take the gate receipts in full, but he wasn’t in the business of promoting fights and he knew that there was no certainty of the turnout.

Then he was offered fifty thousand head of sheep instead—a valuable commodity, no doubt, but worthless to a man who rarely left the city and had no intention of investing in a farming operation—the same was true of the ranch that the businessmen then offered. Finally wealthy patrons from all across Montana were brought in and the matter was framed as one to do with Montana’s honor, rather than a mistake on the part of the Shelby men. The new backers included George Stanton, owner of the Stanton Bank and Trust Company, and Dan Tracy, a hotelier from Grand Falls. After the second installment was scraped together, Tracy was tasked with scouring through the books to find a way that the third instalment could be raised. Tracy ran the numbers and promptly exited the sinking ship.

Hours before it was due to start, the fight was still in limbo. The final $100,000 couldn’t be raised and Doc Kearns was ready to skip town with what he had. Finally, Kearns was talked into letting the fight go ahead in exchange for the entirety of the gate receipts. Tommy Gibbons, Dempsey’s opponent, had been fighting for a percentage of gate receipts over $300,000, it now appeared that he was only fighting for the heavyweight title.

It quickly became apparent that the money wasn’t what motivated Tommy Gibbons. Against the most fearsome knockout artist in boxing, Gibbons went the full fifteen rounds. In doing so he became the only fighter to go the distance with Dempsey since 1918. Gibbons, who had been staying in Shelby throughout his camp, walked home to his family with a trail of fans cheering him. Dempsey would later say of Gibbons that hitting him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind. Many of the sportswriters present would heap praise on the pace of the fight and the skill that both men showed, but for the most part the performance was given to empty seats.

Doc Kearns had taken Dempsey out of New York because the commission had insisted that ticket prices be lowered. Tickets for ringside seats at Dempsey-Gibbons (which had to be purchased from the Shelby tobacconist) were fifty dollars and by the time the fighters entered the ring, Kearns had slashed prices in desperation. Just seven thousand people paid to attend, with a few thousand more hopping the fences to get in.

Tex Rickard had made this business look effortless. Kearns would have loved nothing more than to not need Rickard, but in every aspect of fight promotion Rickard was the master. He had pulled off big fights in Reno, Goldfield, and Toledo. Rickard had proven that people will go to the fight, but they have to have a way to get there. Shelby had no paved roads and was miles removed from any—it was a stop on the Great Northern Railway but it didn’t have fifty thousand people running through it each day. In anticipation of the fight, the Great Northern and other railway companies had organized additional services to Shelby, often bundled in with a one-off payment that got you fight tickets and a stay in their sleeper cars because Shelby had no way to accommodate fifty thousand people. Crucially, Tex Rickard would never have been stupid enough to publicly announce the fight was off while posturing for more money. Two days before the fight, as the last payment fell short, Kearns declared that Dempsey wouldn’t fight. He was won over and the fight was announced to be back on—but the headline appeared in all the newspapers, which were churning out column inches on the continuing debacle. Once that headline went out, cancellations poured into the train lines, and they in turn cancelled their services. After Kearns had publicly changed his mind half a dozen times, the fight finally did take place but the average person would not book their cross country travel and expensive ticket to a world title fight based on the off chance that it might happen

"The Sack of Shelby" took place on July 4th 1923. A week later, four banks in Montana had been put out of business by the fight. This included the bank that George Stanton owned in Grand Falls and both banks in Shelby—one of which was owned by Mayor Johnson. Johnson himself was out $150,000 which he had personally invested into Kearns’s payments and the stadium. When Dempsey and Kearns returned to Rickard, they were reminded what they had been missing. Dempsey’s next four fights—the last of his career—each drew a million dollars at the gate. That didn’t stop Doc Kearns from taking an odd pride in bankrupting the town of Shelby whenever the press asked him about it in years to come.

Check out Jack’s website and extended video previews at FightPrimer.com and follow him on Twitter @JackSlackMMA.

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[amtushinfosolutionspage]

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town

By 1923 moral outrage was the American way of life. The country was three years into the nationwide prohibition of alcohol which had been forced through by the po-faced campaigners of the temperance movement. Yet it was also an age of excess, of decadence, and paradoxically a period in which boozing was more prevalent than ever. The sport of boxing was experiencing success that it never had before and flying in the face of these same moral crusaders. Professional fist fighting has always been on shaky ground morally—even the most eloquent supporters of the sport must admit that they do enjoy watching men try to knock each other unconscious—but the increasing amount of money sloshing around this leisure activity was drawing unwanted attention.

In New York State, prize fighting brought in over five million dollars at the gate through 1922 and at the heart of that was George ‘Tex’ Rickard with his Madison Square Garden Corporation. In 1910 Rickard had promoted the Fight of the Century between black champion, Jack Johnson and returning “Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries, but the resulting race riots and ban on fight film had destroyed boxing’s image. Rickard had to rebuild boxing from the ground up and much of this work was done with Jack Dempsey. Where Jack Johnson had driven crowds mad with his slow fighting style and fast mouth, Dempsey fought like a wild man between the ropes, and was the perfect gentleman the moment the fight ended. Dempsey was a box office sensation and when the wily Rickard matched him against the French war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921, the pair were able to produce the first ever million dollar gate. By 1920, Rickard was able to acquire a two year long lease on Madison Square Garden, by 1925 he had moved the Garden to its third site where it would remain until 1966.

But for a brief period in 1922, Rickard was sent reeling. Several girls— young girls—were brought forward who could attest to Rickard taking them to various apartments around New York, giving detailed and accurate descriptions of the interiors of his office and various addresses amid their allegations. A jury found Rickard innocent of any wrongdoing, but he was shaken and his public image had been smeared. Shortly afterwards in February 1923, the head of the New York State Athletic Commission, William Muldoon, tore through Rickard’s earning potential by announcing that no heavyweight title fight would be held in his jurisdiction unless promoters stopped paying those damn fighters so well and opened up more seating to the common man. The idea that top fighters are pampered and that money is ruining the game has been a fixture in fighting from the beginning, and sportswriters are always recalling a romanticized earlier time, but this might be the only recorded instance of an athletic commission turning down a fight for being too profitable.

This left Jack Dempsey and his manager, Doc Kearns, with no meal ticket. By the start of 1923, Dempsey had been inactive for 18 months. Since he blasted Carpentier, he had been living the good life—traveling overseas, visiting various U.S. cities in the capacity of a beloved celebrity—but he had not been putting in the rounds. There is a ticking clock on any fighter who makes it big and Kearns knew this far better than his fast living young charge did. Entertaining any offer that crossed his desk, Kearns managed to book Dempsey into what has to be regarded as the most fecklessly handled fight in the history of the heavyweight championship.

The Shelby Board of Fight Promoters

Shelby, Montana was famous for nothing. It was a junction on the Great Northern railway that the construction team named after Montana Central Railway manager, Peter Shelby. Shelby, not quite flattered by this honor, insisted that it would never be more than a God-forsaken mudhole. In 1921, the vast Kevin-Sunburst oil field was discovered and the town seemed on the verge of a population boom if they could just make the world aware of this opportunity. The wealthy landowners and oil prospectors in Shelby figured that a heavyweight title fight was a magnificent way to get national attention.

James Johnson, the mayor of Shelby, owner of one of its two banks, and one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, led the group. Shelby saw fit to offer Doc Kearns and Dempsey the princely sum of $200,000 to fight in the town. In some retellings the intention was simply to gain national attention by making the offer, and that the Shelby money men could never have imagined Kearns would jump on it. In other retellings the group intercepted a Montana based manager and promoter named Mike Collins, who was barnstorming through the state with several of his fighters at the time, and asked him to approach Kearns on their behalf. This second version of the story is more fun: the businessmen lost faith in Collins and sent state American Legion commander and pilot, Loy Molumby on an aerial pursuit of Kearns across the United States. Either way, it was Molumby who ended up negotiating with Kearns and who was talked up to $300,000. This was to be delivered in thirds: the first on signing the contract, the second in June, and the third on the 2nd July, two days before the fight.

