#there’s like one law firm in my city that works in patent law which I at least have some experience with

[theobaldhobson]

Once the pier and the fingers were in place, we knew we had something that would work.

In some cases, excessive earwax in dogs may lead to ear infection, whereas in others, ear infection due to other causes lead to excessive earwax. "This agreement is an integral step towards Pacific Seaplanes' goal of providing expanded seaplane services to the west

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Wednesday, July 19 2017 1:17 AM EDT2017 07 19 05:17:51 GMTUpdated: Wednesday, July 19 2017 6:03 PM EDT2017 07 19 22:03:45 GMTThe partner of a police officer who shot and killed an Australian woman who had called 911 told investigators he was startled by a loud sound near their squad car seconds before his partner fired his weapon.. The blade had a bit of rust on it, but that would only make it nastier. When he tried to speak it came out in a scream, and his first flight ended when he crashed into a wall and ended back inside his own broken body. One may do fatal mischief without this recklessness; but when the act is done, regardless of consequences, and death ensues, it is murder in the eye of the law. Food. I know he throws hard but eventually hitters are going to figure him out. "Results to date are right in line with what we predicted and where we wanted this engine to be.". With a size of 315mm 265mm 400mm (H and a total volume of 0.0334m3, the Carbide Air 240 is not a very compact Micro ATX case, yet it takes less than half the volume of the Air 540 (61.55% less) and less volume than the Obsidian 350D (21.87% less). Simeon Souther was indicted at the October Term, 1850, of the Circuit Court for the County of Hanover, for the murder of his own slave. He has had to stand tall and strong to learn to like that one.. "Then the mines started then people started to move here and then we became a community and a territory," he said. But I do hope it works and I think that it is a very well organized and informative plan that if it does work will help the enviornment and the future generations. It's cool to see

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how nicely (and responsively) it hugs even complex geometry in our model.. Every other man seemed to be clutching one, with a quiverfull of bolts hanging from his hip.. It was very awkward for her to sit on the droshky. Edd and Emmett crossed the room, their footsteps ringing on the stone floor. Lovejoy arose, and called me to go with him to see what was the result. C'mon starving Kohli of strike in the finals was unacceptable, he did this in the game against WI to Rohit. Flakes of dried blood crumbled at the touch of her fingertips, black in the lantern light. (I really did; you imagine I never read anything.) I met you afterwards in shabby boots, in the mud without goulashes, with a battered hat, and I drew my own conclusions. We see the public sentiment which has been formed by this kind of education exhibited by the following paragraph from the Cambridge Democrat, Md., Oct. At the top corner of the card, PCI Express 6 and 8 pin supplemental power connectors are present.. Australia were shot out in 32.2 overs and New Zealand were going to bat before the scheduled dinner break once again.. No. He is the living proof of the vitality of kabuki." Kishin Shinoyama, himself a master of the photographic medium, spoke to Paradis about his singular rapport with Bando Tamasburo.". One of the others might have realized what was happening. Since young King Tommen and his counsellors have become so obdurate, we mean to broach the subject with King Stannis. Look at the pictures for reference. And now that he's won the first race of the start of the end of his career, here's a look at what's next for Team Pharoah:After the race, he was led back to the stall he's been staying in at trainer Kelly Breen's barn on the Monmouth Park backstretch.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 06 Mar 2020 (Stunning RPG dice, Shell funded climate denial, Church sends US predator priests to Mexico, South Korea is beating covid-19)

Today's links

The most beautiful RPG dice I've ever seen: And you can also make your own.

The king of Dutch climate denial was secretly in Shell's pay: Frits Böttcher was a packrat, and his papers detail exactly how he was paid to sow climate doubt. He was very good at it.

American Catholic officials helped priests who preyed on children escape to Mexico: At least 51 "credibly accused" priests left the US and took up positions abroad.

A grifty AI company conned the state of Utah into giving access to everything: Banjo claims it will predict and head off terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and child abductions without invading anyone's privacy.

Clearview AI says it only lets cops use its facial recognition tool but it's lying: Investors, cronies and pals got to literally use it as a party trick.

South Korea's beating covid-19 with free testing: Testing is part of the free national health system, and 140,000 tests have been administered.

The web is unusably beshitted with terrible ad-tech: "No, I don't want great articles."

For $3, a robolawyer will automatically force data brokers to delete you and sue the ones who don't: Donotpay meets the CCPA, it's like peanut butter and chocolate.

:

This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

The most beautiful RPG dice I've ever seen (permalink)

Sasha is a spectacularly talented RPG dice-maker, whose online store features the most beautiful dice I've ever seen – and as if that wasn't enough, she also sells dice-making kits to use at home.

https://www.sunshadeauarts.com/sunshadeauarts-academy/

Last month, ahead of the C2E2 con, she posted a series of new, not-for-sale (argh) dice that embed a variety of materials inside large D20s to form nebulas, clouds, alien landscapes, menacing eyeballs, and eldritch scenes. Check them out for yourself!

https://twitter.com/sunshadeauarts/status/1232722877008490497 https://twitter.com/sunshadeauarts/status/1229445585717035010 https://twitter.com/sunshadeauarts/status/1232795390916911104 https://twitter.com/sunshadeauarts/status/1233370655216881664 https://twitter.com/sunshadeauarts/status/1233380666810806274

It's hard to say what these will cost; comparable dice on her site sell for $400. They're handmade, beautiful sculptures, after all.

https://www.sunshadeauarts.com/product/less-than-perfect-midnight-aurora-handmade-resin-inkless-titan-d20/

At that price, they're maybe too expensive for a gift for yourself, but as a graduation present, maybe? And that said, it's exactly the kind of thing I sometimes buy to celebrate selling a new novel, and that's on my roadmap for THE LOST CAUSE, my post-GND, truth-and-reconciliation novel, so I'm definitely putting a reminder in my calendar.

The king of Dutch climate denial was secretly in Shell's pay (permalink)

Club of Rome founder Frits Böttcher was the Netherlands' leading climate denier. He died in 2008. Investigative journalists combing through his papers, discovered that he was paid €500K by Shell and others to sow doubt about climate change.

https://www.ftm.nl/dutch-multinationals-funded-climate-sceptic

His network pushed out scientific frauds like the idea that excess atmospheric CO2 would be "good for plants" through books, lectures and reports.

He was good at it. His work was crucial to stalling action on climate change in the 1990s. Despite this, his 24 sponsors dumped him in 1998 after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, worried that outright climate denial had lost credibility.

No wonder! This was the guy who'd called climate science "a witch-hunt on CO2" and declared "Our planet is not a greenhouse."

In his papers, Böttcher notes that after he published these frauds, Shell contacted him and offered him giant sums to keep it up and amplify it. The work was personally commissioned by Shell managing director Huub Van Engelshoven. Böttcher was a packrat. His papers in the Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem stack 15.9m tall. Inside of them is an eye-wateringly detailed account of how wealthy, planet-wrecking firms deliberately and maliciously paid for climate denial.

That means that we now can name names. We think of climate denial as a kind of emergent property with no human agent, but as the world drowns, roasts, and writhes with pandemic, we have the names and addresses of the people who engineered that situation for their own gain. We know who his political allies were: the VVD party. When the Netherlands' dikes fail and the country begins to drown, these politicians might still be running for office.

It's tempting to think of the climate crisis as something we all bear responsibility for, because we didn't sort our recycling or because we didn't use the underfunded, anemic public transit options available to us. But efforts like this – from Platform Authentieke Journalistiek and Follow the Money – show we were corralled into our complicity by a network of super-rich plutes for their own gain, who knew they were wrecking the world and dooming our children but did not care.

American Catholic officials helped priests who preyed on children escape to Mexico (permalink)

A new instalment in Propublica's outstanding coverage of the Catholic Church's complicity in sexual abuse by priests shows that dozens of American priests who raped children were relocated to Mexico, where they continued to rape children

https://www.propublica.org/article/dozens-of-catholic-priests-credibly-accused-of-abuse-found-work-abroad-some-with-the-churchs-blessing#178005

These priests found new postings thanks to glowing letters of recommendation from church officials who knew that they had been accused – or, in some cases convicted – of raping children in their parishes. Some fled to Mexico to avoid prison, resisting extradition for years.

Not just Mexico: Propublica found 51 "credibly accused" US priests who are currently working in Mexico, Ireland, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Some of them continued to draw pay from their US parishes while they settled in abroad. Parishoners' donations paid for the predators who victimized their children to escape justice.

One priest, Jose Antonio Pinal, wrote letters to Church officials blaming the boy he raped, saying, "that he is not innocent of the situation he wants to blame me for completely." Pinal is still ministering in Cuernavaca. He claims his longrunning rapes of a 15-year-old were consensual, but "he was a minor; so, legally, I am screwed."

When he moved to Mexico, Sacramento church officials wrote to him promising to support him, so long as the new diocese promised to "protect the diocese of Sacramento against any financial liability for any acts committed by you while working in that diocese."

Some of these priests are listed as "inactive" in Church websites, but are still ministering in Mexico. Rev. Jeffrey David Newell, admitted to sexually abusing another 15 year old, and called it a "mistake." He currently serves in Tijuana. Newell says it was a single slip up. Other survivors of his abuse have filed lawsuits against his old US archdiocese. Newell calls their claims "totally absurd." His name has been removed from Church lists of "credibly accused" sexual predators in the clergy.

These predators' survivors are alive and deeply traumatized. And thanks to the inaction, complicity and even encouragement of US Catholic church officials, these priests are ruining the lives of new children all over the world.

A grifty AI company conned the state of Utah into giving access to everything (permalink)

The State of Utah has secretly contracted with "Banjo," a grifty "AI" company, to analyze all the surveillance and internal data generated by all the state's agencies.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200305/13422544042/ai-company-has-access-to-pretty-much-every-piece-surveillance-tech-state-utah-owns.shtml

Banjo gets all the 911 calls, CCTV camera feeds, license plate readers, and internal state databases, and its proprietary, secret algorithm will comb through all that to direct law enforcement.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7exem/banjo-ai-company-utah-surveillance-panopticon

The company claims there are no privacy concerns because it has a patented system for anonymizing data. The patents do not disclose their anonymization method, and every other attempt at this kind of anonymization has fallen prey to "re-identification" attacks.

Banjo gets to locate a facility inside the Utah DOT HQ, and will operate in all 29 counties, state university campuses and 23 cities (including Utah's 10 largest cities). The company's making $20.7m on this contract over five years.

Using FOIA requests, Motherboard retrieved records showing how Banjo got Utah officials to help it sell its services ot the state. When Motherboard questioned the officials about this, they flat-out lied and denied it. The Banjo pitch claims that they'll head off terrorist attacks, mass shootings and child abductions in realtime. The company provides zero evidence that they have ever done such a thing, or that they ever could.

But that lack of evidence didn't deter Utah AG Ric Cantrell:

"They do have case studies. I'm waiting for case studies from Banjo. I'm still waiting for information from them."

Uh, maybe you should have seen the studies before putting Banjo's servers behind your firewall?

Clearview AI says it only lets cops use its facial recognition tool but it's lying (permalink)

Clearview AI is another grifty "AI" company cutting secret deals with law enforcement to use its facial recognition tech, which relies on a database of nonconsensually scraped social media photos.

They claim only cops get to use this. It's a lie.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/technology/clearview-investors.html

Clearview investors, clients and cronies all have logins to the system. Long before it was selling to cops, these people were literally using it as a party trick, getting people at parties to give them photos to subject to Clearview analysis, just for shits and giggles.

For example, billionaire John Catsimatidis used it to freak out his daughter, sneaking a pic of her data while she was at a restaurant and then IDing the guy and texting her with the guy's bio while she was still eating with him.

An investor named David Scalzo gave the app to his children: "They like to use it on themselves and their friends to see who they look like in the world. It's kind of fun for people."

It sure seems like Ashton Kutcher also got to run around and use it without limit or accountability. Last time I checked, he was also not a police officer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNhYqLbsAGk&feature=youtu.be

One tech expert, Nicholas Cassimatis, uses the app as "a hobby."

Your 21st Century panopticon, folks, brought to you by compulsive liars who ask us to trust them not to get it wrong.

South Korea's beating covid-19 with free testing (permalink)

South Korea has tested 140,000 people for Covid-19. The tests are free for all as part of the nation's public health program. Testing has led to world-leading containment of the disease.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-04/south-korea-tests-hundreds-of-thousands-to-fight-virus-outbreak

President Moon Jae-in calls it a "war" and has put the country on the kind of footing that you'd expect of any existential threat, sidelining the interests of industry in favor of national survival. They're testing 10,000 people/day. Results are available in hours. You can get tested at drive-through testing centers. The kits are 90% accurate and were developed by a domestic producer, Seegene Inc.

America is learning that offshoring high-tech manufacturing to save on labor costs and allowing its private sector to dominate its healthcare resulted in a brittle situation where it can't produce reliable tests, and the unreliable tests are only available to the wealthy.

The fate of uninsured, untested, untreated Americans is not theirs alone. They're the ones preparing wealthy Americans' food and cleaning their homes.

We have a shared microbial destiny that no amount of neoliberal doctrine can handwave away.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/01/shared-microbial-destiny/#covidclasswar

The web is unusably beshitted with terrible ad-tech (permalink)

The web is unusably beshitted and encrufted with popups, interstitials, rolldowns, nagware, paywalls, autoplaying video, ads that scroll with the page, and worse. I haven't looked at the web without an adblocker in years and it's still barely usable.

https://www.cjr.org/first_person/the-infinite-scroll.php

The modern web's equilibrium is "as terrible as possible, without being so terrible that you stop reading," or, worse, "as terrible as is necessary to get you pay to bypass the paywall."

In the CJR, David Roth publishes one of the most pitiless, accurate, evocative descriptions of using the modern internet of cruft.

"The page loads, and a little video ad box rises from the bottom left of the screen and begins buffering. Then a big box pops up over the small one with an offer to subscribe to the paper at a special promotional rate… As you contemplate it, the video begins to play in a muted spasm. This throws a scrim of gray over the rest of the page, making it impossible to read…While you've been triaging a second small video player has floated up into the middle left of the screen. You manage to close these various boxes, and now you can scroll. For a few seconds, anyway, until another ad creeps down from the banner ad above the headline."

But Roth isn't merely complaining here. He's also digging into the underlying reality: dwindling margins, short-term thinking, monopolization of the ad-market, and a buyer's market for ads that lets advertisers demand worse and worse of publishers. Publishers are staffed with people who are "perpetually maxed-out and stressed and scrabbling for a dwindling and finite amount of money." They're choosing chumboxes and other garbage because they want to keep the lights on.

This happened before, of course. It's an HTML5, CSS-enabled reprise of the pop-up wars, where exploding inventory and finite advertising allowed advertisers to play publishers off against each other with increasingly obnoxious, intrusive pop-ups.

These were unbelievably terrible, even by modern standards. Pop-ups would spawn at 1px X 1px, making them invisible, autoplaying audio. Others would sense your mouse heading for the close box and move themselves away from your pointer. They'd spawn 3 more pop-ups for every one you closed, or 300, until your computer ran out of RAM and crashed, taking all your work with it.

These pop-ups didn't go away because publishers won the battle. They went away because of pop-up blocking.

When Opera, and then Mozilla, turned pop-up blocking on by default, users finally had a meaningful reason to prefer one browser to the others. One browser was usable. The other one let pop-up ads crash your computer and eat your unsaved docs. As users switched en masse to blocking browsers, publishers could tell advertisers, "Look, we'll run any garbage ad you tell us to because we need your money. But if it's a pop-up it will be blocked by the majority of our users. They just won't see it."

The pop-up wars were won because technologists helped users exercise technological self-determination. But increasingly, browser vendors are ad-tech companies. Even when they're not, browsers are being designed to serve publishers (who are under advertisers' thumbs), not users.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

We should address monopolies in ad-tech and browsers, we should create meaningful privacy protections via a federal privacy law with a private right of action. But all of that needs to be accompanied with legal cover for users who assert the right to unshittify their web sessions.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

This won't just protect users, it will protect publishers. It's one thing to prohibit publishers from intrusive advertising. But it's another altogether to make that kind of advertising literally technically impossible.

For $3, a robolawyer will automatically force data brokers to delete you and sue the ones who don't (permalink)

The always-amazing Donotpay has a new robot-lawyer service: as part of your $3/month, they'll serve every data-broker with a demand to purge your records under the CCPA, and sue the ones who don't.

https://fortune.com/2020/03/05/delete-location-data-privacy-personal-information-donotpay/

Data-brokers don't just drive nuisance calls, they also expose you to risks like being doxed and swatted, or having your identity stolen, including by stalkers and bounty hunters who exploit mobile phone tracking to get your realtime location. Every single person should purge their data from every single data-broker, period. Donotpay targets the top 20 brokers and facial recognition companies, including Clearview AI.

Donotpay automates opt-outs for these companies. It also automates suing companies that don't comply or those that make illegal demands like requiring you to send a scan of your driver's license before they'll purge your records. Once you're signed up, you can opt out your whole family, and even your friends. If you don't want a $3/month sub (which gets you tons of other awesome robolawyering), you can just sign up once, pay $3, purge your records and cancel.

Fulfilling deletion requests costs companies about $10. You can use them punitively. Any time a company pisses you off, you can just file a data-deletion demand under CCPA.

When Donot pay started, it was Ios only and I couldn't use it. Somewhere along the way, they got a web interface, too. I just signed up. I'm gonna pay for the wifi on my flight this afternoon just so I can explore all its options.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Bram Cohen's Stanford talk on BitTorrent https://web.archive.org/web/20051124040524/http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/050216-ee380-100.asx

#5yrsago DMCA abuser ordered to pay $25K to WordPress https://torrentfreak.com/wordpress-wins-25000-from-dmca-takedown-abuser-150305/

#5yrsago Albuquerque PD encrypts videos before releasing them in records request https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150221/17074630102/albuquerque-police-dept-complies-with-records-request-releasing-password-protected-videos-not-password.shtml

#5yrsago Judge who invented Ferguson's debtor's prisons owes $170K in tax https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/06/ferguson-judge-owes-unpaid-taxes-ronald-brockmeyer

#5yrsago Hartford, CT says friends can't room together unless some of them are servants https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-hartford-scarborough-street-house-0218-20150217-story.html

#5yrsago Finnish millionaire gets EUR54K speeding ticket https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-31709454

#1yrago Zuckerberg announces a comprehensive plan for a new, privacy-focused Facebook, but fails to mention data sharing and ad targeting https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-zuckerberg-privacy-pivot/

#1yrago Ruminations on decades spent writing stories that run more than 1,000,000 words https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/03/lessons-learned-writing-really.html

#1yrago A thorough defense of Modern Monetary Theory https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2019/03/05/mmt-sense-or-nonsense/#62e9ed235852

#1yrago GOP lawmaker driven mad by bill that would decriminalize children who take naked photos of themselves, delivers a frenzied rant about anal sex on legislature's floor https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/03/05/39511377/a-bill-decriminalizing-teen-sexting-passes-the-house-causing-republican-to-scream-about-anal-sex-on-the-floor

#1yrago Bounty hunters and stalkers are able to track you in realtime by lying to your phone company and pretending to be cops https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/panvkz/stalkers-debt-collectors-bounty-hunters-impersonate-cops-phone-location-data

#1yrago From prisons to factories to offices: the spread of workplace surveillance and monitoring tech https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/DandS_WorkplaceMonitoringandSurveillance-.pdf

#1yrago NH GOP lawmakers mocked gun violence survivors by wearing clutchable pearl necklaces to gun control hearing https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/06/gop-lawmakers-wore-pearls-while-gun-violence-victims-testified-activists-were-outraged/?utm_term=.addd1b7a24f8

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Emptywheel (https://www.emptywheel.net/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Super Punch (https://superpunch.net/, Bas van Beek (http://www.basvanbeek.com/).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Museums and the Web: March 31-April 4 2020, Los Angeles. https://mw20.museweb.net/

LA Times Festival of Books: 18 April 2020, Los Angeles. https://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/

Currently writing: I'm rewriting a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm also working on "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel afterwards.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[judgestarling]

A Short Story by “Martian” Physicist Leó Szilárd on a Funding Agency whose Mission Is the “Retardation of Scientific Progress”

Leó Szilárd (1898–1964) was a physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. 

