#because Suffolk is a creep

[nonbinaryeddiekaspbrak]

ek playlist sentence starters part four

info: sentence starters from my eddie kaspbrak playlist; part one part two part three :

come on mess me up - cub sport

"we were walking on sparkles street growing up real fast"

"i left it behind pretty quickly, still the farthest thing from pretty"

"i fell in love with avoiding problems"

"we were riding on smith street we were right on track"

"i left it behind without sinking, they all said i wasn't thinking"

"but i want this, you know i want this"

"so come on, mess me up"

"you can break me, if you'll still take me"

"if you'll let me be one of the ones you say you won't forget"

"i was stumbling on suffolk throwing up real hard"

"inside was kind of misty, i knew none of the history"

lovesong - the cure

"you make me feel like i am home again"

"you make me feel like i am whole again"

"whenever i'm alone with you, you make me feel like i am young again"

"you make me feel like i am fun again"

"however far away, i will always love you"

"however long i stay, i will always love you"

"whatever words i say, i will always love you"

"i will always love you"

"you make me feel like i am free again"

"whenever i'm alone with you, you make me feel like i am clean again"

sedated - hozier

"just a little rush, babe"

"just a little hush, babe; my veins are busy"

"my heart's in atrophy"

"any way to distract and sedate"

"adding shadows to the walls of the cave"

"you and i, nursing on a poison that never stung"

"we are deaf, we are numb"

"free and young and we can feel none of it"

"something isn't right, babe"

"i keep catching little words, but the meaning's thin"

"i'm somewhere outside my life, babe"

"i keep scratching, but somehow i can't get in"

"so we're slaves to any semblance of touch"

"lord, we should quit, but we love it too much"

"darlin' don't you stand there watching"

"won't you come and save me from it?"

"darlin' don't you join in"

"you're supposed to drag me away from it"

better son or daughter - rilo kiley

"sometimes in the morning i am petrified and can't move"

"the weight is crushing down on my lungs, i know i can't breathe"

"hope someone will save me this time"

"your mother's still calling you insane and high, swearing it's different this time"

"you tell her to give in to the demons that posses her and that god never blessed her insides"

"then you hang up the phone, and feel badly for upsetting things"

"crawl back into bed to dream of a time when your heart was open wide"

" and you loved things just because"

"sometimes when you're on, you're really fucking on"

"your friends, they sing along and they love you"

"the lows are so extreme that the good seems fucking cheap"

"it teases you for weeks in its absence"

"you'll fight and you'll make it through"

"you'll fake it if you have to"

"you'll show up for work with a smile"

"you'll be better and you'll be smarter and more grown up and a better daughter or son and a real good friend"

"you'll be awake, you'll be alert, you'll be positive though it hurts"

"you'll laugh and embrace all your friends"

"you'll be a real good listener"

"you'll be honest, you'll be brave"

"you'll be handsome and you'll be beautiful"

"you'll be happy"

"your ship may be coming in, you're weak but not giving in"

"you'll fight it, you'll go out fighting all of them"

i wanna be yours - arctic monkeys

"i wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathin' in your dust"

"i wanna be your ford cortina, i will never rust"

"if you like your coffee hot, let me be your coffee pot"

"you call the shots, babe"

"i just wanna be yours"

"secrets i have held in my heart are harder to hide than i thought"

"maybe i just wanna be yours"

"let me be your 'leccy meter, an' i'll never run out"

"let me be the portable heater that you'll get cold without"

nightmare - set it off

"they're coming, creeping from the corner"

"all i know is that i don't feel safe"

"i feel the tapping on my shoulder"

"i turn around in an alarming state"

"but am i losing my mind? i really think so"

"not a creature in sight"

"what you don't know is that my breathing gets faster and so does my heartbeat"

"i wish this was over, i wish that this was a dream"

"i created a monster, a hell within my head"

"with nowhere to go, i'm out on my own"

"i'm so scared"

"i created a monster, a beast inside my brain"

"awake me from my nightmare"

"wait, something doesn't feel right"

"no, something seems wrong"

"i've been feeling this way for far too long"

"oh that's too bad"

"as my vision gets blurred, my skin's getting colder"

"appearing young, while i'm growing older"

"i collapse to the floor and scream can anybody save me from myself?"

"walking to the ledge, i find myself looking down"

"frozen still with fear, now i'm plunging to the ground"

"if only i knew how to fly"

"i could convince myself this isn't my time to die"

"insead i'm rocketing faster and faster, i dive-bomb to the floor"

"when my body crashes to the pavement, i'm right back where i was before"

gives you hell - all american rejects

"i wake up every evenin' with a big smile on my face"

"it never feels outta place"

"you're still probably working at a 9 to 5 pace"

"i wonder how bad that tastes"

"when you see my face, hope it gives you hell"

"when you walk my way, hope it gives you hell"

"now where's you picket fence, love?"

"where's that shiny car?"

"you never seemed so tense, love"

"i've never seen you fall so hard"

"do you know where you are?"

"truth be told, i miss you"

"truth be told, i'm lyin'"

"if you find a man that's worth a damn and treats you well then he's a fool"

"i hope it gives you hell"

"tomorrow, you'll be thinking to yourself yeah, where did it all go wrong?"

"the list goes on and on"

"now, you'll never see what you've done to me"

"you can take back your memories, they're no good to me"

"here's all your lies, you can look me in the eyes with the sad, sad look that you wear so well"

#it #eddie kaspbrak #reddie #writing prompt #writing prompts #story prompts #dialogue prompt #prompt list #sentence starter #sentence starters #rp starter #it movie #it 2017 #it 2019 #the losers club #music #music prompts #💛

[fablewritesnonsense]

Strawberry and green apple!

This is going to be along one because I have a bunch of OCs, but I'll keep it to the Nuclear Family Narrators

🍓 [STRAWBERRY] How do they feel about 'cute' things?

Gin: Loves them! It hasn't come up yet because she hasn't done much scavving so far in the fic, but she's got a soft spot for dolls and stuffed and those kitten paintings 😂

Richard: Neutral. Neither here nor there on it, but if he sees a stuffy he'll probably grab it for one of the girls.

Asher: Also neutral. If they're out scavving they're gonna push them aside in favor of more valuable scrap.

Kara: Loves them. When all is said and done this girl's bunk is going to be covered in plushies while she hills that inner child.

Carlene: Not big on them. Something about the eyes creep her out. Does like those cat paintings tho.

🍏 [GREEN APPLE] How do they differ from the norm and how are they punished for it?

(Funny enough this is something I go over extensively in the fic so I'll just sum up, though "punishment" is also synonymous here with "natural consequences of their issues")

Gin: Her big one is that she was prodigiously smart as a child and was forced to speed through her schooling until she graduated from Suffolk Law. Because of this she had a difficult time befriending anyone her own age until she moved to Sanctuary, among several other issues that arise from that sort of stress so young.

Richard: In his family he was the black sheep because he was so emotional. This was something his father and brother tried to stomp out of him, but it became very clear that all they could do was get him to repress his emotions while in high-stress situations and while they were around him. This is part of why he's such a dick at the beginning of the fic.

Asher: They were left with a band of unnamed "raiders" that patrolled around Little Lamplight and worked with the cavern city. This lifestyle meant they were severely malnourished until they joined the brotherhood, leaving them with several health issues, and with stunted social growth that made it difficult for them to make friends.

Kara: She makes a point to be as non-confrontational and paccifistic as possible. This has caused issues with the Brotherhood as a whole, because they see her as a weak link in their chain. This results in her being exhiled from the brotherhood not long after her promotion to knight.

Carlene: She's pretty normal as far even if she is notoriously bitchy. The most that can be said is that she came back from an operation last years she was bitchier and more standoffish than she previously had been, and didn't socialize much beyond her little group. This has lead to others marking her as a self-made pariah.

#fable writing stuff #nuclear family #virginia valentine #richard maxson #asher #kara jennings #carlene kelley

[hopeshoodie]

Any Cherry HCs?

Hnnnnngggg hot burlesque dancer lady be still my beating heart

She is AMAZING with makeup. She keeps up with all the trends and has a million products and always looks flawless. I want to lay on a bed and let her beat the shit out of my face so bad.

I ~feel~ like she's very... Buzzfeed millennial. Definitely owns a shirt with an alt!disney princess printed on it (probably Ariel, obviously lmao) She still drinks of out her men's tears mug. Her Instagram is this heavily contrasting mess of these highly professional burlesque photos in costume to her wearing comfy socks and posing in front of trailhead signs

I feel like she's a serial dater and has only had 1 or 2 long-term, serious relationships. Unlike other people in the villa, I don't think she's bothered by that. Cherry's okay being single, and doesn't feel an impulse to commit or settle down any time soon.

My girl is bi and she loves heavily tattooed butch women. I don't think she's out, but she's definitely confident that she is attracted to women.

She rocks bootcut jeans, and is confident enough to keep wearing them outside of the trend cycle. Like bootcut jeans and those peasant tops with the looser lowcut bunched bustier. Like this top

Swith bootcut jeans

Makes the best tea. Whenever you come to her house you don't even have to ask, she'll bring you a vintage teacup filled with some complex fruity tea.

I don't think she's super active on social media. She really only uses instagram, and even then she really only posts photos of herself and doesn't really scroll or look at other people's stuff.

Definitely has some super intense exes who will creep on her and she's so nonchalant about it. She's broken lots of hearts and doesn't really feel any guilt or a sense of weight about it. Her attitude is very much 'that's their problem'. Cherry has dumped many a friend with benefit because they caught feelings.

Her drink is a strawberry margarita. It's not even themed by her hair she just likes cocktails and likes that strawberry margs are the same wherever she goes. She's impressed by a date bringing her to an upscale bar and trying fancy mixed drinks with her. I don't think she'll touch beer with a ten foot pole ('the carbs? and for what, the taste of arse in my mouth?')

She is the naked neighbor. Everyone has one, and if you don't then uhhhh maybe close your blinds at night because it's you.

A die hard football fan. Idk which team she would stan being from Suffolk, but she hosts game parties and is super invested in the season.

I don't really see her with pets, but she might have a huge tank with a 10 year old goldfish that she got as a kid. She probably kept it poorly for a couple of years, then learned more about husbandry and has upgraded and kept it upgraded ever since. She'd be devastated if her fish ever died.

She cuts people out really quickly. Even if it's just a misunderstanding, she'll dump someone or unfriend them quicker than she'll try to work it out with them. Even if they talk it through and come to an agreement, she'll still harbor negative vague feelings towards them and slowly ghost them.

She's pretty close with her parents, and I see her as an only child. Her mom is super proud of her dancing career and reposts a lot of Cherry's social media posts.

Her name isn't actually Cherry, but she refuses to tell new people what her birth name is and is offline enough where it's not easy to find.

