I don’t know how many follow or have read the books in this sub, but this is one of the most interesting things I’ve found after reading Rhaenyra being called “Maegor with tits” by the Green opposition.
This is all from the Internet. A click away from any phone.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought.
An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre.
Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem. Socrates was a polarizing figure in Athenian society. In 399 BC, he was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death. He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.
There were four charges that were brought against Socrates. They were that he argued the weaker claim over the stronger claim, that he argue the physical over the metaphysical, that he was against the gods and that he was corrupting the youth.
Socrates was found guilty by a jury of 501 Athenians and was sentenced to drink a deadly poison, named hemlock. Many scholars have argued that the charges against Socrates were politically motivated and have understood his trial and conviction as an attack upon freedom of speech and an indictment of democracy.

The Last Moments of Maegor’s Reign, losing against a misogynistic society led by petty and ambitious nobles and against the Faith of the Seven, a religion that enforces gender roles and inequality between men and women.

By 48 AC Maegor's tyranny could no longer be borne by the realm. At Storm's End Aenys I's last surviving son, Prince Jaehaerys, put forth his claim to the throne, supported by Lord Rogar Baratheon, who was named Protector of the Realm and Hand of the King by the prince. Jaehaerys had two dragons on his side, his own mount Vermithor and his sister's mount Silverwing, against Maegor's Balerion. Grand Maester Benifer secretly escaped on a ship to Pentos. Ser Olyver Bracken and Ser Raymund Mallery, two of Maegor's Kingsguard, also deserted him. Lord Daemon Velaryon, the admiral of the royal fleet, and brother of Alyssa Velaryon was the first of the great lords to forsake Maegor, taking the royal fleet with him, and many other lords followed his example. The great houses of Lannister, Tyrell, and Arryn came out against Maegor and in the riverlands House Tully gave support to Septon Moon and Ser Joffrey Doggett, the leaders of the Poor Fellows.
Maegor called his banners in response, but few answered, giving Maegor an army of barely four thousand soldiers. Despite this, Maegor refused to surrender. At the end of the war council, Maegor remained behind alone in the throne room to brood. He was found dead the next morning by Queen Elinor, seated on the Iron Throne with his robes covered in blood and his wrists slashed. A spike from one of the swords on the throne behind him was impaled through the back of his neck. How Maegor died was never discovered. Some say he had been killed by Queen Elinor, others that he had been killed by a knight of his own Kingsguard. Yet others say he had been killed by a builder who escaped the slaughter three years earlier and desired revenge, and many believe that Maegor had been killed by the throne itself. Others believe that Maegor killed himself by opening his wrists on the blades of the Iron Throne.

The fate of Maegor’s loyal supporters.

Owen Bush was a knight of the Kingsguard during the reign of King Maegor I Targaryen. When Maegor suspected Queen Tyanna of the Tower of betrayal, he had Owen and his sworn brother, Ser Maladon Moore, bring her to the dungeons, where she confessed.
Maegor the Cruel gradually lost political support, resulting in a rival threat in his nephew, Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen. Two of his Kingsguard defected to Jaehaerys, and Maegor lost a third guard when Owen was found dead outside a brothel in 48 AC, his member cut off and stuffed in his mouth.
Maladon Moore was a knight from House Moore and a member of the Kingsguard during the reign of King Maegor I Targaryen. When the king suspected Queen Tyanna of the Tower of treason, Maladon and Owen were dispatched to seize the queen and deliver her to the dungeons, where Maegor was said to have slain her while Maladon was present.
After Maegor died in 48 AC and his nephew King Jaehaerys I Targaryen took the Iron Throne, Maladon was accused of being involved in the death of Queen Ceryse, allegedly restraining her when Ser Owen accidentally killed her. Maladon denied these charges, insisting she died of "shrewishness". While the charges were never proven, Maladon lost his head for his involvement in Queen Tyanna's death, of which he was guilty.
When Queen Tyanna of the Tower admitted to poisoning Queen Alys Harroway during her pregnancy, Tyanna promised the same would happen to Elinor. Tyanna was proven correct when Elinor gave birth to a stillborn abomination said to have been born eyeless and with small wings. Elinor was one of the two wives who survived the king, the other being Queen Rhaena Targaryen.
After King Maegor's death, Lord Daemon Velaryon proposed that King Jaehaerys I Targaryen marry Queen Elinor to reconcile with Maegor's supporters when a bride was being considered for the king, but nothing came of the proposal. After Jaehaerys's ascent, Elinor departed King's Landing dressed in the robes of a penitent. She visited her two elder sons at the Eyrie and Highgarden before retiring to her father's seat at the Three Towers with her youngest son.
Later, King Jaehaerys commanded Elinor to go forth and spread his Doctrine of Exceptionalism to the peoples of the Seven Kingdoms, as well as the goodness of Jaehaerys and Alysanne, becoming one of the Seven Speakers. Her queenly raiment became shabbier and more threadbare each day, and she eventually gave up all claims to nobility, becoming Mother Elinor at the great motherhouse in Lannisport.
House Rosby was one of the first houses to yield peacefully to House Targaryen during Aegon's Conquest, surrendering to Rhaenys Targaryen and Meraxes. The Rosby lands became part of the crownlands surrounding King's Landing. Lord Jon Rosby was named Warden of the Sands by King Aegon I Targaryen during the First Dornish War, but Jon was killed in the Defenestration of Sunspear.
Ser Rayford Rosby defended King Maegor I Targaryen during his trial of seven, but Rayford was slain during the fighting. Lord Rosby remained loyal to the king even as his downfall became certain, and was one of the last to see the king alive. In the chaos that followed the discovery of Maegor's body, Lord Rosby drank a cup of hemlock to join his king in death. His young son received forgiveness from King Jaehaerys I Targaryen at Dragonstone.
In 47 AC, King Maegor was dealing with the issue of his lack of heirs, despite having already married three women. Lord Daemon Velaryon, Rhaena's uncle and a member of Maegor's small council, advised Maegor to wed Rhaena, to unite their claims and prevent new rebellions, and to gain her as a hostage against any potential schemes of Dowager Queen Alyssa. Later that year, Maegor summoned Rhaena to King's Landing, and she did not defy him. At the Red Keep, Maegor married Rhaena in a triple ceremony, together with Elinor Costayne and Jeyne Westerling. As the three women were all widows of men Maegor had killed, they became known as the "Black Brides". Immediately following the wedding, Maegor declared Rhaena's elder daughter Aerea as his heir until he had sons of his own, while disinheriting Rhaena's youngest brother Jaehaerys in the same decree.
After Maegor’s death, discussion arose as to who had the better claim to the Iron Throne. There were some who suggested that Rhaena's claim, as the firstborn child of King Aenys I Targaryen and Queen Alyssa Velaryon, was the strongest. Her gender argued against her, however, and Rhaena herself had come to loathe King's Landing and its court. The claims of her daughters were argued for as well. If Maegor was to be considered a usurper, the true king would have been Rhaena's first husband, Aegon, who had claimed the throne before Jaehaerys had. As such, some suggested the throne should pass to one of his daughters by Rhaena, Aerea or Rhaella.
As time passed, Rhaena began to resent the fact that her claim to the throne, and that of her daughters, had been dismissed in favor of Jaehaerys, to whom she began to refer as "my baby brother". In addition, Rhaena begrudged her mother for promoting Jaehaerys's claim over her own.
Ser Walton Towers was granted Harrenhal by King Maegor I Targaryen in 44 AC after winning a melee in Lord Harroway's Town, but Walton died soon after from his wounds. Harrenhal thus passed to his eldest son. Lord Jordan remained loyal to Maegor during the king's wars, and Lord Rosby were the last to see the king alive before Maegor's death on the Iron Throne. Along with Lords Darklyn and Staunton, Jordan yielded the Red Keep to Prince Jaehaerys, Princess Rhaena, and Princess Alysanne Targaryen. The three lords were sent to the black cells, but were eventually pardoned by King Jaehaerys I after surrendering some of their land.
Jordan eventually died of a chest congestion. Harrenhal passed to Jordan's last surviving son, Maegor Towers, as Jordan's older sons had all died fighting for King Maegor.
Maegor's father, Lord Jordan Towers, was one of the last lords of the Seven Kingdoms who remained loyal to King Maegor I Targaryen. All of Jordan's sons died fighting in the king's wars, with the exception of young Maegor.
Maegor became Lord Towers after the death of his father due to a chest congestion. When King Jaehaerys I Targaryen began a royal progress in 53 AC to celebrate the new year, his first stop was to see the new Lord of Harrenhal, then only nine years of age.
Maegor was an impoverished lord who resided in the Tower of Dread with only a cook and three men-at-arms. Since the rest of Harrenhal was empty, King Jaehaerys settled his widowed sister, Rhaena Targaryen, in the Widow's Tower in 56 AC. Maegor and Rhaena eventually became friends, and she cared for his servants after Maegor passed away in 61 AC. Harrenhal was granted to House Strong after Rhaena passed away in 73 AC.
Maegor was sickly and poor.
Socrates speaks his last words to Crito: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt". Asclepius was the Greek god for curing illness, and it is likely that Socrates' last words were implied to mean that death is the cure, and freedom of the soul from the body.
Asclepius, Greco-Roman god of medicine, son of Apollo (god of healing, truth, and prophecy) and the mortal princess Coronis. The Centaur Chiron taught him the art of healing. At length Zeus (the king of the gods), afraid that Asclepius might render all men immortal, slew him with a thunderbolt.
Zeus saw Asclepius & his medical skills as a threat to the eternal division between humanity & the gods. Asclepius met a tragic end when he was killed by a thunderbolt thrown by Zeus.
Socrates ultimately does not fear death because of his innocence, he believes that death is not to be feared because it may be one of the greatest blessings of the soul.
The reasons for Socrates not escaping when he had the chance the night prior; are made explicit before the Laws make their speech. Because escape defies the will of the Athenians, it requires stealth and bribery, shameful practices that are unjustified in the current situation.
Socrates Feared Democracies Would Elect Demagogues. The term arose in Greece in the fifth century BCE, right around Socrates's time, and is often used negatively. Socrates himself was extremely worried that the democratic format would give rise to a demagoguery.
Demagogues are political leaders who seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.
Modern demagogues include Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Joseph McCarthy, all of whom built mass followings the same way that Cleon did: by exciting the passions of the masses against customs and norms of the aristocratic elites of their times.

This is why Maegor and Socrates died. They challenged authority and lost. They were silenced by the powerful lords and by the elected council of Athens whom were given power by the common people.
They were “heroes”.
“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.
George R.R. Martin.
King Maegor had married all his brides and gave them Queenly status.

Jeyne was married to Lord Alyn Tarbeck. She was widowed when Alyn died during the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye in 43 AC. Jeyne was pregnant when her husband died, and gave him a posthumous son a few months later.

In 47 AC, Jeyne was being courted by a younger son of Lyman Lannister, the Lord of Casterly Rock, when King Maegor I Targaryen sent for her to be wed to him. She married Maegor in a ceremony at King's Landing, along with Lady Elinor Costayne and Princess Rhaena Targaryen. As all three women had been widowed due to Maegor, they became known as the "Black Brides". The stories told of the wedding night claim that Jeyne was given a fertility potion by Queen Tyanna of the Tower, and either drank it, or threw it in Tyanna's face. After the wedding, Queen Jeyne's son was confirmed as Lord of Tarbeck Hall, and sent to Casterly Rock to be raised as a ward of Lyman Lannister.

Lord Edwell Celtigar, the Hand of the King, announced half a year after the wedding that Queen Jeyne was pregnant, and Queen Elinor's pregnancy was announced shortly afterwards. Maegor, joyful, showered both his wives with gifts and honors, and granted new lands and offices to their fathers, brothers, and uncles. Unfortunately, Jeyne's labor began three months early, and she gave birth to a stillborn child, monstrous, lacking arms and legs but possessing both male and female genitalia. Jeyne herself died soon after.

In 48 AC, Tyanna of the Tower confessed to having poisoned Jeyne's child in the womb.
This is all on the awoiaf wiki.
George is a better writer than we’ve given him credit for.
Please feel free to discuss and ask questions.

This is all from the Internet. A click away from any phone.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought.
An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre.
Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem. Socrates was a polarizing figure in Athenian society. In 399 BC, he was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death. He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.
There were four charges that were brought against Socrates. They were that he argued the weaker claim over the stronger claim, that he argue the physical over the metaphysical, that he was against the gods and that he was corrupting the youth.
Socrates was found guilty by a jury of 501 Athenians and was sentenced to drink a deadly poison, named hemlock. Many scholars have argued that the charges against Socrates were politically motivated and have understood his trial and conviction as an attack upon freedom of speech and an indictment of democracy.

The Last Moments of Maegor’s Reign, losing against a misogynistic society led by petty and ambitious nobles and against the Faith of the Seven, a religion that enforces gender roles and inequality between men and women.

By 48 AC Maegor's tyranny could no longer be borne by the realm. At Storm's End Aenys I's last surviving son, Prince Jaehaerys, put forth his claim to the throne, supported by Lord Rogar Baratheon, who was named Protector of the Realm and Hand of the King by the prince. Jaehaerys had two dragons on his side, his own mount Vermithor and his sister's mount Silverwing, against Maegor's Balerion. Learning of her brother's claim, Queen Rhaena Targaryen fled from Maegor in the night, escaping on her dragon Dreamfyre with the Valyrian blade Blackfyre, and her daughter, Princess Aerea, adding a third dragon to her brothers cause. Lord Edwell Celtigar resigned his position as Hand and returned to Claw Isle and Grand Maester Benifer secretly escaped on a ship to Pentos. Ser Olyver Bracken and Ser Raymund Mallery, two of Maegor's Kingsguard, also deserted him. Lord Daemon Velaryon, the admiral of the royal fleet, was the first of the great lords to forsake Maegor, taking the royal fleet with him, and many other lords followed his example. The great houses of Lannister, Tyrell, and Arryn came out against Maegor and in the riverlands House Tully gave support to Septon Moon and Ser Joffrey Doggett, the leaders of the Poor Fellows.
Maegor called his banners in response, but few answered, giving Maegor an army of barely four thousand soldiers. Despite this, Maegor refused to surrender. At the end of the war council, Maegor remained behind alone in the throne room to brood. He was found dead the next morning by Queen Elinor, seated on the Iron Throne with his robes covered in blood and his wrists slashed. A spike from one of the swords on the throne behind him was impaled through the back of his neck. How Maegor died was never discovered. Some say he had been killed by Queen Elinor, others that he had been killed by a knight of his own Kingsguard. Yet others say he had been killed by a builder who escaped the slaughter three years earlier and desired revenge, and many believe that Maegor had been killed by the throne itself. Others believe that Maegor killed himself by opening his wrists on the blades of the Iron Throne.

The fate of Maegor’s loyal supporters.

Owen Bush was a knight of the Kingsguard during the reign of King Maegor I Targaryen. When Maegor suspected Queen Tyanna of the Tower of betrayal, he had Owen and his sworn brother, Ser Maladon Moore, bring her to the dungeons, where she confessed.
Maegor the Cruel gradually lost political support, resulting in a rival threat in his nephew, Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen. Two of his Kingsguard defected to Jaehaerys, and Maegor lost a third guard when Owen was found dead outside a brothel in 48 AC, his member cut off and stuffed in his mouth.
Maladon Moore was a knight from House Moore and a member of the Kingsguard during the reign of King Maegor I Targaryen. When the king suspected Queen Tyanna of the Tower of treason, Maladon and Owen were dispatched to seize the queen and deliver her to the dungeons, where Maegor was said to have slain her while Maladon was present.
After Maegor died in 48 AC and his nephew King Jaehaerys I Targaryen took the Iron Throne, Maladon was accused of being involved in the death of Queen Ceryse, allegedly restraining her when Ser Owen accidentally killed her. Maladon denied these charges, insisting she died of "shrewishness". While the charges were never proven, Maladon lost his head for his involvement in Queen Tyanna's death, of which he was guilty.
When Queen Tyanna of the Tower admitted to poisoning Queen Alys Harroway during her pregnancy, Tyanna promised the same would happen to Elinor. Tyanna was proven correct when Elinor gave birth to a stillborn abomination said to have been born eyeless and with small wings. Elinor was one of the two wives who survived the king, the other being Queen Rhaena Targaryen.
After King Maegor's death, Lord Daemon Velaryon proposed that King Jaehaerys I Targaryen marry Queen Elinor to reconcile with Maegor's supporters when a bride was being considered for the king, but nothing came of the proposal. After Jaehaerys's ascent, Elinor departed King's Landing dressed in the robes of a penitent. She visited her two elder sons at the Eyrie and Highgarden before retiring to her father's seat at the Three Towers with her youngest son.
Later, King Jaehaerys commanded Elinor to go forth and spread his Doctrine of Exceptionalism to the peoples of the Seven Kingdoms, as well as the goodness of Jaehaerys and Alysanne, becoming one of the Seven Speakers. Her queenly raiment became shabbier and more threadbare each day, and she eventually gave up all claims to nobility, becoming Mother Elinor at the great motherhouse in Lannisport.
House Rosby was one of the first houses to yield peacefully to House Targaryen during Aegon's Conquest, surrendering to Rhaenys Targaryen and Meraxes. The Rosby lands became part of the crownlands surrounding King's Landing. Lord Jon Rosby was named Warden of the Sands by King Aegon I Targaryen during the First Dornish War, but Jon was killed in the Defenestration of Sunspear.
Ser Rayford Rosby defended King Maegor I Targaryen during his trial of seven, but Rayford was slain during the fighting. Lord Rosby remained loyal to the king even as his downfall became certain, and was one of the last to see the king alive. In the chaos that followed the discovery of Maegor's body, Lord Rosby drank a cup of hemlock to join his king in death. His young son received forgiveness from King Jaehaerys I Targaryen at Dragonstone.
In 47 AC, King Maegor was dealing with the issue of his lack of heirs, despite having already married three women. Lord Daemon Velaryon, Rhaena's uncle and a member of Maegor's small council, advised Maegor to wed Rhaena, to unite their claims and prevent new rebellions, and to gain her as a hostage against any potential schemes of Dowager Queen Alyssa. Later that year, Maegor summoned Rhaena to King's Landing, and she did not defy him. At the Red Keep, Maegor married Rhaena in a triple ceremony, together with Elinor Costayne and Jeyne Westerling. As the three women were all widows of men Maegor had killed, they became known as the "Black Brides". Immediately following the wedding, Maegor declared Rhaena's elder daughter Aerea as his heir until he had sons of his own, while disinheriting Rhaena's youngest brother Jaehaerys in the same decree.
After Maegor’s death, discussion arose as to who had the better claim to the Iron Throne. There were some who suggested that Rhaena's claim, as the firstborn child of King Aenys I Targaryen and Queen Alyssa Velaryon, was the strongest. Her gender argued against her, however, and Rhaena herself had come to loathe King's Landing and its court. The claims of her daughters were argued for as well. If Maegor was to be considered a usurper, the true king would have been Rhaena's first husband, Aegon, who had claimed the throne before Jaehaerys had. As such, some suggested the throne should pass to one of his daughters by Rhaena, Aerea or Rhaella.
As time passed, Rhaena began to resent the fact that her claim to the throne, and that of her daughters, had been dismissed in favor of Jaehaerys, to whom she began to refer as "my baby brother". In addition, Rhaena begrudged her mother for promoting Jaehaerys's claim over her own.
Ser Walton Towers was granted Harrenhal by King Maegor I Targaryen in 44 AC after winning a melee in Lord Harroway's Town, but Walton died soon after from his wounds. Harrenhal thus passed to his eldest son. Lord Jordan remained loyal to Maegor during the king's wars, and Lord Rosby were the last to see the king alive before Maegor's death on the Iron Throne. Along with Lords Darklyn and Staunton, Jordan yielded the Red Keep to Prince Jaehaerys, Princess Rhaena, and Princess Alysanne Targaryen. The three lords were sent to the black cells, but were eventually pardoned by King Jaehaerys I after surrendering some of their land.
Jordan eventually died of a chest congestion. Harrenhal passed to Jordan's last surviving son, Maegor Towers, as Jordan's older sons had all died fighting for King Maegor.
Maegor's father, Lord Jordan Towers, was one of the last lords of the Seven Kingdoms who remained loyal to King Maegor I Targaryen. All of Jordan's sons died fighting in the king's wars, with the exception of young Maegor.
Maegor became Lord Towers after the death of his father due to a chest congestion. When King Jaehaerys I Targaryen began a royal progress in 53 AC to celebrate the new year, his first stop was to see the new Lord of Harrenhal, then only nine years of age.
Maegor was an impoverished lord who resided in the Tower of Dread with only a cook and three men-at-arms. Since the rest of Harrenhal was empty, King Jaehaerys settled his widowed sister, Rhaena Targaryen, in the Widow's Tower in 56 AC. Maegor and Rhaena eventually became friends, and she cared for his servants after Maegor passed away in 61 AC. Harrenhal was granted to House Strong after Rhaena passed away in 73 AC.
Maegor was sickly and poor.
Socrates speaks his last words to Crito: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt". Asclepius was the Greek god for curing illness, and it is likely that Socrates' last words were implied to mean that death is the cure, and freedom of the soul from the body.
Asclepius, Greco-Roman god of medicine, son of Apollo (god of healing, truth, and prophecy) and the mortal princess Coronis. The Centaur Chiron taught him the art of healing. At length Zeus (the king of the gods), afraid that Asclepius might render all men immortal, slew him with a thunderbolt.
Zeus saw Asclepius & his medical skills as a threat to the eternal division between humanity & the gods. Asclepius met a tragic end when he was killed by a thunderbolt thrown by Zeus.
Socrates ultimately does not fear death because of his innocence, he believes that death is not feared because it may be one of the greatest blessings of the soul.
The reasons for Socrates not escaping when he had the chance the night prior; are made explicit before the Laws make their speech. Because escape defies the will of the Athenians, it requires stealth and bribery, shameful practices that are unjustified in the current situation.
Socrates Feared Democracies Would Elect Demagogues. The term arose in Greece in the fifth century BCE, right around Socrates's time, and is often used negatively. Socrates himself was extremely worried that the democratic format would give rise to a demagoguery.
Demagogues are political leaders who seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.
Modern demagogues include Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Joseph McCarthy, all of whom built mass followings the same way that Cleon did: by exciting the passions of the masses against customs and norms of the aristocratic elites of their times.

