the people who moved into the house added railings to my balcony

Charbel Rajaee  

Prof. Christoph Heldt 

502-120-VA 

September 7th, 2023

Formal analysis assignment

The Starry Night was painted By Vincent Van Gogh in 1889. The artist was born in Netherlands on March 30th, 1853. He is one of the most famous artists in the world and he is well known for his oil paintings. In a 10-year period, he almost painted 900 paintings and approximately did 2100 art works in his whole life. Another thing that he is well known for is cutting his own ear. The painting was done in France at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy. The subject of the painting is that he used memories and emotions that came in his mind from looking outside of his window where there was a view of the countryside. He was letting his depression do the art for him instead of his own positive thoughts. The styles used in his famous painting are modern art and post-impressionism. The Starry Night will always be one of the best projects in Western art to this day. In 1890, he died from a suicide in France. The painting is currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is worth at least 100 million dollars. 

Van Gogh used many elements of art and principles of design. He used composition, which is a huge element of art. It includes balance, proportion, emphasis, rhythm, movement, unity, contrast and pattern. Van Gogh used all of them for his painting. For the elements of art, he used color, line, form, shape, texture, mass and light. As we can see in the painting, there is a lot of color. Mostly blue, yellow and white are visible the most because of the sky. Obviously, he was focused more on the sky of the drawing to create spiral effects with a lot of lines to show the effect. Shape was more used to make the little houses. However, he used lines in his whole painting. The mountains, the tree, the sky, the buildings and roads were all done in straight or curly lines. The texture and light added to the painting brought more emotion and effect to the people viewing this work. 

The cypress tree is made with the mass element of art. This could be related to death or a horror event. Nobody knows what Van Goph means with this tree, but it’s a possibility knowing that he was depressed while painting it. The rhythm is mainly related to his swirls in the sky, and it creates a pattern. By adding the swirls in the sky, it gives the effect of a windy day in a spooky neighborhood. The balance is perfect because the sun and the tree aren't on the same side. In brief, Van Goph uses a lot of elements and design to present his work and his emotions. 

To conclude, I’m really impressed of how talented the artist is despite some negativity in his projects. I don’t like to see people suffer and not feel happy because we only have one life to live. After discovering his life and what he did, it made me understand more about his mental health and his work. My main reaction about the work is I feel related because sometimes people get thoughts of negativity or don’t feel enough for someone. To be honest, I think he was trying to tell us that his life isn't going too well and that he is stuck in a dark place. Another possibility is that he feels unsafe in that certain place where he drew the painting. He could also feel shocked about something that came to his life. Therefore, my understanding did change a little bit because I thought it was related to a horror event. Most paintings send messages that we would have never guessed the meaning because a work could mean anything. My point of view for The Starry Night has evolved and made me realize that artists don’t do art for quality. They do it to express themselves or teach us something that could be useful for the rest of our lives.  

The Emergence of the Technetronic Society of Humankind The world community is being transformed. The current pandemic is only another phase of a metamorphosis set in motion decades ago. The intersection of our physical and digital lives is the battleground, where the last hopes of freedom are being bludgeoned to death. Few can see this because most people are already casualties the old world order sacrificed before the altar of liberty. Most of you reading this introduction will sense a bit of melodrama. But I assure you, anything I could type out here pales in comparison to the skullduggery that has beset humankind the last half-century. The war for planet Earth is upon us, but the battlefield is not some desert in Syria or a swamp somewhere in Latin America. The battlefield is real and virtual. It’s in the streets of Portland, Oregon, and the pages of Facebook. The Third World War is taking place in Walmart. It’s spreading to every back yard in Florida and every apartment complex in Bucharest. We’ve taken up arms against one another over every facet of life, not just whether or not to wear protective masks. Working-Class Struggle Redux Some of you already see this. You understand because you were finally forced to unfriend that high school buddy who Tweets or shares Facebook posters revealing humankind’s ignorance and meanness. We’re back to being tribal, devolution is upon us, and the end is written on the slum wall and the internet version. Wall Street is making a killing, billionaires are gnashing their teeth and wringing their hands, and the so-called little people are boiling in a kettle about to explode. Amazingly, my words here can be proven. Nobody can call “fake news” on this author. No sir. In 1970 the legendary (notorious for some) Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book entitled, “BETWEEN TWO AGES: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.” The author, who was one of the five or six most influential political celebrities of the latter part of the 20th century, is well known for his aversion for first the Soviet Union, and then the Russian Federation. Brzezinski’s book was an is a “how-to” book on methods for using computers and communications technologies as a means of transforming society. Though the book reads like an analysis by a technology outsider, the work is part of a wide-spanning strategy we see coming to competition today. Let’s look at an excerpt from the first section of the book where the former counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson and President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor delineates post-industrial America’s course: “In the technetronic society scientific and technical knowledge, in addition to enhancing production capabilities, quickly spills over to affect almost all aspects of life directly. Accordingly, both the growing capacity for the instant calculation of the most complex interactions and the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control augment the potential scope of consciously chosen direction, and thereby also the pressures to direct, to choose, and to change.” I won’t tax the reader here, but I encourage you to read the book yourself so that what I am presenting will sink in. Brzezinski, in no uncertain terms, is describing the fundamental transformation of society beginning sometime shortly before 1970, when he collated the information within the pages of the book. Remember, he was LBJ’s advisor. The Rise of the Techno-Bourgeoisie He continues in this section to refer to the past ideologies of the industrial age which built and sustained America and other democracies, to insist upon a more “modern” or “advanced” central ideology. Brzezinski, who most detractors would describe as a dinosaur or archaic, was discussing cybernetics replacing humans when Bill Gates was still at Lakeside Prep School being bullied and writing his first computer programs. I mention Gates for a purpose that may be obvious to some readers. This citation from Between Two Ages will transport the reader to my line of thinking here. Brzezinski writes knowingly: “In the emerging new society questions relating to the obsolescence of skills, security, vacations, leisure, and profit-sharing dominate the relationship, and the psychic well­being of millions of relatively secure but potentially aimless lower­middle­class blue­collar workers becomes a growing problem.” Please remember, this was published in 1970, years before Brzezinski would brag that he had helped cause the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan so that it could get its very own “Vietnam.” The man was a genius, an evil one, but a brilliant geo-policy strategist nonetheless. This book is not a reflection of Brzezinski’s powerful mind, however. This book is the revelation of a plan set in motion after Dwight Eisenhower left office. It’s a blueprint for the liberal world order to completely dominate the world. But before you label me, please consider how this “growing problem” is being used today. Who is Donald Trump? Aha! Now I have your full attention. What about the psychic wellbeing of aimless lower-middle-class Americans? Or, the psychic wellbeing of relatively secure Germans right before Adolph Hitler made them afraid of all the nations surrounding their country? Wait! Don’t go to that tangent, please focus on who got Donald Trump in the White House and how this came to pass. You see, Brzezinski and his colleagues created the conditions, the society, and the “path” we see taking shape today. Think about our symbols now, for instance. How did Google come to dominate the internet? Who stood behind? What does Google do? How about Facebook or Amazon, or any of the monumental successes we see controlling this technetronic society we now live in? Google lured the masses in with “free” and with slogans like “do no evil.” The competition was driven off, through massive investment. Now billions of people are analyzed and “computed” like Brzezinski revealed, to transform society, not to simply extract money via ads. Take the case of Facebook, it’s the same story. A huge swath of humanity is studied, spied upon, and manipulated while the puppetmasters tweak ideology, foment discord, and steer the crowd toward the desired endgame. Sounds crazy and dramatic, doesn’t it? But, wait for it. In 1972, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the US House of Representatives. He was then a National Merit Scholar who went to Harvard for a brief time, where he met Steve Ballmer, who would lead Microsoft until 2014. Ballmer was an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble for two years, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, the onetime CEO of General Electric. I hope you are keeping up with me here, for these names figure prominently in the current situation. Immelt was the head of GE’s Medical Systems division (now known as GE Healthcare) as its president and CEO back in 1997. To make a very long story shorter, Brzezinski was closely tied to all the names I am mentioning either through roles at the Council of Foreign Relations, or via more intimate and secretive associations. Take into consideration GE and Immelt’s view on China from back in 2010 when he said; “’I worry about China. I am not sure that in the end, they want any of us to win.” Fast forward to 2015 and Brzezinski is pushing for Donald Trump to “outbid” everyone for the presidency. He tweeted this to his followers on Twitter: “What’s better: a billionaire outbidding everyone for the Presidency, or billionaires picking the candidates for the Presidency?” The answer to his feigned query is drop-dead simple – “It doesn’t matter, the same people control no matter what.” And the control processes were put in action once John F. Kennedy was out of the way. LBJ played his role to a “T”, Nixon got too big for his britches and had to go, Ford plated nincompoop in charge to put the plan on pause, and peanut farmer/Nuke sub commander Carter helped roll out the red carpet for our current technetronic society. But I’m getting ahead. The Immuno-Catalyst Let me retrace a step to the associations of Gates, Ballmer, and Immelt. And most importantly, the current healthcare/pandemic crisis some experts believe is an induced one. Remember Gates’ pal Immelt headed GE Healthcare, which entered an agreement with Gates back IBio to commercialize the iBioLaunch vaccine manufacturing platform. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded iBio Pharma, which has been in recent news because of President Trump grandstanding about a COVID breakthrough. The company is one of those focused on vaccines against the coronavirus. And if you’re getting lost in this maze of technocrats, now it’s time to interject another key player named Warren Buffett. Buffett, who for all intents and purposes owns IBM, is another link in what we should call the Brzezinski Plan for world domination. Remember, it was IBM that teleported Bill Gates out of brainiac obscurity back in 1980. It is not common knowledge, but the last Watson family head of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1981. It was the ideas and ideals along with the patriotism of the latter Watson, from which people like Brzezinski convoluted the notion of modern democracy. Thomas J. Watson Jr. was also central to the administrations of L.B.J., Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Moving forward, most people are unaware, that Warren Buffett is also the biggest contributor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (more than $30 billion). And in this, we see how the “system” of control gets its continuity. Finally, it was the Brzezinski plan that delivered us to the current sorry state of democracy. The former advisor to key presidents not only helped devise the plan to shift the world’s ideologies and social structure, but he also helped empower the super elites running the show, and the lower-middle class minions who would stoke the forest of orchestrated rebellion. When asked how he would deal with the super-rich, Brzezinski differentiated people like Warren Buffett and Gates from the rest, while at the same time feeding the mob that Trump now leads and the left learning hordes on the left hanging: “It would be increasingly helpful if there was a movement to publish, worldwide, lists of those who make, largely through speculation, enormous amounts of money almost instantly, and hide the fact from their social context.” A Government of Business Power So, a ruling elite was and is to be lifted, isolated, and protected using demonic intimidation from every vector. Today’s dog and pony show across western capitals have roots in Rockefeller’s and Brzezinski’s Trilateral Commission, established to help put in motion the tenets from the latter’s Between Two Ages manifesto. If I throw in the fact that the Trilateral Commission’s notable member list includes such notorious super-rich as Jeffrey Epstein here, I’ve no doubt the reader will be overwhelmed by the scope of this “plan” for turning the world upside down. Finally, the academic Noam Chomsky once criticized the commission’s goals as undemocratic saying the publication of the organization, The Crisis of Democracy reflects how modern democratic systems are not democracy at all, but systems controlled by elites. And the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of the various German eugenics programs and the connections to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and Auschwitz tarnish anyone and everyone associated with Rockefeller, and the ruling elite of this new “modern ideal” or technetronic society. In his 1980 book With No Apologies, Republican Senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater called the Trilateral Commission: “A skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power: political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical in the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved.” The Brzezinski Plan for new democracy is the liberal world order’s plan for humanity. It’s a process that’s been going on for decades, one centered around and dependent on the puppet President Donald Trump. You see, I believe it is Trump’s mission to utterly destroy the very social class of people he is supported by. It is the only idea that makes sense if you examine the loosed cannon idiocy of an otherwise shrewd businessman. What better way to bury the working class who have been bred, reared, and marginalized into mediocrity than to create a revolution against everything they stood for? The Confederate flag, the statues of heroes, the race issues resurfacing, riots, discord, snarling and biting at anyone and anything that is not TRUMP! Real Death, Real Fear, Real Monopolization For this Technetronic Era to culminate in a Utopia for the ruling classes, a pandemic was set loose, a very special kind of virus engineered (probably) for segmenting society. The hard-nosed working class would shun the femininity and weakness of mask-wearing, while the ultra-liberals at the other end of the spectrum would thrive on the morality of caring – and on winning against the callousness of right-wing discord. As I try to explain to those who ask, the situation today is a perfect storm of social upheaval engineered to bring in this new society. You see, both sides of the COVID argument are right – and wrong – at the same instant. This is as it was planned. Bill Gates and his monopoly on vaccines and the health community can hide in plain sight, while Trump’s and Biden’s handlers rake in hundreds of billions playing the dynamic markets. Watching it, at least from my perspective, is like watching the pressure in a boiler build up past the red danger gauge on the outside. In Hitler’s Shadow we find the depth of the US deep state and Brzezinski’s role in the planning for the new world without the Soviets (Russians) in the picture. There’s limited space for describing a CIA operation codenamed AERODYNAMIC which was the forerunner for transformative/revolutionary efforts in the CIS including Georgia, Ukraine, and now Belarus. The reader should understand that Brzezinski, and his father before him, were central figures in a movement to subdue and subdivide the Soviet bloc, and later Russia and her neighbors. No one reading this will know of a man named Mykola Lebed, who operated alongside Joseph Bandera and with the backing of the OSS and later the CIA. He immigrated to the United States because of his importance to the CIA and the deeps state, even though he was in league with the worst Nazis who ever breathed. Brzezinski broadened the scope of AERODYNAMIC, which was in league with former Nazi sympathizers to upend Stalin, and then later Soviet leadership. The history of it is all a deep well no single volume could encapsulate. Again, I have fallen too deep into the rabbit hole of the order, but the reader can observe via this CIA document bearing Brzezinski’s authorship how the plan for today was set in motion decades ago. Trump is destroying the Republican Party for good. Technocrat Bill Gates has monopolized immunization and will leverage it for this new Technetronic Society. The money and power behind this forceful transformation of our society are incalculable, mostly unseen, and probably unstoppable. Think about it, a plan to take over the world put in place decades ago, a plan hardly anyone notices because of its incremental, indomitable, and relentless nature. Sounds conspiratorial, doesn’t it? Well, conspiracies killed Caesar and overthrew the Czar. Conspiracies were the seeds of the American Revolution and the French one too. What? You think control is just a roll of the dice?

‘someday, someday’ :: tumblr edition, #21

I woke up to Harry.

"What are you—

"Shhh," He interrupted my sleepy confusion, his arms were digging under my body and pulling me out from the back of the sofa I had been sleeping on, "Just hang on a minute ..."

He leaned over me slowly and lodged himself between the back of the sofa and my body, his arms tightly holding around the duvet I was burritoed in. I very much felt like I was about to fall onto the floor and an involuntary yelp escaped me to express the thought. The jolting movement caused an unpleasant rush through my head pointing to the hangover brewing.

"I've got you," Harry reassured me, straightening up and pulling me even closer against his chest. He wiggled his legs slightly to sandwich mine and help us both to sit snuggly. Flashes of our intimate moments the night before rose in my mind as Harry’s cologne triggered a vivid memory.  His hands now were soft and gentle but my mind remembered them searching my body lustfully and I couldn’t stop the way my heart started racing from the memory.

"Your hair is wet," I told him dumbly, feeling the cold wetness from a stray lock stick to my cheek.

"I had a shower." "Here?" I frowned, Harry hadn't been here when the girls and I had arrived back at my house sometime around four in the morning.

"No," I could feel him smiling as he pressed his lips to my forehead, "I showered at home and came straight here to make sure you survived the night.”

I turned my head up to meet his, grinning back at him when he seemed surprised by the movement. I went straight for his lips, wanting to feel the same sensation of glorious mindlessness that I had kissing him last night. Harry hummed against me and quickly deepened the kiss, dragging a hand up my back to hold the back on my head. The material of the knitted jumper he was wearing scratched my cheek and I smiled against him when he flipped one of his legs over both of mine to trap me further. Just when my body was starting to get into the rhythm of the kiss Harry slowly pulled back from it. His lips found my chin and my nose and then the side of my mouth before he stopped completely and just looked at me.

He didn’t say anything for a few beats, "That was very nice. How was the rest of your night last night? What did I miss?”

I pressed my pointer finger to his chin, inspecting the way his lips were pinker from having kissed me, “I think I have a bruise on my leg from a bar stool.”

Harry’s laugh exploded out of him before even he could contain it and I lowered my hands back between us against his warm chest to snuggle down in the cuddle, “What on earth did you get up to with a bar stool? Should I be jealous?”

“We ended up at a karaoke bar and Bel needed a boost up onto a stool but she fell off and it crashed into my leg. She has an egg on her head.”

“Jesus Christ, is she okay?” Harry’s chest was shaking with laughter.

“She’s mad she messed up the lyrics to Life for Rent.”

Harry nearly snorted when a deeper laugh overtook him and he settled into a long, deep laugh, “She picked a Dido song?”

I was grinning at the way Harry could hardly get the words out. I wasn’t sure how I’d managed to be the one causing this bubbling of joy from him but I loved every second of it. I closed my eyes and settled into the feeling of being held and tried to forget the headache swirling around my head.

“Life for Rent is actually a beautiful song,” I defended quietly.

“It it,” Harry agreed, “It’s just so left of centre. I was surprised ... I needed that laugh, thank you.”

"My pleasure, but if my leg needs to be amputated, boy, are you going to be sorry your initial reaction was laughter."

"Didn't think I'd ever see a day I could say Nina Lawrence was being over-dramatic," Harry said dryly.

"You've unleashed a monster."

“Sounds like you had a fun night?" He asked quietly, his lips moving against my check, "What time did you get in?"

My mind was running at a million miles from Harry being so close and stumbled on my answer, "I did. Somewhere around four I think."

"And you're a good host so you've let them take your bed?" He asked, referring to the girls.

Yes, but I wish I’d taken you up on the offer to stay in yours last night.

"Four in the bed was a bit too much." I confirmed.

"You looked very cosy out here, I wasn't going to join you but I found I couldn't resist."

"I wasn't expecting you this morning," I said, broaching the topic of why Harry was at my house.

He'd surprised me last night when he stayed with my family after my performance at Royal Albert Hall until midnight. Eventually he’d whispered in my ear he needed to leave if he was going to be able to sing properly today. In the excitement of my performance I had forgotten he had his own to think about.

Soon after I ended up going out with the girls, who were keen to have one last dance in London before going back home up North. I wasn’t complaining about him being here this morning, but I thought we had our Christmas farewell the night before.

Up against Harry’s car. For about twenty minutes.

"I'm here to sneak you out for a quick breakfast before the others wake up,” He said, and I felt myself blush at what I had been remembering from the night before, “I was thinking about it last night after I got home and I just kind of decided I wasn’t particularly happy with not seeing you this morning when if I was organised I definitely could.”