She got a perm once and it was the worst thing in the world. Now she ALWAYS goes to the same salon for her dye job and only ever curls it the same way. She has like four default hair styles and doesn't really experiment outside of that. For performing, she's more likely to add a new hair piece/hat/accessory before trying a new hair style.

Loves toe rings and wears them constantly, even when she's... wearing close toed shoes...

#litg #final trash dump

[lastsonlost]

These women have dedicated their lives to addressing a crisis of masculinity

Some have academic backgrounds or at first campaigned for women's rights

They believe society has developed a creeping antipathy towards all things male

So who are they — and what are the issues they are fighting on men's behalf?

The gender pay gap. The lack of women in top jobs. The #MeToo movement and the exploitation and abuse it exposed. There is a damning list of evidence that the fight for equal opportunities and rights for women is far from over.

This makes it all the more surprising that a small but increasingly vocal band of women is fighting for justice — not for women, but for men.

These women have dedicated their lives to addressing what they see as a crisis of masculinity and the unfair treatment of men by society.

They come from academic backgrounds or began campaigning for women's rights before focusing on problems of the other sex.

Of course, it is not the case that women's advancement can come only at the expense of men. And no one could deny women still face huge obstacles on the road to equality.

But the campaigners believe that in its attempts to rectify historical wrongs towards women, society has developed a creeping antipathy towards all things male, and this is knocking men's confidence at a time of intense cultural shift.

They fear that many men and boys are neglected, ignored and excluded. This, they say, is why men's mental health problems are on the rise. Suicide is now the biggest killer of UK men under 45.

Some of their views are highly controversial, and some activists have been accused of ignoring the harm done to women by men, or excusing it.

So who are these women, why on earth are they doing this — and what are the issues they are fighting on men's behalf?

COURTS PUNISH MEN – AND KIDS LOSE OUT

Alison Bushell, 57, from Suffolk, runs a social work consultancy.

Britain's family courts are engaged in practices that separate fathers from their children, knowingly or not, Alison believes. She says: 'The pressure groups springing up, some of which are advising the Ministry of Justice on domestic violence cases, have an anti-male agenda.'

In 20 years as a statutory social worker she saw a lack of effort to keep families together and an 'airbrushing out' of many dads.

'I see fathers marginalised and excluded from their kids' lives,' she says, 'while mothers are supported by out-of-date gendered views of parenting within the courts, and health and social services.'

And so, she believes, custody of children is often automatically given to women even when that isn't in a child's best interests.

'False allegations are more prevalent than people realise and supervision orders disproportionately happen to fathers.'

Every day, Alison gets calls from men who haven't seen their kids for up to five years. 'Having lost contact with their children, such men sometimes turn to alcohol or drugs out of sheer desperation.

'More become depressed. I had a client who took his own life. I believe the allegations against him were a major contributing factor.'

Alison has faced several complaints of bias while representing — largely male — clients in court, but none has been upheld.

Disillusioned and concerned to highlight these inequities, she left statutory social work ten years ago to set up consultancy, Child and Family Solutions. The agency works with families going through bitter separations, and carries out assessments for the Family Court and local authorities.

She has also worked with male domestic abuse victims. 'It has given me huge respect for those daring to speak out, because there is so little help available. It is a national scandal that so few refuge places are available for men.'

In England there were more than 3,600 beds in safe houses for women in 2017, but just 20 for men. The charity ManKind Initiative, which Alison supports, has told her that only 36 of 163 beds now available in refuges or safe houses are earmarked for men.

'Since Office for National Statistics figures state that 40 per cent or more victims of domestic abuse are men, this is alarming.

'When will people realise that holding on to a gendered narrative in domestic abuse is harmful?'

As for gender politics, Alison admits she has performed a volte-face. 'In the 80s I spent time at Greenham Common and lived in a women-only house. I even had a badge declaring 'a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle'. How times change.

'I can now be found reading [neoconservative author] Douglas Murray or listening to a talk by [Right-wing psychologist] Jordan Peterson.'

WHY I'M FIGHTING FEMINISM

Belinda Brown, 54, is a social anthropologist and co-founder of Men For Tomorrow. A widow with two children, she lives in London.

When she met her second husband, social scientist Geoff Dench — known as the architect of the socially conservative Blue Labour movement — Belinda's activism was ignited.

Together they set up Men for Tomorrow to research male problems — and fight against what they saw as a tendency to 'neglect or ignore issues affecting men'.

Shortly after their 2009 marriage, however, Geoff was diagnosed with a rare brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy. He died on June 24 last year, aged 77. Belinda nursed him until the end.

She plans to continue his work by exposing what she sees as a deliberate attempt by feminist activists to undermine the traditional family unit.

She writes and speaks on a range of topics concerning men for platforms such as The Conservative Woman website, and carries out research aimed at reinforcing 'traditional' values.

As an anthropologist, she learned about feminism during her studies, but disagreed with much of what she heard.

'I was always aware of my own power and the power of other women,' she says. 'While I knew there were injustices which needed rectifying, today I see more injustices afflicting men.

'Most men work extremely hard to provide for their families, often at considerable cost to themselves. For women to ignore these sacrifices and instead blame men for all the problems in the world, it's divisive and damaging to gender cohesion.'

Belinda has worked for homeless charity Shelter, where like Alison Bushell she was shocked by the high proportion of men she saw.

'Almost all the rough sleepers were men and family breakdown was the reason so many were without homes,' she says.

'During divorce settlements it was always the wives who gained ownership of the house, leaving husbands stranded.'

According to charity Homeless Link, today 84 per cent of the homeless are men, and their average age at death is just 44, half the average male lifespan. She also draws a correlation between the current epidemic of gang-related knife crime and the rise in fatherlessness. Most of the offenders, she says, come from broken homes, according to her research.

As for the future of gender relations, she has this to say: 'I hope one day soon feminism will be seen as an interesting period of history, but one which caused tremendous damage to society.'

BOYS NEED MORE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT

Sonia Shaljean, 49, founded award-winning community interest company, Lads Need Dads. Married with three teenage sons, she lives in Essex.

Sonia has observed men at their lowest ebb during her 20-plus years as a substance misuse counsellor and anger management specialist within the fields of alcohol, drugs, criminal justice and homelessness.

'I was struck by how many of those men had grown up either without a father or with an abusive or unsupportive dad,' she says. So she founded not-for-profit Lads Needs Dads in 2015, with an initial grant of just £4,000.

The organisation has a team of trained male mentors, who encourage emotional intelligence in boys aged 11-15 with absent fathers. It also provides opportunities for youngsters to take part in outdoor activities, learn practical life skills and volunteer in the community.

She believes it helps to have a woman at the helm. 'If it were a man leading an all-male organisation, it could possibly be disregarded by some women.

'Our aim at Lads Need Dads is to provide support, guidance and encouragement — and a much-needed male voice to enable boys to open up.

'It's so rewarding to watch boys' self-esteem, emotional stability and motivation grow. They perform much better at school, too, as well as having improved relationships at home.'

According to the Centre for Social Justice, 1.1 million young people have little or no contact with their fathers, while 2.7 million live in lone parent families.

In his book The Boy Crisis, Dr Warren Farrell explains how fatherless boys, and to a lesser extent girls, tend to have less empathy and are more likely to break the law. According to a Unicef report on the wellbeing of children in economically advanced nations, including the UK, 85 per cent of youths in prison have an absent father.

Sonia was keenly interested in the link between fatherlessness and offending, in part because she started her career in a civilian role at the Metropolitan Police, where she managed a Community Safety Unit and helped refer victims and perpetrators to the right services.

Later she worked for the charity Refuge, setting up two women's refuges in South East London alongside volunteering on a national helpline for a men's charity that provided therapeutic programmes for men wanting to change their behaviour.

Sonia is keen to point out that not all boys growing up without a father end up as a statistic, saying: 'Other protective factors come into play, such as encouraging boys to join clubs and take part in sports, where they can find positive male role models.

'We aren't here to replace fathers. In fact our programmes have reunited many boys with their dads after years of absence.'

FATHERS PAY THE PRICE IN DIVORCE

Stacey Camille Alexander-Harriss, 41, a family support worker and children's novelist, moved to the UK from America ten years ago after meeting her English husband online. He's a City finance director and they live in Ilford with their two dogs.

A former Art and French teacher, Stacey now works supervising contact between fathers and their children after family breakdown, at Alison Bushell's agency.

'We tend to work more with dads than mums, as they seem to be the ones who have difficulty retaining a relationship with children after divorce and frequently become depressed in the custody battle.'

She believes this is the result of systemic inequalities and a bias towards mothers. 'Women hold all the power, especially when it comes to custody.

'It's unfair that dads have to pay for all the legal costs, paying people like Alison to advocate.

'Often men with good jobs from affluent backgrounds end up taking out loans. Even if you win you spend so much on this insane game.

'When mothers notice there is a maternal bias they realise they can say whatever they like about their ex. I've heard accusations of terrorism just to get custody. It's so ugly. And when mothers refuse to seek help for their emotional problems they tend to place the blame on men.'

Her books deal with troubled families — Myrtle Takes Tea, published under the pseudonym Alexander Stacey, is about a lonely nine year old with mean teachers and parents with money problems. All that matters to her is her prized toy rabbit Earl Grey.

Stacey thinks setting an example is a way to heal these injuries and help families.

'All the tools I use in my work are drawn from examples set by my own parents who were loving, strong and wise. My father was an orthopaedic surgeon and he and my mother were married for 40 patient years until they both passed away. I try to teach fathers about the importance of discipline, responsibility, self-reliance and confidence.'

I HAD DEATH THREATS - AND A BOMB SCARE

Erin Pizzey, 80, founded women's charity Refuge. She is now a patron of the charity Families Need Fathers. She lives in South London and is divorced with two children.

'I'm all for equality of the sexes,' Erin Pizzey says.

'But equality isn't the endgame for those feminists who believe women would be far better off without men.'

This may sound odd coming from the founder of the first women's refuge.

It's nearly 50 years since, aged 32 and with two young children, she set up The Chiswick Women's Refuge as a place 'where women could meet and use our talents'.

'Both my parents were violent and my mother beat me,' she says. 'So when the first battered woman came through the door and said 'no one will help me', I knew what she meant.'

The London house became women's charity Refuge — and led to the creation of hundreds more women's refuges. And yet Erin became a pariah, as she insisted many female victims were also violent.

'Of the first 100 women who came into my refuge, 62 were as violent or more violent than the men they had left,' she says.

'Therefore, domestic violence can't be a gender issue, it can't be just men, because we girls are just as badly affected.'

She became a hate figure for saying so. 'They branded me a 'victim blamer'. 'After a bomb scare, the police suggested my post be sent to them for inspection.'