Doc Kearns is universally recalled as unpleasant, and when the respectable Tommy Gibbons was picked as Dempsey’s opponent, things faltered again. Gibbons’s manager was just one of many men that Kearns had made an enemy. Gibbons and his manager wanted the fight, but neither would be in the room with Kearns for the negotiations. Even Dempsey didn’t enjoy Kearns’s company, but he had come along just as Dempsey had needed him. As a young man, Dempsey had travelled to the boxing centers of the U.S.—New York and San Francisco—and still found himself a no-namer with no prospects. After returning to his family home in Salt Lake City, Dempsey received a timely letter from Kearns, who had managed one of Dempsey’s opponents. Kearns found Jack at rock bottom, but after Dempsey gave Kearns a chance things started to turn around for the young Mormon slugger. Kearns was in it for the money but his fate was tied to Dempsey’s success. When the contract for the Gibbons fight was signed Kearns had $100,000 in hand, the promise of $200,000 more, and the opportunity to walk out of the fight with whatever he already had should the Shelby men fall even a cent short of their promise.

As the fight neared, Dempsey took up residence in Great Falls, a couple of hours’ train ride out of Shelby, and seemed delighted to be back in action. The sparring sessions were frequent and brutal but the visitors to his camp were a constant stream of star struck well-wishers. Dempsey loved the public and he loved the wilderness. It was a change of pace to be out of the city come fight time. But the mood of the public began to sour as Shelby’s financial drama began to play out in the newspapers. When the time came for the second payment, James Johnson confessed that the group of backers had only been able to stump up the underwhelming sum of $1,600. Kearns was irate, but the Shelby men had already hired a small army of carpenters to build them a fifty thousand seat arena. Johnson and Molumby scrambled for alternatives. The first suggestion was that Kearns take the gate receipts in full, but he wasn’t in the business of promoting fights and he knew that there was no certainty of the turnout.

Then he was offered fifty thousand head of sheep instead—a valuable commodity, no doubt, but worthless to a man who rarely left the city and had no intention of investing in a farming operation—the same was true of the ranch that the businessmen then offered. Finally wealthy patrons from all across Montana were brought in and the matter was framed as one to do with Montana’s honor, rather than a mistake on the part of the Shelby men. The new backers included George Stanton, owner of the Stanton Bank and Trust Company, and Dan Tracy, a hotelier from Grand Falls. After the second installment was scraped together, Tracy was tasked with scouring through the books to find a way that the third instalment could be raised. Tracy ran the numbers and promptly exited the sinking ship.

Hours before it was due to start, the fight was still in limbo. The final $100,000 couldn’t be raised and Doc Kearns was ready to skip town with what he had. Finally, Kearns was talked into letting the fight go ahead in exchange for the entirety of the gate receipts. Tommy Gibbons, Dempsey’s opponent, had been fighting for a percentage of gate receipts over $300,000, it now appeared that he was only fighting for the heavyweight title.

It quickly became apparent that the money wasn’t what motivated Tommy Gibbons. Against the most fearsome knockout artist in boxing, Gibbons went the full fifteen rounds. In doing so he became the only fighter to go the distance with Dempsey since 1918. Gibbons, who had been staying in Shelby throughout his camp, walked home to his family with a trail of fans cheering him. Dempsey would later say of Gibbons that hitting him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind. Many of the sportswriters present would heap praise on the pace of the fight and the skill that both men showed, but for the most part the performance was given to empty seats.

Doc Kearns had taken Dempsey out of New York because the commission had insisted that ticket prices be lowered. Tickets for ringside seats at Dempsey-Gibbons (which had to be purchased from the Shelby tobacconist) were fifty dollars and by the time the fighters entered the ring, Kearns had slashed prices in desperation. Just seven thousand people paid to attend, with a few thousand more hopping the fences to get in.

Tex Rickard had made this business look effortless. Kearns would have loved nothing more than to not need Rickard, but in every aspect of fight promotion Rickard was the master. He had pulled off big fights in Reno, Goldfield, and Toledo. Rickard had proven that people will go to the fight, but they have to have a way to get there. Shelby had no paved roads and was miles removed from any—it was a stop on the Great Northern Railway but it didn’t have fifty thousand people running through it each day. In anticipation of the fight, the Great Northern and other railway companies had organized additional services to Shelby, often bundled in with a one-off payment that got you fight tickets and a stay in their sleeper cars because Shelby had no way to accommodate fifty thousand people. Crucially, Tex Rickard would never have been stupid enough to publicly announce the fight was off while posturing for more money. Two days before the fight, as the last payment fell short, Kearns declared that Dempsey wouldn’t fight. He was won over and the fight was announced to be back on—but the headline appeared in all the newspapers, which were churning out column inches on the continuing debacle. Once that headline went out, cancellations poured into the train lines, and they in turn cancelled their services. After Kearns had publicly changed his mind half a dozen times, the fight finally did take place but the average person would not book their cross country travel and expensive ticket to a world title fight based on the off chance that it might happen

“The Sack of Shelby” took place on July 4th 1923. A week later, four banks in Montana had been put out of business by the fight. This included the bank that George Stanton owned in Grand Falls and both banks in Shelby—one of which was owned by Mayor Johnson. Johnson himself was out $150,000 which he had personally invested into Kearns’s payments and the stadium. When Dempsey and Kearns returned to Rickard, they were reminded what they had been missing. Dempsey’s next four fights—the last of his career—each drew a million dollars at the gate. That didn’t stop Doc Kearns from taking an odd pride in bankrupting the town of Shelby whenever the press asked him about it in years to come.

Check out Jack’s website and extended video previews at FightPrimer.com and follow him on Twitter @JackSlackMMA.

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

[secretlystephaniebrown]

Break Your Little Heart In Two

Okay it’s time for the annual “Yorkalina pain train” time of the Steph angst war experience! 

from @powerfulpomegranate “ York’s terminally ill from having Delta plugged in nonstop for [X] number of years. Set after "How to Heal a Broken Heart". (bonus for “-But I just got you back!”) :D

And I mean, who am I to deny the world an angsty sequel to my first RvB fic?

Warnings for: terminal illness, brain damage, impending character death.

Also on Ao3

It happened a few months after Tex left them. One close call, and they were sent away, with promises of joining up again that they knew now to be garbage, because Tex was dead, and never coming back.

It started small, of course, because these things always did. Headaches were getting more and more common as York got older; he and Delta figured it had something to the way his implants were aging. They talked about going to see a doctor, try to figure something out, but at the end of the day, they were criminals with bounties on their heads and very valuable technology in York’s brain, even if Delta wasn’t inhabiting it.

It wasn’t worth it.

But the first time they realized something was seriously wrong.

It was a seizure, just a small one, but it was enough to scramble York’s brain and to send him falling to the ground and cause Delta to scream in panic.

When York came to again, every part of his body hurt and Delta was still freaking out.

He had to risk seeing a doctor.

York had five years to live. He could stretch it to seven, if he took Delta out, but…

Well, what’s the point? Delta could not even bring himself to disagree; separation from York was as good as death, as there was nowhere to implant him or even store him.

The seizures were damaging his implants, which were the cause of them. And as they broke, things would get worse. It would eventually effect his motor skills, killing the nerves in his body. And, as they got worse and worse, eventually the nerves that lead to his heart would die.

York wouldn’t have long to live after that happened.

Years passed. The seizures got worse. York and Delta kept wandering. They stole things. Delta forced York to stay in armor as much as possible—the healing unit negated some of the symptoms, even if it couldn’t do anything to prevent the inevitable.

The years ticked down. Tex died. Wash died. Freelancer fell in a firey blaze, and York bought himself a drink.

His implants splintered in his brain, and York lost all feeling in his left hand and right foot.

It was hard to care, though. He had Delta, at least. Everyone else was dead. York would join them soon enough, if there was an afterlife. If not…

Well, then at least he and Delta could get some peace and quiet.

And then Epsilon’s message was on every screen in the galaxy, and Carolina was with him.

There was really no choice after that.

Fighting was difficult in York’s current state; his limbs didn’t respond as fast as they once had. But he still had Delta, and Delta kept his aim steady and filled his mind with everything he needed to know, and he honestly felt more alive than he had in years, since he’d said goodbye to Tex.

Ironic, considering that the countdown he and Delta both denied keeping said that he only had a month to live.

“Get down!”

An explosion rocked the ship, billowing smoke and fire. There were screams as the Charon Industries guards were taken down. York started to grin.  

“Is everyone okay?” Carolina strode into the room, Wash and a couple of other people that York didn’t recognize behind her. Her stride was familiar—that ease, that confidence, that lethality. There was a worry to it too, that panic when she hadn’t had time to yet take a head count.

Any doubts that York had fostered on the flight to Chorus died instantly. This was Carolina. This was the woman he’d watched die.

Except he hadn’t. Because she had lived. She had lived, and he had mourned her, and she had never found him, never told him, never even contacted him.

And now here she was, and he had a month to live.

York hadn’t regretted not doing anything, all those years. Whiling away his time with Delta, petty theft and the occasional B&E, scraping by.

