John Holbo at Crooked Timber reprises a debate which raged 7 years ago when a book called Liberal Fascism was published. His take focuses on Germany but mine puts more weight on Italy. I think the issue is kind of obvious, but it’s … Continue reading →

Five twists on guacamole, just in time for Cinco de Mayo Cinco de Mayo is mere hours away, so let's talk guac, shall we? Though all you really need to make guacamole are some ripe avocados, a squeeze of lime and a good dash of salt, consider mashed avocado your blank canvas for all sorts of add-ins and textures. We took the liberty of making five variations on everyone's favorite dip, incorporating surprising add-ins (hi there, asparagus) and spices (nice to see you, yuzu koshu). Here's how to win the guac game.

Keep reading on TastingTable.com

Jon Snow is not the bastard son of Ned Stark.

Rather, he is the son — quite possibly trueborn — of the late Rhaegar Targaryen, who was Prince of Dragonstone and heir apparent to the Iron Throne before his death during the rebellion that overthrew the Targaryen dynasty. This means Jon is also Daenerys's nephew, and arguably the legitimate heir to the Iron Throne. His Stark-like appearance comes from his mother, Lyanna Stark, Ned's sister and the one true love of the late King Robert Baratheon.

This, at least, is an extremely popular theory among obsessive fans of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books — one that has been extensively discussed and documented in the fan forums online. It's also a theory that obviously has huge implications for the Game of Thrones television series, and could help explain why the most recent episode chewed up a fair amount of precious screen time with reminiscences of two people who've never appeared on the show.

Of course, nobody can be sure whether this theory — known as R+L=J in the fandom — is true. But it does explain several otherwise hard-to-grasp decisions Ned Stark makes in the first season. What's more, if it's true, it provides a plausible path for Jon to ascend to the Iron Throne, which thematically seems to be the direction the series is headed in.

Wait, who are all these people again?

The R+L=J theory involves crucial actions by several characters who haven't been seen since season one, and by other characters who have never been seen on screen.

These are the key players:

• Jon Snow: One of the main characters of the series, introduced to the viewers and the world as the bastard son of Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell, and an unknown woman. Currently serving as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.
• Ned Stark: At the beginning of the show he is Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. He is appointed Hand of the King by Robert Baratheon and, after King Robert's death, deposed from office by Cersei Lannister and executed at the behest of her son, the new king, Joffrey.
• Robert Baratheon: The King of Westeros at the beginning of the series, he seized power before the show began by leading a rebellion against the Targaryen dynasty, whose last scion was the "Mad King" Aerys Targaryen. Robert is great friends with Ned, but they quarrel repeatedly over Robert's willingness to kill Targaryen children to bolster his claim to the throne.
• Lyanna Stark: Ned's sister, who never appeared in the series. She was betrothed to Robert before the rebellion against the Targaryens, and years later, at the opening of the show, Robert still speaks of his love for her. According to the theory, Lyanna is Jon's real mother. She died during the rebellion, which was sparked by her kidnapping by Rhaegar Targaryen and the arbitrary and despotic rule of Rhaegar's father, the Mad King.
• Rhaegar Targaryen: Rhaegar never appeared in the series, having died during the rebellion against his father the Mad King. According to the theory, Rhaegar is Jon Snow's real father. Unlike the Mad King, Rhaegar is generally well-regarded by those who knew him, but his decision to abduct Lyanna Stark was the downfall of the Targaryen dynasty. It united the powerful Stark and Baratheon families against the Targaryens, joined by the Houses Tully and Arryn that were linked to the Starks and Baratheons by marital and foster relationships.

Why do people believe R+L=J?

At a high level, R+L=J is compelling because it explains Ned Stark's enigmatic behavior vis a vis Jon.

The one thing we really know about Ned is that he puts a ton of stock in honor. Yet we are supposed to believe that this extremely honorable man fathered a bastard son, then brought him home to Winterfell, where the child's presence is a constant humiliation to a wife he genuinely loves, and that he then — for no clear reason — refuses to tell Jon who his mother is.

R+L=J transforms this from a dishonorable and weird sequence of events into an honorable one. Ned took possession of his sister's son, and claimed him as his own because had he admitted the truth, King Robert would have had the boy killed, lest his very existence undermine Robert's claim to the throne. Ned can't tell anyone who Jon's real father is, because the truth would be deadly.

In addition, close readers of the books have found a number of pieces of more specific textual evidence.

What's the detailed textual evidence for R+L=J?

A number of fragments in the books are cited as textual evidence for the theory:

• Jon is said to closely resemble his "half-sister" Arya, who in turn is said to look very much like Lyanna. By contrast, the other Stark siblings are said to look more like their mother, Catelyn Tully.
• At the very end of Robert's Rebellion, three members of the Kingsguard aren't guarding the king at all — they are guarding Lyanna Stark. That's a puzzling allocation of Targaryen forces, unless by guarding Lyanna they are also guarding an unborn son who is heir to the throne.
• After Ned and his friend Howland Reed subdue the three Kingsguardsmen, they find Lyanna dying in a pool of blood. She asks Ned to promise her ... something ... which is not revealed in the text but which Ned recalls at a crucial moment before her death. If R+L≠J, then what was the promise, and why does it come up?

What's the evidence outside of the text?

Jon Snow's storyline is not exactly the most exciting part of the Game of Thrones narrative. Nevertheless, he's given many chapters in the books and a lot of screen time in the show. The audience is primed, in other words, to expect big things out of him. And the mysteries of Jon's parentage and Ned's promise to Lyanna are both classic Chekhov's gun material — why introduce any of this unless it's going to pay off somehow?

The promise to Lyanna could relate to any member of the Stark family, but whoever Jon's mother is, she's got to be someone significantly related to the endgame for Jon. R+L=J sets up the possibility that Jon will contend for the Iron Throne and/or possess useful and dramatically interesting Targaryen dragon powers.

A related extratextual issue is that the TV show necessarily cuts a lot of material from the books. That's often a good guide to which segments of the books are truly necessary to move the story forward, versus ones that simply serve a general world-building or theme-emphasizing purpose. King Robert visiting Lyanna's grave in Winterfell and talking about her survived the adaptation process.

Is this scene just a waste of time? Or did it make it into the television show because the character of Lyanna Stark is going to prove important by the end, thus making it necessary to introduce her to the TV audience, even if they are certain to forget her right away? Well, last night Baelish and Sansa revisited the crypt and talked about Lyanna again as a reminder. But for what?

Then in a separate scene we get an extended reflection on Rhaegar. These two clearly have some role to play in the rest of the narrative.

What are the broader implications of R+L=J?

Contemplating the R+L=J scenario is also a reminder that the vast majority of what we know — or "know" — about the recent history of Westeros amounts to history as written by the victors. The Starks, the Lannisters, and Renly and Stannis Baratheon all ultimately fought against the Targaryen dynasty. Daenarys was too young to have any recollection of the relevant events. House Tyrell fought on the Targaryen side of the war, but we haven't really heard their perspective on its outbreak.

In the victors' telling, the realm was beset not just by a Mad King but by a sudden and entirely irrational action on the part of his previously not-mad son, who for no reason at all kidnapped the daughter of one of the most prominent nobles in the land while she was betrothed to one of the other most prominent nobles.

But what if this is wrong?

What if Lyanna ran off with Rhaegar out of true love, despite her betrothal to Robert? That would change the narrative somewhat. What's more, though arranged marriages are certainly par for the course among the Westerosi nobility, there's no good reason for the Starks to have preferred a match with Robert Baratheon to one with the heir apparent to the Iron Throne.

Unless, that is, the intertwined network of houses Baratheon, Arryn, Stark, and Tully that ultimately brought down the Targaryens was conspiring to overthrow the ruling house since before the alleged abduction. This is the "Southron Ambitions" theory, which is much broader and less specifically grounded in the text than the core R+L=J theory.

According to Southron Ambitions, Mad King Aerys was much less paranoid (though no less brutal) than his "official" portrayal, and was combating a very genuine threat to his rule that existed long before the specific Lyanna crisis. At a minimum, Southron Ambitions posits a "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you" view of Aerys's downfall.

So is R+L=J true?

Well, for starters, the whole idea that assertions about a fictional universe can be true or false raises some puzzling metaphysical issues. David Lewis's 1978 American Philosophical Quarterly article on the subject may be a good place to start if you're interested in that.

On a more banal level, the question is whether the fandom is accurately forecasting where Martin (or HBO, but this seems to be a question that's too fundamental to allow show/book divergence) is going with the story.

One possible issue is that Martin is of course aware of the R+L=J theory and has it within his power to change direction even if this was his original plan for the series. After all, it's clear from events like Ned Stark's execution and the Red Wedding that Martin likes to keep the audience off-balance.

On the other hand, both Martin and HBO's showrunners have repeatedly told the story that when David Benioff and Dan Weiss were pitching the adaptation, Martin tested their knowledge of the books by asking them to guess who Jon's mother was — and they got it right. That's a strong indication that whatever Martin's original plan was, it's still valid, and too central to his long-term plan to be changed.

Niall Beard's Pretentious-O-Meter performs an accurate measure every movie's pretentiousness, determined simply by subtracting viewer ratings from critic ratings. Deliciously clever! Read the rest

by David Neumann, iOS News

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Dominion Enters Closed Beta, Release Date Hinted
My favorite posts here at BGG are ones in which we get a lot of comments. First, that means that you guys are actually interested and read the post, but more importantly, there will be snark and the comment section becomes something better than the post that birthed it i]which isn't a hard thing to do. -ed.[/i.

No topic in all the years I've been doing this guarantees a more hearty comment section than Dominion Online. Since it first entered into our collective consciousness as part of team Goko, to the announcement that it would be here in 2014, to a post from last December stating an early 2015 release.

Seriously, those were good times. Really good times.

But things are changing now that Making Fun is at the helm and I'd like to announce....



Dominion Online entered beta last Friday!

The announcement was made by John Welsh who has "(CEO)" after his name, indicating that he's the CEO, I think. That, or its just a nickname he had in college. Mine was Tiny. Chew on that for a bit.

Not only is Dominion Online in closed beta, but they expect to open the beta up to everyone sometime in May. At first, this will be a PC/Mac thing, but a full tablet version should be released in June.

He also answers questions about cross-platform play and if purchases from the current version of Dominion Online will move over to the new version, and that answer is "yes" to both questions.

They are also looking at getting Dominion on phones, but will need a UI change for the smaller phones out there. So, for now, phones are a wait-and-see.

Here's the entire announcement for you perusal:

John Welsh wrote:

Today we are launching the "closed beta" of version 2.0 of Dominion Online. This represents a major milestone in the development of the project -- the very first time people not on the development team will start to play the new Unity version of Dominion Online. The closed beta will start with a very small group of outside testers. We will continue to add in features with weekly releases. In May we plan to widen the availability of version 2.0 to anyone who is interested in playing. In June the game should be fully launched and version 1.0 will be retired.

The launch version is about 80% feature complete from a technology perspective. Things are not fully "connected" yet, so beta testers may think it looks more like 50%. There is a lot to do still, but things will come together pretty quickly as we complete and integrate modules.

So, what will be new in this version? The game will launch with many improvements such as better matching for live play, a more stable server infrastructure, and rewritten single-player campaigns that introduce variants on traditional Dominion play. Other enhancements will be made in the weeks and months that follow, including the availability of the exciting new Adventures expansion.

We have had many inquiries about the different platforms we will be supporting, especially around if purchases will persist across platforms and if cross-platform multiplayer games will be supported. The answer to both is an enthusiastic "Yes!" By June, you should be able to play with your existing account and your existing purchases on PCs and Macs, in the browser or in a windowed or full-screen executable. We will support WebGL and the Unity plugin for browser play, but we expect that fans who play regularly will prefer the experience offered by the installed Windows / Mac / Linux executable.