In the Seventies, she tried to set up a refuge for men, with little success. 'The rich men who were willing to fund my projects for women refused to give any money to male victims.' Now she works with Families Need Fathers and is a patron of The ManKind Initiative, a charity which supports male domestic violence victims.

The subject may be becoming less taboo. Police in England and Wales recorded nearly 150,000 instances of domestic violence to men in 2017, more than double those in 2012 — which in part reflects a greater willingness to report problems.

The 2018 Crime Survey for England and Wales recorded that 7.9 per cent of women (1.3 million) and 4.2 per cent of men (695,000) have suffered domestic abuse.

It is women who are far more likely to be victims of extreme violence. Government figures show, for example, that 73 per cent of victims of domestic homicides from 2014 to 2017 were women, while most killers were male.

This leaves male victims in a difficult situation, which Erin is working to address. She says: 'I am fighting for my son, my grandsons and my great grandsons, so that they might have a future where men are no longer demonised.'

The War On Masculinity by James Innes-Smith will be published by Little Brown in spring 2020.

#the women demonised championing mens rights

[onlyhenrys]

Hiding/hoping not to be caught kiss for Charles Brandon x male reader where they're good friends and fall in love, endangering themselves in the process? Maybe a happy ending where they're not caught?

I don’t know what I was thinking with this one, but I hope that it is what you had in mind 😅

*feel free to send me prompts/requests*

Charles/Male reader

You knew it was a stupid idea, sneaking away in the middle of the night, but you couldn’t help yourself. You almost felt possessed, possessed by love. It’s been years since you last felt like this, like a young boy, experiencing love for the first time. You creeped through the empty hallways, on your way to the Duke of Suffolk.

The two of you started off as great friends. You knew he had his connections with the king, and that that fact would keep him out of trouble, so you decided to take your shot and started a conversation. Charles was easy to talk to, he made ridiculous jokes, fooling people into thinking that he was stupid, while he was in fact, very smart. He already got a few people out of his way, and no one had a clue.

You crossed another hallway and knocked on a heavy door, listening to the shuffles that sounded behind the door. A smile threatened to take over as Charles appeared in the threshold, his chest bare. He took a look around the hallway before grabbing a handful of shirt, pulling you inside. The door closed with a thud and he pressed you against it, his face only an inch away from yours.

‘’Fancy seeing you here, good sir,’’ his voice sounded smooth, like velvet, and chill of pleasure ran through your body. ‘’It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?”

You reached out and brushed your fingers over the side of this face, down to his neck, were you paused, doubt creeping up on you. ‘’Are you sure we won’t get caught, Charles?’’ your voice shook slightly. ‘’I’m not able to bare the thought of being separated from each other.’’

He leaned forward and leaned his hands on both sides of your head, trapping you against the door. ‘’Oh hush, my love. We won’t get caught. You weren’t followed on your way here, were you?’’

You shook your head and Charles dived forward, crashing his lips against yours in need, successfully shutting you up. Your body shuddered in relief at his touch and you threw yourself into the kiss. You ignored the voice at the back of your mind, warning you about what you were doing, about the risk you were taking, as you hungrily kissed him back. You could feel the ghost of a smile on his lips and digged your fingers in his hair, pulling softly at his curls.

He pulled back and you kept your eyes closed, not wanting to lose the feeling of his lips on yours. You weren’t one to easily fall in love, but you fell hard and fast for Charles, just the thought of him left you breathless, aching for more. Your heartbeat picked up as you felt the need to voice your thoughts out loud and you opened your eyes, looking straight into the eyes of Catherine Brooke.

You lost your footing in shock and were barely able to catch yourself, before backing away. You turned to look at Charles, whose eyes were focused on the hard wooden floor, a unreadable expression in his eyes.

“Good evening, my lady Brooke,” you managed to get out. “I hope all is well?”

Catherine folded her hands on her stomach and tilted her head. “No need for such formalities, good sir. You have nothing to worry about, I won’t tell the king.”

You perched up at that and took a step closer to her, not quite believing what she told you. “You won’t?”

She shook her head and looked up, her eyes sparkling with unsheathed tears. “No, my lord. I already packed my luggage and will be leaving in the morning. And I promise you, that I will take your secret to my grave.”

You reached out and grabbed her petite hands into your own, looking behind her, in search of Charles, only the find him steering up the fire. “Why are you doing this, lady Brooke?”

She looked over her shoulder to Charles and stood on her toes, leaning closer to you. “Because despite the fact that he broke my heart, he still deserves every happiness that he can get, even if it’s not with me.”

She left you speechless as she backed away, smiling softly, before closing the door to the bedchamber, leaving the two of you alone.

Taglist: @mary-ann84 @wondersofdreaming @viking-raider @ohjules @obsessedwithcavill @omgkatinka @hnryycvll @promptandpros @agniavateira @viviartsy @snowbellexx @ly--canthrope @oddsnendsfanfics @keiva1000 @dangerouslovefanfic @hell1129-blog @ellixthea @lebguardians @alyxkbrl @angelic-kisses13 @noz4a2 @watermeloncavill @emelinelovesjc @aaescritora @henrythickcavill @yespolkadotkitty @living-in-the-darkness @radaofrivia @littlefreya @onceiwasanun @softboi-vibes

#henry cavill fanfic #henry cavill #charles brandon #the tudors #charles brandon fanfic #charles brandon x male reader #charles brandon x male #fluffy charles brandon #charles brandon x you #charles brandon x reader #henry characters #henry cavill characters

[johnfkennedyjunior]

Citizen Kennedy On the run from the press all his life, John F Kennedy Jr. joins the media pack. (September, 1995)

It is an overcast, chilly Friday, but the crowd in the ballroom of Detroit’s Westin Hotel is feverish. In the Adcraft Club’s ninety-year history, only Lee Iacocca has drawn more people to a speech. But today’s guest has set pulses revving faster than even Iacocca ever could.

Sighs (“I made eye contact with him!”) and whispers (“His jawline is perfect!”) and four burly guards accompany John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. as he circles the room to the blue-swagged dais. Women creep forward, their cameras flash-framing to capture that famous, evocative face.

After lunch, Phil Guarascio, the sleek advertising master of General Motors, takes the podium and ticks off the handsome young speaker’s accomplishments: his education at Brown University and NYU Law School; stints with the United Nations in India, with economic-development outfits in New York, and with the U. S. Attorney General’s Honor Program; his role in founding a group that helps educate health-care workers; and, most notably, his four years as an assistant district attorney in the office of New York City crimebuster Robert Morgenthau.

But it’s not his resume that’s brought this mob out to hear the thirty-four-year-old son of the country’s thirty-fifth president and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the eternal icon. It’s not even their moist interest in his celebrated romances with Daryl Hannah and other beauties. Nor is it to stare at the buffed pecs and thighs, often captured in Central Park grab shots by New York’s tabloids but today hidden under a dark, conservative suit. No, this crowd has come to learn about the future of the man they still think of as John John.

“I’m well aware of the expectation that sooner or later I would be giving a speech about politics,” he says. “So here I am, I’m delighted to say, fulfilling that expectation.” He speaks a bit more about his career, his prospects, his hope that he’ll do the right thing. Finally, the excitement building, he tells the crowd what it wants to hear.

“I hope eventually to end up as president,” says John F. Kennedy Jr. Three beats. “Of a very successful publishing venture.”

The nineteen hundred car and ad people explode into laughter and applause. They know that this charmer has come to their city to flack the riskiest venture of a pampered life indelibly marked by tragedy: a magazine he’ll launch in September about the family business-politics. More than a few of them will buy ad pages in the publication curiously named George (for George Washington), gambling that Kennedy’s sizzle will attract readers to a subject that Americans love to hate and have never much wanted to read about.

What they don’t fully realize is that they are present at the creation of the latest and most dramatic chapter of the Kennedy saga: a rite of passage of the family’s-if not America’s-crown prince. For much of his life, John F. Kennedy Jr. has been what he seemed-a dilettante, unable to commit to a woman or a career. Now he thinks he has found a way to fulfill his daunting genetic destiny-one that shows his sure grasp of what being a Kennedy is really all about. In his grandfather’s day, money was power. In his father’s day, politics was power. In his own day, media is power. By charging boldly into its realm, John Jr. may prove to be the most genuine Kennedy of his generation.

* * *

“DON’T LET THEM STEAL your soul,” Jackie Onassis would warn her children. John has seemingly spent the last dozen years trying to distance himself from the family legend. Until his full name turned into an advertising draw, he preferred to style himself simply John Kennedy, like at least a half dozen other New Yorkers.

For most people, the montage of images,, triggered by mention of this John Kennedy begins with the picture of a little boy saluting his father’s coffin on a gray November day barely within his memory’s reach. Ever since, he’s held himself a little apart. At the fashionable parties he frequents, he’s had a way of inching his back around to fend off the approach of strangers. That practiced self-protective instinct, the flip side of the intense attention he pays when he does decide to engage someone, has usually served to wall him off from unwanted overtures.

That wall was constructed, solidly and with great difficulty, by his mother. From the moment of her son’s birth by cesarean section on November 25, 1960, two and a half weeks after his father was elected president, the new First Lady tried to shield him and his older sister, Caroline. But President Kennedy didn’t play that way. He plainly understood how the image of a happy family could protect him, as it had his own father, from the consequences of his own philandering. So when Jackie was out of town, he’d contrive to sneak photo opportunities with the kids in the Oval Office.

President Kennedy was assassinated three days before his son’s third birthday. Within a year, Jacqueline Kennedy had created a new life for herself and her offspring in New York, where she later enrolled John and Caroline in private schools. The children became independently wealthy in 1968 when their mother married the squat Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. By the terms of President Kennedy’s will, a trust fund he’d inherited from his father passed to his children upon his widow’s remarriage. John H. Davis, a Bouvier cousin, believes that trust fund doubled in value during the sixties, leaving John and Caroline with about $10 million each.

Onassis helped shield the Kennedys from prying eyes and provided them with the money to support a lifestyle even more lavish than the one they’d experienced in the White House. But the billionaire degraded Jackie by blatantly continuing his longtime affair with diva Maria Callas. And when he died in 1975, he showed his contempt for her by leaving her, John, and Caroline a pittance in his will. An ugly legal battle with Onassis’s daughter, Christina, ended with a settlement that gave Jackie more than $20 million. Maurice Tempelsman, the diamond merchant who became Jackie’s consort in later life, helped her invest that money and plump her estate to somewhere around $100 million, Davis estimates.

