firehose

In the fallout over Wednesday’s suspension of “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson by A&E for anti-gay and racist remarks, GLAAD is experiencing record levels of backlash. “In the five-and-a-half years I’ve worked at GLAAD, I’ve never received so many violently angry phone calls and social media posts attacking GLAAD for us speaking out against these comments,” the media watchdog organization’s vice president of communications Rich Ferraro told TheWrap. He said those reactions range from those who simply believe as Robertson believes to those who feel that GLAAD and A&E’s actions limit the reality star’s free speech.

popular shared this story from Ta-Nehisi Coates : The Atlantic.

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I've yet to take in an episode of Duck Dynasty. I hear it's a fine show, anchored by a humorous and good natured family of proud Americans. I try to be good natured, and I have been told that I can appreciate a good joke. I am also a proud American. With so much in common, it seems natural that I take some interest in the views of my brethren on the history of the only country any of us can ever truly call home:

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

That is Robertson responding to a reporter's question about life in Louisiana, before the Civil Rights Movement. I am sure Robertson did see plenty of black people who were singing and happy. And I am also sure that very few black people approached Robertson to complain about "doggone white people." 

I have some idea why:

 The corpse of 16-year-old Freddie Moore, his face showing signs of a severe beating, hands bound, remained hanging for at least 24 hours from a metal girder on the old, hand-cranked swing bridge spanning Bayou Lafourche.

Hanged by the neck the night of Oct. 11, 1933, in a mob lynching, the black youth had been accused in the death of a neighbor, a white girl...

Arrested Oct. 10, 1933, in the slaying days earlier of Anna Mae LaRose, a 15-year-old girl who was his friend, Moore was pulled from the parish jail in Napoleonville the next night by an angry mob of 50 to 200 armed and unmasked people who had the prison keys.

Some accounts say the lynchers were unknown and from out of town, as far away as New Orleans, while others say the mob was known to authorities. A coroner’s jury, impaneled by then-parish Coroner Dr. T.B. Pugh, said Moore “met death by a mob of unknown persons,” according to news accounts.

After being hauled from the jail, Moore was brought to the field where LaRose’s body was found, according to an Oct. 14, 1933, account in the black-owned New Orleans newspaper, The Louisiana Weekly. With a rope around his neck and clothes stripped to his waist, the teen was then marched, while being beaten, from the murder scene to the bridge and subjected to a branding iron whenever he fell.

Hanging from his body, a sign offered the final indignity: “Niggers Let This Be An Example. Do-Not-Touch-In 24 Hr. Mean it.”

As white people reviewed the scene on the bridge and black residents were warned to stay away, Moore’s body remained within sight of a school and the venerable St. Philomena Catholic Church, its spire above the fray.

One should not be lulled into thinking that the murder of Freddie Moore was out of the ordinary in Louisiana. Between 1882 and 1936, only Georgia, Texas and Mississippi saw more black people lynched. For part of that period four of Louisiana's parishes led the nation for counties with the most lynchings.

That is because governance in Phil Robertson's Louisiana was premised on terrorism. As late as 1890, the majority of people in Louisiana were black. As late as 1902, they still lived under threat of slavery through debt peonage and the convict-lease system. Virtually all of them were pilfered of their vote and their tax dollars. Plunder and second slavery was enforced by violence, as when the besiegers of Colfax massacred 50 black freedman with rifle and cannon and tossed their bodies into a river. Even today the Colfax Massacre is honored in Louisiana as the rightful "end of carpetbag misrule." 

The black people who Phil Robertson knew were warred upon. If they valued their lives, and the lives of their families, the last thing they would have done was voiced a complaint about "white people" to a man like Robertson. Ignorance is no great sin and one can forgive the good natured white person for not knowing how all that cannibal sausage was truly made. But having been presented with a set of facts, Robertson's response is to cite "welfare" and "entitlement" as the true culprits.

The belief that black people were at their best when they were being hunted down like dogs for the sin of insisting on citizenship is a persistent strain of thought in this country. What it ultimately reflects is inability to cope with America that is at least rhetorically committed to equality. One can quickly see the line from this kind of thinking, to a rejection of the civil rights movement of our age: 

Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right

This is not just ignorance, it is a willful retreat into myth. And we must have the intellectual courage and moral strength to follow the myth through. If swindlers, goat-fuckers and gay men are really all the same--disinherited from the kingdom of God--why not treat them the same? How does one argue that a man who is disfavored by the Discerner of All Things, should not be shamed, should not jeered, should not be stoned, should not be lynched in the street?

