The stenographers for once want to type a murder trial procedure instead of an enemy to lovers mafia boss x y/n Wattpad fanfiction

Official Statement from Princess Haya: 24 March 2022

“It is my sincere hope that the judgments published today conclude these legal proceedings.

As we witness the devastating atrocities that are happening in Ukraine and so many other places in the world, my heart, mind and prayers are with the men, women and children who are suffering in unthinkable ways. This statement should not detract attention from the human tragedies that are unfolding by the hour.

I have not used my voice publicly at all for the duration of these proceedings out of respect for the Court, and to protect my family, but I feel I need to mark the end of this long period of litigation and convey my sincere thanks to those who have supported us throughout.

I have, for so long, wanted to express my deep gratitude to His Majesty King Abdullah II, my dear brother. You have ensured throughout our ordeal that your niece, Jalila, and nephew, Zayed, and I, always felt the protective arms of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan around us here in England, and that we remained constantly aware of your steadfast love and support – despite the complex challenges our predicament caused. I am also eternally grateful for the support of my brother, His Royal Highness Prince Ali, and my entire Jordanian family.

Jalila and Zayed love to sit and talk with me about Jordan – the honorable, strong people and proud history. The cooing of the doves at dawn as Amman is bathed in soft light. The knowledge that every footstep one takes is on soil walked upon by prophets, and civilisations of all kinds embraced in a land as old as time. The taste of cardamon in Bedouin coffee, the traditions, the beauty of our deserts and olive groves, and the blanket of green forests and wildflowers in spring. But most of all, the kind, true hearts of the Jordanian people. We adore and miss Jordan and the Jordanian people, and your continued love and support has been, and will always remain, a beacon of light.

The last few years have been a frightening journey and yet the sanctuary, protection and extraordinary compassion we have experienced in England have strengthened our belief in the enduring power of both humanity and justice.

I wish to thank with all my heart the Family Division of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, and the CAFCASS Team, who have supported the children and I with such care and sensitivity. They have given us hope for a future of dignity, free as possible from fear – not a day will go by in my life that I do not feel gratitude for every freedom my children and I have and every moment we are given together.

In the Royal Courts of Justice, there is a family of hardworking people: the stenographers, note-takers, the court security and clerks, who, with the tiniest, gentle gestures, or an encouraging smile and a cheery ‘Good Morning!’ made my days feel safe and bearable. I deeply appreciate their generosity of spirit.

I have been deeply humbled, through this long and intense experience of British Justice, to see with utter clarity the values and foundations that built this wonderful country.

It was one of the great honours of my life to be a part of the early days of the UAE’s story and to call Dubai my home and land of my children for so many years. The love and respect shown to us by so many people of all walks of life was heart-warming; we will never forget you. We are thankful for the many happy memories which we will focus on and keep alive in our hearts. You will remain forever in our prayers.

I will continue to raise our children with respect for the values, cultures and traditions of both of their countries of origin, and pride in their heritage. They will always honour their roots and seek to make a positive contribution to this world in any way that they can as educated, honest and kind royal children.

I wish to thank Baroness Fiona Shackleton for her extraordinary heart. Fiona has worked to protect us night and day for three long, hard years. She has never shied away from telling me when I was wrong, nor of supporting me when I needed to dig deep. Thank you, Fiona, for giving me strength in the darkest hours, for carrying me when I felt too tired to keep going, and for never missing an opportunity to make me smile.

Through this journey I have felt closer to my own mother, who I lost young, than ever before. I know if my mother was alive today she would be grateful, as I am, and she would say that no woman has fought harder for another woman than Fiona Shackleton fought for me. Fiona’s grace, her courage, and her enormous heart will be a guiding example for me for the rest of my life. I am truly blessed and honoured by all Fiona has done and continues to do for me. Thank you for keeping my children and I safe, and together.

Baroness Shackleton, the wonderful team at Payne Hicks Beach, and Counsel, have navigated so many areas of law in the multiple facets of this case. They have done so with the utmost integrity, dignity, and tenacity. I will never forget how each and every one of you agonised over our case in your efforts to protect us. The hours, energy and sheer human determination you showed were completely inspiring. I know that you put your own lives on hold for three years in order to protect ours. I will never be able to thank you enough.

Hard times bring the bravest hearts to the fore; Dr. William Marczak’s brilliance, rigour and decency will never be forgotten. There are others, who I cannot name, who have also shown incredible courage and integrity in all they have done, never hesitating to protect us despite the significant risks they have been exposed to. To all of you, I offer my heartfelt thanks.

There are no words, no words at all, to describe the love, respect, admiration, and pride I have for the two bravest souls of all, Jalila and Zayed. They have met every hardship and challenge with dignity, faith and a renewed resolve to be kinder and more humble people, determined to love, serve, and contribute to a better world.

Jalila, Zayed and I are not pawns to be used for division. As my father, His Majesty King Hussein Bin Talal, would have wished, we will continue to honour our family’s proud tradition of peace, bringing people together and building bridges in the Middle East and to the West.

The children and I will hold dear our unshakeable belief in goodness, kindness and humanity. We will always remain true to those values.

24th March 2022″

Arabic:

– بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم –

بيان رسمي صادر عن صاحبة السمو الملكي الأميرة هيا بنت الحسين

بداية، أتمنى أنه مع ما تم نشره اليوم من أحكامٍ، تُختتم وتُطوى صفحة الإجراءات القضائية.

في الوقت الذي نشهد فيه ما يجري من فظائع وتدمير في أوكرانيا ومناطق أخرى عديدة حول العالم، فإن قلبي وعقلي ودعواتي مع الرجال والنساء والأطفال الذين يعانون بشكل لا يمكن تصورّه. إنّ هذا البيان يجب ألاّ يصرف الانتباه عن هذه المآسي الإنسانية التي تتكشف كل ساعة.

لم أستخدم صوتي علانيةً خلال فترة سير الإجراءات القضائية احتراماً للمحكمة، وحمايةً لعائلتي، إلا أنه يتوجب علي الإشارة إلى انتهاء الإجراءات القضائية الطويلة والتعبير عن عظيم الشكر لكل من دعمنا خلال هذه الفترة.

ولطالما رغبت في التعبير عن امتناني الكبير لجلالة الملك عبد الله الثاني، أخي العزيز، لما أثبتّه لأبنائي الجليلة وزايد خلال هذه المحنة، ولم تتوانَ يوماً عن تقديم حبك ودعمك لنا، وشعرتُ على الدوام بالأمان في حماية الحضن الأردني الدافئ هنا في بريطانيا على الرغم من التحديات المعقدة وصعوبة الظرف، وسأكون ممتنةٌ على الدوام للدعم الذي قدّمه شقيقي، صاحب السمو الملكي الأمير علي، وكافة أفراد أسرتي الأردنية.

أبنائي الجليلة وزايد يحبون الجلوس معي والحديث عن الأردن وشعبه الجدير بالاحترام القوي وتاريخه المشرّف… هديل اليمام عند الفجر حين تكتسي عمّان بضوء الصباح الخافت… ومعرفة أن كل خطوة على ثرى الأردن هي خطوة على أرضٍ داسها الأنبياء… أرضٌ قديمةٌ قدم الزمان احتضنت مختلف الحضارات… مذاق الهيل في القهوة البدوية، تقاليدنا، جمال بوادينا وبساتين الزيتون وغطاء الغابات الخضراء والزهور البرية في فصل الربيع… وأكثر من كل ذلك – قلوب الأردنيين الحقيقية الطيبة. إنّنا نعشق ونشتاق للأردن والشعب الأردني، وإن حبكم ودعمكم المستمر كان وسيبقى دوماً منارةً لنا.

لقد كانت السنوات القليلة الماضية رحلة مخيفة، إلا أن ما لمسناه من حماية وتعاطف استثنائي وملاذ آمن في إنجلترا كان له بالغ الأثر في تعزيز إيماننا بالقوة الدائمة للإنسانية والعدالة.

أتقدم بالشكر الجزيل من كل قلبي لقسم شؤون الأسرة في محكمة العدل العليا بإنجلترا وويلز، وفريق الاستشارات والدعم التابع لمحكمة الأسرة والطفل CAFCASS، الذين دعمونا بأقصى درجات الرعاية والحساسية ومنحونا الأمل بمستقبل شعاره الكرامة الإنسانية لا يعتريه الخوف. لن يمضيَ يوم في حياتي دون أن أشعر فيه بالامتنان للحرية التي أتمتّع بها أنا وأطفالي، ولكل لحظةٍ يتم منحها لنا لنقضيها معاً.

يعمل في محاكم العدل الملكية البريطانية فريقٌ من الأشخاص بجدٍّ واجتهاد: كُتّاب المحكمة ومدونو الملاحظات والأمن والموظفون – الذين ساعدوني على تحمّل الأيام ومنحوني الشعور بالأمان من خلال ما قدموه من لفتات لطيفة كابتسامة مشجعة مصحوبة بعبارة “صباح الخير!”، وإنني إذ أقدر بعمق تلك الروح لديهم.

تشرفت خلال هذه التجربة الطويلة والزخمة مع القضاء البريطاني بما شهدته بوضوحٍ من القيم والأسس التي بُنيت عليها هذه الدولة العريقة.

ومن أكثر ما افتخرت به في حياتي أن أكون جزءاً من قصة الأيام الأولى لدولة الإمارات العربية المتحدة وأن أعتبر دبي بلدي وموطن أبنائي لسنوات عديدة، وما لمسناه من الحب والاحترام من أشخاص من كافة مناحي الحياة قد أثلج قلوبنا، لن ننساكم يوماً، وكلّنا امتنانٍ للذكريات السعيدة التي سنركّز عليها لتبقَ حيّة في قلوبنا. ستبقون دوماً في صلواتنا ودعواتنا.

سأستمر بتربية أبنائنا على احترام قيم وثقافات وتقاليد بلديهما والافتخار بإرثهما. وسيفخرا دوماً بجذورهما وسيثابرا للمساهمة في العالم بشكل إيجابي وبكافة السبل كأطفال متعلمين وصادقين ولطفاء ينحدران من عائلات ملكية.

كما أودّ أن أتقدم بالشكر من البارونة فيونا شاكلتون لقلبها الاستثنائي، والتي عملت بجدٍّ على مدار ثلاث سنوات طويلة وصعبة لحمايتنا، ولم تتردد يوماً عن ارشادي كلما أخطأت، وتقديم الدعم عندما كنت بحاجة للبحث بشكل عميق. شكراً لكِ فيونا لمنحي القوة في أحلك ساعات الظلام ولمساعدتي على الاستمرار عندما كنت متعبةً جداً، ولاستغلالك كل الفرص لرسم الابتسامة على وجهي.

خلال هذه الرحلة، شعرت بأني أقرب إلى أمي – التي فقدتها في سن مبكرة – أكثر من أي وقت مضى. وأعلم أنها لو كانت على قيد الحياة اليوم ستكون ممتنةٌ مثلي وستقول أنه لم يسبق لامرأة أن حاربت لأجل امرأة أخرى كما فعلت فيونا شاكلتون من أجلي. سيبقى فضل فيونا وشجاعتها وقلبها الكبير مثالاً أحتذي به ما حييت. وإنني ممتنّةٌ بصدق وأتشرف بكل ما قدَّمته وتستمر في تقديمه. شكراً لكِ على إبقائي وأطفالي بأمانٍ ومعاً.

قامت البارونة شاكلتون والفريق الرائع في Payne Hicks Beach والمحامين بالخوض في العديد من المجالات القانونية المرتبطة بالقضية، متحلّين بأقصى درجات النزاهة وكرامة النفس والمثابرة. لن أنسىَ يوماً معاناة كل واحدٍ منكم في جهودكم لحمايتنا خلال هذه القضية. لقد كانت طاقتكم وساعات العمل وتصميمكم مصدر إلهامٍ كبيرٍ لي. وأعلم أنكم قد انشغلتم عن حياتكم لثلاث سنوات من أجل حماية حياتنا، ولن أكون قادرة على شكركم بما فيه الكفاية.

إنَّ الأوقات الصعبة تدفع القلوب الأشجع إلى المقدّمة، ولن أنسى يوماً تألق ودقة وأمانة الدكتور ويليام مارشاك، وآخرين لن أقدر على ذكرهم، ممن أظهروا شجاعة ونزاهة لا تُصدَّق في كل ما فعلوه ولم يترددوا في حمايتنا على الرغم مما تعرضوا له من مخاطر كبيرة، أشكركم جميعاً من كل قلبي.

تعجز الكلمات عن وصف الحب والاحترام والتقدير والفخر الذي أكنُّه إلى أصحاب الأرواح الأكثر شجاعة – الجليلة وزايد – اللذين واجها كل المصاعب والتحديات بكرامةٍ وإيمان وعزم متجدد ليصبحا ألطف وأكثر تواضعاً، وبإصرارٍ على الحب والتفاني والمساهمة في عالم أفضل.

الجليلة وزايد وأنا لسنا أدوات تُستخدم للتفرقة، وكما علّمنا والدي المغفور له بإذن الله جلالة الملك الحسين بن طلال – طيب الله ثراه – فإنّنا سنستمر بحمل تقاليد السلام في عائلتنا التي نفخر بها والتي تجمع الشعوب معاً وتبني الجسور في الشرق الأوسط ومع الغرب.

أتعهد أنا وأبنائي بأن نبقى متمسكين بإيماننا الثابت بالخير وطيبة القلب والإنسانية. وسنبقى صادقين على العهد.

Mechtober Day 28 - cannibalism

Transcript of General Court Martial Session, Fort Thames, British Lunar Expeditionary Base.

Attending - Colonel Frances Melchett, OBE. (Presiding Judge) 

Major Dorian Dawes (Prosecutor)

Lieutenant Nadia Bajwa (Defense) (absent)

Sergeant Dywen Morris (Guard)

Private Jonny D'Ville (Accused) 

Lance Corporal Andrew Nasir (Stenographer)

Col. Melchett: And who do we have up next?

Maj. Dawes: Private Jonathan D'Ville

Pvt. D'Ville: It's Jonny  for fuck's sake.

Sgt. Morris: Silence when you speak to an officer!

Maj. Dawes: C Company, 42nd Starborne Infantry. Serial number….uh, 000000004

Pvt. D'Ville: I joined up early.

Col. Melchett: Well, let's get this over with. Dawes, what are the charges.

Maj. Dawes: There are a number of lesser charges, but the primary crime is cannibalism.

Col. Melchett: Ah. Ahem. Well. I thought that with the food shortages at the front, and those dastardly microwave attacks, we had decided to turn a blind eye to the, ahem  incidents, what?

Maj. Dawes: Yes, sir, but this wasn't a microwave incident. The prisoner barbequed and ate a human leg while on R&R. 

Col. Melchett: Good Gravy! That's hardly cricket, what? Do you have anything to say in your defence?

Pvt. D'Ville: It was my leg and my barbeque. For once, I'm afraid, I've committed no crime. Though I'm happy to rectify that and eat someone else's leg, if you'd like?

Sergeant Morris strikes the prisoner around the head with the butt of his rifle.

Sgt. Morris: Silence when you speak to an officer!

Maj. Dawes: Please stop looking at my leg like that. I don't like it.

Pvt. D'Ville: Ah, so you have tasted it then?

Maj. Dawes: Let the record clearly show that Private D'Ville is in possession of two non-prosthetic legs. So unless you're trying to tell the Colonel that you originally had three legs, I think we can assume the devoured limb was not yours.

Pvt. D'Ville: No, it was, I kicked a mine and then dragged it back to base. The leg, that is, not the mine.

Col. Melchett: Just because it was in your possession doesn't mean you grew it yourself, what?

Pvt. D'Ville: Check if you like. The foot's right there. I didn't eat that.

Maj. Dawes: Um. Why?

Pvt. D'Ville: Ew. I have standards. 

Maj. Dawes: Sergeant?

At this point Sergeant Morris conducts a thorough visual inspection of all three of the prisoner's feet.

Sgt. Morris: They do appear to be identical, sir.

Maj. Dawes: He's still not allowed to go around eating his own foot!

Pvt. D'Ville: I didn't eat my own foot, I ate my own leg. And it was delicious, if anyone's interested. I got some spices off a dead Lenny and made a rub that really set my flavour off perfectly.

Col. Melchett: Ooh, do you have any left?

Pvt. D'Ville: Not for officers. My flesh is an enlisted-only delicacy.

Sgt. Morris: Silence when -

Pvt. D'Ville, interrupting: - And there's none for you either.