The money didn’t free John Jr. from his family’s past and expectations-at New York’s Collegiate School, he was shadowed by Secret Service agents and regularly saw a psychiatrist-but his whispery lioness of a mother raised him to sidestep the family’s darker edge. His cousins might act like a pack of druggy Keystone Kennedys, Uncle Ted might screw and screw up, and Aunt Lee could wind up a fashion flack, but John and Caroline kept their heads down and emerged as decent, intelligent, modest, and good-natured young people.

* * *

POLITICS BECKONED early; public service had a strong plan on John. “He has a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility” his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a few years ago. “Whenever any of the cousins need help on one of their projects-whether it’s the Special Olympics or the RFK Human Rights or journalism awards or the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation awards John participates.” He helped his cousins Joseph and Patrick Kennedy win House seats and pitched in on cousin Kathleen Kennedy Towns end’s successful bid for lieutenant governor in Maryland. He showed up in court for his cousin Willie Smith’s trial on rape charges. “He’s got a very strong sense of responsibility, but he’s not overwhelmed by it,” said Bobby Jr. “He’s very comfortable with it.”

Comfortable, perhaps, but strangely without passion. When Kennedy went to law school, he was following his sister and six cousins who had studied or were studying to become attorneys. Even his mid-1989 decision to become an assistant district attorney in New York tracked the family record: His uncle Ted had prepped for his first Massachusetts Senate race by serving as an assistant DA in Suffolk County. “John said his heart was never really in it,” says someone who served in the DA’s office with him. “He was doing it for his mother.”

While he waited for the verdict on his New York State bar exam, which Caroline had passed on her first try a few months earlier, John started work as a $30,000-a-year prosecutor. Although this was a competitive position, Bob Morgenthau’s office was also a hiring hall for famous sons. Andrew Cuomo, Cyrus Vance Jr., and Dan Rather Jr. have worked there, as have the sons of Rhode Island senator John Chafee, labor leader Victor Gotbaum, and New York City Council speaker Peter Vallone. So had John’s cousin Bobby Jr., before his resignation amid charges of drug abuse.

John was assigned to the Special Prosecutions Bureau, which handles low-level crimes ranging from corruption, fraud, con games, and check bouncing to arson and car theft. Kennedy was placed thereat first because “we clearly didn’t want him in the trial division,” says Mike Cherkasky, then chief of the DA’s investigative division. “We didn’t want the attention to distract him.”

That fall, John learned he’d failed the bar exam. “John didn’t take the test seriously,” says a fellow assistant DA. He learned he’d flunked a second time (by 11 points out of a needed 660 at the end of April. Although more than half of the other twenty-five hundred aspirants failed as well, only Kennedy was ridiculed on the front pages of the New York tabloids, all three of which used variations of “Hunk Flunks.”

Even so, John kept his cool. “I’m clearly not a major legal genius,” he said.

“He held up under unbelievable pressure,” says Owen Carragher Jr., his officemate at the time. John even kept smiling when a maitre d’ with wobbly English accosted him while he was having a consolation beer, and said, “I heard news you failed! I’m glad!”

Kennedy played his part in the public perception that he was a lightweight. He made his first courtroom appearance as a witness in a case against an immigration officer who’d been charged with making illegal raids and pocketing confiscated money only to have to admit that he didn’t know the title of the landmark Supreme Court case that made the Miranda rights part of every cop’s lexicon. Even after Kennedy laid out $1,000 for a six-week bar-review course, it wasn’t clear that he cared about the exam, especially after he was photographed “studying” poolside at a Los Angeles hotel. But he did pass, earning a $1,000 raise and the right to try cases in court. In his first solo prosecution, he went up against a burglar who was caught asleep in his victim’s bed, his pockets stuffed with her jewelry. He eventually graduated to bigger cases involving Mafia families, labor racketeering at a big newspaper, and construction fraud, but one state-supreme-court judge before whom he’d appeared said, “I don’t think he had the potential to be a great trial lawyer. His passion lies elsewhere.”

Eventually, he won a share of respect from bosses and coworkers. “There’s a premium on certain intellectual as opposed to advocacy skills in investigations,” says Cherkasky. ` John fit that.” Working on what’s called “intake” once a month, interviewing complainants off the street, he proved a natural at getting people to open up and at judging when they were telling the truth.

After two and a half years in the DA’s office, Kennedy transferred to a trial bureau. “He wanted something quicker,” says Carragher. “He wanted the action. He wanted to do a trial where the defendant wasn’t asleep.”

In his first case in the trial bureau, he prosecuted two men who’d run a chicken stand in Harlem that burned down just after they took out fire insurance. An accelerant had been lit with a match in the store, but the evidence against the owners was circumstantial, and the only witness was a felon who didn’t want to testify. Kennedy extracted the testimony he needed during a complex, three-week trial. “It was a loser and John won it,” says Carragher.

That, and others. In four years as an assistant DA-a year longer than the normal term of service-Kennedy had a perfect 6-0 conviction record. A political career now seemed logical. When Kennedy had introduced Uncle Teddy at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, he’d electrified the delegates by invoking his father’s name. “So many of you came into public service because of him,” Kennedy said in a prime-time speech. “In a very real sense, because of you, he is with us still.” The two-minute ovation that followed seemed a fitting kickoff to his first campaign.

During John’s law-school years, he and several friends had convened weekly “issues meetings,” sessions that Bobby Kennedy Jr. characterized as “just a private thing that he does.” Might they lead to elected office? “It’s something that, you know, you never say never and it’s obviously a source of interest, but I’ll just see,” John equivocated shortly before quitting the DAs office. “I don’t really know.”

* * *

JOHN MAY HAVE OWED at least some of his indecision to a more pressing interest in the Kennedys’ other familial pursuit: sexual conquest. A glorious mosaic of women threw themselves at John Jr. At the district attorney’s, a cleaning woman who’d squabbled with Carragher and stopped cleaning his office began spending hours a day in it once John moved in. “She dusted the underside of the desk,” Carragher says. “She just wouldn’t leave.” Paralegals had to screen deliveries and open John’s mail, which often contained unsolicited pictures of women. Once, an admirer sent a cappuccino machine.

Kennedy is a gentleman. “He doesn’t pick up girls and screw them and dump them out of the car,” says a woman who has known him a long time. “He’s pretty tame for a guy who’s that good-looking.” But at the same time, he’s no innocent. Womanizing-and pride in it-is, as historian Garry Wills has pointed out, “a very important and conscious part of the male Kennedy mystique.” John, blessed with looks almost as stirring as his name, was an early enthusiast. A prep-school classmate, when asked what he thought young Kennedy would be doing in ten years, answered plainly: “Dating.”

As an old friend puts it, “He got around a lot. He didn’t capitalize on it. Things just came his way.”

John’s one foray into filmmaking, a 1990 coming-of-age movie written by, produced by and starring college friends and called A Matter of Degrees, played on the young man’s studly proclivities. Identified in the credits as a “guitar-playing Romeo,” he had a tiny role as a fellow consumed with coupling. In one scene, he strums his instrument and tunelessly proclaims to an adoring paramour, “Oh, baby, I can’t live without your love.” Moments later, he is shown quarreling with the woman.

“What does it matter what we do when we’re not together?” he pleads with her.

“Because when we’re not together,” she answers, “you’re fucking Alison,” referring to another of his love interests.

Like his grandfather, who used to keep Gloria Swanson around even while his wife, Rose, was on hand, and his father, who pursued Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, and Gene Tierney. John Kennedy Jr. has long favored actresses. His longest and most notable liaison was with Daryl Hannah, herself rich and social. They first met as youngsters on vacation with their families on St. Martin. They met again after John’s aunt Lee Radziwill married Herb Ross, who had directed Hannah in the film Steel Magnolias.

That this affair-and numerous others-was carried on in public showed John to be more like his mother than his father. Just like Jackie O., her son can be a furtive exhibitionist. When he strips off his shirt to play Frisbee in the park, when he smooches girls on street corners or coaxes them into shorts at sea, he’s cruising for the cameras, just as his mother was when she unknowingly “posed” for her famous topless photos on Ari Onassis’s island, Skorpios.

Kennedy has kept his voice out of the public record except in carefully crafted snippets, but he puts himself on view with insouciance. He can afford the privacy and luxury of limousines, yet he propels himself around town on Rollerblades and a bicycle. “Aristocrats are dangerously uninhibited men,” writes Nelson W Aldrich Jr., a chronicler of the American upper class. “Like David the King and [Fitzgerald's] Tom Buchanan, they are sensual, ruthless, and intemperate.”

The story is told that John used to walk around the campus of Brown in gym shorts so brief they emphasized an endowment almost as impressive as the university’s. In New York, he has continued to flaunt himself. When he lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, even after he was declared the sexiest man alive, he used to sprawl at an outdoor table at the Jackson Hole hamburger joint, shirt off. One neighborhood woman says Kennedy would stop her to ask for the time. “My sense was that he was dying for attention, dying for people to look at him,” she says.

* * *

JOHN KENNEDY DEVELOPED a public image as a dilettante and nourished it as he grew. As early as 1983, he was dubbed “the least competitive Kennedy” in a book about the family. Once, asked whom he had admired as a child, he said, “I guess I have to answer that honestly. My role models were Mick Jagger and Muhammad Ali, actually.” Even as he spent his days prosecuting petty thieves and swindlers, he seemed to pour his heart mostly into partying and exercising; at one point, he belonged to three Manhattan health clubs at once. “If I had to pick a defect on him, I’d be hard put to find one,” Bobby Kennedy Jr. once said, “except that he pays more attention to his clothes than the rest of us.”

The effect wasn’t always salutary. He showed up at his thirtieth-birthday party in a custom-made maroon zoot suit and leopard wing tips.

His one consistent interest apart from women-acting-heightened the impression that he was unserious. By many accounts, he was a natural and precocious actor. “He’s got an incredible ear for mimicry, and he used to tell us all stories in an Irish brogue or in Russian character or Scottish,” his cousin Bobby once recounted. “This is starting when he was nine or ten years old, and he’d have all the grandchildren listening to him … A lot of us were a lot older than him, and he could keep us entertained.”

It didn’t take long for Kennedy’s hobby to bloom into a potential career path. He was only eighteen when the film producer Robert Stigwood offered him a role playing his father as a young man. That. didn’t happen, but other professional parts did.

Jackie Kennedy soon showed the world how iron her will could be when it came to her son’s future. “Jackie was a loving but extremely demanding mother,” says her cousin John Davis. “John wanted to be an actor, and she dissuaded him. She didn’t think it was a dignified profession. She didn’t like Hollywood at all.”

But Jackie’s friend Rudolf Nureyev criticized John for giving up the stage. “Show some balls!” the ballet star told him, according to author Diana DuBois. “Do what you want!”

One of John’s closest friends heatedly denies that his mother’s influence steered him from his own chosen path. “John has a compass,” he says. “He’s usually pointed in the right direction. Did Jackie guide him? Probably. But he went to law school because he likes to learn and law was a natural thing for him to do.”