Further retreat into the inanity of loving the sinner, but hating the sin--a standard which would clean The Wise Helmsman, himself--will not do. Actual history shows that humans are not so discriminating. Black people were once thought to be sinners. We were rewarded with a species of love that bore an odd resemblance to hate. One need not be oversensitive to be concerned about Phil Robertson's thoughts on gay sex. One simply need be a student of American history. 

After all, life in Endiang, Alberta, the heart of coyote country, isn’t easy for roly-poly animals with short legs and low IQ. So when he and his wife were stocking their farm four years ago, they jumped on a small classified ad selling a small flock of Icelandic sheep.

“They’re not an ‘improved breed,’ so you’re dealing with the same sheep that were running around Iceland during the Viking times. They’re more like wild mountain sheep,” says Somerville, acting president of Iceland Sheep Breeders of North America. “I’ve watched these sheep take on dogs. I’m pretty sure they’d take on a coyote.”

But they’re not feral. In fact, 28-year-old Somerville is certain they’re smarter than standard commercial sheep, and he trusts them­; he sometimes sits in the middle of their pen and holds his seven-month-old son while the sheep snuffle around their faces.

There are many reasons why growing numbers—primarily farmers and knitters — are fixated on the Icelandic sheep. The breed, with fine-grained meat and a wooly coat that is both light-as-air and rugged, has retained one of the purest bloodlines in the agricultural world and carries a romantic and wild history.

Without sheep milk, meat and hides, life for her Viking ancestors would have been impossible, says Ragnheiður Eiríksdóttir, a Reykjavik-based knitting instructor and former nurse. “They were essential to surviving here,” she says. Three years ago she started Knitting Iceland, a tour company that primarily caters to American and Canadian knitters.

“In my classes I talk a lot about the sheep, our culture, farmers and our heritage,” she says. “If you just present someone with a ball of yarn it doesn’t have the same impact as that story, the fact that the whole heritage of a nation follows that ball of yarn.”

The Icelandic sheep is an ancient North European breed, slightly smaller than modern varieties, whose double-layered coat is uniquely suited to cold and wet conditions, says Eiríksdóttir. In Iceland they are raised primarily for their meat, but the wool is a valuable byproduct. The inner layer, or thel, is insulating, superlight and very airy, while the outer layer, or tog, is long, strong and water repellent. Carded together, these two layers make lopi, versatile wool used to knit lopapeysa, the distinctive traditional Icelandic sweater of concentric rings.

These days, says Eiríksdóttir, it is trendy for tourists to bring home an Iceland sweater as a souvenir, which means the humble lopapeysa is quickly becoming a status symbol.

“Over here everybody wears them: babies, old guys at the harbour, hipsters wearing lopi sweaters instead of hoodies,” she says, laughing.

At summer’s apex, before the annual slaughter, the number of sheep in Iceland outnumbers the human population three to one, at approximately 500,000. Allowed to roam wild in the summer, they are ubiquitous on the island’s barren, rocky landscape, sometimes scaling giant mountains in search of edible moss and herbs, where they can only be seen as tiny white, black and brown specks thousands of feet in the air.

Wool from the spring shearing is coarse and generally used to make carpets, while prized lopi wool comes from the autumn shearing. The country only has one industrial spinning mill, Ístex, which is co-owned by a cooperative comprised of 1,800 sheep farmers. From about 1,000 tonnes of raw pelts the mill produces about 454 tonnes of handknitting and felting wool—about 60 per cent is sold domestically.

When Chicago knitter and fibre artist Noelle Sharp was accepted into a three-month residency in Iceland, she wasn’t expecting she’d be staying on a sheep farm in the middle of nowhere. But that’s where she first discovered the joys of knitting with lopi.

“It’s got these great fibres that are kind of spindly. I work with unspun lopi, and it took me a couple of weeks to get used to it because it was like knitting with air,” says Sharp. “Plus, it has this self-cleaning quality to it, so I was told you’re only supposed to wash an Icelandic sweater once a year. I had never heard of that before.”