Legend has it that Leó Szilárd was once asked why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth despite the high probability of it existing. Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us—they just call themselves Hungarians." Thus, was born the term Martians, which included in addition to Leó Szilárd, such luminaries as Paul Erdős, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner. 

The Martians were characterized by their strong accent (made famous by horror actor Bela Lugosi), their “superhuman” intellect, and by the fact that they spoke two incomprehensible languages, Hungarian and Mathematics. John von Neumann even invented a history for the Martians. They are descendants of a Martian scout force which landed in Budapest around the year 1900, and later departed after the planet was found unsuitable for colonization. They left behind children by several Earth women—children who all became famous scientists.

In addition to physics, engineering, and politics, Leó Szilárd also wrote short stories. These were published in a collection entitled The Voice of the Dolphins (1961). The title story describes an international biology research laboratory in Central Europe. This laboratory became reality after a meeting in 1962 with Victor F. Weisskopf, James Watson and John Kendrew. When the European Molecular Biology Laboratory was established, the library was named The Szilárd Library and the library logo features a dolphin.

My favorite story by Leó Szilárd is “The Marla Gable Foundation,” a funding agency whose mission is the “retardation of scientific progress.” It reminds me of the NIH and NSF. 

The Marla Gable Foundation

Leó Szilárd

[1948]

As soon as I saw the temperature of the rabbit come back to normal, I knew that we had licked the problem. It took twenty-four hours to bring his temperature down to one degree centigrade, injecting three grains of Dorminol every ten minutes during that period. Sleep set in between the third and fourth hours, when the body temperature fell below twenty-six centigrade; and after twenty-four hours, at one centigrade, there was no longer any appreciable metabolic activity. We kept him at that low temperature for one day, after which time, having completed our measurements, we injected Metaboline and allowed the temperature to rise to normal within one hour.

There was never any doubt in my mind that once we got this far, and got the temperature down to one centigrade, we could keep the rabbit “asleep” for a week, a year or a hundred years just as well as for a day. Nor had I much doubt that if this worked for the rabbit it would work for the dog; and that if it worked for the dog, it would work for man.

I always wanted to see what kind of place the world will be three hundred years hence. I intended to “withdraw from life” (as we proposed to call the process) as soon as we had perfected the method, and to arrange for being returned to life in 2260. I thought my views and sentiments were sufficiently advanced, and that I had no reason to fear I should be too much behind the times in a world that had advanced a few hundred years beyond the present. I would not have dared, though, to go much beyond three hundred years.

I thought at first that one year should be plenty for perfecting the process as well as for completing the arrangements; and that I should be in statu dormiendi before the year was over. As a matter of fact, it took only six months to get ready; but difficulties of an unforeseen kind arose.

A section of public opinion was strongly opposed to “withdrawal from life,” and for a time it looked as though the eighty-sixth Congress would pass a law against it. This, fortunately, did not come to pass. The AMA, however, succeeded in obtaining a court injunction against my “withdrawal” on the basis that it was “suicide,” and suicide was unlawful. Since a man in statu dormiendi cannot of his own volition return to life—so the brief argued-from the legal point of view he is not living while in that state.

The ensuing legal battle lasted for five years. Finally, Adams, Lynch and Davenport, who handled my case, succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to accept jurisdiction. The Supreme Court upheld the injunction, with three justices dissenting. Mr. Davenport explained to me that the ruling of the Supreme Court, though on the face of it unfavorable, was in reality a very fortunate thing for me because it removed all obstacles that might have stood in the way of my plans. The ruling of the Supreme Court, Mr. Davenport explained, established once and for all that a man is not legally living while in statu dormiendi. Therefore, he said, if I should now decide to act against the advice of his firm, disregard the court injunction and proceed to withdraw from life, no legal action could be taken against me under any statute until I was returned to life three hundred years hence, at which time my offense would come under the statute of limitations.

All arrangements having been completed in secrecy, and having named Adams, Lynch and Davenport as executors of my estate, I spent my last evening in the twentieth century at a small farewell party given to me by friends. There were about six of us, all old friends, but somehow we did not understand each other very well on this occasion. Most of them seemed to have the feeling that they were sort of attending my funeral, since they would not see me again alive; whereas to me it seemed that it was I who was attending their funeral, since none of them would be alive when I woke up.

According to the records, it took about two hours until sleep set in, but I do not remember anything that was said after the first hour.

The next thing I remember was the prick of a needle, and when I opened my eyes I saw a nurse with a hypodermic syringe in one hand and a microphone in the other.

“Would you mind speaking into the microphone, please?” she said, holding it at a comfortable distance from my face.

“We owe you an apology, as well as an explanation,” said a well-dressed young man standing near my bed and holding a microphone in his hand.” I am Mr. Rosenblatt from Adams, Lynch, Davenport, Rosenblatt and Giannini. For reasons of a legal nature we deemed it advisable to return you to life, but if you wish to complete the three hundred years, which appears to be your goal, we hope we shall be able to make the necessary arrangements within one month. At least we shall try our best to do so.

“Now, before you say anything, let me explain to you that the gentleman sitting next to me is Mr. McClintock, the mayor of the city—a Democrat, of course. Subject to your approval, we have agreed that he may give you an interview which will be televised. The proceeds will go to the Senile Degeneration Research Fund. The broadcasting companies understand, of course, that it’s up to you to agree to this arrangement, and they have an alternate program ready which can be substituted if you should object. If you agree, however, we shall go on the air in one minute. Naturally, the broadcasting companies are anxious to catch your first responses rather than have something rehearsed put on the air. I’m certain you’ll appreciate their point of View.”

“Before I answer this,” I said, “would you mind telling me how long I’ve been asleep?”

“I should have told you this before,” he said. “You were out ninety years.”

“Then,” I said after a moment’s reflection, “I have no friends left from whom to keep any secrets. I have no objection to the broadcast.”

As soon as the announcer finished with his somewhat lengthy introduction, the mayor came in.

“As chairman of the Senile Degeneration Research Fund, I wish to express my thanks to you for having graciously consented to this interview. Senile degeneration is one of our most important diseases. One in eight die of senile degeneration, and more than half of those who reach the age of a hundred and five. Given ample funds for research, we cannot fail to discover the causes of this disease, and once the cause of the disease is known it will be possible to find a cure. But I know that I should not monopolize the air; there must be many things that you would want to know about our society. Please feel free to ask anything you like.”

“Why was I returned to life?” I asked.

“I’m certain,” the mayor said, “that Messrs. Adams, Lynch, Davenport, Rosenblatt and Giannini will want to give you a detailed explanation of that. It was their decision, and I have no doubt that it was a wise one in the circumstances. I’m not a lawyer, but I can tell you something about the political background of their decision. Politics—that’s my field.”

“I wonder whether you realize how much trouble your process of “from life” has caused the government. For a few years only a few persons followed your example, mostly political scientists and anthropologists. But then, all of a sudden, it became quite a fad. People withdrew just to spite their wives and husbands. And I regret to say that many Catholics who could not obtain a divorce chose this method of surviving their husbands or wives, to become widowed and to remarry, until this practice was finally stopped in 2001 by the papal bull “Somnus Naturae Repugnans.”

“The Church did not interfere, of course, with the legitimate uses of the process. Throughout the latter part of the century doctors encouraged patients who suffered from cancer and certain other incurable diseases to withdraw from life, in the hope that a cure would be found in the years to come and that they could then be returned to life and cured. There were legal complications, of course, particularly in the case of wealthy patients. Often their heirs raised objections on the ground that withdrawal from life was not yet an entirely safe process; and equally often the heirs demanded that they too should be permitted to withdraw from life for an equal period of time, so that the natural sequence of the generations would be left undisturbed. There are about one million cancer patients at present in statu dormiendi, and half a million of their heirs.”

“Then cancer is still not a curable disease?” I asked.

“No,” the mayor said, “but with all the funds which are now available it can take at the most a few years until that problem is solved. The most important, even though a somewhat controversial, application of your process,” he continued, “came about twenty-five years ago. That was when the present great depression started. It came as a result of seventy-five years of Republican mismanagement. Today we have a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress; but this is the first Democratic President since Donovan, and the first Democratic Congress since the Hundred and Fifth. As more and more of the Southern states began to vote Republican, our party was hopelessly outvoted, until gradually its voting strength began to rise again; and today, with a Democratic majority solidly established, we have nothing to fear from coming elections.”

“So finally there’s a truly progressive party in the United States?” I asked.

“Yes,” the mayor said, “we regard ourselves as progressives. We have the support of the Catholic Church, and eighty per cent of the voters are Catholics.”

“What brought about such mass conversions?” I asked.

“There were no mass conversions,” the mayor said, “and we wouldn’t want any. Families of Polish, Irish and Italian stock, having a stronger belief in the American way of life than some of the older immigrant stocks, have always given birth to more children; and so today we have a solid Catholic majority.”

Now that the Democratic Party is established in office, we’re going to fight the depression by the proper economic methods. As I said before, there was a Republican Administration in office when the depression hit us twenty-five years ago. In the first year of that depression unemployment rose to ten million. Things looked pretty bad. There was no public-works program or unemployment relief, but Congress passed a law, the Withdrawal Act of 2025, authorizing the use of Federal funds to enable any unemployed who so desired to withdraw from life for the duration of the depression. Those unemployed who availed themselves of this offer had to authorize the government to return them to life when the government deemed that the labor market required such a measure.

“Seven out of ten million unemployed availed themselves of this offer by the end of the first year, in spite of the opposition of the Church. The next year unemployment was up another seven million, out of which five million were withdrawn from life. This went on and on, and by the time our party got into office, two years ago, there were twenty-five million withdrawn from life, with Federal support.

“Our first act in office was to make withdrawals from life unlawful; and the second was to institute a public-works program.”

“What does your public-works program consist of?” I asked.

“Housing,” the mayor said. “Is there a housing shortage?” I asked “No,” the mayor said. “With twenty-five million unemployed in statu dormiendi there is, of course, no housing shortage.”

“And will you now return these twenty-five million unemployed to life?” I asked. “Only very gradually,” the mayor replied. “The majority of the sleepers are non-Catholics and it would upset the political balance if they were returned to life all at once. Besides, Operating the refrigerator plants of the public dormitories for twenty-five million sleepers is part of our public works program.

“Incidentally,” he added, “Whether you yourself come under the Anti-Withdrawal Act of 2048 is a controversial question. Your lawyers felt that you would not want to violate the law of the land, and they tried to get a court ruling in order to clear you; but the court refused to take the case, because you weren’t legally alive; finally your lawyers decided to return you to life so that you may ask the court for a declaratory judgment. Even though there is little doubt that the court will rule in your favor, I personally hope that you’ll find our society so pleasant, and so much more advanced than you would have expected, that you’ll decide to stay with us in the twenty-first century.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor,” the announcer said. “This was beautiful timing. We’re off the air,” he said to me, thinking I needed more explanation.

The mayor turned to me. “If you feel well enough, I would like to take you home for dinner. It’s a small party, four or five guests, my wife and my daughter, Betty. The poor girl is brokenhearted. She has just called off her engagement, and I’m doing what I can to cheer her up. She’s very much in love with the fellow.”

“If she loves him so much, why did she break with him?” I asked.

“All her friends teased her about him because he wears teeth,” the mayor said. “Of course, there’s no law against it, it’s just not done, that’s all.”

Something began to dawn upon me at this moment. The nurse, a pretty young girl, had no teeth, Mr. Rosenblatt had no teeth, and the mayor had no teeth. Teeth seemed to be out of fashion.

“I have teeth,” I said.

“Yes, of course,” the mayor replied, “and you wear them with dignity. But if you should decide to stay with us you’ll want to get rid of them. They’re not hygienic.”

“But how would I Chew my food, how do you chew your food?” I asked.

“Well,” the mayor said, “we don’t eat with our hands. We eat from plates-chewing plates. They plug into sockets in the table and chew your food for you. We eat with Spoons.”

“Steaks, too?” I asked.

“Yes, everything,” the mayor said. “But have no fear, we shall have knife and fork for you tonight, and flat plates such as you are accustomed to. My daughter kept them for her fiancé.” “I’m sorry that my second daughter will not be with us tonight,” the mayor said as he was starting his car. “She’s in the hospital. In college she’s taking mathematics and chemistry. She could have talked to you in your own language.”

“Nothing seriously wrong, I hope,” I said.

“Oh, no!” the mayor said.” Just plastic surgery. She’ll be out in a day or two.”

“With a new nose?” I asked.

“Nothing wrong with her nose,” the mayor said. “As a matter of fact, she has Mark Gable’s nose. No, it’s one of these newfangled Operations. My wife and I don’t approve of it, but this girl, she runs with the smart set. ‘Esophagus bypass,’ they call it. No longer necessary to watch your diet, you know. Eat as much as you please and switch it to the bypass—goes into a rubber container, of course. I tried to talk her out of it, but that girl has an answer for everything. ‘Father,’ she said, isn’t there a food surplus in the world? If everybody ate twice as much, would that not solve the problem?”

“Maybe she’s right,” I said, remembering with an effort that I always used to side with youth. When we sat down at table I looked forward to the steak; I was pretty hungry by that time. But when it was served, after a few fruitless attempts with knife and fork I had to ask for a chewing plate.

“The choice cuts are always especially tough,” my hostess explained.

“Tell me,” I said, “when did people begin to discard their teeth, and why?”

“Well,” the mayor said, “it started thirty years ago. Ford’s chewing plates have been advertised over television for at least thirty-five years. Once people have chewing plates, what use do they have for teeth? If you think of all the time people used to spend at the dentist’s, and for no good purpose, at that, you’ll have to admit we have made progress.”

“What became of all the dentists?” I asked.

“Many of them have been absorbed by the chewing-plate industry,” the mayor explained,

“Henry Ford VI gave them preference over all categories of skilled workers. Others turned to other occupations. Take Mr. Mark Gable, for instance,” the mayor said, pointing to a man sitting at my right, a man about fifty, and of great personal charm. “He had studied dentistry; today he is one of the most popular donors, and the richest man in the United States.”

“Oh,” I said. “What is his business?”

“Over one million boys and girls,” the mayor said “are his offspring in the United States, and the demand is still increasing.”

“That must keep you pretty busy, Mr. Gable,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say. Apparently, I had put my foot in it. Mrs. Gable blushed, and the mayor laughed.

“Mr. Gable is happily married,” the mayor said. “He donated the seed when he was twenty-four years old. The stock should last indefinitely, although the demand may not. The Surgeon General has ruled that no seed donated by anyone above twenty-five may be marketed in the United States.”

“Has there been legislation about this, giving the Surgeon General such authority?” I asked.

“No,” the mayor said. “Legislation was blocked by filibuster in the Senate. But the Surgeon General takes action under the Pure Food and Drug Act.”

“How can he do that?” I asked.

“There was a decision by the Supreme Court thirty years ago,” the mayor said, “that all ponder-able substance which is destined to enter through any orifice of the human body comes properly under that act. There was no legislation in this whole field whatsoever. Any woman who wishes to bear a child of her own husband is perfectly free to do so. Over fifteen per cent of the children are born in this manner; but most wives prefer to select a donor.”

“How do they make a choice?” I asked.

“Oh,” the mayor said, “the magazines are full of their pictures. You can see them on the screen at home and in the movies. There are fashions, of course. Today over seventy per cent of the ‘donated’ children are the offspring of the thirty-five most popular donors. Naturally, they’re expensive. Today a seed of Mr. Gable’s will bring a thousand dollars; but you can get seed from very good stock for a hundred. Fashions are bound to change, but long after Mr. Gable passes away his estate will still go on selling his seed to connoisseurs. It’s estimated that for several decades his estate will still take in more than thirty million dollars a year.”

“I have earned a very large sum of money,” said Mr. Gable, turning to me, “with very little work. And now I’m thinking of setting up a trust fund. I want to do something that will really contribute to the happiness of mankind; but it’s very difficult to know what to do with money. When Mr. Rosenblatt told me that you’d be here tonight I asked the mayor to invite me. I certainly would value your advice.”

“Would you intend to do anything for the advancement of science?” I asked.

“No,” Mark Gable said. “I believe scientific progress is too fast as it is.”

“I share your feeling about this point,” I said with the fervor of conviction, “but then why not do something about the retardation of scientific progress?”

“That I would very much like to do,” Mark Gable said, “but how do I go about it?”

“Well,” I said, “I think that shouldn’t be very difficult. As a matter of fact, I think it would be quite easy. You could set up a foundation, with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make out a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. And the very best men in the field should be appointed as chairmen at salaries of fifty thousand dollars each. Also have about twenty prizes of one hundred thousand dollars each for the best scientific papers of the year. This is just about all you would have to do. Your lawyers could easily prepare a charter for the foundation. As a matter of fact, any of the National Science Foundation bills which were introduced in the Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Congresses could perfectly well serve as a model.”

“I think you had better explain to Mr. Gable why this foundation would in fact retard the progress of science,” said a bespectacled young man sitting at the far end of the table, whose name I didn’t get at the time of introduction. It should be obvious,” I said. “First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.”

“Will you stay here with us?” Mark Gable said, turning to me, “and help me to set up such a foundation?”

“That I will gladly do, Mr. Gable,” I said. “We should be able to see within a few years whether the scheme works, and I’m certain that it will work. For a few years I could afford to stay here, and I could then still complete the three hundred years which were my original goal.”

“So you would want to go through with your plan rather than live out your life with us?” asked the mayor.

“Frankly, Mr. Mayor,” I said, “before Mr. Gable brought up the plan of the foundation, with science progressing at this rapid rate I was a little scared of being faced with further scientific progress two hundred years hence. But if Mr. Gable succeeds in stopping the progress of science and gives the art of living a chance to catch up, two hundred years hence the world should be a livable place. If Mr. Gable should not go through with his project, however, I would probably prefer to live out my life with you in the twenty-first century. How about it, Mr. Mayor?” I said. “Will you give me a job if I decide to stay?”