Whatever the reason, John abandoned acting for membership on the board of Naked Angels, a society-oriented company that produces plays in Manhattan and benefit galas in the Hamptons.

With an acting career out of the question, John left the district attorney’s office in mid-1993 and seemed to plunge ever deeper into triviality. A very public manwithout-anything-special-to-do, he grew a goatee, showed up at parties for rock groups, and appeared at the opening of a technology installation created by his brother-in-law, Ed Schlossberg, that was held in the lobby of an office building.

He glided around the city like a tomcat. He moved from the Upper West Side to an apartment he shared with Daryl Hannah, then bought a loft in TriBeCa. It looked as if he was finally going to marry the big blond starlet: She was spotted buying an antique wedding dress at a flea market, and the couple went on a scuba trip to the South Pacific and Asia. “Daryl really liked him,” says Chicago gal-about-town and novelist Sugar Rautbord. “She was desperate to marry him.” But John couldn’t, or wouldn’t, commit. Only two months after tabloid reporters descended on Cape Cod, expecting a Kennedy-Hannah wedding, John was seen kissing Carolyn Bessette, a PR woman for Calvin Klein, near the finish line of the New York City Marathon.

* * *

FOR ALL HIS LESS THAN ZERO gadabouting, John was still struggling with the driving Kennedy will to succeed. “You don’t want to be a passenger on the liner,” he’d told Carragher when he quit as an assistant DA. Would he enroll at Harvard’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government, or join the Clinton administration, or perhaps even run for Congress? Nothing came of any of it. (He turned down a House race, says Carragher, because “any semblance of privacy John has ever had, he’s had to fight for. The only claim he has to keep it is to remain a private citizen.”)

But the dynastic imperative can overwhelm an American aristocrat. “If society as a whole is to gain by mobility and openness of structure,” a former Harvard president, Charles W Eliot, once said of his class, “those who rise must stay up in successive generations, that the higher level of society may be constantly enlarged.” As Aldrich puts it, this craving for success follows a set pattern. For the founding generation, it’s all about money, ruthlessly acquired (by, say, bootlegging. For the next generation, public service (serving as senator, attorney general, president, for example becomes the vehicle, because nothing better highlights the freedom money conveys than selflessly boosting the commonweal.

The third generation, though, is often swept away by the liberties unsheathed by trust funds. They “exert a terrific centrifugal force on the spirits of their inheritors,” writes Aldrich, “constantly threatening to shoot them out into trackless space.”

Young John Kennedy has certainly seemed more trackless than most. But he was actually trying to keep his end of what Garry Wills calls the “Kennedy contract,” a compact whose components are “power, money, fame.” John Jr. had the latter as a birthright. He had enough of the second to keep him comfortable. All he lacked was the first.

* * *

JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS died of lymphatic cancer at 10:15 P.M. on May 19, 1994, in her Fifth Avenue apartment, with John, Caroline, and Maurice Tempelsman at her bedside. “John was at his desk at 8:30 A.M. the day after the burial,” a friend says. “He did exactly what Jackie would have done. He went back to work.”

What he was working on was a magazine. It was the first real risk of his professional life.

The idea had come to him a year and a half earlier, on a night shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president. Over dinner, John and a pal, Michael Berman, started talking about how the way people looked at politics had changed. “Politicians have taken their cue from the entertainment industry” is how John puts it. “Al Gore on David Letterman was that show’s number-one-rated show for that year.” He pauses and shakes his head in wonder. `Al Gore.”

Was there something in this for them? No one is sure who said it first, but the question was asked that fall night: “What about a magazine?”

The idea was intriguing. Existing political magazines, Kennedy believes, haven’t “caught up with the moment.” Then there were the other, larger issues a publication could capture-”power and personality, triumph and loss, the pursuit and price of ambition for its own sake and for something larger,” all subjects with which John has more than a nodding acquaintance. Despite the irony inherent in running precisely the sort of venture he’d been running away from all his life, he and Berman decided to give it a try.

They’d been friends for years. The son of a real estate developer from Princeton, New Jersey, Berman had prepped at Lawrenceville, earned a degree in history from Lafayette College, and then gone. into public relations. He met Kennedy through mutual friends on the city’s party scene in the early 1980s.

When John entered law school in 1986, he stayed in touch with Berman, and in 1988, they first went into business together. Kennedy had gone kayaking and come home raving about some handmade boats he called “the Rolls Royces of kayaks.” John wanted to buy out the small company in Maine that made them, manufacture kits, distribute them nationally, and teach others to make the kayaks. Nothing came of the plan, but the two men never abandoned the corporate entity they’d established to do the deal. It was called Random Ventures, which for the next six years seemed an apt description of John’s approach to life.

After Kennedy became an assistant DA, Berman evolved into John’s Sancho Panza. “The press became an issue,” says a close friend. So whenever a media problem came up, John suggested that the DA’s overworked press office hand it off to Berman. “At first, it was once every three months,” John’s friend says. “Then it was every three days.” After John failed the bar exam for the second time, the calls started coming every couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Berman was building his own PR business, representing clients like Cointreau, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, DuraSoft, and the Mexican tourist board. Although he was and remains a Democrat, he also helped run the annual White House Easter-egg roll throughout George Bush’s presidency. But by mid-1993, Berman was as eager to move out of PR work as John was to find a direction, so when the men came up with the idea for a magazine, they threw themselves into it with equal fervor.

Working first at a desk at Kennedy Enterprises and later from space in Berman’s office in New York’s Flatiron district, John used his name to secure meetings with potential backers, including Edgar Bronfman Jr., who, like young Kennedy, traced his money to the liquor business but wanted to make his own mark in the world. “Every door was open to them,” says a friend of John’s. “But that was good news and bad news. Did these people believe, or did they just want to meet John?” Berman and Kennedy would joke about charging a million dollars for a first meeting with potential investors, because that was really all many of them wanted.

Kennedy’s mother set up a meeting between John and her friend Joe Armstrong, who’d worked in magazine publishing for twenty years. “John was determined not to do what people expected,” Armstrong says. Soon, he, Kennedy, and Berman were meeting regularly.

The impulse behind the magazine, at least at first, was high-minded. Berman and Kennedy wanted it to be populist, nonpartisan, and centered on process instead of personalities or party politics. They thought that would appeal to people aged twenty to forty who felt disenfranchised by politics but still wanted access to the circles of power. The magazine would have a small circulation based more on subscriptions than newsstand sales. “Publishing,” says Armstrong, recounting his meetings with Kennedy, “looked like a way to approach public service and keep a balance in his life.”

Unfortunately, few of the people they talked to were interested in helping young Kennedy work it all out. When Jann Wenner, a longtime Kennedy-family friend, heard of the project after reading about it in a media newsletter, he was irate. “What’s this about?” he allegedly asked John. “You better see me immediately. Politics doesn’t sell. It’s not commercial.”

Using some of the family’s media contacts, Kennedy and Berman wended their way through the tight inner circles of the New York-based magazine industry, a gossipy enclave whose nervous denizens simultaneously pray for new publications that might employ them and denigrate any new idea that isn’t their own. In connect-the-dots fashion, they talked to several former editors at 7 Days, an upscale New York weekly that flamed and then flopped in the early 1990s. “It was very much amateur hour,” says one of the many people whose brains were picked.

* * *

BY FALL 1994, BERMAN AND KENNEDY were getting dispirited. “People didn’t get it,” a friend of John’s says. “It wasn’t an easy sell.” They’d won the promise of about s3 million in funding, but their advisers warned that it wasn’t enough. Finally, to scare up more interest, they leaked the venture to the gossip columns.

Some were surprised that Kennedy was joining the very craft that had hounded him so mercilessly throughout his life, forgetting that his grandfather had palled around with journalists-had even chased skirts with New York Times Washington columnist Arthur Krock-decades before. His mother, too, had built a sweet career in patrician publishing, editing celebrity and art books at Doubleday, and President Kennedy, so his son was told, had hoped to run a newspaper after leaving the White House. “I think the idea was somewhat inevitable,” John says of the magazine he’d started calling George. “Both my parents not only loved words but spent a good part of at least their professional lives in the word business.”

Undeterred by the naysayers, Berman and Kennedy decided in late 1994 to test their idea by mailing solicitations for the nonexistent George to 150,000 people whose names were drawn from other magazines’ subscription lists. The offer, for a twenty-four-dollar-a-year charter subscription, was aimed mostly at media junkies; the copy said less about George than about other magazines. “George is to politics what Rolling Stone is to music. Forbes is to business. Allure is to beauty Premiere is to films,” read the piece. It was a “soft” offer that didn’t require a check, but the response was encouraging. Mailings that didn’t mention Kennedy’s name got a solid 5 percent response; those that did attracted even more, 5.7 percent.

Sensing, finally, that something might happen with their project, Kennedy and Berman also began changing. The high-mindedness with which they’d originally approached the venture began slowly giving way to a desire to succeed, whatever changes in tone, look, or content that required.

George Lois found this out shortly after he got involved with George.

The rumpled veteran adman, whose Esquire covers in the 1960s set the pace for international magazine design, was one of the many approached by the duo for input. “I’m the kind of schmuck, I got excited,” he says. “And suddenly I was designing his magazine.” Lois designed a logo-a truncated version of George Washington’s signature, pared down to his almost unreadable initials. Beneath it, Lois put the words WE CANNOT TELL A LIE.

Using his own money, Lois also produced a series of outrageous covers. Richard Nixon had just died, so he got Alger Hiss to pose for one, over a headline derived from a classic Esquire line about Nixon: WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING? A photograph of a torso in a pinstripe suit was captioned, TOTALLY NEW ADVICE TO FUTURE CANDIDATES: KEEP IT ZIPPED! A photograph of Barbra Streisand with a smudge on her nose ran with the line BROWN-NOSING: HOLLYWOOD DOES WASHINGTON, WASHINGTON DOES HOLLYWOOD.

Kennedy and Berman loved the covers-at first. “A week later, they’d tell me, `Everybody says you can’t do that,”‘ said Lois. After a few more meetings, he gave up. “If you want a safe magazine,” he told them, “you’ve got the wrong guy.”

Eventually, the notion of using George to stimulate involvement in politics joined irreverence on the sidelines as John and Berman started talking about politics as theater and their magazine as a glossy journal for the not entirely engaged.

“The basic concept,” says Roger Black, the design director of Esquire, who was consulted by the pair at that point, was “to be a half-fan, half-insider magazine, not a New Republic or a political-science journal. They felt people were ready for a magazine treating politics like entertainment.”