But here was Carolina, and now all York could think of was lost time. His headache was painful, and Delta was pumping him full of drugs from the healing unit just to keep him upright.

“We’re all alive, C,” Epsilon appeared. “But, ah, there’s something you should probably—”

“Hey ‘Lina,” York said quietly, getting to his feet, straightening up from behind the table. “Long time no see.”

There was a moment of pure, terrifying silence while York prepared to be shot or punched.

“York?” Nope, that was even worse. Carolina’s voice—York had never heard her that hurt, that raw. It sounded like she was on the verge of shattering.

Maybe he shouldn’t have come. Maybe this was just going to be too much pain for both of them.

Ignoring those thoughts, he spread his left hand out, but used the right one to remove his helmet. A risk, technically speaking, since the fist/bullet was still probably in his future, but one that was probably worth it in the end.

“So,” York cleared his throat, reaching into the depths of his mind, pushing past the knowledge of splintered implants and the dizzying few days he had left. “Are you secretly Agent Tennessee? Because you’re the only ten—”

He was cut off in a hug, and York let himself forget, just for now, and instead savored the feeling of her armored arms around him.

The night passed in celebration, and all York wanted to do was find a quiet corner. By now, he’d learned the signs of one of his seizures incoming—the headache had hit a critical point, and the entire world was becoming fuzzy around the edges, suffocating him.

He hadn’t gone near Carolina yet—she’d been swept up in the celebrations, and there was just too much there; things unsaid, things to say…

York wanted nothing more than to see her face again, than to press his lips against hers and feel her hair under his fingertips. But his fingertips had been dead for over a year now and it wouldn’t be fair to ask for anything; not when so many years had passed, not when she’d healed, moved on, moved on in all the ways he hadn’t been able to.

She’d made a family here, with the Reds and Blues. She’d saved planets, brought down Freelancer, and stopped a war. All York had done was tear his own brain apart out of affection for an A.I.

York spotted her out of the corner of his eye—a flash of teal and red, beautiful, glorious red, sitting at the bar, reminding him of Enera, all those years ago. She was looking at him too.

There was nothing that York wanted more in the world than to go to her side, to lean against her and tell a bad joke, to see her smile again. It had been so many years since he’d seen the way her face would go slack, the lines of tension vanishing just for a bit, her green eyes twinkling.

But he didn’t have much time. He turned and walked away, Delta guiding him slowly to a place where he could collapse and no one would see.

There was a small room, and York closed the door behind him and sat down so he wouldn’t fall. Delta had timed it well. York hadn’t been sitting for two minutes when York began to twitch and spasm, screaming into a microphone that Delta had already muted.

“York!”

Carolina had found him—followed him, probably, and was kneeling over him, face pale. “York, what’s wrong, you said you weren’t hurt—”

York gasped for air as he regained control over his muscles, closing his good eye. “It’s nothing,” he said.

“York, that was a seizure,” Carolina said.

“Those are normal, now,” York said, looking away. Then a horrible thought struck him. “Carolina—” He was gripping her hand too tightly, he was in armor and she wasn’t, but he was staring at her, feeling like lightning was in his veins. “How long have you implanted Epsilon?”

Carolina frowned at him. “A few years now—York? What’s this about?”

“Do not worry, York,” Delta said. “I have informed Epsilon of the danger. He will take… appropriate precautions.”

Carolina looked between the two of them. “Precautions?”

York slumped, looking away from her again. “Turns out having an AI in your implants for so long has consequences. The hardware’s not meant to go on forever.”

It was Carolina’s turn to grip his hand too tightly. “What. Do. You. Mean?”

York tugged off his helmet so he could meet her gaze. He could see her eyes flicker across his features, cataloging the changes more thoroughly than she had back on the ship. He forced a smile, but it was awkward and crooked and tired. “I’m dying, Carolina.”

“No,” she said it like a statement, like a fact, like he was just wrong.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve known for a while now.” He shook his head. “Damnedest luck, isn’t it? That I find you now?”

She paused. “… how long do you have?”

“Did it do any damage, Dee?”

“No York. The prognosis remains the same.”

York’s shoulders relax slightly. Those are the worst seizures, when he wakes up only to find out he’s got even less time to live, because it was so bad it pushed a metal splinter somewhere it really wasn’t meant to be.

“Well, at least there’s that.” He stared at Dee’s tiny avatar. Was it just him, or had he gotten smaller? He wondered if he could get that doctor lady friend of Carolina’s to rescue Delta from the mangled remains of his brain, once he was dead. The idea of Delta surviving, even if he was gone was… comforting.

“York…” Her voice was dangerous, carrying with it a warning. Once, York would have poked and prodded at that, teasing her and provoking her in turn. Now, he just stared straight ahead.

“I’ve got a month. Damage hit the nerves to my heart a while back.”

Carolina stared at him. “A month?”

“About,” York said. Another headache was beginning. He probably had twelve hours until another seizure. Maybe he’d jostled something lose during the fight. “It’s hard to say.”

“We’ve got to get you to Grey,” Carolina said. “She’ll… she’ll figure something out.”

York laughed. “Carolina, there’s not a surgeon in the galaxy which could fix the damage. Maybe if I’d figured it out a few years earlier…” He and Delta had tried, too. Delta had ran scenarios, York had tried every drug they could steal, they had even risked going to doctors and brain surgeons on more than one occasion. At this point, even removing his implants completely couldn’t save him. He was too far gone. Had been for a long, long time.

“You can’t die on me,” Carolina said flatly. Like she could control this, like this was something else that she could fight, could punch. “You can’t.”

“Carolina,” York said, and how he hated saying this, he hated all of this. When he’d dreamed this, she’d been smiling. He’d been smiling. There had been a lightness, and tangled limbs and the scent of her shampoo in his nose as he’d kissed her. “There’s nothing you can do. I’m going to die.”

Carolina stared at him, and suddenly she was kissing him, her mouth hard and demanding against his, as if she was trying to push her own life into him, as if she could somehow save him with this. York kissed back, because he was dying, he’d been dying for almost five years now, and it had been longer than that since he’d kissed her, and he’d missed all this so much that tears were blurring his vision.

Carolina rested her forehead against his, and her own cheeks were damp. From his tears or from her own, York didn’t know. He wasn’t sure it mattered.

“You can’t die,” her voice was ragged, and she cupped his face in her hands, thumbs brushing through the stubble, across his cheekbones. York’s throat was too tight, and he struggled to breathe, inhaling sharply the scent of her, still so similar after all these years.

“I only just got you back.”

[sporadiccolorwasteland-blog]