“You don’t need a job,” the mayor said. “You don’t seem to realize that you’re a very famous man.”

“How does being famous provide me with a livelihood?” I asked.

“In more ways than one,” the mayor said. “You could become a donor, for instance. Now that over half of our professional men are medical doctors, more and more wives want children with some measure of scientific ability.”

“But, Mr. Mayor,” I said, “I’m above twenty-five.”

“Of course,” the mayor said, “the seed would have to be marketed abroad. The rate of exchange is none too favorable,” he continued, “but even so you should be able to earn a comfortable living if you decided to stay.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Mayor,” I said. “The idea is a little novel for me; but I suppose I could get accustomed to it.”

“I’m sure you could,” said the mayor. “And incidentally, whenever you decide to get rid of that junk in your mouth, I shall be glad to get an appointment for you with Elihu Smith, the dental extractor. He took care of all our children.”

“I appreciate your kindness very much, Mr. Mayor,” I said, smiling politely and trying to hide a suddenly rising feeling of despair. All my life I have been scared of dentists and dental extractors, and somehow I suddenly became aware of the painful fact that it was not within the power of science to return me to the twentieth century.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO HAVE BAD PROCRASTINATION

My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. Some people would make good founders, and others wouldn't. I think there are five reasons people like object-oriented program, it can be hard to tell apart, and there will probably be survivors from each group. VCs never offered that option. But it means if you have a statically-typed language without lexical closures or macros. But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people get paid market rate for the work they do. And this is not an ordinary economic relationship than companies being sued for firing people. So far, anyway. I suspect signalling risk is in this category too. So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in individual productivity as time goes on.1 Since board seats last about 5 years and each partner can't handle more than about 10 at once, that means a VC fund.

I was saying. Unfortunately there's no antonym of hapless, which makes it difficult to tell founders what to aim for. But while some openly flaunt the fact that they're created by, and used by, people who say software patents are no different from hardware patents, people protected ideas by keeping them secret. The winds of change. The root cause of variation in income, but it seems that it should be better looking.2 Not merely relentless. But if you look at the product we're offering.

If startups need it less, they'll be able to leave, if you have this most common type of ambition do. In most, the fastest way to get rich. There are other messages too, of course. If Google does do something evil, they get doubly whacked for it: once for whatever they did, it would take me several weeks of research to be able to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. Professors and bosses usually feel some sense of responsibility toward you; if you make a valiant effort and failing, maybe they'll invest in your next startup, but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes. They'll each become more like super-angels.3 They build Writely. It may seem unlikely in principle that startups were very risky, but she was surprised to see how constant the threat of failure was—not just less restrictive than series A terms, but less restrictive than angel terms have traditionally been. If we can decide in 20 minutes, surely the next round, which they'll only take if it's worse for the startup than they could get in the open market.

But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. So a company threatening patent suits, sell. I was curious to hear what had surprised her most about it.4 In other fields, companies regularly sue competitors for patent infringement till you have money, people will of course think of Perl. Getting people to take less salary for a while, or increase revenues. If you got ten people to read a manuscript, you were rich. You seem to be so far.

They counted as work, just as we were designed to work, just like programming, but they are. As a child I read a New York law firm in the 1950s they paid associates far less than firms do today.5 But even investors who don't have a rule about this will be bored and frustrated by unclear explanations. After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. If you're not threatening, you're probably not doing anything new, and dignity is merely a sort of plaque. And yet people working in their own minds which they're answering. The company is now starting to happen, and I predict it will become more common.

I got serious about and did a bunch of work, 1 to 2 deals done in a year. 5x.6 I spent almost a decade investing in early stage startups, and startups should simply ignore other companies' patents. When the tests are narrow and predictable, you get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as the average person. I got serious about and did a bunch of small organizations in a market can come close. We didn't have enough saved to live on. Mistake number two. If they think your startup is worth investing in.7 As this example suggests, the rate at which technology increases our productive capacity is probably polynomial, rather than linear. What you're doing is business creation.

Notes

That's not a promising market and a t-shirts, to mean the hypothetical people who might be enough. Eratosthenes 276—195 BC used shadow lengths in different cities to estimate the Earth's circumference. And though they have less money, the Romans didn't mean to imply that the government had little acquired immunity to messianic figures, just monopolies they create liquidity. This has already happened once in China, Yale University Press, 1996.

At one point in the narrow technical sense of the aircraft is. Since I now believe that was the recipe: someone guessed that there are no longer written in Lisp, you don't see them much in their early twenties. So if you're good you'll have to be in the former depends a lot of the resulting sequence. Probabilities in this new world.

Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities. In one way, be forthright with investors.

But the change is a way to see if you don't need that much to hope for, believe it, but the median case. Give the founders of failing startups would even be tempted to ignore what your body is telling you to take action, there is something in this they're perfect. 4%? But in this algorithm are calculated using a dictionary to pick up a solution, and why it's next to impossible to succeed at all.

Please do not take the term literally.

But which of them.

Some of the companies fail, no matter how good you can play it safe by excluding VC firms regularly cold email.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Patrick Collison, Dan Giffin, Trevor Blackwell, Peter Eng, Parker Conrad, Geoff Ralston, and Joe Gebbia for sharing their expertise on this topic.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #course #discussion #weeks #ideas #expertise #organizations #responsibility #century

[cbrownjc]

GRRM and Romance

So, this isn’t something I have seen so much being said on tumblr, but I have seen it said other places, most specifically when it comes to Jon and Daenerys’ relationship, and it’s this: “George R. R. Martin doesn’t do romance!”

And when I see it said, I always do a “what?” double take. Because it’s clear people who say or think this don’t know of GRRMs writing credits outside of ASOIAF/GOT. More specifically, one credit in particular: the television show Beauty and the Beast which aired on CBS from 1987-1990. He was not only one of the main writers for the show, (penning 14 episodes out of the total 46 of the show’s run, the third most of any of the writers for the show), but was also one of the supervising producers of the show as well. And at the time, and even after it short run was over, it was considered to be one of the most romantic shows ever produced for television. 

I was around 9 or 10 when the show first came on back in the 80s, and was so not into dramatic romance shows. So I never watched it when it was in its original run. It was actually about a year after it ended when I first started watching it (having just entered my early teens). And to this day, almost 30 years later, that show still has not only left an impression on me, but is also still one of the most romantic shows I think has ever been done for television, just as was said about it when it first aired. 

The show wasn’t just a romance, it was a High Fantasy Romance. Unlike the reboot on the CW a few years back that had a pretty handsome-looking guy who would “beast” out or whatever, the Vincent of the original looked as he did in the above image from the beginning of the show until the end of it. His physical appearance never changed. And along with his otherworldly looks, he and Catherine shared what could only be described as a mystical connection between them. They could only describe it between them as a “bond” but the gist of it was, they could feel each others emotions. They could feel what the other was feeling at almost every moment. Which, on one level, help to add some “action” into the show, since Catherine was a lawyer and so would get into life-threatening situations with some of her cases. Vincent could feel when she was in trouble and rushed to save her, usually killing the people that were trying to hurt her, giving in to the more “animalistic” side of his nature (though the network kept wanted to reign that fact back).  

However, the point of their bond was more than just for that. It was to enhance the idea of the theme of the show, the theme of the beauty and the beast tale in general, of being able to see the true beauty inside someone. On the surface, Vincent and Catherine both appeared to be ugly. Whereas Vincent just had the physical ugliness, Catherine actually started out the story as a typical spoiled rich girl “yuppy” type, who’s dad would pay for anything she wanted. She’s mistaken for somebody else one night, brutally beaten and left for dead in Central Park, where Vincent finds her and saves her life. 

It is here that their bond begins to form. Vincent, who was always guarded and would hide away from people because of his looks, (except from his “family,” a society of people who lived under NYC as well like he did, and were all viewed as outcasts for various reasons), allows himself to begin to feel worthy of being loved. And Catherine, changed not only by her experience but the kindness of Vincent’s heart, starts working at the DA’s office instead of her dad’s law firm, to help people in any way she can. 

The show only ran three years because of lots of behind the scenes drama. The main one being, Linda Hamilton wasn’t fully committed to doing a tv show just in general. (Filming tv is much different than filming movies). As George himself says in this interview from the Hollywood Reporter, she wanted to go back to doing movies, plus have children. (She and director James Cameron were a couple at the time, and they did have a kid together. Her relationship with him would go on to have a lot of drama in and of itself too). So, when the time came when she could leave the show, she left. Meaning, given the premise of the show, Catherine’s character was killed off. The bond between her and Vincent got broken so he couldn’t save her when she got into a situation beyond her control with one of the most powerful men in the city. 

However, the reason the bond got broken was revealed to be because the bond got transferred into the child she and Vincent conceived a few weeks back, when Vincent was going through a “violent madness” - basically losing his humanity to his more “animalistic” side. The bond between them is what was able to save him from the madness and, though you never see them make love (which you never did at any point during the show even before this, mostly because the network didn’t seem to want to show such a thing), they did, and conceived a child that night. 

The whole theme of this part of the story became based around the Dylan Thomas poem And Death Shall Have No Dominion. A poem I still know most of by heart because of this show. 

Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.

The final episodes of the show closed out the story, with Vincent able to find Catherine before she died (the man who kidnapped her kept her alive when he discovered she was pregnant, then injected her with an overdose of morphine after she gave birth to her and Vincent’s son). They quoted those above lines from that Dylan Thomas poem to each other as she died in his arms. Vincent was able to find the child later and save him too, with the help of a new “beauty” in Diana Bennett. And while I personally did like her character, the whole premise of the show was the uniqueness of Vincent and Catherine’s bond. There was just no way you could take that and begin to try and transfer it to a new character being placed in the “beauty” role. As George R. R. Martin himself said about it:

Basically I look back on it now and think we were in a no-win situation. I think we did some very fine work in the third season, but the core of the show was the romance. It was Vincent and Catherine. We brought in a new Beauty in the person of Jo Anderson, who was a wonderful actress in the part of Diana Bennett. She was great to work with. But you can’t do two seasons of telling the world, “This is a love story for the ages, this is Romeo and Juliet,” and then suddenly third seasons say, “Juliet? Forget Juliet. It’s Romeo and Harriet. Here’s a different love story for the ages!” So that didn’t work. When the love story stopped, our core audience left. If Linda had not left the show we could have gone for five years at least. 

So basically once Vincent found his son, the show was over. 

And it was his experience with writing for the show, and the limits that came with writing directly for tv that he experienced while doing so, that made him leave tv writing behind and go off and begin writing A Song of Ice and Fire. Because with a book, you don’t have to worry about production budgets for creating a world (like the underground NYC world of the show), or actors wanting to leave because they don’t want to do tv anymore, which basically kills your whole show’s premise; or the network not wanting more darkly violent acts for the “beast” to commit when trying to protect his “beauty” . . . along with never being able to show them having sex, and only confirming that they ever did when a child finally comes into the story but only because said actress now wants to leave the show, and is pregnant at the time in real life anyway. 

A Song of Ice and Fire, and by extension the tv show adapted from it Game of Thrones, isn’t a High Fantasy Romance story. A love story isn’t the main driving narrative of the story. However, the idea that GRRM wouldn’t put a romance in the story, and one that is highly romantic in its nature, seems like a very bad take when it comes to his backstory as a writer. If anything, the love stories and relationships he does write about are ones that are just as unconventional as Vincent and Catherine’s was. They don’t follow the normal tropes of relationships or love stories you usually find in romance stories, even in the genre of high fantasy. GRRM himself said that his favorite part to write in Fire and Blood was the story of King Jaehaerys I Targaryen and Queen Alysanne, which he himself has also called a “great romance.” 

Yet, it was straight up an incestous relationship between a brother and a sister and, in universe, they created and had people preach what more or less was a doctrine of exceptionalism in order to justify the relationship. Yet, their reign was one of the most peaceful periods in Westeros history, lasting over 50 years. And yet, their reign also help to set the stage for the Dance of the Dragons civil war just over two decades later. So even the relationship he called a “great romance” has his patented “shades of gray” to it.

Jon and Daenerys are already unconventional when it comes to romance stories in general, not just high fantasy love stories; and the incest part of it not even being the main thing with regard to that IMO. Their fates are clearly entwined, yet they never meet until what is essentially the final act of the story. Just basic and standard writing tropes would have had Jon and Daenerys meeting in act one of the story, forming a connection. And then, though circumstance, being split apart by the end of the first act, so that they would spend the majority of act two trying to get back to each other. Or with that at least being one of their goals, to reunite, along with whatever other goals they needed to accomplish in act two of the story. However, in ASOIAF/GOT, Jon and Daenerys go on their Joseph Campbell-esque Heroes Journeys separately, completely unaware of the other’s very existence until the third and final act of the story begins. That’s just not how it’s usually done, and you usually only see third-act romantic hookups in long-running tv shows after you get multiple cast change-overs. But again, this is why GRRM left writing for tv, so he could do unconventional things like this with his story. 

So this idea that some people have that George R. R. Martin doesn’t do romance is ridiculous. Not only does he do it, he clearly likes very much to do them in highly romantic ways, ways that make them great romances in his view. He just doesn’t do or write conventional romances. His great romance couples are never written in a conventional mode, or have standard conventional romantic tropes about them. And there is always a shade of gray to them. And Jon and Daenerys are no exception to all of that.                  

#Jonerys #Game of Thrones #jon snow #Daenerys Targaryen #George R. R. Martin #A Song of Ice and Fire #Beauty and the Beast #Vincent and Catherine #jon x dany #jon x daenerys #Fire amd Blood #video #grrm

[mollymauk-teafleak]

The night we shared for the first time + hamliza (bc who else) please?

Here it is, the AU you’ve all been waiting for! 

Best Friends and a Baby AU!

(Also, seeing as it’s my birthday, if you fancy giving me an amazing, completely free of charge present you could always leave a comment on this or any of my fics on Ao3! And for the more affluent, I have a ko-fi)

Forthe second time in as many weeks, Alexander Hamilton found himself on aspectacularly, singularly uncomfortable chair, looking at his best friend withan utterly staggered expression in his wide, brown eyes and straining his earsthrough the ambient chatter around him in the vain hope that he’d just misheardand she didn’t just say what he thought she’d said. It was a pretty damnspecific situation to be in but it was one that he was starting to find eerilyfamiliar; one he assumed with a sinking heart he wasn’t through with.

“I’msorry, it’s how much?” he stressed, his hands shifting restlessly in thedeep pockets of the hoodie he wore, a nervous, fidgeting tic he’d been doingsince he took his seat in the waiting room and hadn’t stopped or even slowed.

Elizasighed deeply, tiredly and pulled the stiff pamphlet the doctor had just givenher out from under her arm and pushed it across the seat between them towardsAlex, the relevant page open so she wouldn’t have to say it again and tastethat sour disappointment.

“Fuckinghell,” Alex winced at the sight of the figures almost apologetically printed onthe page, a breakdown of all the medications needed and the consultanciesrequired and the procedures involved, each with its own piece of stone to addto the enormous boulder of a sum at the very bottom line.

“Yeah.That about sums it up,” Eliza allowed with a forced shrug, “And I’d have totake time off work too. For yet more hospital appointments.”

“Oh,”Alex grunted, biting his lower lip and freeing one hand from his cavernoussweater to play with his hair, a sure sign that he’d shifted onto a whole otherplane of anxiety. He knew how much Eliza despised hospitals, it was a miracleand a testament to how much she wanted this that she was even here today, “That…that sucks.”

‘Sucks’felt like it fell a few thousand miles short of what this situation was. Alex’sstomach felt like it had detached from whatever biological skulduggery held itin place and was bouncing loose inside his stomach, the sensation someone wouldprobably have if they’d been riding one of those proper skull-shattering,skeleton-rearranging roller coasters for two weeks straight. Which was prettymuch exactly what Alex had been experiencing, albeit in more of an emotionalthan literal sense.

Hecouldn’t deny that the overwhelming emotion he’d felt when it had become clearthat his best friend didn’t intend for this to be one of their usual lunchdates where they spouted bile about their colleagues who were driving them upthe wall (mostly Alex) or entertained with stories of what ridiculous RichPeople Shit their family had pulled this week (exclusively Eliza), the emotionthat ruled his mind in that instant was fear. He refused to feel guilty forthat and knew Eliza wouldn’t expect it of him. How else was he supposed toreact when the girl whose right-hand man he’d been since the very first day ofcollege, when he’d made an admittedly shaky but impactful first impression bywalking into her and spilling black coffee down the both of them, took hishands across their usual table at their favourite place to eat in the city andasked him in that firm but quiet voice of her’s if he’d mind having a baby withher. She genuinely did phrase it like that, of course she did.

She’dclarified a little better after Alex had recovered from choking on his soda andspending ten minutes hacking and spluttering loud enough to turn most otherheads in the cafe towards them. Her eyes had grown anxious and her cheeks hadturned pink as she’d insisted that she wasn’t asking anything of him but asperm donation, she’d thought about this so carefully and agonised over it formonths, she couldn’t think of anyone better than him, she trusted him, if hedidn’t want to be involved with…what it produced, no obligation at all, ofcourse she’d understand…

Allwhile Alex felt like someone had whipped away the classy hardwood floorsunderneath his feet and left him spiralling through empty space. Memories he’dhoped to never feel invading his brain again were piling up faster than hecould tip them back down into the darker recesses of his mind, giving him thesensation of swarms of spiders clambering and skittering over him, gettingunder his skin. The word father didn’t have amazing connotations forAlex, it never had, but he’d been able to avoid it for a long time while he wasat college and law school, only getting the slightest roiling stomachs andsweaty palms and lips chewed until they bled when his friends would talk abouttheir children, Lafayette and Martha and even John would talk of his daughteroften and fondly. Of course, the panic would only last until he actually metthe little sprogs, they were all cute and funny and liked how their Tio Alexkept marker pens in his pockets so they could colour in his tattoos; theanxiety never held up long after that but there would still be that twinge deepin his stomach at the word alone. He wasn’t sure that was ever going away butat least it was small enough to cope with.

Andthere he was in the middle of the cafe, trying to hide a goddamn riot behind agrin that was turning into a grimace and eyes that were far too shiny to beconsidered normal. And somewhere in the middle of it all, while his back wasturned and his brain occupied with damage control, with putting out as manysmall fires on the inside of his skull as he could before it could turn into aconflagration, a ‘yes’ slipped past his gritted teeth.

Bothhim and Eliza had been utterly stunned by that, nothing passing between thembut a shared look of slack, wide eyed surprise. Alex hadn’t even been awarethat there was a ‘yes’ lurking somewhere, battling its way through his anxiety,through beating winds and raging storms to climb off his tongue ahead of thefrantic screech that oh fuck, he just remembered he’s parked by a meter and heleft his iron on at home and he doesn’t speak English and he only has two moreseconds to live, please excuse him…

Butit had worked so hard to get there…so he supposed that was his answer?