Back in Illinois, Sharp says lopi is the only fibre she uses that isn’t made in America. While it can be hard to find here—she orders hers directly from Iceland—she says it is gaining cult-like popularity in knitting circles. “As far as fashion goes, this year Iceland is huge,” says Sharp, who sells her work online “Sometimes when I’m knitting in public I’ll have knitters come up to me and ask, ‘Is that lopi and where did you get it?’”

According to Hulda Hákonardóttir, Ístex’s marketing manager, sales of lopi to North America make up approximately 20 per cent of their export market and sales have grown 30 per cent since 2009. Part of the growth, she says, is that is becoming increasingly difficult for knitters to find pure knitting wool instead of rayon and acrylic blends, which are generally cheaper.

But Sharp says there’s more to it, that there is an authenticity to the wool, a sense of connection to agriculture and to the sheep inherent in the material. “In Iceland I met this weaver who teaches weaving and knitting. Because of the shortage of trees, older people would wrap their yarn around sheep bones and use them as bobbins. She had a whole bowl of bones with yarn wrapped around them. It was very Viking,” says Sharp.

And then, she says, there’s the smell. “I get all kinds of wool into my studio, and sometimes it smells like an amazing Icelandic sheep, really warm and earthy,” she says. “Even though they have bright colors you just have this sense that they’re not polluting it with dyes and whatnot. You really have to smell it. It smells like a sheep. Other wool smells like nothing.”

Responding to demand for homegrown lopi has been challenging, says Somerville, particularly since they’re “not going to become millionaires selling wool and fleece.” Still, he fields regular calls from other farmers who want to learn more about the breed, and there are currently 300 farmers in North America who are registered owners of Icelandic sheep. After all, as he says: “Sometimes you just want something that’s more self-sufficient.”

For a free Icelandic sweater knitting pattern, click here

The post Why Farmers and Knitters Are Fixated on Icelandic Sheep appeared first on Modern Farmer.

my-doctor-who-feels:

i-am-a-lullaby:

I have a little rule of reblogging this whenever it appears in my dash

IF HE DIDN’T GET THAT KITTEN THEN THAT’S IT I’M DONE I QUIT LIFE

And the kitteh is all like, I CAN HAZ TIME LORD?

surprise you’re in rural atlantic canada

New York Daily News

Barry Diller's P.R. exec tweets racist joke on flight to Africa New York Daily News It's sounding more like OK Stupid. The communications director for media conglomerate IAC, which represents brands like OKCupid, is in trouble after publicly tweeting a racist “joke” that's getting few — if any — laughs. “Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Twitter Turns Ugly Over PR Person's Idiotic TweetMashable How a racist tweet caused an internet meltdown and got a PR woman firedVentureBeat Justine Sacco Deletes 'Hope I Don't Get Aids' Tweet - and Her Account - After ...TheWrap New York Times (blog) -International Business Times -The Age all 49 news articles »

Voting has closed for our Monarch of the Monsters design contest, and we have a winner! With 107 votes it’s the mask wight designed by Sersa Victory for the 13th Age RPG.

Sersa’s commitments for 2014 prevent him from taking on any new freelance projects. So we’re awarding a freelance design commission from Kobold Press to the second place winner: Jeff Lee who brought us the phlogistian faerie for Pathfinder RPG!

Congratulations to our winners and to all the finalists, who will receive PDF copies of the Midgard Bestiary for Pathfinder RPG, Midgard Bestiary for 4th Edition, Midgard Bestiary for AGE System, and the double-ENnie winner, the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding.

Last month I wrote how the Kdenlive project had gone dark after the KDE video editing software's leader had gone missing. Fortunately, the maintainer is alive and well and there's renewed hope for new developments within Kdenlive...

Seattle students protest gay Catholic school teacher's resignation Toronto Sun seattle-protest Students held a second day of protests in Seattle after a Catholic high school asked a principle and coach to resign because he married his same-sex partner. REUTERS/David Ryder. Tweet. Change text size for the story; Print this story. and more »

These just get more and more elaborate.

The Heat have become known for their increasingly extravagant photobombs of each other's post-game interviews, and LeBron James and Dwyane Wade just raised the bar while Chris Bosh spoke after Miami's win over the Kings:

That's a good 'un, but I'm not sure Wade's legs should be given such stress at this point in his career. Just a thought.