Harry’s fingers were drawing distracting circles on my back and feeling the vibrations from his voice as he spoke from having my head pressed against his chest only made it all feel a special kind of intimate.

A lovely warm feeling filled me at his words. If seeing him hold his own with my family and friends last night wasn't already enough to reassure me of Harry fitting in my world surely seeing the effort he put into getting to spend time with me was convincing enough. If only the dirty voices of doubt in me could see that.

I hadn't said anything, Harry squeezed me slightly, "Can I have one more date before you leave?"

"'Course you can," I mumbled back, dragging my hands up and tugging at the neck of his jumper.

"A true gentlemen would have come over and cooked breakfast for all of you ... My compromise is that we bring breakfast back for the girls, what time do you think they'll wake up?."

"They won't surface before midday. The train we’re getting is at 1:30.”

"Great, we have plenty of time then ... On a scale of one to ten how much does <i>your</i> head hurt right now?"

"A four but growing."

"You need some food. And fresh air," Harry said decisively, "A green juice and some breakfast and you'll be good as new."

At the thought of getting up a heavy weariness fell over me, "Or we could just stay like this all day."

Harry hummed into my hairline and squeezed his arms around me again, "Very tempting. But I'm actually extremely hungry, I went for a run earlier."

"Earlier?" I groaned, "What could be earlier than this?"

Harry laughed and without any warning sat up, keeping his hold on me and forcing me upright as well.

"Wait," I protested meekly, needing a moment to take stock of exactly how bad I was feeling.

"Are you going to vomit? Should I be worried about alcohol poisoning?"

I hit his arm lightly, "No, just give me some warning next time."

Harry gave me ten minutes to creep around upstairs and get myself decent for breakfast. It required sneaking into my room for a change of clothes, the three lumps that were Isobel, Sam, and Georgie taking up all of my bed didn't make a sound or movement while I did so. Still, I scrawled out a note for them at left it on top of Sam's phone where it was charging.

Harry had waited for me on the sofa, and when he heard me coming down the stairs he met me at the bottom of them, all rugged up in this coat and a scarf. I followed him out the door, sneaking a look at his bum in the trendy, loose blue jeans he was wearing. He looked fantastic.

Harry grabbed for my hand when outside I started walking towards his car, "Nope, this way," he corrected, tugging me towards him and starting to walk in the opposite direction down my street, "I Googled, there's a nice looking place just around the corner. I thought we could just walk there?"

"You're a man with a plan," I commented, swinging our joined hands between us.

"I'd hate you to think I don't have my shit together," Harry quipped back, "Besides which, I take you and breakfast very seriously."

Oh boy.

"My brain can't decide yet if food sounds good or bad," I groaned, pulling my sunglasses down from the top of my head. The wintery London chill was in the air but we were being graced with an uncharacteristic sunny morning.

The cafe Harry had in mind was a little busy, but Harry walked in with purpose, asking for a table for two of us. We ended up tucked into a corner, Harry sat with his back to the window and immediately opened the menu reminding me not for the first time just how hungry he was.

I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the menu, the third thing on the breakfast list was ricotta pancakes with strawberries. I didn’t need to see any further options.

Harry deliberated over two or three options however, looking crestfallen when the waitress came over and he had to make a final decision. He was trying to avoid dairy for the day to help with his voice.

Once I ordered food with a coffee he pointed to the menu and said “I’ll have this one. With bacon,” a small frown, “And mushrooms.”

He also ordered two green juices, promising me it would help with the thudding in my head.

“Is an OJ not good enough?” I lamented after the waitress left.

Harry grinned at me, “You’re a precious drunk.”

“I am not still drunk,” I defended quickly, taking my sunglasses off my head and putting them on top of my phone on the table.

“Precious hungover then,” He edited warmly. "I really like your family and friends. Last night was great.”

“I thought so to. Although they’re all a bit mad too,” I cringed remembering Bel and Georgie singing a very, very old One Direction song at Harry last night at the hotel. Tequila shots made them quite musical.

As if he knew the moment I was thinking of, Harry spoke up, ”I liked it, it was fun. If I was a plumber they’d have made sewerage jokes all night. It’s okay. I can take it.”

"They all went easy on us, trust me,” I was thinking of all the times my mum made eyes at me throughout the night when she’d caught Harry watching me or being sweet in some way.

"I'm looking forward to getting to the stage where they don't. Hopefully."

He was fishing for reassurance, I smiled and squinted at him, knowing he knew what I was going to say but it was important I said it anyway, "They all love you, don't worry."

Harry's smile brightened and his eyes locked on mine, “I like this ... You never used to make eye contact, it would drive me mad.”

My friends forgotten, suddenly I felt I was under his scrutiny, his attention wafting from one line of conversation to another without warning, "What?"

"You'd look at my chin or my nose, and if we made eye contact you'd look away so quickly it was as though it never happened. It drove me crazy."

I winced, "I can't imagine why you bothered persisting. Sorry."

“I could tell you, but I’m not sure your hangover can weather how sappy I’d get,” Harry said, saved by the bell that was our drinks being brought over to the table.

I was sure the waitress had heard the last of the conversation though, and felt her looking between us knowingly. I felt my face heat and when I chanced a glance across to Harry he looked like the cat that ate the canary.

“Are you still buzzing from last night?” Harry asked when we were alone again.

“Yeah,” I smiled at him, “But the better question is are you excited for your performance tonight?”

“I am” Harry provided carefully, adding a perfectly measured spoonful of sugar to his black coffee and stirring it through.

“But?” I prompted

“I’m a little nervous,” He admitted. “I always am when it’s a telly thing, they’re always a bit awkward. Singing to a camera and then an audience that’s not really into it … It feels like work where proper live shows don’t really. But it will be nice to be back up on stage with the lads.”

I nodded at him diplomatically, “A healthy dose of nerves is a good thing I’ve been told, means you don’t take it for granted.”

“You’re telling me even Protégés even get nervous?”

“Are you ever going to drop that?” I groaned.

“Nope.” He said easily.

“I was shitting myself before last night … I’ve never been good at the ‘healthy dose’ part of that,” I said with a slow smile.

Harry’s face dropped just a touch, but I hadn’t meant to berate him in any way. It had served as a reminder of something to him though and I watched him struggle with what to say next. I decided to rescue him.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” He answered immediately, looking painfully earnest.

“You were so kind to me, right from before I even realised you knew I existed …” I paused, not know how to ask the actual question part, Harry watched me carefully, “Why?”

Some part of him relaxed slightly, “I’d like to think I’m kind to pretty much everyone. It’s the default, my mum would always tell us that when we were kids: Being kind should be your default setting.”

“And what about if someone is a jerk?”

Harry’s smile returned, “Kill them with kindness.”

“What about if someone is kind of standoffish and disinterested in even a pleasant, casual social interaction? What if they barely give you the time of day to be kind?”

“Are you referring to yourself?”

“Maybe.”

“Wear them down until they date you.”

Now I was left without knowing what to say, and my shock evidently played out in my expression because Harry watched me carefully but smiled at whatever he saw. He’d won that discussion by being honest and I could see Harry knew he had me.

“Nina it was never about polite kindness with you.”

Our food had arrived and the smell of sweet, warm pancakes made my stomach rumble with delight, “What does that mean?” I asked, waiting a moment before taking my first bite. It was delicious.

“I’d heard Rodger and Max talk about you well before I met you. They’re nuts about you and the way Rodger would speak about you used to annoy me, if I’m honest. Early on he corrected my assumption he had a thing for you, I think I told him to just hurry up and marry you already,” Harry shook his head at himself, “I used to think ‘if she’s so bloody great how come she never comes to anything’. I started joking that you didn’t really exist, that everyone had invented you as a wind up.”

“You did?”

Harry was laughing at the memory, “I did. Then I left my hat at your place and Rodger told me you would be home to give it to me.” “I’d forgotten about that,” I said, “I always think Rodger’s party was the first time we met.”

“That hurts,” Harry feigns a pain over his heard, “Standing outside your house feeling as though I’d been stabbed in the heart or I was about to throw up is one of my most memorable moments.”

I winced, “What a memory.”

“The second I saw you I was done for, Nina." He said slowly, his expression sincere but cautious as though he was treading carefully with his words, "I’d had all this build up from everyone about about how incredible you were that as soon as I saw you I got a crush ten feet tall and as wide as the sea ... Everyone had failed to mention you were gorgeous too.”

I knew I was bright red, but I could see Harry wasn’t going to save me from my embarrassment, he held eye contact and waited for me to stop internally protesting what he had said. Hearing that Harry's attraction had been so instantaneous both reassured me and had me feeling guilty, it had taken me weeks to get to that point.

"I should really start paying Rodger for whatever he's saying about me."

Harry laughed and nodded, "You really should ... I wasn't just being nice for the sake of it, Nina. I wanted you to like me as much as I liked you. I had that fun but soul destroying feeling where you're so into someone it's addictive and you just want to see them again. It was so annoying not get enough time with you on your own—I’m sounding like a maniac right now, I know,” He hurried, “But I’d find myself so pissed off at Rodger speaking over you or Max jumping in to save you from having to answer. I knew if I just had the time with you alone you’d open up more. I hated that every time I saw you it was coincidental, I just wanted to get to the point where I could plan when I'd get to see you next on my own. I’d make plans with Rodger or Max not knowing if they'd bring you along as well.”

"Harry," I said gently, waiting his remembered frustration play out in his features.

"I'd be crushed every time you didn't appear," He continued slowly, "And after the Regina show, you disappeared for weeks and I never felt like it was my place to reach out directly. I was pretty sure you hated me. "

"I'm sorry, I never hated you."

"I know," Harry smiled, "I can be a romantic dramatist."

"I think I thought I'd embarrassed myself to Kingdom Come and you'd want nothing to do with my drama anyway."

He deflated a little, "I'm not going to be like him, Nina," Harry paused to make sure I knew who he was referring to, "If you're going through something I want to know."

I sighed and dropped my chin into my hand, propped up on the table, "You're pretty lovely, know that?"

"I'd really like this to work for us, Nina, and I don't want to push you but at the same time I don't want to allow there to be any room for you to doubt it. Or me."

We were both finished eating and I watched Harry for a moment. He never seem phased by anything, so having him reveal his feelings when I was hesitant to assume them was pleasant in an unexpected way. Usually the thought of someone noticing me in a social setting made my skin crawl, but knowing Harry had been watching and wanting to know me better was settling somehow. To also have him acknowledge what I had told him about my last relationship and the dynamic there was also reassuring, if not scary. It was always a heavily guarded secret inside me, and I wasn’t used to having him privy to it yet.

"This means I'm going to have to add you to my Christmas list, doesn't it?" I asked playfully, delighted when Harry's face lit up in response.

"You sure do.”

“I think an M&S voucher should suffice,” I teased, trying to look thoughtful.

Harry raised his eyebrows at me, “That would be lovely actually, I could use some new underwear.”

Harry looked proud of his quickness, and he took his time taking a long sip of his coffee, watching me over the cup. I simply smiled back and tried a little of the juice he had ordered for me, scrunching my nose up at what I could only describe as a green flavour.

“Oh god,” I coughed, “That tastes like a garden.” Harry beamed at me, “It’ll put five years back on your life.”

+++

“Bye Harry!” “Bye Harry, we’ll be texting our review after tonight!”

“Harry,” Bel leaned forward between Harry’s front seats, looking as though she was tossing up between multiple things to say, finally settling on, “Don’t trip.”

Harry barked out a laugh at that, promising her he wouldn’t, “It would probably make great TV though,” he added, “I’m sure there are lots of people that would love to see me land on my arse.”

Bel seemed to consider that for a moment, then seemed to shrug it off, “We’ll see you when we see you, Harry. Thanks for the ride.”

I turned in my seat to watch her slip out onto the footpath outside Farringdon station. Harry had made good of his promise to take breakfast back to my house for everyone. We left the cafe with arms of pastries and coffees, and then he insisted on saving us the Uber fare by driving us to the train up North himself. Harry popped the boot for them and looked in the rearview mirror to make sure it had opened.

“Have a great Christmas,” He said quietly, pulling me back, Harry’s eyes flicked back to the mirror as I registered that we wouldn’t have much time to do this goodbye.

“You too,” I said, turning to face him in my seat.

“Have fun and be safe and miss me loads,” He added, shifting around and leaning on the middle console towards me, he curled his index finger at me, “C’mere.”

I smiled and leaned in towards him, Harry’s thumb and pointer finger met my chin and he gently pulled it up to the right angle for him to lower in for a kiss. Harry pulled back after one chaste attempt, giving me only enough time to lick my lips before we were pressed back together, his tongue giving only the shortest tease. He dropped his fingers from chin and sat back in his seat.

“I’ll see you on the 28th,” He confirmed, turning his head to me, “But I’ll talk to you before then.”

“Yep,” I nodded, “Break a leg tonight. And save me some of that croissant bread and butter pudding your mum makes.”

Harry laughed, “I will. She’s going to adore that you’re so keen for it.”

Georgie’s face appeared next to my window, “I need to go.”

“You do,” He agreed, reaching for the side of my face and pulling himself over the console again to give me one last kiss, “Be good.”

I screwed up my nose at him as I opened my door, “I’m always good.”

“You still need to sign the program from last night for me," He said quickly, just as I was about to shut the door, "I’m getting it framed.”

I rolled my eyes at him, "Bye Harry,"

"Merry Christmas, Protégé!"

++

"I fucking hate you.”

I did. I really did. But my face cracked into a grin and I walked back into Bel’s family lounge room carrying a tray of teas. Georgie was modelling a One Direction t-shirt she had pulled from God knows where and Bel was busy pinning a Liam badge to her pyjama top.

“Where did you even get those!”

“It was a two for one deal online,” Georgie told me happily, “Sam didn’t think it was a good idea for us to keep teasing you, but if you ask me she’s being unsupportive.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Sam said, moving over on the two-seater she was on to make room for me. I linked my arm through hers when I sat.

Bel’s parents were away visiting with her sister and brother-in-law in Glasgow, not returning until the following morning. Her dad had the TV sound system to shame all sound systems which apparently meant we had to watch Harry on the telly there. The empty house was enough to sell me on the idea, mine was full of cousins and family who would delight in teasing me about Harry. But this would be the first time I would properly witness him singing and I didn’t think I could handle it if I couldn’t just focus on him and what I was seeing.

We were making an old school sleepover of it, which we had decided upon on the train back earlier today. We all had gone to our respective family homes and then repacked for a night at Bel’s. The food had been ordered in and it was about half an hour until the program started. While we waited for Indian to arrive we chatted our way through numerous pieces of gossip from our wider friendship group in Blackpool, and back to our family Christmases.

It was tradition that we met at the pub on Boxing day where it seemed everyone we knew under thirty five who was home for the holiday season all went to debrief after surviving spending an extended period of time with their families. The same thing happened on New Years Day before everyone headed back to London or Manchester to their regular lives.

"How's that bruise on your leg?" Bel asked suddenly, looking across at me and nodding at my covered legs.

"It's okay, how's your hea—

"—You should’ve gotten Harry to kiss it better,” Georgie cut me off.

“Yeah,” Bel agreed, a devilish smile on her face, “I bet he’s really good at that kind of thing.”

“What!” I squawked, watching Sam stand up when the doorbell rang. She waved off any help in collecting the food and I was left to Bel and Georgie’s inappropriate giggling.

“Harry’s fit, take it graciously.” Bel said.

“He is!” I defended, “But I don’t need to bloody hear it from you.”

“If I had a guy like Harry I’d be snug as shit about it,” Georgie exclaimed, standing up to help Sam unpack the food onto the coffee table. “I could use some new relationship sex. It’s always so delightful.”

“Oh my god,” I groaned.

“Here we go,” Bel rolled her eyes, “Horny Georgie.”

Georgie had the audacity to look wounded, “Sorry, what year is it? I won’t be shamed for liking sex!”

“Nobody was shaming you, George,” Sam said calmly, “But next time take a breath before you mention Nina’s new boyfriend and then sex, mmm?” “I wasn’t saying I wanted to bang Harry!” Georgie said to me quickly.

“I know,” I smiled, wanting to get as far as I could from this conversation as quickly as possible, “Pass me a plate.”

We already had plates and cutlery ready. I watched as the containers were popped open. Bel moved to kneel at the table and started to serve herself bits of all the different curries we had ordered. Sam gave Georgie one last look, and I wished I knew how to save them from each other’s strong opinions. Really I just wanted to move the conversation away from my sex life. I didn’t have the energy to explain why Harry and I hadn’t slept together yet.

Food was just the distraction needed to reset the conversation.

We spent the next hour talking and eating our way through the first part of the Charity Gala on the telly. There was an all-star line up with all the usual suspects in the London music and comedy scene. We gossiped our way through who was who, who was good and who wasn’t really actually funny.

I felt like by the time it was One Direction being introduced that I had lived half a life time in nervous anticipation. I had been preparing myself for a shift, or for at least seeing a side of Harry that I hadn’t before which had the potential to make me feel uncomfortable.

I knew that the band hadn’t performed together very much in the last twelve months. Harry had said that much himself, and it was a fact that was getting played up all night in the lead up to them performing. The world had missed them, the presenter kept saying, as the moment they were on stage was built up—it was clear they were being presented as the big act of the night.

Finally they were announced to be after the ad break. Which gave me enough time to refill my glass of wine and chew my way through a handful of Dairy Milk buttons.

“Don’t eat your hand, Nina,” Bel joked from her spot across the room.

“Shut up,” I mumbled, “It’s this or projectile vomit on your mum’s good rug.”

"Why are you freaking out so much about this?"

"I haven't seen him perform before," I provided quietly, trying to hide the quiver to my voice.

Sam's arm came around me and she held me in a side hug, "This shouldn't change your opinion of him," she said just to me, sensing there was more going on than I was letting on.

"I just haven't seen it before," I reiterated, wondering what 'it' was and why something about the whole concept of seeing Harry perform made me feel uneasy.

The ad break came to a close and there was no introduction to the act or the song, a thumping drum beat started and panning shots of the audience facing the stage took over the screen. The girls quietened around me but Sam kept her arm around me, giving my shoulder a slight squeeze.

The introduction to the song went too long. I kept anticipating the start but the drums kept going and the intro rolled on. Eventually I heard what was distinctly Harry's laugh through a microphone and then he started singing.

The camera panned on him first. He was grinning and a little red but he stood where he was and sang beautifully in an impeccable upper lower register. He swayed slightly to the beat, the silky material of the shirt that was poorly tucked into his jeans moving softly with his hips.

"That's your man, Nina," Georgie clapped towards the TV when Harry stopped singing and someone else took over.

The camera panned over all the members of the band, holding on the drummer for a little while and then going back to get the shot of the audience with the four members of One Direction facing them.

Harry had lovely tone to his voice. It rumbled out of his chest smoothly and his harmonies cut through the melody perfectly. He looked like he belonged exactly where he was on stage. Each time he was on the screen he was interacting the the camera, the audience or a bandmate. Harry made it all look fun and when the song came to and end he joined the others in happily greeting the people in the room with them, thanking the crowd for having them.