Sohere Alex was, being confronted with the damnable highway robbery that was theAmerican medical system and trying to platonically make a baby with his bestfriend. What exactly his game plan was in the moment his…stuff mixed up withEliza’s…stuff and made…more stuff and he was technically no longer neededaccording to the laws of biology, of that he wasn’t exactly sure. He could tellEliza was wondering but she hadn’t pressed, she’d only began to cry and leaptacross the table to give him one of her patented, full body, vice tight hugsthat showed how much unexpected strength was in those delicate arms of her’s.Alex didn’t really think he deserved so much thanks, that he’d earned that lookof awe and adoration in her eyes when she looked at him ever since that fatefullunch date, just for saying yes to jacking off into a specimen cup. That’s allhe’d said a firm yes to. In the few weeks since that day, he’d been franticallycombing his mind for another scrap of certainty to present itself and tell himwhat his brain wanted but it seemed to have completely dried up after the firsttime. Which was pretty fucking rich of his brain, to get him into thissituation and then bail entirely, leaving him with just a terrifying, panicstreaked blankness.

Buthe was here. He loved Eliza, he wanted to help and he’d hold to his promise.Besides, it was only himself he was terrified over, he knew without a singleshred of doubt that Eliza would be a fantastic mother, so wonderful and perfectfor the job that it would be kind of criminal to deprive a child of being bornbelonging to her. Maybe that love and assurance would be enough to cancel outhis contribution…

“Howis it so expensive?” Alex exclaimed, reading the paper again like he could willit to be more palatable, “I mean…isn’t it just like a fancy turkey baster?”

Elizascrewed up her face, making her nose that could only be described in that clichédbut sweet way as ‘button’ crinkle adorably, “Ew, Alex.”

“I’mpretty sure that’s what it is,” Alex crossed his arms defensively, “I did do myreading.”

Hehad, in fact. Alexander Hamilton didn’t do anything without researching itfully first.

Elizaran her fingers through her hair, twisting it into curtains around her facelike she always did when she was stressed, “Well…I guess we can’t do thisright now.”

Alexwinced. He’d love to offer to cover the cost of the procedure, hell even halfof it would do, but college and law school had left him with a crippling amountof debt and not an awful lot else. He’d arrived on his very first day with nextto nothing and had somehow come out the other side with even less.

“Couldyou ask your parents?” he suggested, not liking the idea even as it came out ofhis mouth but he just wanted to do something to take that devastated look offher face.

Elizalooked down at her hands, retreating even more into the sanctuary of her hair,“Um…I would but…they aren’t really fans of the idea.”

Thatjarred him. Not only was Eliza making this huge decision, and entrusting awhole huge chunk of her future happiness to him, she was doing it without thesupport of her parents. Alex wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first timein the twenty-six years she’d been alive that such a thing had happened.

“Oh…”Another thought closed up his throat and made his fingers tense into fists,“Are they…not fans of the whole idea or of the fact that it’s gonna be mybaby?”

Eliza’seyes widened, ‘Oh! Oh, no, no it’s not that, I promise. They’ve not liked itfrom the start, I told them I was thinking about it a while ago and well…thereaction wasn’t great. They just don’t get it.” Her voice grew so faint and sadat the end, her eyes dropping, her tone resigned but as if she’d still hopedfor better in spite of the evidence.

“I’m sorry, Bets…” Alex murmured in as soft a voice as he could evermanage, reaching across and taking her hand, gently moving it from pulling ather hair to clasping it in his lap with both of his own. If there was anyonewho understood general parental shittiness, it was him.

“Hey,it’s okay,” Eliza said, smiling with her usual quiet bravery, “I don’t mind.This is just a setback, right? We can come back to this in… I don’t know, ayear or so. Less if I let my car finally die and start roller-skating aroundNew York. Hey, maybe I’ll have an even more stable job and this will turn outto be for the best?”

“Morelike you’ll find a much better sperm source,” Alex lifted an eyebrow, smilingcrookedly.

“Hey…”Eliza socked him lightly on the arm, “Stop that. I don’t want anyone else, youknow that.”

Alexchuckled, appreciating the lengths she’d go to in defending him from himself,in silent awe of her which, in fairness, was how he spent most of his timearound Eliza. But he knew that face. He’d seen that face at 2am when they’dbeen sharing a cab back from the bar and she’d stuck her head out of the windowto see the lights rushing by and feel the wind in her hair. He’d seen that faceat half past eight, with thirty minutes to go before their final exam, blearyeyed with wild bird nest hair and a look of fierce, caffeine fuelleddetermination the likes of which he’d never seen. He’d seen it illuminated fromwithin like there was some kind of power source behind her eyes that otherpeople didn’t seem to have, a kind of sun that worked on pure joy and wonder,so bright that it could even warm someone like him. He’d seen that face nearlyevery day of his life for the past six years and he knew how to read it.

Andright now, he could see plain as day that Eliza was devastated.

She’dlooked so excited, that joy there again, as she’d taken him through all thethinking and daydreaming she’d done about this, how she’d known the time wasright now that she’d gotten herself a low paying but at least steady job, doingsome kind of clerk or data stuff type for one of the orphanages in town. It hadthe right hours, she could advance in time and with the time she’d beenspending with Dosia’s two boys and Martha’s little Frances and the gaggle ofkids Laf had been producing since the scarily young age of eighteen, she justwas so certain that this was what she wanted. And a year was a hell of a longtime to wait for something you wanted that badly.

Maybeit was that thought, that desperate need to offer her some kind of help, orelse pure and simple stupidity, the rise of his chronic and terminal foot inmouth disease, that made Alex say what he then said next. Or maybe it wassomething else entirely. Maybe, and this was a pretty shaky maybe, it was hisown want for this crazy, insane thing to happen. Maybe it was the fact that, asterrified and confused as this whole thing had made Alex at the start, rightnow? The thought of having to let go of the idea was more than he could bear.

So,he said it.

“Well,why don’t we just do things the old-fashioned way?” he tilted his head, tonelight and airy but there was no solid evidence that he was joking, “You andme?”

Elizalooked at him, a snarky comeback loaded and ready to go on her tongue but whenshe saw his face, her face became a mask of comic surprise.

“Theold-fashioned way?” she asked in a voice that was half scandalised, halfastounded, “As in…like…that.”

“Sex,Eliza, yes,” Alex filled in the gap for her, “You and me. Having sex. To make ababy. That is how it’s worked for thousands of years so…”

Elizagaped at him, reminding Alex of something his mama used to say, about closingyour mouth before you started catching flies. Absurdly calm, enough to reachover and delicately bringing her lower jaw up to close her lips, Alex smiledbemusedly. There didn’t seem to be any flies in here but you could never be toocareful.

“Imean…” he clarified, “This is something people do, right? They hook up forreasons other than, y’know, that they’re in a relationship. Platonic like. I’mnot gonna lie and say I don’t find you attractive, certainly enough to get thejob done. I may be setting myself up for a Mike Tyson blow to the ego here butI think I know you well enough, Bets, to say that you feel the same about me.”

“Butit’s…” Eliza found some words, if fragmented and scattered, “I… I do and I…I know what you’re talking about but…I do love you, Alex…but it’sweird!”

Alexpursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, “As weird as asking your friend todonate sperm?”

Elizaflushed a little, “Okay, smarty pants. Now we’re even.”

Hechuckled, noting that she still hadn’t taken her hand back from his own, shehadn’t moved away from him, “It is weird. But it makes a lot of sense, doesn’tit? We’re both single and young and pretty damn good looking and, mostimportantly, we care a whole damn lot about each other. And you’d get a baby,free of charge with no hospital fuckery required.”

Elizapercolated the logic in her head for awhile, Alex did always have a gift forselling his utterly madcap, bonkers ideas in a way that made them seem like thebest option for everyone involved. And she’d never seen him be wrong yet…notcompletely anyway.

And,if she was being completely honest with herself? At the thought of a night withAlex, freshman Eliza had perked up considerably and was currently bouncing onthe balls of her feet. Her crush on him had been intense, with it being hervery first and all, but it had settled with age as they both grew and maturedand the whole thing that once very possible could have been just neverhappened. Alex was the best friend she’d ever known outside of her family,someone who understood her completely inside and out and somehow still wantedto know more.

She’dalways love him and she was dizzyingly excited at the possibility of being amother. Ever since Alex had said yes, she’d been daydreaming of a tiny littlething who curled into her chest looking for love and safety that she was sowilling to give in staggering amounts, something beautiful that she could lookat with pride and know they would always belong to her and her to them. Herlittle piece of the universe. And yes, with Alex’s wry smile and thirst tolearn and to persevere through anything. The slight weirdness of having sexwith her best friend would be well worth that price.

Andwith half the stuff she and Alex had been through together, what was seeingeach other naked? What was a little roll in the sheets between friends?

“Okay,”Eliza had to laugh a little as she said it, feeling like a character in asitcom about to cut to commercial, “Just to get me pregnant.”

Herlaugh was infectious, soon Alex was giggling helplessly too. It was hard notto.

“Hey,it’s not even that weird, right?” he snorted, muffling his laughter in hissleeve so they didn’t get any more suspicious glances from the nurses andpatients around them, “Just think of it as me loaning you ten dollars. Except,y’know, instead of money, picture my penis…”

Elizalaughed even harder then, so hard tears began building in her eyes, “I thinkI’d rather not.”

“Well,yes, it’s a terrible metaphor,” he chuckled, “But in my defense, this situationis pretty damn rare.”

Thatwas certainly true. Rare and wild and risky. But that was kind of how Alex andEliza had always operated.

Elizashifted a little closer, only looking cuter red in the face and glittery in theeye from laughter, her hands knotting together with Alex’s, “You really are thebest friend ever, Hamilton.”

“Hey,let’s reserve all accolades until you’ve seen my moves, okay?” Alex chuckled,grinning that way he did that made the corners of his eyes crinkle up. But hestill kissed her cheek as they got up to leave, “And you’re my best friend evertoo. Which is exactly why you get the privilege of seeing me naked.”

“Oh,shut up, Hamilton,” Eliza grinned, “I take it back. Now, come on and knock meup.”

Alexscrewed up his face, trying not to dissolve into hysterics again, “Your placeor mine?”

Theanswer to that question was obviously Eliza’s place. Alex had a little cornerof the heights where you could touch both walls at once by stretching out yourarms and the whole thing rattled whenever the elevated train rushed past, insuch a way that all the furniture was rearranged when it was gone. That and itwas inhabited by Alex himself, who’d turned it into a nightmarish hoarder’snest. Not exactly the most sexy of locations, there were no pornographic filmsset amongst stacks of books threatening to fall over and boxes full of halfeaten pizza and groaning folders of case files fit to burst.

So,Eliza’s it was.

Bothof them let out twin sighs of relief once Eliza had put a glass of wine in eachof their hands, it made things feel a little easier. There was a thick pull oftension in the air, one that threatened the whole madcap operation until theycaught each other’s eye in the middle of a slightly stilted conversation on howAlex’s last few job interviews had been going (Eliza had been coaching him forevery single one). Then they both just bust out laughing.

“Idon’t think the whole ignoring the elephant in the room thing is working?” Alexgrinned, rubbing the back of his neck, “Want to just call it what it is and dothe damn thing?”

Elizasnorted, nearly getting rose right up her nose, “And would ‘the damn thing’ inthis case be me?”

Thatmade Alex laugh out loud, the tension in the pit of his stomach uncoiling andslithering away to hide, the way it always seemed to when Eliza was around,“Good thing this isn’t a date or I’d be out on my ass, huh?”

“Coursenot, I’d give you at least two more strikes,” she chuckles, “Though, to befair, if this was a date I wouldn’t be inviting you to my bedroom this early.Which I am about to do, heads up.”

“Thanks,”he smirked, clambering to his feet. He didn’t need Eliza to show him where herbedroom was, he’d slept over a good handful of times, after parties where Elizadeemed him too tipsy to get himself home.

Ithad to be said, the room was quintessentially Eliza. She couldn’t do much aboutthe faded carpet in the living room or the squat, leather sofas or the kitchencupboards that were the colour of phlegm, in Alex’s own words. But the bedroom,tucked away in the corner of the apartment with a window that looked out onto afire escape where she could perch on an evening and watch the sun sink belowthe New York skyline, leaving the stars free to come out, like a million eyesopening cautiously, only gleaming as bright as they could through the thick pollutionas soon as they saw the coast was clear. The room itself was a dusty blue, asoothing colour that seemed to wrap itself around you and keep you safe, thepalate broken only by the many, many photos of her loved ones on the wall (manyof them included Alex) and the rainbow of books and the bursts of green asflowering plants and succulents gathered like old friends embracing on everyspare surface. The quilt on her bed was the same one Alex remembered from herdorm room and every other place she’d lived since, the one she, of course, hadmade herself.

Thewhole scene was just so familiar to him as he stepped inside, trotting atEliza’s heels, so warm and safe and forgiving that he relaxed in spite of thefact that this was a step closer to go time. It was just that this room, maybein different locations but the same room in essence, had seen the absoluteworst of him- crying, having a panic attack, blind drunk, angry- and yet stillwelcomed him back.

Alot like Eliza herself.

“Okay,”Eliza spoke decisively, as if the awkwardness could be wrestled intononexistence by a firm word and a pair of crossed arms, “Kiss me. That’ll letme know if I actually want to do this or not.”

Alextilted his head a little, rolling the sleeves of his sweater up his arms, “ButI kiss you all the time?”

Andhe did, it was true, pecks on the cheek and forehead to make her smile when shewas feeling blue or in joyous awe after she yet again saved his ass with aperfectly timed up of coffee or one of her wonderfully simple solutions thatsomehow utterly fixed problems that he’d been chewing over for days.

“No,I mean…” Eliza searched for words, looking a little exasperated, “Kiss me likeyou’d kiss someone you really wanted to have sex with. Kiss me like…likesomeone you were dying to see naked, like you’re going to explode if you don’tget with them right this minute.”

Alexgave a little snort of disbelief but he stepped forward all the same andwithout another thought in his head, he brought his best friend close to him byway of firm hands on her shoulders and a swift, sure movement, pressing herlips to his, thinking of passion and love and want. He let his lips part alittle after a few moments, after she relaxed in his hold, tilting his head toclose just that little bit of unnecessary distance and was gratified to findher mirroring him. How long the kiss lasted, neither of them were really surebut it ended with both of them a little reluctant to let it go, leaving theundeniable answer as ‘not long enough’.

“So…”Alex murmured, a rasp in his voice.

“Yeah,”Eliza’s eyes were wide and her pupils seemed so big that Alex could fall intothem, “Yeah, I want to do this.”

Hesmiled that crooked smile of his though, underneath it, he was thinking thatthe kiss didn’t really feel all that different from any other time he’d kissedher, which was…disconcerting.

Theydecided to shed their clothes at the same time, in the interests of fairness.

Elizadiscovered that Alex had a lot more tattoos than she’d ever imagined, one’s hehad mentioned to her but she’d never seen with her own eyes, diminishing their expansiveness.Constellations scattered across his lower stomach, she’d seen them poking upabove the line of his pants when he stretched but she’d never realised how farthey reached, how detailed and beautiful in their simplicity they were. A papersailboat trekked bravely across his upper thigh, waves crashing around it, afeathered quill penned a long, looping line of ink up the length of one leg,smatterings of English, French and Spanish were carefully etched onto variousparts of him, curling around clocks and birds and flowers and a Puerto Ricanflag. He was a work of art.

Alexdiscovered a kind of roundness, a fullness, to Eliza around her hips, thighsand stomach. There were curves and slopes and valleys usually hidden underneathher clothes, a smattering of stretch marks he hadn’t known existed, a fewfreckles that moved up the inside of a thigh to places he couldn’t see fromhere but found himself desperately wanting to follow them. His fingers itchedto touch that softness, follow the curves and squeeze and stroke and kiss.

Itwas amazing what new things you could learn from someone with one glance andthe absence of clothes.

Elizahad read up on good positions for conceiving, where gravity could hopefullyplay its part, bringing all the right elements close enough together for thespark to catch and a baby to start forming, like the way dust and gas collectedinto stars under the same force. A pillow under her hips and sprawled backagainst the cushions, she felt a little silly but all Alex could think of wasthe intoxicating darkness of her hair against the sheer white pillows, the wayshe could look up at him as he moved to take his place between her knees, thesoftness now right there under him and nothing to stop him reaching out andcaressing it.

Noone needed to make any kind of verbal request now, their lips met entirely oftheir own accord, though it was Alex who started the gentle nipping at Eliza’slower lip, already a little drunk on kissing her full, slightly swollen,beautifully dusky pink lips, the spine tingling but not unwelcome sensation ofhis tongue sliding over her’s. Though it only took a few seconds before Elizawas responding in kind, her hands coming up to tangle in his thick, dark massof hair and keep him good and close.

Alexalmost made a total idiot out of himself and stopped to request a condom beforehe remembered the whole goddamn point of this and just went for it, needing toshuffle her over a little, raise his own hips, fumble just a tiny amount andthen he was there, with a low sighfrom himself and a short gasp of surprise from Eliza. He almost stopped, terrifiedhe’d caused some hurt, moved to fast, moved without permission, taken too muchtoo soon. But then Eliza’s legs were thrown around his hips, her feet pressinginto his lower back and pushing him, if anything, deeper.

Herteeth grazed his earlobe and she murmured in a tone that was nothing short ofbegging, “Please.”

Alexwasn’t about to make her ask twice. He didn’t think, he didn’t ask for anylogic or reason, he just chased this wild desire in his chest and the plea inhis friend’s voice. He rocked her, heavy and rhythmic, into the softness of themattress, never taking his eyes off her, not wanting to miss a second of theway she bit her lip and her eyes rolled back when he hit home and her pupils swelledand her face took on the achingly beautiful blush of fresh rose petals. It goteven better when his thumb, apparently of its own volition, slipped down andpressed none too lightly against her clit; that made her cry out loud, herexpression rapturous, panting as she climbed higher and higher under hm.

Assoon as he saw her getting there, the only thing he wanted to do in the wholedamn world was get her there faster, harder, better, the pace of his lithe hipsincreasing until the bed springs began to make themselves heard and Eliza’ssweet little gasps became louder and higher, melding into one wordless cry.Alex wasn’t even really aware that the low, wanton growl was his own, the onethat pitched so perfectly with the noises she was making. He just lost sight ofhimself in the pull of her muscles, the feeling of her fingers tugging at hishair, the beautiful heat where their bodies joined and his thumb rubbed.

Asdistracted as he was by what he was doing to her, what she was giving him inreturn, his own climax caught him by such surprise that Alex felt the wholeroom, the whole damn world, tip dizzily around him as his hips jerkederratically and he spent himself inside her. Though he didn’t miss Eliza cominga second or two behind him, writhing so uncontrollably that he was a littleworried for a moment, until the tension let them both go and they were leftexhausted and a little bit shaken.

Alexand Eliza both held their breath, waiting for the awkwardness to comebarrelling back with a vengeance, braced for it, Alex actually mapping outwhere he’d left his clothes so he could scramble back into them as swiftly aspossible and bolt for the door. But it never seemed to find them, like they’dsuccessfully held their breaths and stilled their bodies and it had just passedthem by.