This is why Maegor and Socrates died. They challenged authority and lost. They were silenced by the powerful lords and by the elected council of Athens whom were given power by the common people.
They were “heroes”.
“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.
George R.R. Martin.
King Maegor had married all his brides and gave them Queenly status.

Jeyne was married to Lord Alyn Tarbeck. She was widowed when Alyn died during the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye in 43 AC. Jeyne was pregnant when her husband died, and gave him a posthumous son a few months later.

In 47 AC, Jeyne was being courted by a younger son of Lyman Lannister, the Lord of Casterly Rock, when King Maegor I Targaryen sent for her to be wed to him. She married Maegor in a ceremony at King's Landing, along with Lady Elinor Costayne and Princess Rhaena Targaryen. As all three women had been widowed due to Maegor, they became known as the "Black Brides". The stories told of the wedding night claim that Jeyne was given a fertility potion by Queen Tyanna of the Tower, and either drank it, or threw it in Tyanna's face. After the wedding, Queen Jeyne's son was confirmed as Lord of Tarbeck Hall, and sent to Casterly Rock to be raised as a ward of Lyman Lannister.

Lord Edwell Celtigar, the Hand of the King, announced half a year after the wedding that Queen Jeyne was pregnant, and Queen Elinor's pregnancy was announced shortly afterwards. Maegor, joyful, showered both his wives with gifts and honors, and granted new lands and offices to their fathers, brothers, and uncles. Unfortunately, Jeyne's labor began three months early, and she gave birth to a stillborn child, monstrous, lacking arms and legs but possessing both male and female genitalia. Jeyne herself died soon after.

In 48 AC, Tyanna of the Tower confessed to having poisoned Jeyne's child in the womb.
This is all on the awoiaf wiki.
George is a better writer than we’ve given him credit for.
At the end of Maegor’s reign, House Baratheon, Lannister, Tyrell and Arryn rebelled against Maegor. Maegor had sent the young son of his fourth wife (Jeyne Westerling) as a ward(hostage) to House Lannister. Then he sent the two eldest sons of his sixth wife (Elinor Costayne) as wards(hostages) to House Tyrell and House Arryn. When the great houses rebelled, Lord Daemon Velaryon, the brother of Alyssa Velaryon, escaped with the Royal Fleet and left King’s Landing.
Maegor called his banners to fight against the threat but they were too few and Elinor Costayne begged him to surrender to save her two eldest sons and the son of the long deceased Jeyne Westerling. He banned her from the council room and refused to surrender and his lords and him and Rhaena made battle plans well into the night.
At the end of the war council, Maegor dismissed everyone and stayed alone in the throne room to brood.
The following morning, Elinor Costayne found the King dead, his wrists slashed and throat impaled on the back of the Iron Throne.
Lord Rosby was one of the last people to see his king alive and drank a cup of hemlock to follow him in death.
Lord Jordan Towers named his last son Maegor and died of a chest conjection after Jaehaerys’ ascension to the Throne.
Elinor Costayne left King’s Landing while donning the clothes of a penitent and eventually renounced all claims to nobility and became the owner of a Motherhouse in Lannisport.
Ser Maladon Moore was executed for his involvement in Queen Tyanna’s death whom had confessed to poisoning King Maegor’s wives.
Queen Rhaena was expelled from King’s Landing and her claim to the Throne was ignored because of her gender.
Ser Owen Bush was found dead in a brothel with his cock stuffed in his mouth.

Disclaimer: I am currently on episode 69 (nice), so please no spoilers.
To be real with you guys, Gertrude herself is a fucking mystery. The more it’s shown about her the less I know about her. The same goes can be said about her murder. I… don’t know who did it. The series throws a lot of evidence to why someone would do it (she was way too deep in this shit) but there’s only a few hints on the murderer, I feel like I am nitpicking and it’s driving me nuts.
However, I am finishing season 2 and I guess this might be the big finale reveal, so I decided to give a shot in the dark and try to guess who did it. Yesterday I ran down a list with each important character and eliminated one by one. There’s only two people that are still on my list, therefore I have two suspects.
Firstly I will start with who didn’t kill Gertrude. I don’t think any of the archivists did it, that includes Jon, Tim, Martin and Sasha/Not Sasha. They weren’t involved with the archives up until Jon got promoted, so I don’t think they have any reason to kill her. The same goes to the cops, Bazira and Daisy, they weren’t even involved with the Institute before they got into this case, so they’re also out.
Also other recurring names such as Simon Fairchild and Agnes are also out because, so far, the series haven’t linked them to Gertrude.
Now to my suspects:
The most recent suspect to show up on my list is Mary Key (Jared Key’s mom) due to her statement on episode 62. My evidences are:

1. Marry happily said that “Big things are coming”. Perhaps Gertrude tried to stop those “big things” and ended up murdered.
   
2. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it seems Mary likes the evil books and even studied one of the books; probably more than one, since her statement was about her first “Lightner” (don’t know how to spell his name). Meanwhile, on episode 66, Jon finds that Gertrude was buying the evil books along with flammable substances, she was likely burning the books like Jared did back on episode 4 (while claiming he was against his mother). So there’s a conflict of interests here.
   
3. Mary is clearly a psychopath and she scares me.
   

I admit tho, that this theory is very weak, because is based of only one episode and a supplemental, also there’s no solid evidence, only speculation.
Other likely suspect is the big boss Elias himself. My evidences are:

1. Based on Jon’s investigation, Gertrude was hiding something from the Institute and Elias was her boss, so she was directly or indirectly hiding something from him. Maybe he found out what she was hiding.
   
2. Based on the Security Tapes, the person who killed her had access to the tunnels. The most likely person to know about said tunnels beforehand is the Head of the Institute.
   
3. He is the only person to know her previously, so he is the most likely to have a reason to kill her, specially if she found something she shouldn’t.
   

The evidence against this theory is that Elias really helps Jon’s investigation. Elias gives him the security footage that leads him to now about the tunnels, he even grants Jon access to the tunnels. That doesn’t add up.
Sorry I couldn’t bring a more solid theory, just two sloppy guesses. When I finish season two I’ll bring my thoughts about it.
Thank you for reading.

Part 1: Bad Blood

• Our story begins with an album called Taylor Swift, an [originally] 11 track album where she sings about six boys: Drew Dunlap (Tim Mcgraw; Our Song), Jordan Alford a.k.a the one Swift will tell her friends 'is gay' (Pictures to Burn),Drew Hardwick (Teardrops on My Guitar; Invisible), some unnamed dude (Cold as You), random crush (Stay Beautiful), and Sam Armstrong (Should've Said No). This album, according to wikipedia, was recorded in 2005 (when she was 15; 16 on December 13th).
• In 2008, Taylor Swift accused Joe Jonas of breaking up with her in a 27 second phone call. Taylor also accused Joe of cheating with Camilla Belle ("She's better known for the things that she does on the mattress"). Jonas had a different story:

Several things I will state with all my heart. I never cheated on a girlfriend. It might make someone feel better to assume or imply I have been unfaithful but it is simply not true. Maybe there were reasons for a breakup. Maybe the heart moved on. Perhaps feelings changed. I am truly saddened that anything would potentially cause you to think less of me. For those who have expressed concern over the '27 second' phone call, I called to discuss feelings with the other person. Those feelings were obviously not well received. I did not end the conversation. Someone else did. Phone calls can only last as long as the person on the other end of the line is willing to talk."

• In 2023, Jonas tells Dax Shepard on his podcast, Armchair Expert, that he and Swift are 'cool' and that he doesn't want beef with the Swifties.
• In late 2023, Taylor Swift inserts herself in Joe's divorce drama (while 'happily' dating Travis Kelce), taking Sophie Turner's side -- a woman Swift hadn't seen in years; Sophie was never part of the girl squad and never had a public dinner with Swift pre-divorce. Post-divorced, Swift is papped having dinner with 3 friends, including Sophie, who have all dated Jonas brothers: Gigi Hadid (Joe) and Selena Gomez (Nick). Oh, and Pat Mahome's wife was there too.
• In 2009, a boy named Lucas Till escapes her wrath by being boring. He claims it went nowhere because they never fought.

Part 2: Battle (Let's Go) Tendency

• In 2009, Taylor Swift (19) dates Taylor Lautner (17). They break up in December. Throughout 2009, Swift had become close with John Mayer (daddy issues)...while she was with Lautner. https://people.com/music/taylor-swift-john-mayer-relationship-timeline/
• Taylor Lautner, after the Taylor break-up, went on to marry...Taylor. Huh. Taylor is oddly close with Taylor and Taylor. I'm sorry, but that's just weird. I sincerely hope it was a PR stunt. Nothing wrong with being cordial to an ex, but being bffs and hiring him in a music video -- an ex who never stops talking about your old relationship decades later and marrying someone with your name -- just seems odd.
• In January 2010, Swift and Mayer become official. After they break up, Swift writes 'Dear John' about Mayer, while he writes 'Paper Dolls' about Swift, accusing her of being '22 girls in 1' and 'unaware of what she's running from.' In retrospect, he read her.
• It is said Cory Monteith, Chord Overstreet, and Zac Efron went on a date with Swift, but luckily for those men nothing came from it. This probably happened sometime between 2009-2011. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and guess it was in the month long breaks between her relationships.

Part 3: Starlight Crusaders

• Swift writes 'Enchanted' about Adam Young after knowing him for 10 minutes.
• Apparently had something with Martin Johnson while making 'Two is Better Than One'.
• In 2010, she dates Jake Gyllenhaal (again, daddy issues) for 3 MONTHS. She would go on the sing about him for 13+ years (see: The Manuscript) and make a short film about him 4 years into her relationship with Joe. It must've been good.
• Swift (21) befriends Conor Kennedy (17) a few weeks after his Mother's suicide. As soon he turned 18 (he was still in High School), they begin dating. Within 5 weeks, Swift's people bought her a property in Conor's neighborhood. Relationship ends October 2012 when Conor understandably freaks the fuck out and realizes he's dating female Patrick Bateman. It's worth noting Swifties consider a 19/20 year old adult to have been groomed by Mayer and Gyllenhaal , but nobody really talks about Conor for some reason.

Part 4: Bejeweled is Untouchable

• From November 2012 to January 2013, Taylor Swift is with Harry Styles. I'm not sure what else to say here, except the relationship must've effected her because she stayed single (publicly) for a whopping 2 years.
• Swift has a very public, 15 month relationship with Calvin Harris. She posts multiple pics of Calvin and herself on IG. She describes her relationship with Calvin as 'magical'. It seems as if she's finally found... the love of her life!!!
• Taylor Swift cheats on Calvin Harris with Tom Hiddleston. They officially start dating in May 2016. Hey, isn't May 2016 when Taylor attended the Met Gala and met Jo...
• On another note, it's stated in TTPD that Swift wanted Matty Healy to swoop in and rescue her from Calvin.

Part 5: Daylight Wind

• Swift and Hiddleston break up in September. The reported reason for their break up? Swift didn't want to go public with him, despite constantly being in IG photos and staged pap pics with the man.
• Swift responded with Getaway Car and mocked him in the Look What You Made Me Do music video. Tom, meanwhile, called Taylor a lovely woman and said they had been in love.

Part 6: (Emma) Stone Ocean (Blue eyes)

• For 6/7 years, Taylor Swift was in a relationship with Joe Alwyn. Despite breaking up with Hiddleston because Swift wanted a low profile relationship, there's a narrative that Swift was upset Alwyn tried to avoid saying too much about Taylor in public.
• It is reported Joe and Taylor break up in April 2023. In May 2023, she is reported to be dating Matty Healy. In June 2023, it is reported she and Matty broke up. People magazine claims it was "always casual" https://people.com/taylor-swift-matty-healy-break-up-split-7508332 (cue Curb Your Enthusiasm theme).
• Cososom paints a narrative that 'the decade had played her and Matty for fools' and that she 'changed lovers (Harris, Hiddleston, Alwyn) to escape him'.......when the fuck was Matty Healy in the picture between 2015-2021? I honestly don't know the lore. Am I missing something? Is this a retcon?
• It is revealed Matty Healy has a small dick, he's terrible in bed, he's a druggy, he has a bad suit. Oh, and he smells like poopy!

Part 7: Mirrorball Run

• August 2023: It is reported Kelce and Swift are hanging out, but sources continue to deny it (probably the same source that claimed Healy and Swift were casual).
• Remember when she broke up with Hiddleston because she didn't want to go public after 5 months of dating?
• Kelce and Swift give two contradictory accounts of how they started dating: in his WSJ interview, he says someone played cupid. In her POTY interview, Swift says she saw him on the podcast.
• E.T. claims "both their parents see an engagement coming sooner than later"
• It is currently May 28th, 2024. Between Eras and Football season, Kelce and Swift have approximately spent 75 days together.