Your existing Dominion Online account will also soon work on tablets. Given time required to integrate and test platform APIs -- as well as deal with app store approvals -- it will likely be June when you will be able to download Dominion onto your iPad or your Android tablet via Google Play or Amazon. Timing for mobile phone play is TBD. The game plays well on larger phones, but smaller screens like the iPhone 5/5s beg for a modified user interface. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow us to release for only larger-screen phones, although it should be possible to do so for Android devices.

We are super excited to so close to unveiling the new version of Dominion Online. Please stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks.

Will Forte was already a semi-accomplished sitcom writer when he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2002. He had written episodes of Third Rock From the Sun, That '70s Show, and the less well-remembered Jenny McCarthy Show. But it was on SNL that he found his first major success, with one of his most famous characters, MacGruber, even going on to star in his own movie.

Since leaving SNL as a full-time cast member in 2010, Forte has pursued an eclectic mix of projects. He played a major role in Best Picture nominee Nebraska, a frequently recurring character on 30 Rock, and the voice of Abraham Lincoln in The Lego Movie. His most prominent role, however, is in Fox's sitcom The Last Man on Earth, which wrapped its first season Sunday, May 3, and is available in its entirety on Hulu Plus. In the show, which Forte also created, he plays Phil, a survivor of an unspecified apocalypse, whose awful personality is only revealed when he stumbles upon other survivors.

Though the show debuted to great reviews for its pilot (which featured only Forte on screen for much of its running time), it has proved divisive in subsequent episodes, with some (including myself) finding the show's presentation of Phil as a terrible person to be subversively hilarious and others simply finding him too much to bear. I talked with Forte recently about why so many people don't like Phil, what he learned as a first-time showrunner, and how little he knows about season two.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Todd VanDerWerff: I binged this first season and ended up really liking it, but a lot of my friends who watched it week to week got frustrated with it. To what degree were you building it as one unit, versus individual episodes?

Will Forte: We came into it thinking about it as a whole season. Obviously, we had to get down to the particulars, but more than anything we were thinking about the whole arc. We have the benefit of knowing where Phil ends up. Other people don't. I tend to like a little bit of mystery in stuff.

I'm proud of it. I'm sad that some people didn't share that, but the room and the cast, that's what's important to me, is how they feel about it. I wish other people had stuck with it, and some people did. We lost some, but I'm certainly not going to change what I like for those other people. I'm going to write it the way I think is best, and the people who are fans of that will tune in. The other people, that's unfortunate. I wish they did like it, but you're never going to win over everybody.

TV: Phil often seems like the most awful person on TV, but you're careful to make the joke on him. How do you balance that for the audience?

WF: That's the tricky part. Sometimes we did it. Sometimes we didn't.

Certainly we want you to be on Phil's side, but we also realize we're making you follow this guy down through some dark moments. He loses it a little bit. I think it's a pretty heightened situation that he's going through, obviously. He's been on his own for so long that I think people forget his mind is still kind of cloudy from his situation of [thinking he's] the last person alive.

But that's the trick. We learned a lot of lessons from this season. I'm very excited to go in and to get a crack at a second season. I'd never run a show before, and I started out in the business writing, but I was a low-level writer when I went off to SNL, so I had no business running this show. [Laughs.]

We're really proud of it, but it certainly doesn't mean we couldn't do some things a lot better.

TV: What are some things you learned from the first season?

WF: We wrote scripts that were too long, so you get to a point where you're trying to edit this stuff down, and you have to lose a lot of the nuances of the characters and the situations. Everything seems a little more broad. You lose little connectors that make things seem a little more organic.

That's an important thing to me: telling the story in a more economical way, so everything feels more real and organic. Even crazy situations that seem a little big and broad and over the top, everything will seem a teeny bit more realistic when you're able to fully show [the character moments]. We learned who these characters are.

Every part of this process is something that's not a new thing now. I've got the best writers around. We've all been working together now for a year, so we know each other, and there's a lot of shorthand. The cast is all so fantastic, and we all got to know each other really well. This crew is just amazing. So every part of the process is going to be streamlined and well-oiled.

TV: Your writers' room is full of people who've done great stuff elsewhere. How did you convince people to come on board a TV show that could have easily seemed unsustainable?

WF: I had the benefit of knowing what we were going to do with it, so when I met with these people, it was, "Oh, here's the plan." They saw right away that it would be a fun thing to attempt.

These people are like family to me. I'm working with two of my best friends, one of whom I worked at SNL with, John Solomon. Emily Spivey and Liz Cackowski I've worked with for years at SNL. Emily I was in the Groundlings with. Andy Bobrow I was in the Groundlings with 20 years ago. Erik Durbin, we worked at Third Rock from the Sun together. There's like 100 plus years of friendship in this room.

TV: Obviously the show is not a hard-core tale of what it would be like to live through the apocalypse. Instead, it's kind of a satire of modern life. What were you hoping to say about our modern world using that setting?

WF: I hope to really tackle this much more in the second season, but it is a way to examine the things we do in current-day society that don't make a lot of sense. You can examine them on a real micro level.

You can only do so much in the time we're given. It's only 21 and a half minutes, so some of these things we didn't really get to tackle in the same way. We favored the stuff that was interpersonal stuff.

Anything can happen, but it seems like we've probably reached the limit of humans coming in for the time being and can really look at some of these societal rebuilding things that we didn't get a chance to in the first season.

TV: So much of the discussion around the show has been focused on Phil, but Carol (Kristen Schaal) is just as important of a character. How did you develop her character?

WF: Carol was part of the original pitch. Kristen Schaal was the person who we thought of from the very beginning. We even mentioned her in the pitch, so she's always been just as important to this thing as Phil. We knew that we would be arcing out the season with her starting at a certain place and ending at a certain place.

I can't say enough about Kristen. She's asked to do this really hard role, and I don't know anybody else who could pull it off.

TV: You end on some big moments in the first-season finale. As you're discussing season two in the writers' room and production meetings, what are some themes or ideas you keep returning to that you're interested in exploring?

WF: I'm not going to tell you much about season two, because I have no idea what we're going to do for season two. [Laughs.]

We have little ideas here and there, but we haven't figured out a season-two arc yet. The season-one arc poured out of this one weekend of thinking stuff out and for the most part remained intact, with little intricate details changed around a bit. But the general strokes of season one came out pretty quickly.

Season two, there's a lot of stuff to think about, because there's so many ways to go. We leave at the end of episode 13 with a ton of ways to go with every character. Everybody in the cul de sac, they could leave and go somewhere. Phil and Carol, who knows where they'll end up? And obviously the final scene with Jason [Sudeikis, who plays Phil's brother, an astronaut stranded on the International Space Station]. Who knows what will happen there?

I have ideas for them, but until we really get in there and think out how everything can work in concert, we won't know exactly. That, to me, is the most exciting thing. If I knew what we were going to do, that would mean other people could probably guess what we were going to do. That would mean there was one logical way to go. This excites me to be in such open territory.

Watch The Last Man on Earth on Hulu Plus.

O PSdeG de Amoeiro denuncia e achega vídeos ante a Xunta Electoral nos que se proba como o PP fai campaña en xeriátricos, ofrece notarios de balde para facilitar o voto ou utiliza unha ampla rede de contactos na Administración para carretar as papeletas de maiores impedidos.

[body_image width='600' height='401' path='images/content-images/2015/05/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/04/' filename='la-hipocresia-de-los-politicos-frente-a-la-prostitucion-325-body-image-1430734506.jpg' id='52225']

Fotografía vía Colectivo Hetaira

Fue hablar Albert Rivera y el asunto saltó a los titulares. El líder de Ciudadanos, formación que se mide ya con los dos grandes partidos tradicionales y Podemos en un cuarteto electoral, anunció el pasado 13 de abril que la regulación de la prostitución iría en su programa para las elecciones generales. Las declaraciones del flamante niño de los ojos de muchos españoles alteraron a muchos pero trajeron pocas propuestas frescas: el polémico proyecto ya lleva tiempo acomodada en los programas del nuevo partido de moda. En respuesta al atrevimiento del catalán, políticos, periodistas y tuiteros en general se lanzaron de cabeza al debate.

El ruido ha sido fuerte, pero la renovación de las caras de una clase política empeñada en regenerarse no han traído ideas nuevas a un asunto, cuando menos, incómodo hasta en los círculos feministas. Las marcadas diferencias que separan a unas y otras fuerzas políticas se desdibujan cuando toca -porque parece ser algo que llega, que nadie se atreve a sacar a colación - hablar del trabajo sexual. Aquí el consenso es la ley y se traduce en un rechazo tajante de la posibilidad de regulación de algo que atenta contra la "dignidad" de las mujeres y que es inherentemente violencia. De izquierda a derecha, los argumentos han sonado vagamente diferentes, pero la conclusión ha sido grosso modo la misma. La misma de siempre.

"El debate social está muy polarizado entre dos posiciones, la abolición o la regulación, y luego está la gente que directamente no quiere entrar en el debate y que por eso la prostitución está en un limbo jurídico", cuenta a VICE June Fernández, periodista y directora de Pikara Magazine, una publicación feminista y con perspectiva de género que en apenas unos años se ha convertido en una referencia dentro y fuera del Estado español. "También creo que hay una polarización entre victimizar al extremo a todas estas mujeres, sin hacer distinciones, y la postura extrema contraria, que sería decir que la prostitución es una actividad laboral como otra cualquiera", reflexiona.

Sus palabras reflejan el panorama al que se enfrentan quienes pretenden abordar el tema con todos sus matices. ¿Prostitución? Violencia, trata, tráfico. Esas palabras se repiten en la boca de los representantes de todo el espectro político, de izquierda a derecha. Comosi acaso fuesen lo mismo.

Pero la realidad de la prostitución es mucho más compleja: "Cuando se hace el discurso de que la mayor parte de las prostitutas lo hacen obligadas por mafias, se está obviando que si las mafias existen es porque las mujeres de países de países empobrecidos acuden a estas redes para poder emigrar. Esto pone de manifiesto que, cuando se habla de prostitución, se habla muy poco de extranjería y se habla muy poco de que, por una parte, muchas mujeres terminan en redes de tratas o tráfico de personas como una estrategia para poder emigrar a una Europa construida como una fortaleza, y por otra parte, que incluso las mujeres que vienen a España por otras vías ejercen la prostitución porque esta Ley de Extranjería limita sus posibilidades laborales", critica la periodista. "Esto es, una mujer inmigrante sin papeles básicamente a lo que se puede dedicar es a limpiar casas, a cuidar a ancianos o niños o a la prostitución".

Mientras debaten sobre si somos remanente de la esclavitud o ciudadanas de derecho, nos tenemos las unas a las otras. pic.twitter.com/L8TTcJjJHc
— Colectivo Hetaira (@c_hetaira) abril 16, 2015

Cuando se habla de trata, además, hacer números es sencillamente imposible. El limbo jurídico en el que se encuentran la prostitución y las personas que a ella se dedican impide conocer la dimensión real del problema. Pero Fernández va más allá: "Personalmente creo que hay una confusión constante entre trata y prostitución. No creo que sea fácil establecer una línea clara de cuándo estás siendo obligada o cuándo el trabajo es voluntario. Hay un baile de cifras que no representa la realidad. Habrá que definir qué es voluntario y qué es obligado, porque hay veces en que obliga una mafia que secuestra, y veces en que obliga una Ley de Extranjería que no deja trabajar en otra cosa". Desde el año pasado, y por iniciativa del Partido Popular, la prostitución se contabiliza en el PIB español, aunque el compromiso de 2006 del Congreso de los Diputados de confirmar cuánto dinero mueve de verdad esta actividad y cuántas personas la ejercen sigue siendo, casi 10 años después, papel mojado.