Theyuntangled themselves as painlessly as they could, leaving Alex to roll onto hisback by Eliza’s side, both just catching their breath. At some point theirhands found each other and joined, subtly and gently, without either of themreally being aware of it. It was a long time before either of them saidanything.

“I…well,hopefully that worked,” Eliza found her voice first, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Yeah…”Alex began, short of breath, gazing straight ahead just like she was, like theyboth recognized that that was a safe place for their eyes to rest. Who knewwhat might happen if they went wandering? “Though…what are the chances that yougot pregnant back there?”

Elizablinked, her free hand fluttering unconsciously to her stomach, resting therelightly, “I’m not sure. Low, I guess, relatively speaking.”

Alexspoke as casually as he could, “Well then, it would make sense, wouldn’t it,if, y’know, as long as you were still ovulating, we…we kept doing that?”

Therewas a slight mutual wince as they both froze, waiting to see of what he’d justsaid had crossed the line, upset the painfully delicate balance they stood onhere. But there was no thunder, no sudden swarm of locusts, the earth didn’topen up underneath the bed. Nothing happened.

“Imean, it’s only logical,” Eliza murmured, “Yeah, why not?”

Evenas they (eventually) dressed and gathered themselves back together, it stillfelt like something important hadn’t been said, there was the feeling of a gapgoing unfilled, a missing step. It was still there as Alex stood on Eliza’sstoop, lingering as they said goodbye, both of them feeling this glaringabsence.

“Hey…”Eliza called out as Alex’s sneakers touched down on the sidewalk, reaching in asudden, frantic rush to fix the problem. But as Alex turned back, looking ather quizzically with his wide, brown eyes, she didn’t know what to say.

So,what she said was, “You know you’re my favourite person ever, right?”

Alexcracked a smile, chuckling gently, “Yeah. You’re my favourite too.”

Itwasn’t quite right. But it would do for now.

#best friends and a baby au #night we shared prompts #prompts #my writing #ficlet #hamliza #alexander x eliza #some classic fanfic shenanigans

[ebenvt]

Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living

The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures. I tell the story by changing the setting from the 2000s to the late 1800s when much of the technology behind bacon curing was unraveled. I weave into the mix beautiful stories of Cape Town and use mostly my family as the other characters besides me and Oscar and Uncle Jeppe from Denmark, a good friend and someone to whom I owe much gratitude! A man who knows bacon! Most other characters have a real basis in history and I describe actual events and personal experiences set in a different historical context.

The cast I use to mould the story into is letters I wrote home during my travels.

C & T Harris in New Zealand and other amazing tales

June 1893

Dear Kids,

There is a Māori proverb that says, “A grey hair held between the finger and thumb is an infinitesimally trivial thing, yet it conveys to the mind of man the lesson of an everlasting truth.” Such is the wisdom of the Māori. They have their own unique set of proverbs; a strong and proud race with sophisticated laws and customs which rivals the modern cities of Europe in complexity and detail. These existed since long before there was any European contact.

New Zealand is an exceptional place to be with a beauty that is unimaginable. The developments from around the world of refrigeration and the production of bacon by the most modern ways reached these far shores of the earth. The three ways that I see this happening is in the quick development of refrigeration storage facilities at all major locations on the Islands, in the fact that I suspect C & T Harris to be looking to establishing curing works here and in the local pig breed I found in the Island, very popular among the Māori people.

Cold Storage in New Zealand

The Dunedin works of the New Zealand Refrigerating Company is the first cold storage installation in operation on these shores. The Dunedin works are only a bit larger than those in Christchurch, Wellington, Napier, Auckland, Timaru, Oamaru, and Invercargill. In total, there are 21 works in the colony. The business was only started in 1882 in a small way and has since then increased tremendously. Currently, they are responsible for the export of a million carcasses of sheep and lambs per annum, with a total stock of about eighteen million.

The shipping companies could, in the early day of the trade, insist that a required quantity of sheep be supplied to their steamers. The freezing companies set up agreements with farmers on the back of the requirements from the steamers to take up the bulk of the space.

Since those early years, speculators stepped in, at least here on the Middle Island, who started buying the sheep from the farmers for cash which obviously suited the farmers better than having to wait for the steamers to take up their stock from the freezing facilities who only stored the goods. The shipping companies lost the constant supply from the farmers and the farmer is now shielded from the risk of competing with the English market. I heard from farmers that the bulk of the sheep sent from the Middle Island was sold in this way, especially in Christchurch and at the Bluff; and as for the farmers, they got their cash sooner and was able to negotiate good prices with the traders.

New Zealand has then, like Australia and South Africa became part of the New World, which is able to supply the old world.

C & T Harris in New Zealand 1

As is the case around the world, pigs are a very useful dance partner of the dairy industry. Berkshire is the most popular breed in the colony. The large and small breeds of White Yorkshire are also bred, but they are not as popular as the black pigs. Many farmers don’t breed the pigs; they only rear and fatten them which has proved to be a very lucrative business. The New Zealand pigs are heartier than those from England and unlike the English pigs, they only need a good grass paddock, with an abundance of roots, a small quantity of unthreshed pea-haul for finishing them a few weeks before killing, and of course, lots of water with good shelter from the sun during the warmest summer months.

Minette and I visited a few large pig farmers who farm close to Cheviot and Gore Bay. I was pleasantly surprised to meet an old friend from South Africa working on a large pig farm very close to Cheviot. We visited Brendon and his lovely wife, Belinda. Their children are a blessing, not only to them but all who know the Buckland family. The amazingly gifted poet and artist, Rachel is the oldest, then the very unique and beautiful Ruth, Hanna who if spontaneous and joyful, 3rd; the super energetic and joyful Hezekai is 4th, followed by the completely unique and lovely Asher and finally, Anastasia who is still a baby – uniquely adorable. Of all the people I have met on earth, this very amazing family perfectly exemplifies what we have been taught a Christian should be and we count the time spent with them as one of the biggest highlights of our trip. They don’t walk around preaching but their lives are worth imitating in every respect!

Bredon tells me that there is a very definite expectation among farmers that the trade of raising pigs will meet the demand of local meat curers and the trade is expected to increase rapidly. Brendon is the kind of man who keeps his word and I suspect that his source asked him not to divulge the name of the firm involved but he told me that one of the largest suppliers in the UK of mess pork to the navies of the world and the mercantile marine operations, sent an agent to New Zealand in order to investigate the viability of setting up a branch in the colony. The agent has been here for some time now, a couple of months at least, and is making inquiries as to the prospect of opening up branch establishment. He ran a trial to test the quality of our pigs for their purposes. The trail was done by preparing some carcasses by a process patented by the firm. He then shipped these to his principals in England. He received a cablegram which stated that the meat and the curing were done to “perfection.” As a result of this, arrangements are being made for extensive trade throughout the colony. The English firm is prepared to erect factories at a cost of £20,000 each in areas where they have a reasonable expectation to secure 2,000 pigs per week. (The NZ Official Yearbook, 1893)

Even though I don’t know this for certain, C & T Harris is obviously a very strong candidate for the “large English firm”. The only company I know in England who used patented technology and is financially strong enough to fund such an operation is the firm, C & T Harris (Calne). It is of huge interest to me that the firm mentioned, possibly Harris, set curing operations up around the world to supply the shipping industry.

We have seen that pork industries are very beneficial to dairy and brewery industries since it provides a way to dispose of low-value by-products such as whey protein, a by-product in cheese making and brewery waste which otherwise has to be discarded. Another reason why a healthy pork industry is a benefit to the farmer is that it provided an effective way to deal with inferior grain which may be converted into mutton and pork. It is not a good practice to pay freight on inferior samples of grain; it will pay far better to convert it into mutton and pork, which may be driven to market on four legs, instead of four wheels. The rule applying to our dairy produce—namely, that it should be of the finest quality—applied with equal force to grain intended for shipment.

The Kunekune

To my great surprise, we found a pig breed on the Islands, very popular amongst the Māori, that looks almost exactly like the Kolbroek breed of the Cape. Kunekune is a Māori word meaning “fat and round” and it perfectly describes this adorable and mild-tempered animal.

Let me first show you what I mean when I say that they look exactly like the Kolbroek.

-> Compare the Kune Kune photos, courtesy of the Empire Kunekune Pig Association of New York (https://www.ekpa.org/).

-> Compare these with the Kolbroek, photos with the courtesy of Zenzele Farm in South Africa. (http://www.zenzelefarm.com/Kolbroek.html)

I wonder if the Kolbroek which came to the Cape of Good Hope is, in essence, the same pigs (group or breed) that also arrived at the shores of New Zealand? How does it happen that these pig breeds look so strikingly similar? I wonder if I, as a foreigner and not a Kunekune, Kolbroek or pig breeding expert can venture a guess how it could have happened that these animals look so similar.

Form of the Kunekune Compared with Drawings from England

Kune Kune Sow and Piglets by Elisabeth Sequoia

Large White

Berkshire

Compare the form of the Kune Kune with the Berkshire and Large White’s.  The similarities are very interesting.

Uniting the Kolbroek, the Kunekune, the English East Indian Company, and China

We know that the Kunekune has Chinese genes. An obvious link between the Kunekune, the Kolbroek, and China from the 1700s is the English East Indian Company and possibly the English navy. The English East Indian Company is the most obvious organisation of that time who facilitated trade between England and China. It makes sense that they were responsible for populating England with Chinese pigs. It also stands to reason that it was an English East Indian ship that was responsible for ferrying the fletching nucleus of pigs of what would become the Kolbroek to Kogel Bay at Cape Hangklip where runaway slaves possibly took over the small herd which swam ashore off the sinking Colebrook and were responsible for initially preserving them.

If the Kunekune came to New Zealand around the same time and also from an English East Indian ship or from the English navy; if the New Zealand pigs were also taken on board from Gravesend as the evidence seems to suggest was the case with the Kolbroek pigs; if the pigs were not breed-pigs like the Berkshire or the Buckinghamshire but, as I suspect, village pigs from Kent; this will explain the Chinese connection and how these seemingly very close relatives made it to both South Africa and New Zealand. One would expect to find evidence in the genetic makeup of the breeds, both Chinese and European origins.

Considering the facts before us leads to this very intriguing and neat conclusion and would settle the matter of the origins of the Kolbroek based on the strong similarities between the Kolbroek and the Kunekune. It would preclude the possibility that the Kolbroek “evolved” through a complicated cross bearding of Chinese or Portuguese, Spanish or Dutch breeds with South African wild boars or even warthogs. Let’s delve into the facts.

China

I have written to you previously about the development of the English Pig when Minette and I met Michael in Liverpool while we stayed at the Royal Waterloo Hotel. I do not wish to repeat myself except to remind you that around eight thousand years ago, pigs in China made a transition from wind animals to the farm. They started living off scraps of food from human settlements. Humans penned them up and started feeding them which removed the evolutionary pressure they had as wild animals living in the forest. They were bred by humans instead of being left in the forests to breed naturally and to fend for themselves. This led to an animal that is round, pale, short-legged, pot-bellied with traditional regional breeding preferences that persist to this day. (White, 2011)

In contrast to the Chinese custom, in the West, the scavengers were treated differently. There is evidence that pigs were initially exploited in the Middle East around 9000 to 10 000 years ago. These denser settlements of the Neolithic times in the fertile crescent did not pen the animals up but ejected them from their society. The pigs may have been a nuisance or competed with humans for scarce resources such as water. Genetic research shows that the first pig exploitation in Anatolia (around modern-day Turkey) “hit a dead end.” (White, 2011) The pigs that were domesticated here all died out.

The pigs in Europe and England were kept in the wild for extended periods of time. Various European populations developed techniques of mast feeding (Mast being the fruit of forest trees and shrubs, such as acorns and other nuts). Herds were pushed into abandoned forests and feeding them on beechnuts and acorns that are of marginal value to humans. (White, 2011)

The practice of pannage, as it is called, is the releasing of livestock-pigs in a forest, so that they can feed on fallen acorns, beech mast, chestnuts or other nuts. One of the requirements for a Chinese/ European pig breed to have survived either in South Africa or New Zealand as a distinct breed is that the pigs did not become part of the general pig population, dealt with according to European custom, but, instead, was kept according to Chinese traditions in pens. The “pressure” to keep them in pens instead of letting them run wild as was the custom at the Cape, I believe was that the pigs were received by runaway slaves who knew pig husbandry and kept the pigs penned up as they did with other domesticated animals on their hideouts as a way to keep them “close” and out of sight of the general farm population for fear of being detected by authorities and the slaves be re-captured. The question is if there existed similar pressure in New Zealand.

The most likely candidate to have taken the pigs from England to the Cape was the Colnebrook in 1778 and Captain Cook, who is known to have released pigs on islands he visited, is the most likely candidate to have ferried the ancestors of the Kunekune to New Zealand. The pigs that he released on the middle Island who was not penned up but roamed the forests became feral and their characteristics changed to revert back to the wild state. We know that crossbreeds between Chinese and European breeds appeared in England well before the 1778 sailing of the Colebrook for the Cape of Good Hope and the three visits of Cook to New Zealand, in 1769-70, 1773 and 1777.

Kunekune

We have already seen that the Kunekune and the Kolbroek can be one pig breed for all intent and purposes. What is there that we know about the genetics of the Kunekune? A paper was presented by Gongora, et al., at the 7th World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production, Montpellier, France, (2) entitled Origins of the Kune Kune and Auckland Island Pigs in New Zealand.

They introduce their paper as follows, directly addressing the matters of interest to us. “Migrating Polynesians first introduced pigs from Asia to the Pacific islands (Diamond, 1997), but it is not clear whether they reached New Zealand. European sailors and settlers introduced pigs into New Zealand in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of which became feral, but few records were kept of these introductions (Clarke and Dzieciolowski, 1991a; 1991b). It is believed that the European settlers introduced contemporary domestic animals originating either directly or indirectly from Europe (Challies, 1976).” (Gongora, 2002) It is this last possibility that is of interest to us. If the DNA evidence supports this possibility, it opens up the link with the Kolbroek since both pigs have prominent Chinese in their DNA and both possibly originating from Europe.

One must be careful here since Cook got pigs from many parts of the world and others are known to also have sent pigs to New Zealand. The possibility, for example, that the Kunekune came from pigs that Captain Cook released on the South Island in 1773, obtained from Tonga and Tahiti, and, therefore, undoubtedly of Polynesian origin (Clarke and Dzieciolowski, 1991a) remains. (Gongora, 2002)

Gongora, and coworkers et al. (2002) reports that the “unequivocal Asian origin of the Kune Kune mitochondrial sequence is consistent with the pigs being taken from Asia to New Zealand by the Polynesian ancestors of present day Maoris, but may be better supported by the well documented introduction of Polynesian pigs into New Zealand by Captain Cook in 1773.” (Gongora, 2002) This is, of course, the most obvious conclusion.

However, the possibility of the introduction of this Asian mitochondrial sequence via a European breed, which acquired Asian mitochondria by introgression in the 18th century in Europe is as good a possibility as the aforementioned. (Gongora, 2002) Gongora says that “such introgression explains the clustering of the Large White and Berkshire sequences with Asian pigs” as can be seen from the graph below.

Nucleotide substitutions and gaps are found in 32 porcine mtDNA D-loop sequences. The Kune Kune clusters with Asian domestic pigs are most closely related to Chinese and Japanese breeds. The Auckland Island sequence clusters with domestic European breeds (Gongora, 2002). Auckland Island is situated south of New Zealand and it is thought that the pigs that were released there may have the same origin as the Kunekune.

“Analysis of additional Kune Kune sequences as well as more Polynesian sequences may help distinguish the first two possibilities from the third. Finding unambiguous Polynesian sequences may be difficult though, as Giuffra et al. (2000) found that a feral pig sequence from Cook Island in Polynesia clustered with European domestic pig sequences. Analyses of nuclear gene sequences in conjunction with mtDNA sequences will also help in discriminating between European and Asian origins as for the porcine GPIP gene in the study of Giuffra et al. (2000). Analysis of microsatellite marker allele frequencies using the standard ISAG/FAO marker set (Li et al., 2000) will also assist in deciphering the relationships of these populations of pigs and are already underway for the Auckland Island population and are planned for the Kune Kune pigs. Jointly these studies will illuminate the history of Pacific island pigs, their geographic origins and genetic diversity.” (Gongora, 2002)

They conclude by stating that “Kune Kune pigs have Asian mitochondrial DNA but at this stage we cannot distinguish between i) Polynesian introduction of Asian pigs, ii) European introduction of pigs from Asia/Polynesia or iii) introgression of Asian mtDNA into European pigs in Europe in 17th century and subsequent introduction of these “European” pigs into New Zealand.” (Gongora, 2002) The link with the Kolbroek may give a hint of what actually happened.

Links with Captain Cook

A cursory survey of Captain Cook and pigs confirm the fact that he released pigs on the islands. He did this at more than one time. The pigs could even have been from the Cape Of Good Hope. On this 3rd voyage to New Zealand in 1776, he was met by a ship in Cape Town who accompanied him to New Zealand. The ship was the Discovery, commanded by Charles Clerke. “The Discovery was the smallest of Cook’s ships and was manned by a crew of sixty-nine. The two ships were repaired and restocked with a large number of livestock and set off together for New Zealand [from Cape Town] ( December).” (http://www.captcook-ne.co.uk)

We also know that pigs were sent to New Zealand from Australia. In 1793, Governor King of Norfolk Island gave 12 pigs to Tukitahua, one of two northern Māori chiefs who had been kidnapped and taken to Norfolk Island. By 1795 only one animal was left. King then established relations with the northern chief Te Pahi, and sent a total of 56 pigs in three ships in 1804 and 1805. It is probably from these, and from being gifted between tribes, that pigs became established in the North Island. From 1805 Māori were trading pigs to Europeans.” (https://teara.govt.nz)

Still, it is unlikely that the Kunekune came from animals that were merely “released” on the islands. These animals reverted to the feral state. I also suspect that, as was the case along the South African coast, pigs that were given as a gift or traded were probably consumed. There must have been a reason, planning, purpose and some instruction that accompanied the exchange of pigs into the hands of a leader who could command the breeding of the animals. Such an example exists, and as we will see later, it relates to the one voyage of Cook that started at Gravesend.

“Two pigs were gifted to Māori by de Surville at Doubtless Bay in 1769. During Cook’s second and third voyages, a number of boars and sows were released – most in Queen Charlotte Sound, but two breeding pairs were given to the Hawke’s Bay chief Tuanui.” Cook’s first visit to Hawked Bay was in 1769 sailing in the Endeavour as part of his first Pacific voyage (1768-1771). We know that he released pigs on the South Island. “Wild pigs, in the South Island at least, may have originated from Cook’s voyages, and are generally known as Captain Cookers.” (https://teara.govt.nz)

Below is a portrait of Tuanui (also known as Rangituanui), principal chief of Ngati Hikatoa. The drawing by W. Hodges. Engrav’d by Michel. Published Feb 1st, 1777 by Wm. Strahan New Street, Shoe Lane, and Thos. Cadell in the Strand, London. No.LV. 1777

Cook gave him breeding pigs, a very interesting fact. There are accounts from New Zealand where Māori’s tried to pen up wild animals with no success. A leader such as Tuanui is exactly the kind of exchange one would expect to develop into the Māori-pig or the Kunekune.