To be continued
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwPWGUhEtP0

PLAYBOY Interview With Conan O'Brien Interview by Kevin Cook For Playboy Magazine February 1998 Part 3
Playboy: Now that you're doing so well do you worry about losing your edge? O'Brien: I fear being a victim of success. It's seductive. You have new choices. "Conan, Sylvester Stallone wants to be on, but we're already booked." My feeling is that I must say no to Stallone. "Sorry, Sly. Bob Denver's on that night.
Playboy: How's your relationship with NBC executives now that the show is a success? O'Brien: Better. But I have not forgotten the bad old days. Let me tell you about one executive. He's no longer with the company. I had him killed. But in our darker days he came to the set one night after we did a great show. I come off after the show and this guy says, "Wow, that was terrible." He thought the show should look like MTV. "Run into the audience and tell jokes. Run up to a guy, have him shout his name, get everybody cheering."
Playboy: You didn't agree apparently. O'Brien: Too much of television is energy with no purpose. People going "Whoo!" But that's just empty energy. That's American Gladiators. I often try to lower the energy, especially when school is out and college kids are here. They're huge fans, they're psyched, but we're a quirky comedy show, not MTV Spring Break.
Playboy: Were you thrilled when the Marv Albert sex case hit the news? O'Brien: Oh man, was I into Marv. I would love to trick you into thinking I'm high-minded, but that story made me think, My God, yes, I'll use this, and this... But it bothered me the way he was publicly vilified. People were getting off on the kinky stuff; they condemned Marv for wearing women's clothing, which isn't a crime.
Playboy: Yet tonight you did a Marv Albert joke. You said Marv had a new job as a mannequin at Victoria's Secret. O'Brien: You can be uncomfortable with it and still use it. Isn't that what guilt is all about?
Playboy: What comedy bits do you regret doing? O'Brien: We did one with a character called Randy the Pyloric Sphincter. Now, the point of the joke is that this is not the sphincter that excrement passes through. The pyloric sphincter is at the top of the digestive tract. It basically keeps acid from going up into the oesophagus.
We had a guy in a sphincter costume and a cowboy hat. He says, "Hi kids, I'm Randy the Pyloric Sphincter. No, not that bad sphincter! When food passes through me, it isn't digested yet." He then proceeds to squeeze foods that look like shit whether they're digested or not. Chocolate. Picture a sphincter exuding a huge chocolate bar. We were grossing people out.
Playboy: So why put Randy on the air? O'Brien: I just loved the fact that he wore a cowboy hat.
Playboy: What sorts of bits do you refuse to do? O'Brien: Arbitrary humor. "Here's the sketch: Conan jumps into a barrel of wheat germ." I'll ask him what the joke is. "It's crazy, that's all."
Look, I was a comedy writer. I've been through this before. If the joke is that there is no joke, the writer gets no paycheck.
Playboy: Jumping into wheat germ sounds like Letterman. O'Brien: My show began with me and everyone involved with the show doing all we could to avoid being anything like Letterman. Which is difficult. He invented a lot of the form. He carved out a big territory. He's the Viking who discovered America, and now I have my little piece of northwestern Canada that I'm trying to claim as my own.
Playboy: So how do you avoid being Dave-like? O'Brien: We have always scrupulously avoided found comedy. You never see me going up and talking to normal Joe on the street. The real word of people, dogs, cabbies -- Letterman is great at that. His genius, I think, is playing with the real world around him. Which is not my forte at all. My idea is more about creating a fake, cartoony world and playing with that.
Playboy: Are you goofy in real life? O'Brien: My private life is boring. I've been with the same woman, Lynn Kaplan, for four years, and there ain't nothing crazy going on. Lynn is a talent booker on our show. We go to my house in Connecticut on weekends. I sit around playing guitar.
Playboy: Gossip columnists have placed you in Manhattan with other women. O'Brien: One of them had me with Courteney Cox. Lisa Kudrow and I did improv together years ago and we went out for a while. Maybe that's why I can now be romantically linked to the entire cast of Friends. I may be thrilled with that, but my girlfriend is one of those people who believes everything they read in the tabloids. She's sitting at the table in Connecticut when she opens a tabloid and says, "What the hell?" There's a big photo of me with Courteney Cox. The story says, "Courteney's moving in with Conan."
Playboy: Did Lynn believe it? O'Brien: No, because the story went on to say, "Conan and Courteney were seen at the Fashion Cafe munching veggie burgers." That sentence ended her faith in tabloids. Lynn knows that I would never (a) go to the Fashion Cafe and (b) eat a veggie burger. I'm an Irish-Catholic kid from Boston; I'll eat red meat until my heart explodes out of my chest.
Playboy: Do you still drive an old Ford Taurus? O'Brien: When I got my five-year contract I moved up. Bought a Range Rover. Now I drive the Range Rover to Connecticut for the weekend, park it and tool around in the Taurus all weekend. I can't let go of that Taurus. It's an extension of my penis.
Playboy: Can you forget about the show on weekends? O'Brien: I drive around playing Jerry Reed tapes, fantasizing that I'm some backwoods character. But even then -- you know, it's probably not an accident that people who do these shows tend to be depressive. You want so badly for it to be right every night, but mounting an hour-long show four times a week -- the pace will kill you. One night I put my fist through a tile wall. Another night, I walked off the stage, pulled an air-conditioning unit out of the wall and kicked it. This stuff I can't explain. Nor can I excuse it. But there may be something maddening about these shows. The pace is... I forget shows we did last week. That's why I can't imagine doing this for 30 years. I bet you could show Johnny Carson footage of how he shrieked as his body was lowered into acid and he's say, "Hmm, don't remember that one."
I saw Jerry Seinfeld at the Emmy Awards. He said he liked the show, then he paused and said, "How do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Do what you do every night for an hour?"
That shocked me. This is Jerry Seinfeld, the master. A man everyone can agree is funny. And I really have no answer.
Playboy: Praise from Seinfeld must cheer you up. O'Brien: (Shaking his head) I worry that we have hit our stride and must be headed for a fall. Because every show has an arc. The Honeymooners had an arc. People forget, but The Honeymooners was mean and depressing. Art Carney wasn't fun and cuddly yet. Even successful shows take time to find their rhythm. Then they get self-indulgent and fuck it up. Look at late Happy Days episodes. They quit shooting on location, Mork keeps visiting, and it's an excuse to spin off new shows.
Playboy: Will you fuck it up, too? O'Brien: Eventually my only consolation may be that I get paid a lot. I'll say, "I know it sucks, but I'm getting $65 million a year!"
Playboy: Letterman said almost exactly that not long ago. When a joke died he admitted it sucked. "But I'm making a fortune!" he said. Do you really worry about losing your edge? O'Brien: I want a living will for my career. I want the people around me to pull the plug when I become a self-parody, an old blowhard like Alan Brady. Remember him, the television star Rob Petrie worked for on the Dick Van Dyke Show? Pompous, over-the-top, over-the-hill. I don't want to be Alan Brady.
Playboy: Letterman paid you an odd compliment. "When I see that show it withers me with exhaustion," he said. O'Brien: That's our new slogan. "Watch Late Night -- We'll wither you." But I think Dave was saying that he knows how hard it is to make a show like this every night.
Playboy: Suppose Leno left The Tonight Show. Would you like to duel Dave at 11:30? O'Brien: Our best slot would be eight A.M.. We have puppets, cartoons, lots of childishness. I think I'm doing an OK late-night show but it's a great kids' show.
Playboy: This from Mr. Hip? O'Brien: No. When someone says this or that sort of comedy is hip and alternative -- "Yes, these are cool people" -- I hate that. Because at the end of the day, funny is funny. People get fooled about me because I went to Harvard. "He's cerebral." But I love Green Acres. I love how Green Acres bends reality.
Playboy: Sounds cerebral. O'Brien: It isn't. In one episode Oliver Douglas has to go to Washington, D.C. His wife says, "Darling, take a picture of the Eiffel Tower." He says, "Lisa, the Eiffel Tower ---" Then Eb comes in. "Mr. Douglas, git me an Eiffel Tower postcard!" Now Oliver is terribly frustrated. He keeps sputtering about Washington, D.C., but nobody listens. At the end, he goes to Washington, looks up, and there's the Eiffel Tower. That is the kind of thing that made me love T.V.
Playboy: As a TV-mad college kid you cooked up scams to meet celebs. O'Brien: I wanted to meet Bill Cosby, so my friends and I offered him some fake award. We took a bowling trophy and called it the Harvard Comedy Award, something like that, and Cosby, thinking it was the Hasty Pudding Award, accepted. So I drive out to meet his private plane. "Over here, Mr. Cosby!" And I chauffeur him in my dad's second hand station wagon. Cosby sits in the backseat, picking old McDonald's wrappers off the floor, and says, "This is about the Hasty Pudding Award?"
"Oh no, nothing like that."
Playboy: You tricked Bill Cosby into letting you drive him around? O'Brien: I didn't realize that one does not pick up a famous person in a 1976 station wagon. They like to fly first-class, to be picked up in a Town Car and put up in a nice hotel. Fortunately I am not directly involved in celebrity care anymore.
Playboy: Did you bring other comics to Harvard? O'Brien: Yes. John Candy's people warned me that John was on the Pritikin diet. They gave me strict dietary instructions. John immediately ran into a bakery on Harvard Square to get pastries. He said they were Pritikin eclairs.
Playboy: You once stole a famous television costume. O'Brien: When Burt Ward visited Harvard there were fliers all over the campus: Burt Ward to Appear With Original Robin Costume (Insured by Lloyd's of London for $500,000). In fact, Burt Ward was said to keep a bunch of them in his car; he'd pass them out to impress girls. Naturally, I wanted to screw with him. A few friends and I attended his speech at the science center. We went dressed as security guards. I said, "Mr. Ward, I've been sent by the dean to safe guard the costume." As if it were the Shroud of Turin. But the guy is humorless. "Yes, very good. That costume is very valuable," he says.
That's when we hit the lights. Which works great in the movies. In the movies the lights go out and suddenly the jewel is gone. In real life, though, what you get is some dimming. You hit the lights and people can see a little less well.
Playboy: Did you grab the costume? O'Brien: We grabbed it and the chase was on. Some Burt Ward admirers -- young Republicans, I guess -- took off after us yelling, "Stop them!" But we escaped in a waiting car. We proceeded to torment Burt Ward for hours on the phone, saying, "This is the Joker, hee-hee-hee. I've got your costume."
Playboy: How did Burt react? O'Brien: Robinlike. He said, "Return it or you will feel my wrath!" Playboy: Burt Ward used to tell reporters he had an IQ of 200. O'Brien: He may be delusional.
Playboy: Were you always starstruck? O'Brien: Stars are fascinating. When I was a writer for Saturday Night Live, Robert Wagner did the show. One day he was sitting offstage, talking on the phone. He had on a camel-hair jacket, silk scarf, and of course his perfectly arranged Robert Wagner hair. "Very good, goodbye," he says, and hangs up. Suddenly his hand shoots up and touches the right side of his head, where the phone receiver may have disturbed a few hairs. At that point you know he has done this smooth move every day since 1948.
Playboy: You seem to prefer goofy celebs -- Jack Lord, William Shatner, Robert Stack. There are photos of Stack and Adam West, TV's Batman, here in your office. Do those guys know you are making fun of them? O'Brien: I'm not. I have a real affection for those men. To me, meeting Andy Griffith is just as interesting as interviewing Allen Ginsberg. I'm interested in Martin Scorsese and Gore Vidal as well as Jaleel White, TV's Urkel.
Playboy: How do Gore Vidal and Urkel compare? O'Brien: I'd say Jaleel White's prose style is not taken as seriously. But the same is true of Vidal's nerd character.
Playboy: As one of the writers on The Simpsons you helped create some memorable characters. O'Brien: What I loved about The Simpsons was that it wasn't a cartoon for kids. A cartoon might look like the friendliest thing in the world, but we were subversive. I loved it when we had Lisa write a patriotic essay in school: "Our country has the strongest, best educational system in the world after Canada, Germany, France, Great Britain..." It was this great sugarcoated cutting remark. I loved her for it.
Playboy: Tell us a Simpsons sercret. O'Brien: When Dan Castellaneta started doing Homer's voice, he was doing Walter Matthau. Like I said, it takes time to find your rhythm.
Playboy: So are you satisfied with your work? O'Brien: Intellectually, yes. The show works. Advertisers like to buy time on it. Young people really like it. But I was a moody, driven, self-critical person before I got this show, and that hasn't changed. It's just that I now have something even more frightening than a Saturday Night Live sketch or a Bart Simpson joke to worry about. I have an hour of comedy broadcast every night. My anxiety has finally met its match.
Playboy: Will you and Lynn get married? O'Brien: The core idea of being a comic, particularly a comic with a talk show, is control. Marriage is a leap of faith, a giving up of control. I'm not sure if I can make that leap.
Playboy: What about kids? O'Brien: What sort of dad would I make? Maybe this job and a normal family life are diametrically opposed. Dave, Jay, Bill Maher, Arsenio -- where are your kids? Jack Paar seemed to have a normal life with a wife and child, but you don't see much of that. And I believe that your kid should be the most important thing in your life. I may not have room, at least not now. I have Pimpbot to think about.
Playboy: Another foul mouthed Late Night character. O'Brien: Half-robot, half-Seventies street pimp. He's got a feathered hat and a metallic voice: "Gotta run my bitches. Run my ho's. I'll cut you." Right now my life revolves around Pimpbot.
Playboy: You need to settle a fashion question. You, Leno and Letterman seldom wear suits off stage. Leno likes flannel shirts, Letterman prefers jeans and sweatshirts. You wear T-shirts. Why wear a suit and tie on the air? O'Brien: There are two schools of thought on that. The Steve Martin approach says that you're putting on a show, so dress up for the people. The George Carlin approach says all that old showbiz stuff is over, this is the new way, so wear a T-shirt. I choose a jacket and tie because that's the uniform people expect talk show hosts to wear. If I came out in a mesh T-shirt and chains it might distract people from the comedy.
Playboy: How would you describe your show? O'Brien: It's a hybrid. If Carson defined the talk show and Letterman was the anti-talk show, where do you go next? That was the question we faced. What we did was make a show that has the visual trappings of the classic Tonight Show -- the desk, the band, the sidekick -- but with everything else perverted. When it works well I'd say my show is one part Carson, one part Charlie Rose and one part Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
Playboy: Do you have any advice for future talk show hosts? O'Brien: You had better love the job. Some hosts don't. You can see it in their eyes. Chevy Chase's talk show -- he did not want to be there. And if that's in your eyes you're finished, because there's another show tomorrow and next week and the week after that. You can't conquer it. You can do two or three or ten good shows in a row and still want to punch a wall when you slip up.
Playboy: Can you ever conquer your repressed childhood? O'Brien: It's always there. I still believe in moral absolutes. Murder, for instance, is wrong, unless it helps the show.
Playboy: Still, talk show hosts have perks most guys can only dream of. O'Brien: It's great to be played over to the desk. You finish your monologue, then the band kicks in as you cross the set. Fortunately, we have a great band. Even when people didn't like anything about the show, they loved the Max Weinberg Seven. The music heightens everything. Now you are more than just a guy in a suit, you're Co-nan O'Bri-en! I think every guy should have that -- if a band played you over to your rental car at the airport, you'd have a cooler day.
Playboy: Is Andy Richter your Ed McMahon? O'Brien: He's Andy. When we were getting started and the network wasn't sure of me, they kept asking, "Who's that Andy guy?" I think we've answered the question. Part of the show's rhythm is my energy played against the quiet steadiness of Andy.
Playboy: Is that rhythm genuine? O'Brien: Yes. Our mentalities mesh. I'm always dissatisfied. He's the guy saying, "Hey, relax. It's good enough." My girlfriend would be happy if I had a bit more of that in me.
Playboy: Who is the guest you can't get? O'Brien: Werner Klemperer. He refuses to revive Colonel Klink, the commandant he played on Hogan's Heroes. Which confuses me. Is he going to come up with another character at this late date -- Werner Klemperer as the aging black man or kung fu fighter? No, he's Colonel Klink.
Playboy: You once said that as a boy you wanted to be like Bob Crane in Hogan's Heroes, the cool guy who "wore a bomber jacket and wised off to Nazis." O'Brien: I asked Werner Klemperer to do some bits as Colonel Klink. He refused. Then a strange thing happened. We're shooting abit on the West Side when Werner Klemperer comes around the corner. Pulling his parka up to his chin, just like Colonel Klink, he walks past our film crew and says, "Hello, Conan. I must say the show is very good lately. Give my best to Andy. Farewell!" It was a cameo appearance in reality. He was there, he was gone. I wanted to shout, "Hey, Werner Klemperer just did a walk-on in my life."
Playboy: Are you losing the boundaries between your life and your job? O'Brien: There are no boundaries. At any minute Werner Klemperer may step in here and give me 30 days in the cooler. It's getting surreal. Just this morning I am going through the lobby downstairs when two girls see me. One girl nudges the other, "Look, it's the guy from Conan O'Brien!" I guess she couldn't quite place me, but she knew which show I was on.
Copyright Playboy Magazine 1998

This is all from the Internet. A click away from any phone.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought.
An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre.
Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem. Socrates was a polarizing figure in Athenian society. In 399 BC, he was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death. He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.
There were four charges that were brought against Socrates. They were that he argued the weaker claim over the stronger claim, that he argue the physical over the metaphysical, that he was against the gods and that he was corrupting the youth.
Socrates was found guilty by a jury of 501 Athenians and was sentenced to drink a deadly poison, named hemlock. Many scholars have argued that the charges against Socrates were politically motivated and have understood his trial and conviction as an attack upon freedom of speech and an indictment of democracy.

The Last Moments of Maegor’s Reign, losing against a misogynistic society led by petty and ambitious nobles and against the Faith of the Seven, a religion that enforces gender roles and inequality between men and women.

By 48 AC Maegor's tyranny could no longer be borne by the realm. At Storm's End Aenys I's last surviving son, Prince Jaehaerys, put forth his claim to the throne, supported by Lord Rogar Baratheon, who was named Protector of the Realm and Hand of the King by the prince. Jaehaerys had two dragons on his side, his own mount Vermithor and his sister's mount Silverwing, against Maegor's Balerion. Learning of her brother's claim, Queen Rhaena Targaryen fled from Maegor in the night, escaping on her dragon Dreamfyre with the Valyrian blade Blackfyre, and her daughter, Princess Aerea, adding a third dragon to her brothers cause. Lord Edwell Celtigar resigned his position as Hand and returned to Claw Isle and Grand Maester Benifer secretly escaped on a ship to Pentos. Ser Olyver Bracken and Ser Raymund Mallery, two of Maegor's Kingsguard, also deserted him. Lord Daemon Velaryon, the admiral of the royal fleet, was the first of the great lords to forsake Maegor, taking the royal fleet with him, and many other lords followed his example. The great houses of Lannister, Tyrell, and Arryn came out against Maegor and in the riverlands House Tully gave support to Septon Moon and Ser Joffrey Doggett, the leaders of the Poor Fellows.
Maegor called his banners in response, but few answered, giving Maegor an army of barely four thousand soldiers. Despite this, Maegor refused to surrender. At the end of the war council, Maegor remained behind alone in the throne room to brood. He was found dead the next morning by Queen Elinor, seated on the Iron Throne with his robes covered in blood and his wrists slashed. A spike from one of the swords on the throne behind him was impaled through the back of his neck. How Maegor died was never discovered. Some say he had been killed by Queen Elinor, others that he had been killed by a knight of his own Kingsguard. Yet others say he had been killed by a builder who escaped the slaughter three years earlier and desired revenge, and many believe that Maegor had been killed by the throne itself. Others believe that Maegor killed himself by opening his wrists on the blades of the Iron Throne.

The fate of Maegor’s loyal supporters.