"And all of you at home too," A voice off screen said, I wasn't sure which member.

Harry appeared on screen again, screwing the lid back onto a water bottle, and then leaving it to walk back to his mic stand, "Thank you for having us," He said simply, "This is Story of My Life."

They played through the slower song and I stared at Harry's spot on the stage the whole time, only noticing his bandmates when the camera left him and I was forced to. The girls were making observations around me but I wasn't really listening. It was so strange to be looking at Harry in that setting.

He had slowly become such a strong force in my life and I was finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that there was such a huge part of him, of his life, that I'd not experienced at all. We hardly spoke about his job and I was left wondering why. He was clearly so good at it and I was concerned by the fact he hadn't shared much with me.

The next song started and I turned to Sam beside me, "Harry never talks to me about his job. Is that odd?"

She craned her neck to look at me properly, her brows drawn like she didn't understand where my question was coming from, her features then rose into surprise, "Nina, I ... No, I don't think so. Don't ... Don't psyche yourself out. Harry's so into you, you'd have to be an idiot to miss that."

I looked back to the screen, watching Harry sing his heart out on live National television, "We don't talk about who he is. I mean, look," I waved my hand at the television, "He's fucking Harry Styles ... Why is that only just hitting me?"

"Because he's not that to you, babe," Georgie added gently from across the room, her eyes understanding, "He's just a lad. He's just your Harry. And I know we give you both shit ... Well, mostly me," She half shrugged, "We give you shit about him but if he was some famous fuckwit we wouldn't act like we do." "He's set the tone," Bel jumped in, "He didn't walk in and throw his name around, and now he's sharing it with you. It's probably awkward for him to bring it up with people."

"I think it's my fault," I said. "I've been so bad at asking him about himself, I alway feel so awkward and I didn't want him to think I was digging for that, you know?"

"Don't overthink this," Sam hugged my side, "He's mad about you, and I bet he appreciated not feeling like was a factor with you.."

The only real window into Harry's job and the status that came with it had been my attending the dinner earlier in the year where I'd met some of his friends. Friends, who as it turned out, had sent a photograph of the night to someone working at a media corporation. I'd been distracted by the fact Harry had lied about how we knew each other, and I hadn't focused really on the fact that was what his life was like sometimes, and why.

The 'why' was this, what I was watching, Harry being on stage and a part of this universally known and loved band.

"Nina," Sam pulled me out of my thoughts, "He's really bloody good. Appreciate his job for that, don't get stuck on the rest of it ... You've got music in common, let that be something wonderful."

She was right. Having music in common with Harry was wonderful.

"He's so cool," I said without thinking.

"Right," Georgie huffed, "How do you think we all bloody felt watching you last night?"

"His voice is really lovely," I could feel a blush rising.

"Now we're talking!" Sam said, jamming her fingers into my ribs, "That rockstar is yours."

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I replied softly, hoping nobody would elaborate on the matter. I regretted saying it as soon as it came out of my mouth. I hadn't felt any pressure with Harry on the topic, so why it fell out of my mouth in that moment I couldn't say.

“Ah,” Georgie waved off my comment easily, “You’re whatever the step before boyfriend is.”

I hope so.

American presidents lie. They always have. Just Google “Lyndon Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin,” “Bill Clinton and NAFTA” or “George Bush and weapons of mass destruction.” Even Honest Abe likely told a fib or two.

But no U.S. president has ever lied as prolifically, constantly, insidiously and dangerously as Donald Trump. He never stops. He’s the Energizer Bunny of endless falsehood.

It’s enough to make even Orwell’s head explode.

Trump, who received votes from just one in four U.S. adults in 2016, claimed that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton were it not for the voter fraud of undocumented immigrants. The alleged criminal votes were never cast.

Trump called his 2016 Electoral College victory “The biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan.” It was no such thing.

Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd even as aerial photographs of the event contradicted his boasts.

He has repeatedly and preposterously claimed that the Latinx immigrant population is full of murderers, rapists and gang members. It is not.

Trump claimed that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before his 2016 election victory. They were not.

He claimed to have as president-elect negotiated a deal to “save 1,100 jobs” at a Carrier plant in Anderson, Ind. He did no such thing.

He absurdly concocted a terrorist attack that never occurred, in Sweden, during his first month in office.

He claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his speech was the best ever delivered to the Boy Scouts Jamboree. No such call ever took place. Trump’s terrible oration was widely reviled.

Trump claimed to have fired James Comey because the FBI director mishandled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal prior to the 2016 election, not because he was continuing to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. That was another baldfaced lie.

He claimed that white-nationalist and neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., were “protesting very quietly,” and that liberal and left counter-protesters “didn’t have a [protest] permit.” False and false.

Trump laughably told oil workers in North Dakota that environmentalists “didn’t know why” they opposed the ecocidal, petro-capitalist Dakota Access and Keystone-XL pipelines. Ridiculous.

Trump lied repeatedly and viciously about the number of people who diedduring and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

He ludicrously claimed to have led a strong federal response to the devastating storm in Puerto Rico. (He gave himself a “ten.”)

Trump absurdly claimed that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn didn’t do “anything wrong.” Flynn was later convicted for lying about his communications with the Kremlin during Trump’s presidential transition.

Trump farcically claimed that Paul Manafort never played a major role in his 2016 campaign. (Manafort chaired the Trump campaign up through the Republican National Convention that year.)

Trump falsely claimed that a Justice Department inspector general report exonerated him of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. The report did neither of those things.

Trump ridiculously claimed that Michael Cohen was never a big player in his career or campaign. Cohen was Trump’s longstanding personal attorney and “fixer,” and he too has been convicted on federal charges.

Trump has claimed to know nothing about the illegal campaign finance payoff of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Cohen exposed that lie this summer.

After Cohen turned himself in to federal authorities, Trump said that Cohen pleaded guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that “were not crimes.” False. The violations are indeed federal crimes.

Trump unbelievably claimed not to have known that his son and son-in-law met with Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Trump helped concoct the White House lie that the real subject matter of that June 2016 meeting was U.S. adoption policy.

He says that China “has been attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2018 elections.” There is no evidence to support that charge.

He falsely claims to be a self-made billionaire, something that The New York Times shows to have been a lie. (His father staked his entire business.)

Trump says that he and the Republican Party passed a “middle-class” tax “reform.” He certainly knows that they enacted a plutocratic tax cut, a great windfall for big corporations and the richest 1 percent.

Trump absurdly claimed before the tax cut that “we [U.S.-Americans] pay more taxes than anybody in the world” (we don’t) and that the tax “reform” would “cost me a fortune.”

He absurdly said that “public lands will once again be available for public use” while handing over 2 million acres to private corporations for coal mining, oil drilling, uranium extraction and other environmentally disastrous industrial activities.

He falsely claimed that he was legally compelled to order a “zero tolerance” border policy last spring that separated Mexican and Central American children from their parents.

In defense of his good friends atop the absolutist, head-chopping Saudi Arabian regime (which sends kill teams to torture, kill, and vivisect dissenting journalists in foreign embassies), Trump claims that Saudis have purchased $110 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S. and that this purchase creates “five-hundred thousand jobs,” later inflated to ““1 million jobs.” ”in the U.S.  His numbers here are absurdly exaggerated.

He claims without evidence that there are “people of Middle Eastern descent” in the latest Central American migrant “caravan” moving through Mexico towards the U.S.’ southern border.

He baselessly insisted that “Democrats are paying members of the caravan to try and get into the U.S. to harm Republicans in the midterms.”

He has sent U.S. troops to guard the border on the absurd lie that the beleaguered caravan constitutes a “national emergency.”

He preposterously claims that it is the mainstream media, which he calls “the enemy of the people,” and not him that has created our current climate of hatred and violence—even as he applauds a Montana congressman for body-slamming a young reporter.

Trump’s evasion of responsibility follows a hate-filled campaign and 21 months of ax-grinding in the Oval Office that has seen him call immigrants criminal gang members, murderers and rapists, while maliciously describing his political enemies and media critics and journalists as “evil,” “low lifes,” “low IQ” and “the most dishonest people on Earth.” Along the way, the openly sexist Trump has referred to women as “animals,” “dogs,” “horse-face,” “fat” and worse. The white supremacist who killed 11 people in a Jewish synagogue last Saturday was egged into violent action by Trump’s ridiculous and hateful caravan rhetoric.

The Trump Lie Machine is going into head-spinning and soul-numbing overdrive as the midterm elections draw closer.

Trump claimed earlier this year that leftist violence will break out across the country if Democrats reclaim Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. The absurdity speaks for itself.

Trump said in Arizona recently that immigrants had illegally taken over a city council in California. The claim was complete nonsense.

Trump has recently and insanely suggested that people are “rioting” in California “to get out of Sanctuary Cities. …They’re demanding to be released from sanctuary cities.” (This may be the single craziest thing I’ve ever seen Trump claim. It is truly bizarre.)

Trump is ridiculously claiming the Democrats will kick seniors off health insurance, abolish insurance protections for people with health problems, destroy Social Security, abolish U.S. borders and (I am not making this up) give “illegal” immigrants “free cars.” That’s right: “free cars” for “illegals.”

Trump repeatedly—36 times across seven political speeches this fall—called the Democrats “radicals.” Of course, the Democrats are a deeply conservative, Big Business-friendly, imperial/pro-military, and depressingly centrist apparatus. There isn’t a single genuine radical in their entire party.

Trump says that the “new platform of the supposedly ‘radical’ Democrats is to abolish ICE” (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). That is flatly false.

Trump lies and distorts so relentlessly and profusely that tracking and fact-checking his false statements has become a full-time job for journalists at home and abroad.

One of these journalists is Daniel Dale, the Washington bureau chief of the Toronto Star. He calculates that Lyin’ Don has made four false claims per day since being sworn into the presidency 21 months ago with his hand on the Bible.

When Dale was first assigned the Trump beat in September 2016, he found the Republican candidate “so incessantly dishonest” that his habit of twisting and inverting reality required a specific focus “separate from the day-to-day news coverage I was doing.” Dale looked forward to being “freed from this [ugly] task” of covering Trump’s persistent untruths once Hillary Clinton prevailed, as was widely expected. Trump won “and so, [he] had to continue.”

What accounts for this endless mendacity and rhetorical manipulation? Speaking to “Public” Broadcasting System “NewsHour” anchor and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff last week, Dale theorized that Trump and the Republican allies and outlets who repeat his outlandish and bogus assertions want to drive media coverage and political discourse away from topics they wish to avoid—health care, the Mueller investigation and “anything else the president doesn’t want us to talk about,” such as Trump’s still unreleased tax returns, climate change and the party’s regressive tax cuts.

Dale is on to something there, no doubt, but the real meaning of the president’s Twitter-amplified Fibby Pulpit is deeper and darker than mere diversion and partisan spin. As Chris Hedges suggests in his latest book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” Trump and his party’s continuing defiance of reality suggests that the United States is sliding into “corporate totalitarianism”:

Trump and the Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are intensified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. … But Clinton did not pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of ‘fake news.’ They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted them with the revoking of net neutrality. … “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed,” Hanna Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. …

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. … Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit – only there never was a report. … The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. … When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, and depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s faith in threats and force.

Consistency is discarded. The Trump administration has cited “states’ rights” in trying to roll back federal requirements that out-of-date coal and nuclear plants be shut down, even as it endeavors to federally negate the state of California’s right to enforce comparatively stringent emission regulations.

Republican Congressional candidates run campaign commercials proclaiming their commitment to retaining the Affordable Care Act’s provision prohibiting health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions at the same time that the GOP is viciously challengingthat provision in court.

Trump blames the nation’s bourgeois media and a timid, centrist Democratic Party for the hatred, incivility and demonization that pollute U.S. politics while he calls his opponents “evil” and celebrates violence against liberals and journalists.

It is important to understand, as Hedges does, that the Trump-led assault on veracity, evidence and our very ability to separate truth from falsehood has been able to gain traction only because a decades-long corporate coup has devastated and discredited public education, academia, organized labor and the legal and criminal justice systems. It has done all this and more while turning the Democratic Party into what the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition.

Think of this distinctively American “corporate-managed democracy” and “inverted totalitarianism” as the nation’s pre-existing authoritarian condition for the rise of an Amerikaner-style fascism.

In the face of what an authoritarian like Trump and his white-nationalist Republican Party have done over the last two years of one-party rule—an annulment of what’s left of the U.S. Constitution’s much-ballyhooed “checks and balances”—there’s no credible moral argument against the notion that progressives living in contested districts should choose the lesser of two evils in next week’s midterm elections. Adolph Reed Jr., Noam Chomsky and Arun Gupta’s warnings about the dangers of a Trump presidency have been richly born out. I, for one, should have paid them more heed.

Still, we on the left, what’s left of it, should nonetheless retain our capacity to be properly nauseated by a yard sign I recently saw in arch-liberal, super-blue Iowa City, Iowa. Surrounded by other, smaller signs with the names of a handful of dismal local and statewide Democratic candidates, it read “MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN: Vote.”

Please. The notion that the richly bipartisan corporate totalitarianism of which Trump is the apotheosis can be reversed, and the nation made “good” simply by voting Herr Donald and the Republicans out of office is a childish fantasy.

That, too, is a Great Lie. As marchers celebrating a rare legal victory over a white supremacist U.S. police state in Democratically controlled Chicago chanted last month, “The whole damn system is guilty as Hell.” It’s the whole damn system that must be democratized from the bottom up. From the dismal dollar Democrats, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, “P”BS, Tom Steyer, the Gates Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, the Obama and Clintons on the so-called left, to the radically reactionary Republicans, the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Breitbart, right-wing talk radio, the Sinclair Broadcasting Co., the Federalist Society and more on the actual right, imperialism, racial inequality and class rule have brought us to this menacing pre-fascist moment.

Paul Street

ContributorPaul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…

Phroyd

Down In Mexico

Article appears in the Summer 2019 issue of The Palisades Magazine & Issuu:

Mexico City. How do you cover one of the world’s largest cities in just 4 days? Take a deep breath, be prepared to walk… and let’s go!

Day 1 - The Travel Day is to wonder or worry, depending on your predispositions. I am slightly apprehensive before any foreign trip. And noting Mexico in the news a tiny bit recently, I plan to exercise good street smarts. I do not plan to (just a whimsical example) don a child’s costume bulletproof vest to fit a narrative of “scary place”. One shouldn’t look for trouble, but the same applies in any American city. I’ve been down in Mexico three times in as many years and have found a wonderful vacation destination each time.

You arrive at the Mexico City airport after flying over a sprawling metropolis. The mind boggles that this is only the 25th largest city in the world with a population of 8.8 million. It seems much larger. By contrast, Los Angeles has about 4 million. Clearing customs was simple. As was locating our hotel-provided driver. After a jaunt through traffic we arrive at our hotel, the Nima Local House in the Roma Norte Neighborhood. Again, simple.

Did you watch Roma? No? Go watch Roma. It was a happy coincidence this is the neighborhood featured in the movie. The streets are reminiscent of those in our older cities; Rittenhouse Square, Brooklyn Heights, Russian Hills (sans hills), Dupont Circle. And the streets are wide, grand tree-lined promenades crossed with a gridded layout. I fell in love with the walkability as we strolled to find some cocktails, eventually ducking into Licorería Limantour, a hipster hot spot.

Do you know Spanish? No? Mexico is our closest non-English-speaking country, and hey it doesn’t hurt to be neighborly... but if you do not, everyone speaks English. After a couple of "Margarita al Pastors” followed by a some “Mezcal Stalks”, proper cocktails at times served tongue-in-cheek in ridiculous vessels, though due to the drink itself I don’t remember them, I picked my head up off the bar to check out the locals; think fashionable. This is an old, cosmopolitan city full of art and culture; whereas I just got back from a business trip to Las Vegas and noted that the current fashion trend for US tourists is “freshly dumped out of a canoe”. One should bring their casual “A” game to Mexico City; men: button-down shirt (button one less than usual), nice jeans or pants, stylish shoes; women: think NYC in Spring, keeping in mind you will be walking a lot. Speaking of walking, we are going to be late to our dinner reservation. “La cuenta, por favor!” This will be your first double-take, a ‘twenty dollars in LA’ cocktail is only three bucks. Score one for the exchange rate.

Do you like when I start every paragraph with a question? No? I’ll stop. Dinner that evening was at Maycoll Calderón's Huset, a self-described “country kitchen” with a rustic indoor/outdoor space. Preceded by more craft mezcal cocktails, the entire meal was superb, having the gnocchi, grilled beef, chicken-ginger rice, and roasted vegetables. But I must note, regarding the steak, that the local interpretation of “medium rare” requires one to chase their dinner around the room a bit first; hot travel tip: order “medium” or above. We skipped dessert, as it was not a possibility given prior intake, and meandered the few blocks back to the hotel where we sat on the roof terrace enjoying the warm night air… that is until a screeching steam whistle announcing Death Incarnate punctuated the stillness, creeping ever closer; what the hell is it? I was not going to find out. Time to retreat to bed.

Day 2 - Zero Sleep. I am going to die. Did I magically catch the flu? Is the pollution really that bad? Apparently I am allergic to lilies. I did not quite know this until I spent the whole first night coughing and sneezing. And the room was charmingly decorated with them. But, once removed, all was well again. I did sleep late though, and this altered our plans so we missed out on the large art museums and grand parks; but this will only justify a future trip. We ended up taking an Uber to the Zócalo, the main square, and visited a street vendor for some Tlayudas Oaxaca, a masterpiece of grilled meat, veggies, and cheese on a large toasted flatbread. Then ambled over to the Templo Mayor, the main temple of the Mexicas in the city of Tenochtitlan; some fun facts: it was once referred to as "island of the dogs” because the elevation provided a safe haven for strays during flooding. It is also considered by the Aztecs to be the center of the known universe - sorry cat lovers.

You will now be thirsty from standing under the hot sun on the exposed square. You will go to the La Frapp rooftop for drinks. You will order a Model Negra with Orange Juice and Tequila. You will send me a thank you note later.

After the beverage constitutional, another Uber to the La Condensa neighborhood, full of Art Deco apartments and a large park. The Parque España (formally Parque General San Martín) will subtly remind that you are in a warm, jungle environment with it’s lush greenery and hanging mosses. We wandered and admired and then found ourselves at Milos for a mezcal break. While in CDMX, drink mezcal, drink tequila… they are health drinks. Don’t believe me? Google it.

After some miles we made it back to our neighborhood for dinner at Taqueria Orinoco. This is no frills. But it’s TACOS! East as many as you possibly can. Order the tres proteínas for a combination of trompo (al pastor), res (steak), and chicharrón (pork belly). Wash them down with a few Superior Cervezas. Then request someone roll you over to Churrería El Moro for a paquetes combination of Mexican hot chocolate and churros. We sat idly on a park bench along Avenue Álvaro Obregón, swinging our legs, enjoying the passersby and warm night air.