Sergeant Morris kidney-punches the prisoner.

Maj. Dawes: we have received some testimonials on the prisoner's behalf from his superiors. I have a note here from his sergeant….I can't quite make out this signature...Sergeant...Tim? It says….ah.

Col. Melchett: Well? Don't leave us in suspense, man.

Maj. Dawes: It just says 'Just shoot the bastard and send him back to us. We need him for the war.' 

Col. Melchett: I see. Anything else?

Maj. Dawes: Yes, a letter from Colonel Toy Soldier. Erm. It just suggests that hanging him would be preferable to shooting him as it would be 'more jolly good fun'.

Pvt. D'Ville: Heh. Thanks, TS.

Maj. Dawes: Not very popular, are you, private?

Pvt. D'Ville: You might be surprised. I certainly wasn't.

Maj. Dawes: There are a number of other charges related to Private D'Ville's 48 hour pass in Fort Thames. In addition to the cannibalism, I mean.

Col. Melchett: Go on, then, man!

Maj. Dawes: Taking part in an illicit poker game, winning against a superior officer in an illicit poker game, refusing to return superior officer's property when so ordered, punching superior officer, brewing illicit moonshine, drinking illicit moonshine, distributing illicit moonshine, making molotov cocktails out of illicit moonshine and threatening to burn down ENSA, organising an illicit concert, singing banned songs, writing new songs that we needed to issue new banning orders for, and the possession of an illicit deadly weapon - to whit, one harmonica. 

Pvt. D'Ville: It was a slow weekend. That's why I finally had the time to properly slow roast my leg.

Sgt. Morris: Silence when you speak to an officer!

Col. Melchett: Right, I've heard enough. It's almost lunchtime. Just take the prisoner out back and shoot him, what?

Pvt. D'Ville: I'll save you the trouble.

Maj. Dawes: My God! Where did he get that gun?

At this point Private D'Ville first shoots himself through the head  and then shoots Colonel Melchett, Major Dawes and Sergeant Morris. Private D'Ville then proceeds to borrow a paper knife from Lance Corporal Nasir's desk, saws off Major Dawes' left leg  and slings it over his shoulder.

Pvt. D'Ville: Right, then. That's my pass up, so I'll be heading back to my unit. Good luck with your note taking.

End note - Lance Corporal Andrew Nasir requests an urgent transfer to a posting as far away from Private D'Ville as humanly possible. 

Half-Life²: Anticitizen - Chapter 3

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

_____________________

Chapter 3

Trespass

The true citizen knows that duty is the greatest gift.

The true citizen conserves valuable oxygen.

The true citizen cooperates with his Civil Protection team.

The true citizen’s job is the opposite of slavery.

The Consul’s brief messages echo across the pavement, each one followed by a hollow chime. It has an almost hypnotic effect, as I find myself staring up at the cluster of screens hanging over the intersection. It’s an Orwellian sight to behold: the citizens going about their day while the Consul’s watchful gaze looks down from above.

The true citizen embraces the Universal Union.

I think back to my encounter with the Vortigaunt. It had been a shock to hear English words coming from the mouth of the alien. Its voice was guttural and rough, and it continually made insect-like hissing and clicking sounds, but it spoke English nonetheless. Quite eloquently, even. Vastly different from Black Mesa, where the hisses and clicks had been the only components of their communication. But perhaps the bigger shock in seeing the Vortigaunt was not what it said, but the way it spoke to me. Like I hadn’t killed dozens of its kind in Black Mesa after seeing them slaughter my coworkers. After such hostility, I expected this Vortigaunt to charge up a bolt of green energy and attack me, and my instincts wanted me to reach for a weapon I didn’t have. The last thing I expected was for it to greet me as an ally.

“Your presence gives us hope, Freeman,” it had said. “As you saved my kin in the border world, so shall you save us again on this miserable rock. For now that the lesser master lay defeated, the greater must also fall in time.” Ah, so that’s how it is, I thought. When I killed the Nihilanth, I freed the Vortigaunts from their enslaver, and now they expected me to do the same once more. I remembered the slave camps and factories on Xen, where, for just a brief moment, they didn’t attack me – until the Nihilanth’s Controllers arrived and forced them to fight. They must have realized I was their one hope for freedom. A freedom which, ultimately, was very short-lived.

The Vortigaunt then walked to the contraption that held another one of its kind in its dark liquid. It placed its two-fingered hand against the glass and, despite its alien features, I could see sadness fall across its face. “The Vorti-cells drain power from my kin to support the Combine’s machinery. Those who enter them seldom emerge. The few who do are weakened almost to the point of collapse. Truly, it is a fate far worse than the shackles I bear.” The shackles were different from the ones worn by the Nihilanth-enslaved Vortigaunts. Instead of shining green, they were a dull gray. Their design remained very similar, though. Wrist bracelets, a collar, but also a sort of codpiece that I didn’t remember seeing on the Nihilanth’s slaves. Apparently the Combine deemed it necessary to cover the Vortigaunts’ loins – even though they housed no visible organs of any kind.

The Vortigaunt proceeded to grab a broom from against the wall and told me it had to resume its duty or suffer punishment. It seemed rather ironic, almost comedic even, that an alien race powerful enough to power factories was also being employed to sweep the streets. Recalling the instructions Jeremy had given me, I asked the Vortigaunt if he knew how I could get to the Manhack Arcade, where Barney was supposed to meet me. “Ah,” he responded pensively. “The Manhack Arcade. The hall of the unwitting executioners.” He proceeded to give me clear directions. I was to go to a place he called the Stenographer’s Chasm and then continue in a straight line. I wondered what he meant by ‘unwitting executioners’, but before I knew it, he had already said his goodbyes and disappeared around the corner.

The strange encounter had left me confused and a bit shaken, but I resolutely continued my journey and followed the Vortigaunt’s directions. I had a hard time imagining what this ‘Stenographer’s Chasm’ could be, but I could never have imagined what it turned out to be. An enormous, Combine-modified warehouse consisting of one long room that extended far into the ground, filled with rows of workers perched on stools behind desks, frantically typing on typewriter-like machines. But the stools and desks weren’t on the ground: they were mounted onto single, suspended rails that ran across the room. There were multiple levels of these rails and desks reaching all the way to the ceiling and down into the chasm. The workers had nowhere to go. My guess was that at the end of their shift or when their quota was fulfilled, the rails transported them to a place where they could safely dismount their stools. Until then, they could do nothing but work. I didn’t know what it was they were doing. What kind of paperwork could the Combine have? They didn’t seem like the type to bother with those kinds of things too much. Then again, an intergalactic empire is bound to have some unavoidable paperwork. Probably keeping track of resources and the like.

More disturbing sights awaited me, though. It all began at a building that produced a continuous sound of whirring and chugging, like a giant steam engine. Looking through the window, I saw a black and white tiled hall that was filled with enormous, diagonal pistons moving back and forth. At their base, people were working on the large engines that seemed to drive the pistons. I then realized that the engines weren’t just large, the figures knelt at their base were also small… they were children. Children, no older than twelve, were working on heavy machinery under the watch of Metrocops. And that wasn’t the only factory where children were being forced into labor. A bit further down the street was a smaller brick building that housed a large furnace. More children were stationed at a conveyor belt that lead into the furnace. They took white, ellipsoid objects from barrels and placed them onto the conveyor. They weren’t being burned in the furnace: they reemerged out of the side, attached to the ends of poles, and were transported into another machine. I had seen the white objects before on the brown-robed, flamethrower-wielding beings in the station and on posters that Jeremy had referred to as ‘Cremators’. These were Cremator heads. I tore myself away from the windows and continued my way through the industrial area. I never looked through another window again.

The factories eventually made way for a busier commercial district, which is where I find myself now. It’s the busiest place I’ve seen in this city, apart from the military parade. This must once have been a street with many successful shops, but now most of the display windows stand empty. One of the buildings still in use houses the same ration dispensers I also saw in the station. Another one showcases multiple television screens, all of which display the Combine logo.

“Can you believe it? Free TVs!” says a citizen gazing through the window.

“Don’t get too excited,” his companion replies in a cynical tone. “Those things only have one channel: the Consulcast.” He points over his shoulder at the cluster of screens overhead, where the Consul’s many faces are still naming the values of a true citizen.

But the Consulcast nor the free TVs are the reason why there is so much traffic on this street corner. In fact, I’d wager the Combine strategically placed those here so that as many citizens as possible would be exposed to the propaganda. The real eye-catcher everyone seems to be here for is across the street: the Manhack Arcade. It’s a large building that forms the corner of the street. Completely Combine-made, no recycling of old buildings. The people in the street flock towards the wide entrance on the corner, which is flanked by two Metrocops. Above it hang a number of yellow posters and banners and even more screens, all showing Combine logos and imagery.

I wonder if I should go in. Jeremy told me Barney would meet me at the Manhack Arcade, but it’s unclear if that means outside or inside. It seem risky going into a Combine facility, but it doesn’t seem like the citizens get scanned like they did at the checkpoints, and I could probably slip by the two guarding Metrocops unnoticed by hiding in the crowd.

I wait a little longer, hoping Barney will show himself. The clouds have gotten darker still, and before long a light drizzle starts pouring from the sky. Not only am I not dressed for rainy weather, I also want to avoid getting into too much contact with this water, which, judging from the greenish color of the clouds it originates from, could have all kinds of toxins or undesirable pH values. And so, when an exceptionally dense group of people approaches the entrance to the Arcade, I join them and walk past the Metrocops without either of them giving me a second glance.

Inside is a corridor that leads to the main room. Like the Stenographer’s Chasm, it’s long, tall, and extends down into the ground. Instead of rails with desks and tired workers, this room is filled with catwalks leading to strange machines. Citizens queue in front of them and when it’s their turn, they step onto a pedestal in front of the machines, grab hold of two control handles and lean forward to place their heads in some sort of virtual reality display built into the arcade.

A screen above the player allows bystanders to follow the game. A citizen near me has just started: at first, the screen shows only a grid of red lines in a black void. Then, the grid bends and reshapes itself into a three-dimensional environment that resembles a ruined building. Several humanoid shapes appear in yellow and orange tints, like heat vision, but with a clear red outline to them. The player navigates the environment, seemingly flying, and moves towards the outlined targets. The targets start moving around, trying to evade the player, but eventually he catches up to one. It’s not clear what happens, but when the player bumps into the target, the red outline disappears and a score of one hundred appears in the bottom right corner of the screen. “Ha ha, got one!” the player exclaims. Another nearby player is already at a score of eight hundred, when one of the targets suddenly rushes at him, holding up some kind of long object. The screen goes black and the words ‘GAME OVER’ appear on the screen. “Damn it!” the man shouts. “I was almost at my high score!”

Something’s not right. The way the targets move – it doesn’t look like a video game character. Much too erratic and lifelike. And from what I’ve seen of the Combine so far, I doubt they would put effort into providing ground-breaking AI technology for their panem et circenses. The Vortigaunt’s words echo through my mind: ‘the hall of the unwitting executioners’. I can put two and two together, but I don’t want to. I refuse to believe that what I fear is true. People slaughtering their own, cheering while they do it – and without ever realizing what they did. Or, at least, I deeply hope they don’t.

I don’t want to stay here any longer. Watching these innocent people enjoying the Combine’s twisted games turns my stomach. I have to find Barney. But how can I simultaneously hide from the real Metrocops and try to get Barney to see me?

As I pace through the room, I notice a Metrocop eyeing me. It’s hard to tell with the gas masks, but it seems like his gaze is following me. Is he Barney or a suspicious guard? I try to act inconspicuous and wait for a signal. Suddenly, the Metrocop turns away and walks towards a door. He interacts with the locking mechanism and it opens before him. He throws another prolonged glance in my direction before stepping through, out of sight. I wait. The door doesn’t close behind him. I cautiously make my way to the door. It leads to some sort of backstage corridor, clearly a ‘staff only’ area. I can’t see the Metrocop. I look around the Arcade one last time, but none of the remaining guards seem to notice me, so I enter the corridor. It’s cold and dark, and my footsteps are loud on the metal floor. I arrive in a small room with one of those Combine consoles. The wall is lined with a rack containing dozens of small, deactivated drones whose purpose I can’t discern. I hear the door I entered through close.

“Hey, you!” I hear from one of the neighboring corridors. A Metrocop – the one I followed in here – enters the room. “Do you have your identification?” He menacingly steps towards me. Seems it wasn’t Barney after all. Tough luck. “You are not supposed to be in here. I need to see your identification.”

Well, I seem to have gotten myself into a sticky situation. The Metrocop is trying to drive me into a corner, drawing his stun baton. “Overwatch, restricted incursion in progress in sector 8. Permission to enact civil judgement?” he says to seemingly no one. There’s a short blip and a burst of static following his question. I’m not thrilled about the prospect of ‘civil judgement’, so I decide not to wait until he gets his answer from whoever Overwatch is. I place my hands on my head, feigning surrender, while I scan the exits. The corridor back to the main Arcade hall is sealed and I can’t tell where the others lead, so I’ll have to trust my instincts.

Either the Metrocop has received his permission from Overwatch, or my eyes darting around the room have made him suspicious, because he suddenly swings his stun stick at my head. I try to duck and the blow lands against my elbow, sending a shock through my entire arm as blue sparks fly from the weapon. In response, I kick at his shin as hard as I can. He grunts and loses his balance, and I take the opportunity to dart down the nearest corridor. I hear the Metrocop’s heavy boots give chase behind me as he mumbles a status report to Overwatch. I round a corner, praying I won’t run into a dead end. I see a T junction ahead. Suddenly, I hear a deafening bang behind me, and the sound of a bullet hitting metal. Damn. He has a gun. I have to reach the junction as fast as possible. No time to look which way to go. As the echo of the gunshot fades out, I speed off into the left corridor just before another bullet plunges itself into the wall.

Suddenly, my surroundings open up into a larger room that’s two thirds Combine architecture and one third concrete rubble, remainders of whatever building was here before they installed their Arcade. I could get out through the collapsed walls and floors, but I’d be an easy shot. There’s also what looks like a Combine elevator with a bright red button inside it. I have milliseconds to make a decision. How far behind is he? Can I pull it off?

I slam my fist into the red button, rush back out of the elevator and then dive behind a half-collapsed wall. The doors close and the elevator starts to rise as I flatten myself against the concrete, bent rebar poking into my shoulder. My left arm is numb from the shock of the baton. I hear the Metrocop charging into the room. I hold my breath and pray he falls for my trick. It’s a trick as old as time. He stands still and I wait, my heartbeat ear-deafening.

“Subject is headed for top floor, secure perimeter around elevator.” I have to keep myself from sighing in relief. He isn’t gone yet. In fact, he seems to just stand still in front of the elevator. He must be waiting for the elevator to reach its destination. If he waits for the top floor units to report an empty elevator, my cover is blown.

“Copy,” he says. My functional right hand grabs hold of a loose chunk of concrete near me. I hear him walk a few steps, and then a couple of beeps. “Elevator power disengaged. Heading to your location.” With that, he walks out of the room, and I can finally breathe again. They don’t know the elevator is empty yet. They think they have me trapped in an unpowered elevator. Now to finally get out of here.

Easier said than done, as it turns out. The ruins are a concrete maze, and I constantly have to watch my step. It doesn’t help that the rain that seeps down through the broken ceilings makes everything slippery. The downpour has changed into an outright storm: the water beats down loudly on the concrete and every now and then a roaring thunderclap tears through the sky. Meanwhile, I guess the Metrocops discovered I wasn’t in the elevator after all, because I suddenly hear the cold, disembodied female voice – Overwatch, I assume – echo through the air once more: “Individual, you are charged with anti-civil activities: 63 criminal trespass, 148 resisting arrest, 243 assault on Protection Team. All local Protection units: code alert: locate, contain, prosecute.”

I spot one of the lambdas painted by the resistance group on a pillar. It leads the way down a slope of collapsed floor into a sub-street level area. Knowing the Metrocops are looking for me again, I try to speed up my pace a little while heading down – a mistake. The wet rubble gives way and I lose my footing. The world spins around me as I slide and tumble down the slope. I try to shield my head with my arms. I roll over the floor after reaching the bottom before coming to a stop.

I lie on my back as my surroundings come back into focus. I’m in some sort of underground sewer chamber: I see a ladder on the wall leading up to a manhole cover and there’s a grate in the ceiling through which light and rain pours down in a small waterfall, though the ground I lie on is thankfully dry. I do a quick damage report: my palms are chafed and I’ll undoubtedly have a few bruises, but no lasting damage. I’m lucky I didn’t hit my head on any of the protruding edges of the concrete.