Owen Bush was a knight of the Kingsguard during the reign of King Maegor I Targaryen. When Maegor suspected Queen Tyanna of the Tower of betrayal, he had Owen and his sworn brother, Ser Maladon Moore, bring her to the dungeons, where she confessed.
Maegor the Cruel gradually lost political support, resulting in a rival threat in his nephew, Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen. Two of his Kingsguard defected to Jaehaerys, and Maegor lost a third guard when Owen was found dead outside a brothel in 48 AC, his member cut off and stuffed in his mouth.
Maladon Moore was a knight from House Moore and a member of the Kingsguard during the reign of King Maegor I Targaryen. When the king suspected Queen Tyanna of the Tower of treason, Maladon and Owen were dispatched to seize the queen and deliver her to the dungeons, where Maegor was said to have slain her while Maladon was present.
After Maegor died in 48 AC and his nephew King Jaehaerys I Targaryen took the Iron Throne, Maladon was accused of being involved in the death of Queen Ceryse, allegedly restraining her when Ser Owen accidentally killed her. Maladon denied these charges, insisting she died of "shrewishness". While the charges were never proven, Maladon lost his head for his involvement in Queen Tyanna's death, of which he was guilty.
When Queen Tyanna of the Tower admitted to poisoning Queen Alys Harroway during her pregnancy, Tyanna promised the same would happen to Elinor. Tyanna was proven correct when Elinor gave birth to a stillborn abomination said to have been born eyeless and with small wings. Elinor was one of the two wives who survived the king, the other being Queen Rhaena Targaryen.
After King Maegor's death, Lord Daemon Velaryon proposed that King Jaehaerys I Targaryen marry Queen Elinor to reconcile with Maegor's supporters when a bride was being considered for the king, but nothing came of the proposal. After Jaehaerys's ascent, Elinor departed King's Landing dressed in the robes of a penitent. She visited her two elder sons at the Eyrie and Highgarden before retiring to her father's seat at the Three Towers with her youngest son.
Later, King Jaehaerys commanded Elinor to go forth and spread his Doctrine of Exceptionalism to the peoples of the Seven Kingdoms, as well as the goodness of Jaehaerys and Alysanne, becoming one of the Seven Speakers. Her queenly raiment became shabbier and more threadbare each day, and she eventually gave up all claims to nobility, becoming Mother Elinor at the great motherhouse in Lannisport.
House Rosby was one of the first houses to yield peacefully to House Targaryen during Aegon's Conquest, surrendering to Rhaenys Targaryen and Meraxes. The Rosby lands became part of the crownlands surrounding King's Landing. Lord Jon Rosby was named Warden of the Sands by King Aegon I Targaryen during the First Dornish War, but Jon was killed in the Defenestration of Sunspear.
Ser Rayford Rosby defended King Maegor I Targaryen during his trial of seven, but Rayford was slain during the fighting. Lord Rosby remained loyal to the king even as his downfall became certain, and was one of the last to see the king alive. In the chaos that followed the discovery of Maegor's body, Lord Rosby drank a cup of hemlock to join his king in death. His young son received forgiveness from King Jaehaerys I Targaryen at Dragonstone.
In 47 AC, King Maegor was dealing with the issue of his lack of heirs, despite having already married three women. Lord Daemon Velaryon, Rhaena's uncle and a member of Maegor's small council, advised Maegor to wed Rhaena, to unite their claims and prevent new rebellions, and to gain her as a hostage against any potential schemes of Dowager Queen Alyssa. Later that year, Maegor summoned Rhaena to King's Landing, and she did not defy him. At the Red Keep, Maegor married Rhaena in a triple ceremony, together with Elinor Costayne and Jeyne Westerling. As the three women were all widows of men Maegor had killed, they became known as the "Black Brides". Immediately following the wedding, Maegor declared Rhaena's elder daughter Aerea as his heir until he had sons of his own, while disinheriting Rhaena's youngest brother Jaehaerys in the same decree.
After Maegor’s death, discussion arose as to who had the better claim to the Iron Throne. There were some who suggested that Rhaena's claim, as the firstborn child of King Aenys I Targaryen and Queen Alyssa Velaryon, was the strongest. Her gender argued against her, however, and Rhaena herself had come to loathe King's Landing and its court. The claims of her daughters were argued for as well. If Maegor was to be considered a usurper, the true king would have been Rhaena's first husband, Aegon, who had claimed the throne before Jaehaerys had. As such, some suggested the throne should pass to one of his daughters by Rhaena, Aerea or Rhaella.
As time passed, Rhaena began to resent the fact that her claim to the throne, and that of her daughters, had been dismissed in favor of Jaehaerys, to whom she began to refer as "my baby brother". In addition, Rhaena begrudged her mother for promoting Jaehaerys's claim over her own.
Ser Walton Towers was granted Harrenhal by King Maegor I Targaryen in 44 AC after winning a melee in Lord Harroway's Town, but Walton died soon after from his wounds. Harrenhal thus passed to his eldest son. Lord Jordan remained loyal to Maegor during the king's wars, and Lord Rosby were the last to see the king alive before Maegor's death on the Iron Throne. Along with Lords Darklyn and Staunton, Jordan yielded the Red Keep to Prince Jaehaerys, Princess Rhaena, and Princess Alysanne Targaryen. The three lords were sent to the black cells, but were eventually pardoned by King Jaehaerys I after surrendering some of their land.
Jordan eventually died of a chest congestion. Harrenhal passed to Jordan's last surviving son, Maegor Towers, as Jordan's older sons had all died fighting for King Maegor.
Maegor's father, Lord Jordan Towers, was one of the last lords of the Seven Kingdoms who remained loyal to King Maegor I Targaryen. All of Jordan's sons died fighting in the king's wars, with the exception of young Maegor.
Maegor became Lord Towers after the death of his father due to a chest congestion. When King Jaehaerys I Targaryen began a royal progress in 53 AC to celebrate the new year, his first stop was to see the new Lord of Harrenhal, then only nine years of age.
Maegor was an impoverished lord who resided in the Tower of Dread with only a cook and three men-at-arms. Since the rest of Harrenhal was empty, King Jaehaerys settled his widowed sister, Rhaena Targaryen, in the Widow's Tower in 56 AC. Maegor and Rhaena eventually became friends, and she cared for his servants after Maegor passed away in 61 AC. Harrenhal was granted to House Strong after Rhaena passed away in 73 AC.
Maegor was sickly and poor.
Socrates speaks his last words to Crito: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt". Asclepius was the Greek god for curing illness, and it is likely that Socrates' last words were implied to mean that death is the cure, and freedom of the soul from the body.
Asclepius, Greco-Roman god of medicine, son of Apollo (god of healing, truth, and prophecy) and the mortal princess Coronis. The Centaur Chiron taught him the art of healing. At length Zeus (the king of the gods), afraid that Asclepius might render all men immortal, slew him with a thunderbolt.
Zeus saw Asclepius & his medical skills as a threat to the eternal division between humanity & the gods. Asclepius met a tragic end when he was killed by a thunderbolt thrown by Zeus.
Socrates ultimately does not fear death because of his innocence, he believes that death is not feared because it may be one of the greatest blessings of the soul.
The reasons for Socrates not escaping when he had the chance the night prior; are made explicit before the Laws make their speech. Because escape defies the will of the Athenians, it requires stealth and bribery, shameful practices that are unjustified in the current situation.
Socrates Feared Democracies Would Elect Demagogues. The term arose in Greece in the fifth century BCE, right around Socrates's time, and is often used negatively. Socrates himself was extremely worried that the democratic format would give rise to a demagoguery.
Demagogues are political leaders who seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.
Modern demagogues include Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Joseph McCarthy, all of whom built mass followings the same way that Cleon did: by exciting the passions of the masses against customs and norms of the aristocratic elites of their times.

This is why Maegor and Socrates died. They challenged authority and lost. They were silenced by the powerful lords and by the elected council of Athens whom were given power by the common people.
They were “heroes”.
“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.
George R.R. Martin.
King Maegor had married all his brides and gave them Queenly status.

Jeyne was married to Lord Alyn Tarbeck. She was widowed when Alyn died during the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye in 43 AC. Jeyne was pregnant when her husband died, and gave him a posthumous son a few months later.

In 47 AC, Jeyne was being courted by a younger son of Lyman Lannister, the Lord of Casterly Rock, when King Maegor I Targaryen sent for her to be wed to him. She married Maegor in a ceremony at King's Landing, along with Lady Elinor Costayne and Princess Rhaena Targaryen. As all three women had been widowed due to Maegor, they became known as the "Black Brides". The stories told of the wedding night claim that Jeyne was given a fertility potion by Queen Tyanna of the Tower, and either drank it, or threw it in Tyanna's face. After the wedding, Queen Jeyne's son was confirmed as Lord of Tarbeck Hall, and sent to Casterly Rock to be raised as a ward of Lyman Lannister.

Lord Edwell Celtigar, the Hand of the King, announced half a year after the wedding that Queen Jeyne was pregnant, and Queen Elinor's pregnancy was announced shortly afterwards. Maegor, joyful, showered both his wives with gifts and honors, and granted new lands and offices to their fathers, brothers, and uncles. Unfortunately, Jeyne's labor began three months early, and she gave birth to a stillborn child, monstrous, lacking arms and legs but possessing both male and female genitalia. Jeyne herself died soon after.

In 48 AC, Tyanna of the Tower confessed to having poisoned Jeyne's child in the womb.
This is all on the awoiaf wiki.
George is a better writer than we’ve given him credit for.

Admissible Testimonials of State of Loc Nation Citizens Victim Impact Statements Cc: Office of Victim and Survivor Rights and Services One of the rights guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the right of a suspect to confront witnesses against him or her. The Crime Victims' Rights Act (CVRA), 18 U.S.C. § 3771, is part of the United States Justice for All Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-405, 118 Stat. 2260 (effective Oct. 30, 2004). • The right to full and timely restitution as provided in law. • The right to proceedings free from unreasonable delay. Based on the evidence presented regarding Captain Willie Lynch Story and Colonel Charles Lynch law, it's evident that generational damage has resulted from broken homes, domestic violence, unbalanced opportunities in education, unfair targeting by authorities, and systemic oppressions. Injustice 1. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." (Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963). 2. Nelson Mandela famously said, "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." (Rivonia Trial Speech, 1964). 3. Harriet Tubman's words resonate: "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me." (Interview with Sarah Bradford, 1865). Children of Generational Kidnapping During the Illegal Transatlantic Slave Trade 1. Frederick Douglass boldly stated, "I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them." (Speech at the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1848). 2. Olaudah Equiano vividly described the horrors of slavery: "The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable." (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789). 3. Sojourner Truth's powerful words echo through time: "I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?" (Ain't I a Woman? Speech, 1851). Racism 1. James Baldwin's poignant reflection encapsulates the Black experience: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time." (Notes of a Native Son, 1955). 2. Malcolm X asserted the rights of African Americans: "We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary." (Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, 1964). 3. Rosa Parks expressed her desire for freedom: "I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would also be free." (Interview with Rosa Parks, 1995). Identifying current victims of injustice, slavery, and racism can be complex due to the ongoing and evolving nature of these issues. However, here are some examples of groups and individuals who have been identified as victims in recent times: Injustice 1. Uyghur Muslims in China: The Uyghur ethnic minority in the Xinjiang region of China faces mass internment, forced labor, and other severe human rights abuses. The Chinese government has been accused of committing cultural genocide against the Uyghurs. 2. Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar: The Rohingya people have faced brutal military crackdowns, leading to widespread displacement, with many fleeing to Bangladesh and other countries. The United Nations has described the actions against them as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. Children of Generational Kidnapping During the Illegal Transatlantic Slave Trade 1. Modern-Day Slavery in Various Countries: Human Trafficking Victims, particularly women and children, are trafficked globally for purposes of forced labor, sexual exploitation, and other forms of modern-day slavery. Countries like India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria have high incidences of human trafficking. 2. Qatar’s Migrant Workers: Migrant workers in Qatar, many from South Asia, have faced exploitative labor conditions while working on infrastructure projects, including those related to the FIFA World Cup. Reports include cases of passport confiscation, non-payment of wages, and unsafe working conditions. Racism 1. African Americans in the United States: African Americans continue to face systemic racism in various aspects of life, including criminal justice, employment, housing, and healthcare. The Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted ongoing police brutality and racial disparities in the justice system. 2. Indigenous Peoples in Various Countries: Indigenous communities worldwide, including in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil, face ongoing discrimination, land dispossession, and marginalization. They often suffer from poorer health outcomes, lower educational attainment, and higher rates of poverty compared to non-Indigenous populations. 3. Romani People in Europe: The Romani people, also known as Roma, face widespread discrimination and social exclusion across Europe. They often live in segregated communities and have limited access to education, employment, and healthcare. Story Corp A nonprofit organization that collects and shares stories from diverse communities: Search the collection of conversations from nearly 700,000 participants, the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. “We Knew We Were the Best.” Reflections from the First Black Marines of Montford Point - StoryCorps Link: StoryCorps - Black Marines Link: StoryCorps - Racism Stories (84 stories on this link) Documentaries on Racism 1. "13th" (2016) - Directed by Ava DuVernay, this documentary examines the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States. 2. "I Am Not Your Negro" (2016) - Directed by Raoul Peck, this documentary is based on James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript "Remember This House." It explores the history of racism in the United States through Baldwin's reminiscences of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. 3. "The Central Park Five" (2012) - Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, this film tells the story of five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989. It highlights issues of racial profiling and 4. "Get Out" (2017) - Directed by Jordan Peele, this horror film uses suspense and satire to address issues of racism and exploitation experienced by African Americans. 5. "The Color Purple" (1985) - Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel by Alice Walker, this film depicts the life and struggles of an African American woman in the early 20th- century South. 6. "Mississippi Burning" (1988) - Directed by Alan Parker, this film is based on the true story of the FBI investigation into the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. 7. "American History X" (1998) - Directed by Tony Kaye, this film examines the life of a former neo-Nazi who tries to prevent his younger brother from following the same path of racism and violence. 8. "The Help" (2011) - Directed by Tate Taylor, this film explores the lives of African American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the Civil Rights Movement. 9. "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962) - Directed by Robert Mulligan and based on Harper Lee's novel, this film tells the story of a lawyer in the Depression-era South who defends a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. 10. "Fruitvale Station" (2013) - Directed by Ryan Coogler, this film is based on the true story of Oscar Grant, a young Black man who was shot by a police officer at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, California. Rev Dr. Christina Clement's Personal Story Rev Dr. Christina Clement's personal journey epitomizes the enduring struggle against systemic oppression. Married high school sweetheart which lead to broken home marred by abusive relationships, she experienced firsthand the consequences of societal neglect and racial discrimination. Despite her resilience, Rev Dr. Clement faced numerous obstacles, from inadequate educational opportunities to the prevalence of crime and violence in her neighborhood. Her name, Christina, was chosen by her mother as a means of circumventing racial bias and discrimination in employment. This poignant decision reflects the pervasive nature of racism and its impact on individuals' opportunities and livelihoods. Even in the face of adversity, Rev Dr. Clement persevered, advocating for justice and equality in her community. Legal Context: Motion of Default Judgment The time frame for a Motion of Default Judgment to be signed and recognized varies depending on the specific circumstances of the case and applicable legal procedures. However, the delay in addressing such motions can serve as further evidence of systemic oppression within the legal system. Despite the clear merits of the case and the rights afforded to victims under the law, bureaucratic hurdles and institutional biases may impede the timely resolution of legal proceedings, perpetuating the cycle of injustice. By amplifying the voices of individuals like Rev Dr. Christina Clement and acknowledging the systemic barriers they face, we affirm our commitment to combating racial discrimination and ensuring equal access to justice for all. There are thousands of victim statements through poetry, court records, song, movies, etc. The pervasive impact of historical injustices continues to haunt our present and jeopardize the future of generations to come. From the enduring legacy of systemic racism to the devastating effects of substance abuse, such as the introduction of fentanyl to our youth, the toll on our society is immeasurable. Considering these challenges, it is imperative to embark on a path of comprehensive restitution and repair. The proposed remedies outlined in both Volume 2 - International Territory and Volume 3 - National Territory of Revealed the Kingdom of Locs Nazirite Vow continues, targeting a population of 1.4 trillion and 4.2 million respectively, are vital steps toward addressing the deep-rooted wounds inflicted upon our communities. Central to this endeavor is the recognition of the State of Loc Nation as a sovereign state country, entrusted with the governance of over 440 electors. Under this framework, the administration, led by President Rev Dr. Christina Clement, is poised to enact transformative change that aligns with the aspirations and needs of its citizens. Crucially, this transformative agenda necessitates a comprehensive overhaul of our existing constitutional framework. By adapting our laws and institutions to better serve the interests of the people of Loc Nation, we can lay the foundation for a more just, equitable, and prosperous society. As we embark on this journey of healing and renewal, let us remain steadfast in our commitment to justice, equality, and the well-being of all members of our community. Together, we can build a brighter future for Loc Nation and pave the way for a more inclusive and harmonious world.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror, by Mizuki Tsujimura
"Lonely Castle in the Mirror" is a genre-savvy portal fantasy about junior high students who get drawn into a mysterious castle when they're supposed to be in school. Kokoro had a terrible experience early in the school year that's made her terrified of facing her classmates, and develops some kind of (psychosomatic?) illness that prevents her from attending either the normal school or a special alternative school for students who need more support. Shortly after this, her bedroom mirror turns into a portal to the castle with six other students who are also not in school during the normal hours. The "Wolf Queen" in charge--an elementary school girl who enjoys allusions to "Little Red Riding Hood"--tells them all that there's a secret key in the castle that can grant one wish, and they have a year to find it and, potentially, use it. Also, if anyone is caught in the castle outside of the 9-5 school day timeframe, they'll all be eaten by a wolf.
So, these painfully shy students have the opportunity to make friends and have a non-terrifying experience with kids their own age, and they all enjoy bonding and playing video games and drinking tea together, and for the most part nobody cares about finding the key, because that would make the castle close and prematurely end their new friendship. For most of the book, the contrived quest stuff doesn't play into it. And then when it does, it kind of lampshades "oh yeah I have to do this on speedrun mode."
There are a lot of takes pointing out that books where "the magic goes away"/"everyone loses their memories"/"we just have to move on with our lives and pretend like the portal fantasy never happened" can be pretty messed up. In this book, however, I couldn't find myself relating to the characters because it felt like a perverse incentives situation. Yes, middle school is an emotionally volatile, turbulent, unpleasant environment full of many immature people. This is a pretty common experience, actually. Kokoro just can't handle it, and as a response, the infinitely patient teacher at the alternative school reassures her mother that she's battling really hard and it's not her fault, she just can't go to school, and then she gets to go through a portal into fantasy world with people who play video games and eat snacks all day...? I understand there's more to it than that, but something has to change about this situation because otherwise this really isn't the message you want to send. (Once we learn about the backgrounds and life situations of some of the other students, I can imagine how it was easier for people like Subaru and Aki to fall through the cracks, but it feels like, eg, Masamune and Ureshino's junior high situation should have had some kind of guidance counselor or adult in the room. The readers' guide in the back of the book describes Kokoro as a "futoko," and I understand this is more pervasive in Japan than elsewhere, but I have a hard time accepting that seventh graders staying home for months on end with no apparent homeschooling or tutoring gets such a shrug.)
The prose didn't really grab me, sometimes it felt awkward ("That day, Fuka apparently enjoyed the chocolates back home, for she faithfully reported to Kokoro that 'they were delicious.'") and there were a several parts with very. short. one. line. paragraphs.

Kokoro tried to convince herself that she hadn't been at home that day. Miori and the others had simply pounded on the door of an empty house, trampled over the patio, gone round and round over outside of the house. But nothing actually happened. Nothing at all. She never was about to be killed. And yet the next day, she said, "I have a stomachache." And she really did. It was no lie. And her mother chimed in: "You do look pale. Are you OK?" And that's when Kokoro stopped going to school.

A few paragraphs later:

Would she be able to protect herself?
The only place she could now go to freely from her bedroom was the castle.
If I'm in the castle, she started to think, then I'll be safe.
Only the castle beyond the mirror could offer her complete protection.

Girl, I know your mental health isn't the greatest, but we're talking about the place where people threatened you with being eaten alive by a wolf. ??? Sorry, my suspension of belief does not extend this far.
There's also a random red herring with a neighbor student whose father has an interest in researching fairy tales, and like, maybe that "real world" location/characters are related in some way to the portal world? No, it's just a fortuitous coincidence that helps Kokoro have access to more Western fairy tale info.
The good news is, about halfway through the characters start developing some genre-savviness and realizing what they have in common, and towards the end, things pick up significantly in terms of how and why some of the arbitrary fairy-tale logic came about. So it definitely sticks the landing in that way.
Bingo: Prologue/Epilogue, Author of Color, Book Club
Promise of the Flame, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl
At the end of "Stewards of the Flame," to which this book is a sequel, our heroes Jesse, Carla, and Peter had hijacked a spaceship and jumped to an uninhabited planet to set up a colony where humans could develop psionic powers free from the medical bureaucracy of Undine. Jesse's hyperspace jump was rushed and not perfectly calculated, so in order to ensure their oxygen supply makes it all the way to planet Maclairn (named after their late founder), the Group had to confront their deepest fear and brave the stasis boxes that had been Chekhov-gunned several times in the last section. As the existence of the sequel implies, the protagonists and most of their comrades survive stasis. But while, in "Stewards," the hyperspace navigation "error"/imperfection sets up the Group's ultimate test, here it casts a long shadow as Jesse keeps wondering, "could we have picked a better landing site if I hadn't screwed it up?"
The early days on Maclairn are a struggle. The first part of the book is a recurring cycle of "should we do things this way or that way? Well, we came here to set up a society fully founded on mind powers, we pretty much have to commit to the bit or else what's the point." Repeat ad infinitum. Later, this broadens somewhat to "we have to have psi powers coexist with modern technology to fulfill Ian [Maclairn]'s dream, otherwise what's the point." There are clear parallels to (Engdahl's older trilogy) "Children of the Star"; that society represents the endpoint if they go down a path of giving up on modern technology--and the burdens of agrarian, high-population-growth societies fall disproportionately on women. If "Stewards" had motifs of baptism, this is more of an Exodus story, with the characters sulking about "why did you bring us out of Undine just to starve in the wilderness, at least there we had enough to eat." "My God, came Carla’s thought, we’re homesick! Homesick for Undine! I never admitted that to myself, it was so foolish, I’d wanted so much to leave . . . I guess I just pushed it down inside, into a place I didn’t dare go. . . ."
The consequences of the hyperspace jump being off are a minor tonal retcon/change in perspective on the events of the first book. A more significant one, to me, involves love triangle dynamics. In "Stewards," we learn that Carla and Peter both previously had spouses who died under the authoritarian Undine government. Fortunately, Jesse shows up just when Carla is ready to love again, and their relationship brings him into the Group and thus enables their escape from Undine. "Promise" adds that Peter has been silently pining for Carla all along, but needed Jesse's starship skills too much to say anything. We're told the Group's adult recruits skew slightly female, but that isn't represented among the main characters, and you're telling me that none of them are Peter's type? All three of them sigh and angst about "oh, we're such great friends, we can't let this love triangle come between us," and at times it feels like it's setting up for a polygamy plotline (they're all highly powerful telepaths, they can't keep secrets from each other!) And then it just...goes nowhere. As in the first book, I can accept that sex is probably great among telepaths; I can't buy that every single person has to have sex in order to fully level up their telepathic sensitivity!
The best parts of "Promise" involve the culture clashes between Jesse, who grew up on Earth; the rest of the adult Group members, from Undine; and the Maclairn-born generation. Undine's environment is so tightly regulated, they don't even have insects or lizards, so the planet's "collective unconsciousness" doesn't have a fear of creepy-crawlies; Jesse's initial revulsion risks "contaminating" the psyche until everyone faces their fear.