Time for bed… one again the Locomotive of Death slowly approaches. I dream fitfully of stone and stairs and feathered warriors as I stand at the nexus of the earth, the sky, and... the underworld.

Day 3 - More Annoying Uses for Plastics, and The Aztecs versus the Oxfords. We awake to a quick breakfast in the atrium of our hotel - making a commitment to reverse engineer their roasted pepper salsa recipe. Then hop in an Uber to head to the Aztec pyramids. We are in a hurry. It’s the free day for locals and we want to beat the crowd.

The pyramids are sublime. Works of permanence and precision laid out with obsessive specificity seldom rivaled the world over. The crude plastic jaguar and hawk noisemakers that every third person is selling to bored children by the thousand are not. The location is jarring with annoying noise. This is probably the reason there are no more actual jaguars or hawks in the area. Scared away. There’s too many people here. Too much plastic. Too many failed attempts at trumpeting a catcall or hawks’ screech. I was struck by the juxtaposition of laborious achievement against cheap novelty, just as I was by the fact that Oxford University is older than the founding of Tenochtitlán by the Mexica; humans seem to have both a sliding scale of antiquity alongside the inability to contemplate the longevity of their particular contributions.

We return to CDMX and hit the Juárez neighborhood to eat at Contramar, an airy, popular lunch spot. We ordered tuna tostados, a Serrano ham omelet made with French fries and cheese, and shrimp & octopus tacos; get the tostado, devour the omelet (and make it at home during every single meal for the rest of your life), skip the tacos. Afterward, we decided to visit one of the many parklet traffic circles to idly watch the world revolve and sip a few beers at La Zaranda Miravalle.

Cabrera 7 was our dinner. The decor is garden party and pop art. The view is of Plaza Luis Cabrera with it’s large fountain in across the street. Food was good. Portions were great. But we were simply not in the mood. Too much walking. Too much overindulging. It would be a disservice to describe anything further - we simply didn’t eat. Go there only when you are hungry.

At this point we plod the streets back to our hotel. Stuffed like Piñata. Catatonic. Directionless. We feel a distinct pull toward life and vitality; Gravity beckons us toward Plaza Rio De Janeiro where there is a gala Oscar viewing party. Alfonso Cuarón is up for Roma, the semi-autobiographical tale of life in this neighborhood during the early 70’s “Dirty War” period. Roma ended up winning 3 Oscars and the place absolutely exploded with jubilation each time; Best Director, Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography. Congrats to Cuarón. Congrats to Roma Norte. Congrats to Mexico. We celebrated in our own way back at the hotel with a wine from Valle De Guadalupe (Mexico has a wine country. It is fantastic. You can drive there from LA) and a viewing of Roma. En route we accidentally identified Whistling Death, himself - not the soul-stealer of lore, but the Camotes Cart man slinging a confections of sweet potato and plantains. We ran smack into his cart on our way back to the hotel. I am told the whistle is the sound of childhood to a lot of locals, and not a harbinger of corporeal impermanence. I don’t see it.

Day 4 - Goodbye to Roma Norte… We awake on our last day and head to Toscano Roma for breakfast. Notable was the beet, orange, raspberry smoothie - I now put beets in smoothies at home. One last idle stroll. And off to the airport. See you next time, Mexico City. There’s so much to see. So much I missed. I will definitely be back. If only to dress well, admire the architecture, sample the haute cuisine, and practice my Spanish, in a grand city chock full of life, vitality, art and culture.

Links:

Nima Local House - http://nimalocalhousehotel.com/

Roma Norte - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Roma#Roma_Norte_I

Licoria Limantour - https://www.yelp.com/biz/limantour-m%C3%A9xico-5

Huset - http://www.huset.mx/

Zocalo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo

La Frapp - https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Coffee-Shop/La-Frapp-356500598031678/

Parque Espana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_Espa%C3%B1a

Milos - https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g150800-d2297923-Reviews-Milo_s_Bistro-Mexico_City_Central_Mexico_and_Gulf_Coast.html

Taqueria Orinoco - http://www.taqueriaorinoco.com/

El Moro - http://elmoro.mx/

Teotihuacan aka “The Pyramids” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan

Contramar - http://www.contramar.com.mx/

La Zaranda Miravalle -

Cabrera 7 -

Plaza Rio De Janeiro - https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_R%C3%ADo_de_Janeiro

Cafe Toscano Roma - https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g150800-d3251109-Reviews-Cafe_Toscano-Mexico_City_Central_Mexico_and_Gulf_Coast.html

Down in Mexico, The Coasters - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebl5Sx4zqYw

Avengers: Endgame - How Thanos Could be Defeated

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Avengers: Infinity War makes Thanos look unbeatable. We look for the one chance Doctor Strange saw to defeat him in Avengers: Endgame.

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Feature

Books

Gavin Jasper

Avengers: Infinity War

Apr 2, 2019

Marvel

Thanos

Avengers: Endgame

Thanos the Mad Titan is kind of a big deal these days. A decade of Marvel Studios movies led to one starring him that painted him as being the king badass of bad guys. The opening five minutes of Avengers: Infinity War alone make him look like the toughest, most imposing threat to any and all superheroes. Not only is he a dangerous brick house of a purple man, but his adventures usually lead to him buffing up his power with Cosmic Cubes and Infinity Stones.

How do you solve a problem like Thanos in the highly anticipated Avengers: Endgame?

Scouring his comic history, I’ve compiled a list of all the times Thanos has been taken down a peg. Maybe one of these is that "one in fourteen million chance" that Doctor Strange mentioned in the movie.

You can either watch the video for the short version, or keep reading the full article for more details!

OK, now let's get on with the rest of this...

THANOS WAR (1974)

Thanos started off as a Dr. Claw-type of threat who was treated like a big deal, but never got his hands dirty. Like how in his first appearance, in an issue of Iron Man, Thanos’ “defeat” came in the form of a robot duplicate. He didn’t truly take a big L until possessing the Cosmic Cube and facing Captain Mar-Vell.

Watch Avengers: Infinity War on Amazon

Using his newfound omnipotence, Thanos rid Earth of its population and discarded the Cosmic Cube by becoming a big, scary Neon Noodle face in the sky. Captain Marvel wasn’t much of a match for Thanos, especially in this form, but he realized that even if discarded, the Cosmic Cue was still the source of Thanos’ abilities. While Thanos tried to disorient Mar-Vell’s surroundings and even speed up his aging, the Captain was able to use his last ounce of strength to karate chop the Cosmic Cube, thereby seemingly killing Thanos and setting everything back to normal.

DEATH WATCH (1977)

Adam Warlock teamed up with the Avengers to go stop Thanos from blowing up the solar system. They all failed horribly and Warlock was killed; his soul winding up inside the Soul Stone with Gamora and Pip the Troll. Moondragon reached out and showed all this to the mind of a sleeping Peter Parker, who in turn went to Thing and said, “Yo, I had the weirdest dream. Want to help me save the world just in case?”

further reading - Avengers: Endgame Trailer Breakdown and Analysis

While Thanos got huge villain points for refusing to monologue in front of the heroes at the cost of giving the heroes an advantage (in 1977, no less! Wow!), Spider-Man and Thing freed the heroes anyway. The Avengers and Thing jobbed out to Thanos something fierce, but Spider-Man was able to shatter open a special globe with the Soul Stone in there, releasing Adam Warlock in fiery ghost form. Warlock grabbed onto Thanos and transformed him into a statue, albeit one with the retained ability to cry.

SPIDEY SUPER STORIES (1979)

As mentioned in the list of weirdest Thanos moments, Thanos appeared in the all-ages 70s pile of ridiculousness that is Spidey Super Stories. This dorky take on Thanos chased the Cat (Hellcat) with a helicopter and later stole the Cosmic Cube from a teenage skateboarder named Speedy. Having the Cosmic Cube in hand, he seemed unstoppable to the Cat and Spider-Man.

That is, until he created an earthquake, which not only affected his enemies, but also caused the Cosmic Cube to fall out of his hand. Spider-Man told him, “You were too tricky for your own good, Thanos!”

Speedy picked up the Cosmic Cube, wrapped Thanos up in grass, and then the police led Thanos away in handcuffs. It’s one of those images that will never not be funny.

INFINITY GAUNTLET (1991)

The big event that inspired Avengers: Infinity War had Thanos trip himself up in his moment of ultimate victory. Thanos had the full Infinity Gauntlet, which allowed him to mold the universe at his will, all to impress Death. After defeating the surviving superheroes and overpowering the cosmic entities, he went one-on-one with Eternity himself.

Thanos won, escaping his physical body to instead become an unbeatable force living in the fabric of the cosmos. Thanos’ folly was that his lifeless body still held onto the Infinity Gauntlet and like a car with the keys in the ignition, that godly power was there for the taking. Nebula zipped over to snatch it, gaining omnipotence, while Thanos was demoted.

further reading: Every Version of Marvel's Infinity Gauntlet Story

Thanos then joined the heroes against Nebula and afterwards faked his death by getting hit so hard by Thor that he exploded. Sweet plan!

WHAT IF THE SILVER SURFER SUCCEEDED? (1993/1998)

The most memorable part of Infinity Gauntlet was the sequence where Thanos powered himself down just enough so that the remaining superheroes had the slightest chance to beat him. They all died horribly, but that was part of the plan. It was all a distraction for Silver Surfer to zip by and grab the Gauntlet off of Thanos’ hand.

He missed, of course.

Two What If comics showed what would have happened had he removed the Gauntlet. One story had the Silver Surfer wield the Infinity Gauntlet with good intentions to make the universe a better place, only to gradually go insane from its power. Dr. Strange brought in Shalla Bal to talk some sense into him, which caused the Surfer to destroy the Gauntlet itself (seemingly at the cost of his own life, but instead, he and Shalla snuck off to a paradise planet).

further reading: The 100 Best Marvel What If Moments

Thanos pondered over his defeat and smiled at how close he got to victory.

In the other story, Surfer pulled the Gauntlet off Thanos, but fumbled it due to Thanos blasting at him. Surfer lost his hold on it and it was snatched out of the air by the comedic Impossible Man. The issue was more about Silver Surfer as the main character and while Thanos was depowered, he practically forgotten about within a couple pages.

URBAN JUNGLE (1998)

Back in the late-90s, Mark Waid and Andy Kubert did a Ka-Zar ongoing that lasted roughly a year. Much like Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ka-Zar took on his evil brother who turned out to be working for Thanos. Thanos had some plot based on terraforming the entire universe so that all the plant life would kill everyone else, including Hillbilly Stephen King.

Somebody out there will get that reference.

In this story, Thanos absolutely towered over Ka-Zar and was able to shrug off all of his attacks. They fought it out in the middle of a volcano and while Thanos had Ka-Zar in a bearhug, the power of love gave Ka-Zar some crazy Spider-Man-under-a-pile-of-wreckage strength and he both escaped the hold and knocked Thanos into the lava below.

further reading: Complete Schedule of Upcoming Marvel Movies

That wasn’t the end of Thanos, as he rose from the lava, but the aftermath was a bunch of confusing jargon involving a magic medallion.

CALL OF THE WILD (1998)

After his loss to Ka-Zar, Thanos was locked up in some kind of energy dimension, unable to escape without help. In the form of a giant, he tried to convince the Hulk to pull him out of that dimension in exchange for power, only for Nate Grey to interfere. Alone, Hulk and X-Man were no match for the colossal Thanos.

Together, X-Man was able to transfer his telekinetic armor onto Hulk’s body. Bouncing around, looking like The World from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Hulk proceeded to overpower Thanos and sent him back into the portal from whence he came. Thanos’ connection to reality was cut completely and the heroes went their separate ways.

Seriously, though. He looks exactly like The World.

THE FINAL MORNING (2000)

Thanos teamed up with Mangog to best Thor, power up with a bunch of cosmic artifacts (as Thanos is wont to do) and bring forth the end of all life in the universe. Thor was able to take out Mangog in a way most badass, but he was still no match for the amped-up Thanos. Luckily, Odin had Jagrfelm the Blacksmith make some extra special weapons powered by the Odinforce to buff up Thor to Thanos’ level. Odin summoned Firelord to make the delivery in time.

Enhanced and ready for a piece of the Mad Titan, Thor fought Thanos to a standstill at first until destroying one of the empowering artifacts and turning back Thanos to normal. From there, it was only elementary that Thor would thrash Thanos into a purple mess. Thor’s ally Tarene then used her magic tears to explode Thanos into a smoldering corpse.

Thanos creator Jim Starlin would later retcon this loss, as well as the Ka-Zar incident, as being against mere clones. I have to imagine that’s more because of Thanos getting outright killed or his plot to wipe out the universe, since Infinity Gauntlet made it apparent that Thor (even Eric Masterson Thor) could possibly tear Thanos apart if he didn’t have the Infinity Stones.

SQUIRREL GIRL (2006)

Squirrel Girl joined the Great Lakes Avengers with the dynamic being that they’re lame heroes and she’s lame on the surface despite being able to take down major threats. GLX-Mas Special (during the time when they were the Great Lakes X-Men) had Thanos come to Earth moments after Squirrel Girl just took down MODOK. Thanos talked up some plot about ruling the universe with something called the Pyramatrix.

Squirrel Girl ran into action as a way to end her part of the story. Later in the issue, it was shown that she defeated Thanos all on her own with Uatu the Watcher verifying that it was indeed him. HOW she won was never explained.

A later comic would claim that it wasn’t actually him because we can’t have nice things.

ANNIHILATION (2006)

The first Annihilation was essentially the story that planted the seeds for modern-day Guardians of the Galaxy being a thing. In it, Thanos was more of a henchman to main villain Annihilus, much like how the Grim Reaper is somehow the henchman to Dracula in the Castlevania games. Part of their reign of terror had to do with Galactus being captured and weaponized against his will. Eventually, Thanos realized that Annihilus’ plans were a bit too far for him and decided that he’d help the heroes by releasing Galactus.

Before he could do that, he noticed Death hanging out in the room. As he realized what was up (his time, to be more specific), Thanos suddenly saw his own heart torn out of his chest from behind. Drax the Destroyer was created to kill Thanos and damn it, that was exactly what he was going to do.

MARVEL ADVENTURES (2006)

In the family-friendly world of Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #16, Thanos clobbered Captain Mar-Vell so hard in the middle of a space battle that the Kree hero was knocked into Earth. There, he teamed up with the Fantastic Four to fight Thanos. Part of the issue centered around an invention of Reed’s called “utility fog,” which was a cloud of shape-shifting nanites.

At first, the heroes used the utility fog to create duplicates of themselves and fight Thanos 10-on-1. This didn’t work out, but Sue was able to funnel the fog into Thanos’ mouth, allowing the nanites to shut down Thanos from the inside.

MARVEL ZOMBIES 2 (2007)

The original Marvel Zombies miniseries ended with a handful of heroes-turned-zombies devouring Galactus and absorbing his cosmic abilities. They moved on to scouring the cosmos to devour both planets and the inhabitants. As of Marvel Zombies 2, not only did their ranks increase to include various high-ranking space characters like Phoenix, Gladiator, and Thanos, but they also seemingly finished off all the food in the universe.

Zombie Thanos ranted about Zombie Hulk eating too much food and putting them in this situation, but the argument ended pretty succinctly with Hulk clapping over Thanos’ head and causing an explosion of gore. Gladiator tried eating some of Thanos’ exploded brains and skull fragments, but then immediately vomited them back up.

THE NEWER FANTASTIC FOUR (2009)

A What If issue showed a world where Wolverine, Spider-Man, Hulk, and Ghost Rider remained the New Fantastic Four due to the demise of the original team. A sequel showed how things would have gone had they existed during Infinity Gauntlet. Due to Ghost Rider being erased in the Finger Snap Heard ‘Round the Universe, Iron Man took his spot.

The team didn’t agree to Adam Warlock’s “everyone die so we can maybe steal the Gauntlet” plan, but their attempts at fighting Thanos head-on didn’t work out either. It was Wolverine’s attention that saved the universe, as he took note the way Mephisto was able to lead Thanos around, as well as Thanos’ feelings for Death. Wolverine smooth-talked Thanos into smiting Mephisto and making Wolverine his new advisor.

Wolverine, having a better understanding of women than Thanos, talked up how important touch is to a relationship and insisted that Thanos march over to Death and touch her face. By the time Thanos built up the resolve and reached over, Wolverine chopped his arm off and called him a sucker.

Hulk beat down Thanos, Spider-Man set things right with the Gauntlet, and the day was saved.

AVENGERS AND THE INFINITY GAUNTLET (2010)

A more all-ages take on Infinity Gauntlet had the team of Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine, Ms. Marvel, Dr. Doom, and space trucker US Ace take on Thanos. It was a silly endeavor, but very much worth reading.

When the heroes (and Doom) fought Thanos, they got their asses handed to them as expected. Out of nowhere, US Ace drove his space truck into Thanos. It didn’t kill him, but it did knock off his Gauntlet. Dr. Doom stole it, but it didn’t do him any good due to the realization that he was just a Doombot.

Thanos tried to put the Gauntlet back on, only for Spider-Man to steal it with a web yoink and put it on. Spider-Man wished that Thanos never found the Infinity Gems and the story reset itself where only Spider-Man and Thanos remembered the incident.

REBIRTH RAMPAGE (2010)

The Universal Church of Truth seemed like they were resurrecting Adam Warlock or his evil self Magus, but instead they brought Thanos back from the dead. Not only was that something that would piss Thanos off on principle, but his mental faculties weren't back to normal just yet. The Guardians of the Galaxy had to fight what was essentially a purple Hulk with his junk flapping around.

The Guardians had a hard time fighting the revived Thanos, as he even seemed more powerful than ever. Groot’s brute force failed, Gamora’s god-killing sword broke on Thanos’ skin, and Drax didn’t do much better. The Guardians hit him with everything they had and it only pissed him off.

Finally, Star-Lord pulled out a cracked Cosmic Cube and used it to lure Thanos over. Then he let loose with a blast – straight into the crotch – that proceeded to knock out Thanos.

DEADPOOL KILLS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE (2012)

In one universe, Deadpool became aware that he’s a fictional character and instead of making him all wacky, it broke him and turned him into a brutal nihilist. The four issues were mainly just him killing various characters in occasionally inventive ways. At the beginning of the final issue, we got to see him take out tons of heroes and villains in one fell swoop in what appeared to many as a mass suicide.

Turned out Deadpool was using the Puppet Master’s puppets to control people and make them kill themselves. To show he was thinking big, he pulled out a Galactus doll and we got to see Galactus and other cosmic types floating dead in space. This included the upper half of Thanos.

AVENGERS AND GUARDIANS ASSEMBLE (2012)

The first arc of Avengers Assemble had two major roles in relation to Marvel synergy. First, it came out around the time of the first Avengers movie and capitalized on both the Avengers’ popularity and the post-credits Thanos appearance. Second, it introduced the Guardians of the Galaxy as we know them, tweaking the character traits a little bit and mostly ignoring how their previous series ended because they had a movie coming out in two years and this was Marvel’s way of planting the seeds in the readers’ minds.