La lucha contra la trata se instrumentaliza en función a unos intereses que van más allá de la búsqueda de la "dignidad" o la erradicación de la "violencia". VICE ha entrevistado a Josué González Pérez, activista feminista LGTBI e investigador en cuestiones de género, quien señala las contradicciones de un enfoque cuyas consecuencias son nefastas para muchas prostitutas: "Las políticas restrictivas son legitimadas a través de los medios de comunicación con la exposición de macrorredadas, por ejemplo, en un club de alterne, que se dice que se han producido en pro de la lucha contra la trata, cuando en realidad se trata de un control migratorio. Lo que no se sabe y no se dice es que esas mujeres muchas veces ni siquiera eran víctimas de trata y luego, con frecuencia, son deportadas".

Al componente fuertemente xenófobo se le suma el doble rasero de la clase política. Son los mismos partidos que gobiernan y tratan de obviar el debate público al respecto -y, cuando este se hace inevitable, se encierran en sus discursos monolíticos - los que a nivel municipal aprueban ordenanzas que de facto persiguen y criminalizan el ejercicio de la prostitución. Las políticas de control del cuerpo, que en 2012 se cobraron la vida de Mary, una prostituta del Raval, se materializan en multas de hasta 750 euros en ciudades como Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, Sevilla, Granada, Málaga o Valencia. Todo ello se enmarca, según algunos, en un proyecto silencioso de gentrificación, que no pretende solucionar el problema sino invisibilizarlo, desplazarlo, con el fin de adecentar la zona.

Quienes mejor conocen estas realidades son ellas mismas. "Aquí en Madrid hemos tenido casos de mujeres prostitutas con una situación de violencia de género en sus familias y los servicios sociales locales les han dicho que primero tenían que dejar la prostitución para luego poder solucionar su problema", cuenta a VICE Mamen Briz, una de las portavoces de Colectivo Hetaira, probablemente el ejemplo más conocido de prostitutas organizadas para defender sus derechos; aunque no el único, como han demostrado, entre otras, las Prostitutas Indignadas de Barcelona. "El PSOE y el tripartito catalán fueron los primeros en poner en marcha normativas cívicas ciudadanas, en concreto en Barcelona, que vinieron a hacer todavía más intolerable la situación de las trabajadoras del sexo, sobre todo de aquellas más vulnerables", critica Briz, quien añade lo siguiente: "El argumento de 'la prostitución es violencia' es un argumento que se emplea desde muchos sectores de una manera absolutamente utilitarista e ideologizada".

[body_image width='810' height='540' path='images/content-images/2015/05/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/04/' filename='la-hipocresia-de-los-politicos-frente-a-la-prostitucion-325-body-image-1430734669.jpg' id='52227']

Fotografía vía Colectivo Hetaira

La dignidad de estas personas, la violencia a la que -casi todos coinciden- están expuestas, deja de ser motivo de preocupación cuando el negocio es suculento. El investigador González Pérez recuerda el caso de Eurovegas: "En este proyecto, uno de los agentes que estaba en la mesa cuando se estaba intentando diseñar era el colectivo de empresarios de alterne, a quienes representa ANELA, que quería impulsar políticas totalmente distintas a las reclamadas por las trabajadoras del sexo". Madridy Cataluña se disputaron ferozmente el título de anfitrión del complejo de juegos que, según Hetaira, facilitaría la apertura de "grandes prostíbulos" donde las trabajadoras no tendría ningún tipo de garantía y las mafias podrían "campar a sus anchas parapetadas en sociedades anónimas". Un ejemplo más en la línea de esa "doble moral" que quiere erradicar la prostitución "que se ve", pero que no se compromete a combatir de manera efectiva la trata de mujeres.

El debate político, sin embargo, no es sensible a esta complejidad. Ante el anuncio de Rivera de la propuesta de regulación del trabajo sexual, PP, PSOE, UPyD y la Izquierda Plural mostraron su rechazo a que se comercialice el cuerpo de las mujeres -como si actualmente no se hiciese, por mucho que su silencio hiciera pensar lo contrario - y a que Ciudadanos lo utilice como reclamo electoral. La pregunta es cuándo creen ellos que deberá abordarse el asunto. Asociaciones y activistas que defienden los derechos de las prostitutas critican el abandono de los partidos gobernantes (fue el PSOE, por ejemplo, el que dejó a estas fuera de la Ley Integral contra la Violencia de Género, y el PP quien modificó una justicia universal que, según critican las asociaciones, es ya incapaz de perseguir a las mafias) y la falta de interés del resto de partidos. "Es significativo", señala González Pérez, "cómo fuerzas que son antagónicas son capaces de difuminar fronteras políticas respecto a este fenómeno y de generar un consenso basado en la exclusión, en este caso la de las trabajadoras del sexo".

Tampoco la izquierda es capaz de articular un discurso diferenciado. El investigador cree que hay un desinterés por la cuestión: "Al fin y al cabo son putas, y las putas poco interesan a la sociedad. Eso tiene que ver con que las organizaciones de izquierda no son impermeables a la ideología patriarcal y a la jerarquización de la sexualidad y de las prácticas sexuales". Sigue vigente, según él, "una clasificación entre buenas y malas mujeres, entre putas y santas, que solo beneficia al patriarcado".

Desde Hetaira dan la bienvenida a la propuesta de Ciudadanos, pero se muestran "críticas" con el enfoque que aparentemente ha adoptado la formación: "Quien quiera ejercer de trabajador sexual va a tener que hacerse autónomo sí o sí, lo quiera o no, ya reúna o no los requisitos para poder serlo. Esto significa que habrá mujeres y hombres que queden excluidos de esta posible legalización. Además habla de que deberá ejercerse siempre en locales convenientemente legalizados. Esto significa que los empresarios de locales de alterne pueden estar muy contentos, porque no se van a tener que responsabilizar en absoluto de que las personas que trabajan en su club tengan los derechos laborales correspondientes: no van a tener derecho como trabajadores a terceros, sino que van a ser una especie de falsas autónomas. Esta norma, además, excluye de manera absoluta a las personas que captan a su clientela en la calle y que por los motivos que sean no van a tener acceso a ningún local o club de alterne. Las más mayores, las menos agraciadas físicamente o cualquiera que tenga una condición que no le guste al cliente no lo van a tener tan fácil".

Hay quien cree, en realidad, es todo una cuestión de dinero. Albert RIvera no ha sido recatado al respecto. El candidato ha enfatizado la "vertiente económica" de la propuesta: está convencido de que el negocio de la prostitución podría ser la tercera actividad económica de España. Las críticas de las asociaciones como Hetaira han señalado que de nuevo el líder de Ciudadanos se centra en los intereses de los empresarios y no atiende a las necesidades reales de las prostitutas: "Algo que nos hace mucha gracia a las mujeres de la calle es cuando se habla de las ingentes cantidades de dinero que mueve la prostitución, ya que es un dinero que por mi bolsillo desde luego no está pasando", ironiza Mamen Briz.

Es año electoral, pero esto es lo que suele pasar... Pero no decaemos, seguimos reivindicando un modelo laboral! pic.twitter.com/cW1wsLBecv
— Colectivo Hetaira (@c_hetaira) marzo 2, 2015

Aún así, ellas saben que unas elecciones son un momento para intentar encender la chispa del debate que pocos se atreven a sacar del cajón: "En esta ocasión, nosotras hemos decidido adelantarnos y hemos realizado una serie de propuestas de cambio, tanto a nivel nacional como autonómico y local; en relación a la prostitución, pero también a la trata de personas", cuenta Briz. "Estas propuestas se las hemos hecho llegar a todos los partidos políticos, también a Ciudadanos. Es cierto que nos pidieron una entrevista, pero estamos todavía pendientes de ella, no hemos vuelto a tener contacto alguno". Queda por ver si de aquí a que se celebren las elecciones se les dará la oportunidad siquiera de opinar sobre la regulación de su medio de subsistencia.

¿Cómo abordar un debate como este? La periodista June Fernández cree que " es necesario un análisis de género sobre los modelos de sexualidad masculina y femenina y su relación con la prostitución. Por qué una cuarta parte de los hombres españoles ve como una opción recurrir a servicios sexuales, y qué relación hay entre esto y que se mantenga la dicotomía de la santa esposa y la puta. Creo que es importante pensar en profundidad qué hacer con los hombres y, personalmente, no creo que la solución sea la punitiva, criminalizarles, caricaturizarles como explotadores de mujeres, pero tampoco creo que haya que normalizar el consumo de servicios sexuales, sino que hace falta cuestionar el modelo de sexualidad masculina y su forma de entender la prostitución". Está convencida de que son las propias trabajadoras quienes conocen su realidad y sostiene que una perspectiva feminista "implica el reconocimiento de las otras mujeres y de sus propias estrategias de lucha, y mucho ojo con el estereotipo de mujeres oprimidas, indefensas y sin capacidad de acción".

El investigador González Pérez coincide en rechazar los discursos "salvacionistas" y aboga por dar voz a las protagonistas: " A muchas personas les preguntas por la prostitución y parece que han hecho un estudio empírico del sector. En realidad no es más que un discurso prefabricado", critica.

En VICE hemos decidido darles a ellas -"las otras", según June Fernández, "las de abajo", según Josué González - la última palabra. Mamen Briz recuerda que en Hetaira tienen ya 20 años de trabajo a sus espaldas y enumera toda una serie de líneas de actuación: revocar una Ley de Seguridad Ciudadana que amenaza con perseguirlas, inspecciones de trabajo en locales de alterne, permisos de residencia y trabajo para aquellas en situación irregular, etcétera. Ella cree firmemente que la sociedad española está preparada para el debate. Solo queda el resto estemos dispuestos a escucharlas: "Es increíble la cantidad de personas que saben muchísimo sobre la prostitución pero nunca se han tomado un café con una prostituta".

Year: 2013

Duration: 1:16:46

Directed by: Christina Voros

Actors: Peter Acworth, Maitresse Madeline, Chris Norris

Language: English

Country: USA

Also known as: Kink

Description: A documentary about the famous fetish pornographic website kink.com produced by renowned filmmaker James Franco.

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 Kink 2013

The piano is one of those inventions that's hard to think of as an invention because it's just always been ... there. When you do think about someone actually inventing it, it's hard not to wonder: why haven't I heard of this person before? And why isn't his name plastered on every piano in existence?

Bartolomeo Cristofori, who celebrates his 360th birthday today, is generally credited with being the sole inventor of the piano. The fact that his name is largely forgotten is a reflection of his times, when a genius could be just another employee.

The piano eventually beat the harpsichord by solving its biggest problem

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The first official record of the piano appears in 1700, though Cristofori may have been working on it for a couple of years before then. Cristofori's most recognizable piano dates later, to 1720. But more important than the date was the step forward the piano represented.

At the time, the harpsichord was the dominant keyboard instrument. The biggest problem was that it couldn't play notes with differing degrees of softness. To play a note, a tiny device called a plectrum plucked a string, and the note played. There wasn't an easy way to modify the sound and give it additional nuance. Though there were some hacks (and other instruments) that tried to fix the problem, they never worked well enough.

The piano was clearly indebted to the harpsichord — in early records, Cristofori called the piano an Arpicembalo, which means "harp-harpsichord," and he frequently worked on and invented other harpsichord-like devices. But the piano took one big step beyond that instrument by using a hammer instead of plucking a string. That allowed for a better modulation of volume thanks to its hammers and dampers, which could more artfully manipulate sound than the plucking motion of the harpsichord.

The earliest surviving piano is from 1721, and it's clear it was a transitional instrument: there are hints of the harpsichord in its sound. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes, it had a narrower range, thinner strings, and harder hammers than modern pianos, which are part of the reason it sounds a bit like a harpsichord.