“Horror vids involving animal life aren’t permitted on colony worlds,” Peter told him. “Haven’t you ever wondered why starship libraries don’t contain any? Earth has always banned their export as a measure to protect extraterrestrial lifeforms. It’s one of the few government trade regulations I think is wise.” Of course, Jesse realized. The average Earth citizen’s reaction would have been to kill the crawlies—if possible, to exterminate them. That hadn’t occurred to anyone yesterday. And horror vids often portrayed even intelligent aliens as repulsive; what kind of precedent would that set if similar ones were ever encountered?
Traditionally, said the knowledgebase, small farmers had chopped chickens’ heads off with a hatchet. Wringing their necks was said to be more humane, but nobody wanted to experiment on live, squawking chickens despite the specific instructions provided. These warned that the hardest part, in the physical sense, would be catching a grown chicken in the first place—a fact soon borne out by experience, as chickens are not devoid of telepathic sensitivity and the pursuers were unconsciously broadcasting their intent to kill.
Kel, like many of the Group’s other children, had been slow in learning to talk. It had taken awhile before it dawned on the adults that this was because the kids’ telepathic bonds with their parents had been so strongly encouraged that they felt no need to communicate vocally. Speech could not be allowed to die out in a psi-based culture; it was essential not only to reading but to the framing and communication of complex ideas. Now, everyone realized that like the skills for volitional control of the body, telepathic conveyance of concepts, as distinguished from emotions, must wait until the kids were older.

On the other hand, the scope of "this is dangerous, but we must, to commit to the psionic bit" and "well, we've come through a lot of tough situations before, but this time really is the end...jk never mind we got out of it" got repetitive. There was one scene towards the end where it's like "okay, we're almost done, I can see how telepathy might be used to enable a permanent self-sacrifice...nope, we're still going, huh," and even though some of the resolutions were nice callbacks/tying up foreshadowing, it was still a lot.
Like in James P. Hogan's "Voyage to Yesteryear," the kids who were raised outside of Earth and Undine's prejudices are, overall, a great step forward for humankind, but there can be some values dissonance. In both cases, the desire for lots of population growth leads to a much lower age of consent than Earthlings are used to. Justified somewhat more in Maclairn's case; telepathy means almost everyone wouldn't fathom hurting each other and of course sex is consensual, as well as amazing. On the other hand, in both cases, there's no prison infrastructure; if someone is determined to be evil and is posing a grave threat to others, you just have to kill them. "Promise" gets a little more philosophical about the problem of evil--if it's not nature and it's not nurture, what causes it? Free will? Sure, but it seems as if some people are also evil from day one even if their DNA is just fine.
There are a couple shoutouts to Lord of the Rings and Star Trek that fit in nicely. I found "it's just like using the Force, you know, like in that old vid, Star Wars" to be more of a distraction. Similarly, Engdahl's commitment to showing her work ("in the twentieth century on Earth, you know, people experimented with remote viewing!") got to be a distraction. But the exploration of "okay, let's try a rain dance, even if it fails we're learning something and pushing knowledge forward" was a great use of the "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" trope, which is what I come to Engdahl for anyway.
Some people, like Peter, tend to believe in an afterlife; others, like Jesse, are more skeptical. Earth religions don't transfer well to other planets because the interstellar gap is too big for the collective unconsciousness to bridge. Despite this, characters use the word "God" (like in a telepathic context of "Carla . . . oh, God, Carla, answer me!") approximately 144 times. Do you have no one else's name to take in vain???
Criticisms aside, I do think that this is less heavy-handed than "Stewards" and at least as good a starting point!
Bingo: Dreams, Prologues/Epilogues, Self-Published, Survival. One prominent character acquires a physical disability midway through the story. Jesse and Peter's Criminal record on Undine is not very important (since the entire book is set on or around Maclairn), but it becomes more prominent in the last section.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty
Once upon a time (1100s Indian Ocean) there was a notorious nakhudha (pirate captain) named Amina al-Sirafi. Ten years ago, she retired, and now she's a single mom with a bad knee and a leaky roof. However, a wealthy noblewoman who believes her granddaughter has been kidnapped by a Western European would-be sorcerer insists on having Amina rescue her, never mind Amina's own family responsibilities. So Amina has to put the band back together, staying one step ahead of the authorities while getting to the bottom of the mystery.
Amina and her crew are likable rogues. I found this easier to get into than Chakraborty's "City of Brass". That book focused more on a long-term conflict between two factions, neither of whom consistently seem like the "good guys"; maybe that's supposed to be sending a message about RL actually works, but I found it confusing at times. In contrast, the early sections of "Amina" are about tracking down individual allies, from a gay smuggler stuck in a prison in Aden, to a navigator and family man in Mogadishu, while researching the notorious Falco Palamenestra and speculating what he might be up to.
At first, Amina's Muslim identity comes through more in the ways characters talk, and some level of monster-fighting exorcism (like Catholicism in some horror movies), than actual practice. But gradually, we see more of how she's struggled to be a parent in her post-pirate life:

If the criminal past didn’t alert you, I have not always been a very good Muslim. Drinking and missing prayer were among my lesser sins, and if I tried to straighten myself up every year when Ramadan rolled around—a new life of piety easy to imagine while dazed with thirst and caught up in the communal joy of taraweeh—I typically lapsed into my usual behavior by the time the month of Shawwal had ended.
But then Marjana was born. And Asif was . . . lost. And if one of these events made me feel as though I had no right to ever call upon God again, the other filled with me a driving need I could not deny. So I keep my daily prayers, even if I feel unworthy the entire time.

To me, this rang true as a depiction of a complicated, realistic, person of faith.
This is a time and place that I knew very little about. For instance, one plotline involves the island of Socotra, an island off the coast of Somalia which is today part of Yemen. There are caves there with graffiti from sailors going back thousands of years, in Indian and Greek and Ethiopic scripts. This is a real place! I would not have been able to tell you anything about it before reading this book! So Chakraborty's vivid descriptions of places this, and of the diverse cultures and religious backgrounds of pirates who live and work alongside each other, is compelling. There's a danger in this as a reader, though, in that getting too caught up in the "worldbuilding" of the actual world can make it feel like its "foreignness" is what makes it speculative and fantastical, which is obviously inaccurate and beside the point. That's one reason why jumping in at the deep end with an honest-to-goodness sea monster in chapter one might have been a good choice, to remind us that there really are otherworldly things happening.
The themes of "rich people love to jerk poor people around" and "the male gaze sucks" are clear, but there's lots of quippy banter mixed in.

“That was you, was it not? The woman who poisoned the soldiers at the wali’s office, freed a crew of homicidal pirates, set a score of ships on fire, and fled the harbor in the middle of the night?” “I would never confirm such a thing and put you at risk of consorting with criminals. But it was two ships, not a score. I wouldn’t wish to encourage exaggeration.”
Sailing past its ancient breakwater—the stones said to have been set there by giants—you might feel as though you have entered a mythical port of magic from a sailor’s yarn. You would be sorely mistaken. Aden is where magic goes to be crushed by the muhtasib’s weights, and if wonder could be calculated, this city would require an ordinance taxing it.
“She knows you are a pirate?” “I am not a pirate,” Majed huffed. “I am a cartographer with a checkered past.” “Yes. A checkered past of piracy.”

The book contains a few chapters that are "in-universe documentation" or chronicles of the places and people in the main narrative. This is a trope I really enjoy at times. However, in this case, I didn't feel it added much, beyond underscoring the themes that "men feel threatened by powerful women, oh no."
The biggest issue for me was how all the diverse, sympathetic characters just kind of went along with developments that felt more reminiscent of 2020s Tumblr idiolect than 1100s Indian Ocean. How fortuitously convenient! (At least it got a Hugo nom.)
Smaller quibbles: the timeframe with Amina in her forties is appeSaling to the extent that it's a story about a working mother trying to follow her own dreams while also desperately missing her kid. But in order to make that work, the narrative sometimes withholds a lot of important information about the tragedies in Amina's past/her relationship with her child's father until it can be brought forward for dramatic effect, and it made me wonder what a story from the younger Amina's POV would look like without the artificial suspense problem.
More broadly, I felt like the second half's pace wasn't as crisp as the first--there's a dramatic near-death experience, then a bunch of fantastical creatures are introduced in quick succession as if to make up for the "worldbuilding via the actual world" stuff earlier, then we get a very contrived in-universe sequel hook, then we double back to a setting that had already been introduced. Whereas the first part was "we need to go to A to do B and then that gives us a clue that leads us to C."
Who wore it better?

“It is invalid!” I burst out. “Our nikah. It is not permissible for me to marry a non-Muslim.” Raksh frowned. “Is that why the man had me say all those words about God and prophets?” He returned to studying the contract. “Trust me, dear wife, I can be a vast number of things.” “But—but you are not a believer.” “Of course I am. Best to know the competition, yes?”

Compare "Alif the Unseen" (which is one of my favorites and I suspect I probably was harsh on "City of Brass" by comparison):

"But I told him I couldn't marry him even if I wanted to, because I can't marry an unbeliever. And he laughed and said he'd been a believer, 'for a the better part of a thousand years,' I believe were the exact words." "What?" said Alif. "Vikram? Vikram the madman who bites people?" "He might be those things," said the convert hastily, "but did you ever know him to do or say anything really blasphemous?" "I guess not."

Bingo: Alliterative Title, Criminals, Dreams, Reference Materials, Readalong! It's planned to be First in a Series but the sequels aren't out yet. (Statistics from last year just came out and this was the most popular book across all 2023 bingo cards, with ~200 reads!)
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
When I read "Uprooted" and griped about the implausible romance and/or reactive plot, people's reactions were "try Spinning Silver, it's an improvement in some of those ways." And yeah, it is! I was aware that Spinning Silver was set in the same world as Uprooted, ~1700s Eastern Europe but with some fantasy elements, and that it was based on Rumplestiltskin.
But it's a lot more than a simple retelling. "Spinning Silver" teases out the individual trope elements of Rumplestiltskin--a mercenary father trying to get his daughter to marry up, the dead mother looming over the plot, a woman given the impossible task of making gold out of other elements, terrible bargains, aloof and unknowable beings from the fae world, the power of knowing someone's true name, the horror of a mother trading her child to inhuman creatures--and blows them all up, turning them inside-out, and creating something original.
It also does a lot with POV. For the first chunk, we have two young women from a small town who go back and forth telling the stories of their business dealings. But as the book goes on, we start jumping into more and more people's heads, and everyone's voice is very different. Sometimes this can be used for dramatic irony; we hear what character A thinks of their interaction with B, then we jump back and tell the same scene from B's POV and what was going through their head is very different than what A assumes. Once in a while, this makes the plot drag--there's a couple of scenes towards the end where we can't have any suspense about "oh no, will they find what they're looking for" because we've just seen the corresponding scene from another POV, and it would have been more effective to rearrange them--but overall, things are propelled forward much more intriguingly than "Uprooted."
Our POV characters are:

• Miryem, the daughter of the village moneylender. Miryem's family is Jewish, which means her father is one of the few people socially permitted to work as a moneylender--but he's more interested in currying favor with the neighbors than getting his debts repaid, so his family goes hungry. Miryem steps up, grows "cold" and "wintry," and takes on his job, to her parents' horror. But an offhand remark about "look, I can turn silver into gold" (metaphorically, because of, you know, capitalism) inadvertently catches the ear of the "Staryk," monstrous elven raiders who live in a parallel realm.
• Wanda, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic. Miryem is like "he can't pay off his debt because he's drunk everything away, I'll have them repay me by hiring Wanda to assist me with our work, I know this is cold and ruthless but I have to." Then when we see it from Wanda's POV she's like "you're giving me money to be out of the house and away from my father? And you'll even feed me? What an undeserved kindness!" Her reaction to "learning to manipulate numbers and do arithmetic is an amazing kind of magic!" felt cheesy and over-the-top, but the contrast between the literal phrasing of a royal decree and the way she "translates" it was more convincing.
• Irina, the daughter of the duke of Vysnia (Vilnius, Lithuania). Like Wanda, her mother is dead and her father is trying to arrange the most profitable marriage for her, never mind what she wants. When Miryem is compelled to turn magical Staryk silver into gold, she does so by having an acquaintance forge silver jewelry which the duke purchases--so when the gold takes on magical powers in the Staryk world, so does the silver with Irina, and brings her to the attention of a tsar. Despite her cold relationship with her father, she learns a lot from him and is a true politician, adept as anyone at cutting deals to keep her realm safe.
• Stepon, Wanda's younger brother. His narration is very simple and childlike (amazing cold open with "I like goats because I know what they will do.") It's possible he has some kind of sensory/mental health issues, or it's possible he's just eleven and overstimulated by unfamiliar crowds.
• Magreta, Irina's nurse/caretaker. She can be kind and supportive, but her casual antisemitism provides a contrast to how Miryem is treated by the villagers.
• Mirnatius, the tsar. For a while we mostly see him through Irina's POV ("this guy is so full of himself he requires a new outfit every day, that's no way to manage the economy"), but again, his narration provides a very different perspective on what's going on.

So I said the romance was better than "Uprooted," in that we didn't have the implausible "elderly magician berates young woman all the time but also they can't keep their hands off each other." In "Spinning Silver," both {Miryem and the Staryk king} and {Irina and Mirnatius} are paired off without much say-so on anybody's part, it's being manipulated by magic/higher-ups. So the timeframe of the book is mostly them all learning how to tolerate each other, and the romance is kind of left to your imagination in the future era.
The Staryk magic is kind of like...you can see their roads briefly if they make incursions in the human world, but as soon as they've disappeared, you start forgetting them and it really takes effort to remember. This means that if someone, like Miryem, disappears into the Staryk world, she's forgotten almost immediately except for little irregularities that don't seem right. These depictions were well-done. (Except that I was trying to remember if the Staryk were the same as the [jerk, mundane human] aristocrats in "Uprooted." They're not. I think I was half-remembering "Marek," the creepy prince, instead of "Staryk," the winter elves.)
There's a cool liminal space that sets up back-and-forth "communication" between the human and Staryk realms, and again, the multiple POVs are a good framework for this. On the other hand, there are some things, like, why do the Staryk want human gold, that are kind of chalked up to "magic idk" and not completely spelled out; for some of the confrontations at the end, again, it's better not to worry too much about hard magic systems and just go with the vibes. There's also an earlier plot that definitely plays the trope of "the less the audience knows about the plan, the more likely it is to succeed" trope straight.
Especially early on, it can be a very bleak "everyone sucks here" setting. Wanda and Stepon's father is horrific. Irina's father is mercenary and sets her up with Mirnatius, a dandy who abuses animals for fun. Nobody in the village respects Miryem's family, and when she tries to reclaim what she's due, her parents are horrified. The Staryk raid the village and carry off women and demand impossible tasks. There's a lot of "I have my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it" coming from all sides. Even though the plot is moving forward, it's hard to feel like there's anything to root for.
But cracks of light shine through. Miryem's mother, and her mother, defy the "dead moms" trope, and are able to be loving parental figures to Wanda, Stepon, and their brother Sergey. Miryem's grandfather is wise and conscientious, warning her of the risks that some of her choices pose not only to their family but to the Vysnia Jewish community as a whole, but still recognizing she's mature enough to make her own choices. They even make use of a real-world Jewish blessing for the first blossoming of trees in the spring. Even when people are trying to be cold, sometimes they're just too human!
Bingo: Alliterative Title, Under the Surface (not for most of the plot, but there is a secret tunnel that gets use), Multi-POV (and how!)
The Infinite Arena (edited by Terry Carr)
Anthology of SF short stories about sports, stumbled upon while browsing a used bookstore. I like sports and the first one was based on "Casey at the Bat," so okay, sold.
It's from 1977, and the stories were originally published in the 40s-70s timeframe. The sex ratio among writers appears to be nine men, zero women, which is pretty "impressive" considering there are only seven stories. Three of them are installments from series that feature the same recurring character(s), so maybe that explains some of the...paucity? I don't want to say they're "flat" or "shallow" or anything, most of the contemporary "deep" stuff isn't to my taste either, but it feels like there's "no 'there' there" for several of these. In some cases, it's like, "we have to raise the stakes by involving gambling/someone's fate being on the line"; in others, it's looking for parallels between sports and other aspects of life (warfare? weird alien insects?) that provide the impetus for two plots to intertwine.
-Joy in Mudville (Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson)--very impressionable and earnest teddy-bear-like alien species imprints on humans, and immediately become obsessed with baseball. One of the aliens names himself Mighty Casey, but unfortunately, opponents can rattle him by reminding him of how "Casey at the Bat" turned out. Fortunately, what poetry can break, poetry can also fix...

"You untentacled mammal! raged Ush Karuza. "You sslimeless conformation of bored flesh!" Alex had long ago discovered that mankind rarely reacts to insults couched in nonhuman terms. It did not offend him at all to be told that he was slimeless.

-Bullard Reflects (Malcolm Jameson)--Dazzle Dart is a sport played by bouncing light rays around with reflective gear and aiming for a goal at the opponents' end. Like American football, one team is designated on offense at a time, and the other is on defense, but you can "intercept" and score from on defense. In Dazzle Dart, this is worth bonus points. Except instead of normal goals and "turnover" goals being worth one and two points respectively, it's twenty-five and fifty. And you thought Quidditch was silly. (This is from 1941.)
-The Body Builders (Keith Laumer)--the best of the stories, in my opinion, in that it predicts both technological advancement and the social changes that will ensue in a clever way.

So it's a little artificial maybe--but what about the Orggies, riding around in custom-built cars that are nothing but substitute personalities, wearing padded shoulders, contact lenses, hearing aids, false teeth, cosmetics, elevator shoes, rugs to cover their bald domes? If you're going to wear false eyelashes, why not false eyes? Instead of a nose bob, why not bob the whole face? At least a fellow wearing a Servo is honest about it, which is more than you can say for an Orggie doll in a foam-rubber bra--not that Julie needed any help in that department.

-The Great Kladnar Race (Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett)--bored humans on an alien planet try introducing something like horse races that they can bet on. However, the aliens' concepts of sports and competition and betting don't necessarily align with the humans'.
-Mr. Meek Plays Polo (Clifford D. Simak)--guy who has only seen one space polo game in his life somehow accidentally stumbles into being the "expert" space polo coach, oops. Also there are weird alien bugs that are great at computation (a little like "The Circle").
-Sunjammer (Arthur C. Clarke, whose name is spelled wrong on the front cover)--a solar flare interrupts a solar sailboat race. Felt timely given the storm of a few days ago! (I did not get to see the aurora, alas.)
-Run to Starlight (George R. R. Martin)--short and slow but extremely muscular aliens enter an American football league and crush everyone, metaphorically and literally. However, the aliens' concepts of sports and competition don't necessarily align with the humans'. Too bad he never wrote anything else ;)
Bingo: 5+ short stories.