Anyway, I look forward to the day when one Heat player bursts out of another Heat player's chest Alien-style, thereby ending the photobomb competition forever.

(GIF via the Heat website/Danny Martinez)

Frozach Submitted

Massachusetts state police announced today on an official Facebook page that a trooper stopped a vehicle in which 1,250 packets of heroin stamped "Obamacare" and "Kurt Cobain" were found. The four people inside the car were arrested. A state police dog ("K9 Frankie") found the bags of heroin after a routine traffic stop. AP:

State police Lt. Daniel Richard says it's not unusual for heroin to be stamped with numbers, words or symbols to identify who's selling it. But he says the "Obamacare" stamp is one he hadn't heard of.

NBC Connecticut:

Police arrested Tyler Robenstein, 23, of Colchester, Vt., and charged him with trafficking in heroin, conspiracy to violate the drugs laws, possession to distribute a Class A substance, speeding, unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle and failure to change lanes for an emergency vehicle. The three passengers -- Marquese Jones, 22, and Sherod Green, 24, both of Newark, N.J., and Ashley Beaulieu, 21, of Colchester, Vt. -- were charged with trafficking in heroin, conspiracy to violate the drugs laws and possession to distribute a Class A substance.

San Francisco-based social media startup Buffer just did something unprecedented: It published the salaries of every one of its employees online, available for the public to see. “We hope this might help other companies think about how to decide salaries, and will open us up to feedback from the community,” CEO Joel Gascoigne wrote in a blog post published on Thursday.

You can see for yourself, right here. Gascoigne makes $158,800 a year; COO Leo Widrich makes $146,800; CTO Sunil Sadasivan makes $137,600. The list goes on, and no one—not even those still in Buffer’s beginner “Bootcamp” period (in which employees are still technically freelancers) makes less than $70,000.

The move is part of Buffer’s more general strategy to ”default to transparency”—meaning making operations as transparent as possible. The startup, which helps users schedule social media updates, already publishes its revenue and user numbers every month. It even allows everyone at the company to have access to email exchanges among other employees.

But publishing employee salaries is just one part of wage transparency; the other is explaining how management calculates an employee’s worth. Buffer makes that public too.

As you can see, there’s only one truly subjective variable: level of experience. That’s established through management’s discussions with each employee, as Gascoigne told 99U.

By creating a transparent formula and paying above market rate, Gasciogne says he hopes to promote long-term commitment from employees. “In Silicon Valley, there’s a culture of people jumping from one place to the next,” he told 99U. “That’s why we focus on culture. Doing it this way means we can grow just as fast—if not faster—than doing it the ‘normal’ cutthroat way.”

It’s unclear what, if any, benefit disclosing every employee’s salary to the public offers a budding startup like Buffer. Disclosing salaries within a company is one thing—it promotes openness and fairness, which is a good for morale—but disclosing every employee’s salary to the public is another thing entirely. If the move is more of a publicity stunt to round up some good will and incite chatter, then kudos to Buffer. That mission has been accomplished.

When the last Harry Potter movie came out in 2011, no one expected there to be plans for a new film series within two and a half years, never mind a new film series and a new play.* And yet that’s exactly what's happened. In September Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was announced, and now we’ve learned that J.K. Rowling is developing a Harry Potter play for the West End. Accio tickets to London! *It makes sense, because dolla dolla bills y’all, but I refuse to be cynical about more Harry Potter.

Americans have been trying hard to eat more healthily. Three decades of bad news about red meat and pork—worries about fat, cholesterol and cancer, for example—mean they’re passing up steaks, hot dogs and hamburgers more often. But they’re clearly not giving up meat altogether: they’re eating more chicken instead.

But chicken might not necessarily be a safer choice than other meats. A new study by Consumer Reports, a product review magazine, adds to the mounting concerns that chicken consumed in the US is teeming with harmful bacteria. Around half of the 300-plus raw chicken breasts it purchased in stores in 26 US states contained at least one type of bacteria that was resistant to three or more leading antibiotics.

And more than half of the samples also tested positive for fecal contaminants, which contain harmful bacteria (overall, 97% of the samples contained “bacteria that could make you sick”).

The prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains found in the Consumer Reports study is especially alarming, since these “superbugs,” as they’re called, cause at least 23,000 deaths in the US each year.