Almost Always

Side A: Zero to Twelve I defied the law of nature when I forced myself into this world 60 days short of my time. No one and nothing could stop me. My tiny little lonesome effortlessly breezed its way from breathing water to breathing air in one, unintentional push. And because of my mighty, unstoppable, and unscheduled entrance to life, that thing of an incubator was my home for the next couple of months. Well, turned out as a consequence of my stubbornness, that I was geared to leave this world almost as fast as I got here. Tubes and gadgets stuck all over my pint-sized body were my tickets to dear life until.. some stroke of reversal of fortune happened. My grand father passed and instantaneously, as if he made a deal with God, all my vitals lit up to normal levels and I transformed from an expired vegetable to a bouncy, healthy, bundle of a sunshine of a baby like I wasn't about to bid sayonara to this world a few moments before that. So you see, this sequence of events pretty much defined how my future self would storm into life's daring challenges... and I'm a sucker for challenges! In a nutshell? My mantra has become that the end should justify the means. Challenges come and I'd relentlessly persist through them by any means, ways or fashion. If I'm mistaken? I pay the price, then often, some divine intervention picks me up and I move along with renewed vigor ... on cue again for the next. Once when I was in prep school I left home with no pencil and came back with dozens of it. I skillfully acquisitioned them from my classmates by trading whatever I had using my 7 year-old mind's convincing power. Why dozens? Because I never wanted to leave home without it again. That much I knew. Throughout grade school my entire being would selectively not focus on class as they bored me to kingdom come. Instead, I find my energies constantly exploring everything else that's fun, real, and somewhat provoking. Of course my grades would be hanging on with my pinky finger from a thousand meter drop-off cliff as expected. And then a wake up call. I'd feel my mom's fury like an intensity 7 tremor beneath me. I'd hear her high-pitched voice yelling like it was embedded in my eardrums. The result? Let's just say that the thousand meter drop off cliff didn't get to enjoy my imminent fall. Rather, I soared more than a thousand meter high from the cliff as I managed to finish in the top 5 of the class by year's end. This would be exactly the same scenario during the next 7 years of my grade school life. By 4th grade, my mom was already nonchalant about it. She perhaps knew since then that her son will always be on top of his game. How'd I do it? By the end of each school year's final quarter, somehow I always knew I had my good times and I recognized the need to pay back while same time proving that hey, ain't nobody can take me for a failure. And so, remember that energy I used to burst into this world prematurely? That would be the same energy that propelled me to study beyond anyone's expectations when it mattered the most. I was surprised myself with what I can deliver at crunch time. Until it felt like a natural thing for me to do. At home I was a certified TV junkie to say the least. I would successfully find ways to skip school so I don't miss special episodes of Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and The Mickey Mouse Club. I would delay having dinner despite being yelled at just to tune in to Voltes V, Starsky & Hutch, CHIPS, The Love Boat, Three's Company, Charlie's Angels, Six Million Dollar Man. I would sleep late as I was glued to Dynasty, Knots Landing, and Falcon Crest ... Oh my nights were always busy, very busy indeed till my eyelids shut involuntarily. Our TV back then was a classic black and white set with a knob that was manually rotated to switch channels. It's life depended on an antenna that sits on top of it and another on our roof. Often, it needed a good kick on the side each time the reception scrambles about. Yes. True. But that TV was my life. It was everything to me. I remember watching The Cosby Show from outside the window of a neighbor's house because our TV died. I also remember holding on to something blue and fervently wishing for a colored TV (it was a prime commodity back then) every time the car am in drives pass a railroad. All these attachments I figured because I felt alive when my kid-of-a- mind was taken to a journey of pure amazement which unknowingly then, allowed me to translate it into expressions of inspirations and motivations that drove me to create things and bring whatever I can take from it to life. Exactly the reason why I was ecstatic when at 9, my aunt who then worked for an advertising agency got me to do a TV commercial for a powdered milk product. And then again the year after that where I was cast for a noodle soup commercial. My mom says that the first time I was on TV was when she brought me to watch the live telecast of Uncle Bob's Lucky 7 Club. I was an audience. Well, that was until I ran to the stage and wiggled and danced while some children's song was being sang by a guest. Yep, the camera didn't stop rolling and Uncle Bob ended up interviewing me. I was 5 years old. The following week, I was asked to come back and dance again. I mirrored what I could. At 10 I brought friends together and created events and relations that brought to life my own version of whatever inspired me from my countless rendezvous with boob tube. For 2 summers, I'd bring together my playmates, cousins, distant cousins into our home and sang and danced and drew and played games and finally rehearsed program numbers complete with costumes that we would present to our parents by summer's end. I remember going to a 6am calisthenics group where middle aged adults were doing their morning exercises. There, my 11 year old frail frame joined the oldies doing jumping jacks and was later asked to speak to explain why I joined. I nervously spoke and after, I passed around a box asking for donations so I could stage my club's summer presentation in a decent theater hall. I came home with over P5,000.00 that morning and the rest was history. That was The Double Wofflers Club which till this day, every parent of every kid in that club recalls how proud they were of us. My mom to this day talks about it to showcase her pride for the kind of kid I was (yes, I cringe every time she does that). I was a kid, literally. And all that to me was play. It was my reality of fun. Little did I know that that kind of play was the onset of who and what I was to become when I grew up. Other than that I was your average kid who roller skated with friends, played baseball and football, hide and seek, tex (yes those cards that are flipped in the air), tumbang preso, patintero, swam in the flood, sang carolling songs door-to-door during Christmas, amassed a closet-full of toys and yes, not to mention explored escapades that fed a child's curiosity over life's mysteries. All these potential and momentum somehow got derailed or thrown out of the window just before I was due to graduate from grade school. I didn't just yet. I had to stop school. Why? My parents graphically culminated their long estranged relations via a grueling, physical, somewhat bloody fight right in front of us kids one supposed normal evening. Welcome to the beginning of my puberty stage in life.

[flauntpage]

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town

By 1923 moral outrage was the American way of life. The country was three years into the nationwide prohibition of alcohol which had been forced through by the po-faced campaigners of the temperance movement. Yet it was also an age of excess, of decadence, and paradoxically a period in which boozing was more prevalent than ever. The sport of boxing was experiencing success that it never had before and flying in the face of these same moral crusaders. Professional fist fighting has always been on shaky ground morally—even the most eloquent supporters of the sport must admit that they do enjoy watching men try to knock each other unconscious—but the increasing amount of money sloshing around this leisure activity was drawing unwanted attention.

In New York State, prize fighting brought in over five million dollars at the gate through 1922 and at the heart of that was George ‘Tex’ Rickard with his Madison Square Garden Corporation. In 1910 Rickard had promoted the Fight of the Century between black champion, Jack Johnson and returning "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries, but the resulting race riots and ban on fight film had destroyed boxing’s image. Rickard had to rebuild boxing from the ground up and much of this work was done with Jack Dempsey. Where Jack Johnson had driven crowds mad with his slow fighting style and fast mouth, Dempsey fought like a wild man between the ropes, and was the perfect gentleman the moment the fight ended. Dempsey was a box office sensation and when the wily Rickard matched him against the French war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921, the pair were able to produce the first ever million dollar gate. By 1920, Rickard was able to acquire a two year long lease on Madison Square Garden, by 1925 he had moved the Garden to its third site where it would remain until 1966.

But for a brief period in 1922, Rickard was sent reeling. Several girls— young girls—were brought forward who could attest to Rickard taking them to various apartments around New York, giving detailed and accurate descriptions of the interiors of his office and various addresses amid their allegations. A jury found Rickard innocent of any wrongdoing, but he was shaken and his public image had been smeared. Shortly afterwards in February 1923, the head of the New York State Athletic Commission, William Muldoon, tore through Rickard’s earning potential by announcing that no heavyweight title fight would be held in his jurisdiction unless promoters stopped paying those damn fighters so well and opened up more seating to the common man. The idea that top fighters are pampered and that money is ruining the game has been a fixture in fighting from the beginning, and sportswriters are always recalling a romanticized earlier time, but this might be the only recorded instance of an athletic commission turning down a fight for being too profitable.

This left Jack Dempsey and his manager, Doc Kearns, with no meal ticket. By the start of 1923, Dempsey had been inactive for 18 months. Since he blasted Carpentier, he had been living the good life—traveling overseas, visiting various U.S. cities in the capacity of a beloved celebrity—but he had not been putting in the rounds. There is a ticking clock on any fighter who makes it big and Kearns knew this far better than his fast living young charge did. Entertaining any offer that crossed his desk, Kearns managed to book Dempsey into what has to be regarded as the most fecklessly handled fight in the history of the heavyweight championship.

The Shelby Board of Fight Promoters

Shelby, Montana was famous for nothing. It was a junction on the Great Northern railway that the construction team named after Montana Central Railway manager, Peter Shelby. Shelby, not quite flattered by this honor, insisted that it would never be more than a God-forsaken mudhole. In 1921, the vast Kevin-Sunburst oil field was discovered and the town seemed on the verge of a population boom if they could just make the world aware of this opportunity. The wealthy landowners and oil prospectors in Shelby figured that a heavyweight title fight was a magnificent way to get national attention.

James Johnson, the mayor of Shelby, owner of one of its two banks, and one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, led the group. Shelby saw fit to offer Doc Kearns and Dempsey the princely sum of $200,000 to fight in the town. In some retellings the intention was simply to gain national attention by making the offer, and that the Shelby money men could never have imagined Kearns would jump on it. In other retellings the group intercepted a Montana based manager and promoter named Mike Collins, who was barnstorming through the state with several of his fighters at the time, and asked him to approach Kearns on their behalf. This second version of the story is more fun: the businessmen lost faith in Collins and sent state American Legion commander and pilot, Loy Molumby on an aerial pursuit of Kearns across the United States. Either way, it was Molumby who ended up negotiating with Kearns and who was talked up to $300,000. This was to be delivered in thirds: the first on signing the contract, the second in June, and the third on the 2nd July, two days before the fight.

Doc Kearns is universally recalled as unpleasant, and when the respectable Tommy Gibbons was picked as Dempsey’s opponent, things faltered again. Gibbons’s manager was just one of many men that Kearns had made an enemy. Gibbons and his manager wanted the fight, but neither would be in the room with Kearns for the negotiations. Even Dempsey didn’t enjoy Kearns’s company, but he had come along just as Dempsey had needed him. As a young man, Dempsey had travelled to the boxing centers of the U.S.—New York and San Francisco—and still found himself a no-namer with no prospects. After returning to his family home in Salt Lake City, Dempsey received a timely letter from Kearns, who had managed one of Dempsey’s opponents. Kearns found Jack at rock bottom, but after Dempsey gave Kearns a chance things started to turn around for the young Mormon slugger. Kearns was in it for the money but his fate was tied to Dempsey’s success. When the contract for the Gibbons fight was signed Kearns had $100,000 in hand, the promise of $200,000 more, and the opportunity to walk out of the fight with whatever he already had should the Shelby men fall even a cent short of their promise.