We have a box of correspondence that belonged to a man named Oscar Franz. His wife was named Bertha Rosina (Martin) Franz. They were married in Germany in 1870. They eventually settled in Squirrel, Idaho, but made stops along the way in Louisville, KY, somewhere in Indiana and possibly one other place. I’m linking the ancestry.com page I found for Bertha that I believe is correct as it has Oscar’s name and her place of death as squirrel. - https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KH48-H1bertha-rosina-martin-1845-1923
Son named Otto Franz, married to a Daisy that lived in Shively, KY.
We’d like to find a descendant of Oscar and Bertha to get them this box of their family history. Much of it is from the 1890s.

For most of the past two seasons, Vanni's preferred formation has been the 3-5-2 / 3-4-3 after shifting away from the 4-3-2-1 Christmas tree, which they used throughout 2021-22.
I've watched enough to feel confident in posing the question: why are we married to a system that's so dependent on contributions from the wingbacks and wide attackers without anyone who's above-average in those positions?
Not only did the change to this formation make all of the Whitecaps' wingers redundant, which contributed to them trading or loaning out more direct attackers like Cristian Dajome or Deiber Caicedo, they didn't replace the chance creators (Gressel, and to a lesser extent, Richie Laryea) who could paper over some of their personnel weaknesses. Bovalina is likely the best natural wingback on this roster, and he's played all of 1.5 games. Priso, Martins, and Kreilach are substandard fits for this system.
The result is that you've got a team that relies on Ali Ahmed having too much attacking responsibility, Ryan Raposo and Alessandro Schopf playing ill-fitting roles out wide, Laborda constantly being exposed and dragged out of position, and two other defenders who aren't great at closing down attackers or covering for mistakes.
It's obvious that other teams have figured out that the final ball is usually going to be a hopeful cross for a very isolated Brian White, and that if you can remain compact, you can burn the Whitecaps' overcommitted defenders 1v1 and in transition.
I really hope that they can pick up some quality players to allow for different tactical approaches in the summer, because Vanni's approach isn't working.

ASOIAF Written by George R. R. Martin
Firstly, Jaime and Cersei are twins, and the Lannisters have a strong sense of family loyalty and identity. By being together, Jaime and Cersei maintain the purity and strength of their lineage. They believe that their bond makes them stronger, reinforcing their Lannister identity and pride. Cersei and Jaime having children (and keeping it a secret) ensures that the offspring are fully Lannisters while maintaining their claim to the Iron Throne. This was done because Cersei wanted to manipulate and control her children, as she believed that having her children fathered by someone else could allow them to be used against her. Additionally, having children with Jaime meant her children wouldn't look like their "father," which could further align them with the Lannisters.
The Targaryens’ obsession with purity through incest parallels my theory about the origin of Empyreans in Elden Ring. Just as the Targaryens marry within their family to maintain the purity of their bloodline and their ability to control dragons, Empyreans are the result of similar practices, embodying pure-blooded lineage. This purity grants them special status and power, reinforcing their divine nature. The notion that Empyreans, like Ranni, Miquella, and Malenia, are born from the incestious union of closely related deities aligns with the Targaryens' belief that their incestuous unions preserve their family's unique traits and magical abilities.
Elden Ring World created by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin
Writer George R. R. Martin
Producers George R. R. Martin, Vince Gerardis
“Radagon is Marika” - Radagon’s and Marika’s relationship can be seen as a reflection of their love for themselves, as being with someone who is essentially a mirror image can be a form of self-love. Marika, in particular, sees Radagon as an extension of herself, just as Cersei sees Jaime. During Jamie’s journey, without Cersei, he began to change as he saw the damage Cersei has caused but ultimately he didn’t change enough and went back to Cersei, this could parallel Radagon’s time with Rennala and eventual return to Marika. Marika is the god that Radagon is yet to be; she is the important one with the Elden Ring and has the power to destroy it, while Radagon is powerless. This form of self-love, narcissism, manifests most prominently as the obsession with maintaining a pure lineage.
Malenia’s Remembrance “Miquella and Malenia are both the children of a single god. As such they are both Empyreans, but suffered afflictions from birth.” The “single god” in question here is Radagon and Marika, who produced children which would make Miqeulla and Malenia pure blooded; a pure blooded lineage with an innate power of being an Empyrean, which parallels with the Targaryens dragon riding powers being maintained with incest.
"but suffered afflictions from birth." I believe these afflictions are metaphors for the challenges some Targaryens faced due to their bloodline, such as the "Targaryen Madness." In lore, some of these defects are attributed to curses and magic. However, ultimately, this reflects the real-world practice of incest among royal families to preserve power through pure bloodlines, depicted metaphorically and enhanced by magical elements.
“of a single god” or "single being who is God" Building onto my comparison between Marika, Radagon, Cersei, and Jaime, I believe that not only are Marika and Radagon twins, but twins that fused together in the womb to create a single being with two souls, two spirits, and a single body. Additionally, it’s worth noting that a female fraternal twin is more likely to have twins herself. This could explain why Marika, being a twin, has two sets of twins, Miquella and Malenia, and Morgott and Mohg, which aligns with the hereditary likelihood of hyper-ovulation and producing multiple offspring.
Jon Snow, Rya, and Ranni Snow
Jon, and many others, thought he was the bastard son of Eddard Stark. However, it is later revealed that he is the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen, making him a legitimate heir to the Iron Throne. Jon's hidden lineage is the main cause of his identity crisis. He struggles with his place in the world, torn between his Stark upbringing and his Targaryen lineage. In Rya's case, one side of this duality is her lineage as the daughter of Rykard, representing her true, serpent nature. The other side is her upbringing under Tanith, embodying the human identity she was raised to believe in. This conflict between her inherent lineage and her nurtured identity is a microcosm of the larger themes in Elden Ring and ASOIAF, where characters often struggle between their origins and the roles they are molded into by their environment.
Ranni's lineage, which I believe stems from Marika and Radagon, and the Empyrean condition associated with it, influence her actions and decisions. Her rebellion against her fate, casting away her Great Rune and Empyrean flesh, mirrors Jon’s and Rya's struggle against their imposed identity, as I believe casting away your flesh and Great Rune is symbolic of denying an aspect of yourself, discarding your imposed identity.
Daughters Beyond DNA: Exploring the Broader Meanings of 'Daughter'
Ranni is called "daughter" many times within Elden Ring, but I believe she is not the biological daughter of Rennala. Instead, Ranni is the biological daughter of Marika and Radagon and birthed from the Amber egg Radagon gave to Rennala as a wedding gift.
Throughout Elden Ring's story, there is a pervasive theme of adopted daughters, yet they are referred to as just 'daughter' by the adoptive parent and sometimes even by the adopted daughter herself.
Zorayas' Letter "I wish to set out on a journey. So that one day, I can carry on Mother's work. Be the proud daughter of Tanith of Volcano Manor."
Hewg "An imprisoned monster does not deserve an apprentice, or a daughter."
Gideon "I understand you've been speaking to Nepheli. She is my daughter. I took her in when she lost the guidance of grace."
Gowry "She is one of my dear daughters. But the rotting sickness erodes one's memory.", "O Millicent, my daughter... Who would prune your sapling flesh?", "Millicent, my daughter. Why would you take out the needle?"
Nepheli "...So you know already, do you? Right. It's true. My father cast me out."
How a single mistranslation nearly killed this hidden story
I have done a lot of research and reading to figure this stroy out and one mistranslation almost killed it entirely. Rogier says "Lunar Princess Ranni. One of the children born to King Consort Radagon and his first wife*, Rennala.*" the keyword is "born" this is explicit and would make Ranni Rennala's biological daughter, I was going to drop the theory and admit defeat however I decided to check the Japanese text and was relieved to say the word "born" doesn't appear there. 月の王女ラニ。王配ラダゴンと最初の妻レナラの、子供たちのひとり "Lani, Princess of the Moon. One of the children of Radagon and his first wife, Lenara."

ASOIAF Written by George R. R. Martin
Firstly, Jaime and Cersei are twins, and the Lannisters have a strong sense of family loyalty and identity. By being together, Jaime and Cersei maintain the purity and strength of their lineage. They believe that their bond makes them stronger, reinforcing their Lannister identity and pride. Cersei and Jaime having children (and keeping it a secret) ensures that the offspring are fully Lannisters while maintaining their claim to the Iron Throne. This was done because Cersei wanted to manipulate and control her children, as she believed that having her children fathered by someone else could allow them to be used against her. Additionally, having children with Jaime meant her children wouldn't look like their "father," which could further align them with the Lannisters.
The Targaryens’ obsession with purity through incest parallels my theory about the origin of Empyreans in Elden Ring. Just as the Targaryens marry within their family to maintain the purity of their bloodline and their ability to control dragons, Empyreans are the result of similar practices, embodying pure-blooded lineage. This purity grants them special status and power, reinforcing their divine nature. The notion that Empyreans, like Ranni, Miquella, and Malenia, are born from the incestious union of closely related deities aligns with the Targaryens' belief that their incestuous unions preserve their family's unique traits and magical abilities.
Elden Ring World created by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin
Writer George R. R. Martin
Producers George R. R. Martin, Vince Gerardis
“Radagon is Marika” - Radagon’s and Marika’s relationship can be seen as a reflection of their love for themselves, as being with someone who is essentially a mirror image can be a form of self-love. Marika, in particular, sees Radagon as an extension of herself, just as Cersei sees Jaime. During Jamie’s journey, without Cersei, he began to change as he saw the damage Cersei has caused but ultimately he didn’t change enough and went back to Cersei, this could parallel Radagon’s time with Rennala and eventual return to Marika. Marika is the god that Radagon is yet to be; she is the important one with the Elden Ring and has the power to destroy it, while Radagon is powerless. This form of self-love, narcissism, manifests most prominently as the obsession with maintaining a pure lineage.
Malenia’s Remembrance “Miquella and Malenia are both the children of a single god. As such they are both Empyreans, but suffered afflictions from birth.” The “single god” in question here is Radagon and Marika, who produced children which would make Miqeulla and Malenia pure blooded; a pure blooded lineage with an innate power of being an Empyrean, which parallels with the Targaryens dragon riding powers being maintained with incest.
"but suffered afflictions from birth." I believe these afflictions are metaphors for the challenges some Targaryens faced due to their bloodline, such as the "Targaryen Madness." In lore, some of these defects are attributed to curses and magic. However, ultimately, this reflects the real-world practice of incest among royal families to preserve power through pure bloodlines, depicted metaphorically and enhanced by magical elements.
“of a single god” or "single being who is God" Building onto my comparison between Marika, Radagon, Cersei, and Jaime, I believe that not only are Marika and Radagon twins, but twins that fused together in the womb to create a single being with two souls, two spirits, and a single body. Additionally, it’s worth noting that a female fraternal twin is more likely to have twins herself. This could explain why Marika, being a twin, has two sets of twins, Miquella and Malenia, and Morgott and Mohg, which aligns with the hereditary likelihood of hyper-ovulation and producing multiple offspring.
Jon Snow, Rya, and Ranni Snow
Jon, and many others, thought he was the bastard son of Eddard Stark. However, it is later revealed that he is the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen, making him a legitimate heir to the Iron Throne. Jon's hidden lineage is the main cause of his identity crisis. He struggles with his place in the world, torn between his Stark upbringing and his Targaryen lineage. In Rya's case, one side of this duality is her lineage as the daughter of Rykard, representing her true, serpent nature. The other side is her upbringing under Tanith, embodying the human identity she was raised to believe in. This conflict between her inherent lineage and her nurtured identity is a microcosm of the larger themes in Elden Ring and ASOIAF, where characters often struggle between their origins and the roles they are molded into by their environment.
Ranni's lineage, which I believe stems from Marika and Radagon, and the Empyrean condition associated with it, influence her actions and decisions. Her rebellion against her fate, casting away her Great Rune and Empyrean flesh, mirrors Jon’s and Rya's struggle against their imposed identity, as I believe casting away your flesh and Great Rune is symbolic of denying an aspect of yourself, discarding your imposed identity.
Daughters Beyond DNA: Exploring the Broader Meanings of 'Daughter'
Ranni is called "daughter" many times within Elden Ring, but I believe she is not the biological daughter of Rennala. Instead, Ranni is the biological daughter of Marika and Radagon and birthed from the Amber egg Radagon gave to Rennala as a wedding gift.
Throughout Elden Ring's story, there is a pervasive theme of adopted daughters, yet they are referred to as just 'daughter' by the adoptive parent and sometimes even by the adopted daughter herself.
Zorayas' Letter "I wish to set out on a journey. So that one day, I can carry on Mother's work. Be the proud daughter of Tanith of Volcano Manor."
Hewg "An imprisoned monster does not deserve an apprentice, or a daughter."
Gideon "I understand you've been speaking to Nepheli. She is my daughter. I took her in when she lost the guidance of grace."
Gowry "She is one of my dear daughters. But the rotting sickness erodes one's memory.", "O Millicent, my daughter... Who would prune your sapling flesh?", "Millicent, my daughter. Why would you take out the needle?"
Nepheli "...So you know already, do you? Right. It's true. My father cast me out."
How a single mistranslation nearly killed this hidden story
I have done a lot of research and reading to figure this stroy out and one mistranslation almost killed it entirely. Rogier says "Lunar Princess Ranni. One of the children born to King Consort Radagon and his first wife*, Rennala.*" the keyword is "born" this is explicit and would make Ranni Rennala's biological daughter, I was going to drop the theory and admit defeat however I decided to check the Japanese text and was relieved to say the word "born" doesn't appear there. 月の王女ラニ。王配ラダゴンと最初の妻レナラの、子供たちのひとり "Lani, Princess of the Moon. One of the children of Radagon and his first wife, Lenara."

Shannen Doherty is a guest. She had also just had Tori Spelling on her own podcast, here:
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https://new.reddit.com/BeverlyHills90210/comments/1d07a2z/lets_be_clear_with_shannen_doherty_lets_go_back/
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• Doherty and Spelling just got back from the Steel City Con. It was Doherty’s birthday that weekend. Doherty’s friend flew Doherty and Spelling there on his plane. Doherty has her own pillow on the plane. Her friend Chris flies the plane.
• Doherty was only scheduled to show up on Saturday and Sunday. Some fans were upset that she didn’t show up on Friday. Doherty said at the panel that she was only supposed to show up on Saturday, to clarify to the fans.
• Some agent’s wife wrote things about Doherty, that he didn’t really know about. Doherty thought those type of people had been rooted out. But that maybe there’s more that she needs to haul out of there (and she makes a shotgun cocking noise).
• When Spelling listens to old interviews, she can’t believe the voice she had. She laments at how she was coached to act nice, and didn’t stand up for herself. She has now found her voice.
• They think Priestley’s voice is different now, as well as Brian Austin Green’s. Spelling is jealous that Green can go through puberty on the show, and can come out better. They think Ziering, Garth, and Carteris’ voices sound the same.
• Spelling learned recently that Doherty and Brian Austin Green tried to date, when she was doing Charmed. They tried to kiss and it was awkward, so it didn’t last.
• Spelling had a female parrot, Charlie Bird. She had found the bird in Lahaina and took it home on the plane with her. One day, when Spelling wasn’t there, her bad boyfriend had been blowing smoke onto the bird. When Spelling walked in to her place, she said hi to the bird and went for her normal kiss with the bird. Charlie bit her nose and split it open. There was blood everywhere. She called her boyfriend to take her to the hospital, but he couldn’t, because he was playing a poker game.
• She had to call her parents to take her to the hospital. Her parents wondered why her live in boyfriend couldn’t take her.
• Her parents made her get rid of the bird. She gave it to makeup artist (who did makeup on Beverly Hills, 90210) Nicky Schillace. He had a farm.
• Doherty recalls how this is the like the story parents tell young children about a pet needing more space and going to a farm, except it’s for real.
• Birds live 80+ years and are smart.
• When Spelling was in Maui with Doherty and Doherty’s boyfriend, her fiance proposed by the waterfall. He then did something horrible. He then hung out with the guys the next day. Doherty was so mad, that she took his credit card from the room, went to a boutique, and bought this 12” glass dolphin, for $3,500. The boyfriend came back early. Doherty went to her room to talk to the boyfriend in their room. Something happened and Doherty smashed that dolphin.
• That was the same trip where Spelling came back with Charlie Bird.
• Doherty has always regretted her marriage engagements except for one or two. She said yes because she didn’t want to say no. But has always known that for those other ones, she’d break up soon.
• Doherty says when someone keeps telling you you’re a has-been, washed up, ugly, you start to believe it. And have no confidence. And think that if she left them, who else would want to be with her? She would start to believe it.
• Spelling says both her and Doherty would hang on to their boyfriends for too long.
• Doherty’s mom says “a tiger doesn’t change their stripes”. Doherty wishes she had listened.
• Spelling says all of her boyfriends, except her first husband, has cheated on her. Spelling thinks she learned to accept cheating.
• Doherty has always had a hard line about cheating. She thinks she learned to accept less, though.
• Doherty’s ex Rob Weiss was cool. She also adores her 2nd husband, Rick. Everyone else thinks she should have a problem with him. Rick has now been 15 years sober. He had a heart of gold, and was never abusive. He was just into drugs. Doherty says Rick has changed a lot from when she was married to Rick.
• Doherty: People can change, but not to the degree you want them to.
• Spelling says she’s a cheater too, because that’s how she and Dean met. Doherty says Spelling isn’t a cheater now though, since she didn’t cheat during the 18 years she was married to Dean though.
• Spelling lost her virginity to someone named Ryan. Doherty had worn a Betsy Johnson black floral dress in a cast photo. That was the same dress Spelling had lost her virginity in. Doherty had wanted to borrow that dress. Spelling told her there’s a bloodstain in the back. Doherty still borrowed it. She said she didn’t give a fuck. The dress had red roses. Spelling had gotten it cleaned, but the blood stain wasn’t fully removed. The stain looked like it was part of the rose on the dress.
• Doherty said she loved that dress, that she got one just like it, but in all black.
• Spelling cheated on Ryan with Brian Austin Green. Ryan had been great. When Ryan found out, they broke up.
• After cheating, Spelling would then break up with Brian Austin Green, but not immediately. Green was the first love of her life.
• Doherty says that was teenage infatuation.
• Spelling still gets hot and riled up near Green, even though Green is engaged now.
• Doherty says they all hung out so much, that Spelling couldn’t help but be infatuation with Green.
• Spelling had to go to Doherty’s house to hook up with Green, because she couldn’t do it at her manor.
• Doherty says maybe people can change from when they’re 18 - 21 years old, because those people are learning what’s right and wrong. They’re also caught up in hormones. Doherty says Spelling is not a serial cheater just because she cheated during that age range. Serial cheaters are those that cheat in every relationship. Doherty says people aren’t fully developed in that age range, to know that they should break up before they cheat.
• Spelling tells Doherty that Donna Martin and David SIlver got married at the end of the show. While filming the wedding episode, they were a linked force. By the 10th season, they still had the passion for the show and were willing to step up. They were producers at heart, and bonded over that. They came together as their actual personal selves, not just as characters.
• Spelling says when they did BH90210, Green thought Spelling and himself were just friends, during the early years of Beverly Hills, 90210. Even though she was infatuated with him.
• Doherty says that’s not true, Green knew how Spelling felt about him.
• Doherty thinks Green was in a difficult position, because he was with a producer’s daughter, and working together.
• When filming the wedding episode, Green and Spelling wrote their own vows to each other. They rewrote the scripted vows. During rehearsal, they read the scripted vows. On camera, they wrote their rewritten vows.
• Spelling told Jennie Garth that she thinks she’s in love with Green again, after that wedding episode. Garth said not to go down that road again.
• Recently, Spelling was talking to Green. Green has been supportive of Spelling, and given her inspiring words. Spelling then said to Green, “no one’s broken my heart since you”. There was then a pause, pause, etc. This is the first time she’s said this since 30 years.