But even then, it's obvious why the piano changed music forever:

Soon, the piano got its name. Cristofori also referred to his invention as "un cimbalo di cipresso di piano e forte" (a keyboard of cypress with soft and loud), and over time it was shortened to piano forte, and eventually just piano.

It's rare that such an old instrument has so clear an inventor and is so obviously a revelation. So why do we have to be reminded of Bartolomeo Cristofori's name? After all, there must be a reason pianos aren't called Cristoforis.

Court employment, centuries of improvement, and slow adoption all probably made Cristofori's name fade

Wikimedia Commons

We may know so little about Cristofori because he was just a hired hand (albeit a well-respected one). As an employee of Ferdinando de' Medici, an Italian prince and member of the famous Italian family, Cristofori was hired to serve the court, not music alone.

As an employee of the Medicis, Cristofori was a cog in a royal machine. Though he was earnestly recruited to work for the Medicis, he was initially shoved into a workspace with about 100 other artisans (he complained about how loud it was). Ferdinando de' Medici encouraged Cristofori to innovate, but the inventor was also tasked with tuning and moving instruments, as well as restoring some old ones. Unlike musicians, who circulated royal courts and could become famous far beyond their borders, Cristofori was a local commodity. He wasn't seen as a revolutionary genius — rather, he was a talented tinkerer.

At the same time, without the Medicis Cristofori may never have been able to invent the piano. The royal family gave him a house to work in, space to experiment, and, eventually, his own workshop and a couple of assistants. As the wealth of the Medicis declined, Cristofori did sell some pianos on his own, but he didn't possess anything like a modern patent — other people were free to sell their own improvements on the instrument. He remained in the court until his death in 1731.

A portrait of Ferdinando de' Medici with his musicians. (Imagno/Getty Images)

The piano's relatively slow adoption may have stolen Cristofori's credit, as well. Even if an invention went "viral" in the 18th century, it still had to travel at a glacial 18th-century pace. Queen Maria Barbara de Braganza purchased five pianos of Cristofori's design, and after that the instrument slowly spread in elite circles. There were early objections to the piano — Johann Sebastian Bach thought it could use some tweaks — and even Mozart, born in 1756, played the harpsichord as a child. It probably lessened Cristofori's fame that his invention took 100 years to truly oust the harpsichord from elite musical circles.

Finally, there were a lot of improvements to the piano, and those improvements were crucial to its success. Organ builder Gottfried Silbermann added a sustain pedal, and he also boosted sales of the piano. Other inventors added materials better suited to the piano's unique abilities. Finally, composers eventually came around to the piano, which helped it replace the harpsichord as the premier musical instrument.

Though Cristofori was clearly the inventor of the piano, it's less clear exactly why he's forgotten outside of musical circles. It may be a combination of his employment, the piano's slow adoption, and the subsequent improvements. He wasn't famous when he was alive — that's the reason we only have one portrait of him — and he isn't particularly famous today. But in a way, that nuance is appropriate for an inventor who introduced new shades of sound to music. Cristofori's legacy isn't the sharp plucking of a harpsichord — it's a piano, playing still.

★★★

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BITOLA, MACEDONIA — Indonesia just executed two Australians by firing squad, putting a bit of a chill into bilateral relations.

For me, this is great news. Until now, I had been led to believe that the tension between Indonesia and Australia was my fault. I wrote an article for Pando a few weeks ago, describing my visit to a remote Timorese Army base and giving a quick sketch of the horrors inflicted by the Indonesian Army (TNI) on East Timor.

It seemed to me like a harmless bit of writing. But then, that’s probably what should go on my tombstone, if I can ever afford one: “It seemed harmless to me!”

Others, including my wife’s employers in Timor, begged to differ. According to them, my article had singlehandedly ruined ties between Jakarta and Canberra. Oh, and Wellington also. I have reach apparently.

Katherine’s bosses accused me of outraging the tender feelings of TNI, which is roughly like being accused of having disturbed Count Dracula’s beauty sleep with noisy daytime chatter outside his crypt. I had also hurt the feelings of just about everyone who matters in Timor’s Lilliputian expat community, from Aussie barflies to Timorese collaborators in the genocide. All these model citizens were apparently weeping bitter tears over one damned War Nerd article.

It was ridiculous. But you know, it’s easy to say that now that we’re safely out of Timor, thanks to a timely extraction flight, paid for by PandoDaily. At the time, I believed all that nonsense and wanted to kill myself. I would have groveled before my accusers if my editors from Pando, Paul Carr, Mark Ames, and Sarah Lacy, hadn’t slapped me awake.

You have to understand, this wasn’t the first time my articles had gotten us booted from a place we’d hoped to stay for a long, happy, uneventful time. We’ve been bouncing from country to country, encouraged to leave time after time, just because of my articles. In fact, the reason we went to Timor from Kuwait is that I’d been found non grata in Kuwait. This is what they call notoriety, which is sort of like being famous, only without the good parts.

And these expulsions seem to be coming faster and faster. We lasted a mere three months in Timor . . . and I wasn’t even working there for more than a week. And before that, in Kuwait, I was fired on arrival, without even getting a chance to mess up.

This sort of record does something to one’s self-esteem, if one happened to possess any. You start to understand why they threw Jonah off the boat. You start to agree with them. You start to remember with new understanding why the pre-Contact Fijians, normally very hospitable, met shipwreck victims with war clubs, meat-forks, and a bonfire.

Fijians considered shipwreck victims edible because they “came ashore with salt water in their eyes.” Pre-seasoned, you might say. We hit Timor in that condition. Although I don’t know if “we” is the proper pronoun. Katherine had no trouble in Timor. She never had any problems. It’s always me, these War Nerd articles of mine, that get us in trouble.

In Kuwait, one of the American “reverts” (Muslim converts) had googled me…and that’s really all you need to know. These War Nerd articles seem like simple common sense to me, a little rough humor, maybe, but the whole world seems to be allergic to them.

So, after this “revert” American smiled very unconvincingly at me—her name was Sherri, and she looked like Colin Powell in an abaya, if that gives you any idea of what I mean by “unconvincingly”—and told me I’d have to do a “demonstration class” before they could let me work on the fragile minds of the Kuwaiti officer corps. She then handed me over to “Doctor Abdullah,” a Mauritian dwarf, who led me down a corridor, smiling even less convincingly, and decanted me into a room which contained, not the expected handful of Kuwaiti officers eager to learn English idioms, but the base’s second-in-command, Captain Zayid, sitting at a desk with a lot of flags behind it.

Beside Captain Zayid was my fellow American, Sherri. Her crinkly smile was gone. No more pretending. As Captain Zayid motioned me to the hot seat in front of his desk, Doctor Abdullah zipped past me on his crafty little legs and sidled in next to Sherri. The two of them formed an admirable composite of the evil vizier of legend, seated at the sovereign’s right hand.

Behind me were two more Kuwaiti officers with lots of senior-looking braid on their tunics. Captain Zayid scowled and began, “You are a writer?”

“Uh, yes.”

“So…Kuwait is a relatively…free…country, but there are exceptions…”

I was one of the exceptions. I swear to god, if you set me down in a Quaker colony they’d be weaving nooses in a week.

The door opened again and another officer came in, sat down behind me. He had a lot of braid too.

Doctor Abdullah the evil vizier-midget piped up: “You said that the Hindus are good and the Muslims are bad!”

I honestly had no idea what the little freak was talking about. His rage was impressive, though, and rage always overawes me. I can never feel that righteous; all my thoughts are bad and wrong. When I hear pure righteous rage, it tends to convince me.

So, in a weirdly Dostoevskian moment, I was both totally unaware of what the Hell he was talking about, and convinced that he had me dead to rights, with God on his side.

He waved some printouts at me. One of the men behind me said something about “War Nerd,” and I finally had some idea of what universe we were in. But it wasn’t ’til the next day, lying in bed trying to make sense of what had happened, that I realized Doctor Abdullah and Sherri the Revert had printed out an old War Nerd column I did from the very early post-9/11 era, when I was writing in full character as Gary Brecher, an under-employed data-entry clerk in Fresno. Tasked with writing about the current round of India-Pakistan playground woofing on the Kashmir front, I’d tried to imagine what a guy like Brecher—and I grew up with hordes of ’em —would have thought, and it seemed pretty obvious he’d have sneered at the whole elaborate bluff, always ending in no war at all, or in a ridiculous little skirmish at most.

Somehow, the Sherri/Adbullah brain trust had taken that old article and derived from Gary’s redneck contempt for the whole Indo/Pak pantomime an unforgivable pro-Hindu, anti-Muslim (which is to say, pro-India, anti-Pakistan) slant. Apparently it’s my fault that Pakistan lost every war it fought with India.

But in real time, with that ferocious little man waving a sheaf of paper at me, I had no idea at all what was going on, except that righteous rage had found me out again.

It went on for quite a long time, but after the first few rants, I kind of lost track. All that stays with me is Sherri’s little Mona Lisa smile in that abaya, and Doctor Abdullah’s crazy red eyes. All through it, Captain Zayid, the silent emir, sat in his chair, waiting for us to finish. Then he said, “So…we will let you know. For now, you will not be teaching.”

The go-between from the hiring agency, Mishaal, debriefed me, by way of horror. He kept saying over and over, “This has never happened before.” He meant, to him. It had already happened to me, lots of times. It felt all too familiar.

Mishaal was in a weak position. His company was just a contractor to the wealthy fiction known as “The Kuwaiti Armed Forces.” If the hobbyists comprising Kuwait’s officer corps turned against his company, they had nothing. And Mishaal was a Christian. There’s a cringe that goes with that in the Peninsula, protective, ambitious, sly, nervous.

No one knew what I was supposed to do. Take the bus to work? Stay home? I got on the damned bus next morning anyway, on the off chance.

When we got to the base, Mishaal took me aside and broke it to me in a suave, sensitive manner: “Ah, you don’t need to come to work anymore. You should go sightseeing.”

I went outside, to the smokers’ ghetto, walked out onto the dry field and looked at the ants. They have two kinds of ants in Kuwait, big and slow and small and fast. They were skittering around ignoring each other. Teachers came out on the porch and smoked, probably talking about me. It all felt very familiar. I know that drill.

I went sightseeing, as it were, for the next fifteen months. There are no sights in Kuwait. Kuwait is what the planet will look like in a thousand years. Makes you glad you won’t be around to see it. Dead, all dead. The Gulf is like a sewage-treatment pond without the treatment; the dust-fields have no life but cars, plastic bags, stray cats, and pigeons—oh, and two kinds of ants of course. And by the way, if you like cats, go to Kuwait; you’ll be cured. There was one that used to lie against the door to the basement gym, to get as much of the AC as it could. It was always slow to get out of the way, and you tried not to look at it because there were worms dangling from its snout.

It’ll be a great planet for the worms, a thousand years from now. And the flies, and the cats. The rest—not so good.

So when Katherine got a nibble on this job in Timor, where the planet is supposedly still alive, I was the cheerleader. The maps said there’s a fringing reef all around Timor, right offshore. Walk into the water and you’re over a coral city. Hell, we might be the last humans to see such a thing. We had to go. Besides, they might not have heard of me in Timor; I might be employable in a place as desperate and remote as that, just coming out of a war with the monstrous Indonesian Army. They might be too distracted to google me.

We left Kuwait on Christmas, in the cool of winter. We had to be in Timor before New Year, according to Tony, the Aussie who did Katherine’s Skype interview. I asked her what Tony sounded like; “Oh, blokey,” she said. Blokes…you have to live in Australasia for a while to get the whiff of that. They’re a mixed lot, blokes, but on the whole, it’s not a good sign.

Katherine’s Kuwait employer had promised up and down, over and over, that his employees would get their December pay in time for their kaffir holidays. We were going to use her December pay for our traveling money.