I become aware of a sound, just barely audible over the storm. It sounds like a fire – no, more like a flamethrower. At the same moment, I notice the dancing orange light on the brick wall, and my nostrils are assaulted with the stench of burning flesh. I immediately jolt up. Pain shoots through my back at the sudden movement. I look around and immediately spot the source of the sound: there’s a Cremator standing on the opposite side of the room. The two lanky, leathery-skinned arms sticking out of its brown robe carry a heavy flamethrower which, I notice for the first time seeing one up close, is connected to a spherical fuel tank in the middle of its stomach with a thin tube. ‘Flamethrower’ might be an incorrect word, however. Instead of producing flames, it shoots the green particle jets I also noticed being used to clean trains in the station. It must be some sort of corrosive liquid that only affects organic matter. The source of the orange light on the walls turns out to be a burning pile of charred flesh being sprayed by the Cremator. The flesh is being set ablaze by the green particles, but not only that: where the jets hit the flesh directly, it seems to blacken and disintegrate. Despite the fact that the corpses have turned black as coal and have been turned into an amorphous, ever-shrinking pile, I can still make out just enough to see that these were once people.

The Cremator stops what it’s doing and turns its white, oval head towards me, alerted by my sudden movement. Its tiny, expressionless eyes lock onto me. I hear mechanical breathing from the Cremator’s mouth-tube as it steps closer. It tilts its head like a curious animal before it points the nozzle of its weapon towards me. I could try to run, but I doubt I could get far enough to evade the scorching cloud. I briefly wonder if I should not have moved an played dead. It probably wouldn’t have saved me from being disintegrated.

“Cremator! Stand down!” A Metrocop charges in and stands between me and the Cremator. “This prisoner is property of Civil Protection and is to be transferred to Nova Prospekt for processing.” The Cremator tilts its head again, then turns around and returns to its previous work. The Metrocop turns around to face me. I should be worried, but I’m not. Despite its distortion, I have already recognized his voice. I once again hear the click of the mask detaching and am greeted by Barney’s smug grin. I’ve never been happier to see that stupid grin.

“So Gordon, is this what you call ‘not drawing any attention to yourself’? You’ve got practically every Metrocop in the sector looking for you!” He reaches out and grabs my arm to pull me onto my feet. The numbness from the stun baton is almost gone, though it now hurts from the fall instead. As I rub my elbow, I glance at the Cremator. It seems to be minding its own business, but I don’t feel comfortable hanging around near it much longer, and I wonder if it’s a good idea for Barney to unmask himself and be so friendly with me in its presence. Barney follows my gaze and says “Don’t worry about him, he won’t bother us again. They’re not too bright, these Cremators. Mindless synths. They were made to be janitors, primarily. Destroy biological waste, contain the Xen infestation…” He looks down at the charred corpses grimly. “… clean up after the Civil Protection patrols.” He beckons me and starts walking. “The reason he was about to disintegrate you is because you are not a registered citizen or Combine unit. So to him, you would have to be either a Xenian creature or a very lively corpse. Either way, you were considered ‘unauthorized biological mass’ and had to be disposed of.”

We enter an underground utility tunnel. The sounds of the storm fade away as we follow the cables and pipelines down the dimly lit corridor. “You’re lucky I found you,” Barney remarks. “Those Immolators of theirs can give you a nasty burn. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to meet you at the Arcade, I was held up by unforeseen complications on my shift. I had just gotten back to Dr. Kleiner’s lab when I heard the local CP units go crazy over some guy causing trouble at the Arcade.” He flashes me a smirk. I tell him what happened at the Arcade, with the Metrocop I had thought was him. “You got baited,” he replies. “Some CPs will bait citizens into breaking rules, like trespassing, just so they can enact some civil judgement.”

We march through the underground network in silence for a while before I cautiously bring up Jeremy. Barney sighs sadly and lightly shakes his head. “Yeah, I heard what happened.” He doesn’t say anything for a moment, seemingly choosing his next words carefully. “Listen, Gordon… don’t worry about it, okay? I can probably pull some strings to make sure he turns out okay.” He doesn’t sound all that certain. “Either way, don’t blame yourself. Each of us knows the risk in what we’re doing. We’re all prepared to... go all the way for our cause.” I get an uneasy feeling in my stomach. Barney is being uncharacteristically serious and grim. This is not the same man I knew before Black Mesa. Then again, the same goes for myself.

His face lightens up again and he slips back into his usual grin when we go down a side tunnel with another lambda, at the end of which is a short staircase with a metal door. “Well Gordon, looks like we’re finally here.” He opens the door and the sound of machinery pours out. Not harsh, loud and aggressive, like the Combine factories, but light beeps and clicks over a soft hum. A familiar sound that invites me inside. The sound of science.

_____________________

Consul screens

Stenographer's Chasm

Piston hall

Cremator factory

Manhack Arcade exterior + Citadel

Manhack Arcade interior

Cremator

Underground

And for the first time, there aren't just images for reference, but also sound: here is the original Vortigaunt voice.

As always, really excited to share this new chapter of Anticitizen with you. We've finally reached Kleiner's lab, so from now the story will start picking up pace. And as always, please let me know what you think :)

Beth and Saint Catherine of Alexandria

I wrote this nearly three years ago and it has been languishing in my google docs waiting to be made tumblr-ready ever since. I have not updated the content appreciably, so it may very well contain outdated theories or speculations long since proven false or at the very least ill-timed, but it feels like unfinished business. I'd rather realease it into the wild than delete all this work. To my knowledge, no one else has yet touched on at least the visual connections herein, but I have been out of touch with TWD and the fandom for a few years now, for various reasons. Thank you for your indulgence.

Apologies if I'm rehashing old information; I looked and couldn't find anything like this, but maybe I ain't looking right.

Special thanks to @bethgreenewarriorprincess and @bethgreeneishopeunseen for listening to me ramble about this and all your help!

The image below of Beth waking up in the hospital never appeared in the show, but has been used often promotionally (here, here, and here for a start), even years later (on August 7, 2016) with the tweet of the Beth's Journey video originally posted to YouTube on November 30, 2014 after 5x08 Coda aired.

She looks altogether more beatific than Rick did in roughly the same situation. See how the light, almost heavenly in nature, illuminates her clean face, smooth brow, and shiny hair and reflects in her eyes, giving them a diffused look, as though she’s looking at something no one else can see, like an apparition. Contrast this with Rick bathed in wan light, sweaty and unkempt, his brow furrowed in confusion and dawning alarm, as he takes in the evidence of neglect in the room around him that is plain for us to see in the ensuing shots.

I knew I'd seen this image somewhere before, and I know it's a very typical depiction of beatific passion, many examples of which can be found in religious art and throughout art history (e.g., here, here, here, and here). But it specifically looks, to me, most like Raphael's Saint Catherine of Alexandria. (for an additional analysis of Beth's saintly framing supported by connections to another saint, St. Mary Frances, see here)

This is a cropped screenshot of the full image found on Wikipedia. Note that another depiction by Caravaggio, whose The Denial of Saint Peter figures very prominently in 5x04 Slabtown (for an analysis of the use of this painting in 5x04, see here), is linked from that page and vice versa, but not any other artist's versions, of which there are many (see here, here, and here for a few). (It is also interesting to note that Caravaggio's The Denial of Saint Peter is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and though it has toured, it has never been exhibited at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. The High does have another painting titled The Denial of St. Peter in its collection, which was painted some twenty years later by Nicolas Tournier who was influenced by Caravaggio's work.)

Saint Catherine of Alexandria is a bit of a mythic figure; the following summary of her life is quoted from the Wikipedia page for her, with citations included linked within.

Legend

According to the traditional narrative, Catherine was the daughter of Constus, the governor of Alexandrian Egypt during the reign of the emperor Maximian (286–305).[6] From a young age she had devoted herself to study. A vision of the Madonna and Child persuaded her to become a Christian. When the persecutions began under Maxentius, she went to the emperor and rebuked him for his cruelty. The emperor summoned fifty of the best pagan philosophers and orators to dispute with her, hoping that they would refute her pro-Christian arguments, but Catherine won the debate. Several of her adversaries, conquered by her eloquence, declared themselves Christians and were at once put to death.[7]

Torture and martyrdom Catherine was then scourged and imprisoned, during which time over 200 people came to see her, including Maxentius' wife, Valeria Maximilla; all converted to Christianity and were subsequently martyred.[8] Upon the failure of Maxentius to make Catherine yield by way of torture, he tried to win the beautiful and wise princess over by proposing marriage. The saint refused, declaring that her spouse was Jesus Christ, to whom she had consecrated her virginity. The furious emperor condemned Catherine to death on a spiked breaking wheel, but, at her touch, it shattered.[7] Maxentius finally had her beheaded.

Burial A tradition dating to about 800 states that angels carried her corpse to Mount Sinai. Her body was discovered around the year 800 at Mount Sinai, with hair still growing and a constant stream of healing oil issuing from her body.[9] In the 6th century, the Eastern Emperor Justinian had established what is now Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt (which is in fact dedicated to the Transfiguration of Christ).

She is generally believed to have been eighteen at the time of her death. Her feast day is November 25, and in celebration of this day in France, unmarried women pray for her intercession to find them husbands. These unmarried women are referred to as “Catherinettes” and their friends make elaborate hats, or bonnets, for them, using the colors yellow for faith and green for wisdom. The Catherinettes are crowned with these bonnets and make pilgrimages to St. Catherine’s statue in their local churches. Also of note and pertaining to France, she is believed to have appeared to Joan of Arc.

Saint Catherine has patronage over many things; because of her chastity, she is the patroness of unmarried women; because of her scholarship and skill in debate, she is the patroness of apologists, archivists, educators, female students, jurists, lawyers, librarians, libraries, philosophers, preachers, scholars, schoolchildren, scribes, secretaries, stenographers, and theologians; because of her association with the breaking wheel and wheels in general, she is the patroness of craftsmen who work with a wheel (potters, spinners), mechanics, millers, and wheelwrights; because of her beheading, she is patroness of knife sharpeners; because of her martyrdom, she is the patroness of dying people and nurses; because of a tradition in France on her feast day relating to her patronage of unmarried women, she is patroness of milliners, hat-makers, tanners, and haberdashers.

She is associated with a number of items, or attributes, and when depicted in art these items are often shown with her. A crown, either atop her head or at her feet, denoting her royal birth; a book, held open or closed in her hands, and perhaps her arguing with the pagan philosophers denoting her eloquence and wisdom; a bridal veil and ring denoting her mystical marriage to Jesus Christ; a dove as one legend states she was fed by a dove while imprisoned; a scourge, the breaking wheel, either whole or itself broken at her touch, and the sword that finally ended her life by decapitation; (hailstones are also listed in places, I got nothing). The type of firework known as the Catherine wheel is named for her.

Additional references for information about Saint Catherine of Alexandria can be found here, here, here, and here.

And now for the parallels, the reason I’m boring you all (all two of you) with these details about a long dead, and likely entirely legendary figure.

Like Saint Catherine, Beth is the daughter of a leader. Hershel Greene, initially of the Greene family farm and later of the prison. Before the fall of civilization, Beth was a student and after she doesn’t start out understanding what’s really going on in the apocalypse. When faced with it, she thinks she wants to die, but when she tries to kill herself she has an epiphany and chooses to live; this is rather like Saint Catherine’s path to conversion, in how she devotes her life to learning, then experiences a vision and becomes Christian.

Beth was “imprisoned” in Grady Memorial Hospital, was beaten, but never broken. Carol and the others "visited her" in her prison and she converted people, like Noah and Dr. Edwards, to another way of thinking. She broke their system by challenging it and getting Dawn killed after having killed the biggest offenders, Gorman and O'Donnell. She was shot, but didn’t die. Saint Catherine was imprisoned and tortured, many came to visit her and were converted. They tried to execute her and she not only survived, she broke the tool of her execution, symbolically breaking their system. Both were eighteen at the time of their imprisonment and attempted execution.

Beth was carried out of the hospital by Daryl, who wears angel wings, and left in a trunk after running from 800 walkers. She wasn't dead so her body would not corrupt. Additionally, she is immune to the infection and incorruptible by it (another way she “breaks the wheel” by breaking the infection). Her immunity will be the source of the cure and thus heal others. Saint Catherine's body was carried to Mount Sinai by angels and was found incorrupt and issuing healing oil in the year 800.

The mystical marriage of Saint Catherine is interesting; one variation on her conversion involves her search for a husband that matched her in intellect, nobility, and beauty and a hermit in the desert who, after a vision of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, went to Saint Catherine and told her of the spouse she desired. This hermit eventually baptised her, preparing her for her mystical marriage to Jesus. C@rol, who was a hermit for a while, brought Beth’s knife (an attribute of Saint Catherine, a small sword) to Daryl, giving him his lady’s favor, essentially marrying them (more here).

Saint Catherine’s reason for her refusal of the offer of marriage from the man who was trying to have her executed makes me think of the metas about 4x12 Still and the blood splatter on the white sweater foreshadowing Beth losing her virginity with Daryl (here and here, though there are more). I can just imagine Negan asking her to join his harem and Beth refusing by saying she's already promised to someone.

Bonus connections!

Beth’s father, Hershel, was beheaded with a sword like Saint Catherine; I know this isn’t a direct parallel as this happened to her father and not her, but I think the connection is solid enough with him being her father and her having watched it happen.

The spoked breaking wheel rather resembles a clock, which is heavily connected with Beth.

Saint Catherine appeared to Joan of Arc and counseled her; in 5x04 Slabtown Beth brought some small comfort to Joan during her confinement after her amputation.

Coda aired on November 30, the Sunday following Saint Catherine’s feast day of November 25.

Saint Catherine is a patroness of mechanics, and Daryl, Beth’s apocalypse husband, is the mechanic of the group (bonus bonus, he rides motorcycles which have spoked wheels like the breaking wheel).

The blond walker in the yellow wheelchair (mentioned here, here, and here, towards the bottom in all three) with the wounded left foot in 4x06 Live Bait is connected with Beth through her signature yellow color and wounded left foot in 5x13 Alone, and the spoked wheels of the wheelchair resemble the breaking wheel, symbolically representing the hospital and foreshadowing her breaking of it.

In Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria, there is a braid in Catherine's hair that starts at her left temple; Beth often wore a braid on the left side in her ponytail.

The traditional colors of the bonnets made for the Catherinettes celebrating Saint Catherine’s day in France were yellow for faith and green for wisdom; Beth has been strongly associated with yellow and faith and her last name is Greene. Also both she and her father have been associated with wisdom.

Not to mention the St. Catherine of ALEXANDRIA thing.

The final parallel I would like to highlight is the breaking of the wheel as the breaking of the cycle the show is currently stuck in, like a pair of millstones, the runner stone circling on the bedstone seemingly endlessly. The official synopsis for season 7 says “This half season is about these characters starting over. The overall theme of the season is beginning again.” The first episode of season 6 was called First Time Again. In season 5 after Terminus they begin again together. The Governor destroys the prison and they are forced to begin again, scattered. How many times will we take it once again from the top, everyone? (Washington D.C. = D.C. = da Capo, anyone? “Da Capo” is Italian for “from the head” and shares the same Latin root with “decapitate.”)

I mean, that's what the comic has done, over and over and over again; the war with the governor, All Out War, The Whisperer War—same shit different day. Abraham references this in his speech in 5x02 Strangers, “Wake up in the morning, fight the undead pricks, forage for food, go to sleep at night with two eyes open, rinse and repeat?” as encouragement to get them to join his mission to D.C.

Beth’s return is a way to break that cycle for the show—in the endless string of deaths and losses, finally they get someone back.

Morgan says, “People can come back, Rick.” in 6x15 East. Morgan says it to Rick just like Rick said it to the governor when he came to take the prison. Rick says, "Everyone who's alive right now. Everyone who's made it this far. We've all done the worst kinds of things just to stay alive. But we can still come back. We're not too far gone. We get to come back. I know... we all can change." in 4x08 Too Far Gone.

In 6x15 East, Morgan also says, "It—it's all a circle. Everything gets a return." Everything comes full circle with Beth’s survival, she’s not just “another dead girl” as she says in 4x12 Still.

The circle, the cycle, the wheel—Beth will break the wheel just like St. Catherine of Alexandria. Once more from the beginning, but skip to a different ending (da Capo al Coda).