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• She then said just kidding. They smiled and went back to talking.
• Doherty says all of their boyfriends have had red flags. But that they themselves had their own red flags. Because of their jobs. Because they didn’t have normal social dynamics with people. Because of the bad press.
• The press hurt bad.
• Doherty says she both had trauma, and an ego.
• Spelling isn’t sure what she wants right now.
• Spelling says it’s difficult to be with a man, and not have the man feel emasculated. Because of all of the wealth and fame the women like herself have.
• Doherty says some men have their own status too. There are men with strong worth ethics, that have achieved success, and have their own professional status.
• It is hard to be with a woman that can get her own reservation anywhere. But, there are men that would take pride in being with such women.
• Doherty says to not look for men that a women can dominate, or for a man that will put a woman down. But a man that will be proud to be with the woman.
• Spelling says it’s hard to find such men. She’s afraid she can’t find such men.
• Doherty says “do you think Keith Urban is emasculated by Nicole Kidman”? He’s a massive country star. She’s one of the most talented actresses of our time. They compliment each other, and feel that they’re equals.
• Spelling has been separated for almost a year. She recently filed for divorce.
• Spelling says it’s ingrained in men’s soles to be providers. Men think they are worthless if they’re not providers.
• Spelling wonders how a man can deal with a woman that’s surrounded by paparazzi.
• Doherty says well maybe she feels a man can be limited by having a 9-5 job. She wants to do stuff in the middle of the afternoon, and feels limited by their career. But if she cares about them, she will adjust and make it work.
• Doherty has been set up recently. She said no at first because she wasn’t ready.
• Then she said no because it was a blind date. She says the guy has to know coming in that she has cancer. The guy has to know coming in that she’s on a time clock.
• Spelling says she proactively makes herself small and tries to sabotage herself.
• Doherty says not to put that thought in mens’ brains. Don’t ever make yourself small for anyone. She’s been telling Spelling that for 30 years. Spelling needs a new list of dos and don’ts.
• Doherty loves waking up next to her dog. Her dog doesn’t kick her or take the covers. The most the dog does is make a circle, and lay back down.
• Spelling hates when she wakes up and men are wrapped around a woman. She was conditioned to believe that that meant he likes her. She would be laying there for hours. She hate sleeping with someone.
• Doherty can’t stand cuddling. She gets hot at night. She always needs A/C and fans. She doesn’t want to be wrapped around like an octopus.
• There’s a certain amount of time for cuddling, then go to your side of the bed.
• Spelling and Doherty say men should listen to their podcasts before dating them.
• Spelling says she’s never really “alone”.
• Spelling thinks she is not good enough if she’s not adored by a man, or doesn’t have his attention. It’s ingrained in her. But she hates that thinking now.
• Doherty says it’s good to be adored by your friends. That’s more important than a partner. There’s no messiness with friends. If they can accept the real you, that’s more important.
• Spelling likes how Doherty’s friend Chris is physically affectionate. He puts her arm around her.
• Doherty says she has some physical affection through that. But for now, sex isn’t the most important thing now. Having a best friend is so much more important.
• Doherty has affection from her exes. She can call them any time of the night, without dating them. She gets what she needs from the most important people from her life, so she doesn’t need it from outside sources.
• Doherty says she grew up in a time when the men were paid the most, they were the quarterbacks, they could do no wrong. No one would listen to women, they were called a bitch. She asked why they made Brenda a dramatic angsty girl. That’s what spawned the I Hate Brenda newsletter.
• Spelling does not like the giggle she used to do. What she did then, is not cute for a 50 year old now.
• Doherty says Spelling has always settled for less than she deserved.
• Doherty tells Spelling that giving an opinion is a god given right. Don’t say sorry for it. Someone might not like her opinion, but oh well, it’s your opinion. It’s valid. Don’t say sorry for your opinion.
• Spelling remembers how Doherty was shamed for her opinions, back in the day. That’s what made Spelling try to be nice and cute.
• Doherty says Spelling’s mom was strong.
• Spelling says what Doherty doesn’t know is that she would say sorry to her dad all the time. Her parents never fought, but her dad would give an opinion, and her mom would say sorry. That got ingrained in her. That she doesn’t have a right to speak.
• Her mom was her dad’s biggest champion.
• On the outside, her mom was smart, savvy, strong. But at home, it was different. That was a mixed message.
• Spelling would say sorry to Dean. He asked why she did that. She then told him her mom did that with her dad.
• Doherty said Spelling likes avoiding confrontation. But giving an opinion isn’t confrontation.

White Men Can't Jump. It has that have-to-hustle feel, not only the "scam people out of their money" sense, but also in the "having to to work energetically" way. So many people need multiple jobs to live in this expensive city, just like Wesley Snipes: "I got lots of jobs. I got the cable thing, I got the roof thing, I got the paint thing, construction is a little slow right now, but basketball is still putting food on the table."
Also Spread with Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche; sleeping around with rich people as a "job." I didn't live that life, but I knew of people who did. More modern would be influencers who "hang out" with rich guys. Or, heck, any pretty person who marries a rich person as more of a business transaction than out of true love, and LA has a ton of pretty people and rich people.
And Rock of Ages. I knew of plenty of people to came to LA to be stars, it not working out for them, and ending up in normal jobs. Also slime balls like Paul Giamatti, although thankfully not too many. And the stars I ran into around town weren't all drugged up like Tom Cruise; they were mostly just normal people. Although the ending where they do become rock stars, while uplifting, was unrealistic. If it stopped halfway through, when their dreams had failed and they're working unglamorous jobs they hate, it would be more honest. Rock of Ages actually felt more like LA to me than La La Land.
Finally, After Hours (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese, isn't set in LA, but it still felt like some of the weirder parts and parties of DTLA you could get into.
Those are a couple of mine. What movies best capture the vibe of Los Angeles to you?

I asked this on AH, because it qas bothering me a lot and I've yet to see more people talking about this, so I thought to ask it here too.
Why are Jaehaerys and Alysanne written so inconsistently as if to manufacture cheap drama?
Jaehaerys is we can't consummate the marriage while Alysanne is so young, weeps for his dying mother who was too old to have kids, and has a heel turn when it comes to Alysanne in her old age? Why take Alysanne's agency away from her? Why not have him be the one who wants to stop having children and her to be the one who want to still give him children (Alyssa similarities)? Why take her agency away? Especially when it's dismissed with an off-hand comment by her. I thought we were getting some conflict. But no.
Why make them retards when it comes to their younger children but not their older ones, rather than flawed parents all across the board? Why is Alysanne a raging feminist with Daenerys when she has sons? I don't get it, it was such a weird take for a woman of her time. I totally agree with her when she went all out on Jaehaerys ass for disinheriting Rhaenys and would've wished to see it actually argued between them about setting dangerous precedents, how Westeros wasn't ready for a Queen, etc.
Like I get that Martin had no idea what to do with their many children, but you don't have to kill off all of them for some of them not have led interesting lives, or to be pushed down the inheritance line as long as Aemon/Baelon's kids survive and keep having kids. A Viserra married into the North, to the heir of House Manderly, later a matron could be a reason why the North would side with Rhaenyra. A Saera living alongside her husband in Westeros and actually taking lovers and being “I take on a passenger only when the ship’s hold is full.” is still a source of shame and family drama. A Daella who lives after Aemma's birth and never has other children, who possibly outlives her own daughter is another interesting take.
Their chapters read more like some American TV show drama rather than two good rulers who have if nothing else than at least some common sense between one another, but not so stellar parents and it all comes down to their weirdly inconsistent characterization.
Is it just me who thinks like this?

Hello people, I found this movie review written by my great-grandfather on his desk, I asked him about it and he just rambled on about how "Many great Hollywood films were inspired by ancient Greek tragedies" and how "Hollywood went down the shitter after Elvis died". Please take this transcription with a grain of salt, as while he is a brilliant man, he's also a brilliant lier.
If anybody remembers this movie or can find anything about it that would be greatly appreciated.
If anybody is wondering, my grandfather is still kicking, he's 104.
Overview:
In the Oedipus trilogy, containing the movies Oedipus Rex (1948), Oedipus at Colonus (1951), Antigone (1952) is commonly regarded as one of the greatest works during the golden age of Hollywood.
The trilogy grossed a total of 340 million in the United States alone, easily doubling that in worldwide markets.
1: Oedipus Rex (1948)
The story was a faithful recreation of the original Oedipus play from ancient Greece, telling the story of a prince whose prophecy was told by the oracle of Delphi that he would kill his father and marry his mother.
A major difference is that the plague of Thebes is replaced with a monsoon.
I've found out that the chance was made due to a weather issue in Greece where they were filming the movie.
The writing was pure genius, able to translate the ancient play into the modern arts while still retaining its charm.
The movie takes its time and really succeeds in conveying emotion in the audience, without feeling cagey.
The ending of the movie was as devastating as technically impressive, the practical effects used to show Oedipus blinding himself or Jocasta’s hanging were like nothing ever seen on film before that point, true technological wonders.
To sum up everything stated so far, Oedipus Rex was a revolutionary film, in both matters of writing and practical effects.
2: Oedipus at colonus (1951)
A beautiful story of redemption, heartbreak, and courage.
This installment in the franchise wasn’t as well received in a critical sense, but did extremely well in general audiences.
It contained cameos from famous actors such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin.
The film is commonly regarded as a low point in the trilogy, despite its popularity.
The incredible soundtrack of the movie is accredited to world-renowned composer and singer, Cole Porter.
Critics have bashed the film as a cheap action flick masquerading as a part of the oedipus trilogy.
During test screenings of the film among different audiences, the film was generally well received, however, when shown to an audience of world war 1 and 2 veterans, a few had panic attacks within the audience due to its excessive violence and massive battle scenes.
The film contains little to no faithfulness to the original play, containing gladiator battles and massive spectacles of battles between the Romans and Carthaginians, an event not to happen until over 100 years after the original play was written.
The movie's poor critical reception is chalked up to the sudden change of director.
The previous director, Michael Phillips had a bout of pneumonia which led to him becoming incapable of directing.
The shoe-in for Michael was one Peter Yukon, who is believed to have blackmailed executives to get the position.
Yet, even with its bashing by the critics, the film had some silver linings.
The film made 80 million dollars at the box office, the highest-grossing film in history at that time.
It also had incredible choreography in fight scenes with camera angles far ahead of its time.
One final feature of the film was its surprisingly good writing, even with its unfaithfulness to the original story and its bad aura on the franchise.
In conclusion of this segment, Oedipus in Ccolonus was a surprisingly good film when going in with an open mind, despite its major flaws.
3: Antigone (1952)
Antigone is sort of a redemption for the trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus was a lower point in the trilogy, and ironically, Antigone would be the one to redeem it
It had a budget of 37 million, the highest budget of any movie ever at the time, which I believed to be put to good use, if not a little over the top.
Frank Sinatra wrote the theme for Oedipus Rex, a song called “you can’t tempt fate” a hidden gem within his discography.
Michael Phillips returned to his role of director for this film, which is the main reason behind its success.
A large part of the film's budget was the starboard cast of actors including the likes of Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and more.
Another attribution to its large budget is its many filming locations, including Hollywood, Italy, Greece, Bavaria, and more.
The writing was pure genius, able to perfectly balance the heavy scenes while still being able to have comedic moments without undermining the message.
Antigone’s death was as devastating as pure genius, painting the story as a battle between differing ideals, rather than right versus wrong.
The retroactive continuity done to make the second movie make sense was absolutely genius, without spoiling too much, Romulus’s inclusion not only made it make sense continuity wise, but also elevated the story and made the B plot just that much more interesting.
While inaccurate to the myth, Creon’s portrayal as a callous, yet logical and fair leader is impressively done, and Kirk Douglas’s incredible playing of the role just added icing to the cake.
Marilyn Monroe’s playing of Antigone was impressive, giving her an opportunity to be more than the sex symbol she is often presented as.
In conclusion, Antigone was the greatest film in the trilogy, and gave it the incredible comeback it deserves.

PowerBook V: Justice
Plot Summary:
Years after escaping the shadows of his father, Tariq St. Patrick has built a successful career as a defense lawyer, striving to protect those who cannot protect themselves. He is married to Effie Morales, who, despite Tariq's lucrative career, continues to chase her ambitions by finding a career in real estate. Their life intersects with Brayden Weston, whose venture into the pharmaceutical industry has pulled him back into the criminal underworld, now more dangerous and corrupt than ever.
Brayden's pharmaceutical company faces legal trouble due to illegal drug distribution orchestrated by his right-hand, Keilani Santos. Keilani, while deeply embedded in Brayden’s operations, is secretly conspiring with Lobos Jr. to overthrow Brayden and claim the empire for herself. As Brayden’s world unravels, he turns to Tariq for help, forcing Tariq to choose between the courtroom and the streets once more.
Character List:

• Tariq St. Patrick: A thriving defense lawyer, determined to protect his family and seek justice within the legal system.
  
• Effie Morales: Tariq’s wife, a real estate mogul with a relentless drive for success, introducing Tariq to Martin Claire.
  
• Brayden Weston: A venture capitalist in the pharmaceutical industry, whose greed and corruption pull him back into the criminal world.
  
• Martin Claire: A sophisticated and charismatic real estate tycoon in his late 40s. Martin has built a vast empire with sharp business acumen and ruthless negotiation skills.
  
• Keilani Santos: Brayden’s manipulative right-hand, working with Lobos Jr. to take down Brayden and seize control.
  
• Luca Sanchez: A ruthless enforcer with a troubled past, used by Lobos Jr. and Keilani to execute their plans, harboring feelings for Keilani.
  
• Sabrina Hart: A formidable lawyer opposing Tariq, eager to bring down Brayden’s corrupt empire.
  
• Felipe Lobos Jr.: The manipulative and sadistic leader of a criminal organization, orchestrating the downfall of Brayden for personal gain.
  
• Lonzo: A local distributor caught in the larger criminal scheme, providing comedic relief while highlighting the human cost of the drug trade.
  
• Diana Tejada: Tariq’s ex and mother of his son, a successful businesswoman with no interest in returning to the criminal life.
  
• Yasmine St. Patrick: Tariq’s estranged sister, who has embraced the drug world, severing ties with her brother.
  

Episode Titles and Descriptions:
Episode 1: "New Dawning” Tariq's stable life is disrupted when Brayden’s legal troubles escalate, forcing him to confront the criminal ties Brayden has maintained. Keilani’s betrayal begins to surface, setting the stage for a conflict that will challenge Tariq’s new principles.
Episode 2: "Old Friend, Bad Enemy” Brayden realizes that Keilani is working against him, but he’s too deeply entangled to escape on his own. Tariq reluctantly agrees to help Brayden, discovering the extent of Keilani’s manipulation and the threat posed by Lobos Jr.
Episode 3: "Law of the Land” As Tariq delves deeper into Brayden’s legal case, he uncovers a conspiracy that ties Brayden’s pharmaceutical business to illegal drug distribution. Keilani and Luca step up their efforts to undermine Brayden, while Lobos Jr. tightens his grip.
Episode 4: “Only Hope” Effie’s real estate dealings introduce Tariq to Martin Claire, whose own interests intersect with Brayden’s business. Tariq must balance his legal responsibilities with the need to protect his family as the situation grows more dangerous.
Themes:

• Redemption and Integrity: Tariq’s struggle to maintain his integrity while dealing with the remnants of his criminal past.
  
• Betrayal and Trust: Brayden’s realization of Keilani’s betrayal and the complexities of trust in their dangerous world.
  
• Family and Loyalty: The impact of Tariq’s decisions on his family, especially his relationship with Yasmine and Effie.
  
• Power and Corruption: Brayden’s descent into corruption and the addicting allure of power that challenges his and Tariq’s morals.
  

Episode One DROPS JUNE 1ST, 2024!

My husband (M30) & I (f28) are married for more than a year and 8 years na magkarelasyon. Last month nanganak ako sa first baby namin, at alam nyo naman kapag kapapanganak lang, nakaranas ng PPD. So ako, na-shock ako sa new chapter ng life namin at medyo malala yung baby blues ko. Lagi ako umiiyak tapos bigla-bigla nalulungkot. So etong asawa ko, after nya ko i-comfort, patatawanin nya. Alam Nyo ba yung famous pic ni Coco Martin na nakalabas yung dila habang may hawak na baril? Lagi nya ginagaya yun. 😭 Tapos kakantahan nya ko ng "family is love" ni Coco.
Tapos out of nowhere bigla nyang gagayahin yung commercial ni Coco tapos sasabihin nya yung part na "yummy" in Coco's version. Put@&#+#)#) tawang-tawa talaga ko. Kasi kuhang-kuha nya. Actually, ganun sya since 1st year namin. Dun nya ko napasagot sa pagiging confident nya and malakas na sense of humor.
Tapos lagi syang may baon na knock-knock jokes. Lagi Kong tinatanong na "daddy hindi ba mauubos yung jokes mo?" Pero itutuloy nya lang. Yung iba, ante daddy jokes na. Matatawa ka na lang kasi ang corny na. 😭
Tapos, di ko malimutan na may buong linggo na hindi sya nagjojoke kasi napanaginipan nya daw ako na nagpapaalam at nakaputi na dress. Tapos ginising nya agad ako. Kwento sya nang kwneto tapos namumula na yung mata nya kakapigil umiyak. Muntik na sana ko na-touch kaso almost a week akong sleep deprived dahil maya nya ko ginigising dahil baka daw hindi na ko humihinga. 🥲 E that time buntis na ko kaya mas lalo naparanoid ang Lolo mo.
After nun, pray hard lang sya tapos nung lumipas na, balik na naman sya sa pagiging normal nya. 🥹