Thanos came to Earth to steal what he thought was a Cosmic Cube, leading to a team-up between the Avengers and the Guardians. Thanos succeeded and became this unstoppable giant, banishing the heroes to another dimension. Turned out it wasn’t so much a real Cosmic Cube as a replica created by the US government. With the help of the Elders of the Universe, the heroes returned with a weapon that would destroy the fake cube. Thanos returned to his normal form.

Hulk threw a growing Groot at Thanos, who delivered a couple haymakers until being swatted away. Then Thanos looked in horror as the Guardians of the Galaxy and several Avengers rosters (including two Hulks) rushed him down and started curbstomping him into oblivion. Thanos acted like he still had some fight left, but then the Elders popped in to steal him away.

INFINITY (2013)

Usually, Thanos’ deal is that he’s trying to get his girl, but around the time of Infinity, Thanos’ deal was that he got the girl too many times. As some kind of galactic Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Thanos sired children all over the universe and one day decided that, oh wait, making babies is counterproductive to stanning for Death. Remembering the time he knocked up an Inhuman during a trip to Earth, he returned to make sure his offspring was wiped out.

The whole event led to a cloud of Terrigen Crystals spreading across the world and one of the people empowered by it was Thanos’ son. Calling himself Thane, the youngster came across Thanos fighting off the Avengers and let loose with his power to encase people in amber. Locked in a cube of amber in a pose similar to that time he was turned into a statue, Thanos was stuck in a horrifying stasis where he was conscious but completely immobile.

UNI-DEADPOOL (2015)

Deadpool and Thanos worked together to free Death from the clutches of Eternity. After all, with no Death, there was no...death. Death allowed the two to tap into her power in order to bring Eternity to his knees, but Thanos started to go too far and intended to kill Eternity once and for all. Death removed her powers from Deadpool and Deadpool realized that Death wanted this. The entire universe was going to die.

Not enough to fight Death-powered Thanos on his own, Deadpool ended up getting a big buff in the form of the Captain Universe Uni-Power. That allowed him to fight Thanos head-on, but that wasn’t what got him the win. Deadpool pointed out that Thanos’ resilience and refusal to die or even stay dead makes him more of an agent of life than death. Death pondered this on the side and chose to remove Thanos’ newfound abilities.

Screaming that he was weak and alone once again, Thanos vanished in an explosion caused from Deadpool’s blasts.

WHAT IF? INFINITY: INHUMANS (2015)

In this reality, Thanos gave Black Bolt the ultimatum where if Black Bolt didn’t kill the Illuminati and the Avengers, then Thanos would wipe out the entire Inhuman race. Fast-forward to an Earth ruled by Thanos and his henchmen.

A hooded figure was treated as the ultimate weapon against Thanos that needed to be protected against all threats. In the climax, she revealed herself to be Dazzler. Between her ability to turn sound into light blasts and the excessive power of Black Bolt’s voice, Thanos was easily annihilated.

WHAT IF? INFINITY: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (2015)

After Infinity, Thanos was locked up in a cube of amber in the custody of the Illuminati. In this alternate timeline, Rocket Raccoon stumbled upon this fact from spying on Iron Man. He and the Guardians proceeded to fight the Illuminati and free Thanos for the sole purpose of killing him.

The actual death isn’t shown or 100% explained. All it needed was a two-page spread of the Guardians being accompanied by various cosmic allies like Beta Ray Bill, Ronan, Gladiator, Annihilus, and so on. Star-Lord told him that they’re the Guardians of the Galaxy and the galaxy is sick of Thanos’ shit.

Afterwards, they all got very drunk in celebration while Earth's heroes were told that they were grounded and could no longer venture into space.

WHAT IF? INFINITY: DARK REIGN (2015)

Nobody’s perfect, but certain villains are better at using the Infinity Gauntlet than others. Wielding such power comes with such responsibility, so of course who would botch controlling the Infinity Gauntlet worse than a Spider-Man villain?

In a world where Norman Osborn got his hands on the Infinity Gauntlet, he reached back several decades to bring his father into the present and showed him his many accomplishments. While his father was abusive and cruel, he was still able to call out Norman for being a monster. Norman then figured he’d just make his father love him with his omnipotence and it worked!

Then they returned to his stronghold to find all of the Dark Avengers killed by Thanos. The two battled it out and while Thanos couldn’t scratch the Green Goblin, he was at least able to get under his skin by pointing out that he never forced Death to love him because he’d know that it wasn’t real. Norman would soon realize the same about his father’s glowing words.

Norman rendered Thanos into a pile of smoking bones via blasting a Goblin Glider into his sternum. He confronted his mind-controlled father by asking why he loved him. Not finding, “Because you’re my son,” satisfactory, Norman wiped out his father’s existence from history itself.

Realizing his mistake almost immediately, Norman faded away as well. What a maroon.

SECRET WARS (2015)

As the culmination of Jonathan Hickman’s epic Fantastic Four and Avengers runs, Secret Wars was the story of Dr. Doom gaining omnipotence and creating a world made up of scraps of broken alternate universes. It was kind of trippy but very awesome.

When the heroes waged war against God Doom, Thanos challenged him head-on. Without the Infinity Gauntlet. Thanos talked a big game like he had any chance at all and Doom simply tore out his spine like he pressed forward, down, forward, high punch.

At least with the Norman Osborn fight Thanos set him up to lose in his death.

SECRET WARS: THE INFINITY GAUNTLET (2015)

One of the reasons why Secret Wars was such a rad event was the many spinoff stories about the various alternate universes-turned-kingdoms. One of which centered around a family of Nova Corps members in a society overrun by space bugs. Stalking and later befriending the family was Thanos, who carried with him the Time Stone. The Nova family happened to have the Reality Stone.

By the end of the story, Thanos had an almost full Gauntlet while the Novas only had that one Reality Stone. The father put up a good fight, but was still no match for Thanos’ might. The daughter, Anwen, offered to give him the Reality Stone in exchange for their lives. Agreeing to the terms, Thanos placed it in his completed Gauntlet and gloated over his absolute power.

Suddenly, the Gauntlet shorted out while being overcome with purple flame and Kirby Krackle. It overwhelmed Thanos and turned him into a charred skeleton, all while Anwen revealed that she used the Reality Stone to create a poisonous replica called the Death Stone.

CIVIL WAR II (2016)

So Civil War II was a really bad miniseries by Marvel that acted as well-meaning character assassination for Carol Danvers Captain Marvel. Regardless, the first issue had a taste of rad Thanos action. The Inhuman known as Ulysses had a premonition that Thanos was going to be snooping around Earth. Against Iron Man’s wishes, Captain Marvel put together a team to ambush Thanos. Interestingly enough, the miniseries didn’t even show how the fight went down for the most part. All it showed was Thanos’ surprise, his critically injuring She-Hulk, and his fist going through War Machine.

An issue of Ultimates at least showed that afterwards, the Ultimates roster joined together to pour it on Thanos until he went down.

ULTIMATES REMATCH (2016)

Thanos was locked up in the Triskelion, but as you’d expect, he got free. The Ultimates tried fighting him and this time he was able to overpower them. Black Panther realized that the secret to stopping Thanos wasn’t brawn, but brains. While Ms. America and Captain Marvel kept Thanos busy, the others put together a device that prevented electrical synapses in his brain. Thanos collapsed and went silent.

Black Panther pointed out that such a device would kill anyone else, but it’s possible that Thanos simply can’t die.

THE GROUNDED GUARDIANS (2017)

Thanos escaped custody once again and left the planet, which was extra frustrating for Gamora as the Guardians of the Galaxy lost their transportation during Civil War II and were stuck on Earth for a while. Luckily, or unluckily, Thanos decided to head back to Earth as part of an agreement with Annihilus, the Brood, and the Badoon. This was Brian Michael Bendis’ final issue writing Guardians of the Galaxy and he wanted to go out with a bang.

It started with Drax vs. Thanos, but over time, the whole Guardians roster started to trickle in to lay in on Thanos. Star-Lord, Groot, Venom, Kitty Pryde, Thing, Angela, Rocket, and Captain Marvel. The Avengers were apparently on the way. Then Gamora arrived, ignoring Thanos’ claims that this world could have been hers had she not betrayed him. Gamora smugly agreed that this way was better and the Guardians rushed Thanos.

While the end of the fight wasn’t shown, the final pages did give us an imprisoned Thanos in the hands of the Nova Corps, looking all Hannibal Lector.

THE SHI’AR IMPERIAL GUARD (2017)

In Thanos’ recent ongoing series, he started to realize that his body was breaking down and he’d regularly cough up blood. He went to Mentor to find a cure, but Mentor’s failure led to death as punishment. Thanos was then met by the Shi’ar Imperial Guard, who tried to overwhelm him with their vast numbers. Thanos had his moments of dominance, but it was apparent that he wasn’t as strong as he usually was and they were getting the best of him.

Exhausted and weakening, Thanos saw the Imperial Guard’s heaviest hitter Gladiator standing behind him. With one hell of a punch, Gladiator knocked Thanos into next week. Thanos was under arrest.

PHOENIX THANE (2017)

Not only was Thanos weakened, but a handful of his enemies joined together to end him once and for all. With Death whispering in his ear, Thane put together a team of himself, Nebula, Starfox, and the Champion of the Universe. In reality, Thane was planning on betraying them anyway, as his plan was to steal a Phoenix egg and grant himself the power of the Phoenix Force.

When the time came for him to confront Thanos, there was very little to the fight itself. Just one blast of cosmic flame that depowered Thanos even further and teleported him to a slum planet, cursed to live out the rest of his pathetic life.

In the end, Thane’s former allies helped Thanos regain his abilities and stop Thane. Apparently, it was part of Death’s plan all along, but Thanos was all, “I don’t want your love anymore!” Those feelings lasted like a week.

THANOS VS. THANOS (2018)

“And if Thanos must die?”

“No one kills Thanos but Thanos.”

At the end of his ongoing, Thanos was brought to the distant future to meet up with his older and very victorious self, King Thanos. Over countless years, Thanos wiped out seemingly all life in the universe. The only things left were his henchman Frank Castle (a failed Ghost Rider/Herald whose mentality has made him more Deadpool than Punisher over the years), the Hulk (treated as Thanos’ dog), and the threat of a vengeful Silver Surfer armed with Mjolnir. King Thanos brought his younger self over to help him kill the Surfer, hoping that it would bring forth the missing Death.

When only the two Thanos’ remained, Death showed herself and made it apparent that she wanted them to fight to the death. Their battle was brutal, but the younger Thanos was supreme. Still, he would not be goaded into killing his older self, purely out of disgust. Instead, he went back to the present with the promise that he would make sure that King Thanos’ future would never come to pass, killing him with non-existence.

I guess they took the whole “Thanos undoes his own victories” thing literally.

Any other Thanos losses you want to remind me of? Sound off in the comments!

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Gavin Jasper notices that Carol Danvers sure happens to partake in a lot of Thanos smackdownery. Huh. Follow Gavin on Twitter!

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Arplis - News: 20 Fun Ways To Pass the Time When You’re Stuck at Home

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The coronavirus outbreak has forced millions of people worldwide to practice social distancing and hunker down at home. With no certain end date in sight, though, you may be looking around your humble abode wondering how on earth you will pass all the time.

If you’re craving a break from pandemic panic, check out this silver linings playbook of all the fun things you can do while holed up at home.

Think about it: How often do we pine to slow down our lives and spend more time puttering around the house? Now’s your chance. Embrace it!

Here are 20 fun things you can do at home that’ll make time fly.

1. Create your own pajama lounge

With all that’s going on, there may be times when you hanker for the comfort of your pajamas all day long. Luckily, pajama lounges—dedicated casual hangout spaces—are a real thing. Create your own in a low-traffic area with cozy accessories, as well as books and games. Here are more pajama lounge ideas to get you started.

2. Finally master folding a fitted sheet

Organizing your closets is the perfect at-home activity, and among the top mysteries for many people is how to fold a fitted sheet: How do you fold something with no corners? We promise your linen closet will never be the same after you follow these two-minute instructions on how to perfectly fold a fitted sheet.

3. Update your media center

Do you still have a massive collection of DVDs and CDs that make your media center look like an outdated mess? It’s time to box up that collection to donate (at a later time). Here’s more living room organization advice.

4. Throw a ‘Netflix party’

Miss going to movies with friends? Host a “Netflix party.” There’s a Chrome extension you can download that lets you watch Netflix with friends and chat on the side about that B-horror movie you’re watching together. Bonus: You can pause for snack and bathroom breaks.

5. Work out for free

Lest you become a couch potato, Planet Fitness is holding classes—or “work-ins”—for 20 minutes or less on Facebook, live daily at 7 p.m. EST. If you miss a class, no problem! You’ll be able to go back and replay at your leisure. Here are more home gym ideas.

6. Spend 15 minutes in your bathroom

Organizing, that is! Many of us are sharing bathrooms all day and night with a family member or three. Keep everyone’s sanity by clearing off the countertops, which makes them easier to sanitize. Here are more fast bathroom organization tips.

7. Grow some greenery

You can order seeds and starter planters online, such as the AeroGarden Black Harvest gourmet herb seed kit ($99, Amazon). Watching sprouts appear and grow will mark your days in a whole new way.

8. Tour a museum

Many museums may be closed, especially those in big cities, but some are offering free virtual tours. You can walk the Guggenheim’s spiral staircase in New York City via Google Street View, jet off to Paris to see the works of Monet and Cézanne at the Musée d’Orsay, or hit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and many more. Not a bad way to broaden your mind from the comfort of your couch.

9. Conquer your junk drawer

We could all use some small victories right about now. These quick junk drawer organization ideas will turn the chaos of loose pens, batteries, and rubber bands into calming order.

Photo by Farm Fresh Therapy 

10. Optimize your pantry

Now that you’re stocked up on staples, make sure to keep them organized. For starters, use an easy-to-reach basket to hold individually wrapped bags of snacks, so your kids won’t tear apart the pantry looking for them. Here’s more on how to organize a pantry that will inspire great meals.

11. Create a memory board

An old bedspring-as-memory-board holds to-dos, pictures and keepsakes.

Okio B Designs

If you have an old crib or toddler bedspring gathering dust in your basement, you can transform it with just some paint. Once it’s dry, use clothespins to attach photos and memorabilia. Then check out other ways to upcycle nursery items.

12. Clean brushes and combs

Clean is in! So sprinkle a tablespoon of baking soda in a bowl of warm water, and soak your hairbrushes and combs. Rinse them and air dry. Here are more spring cleaning tips using supplies in the pantry.

13. Tame your sports equipment

To corral mitts, helmets, and balls of every size that may be in the way when they’re not in use, hang a mesh laundry bag on the back of a door, or use a hook on the wall of your garage. If that sounds satisfying, check out these other garage organization hacks.

14. Give your soil a snack

Now is a great time to enrich your garden soil as you prep your yard for spring by raking in some household items you may have on hand from eating in more. Coffee grounds will improve soil drainage, aeration, and water retention. Putting crumbled shells into planting holes helps prevent tomato blossom-end rot, and the shards repel garden pests.

15. Make a gilded honey bear vase

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My cat got ahold of one of my succulents and he's lookin' pretty measly now, so I transplanted him into this lil' honey bear planter that I made 🍯🐻🌵We'll see if the little guy pulls through! 🤞🏻 . . . #abmplantlady #honeybeardiy #succulents #succulentlove #thatsdarling #flashesofdelight #succulentinspo #succulentlover #cactiobsession #copperspraypaint #spraypaintdiy #diyproject #easydiy #mycreativebiz #thehappynow #borntocreate #howihue #honeybear #craftproject #succulentdiy #succulentplanter #succulentplanterdiy #girldoit

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Are you squeezing honey out of a bottle in the shape of a cute honey bear? Turn it into an adorable vase with some spray paint. Or let your children finger paint clean honey bears as a fun project. Here are some other ways to reuse items in your home.

16. Give grout new life in minutes

You may be eyeing your bathroom tile, now that you are home more. Luckily, getting mildewed grout to look like new doesn’t require any special skills—just some elbow grease and equal parts vinegar, baking soda, and bleach. Here are other DIY bathroom projects.

17. Tame your cords

Many people are thankfully relying on technology to stay connected. Give your jumble of cords some love by untangling and labeling them. Start by unplugging everything from the power strip, and then wind your way back to the device. Once you find where each cord belongs, add an identifying label. Here’s more on how to organize cords.

18. Organize craft supplies with Mason jars

Photo by Decor Steals 

With millions of kids at home from school, art supplies like markers and crayons may have exploded all over living room floors. So corral small art gear into pretty Mason jars. (You can also run a few pasta jars through the dishwasher instead.) Check out more ways how to prevent kids toys from taking over your house.

19. Go through your kids’ artwork with them

You may finally have the time to go through your children’s artwork to find the pieces that you felt didn’t pass the fridge test and … yes, throw it away. If you’re on the fence, photograph or scan it to save it digitally indefinitely. Check out more ways to get your kids’ room under control.

20. Enjoy a virtual happy hour

Fight feelings of isolation by kicking back at a virtual happy hour or tea time with friends. All you need is the video conferencing app Zoom—or to set up a Google Hangout—and your drink of choice. Cheers!

The post 20 Fun Ways To Pass the Time When You’re Stuck at Home appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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The Subway Crush Who Crushed Me

We met on the subway on a Saturday morning nearly 14 years ago. Our meeting had been a long time coming. He had been my subway crush for four years.

I had met him once or twice at those early 20s apartment parties in New York, the kind with opened bags of tortilla chips on Formica counters, gloppy salsa poured into Ikea bowls, bottles of cheap liquor lined up next to red Solo cups and cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays on fire escapes, with illicit activity happening in the bathrooms or right on the coffee table.

He had been dating a co-worker of mine, a woman named Lana, and then he wasn’t, but he was still around, just out of sight, just out of reach. I liked him. A lot.

His name was Ronen, but to me and my friends he was known as “that Israeli guy” and then, months later, as “subway crush.”

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I would see him sometimes in the morning on the way to work, at my stop in Carroll Gardens. I would fidget on the other side of the concrete pole separating us as the F train pulled up and watch him when the crowds parted: He was tall with black hair and a beard. Big hands. He listened to music. He read. He was never with another woman.

Seven years passed. Sometimes months would go by and he would disappear. Occasionally I would ride the train with some other guy and hope to see him so he would see me with this other guy.

I never did. I also never saw him in the neighborhood, although he clearly lived nearby.

When we finally met on that fateful Saturday, my voice shook. He was with my old co-worker, the woman he used to date, Lana, and her newish husband, Max, Ronen’s best friend to whom he had introduced her. She and Ronen had not been a match, but Lana and Max were. And Ronen was part of that love.

Lana said hello and Ronen followed and I said, “I see you on the subway all the time!” Too loudly, I’m sure.

“I see you all the time,” he said in a voice that was not at all the voice I had imagined him having. And his smile — it brightened his face like a light bulb. I found myself squinting as it shone down on me. And smiling back.

A week later we went on a date. Six months later I moved in. One year later we were engaged and a year after that, married. I could not believe I had been right, that my intuition about Ronen had been so spot on.