So of course it didn’t show up at the airport ATMs. Not in Dubai, not in Singapore, and not in Bali, our last stop before Timor. So it was a long, scared flight, with no cash in hand and the Visa maxed out. We hit the little airport in Dili, the capital and only real city in Timor, with exactly zero dollars.

We’d told Tony when our flight would arrive, but there had been no response. The job could turn out to be a complete fiction. They often are, these ESL scams.

We came ashore in Timor with salt water in our eyes, in other words. Terrified out of our minds. The Visa had failed the last five times we’d tried it. No way it would work here, at the end of the world.

The Dili Airport is a grotesque assemblage under any circumstances, never mind broke and scared. It was built to look like the tall thatched huts of traditional Timor villages, but with UN plastics instead of thatch. It looks demonic, that witch’s-hat point wobbling in the heat.

The heat is the main fact about Timor. Kuwait, Saudi… that’s not heat. Bangkok? Warm, yes, but not hot. KL, maybe; KL is the only place that even begins to match Dili for real, sweaty, swarmy, suffocating, humid heat. You get off that little Indonesian commuter jet and go down the ramp into something that makes saunas seem breezy-cool.

Dili Airport, with terrifying thatched hut mimicry and Ebola poster 

And the first thing you see is a big, hand-written sign, “PAY VISA FEE.” Which we couldn’t.

Terror is goofy, if it has time. I had time to get very goofy, because Katherine volunteered to find an ATM while I minded the baggage. I shied from the Visa-Fee counters as far as I could. It’s a tiny, ramshackle place, the Dili airport, lax security, plenty of shying-room. Timorese guys, all of them looking short, wiry, dark, and hard as Honduran welterweight contenders, stared at me as I perched on the side of a non-functioning baggage X-ray. I knew that ATM wouldn’t work. None of them did, not the best and brightest at the shiny Bali airport. There probably wouldn’t even be an ATM here, and if there was, obviously it wouldn’t work, and we were doomed.

A Timorese guy said something to me and I nodded, smiling like an idiot, hysterically deaf. He went away. This is the end. No more squirming. Can’t even pay the visa fee. We’re finished.

Katherine came back. I couldn’t read doom on her face. She held out a hand with five $20 bills in it. “It worked!”

We tried every damn ATM in Dili, over the next three months, and not one of them would take our Visa. I still have no idea why that one at the airport gave us a hundred dollars. We went back to it later and it wouldn’t give us a dime. In fact, we had to borrow money from Katherine’s boss to get through the first month in Timor. That was fatal, like bleeding in shark waters. The one-off generosity of the airport ATM seemed like a horrible miracle to keep the story going, like the quarters a wanking demon might put in an old-time porn machine at a sex shop. Keep us in the game, get another episode going.

But at the time I just giggled in shock at the sight of those twenties. You have no idea how beautiful a $20 bill can be ‘til you’ve gotten off a plane with zero cash, and a sign about visa fees is staring at you.

We paid our fees and walked through. The metal detectors were off, the guards waved us through—once you’re outside the so-called West, there’s no security. And we were out, free, in Timor…and there was a fat white man who looked like he was expecting someone.

That was Tony, our connection. I was overjoyed to see him, the first and last time I experienced that reaction.

Tony took us in his stride, in that blokey way we both know, got us into a Hyundai SUV with the windows up, and took off. He said the AC was on, but it wasn’t. That was Tony, if only I’d realized it, driving us through the hottest town on the planet in an SUV with the windows up, insisting that the AC was on while he poured sweat.

He was frank about it. “People ask me, ‘Do you ever stop sweating?’ I say ‘Yuh, when I leave Asia.’” He was angry about being fat, you could feel that, but as is often the case, that was one of the best things about Tony. Fat was the least of his faults.

I kept thinking, would Katherine lose her job if I OPENED A FUCKING WINDOW? I thought she might, so we kept them shut. We were trying so hard. That’s what kills me, how hard we tried.

Tony gave us the tour. He hated everything. We were both being positive: “Oh wow, there’s a guy selling fresh fish, right off the beach!”

Tony: “Yuh, you don’t wanna buy’em though because they flush the poo right out to the sea there. Besides, these people don’t know shit about catching fish so half the time you’re eating frozen. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

A van cut us off. “These microlets, they call’em, they can’t drive, it’s worth your life to get on one of’em, half these people came right out of the bush, no bloody idea…”

He had stories, rugby stories. Tony Abbott was on his team once. A wanker. A lot of wankers in Tony’s world. Most of the wankers seemed to be American. Tony was trying to soft-pedal it, but he clearly hated Americans (I mean more than is reasonable). It was hard to listen, because there was no air, just sweat. He had a bad word for every passing sight, even the hotel he was taking us to: “Here we are, Dili Beach Hotel, that’s where you’ll be, it’s sort of a ridiculously Australian place, but you can get a beer up there on the veranda, you can find me there most afternoons…”

The sea was just across the road. There was a fringing reef shown right off the beach, all around the island. We were hoping to snorkel right outside the hotel. But Tony cleared that up for us: “Nah, ya don’t wanna go in the water, it’s all poo, right down from the sewers.”

Which was true, as it turned out. Dili Beach Hotel backs onto a massive open sewer that pours right into the ocean. The reef is dead, long dead. The locals gather the chunks of bleached coral to sell as decorative rock to the NGO elite.

You see that elite going by now and then on the sweaty, crowded streets of Dili. First you hear the sirens, then a motorcycle escort bullies its way through the crowd of scooters and minibuses, followed by a couple of SUVs with the shaded windows up. Somewhere in those air-conditioned interiors are two or three employees of the UN or the Australian Federal Government, planning new do-goodery to be inflicted on the already prostrate people of Timor.

Dili has a two-tier economy, with the NGO/Australian/NZ elite living in gated compounds tucked discreetly away in the maze of slum shacks. You never really see them until they need to bull their way through traffic, to or from the airport. Or at the Dili Beach Hotel when there’s a big game on.

All I wanted was to get in on a little of that sweet expat cash. Katherine’s job teaching Timorese Army officers at a base an hour outside Dili was off-limits to me. That had been conveyed to me very clearly.

Tony, doing his fat-henchman routine, had told us about Mark, the boss, when he picked us up at the airport. It was Mark’s SUV he was driving when he picked us up. Mark himself was busy. Mark, Tony told us, was always busy: “Mark only has two speeds, on and off.” Tony loved his boss, as a henchman must.

Mark called me about a month after we arrived. It seemed there might be a job for me after all. Not teaching at the base; that was absolutely off limits. I still wonder if there’s some sort of website for bosses in the army-officer TESOL biz, with a black list of those who must not be hired under any circumstances. If there is, I know whose name leads the list. Which is not fair, damn it, because given a chance, I’m a good employee, pure American lower-middle class submissiveness.

In fact, that was the attitude I tried to show to Mark, the big boss, when I was called into The Presence. LELI, the TESOL school he runs, is about a block inland from the Dili Beach Hotel, on a slum street with a surplus of stray dogs and feral children. In the midst of this tropical squalor, I swear to God, is a suave façade adorned with this tag, in large print: “’The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’ Wittgenstein.” I had one of those canine reactions to the sign, a low growl inside my head. I don’t get along well with people who like Wittgenstein. Somehow he became an honorary Englishman and Nietzsche, the better mind, was consigned to cartoon villainy.

To emphasize the limits of LELI’s language, a guard sits at all times just inside the invisible line separating LELI from the street. Let’s not kid around here, though; if you’re pale, you’re in. Or would be, most of the time. Me, I was going to have to audition. Hence the sweating.

Mark ushered me into his office with a sepulchrous, “Hello John, come iiiiinnn….” He looked like a genteel ghoul, a plummy cadaver with hollow eyes, but it was his voice that made the big impression. I can imitate that voice; you should hear me, in fact. I am, if I do say so, a riot. But describing it is more difficult. Imagine Boris Karloff playing a vicar. Or Alan Rickman as the terrorist CEO in “Die Hard.” That’s the best I can do. Plummy, sinister, yet ridiculously pretentious, all at once.

I still don’t even know where it came from, that voice. It sounded upper-class British to me, but there were a half-dozen actual Brits teaching at that school who swore that Juba sounded Australian to them.

Mark frowned. “Ah, now, we had planned to offer you an opportunity to teach for World Vision, a…Christian outfit…” The frown deepened to real distaste. “But, ah, they have not responded in a timely manner, and so we’ve had to tell them we can’t proceed.” The frown was intense now, like Alan Rickman learning that Bruce Willis had dispatched another of his East German henchmen.

“So, ah, we have elected to offer you another position, this one at the F-FDTL base in Baucau. Are you familiar with Baucau?”

I shook my head. “It’s an interesting place, I think you’ll find. Somewhat remote…” what I see now was the look of a monitor lizard staring down into a nest full of eggs. Yeah, I was groveling; my pride got left behind somewhere several countries back.

He nodded. “Good.”

I felt I should say something to sound like a savvy applicant, so I asked, “Is there any topic I shouldn’t discuss there?” See, I do kinda know there’s a tact problem here.

He frowned. “Well, you probably shouldn’t comment on the Catholic Church in the negative way that I might like to do. The Timorese are still absurdly attached to it.” I nodded to beat the band here. Peter at Gethsemene had nothing on me, not where there’s a paycheck involved, but I was getting that Rodney Dangerfield collar-pull feeling: Igor the henchman hated Americans and his Dr. Frankenstein boss hated Catholics. I felt that a bead was slowly being drawn on my forehead.

Mark seemed to feel the interview was over. I had had my five minutes in The Presence and was now a minion in good standing. He handed me a USB stick. “You’ll be picked up Sunday evening. Here’s the listening component of the course, and I’m sure there’ll be, oh, markers, a projector and so on at the base.”

Well, there wasn’t, of course. The base was a four-hour 4WD drive from Dili, and at the end of that long bounce, there was nowhere to stay. That’s why I ended up stuck in a steel container—long story—and would still be inside it if they hadn’t pried the window-screen off to let me climb out. Very undignified at my age, but infinitely preferable to spending eternity inside something that would have been considered a bit snug in a submarine. Here’s the Facebook post I wrote about it:

My compartment in Baucau

This is the steel cubicle I crawled into after the first day on Timorese Komponente (Base), Baucau. The steel boxes seemed appealingly safe, with tight-fitting steel door raised three inches off the floor to make entrance harder for crawling visitors. There was mold on the ceiling but the little AC unit worked in this cubicle, unlike the others. AC > allergies, even though it came on with a bomb-like roar every time I drifted off.

But it was too good to last. The door got cranky, and I shut it hard on the second day. It shut for good. Forever. I tried to get out, slammed my shoulder against it. The lock turned freely, totally broken. The fit was almost airtight. I hammered and yelled ‘til the caretaker shouted in reply. She speaks fluent something, not Tetun or Portuguese, her own idiolect, and takes it for well-meant Esperanto, a universal angelic tongue. (The crucifix is her doing.) I tried to explain, by way of yelling–my own universal language–that I was locked in. She burbled that pious Ur-tongue back at me. This went on for some time.

I’d already been having what first-world problematics call “suicidal ideations” since arrival on base, and this seemed to clinch it. “Now would be a good opportunity,” as Lowell’s Puritan anhedonists would have said. But she was at the barred window now, burbling towards something, saying “I can-can…” It struck me forcibly that I couldn’t-couldn’t, until I saw she was pointing toward the key. Passing the key though a nice tarantula-sized hole in the window mesh, I let her try it 20 or 50 times, knowing with something like happiness–close as the context allowed–that she’d fail. That door was locked forever, closed as an old-Catholic marriage. Til death at the very least, and some time after.