http://www.anthonyflood.com/hakimreflections.htm
I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1919; my family was musical. My grandfather is still the only black man to have conducted his own compositions with the Duluth Symphony Orchestra. But I didn’t get serious about playing until I went to Los Angeles, after my high school graduation (1937) to visit my father. There I met Dexter Gordon, Illinois Jacquet and other fine young players. When I went back to the Mid-West to go to the University of Minnesota (only one year), I also played with Oscar Pettiford’s family band. The whole family, his father, even his sisters, played on several instruments.
In 1938 I went to Peoria to play with Fats Dudley, a 300-pound trumpet player and singer who played and sang like Louis Armstrong. Morris Lane the noted tenor player was also there at that time. He had to leave town not long after I came because of his involvement with a white girl. In 1940 I myself was run out of Kankakee, Illinois, for the same reason—the daughter of the President of Kresge’s Department Store. These were very prejudiced times and places.
Fortunately Chicago was only 50 miles away. I remember playing with many great musicians there, including the young Wilbur Ware and a tenor player named Buster Brown who accompanied himself on sock cymbal with his foot. I went to work with Jesse Miller, a trumpeter who had been with Earl Hines. A. K. Atkinson the arranger who later became A. K. Salim and who introduced me to Islam, was on alto; Goon Gardner was the other alto. The drummer was Ike Day, a kid, only 15. Ike Day was playing two bass drums then; out of sight; a big influence on Max Roach and others. (He died of an O.D. in New York a few years later).
This group was playing at a club on 63rd and Cottage Grove called Joe Hughes’s Deluxe. The featured acts were female impersonators backed by (real) chorus girls. One night we were playing Stompin’ At The Savoy for the chorus girls when, out of the blue we heard this horn from the front of the club playing over the top of the band. I looked up and saw Charlie Parker. He never stopped playing, just walked right through the chorus girls and came and stood over by the piano. Jesse Miller, who had played with Bird when Bird played second tenor for Earl Hines, had told me that Bird’s ability drove Hines’ first tenor (Bob Crump) to quit playing. A. K. and Goon had also been telling me about Charlie Parker. At that time, of course, Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges were my main men on alto. After hearing Bird that night I forgot about all other alto players.
I started hanging out with Bird in Chicago. (This was years before I recorded with him in New York.) Bird got a gig at the Rum-Boogie, a club on 55th Street and Central Parkway (now Martin Luther King Drive). As my gig with Jesse Miller started later than Bird’s, I would go with him to hear his first set. The band, about ten pieces, was led by an old man who played violin. Marl Young, the pianist, wrote the music for this band—very, very hard but good music. (Marl Young lives in L.A. now and writes for the movies.) Eddie Johnson, a great tenor player, was in the band; Gale Brockman and Billy Orr were on trumpets.
Anyway, Bird was never there for rehearsals. The band would rehearse all afternoon, Bird was never there, and the other members of the band were mad and didn’t like Bird. But the leader, the old man, did like Bird, which is why he never got fired. I remember this incident like it was yesterday. I went by with Bird to hear his first set. He always came about two or three minutes before the show hit. He’d look at the third alto part, glance at his part (he was playing lead); when the curtain came up, Bird was playing that music like he owned it plus adding things to the part. Well this night, Jimmy Dorsey was playing at the Sherman Hotel in the Loop, and he came down to hear Bird. The old man, Bird’s bandleader, knew what was happening. He called Cherokee, which featured Bird. Bird, of course, played like a man possessed. Jimmy Dorsey came back to the dressing room, introduced himself, and said to Bird, “Here man, you need this much more than I do,” and gave Bird his brand-new padless Selmer. I was with Bird the next day when he put it in pawn. I begged him not to. His own horn was a wreck, held together with tape, gummed paper, etc. This didn’t matter to him.
At that time there was a great club on the South Side, the Club De Lisa. The leader of their 12-piece band was a great show drummer, Red Saunders. Chicago was wide open then. You could buy liquor in drug-stores, and clubs were open 24 hours. On Saturday night and Sunday morning, every-one would go to the De Lisa—all the biggest sportsmen (pimps), the top whores, top Mafia hoods who would make the all-time Mafia list, if I could remember names. (I guess it’s better that I can’t). Well, I’d get off my gig at around 4:30 and, with Bird and other cats, go to the De Lisa. Bird would sit in with Red Saunders’ band, which included altoist Nat Jones, a great player in the tradition of Johnny Hodges. Also playing was a great tenor player from Texas, Tom Archia. Billy Eckstine was on the show; this was before he formed his first band. Also the tap dancer Baby Lawrence, who I heard trade fours with Bird on a Limehouse Blues, way up-tempo. This was taken down on a wire recorder, a classic. I don’t know who has this wire recording, which must be worth many thousands of dollars by now. Incidentally, the greatest comedian George Kirby was a bus boy in the De Lisa and got his start there by filling in with comedy.
I remember hearing Art Tatum with Bird in Chicago. After his gig in the Loop, Tatum would come down to a club on the South Side, drinking beer after beer and playing for five or six hours. All piano players in the city would be there. I remember Bird telling me then, “I wish I could play like Tatum’s right hand.”
I did work a gig with Bird in Chicago. For a while we played at the Sherman Hotel with Hot Lips Page opposite Boyd Raeburn’s Big Band. The second day of the gig, we couldn’t find Bird at all for the second set. We went up to our suite in the hotel, where we found Bird out cold in the bathtub. We got him together, he came down, and his playing just scared everyone to death. Charlie Ventura was with Raeburn’s band. The more Bird played, the paler he got.
When Bird left Chicago I rejoined Jesse Miller at the Downbeat Club. Red Allen was also playing there, with J. C. Higgenbotham on trombone. Ben Webster came in from New York to play as a guest artist with Red Allen. But he liked our rhythm section better. We’d play on the one the radio one hour, six nights a week. (It was so very hip then). Well, when Ben left to go back to New York, he told our rhythm section (Rail Wilson, bass; Hillard Brown, drums) he would send for us to come and play with him on the Onyx Club on 52nd Street. We thought he was kidding, but in about a month he sent us first-class sleeping train tickets.
This was in 1944. I was with Ben for 15 months on 52nd Street. Brown and Wilson went back to Chicago when the brownouts came in 1945. New York was it for me. The rhythm section at the Onyx Club became Eddie Nicholson (drums), Gene Ramey (bass) and myself. Many times Roy Eldridge would play with us, or Stuff Smith, or Bob Dorsey, a great tenor player. Then it was Bird—always late. Mike Weston, the Onyx Club owner, would be frowning as Bird came in late, but after a couple of Bird’s choruses, he’d be smiling. One night Bird was very, very late. Bird came in while Ben Webster was drinking at the bar; the rest of us were trioing. Bird picked up Ben’s tenor and said I Cherokee. He played that tenor like he owned it, and Ben was shook. He just kept saying “Give me another double.” The thing about this was that nobody could get a sound out of Ben’s tenor but Ben himself, due to the thickness of the reed, etc. I saw many great tenor players try-Prez, Buddy Tate, Ike Quebec, no good!
During this time I played the Ko-Ko date with Bird as I was living with him at 117th Street and Man-hattan Avenue, in Harlem. I was sent to the land-lady, Doris Schneider, because we were both from Chicago. I introduced Bird to Doris, and a week later he was living there. Later, for a while, they were married. Billie Holiday and her man, trumpeter Joe Guy, also lived in this eight room pad. Bird drew people like Thelonious Monk, Miles, and Dexter Gordon to the scene. Why this place didn’t get busted, I’ll never know. Everything was happening there.
About the record date; Bud Powell was supposed to be the pianist, but he was hung up in Pennsylvania and didn’t get back. Incidentally, the first pianist I heard playing like Bird was not Bud, but Elmo Hope. But Bud played so strong, he just took that style over. Bud was not easy to get along with, kind of a ferocious guy. He’d throw shoes at his little brother, Richie, when Richie tried to listen to us playing. He’d say things like, “Get up off that piano stool, you blind mother----!” to people like [Art] Tatum and [George] Shearing. He and Bird, despite their mutual love and respect, did not get along; their personalities clashed. But I hung out a lot with Bud. I think he liked me because I didn’t try to copy him. Naturally, I learned his tunes, but I didn’t slavishly imitate his solos.
With Bud, as I said, in Pennsylvania, Bird brought me to the record date, and I played on all the tunes except Now’s The Time and Billie’s Bounce. That was Dizzy (who happened to be recording with another group in the same building). For many years I didn’t get credit for this date on the liner notes, which have now been straightened out. Nor did I ever get paid for it. This is because I was still on transfer from the union in Chicago. The union delegate at the studio said that I couldn’t play, but as soon as he left, Bird told me to come out and play. My first paying record date was with Dexter Gordon. At this time (1945) I also recorded with Ben Webster, Big Sid Catlett, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Bill DeArango.
My association with Bird and Bud helped to bring the new music on to 52nd Street. Bud would sit in at the Onyx Club while I worked there. Most of the musicians there didn’t understand Bud or Bird. Roy Eldridge would take me outside to smoke (everyone smoked then, we called it “gage”) and ask me about what Bird and Bud Powell were doing. I couldn’t tell him, all I knew was that it sounded great, made musical sense, and swung like no other music I’d heard. It made all the other music sound stiff and unswinging. This is what I’d tell Roy. The one exception was Prez, Lester Young.
I had always dug Prez. He used to come to Minneapolis with Count Basie before I left that area. I first heard Prez with his own group at the Spotlite Club on 52nd Street. He had just come from L.A. after his stint in D.B. (the army’s disciplinary barracks, thus the tune D.B. Blues). He had Kenny Kersey on piano. When Prez decided to revamp, I got the gig. Shadow Wilson was on drums (Lyndell Marshall on the road), Prez’s friend Rodney Richardson on bass, Bennie Harris on trumpet. Bernie brought Bud Powell to Prez as we were boarding the plane for our first road gig, but Prez said, “I’ve already got Lady Dense.”
That was me. My name at the time was Argonne Dense Thornton, and Prez called everybody “Lady” (most famously, Lady Day [Billie Holiday]). He had, incidentally, his own lingo for everything, and it took me several months to understand him. But it was all appropriate. The police he called “Bob Crosbys.” If something was a real drag, he called it a “von Hangman.” His most famous expression, “I feel a draft,” could mean that he detected racial discrimi-nation or that he felt bad since you wouldn’t drink and smoke with him. Reefer he called “Ettuce.” Whites he called “grey boys.” (I don’t know if he originated that term.) Blacks were “Oxford greys.” The bridge of a tune he’d call a “George Washington.” When we hit a new town and Prez would go looking for an old girlfriend, he’d say he was going to see “a Wayback.”
This gives me a chance to correct two en-tirely false rumors about Prez. One, he was not a faggot, not at all. Two, he was not into heroin or cocaine: he just smoked and drank. He was a great human being as well as one of the greatest jazz soloists of all time: responsible about money, generous with his possessions, natural, friendly, gentle, as well as creative.
With Prez I recorded the famous hit Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid, which in fact is my composition. The studio man came in and asked us, as we were warming up, to do something with Symphony Sid’s name in it, as we were going back to the Three Deuces on 52nd Street and the disc jockey had his radio show from there. Meanwhile, I was playing this blues melody off the top of my head. Prez said, “We’ll play that,” and we did it in one take. The A&R man just assumed that the tune was Prez’s.
While I was with Prez, the drummer, Lyndell Mar-shall, had a nervous breakdown. At my suggestion, the great Roy Haynes came into the band.
I remember a couple of things about Bird that happened while I was with Prez. Prez and I were in [Washington] D.C. at a club called Caverns, and Bird was also in town with Duke Jordan on piano. Bird asked me to join the band (not, I’m sure, because he didn’t like Duke’s playing, but for personal reasons, which my reply explains). I told Bird, “I love you, but I can’t put up with your not paying people and leaving them stranded in different places. If you did that to me I’d have to hurt you or try to, and I’d hate to have that happen because I love you. I’d rather be your friend and listen.”
Another time when I was with Prez, we had a week off before a gig in Chicago, so I went to Chicago ahead of time to hear Bird and Miles. The saxophonist who had the house band at the club where Bird played was named Eddie Wiggins. Wiggins had a long line of reed instruments up on his bandstand—clarinet, flute, bassoon, alto, tenor, English horn. Bird came in, early for once—no one else in his band was there. He had left his horn at the club. Now Bird had very good connections in Chicago, but this time he had apparently forgot to pay them. He opened his horn case to find all the keys torn off or broken. Without blink-ing an eye, Bird asked Wiggins if he could play the first set with Wiggins’ group. Then he proceeded to play all those instruments, a few choruses on each one, even the bas-soon. Of course, I was dumbfounded; Bird never ceased to amaze me. I remember him astounding some Afrikaaner mathematicians by suddenly solving a problem they were discussing; they couldn’t believe that Bird didn’t have an advanced degree in math. Same thing with chess. Tadd Dameron and Max Roach would be playing up at Dizzy’s, Bird and I would come in, Bird would walk over to the board, make a move and say “Checkmate.” And Bird is the only person who knew me before I became a Muslim and changed my name who never, after I told him my new name, called me anything but Sadik Hakim.
One thing Bird and Prez had in common; I remember both of them cutting Benny Goodman and embarrassing him. When I was with Ben Webster at the Onyx Club and Bird was across the street at the Spotlite Club, I’d go over to hear Bird as soon as our set ended. One night Benny sat at a front table as Bird began his set with Dizzy Atmosphere—way up-tempo. When he looked over and saw Benny, he changed to Dizzy Fingers (a feature of Benny’s). In the first eight bars, Benny turned red, green and all kinds of colors.
Later, with Prez on tour in L.A., we played opposite Benny at the L.A. Auditorium. (Frankie Laine was the between-sets act). Funny thing, Prez played his silver metal clarinet all night, never touching the tenor. He blew Benny away. All of us broke up as Benny turned red and a few more colors once again.
(The story is that Benny gave Prez this old metal clarinet, so maybe there was another reason for Prez to play it that night-Ed.)
I used to play Sunday afternoon gigs with Bird in Philly. The house band at this club had John Coltrane playing alto. At that time the very young Trane was probably the second best altoist in the world. I also played with Sonny Rollins back in the 40s. We both worked in a group led by trumpeter Louis Metcalfe, an older man who had played with Ellington. I used to marvel at how Rollins could get such great solos out of the corny tunes we had to play. He was playing tenor then, but I had known him even earlier, when he was playing alto. (In 1961, I closed Birdland with Sonny) [Birdland closed in 1964.—T.F.]. I also remember some great, unknown saxophonists whose careers were tragically cut short. Like Henry Pryor, an alto player in the style of Bird, who got killed by police in Chicago while breaking into a church to get money for dope. A great waste. Or Lank Keyes a tenor player influenced by Prez, also very great, who O.D.’d in Chicago.
There have been and still are, many great saxo-phonists—Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Sonny Stitt, and today, George Coleman, Junior Cook, Clifford Jordan, Johnny Griffin. Still, no one has had a story to say like Bird and Prez. When I was working at the Onyx with Ben Webster, and Prez was across the street at the Spotlite Club, Dexter Gordon would march up and down in front of the Spotlite with a huge sign saying, GO IN AND HEAR THE TRUTH. Maybe THE TRUTH is what we should have called it. (Bird hated the name Be-Bop, which was Dizzy’s concoction.)
I will take this opportunity to get one other thing straightened out. The tune Eronel, attributed to Monk, is another composition for which I should have gotten credit. When I was at the Onyx Club with Webster, I met a beautiful 17-old lady from Kansas City named Lenore. We were together about a year. The tune I wrote for her was her name spelled backwards. Monk came over to my house one day, saw the music on the piano, played it and liked it, even suggested a chord change (which I rejected). I went to Montreal for a year in 1949, and when I returned, I heard the same exact tune, credited to Monk, on a record he made with Milt Jackson. Monk told me that he just forgot to tell the record company the tune was mine. Incidentally, anyone should be able to tell that Eronel does not sound like a Monk composition.
Monk is, of course, a great genius, and continued on he showed me many of his tunes. Earl Hines and Nat Cole were among the first pianists I really dug. Then Elmo Hope and Bud Powell. My favorites in the last two decades: Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan—they’re even in my book. In the new breed I like Cedar Walton, Mickey Tucker, John Hicks, for sure Kenny Barron, and Herbie Hancock—when he was playing piano. Electronic music is garbage to me. Everything is too loud to swing and, as Duke said 50 years ago, It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing. Among women pianist, I like Boo Pleasant, Shirley Scott, Terry Pollard. Among the less well-known, Willie Anderson, from Detroit, without peer, and Charles Fox from St. Louis (whatever happened to him?). But don’t let me forget Barry Harris, Walter Davis, Walter Bishop, Bill Evans, Horace Silver, Oscar Denard, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Oscar Peter-son—so many great players, I can’t name them all.
Although I once watched Prez and Coleman Hawkins drink next to each other at a bar (the Spotlite Club, owned by the late Clarke Monroe) for two weeks without speaking, it seems like the musicians were closer in those days. Playing with Prez for those two or three years was one of the best times in my career. And I’ve had many good ones.

Hello people, I found this movie review written by my great-grandfather on his desk, I asked him about it and he just rambled on about how "Many great Hollywood films were inspired by ancient Greek tragedies" and how "Hollywood went down the shitter after Elvis died". Please take this transcription with a grain of salt, as while he is a brilliant man, he's also a brilliant lier.
If anybody remembers this movie or can find anything about it that would be greatly appreciated.
Overview:
In the Oedipus trilogy, containing the movies Oedipus Rex (1948), Oedipus at Colonus (1951), Antigone (1952) is commonly regarded as one of the greatest works during the golden age of Hollywood.
The trilogy grossed a total of 340 million in the United States alone, easily doubling that in worldwide markets.
1: Oedipus Rex (1948)
The story was a faithful recreation of the original Oedipus play from ancient Greece, telling the story of a prince whose prophecy was told by the oracle of Delphi that he would kill his father and marry his mother.
A major difference is that the plague of Thebes is replaced with a monsoon.
I've found out that the chance was made due to a weather issue in Greece where they were filming the movie.
The writing was pure genius, able to translate the ancient play into the modern arts while still retaining its charm.
The movie takes its time and really succeeds in conveying emotion in the audience, without feeling cagey.
The ending of the movie was as devastating as technically impressive, the practical effects used to show Oedipus blinding himself or Jocasta’s hanging were like nothing ever seen on film before that point, true technological wonders.
To sum up everything stated so far, Oedipus Rex was a revolutionary film, in both matters of writing and practical effects.
2: Oedipus at colonus (1951)
A beautiful story of redemption, heartbreak, and courage.
This installment in the franchise wasn’t as well received in a critical sense, but did extremely well in general audiences.
It contained cameos from famous actors such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin.
The film is commonly regarded as a low point in the trilogy, despite its popularity.
The incredible soundtrack of the movie is accredited to world-renowned composer and singer, Cole Porter.
Critics have bashed the film as a cheap action flick masquerading as a part of the oedipus trilogy.
During test screenings of the film among different audiences, the film was generally well received, however, when shown to an audience of world war 1 and 2 veterans, a few had panic attacks within the audience due to its excessive violence and massive battle scenes.
The film contains little to no faithfulness to the original play, containing gladiator battles and massive spectacles of battles between the Romans and Carthaginians, an event not to happen until over 100 years after the original play was written.
The movie's poor critical reception is chalked up to the sudden change of director.
The previous director, Michael Phillips had a bout of pneumonia which led to him becoming incapable of directing.
The shoe-in for Michael was one Peter Yukon, who is believed to have blackmailed executives to get the position.
Yet, even with its bashing by the critics, the film had some silver linings.
The film made 80 million dollars at the box office, the highest-grossing film in history at that time.
It also had incredible choreography in fight scenes with camera angles far ahead of its time.
One final feature of the film was its surprisingly good writing, even with its unfaithfulness to the original story and its bad aura on the franchise.
In conclusion of this segment, Oedipus in Ccolonus was a surprisingly good film when going in with an open mind, despite its major flaws.
3: Antigone (1952)
Antigone is sort of a redemption for the trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus was a lower point in the trilogy, and ironically, Antigone would be the one to redeem it
It had a budget of 37 million, the highest budget of any movie ever at the time, which I believed to be put to good use, if not a little over the top.
Frank Sinatra wrote the theme for Oedipus Rex, a song called “you can’t tempt fate” a hidden gem within his discography.
Michael Phillips returned to his role of director for this film, which is the main reason behind its success.
A large part of the film's budget was the starboard cast of actors including the likes of Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and more.
Another attribution to its large budget is its many filming locations, including Hollywood, Italy, Greece, Bavaria, and more.
The writing was pure genius, able to perfectly balance the heavy scenes while still being able to have comedic moments without undermining the message.
Antigone’s death was as devastating as pure genius, painting the story as a battle between differing ideals, rather than right versus wrong.
The retroactive continuity done to make the second movie make sense was absolutely genius, without spoiling too much, Romulus’s inclusion not only made it make sense continuity wise, but also elevated the story and made the B plot just that much more interesting.
While inaccurate to the myth, Creon’s portrayal as a callous, yet logical and fair leader is impressively done, and Kirk Douglas’s incredible playing of the role just added icing to the cake.
Marilyn Monroe’s playing of Antigone was impressive, giving her an opportunity to be more than the sex symbol she is often presented as.
In conclusion, Antigone was the greatest film in the trilogy, and gave it the incredible comeback it deserves.