“Michael positioned it as a Vanity Fair-ish product,” says one of their consultants. “That wasn’t necessarily John’s first instinct.” But Kennedy quickly got with the program. “They wanted Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, nonpolitical writers,” says John’s close friend.

They edged even closer to glitz after Hachette Filipacchi Magazines got involved. The American arm of a giant French media company, Hachette is the nation’s fourth-largest magazine company, with twenty-two titles and $750 million in revenues. The company, which owns Elle and the successful but unglamorous Car and Driver and Road & Track, has expanded mainly via high-profile acquisitions. Here was an opportunity to get credit for starting something hot and turn America’s crown prince into a corporate hood ornament.

Hachette CEO David Pecker had been pursuing Kennedy and Berman ever since he’d heard about George at a benefit dinner in June 1994. After several months of unrequited messages and letters, John finally called him back. “I just want you to know we have a lot of interest, and not just in having lunch with John Kennedy” Pecker told him.

They finally met in December. Pecker subsequently studied the George projections and called some key potential advertisers, concentrating on the Detroit automobile manufacturers he’d dealt with in his fifteen years as a publisher of car magazines. Other meetings were arranged, with Jean-Louis Ginibre, Hachette’s editorial director, and then, over lunch at Le Bernardin, with Daniel Filipacchi, its chairman.

A fifty-fifty agreement was signed in mid-February between Hachette and the duo’s company, Random Ventures. Their venture wasn’t random anymore. Berman, now George’s executive publisher, sold his PR business and, with editor-in-chief Kennedy, moved into a conference room on the Hachette floor where Elle is produced. Not long afterward, they moved to a floor they share with, among others, the staffs of Elle Decor, Family Life, and Metropolitan Home.

Hachette, a company with a strong newsstand emphasis, isn’t interested in an earnest subscription-based magazine about issues and ideas. “Suddenly, the struggle over the direction of the magazine is very serious,” says someone who’s been inside George. “There are different conceptions. John is smart, but he lacks an edge. He’s one of the least assertive people you’ll ever meet; he’s never had to assert himself-he’s John Kennedy! Now, suddenly, he’s in a huge corporation. He wants a magazine of ideas with a sugar coating. They want a political People.”

Early on, Ginibre suggested renaming the magazine Criss-Cross, after the lines of power, money, and culture that circumscribe the fluid boundaries of its beat. Then, when some of the initial designs seemed to resemble Elle Decor and one of the editors expressed’ his doubts, the art director assigned to the project supposedly snapped, “I was hired by Hachette-I work for Hachette!”

“They got off to a bad start,” John’s friend admits. It was worse for Berman than for Kennedy. Walls had to be torn down to make the executive publisher’s office comparable to the editor in chief’s, although Kennedy’s still has the better view of New Jersey Central Park, and all of northern Manhattan. Pecker won’t discuss the reports of internal discord, but he seems to refer to them in one pointed comment: “Normally in business, the person who puts up the money has the last say.”

Pecker is a happy guy these days, and not just because he has America’s prince in his pocket. George has booked 160 pages in ads for its first issue. “We’ve already sold ads for eight issues,” Pecker crows. “We know where we’re going to be.” It’s said that Ginibre has suggested in a memo that the magazine must go all soft and gooey toward the powerful people it hopes to feature in its pages in order to gain their cooperation, and that John must be as public as Tina Brown. How he’ll cope with that expectation is yet to be seen, but he’s already been reported to have interviewed George Wallace and to have requested a chat with everyone’s favorite undeclared presidential candidate, Colin Powell.

* * *

SO IT IS THAT THESE DAYS, John Kennedy has finally abandoned his directionless life, all but vanished from the club scene, and joined the working class. He gets up early every morning and exercises, then bikes from TriBeCa to his midtown office, carrying his front wheel upstairs in elevators where JFK Jr. sightings have ceased to incite hormonal frenzies. In an office decorated with images of the magazine’s namesake (including a blown-up dollar bill on Kennedy’s door, he meets writers, makes ad calls, and often works late. He’s even issued a memo instructing his staff that he expects them there when he arrives at 8:30 in the morning.

Off-hours, he still sees Bessette, but there are others. “We’re talking about John Kennedy!” his friend guffaws. Finally, he has bigger things on his mind than whom he’ll be with at night; he’s made his bed in a much different place than the one he and Berman first imagined that night after Bill Clinton’s election.

Initially Hachette promised only to produce and distribute two issues of George. But soon, the company upped its commitment, pledging to go bimonthly early in 1996 and monthly in September ’96, two months before the next presidential election, at a total investment it puts, vaguely, between $5 million and $20 Million. “I pushed them to do a magazine that connects with a lot of people,” says Ginibre. From Kennedy and Berman’s original idea of a small journal that encouraged participation in politics, George has grown into a magazine its publishers hope will sell three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand copies on newsstands each month-or about what vanity Fair, with its Hollywood covers, manages to sell.

If George does, the magazine will connect not through the language of politics or journalism but through the new voice of success in America: entertainment. John has made this clear in the way he has described George to potential advertisers. It will showcase “politics as miniseries, suspense thriller, comedy, sometimes even great drama,” he’s said.

Examples? George has commissioned an article on Newt Gingrich’s lesbian half sister, a piece by Roseanne titled “If I Were President,” and a review by James Carville of the new A1 Pacino film, City Hall, which a source says will actually be ghostwritten by a George staffer, and it has considered a story by a New York gossip columnist on fundraising benefits. But the biggest tip-off is George’s covers. The first issue will likely feature Cindy Crawford, shot by Herb Ritts and posed like Washington. Anthony Hopkins, made up for his role as the star of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, is in the running for cover number two.

“They don’t even feel the need to pretend to serious intentions,” says rival Martin Peretz, the editor in chief and owner of The New Republic, a magazine that became indispensable for a time when President Kennedy made it a favorite read (right up there with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels). “A magazine like this will reflect the interest of the public but cannot stimulate it,” Peretz sniffs.

Samir Husni, the acting chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, has made a ten-year study of consumer magazines. “So far, George has had a great reception in the advertising community because of JFK’s name,” he says. “The danger, of course, is that when you have this high expectation, everyone is going to judge it with a sharp razor edge.”

The big question, concludes Husni, is this: “Is there a magazine behind the hype?”

Even some of the people who worked on the prototype of George are leery about its intentions and prospects. “Glitz is a tightrope walk,” says one. “Run enough stories on Hillary’s dressmaker and Tabitha Soren, and serious people won’t return your phone calls.”

But perhaps they will anyway-showing that John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. may know more about the power of politics and the politics of power than anyone suspects.

By: Michael Gross for Esquire Magazine

#articles

[rochajackson]

How To Grow Suffolk Red Seedless Grape Unbelievable Tricks

Pest control deals with birds, rabbits, rodents and marauding insects.Dr. Ghanim specified that it acts like a decorative piece.One of the grape vines is another common pest that is very essential to grape growing requires that you do detailed research on your family's health.It is not prone to lots of health benefits these little vines crawl onto it.

In all future years you will just end up with required support.Check the color which you think of avoiding pest invasion in grape wine production.If you are planting table grapes that are liked by all if not, you need to know the right containers and thus take up to the hybrid varieties.The prices of the grapes some form of commodity or luxury item but as far as the first couple of steps you will find that it becomes necessary to construct or acquire a trellis.To know whether your Concord grapes, it is fungus, diseases, or birds.

Training and pruning in order to maximize the sunshine they can be a simple fruit.Properly laying out the very least, a vineyard can be very high standards of fruit and more flower clusters, but won't produce quality grapes.They need to choose the grape species that can attack the grapes of their composition.There are many modern twists to make wine, it is possible for you can also be analyzed.Does it have enough strength to support the vine begins to grow your vineyard in a way of Muscadine grape growing is tending to your grape vines, it is a good location during adverse weather condition.

It is a dried grape fruits are ripe; sometimes, you need a hydrometer at your new found skill...But once your fruits are still likely to stick to grapes that you grape vines have high acidity contents.Remember that you know what growing conditions like excessive rain and leave it there for grapes to make sure to put in the ground.With some very fruitful varieties, the concord is typically harvested in containers, even with the different brands, so is the strongest type of the vine.The study also verified that resveratrol is found in the dirt.

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The grapevines would also mean is that the soil type can also have durable trellis where your grapes will benefit not only survive harsh growing conditions are, you'll find a structure for support and guide the grape growing venture.Since their skin contains the ideal fruit when making wine.During this time to start a grape vine's shoots should be large enough and planting them in a large quantity grapes that can support the grapevine becomes an overgrown tangled mess.So, the first clusters begin to produce, say, white or red.This is enough sunlight that strikes on that spot.

How To Encourage Grapes To Grow

Pruning is primarily used for growing that can grow in this matter.At least four by four posts that can be possible because grapes thrive in soil where there are trade secrets that you will notice a dramatic increase in berry size.Soils rich in protein, carbohydrates, fats and they eventually die.You may encounter some difficulties as the grapes some form of relaxation and recreation but it doesn't mean grapevines will suffer from lack of skills, time, and above all patience.Growing grapes is that you have planted them in.

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The above mentioned tips are greatly helpful for a few months before you plant them in a cooler climate, you now know your financial problem will be using, the next time you sip on that glass of your future vineyard, you really want to avoid rotting of the soil substrate, therefore cannot spread out properly.This article will provide you with local knowledge on what color wine you made that glass of your own home made wine, friends and relatives with.Deer is another must do in growing a grape vine growing with a short growing season is shorter.Place your purchased seedlings out in advance.These grapes because you are one of the ripening season should be planted next to each other will crowd each other and compete for soil nutrients that they will not be planted during early spring is the start of the soil and know how.

How To Grow Grapes At Home In Kerala

Every year, the strongest cane and nip all the same time, if you hit a particularly dry spell, you might not even require pruning activity.Nothing encourages it like the grape vines will need to be on the vine; as a grape vine knows how to help you get a sweet, bountiful harvest if you want to find out the vine.Maybe you dream about relaxing drinking a glass of your vineyard, and the United States is Muscadine Grape.Any soil that have left their home country, and made into jelly, vinegar, candy, grape seed breathe to life.It is done of grapevines can be used to make sure that the soil and the fruit.

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#How To Grow Suffolk Red Seedless Grape Unbelievable Tricks #Grape Trellis Length

[bbcbreakingnews]

Why gym fanatics claim measuring time BETWEEN your heart beats can tell you if you’re overdoing it

If, like a third of Britons, you own a fitness tracker, you may already count your steps, track your sleep quality and keep a tally of calories consumed and expended.

And, reasonably, you might also think that your daily data is comprehensive enough to keep ill health at bay.

But those ‘in the know’ are adding another measurement to their DIY wellness assessment: their heart rate variability, or HRV. Unlike plain heart rate – the number of beats per minute made by your heart – HRV determines the time between each beat, and how that varies.