The Absolute and the Infinite

G. de P. — It is the philosophic One, the originant, which is the Absolute: from the One comes the two; from the two the triad; from the triad the tetrad, etc.  The point is this: the philosophic One or the cosmic One is the cosmic Absolute; but it is not the zero, representing Infinitude; consequently the zero, Infinitude, holds an infinite number of such Ones or Monads, whether cosmic or not.

O. L. — I understand the way you use the word ‘Absolute’ in Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy: you there define it, so that it is quite clear; but what is the real reason for your emphasizing that meaning of it, which is of course in the etymological derivation of the word?  It is different from the usual meaning carried by the word ‘Absolute’ in philosophy here in the West.

G. de P. — That is true.  I so use it, first for purposes of accuracy; second, because it is a wonderful philosophical key: every Absolute being the Hierarch of its Hierarchy, the One from which all series thereafter outflow — one, two, three, etc. — to the end of the Hierarchy; and each such One is an Absolute or Mukta, Jivan-Mukta, absolutus, signifying ‘free,’ ‘set free,’ — free from servitude to all the lower planes and master thereof.

O. L. — I have understood that; but still, could not that fact be said and explained without using the word Absolute for it?

G. de P. — It could, but it seemed inadvisable.  You see that the word ‘Absolute,’ derived from the Latin, is an exact equivalent of the Sanskrit word Moksha or Mukti of Brahmanism; and I deliberately chose that word and tried to point out the inaccuracy of the use of this phrase ‘The Absolute’ in the West in order to signify ‘Boundless Infinitude.’ This is not only an etymological, but a logical, fault, and I desired to point this out.  The word as I used it is a true key to great things.

O. L. — It will arouse criticism; and people will say: “Of course, your etymology is true; but what is the use of it?  The word ‘Absolute’ has acquired this specific meaning in our Western languages, in all philosophies: what therefore is the use of your change?  Why make use of it with a different meaning?”  It only mixes things up for ordinary people studying philosophy, and therefore arouses criticism.

G. de P. — Many people will doubtless say just that; but I do not object to criticism.  It arouses comment and thought.  My use, outside of anything else, has the virtue of being accurate, of being philosophically exact, of employing a word in its proper, original, exact, etymological sense; and best of all, it is a wonderful key to greater things.  It is perfectly indifferent to me if the entire Occident uses a word wrongly, because I am going to use it aright, if by that use I can strike a new keynote of thought, point out a pathway of consciousness, and give a key to a wonderful doctrine.  Do you now see?  If it arouses comment and criticism, as in fact I knew it would, all the better!

The above is a stenographic report of an informal gathering at Point Loma, in which a discussion arose regarding the use of the term, 'Absolute,' in Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy by G. de Purucker

Reposted from @quotabelle - “I am thankful that I was taught how to think and not what to think.” ~ Lizzie Magie . . It’s Woman Crush Wednesday ~ and we have our nominee! Lizzie Magie was born in 1866, when opportunities for girls to learn were spotty. What she did with her education broke norms ~ going from being a stenographer to a designer of educational games to a patent holder. The Monopoly myth claims the iconic board game was invented by a man, but it was Lizzie’s brainchild. She had created The Landlord’s Game three decades before Monopoly as a way to teach children a lesson about how the dice are stacked against them. To her chagrin, her little landlords delighted in playing unscrupulous robber barons. When Monopoly came out years later, based on Lizzie’s concept, it became the most popular board game in the world. We’re board game enthusiasts ~ so when we pass Go, can’t help but think of the original maker. We see you, Lizzie! #BeautifullySaid by #lizziemagie #inventor #gamedesigner #socialactivist #monopoly #boardgames #gritandgrace #quotabelle - #regrann https://www.instagram.com/p/BwXSehSFp9i/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1vrua9ewsgron

Famous Muses & Girlfriends in Filmmaking Pt. 26

MUSE: Jean Arthur (born Gladys Georgianna Greene)

Jean was born on October 17th, 1900 in Plattsburgh, NY to photographer Herbert Greene and his wife Johanna Nelson. Jean was of Norwegian ancestry and had Lutheran maternal grandparents, though her parents were practicing Protestants. She and her three brothers grew up in various locations like New York, Maine and Florida because of Herbert’s photography career before settling in Manhattan when Jean was 15. When WWI broke through, Jean dropped out of school and got a job as a stenographer as her brothers registered to serve (older brother Albert would sadly die from a gas attack). About five years later Jean started modeling in NYC and even befriended future MGM queen Norma Shearer, who was also a model at the time. In 1923, Jean and Norma headed out to California with offers for movie careers. But Jean would begin wasted in short silent films and B-movie westerns because she wasn’t comfortable with the fashionable flapper persona of the 1920s. Her shyness and slightly nasal voice would hold her back from stardom for a decade, while she was passed along to various studios around Hollywood. Eventually when ‘talkies’ debuted, Jean started gaining traction at Paramount Pictures with flicks like The Canary Murder Case (1929), The Saturday Night Kid (1929) and the later hit A Foreign Affair (1948). To help calm her social anxiety, Jean was recommended to get stage training on Broadway, which only lasted a year in 1931. She also went from a natural brunette to a peroxide blonde. In 1934, Jean was offered a contract at Columbia Pictures, where she would make the majority of her best received films such as Easy Living (1937), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and The Talk of the Town (1942). She had her only Academy Award nomination—for Best Actress—in The More the Merrier (1943).

Unlike most actresses in old Hollywood and even modern filmmaking, Jean hit her prime as an actress in her late 30s and early 40s. Even more impressive is that she was consistently cast as leading ladies and love interests which is almost unheard of at that age. Part of this success was for a few reasons. One, she’s very talented. Two, she never revealed her age in resumes throughout her career, though it was always rumored she was born sometime between 1900-05. Three, she either found the fountain of youth or an amazing diet+skin routine because she legit looked exactly the same for two full decades. (Never spending time in the sun probably helped in the skin department too.) Jean was a bit like the American Greta Garbo with her aloofness and privacy off camera. Before Diane Keaton, Winona Ryder and Zooey Deschanel existed, Jean was the neurotic queen of classic cinema. She never socialized in public and rarely participated in interviews or magazine photospreads. Like Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert, Jean insisted all of her profile shots be from the left side of her face. Allegedly on her final day as an actress for Columbia in 1944, Jean exclaimed “I’m free!” while walking out of the studio. She had become so burnt out on fame and films, that she only made two more movies: A Foreign Affair and the classic western Shane (1953). She tried Broadway again in 1950, with a successful run of ‘Peter Pan;’ and then experimented with starring in her own sitcom “The Jean Arthur Show” (1966) for three weeks before the show was cancelled. She officially retired from performing when she discovered she had a psychosomatic illness, and then spent the 1970s teaching drama at Vassar College and North Carolina’s School of Arts. Filmmaking legend Frank Capra openly referred to Jean as his ‘all-time favorite actress’ to work with. While they were both contracted at Columbia, Capra had her as the female leads in his dramedy masterpieces Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The latter two co-starred Capra’s favorite male star, Jimmy Stewart.

Okay, so this entry is going to be a little different than the usual theme of this series. Basically I just want to tell you a story on how one of my fave screen couples, Jean and Jimmy, apparently weren’t into each other at all IRL. Jimmy and Jean played adorable love interests to each other in Mr. Smith and You Can’t Take It with You, but were polar opposites out of character. Unlike Jean—who was either at the studio or her therapist’s office when she wasn’t locked in her house—Jimmy was a huge extrovert whether it be up in the air flying one of planes, clubbing in Hollywood with many a starlet or just chilling with his dudes. When Mr. Smith went into production it was originally planned as a sequel to Mr. Deeds, reuniting Capra, Gary Cooper and Jean. This made Jean extra excited because she liked Gary a lot as a friend and co-star (she even credited him for helping her get over being camera shy). But then Gary ended up having to choose Beau Geste (1939) over Washington, and Capra used the available role as a way to work with Jimmy again. Capra was a big supporter of Jimmy becoming a lead actor, and thought he was the perfect choice for Jefferson Smith. “I knew he would make a hell of a Jeff Smith. He was a country kid, an idealist. That’s very close to him.” Jean, err…thought otherwise. She apparently told Capra that he made a mistake casting a ~pretty boy as a man who goes up against the entire government; and that someone with a stronger, masculine, more intimidating presence (Gary) would make more sense. She was so disappointed in the casting, that apparently she complained about it on set (kinda overkill, but okay…). Jean even turned down working with Capra and Jimmy a third time seven years later in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), where she was offered the part of Mary Hatch (Donna Reed). Good thing she turned it down though, because who the hell would believe Jean as an 18-year-old during the dance sequence? Meanwhile, Jimmy had nothing but nice things to say about Jean during all of this. He went as far as to call her one of finest women he ever worked with.

So there you go. My favorite male actor of all time and one of my favorite actresses had amazing chemistry on film, but didn’t get along as people. I’m so sad. But my one question, is like…why?? I still can’t even figure what Jean’s deal with him was besides the ‘miscasting’ and Jimmy being a big playboy at the time, while she was a wallflower. I mean, I know he was a lifelong Republican and she was a registered Democrat, so it could’ve been political….But if that was the case, then why did she love Gary so much, when he was just as conservative?? IDGI. Apparently Jean did eventually come around to agreeing that Jimmy gave a good performance in Mr. Smith while participating in a retrospective on Capra’s career in the 1970s. She also listed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as her favorite movie she made.

Oh, and to make this post somewhat relevant to the M&G series, I’ll mention that Jean was married twice in her personal life. The first time was when she was 27 to some guy named Julian Anker for only 20 hours. And the second time was to writer-producer Frank Ross from 1932 to 1949, during which they also collaborated on The Devil & Miss Jones (1941) and The More the Merrier. Oh, and she had an affair with studio head David O. Selznick back when they were both working at Paramount and he was married to L.B. Mayer’s daughter Irene (SMH). Living up to her reclusive reputation to the fullest, Jean died single, without children and requested not to have a funeral when she died at age 90 of heart failure in 1991. Her ashes were scattered across the California coast. For the past nine decades, Jean has been remembered and considered one of the most versatile actresses of her generation. Her former director George Stevens once called her “one of the best comediennes of screen history.”

Snippet #1 - HHiE

I finally kicked the climax of the latest ntfs into shape after a legit year of trying to figure out the emotional tone. So that’s only...another 3000 words...to go.... 

Anyway, I’m also kicking my own ass getting ‘History Has Its Eyes’ -the direct ntfs sequel- done, bc I;m dropping the first chapter w the end of ntfs, which is a little difficult bc I seem to have misplaced my lore doc. which is sad.jpg and why despite there being updates there isn’t any movement on any of my Naruto work. Bleh.  

It is the summer of Mito’s 17th year. Her eldest sister has just died, the war has ended and her apprenticeship to a stenographer in the court of the Fire daimyo has abruptly come to an end.

In two days Mito will be a wife. She’s the inheritor of the contract originally meant for her flighty sister Shiori. Her quick feet took her right into the path of a knife. As part of an agreement with the newly founded Konoha, which has just lost one of its founders and is floundering for support, Mito will marry now to secure an alliance. The Hokage will personally see to it that her sister’s killer is struck down. This is as much as her grief stricken father can bare to see to himself. Everything else from the travel arrangements to the dowry to the alliance itself has been left in her Aunt Shinju’s more than capable hands.

“This is what the world is, child.” Her aunt says as they pour over swatches of fabric and numbers of pearls and the tiny delicacies Mito will take to show off at the wedding. They are in a tall room with very little light as per Uzumaki tradition. When the Uzumaki first came down from the mountains of Lightning to the sea that sang in their blood they seeked passage on the back of a handsome dragon. The dragon said he would take them only if a woman laid in the curl of his coils for three days at the end of which she would become his wife. A village woman, red of hair and brimming with the vitality they would become known for, stepped forward and offered herself. She stayed in the shifting of his body with no light and no warmth but that which she could make herself. On the third day when he uncoiled she took him to bed and tamed him with light and warmth and given the nature of the metaphor, Mito assumes, her maidenhood.  

Ever since the women of the Uzumaki family stay in cold dark rooms before their weddings reminding themselves of the power they and they alone possess.

“This is what what is?” Mito asks as she pops another salty sweet dried fruit in her mouth. Technically they’re for the Senju elders as a goodwill gift but Mito knows that no one but her will enjoy them. They’re considered odd in her homeland let alone somewhere that has never even seen fruit trees dipping into the ocean.

“Marriage.” Her aunt swats her fingers when she goes to eat another. “These things in front of you will define how you begin the biggest role of your life. And it is a role. You will find yourself wishing to give parts of yourself to your husband you’d never think to give to anyone else. Bare in mind that you will never get to take it back. Once out there it belongs to the two of you. You may think nothing of telling him how much you love those little fruits but once he knows he can, and probably will, use that information against you. Perhaps kindly, maybe you’ll never do without them and Old Woman Kimaiyo can retire fat and happy on the trade. Perhaps he’ll never let you taste another and wipe your homeland from your lips in favour of his. Either way-”

“Information is truth and the truth is never harmless.” There’s a seal for that, taught to every new shinobi of their clan.

Her aunt draws a spiral on her hand, the one on every shield and sword. “And an Uzumaki is never defenceless.”

Henry Miller: Herakleion

Henry Miller

Herakleion

I had in my pocket a card of introduction to the leading literary figure of Crete, a friend of Katsimbalis. Towards the evening I found him in the cafe where the Germans had been hatching their Wagnerian machinations.

I shall call him Mr. Tsoutsou as I have unfortunately' forgotten his name. Mr. Tsoutsou spoke French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, demotic Greek, newspaper Greek and ancient Greek. He was a composer, poet, scholar and lover of food and drink. He began by asking me about James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Andre Gide, Breton, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Lewis Carroll, Monk Lewis, Heinrich Georg and Rainer Marla Rilke. I say he asked me about them, much like you would ask about a relative or a mutual friend. He spoke of them as if they were all alive, which they are, thank God. I rubbed my head. He started.oft on Aragon—Had I read Le Paysan de.Paris? Did I remember the Passage Jouffroy in Paris? What did I think of St. Jean Perser. And of Nadja of Breton? Had I been to Knossus yet? I ought to stay a few weeks at least—he would take me over the island from one end to another. He was a very hale and hearty fellow and when he understood that I liked to eat and drink he beamed most approvingly. He regretted sincerely that he was not free for the evening, but hoped to see me the following day; he wanted to introduce me to the little circle of literati in Herakleion. He was excited by the fact that I came from America and begged me to tell him something about New York which I found it almost impossible to do because I had long ceased to identify myself with that odious city.

I went back to the hotel for a nap. There were three beds in the room, all of them very comfortable. I read carefully the sign warning the clients to refrain from tipping the employees. The room cost only about seventeen cents a night and I became involved willy-nilly in a fruitless speculation as to how many drachmas one would give as a tip if one could tip. There were only three or four clients in the hotel. Walking through the wide corridors looking for the W. C. I met the maid, an angelic sort of spinster with straw hair and watery blue eyes who reminded me vividly of the Swedenborgian caretaker of the Maison Balzac in Passy. She was bringing me a glass of water on a tray made of lead, zinc and tin. I undressed and as I was pulling in the blinds I observed two men with a stenographer gazing at me from the window of some outlandish commercial house across the way. It seemed unreal, this transaction of abstract business in a place like Herakleion. The typewriter looked surrealistic and the men with sleeves rolled up as in commercial houses everywhere appeared fantastically like the freaks of the Western world who move grain and corn and wheat around in carload lots by means of the telephone, the ticker, the telegraph. Imagine what it would be like to find, two business men and a stenographer on Easter Island!, Imagine how a typewriter would sound in that Oceanic silence!

I fell back on the bed and into a deep, drugged sleep. No tipping allowed-that was the last thought and a very beautiful one to a weary traveller.

When I awoke it was dark. I opened the blinds and looked down the forlorn main street which was now deserted. I heard a telegraph instrument clicking. I got into my things and hurried to the restaurant near the fountain.

The waiter seemed to expect me and stood ready to translate for me into that Iroquois English which the itinerant Greek has acquired in the course of his wanderings. I ordered some cold fish with the skin 'on it and a bottle of dark-red Cretan wine. While waiting to be served I noticed a man peering through the large plate-glass window; he walked away and came back again in a few minutes. Finally he made up his mind to walk in. He walked directly up to my table and addressed me in English.

Was I not Mr. Miller who had arrived by plane a few hours ago? I was. He begged leave to introduce himself.

He was Mr. So-and-So, the British Vice-Consul at Herakleion. He had noticed that I was an American, a writer.