Oral Tradition

I have great respect for oral traditions. Over the years I have seen how tenacious phrases and stories are over time, persists. It seems to me that the shorter the phrase, the simpler it is to pass on and, oftentimes, the more revealing it is of an actual event. This is more or less my approach with the Kolbroek and I was eager to see just how entrenched the theory is that Captain Cook released, not just any pig, but pigs from England on the shores of New Zealand that could have been the start of the Kunekune.

Searching through old newspapers yielded the following. From The Age (Melbourn, Victoria, Australia) (3) it was reported that “when Captain Cook landed in New Zealand during one of his great voyages of discovery, he set free on the shore several pigs which had been brought all the way from England to provide fresh meat on the voyage.” The wild pigs of New Zealand are according to the author, also descendants of the pigs that Cook released here. The link with England is of particular interest.

The Courrier (Waterloo, Iowa), 7 April 1886 calls the Māori Pig, “a descendant of one of Captain Cooks Pigs it may be – a swine, black but not completely, ill-shaped and clumsy, but apparently a perfectly happy pig leading, as he does, the life of a free and independent gentlemen, as does his mater, the Maori landowner and rejoicing in the grubbing up of abundant and gratuitous fern roots.” There is no reference to the pigs being from England and the author mentions the link between the Māori pig and Captain Cook as a possibility, but there can be little doubt we are talking about Kunekune here.

Studying old drawings can assist us as it does in our study of the development of pig breeds.

(King, 2015)

The image above can easily be a young Kunekune but then again, it could be any one of a number of smaller Chinese breeds.

The Gravesend Connection

The diary of events leading up to Cook’s first voyage gives us a connection with Gravesend.

Jul. 18 Mon. Pilot arrives to take Endeavour to the Downs. 21 Thu. Sails from Deptford for Gallions Reach. 30 Sat. Sails from Gallions Reach to Gravesend. 31 Sun. Sails from Gravesend. Aug. 3 Wed. Endeavour in the Downs. 7 Sun. Cook joins Endeavour to commence Voyage. 8 Mon. Sails for Plymouth.

(from https://www.captaincooksociety.com)

Cook’s second and third voyage was undertaken, not from Gravesend, but another location in Kent, The Downs. This means that in 1768 Captain Cook took pigs on board the HMS Endeavour, and in 1778, a mere 9 years later, the East Indiaman, Colebrook, took pigs on board from the exact same location in Kent. Could these have been Chinese Pigs, crossed with the same large English breed, possibly from the same boar resulting in the Kolbroek and the Kunekune?

Here is a possible reconstruction of events from my imagination. Village pigs at Gravesend in Kent, during the early 1700s, received a dominant pig boar that the villagers used to service their sows. This boar was probably owned by a wealthy local landowner. Beginning in the 1700s, Old English pig breeds were crossed with Chinese pigs, probably brought to English shores by the English East Indian Company. The navy used Gravesend to stock their ships with livestock, as did the English East Indian Company. Captain Cook took on board some of these pigs that managed to survive the journey without making it onto the sailers menu, all the way to New Zealand where they were given as a present to a powerful Maori chief who bred them. They later became the legendary Kunekune pigs.

It was the same kind of pigs that went aboard the East-Indiaman, the Colebrook, who sank off Cape Hangklip. Pigs from the sinking ship swam ashore at Kogel Bay, was taken in by runaway slaves (drosters) and became the legendary Kolbroek breed of the Cape of Good Hope.

The breeds, as they exist today, share so many similarities that if one would simply look at them, one would say it is the same breed. Much more work remains. Evidence may prove reality to be far removed from my imagination, but look at what we learned!

The Harris Family of Cheviot

My theories about the origin of the Kunekune may or may not be accurate, but what is certain is that New Zealanders are “salt of the earth” kind of people. No wonder the Buckland family loves this place. It fascinates me that the largest employer in Cheviot is the Harris family has been instrumental in the establishment of the biggest bacon curing operation in New Zeland. I can find no obvious link between the Harris family in Cheviot and the Harris clan from Calne. We had the privilege to get to know Nick and his brother Bryan Harris from Cheviot. Bryan showed me the best way to kill a pig. I showed up unannounced at their abattoir one day. He told me he was insanely bussy, but he has done exactly what I did by showing up unannounced at meat plants in many parts of the world to learn from them and he has never been refused a tour or an audience with the right people. Based on his own experience he paid it forward and spend an entire morning with me, despite his tough schedule, showing and teaching me. He introduced me to the work of an American lady who designs abattoirs in such a way as to ensure very little stress for the animal. His energy and love for his work are infectious. Nick, like Bryan, worked in their butchery in the town of Cheviot that was started by their dad while he qualified as a chartered accountant. As such he is uniquely gifted to teach me about accounting and the pork business. From Nick, I learned the basics of accounting applied to the pork industry and how one links what happens on the floor to the accounting records in the office. More than that, he is an excellent farmer with loads of top management experience. I wish I met these two brothers when I left school! They are an amazing wealth of information and reminds me of the Māori proverb I started the letter with which says that “a grey hair held between the finger and thumb is an infinitesimally trivial thing, yet it conveys to the mind of man the lesson of an everlasting truth.” Such is Nick and Bryan Harris!

The largest pork producer in England is C & T Harris. The largest bacon producer in New Zealand is closely connected to the Harris family and, as you will see later, the Harris family of Australia is responsible for a massive bacon curing operation in Castlemaine. The coincidence is staggering and the tale of the Harris family of Australia I leave for a future conversation! Whichever way you look at it, in the world, no other single surname has been as closely associated with bacon as Harris!

After Cheviot, we spend time with Stu and Simon who are senior managers at Hellers. Stu runs production and Simon manages the operation. They too are salt of the earth kind of men. It was Easter Friday when I showed up at the Heller factory for the first time and both Stu and Simon gave me an amazing welcome. Since then, they became good friends and confidants. People that I have the freedom to discuss our Cape Town plans with and who always give clear and unbiased advice.

Minette and I fell in love with New Zealand as we have never experienced anywhere else in the world. The biggest reason is the people of this amazing land even though the land itself is of a beauty that is unrivaled. It was an honour to have married here and to forge a close connection with the people of this land. New Zealand has a unique place in the world community who have contained on its shores, the basic ingredients of bacon curing and living life to the fullest. We are stunned by the experience of the land and its people. I am excited about the prospect that one day you guys will visit these shores and have your own amazing experiences. I think we are building up a set of confidants around the world who will assist us to face any challenge that may be thrown our way at Woody’s.

Lots of love from Christchurch,

Dad and Minette.

Further Reading

Chapter 03: Kolbroek where the story starts.

Read with Chapter 09.15 The English Pig where I deal with the source of pigs for Gravesend where live pigs were loaded onto ships.

(c) eben van tonder

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Notes

(1) The source does not state that the firm from England who set up the New Zealand operation was C & T Harris but considered at face value, they are certainly the best candidate.

(2) Publication date, August 19-23, 2002

(3) Publication date, 14 July 1939.

References

Sinclair, J. (Ed). 1897.Pigs Breeds and Management. Vinton and Co, London

Harris, J. (Ed.). c 1870. Harris on the pig. Breeding, rearing, management, and improvement. New York, Orange Judd, and company.

The New Zealand Official Yearbook, 1893.

http://www.majstro.com/dictionaries/Afrikaans-English/Slams

https://teara.govt.nz/en/kai-pakeha-introduced-foods/page-1

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/search/imagedetail.php?id=260

http://www.captcook-ne.co.uk/ccne/timeline/voyage3.htm

The Age (Melbourn, Victoria, Australia) of 14 July 1939, p 5.

Biology online. Retrieved 15 February 2013.

The Courrier (Waterloo, Iowa), 7 April 1886

Gongora, J., Garkavenko, O., Moran, C.. 2002. From the 7th World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production, August 19-23, 2002, Montpellier, France, Paper entitled Origins of the Kune Kune and Auckland Island Pigs in New Zealand.

Green, G. L.. 1968. Full Many a Glorious Morning. Howard Timmins.

King, C. M.., Gaukroger, D. J., Ritchie, N. A. (Editors), 2015. The Drama of Conservation, Springer.

Yu, G., Xiang, H., Wang, J., Zhao, X.. 08 March 2013, The phylogenetic status of typical Chinese native pigs: analyzed by Asian and European pig mitochondrial genome sequences. Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology volume 4, Article number: 9 (2013).

White, S.. 2011. From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History, Vol. 16, No. 1 (JANUARY 2011), pp. 94-120, Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23050648

Photo References

https://www3.stats.govt.nz/New_Zealand_Official_Yearbooks/1893/NZOYB_1893.html

http://mfo.me.uk/wiki/index.php?title=C%26T_Harris_%28Calne%29_Ltd

Chapter 10.02: C & T Harris in New Zealand and other amazing tales Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures.

#bacon and the art of living #Bacon History

[frivoloussuits]

Not Just a Great Lawyer

At the tender age of 21 Harvey Specter storms into the Chilton Hotel, prepared to do battle. His weapons of choice are a well-tailored suit and a briefcase full of cat hair.

Word count: ~3k Rating: G Relationships: Gen

Written for @suits100​, prompt 85-- “Role reversal: lawyer!Mike and dropout!Harvey.”

Mike Ross, Pearson-Hardman’s newest senior partner, is mildly bored by his associate interviews.

It’s not that he expected anyone to match him for sheer intellect, but there are other sorts of genius, other qualities that can catch his interest, and these cookie-cutter Harvard kids haven’t got any of them. He toys with the idea of asking Norma to screen them and kick the least promising out but hasn’t got the heart to actually do it, so he resigns himself to another six unremarkable interviews.

And if he starts replaying movies in his head every time a candidate starts reciting an obviously rehearsed answer-- seriously, Mike recognizes one word for word from a years-old Glassdoor thread-- who would blame him?

The second-to-last slot of the day is empty, so Mike busies himself into one of his current cases. He’s half-way through scanning a patent specification when there’s a knock on the door.

“Rick Sorkin?”

“Actually”—the door opens, and a man swaggers in—“I’m Harvey Specter, and I’m . . . You’re not Louis.”

Mike’s new to Pearson-Hardman’s office politics, but he never imagined someone would be upset to find him in a room instead of Louis Litt. Still, Harvey’s smirk is fading right in front of his eyes. Mike looks him up and down-- he looks young, more like a college kid than a graduate of law school, yet he’s dressed in the smartest suit Mike’s seen today, his hair carefully slicked back, a briefcase in his hand.

“No, I’m Mike Ross. I know Louis is typically in charge of hiring junior lawyers and staff, but since these are interviews for my personal associate I asked to handle them myself.” He frowns for a moment, trying to identify why he knows Harvey’s name. “You’re not in my stack of resumes, though.”

“No, I’m not.” There’s something sharp in how he says it, though his expression has turned utterly impassive. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Ross. I’ll show myself out.”

As he turns to go, Mike remembers. “You’re from the mailroom, aren’t you?”

“Hang on--” Harvey whips back around with widened eyes-- “the memory trick’s real?”

Mike stares for a moment and then bursts out laughing. “You sure you can’t stay for a couple minutes? I suspect you’re the most interesting visitor I’ve had all day.”

He offers his hand. Harvey considers it for a moment, shrugs, and advances to take it. The moment they touch, the latches on Harvey’s briefcase give out, dropping papers, photographs, and a baggie of cat hair around their feet.

Harvey doesn’t look down, doesn’t even blink. He just keeps his eyes on Mike’s and sighs, “I think I just proved it.”

“This is a solid case,” Mike remarks, poring over the affidavits and transcripts and other evidence that Harvey has arranged on the Chilton desk, “And it shows that he’s opened the firm to multiple workplace harassment suits. How come Jessica hasn’t squashed this behavior?”

“Because nobody tells her,” Harvey answers. “Harold and the other victims of Mr. Litt are understandably terrified of all the upper-level management in the firm, they’d never report anything he does. The reason they talked to me is that I’m basically the polar opposite of upper-level management.”

Mike touches a record, complete with pictures and a bag of the offending material, of Harold Gunderson’s ER visit following a near-fatal allergic reaction to cat hair, and he murmurs, “This kid could have died.”

“Yep. Everyone knows Louis is out of control, but nobody’s actually put together a case.”

“Except you.”

“Well, Louis would say a guy from the mailroom is nobody. Only thing he uses me for is being a fake associate.”

Mike blinks and looks up at Harvey. “What do you mean?”

“He planted me with the first-year associates when they started work, had me pretend to slack off on my assignments, and then he fake-fired me to scare the rest of them straight.”

“Jesus!”

“At least I got a good deal out of it,” he snorts. “He bought me this suit so I’d look the part, just before he reminded me that this was the closest I'll ever get to being a real lawyer."

Harvey says this matter-of-factly, as if it doesn’t phase him, but Mike still winces. “Why’d you go to the trouble of investigating him? This can’t have been easy to put together.”

“Would you believe it was out of the goodness of my heart?”

“Not for a second.”

"Why-- because I tried to approach Louis with the case?"

"Yep. If you just wanted him to change his ways, you probably would have gone straight to Jessica, and you definitely wouldn’t have tried so hard to make sure all your key evidence could be admitted in court.”

"To be fair,” Harvey says, “I was actually going to ask him to stop nearly killing his coworkers."

"Maybe, but that wasn't your main goal. You were going to blackmail Louis into giving you something else." Mike narrows his eyes as he figures it out. "A job. What position, though? Legal Document Services, secretary, librarian . . .”

“Paralegal.”

“Do you have official credentials? A degree in Paralegal Studies?"

"Didn't finish college. What I do have, though, is the ability to interview even reluctant witnesses, and organize evidence, and figure out strategy, and find precedent,” he says, pointing to papers on the desk that demonstrate each skill. "I've also gotten pulled onto doc review before-- long story, and I don’t think I can legally tell you most of it-- and I got last year's summer associate to pawn off frankly staggering amounts of his workload onto me."

"That’s fairly impressive experience, for someone supposedly confined to the mailroom.”

“I’ve done a hell of a lot more in this firm than my job title would suggest,” Harvey declares, voice warm with pride. “Unfortunately, nobody rational is going to willingly hire a paralegal who didn’t finish college, so I figured I needed the blackmail to give Louis a kick in the pants.”

“And what if Louis heard this entire case, and then he just fired you anyway? Would you have threatened Jessica next?”

“I like being alive too much to try that,” he replies immediately. A few moments later, he adds, “I like Jessica too much, too. I’d have just turned the evidence over to her in the hopes that she’d somehow be impressed enough to hire me, and if not I’d go . . . and move on.”

There’s something earnest in his eyes as he says it, as he claims that he’d never actually make good on his bluff and sue the firm, and Mike wants to believe him. Still, he knows Harvey might only be backing down from that possibility because his master plan’s going awry right now.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Mike says, internally flinching as he takes a hard line, “because I’m not going to let you blackmail Jessica. Hell, I’m not going to even let you go back and blackmail Louis, though I do intend to let Jessica know of the complaints against him so she can deal with them. If you go against the firm to advance your own career, I can and will bury your suit and then bankrupt you with a countersuit.”

“You just said I had a solid case--” Harvey protests.

“--against most lawyers, sure, it’s solid. I’ve already found six, no, seven ways to tear it apart.”

“What openings did I leave?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“You could just be bluffing.”

“You’ve heard about me, my ‘memory trick,’ as you called it. When it comes to sheer legal prowess, I don’t need to bluff.  And let’s just say the fact that you’ve explicitly put this forward for personal gain doesn’t do you any favors.”

Harvey doesn’t stumble or cower as Mike expected. Instead, he leans forward, apparently intrigued by the challenge. “If you’re going to turn Louis in, can I at least present the evidence to Jessica myself and ask for a job?”

Mike opens his mouth to answer that he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know what the hell you’re supposed to do in a situation like this, but then he notices at the clock. “It’s 4:02, where’s my actual interviewee?”

“Oh, about that . . .” Harvey shifts in his seat, trying to put on a guilty expression and not quite succeeding. “I met with him earlier this morning and paid him not to show up.”

“What?” Mike splutters.

“I figured I might need the extra time with Louis, and anyway it’s not like Rick Sorkin was going to get the job.”

“Why-- why would you possibly think that?”

“Well, if his GPA didn’t disqualify him, the fact that he settled for half of what I was willing to pay should.”

He says it so straightforwardly that Mike bursts out laughing. “I can’t believe I just heard that.”

“I can’t believe I walked into a fake job interview with a briefcase full of cat hair,” Harvey smirks, “yet here we are.”

Mike looks at him, takes a deep breath, and then shakes his head. “Really though, what am I missing here?”

“What do you mean?”

"You're obviously smart, motivated, good with people-- maybe too good-- and the fact that you're in the mailroom suggests you're also detail-oriented and well-organized."

"So how does someone like me end up a deadbeat dropout?"

“I was going to phrase it more delicately,” he grimaces, “but yeah.”

Harvey's jaw tightens, like Mike’s genuinely caught him off-guard for the first time. "Look, I wanna get places on the strength of my skill and intellect, not because I have a good sob story."

"You sure about that? I've been told I'm a pushover for sob stories."

"Oh, yeah, you are. You actually cared about Harold Gunderson, which is not something anyone else in this city has managed.”

"I especially like sob stories where people face despair and horror and pain and come out on top. I like stories about the human spirit--” he pauses-- “and something tells me you've got an awful lot of spirit."

Harvey watches him for a second. "Tragic backstory it is, then. I'll give you the short version. My dad died last year, when I was twenty."

Though Mike doesn't say anything, something softens in his eyes, and all of the sudden the words come more easily to Harvey. "I was just starting my junior year of college, on a partial scholarship, and there was just enough money to make things work. Then my little brother got diagnosed with cancer." Something gives in Harvey’s poker face, and his frustration bleeds through as he continues, "The insurance premiums shot up, but we have to pay them somehow. My mom's an art teacher, we can't afford it on her salary, so I needed to get more money immediately. I dropped out, started working in the mailroom. Not what I wanted out of life, but I'm not going to sacrifice Marcus just for some degree."

"Can you explain to me how the paralegal job fits into this?" Mike asks, gently as he can.

"I can't pay all my bills on the mailroom job for much longer. Either I get something better here, or I quit and work retail and wait tables 16 hours a day.” When Mike raises an eyebrow, he adds, “Anything’s possible with enough Red Bull.”

“So you want the paralegal job primarily for the money?”

"Pearson-Hardman does pay its paralegals pretty damn well, but that’s not the main appeal.” Harvey takes a deep breath before admitting, “I ended up working here in the first place because I wanted to be a lawyer."

"Wanted or want?"

"Want." He straightens up and raises his chin as he says it, no doubt or hesitation in his voice.

There’s a moment of silence.

Then Mike remarks,  "Did you know I'm admitted to practice in nine jurisdictions? New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, all four New York district courts and the second circuit. I’m also a member of the patent bar, but I can never decide how to count that."

He sees Harvey’s initial confusion at the subject change, and then he sees that confusion morph into amazement. “Whoa-- why?”