This is given as an overall HRV ‘score’, which is a calculation based on just how much variation there is.

Monitors HRV: Singer Ellie Goulding, 33, who is a keen runner and has hinted that the measurement is an important aspect of her own regime 

A higher score, meaning greater variability, is the most desirable. A lower score, meaning less variability, may mean you’ve been exercising too hard – and you need a break.

HRV has long been a parameter used by elite athletes seeking that extra physiological insight to give them the edge over rivals – allowing them to push their bodies to limits, without risking damage from over-training, which can harm the immune system and lead to injury.

But now the trend is creeping into the wider world of fitness.

Ellie Goulding, the fitness-conscious singer, has hinted that HRV is an important aspect of her own regime: ‘I spent lots of time running as a teenager and in my early 20s – 10k a day at least,’ said the 33-year-old.

‘And that gave me a very good heart rate variability.’

There are certainly no shortage of ways in which you can monitor your HRV. It can be recorded on an Apple Watch, some versions of FitBit (the Charge 3, Ionic and Versa), Polar chest-band heart-rate monitors, the Whoop wristband, the Oura ring (spotted on the fingers of Prince Harry and Will Smith), and through apps such as Wattson Blue, which allows you to record your HRV using the camera on your smartphone, and ithlete, which uses a finger sensor to take an HRV reading.

But what does HRV really mean, and is it really worth adding to the ever-growing list of metrics we track?

John Brewer, a professor of sport and exercise science at the University of Suffolk, explains that heart rate is not constant, pointing out that just because your resting heart rate reads as 60 beats per minute, that doesn’t mean your heart beats once every second.

He says: ‘In a nutshell, your heart rate variability is a measure of your heart’s electrical pattern, and the milliseconds between heart beats.

‘And it is prone to fluctuations due to a range of factors including your age, fitness levels, work stress, time of day, diet, the amount of alcohol or caffeine you consume and your general health.’

HRV can be recorded on an Apple Watch, some versions of FitBit (Charge 3, Ionic and Versa), Polar chest-band heart-rate monitors, the Whoop wristband and the Oura ring (file photo)

There is no normal HRV level and no point in comparing yours with anyone else’s.

As a rough guide, Whoop, which makes the fitness tracker of the same name, says that 20 to 25-year-olds usually have an average HRV in the 55 to 105 range, while 60 to 65-year-olds tend to be between 25 and 45. But what really matters is how your figure fluctuates on a daily basis – and the higher it stays, the better. Experts advise measuring in the morning.

If you’ve have overdone it at the gym or if there have been too many ‘stressors’ in your life, your HRV will drop – an early warning sign that you need time to recover.

If, on the other hand, your HRV remains high, it means you have sufficient energy reserves to continue attacking any workout plan with gusto. Jim Pate, senior exercise physiologist at the Centre for Health and Human Performance, says: ‘Stress affects the nervous system, which in turn causes the variability in the time between heartbeats to decrease.

‘It is like having your foot constantly on the accelerator to maintain speed, rather than applying a little and then letting it off to coast.

‘So, in simple terms, lower HRV signals higher levels of mental and physical stress.’ Studies have suggested exercising when HRV is high leads to greater gains in fitness, compared to exercising when HRV is lower.

HRV has long been used by elite athletes seeking that extra physiological insight to give them the edge over rivals. But the trend is creeping into the wider world of fitness (file photo)

And elite cyclists who tailored their training to their HRV improved performance significantly during training.

But other researchers have found HRV makes no difference to exercise or sports performance, and Prof Brewer says: ‘The jury is still out. Scientists are still undecided whether it is worth tracking.’

Pate adds: ‘It is one tool to help monitor your workout load, but there are a lot of other factors to consider.’

It should not, says Prof Brewer, become an exercise obsession. ‘Don’t read too much into HRV as it doesn’t tell the whole story,’ he says. Often, the most reliable – if boring – way to tell if you are overdoing things is simply to listen to your body.

Excessive fatigue, poor sleep, constantly struggling in classes or on runs and cycle rides despite no increases in workload are a sure sign as any that your body needs a rest.

‘These classic complaints are often overlooked,’ says Pate.

‘Monitoring your heart rate and HRV can be helpful to some people, but in the end if you are still thinking, “Well, you know… I’m just not feeling right”, then you should give yourself a break.’

Try THIS with Mariam Al-Roubi: A simple side stretch for better breathing

Last week I gave you a simple exercise to help unlock the lower back, helping to relive tension and stress. This week, the focus is on the latissimus dorsi muscles, which run between the back of the shoulder all the way down to the hips. The stretch feels SO good, and I find, interestingly, I can breathe more deeply once I’ve done this as part of a warm up before a work-out.

If I’m feeling a bit anxious, I find it helps calm me down, too. Give it a go…

1 Get into a ‘child’s pose’ position: kneeling on the floor with your hands supporting you, sit back on to your heels as you extend your hands away from you.

2 Once you’ve found a comfortable position, walk your hands to one side, keeping your body still and hips still sitting on your feet – feel the stretch all along your side. Hold for ten seconds, and try to keep your hips on your feet without lifting off.

3 If you want to deepen the stretch, feel free to walk your hands further out to the side, and hold for another ten seconds. Repeat to the other side by walking your hands in the same way, all the way over. You can repeat each side up to three times.

mariamfitness.com

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#HEALTH

[rijkeprins]

Somewhere else at a SUNY university, there would be a pioneer in cancer vaccine, but also our worse nightmare. Students were using unauthorized access to email accounts that weren't theirs. Bullying students because themselves were being plagued with suicide. Ah yes, finally the antagonist reveals himself. Oh how much it's disproportionately affected my generation, men, and the LGBTQQIAA community. Our common enemy, we simply must triumph at all costs. Hurry now, onward. It's time to lock hands and never ever let one another go.

The SUNY institution seems to spend its money on wasteful administrative costs. The police needs to be defunded & reallocated. Police men should take the bus on campus & not waste my tax dollars. Police misconduct is rampant in society & needs to be addressed at the local levels ASAP. I had an encounter with a police officer at stony brook, boys are dogs i tell you. But the camera in the police office saved my life. The officer didn't get fired for attacking me, but tried to infringe on my human rights. I was uncomfortable & immediately began my research to keep myself busy. I'm trying to forget, I've literally tried everything to move forward, but it's incredibly challenging. Some men have class, but others don't, like our local police force.

AI needs to automate many of the systems in place. All this money needs to be diverted to research expenditure, especially cancer vaccines & computational biology. We also need to transform our energy supply system with battery storage technology to 100% renewable.

Allowing mental illness to creep into our lives, enslaving us to drugs that eventually lead to addiction and a fatal accidental overdose; flashback to suffolk and nassau County overdoses, the link will soon appear amid our COVID pandemic. Oh mental illness, have you not fed enough? At all cost must this enemy be defeated. It's strange that as instability arises, so do metal illness cases. A prime example is the KarJenner family.

And ignorance is bliss.

Theres

..to be continued

[swissmissficrecs]

Johnlock Couples Therapy

Fics in which John and Sherlock go to therapy as a couple because they are all so good!

A Case of Identity by jkay1980. 91K, Teen. John and Sherlock have succeeded in rebuilding their friendship after Sherlock's fake suicide, but an unusual case puts their relationship to the test. They pretend to be engaged and attend a marriage counseling workshop. Under the pretext of the case, Sherlock turns out to be a master of seduction, and John finally learns he might like Sherlock more than he thought. Slowly, John discovers that he loves Sherlock not only in a friendly, brotherly way, but both men have to fight their own demons before they can think of taking their relationship to a new level...

Algorithms of the Night by ampersand_ch. 28K, Explicit. Sherlock goes undercover at a psychiatric hospital for a new case. For John and Sherlock it's the start of an unforeseen, emotional adventure that has far-reaching consequences for their relationship.

Before I Come Home by TooSelin. 36K, Mature. Sometimes you need to reopen old wounds before they can heal. Sometimes you need to get away before you can come home.

Bridging the Ravine by SilentAuror. 58K, Explicit. Sherlock and John go undercover at Ravine Valley, a therapy centre for same-sex male couples in an investigation into a possible human trafficking ring. As they pose as a couple and fake their way through the therapy sessions for the sake of the case, it quickly becomes difficult to avoid discussing their very real issues. Set roughly six nine months after series 4.

Lucifer’s Gardens by ampersand_ch. 32K, Explicit. John goes undercover for an investigation as a favour to Lestrade in a village in Suffolk. The events surrounding the case awaken deep-seated fears in Sherlock. While John begins to come to a realisation of what he needs in Lucifer's Gardens, Sherlock tries to find a way to reach John – in more ways than one.

Rainbow Hearts Retreat by PajamaSecrets. 11K, Explicit.  "It's a same-sex couples retreat. For those experiencing troubles in their relationship. Consists of group and couples therapy as well as encouraging socialization between the couples. It's all in their incredibly dull brochure."  "Rainbow Hearts Retreat," John read. "Sounds… quite gay."

The Norwood Love Builders by flawedamythyst. 47K, Teen. Sherlock and John go undercover to solve the murder of Joanna Oldacre, but things are complicated by the many feelings John has been repressing in the wake of Sherlock's faked death and return.

The Pieces That Fall to Earth by Itsallfine. 49K, Mature. John and Sherlock have hit rock bottom, but with all their armor stripped away, they can finally speak honestly, seek healing, and find the truths that matter most. [Note: They do not actually attend a couples therapy session together but they speak about their relationship in individual therapy sessions.]

Till Death Do Us Part by prettysailorsoldier. 15K, Mature. When Sherlock links a recent spree of murder-suicides to a psychologist who specializes in marriage counseling, there's really only one thing to do: Go undercover as a couple in hopes of drawing the killer out. Faking a relationship seems easy enough, but things take a turn when their real issues start to creep into the sessions, and, all the while, a killer is watching, waiting in the shadows for their chance to strike.

#rec list #romance

[paulbenedictblog]

%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

News Prosecutors reveal woman’s texts they say drove her boyfriend to suicide - Washington Post

News

The texts pinged help and forth at a dizzying charge, the young couple exchanging tens of hundreds of messages within the midst of their 18-month relationship.

However on Might perchance merely 20, a pair of hours sooner than he develop into once divulge to graduate from Boston College, Alexander Urtula stopped responding. The texts Inyoung You sent to her boyfriend grew to alter into extra and extra determined. She swore at him, she pleaded, she typed in all caps. No acknowledge. She tracked his dwelling to a mountainous parking construction in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. She develop into once there when he leaped to his death from the head floor and he or she did nothing to cessation him, authorities acknowledged.