He was always happy to make the acquaintance of an American. He paused a moment, as if embarrassed, and then went on to say that his sole motive for introducing himself was to let me know that as long as I remained in Crete I was to consider his humble services entirely at my disposal. He said that he was originally from: Smyrna and that every Greek" from Smyrna was eternally indebted to the American people. He said that there was no favor too great for me to ask of him.

The natural reply was to ask him to sit down and share a meal with me, which I did. He explained that he would be unable to accept the honor as he was obliged to dine in the Qosom of his family, but-would I do him the honor of taking a coffee with him and his wife at their home after dinner? As the representative of the great American people (not at all sure of the heroic role we had played in the great disaster of Smyrna) I most graciously accepted, rose, bowed, shook his hand and escorted him to the door where once again we exchanged polite thanks and mutual felicitations. I went back to the table, unskinned the cold fish and proceeded to wet my whistle.

The meal was even lousier than at noon, but the service was extraordinary. The whole restaurant was aware that a distinguished visitor had arrived and was partaking with them of their humble food. Mr. Tsoutsou and his wife appeared for just a moment to see how I was faring, commented bravely on the delicious, appetizing appearance of the skinned fish and disappeared with bows and salaams which sent an electric thrill through the assembled patrons of Herakleion's most distinguished restaurant. I began to feel as though something of vast import were about to happen. I ordered the waiter to send the chasseur out for a coffee and cognac. Never before had a vice-consul or any form of public servant other than a constable or gendarme sought me out in a public place. The plane was responsible for it. It was like a letter of credit.

The home of the vice-consul was rather imposing for Herakleion. In truth, it was more like a museum than a home. I felt somewhat hysterical; somewhat disoriented.

The vice-consul was a good, kind-hearted man but vain as a peacock. He drummed nervously on the arm of the chair, waiting impatiently for his wife to leave off about Paris, Berlin, Prague, Budapest et cetera in order to con[1]fide that he was the author of a book on Crete. He kept telling his wife that I was a journalist, an insult which normally I find hard to swallow, but in this case I found it easy not to take offense since the vice-consul considered all writers to be journalists. He pressed a button and very sententiously commanded the maid to go to the library and find him a copy of the book he had written on Crete.

He confessed that he had never written a book before but, owing to the general state of ignorance and confusion regarding Crete in the mind of the average tourist, he had deemed it incumbent upon him to put down what he knew about his adopted land in more or less eternal fashion. He admitted that Sir Arthur Evans had expressed it all in unimpeachable style but then there were little things, trifles by comparison of course, which a work of that scope and grandeur could not hope to encompass.

He spoke in this pompous, ornate, highly fatuous way about his masterpiece. He said that a journalist like myself would be one of the few to really appreciate what he had done for the cause of Crete et cetera. He handed me the book to glance at. He handed it over as it it were the Gutenberg Bible. I took one glance and realized immediately that I was dealing with one of the "popular masters of reality," a blood-brother to the man who had, painted "A Rendezvous with the Soul." He inquired in a pseudo-modest way if the English were all right, because English was not his native tongue. The implication was that if he had done it in Greek it would be beyond criticism. I asked him politely where I might hope to obtain a copy of this obviously extraordinary work whereupon he informed me that if I came to his office in the morning he would bestow one upon me as a gift, as a memento of this illustrious occasion which had culminated in, the meeting of two, minds thoroughly attuned to the splendors of, the past. This was only the beginning of a cataract of flowery horseshit which I had to swallow before going through' the motions of saying good-night. Then came the Smyrna disaster with a harrowing, detailed recital of the horrors which the Turks perpetrated on the helpless Greeks and the merciful intervention of the American people which no, Greek would ever forget until his dying day. I tried desperately, while he spun out the horrors and atrocities, to recall what I had been doing at this black moment in the history of Greece. Evidently the disaster had occurred during one of those long intervals when I had ceased to read the newspapers. I hadn't the faintest remembrance of any such catastrophe. To the best of my recollection the event must have taken place during the year when I was looking for a job without the slightest intention of taking one.

It reminded me that, desperate as I thought myself then to be, I had not even bothered to look through the columns of the want ads.

Next morning I took the bus in the direction of Knossus.

A Sirious Problem Transcript

MEGAN: Hi, welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

CARRIE: I'm Carrie Gillon.

MEGAN: And I'm Megan Figueroa. And today we are going to be talking about artificial intelligence generally and more specifically automatic speech recognition. We have a guest here with us, because Carrie and I do not know anything about - well, ok, I shouldn't speak about Carrie’s ignorance on the topic - but I don't know

CARRIE: You were correct: I know nothing.

MEGAN: Ok. We are joined by Dr. Rachael Tatman. She is a data preparation analyst at Kaggle, which is, according to its own Twitter account, the world's largest community of data scientists. Rachael has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Washington, where she specialized in computational sociolinguistics. Her dissertation, among other very cool things, showed the ways in which automatic speech recognition falls short when dealing with sociolinguistic variation, like dialects. Welcome Rachael.

RACHAEL: Hi! Thanks for having me.

CARRIE: Hi!

MEGAN: I'm very excited to have you. I feel like, with automatic speech recognition - I don't know if other people feel this way - but I was in the camp where I didn't realize that I should care about what's happening, with how automatic speech recognition is being made or to listen to voices. I didn't know that I had to care, and now I care. Hopefully we’ll show listeners why we should care.

RACHAEL: Yeah! I can share one of my stories about automatic speech recognition. One thing that's really difficult is children's voices, because obviously children are a different size, and they have a lot of acoustic qualities that are different. But also children have a lot of individual variation. If you spend a lot of time with kids, what's a “bink bink”? Is it a blankie? Is it a bottle? I'm Dyslexic, and when I was in grade school, they tried to use automatic speech recognition to like help me type faster, so I could complete assignments and turn them in. And not fail third grade. Yeah: it did not work well. I remember very distinctly that I tried to say “the walls were dark and clammy”. We were doing a creative writing exercise, and it was transcribed as “the wells we're gathered and planning”. Which is kinda close acoustically, but also there's some probably poor language modeling behind that, where they thought that that was a more likely sentence than the one that I'd started with.

CARRIE: Wow.

MEGAN: Lets define automatic speech recognition for the listeners, and for myself. What is automatic speech recognition?

RACHAEL: It's the computational task of taking in an acoustic signal of some kind and rendering it as speech. When I say an acoustic signal, I mean specifically a speech acoustic signal, because also people work with whale song and bird song and stuff. It gets used a lot in especially mobile devices. If you know Google Now or Cortana - I don't know how many people actually use Cortana - or a Bixby, which is Samsung's virtual assistant, or Siri, which is probably the most well-known one, they all rely on automatic speech recognition to sort of understand what you're saying and reply to your tasks. It gets used a lot in virtual assistants, which is Echo or Google Play, or Apple's launching one soon, as well. I don't know how much you guys keep up with tech news, but these are little devices that sit in your home, and you can be like, “hey, Siri”. I guess, I don't know what the Apple one’s gonna be called. Or, “okay, A L E X A”. I don't want to say it, because I don’t want to turn on everybody’s Alexa.

CARRIE: Oh no! I think you just did!

ALEXA: Hmm. I'm not sure what you meant by that question.

RACHAEL: Go back to sleep Alexa. It's everywhere, is the point. People are incorporating into new technologies. They're getting really excited about it. People are talking about incorporating it into testing for schools, for standardized testing. People are talking about incorporating it into medical diagnostic tests. Things like - what's that a semantic one, where you have to name a bunch of things that are similar, before you move on?

CARRIE: I don't know.

RACHAEL: It gets used for diagnosing a lot of things, like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's and specific learning disorders. Semantic coherence test maybe?

CARRIE: Yeah.

RACHAEL: Anyway, people have been working on using speech recognition for that, so incorporating it into this. People are using it for language assessment, for immigration and visas, a lot of very high stakes places.

MEGAN: That's very high stakes! That's very important.

RACHAEL: Probably my favorite thing to be upset about in this realm is people incorporating NLP, which is natural language processing, which is more as text, and also automatic speech recognition, in these algorithms that you put information into and it tells you whether or not you should hire the person.

CARRIE: UGH. Oh my god.

RACHAEL: So very, very high stakes applications. You may not always realize that your voice or your or your language is being used in this way.

MEGAN: You can't see my face, but I'm horrified right now. Okay. It's very important. There's a lot of practical applications that automatic speech recognition is being used for. In all of these realms, there's possibility of discrimination.

RACHAEL: Yeah. As far as I know, no one who has looked at an automatic speech recognition system or a text-based system, specifically looking at performance across different demographic groups on a certain task, has ever found that “nope there's no difference, it doesn't matter, the system is able to deal super well with people of all different backgrounds”. Looking specifically at speech, I've done a number of studies, and by a number I mean two, and I'm working off and on a third, because I am also working full-time - this isn't part of my job. I'm not speaking on behalf of my company or employer. If you're gonna yell at anybody, yell at me personally. This is my private, individual thing. What I found is that there are really, really strong dialectal differences - so differences between people who have different regional origins. Which dialects get recognized more or less accurately seems to be - I'm having a hard time picking it apart, but I think it also is a function of social class. It's fairly difficult to find speech samples that are labeled for the person's dialect and also their social class, and good sociolinguistics sampling methods. It's really hard to find large annotated speech databases that you can do this analysis with, but I found really strong dialectal differences in accuracy, with general American, or mainstream American English, or mainstream US English, or standardized American English - there's a lot of different terms for this “fancy” talk - having the lowest error rate. I found that Caucasian speakers have the lowest error rate. Looking at Caucasian speakers, African American speakers, speakers of mixed race, and the study where I had race information - I only had one Native American speaker, so I had to exclude them, because one data point is not a line. So that's worrying.

MEGAN: Right. What does it mean to have an error? What is the practical result of an error in speech recognition?

RACHAEL: There are three types of errors. One is where a word is substituted, so you say “walls” and it hears “wells” and transcribes that. Another one is deletion, where you say something like “I did not kill that man” and “I did kill that man” is transcribed. I should say people are still using hand stenographers for court cases, as far as I know. I don't think anyone in the legal system is using ASR, but yikes.

CARRIE: Better not.

RACHAEL: There’s also insertion, when you think that you heard a word and it wasn't actually there. A lot of times words that’re inserted are function words like “the” and “of”, things like that.

MEGAN: So deletion, insertion, and hearing it wrong. Doing another word.

RACHAEL: Yeah those are the only three transformations you can do, yes.

MEGAN: Okay.

RACHAEL: Word error rate is just, for all the words, how many of them did you get wrong in one of these ways. Just on a frustration level, if you're using speech recognition as a day-to-day user, and it doesn't work real great, that's annoying. I'm sure if you guys ever use speech recognition, like on your phones, or I have a Google home, and I'll use it for a timer a lot. It's actually gotten better - it used to be really bad at hearing the word “stop” like “stop the timer”. I think that might be because of the [ɑ] [ɔ] merger that some people have. That's my pet theory. But it's gotten a lot better at understanding “stop”. I would have to say “stop” five times while I'm standing at the kitchen with cheese smeared on my arms up to my elbows or whatever.

CARRIE: That's really strange because there isn't a different “stop”. I have the [ɑ] [ɔ] merger, so I can't make the other word, but it doesn't exist anyway.

RACHAEL: Yeah, it may be that the acoustic model is more - so speech recognition, I'm gonna say this generally - because people are futzing around with it a lot and I'm messing it up -generally has two modules. One is the acoustic model, which is “what waveforms map to what sounds” and the other is the language model, which is “what words are more likely”. When you when you put those together, out comes the other end through some fancy math the most likely, for some given set of input parameters, the most likely transcription, ideally. And my guess is that if you're not specifically modeling the fact that some people have two vowels and some people have one vowel in that space, you may be less able to recognize those sounds generally, because you think that there's just a lot of variation there. Especially since there's also the Northern city shift that's muddling that whole area as well. Sorry, should I assume a lot of phonetic backgrounds on the part of your speakers?

CARRIE: Our listeners? Yeah, I was just gonna say: maybe we should describe what the Northern vowel shift is.

RACHAEL: There are a number of vowel shifts in the United States, and if you think of individual vowels as being little swarms of bees that are clustered around flowers, sometimes the swarms of bees move on or the flower moves and the swarm follows after it, and different places have movement in different directions. I don't know, is that a good analogy? I'm using my hands a lot. I know you guys can't see it. Is that clear?

CARRIE: I understand what you're saying but I'm not sure. Good question.

MEGAN: I don’t know. I like the analogy. I feel like that's good.

RACHAEL: I would look up vowel change shifts, if I was listening to this. I’d just google them, and you'll see some nice pictures and arrows. You’ll be like “oh!”

CARRIE: Yeah. We’ll add something to the Tumblr to explain a little bit about vowel shifts, and also the merger we were talking about, because I can't replicate it. I can't do that open o [ɔ].

MEGAN: I can’t either. I don’t have it.

RACHAEL: “cot” [k ɔ t] as in “I caught the ball” and then “caught” [kɑt] - nope, I have it backwards again.

CARRIE: Yep. We haven't asked you yet, but what is computational sociolinguistics?

RACHAEL: I don't think I made up the term, but I'm probably one of the first people to call myself that. Dong Nguyen - she's currently at the Alan Turing Institute - has a fabulous dissertation that has a really nice review chapter that talks about the history of this emerging field. It is approaching sociolinguistic questions using computational methods, and it's also informing computational linguistics and natural image processing and automatic speech recognition with sociolinguistic knowledge. Working on dialect adaptation, I think would fall within that - that's when you take an automatic speech recognition system that works on one dialect and try to make it work good for other dialects as well. I've done some work on modeling variation in textual features by social groups. I've looked at political affiliation and punctuation and capitalization in tweets, and there's pretty robust differences at least in the US between oppositional political identities. I'm trying to think of other people's work, so it's not just: here's a bunch of stuff that I've done!

MEGAN: Basically, everyone's trying to model everything.

RACHAEL: Basically. Or should be, hopefully. I think, historically, there hasn't been a lot of - I think sociolinguists are much better about knowing what's going on in computational linguistics then computational linguists are at knowing about what's going on in sociolinguistics. I'm coming from sociolinguistics and coming to computational linguistics. I'm trying to have a big bag of Labov papers and toss them to people, be like “here you go! Here you go!”

MEGAN: Yes and Labov is a very famous sociolinguist.

RACHAEL: He is, yes. I would call him the founder of variationist sociolinguistics - which is not the only school, but it is the school that I work in mainly.

CARRIE: Yeah, I think that's - well that's the most famous one as far as I know.

MEGAN: Yeah. I didn't know there were other ones. Of course there is.

RACHAEL: Yeah, I'm trying to think of names. Mostly I'll come across it I'll be like “oh”. I guess discourse analysis is a type of sociolinguistics.

MEGAN: Oh, okay.

CARRIE: Yes.

RACHAEL: But different bent.

CARRIE: How is automatic speech recognition trained to understand humans? I think you've already started to answer this, but maybe you can answer it'll be even more, if there is more to say.

RACHAEL: Yeah. I mentioned there are two components: there's the acoustic model and then there the language model. Usually the language model is actually trained on texts. You take a very, very, very large corpus. I think right now - I don't know about the standard, but what I think most people would like to use would be the Google trillion word corpus, which is from scraped web text, or people use the Wall Street Journal corpus, which is several hundred million words long. You know the probability of a certain set of words occurring in a certain order, so it's the poor man's way of getting syntax. I'll tell you about how it's traditionally done. People are replacing both the pronunciation dictionary and the acoustic model, which sometimes includes the pronunciation dictionary with big neural nets. We can talk about that in a little bit, but traditionally the pronunciation dictionary was made by hand. The Carnegie Mellon the pronunciation dictionary, or CMU pronunciation dictionary, is probably the best-known one for American English. People transcribe words, and if there's one that you need that's not transcribed, you add it.

MEGAN: And what’s a pronunciation dictionary?

RACHAEL: It is a list of words and then how they're pronounced. The phones, so “cat” would be [k] [æ] [t] - those three sounds in order. Then the acoustic model takes the waveform and tells you the probability of each of those sounds. So it's like “well I'm pretty sure it's [æ], but I guess it could also be [ɑ]”, through a process of transformations. People recently have been taking a speech corpus - usually one that's labeled, so you know what words are spoken - and then using all of that data and shoving it into a neural net, which is a type of machine learning algorithm - it's a family of machine learning algorithms. People use different types and flavors, and they have different structures. What neural nets are really, really good at is finding patterns in the data, and recognizing those same patterns later, without you having to tell them to do it. They learn it themselves, from just the way that the information is organized. They've been really, really good and useful in image processing, in particular, being able to look at a photo and be like “here is an apple”, “here is an orange” and “I have circled them helpfully for you”. They're really good at that. But as it turns out there is more structure in language than there is in other types of data.