"I don’t mind tests, and it's convenient to be admitted everywhere in this area. I took New York’s bar exam right out of law school, New Jersey’s exam wasn’t hard to pass a couple years later, and I was admitted into the Connecticut bar--”

“--on motion, because you already got in with New York,” Harvey finishes. “Why California, though?”

“California just looks nice on a resume."

"You took the California bar because it looks nice on a resume," he deadpans.

"Yep,” Mike says, smacking his lips on the “p” before murmuring, “I've been in good standing with them for . . . oh, five years, now."

He says it quietly, casually, but Harvey’s eyes widen. “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”

“Depends. What do you think I’m talking about?”

“Division 1, Chapter 3, Rule 4.29 of the Admissions and Educational Standards of the California Bar.”

Their eyes meet, and suddenly Mike can’t repress a grin. “Per Rule 4.26, an aspiring lawyer can skip formal law school and instead enter the California bar by studying the law diligently and in good faith in a law office. Per Rule 4.29, Section B, the attorney with whom the applicant is studying must be admitted to the active practice of law in California and be in good standing for a minimum of five years.” He considers stopping there, but Harvey’s gazing at him like he’s walking on water and he decides to indulge and show off further. “He must also personally supervise the applicant at least five hours a week, examine the applicant at least once a month on study completed the previous month, and report to the committee on the number of hours the applicant studied each week, on the books and other materials studied, etc. etc.”

“You’d be willing to do that for me?”

“Hey, it wouldn’t just be hard on me,” Mike warns him. “This would be hard work. Long hours. Longer than usual when you throw in the studying, which I doubt either of us can count towards our billable hours targets, no matter how many loopholes we use.”

“You give me this chance,” Harvey replies, eyes bright and serious, “I will work to school those Harvard associates and be the best lawyer—law student—mentee you’ve ever seen.”

“You’d be a paralegal, my dedicated paralegal. If Jessica somehow approves this,” Mike says, pulling a face, “which somehow I really doubt . . .”

“Hey,” Harvey cuts in, “you’re a lateral hire, and an amazing one, too— I’ve seen the press releases. Jessica wants to show you off and keep you here, which means she wants to make you happy. Knowing Louis, she probably had to threaten to fire him to get you control of these interviews today, there’s no way he gave these up easily, and that already demonstrates that she’s giving you a lot of leeway.”

Mike furrows his brow. “I don’t want to take advantage of her—“

“So frame it as advantageous to her.”

“How do I do that?”

“First-year associates are utterly incompetent, you know that?”

“. . . I’m aware of this fact, yes.”

“Even the ones from Harvard, they by and large have no idea what they’re doing in a real corporate setting. I’m already better adjusted than a lot of them, with more applicable work experience, and that should make up for the fact that I’m not as familiar with law. All in all, you’re getting someone only slightly more useless than a first-year associate—“

“And at half the price, even when you account for my lost productivity.”

“Exactly. And if she still complains, just offer to take on some pro bono case as punishment.”

Mike squints at him, confused. “But . . . I like pro bono cases.”

Harvey just gapes back at him before groaning, “Please tell me you didn’t tell her that.”

“No, it hasn’t come up--”

“Good. Do tons of pro bono, but make her think you hate it and that you only do it to curry favour with her. She’ll love you forever.”

Mike leans back in his chair, chuckling. “Do you know why I’m hiring you?”

“I can make an educated guess.”

“Hit me.”

“You have two main reasons. First of all, I’m the only person you’ve talked today who hasn’t bored you out of your mind. Second, you love my sob story.”

“Both true—though how you manage to make the fact that I care about your family sound pathetic is beyond me—but there’s a third reason. I think you’re going to be a lawyer whether I help you or not.”

“That’s pretty unlikely—”

“Yeah, but you seem like someone who gets what he wants, hell with the odds.” Harvey smiles as he says it, and Mike knows he’s read him right. “And going by your investigation, and your deal with Rick Sorkin, and your advice on how to break this to Jessica, you’re going to be a great lawyer.”

He pauses, but for once the kid stays quiet, waiting.

“But,” Mike continues, “it seems to me like someone told you, at some point, that it’s not okay to deal kindly with people or to care. And so, for the public good, I think I should make sure that you become not just a great lawyer—“

“But a good one.”

“Yep. That’s why I don’t just want you strong-arming Jessica into letting you work for the firm, I want you working under me, and training to be as capable and ethical a lawyer as possible. That means, incidentally, that you’ll be assisting me on all my many, many pro bono cases.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Harvey says. He doesn’t put much effort into disguising the sarcasm.

Mike just laughs. “Well then, I’m emailing the firm I just found my new assistant.”

#suits100fanwork #suits100 #mike ross #harvey specter #suits #my fic

[insecure-hbo-recaps]

hella questions

Previously on Insecure: A bunch of bad dates, missing Lawrence, trifling Lawrence, failed "get my ex back" party, Molly is way underpaid. And two minutes of ex sex.

"Y'all fucked?" is the incredulity that welcomes us to the second episode of the season. I can't decide if I love or hate that Issa has one of those old school ugly wooden entertainment center things that I'm sure we ALL had growing up.

Issa is also wearing a hoodie with Harriet Tubman on it... though I can't figure out what the two pictures on her wall are. Molly wants to know who initiated the sex and whether they've spoken since. They aren't really in any better place, and Molly doesn't find this encouraging. Issa is grasping at straws. Molly asks whether it was a getting back together fuck or a "fuck you" fuck. Hmmm. As someone who recently had sex with her ex that she's still in love with... it was definitely neither lol. It was... well, actually, it was a “I put up this picture of me kissing another dude as my facebook profile pic so that everyone could stop feeling sorry for me for being single, but you think I moved on and am dating someone else and don't love your trifling ass anymore and you got the nerve to have a jealous streak" kind of a fuck. This fool asked me like four times "so what's new with you?" As if I would tell if it WAS true, lol. Anyway, the sex between Lawrence and Issa would fall in a similar category - dudes being in their insecure ass feelings but STILL not trying to give you the respect you deserve.

Issa calls the sex "nebulous." Nebulous: unclear, vague, or ill defined. Molly is wary of drawing any conclusions based on this murky outcome, but Issa brightly tries to convince herself the sex means something good. Idk, girl. I don't feel like that. I'm not even going to delude myself that way.

Lawrence is in the gym, because in case you haven't noticed, he ain't a capn crunch eating white socks scrub no more. He starts to text Issa that he made things weird and didn't plan for it to happen, but thinks better of it and deletes it.

Meanwhile, Molly did stick with her therapist and is at a second session. Far from how close mouthed she had been before, she is ranting energetically about her stronger work ethic and going above and beyond but still being underpaid. Honestly, this is why I just solve this issue by half assing everything at work. I'm never going above and beyond. I will ALWAYS be a solid 3/4 at annual performance review time. Fuck your five star review. This job don't give a fuck about me and I don't give a fuck about y'all. And when the pay stops being enough, my resume makes it easy for me to bounce and renegotiate a new salary. But Molly is not interested in conceding defeat and can't understand why she can't figure out a way to get into the all boy's club. The therapist points out that Molly is "shoulding" all over herself. And if you watch this show, you've seen Sex and the City, so we don't need to break down the logistics of this.

The therapist tries to tell Molly she's living in the reality she thinks she should have, not the one she does have. Molly, naturally, doesn't understand what she's saying. The therapist tells her that there are certain standards levied at black women - and let's take the time to point out the difference here... in the past, the standards of a black woman were to singlehandedly manage a household and all of its financial and functional needs, put yourself aside and be a supporting force for everyone else in your life, and maybe you might find a man but how can you expect that, and you shouldn't, because it's too hard, and well, if you can't find one, maybe nice Willie the janitor will be there for you and don't be thinking bout no law degree. That shit ain't the move no more. These days the perfect standards of being a black woman are all about getting your 2013 self titled album Beyonce on - fulfilled in yourself and your life choices and not subscribing to any ideology that says you can't be enough or what you have to offer isn't valuable... with a slice of "even if no one else can see my value, I know it far exceeds that of many of those around me." Later for settling. Later for accepting scraps. But now that opens the door to a battle that's twice as hard, choosing to except the ways in which you are exceptional, in a world that is not willing to agree with you purely because... you are a black woman.

The therapist asks Molly if she would be open to a life that doesn't look like the one she thinks she "should" have. Molly isn't ready to grapple with that idea, and demurs on scheduling the next session. See what I'm saying? Bitches afraid to look at themselves.

Gallery opening. Which, again, is a little too close to Sex and the City for me, but I don't know what y'all be doing in California or New York. Gallery openings ain't a thing in Chicago. The four of them are talking about Issa's party. Tiffany is being annoyingly bougie as usual, Kelli is only mildly extra. I don't... I don't know what to say about these outfits.

I fully respect everything Insecure is doing. But I'd be a damn lie if I said... it was very... right, I suppose. It wouldn't be the route I'd take if it were my show, I guess is what I'd say. They are trying to decide plans for the weekend but Issa doesn't want to go out clubbing - she thinks sleeping with Lawrene means a reunion is imminent so she can't really be going out anymore. Tiffany decides to empathize and shares that her gay husband lived in a hotel for basically half a year while they were going through something. "The point is, even perfect couples have problems," Tiffany says, and I'm not looking forward to the season where they try to humanize Tiffany by showing she hides behind all this "perfect" bullshit to cover up the fact that she is miserably depressed and hates herself. I accidentally paused at a moment that captures this sentiment:

Issa thinks she just needs to give Lawrence time to forgive her; he can't just walk away from five years like that. Every single time I've thought I offered something so incredibly unique to a man he'd be stupid to walk away from it, I was patently, 100% wrong. Kelli points out that for 2 of those years his bum ass mooched off on her couch and Issa should move on. Issa wants to work it out. But... really? Why would Issa want to still be with Lawrence? She wasn't happy with him, that's why she cheated in the first place. And I'm not buying that she saw the error of her ways and truly wants the life they had together in the end. More like being single is shit, especially when you've had someone as your counterpart for a significant chunk of time, and rather than adjusting to something new it's easier and more comfortable to want back what you had.

Kelli lets it slip that Lawrence is with someone knew, which Tiffany was also aware of. They know who she is and everything, but Issa claims she doesn't want to know. In the two seconds it takes to decry that claim, Molly finds Tasha's instagram profile. Tiffany offers some friendly shit-talking ("why does she only speak in emojis?") and Kelli says she looks like a stripper. Issa pretends like she doesn't want to know who she is.

Gallery bathroom. While Issa is doing her "go high or go low?" mirror freestyle, I am just mesmerized by her crown-mimicking braidout. Like. I wouldn't wear it because I couldn't pull it off, but it is fascinating on her. She decides going the high road is overrated, and when Molly comes to check on her, Issa snaps, "pull that bitch up!" The soundtrack that kicks in at that moment - bass heavy intoning "fuck that nigga" - pulls all of us back on the thrones we sometimes forget but need always to occupy.

The next day. For reasons that are unclear, Issa stops by Chad's apartment looking for Lawrence. Chad remarks on her glow up approvingly, which Issa awkwardly plays off. They have awkward small tight for a bit before Issa asks for Lawrence. Chad doesn't want to say where he really is, and if I had the skills/patience to make gifs, I'd insert one here now of the coy way he then slups on the straw of his beet juice. As it is, Issa concedes defeat and decides to leave.

It turns out Lawrence is at Tasha's, watching Defamation. I know that's not the name of their in-series show, but I can't be bothered to find out what it was, so I'm just going to call it the same as DWP's. Tasha is into it while Lawrence is aloof, and the thing that makes *me* most uncomfortable about Tasha - as stated, I do not buy into the thotty because she is traditional narrative - is her liking Real Housewives-y television and occupying that "black women in Atlanta" sort of social space. I do fully approve of her around the way girl oversized gold hoops.

Lawrence says he has things on his mind and Tasha, again refreshingly casually, asks whether he wants to talk about it. She gets a text from her mom, informing her about a family barbecue. She takes a moment and hints about whether or not Lawrence would like to come. Rather than pretend to be oblivious, Lawrence actually makes a noise like he acknowledges this time that he knows this would mean something, and Tasha, sensing his hesitation, immediately walks the invitation back. Lawrence decides to just drop that he slept with his ex. He tries to explain why it happens and says he just wants to be honest, and doesn't know what it means. Hmm. I don't know at this point in their relationship how big a deal this should be, so Tasha's measured response of "I think you need to go" is about level and appropriate. Oh MAYNE, she got that black glass and gold accented vanity mirror that I'm sure was a pattern we ALL had in our moms' bedrooms at some point.

Dunes. Issa is getting ready for bed, trying to resist looking up Tasha. Of course she isn't able to manage it, and pulls up Tasha's instagram.

Law firm. Molly rolls up on the front desk lady and they exchange pleasantries and niceties. Molly wants to know about a hockey game the bosses are going to. She is planning to shoot her shot and try to ingratiate herself into the "boy's club." "I'm scared of you," the front desk lady says neutrally, grinning and turning back to her computer.

Issa's boring after school job. The principle is prejudiced against latinos, Frieda doesn't like it, Issa is tone deaf. Blah blah blah.

So how do we feel about Chad's suit? Apparently he had to wait outside for Lawrence to express his disbelief that Lawrence told Tasha about Issa. Uh, how did he find out about that? lol. Lawrence says he couldn't lie about it because he's "not dirty like that." Chad, and all of us:

Seriously, what's up with Lawrence? He is delusional about his capacity for being a good dude. Which, to be perfectly frank with you, is not very surprising to me for a guy who could mooch off his girlfriend for two years and then be totally blindsided with her being dissatisfied and unhappy in the relationship. Lawrence can't believe he slept with Issa, thinking he was once step out the door away. Chad is overall not surprised that Lawrence went back to being a "John Legend ass nigga."

Apparently they are going to check out a new apartment for Lawrence. Why does Chad need to be there for that? Chad mentions that Issa came by looking for him, acknowledging her glow up: "did she always look like that?"

The broker is a black woman in an off white pantsuit. You know how sometimes you'll be watching white tv and you never see any black people until you need a bus driver or a maid or a nurse or some other menial service person? Insecure does this in reverse where most of the roles of businesspeople in the community are held by black women, which is truer to life. Anyway, she's Patty from ABG. The apartment seems to have disturbingly pale sea green walls which I would not be happy with. I'd feel like my entire apartment is a bloody bathroom from a scary movie. That's the exact same shade of sea foam green blue.

They like the apartment. It's pretty big. I know nothing about Los Angeles real estate but I assume it's extremely expensive. Lawrence is hesitant to commit, possibly because he wants an invite back to the Dunes. Who knows, the scene doesn't elaborate.

High School. Frieda is mad about Principal Gaines not caring about the latino students. She calls it a "racist joke" he made. Issa doesn't care, and Frieda's Clueless White Person rambling doesn't help. They arrive to the after school program to find it full of students. Gaines hooked them up with kids. Issa is thrilled but Frieda is concerned about the lack of latino students.

Molly is riding an escalator somewhere. Where ya going, Molly? Ooooh... eeeee... she's making the bold but fairly ill considered decision to try to rub elbows with the boys club in the box seats for a hockey game.

I don't begrudge Molly attempting to shoot her shot, but there have got to be more... shall we say organic ways for her to attempt it. We look like assholes popping up in entirely the wrong context like this. Now I'm having a flashback to an ill advised friendship with an overweight white woman who, time would reveal, primarily wanted to use me to get an in into black spaces where she could meet black men. But never fear, her black female friends were just as corny and thirsty: her black counterpart was this overweight chick who went out of her way to assure all of us how much she loved hockey and when she talked about basketball she made sure to only talk about the two or three white players on our home team. The thirst was real and it went in both directions, and that is tonight's anecdote on why I make very little effort to make female friends as an adult.

Back at the Dunes, Issa cannot resist the allure of her phone, holding the secrets as it does to Tasha's insta. Of course she eventually caves and we are treated to this snap filtered gem:

Doing the most. But followed up by this:

Loving the wig. Issa throws the phone down pretending she doesn't care, going back to her book.

Back at the hockey game, Molly's attempts to bond with middle aged white men is typically embarrassing. They're drinking shitty beer, Stella Artois as far as I can tell? Molly takes a moment then decides to shoot her shot, socially approaching her boss. He's wearing a ridiculous suit. They make small talk about lobster rolls, but Molly misses the timbre of the humor and her "women are clueless about sports" bit doesn't quite land. Which I'm going to go ahead and chalk up to a racial barrier because let's just admit it. It's not believable to pretend a black woman gives a fuck about hockey. I have sat around with white dudes and tried to watch hockey games. That shit is boring. They score once every fifteen minutes. Let us submit a blanket moratorium on black women appeasing whites by pretending to like hockey.

The next morning at work, Molly tries to maintain cordial commentary with her boss but it's awkward and they both wish it had never happened. She walks away from the break room while her boss and a random white man look awkwardly after her before going back to their conversation.

Hey. Don't you fucking hate that we have to do this shit?

Chad's. Lawrence is on his air mattress, looking pensive. Dune's. Issa is on her mac still stalking. She has progressed to facebook. Then she swaps to Twitter. Then she swaps to the LinkedIn. I have amazing internet stalking skills. I once found posts from a message board someone posted on anonymously in high school. I knew an ex of mine had gotten married like six months after I dumped him and I wanted to know who the wife was - that took licensed private investigator levels of digging because he had zero online footprint and a super generic name. I once found someone's professional license, which listed their contact number, saved the number to my phone, and used it to find their instagram page. Fuck with me dog. No one has shit on my internet stalking game. I'm not crazy just nosy as fuck.

Letsmovealong... Tasha's social media is meant, I'm thinking, to paint her as slightly basic. She has Beyonce quotes in the Beyonce font, she's wearing an uncomfortable suit in her linkedin pic. She takes pics eating jalepeno poppers in ecstasy. And, to be fair, I think that's the characterization we are meant to take away from Tasha. She isn't quirky like Issa. She's just "regular black." And I know that's a thing that people have had negative reactions to, so I don't mind telling you I aggressively defend "regular black." I live on the northside of my city, which is white neighborhoods. Every man I date has no less than a college degree and often a graduate or professional degree, as, having one myself, this only makes sense for finding someone with compatible values. So my ability to occupy a quirky, upwardly mobile black space must take responsibility for blackness as a whole, in the sense that it would be shameful for me to shun "regular blackness." Whenever I'm wearing curly 30 inch remy in my sew in and I meet randoms who ALWAYS ask me whether I'm latina I make SURE to put them in their place. Asking me whether I'm mixed. That's not a compliment, y'all. Don't be on the okcupids and the tinders talking about you're "other" race. I used to block men on sight with bedebees talking about some "Mixed race, other." Don't side with the oppressors. Don't shun regular blackness. (I have seen many, many black people do this, both male and female, and it is incredibly disheartening and disappointing. It's not just men. Women do it too. All of y'all need to stop.)

Issa realizes that Tasha works at the bank Lawrence goes to. So the next morning she takes it upon herself to take a visit, taking note of the Best Buy right next door. Issa goes inside and gets in Tasha's line. "I'd like to make a deposit," she says, and then cold-cocks Tasha. This, of course, is yet another fantasy.