And then the universe punched me right in my smug, dumb face.

Eight years and two beautiful sons later, Ronen left for work from our home in Decatur, Ga., and never returned. During the day, blood vessels suddenly ruptured in his brain and he fell into a coma from which he never emerged. A week later, he died.

Inside that beautiful head, behind that megawatt smile, had been a ticking time bomb, an arteriovenous malformation — a rare tangle of abnormal and poorly formed blood vessels prone to hemorrhage and rupture — that was lying in wait to devastate him and the many people who cared for him.

No one saw it coming. I certainly had not. The thought had never entered my mind — that Ronen could be here one morning and be gone by that same afternoon.

It was near 100 degrees the day of the funeral, the sun beating mercilessly on the heartbroken crowd. Later, my father would say to me, “I’ve never seen a crowd like that. It was like J.F.K.’s funeral or something.”

And it was.

Friends and family had flown in from all over the world to pay their respects, not quite believing that this kind of tragedy could befall Ronen, the kind of man that lent sparks of life-affirming energy to everything he did.

And there I was, holding the hand of our 5-year-old, our 2-year-old sucking a lollipop on my lap, the “Ema?” “Ema?” “Ema?” questions already relentless. Ema is the Hebrew word for mother. I had always assumed I would be “Mom,” but I became an Ema. Ronen was Aba and I was Ema. That’s how we worked.

Sweat rolled down my legs as tears fell from my eyes. What in the world had happened? Never in a million years did I foresee this unfair fate. It had no resemblance to my childhood, and I had nothing to compare it to. How on earth was I going to be a single mother? How could it be that their father was gone? Time would press on, we would all — hopefully — age, and Ronen would be forever 44.

It’s been two and a half years. I look for him. Is that him, that hawk circling overhead? Or that butterfly flitting through the back yard? But these things don’t resonate.

I have a recurring dream in which he has left me for another woman, and I’m so angry I want to scream. I do not like this dream. My wise friend, Pam, suggested that perhaps it’s my subconscious trying to give me a replacement explanation for his absence, one that makes some sort of sense, and I can see that.

But why pile pain on top of pain? Couldn’t I just see him in a white robe? Couldn’t he just give me one of his famous hugs? That I would much prefer.

And my intuition. I don’t trust it like I used to, but time has pressed a sort of reset button on my senses. All of them, but especially this: I have come to understand the difference between intuition and clairvoyance. Trusting your gut and following your heart is intuition. I am no clairvoyant and never claimed to be.

So there is a difference. Just because I failed to foresee Ronen’s untimely and unjust death does not mean I can’t listen to (once in a while, when it’s especially loud) that inner voice in my head, that fluttering of recognition in my chest. I may be heartbroken, but I would fall in love with and marry Ronen all over again.

I would.

Once when we were dating, Ronen said something to me that I hold deep in my heart, still. We were people-watching in South Beach when he turned to me and said, “Sometimes I look at you and forget that you’re my girlfriend, and I think God, she’s so beautiful. Like you’re a stranger but then I realize that you’re not and I’m just so proud.”

I’d never heard something more romantic. It didn’t matter if other men saw me that way or not; it was that he did. And the fact that he would so effortlessly say that to me as steel drums played and the sun set in the pink sky made my heart explode into a million songbirds.

I see Ronen in our boys, Ari and Lev. Seven-year-old Ari is built exactly like Ronen, tall and thin with yeti feet and impossibly long toes. And his face is Ronen’s, as are his facial expressions. He was too young when Ronen died to imitate those expressions, and yet here they are: Ronen’s look of wonder, his goofy grin, the way his smile lights up his brown eyes. There he is.

And Lev, my 4-year-old. He resembles me more than Ronen, but the things he says! Ronen used to tell me to hug him “harder.” “Harder!” he would say until I could barely breathe.

Lev says the same thing, with the exact same inflection.

Our boys channel him. They say things that knock the wind out of me.

Once while I was sitting poolside, barefaced and dripping, at my friend’s parents’ house in Florida, Lev stood in the shallow end and looked at me. Really looked at me.

“What?” I said, patting my head for who knew what.

“Ema,” he said. “You look so beautiful.”

Another time, putting Ari to sleep, before I left the room, he said, “Ema?”

“Yes?”

“You’re more beautiful than you think you are.”

These are not the normal kinds of things I imagine little boys saying to their mother. Not with this kind of eerie, otherworldly conviction. And I swear, I haven’t bribed them. The only explanation I can come up with is Ronen. Speaking through them.

It’s what he would say to me now, if he could. If he were here like he should be.

Intuitively, absolutely, I feel this in my bones; I hear him in their voices.

Time has replanted a few seeds of optimism in the new, forever altered soil of me. My heart can and should still be followed.

And I am grateful for the growth.

Zoe Fishman, who lives in Decatur, Georgia, is the author of several novels, most recently “Invisible as Air.” She is @zoefishman76 on Twitter.

Modern Love can be reached at [email protected].

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Ante Up! U.S. Housing Markets With the Biggest—and Smallest—Down Payments

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You’re sick to death of watching your rent checks circle down the drain. Your spouse is jonesing for his or her dream kitchen, complete with quartz counters, a Sub-Zero fridge, and a funky backsplash. Your kids want space to run around—and you desperately want space from them.

Yes, my friends, it’s time to buy a home.

But after some quick number crunching, you find yourself face to face with the most terrifying and seemingly insurmountable part of the process, the Mount Everest of home buying: that towering down payment. It isn’t a pretty picture. Who on Earth has that much money lying around?

Making matters more complicated, not all home buyers feel your pain—or at least, not as deeply. In some parts of the country, a down payment might be greater than your annual salary; in others, you can save for it by packing lunch, skipping daily lattes for a few months, and banking your tax return.

So the realtor.com® data team set out to find where buyers will fork over more than the industry benchmark 20% down payment for homes—and where they’ll need to plunk down only single-digit percentages.

Lenders prefer those gold standard 20% down payments because they ensure that buyers have enough skin in the game—and buyers aspire to them to avoid costly private mortgage insurance, which would allow them to put down less cash on the table. But many buyers also have access to a variety of mortgage programs, such as the Federal Housing Administration loan, which allow those with decent credit scores to put down only 3.5%. The catch: In some markets (often with sky-high home prices), many homes don’t qualify for these programs.

“Coming up with a big-enough down payment is one of the top impediments to purchase,” says Javier Vivas, director of economic research at realtor.com. “It’s really challenging for younger buyers who don’t have deep pockets and haven’t had time to build up that big financial lump sum.”

And did we mention mortgage interest rates are also going up?

“Buyers are cutting back and trying to save, but prices are rising even faster, and the market is overtaking their ability to afford a home,” says Joe Melendez, founder and CEO of ValueInsured, a Texas-based firm that sells down payment insurance to home buyers. “They are continually falling behind.”

Our team analyzed mortgage data to come up with the average percentage down payment in each of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, taking into account those who anted up way above average as well as those who used government-subsidized, low-cost loans. We looked at realtor.com home prices and mortgage data from Optimal Blue, a real estate data firm that specializes in lending records, to come up with our findings. (All-cash purchases, common in blazing-hot markets, were not considered.)

The unfortunate truth: The markets where down payments regularly blow way past the norm are often the ones where homes also cost the most. Looking to own a sweet two-bedroom condo with a view in Manhattan? You’d better get ready to plunk down a half-mil, or much more.

But those old rules of supply and demand aren’t the full story—there are plenty of exceptions across the U.S. Red-hot Washington, DC, didn’t even make our top 10 with an average down payment of just 11.8%—the same as perennially downtrodden Detroit. (DC has lots of veterans who are eligible for low down payment loans.) But the median home price in DC is $425,000, compared with $204,600 in Detroit.

Been saving those pennies? Then let’s take a look at how many you’ll need, and the housing trends that explain them.

Markets with the highest down payment percentages

Let’s start by looking at the housing markets where people are putting down the highest percentage of their home price. We really hope you’re sitting down for this.

Trend No. 1: Saving up for a down payment in California? Good luck

Every spring, a new crop of computer science grads and bright-eyed entrepreneurs make their way to the San Francisco Bay Area. They land great gigs at places such as Google and Twitter, and have all the free snacks and nap pods their hearts could desire. It’s too bad homeownership in San Jose and San Francisco, the twin gateways of Silicon Valley, could still be light-years away.

The average down payment in the San Jose metro was highest on our list, at 23.9%, according to our findings. In the nearby San Francisco metro, which came in second, it was just slightly lower, at 22.6%. That number really sinks in when you consider how much homes in the Bay Area cost. The median listing price is $1.2 million in San Jose and $899,000 in San Francisco.

This all means that you’re going to need to shell out a big chunk of change to buy here. Over the past 12 months, the average down payment in San Jose was $257,000. In San Francisco that figure was $212,000.

Plaza de Cesar Chavez in San Jose, CA

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In fact, San Jose holds the ignominious honor of being the metro with both the highest home prices and the highest down payments in the U.S.—a Bay Area double whammy!

“The competition is very strong. You need at least 20% to be competitive,” says Heidi Mueller, an adviser at Engel & Völkers San Francisco.

So how can a 20- or 30-something save up that amount? Heck, how can anyone?

“A lot of [buyers here are] software engineers, so they get paid well and can make that money on their own,” Mueller says. But she concedes not everyone fits that category, and many are getting pushed farther out.

“A lot of younger buyers are moving over to Oakland,” she notes. Or farther out, to Vallejo or even Sacramento.

But the Bay Area isn’t the only part of California where prices—and down payments—are exploding. In this month’s realtor.com ranking of the hottest real estate markets, 13 of the top 20 housing markets were in the Golden State.

The typical down payment in Los Angeles was 17.9%, ranking third on our list. Meanwhile, in San Diego, where home prices have been climbing steadily, the average down payment was 15.9%. The Southern California city was the fifth-highest in our rankings.

Trend No. 2: New York is even more unique than you thought

There are a few things to learn if you move to New York City. Don’t get into an empty subway car (you’ll never do it twice). Queens has great ethnic eats. Times Square should be avoided like bubonic plague unless you’re seeing “Hamilton” (again). And if you buy a home, you’re going to have to pony up an ungodly amount of cash. Or not, if you’re willing to move to the outskirts of the Big Apple.

Aerial view of city so nice they named it twice

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Still with us?

Manhattan is the most expensive single county in America to buy a home. The median price here is $2 million, and the average down payment is 29.7%. A 40% down payment is hardly unusual, and multimillion-dollar, all-cash offers barely cause a stir. In Brooklyn, the average down payment is 22.4%; in can’t-get-no-respect Staten Island, it’s 21.9%.

So New York City should top our ranking, right? It’s not even close. New Yorkers pay an average down payment of 15.2% in the metro area. That puts the City That Never Sleeps in eighth place on our list.

The average is pulled down because the New York metro stretches far beyond Manhattan and the city. The metropolitan contains counties in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. (Thank the U.S. Census Bureau for that definition.) The median home price for the entire metro is $492,000. And the counties outside the city limits helped to lower that figure. In New Jersey’s Sussex County, the average down payment was—get ready for it—just 9.9%.

Saving enough for a down payment here can be a struggle for even affluent residents, who pay some of the highest rents in the world. Gary Malin with City Habitats says buyers often reach it through a combination of sources: years of savings, help from relatives, and selling off other assets and investments.

But buyers who are open to buying outside the city don’t have to go through such an ordeal.

Alexandra Zendrian, 33, and her husband purchased a home in 2015 for around $370,000 in East Northport on Long Island, about an hour-and-a-half drive from Manhattan. The couple were able to do so with around a 4% down payment, which they saved up over two years by eating out less and putting their raises straight into the bank.

Similar to New York, No. 4–ranked Boston had much higher down payments near downtown. While the metro had an average of 16.3%, that figure was 17.8% in Suffolk County, which contains the city. Meanwhile, farther out in Strafford County, the average was 10.2%.

Trend No. 3: Bidding wars in Denver

After years of booming real estate, the home prices in Denver are about as high as the altitude (or the folks killing time outside the nearest legal marijuana dispensary). The median home price here is now $543,000. And that soaring market has resulted in a higher standard down payment, at an average of 15.2% over the past 12 months, ranking the Denver metro No. 7.

And it’s not just Denver. Colorado’s housing markets have some of the highest average down payments in the country, including Colorado Springs, at 19.2%, and Fort Collins, at 16.1%. But their populations were too small to make our ranking.

Sunset over Denver cityscape

iStock

What stands out about Denver is that its down payments are higher than those of some of its fellow tech hubs on the West Coast. Portland, OR, ranked ninth, with an average down payment of 15%. Denver also ranked higher than Seattle, which has an even hotter home market and tech sector. Seattle ranked 10th, with an average of 13.6%. Sorry Jeff Bezos, you aren’t No. 1 on this ranking!

“If I have a buyer come to me, and all they have is 10% [saved up] and mediocre credit, I won’t even work with them,” says Allan VanInwegen, a real estate agent at HomeSmart Cherry Creek Properties in Denver.

There are a lot of folks here looking for homes. And in a market such as Denver, with tons of bidding wars, a higher down payment can be the thing that keeps you in the game, VanInwegen says.

Markets with the lowest down payment percentages

Phew, enough with the nosebleed down payments! Let’s look at some markets without exorbitant entry fees, shall we?

Trend No. 1: Loan programs keep down payments low

Military jets in the sky and naval ships off the coast are two signs that you’re in Virginia Beach, VA, a metro with one of the biggest military presences in the country.

That means there are lots of U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs home loans, available to active and former members of the military, which do not require down payments. And it shows up in the numbers: The average down payment in Virginia Beach was 6.8% over the past 12 months. That put the metro in our No. 1 spot for the lowest average down payment. Take that, California!

The Nauticus and the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, VA

iStock

“What ends up happening is that people are stationed here and decide to stay. They still have their VA eligibility,” says Barry Jenkins, a real estate agent in Virginia Beach. “That alone drives down the down payment numbers significantly.”

Buyers can also snag Federal Housing Administration mortgages, those government-backed 3.5% home loans. They might be scarce in markets with the highest home prices, but  they’re common here—as they are in other housing markets with the lowest average down payments.

In the case of New Orleans, which ranked eighth lowest, with an average 9.6% down payment, it’s more than just federal loan programs keeping costs down. After Hurricane Katrina, local agencies expanded mortgage programs to help residents stay in the region. For example, the Finance Authority of New Orleans offers grants of 3% to 5% of the home loan to help buyers with down payments.

Trend No. 2: Lower-growth metros = lower down payments

As a housing market gets more competitive, buyers have to make sure their offers stand out—and that often means putting more cash on the table. But those factors don’t apply to some of the places with slower population and housing growth.

The figures put Cleveland at fourth for lowest down payments, with an average of 8.7%, and Rochester, NY, at fifth, with an average of 8.8%. They were two of the slowest-growing largest metros in the country in 2017, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

Both metros have watched plants shut down and manufacturing jobs leave town. And as a result their housing markets took direct hits. But it’s worth noting that downtown areas in both cities have seen a resurgence in recent years.

Cleveland, OH

Douglas Sacha/Getty Images

Many of the other metros that made our ranking have experienced some similar economic woes over the past decades. Or at least they haven’t experienced the same growth as the metros at the top of our list. They include Cincinnati (8.6%) at No. 2, San Antonio (8.6%) at No. 3, Memphis, TN (9.1%) at No. 6, and Columbus, OH (9.2%) at No. 7. Birmingham, AL (9.8%) ranked ninth, and St. Louis, MO (9.8%) came in at 10th.

Trend No. 3: Even in cheaper metros, you’ll need 20% down in some neighborhoods

Before you pack up your things and head to one of these low-low down payment housing metros, keep in mind that all neighborhoods aren’t equal. Buyers still often have to put down around 20% to purchase a home in the most desirable parts of town.

“I’ve had buyers looking for a condo [in downtown New Orleans] thinking they could qualify for the loan. But banks are like, ‘Hey, not for a condo there,’” says Anne Comara, a real estate broker at Engel & Völkers New Orleans. She says in sought-after neighborhoods such as the French Quarter and the Garden District, buyers can’t get a loan without a 20% down payment.

The French Quarter in New Orleans, LA

iStock

In some of the more expensive neighborhoods in the Cincinnati region, such as Hyde Park and Indian Hill, the typical down payment is also closer to 20%, says Cincinnati-area real estate agent Stephanie Sudbrack-Busam of Sibcy Cline Realtors.

“Right now, it’s a very competitive market; multiple offers are common,” Sudbrack-Busam says. With two equal offers, “one is a 5% [down payment] and one is 20%, [sellers] are going to take the higher one that has less risk.”

The post Ante Up! U.S. Housing Markets With the Biggest—and Smallest—Down Payments appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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Ante Up! U.S. Housing Markets With the Biggest—and Smallest—Down Payments

realtor.com;iStock

You’re sick to death of watching your rent checks circle down the drain. Your spouse is jonesing for his or her dream kitchen, complete with quartz counters, a Sub-Zero fridge, and a funky backsplash. Your kids want space to run around—and you desperately want space from them.

Yes, my friends, it’s time to buy a home.

But after some quick number crunching, you find yourself face to face with the most terrifying and seemingly insurmountable part of the process, the Mount Everest of home buying: that towering down payment. It isn’t a pretty picture. Who on Earth has that much money lying around?

Making matters more complicated, not all home buyers feel your pain—or at least, not as deeply. In some parts of the country, a down payment might be greater than your annual salary; in others, you can save for it by packing lunch, skipping daily lattes for a few months, and banking your tax return.

So the realtor.com® data team set out to find where buyers will fork over more than the industry benchmark 20% down payment for homes—and where they’ll need to plunk down only single-digit percentages.

Lenders prefer those gold standard 20% down payments because they ensure that buyers have enough skin in the game—and buyers aspire to them to avoid costly private mortgage insurance, which would allow them to put down less cash on the table. But many buyers also have access to a variety of mortgage programs, such as the Federal Housing Administration loan, which allow those with decent credit scores to put down only 3.5%. The catch: In some markets (often with sky-high home prices), many homes don’t qualify for these programs.

“Coming up with a big-enough down payment is one of the top impediments to purchase,” says Javier Vivas, director of economic research at realtor.com. “It’s really challenging for younger buyers who don’t have deep pockets and haven’t had time to build up that big financial lump sum.”

And did we mention mortgage interest rates are also going up?

“Buyers are cutting back and trying to save, but prices are rising even faster, and the market is overtaking their ability to afford a home,” says Joe Melendez, founder and CEO of ValueInsured, a Texas-based firm that sells down payment insurance to home buyers. “They are continually falling behind.”

Our team analyzed mortgage data to come up with the average percentage down payment in each of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, taking into account those who anted up way above average as well as those who used government-subsidized, low-cost loans. We looked at realtor.com home prices and mortgage data from Optimal Blue, a real estate data firm that specializes in lending records, to come up with our findings. (All-cash purchases, common in blazing-hot markets, were not considered.)