CARRIE: Shocking. [sarcasm]

RACHAEL: It is to some people. I've had a lot of frustrating conversations where people were like “but it works really good on images!” I'm like “yes, but language is different”. If it weren't, we wouldn't need linguistics. People wouldn't need to study language their entire lives, if it was just like images but in sound, basically. Which I think is probably not news to any listeners of this podcast, but definitely it is news to some people. Neural nets are really good at seeing things that they've seen before, or identifying the types of things they've seen before, and if they see new things, they're not so good at it. I think that's really where a lot of the trouble with dialect comes in, because sociolinguistic variation is very systematic between dialect regions. One person can have multiple dialects as well. I don't want to make it sound like you sort people into their dialects and then apply the correct model and then boom everything's correct all the time. Because people have tried that and it works better than not doing anything, but it's still not - I don’t know. There's a lot of work to do, and I don't want to make it sound like speech research engineers are just fluffing around and not knowing about language, because they do. But it's difficult, and it hasn't, I think, been a major focus for a lot of people recently, and I'm hoping that it will become more of a research focus.

MEGAN: You said something in one of your interviews that I wanted to read here that I liked. You say that “generally the people who are doing the training aren't the people whose voices are in the dataset. You'll take a dataset that's out there that has a lot of different people's voices, and it will work well for a large variety of people. I think the people who don't have sociolinguistic knowledge haven't thought about the demographic of people speaking would have an effect. I don't think it's maliciousness. I just think it wasn't considered.”

RACHAEL: Yeah.

MEGAN: I think “it was a considered” part - it's how I felt actually. I obviously very much care that people aren't discriminated against in every aspect of life. But I just didn't think about speech recognition.

RACHAEL: Yeah. I think we have this idea that like “oh a computer’s doing it, so it's not gonna be biased”.

MEGAN: You’re right.

RACHAEL: That’s nice to believe that you have the ethical computer from Star Trek, but bias is built into all machine learning models. It's one of the things you study in a machine learning class. You talk about bias and variance, and it's there in the model, and it's there in the data. Pretending that it can go away if you just keep adding more data is a little bit of a problem for the people who are actually using the system, and it doesn't work as well for them as it should, maybe.

CARRIE: It's also very naïve.

MEGAN: Yeah. Humans are the ones that are doing it, right. We’re behind the machines. Of course there's biases. I was thinking, I've said I've never thought about this before, but I don't use Siri, because Siri does not understand me very well at all. I've given up.

SIRI: I miss you Megan.

MEGAN: I didn't take the next step. I didn't take the next step, and think “oh why is this the case that she's not understanding me very well”.

RACHAEL: Yeah.

CARRIE: She understands me pretty well. I have a pretty standard North American accent.

RACHAEL: A little bit of the Canadian shift.

CARRIE: I do, but it's not enough to trick SIRI, apparently. My accent has shifted somewhat since living in the States for over nine years. I knew that speech recognition did have a problem with at least some dialects, because there's a fairly famous skit from Burnistoun, the Scottish sketch comedy show, where he's just saying “eleven”, and it's one of the words where in a Scottish accent “eleven” is pretty close, so the speech recognition should have been able to pick it up. Most of the sketches is them speaking in a Scottish dialect that I think many Americans would not understand actually.

IAIN CONNELL: You ever tried voice recognition technology?

ROBERT FLORENCE: No.

IAIN CONNELL: They don't do Scottish accents.

ROBERT FLORENCE: Eleven.

ELEVATOR: Could you please repeat that.

ROBERT FLORENCE: Eleven.

IAIN CONNELL: Eleven.

ROBERT FLORENCE: Eleven. Eleven.

IAIN CONNELL: Eleven.

ELEVATOR: Could you please repeat that.

IAIN CONNELL: Eleven. If you don't understand the lingo, away back home your own country. [If you don't underston the lingo, away back hame yer ain country.]

ROBERT FLORENCE: Oohh, is the talk now is it? “Away back home your own country?” [Oh, s'tha talk nae is it? "Away back tae yer ain country"?]

IAIN CONNELL: Oh, don't start Mr Bleeding Heart – how can you be racist to a lift? [how can ye be racist tae a lift?]

ELEVATOR: Please speak slowly and clearly.

CARRIE: Anyway, it's a really funny sketch, if you haven't seen it. I will post it, because I think it's funny.

MEGAN: I don't know what it is about me. I don't know if vocal fry would affect it at all. I'm also kind of mumbly. I try not to be mumbly on the podcast obviously, but in my normal everyday life, I am a mumbler, so that might be it. I expect Siri to understand my mumbles, but she don't, so I gave up.

RACHAEL: But see, that's part of the problem, because - I don't know for sure, but I would be beyond shocked if - because I know that for sure, Google has the ability to - it retains the speech samples that you send them, and I'm sure that they fold them back into their training data, so if you're not using it, because it doesn't understand you, it's pretty much never gonna understand you, is the unfortunate thing. I think that's really part of the reason that there's - I think - pretty strong class effects. This is this is me having a science hunch that I haven't really banged out yet in some experimental work. I think that people who have a higher socioeconomic status and particularly professional class, mobile - not rural the other one.

CARRIE: Urban.

RACHAEL: Urban! Yeah, thank you. Especially professional, mobile, urban people have - I'm almost positive - higher cognition rates, correct word rates.

MEGAN: You mentioned something about how the language model was taking in things like The Wall Street Journal. Wouldn't that affect it too? That's not your acoustic signal, but it's the way you speak? I don't know.

RACHAEL: Yeah. No that's fair. “‘Fiduciary’ seems to be a fairly common word that humans use all the time, so I’m gonna look for that one.”

CARRIE: I would be very surprised if class didn't play a role. It always does. In everything that we talk about, there's something about class going on too. But we don't think about it as much in North America as we should.

MEGAN: We really don't. Especially since it's wrapped in with race and ethnicity so much. I act like I know anything beyond the States. It's just very American.

RACHAEL: I think it's very much the top-level thing that people think about with language variation in the UK, for sure.

MEGAN: Ah, okay.

CARRIE: Yeah. Absolutely.

MEGAN: Interesting.

RACHAEL: There's RP, and then those weird regional dialects that we don't like. As a person not from the UK, that's the judgments that I've gotten from consuming popular media.

CARRIE: It used to be worse. Because the BBC used to only have received pronunciation with their reporters, but now you'll hear regional varieties. Still the most prestigious versions of those varieties, but at least you'll hear Irish dialects now. Things are slightly better.

MEGAN: You'd hope so. ASR is trained to understand humans, so you're feeding in them these datasets, and I didn't know this but I guess, like you said, if I talk to Siri, I'm also feeding into a dataset.

RACHAEL: Yeah. That seems very likely to me. Again, I don't know for sure, and this may be something that's Googlable, you could find using a search engine, and it may be something that you could not find using a search engine. The other thing about neural nets is because they're good at seeing things they seen before, they get really good if you have a lot of data, a lot of data. I have not yet seen the company that would ignore free data that people were giving to it to improve model performance.

MEGAN: Do you have examples of automatic speech recognition failing to understand people that we can give the listeners, so they can see the problem?

RACHAEL: I can give you one from my life, which continues to drive me nuts. I'm from the South and I have a general American professional voice that I use, but especially if I'm relaxing with friends or with my family, I definitely sound more Southern. One of the things that happens in the South and also in African American English is nasal place assimilation. If you have a nasal after a stop, which are sounds like [k] [t] [p] [g] [d] [b], you will change the nasal, [m], [n], or [ŋ], to whatever the thing in front of it was. I would say “beanbag” as “beambag”, especially in an informal setting. Or a “handbag” is “hambag”. Put your things in your handbag. I think it's a fairly common thing. Google used to always, always, always search for “beambag” when I wanted to know about “beanbags”, because I was doing research to get - I currently have one, I just turned to look at it - a really good beanbag chair. They’re very comfy! I like them. It kept telling me about “beambags”, which are not a thing! It just drove me up the wall, because lots of people do this thing. This is a normal speech process.

CARRIE: Yeah. Very common.

MEGAN: Also, a “hambag”, a bag of hams and that might be something people have.

RACHAEL: I guess a Smithfield ham does come in a bag. It comes like a little canvas bag.

MEGAN: I guess that's where it's trying to get you. But that's not what you’re [meaning]. That’s funny. Okay, how do we solve this problem? What should we be thinking about when we develop automatic speech recognition databases and such? Who should be involved?

RACHAEL: Sociolinguists. Definitely hire sociolinguists. That's my general go-to drum. It's a hard problem. I don't want to pretend that a sociolinguist looks at it and they're like “ah! Fix this parameter!” and then suddenly it works great for everyone. Because the fact of minority languages or language varieties, in particular, is that they’re minority because fewer people use them. If you are trying to optimize performance and accuracy for the model as a whole, and you raise it for the people who are from minority groups - whatever those may be - if you are using the one model, that will lower it for your majority language speakers. Just adding more data isn't necessarily going to be the fix. People have been have been working on this for a long time, and it's a very hard problem, and I have nothing but respect for everyone who's working on this. There's a couple of approaches that people are doing. One is to train multiple models on different stable language varieties. In the US I might train one on West Coast generally, and as far as that is a single language variety, I’d probably train one on the Northeast, one on the northern cities, so Chicago, Michigan sort of area - Chicago's in Illinois - Illinois, Michigan sort of area. One on the South. One also for the mid-Atlantic region. And then select one of those models, based on whichever would most accurately represent the person who's speaking. That's one approach. Another approach is to take the model and then change it for every single person's voice. That will capture dialectal variation, but it will also capture individual variation. The reason that your phone doesn't do that automatically is because it is very computationally intensive. These models are very big. They have a lot of information in them. They have a lot of parameters, and to change those, it takes a lot of raw processing power. That's not really feasible to do for individual people, as it stands. I don’t know, maybe in five years it will be completely feasible. We’ll all have GPUs falling out of our pockets everywhere we go. I don't know. That's another approach that some people have taken. I don't know, maybe with some fancy new ensembling - which is where you multiple different types of models and stick them together like - what are those, K’nex? - and they build a pipeline, and then you shove the data all the way through the pipeline, and all the different models that are connected together. Those have been getting really good results lately, so maybe some sort of clever ensembling, where you do something like demographic recognition, and then something like shifting your language model a little bit. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what people are gonna come up with.

MEGAN: This is the future. This is the future that millennials want or something. I don’t know. This is the future liberals want. If this is the future, I'm thinking about the fact that in 30 years we're gonna be a majority-minority country. We're on our way to this becoming a bigger and bigger problem.

RACHAEL: Yes. Definitely.

MEGAN: The fact that Siri or Alexa - sorry - has trouble understanding people that aren't in this white -

RACHAEL: Super-privileged, small group?

MEGAN: Yeah, right. There's a gender bias too, right? It's males that are understood.

CARRIE: And we're the majority.

RACHAEL: I just want to quickly intercede here - I did some in earlier work finds that it was more accurate - specifically YouTube's automatic captions were more accurate for men than women, but I think, because I couldn't replicate that result, the problem there was actually signal-to-noise ratio. Women tend to be a little bit quieter, because we're a little bit smaller. If you are speaking at the same effort-level in the same environment, there's just gonna be a little bit more noise in the signal for women, because we're not quite as loud. I don't know that clutter signal processing can fix that. I'm gonna keep working on this, and who I might find out that actually there are you know really strong differences, it maybe it can't deal with things that women do more. I was gonna say “vocal fry”, but I've seen no evidence that women fry more than men, which I'm sure you talked about. At length.

CARRIE: Right. That was our first episode. Everybody does it. Leave us alone!

MEGAN: Leave it alone. Get the fuck off my vocal fry! What I'm hearing is this is something that we should all very much care about, because, like Carrie said, everyone else is the majority. If it's best trained on white men that are in higher socio-economic classes, that's not the majority. It sounds like we need to have people in the room, because, like you said, you don't think it was considered when they were making these datasets. We need people in the room that are like “wait, I come from this community where that's not how we talk, this is not gonna work for me or us”.

RACHAEL: Yeah, definitely.

MEGAN: I definitely want to plug a representation too. We need more people in the room.

RACHAEL: Definitely. I've been talking about English, because that's what I know about, and specifically American English. I don't want to get into British dialectology, cuz that's crazy, crazy complex. But this is also a problem in other languages. Arabic dialects are incredibly different from each other.

CARRIE: Right.

MEGAN: Now I'm thinking about people that are bilingual.

RACHAEL: Or bidialectal.

MEGAN: Or bidialectal, for sure. That's gonna be something else that we would want automatic speech recognition to recognize.

RACHAEL: Yeah. Absolutely. I can give people something that you can do right now - is that Mozilla, which is the company that owned the Firefox - continues to own, I think, the Firefox web browser - is currently crowdsourcing a database of voices, and voice samples. You can head over to that website, for which there is a link that I for sure can't find. I think it's called the Mozilla Common Voice Project, but don't quote me on that unless it's right.

MEGAN: We'll put it somewhere.

RACHAEL: Mozilla is doing a collection of voices of people, and they're specifically trying to get people from different demographic backgrounds, for specifically this problem, for knowing demographic information about someone, for having speech samples for the. They're also having people manually check the recording, so if this is something that's interesting, and you want to listen to a lot of voices, I'd recommend heading over there and checking it out.

MEGAN: Ah, so they are crowdsourcing automatic speech recognition. That's a good idea. That’s a tough - how you get the most variation in the people that reply.

RACHAEL: One thing that I found in my own work, and other computational linguists have found as well, is that we know a lot about variation in speech, but a lot of the same variation also exists in text. A lot of the text that you produce in your day-to-day life, especially if it's anywhere online, is getting fed into a lot of natural language processing tools. There are also problems with those. Things like identifying what language someone is using is not as good.

CARRIE: Yeah, I notice that on Twitter a lot. It wants to translate from French all the time.

MEGAN: Yeah.

RACHAEL: Twitter's language ID is a hot mess. A hot mess.

CARRIE: And it's never French. It's never French. In fact, sometimes it's English. I'm like “what is going on?”

MEGAN: I've had Estonian. Translate from Estonian.

RACHAEL: Yeah. Estonian tends to show up a lot. I'm trying to think of - I have started doing some very lackadaisical data collection. I think it seems to work on a character level, so it tends to be fairly good at languages that have a unique character set. It tends to be very good at Thai, but related Germanic languages - pfft - it does not. That's Bing. That's on Microsoft. They're the back end there, so I 100% blame them. Maybe, if they hadn't gutted their research teams, they would be able to do this better.

CARRIE: Hint hint.

MEGAN: That is something that we can do immediately. Do you have something really poignant you want to say about why this is all important? What's the takeaway message? Because we've been talking us this whole time about why it's important, but what do you think is the takeaway?

RACHAEL: It's important to hear people's voices. Both literally and metaphorically.

CARRIE: There we go. There's the money shot.

MEGAN: That’s the money shot. Money, money, money. See that's what we wanted!

CARRIE: Yes. It's important to hear people's voices. I think that's a good place to end.

MEGAN: Yeah, cuz that was it. Unless you have anything else, Rachael?

RACHAEL: Hmm. No, I don't think so. I use my hands a lot, so hopefully a lot of the things that I was saying with my hands I was also saying with my voice.

MEGAN: Yeah, I realized that at our first episode, I was using my hands, and now my hands don't even move. It comes with some experience - of my four episodes that I have done, five episodes.

CARRIE: Five! Five episodes. This is our sixth.

RACHAEL: Ooh! Lucky number 6!

CARRIE: Thank you so much, Rachael, for talking with us today.

RACHAEL: You’re welcome!

CARRIE: That was awesome. I learned a lot.

MEGAN: I know, I learned so much. I was so ignorant on this subject. So thank you. Hopefully this will be of interest to people that have no idea, but also to our listeners that really like speech recognition stuff. I know that I know that they're there. This is very exciting. Alright, cool. I guess we want to leave everyone with one message, which is: don't be a fucking asshole.

CARRIE: Don't be an asshole. Bye!

CARRIE: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by Chris Ayers for Halftone Audio. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at [email protected].

Ebenezer Howard gives us the garden city

Think of the world’s great cities and the word “plan” does not come readily to mind. Most show scant signs of intelligent organisation, their organic growth resembling ivy spreading alongside a footpath, directed by whim as much as by geography.