As the fight neared, Dempsey took up residence in Great Falls, a couple of hours' train ride out of Shelby, and seemed delighted to be back in action. The sparring sessions were frequent and brutal but the visitors to his camp were a constant stream of star struck well-wishers. Dempsey loved the public and he loved the wilderness. It was a change of pace to be out of the city come fight time. But the mood of the public began to sour as Shelby’s financial drama began to play out in the newspapers. When the time came for the second payment, James Johnson confessed that the group of backers had only been able to stump up the underwhelming sum of $1,600. Kearns was irate, but the Shelby men had already hired a small army of carpenters to build them a fifty thousand seat arena. Johnson and Molumby scrambled for alternatives. The first suggestion was that Kearns take the gate receipts in full, but he wasn’t in the business of promoting fights and he knew that there was no certainty of the turnout.

Then he was offered fifty thousand head of sheep instead—a valuable commodity, no doubt, but worthless to a man who rarely left the city and had no intention of investing in a farming operation—the same was true of the ranch that the businessmen then offered. Finally wealthy patrons from all across Montana were brought in and the matter was framed as one to do with Montana’s honor, rather than a mistake on the part of the Shelby men. The new backers included George Stanton, owner of the Stanton Bank and Trust Company, and Dan Tracy, a hotelier from Grand Falls. After the second installment was scraped together, Tracy was tasked with scouring through the books to find a way that the third instalment could be raised. Tracy ran the numbers and promptly exited the sinking ship.

Hours before it was due to start, the fight was still in limbo. The final $100,000 couldn’t be raised and Doc Kearns was ready to skip town with what he had. Finally, Kearns was talked into letting the fight go ahead in exchange for the entirety of the gate receipts. Tommy Gibbons, Dempsey’s opponent, had been fighting for a percentage of gate receipts over $300,000, it now appeared that he was only fighting for the heavyweight title.

It quickly became apparent that the money wasn’t what motivated Tommy Gibbons. Against the most fearsome knockout artist in boxing, Gibbons went the full fifteen rounds. In doing so he became the only fighter to go the distance with Dempsey since 1918. Gibbons, who had been staying in Shelby throughout his camp, walked home to his family with a trail of fans cheering him. Dempsey would later say of Gibbons that hitting him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind. Many of the sportswriters present would heap praise on the pace of the fight and the skill that both men showed, but for the most part the performance was given to empty seats.

Doc Kearns had taken Dempsey out of New York because the commission had insisted that ticket prices be lowered. Tickets for ringside seats at Dempsey-Gibbons (which had to be purchased from the Shelby tobacconist) were fifty dollars and by the time the fighters entered the ring, Kearns had slashed prices in desperation. Just seven thousand people paid to attend, with a few thousand more hopping the fences to get in.

Tex Rickard had made this business look effortless. Kearns would have loved nothing more than to not need Rickard, but in every aspect of fight promotion Rickard was the master. He had pulled off big fights in Reno, Goldfield, and Toledo. Rickard had proven that people will go to the fight, but they have to have a way to get there. Shelby had no paved roads and was miles removed from any—it was a stop on the Great Northern Railway but it didn’t have fifty thousand people running through it each day. In anticipation of the fight, the Great Northern and other railway companies had organized additional services to Shelby, often bundled in with a one-off payment that got you fight tickets and a stay in their sleeper cars because Shelby had no way to accommodate fifty thousand people. Crucially, Tex Rickard would never have been stupid enough to publicly announce the fight was off while posturing for more money. Two days before the fight, as the last payment fell short, Kearns declared that Dempsey wouldn’t fight. He was won over and the fight was announced to be back on—but the headline appeared in all the newspapers, which were churning out column inches on the continuing debacle. Once that headline went out, cancellations poured into the train lines, and they in turn cancelled their services. After Kearns had publicly changed his mind half a dozen times, the fight finally did take place but the average person would not book their cross country travel and expensive ticket to a world title fight based on the off chance that it might happen

"The Sack of Shelby" took place on July 4th 1923. A week later, four banks in Montana had been put out of business by the fight. This included the bank that George Stanton owned in Grand Falls and both banks in Shelby—one of which was owned by Mayor Johnson. Johnson himself was out $150,000 which he had personally invested into Kearns’s payments and the stadium. When Dempsey and Kearns returned to Rickard, they were reminded what they had been missing. Dempsey’s next four fights—the last of his career—each drew a million dollars at the gate. That didn’t stop Doc Kearns from taking an odd pride in bankrupting the town of Shelby whenever the press asked him about it in years to come.

Check out Jack’s website and extended video previews at FightPrimer.com and follow him on Twitter @JackSlackMMA.

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town

By 1923 moral outrage was the American way of life. The country was three years into the nationwide prohibition of alcohol which had been forced through by the po-faced campaigners of the temperance movement. Yet it was also an age of excess, of decadence, and paradoxically a period in which boozing was more prevalent than ever. The sport of boxing was experiencing success that it never had before and flying in the face of these same moral crusaders. Professional fist fighting has always been on shaky ground morally—even the most eloquent supporters of the sport must admit that they do enjoy watching men try to knock each other unconscious—but the increasing amount of money sloshing around this leisure activity was drawing unwanted attention.

In New York State, prize fighting brought in over five million dollars at the gate through 1922 and at the heart of that was George ‘Tex’ Rickard with his Madison Square Garden Corporation. In 1910 Rickard had promoted the Fight of the Century between black champion, Jack Johnson and returning "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries, but the resulting race riots and ban on fight film had destroyed boxing’s image. Rickard had to rebuild boxing from the ground up and much of this work was done with Jack Dempsey. Where Jack Johnson had driven crowds mad with his slow fighting style and fast mouth, Dempsey fought like a wild man between the ropes, and was the perfect gentleman the moment the fight ended. Dempsey was a box office sensation and when the wily Rickard matched him against the French war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921, the pair were able to produce the first ever million dollar gate. By 1920, Rickard was able to acquire a two year long lease on Madison Square Garden, by 1925 he had moved the Garden to its third site where it would remain until 1966.

But for a brief period in 1922, Rickard was sent reeling. Several girls— young girls—were brought forward who could attest to Rickard taking them to various apartments around New York, giving detailed and accurate descriptions of the interiors of his office and various addresses amid their allegations. A jury found Rickard innocent of any wrongdoing, but he was shaken and his public image had been smeared. Shortly afterwards in February 1923, the head of the New York State Athletic Commission, William Muldoon, tore through Rickard’s earning potential by announcing that no heavyweight title fight would be held in his jurisdiction unless promoters stopped paying those damn fighters so well and opened up more seating to the common man. The idea that top fighters are pampered and that money is ruining the game has been a fixture in fighting from the beginning, and sportswriters are always recalling a romanticized earlier time, but this might be the only recorded instance of an athletic commission turning down a fight for being too profitable.

This left Jack Dempsey and his manager, Doc Kearns, with no meal ticket. By the start of 1923, Dempsey had been inactive for 18 months. Since he blasted Carpentier, he had been living the good life—traveling overseas, visiting various U.S. cities in the capacity of a beloved celebrity—but he had not been putting in the rounds. There is a ticking clock on any fighter who makes it big and Kearns knew this far better than his fast living young charge did. Entertaining any offer that crossed his desk, Kearns managed to book Dempsey into what has to be regarded as the most fecklessly handled fight in the history of the heavyweight championship.

The Shelby Board of Fight Promoters

Shelby, Montana was famous for nothing. It was a junction on the Great Northern railway that the construction team named after Montana Central Railway manager, Peter Shelby. Shelby, not quite flattered by this honor, insisted that it would never be more than a God-forsaken mudhole. In 1921, the vast Kevin-Sunburst oil field was discovered and the town seemed on the verge of a population boom if they could just make the world aware of this opportunity. The wealthy landowners and oil prospectors in Shelby figured that a heavyweight title fight was a magnificent way to get national attention.