She came back to the window, burbling the revelation that the key (“can-can”) did not work. I pointed hopefully to the fire extinguisher on the wall, making smashing gestures. I didn’t think it would work, I just wanted very badly to smash it. She looked shocked and a little disappointed in me. It’s amazing how, even now, as a supposedly disillusioned old man, that stuff works on me. It might as well be my First Communion, which I celebrated with anxiety diarrhea. The main epiphany of these past few months is that no matter how bitterly I talk, I am nothing but a Good Boy and I will die in that wretched state. I sat down instantly, ashamed, trying to be good. I will be good, and wait, and pee on the floor if necessary. No, in that water bottle. I can transfer the good water to one bottle and pee in the other, and wait patiently.

My favorite line, from Mass: “As we wait in joyful hope…” Not joyful, God knows, but waiting, a long time. A half hour of crowbars (failed; see scratches on door) and then screwdrivers. No luck.

They switched to working on the window screen; Honorio, her husband, unscrewed the whole frame of the bars, and I de-groined myself climbing out one leg at a time, to fall onto the flower bed, walk back in, and give that door a good hard left hook. Which hurt; me, not the door. I fought the door and the door won.

And that was the end of my lunch hour and it was time to teach again.

It was a Hell week, but after returning to Dili and Katherine for the weekend, I fully intended to go back for the second week. I hated the very thought of going back to Baucau, but I was going to do it. In fact, I was in a taxi on my way to the slum where the buses to Baucau depart, when I got a call that the second week of teaching was cancelled due to insurrection. There’d been an attack on a police station a few miles from Baucau, part of the long-running feud between ex-rebel factions, and it wouldn’t do to have foreign instructors catching a stray bullet.

The bus I almost had to take back to Baucau. Thank you Mauk Maruk!

I wasn’t scared of getting shot. Never have been. I’m scared of other things, mainly the P-words: people and poverty.

So the rebel attack near Baucau seemed like a divinely ordained reprieve. I decided not to go back. I called Mark Juba and burbled the decision to him in a groveling rush: “Hi Mark I’m just calling to let you know I don’t think I can go back to Baucau for the second week there’s so much uncertainty about when it will resume and there are no materials in the classroom and the army wants me to stay in this house that had dog shit on the floor and furniture in crates and no screens on the window so either I open them and get malaria or die of the heat and y’know the dogshit on the floor was really runny like diarrhea and it was just a little too much for me and there were nine students the first day and thirty-seven the second day and there are no microphones so I can’t do the listening component I tried saying them out loud but there was one that was supposed to be from Keira Knightly and I really couldn’t do the voice properly and I almost got stuck in a steelbox also and there’s no transport except for microlets and Tony told me they’re lethal and anyway I’m really really sorry…sorry and I just wanted to let you know.”

There was a terrifying, “Mmmmm.” from Mark. It was not a happy “Mmmmm.” I had let him down.

So I burbled, “But I just want to let you know also that you don’t have to pay me for the week I did there I know it’s supposed to be six hundred per week but never mind that I don’t want to be paid.”

There was another “Mmmmm?” with a question mark. Much warmer. I felt that I’d been patted on the head via telephone.

Well, what can I say? One of nature’s victims. Actually, we lost quite a lot of money on the Baucau job because half my stuff is still there in that steel box: backpack, shoes, Kindle.

I had to try to make money with writing instead so I wrote an article about the road to Baucau. I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to talk too much about my slapstick adventures on-base, so I stuck to the grim landscape I’d seen on the long trips from Dili to Baucau and back, with a little historical context for readers who weren’t too familiar with Timor’s godawful recent history.

It honestly never occurred to me that anything in that article could bother anyone. You can read it yourself; would you have known it’d cause trouble? The only people I intentionally offended in it were the Indonesian army elite, and for God’s sake, how can you offend monsters like that? Godzilla sobbing into a hankie because somebody yelled at him; it’s not a side of monstrosity you hear about much.

But somebody was offended. You think I should’ve known? Maybe, but I really didn’t. I really thought it was a harmless article. I’ve done things that were damned well meant to offend people, but this wasn’t one of them.

It’s happened before though, this surprise. It’s a lifelong blind spot, always coming down to that proverb, “You can’t run with the fox and hunt with the hounds.” Why not? I always wondered, why can’t you? I want to run with the fox, hunt with the hounds, film it for the BBC, protest with PETA, sneer with the squires, and shrug with the slobs. Doesn’t everybody?

Apparently not. I was already working on my next article when Katherine came home from work, looking gray and sick. She keeps it to herself; most people can’t tell when she’s hurting.

“What happened? What happened?”

“Let me get some water. I’m sweating like a pig.”

She always insisted on walking home in the afternoon heat.

It took a while to get the story. She was shaky, hurt and shocked. Neither of us had seen this one coming. Finally, she told me what happened.

“They called me in…”

“Who? Who did?”

“Tony.”

Yeah? What’d he say?”

“Nothing, just, ‘Mark wants to see you, just pop in to his office.’”

“Oh God. What was it? Your passport?”

They’d been keeping Katherine’s passport for almost two months. That wouldn’t be too bad, some passport complication….

Katherine’s hands were shaking as she held the glass of water. “I should’ve known! Tony was polite for once. He actually said, ‘Let’s just see if Mark is in.’ He was smiling. I should’ve known.”

It took her a while to describe the whole interrogation. You can’t recall these things all in one go; you debrief in bursts, as much as you can handle, then a little pacing, groaning, messing with things in the kitchen just to be doing something.

Mark was waiting for them. As soon as Katherine came in, he motioned her to the hot seat—our seat, as I think of it. Tony took the classic henchman position, slightly out of the way.

Mark stood up, grabbed a print-out off his desk, slapped it down in front of Katherine and said: “What can you tell me about this?”

When she told me that part, I groaned. I mean more loudly than usual. I knew exactly what that sheaf of papers was.

But at the time, Katherine didn’t, she leaned forward, recognized something I’d read to her and said, “Oh, that’s John’s article!”

Mark stared Katherine down, but she still didn’t understand what was going on.

“Have you read it?” He asked quietly.

“Of course! I always read what he writes. It’s one of the perks.”

Then – dash – and I can imagine his plummy Alan Rickman voice getting even Rickmanier, more Karloffian, “I see. And you thought it was…” he paused as if to suppress overwhelming emotion, “appropriate given where you work and the sensitive nature of any military base in the world.”

Katherine’s reply, clearly the best under the circumstances was, “Um…yes?”

“You didn’t object at all? You didn’t try to stop him from publishing it?”

“No! It’s John’s writing. I don’t tell him what he can and can’t write or publish.”

At this point, Katherine said, Mark’s face got very weird. “His eyes popped out, and a vein on his forehead started pulsing. I didn’t think people could do that!”

Mark invited Katherine to consider his feelings. “I just think…that one of you might have thought for one second before publishing this about who it might affect. How do you think I felt when out of the blue the Australian ambassador called me up to ask about this—shocking, derogatory—article, which I knew nothing about? What was I supposed to say when he asks me why I have employed the spouse of this author? Especially employed her to work on the very jewel in the crown of the Australian defense force mission in East Timor? I didn’t know how to answer that. Do you?”

Apparently, Mark Juba, a grown man, actually used the phrase “the jewel in the crown.” And I’m the bad guy! To me, that is a language crime that dwarfs anything I’ve ever done in my life. But I’m not running this show.

He went on in this vein for some time. The last phrase he used was “biting the hand that feeds you.” That’s what poverty is; it means sooner or later you will hear the phrase “biting the hand that feeds you” and that alone is reason enough to get rich now, by whatever means necessary. Don’t ever be in a position to hear the phrase “biting the hand that feeds you” from Katherine as her hand holding a water glass is still shaking.

But even in the worst moments there are comic touches. Mark apparently finished with: “And Tony agrees with me 100%.” At which point Tony’s sweaty head bobbed in confirmation.

There’s a shock: Tony and Mark were in complete agreement.

I caved. No use lying; I groaned, I howled—it was all coming back to me, all the previous interviews with one of my articles waved around in my face or Katherine’s face; I caved. Neither of us slept very much that night and I forced myself to call Mark Juba the next morning.

And I caved. I groveled. I caved. There’s a predator for everybody in this world, and plummy guilt-inflicting works on me. He went on and on in that horrible Rickman elegiac tone about how I’d hurt people’s feelings, so many people’s feelings, so hurt, so terribly hurt. Even the guy who first drove me to Baucau was hurt. Everybody was hurt, especially his in-laws. In fact, it was odd how he kept talking about his in-laws and his wife. They were Timorese. I’d guessed vaguely that local connections had probably helped Juba establish his business, but there was something about his reaction as he went on and on to me in this phone conversation that started to make me think that it wasn’t the Australian Embassy that was upset, or even the tender sensibilities of TNI, but Juba’s in-laws.

At the time, though, it was only a vague impression. My main job in that phone call was to promise absolutely anything as long as he’d leave us alone and not fire Katherine. I know this doesn’t sound very heroic, but you can be heroic the first time, maybe the second time. The fourth or fifth time, believe me, you won’t be heroic.

He wanted the article taken down; I agreed. He wanted me to print a retraction; I agreed, even though I didn’t know what I was supposed to retract. What? I didn’t go to Baucau? TNI didn’t massacre a bunch of people? I didn’t see a bunch of burned-out houses?

So I wrote to Paul Carr and Mark Ames at Pando in this degraded state. The first line of my email was “Canberra and Wellington both want my bald head on a stick.” And it went on at full shriek for some time. I asked them to take down the article and let me write whatever grovel was required.

They refused. It still hurts me, imagining what they must have thought of me, but… well, anyway. They refused.

And that was when the stalking began.

Mark Juba was not used to being crossed. And my way of crossing people is, admittedly, somewhat confusing, consisting as it does of immediate concession followed by hiding in the deepest hole I can find. He started phoning. Oh how he phoned. But one thing I’ve noticed about cellphones is that you can turn them off. It’s not like there were a lot of other people trying to phone me. No one, to be specific. Then he started to send emails. He noticed, he said, that the article had not been changed. I had noticed that too. I was hoping he would go away if I failed to reply to his emails. That happens sometimes. But I was underestimating my Juba. Something was driving him, something I didn’t fully understand at the time. He was in a serious rage, but it didn’t seem like his own. He was conveying the rage of someone bigger and scarier than he was.

Finally, having been let down by electronic media, he resorted to older methods: he cornered us in a van. A van with blacked-out windows, no less. We were coming back from lunch, lunch at a Chinese restaurant, which somehow makes it worse because if lunch at a Chinese restaurant isn’t sacred then what is? We were walking back across an almost empty parking lot with the concrete shimmering in the heat, when Katherine said, “Uh oh!”

I yipped: “What? What? What? What?”

We were both in combat mode, well aware that something was going to happen.

She said under her breath, “That looks like the LELI van.”

To be continued…

[Illustration by Brad Jonas for NSFWCORP/Pando]

After the dissolution of his long-running pop-punk band the Groovie Ghoulies in 2007, Kepi Ghoulie kept busy cranking out high-quality music of various kinds. He made some pop-punk records, a folky record, a kids’ album, and a straight-ahead rock & roll album, all simple and catchy as can be.
With Kepi Goes Country, the lovable Kepi does exactly what the title says and goes country, proving that his eminently catchy songs can transition to just about any style and make sense.
He could go out tomorrow and buy a batch of synthesizers and make a really fun synth pop album of song with big hooks and a sweet heart. Here, the lilting tempos, chirping mandolins, hopped-up harmonicas, corn-fed harmonies, and Johnny Cash covers (“Ring of Fire,” of course) all work in…

320 kbps | 68 MB  UL | HF | MC ** FLAC

…tandem with Kepi’s unvarnished vocals, uplifting words, and singalong melodies to provide a country experience that even country music haters might like. That’s the power of Kepi and songs like “She Gets All the Girls” and “Let’s Do It Again” — the guy just knows how to write ’em. Hopefully Kepi doesn’t stay country, since pop-punk is his true home, but his side trip is a very pleasant one that any of his fans will be glad to take too.