Ebenezer Howard, in his garden, in 1826. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Social scientists now recognise that along with establishing a physical space, cities need to accommodate environmental and social systems such as schools, transport, housing, employment and sanitary requirements.

In the International Encyclopaedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Robert Freestone, from Sydney’s University of New South Wales, writes that: “On balance, urban planning initiatives have meant that a significant proportion of humanity on every continent found itself living in better circumstances at the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning.”

In the same book, Naomi Carmon, from the Israel Institute of Technology, writes that the aim of early city planning initiatives was to “make the city and its neighbourhoods safe, sanitary, economically efficient, and socially attractive”.

The prominent figure at the beginning this city planning movement, Carmon suggests, is Ebenezer Howard, whose 1902 book, Garden City of Tomorrow, “influenced 20th-century urban planning more than any other publication”.

In his 1982 book, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, author Robert Fishman says, “Of the three planners discussed here, Ebenezer Howard is the least known and the most influential.”

“If Howard’s achievements continue to grow in importance,’ he adds, “Howard the man remains virtually unknown.”

The man was born in London, England, on 29 January 1850, but in 1871 emigrated to the US, where he tried, but failed, to make a go at farming in Nebraska.

He’d left school at 15 and found work in London as a stenographer, so when his US farming efforts were unsuccessful, he moved to Chicago and returned to shorthand as a court reporter and newspaper stenographer. When he returned to London in 1876 he worked for the Hansard company as a Parliamentary reporter.

Max Steuer, writing in the June 2000 edition of the British Journal of Sociology, in a paper titled “A hundred years of town planning and the influence of Ebenezer Howard”, says Howard “had no particular educational background, but always took an interest in social movements”.

The idea for which Howard is renowned is his scheme for “garden cities”, several of which were built and exist in Britain and the US, along with many of the principles he established being adopted around the world.

Ebenezer Howard’s original garden city concept. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A 2019 paper by Dragica Gataric from the University of Belgrade, in Serbia, says Howard “proposed the establishment of a new city type in order to remove/reduce the differences between rural and urban settlements”.

Gataric says Howard envisioned these garden cities as environmentally friendly places with the economic and cultural advantages of city life as well as ecological advantages of rural areas.

Howard planned his garden city in fine detail, down to the number of inhabitants – about 32,000 – and layout. There was to be six boulevards radiating out from a city centre, circular in shape with park and public buildings, dividing the city into six equal housing units, each of which including a school and about 5000 inhabitants. Factories, workshops, warehouses, and the like would be located along the city’s periphery, alongside a circular railroad that would surround the city.

Gataric says Howard introduced zoning into the city planning process, such as industrial, residential, public space and green areas, “with the idea that they should be spatially separated units”.

If the garden city was to reach its capacities by its spatial and demographic development, she says, a new garden city would be built on the outskirts of that home city.

“The city would be surrounded by a ‘spatial wall’ – a green belt (intended for agriculture and recreation), whose function would be to limit population and spatial expansion (urban growth), as well as to provide the urban population with immediate proximity to greenery and the agricultural environment. It would also be a sports and recreation zone.”

Howard continued as a Hansard reporter for all of his working life. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1924.

He died on 1 May 1928 in one of his own creations, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England.

Ebenezer Howard gives us the garden city published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

Everybody Says Mark Was the First Gospel, But Was It? (With Dr. David Alan Black

COMMENTARY:

Well, for reasons that you will have to come to grok in fullness, Dr. Black has all the pieces, but he's jammed them into his premise because he is old enough to have been elgible for the draft his first year of college in 1971, the year I got back from Vietnam, The consequene is he has a blind spot about all things military because he was scared shitless of going to Vietnam.

And he's pretty typcial of Pro-Life Evangelical Spiritual Warriors. It's like Donald John Trump* calling himself a "War President"; or smarter about pandemics than the White House pandemic reponse team he disbanded in 2018 for the same reason the Republicans in Florida sabotaged the mechanisms for receiving unemployment: dumb ass Joe McCarthy Conservative politics.

I went to Vietnam because I was a Christian Soldier and my commission was the Liberation Gospel of the Gospel According to Mark. I went. locked and loaded, to Vietnam and I earned my spurs. I have a Combat Infantryman's Badge and a couple or three scaples. I went to Vietnam to kill a Kong for Christas and I stand here and declare "Mission Accomplished".

Then I came back to the World and have spent the last 49 years dealing with white, male Spiritual Warriors like you and Dr. Clark and Donald John Trump*. Which is why the suicide rate among combat veterans is 22 vets a day. You know how you like to poo-poo numerology and numerics in the Bible? Well, could make the case that the Holy Spirit has somehow suppressed the suicide rate in veterns like me to JUST 22 a day just so I can point it out to you at this very instant for the very first time anywhere on the internet of Christendom.

Those who have eyes, see.

The axis between Q and the Letter to the Hebrews is a case study in a generic intellince assessment process being employed in Langley, today. It's the way the etimoloigists that Donald John Trump* fired from the White House in 2018 would have gone about making a risk assesssment for the Coronavirius long before China would have permitted the word of the pandemic from getting out. You can see why the godless commie cocksuckers in Beijing would have wanted to keep the pandemic secret from the world given that America just pulled an aircraft carrier off the line to protect the crew: during the battle of Stalingrad, a little pandemic would have just added a subject to sing about to the festivities.

The Gospel According to Mark is not the first intelligence report to be sent to Rome about the resurrection of Jesus. Here's where Dr. Black and I are joined at the hip: my intent is to establish the historicity of the Gospel of Mark in such a way that any rational, intellectually honest and morally anchore human being can drop kick asshole anti-theists like Richard Carrier and Richard Dawkins in their ideologically puffed up balls and through the goal posts of their own asshole pretzel logic.

Dr. Black has all the same peices I do, but, because he was scared shitless of going to Vietnam and then the military gunned down the 4 students at Kent State scared all the white anti-war draft dodgers shitless after the celebration of the end of was at Woodstock which turned into rage, hie has a blind spot about the Romans because,. One, they've always been the bad guys lurking behind the scene and, two, the Romans in the first century until the Milvian Bridge in the 4rh century went to a great deal of trouble keep their existence in the Praetorian Guard and the Legions a secret, or hiding it in plain sight with the Cult of Murtha and the associated Caesar Worship, with it's baptism in blood.

The Roman military had absolutely no expectation of anything like the Resurrection. None. I mean, there were all sorts of stories floating around in their mythos about “the gods” in pretty much the same way the stories about Batman and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, but a story about a god who is born of woman, creates the structures of an army composed of Gideons poise to crush the Romans in Galilee, like they did the 12th Legion of Cestius Gallus in 68, but has the more important mission of being truly crucified, USDA Caesar Tiberius Guaranteed, stuck a fork into Him to make sure he was dead, and buried behind a stone requiring 17 men, a centurion and a corporal's guard of 2 squads of 16 men to roll into place.

And up from the grave He arose! This just wasn't in the Roman field manuals, anywhere, so they began to study it.

It so happens, they had already collected a great deal of data about Jesus as a routine surveillance detail when He popped up over the Roman military horizon as a potential insurgent aligned with John the Baptist. Sometime around 27, before John is arrested and they continued this surveillance with decreasing interest until He is remanded to Pilate by a Jewish lynch mob composed of all the A-List citizens of Jerusalem demanding his execution. All that spy product is the initial material contained in Q and Cornelius, the centurion in Acts 10, is Pilate's administrative chief of staff and the curator for Q from it's implementation as a subject of force protection by the Roman intelligence services in Palestine.

Go back the 19 minute time stamp when Dr. Black is describing the stenographic nature of the prose style of the Gospel: the presence of the historic present is the transcribed report of a spy from the field, the raw intelligence of intelligence spy craft arranged along a meticulous and rigorous timeline exactly like the log of a ship or the book of a police desk sergeant. This is scientifically based observation for evaluation somewhere up the chain of command to squeeze out the military/political implications of all things under their purview. As Luke observes in Acts 24:22, Felix knew all about The Way long before Paul washed up from Jerusalem at his feet.

And it began with Cornelius and Q. Theophilus is the spy master in the Praetorian Guard both Pilate and Cornelius report to regarding military intelligence. Theophilus has the same organizational role in the Praetorian Guard that George Smiley has in MI6: he's not M, but he M is his first report, and M speaks to the Emperor. In particular, Tiberius. Until 31, Sejanus is M in the Praetorian Guard, so it's not clear if Sejanus would have choked off the initial intelligence report that compelled Tiberius to propose to the Senate that Jesus be elevated to the status of a legal deity or not, but the timing is such that, if Jesus had died on the Passover in 31, the news of His Resurrection could have moved, unfettered, to Tiberius as early as that year.

For numerological reasons, I like 33 better but only by a hair over 31 CE as the year it all got started.

But the important thing is, Tiberius made his Jesus proposal after, or during, the purge of Sejanus and, as a consequence, the Senate was forever after hostile to all things Tiberius, especially Christians, which is why they went underground. If you notice, the only connection Cornelius makes with Jesus is by naming Jairus, who was president of the Capernaum synagogue. Cornelius knew Jesus, personally, and was justified by faith in Matthew 8:10. And Cornelius was in the room with Pilate during the interrogation of Jesus.

Why didn't Cornelius intercede, then, you may ask. It has to do with Romans 13:1 – 7 and the spirit that fulfills the letter of the law. It has to do with the dramatic tension of “A Man for All Seasons”. It has to do with why Mitt Romney voted to convict and Socrates took the cup and Jesus died on the cross. It's why I went to Vietnam and why I left the army. The rule of law, duty and the sworn oath. That's the basis of the absolution of Luke 23:34.

The letter to the Hebrews is an intelligence finding, to return to the theme of a case study in generic intelligence risk assessment. Q stayed in Caesarea and was possibly destroyed during the Jewish Wars, but Theophilus assembled a mirror, and complimentary, portfolio in Rome to study just what it all meant. Paul's role was to defend the ethic of Jesus in Rome to Theophilus and his committee/church, which he, Paul, does successfully. Unlike Athens, where he was preaching to philosophers. Paul is preaching to students of philosophy in the Roman equestrian class: their whole success was as early adopters and they already believed in Romans 13: 1 – 7, but the missing link was Melchizedek and the offering of bread and wine and that closes the loop of Moses with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

Everything in the Gospels begins moving to Rome when Jesus is remanded to Pilate. Dr. Black is almost right about the relationship between Mark and the Gospel of John. John Mark is the publisher, editor, character and probable translator of the original Latin of the autograph to the coine Greek of the final version and John Mark is also the author of the Gospel of John. John Mark is the “beloved disciple” of the Gospel of John is probably 14 years old when he is witness to the Roman coup-de-grace on the cross. He is something of a mascot, a Junior Disciple, who first meets Jesus at the wedding in Cana something after Jesus is baptized, and travels around with Jesus and his crew from about that time until after the feeding of the 5000, which occurs just before the Passover the year before Easter and sometime just after John the Baptist is beheaded in 29. John Mark's chronology is not entirely reliable, but the narratives of Mark and John converge in both Gospels in Chapter 6 and diverge until they converge in Chapter 11. The Triumphal Entry  into Jerusalem happens in the morning of Palm Sunday and Lazarus is raised from the dead in the late afternoon in Bethany. John Mark was in Bethany for both the Triumphal Entry and the Scourging of the Temple.

The Gospel of John is a complimentary reader to Mark and originates from the perspective of someone for whom Passover was like Christmas while the Synoptic Gospels treat Passover as an annual issue of crowd control. The anointing of Jesus is a coronation in Mark but a particularly erotic celebration in John of the Bridegroom that is an allusion to Ruth at the feet of Boaz, her redeemer. This is the best case to be made that Jesus had a wife, but He died a virgin.

Matthew is undoubtedly written by Matthew Levi and is the outlier to the other Gospels in that, as Dr. Black observes, is a polemic for the Judaizers who opposed Paul's missionary to the Gentiles. Luke is making an obvious reference to Matthew's Gospel in the preamble to Luke where the transliteration is that he. Luke, is correcting what Matthew fucked up.

Luke probably started Acts as an amicus brief for Paul's defense of Romans, but Theophilus commissioned him to expand his study after he, Luke, is introduced to Cornelius and given access to Q. It is obvious that both Mark and Matthew are available to Luke when he follows Paul to Caesarea and, based on an observation in David Sloan's “What if the Gospel according to Hebrews is Q”, Luke had Mark to begin with (he notices that Luke 3:1 introduces John the Baptist like the beginning of Mark  after introducing him as the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth in Luke 1).

That's not all, but here's a little more numerology for you to consider: the 13 Epistles of Paul being with the longest and narrows to the shortest like an arrow pointing at Hebrews, which has 13 chapters, which were added in the 16th century, as you have pointed out in another video.

Dr. Black has all the pieces and, if you add Richard Bauchman's eyewitness in the Gospels to the mix, and rearrange the pieces around his fear of going to Vietnam, it all leads to the nature of the canon and removes most of the mystery to fully reveal the historicity of the Mystery of the Resurrection in the eyes of the Romans back in the day.

The Suffragette With a Passion For Saving Charleston's Historic Architecture

https://sciencespies.com/history/the-suffragette-with-a-passion-for-saving-charlestons-historic-architecture/

The Suffragette With a Passion For Saving Charleston's Historic Architecture

In 1909, the South of Broad area in Charleston, South Carolina, was filled with slums and decaying historic homes. That same year, Charleston native Susan Pringle Frost was just dipping her toe into the world of real estate. She’d been working as a U.S. District Court stenographer since 1902, but was distressed by the sad state of her city.

“There were ills aplenty in the Charleston of the early 20th century,” says Betsy Kirkland Cahill, chair of the board of the Preservation Society of Charleston, in an email. “Impoverished by an unrelenting sequence of natural disasters—fire, earthquake, tornado—and ravaged by the Civil War, the city had as many rats as people. Trash was everywhere in the streets, along with dirty water from the butcher pens; there were 12,000 privies on the peninsula, and 434 cows. Streets were unpaved, and in many yards, the only source of water was a single spigot. The beautiful, gracious houses that had characterized the antebellum city were sinking into disrepair and decay.”

First settled by the English in 1670, Charles Town, named after King Charles I, was originally located across the Ashley River from the peninsula it sits on now. By 1680, the city had grown, and relocated to the current spot, where it soon became known for elegant architecture and bustling trade. In the 1750s, it was the largest and richest town south of Philadelphia. It officially became “Charleston” in 1782.

Frost was born in the South of Broad neighborhood, south of where Broad Street intersects the peninsula, on January 21, 1873, to Dr. Francis LeJau Frost and Rebecca Brewton Pringle, both from old Charleston rice planting families. For her advanced schooling, Frost attended the prestigous Saint Mary’s Episcopal boarding school in Raleigh. Two years in, though, the family’s plantations started to decline and her father’s fertilizer business failed. She left school in 1891 to learn basic stenography skills and then took jobs as a stenographer to help support her then-impoverished family.

Frost’s stenography work introduced her to two employers that would have a large impact on her future: architect Bradford Lee Gilbert and the U.S. District Court. She developed an interest in historical architecture while working for Gilbert, and the women’s suffrage movement was really taking off while she worked at the court. Once the Equal Suffrage League was formed in South Carolina, Frost—who, at 41, had never married—founded the Charleston chapter. She led the push in Charleston for the right for women to vote.

By 1918, Frost had had enough of the demise of the city’s historic structures. During her time as a stenographer, she’d come to believe that women needed to do everything they could to combat societal ills. And so, for the sake of her hometown, she quit her stenographer job and decided to go into real estate full-time, with a mission to protect and preserve Charleston’s historic buildings. Basically, she was a home flipper—and one of Charleston’s first.

“To Sue Frost, the historic homes that were decaying or sometimes literally being dismantled in front of her eyes were the bodies that housed the souls—the soul—of her beloved Charleston,” Cahill says.

Frost, the first woman on Broad Street to both have an office and work in real estate, started her efforts when real estate was just a side job, purchasing several old properties in 1910, more on Tradd Street in 1911, three on St. Michael’s Alley in 1913. She didn’t have enough money on her own to buy all these properties, but she was able to afford it with a mixture of investments from wealthy friends—like the DuPonts, who employed Frost’s sister as a secretary—and rent payments from properties she rented out after buying them. When she bought 57 Broad Street in 1920, she opened her real estate office full-time, purchasing several houses on what’s now known as Rainbow Row that same year. She intended to restore them when she raised the necessary funds, but was never able to do so and ended up selling the homes.