James Johnson, the mayor of Shelby, owner of one of its two banks, and one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, led the group. Shelby saw fit to offer Doc Kearns and Dempsey the princely sum of $200,000 to fight in the town. In some retellings the intention was simply to gain national attention by making the offer, and that the Shelby money men could never have imagined Kearns would jump on it. In other retellings the group intercepted a Montana based manager and promoter named Mike Collins, who was barnstorming through the state with several of his fighters at the time, and asked him to approach Kearns on their behalf. This second version of the story is more fun: the businessmen lost faith in Collins and sent state American Legion commander and pilot, Loy Molumby on an aerial pursuit of Kearns across the United States. Either way, it was Molumby who ended up negotiating with Kearns and who was talked up to $300,000. This was to be delivered in thirds: the first on signing the contract, the second in June, and the third on the 2nd July, two days before the fight.

Doc Kearns is universally recalled as unpleasant, and when the respectable Tommy Gibbons was picked as Dempsey’s opponent, things faltered again. Gibbons’s manager was just one of many men that Kearns had made an enemy. Gibbons and his manager wanted the fight, but neither would be in the room with Kearns for the negotiations. Even Dempsey didn’t enjoy Kearns’s company, but he had come along just as Dempsey had needed him. As a young man, Dempsey had travelled to the boxing centers of the U.S.—New York and San Francisco—and still found himself a no-namer with no prospects. After returning to his family home in Salt Lake City, Dempsey received a timely letter from Kearns, who had managed one of Dempsey’s opponents. Kearns found Jack at rock bottom, but after Dempsey gave Kearns a chance things started to turn around for the young Mormon slugger. Kearns was in it for the money but his fate was tied to Dempsey’s success. When the contract for the Gibbons fight was signed Kearns had $100,000 in hand, the promise of $200,000 more, and the opportunity to walk out of the fight with whatever he already had should the Shelby men fall even a cent short of their promise.

As the fight neared, Dempsey took up residence in Great Falls, a couple of hours' train ride out of Shelby, and seemed delighted to be back in action. The sparring sessions were frequent and brutal but the visitors to his camp were a constant stream of star struck well-wishers. Dempsey loved the public and he loved the wilderness. It was a change of pace to be out of the city come fight time. But the mood of the public began to sour as Shelby’s financial drama began to play out in the newspapers. When the time came for the second payment, James Johnson confessed that the group of backers had only been able to stump up the underwhelming sum of $1,600. Kearns was irate, but the Shelby men had already hired a small army of carpenters to build them a fifty thousand seat arena. Johnson and Molumby scrambled for alternatives. The first suggestion was that Kearns take the gate receipts in full, but he wasn’t in the business of promoting fights and he knew that there was no certainty of the turnout.

Then he was offered fifty thousand head of sheep instead—a valuable commodity, no doubt, but worthless to a man who rarely left the city and had no intention of investing in a farming operation—the same was true of the ranch that the businessmen then offered. Finally wealthy patrons from all across Montana were brought in and the matter was framed as one to do with Montana’s honor, rather than a mistake on the part of the Shelby men. The new backers included George Stanton, owner of the Stanton Bank and Trust Company, and Dan Tracy, a hotelier from Grand Falls. After the second installment was scraped together, Tracy was tasked with scouring through the books to find a way that the third instalment could be raised. Tracy ran the numbers and promptly exited the sinking ship.

Hours before it was due to start, the fight was still in limbo. The final $100,000 couldn’t be raised and Doc Kearns was ready to skip town with what he had. Finally, Kearns was talked into letting the fight go ahead in exchange for the entirety of the gate receipts. Tommy Gibbons, Dempsey’s opponent, had been fighting for a percentage of gate receipts over $300,000, it now appeared that he was only fighting for the heavyweight title.

It quickly became apparent that the money wasn’t what motivated Tommy Gibbons. Against the most fearsome knockout artist in boxing, Gibbons went the full fifteen rounds. In doing so he became the only fighter to go the distance with Dempsey since 1918. Gibbons, who had been staying in Shelby throughout his camp, walked home to his family with a trail of fans cheering him. Dempsey would later say of Gibbons that hitting him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind. Many of the sportswriters present would heap praise on the pace of the fight and the skill that both men showed, but for the most part the performance was given to empty seats.

Doc Kearns had taken Dempsey out of New York because the commission had insisted that ticket prices be lowered. Tickets for ringside seats at Dempsey-Gibbons (which had to be purchased from the Shelby tobacconist) were fifty dollars and by the time the fighters entered the ring, Kearns had slashed prices in desperation. Just seven thousand people paid to attend, with a few thousand more hopping the fences to get in.

Tex Rickard had made this business look effortless. Kearns would have loved nothing more than to not need Rickard, but in every aspect of fight promotion Rickard was the master. He had pulled off big fights in Reno, Goldfield, and Toledo. Rickard had proven that people will go to the fight, but they have to have a way to get there. Shelby had no paved roads and was miles removed from any—it was a stop on the Great Northern Railway but it didn’t have fifty thousand people running through it each day. In anticipation of the fight, the Great Northern and other railway companies had organized additional services to Shelby, often bundled in with a one-off payment that got you fight tickets and a stay in their sleeper cars because Shelby had no way to accommodate fifty thousand people. Crucially, Tex Rickard would never have been stupid enough to publicly announce the fight was off while posturing for more money. Two days before the fight, as the last payment fell short, Kearns declared that Dempsey wouldn’t fight. He was won over and the fight was announced to be back on—but the headline appeared in all the newspapers, which were churning out column inches on the continuing debacle. Once that headline went out, cancellations poured into the train lines, and they in turn cancelled their services. After Kearns had publicly changed his mind half a dozen times, the fight finally did take place but the average person would not book their cross country travel and expensive ticket to a world title fight based on the off chance that it might happen

"The Sack of Shelby" took place on July 4th 1923. A week later, four banks in Montana had been put out of business by the fight. This included the bank that George Stanton owned in Grand Falls and both banks in Shelby—one of which was owned by Mayor Johnson. Johnson himself was out $150,000 which he had personally invested into Kearns’s payments and the stadium. When Dempsey and Kearns returned to Rickard, they were reminded what they had been missing. Dempsey’s next four fights—the last of his career—each drew a million dollars at the gate. That didn’t stop Doc Kearns from taking an odd pride in bankrupting the town of Shelby whenever the press asked him about it in years to come.

Check out Jack’s website and extended video previews at FightPrimer.com and follow him on Twitter @JackSlackMMA.

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town

By 1923 moral outrage was the American way of life. The country was three years into the nationwide prohibition of alcohol which had been forced through by the po-faced campaigners of the temperance movement. Yet it was also an age of excess, of decadence, and paradoxically a period in which boozing was more prevalent than ever. The sport of boxing was experiencing success that it never had before and flying in the face of these same moral crusaders. Professional fist fighting has always been on shaky ground morally—even the most eloquent supporters of the sport must admit that they do enjoy watching men try to knock each other unconscious—but the increasing amount of money sloshing around this leisure activity was drawing unwanted attention.

In New York State, prize fighting brought in over five million dollars at the gate through 1922 and at the heart of that was George ‘Tex’ Rickard with his Madison Square Garden Corporation. In 1910 Rickard had promoted the Fight of the Century between black champion, Jack Johnson and returning "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries, but the resulting race riots and ban on fight film had destroyed boxing’s image. Rickard had to rebuild boxing from the ground up and much of this work was done with Jack Dempsey. Where Jack Johnson had driven crowds mad with his slow fighting style and fast mouth, Dempsey fought like a wild man between the ropes, and was the perfect gentleman the moment the fight ended. Dempsey was a box office sensation and when the wily Rickard matched him against the French war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921, the pair were able to produce the first ever million dollar gate. By 1920, Rickard was able to acquire a two year long lease on Madison Square Garden, by 1925 he had moved the Garden to its third site where it would remain until 1966.

But for a brief period in 1922, Rickard was sent reeling. Several girls— young girls—were brought forward who could attest to Rickard taking them to various apartments around New York, giving detailed and accurate descriptions of the interiors of his office and various addresses amid their allegations. A jury found Rickard innocent of any wrongdoing, but he was shaken and his public image had been smeared. Shortly afterwards in February 1923, the head of the New York State Athletic Commission, William Muldoon, tore through Rickard’s earning potential by announcing that no heavyweight title fight would be held in his jurisdiction unless promoters stopped paying those damn fighters so well and opened up more seating to the common man. The idea that top fighters are pampered and that money is ruining the game has been a fixture in fighting from the beginning, and sportswriters are always recalling a romanticized earlier time, but this might be the only recorded instance of an athletic commission turning down a fight for being too profitable.