Brian Carpenter is a master of dark Americana. Hailing from Boston, his style is fluid, mostly referencing early 20th Century American jazz and other folk/roots music. His first band that caught attention, Beat Circus worked in a self-described "American Gothic" style, releasing three albums with three different themes. But this is not his sole musical endeavor.

Beat Circus' first album, Ringleader's Revolt fits in with the Band's title, referencing circus themes (musical and thematic) and establishing their string band/brass band orchestration. Tracks such as Mandalay Song include an instrument, not widely heard in American music anymore, the tenor banjo, featured in many melodic rather than strictly chordal and arpeggiated roles.

Moving on, they explored more American styles. The next album touched on similar territory through a song cycle entitled Dreamland, referring to the doomed Coney Island theme park of the same name. The track Ghost of Emma Jean started a roots-Americana framework that would set the scene for their Appalachia-Steampunk album Boy from Black Mountain.

Brian has also created another group dedicated to early American jazz Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train Orchestra. Referencing a similar style with a tweaked orchestration they released Hothouse Stomp which used pre-big band jazz as its source material; again featuring quintessentially early 20th century American usage of instruments like tenor banjo and musical saw. The next released album worked off of lesser known jazz tunes of the 30s, including the amazing Beethover Riffs On, originally written by John Kirby.
Their soon-to-be-released album Hot Town looks deeper into 1930s and 40s jazz traditions of New York and Chicago, taking note of the Stride style in songs such as Alligator Crawl (apologies for the iTunes link - as the album is unreleased).

*should be stated that while not personally affiliated with Brian in any way (guaranteed he has no idea who I am), I did mix Beat Circus at a Boston event hosted by Sxip Shirey (previously, previously, I can verify he has NO idea he knows who I am...I ran into him on a 3 train one day). They were one of the greatest acts I've ever had the pleasure of mixing. Well, them and Reggie Watts (too many previous-es, just search him)...who was on the bill the next week...

Some of the greatest superheroes of all time have heeded the call of “Avengers Assemble!” Also, a lot of randos.

Marvel

Dr. Druid

So how do you get to be the worst Avenger? Dr. Druid — Dr. Anthony Ludgate Druid — was a psychiatrist (an occupation largely centered around sitting and talking), who got trained by an ancient mystic to be the backup sorcerer if anything happened to the more popular Doctor Strange. Besides being a literal superhero understudy, he also got mind-controlled by a villain named "Terminatrix," left the team in disgrace, joined another team, got mind-controlled again, faked his own death, betrayed at least one more team, and then bravely got killed for real.

Marvel

Jack of Hearts

Jack of Hearts is a half-alien whose scientist father exposed him to experimental "zero fluid," giving him the power to shoot energy blasts. He chose a playing-card-themed identity for unclear reasons and hung out in space for a while, before joining the Avengers during an emergency hiring crisis, and eventually blew himself up in space — along with a child murderer he grabbed on the way. Classic super heroics.

Marvel

Triathlon

This dude is a disgraced Olypmic athlete who got his powers from a weird cult that subsequently pushed the Avengers to bring him on as a diversity hire as part of a secret plot to infiltrate the team. Very questionable. He later becomes the 3-D Man, maybe because he didn't feel dorky enough.

Marvel

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Updating Richard Scarry's beloved Busy Town for Silicon Valley corpthink been done before, but never with the depth and persistence of the Welcome to Business Town Tumblr. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

(YouTube link)

Every action movie trailer follows the same formula in the past twenty years or so. The formula is so established that I’m often a bit confused as to whether this is a new trailer or something I’ve seen before. Red Letter Media lays out the formula.

Establishing shot of a city.
Bwaaaaaam! (often the sound familiar from Inception)
Mysterious, cryptic, and vague lines.
Make your characters look cool.
Build up to silence, then BAM!
Action Montage!
And don’t forget the powerful and/or inspiring monologue.
End montage with another cut to quiet.
Eh, throw in a laser shooting into the sky. Why not?
Title. (finally)
Clever and/or funny end tag before release date.

Each trope is illustrated with more examples than you can shake a stick at, if you were so inclined. -via Boing Boing

By Gladstone  Published: May 02nd, 2015 

"Garage" and "parking" both showed up in American English around the turn of the 20th century and have stuck around ever since. "Almah" — a word for a dancing girl or prostitute — vanished after a brief heydey in the early 19th century.

Those are some of the lessons from this chart from David Taylor at Prooffreader.com, which shows words that overwhelmingly appear in some decades and not in others:

David Taylor, Prooffreader.com

The data comes from the Corpus of Historical American English, which includes 400 million words of American texts dating back to 1810.

Some of these seem obvious. Of course people weren't talking about telephones or automobiles before they were invented, or about baseball and basketball before those sports became widely popular.

But this isn't just a chart about language. It's a chart about how society evolved during and after the Industrial Revolution, and how language adapts to reflect new ideas and changes in the way we live.

Many of the words refer to new inventions: video, telephone, radio, computers, and so on. "Computer" at first referred to a person who did computation by hand, and then to a type of adding machine, before taking on its modern meaning.

Other words on the list show how the world of work has changed. Words like "weekend," "unemployment," "scheduled," "output," "techniques," and "skills" don't seem particularly modern. But they reflect a profound shift toward modern society. They all entered the language in the late 19th century and early 20th century, as work and society were becoming more structured, urban, standardized, and professionalized. Railroads created the need for standardized timekeeping. The five-day workweek was emerging. So was the modern job — stable employment in an organized workplace hierarchy.

New words show how all the new inventions reflected on the chart — telephones and radio that let people speak over long distances, televisions and video that showed them pictures from far away, airlines and airports that made long-distance travel more feasible — led to a more interconnected world, a sense of the earth as a planet. "Global" and its opposite, "regional," are 20th-century concepts. You also see the rise of international enemies — "Nazi" first appears in the 1910s, but searching the corpus reveals it's usually a misprint or a proper name; it doesn't show up in force until the 1930s. The same is true of "Soviet," which shows up on the chart in the late 19th century in entries that are mostly miscategorized. It's not used in the sense of Soviet Russia until the 1910s.

And finally, the chart portrays a society that's more accepting of vulgarity than it used to be. "Fuck" shows up in print mostly in the second half of the 20th century, but it dates back to the 16th century. It just didn't appear in writing very much until the 1960s. Like other words on this list, it doesn't represent a shift in language as much as a shift in society: changes either in how we behave, or how we talk about it.

★★★

WATCH: 220 years of population migration

Ben E. King has died at 76. He was the original singer of "Stand by Me" (later covered by John Lennon, Otis Redding, Bono/Springsteen, and many others), which he cowrote with the famous songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller.

But my favorite of his songs is his first solo hit (i.e. without the Drifters), "Spanish Harlem." He didn't write that one. But he did write Led Zeppelin's "We're Gonna Groove."

A lesser-known one: "I Who Have Nothing" (info).

The New York Times obituary quotes him:

"I still think my whole career was accidental. I didn't pursue it. I feel like I'm cheating sometimes."

When Tinder first came along, it was heralded by some as the Grindr for straight people and a hook-up app that women would actually use. Men braced themselves for what was supposed to be a rush of incoming babes, women who had been released from the confines of a Girls Gone Wild! VHS but didn't expect anything so extravagant from them as a novelty T-shirt for taking their clothes off. Simple girls, horny girls. When Tinder matches occurred, these men stormed into our messages with all the social grace of Steve fucking Urkel but none of his endearing sincerity with appeals like, "Sexy dress. Hook up?" They used the precious real estate of their bio to complain about women rather than entice them. They wore jerseys for teams that suck. They attempted to order women to their homes as if they were chicken fingers on Seamless. And almost every last goddamn one of them found their whiskey habit absolutely fascinating.

"Dick is abundant and low value." Alana Massey on successfully using Tinder as a hook-up app. [NSFW header illustration]

A recent study published in the The New England Journal of Medicine has found that 97% of women rank “fear of going lady bald” over a fear of death. The study specified that lady baldness is defined as “the phenomenon of hair loss, as with male-patterned baldness—but on a lady head, and way sadder.”

 

“Of course I’m terrified of death,” said one study participant, “but the thought of going lady bald can literally keep me up at night. Like, what, would I have to start wearing wigs? Or fancy scarves on my head? I just…I—” The woman then said she “needed a moment” and left the room, her breath “panicked and uneven” according to researchers.

 

Another participant vigorously nodded her head, stating, “On a fear scale of one to ten, with one being totally chill, and ten being getting your house haunted like in that movie Poltergeist, I’d rank going lady bald as an eleven.”

 

“At first, the women surveyed wanted to know exactly how lady-bald we were talking about,” says head researcher, Nicholas Wilson. “Most study participants were especially concerned having no hair whatsoever, or just thinning at the top so that only people taller than me would really get a good look.”

 

 

Wilson adds that essentially all respondents agreed that even a little bit of noticeable thinning was worse than facing down the irreversible finality of death.

 

“I don’t think people realize just how pervasive fear of lady baldness really is,” says one study participant. “Every time some of my hair falls out in the shower or on my hairbrush, I spend three seconds fighting back hysterical tears because I am so incredibly frightened that this is the beginning of my slow descent into lady baldness, more so than the certainty of my own demise. And I’m a federal agent.”

 

The study also found that the majority of women polled also ranked fear of lady baldness over job loss and assault, but not over the office chair-induced condition, “giant flat butt.”

97% of Women Rank Going ‘Lady Bald’ over Fear of Death is a post from: Reductress

So your good friend Katie suddenly has a new boyfriend, someone you did not choose and do not want in your life. Of course you want her to be happy, but how can she possibly be happy spending so much less time with you and more time with someone so not-you? This intruder is clearly attempting to take her away and you’re the only thing that can save her! Here are the quickest ways to mark your territory and scare that man back into the manhole from whence he came:

 

Stare at his dick a lot.

Actively stare at his junk, like, all the time. Stare at it as if to let it know that it is not safe here. Men think with their penises, so without it he wouldn’t be able to think at all. That will scare him. He will leave. Now you and Katie can dedicate this afternoon to a shopping party!!!

 

Do. Not. Acknowledge.

Never greet him, as that is a sign of weakness. If you must use his name, only refer to him with aggressive nicknames like “Bucko” and “Shitferbrains” in order to assert your dominance. Never back down, because remember, this is a very important act of feminism! Now go get some hummus—it’s girls’ night!

 

Steal his number from Katie’s phone and text him pictures of dead stuff.

Hopefully you don’t already have that on your phone, but this moment is what the internet was created for! Send him gross pictures of roadkill, time-lapse gifs of fruit rotting, and basically anything involving maggots so he understands that he’s ruining your life by taking the foundation upon which it is built and setting it aflame! After this trick, you’ll have way more QT with KT!! Yay!

 

 

Scream.

Scream at him until he gets the clue and removes himself permanently from Katie’s life. Not words, just one long, mono-pitch scream right to the face. Never break eye contact, except to stare at his junk some more, and maybe throw a scream down there too. Even if this tactic doesn’t work, Katie should obviously see his fearlessness in the face of such horrific behavior as a red flag. Then you guys can go for a ROAD TRIP!!!

 

Threaten to take his life.

Under the auspices of needing him to help you carry something, silently lead him to the roof. No no; he’s doesn’t get to ask questions. He’ll find out where you’re going when you get there. Have him stand still while you circle him like a very intimidating shark. Leave it silent for a while until you ask him how good he is at staying alive. As he gives you his lame, friendship-destroying answer, quietly whisper about the others…the ones before him… Then hurry back downstairs because the commercial break is probs over and you need that sweet GOT action!!! #TeamKhaleesi

 

Actually take his life.