The Joseph Manigault House, the 1803 home of a prominent plantation owner at 350 Meeting Street, was in danger of destruction in 1920. Frost, along with about 30 other Charleston residents concerned with saving the property, gathered to discuss not just what they would do, but also the formation of an organization to preserve local buildings. The group, called the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, was formed at Frost’s insistence, and she was elected president. That group is still in operation today, as the Preservation Society of Charleston. The society works to recognize and protect historic places throughout the city, reviewing proposals for both changes to historic properties and new construction in historic areas. It also manages a historic marker program for local properties. One of the society’s more recent projects was establishing the Thomas Mayhem Pinckney Alliance in 2013, which preserves sites and contributions of African Americans throughout Charleston and its history. Thomas Mayhem Pinckney was Frost’s right-hand man; he worked as her general contractor, making updates to the properties she bought as needed.

Frost made it a point to spread the gospel of the fledgling preservation society. She campaigned tirelessly to save buildings from destruction or dismantling, and to beautify and modernize the city itself. She regularly wrote to newspapers to recruit members and garner support for the society, and she did everything she could to help on her own—even if that meant going into debt from sacrificing commissions, instead using that money to fix up and protect old homes, or holding onto properties long enough for locals to realize they were important buildings.

“She wanted to revitalize buildings and neighborhoods for the sake of the residents, for all those who would dwell in them,” Cahill says. “In her conviction, her utter dedication, and her zeal to protect her beautiful city for future generations, Susan Pringle Frost set the Preservation Society on the course it has followed for the past century.”

In her lifetime, Frost was well known around Charleston, recognized by the mayor for her work and featured in several newspaper cover stories. But outside of Charleston, and since her death on October 6, 1960, she’s been largely unknown and her story forgotten. Now, with the 100th anniversaries of women securing the right to vote and the founding of the Preservation Society of Charleston, Cahill aims to get Frost the recognition she deserves.

“As the Preservation Society has strengthened its operations and its message over the past five years, Frost has re-emerged into the spotlight as the Society of today derives inspiration and energy from her dedication, her outspokenness, and her love for Charleston,” Cahill says. “She is central to our work and to our message. She was a principled and determined woman, unafraid to challenge conventional understandings of women’s role in society. And in this centennial year especially, Susan Pringle Frost deserves a prominent place in the history of Charleston, and the history of the preservation movement.”

Here are five buildings (or groups of buildings) Frost helped preserve:

Dock Street Theatre

Dock Street Theatre

(Michael Parks Photography)

When the Dock Street Theatre opened in 1736, on the corner of Church Street and Dock Street (now Queen Street), it was the first building in the country that was specifically built for theater performances. The opening show was The Recruiting Officer, and shortly after, the theatre hosted one of the country’s first opera performances, Flora: Or Hob in the Well. Four years later, a massive fire in Charleston destroyed the building. It was rebuilt in 1809 as the Planter’s Hotel, a home for South Carolina planters who were in town for the horse-racing season. The hotel was slated for demolition in 1935, when Pringle and other concerned citizens lobbied for it to be saved—leading to the building’s owner, Milton Pearlstine, handing it over to the city. It became a public works project, and it transformed into the new Dock Street Theatre, which opened to the public in 1937. It remains in operation today, with around 10 performances per season by Charleston Stage, South Carolina’s largest professional theater company. The property underwent another renovation in 2010, introducing modern technology to the stage.

Joseph Manigault House

Joseph Manigault House

(Explore Charleston)

Gabriel Manigault designed and built this home for his brother Joseph sometime between 1790 and 1803. The Manigaults had risen to fame in South Carolina as successful merchants and rice planters; when Joseph moved into this house, he owned several plantations and more than 200 enslaved laborers. By 1920, the property was dilapidated, with planned destruction to make way for a new service station. Frost, seeing the importance of keeping the historical structure intact, formed the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, which bought the home. The society owned it for two years before selling it to the Esso Standard Oil Company; the mortgage payments made it impossible for the society to keep it. Unfortunately, by 1933, it was in disrepair again. This time it went up for auction, and the Charleston Museum purchased it. Now the house, restored to its 19th-century splendor and furnished with antique American, French and English pieces, is available for public tours.

Rainbow Row (private residences)

Rainbow Row

(Justin Falk Photography)

On East Bay Street, in the northeast corner of South of Broad, a row of pastel painted townhomes has been a landmark in Charleston since the 1930s. In the ’20s, though, the neighborhood was derelict and slated for demolition. Frost bought six of the homes, which used to belong to merchants who ran shops on the first floor, planning to restore them at a later date. She was never able to raise the funds, though, and ended up selling them to Judge Lionel Legge and his wife, Dorothy, who began the rainbow color scheme by painting their own home pastel pink. There are currently no restrictions on paint colors, but any color changes to the homes on Rainbow Row have to be approved by the city’s Board of Architectural Review.

Miles Brewton House (private residence)

Miles Brewton House

(Justin Falk Photography)

Wealthy merchant Miles Brewton built his home—a Georgian-style townhouse with stacked porticos—at 27 King Street around 1769. His family only lived in it for a few years, though; in 1775, Brewton, his wife, and his children were all lost at sea. Afterwards, his sister Rebecca Brewton Motte—Frost’s great-great-grandmother—took over ownership of the home. The Miles Brewton House was considered such a fine home that when Charleston was occupied by the British from 1780 to 1782, Lord Cornwallis, Lord Rawdon and Henry Clinton used it as a headquarters. Frost helped preserve the house simply by living in it. She was born there, later moved back into it with her sisters in 1919, and lived there until her death. The house remains in the family to this day as a private residence.

Tradd Street (private residences)

Tradd Street

(Explore Charleston)

The houses on Tradd Street were some of Frost’s first purchases when she got into real estate. The properties represent a mix of architectural styles, including Federal, Georgian, colonial, Italianate and traditional Charleston Single, an architecture style identified by homes being one room across and longer than they are wide. Frost started with two—financed with money from her stenographer job—and eventually owned 11 buildings on the street. She bought the properties at a low price, fixed them up with Pinckney’s help, and either sold them, unfinished, to investors who would take over the work, or rented them out. Often, though, Frost operated in the red, accumulating a large debt to the city that the mayor eventually reduced to honor her preservation work. She preserved so much of Tradd Street, in fact, that she earned the nickname “The Angel of Tradd Street.” The homes are now all private residences, but the street is popular on Charleston history tours that highlight the city’s 18th-century merchant homes. At least ten of the houses are historical landmarks. The one at 54 Tradd Street, for example, was home to Charleston’s fifth postmaster, who operated the post office out of his front room. Another, at 58 Tradd Street, was owned by Robert Wells in 1778, the largest bookseller and printer in the south; he and his son used the first floor to publish a Tory newspaper, which eventually got them banned from South Carolina.

#History

Deep (Stenography) Practice

The Talent Code is a paradigm-obliterating examination of the neuroscience behind building skill that tears down the mythology of the lone genius, born with a superior innate talent, that permeates the origin stories of our most venerated artists, athletes, writers, and performers.  It points out that skill development is a function of myelin insulation of neural circuitry that can take astronomical leaps forward with what the author calls Deep Practice.

“Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways --operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes -- makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them -- as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go -- end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.” - Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

So how does this relate to stenography practice? There is a vigorous method of stenography mastery I picked from a post on one of the Facebook forums for stenographers. So I have no idea to whom credit for this technique belongs (I hope you let me know and I’ll credit you!), but I know it was referred to as “breakdown.”

Target a dictation (or a portion) that you want to master. Maybe it’s got a few words that cause you to hesitate. This piece, as you can see, isn’t very complicated, but at 200 wpm I was hesitating around the highlighted words. The method that follows can be done to the entire take or you might try applying it to your trouble spots.

Write the take. Then go back and scope the take as if you were cleaning up a bit of trial or deposition testimony, so you have a master transcript to work against. Then draw a tick mark above every English portion you’d write in one stroke (I didn’t include the punctuation in this example but feel free to get that hardcore.)

Next you get a metronome (I use the metronome app on my iPhone), and set it to a get-able (or maybe a push speed). You start with the first two ticks and write them to the beat of the metronome from the copy three times, perfectly. Once you’ve written those two perfectly you add the next tick, and write the group of three, three times, perfectly. Then you drop the first tick and write tick two and tick three, perfectly, three times before adding tick four to your set. 

The strokes must be executed perfectly to move on.  Groups of two then three then two then three. This will take some time, so don’t expect to get through an entire five-minute piece in one sitting.  The struggle is in transitioning masterfully from stroke to stroke, myelinating the neural pathway between the two, and strengthening the automatic response.

Write the piece again after applying this breakdown even to the first 30 seconds of the take and see whether your automatic responses feel more solid. I started at 100 bpm and have made it up to 140 on this piece, and my power of writing it has drastically transformed. Increase the speed as you gain comfort with the method or it’s starting to feel too easy. This method has revealed to me many surprising areas of hesitation from theory concepts that needed refreshing, to brief forms that I was writing incorrectly, to subtle fingering transitions I had no idea caused me any difficulty and now have smoothed out. Why Does It Work? “There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition. Nothing you can do -- talking, thinking, reading, imagining -- is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing the impulse down the nerve fiber [in the brain], fixing errors, honing the circuit.” 

- The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle

p.s. This is not a substitute for other forms of practice on the steno machine, nor is it “the only” way to practice. It is simply a powerful technique that yields tangible results. I would categorize it under the umbrella of accuracy practice, and it would ideally complement a regimen of high speed dictation, briefs/theory practice, and other forms of accuracy practice (full dictation at or below target speeds).

I. This doesn’t begin with the fire, but it’s as good a bookend as any— just one tableau of many featuring the usual cast of accusatory fingers and the figures in their line of ire. Those whom rules have favored and those who know what it is to suffer. We’d never been to that space, never met the artists and attendees who perished in a building like the wooden belly of a ship, but we know places like it, have danced and sung among fairy lights, handmade lofts, puppets built by da Vinci’s latest incarnation as a trans girl. Those people shouting shame over building codes have likely been the comfortable kind exercising freedom not to be spat on, threatened, killed for being observably at odds with the bodies they were given. Yes, I said those people, and I meant the enfranchised yapping like lapdogs from narrow confines, not the beings residing in rinky-dink bedrooms/garages that double as performance spaces for bands nowhere else will book. I’m a straight-seeming cis white girl learning to catalogue my privileges and extending them to others when I can and still I have been on the shitty side of a rental inquiry. I know how it feels to be, on paper, worth absolutely nothing and how easy to feel that way off of paper, too. II. I don’t get told to kill myself, but I know many in the LGBT community hear this regularly. Sometimes the command is convincing enough. Anger is a mirror and I don’t believe the otherwise-at-ease offended by some people’s existence are looking in it. I try to imagine having love and sympathy even for livid Jesus-freak gazillionaires stripping rights from everyone who can’t pay their way out of a bind and I can’t do it, can actually see my own humanity’s limits. Would that they too would try this exercise, or another: admit faults! Hard to trust anyone who has no sense of humor. A gentle soul who says she talks to angels has become someone I don’t recognize, taking to Facebook to slut-shame Beyoncé, tongue-lashing Obama for his immigrant sympathies, typing in vitriolic caps about all of the WHINERS who can’t accept Trump as a gift from the Lord. If he is a gift, it is a flaming column of shit wrapped in dubiously human skin, in my very un-angelic opinion. What’s absurd about the man is the obviousness of his insecurities— he doth protest too much—the kind of complex that might inspire sympathy were he not responsible for the lives and deaths of everyone within these borders and many beyond. An awareness of my faults makes me hesitant, makes me reach for the scaffolding of facts while his make him bombastic, loose-cannon, a smug, dumb charlatan, the emperor everyone knows is nude. The angel lady insists not all of God’s chosen ones were perfect. I’m a heathen by choice, prefer to direct my energies to stones, intentions, the wheel of the year. I like my lore more figurative. Still, something tells me God’s chosen weren’t hate-mongering gropers (or worse). Just a hunch. A woman’s intuition. Since childhood I have tried not to know anyone well enough to dislike them, or give them license to antagonize, but Facebook is the license now. We are all animals. At work I held and scanned sweat-stained armbands from the Holocaust, touching fabric that touched people condemned to death or to put them there: red and green triangles, Stars of David, angular S’s and skulls. This is not a metaphor. The rabbi-turned-collector I work for, who deals in Judaica, tells me something I’ve never known: shows me the band that says Jüdische Polizei, for Jews the Nazis forced to police their own people, a level of fucked-up I’d never read. Each day new 1930s and 40s equivalences grow more disturbing, like how fucking stupid and heartless are we, and what kills me is that it’s the red-blooded self-professed patriots only too happy to repeat history, likely the same people who look back at any clash and think they would have been hero underdogs, which is what all Americans fancy ourselves, right? My husband’s aunt is a troll. This is a metaphor. Says he doesn’t watch real news, directs him to YouTube conspiracy videos. These are our times: rhetoric trumps reason, is wielded like a weapon against “ignorance” by those who vilify book-learnin’. I know only too well that I don’t know everything, which makes me not want to claim expertise on anything, which is of course what I want from everyone else, the same control in different clothes. I know how to escape a dinner party mostly unscathed, how to be a worker about whom no one has license to complain, but I don’t know how to be a soul or what true goodness is. Sometimes when I am in a mood, it seems easiest to leave the earth plane altogether, let everyone else deal with this ever-intensifying mess because who am I to do it? I, riddled with faults! I, not very kind! When my serotonin levels are not set to self-destruct, I wonder how often Donald Trump thinks about offing himself and figure the answer is never. III. For the first time in three years, my husband and I were home in the U.S. for the fourth of July. We’d spent twelve months in a nation where kings own newspapers and teachers sign waivers saying they’ll never speak ill of their school, the king, or the country. Portraits of royals hang in every business and home. I watched from afar as my homeland grew foreign to me, an unfunny joke I didn’t bother to defend. At least U.S. journalism is real, I’d thought, an antidote to automatic support for all-powerful leaders. Sad! In Bhutan, foreign workers need government permission to leave town for the weekend, afternoon, even an hour. This is granted by the immigration office, assuming all goes well with a letter from one’s employer, the whims of government workers, and sometimes a whiskey bribe. We presented our papers at checkpoints and kept trips to a minimum, inconvenienced and suspect because foreign. For us, there was an endpoint to this suspicion. In our own country again, we sang “proud to be an American” with gusto, gallows humor. I didn’t yet think such a system could happen here, didn’t know that six months later I’d be shouting at the airport with hijabis and Jews holding signs saying “We’ve seen this before.” I can’t command and articulate encyclopedic knowledge on the history of anger in and toward and from the Middle East and everywhere else, which is what I feel I need every time anyone starts in against Islam, but it’s not like facts are doing too hot these days so what does it matter, why am I still trying to fight fair against people who make up the rules as they go, who pride themselves on never reading books, whose tones of voice call to mind a fat cartoon man tugging his suspenders with jazz hands, chewing one end of a cigar? Floating over my shoulders I’ve got on one side a stenographer and on the other a housecat, both judgey and withholding, not the spirits to summon in an argument against oversimplification, the casting of all of a kind of person as their worst representative—which is what U.S. Americans can anticipate now that the rest of the world sees us for what we’ve always denied that we are: buffoons, ill-meaning and otherwise. I don’t know what to do with myself so I am calling representatives, studying Spanish, reading the Quran before the Bible, wishing my boss Shabbat Shalom, trying out Insha’Allah, everything graceless as crayon art magneted to the fridge, but an alternative to withering. At the women’s march, where I didn’t march so much as shift my weight from side to side for hours, so crowded, all I did was look and listen to people who’ve done this before, their history of anger a resistance pre-dating my existence. I imagine the fire victims who might have marched with us against all manner of finger-pointing, their pockets perhaps like mine lined with stones: malachite for a resilient heart, sodalite for courage to speak truth, tiger’s eye for personal power. Among the signs about witches and coat hangers: Black lives matter. Can’t believe that statement is ever a provocation, but then what I cannot believe is redefined every time I read the news now. Home after the protest there’s a Facebook statement from the angel whisperer: “Congratulations, ladies. You just marched for terrorism.” A flame of anger. Then a video clip: someone just punched a Nazi in the face. 2017 battle cry as .gif. “We’ve seen this before” manifest as a fist. For a moment, that was all the clarity I needed.

RUMPUS ORIGINAL POETRY: “Mewl” by Sarah Lyn Rogers