This left Jack Dempsey and his manager, Doc Kearns, with no meal ticket. By the start of 1923, Dempsey had been inactive for 18 months. Since he blasted Carpentier, he had been living the good life—traveling overseas, visiting various U.S. cities in the capacity of a beloved celebrity—but he had not been putting in the rounds. There is a ticking clock on any fighter who makes it big and Kearns knew this far better than his fast living young charge did. Entertaining any offer that crossed his desk, Kearns managed to book Dempsey into what has to be regarded as the most fecklessly handled fight in the history of the heavyweight championship.

The Shelby Board of Fight Promoters

Shelby, Montana was famous for nothing. It was a junction on the Great Northern railway that the construction team named after Montana Central Railway manager, Peter Shelby. Shelby, not quite flattered by this honor, insisted that it would never be more than a God-forsaken mudhole. In 1921, the vast Kevin-Sunburst oil field was discovered and the town seemed on the verge of a population boom if they could just make the world aware of this opportunity. The wealthy landowners and oil prospectors in Shelby figured that a heavyweight title fight was a magnificent way to get national attention.

James Johnson, the mayor of Shelby, owner of one of its two banks, and one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, led the group. Shelby saw fit to offer Doc Kearns and Dempsey the princely sum of $200,000 to fight in the town. In some retellings the intention was simply to gain national attention by making the offer, and that the Shelby money men could never have imagined Kearns would jump on it. In other retellings the group intercepted a Montana based manager and promoter named Mike Collins, who was barnstorming through the state with several of his fighters at the time, and asked him to approach Kearns on their behalf. This second version of the story is more fun: the businessmen lost faith in Collins and sent state American Legion commander and pilot, Loy Molumby on an aerial pursuit of Kearns across the United States. Either way, it was Molumby who ended up negotiating with Kearns and who was talked up to $300,000. This was to be delivered in thirds: the first on signing the contract, the second in June, and the third on the 2nd July, two days before the fight.

Doc Kearns is universally recalled as unpleasant, and when the respectable Tommy Gibbons was picked as Dempsey’s opponent, things faltered again. Gibbons’s manager was just one of many men that Kearns had made an enemy. Gibbons and his manager wanted the fight, but neither would be in the room with Kearns for the negotiations. Even Dempsey didn’t enjoy Kearns’s company, but he had come along just as Dempsey had needed him. As a young man, Dempsey had travelled to the boxing centers of the U.S.—New York and San Francisco—and still found himself a no-namer with no prospects. After returning to his family home in Salt Lake City, Dempsey received a timely letter from Kearns, who had managed one of Dempsey’s opponents. Kearns found Jack at rock bottom, but after Dempsey gave Kearns a chance things started to turn around for the young Mormon slugger. Kearns was in it for the money but his fate was tied to Dempsey’s success. When the contract for the Gibbons fight was signed Kearns had $100,000 in hand, the promise of $200,000 more, and the opportunity to walk out of the fight with whatever he already had should the Shelby men fall even a cent short of their promise.

As the fight neared, Dempsey took up residence in Great Falls, a couple of hours' train ride out of Shelby, and seemed delighted to be back in action. The sparring sessions were frequent and brutal but the visitors to his camp were a constant stream of star struck well-wishers. Dempsey loved the public and he loved the wilderness. It was a change of pace to be out of the city come fight time. But the mood of the public began to sour as Shelby’s financial drama began to play out in the newspapers. When the time came for the second payment, James Johnson confessed that the group of backers had only been able to stump up the underwhelming sum of $1,600. Kearns was irate, but the Shelby men had already hired a small army of carpenters to build them a fifty thousand seat arena. Johnson and Molumby scrambled for alternatives. The first suggestion was that Kearns take the gate receipts in full, but he wasn’t in the business of promoting fights and he knew that there was no certainty of the turnout.

Then he was offered fifty thousand head of sheep instead—a valuable commodity, no doubt, but worthless to a man who rarely left the city and had no intention of investing in a farming operation—the same was true of the ranch that the businessmen then offered. Finally wealthy patrons from all across Montana were brought in and the matter was framed as one to do with Montana’s honor, rather than a mistake on the part of the Shelby men. The new backers included George Stanton, owner of the Stanton Bank and Trust Company, and Dan Tracy, a hotelier from Grand Falls. After the second installment was scraped together, Tracy was tasked with scouring through the books to find a way that the third instalment could be raised. Tracy ran the numbers and promptly exited the sinking ship.

Hours before it was due to start, the fight was still in limbo. The final $100,000 couldn’t be raised and Doc Kearns was ready to skip town with what he had. Finally, Kearns was talked into letting the fight go ahead in exchange for the entirety of the gate receipts. Tommy Gibbons, Dempsey’s opponent, had been fighting for a percentage of gate receipts over $300,000, it now appeared that he was only fighting for the heavyweight title.

It quickly became apparent that the money wasn’t what motivated Tommy Gibbons. Against the most fearsome knockout artist in boxing, Gibbons went the full fifteen rounds. In doing so he became the only fighter to go the distance with Dempsey since 1918. Gibbons, who had been staying in Shelby throughout his camp, walked home to his family with a trail of fans cheering him. Dempsey would later say of Gibbons that hitting him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind. Many of the sportswriters present would heap praise on the pace of the fight and the skill that both men showed, but for the most part the performance was given to empty seats.

Doc Kearns had taken Dempsey out of New York because the commission had insisted that ticket prices be lowered. Tickets for ringside seats at Dempsey-Gibbons (which had to be purchased from the Shelby tobacconist) were fifty dollars and by the time the fighters entered the ring, Kearns had slashed prices in desperation. Just seven thousand people paid to attend, with a few thousand more hopping the fences to get in.

Tex Rickard had made this business look effortless. Kearns would have loved nothing more than to not need Rickard, but in every aspect of fight promotion Rickard was the master. He had pulled off big fights in Reno, Goldfield, and Toledo. Rickard had proven that people will go to the fight, but they have to have a way to get there. Shelby had no paved roads and was miles removed from any—it was a stop on the Great Northern Railway but it didn’t have fifty thousand people running through it each day. In anticipation of the fight, the Great Northern and other railway companies had organized additional services to Shelby, often bundled in with a one-off payment that got you fight tickets and a stay in their sleeper cars because Shelby had no way to accommodate fifty thousand people. Crucially, Tex Rickard would never have been stupid enough to publicly announce the fight was off while posturing for more money. Two days before the fight, as the last payment fell short, Kearns declared that Dempsey wouldn’t fight. He was won over and the fight was announced to be back on—but the headline appeared in all the newspapers, which were churning out column inches on the continuing debacle. Once that headline went out, cancellations poured into the train lines, and they in turn cancelled their services. After Kearns had publicly changed his mind half a dozen times, the fight finally did take place but the average person would not book their cross country travel and expensive ticket to a world title fight based on the off chance that it might happen

"The Sack of Shelby" took place on July 4th 1923. A week later, four banks in Montana had been put out of business by the fight. This included the bank that George Stanton owned in Grand Falls and both banks in Shelby—one of which was owned by Mayor Johnson. Johnson himself was out $150,000 which he had personally invested into Kearns’s payments and the stadium. When Dempsey and Kearns returned to Rickard, they were reminded what they had been missing. Dempsey’s next four fights—the last of his career—each drew a million dollars at the gate. That didn’t stop Doc Kearns from taking an odd pride in bankrupting the town of Shelby whenever the press asked him about it in years to come.

Check out Jack’s website and extended video previews at FightPrimer.com and follow him on Twitter @JackSlackMMA.

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

The Night Jack Dempsey Bankrupted a Town

By 1923 moral outrage was the American way of life. The country was three years into the nationwide prohibition of alcohol which had been forced through by the po-faced campaigners of the temperance movement. Yet it was also an age of excess, of decadence, and paradoxically a period in which boozing was more prevalent than ever. The sport of boxing was experiencing success that it never had before and flying in the face of these same moral crusaders. Professional fist fighting has always been on shaky ground morally—even the most eloquent supporters of the sport must admit that they do enjoy watching men try to knock each other unconscious—but the increasing amount of money sloshing around this leisure activity was drawing unwanted attention.

In New York State, prize fighting brought in over five million dollars at the gate through 1922 and at the heart of that was George ‘Tex’ Rickard with his Madison Square Garden Corporation. In 1910 Rickard had promoted the Fight of the Century between black champion, Jack Johnson and returning "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries, but the resulting race riots and ban on fight film had destroyed boxing’s image. Rickard had to rebuild boxing from the ground up and much of this work was done with Jack Dempsey. Where Jack Johnson had driven crowds mad with his slow fighting style and fast mouth, Dempsey fought like a wild man between the ropes, and was the perfect gentleman the moment the fight ended. Dempsey was a box office sensation and when the wily Rickard matched him against the French war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921, the pair were able to produce the first ever million dollar gate. By 1920, Rickard was able to acquire a two year long lease on Madison Square Garden, by 1925 he had moved the Garden to its third site where it would remain until 1966.