This one is like a lot of effort, but the results are guaranteed! Simply get yourself possessed by a real demon, eat his brain out of his brunch-killing, girl-talk slaughtering, snack-share destroying head, and murder him so much!!!!!!!! Then take a step back, look at what you’ve done, and wonder if you’ve gone a little overboard. Then call Katie, cuz it’s Froyo Friday!!!

 

So next time you need to be sure that Katie doesn’t enjoy happiness unless it revolves around you, follow these steps. Who knows, maybe you’ll have to kill her too so you can be together forever!!!! Hos before bros! #BFFs forever!!!!!

How To Terrify Katie’s New Boyfriend So You Can Get Your Friend Back is a post from: Reductress

«Hablemos sobre mi muerte», espetó Kim Fowley a Mike Stax para el fanzine Ugly Things en 2001. Acto seguido, explotó a hablar, ya imparable: «Llevo muerto mucho tiempo. En verdad espero morir después de una buena cena, en una cama con sábanas limpias. Probablemente acabaré en el infierno porque me gustan las tipas guarras y sospecho que en el cielo sonarán cosas tan infumables como Pat Boone. ¿De qué me arrepiento? De no haber sido más malo. Soy el tipo más cool del mundo. Soy el tipo más gilipollas del mundo».

El pasado 15 de enero Fowley soltó su última frase: «Stay teenager, stay r´n´r» y dejó de hablar para siempre. Murió en Los Ángeles, acogido en casa de Cherie Currie, la cantante de The Runaways, la mejor all girls band de historia —con permiso de The Ronettes— que Fowley ideó, cocinó y produjo.

Currie declaró una vez que Fowley era «un bestia al que no se le debería permitir acercarse a las chicas jóvenes», y anduvieron en batallas legales por temas de derechos durante décadas, pero la vida da muchas vueltas: se reconciliaron en 2008, y Currie decidió cuidar de él en los últimos meses de su vida. En cualquier caso, Fowley alumbró a las Runaways, pero hizo mucho más. Fue, sobre todo, una máquina de hacer canciones —un «puto jukebox humano», según sus palabras— y un tipo que fue testigo y parte de la extraordinaria revolución sónica vivida en la década de los sesenta.

Fowley no se andaba por las ramas: se autoproclamaba leyenda viva, y ese fue el nombre que le puso a su sello discográfico. Fue también productor, manager, genio y figura, pero Fowley no podía estar más en desacuerdo con esas definiciones: «Como ser humano soy un pedazo de mierda, como bussiness man soy un auténtico gilipollas, pero como performer soy sensacional, soy acojonante».

A todas luces indefinible, Fowley fue fruto de una interesante camada: los cachorros de Hollywood que crecieron en la época dorada del negocio cinematográfico y se hicieron jóvenes salvajes a caballo entre la década de los cincuenta y los sesenta. Su padre era Douglas Fowley, el desesperado director de cine que gritaba a la actriz lerda en Singing in the rain:

Vivió en un ambiente especial: sus compañeros en el instituto fueron Jan & Dean y el futuro Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, para quien empezó a escribir canciones en 1957. El 3 de febrero de 1959 oyó por la radio que se había estrellado el avión de Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly y ya no volvió más a clase. En ese preciso momento, como una iluminación, decidió que se iba a dedicar a la música. Aunque no encontró mucho apoyo familiar. Su padre le advirtió al respecto: «No eres judío, no eres de la mafia, no eres negro ni hillbilly. Ni siquiera eres guapo. Entonces, ¿por qué cojones crees entonces que tienes alguna oportunidad en el negocio de la música?». Obviamente, hizo caso omiso a los cenizos consejos paternos y, sin perder tiempo, se pateó todos los estudios discográficos de la ciudad. En verano de 1960 publicó el single «Alley Oop», coproducido con The Hollywood Argyles. Funcionó como un cohete y fue bombazo. Llegó al n.º 1:

Nunca lo sabremos, pero quizás Fowley ya no se recuperó de tan súbita experiencia: tener un sueño que se antoja imposible y, contra todo pronóstico, conseguirlo prácticamente al instante. Y vuelta a empezar. Hasta 1963, Fowley perseveró, intentó ser escuchado y tomado en serio por las buenas: ofrecía amablemente sus servicios, sus canciones, su tiempo, su alma. Incluso «era correctísimo, iba trajeado, era amable, elegante, iba aseado», puntualizó en una ocasión. Un día llegó un nuevo rechazo, esta vez de Capitol Records y, así, de un plumazo, decidió tirar todo eso por la borda. Para empezar, optó por no cortarse el pelo —«Es difícil hacerse a la idea de cómo dejarse el pelo largo liberó a tantos hombres en aquel tiempo», dijo un día— y, sin más dilación, decidió, según sus palabras, «dejar de ser educado, sacar dinero de donde pudiera y follarme todo lo que se moviera».

A finales de ese año, precisamente Capitol sacó el single de un nuevo grupo británico: era «I want to hold your hand», de los Beatles. De repente, «fue como si alguien hubiera lanzado una bomba en el negocio musical», afirmó. Decidió viajar a Londres porque quería conocer de primera mano qué pasaba por allí y averiguar qué ingredientes habían hecho posible que unos chavales ingleses robaran la escena musical juvenil de forma tan abrupta como incontestable.

La inmersión sixties de Fowley parece fruto de un rumboso guionista de Austin Powers, pero es tan real como imbatible: por ejemplo, en una fiesta Brian Jones le robó un gato porque consideraba que no lo cuidaba bien, se hizo amigo de Christine Keeler antes del caso Profumo, y vivió en la antigua casa de Shirley Bassey. Y todo tiene su explicación: «Una de las mejores cosas de los sesenta es que todo el mundo quería conocer a todo el mundo, no como ahora, cada uno metido en sus rollos». Más que nada y sobre todo, vivió la efervescencia de la escena londinense: entre muchísimo otros, vio a The Who antes de serlo —los grandísimos The High Numbers—. «Fueron la primera banda punk, sin duda», aseguró Fowley, al menos de la vieja Europa:

Con la llegada de la niebla y el frío del otoño inglés voló de vuelta al sol de California, justo a tiempo para ver uno de los primeros conciertos de The Byrds. Fowley conocía a todo el mundo y estaba en el epicentro del terremoto musical que se vivió en aquellas noches. Una vez explicó que vio tocar a The Yarbirds en un club en Los Ángeles y que, en el momento del inicio de la actuación, se quedaron momentáneamente sin luz en el escenario: optaron igualmente por iniciar la actuación y empezaron a tocar la introducción del tema «I´m a man» totalmente a oscuras, con los amplificadores a todo trapo. Cuando de golpe regresó la iluminación, toda la audiencia —unas doscientas personas— enloqueció y rugió al ritmo de la canción. Una experiencia sónica en toda regla. Mientras, en la puerta del garito, Marlon Brando, Natalie Wood y Joan Baez se tiraban de los pelos porque se lo estaban perdiendo: se habían quedado en la calle porque el local estaba lleno hasta los topes y no entraba un alfiler.

Fowley es el tipo que siempre estuvo allí, el que huele y casi palpa todo el éxito, el dinero y un lugar en la historia de la música. El que conoce a todos, el que les aconseja, el que a veces colabora en sus discos y se va de fiesta con ellos. Vivió de primera mano las sucesivas vueltas de tuerca de la revolución musical de gran parte de la década de los sesenta y parte de los setenta, y vio ante sus ojos el nacimiento y desarrollo de Beach Boys, los Who, los Rolling Stones, los Byrds, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa y Alice Cooper. Y era muy consciente de lo que estaba pasando: en ese momento, con nombres de ese calibre a tu alrededor «lo que hagas no cuenta mucho, aunque sea interesante», afirmó. Tenía, claro, sus obsesiones personales. Una era Phil Spector —a su vez obsesionado con Brian Wilson, de los Beach Boys—, de quien afirmaba que, para su desgracia, siempre iba un paso delante de él —exactamente «un año y medio», según sus cálculos— en materia de canciones y producción. El otro era Jim Morrison: siempre creyó que el cantante de los Doors le robó la melodía de su tema «The Trip» para componer «Soul Kitchen». «Si hubiéramos firmado los dos el tema, otro gallo me habría cantado», afirmó.

Fowley era un compilador de momentos únicos, un historiador de la música andante, y sus más increíbles historias y excéntricas afirmaciones resultaron ser asombrosamente ciertas, según se encargaron de contrastar diversos entrevistadores. En su inabarcable periplo por bares, hoteles, callejones y clubes, habló con todo el mundo. «¿Cuál es tu secreto?», le preguntó respectivamente a Brian Wilson, a John Lennon y a Bob Dylan en diferentes años, en sitios distintos. El primero le contestó: «Es muy fácil: el año tiene doce meses, y yo escribo sobre el calendario». «¿Cómo?», le repreguntó Fowley. «Que escribo sobre los nueve meses de instituto y los tres meses de vacaciones, es decir, sobre la rutina de la escuela y, después, sobre la diversión del verano», le aclaró Wilson. El segundo, Dylan, fue bastante más escueto: «Explico historias y hago preguntas». El tercero, Lennon, fue más filosófico: «Los Beatles dejaron de ser una banda cuando dejaron de intentar mejorar, reescribir, reinterpretar o reinventar los discos favoritos que nos gustaban en cada momento».

Al margen de consejos, Fowley tenía que vivir: lo ficharon en Imperial records en 1968 «simplemente porque llevaba el pelo largo», aseguró, colaboró con Gene Vincent, con Blue Cheer, con los Modern Lovers, con los que pudo, con los que lo quisieron, y sobrevivió para contar su rico y extravagante periplo por el planeta Tierra. Vivió el tiempo suficiente para ver la película de Hollywood —en otro tiempo su casa, su centro de operaciones— sobre The Runaways, con Kristen Stewart y Dakota Fanning como Joan Jett y Cherie Currie respectivamente, y un rudo Michael Sannon ejerciendo de pérfido Kim Fowley. Descanse en paz, libre al fin de Pat Boone, en el infierno.

La entrada In memoriam: Kim Fowley aparece primero en Jot Down Cultural Magazine.

Ben, E King, una de las grandes voces del soul, ha muerto hoy a los 76 años, tal y como ha confirmado 'The Guardian" a través de su agente. Stand by me, una canción a la que puso voz y texto, fue su gran éxito.  

La carrera de Ben E  King empieza ligada al 'doo wop' de 'The Drifters' y a grandes éxitos de la banda como 'There Goes My Baby" y "Save The Last Dance For Me". Eran los años 50. En los 60, King se lanzó a por una carrera en solitario cuyo momento cumbre lo marcó 'Stand by me'.

La canción, lanzada en el 61,entró rápidamente en el top 5 estadounidense y es el cuarto tema que más veces se ha emitido a través de la radio y la televisión en la historia del país. King recibió en 2012 el premio de los Compositores del Hall de la Fama. 

 

Tan popular y conocido es 'Stand By Me', que volvió a las listas de éxitos en los años 80 y fue durante tres semanas número uno en el Reino Unido. La canción ha estado nueve veces entre los más votados de la Billboard Hot 100 de Estados Unidos.    

A principios de este año, la Biblioteca del Congreso añadió la inmortal canción en el Registro Nacional de Grabaciones declarando que "la voz incandescente de King hizo de esta canción un clásico".

 

Se veía venir, y lo raro es que no hubiera sucedido antes. Grooveshark, el servicio de streaming musical gratuito, ha cerrado oficialmente las puertas tras años de batallas legales. En un comunicado han anunciado el cierre y pedido disculpas por lo que fue, efectivamente, un negocio básicamente ilegal.

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