The unfortunate truth: The markets where down payments regularly blow way past the norm are often the ones where homes also cost the most. Looking to own a sweet two-bedroom condo with a view in Manhattan? You’d better get ready to plunk down a half-mil, or much more.

But those old rules of supply and demand aren’t the full story—there are plenty of exceptions across the U.S. Red-hot Washington, DC, didn’t even make our top 10 with an average down payment of just 11.8%—the same as perennially downtrodden Detroit. (DC has lots of veterans who are eligible for low down payment loans.) But the median home price in DC is $425,000, compared with $204,600 in Detroit.

Been saving those pennies? Then let’s take a look at how many you’ll need, and the housing trends that explain them.

Markets with the highest down payment percentages

Let’s start by looking at the housing markets where people are putting down the highest percentage of their home price. We really hope you’re sitting down for this.

Trend No. 1: Saving up for a down payment in California? Good luck

Every spring, a new crop of computer science grads and bright-eyed entrepreneurs make their way to the San Francisco Bay Area. They land great gigs at places such as Google and Twitter, and have all the free snacks and nap pods their hearts could desire. It’s too bad homeownership in San Jose and San Francisco, the twin gateways of Silicon Valley, could still be light-years away.

The average down payment in the San Jose metro was highest on our list, at 23.9%, according to our findings. In the nearby San Francisco metro, which came in second, it was just slightly lower, at 22.6%. That number really sinks in when you consider how much homes in the Bay Area cost. The median listing price is $1.2 million in San Jose and $899,000 in San Francisco.

This all means that you’re going to need to shell out a big chunk of change to buy here. Over the past 12 months, the average down payment in San Jose was $257,000. In San Francisco that figure was $212,000.

Plaza de Cesar Chavez in San Jose, CA

iStock

In fact, San Jose holds the ignominious honor of being the metro with both the highest home prices and the highest down payments in the U.S.—a Bay Area double whammy!

“The competition is very strong. You need at least 20% to be competitive,” says Heidi Mueller, an adviser at Engel & Völkers San Francisco.

So how can a 20- or 30-something save up that amount? Heck, how can anyone?

“A lot of [buyers here are] software engineers, so they get paid well and can make that money on their own,” Mueller says. But she concedes not everyone fits that category, and many are getting pushed farther out.

“A lot of younger buyers are moving over to Oakland,” she notes. Or farther out, to Vallejo or even Sacramento.

But the Bay Area isn’t the only part of California where prices—and down payments—are exploding. In this month’s realtor.com ranking of the hottest real estate markets, 13 of the top 20 housing markets were in the Golden State.

The typical down payment in Los Angeles was 17.9%, ranking third on our list. Meanwhile, in San Diego, where home prices have been climbing steadily, the average down payment was 15.9%. The Southern California city was the fifth-highest in our rankings.

Trend No. 2: New York is even more unique than you thought

There are a few things to learn if you move to New York City. Don’t get into an empty subway car (you’ll never do it twice). Queens has great ethnic eats. Times Square should be avoided like bubonic plague unless you’re seeing “Hamilton” (again). And if you buy a home, you’re going to have to pony up an ungodly amount of cash. Or not, if you’re willing to move to the outskirts of the Big Apple.

Aerial view of city so nice they named it twice

iStock

Still with us?

Manhattan is the most expensive single county in America to buy a home. The median price here is $2 million, and the average down payment is 29.7%. A 40% down payment is hardly unusual, and multimillion-dollar, all-cash offers barely cause a stir. In Brooklyn, the average down payment is 22.4%; in can’t-get-no-respect Staten Island, it’s 21.9%.

So New York City should top our ranking, right? It’s not even close. New Yorkers pay an average down payment of 15.2% in the metro area. That puts the City That Never Sleeps in eighth place on our list.

The average is pulled down because the New York metro stretches far beyond Manhattan and the city. The metropolitan contains counties in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. (Thank the U.S. Census Bureau for that definition.) The median home price for the entire metro is $492,000. And the counties outside the city limits helped to lower that figure. In New Jersey’s Sussex County, the average down payment was—get ready for it—just 9.9%.

Saving enough for a down payment here can be a struggle for even affluent residents, who pay some of the highest rents in the world. Gary Malin with City Habitats says buyers often reach it through a combination of sources: years of savings, help from relatives, and selling off other assets and investments.

But buyers who are open to buying outside the city don’t have to go through such an ordeal.

Alexandra Zendrian, 33, and her husband purchased a home in 2015 for around $370,000 in East Northport on Long Island, about an hour-and-a-half drive from Manhattan. The couple were able to do so with around a 4% down payment, which they saved up over two years by eating out less and putting their raises straight into the bank.

Similar to New York, No. 4–ranked Boston had much higher down payments near downtown. While the metro had an average of 16.3%, that figure was 17.8% in Suffolk County, which contains the city. Meanwhile, farther out in Strafford County, the average was 10.2%.

Trend No. 3: Bidding wars in Denver

After years of booming real estate, the home prices in Denver are about as high as the altitude (or the folks killing time outside the nearest legal marijuana dispensary). The median home price here is now $543,000. And that soaring market has resulted in a higher standard down payment, at an average of 15.2% over the past 12 months, ranking the Denver metro No. 7.

And it’s not just Denver. Colorado’s housing markets have some of the highest average down payments in the country, including Colorado Springs, at 19.2%, and Fort Collins, at 16.1%. But their populations were too small to make our ranking.

Sunset over Denver cityscape

iStock

What stands out about Denver is that its down payments are higher than those of some of its fellow tech hubs on the West Coast. Portland, OR, ranked ninth, with an average down payment of 15%. Denver also ranked higher than Seattle, which has an even hotter home market and tech sector. Seattle ranked 10th, with an average of 13.6%. Sorry Jeff Bezos, you aren’t No. 1 on this ranking!

“If I have a buyer come to me, and all they have is 10% [saved up] and mediocre credit, I won’t even work with them,” says Allan VanInwegen, a real estate agent at HomeSmart Cherry Creek Properties in Denver.

There are a lot of folks here looking for homes. And in a market such as Denver, with tons of bidding wars, a higher down payment can be the thing that keeps you in the game, VanInwegen says.

Markets with the lowest down payment percentages

Phew, enough with the nosebleed down payments! Let’s look at some markets without exorbitant entry fees, shall we?

Trend No. 1: Loan programs keep down payments low

Military jets in the sky and naval ships off the coast are two signs that you’re in Virginia Beach, VA, a metro with one of the biggest military presences in the country.

That means there are lots of U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs home loans, available to active and former members of the military, which do not require down payments. And it shows up in the numbers: The average down payment in Virginia Beach was 6.8% over the past 12 months. That put the metro in our No. 1 spot for the lowest average down payment. Take that, California!

The Nauticus and the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, VA

iStock

“What ends up happening is that people are stationed here and decide to stay. They still have their VA eligibility,” says Barry Jenkins, a real estate agent in Virginia Beach. “That alone drives down the down payment numbers significantly.”

Buyers can also snag Federal Housing Administration mortgages, those government-backed 3.5% home loans. They might be scarce in markets with the highest home prices, but  they’re common here—as they are in other housing markets with the lowest average down payments.

In the case of New Orleans, which ranked eighth lowest, with an average 9.6% down payment, it’s more than just federal loan programs keeping costs down. After Hurricane Katrina, local agencies expanded mortgage programs to help residents stay in the region. For example, the Finance Authority of New Orleans offers grants of 3% to 5% of the home loan to help buyers with down payments.

Trend No. 2: Lower-growth metros = lower down payments

As a housing market gets more competitive, buyers have to make sure their offers stand out—and that often means putting more cash on the table. But those factors don’t apply to some of the places with slower population and housing growth.

The figures put Cleveland at fourth for lowest down payments, with an average of 8.7%, and Rochester, NY, at fifth, with an average of 8.8%. They were two of the slowest-growing largest metros in the country in 2017, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

Both metros have watched plants shut down and manufacturing jobs leave town. And as a result their housing markets took direct hits. But it’s worth noting that downtown areas in both cities have seen a resurgence in recent years.

Cleveland, OH

Douglas Sacha/Getty Images

Many of the other metros that made our ranking have experienced some similar economic woes over the past decades. Or at least they haven’t experienced the same growth as the metros at the top of our list. They include Cincinnati (8.6%) at No. 2, San Antonio (8.6%) at No. 3, Memphis, TN (9.1%) at No. 6, and Columbus, OH (9.2%) at No. 7. Birmingham, AL (9.8%) ranked ninth, and St. Louis, MO (9.8%) came in at 10th.

Trend No. 3: Even in cheaper metros, you’ll need 20% down in some neighborhoods

Before you pack up your things and head to one of these low-low down payment housing metros, keep in mind that all neighborhoods aren’t equal. Buyers still often have to put down around 20% to purchase a home in the most desirable parts of town.

“I’ve had buyers looking for a condo [in downtown New Orleans] thinking they could qualify for the loan. But banks are like, ‘Hey, not for a condo there,’” says Anne Comara, a real estate broker at Engel & Völkers New Orleans. She says in sought-after neighborhoods such as the French Quarter and the Garden District, buyers can’t get a loan without a 20% down payment.

The French Quarter in New Orleans, LA

iStock

In some of the more expensive neighborhoods in the Cincinnati region, such as Hyde Park and Indian Hill, the typical down payment is also closer to 20%, says Cincinnati-area real estate agent Stephanie Sudbrack-Busam of Sibcy Cline Realtors.

“Right now, it’s a very competitive market; multiple offers are common,” Sudbrack-Busam says. With two equal offers, “one is a 5% [down payment] and one is 20%, [sellers] are going to take the higher one that has less risk.”

The post Ante Up! U.S. Housing Markets With the Biggest—and Smallest—Down Payments appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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                                                                  NOVEMBER         2017

 *****Bill Murray has been singing at Carnegie Hall promoting the new album with Jan Vogler and friends.

*****A beautiful eastern black rhino was born on October 2nd. There are only a few hundred left in Africa.

*****NASA just found 20 new habitable planets.

*****Loving , loving ,loving At Home with Amy Sedaris. Great guest stars and Von Mueller’s: The official maple syrup of the Third Reich and other humor of that ilk. It is like Pee Wees playhouse, Mister Rogers, Martha Stewart, local DIY shows, SNL and SCTV all rolled into one. Go Amy!!

*****The World Series did not include the Cubs. Astros V Dodgers.

*****The first African American full time Nascar driver since 1971, Darrell Wallace Jr. will drive for Richard Petty.

*****Some drunks at a wedding reception in Illinois jumped the fence at Wildlife Prairie Park to chase bison. The newlyweds had already left.

*****San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz called out Scary clown for his slow response to the Puerto Rico disaster.

*****Coming to Broadway this fall: The Cher Show!!

*****Robin Thede has a new show on BET called The Rundown.

*****So, Tim Allen was whining on Norm Macdonald’s program about Last Man Standing being cancelled. Allen said, ”There is nothing more dangerous to Hollywood than a funny likeable conservative.” What?? I could not even get thru one episode of that show. I think he was damn lucky that thing stayed on the air as long as it did. Friends and I were shocked whenever we would notice the show was still going.

***** Trump released demands to overhaul the green card system by hiring 10 thousand more immigration officers and more money to build the wall.

*****OJ Simpson is out of prison and his first meal was at McDonald’s. That is so fucking American.** Speaking of the arches: Mulan sauce.. that was a thing?

*****On the great new show White Famous, I believe I saw Jamie Foxx’s balls under that skirt!!

*****Stephen Colbert and Ted Danson share an ancestor. The same is true of Mary Steenburgen and William H. Macy.

*****Ines Rau, a French model is Playboys first transgender playmate.

*****Things sure exploded on The View because of the phone call Trump made about a fallen soldier. Rep. Frederica Wilson claims that he did not mention La David Johnson’s name and told his widow that he knew what he was getting into. **He seems to have no sensitivity but then we knew that. He is the Greg Stillson of 2017!

*****What a great couple of weeks on the late night shows. Thank you for Conan and his horse story on Colbert. Thanks for Paul and Dave and Biff on Kimmel. ** Kimmel’s son Billy is getting ready for a second surgery and there will be some guest hosts with Shaq, Dave Grohl, Channing Tatum and Jennifer Lawrence.

*****David S. Pumpkins now has an animated show and has really become a thing.

*****Dale Earnhardt Jr. and wife are having a baby.

*****It looks like the Czech Republic now elected a leader just like Trump in their choice of Andrej Babis.

*****Russian sanctions have still not been implemented and the deadline was October 1. Hey scary clown: Just signing the measure means nothing!!

*****Diane Lake, a young former member of Manson’s family wrote a book about letting go of Charlie. She promoted ‘One of the Family’ on Dr. Phil.

*****So.. It seems that the prototypes of the wall are near the Mexican border and it is drawing gawkers from across the border. So.. The wall to prevent illegals is actually drawing them to the site to check it out. Priceless.

*****Judas Priest is going on tour.

*****Mark Wahlberg hopes God will forgive him for Boogie Nights. C’mon own your fucking art.. You were lucky to be in suck a brilliant film.

*****Dave Letterman received his Mark Twain prize for American humor on October 22. He now claims, “I’m now the most humorous person in the world.”

*****East Peoria’s Joe Girardi is out as the NY Yankees manager.

*****Her it comes: The final season of Major Crimes.. This is a tough one, what quality acting there is on that show.

*****Days alert: It breaks my heart that they brought back Dr. Rolf back and immediately killed him off. At least he was in Abigail’s dream and boy was he hairy!!Please let him have a twin like on Night Court.** Why are characters heading to Memphis? Will they meet with someone who can help answer questions about Will Horton? Will Paul find out the truth before anyone else and will he keep it to himself? If Will is alive, is he the same person or has he went thru big changes? ** Rumors are out there that EJ could be headed back..fingers crossed.

*****Texas inmates donated $53,863 for hurricane Harvey relief.

*****Has Mueller filed his first charges in the Russia investigation?

*****Trump’s approach to Iran seems to be undoing all of Obama’s efforts. This, of course is the ultimate goal of the Trumpers so good news for them. Trumps use of the term ’Arabian gulf’ has helped to unify the diplomatic and revolutionary sides of the Islamic republic.

*****Too Funny to Fail takes on the subject of the failure of The Dana Carvey Show.

*****Robert Plant has a new album, ‘Carry Fire’ which he will support with a 2018 tour.

*****Congress did not reauthorize the healthcare program for kids so 9 million kids are booted off healthcare.

*****Bob’s Burgers did a great episode about brunch drunks. Oh that is such a thing!!

*****The new administration just loves pollution. Just one more thing to add to the ever growing list of climate change dismantling is Scott Pruitt helping to get rid of the clean power plan. I am sure their corporate polluter friends and Obama haters are pretty happy about that.

*****Scarlett Johansen and Colin Jost made their first public appearance as a couple at an SNL after party.

*****Word is that they have found Paul Revere’s outhouse and they are examining its contents.

*****I’m so glad that Curb is back!!! J.B. Smoove is killing it as usual.

*****Roman Polanski has a new film, ‘Based on a true story’ which stars his wife Emmanuelle Seigner.

*****Metamora High school in Illinois is reeling from a racist video put out by some members of the football team.  The entire school system of Metamora which includes Riverview and Germantown hills was closed October 3 due to a mass shooting scare.

*****The newest Eastwood film is the 15:17 to Paris.

*****Facebook had to turn over about 3,000 ads for inspection. Facebook employees offered themselves up to the Trump and Clinton campaigns. Only Trump took them up on it. Google and Twitter also embedded themselves in his campaign.  The staff used all they were taught to put bogus Hillary info out there and penetrate the rural vote.  They pushed a lot of buttons with infrastructure in middle America. The platform churned out 50 to 60 thousand ads a day.  By pinpointing the things you care about most , they seemed to use the trickery well because it worked.

*****They found the tomb of Santa in Turkey.

*****Nick Cage has his own candy bar in Japan.

*****Chris Elliott is on the Last man on earth. Thank you God!

*****The country talked about guns for a few days again after the Vegas shooting. No license or registration is needed in Vegas. Machine guns are perfectly legal. As saner people have mentioned: The GOP insists that the Vegas shooter’s gun arsenal is a right but medical treatment for his 500 + victims is merely a privelage. Well put Desirina Boskovich.** The American college of physicians says that gun violence is a public health issue and calls for banning automatic and semi -automatic weapons.** 78% of Americans don’t own guns.**Wayne LaPierre was on Face the Nation to reinforce that anti -gun people are elites. The only sane thing he said was that we need to enforce the laws we have in place better to start with.

*****Sen. Bob Corker is ranting about Trump and the ‘adult day care center’ we call the White house.

***** Oh my God.. Rick Springfield is on AHS. Whoa! Sometimes that show just amazes you with its direction. Hell yea.

*****Brett Ratner and Jared Leto will bring Hugh Hefner to the big screen.

*****Jedediah Bila has left the View and has been replaced by Meghan McCain.

*****Colin Kaepernick consulted a Navy seal about his peaceful protest. The Seal told him that he didn’t see a problem with the kneeling at the games. He found it more respectful than sitting. People seem very divided on this issue  but this country has always disagreed on their version of patriotism. Wearing the flag s disrespectful, kneeling during our anthem is not. Perhaps the players should hold AR 15’s instead of taking a knee. Our President does not seem to have a problem with protesters showing up armed.**Pence made a big show of walking out of the game after the kneel. Only loves the team if they think as he does. It was an expensive stunt.

*****California has been experiencing the biggest wildfires in state history.

***** Hmm. I see a movie with Liam Neeson , Clint Eastwood and Kurt Russell.

***** The Pioneer Woman speaks of a granny named Inee.

*****So, I rarely watch Fallon but that Hillary show was awkward and special. The respect and beautiful words from the female writers and Miley brought tears.

*****Can’t wait to see Suburbicon.. looks fab!!

*****350 barrels of oil were spilled in the gulf of Mexico.

*****Reporters were arrested in St. Louis as they interviewed demonstrators. This is in violation of their first amendment.

*****Anti- abortion advocate Rep. Tim Murphy had a bad week as congress was trying to pass a bill that would ban and bring criminal charges against those who have abortions after 20 weeks. His mistress Shannon Edwards claims that he asked her to get an abortion but it turned out the pregnancy was just a scare.  He now says that it is his staff who wrote the pro- life rhetoric he spewed. He has resigned.**Scary clown wants to broaden the rules to let more employees deny birth control coverage.

*****The Rolling Stones have 18 recordings pulled together for On Air. The collection of 1963- 1965 BBC show clips were never commercially released.

***** Harvey Weinstein? Secret employees? Everybody knew?  WTF?  Obviously we have some extreme self indulgence and mental health issues here. Why can’t powerful men control themselves? **Many of the liberal donations he made have been donated to charity.** The list keeps growing with thanks to Ronan Farrow and his exhaustive work in the story on The New Yorker. Weinstein’s wife has left him so he is in for some shit. ** More women are coming forward about other powerful men as well like R Kelly, Mark Helprin and James Toback.** When the movie is made of the Harvey scandal, I hope they cast Jeff Garland in the title role.**In the wake of the Weinstein tsunami there have been protests at public gatherings for other men with pasts .A retrospective for Roman Polanski  did not turn out so well.