The consequences of superbug outbreaks are often more severe than those involving regular bacteria. A salmonella outbreak linked to Foster Farms, the US’s sixth-biggest chicken producer, which sickened 416 people this year, required twice the usual rate of hospitalization, says the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

That said, the bacteria found in the study doesn’t always sicken people. For instance, even though E. coli has a nasty reputation for causing food poisoning, all but a few strains are harmless. However, 11% of the chicken samples contained an E. coli strain that causes urinary-tract infections. And two bacteria types—campylobacter and salmonella—are much more likely to cause diarrhea and vomiting, says Food Safety News.

How can you avoid these superbugs, and still enjoy chicken breasts?

Hard to say. None of the brands and types of chicken tested (pdf) contained bacteria at significantly lower rates. There was no significant difference in the amount of bacteria types between regular chicken breasts and those labeled “no antibiotics” or “organic.”

“At the moment, the only way to protect yourself from becoming sick is to remain vigilant about safe handling and cooking,” says Dr. Urvashi Rangan, executive director of the food safety center for Consumer Reports. Handling contaminated raw chicken can transfer bacteria to kitchen surfaces where they can live for days.

The good news is the US government is planning to ban the use of “medically important” antibiotics in food animals. Pumping animals with antibiotics to make them grow or keep them from being sickened by unsanitary cage conditions helps bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.

But here’s the bad news: The US Department of Agriculture may soon allow poultry plants to process 175 chickens a minute, up from the current maximum of 140, says Consumer Reports. That’s likely to increase the presence of feces on raw chicken. It may also unload certain food inspection duties from the federal government onto individual companies, which would leave the task of reporting unsanitary conditions to poultry company employees.

McGruber writes "During her testimony (PDF) at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing Wednesday about the data-broker industry, Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, revealed that the Medbase200 unit of Integrated Business Services Incorporated had been offering a list of 'rape sufferers' on its website, at a cost of $79 for 1,000 names. The company, which sells marketing information to pharmaceutical companies, also offered lists of domestic violence victims, HIV/AIDS patients, and 'peer pressure sufferers.' In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Integrated Business Services Incorporated President Sam Tartamella initially denied that his company maintained or sold databases of rape victims. After the Journal provided him a link to the 'rape sufferers' page, he said he would remove it from Medbase200's website and denied ever having sold such a list. The page was removed later Wednesday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pentagon on Friday announced it is holding what it calls its first-ever “Afghanistan white goods sale,” where speed is of the essence and there are bargains to be had for wily shoppers.

Deputy Salt Lake County Clerk Dahnelle Burton-Lee said the district attorney authorized her office to begin issuing the licenses but she couldn't immediately say how many had been issued.

Since 1994, thousands of fans of Bikram Choudhury—whose eponymous brand of heated yoga gained devotees including George Clooney, Lady Gaga, and Jeff Bridges—have flocked to his teacher-training program. Some women in his orbit now say that Choudhury sexually harassed and even sexually assaulted them, and five are suing him.

A renewed probe into John Wayne Gacy, the infamous serial killer who shattered so many families four decades ago, recently helped put a California family back together.

America received the ultimate booty call on May 7, 1992, courtesy of Seattle rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot and his song “Baby Got Back.” Since its release, the up-tempo track has become our national anthem of ass.

There is no telling what an NFL player will do when he reaches the end zone. Ickey Woods shuffled; Tim Tebow prayed; Joe Horn once made a phone call. With this in mind, the Count decided to conduct the first-ever audit of touchdown celebrations by analyzing 1,150 touchdowns from this season and categorizing them.

Jeff Cantrell wanted one thing a lot: to have the alien warlords of GWAR play at the Super Bowl in 2015. It was never going to come true, but he gave it his best, and it was beautiful.

You don't really make friends on the internet. We maintain friendships on the internet, just by communicating and helping out and exchanging jokes and Houston Astros GIFs as friends do. We can identify affinities with people on Twitter or message boards or (and I can't imagine this, but sure) comment sections. The relationships we make in the online world's semi-real space -- instant and more distant than arm's length; conversational and silent -- are only as real as their environment.