But for a brief period in 1922, Rickard was sent reeling. Several girls— young girls—were brought forward who could attest to Rickard taking them to various apartments around New York, giving detailed and accurate descriptions of the interiors of his office and various addresses amid their allegations. A jury found Rickard innocent of any wrongdoing, but he was shaken and his public image had been smeared. Shortly afterwards in February 1923, the head of the New York State Athletic Commission, William Muldoon, tore through Rickard’s earning potential by announcing that no heavyweight title fight would be held in his jurisdiction unless promoters stopped paying those damn fighters so well and opened up more seating to the common man. The idea that top fighters are pampered and that money is ruining the game has been a fixture in fighting from the beginning, and sportswriters are always recalling a romanticized earlier time, but this might be the only recorded instance of an athletic commission turning down a fight for being too profitable.

This left Jack Dempsey and his manager, Doc Kearns, with no meal ticket. By the start of 1923, Dempsey had been inactive for 18 months. Since he blasted Carpentier, he had been living the good life—traveling overseas, visiting various U.S. cities in the capacity of a beloved celebrity—but he had not been putting in the rounds. There is a ticking clock on any fighter who makes it big and Kearns knew this far better than his fast living young charge did. Entertaining any offer that crossed his desk, Kearns managed to book Dempsey into what has to be regarded as the most fecklessly handled fight in the history of the heavyweight championship.

The Shelby Board of Fight Promoters

Shelby, Montana was famous for nothing. It was a junction on the Great Northern railway that the construction team named after Montana Central Railway manager, Peter Shelby. Shelby, not quite flattered by this honor, insisted that it would never be more than a God-forsaken mudhole. In 1921, the vast Kevin-Sunburst oil field was discovered and the town seemed on the verge of a population boom if they could just make the world aware of this opportunity. The wealthy landowners and oil prospectors in Shelby figured that a heavyweight title fight was a magnificent way to get national attention.

James Johnson, the mayor of Shelby, owner of one of its two banks, and one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, led the group. Shelby saw fit to offer Doc Kearns and Dempsey the princely sum of $200,000 to fight in the town. In some retellings the intention was simply to gain national attention by making the offer, and that the Shelby money men could never have imagined Kearns would jump on it. In other retellings the group intercepted a Montana based manager and promoter named Mike Collins, who was barnstorming through the state with several of his fighters at the time, and asked him to approach Kearns on their behalf. This second version of the story is more fun: the businessmen lost faith in Collins and sent state American Legion commander and pilot, Loy Molumby on an aerial pursuit of Kearns across the United States. Either way, it was Molumby who ended up negotiating with Kearns and who was talked up to $300,000. This was to be delivered in thirds: the first on signing the contract, the second in June, and the third on the 2nd July, two days before the fight.

Doc Kearns is universally recalled as unpleasant, and when the respectable Tommy Gibbons was picked as Dempsey’s opponent, things faltered again. Gibbons’s manager was just one of many men that Kearns had made an enemy. Gibbons and his manager wanted the fight, but neither would be in the room with Kearns for the negotiations. Even Dempsey didn’t enjoy Kearns’s company, but he had come along just as Dempsey had needed him. As a young man, Dempsey had travelled to the boxing centers of the U.S.—New York and San Francisco—and still found himself a no-namer with no prospects. After returning to his family home in Salt Lake City, Dempsey received a timely letter from Kearns, who had managed one of Dempsey’s opponents. Kearns found Jack at rock bottom, but after Dempsey gave Kearns a chance things started to turn around for the young Mormon slugger. Kearns was in it for the money but his fate was tied to Dempsey’s success. When the contract for the Gibbons fight was signed Kearns had $100,000 in hand, the promise of $200,000 more, and the opportunity to walk out of the fight with whatever he already had should the Shelby men fall even a cent short of their promise.

As the fight neared, Dempsey took up residence in Great Falls, a couple of hours' train ride out of Shelby, and seemed delighted to be back in action. The sparring sessions were frequent and brutal but the visitors to his camp were a constant stream of star struck well-wishers. Dempsey loved the public and he loved the wilderness. It was a change of pace to be out of the city come fight time. But the mood of the public began to sour as Shelby’s financial drama began to play out in the newspapers. When the time came for the second payment, James Johnson confessed that the group of backers had only been able to stump up the underwhelming sum of $1,600. Kearns was irate, but the Shelby men had already hired a small army of carpenters to build them a fifty thousand seat arena. Johnson and Molumby scrambled for alternatives. The first suggestion was that Kearns take the gate receipts in full, but he wasn’t in the business of promoting fights and he knew that there was no certainty of the turnout.

Then he was offered fifty thousand head of sheep instead—a valuable commodity, no doubt, but worthless to a man who rarely left the city and had no intention of investing in a farming operation—the same was true of the ranch that the businessmen then offered. Finally wealthy patrons from all across Montana were brought in and the matter was framed as one to do with Montana’s honor, rather than a mistake on the part of the Shelby men. The new backers included George Stanton, owner of the Stanton Bank and Trust Company, and Dan Tracy, a hotelier from Grand Falls. After the second installment was scraped together, Tracy was tasked with scouring through the books to find a way that the third instalment could be raised. Tracy ran the numbers and promptly exited the sinking ship.

Hours before it was due to start, the fight was still in limbo. The final $100,000 couldn’t be raised and Doc Kearns was ready to skip town with what he had. Finally, Kearns was talked into letting the fight go ahead in exchange for the entirety of the gate receipts. Tommy Gibbons, Dempsey’s opponent, had been fighting for a percentage of gate receipts over $300,000, it now appeared that he was only fighting for the heavyweight title.

It quickly became apparent that the money wasn’t what motivated Tommy Gibbons. Against the most fearsome knockout artist in boxing, Gibbons went the full fifteen rounds. In doing so he became the only fighter to go the distance with Dempsey since 1918. Gibbons, who had been staying in Shelby throughout his camp, walked home to his family with a trail of fans cheering him. Dempsey would later say of Gibbons that hitting him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind. Many of the sportswriters present would heap praise on the pace of the fight and the skill that both men showed, but for the most part the performance was given to empty seats.

Doc Kearns had taken Dempsey out of New York because the commission had insisted that ticket prices be lowered. Tickets for ringside seats at Dempsey-Gibbons (which had to be purchased from the Shelby tobacconist) were fifty dollars and by the time the fighters entered the ring, Kearns had slashed prices in desperation. Just seven thousand people paid to attend, with a few thousand more hopping the fences to get in.

Tex Rickard had made this business look effortless. Kearns would have loved nothing more than to not need Rickard, but in every aspect of fight promotion Rickard was the master. He had pulled off big fights in Reno, Goldfield, and Toledo. Rickard had proven that people will go to the fight, but they have to have a way to get there. Shelby had no paved roads and was miles removed from any—it was a stop on the Great Northern Railway but it didn’t have fifty thousand people running through it each day. In anticipation of the fight, the Great Northern and other railway companies had organized additional services to Shelby, often bundled in with a one-off payment that got you fight tickets and a stay in their sleeper cars because Shelby had no way to accommodate fifty thousand people. Crucially, Tex Rickard would never have been stupid enough to publicly announce the fight was off while posturing for more money. Two days before the fight, as the last payment fell short, Kearns declared that Dempsey wouldn’t fight. He was won over and the fight was announced to be back on—but the headline appeared in all the newspapers, which were churning out column inches on the continuing debacle. Once that headline went out, cancellations poured into the train lines, and they in turn cancelled their services. After Kearns had publicly changed his mind half a dozen times, the fight finally did take place but the average person would not book their cross country travel and expensive ticket to a world title fight based on the off chance that it might happen

"The Sack of Shelby" took place on July 4th 1923. A week later, four banks in Montana had been put out of business by the fight. This included the bank that George Stanton owned in Grand Falls and both banks in Shelby—one of which was owned by Mayor Johnson. Johnson himself was out $150,000 which he had personally invested into Kearns’s payments and the stadium. When Dempsey and Kearns returned to Rickard, they were reminded what they had been missing. Dempsey’s next four fights—the last of his career—each drew a million dollars at the gate. That didn’t stop Doc Kearns from taking an odd pride in bankrupting the town of Shelby whenever the press asked him about it in years to come.

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