*****Meet the Press and the AFI are having  film fest. Look for the film Heroin(e).

*****Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were indicted for hiding foreign bank accounts, money laundering, false statements, conspiracy against the U.S. just to name a few. There is now a viral video with the music from To Russia with love that shows Trump and various staff being taken in by the FBI. I teared up.. Could it happen??** George Papadopolous has pled guilty.

*****Kathy Griffin is slamming Harvey Levin and Andy Cohen. She claims that Levin was egging people on about her Trump head stunt. Her Mother in a retirement community and her sister dyeing of cancer were receiving death threats. Cohen who produced her ‘My life on the D-list” is taking over her New Year duties on CNN.  Her claim about him is he often tried to get her do coke and he is generally an ass.

*****Actor Anthony Rapp claims Kevin Spacey was sexually aggressive with him when he was 14 and Spacey was in his 20’s.  Kevin denied and apologized and came out.

***** You must check out Denis O’Hare as Edgar Allan Poe on PBS American Masters.

*****Corey Feldman wants to expose the pedophiles of Hollywood for 10 mil.

*****Does it bother anybody else that those on cooking shows never seem to use spatulas to scrape the bowl? They pour and move on.

*****Check out the Comedy Get Down with Cedric the Entertainer, Eddie Griffin, DL Hughley, Charlie Murphy and George Lopez.

*****Larry Flynt is offering 10m million for info leading to the impeachment of scary clown.

*****Ben Stiller takes on the 2015 prison escape of David Sweet and Richard Matt. The Showtime production will star Benecio Del Toro, Paul Dano and Patricia Arquette

*****Jemele Hill is back from her suspension form ESPN because of her tweets. Let the girl stand up for her beliefs.

*****Atlanta has voted to decriminalize weed, now if they can get the rest of Georgia on board!

***** So it seems the boy scouts are going to now admit girls.

*****It has been nice to see Charley Pride every now and again lately.

*****Hooray!! Jessica Tuck is on General Hospital.. Oh, How I have missed you Jessica Tuck.. Where have you been??

*****A report says that white nationalists are flocking to get their DNA tested  to prove their white heritage with some mixed results. Of course they often find they have African ancestry or other  blood they may not want to admit is running thru them. Duh!

*****Nellie (Cornell Iral Haynes Jr.)  was arrested for rape on his tour bus at a Wal Mart.

*****Chicago pastor Robbie Wilkerson and his wife Tasha were sentenced to 37 months and 12 months respectively for defrauding a summer food program for impoverished kids.

*****The 207 Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.

*****Steven Avery of Making a Murderer has been denied a new trial.

*****Roseanne Cash is getting some backlash for her comments. Cash wrote, ”The NRA funds domestic terrorism.” Her life has been filled with threats because of her views with smears like, ”your Dad would be ashamed of you.” Some ‘fans’ obviously did not understand her Father.

*****The White house thinks NBC should apologize after their report about Rex Tillerson threatening to resign after clashes with Trump. The scuttlebutt is that Pence intervened. Word is that Tillerson called Trump a fucking moron. Rex says he never considered leaving.

*****Senate intelligence can’t seem to get anywhere on the Trump dossier because everyone refuses to cooperate.  The committee has reported they are still interviewing and going thru documents. The investigation is now in exploratory mode. They do know that Russia is currently active in meddling in our election process and our vote tallies were accurate. Republican members of the bipartisan panel are praising the Obama administration for their complete cooperation.

*****Marilyn Manson had to cancel 9 shows after being crushed by a stage prop!

*****R.I.P. Tom Petty, the victims of the Rt. 91 country music fest in Las Vegas, S.I. Newhouse Jr., Bunny Sigler, Ralphie May, Bob Schiller, Fats Domino, John F. Dunsworth, Robert Guillaume, Gord Downie, Richard Wilbur, Sima Wall, Jack Bannon and victims of the NY Halloween attack.

Why mobile apps will always end up in the big bucket of fail without the cloud

Mobile apps are cloud natives — if your company is building apps with on-premise back ends, you’re going to fail

If there’s one class of workload that stands out as ripe for cloud, it’s mobile. For start-ups and Fortune 500 companies alike, it’s the perfect use case for a full public cloud solution. Yet it’s surprising how many large companies still continue to develop apps as extensions of in-house architecture.

Today we’ll look at why this Failure Pattern is doomed from the start and how you can avoid making these mistakes in the first place. Contrary to what you might hear, it’s still true that everyone wants to build an app. It’s also true that many companies don’t have a clue about what’s happening with app platforms and lack the skills to be successful.

Opposable digits are required.

Mobile apps are different — really different

There are a few things to keep in mind when developing customer-facing mobile apps:

Mobile apps are not like other software. You have little control of distribution once they are launched in the store, the ratings system will quickly highlight a dud, and the user’s expectations are sky-high in terms of performance and capabilities.

Coding mobile apps is hard, debugging can be even harder since you never meet the end user, and for the most part the tools your developers need to be successful are mobile-specific and cloud-based.

Mobile app users have been trained by the best Silicon Valley companies to expect a constant stream of high quality updates. This demands true agility in your development stack, without which the app will grow stale and wither away.

You will have two dev teams because somebody in IT thought cross-mobile platform development systems were a bad idea. Now this is the only project in your company with two teams developing the exact same thing (one for Android and one for iOS). While many IT Managers think Xamarin is a stomach ulcer medication, it can really help here.

You will have no idea what works in the app for your users until you release. This means the functionality will be changing rapidly and you’ll need a platform that can still function reliably while everything changes.

Everyone you’ll meet thinks they’re an expert in mobile apps because they are in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram between ‘Owning a smartphone’ and ‘Having a son/daughter/nephew/friend who writes apps in their bedroom’. Just remember, when everyone you know gives you their 2 cents, that’s still only 68 cents.

So are you still building that mobile app with no cloud? Good luck on that big bucket of Fail.

And don’t call me Shirley.

Your bad IT is normally invisible to your customer

As companies get larger, their internal technology tends to resemble a tight ball of elastic bands as a critical part of a giant Rube Goldberg machine. It’s simultaneously laughable and terrifying watching decades of kluges jammed together powering the whole thing, waiting to get someone fired when they break it.

If you look at something as relatively simple as mobile ecommerce, it opens an infrastructural Pandora’s Box, which becomes especially obvious when you compare mobile ordering to non-mobile ordering from a customer perspective. For non-mobile…

Purchasing without mobile hides all your terrible technology

A customer walks into the retail store and has no idea what a Frankensteinian disgrace the supporting technology really is. The customer buys a product and leaves happy. “I love this store,” she says.

A customer calls an ordering hotline and has no idea the sales person has to log into 10 different systems to place an order and the fulfillment system only works when nobody uses the toaster in the break room. The sales person will talk about the weather, write down the order and credit card number on a piece of paper if there are any problems, and handle the problem after the customer hangs up… happy. “She was so helpful,” he says.

A customer goes online and doesn’t realize the Shopify front-end sends an order via fax machine to a warehouse that isn’t even connected to the rest of the company. The customer places order and leaves, happy. “Wow, this website was fast,” they all think.

In this non-mobile landscape, it doesn’t really matter if the inventory isn’t real-time, nothing works reliably and systems don’t talk because the company internalizes the chaos and hides its technology shame. When it’s busy in the real world, the parking lot at the store and the size of the call center are the natural bottlenecks that tell customers to try again later.

When you introduce mobile — this all changes

The customer opens your app, expects to browse inventory in real time, place an order and receive a confirmation instantly.

The customer opens app to modify order, get tracking numbers and expects accurate ordering and delivery information throughout. They expects your app to provide timely notifications for relevant alerts about the order throughout

A mobile customer goes to the website and expects all of the above functionality, plus completely in-sync performance, to the point where even the shopping carts across mobile and web need to have the same items at the same prices.

The customer visits your mobile app on Black Friday and expects the same performance as any other day.

In each of these cases, previously hidden issues surface directly on the app if it’s just a bolt-on to the problematic infrastructure. I can’t stress enough how this approach creates a window into what’s wrong with your IT.

So when you wake up one day and find yourself facing a mobile app project, initially you might think it’s like the website but with a different front-end. But once you start thinking through the use cases from a customer perspective, that’s when you’ll break out in a cold sweat and realize the project is about fixing your company’s entire IT disaster. Then you’ll either start looking at the cloud or updating your LinkedIn profile.

Standard defensive posture for Mobile Product Managers.

Mobile apps expose the cobwebs, Band-Aids and embarrassing secrets in your technology stack directly to your customer.

Cloud To The Rescue

Describing mobile apps as complicated is like calling a drowning person ‘wet’. In many ways they represent the pinnacle of what can be delivered technically in an IT environment. So no pressure.

If I were writing an enterprise-scale customer-facing mobile app today, I would start with AWS Mobile or Google Firebase. Both of these extraordinarily rich platforms can solve many of the headaches in mobile development. Both have services that will let you solve:

Authentication: let’s users log in seamlessly, integrate with social sign-ons and identify fraud detection along the way.

Messaging: email, SMS, push notifications, integration with Google Now and other smart alerting systems.

Cross-platform development: rich SDKs let you build identical functionality across iOS and Android (you knew about writing everything twice, right?).

Analytics: collect app analytics across millions of device and process at cloud-scale into real-time dashboards.

Scalability: fully managed services that provision and auto-scale underlying hardware when your users get busy and the install base explodes.

Deployment pipelines: allows your developers to write, stage and deploy different parts of the application in a robust, repeatable way.

Testing: device farms that run your apps on hundreds of real devices and collect bugs, crashes and performance issues.

… and the list goes on. Any one of these bullet points would be a nightmare to tackle using on-premise approaches and some would be flat-out impossible. I know, I know, if you had an unlimited budget and thousands of engineers, you could ultimately build all of this yourself. But why build a coal power plant for your toaster when you can just use a power outlet?

Both AWS and Google have a suite of highly affordable world-class services for mobile infrastructure. You can’t do a better job given the time and money available.

Who needs servers anyway?

Amazon Lambda and Google Cloud Functions are two examples of what’s called serverless computing and there is some really compelling goodness here. This is the flying car to your IT’s horse and cart and will likely soon be how all web and mobile development will be done in the future. It’s also impossible to do on-premise so for all the IT folks who think they’re doing private cloud by running VMware, bubble burst.

At a basic level, all any computer system really does is take some input, do something, and produce output. Servers and operating systems hide this fact and give us something to play with and maintain but from a business or application standpoint, they don’t create any actual value. When a user is putting his dog-face on in Snapchat, he doesn’t care if you just resized from a m1.medium instance to an m1.large, or if your dev team just updated their CentOS version. His primary concern is the AddDogface function provided uniquely by the service.

In the serverless world, we focus only writing those functions and nothing else. Serverless affords us the opportunity to complete ignore the infrastructure, pretend it doesn’t exist, and safely assume it will run when needed. What on earth does this mean for mobile? Let’s geek out for a second at this social message app example using AWS Lambda:

Serverless: all scale, no fail.

The beautiful things here might not be immediately apparent:

Whether you have one user or one billion, this will work. The design focuses on functional flow and logic.

You only pay for what you use so the cost scales with your app’s success (there are reported cases of infrastructure costs dropping by 90% with this model).

It’s extremely simple and flexible. Simple and flexible work well for on-time agile mobile products. Complex and fragile do not.

Developers are happiest when writing functionality related to their app and not troubleshooting infrastructure. Trust me on this one.

Serverless infrastructure diagrams are just about the only IT architectures where every component, arrow and dotted line is directly related to your app.

“We’ll never need a mobile app.”

Mobile apps are difficult, unavoidable, challenging, business-changing, enlightening, frustrating, remarkable, fragile and mercurial. Even if your company isn’t producing customer mobile software today, it will be tomorrow.

By any metric, customers are turning to mobile devices ever more often, and it’s only a matter of time before you’ll need a comprehensive mobile game plan. Mobile is profoundly changing the way customers (and employees) interact with companies and there are complex issues to handle.

Cloud solutions give you the best opportunity to deal with the most onerous problems here. It’s hard enough to build a useful, fast, good-looking and functional application that will delight your demanding customers without dealing with issues around scaling, security and agility that have been largely figured out for you. Now go build your awesome serverless mobile app!

Did you enjoy this? If so, click the heart icon! Do you have questions? Don’t be shy, send me a tweet or comment!

In the next installment, I’ll be looking at how cloud services can apply to some common business applications.

Why mobile apps will always end up in the big bucket of fail without the cloud was originally published in A Cloud Guru on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Arplis - News: 20 Fun Ways To Pass the Time When You’re Stuck at Home

martin-dm/Getty Images

The coronavirus outbreak has forced millions of people worldwide to practice social distancing and hunker down at home. With no certain end date in sight, though, you may be looking around your humble abode wondering how on earth you will pass all the time.

If you’re craving a break from pandemic panic, check out this silver linings playbook of all the fun things you can do while holed up at home.

Think about it: How often do we pine to slow down our lives and spend more time puttering around the house? Now’s your chance. Embrace it!

Here are 20 fun things you can do at home that’ll make time fly.

1. Create your own pajama lounge

With all that’s going on, there may be times when you hanker for the comfort of your pajamas all day long. Luckily, pajama lounges—dedicated casual hangout spaces—are a real thing. Create your own in a low-traffic area with cozy accessories, as well as books and games. Here are more pajama lounge ideas to get you started.

2. Finally master folding a fitted sheet

Organizing your closets is the perfect at-home activity, and among the top mysteries for many people is how to fold a fitted sheet: How do you fold something with no corners? We promise your linen closet will never be the same after you follow these two-minute instructions on how to perfectly fold a fitted sheet.

3. Update your media center

Do you still have a massive collection of DVDs and CDs that make your media center look like an outdated mess? It’s time to box up that collection to donate (at a later time). Here’s more living room organization advice.

4. Throw a ‘Netflix party’

Miss going to movies with friends? Host a “Netflix party.” There’s a Chrome extension you can download that lets you watch Netflix with friends and chat on the side about that B-horror movie you’re watching together. Bonus: You can pause for snack and bathroom breaks.

5. Work out for free

Lest you become a couch potato, Planet Fitness is holding classes—or “work-ins”—for 20 minutes or less on Facebook, live daily at 7 p.m. EST. If you miss a class, no problem! You’ll be able to go back and replay at your leisure. Here are more home gym ideas.

6. Spend 15 minutes in your bathroom

Organizing, that is! Many of us are sharing bathrooms all day and night with a family member or three. Keep everyone’s sanity by clearing off the countertops, which makes them easier to sanitize. Here are more fast bathroom organization tips.

7. Grow some greenery

You can order seeds and starter planters online, such as the AeroGarden Black Harvest gourmet herb seed kit ($99, Amazon). Watching sprouts appear and grow will mark your days in a whole new way.

8. Tour a museum

Many museums may be closed, especially those in big cities, but some are offering free virtual tours. You can walk the Guggenheim’s spiral staircase in New York City via Google Street View, jet off to Paris to see the works of Monet and Cézanne at the Musée d’Orsay, or hit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and many more. Not a bad way to broaden your mind from the comfort of your couch.

9. Conquer your junk drawer

We could all use some small victories right about now. These quick junk drawer organization ideas will turn the chaos of loose pens, batteries, and rubber bands into calming order.

Photo by Farm Fresh Therapy 

10. Optimize your pantry

Now that you’re stocked up on staples, make sure to keep them organized. For starters, use an easy-to-reach basket to hold individually wrapped bags of snacks, so your kids won’t tear apart the pantry looking for them. Here’s more on how to organize a pantry that will inspire great meals.

11. Create a memory board

An old bedspring-as-memory-board holds to-dos, pictures and keepsakes.

Okio B Designs

If you have an old crib or toddler bedspring gathering dust in your basement, you can transform it with just some paint. Once it’s dry, use clothespins to attach photos and memorabilia. Then check out other ways to upcycle nursery items.

12. Clean brushes and combs

Clean is in! So sprinkle a tablespoon of baking soda in a bowl of warm water, and soak your hairbrushes and combs. Rinse them and air dry. Here are more spring cleaning tips using supplies in the pantry.

13. Tame your sports equipment

To corral mitts, helmets, and balls of every size that may be in the way when they’re not in use, hang a mesh laundry bag on the back of a door, or use a hook on the wall of your garage. If that sounds satisfying, check out these other garage organization hacks.

14. Give your soil a snack

Now is a great time to enrich your garden soil as you prep your yard for spring by raking in some household items you may have on hand from eating in more. Coffee grounds will improve soil drainage, aeration, and water retention. Putting crumbled shells into planting holes helps prevent tomato blossom-end rot, and the shards repel garden pests.

15. Make a gilded honey bear vase

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My cat got ahold of one of my succulents and he's lookin' pretty measly now, so I transplanted him into this lil' honey bear planter that I made 🍯🐻🌵We'll see if the little guy pulls through! 🤞🏻 . . . #abmplantlady #honeybeardiy #succulents #succulentlove #thatsdarling #flashesofdelight #succulentinspo #succulentlover #cactiobsession #copperspraypaint #spraypaintdiy #diyproject #easydiy #mycreativebiz #thehappynow #borntocreate #howihue #honeybear #craftproject #succulentdiy #succulentplanter #succulentplanterdiy #girldoit

A post shared by Boujee Dupez (@boujeedupez) on Jul 9, 2017 at 5:47pm PDT

Are you squeezing honey out of a bottle in the shape of a cute honey bear? Turn it into an adorable vase with some spray paint. Or let your children finger paint clean honey bears as a fun project. Here are some other ways to reuse items in your home.

16. Give grout new life in minutes

You may be eyeing your bathroom tile, now that you are home more. Luckily, getting mildewed grout to look like new doesn’t require any special skills—just some elbow grease and equal parts vinegar, baking soda, and bleach. Here are other DIY bathroom projects.

17. Tame your cords

Many people are thankfully relying on technology to stay connected. Give your jumble of cords some love by untangling and labeling them. Start by unplugging everything from the power strip, and then wind your way back to the device. Once you find where each cord belongs, add an identifying label. Here’s more on how to organize cords.

18. Organize craft supplies with Mason jars

Photo by Decor Steals 

With millions of kids at home from school, art supplies like markers and crayons may have exploded all over living room floors. So corral small art gear into pretty Mason jars. (You can also run a few pasta jars through the dishwasher instead.) Check out more ways how to prevent kids toys from taking over your house.

19. Go through your kids’ artwork with them

You may finally have the time to go through your children’s artwork to find the pieces that you felt didn’t pass the fridge test and … yes, throw it away. If you’re on the fence, photograph or scan it to save it digitally indefinitely. Check out more ways to get your kids’ room under control.

20. Enjoy a virtual happy hour

Fight feelings of isolation by kicking back at a virtual happy hour or tea time with friends. All you need is the video conferencing app Zoom—or to set up a Google Hangout—and your drink of choice. Cheers!

The post 20 Fun Ways To Pass the Time When You’re Stuck at Home appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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