So I can say that while I exchanged something like 65 emails with Jeff Cantrell over the course of writing several stories on his quest to get GWAR the halftime gig at the 2015 Super Bowl, and while I enjoyed every one of those exchanges, I didn't really know the guy. I know what his voice sounded like, because I hooked him up with a radio producer I know in Seattle; the show had him on for a deliriously great segment that revealed Cantrell to be as winning out loud as he was online.

But although we both enjoyed our correspondence enough to keep it going even when he took a breather from the whole #GWARBowl endeavor a month or so ago, I don't know that I can say that Jeff and I were friends. We never met, and never really came that close to meeting. I think this is part of why I felt so sad at the news, on Friday afternoon, that Cantrell had died suddenly, earlier this week. The bigger part of it, of course, is that it's sad that he won't be around for his wife and family and friends, and also to continue to push on with his sprung quest to have the most disgusting band in the world blast stage blood (and, um, other stage fluids) all over the stage-managed, meticulously branded spectacle that is the Super Bowl. The sadness I'm feeling most acutely right now, though, is that I would have liked to have been his friend.

I imagine you would have, too, if you are the sort of person who likes other people. I knew very little about Cantrell beyond the fact that he did video stuff and lived in the West Virginia-adjacent part of Kentucky, and that he had a unique and wonderful sense of humor. You never know what to expect from email correspondence with someone whose address has a "69" in it and ends in hotmail.com, but Cantrell's emails were little bits of goofy, exclamatory art: reliably both wry and ribald, with an emotional tone unfailingly somewhere between a bear hug and two bear hugs.

I could never quite figure out if he really thought GWAR might play the Super Bowl, although I suspect he knew it wasn't going to happen. But he wasn't trolling in a put-on character, either: he knew this was a great and funny idea, and if he knew that it was impossible, he also knew that it was hilarious and so very much worth the doing. The NFL, being the NFL, gave him an email address and a name to which he was to address some questions, and never gave him anything else.

But he pushed on, and more and more people signed his Change.org petition and he planned some new ways to get the NFL to pay attention to his dream, even if it was just to issue a press release reading, "Dude, obviously not." Cantrell had been in touch with the man behind Improv Everywhere, and was considering some sort of happening at NFL headquarters. Jeff went so far as to post a Craigslist ad in New York looking for participants, but made it so vague -- he wanted to surprise the NFL -- that it got no response. In one of our later emails, he made his first concession to the grim reality of the NFL's humorlessness: he'd decided that it would be okay if GWAR played the Pro Bowl instead of the Super Bowl. He really did want the NFL to hear him out, and Greg Aiello responded by blocking the @GWARBowl account on Twitter.

The last email I got from Cantrell was on Thanksgiving. He and his wife had gone to a GWAR show earlier in the month, but he mentioned that he "had to slow down a bit (finally made my first ER visit!!)." He ran some new ideas by me, reiterated his desire to achieve "Double Yankovic" -- twice as many signatures on his petition as on this one advocating for Weird Al to play the Super Bowl -- and wished me an "awesome T-day"; I told him to take care of himself, expressed my certainty that he'd achieve Double Yankovic (he did), and wished good things back at him, and that was that.

I am not communicating what I want to communicate, I fear, because I only know so much about him; the nature of our relationship and the medium in which it unfolded ensured as much. But here's a last thing that might help you understand. Cantrell changed his email signature frequently, although it was generally themed around Things You Should Know About Me. Here's how it read in that last email:

1) I have excellent phone skills, to the point that other hill children would say, "Why you talk like that?"
2) A level I made for Warcraft II was included on the CD that came with PC Gamer (it was the one with Hexen II demo on it).
3) I love "Evil Dead" so much that I spent two spring breaks in college going the real place where it was filmed in Tennessee.
4) I caused international unrest by asking for GWAR to be at the 2015 Super Bowl.
5) Robocop offered to buy me from my mother (well, it was Peter Weller).

Who would not want to be friends with that person? Who but the NFL could resist this person? So: rest in peace to one of the more interesting men I never knew, and thanks.

Here's a link set up by one of Cantrell's friends for donations to the American Heart Association in Cantrell's name.

Other Books In This Series The Cajun's Captive (Book One) Bitten in the Bayou (Book Two) Seduced by a Cajun Werewolf (Book Three) Mated to a Cajun Werewolf (Book Four) Stranded with a Cajun Werewolf (Book Five)

As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.