But in real life, Molly is having a cup of espresso on some campus somewhere. Lawrence spots her and decides he's not petty enough to not say hi. I'm loving the linen denim blue button up, less endeared by the flat hipster leather backpack, but I don't mind the attempt. They hug with Molly surprised to see him - she was there for some meeting or other. Lawrence says it's "Meridian" which I know as a health insurer, but probably means something different as it's where he works. Molly's wear a midi dress and heels which... I remember those cut out shoulder cut out things from a time far far in the past, guys.

They make small talk about Lawrence's new job and how they're both "good." Lawrence makes to walk away but Molly, steeling herself, calls him back. She wants to talk about Issa, who she tells him is "still torn up." "And?" Lawrence says, rudely. Yeah, Lawrence has no concept of the fact that their relationship was garbage. Maybe it wasn't always, but where they were when we met them, their relationship was trash.

Molly champions Issa and asks whether he hates her. He says he doesn't, so Molly asks if he'd ever take her back. We don't get to see Lawrence's response as we swap to Issa in her car. She's still outside of the bank when Tasha walks past, talking to a friend. Issa drops the recline on her seat all the way back to hide. Molly calls at this moment, walking away from her conversation with Lawrence and carrying a fabulous pale tan attache case. She makes it clear to us that she was only there as a plant, to run into Lawrence so she could ask him about Issa. This is the new age adult version of the secret three way call.

Issa asks what Lawrence said about her. Molly apologizes, and breaks the bad news that Lawrence says he's done. He ended up taking the new apartment, so he's not coming back. Issa digests this in silence. Molly offers to come by but Issa tells her she's fine. She reclines in her car a bit longer into an annoying security guard comes by and tells her she can't sleep there.

Nighttime. Molly's still at work, skyping with Hannah, the lawyer who recently transferred to the Chicago office. They're both working late. My ambitions and skillset and also personal passions would seem to dictate that I should have been a lawyer. But even when I was much younger and just starting to think about what I wanted my life to look like, I never wanted to give more of a fuck about work than anything else in my life. Like, this being at the office at nighttime shit? No thank you. ....I kinda regret that now. You know? Maybe in the go-go 90s I took the trope of the serious businesswoman who doesn't have time for a man and a life and a family too seriously. I don't know.

Molly makes professional good with Hannah, offering to help with her workload - and this is kind of what I mean - in kind of like "I'm a workhorse, use me." Hannah is touched by the offer, and agrees to throw some work Molly's way, perhaps recognizing the ploy Molly is extending. So that one, at least, went over well.

Somewhere in LA. While Molly's in her office, Lawrence has stopped by Tasha's house. She comes out to meet him where he is waiting by his car. She's wearing ripped jeans and very clunky sneakers. When Lawrence says hi, she regards him coldly. He launches into an apology, telling Tasha she didn't deserve that. Tasha, still playing "cool girl" who doesn't make a big deal about the fucked up shit you're dealing, plays understanding, that she gets why he was still messing with his ex. She knows their relationship wasn't exclusive.

She's giving him an out. But Lawrence muddies this by saying his thing with Issa was over. Tasha tried to let him keep things casual, but his response signals that casual behavior isn't ok while they are seeing each other. Recognizing this, Tasha makes an excuse for why she has to go back inside.

But, at the last minute she just can't help it, and caves, asking him whether or not he wants to come in for dinner. Lawrence, who was walking away, stops and takes her up on it. Damnit, Tasha. You almost made it.

Dunes. Issa, in her hairscarf and tshirt again (this has been a dry week for Issa right?) is putting away her laundry. She is suddenly annoyed about hanging all of her clothes on one side of the closet. Lawrence's shit is gone. She angrily shelves her shit on the opposite side, and, in bed, pulls her pillow in the middle, grappling with the reality that Lawrence is really not coming back.

Swiper more swiping helps blunt some of the pain as Issa pulls up Tinder again, trying, still trying.

#insecure hbo #issa rae #hella questions

[chiseler]

EINSTEIN’S COTTAGE

On Sunday, July 16 1939, two men drove from Manhattan out to the forked tip of Long Island. They rolled onto Nassau Point, a pretty, quiet peninsula of summer cottages, beaches, and sailboats that poked out into Little Peconic Bay. They stopped and asked a few people for directions to an address on West Cove Road. No one recognized it. Then they asked a boy if he knew where “Professor Einstein’s” cottage was. Oh sure, the kid replied, and pointed them the right way.

The two men were the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, both Hungarian-born refugees from Nazi Europe. Their visit with Albert Einstein this sunny Sunday afternoon was the first step in America’s atomic bomb program.

*

As the Nazis and Fascists clamped down on Europe and imposed not only anti-Semitic but anti-intellectual regimes, many of the best scientific minds fled to America. Albert Einstein, the most famous of them all, sailed from Germany to California, where he was a guest lecturer at Caltech, in December 1932. By March 1933, when he and his wife Elsa were supposed to sail home, Hitler was in power. Einstein never set foot in Germany again. In October 1933 he and Elsa settled in Princeton. After Elsa died in 1935 he became reclusive, dividing his time between Princeton and rented summer cottages out on Long Island.

Einstein was in his early 50s when he relocated, and his important work was behind him. As Richard Rhodes explained in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, most of the other physicists who came from Europe in the 1930s were in their peak 20s and 30s. Leo Szilard was born in Budapest in 1898. In 1921 he went to the University of Berlin, where Einstein was on the faculty. Through the 1920s they often partnered on patenting inventions, ranging from a refrigerator to the cyclotron. (Ernest Lawrence independently built the world's first at UC-Berkeley in 1932.) Szilard fled Germany for England in 1933. In January 1938 he arrived in New York City, where he was hired by Columbia University.

In New York City Szilard found an important financial backer for his continuing research in a prosperous Wall Street banker and philanthropist, Leo Strauss (pronounced Straws). Strauss grew up in a German Jewish household in the South. Blinded in one eye in a rock fight as a kid, he could not serve in the military in World War I, and instead worked as a personal aide to Herbert Hoover, who was then running relief programs for war victims. Late in the 1920s he moved to New York to join the Wall Street investment firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co., where he became a partner. Two of his philanthropic causes were the plight of Jewish refugees, which left him with a deep hatred of both Nazism and Soviet Communism, and nuclear physics, which led him to Szilard. Strauss would play a critical role in America's nuclear policy after the war.

In Berlin, Szilard had become friends with another brilliant Jew from Budapest, Eugene Wigner. Wigner first came to America in 1930 to lecture at Princeton, and stayed when Hitler rose to power. Hans Bethe, son of a university professor, was raised Protestant but was Jewish on his mother's side. He stayed on in Germany until 1935, then accepted a position at Cornell. The night he arrived in America he walked all around Manhattan, soaking it in. Edward Teller, another Hungarian Jew, got his Ph.D. at Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg in 1930. He left Germany in 1933 and came to America in 1935.

Enrico Fermi was a native of Rome, where he did groundbreaking work in nuclear physics that pointed the way to fission. He and his wife Laura first visited New York in the summer of 1930, when the Depression was just getting under way. "One of my earliest recollections of America," she later wrote, "is of standing with Fermi in Times Square and watching unemployment statistics among the glowing headlines that appeared in rapid succession high on top of the New York Times Building." In 1936 Fermi returned and spent the summer teaching a course at Columbia. Two years later, Italy adopted the first of its leggi razziali, its "race laws" mostly aimed at Jews. Laura was Jewish. That year, the Fermis traveled to Stockholm so that he could receive the Nobel; they did not go back to Rome. In January 1939 they stepped down off the liner Franconia in New York City, where he had a position waiting for him at Columbia.

Along with Europeans like Szilard and Fermi, the Columbia faculty boasted some great American scientists. Isidore Isaac Rabi had grown up speaking Yiddish on the Lower East Side, so steeped in Old World Judaism that he only found out the earth circled the sun when he read it in a library book. He joined the physics faculty at Columbia in 1929. Harold Urey, raised in the Midwest and West, began teaching chemistry at Columbia is 1929. He was the world's leading scientist in the field of isotopes; in 1934 he won the Nobel for discovering the hydrogen isotope deuterium. John Dunning also came from the West and joined the Columbia faculty in 1929. When the neutron was discovered in 1932 its properties became his particular field of research.

One New York native would be associated in the public mind with atomic research above all others. Born in 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer grew up in an apartment that took up the entire 11th floor of 155 Riverside Drive at West 88th Street, with a panoramic view of the Hudson. His father, a German Jew, had come to America with no money and no English and was a prosperous textiles merchant by the age of 30. His mother was a delicate and refined artist from Baltimore. In an era of widespread anti-Semitism, their son Julius styled himself J. Robert to sound less Jewish.

*

Two weeks after the Fermis arrived in New York in January 1939, the physicist Niels Bohr came from Denmark with the news that German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, following up on Fermi's work, had split the nucleus of the uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons -- nuclear fission. The news hit physicists in America, and around the world, like a thunderclap. In the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia, John Dunning had built a cyclotron a few years earlier. He used it to reproduce Hahn's results on January 25 – the first nuclear fission in the U.S.

Leo Szilard was in bed with a high fever when he heard the Hahn news. He sent a letter to Strauss, sprinkled with cautious words like "perhaps" and "potential" and "possibilities," suggesting that fission might lead to "atomic bombs." A handful of others drew the same conclusions. Oppenheimer was making the first crude drawings of a uranium bomb within a week of hearing the news. Gazing thoughtfully out a window at Columbia's campus, Fermi quietly cupped his hands as though holding a baseball and told a colleague, "A little bomb like that, and it would all disappear." By April the Associated Press was reporting that the debate among physicists was not over whether a uranium bomb was feasible, but how big a bang it would make – enough for "blowing up a sizeable portion of the earth" or just enough to "wreck as large an area as New York City."

Writing some thirty years later in her book Illustrious Immigrants, Laura Fermi claimed that a quartet of the refugee scientists from Europe – Szilard, Fermi, Wigner and Teller – were the first to be deeply alarmed by the thought of Nazi Germany developing such a weapon. "In a sense this was natural," she wrote. "Hungarians and Italians knew dictators well," and were "well acquainted… with both Hitler's ruthlessness and the capabilities of German scientists." They were convinced the Allies must begin research and development instantly.

But the United States in the spring of 1939 was not one of the Allies. It was still neutral by law and almost unanimously isolationist in opinion. Szilard felt it would take more than a gaggle of scientists, many of them Jews from Europe, to budge the country. It would take the most famous scientist in the world.

When Szilard and Wigner met with Einstein that Sunday afternoon, he’d made two appearances at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, but otherwise was spending his summer happily sitting on the beach (he could not swim), playing his violin, and fiddling with his small sailboat, which he’d named Tinef, Yiddish for junk. Szilard was startled to discover that Einstein had not yet heard about the explosive potential of uranium. "Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht!" Einstein exclaimed: "I never thought of that!" He agreed to help alert the government.

That week in Manhattan Szilard met Dr. Alexander Sachs, a distinguished biologist and economist who was also a vice president at the giant investment firm Lehman Corporation. Born in Lithuania in 1883, Sachs had come to New York City at the age of 11. He studied at Columbia and Harvard, worked for a few years as an assistant to Louis Brandeis at the Zionist Organization of America, and worked for FDR in one of Roosevelt's many New Deal agencies. Sachs told Szilard he could put a letter from Einstein in the president's hand.

Einstein's letter went through a few drafts, Einstein writing in German, with Szilard, Teller and Sachs all contributing. It was translated and ready by mid-August, but with Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, FDR's appointment calendar was filled to overflowing. Sachs finally got into the Oval Office on October 11. Roosevelt didn't read Einstein's letter, but instead chatted with Sachs over brandies. He got the gist – that what Sachs and the scientists wanted, he said, was "to see that the Nazis don't blow us up."

With the president's go-ahead, a Committee on Uranium met ten days later. It included Sachs, Szilard, Teller, Wigner, and an army and navy officer. The military men were skeptical, but they grudgingly granted a few thousand dollars so that the Columbia physicists could do small-scale experimenting.

With so little government support, progress would be slow through 1940. In December of that year, scientists at Berkeley would create a new element, plutonium. The isotope plutonium 238 could also be used in weapons of enormous power, and it could be produced more quickly than fissionable uranium 235. At Columbia, Fermi and Szilard, with the help of husky football-players, built a large uranium-graphite lattice in Schermerhorn Hall to continue investigating the potential of uranium.

Otherwise, nothing much would happen with atomic research in America until the Japanese woke the sleeping giant by bombing Pearl Harbor.

by John Strausbaugh

#Einstein's Cottage #Einstein #The Chiseler #John Strausbaugh #Fermi

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND ACQUISITION

Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one has to make the software easy to use. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. I, Ada have lost, while hacker languages C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, Lisp. As with office space, the number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their own societies where intelligence is the most important skills founders need to learn.1 If you're designing a tool, for example, you can say later Oh yeah, we had to make search better, and I answered twenty, I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. Compared to other industrialized countries the US is disorganized about routing people into careers. Which means it's doubly important to hire the best people.2 I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch, but how clean the path to the finished program was.

So if you start a company.3 So please, get on with it.4 And most importantly, their status depends on how ambitious you feel. School is a strange one. And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. I'm not saying that issues don't matter to voters. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it is unfair to delay. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. All I can say is, try hard to do it as a business, rather than because they wanted to. It was really close, too. 6 each founder 250 12. Teenage kids used to have a deft touch.5

Even a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.6 Seed firms are like angels in that they invest exclusively in the earliest phase. The average MIT graduate wants to work at Google or Microsoft, because it's easier to sell at first, but mainly because the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you'll have. The founders are required to vest their shares over four years.7 Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves, because that's where smart people meet. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year.8 Livable towns? They just need something to chase.9 The best way to explain how it all works is to follow the case of a hypothetical very fortunate startup as it shifts gears through successive rounds.

One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing people don't plan, so you're more likely to get them in a society where it's ok to be overtly ambitious, and in fact can't be done by collaborators and design can't? Above all, they slow you down: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead.10 We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off.11 For example, many startups in America begin in places where it's not really legal to run a startup are prone to wicked cases of buyer's remorse. That's the main reason I wrote this. This is less the rule now, partly because the disasters of the twentieth century.12 The Selling of the President 1968, Nixon knew he had less charisma than Humphrey, and thus simply refused to debate him on TV.13 What struck me at the time, I would have seen that being smart was more important.14 And for many if not most startups, ours began with a core of fanatically devoted users, and all Evan and Joshua had to do it, and selling, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. But beyond that they didn't want to be smart, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.15 They are doubly hosed: the general partners themselves are less able, and yet they have harder problems to solve, because the people I worked with were some of my best friends.

Occasionally startups go from seed funding direct to acquisition, however, and I feel as if I have by now learned to understand everything publishers mean to tell me about a book, and perhaps even move to the sort of backslapping extroverts one thinks of as typically American. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. The advantage of raising money from friends and family is that they're easy to find. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. C, Perl have won. So at the last dinner; it's more of a party. Morale is key in design. I didn't really grasp it at the time what we were practicing for. That's big company thinking.16 Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere. The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people.

The way to get rich from a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. Unless you're in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. So if you want to, but you have to do is other things.17 The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. I was persistent, but I don't believe it till you get the check. That's a problem, because looking down on the user, but you knew there would be no more Calvin Coolidges. It might be hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been cases of molecular bonding rather than nuclear fusion. Then you can gradually transform yourself from a consulting company, and that would probably be replaced, as if you couldn't get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title. Nor does it harm you in the hope you'll be able to brag that he was an investor. They were helpful in negotiating deals, for example.

This pattern is repeated constantly in startup hubs. By accepting the term sheet, and then have to call them back to tell them you were just kidding, you are in big trouble. But I decided not to, because that's what it means is to have a deft touch. To a scientist, at least for programmers. I was learning so little that I wasn't even learning what the choices were, let alone negotiate the terms, so the deal fell through. Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. With the help of some part-time jobs they made it last 18 months. And in any case, many technical ideas do have political implications. But in fact that place was the perfect space for a startup at all, because if your sponsor goes out of business?

Notes

We didn't let him off, either as truth or heresy. Which is why, when I became an employer. You should probably start from the rule of law per se but from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

Bureaucrats manage to think of a handful of companies to be closing, not like soccer; you don't have to deliver these sentences as if having good intentions were enough to be when it was considered the most promising opportunities, it is. And yet if he were a first—e.

At first literature took a painfully long time I thought there wasn't, because it is very long: it has to grind. They want so much more attractive to investors, you can't easily get a false positive, this would probably be the fact that investment is a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. As a friend with small children to consider how low this number could be made. That's a valid point.

Sheep act the way they have less money, then used a TV for a group to consider behaving the opposite way as part of a severe-looking little box with a cap. You're too early if it's not uncommon for startups is uninterruptability. That's very cheap, 1/10 success rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would give you term sheets.

If you want to lead. For similar reasons it might help to be at the end of the growth in wealth, the police in the narrowest sense. Most of the growth in wealth, and know the actual amount of time on schleps, and stir.

And for those interested in each type of proficiency test any apprentice might have. Many will consent to b rather than insufficient effort to see it in the beginning. The wave of the first duty of the incompetence of newspapers is that it's a departure from his family, that suits took over during a critical period. If you want to change.

Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. If you weren't around then it's hard to make peace with Spain, and there didn't seem to be vigorously enforced. Their inexperience makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, analog brain state. When you fix one bug happens to compensate for another.

The empirical evidence suggests that if you like a ragged comb.

Currently we do. Though they are themselves typical users. If I paint someone's house, though I think in general.

In either case the money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores. They assumed that their system can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme. As far as I know it didn't to undergraduates on the spot very easily. They can't estimate your minimum capital needs that precisely.

We wasted little time on is a way in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. In sufficiently disordered times, even the flaws of big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd be proportionately more effective, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but they were more dependent on banks, who would have been doing so because otherwise competitors would take Abelson and Sussman's quote a step further. It's when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations? 92.

But an associate is not economic inequality. On their job listing page, they were just getting kids to be important ones. I can't predict which these will be, unchanging, but they get a patent is now the founder visa in a situation where they are not one of the things you're taught. And yet there is a trap set by evil companies for the same time.

Even though we made a lot of people, how little autonomy one would say we depend on closing a deal to move forward. Y Combinator. Buy an old-fashioned idea.

If you're expected to do that.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation reaches a certain field, and you have to be vigorously enforced.

The meanings of these, and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. Basically, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, because investing later would probably also a name. Of the two elsewhere, but they seem like I overstated the case of heirs, professors, politicians, and instead of reacting. Though we're happy to provide this service, and configure domain names etc.

A lot of companies to do that. More precisely, while they may end up reproducing some of those you should start if you don't have one. No one in its IRC channel: don't allow the same way a restaurant is constrained in b the second clause could include any possible startup, and Jews about.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #sup #group #market #competitors #employees #core #startups #rounds #scheme #hackers #rate #craziness #cans #peace #lot #book #jobs #restaurant #visa #rule #step #IRC #job #people #case