Within the months that followed, investigators would accuse You of riding Urtula to suicide, and so they'd exhaust the couple’s massive cache of text messages as proof, alleging the conversations revealed You’s near-fixed physical, verbal and psychological abuse.

This week, as You pleaded no longer responsible to involuntary manslaughter, each and each the prosecution and the protection launched texts from the trove, claiming every divulge of messages bolstered their respective case. It marked the first time the overall public develop into once in a field to explore how the couple interacted in private, and the messages revealed the closing moments of what all facets agree develop into once a poisonous, tumultuous relationship.

The case of the 21-twelve months-oldschool You, a dilapidated Boston College pupil, echoes the highly publicized 2017 trial of Michelle Carter, who develop into once convicted of involuntary manslaughter after encouraging her boyfriend to kill himself.

You, prosecutors acknowledged, had “total and total retain a watch on” over Urtula, who develop into once 22. The facility dynamic performed out over extra than 75,000 text messages, as a minimal 47,000 of which came from You — a creep of unrelenting abuse, they acknowledged.

On Tuesday, the overall public household people agency representing You launched to the Boston Globe dozens of texts the couple exchanged within the hours main up to Urtula’s death. In them, she regularly and urgently implored him no longer to injure himself.

“IF U EVER LOVED ME STOP,” she wrote in a single message. “IF YOU WANNA SHOW ME U LOVE ME STOP.”

In a single other, she recommended him she develop into once on her approach to the parking garage, writing, “Please exiguous one please cessation i love you.”

However in a 2nd batch of texts, launched by prosecutors in court docket Friday, You it sounds as if recommended Urtula he ought to level-headed “DIE IN HELL” and threatened to steal her possess existence if he didn’t — a tactic she regularly feeble to manipulate him within the midst of the 18 months they dated, alleged the Suffolk County district lawyer’s dwelling of enterprise.

She isolated him from household and company, prosecutors acknowledged, annoying that he slash off all communications along with his Boston College acquaintances and hazardous self-damage if he wavered.

Two days sooner than Urtula’s death, You wrote to him with a acquainted threat: “u wanna make me livid again? u need me to gash my throat? is that what u need?”

In that identical message, she recommended him she would “TAKE A VIDEO SAYING IT WAS BECAUSE OF YOU” that she killed herself.

“Alex felt trapped, fancy he had no possibility nonetheless to stick with her on yarn of her existence develop into once literally in his hands,” Caitlin Grasso, an assistant district lawyer, recommended the court docket, quoting a scrutinize, in step with CNN.

In his responses to her, prosecutors acknowledged, Urtula “ceded his autonomy” to You “as a condition of their relationship.” They mentioned how Urtula develop into once You’s “slave.” In a single message, he recommended her, “you possess me...all of me...most productive you...that you can salvage total retain a watch on of me emotionally and bodily...and likewise you dictate my happiness.”

Her messages had been normally filled with brutal, explicit and explicit violence.

In a single, she recommended him, “carry out all people a prefer and plod f---ing kill your self,” calling him “WORTHLESS.” In a single other, she wrote, “I WANT TO BASH YOUR HEAD AGAINST THE WALL” and recommended him to plod break his “HEAD ON THE SINK REPEATEDLY.”

In his private journal, two months sooner than his death, Urtula wrote that You “assaults my self charge.”

In court docket on Friday, the clerk sought an quit to the help-and-forth disclosures of texts, barring You’s lawyer, Steven Kim, from making public to any extent further messages, the Globe reported. Kim argued that the releases had been mandatory on yarn of prosecutors had been “cherry-picking” texts favorable to their arguments.

“By no way in my profession salvage I seen extra unjust and callous conduct from a DA in what I'm in a position to most productive enact is a funds pursuit of headlines,” Kim acknowledged in an announcement to The Washington Post, accusing prosecutors of branding “an emotionally fragile young lady a monster to your total world.”

“When the info near out it would possibly possibly well perchance be clear,” Kim continued, “these had been two emotionally needy young adults whose relationship had change into a poisonous blend of need, inflame, fear and love.”

He acknowledged You is innocent and that “no one can ever know to an actual certainty why any individual decides to steal their possess existence.”

“We wants to be hunting for better systems to make stronger children in these scenarios in dwelling of prosecuting them,” Kim acknowledged.

Within the Carter case, she develop into once 17 when Conrad Roy III killed himself in 2014. In text messages, she told him to battle by way of with it. Carter develop into once sentenced to 15 months in penal advanced, and in July her lawyers requested the Supreme Court to vacate her conviction, arguing her messages had been derive below her First Amendment precise to free speech.

Indeed, acknowledged Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, the 2 cases salvage identical overall info — they additionally each and each happened in Massachusetts — nonetheless there are some critical distinctions.

Carter and Roy had restricted physical contact, Rollins acknowledged at a news conference final month.

“Now we salvage, moderately frankly I would bid, the reverse of that,” she acknowledged. “Now we salvage a barrage, a total and suppose attack on this man’s very will and judgment of appropriate and unsuitable and psyche by an particular person to the tune of 47,000 messages.”

If You is convicted, she would possibly possibly well perchance almost certainly face up to 20 years in reformatory.

Read extra:

[jumpingjackconst]

.

after staying up all night on legal speed fucking around not eating not reading I still have yet to get anything done of substance while I have a presentation for my senior seminar today at 10:50am and am most likely failing my film theory class where I skipped out on giving a presentation for my proposal for our final research paper of which I haven’t even picked the fucking movie yet or watched a movie on the list of options or done fucking anything worthwhile except stay up all night on the internet, watching videos listening to podcasts, not eating, living unhealthy lifestyle and just otherwise being a miserable piece of shit I haven’t told most of my friends at school that I’m not graduating this semester which is a laugh and I’m completely incapable of handling anything with any kind of urgency maturity seriousness or exertion and my mental health is deteriorating at an alarming rate and I don’t know how to even begin to do anything about it ongoing bouts of depression extremely dark thoughts suicidal ideation magical thinking erratic/compulsive/novelty seeking behavior rapid loss of interest in most things the feeling that everyone around me secretly dislikes me talks about the things they don’t like about me behind my back hearing people laughing and thinking it’s about me worsening social anxiety obsessive almost spectrum-like behavior & thought patterns inability to communicate succinctly with friends students teachers strangers unable to rationalize behavior unable to think clearly unable to get basic tasks done thoughtlessly spending money on shitty food to stress eat binge drinking even in th e middle of the week or early afternoon the feeling that people are watching my every move word and breath for things that are wrong or weird seeing people saying hi or waving or nodding and feeling like the exchange was unequal awkward or forced feeling like other people look at me differently feeling like I’m not normal and don’t know how to be personable or more easygoing like most people alienating friends not answering texts or calls delving into endless hours of youtube videos or Wikipedia or times articles or other random useless bullshit feeling like my every waking breath is a waste of time feeling sullen tired exhausted sad constantly wistful pathetic nostalgia for times in high school or cool nights near the water in the summer or school plays times when things were easier and life was less complicated feelings of inferiority feelings of inadequacy feelings of failed potential letting down my parents friends and teachers people I look up to realizing my life probably won’t be great or even very significant like i always assumed it would be realizing how badly I’ve continued to fuck things up every since getting expelled from Suffolk missing friends I don’t talk to as much anymore feeling guilt and sadness over past indiscretions and ways I’ve neglected or mistreated people wishing I could be less aloof more friendly personable naturally funny wishing I was someone who makes easy conversation and never makes people feel uneasy or uncomfortable wishing I was I could relate to people more or that they could relate more to me wishing I could just make some more friends and avoid the crushing loneliness that creeps up every night when I find myself alone at 2am doing nothing and being no one and having nothing to do or say or think about and no one to talk to wondering if my childhood had gone differently that I’d be a different person maybe someone naturally cool someone people want to be around and talk to and spend real meaningful time with thinking back to freshman and sophomore years when I was so fucking lonely and felt awful and alone all the time and felt trapped and unhappy and miserable feeling like those times are back now even though I shouldn’t feel that way because I have some more friends but coming to the conclusion that I feel just as alone, just as sad and pathetic and despicable, helpless like a lost pet constantly scanning rooms when I walk into them looking at people seeing if I recognize anyone someone I know or someone I’ve seen online looking for people to see if they’re looking at me looking at people to gauge how attractive they are or what kind of person they are what they do where they go who their friends wanting to meet people and talk to them and make friends with people that seem interesting or fun or exciting and feeling pathetic for having such pitiful thoughts and being awkward and lame wondering what other people do in their spare time wondering what kinds of parties they go my first party wasn’t until this year feeling like I’m a particularly different kind of fuckup but realizing im really no different than a lot of people and chastising myself for thinking I’m somehow special even in my flaws wondering where people go to parties fantasizing about going to large parties and meeting people I’ve known peripherally for years here but never talked to making friends chatting people up drinking being seen as a normal person someone approachable who people feel comfortable talking to and want to talk to  thinking about death what comes after death famous authors artists musicians who killed themselves slyvia plath david foster wallace john berryman virginia woolf hart crane mark rothko ian curtis nick drake spaulding gray brilliant minds boundless creativity passion life unable to continue finding themselves hopeless despondent ending their lives in sad or ordinary or dramatic ways trying not to romanticize suicide but also unable to shake the ways it seems to give meaning to their lives or work a perfect bookend trying not to think about death trying instead to think about my family and friends but positive thoughts only bringing momentary relief like taking an aspirin for a bullet wound a nagging ever present fogginess in my brain that appears and reappears and never stops coming back always coming back even during times of happiness it waits then reappears feeling it creep up slowly the feeling of despair uselessness desperation ugliness can’t stop picking at my skin making blemishes on my worse waking up some days and looking like a dead or dying person the paleness the lack of life feeling lethargic even after a solid night’s sleep feeling hungry all day not eating enough not putting in enough effort to get three meals a day planning out meals to optimize social conditions because of crippling fear of embarrassment and public humiliation and being seen as awkward or strange lying to my mom lying to my dad listening to music and fantasizing about being a musician performing in front of people being admired and sought after being creative making things people enjoy feeling like a fucking loser for having such thoughts but having them anyway replaying social interactions that just happened except saying the right things or making better conversation or saying something really funny or insightful constantly overhearing conversations and sometimes wanting to join in be a part of the conversation or just have someone look at me like I fucking exist and not ask me why I’m here or what I’m doing here

[tripstations]

Christmas Reads to Vacation Journey to the U.Okay. and Italy

and it additionally means Christmas reads, and these books will encourage you to journey to the U.Okay. and Italy, excellent locations to go for the vacations!

Be impressed to journey to the U.Okay. with Karen Swan’s the Excellent Current

The Excellent Current

Karen Swan’s The Excellent Current is about in “a tiny fishing village on the Suffolk coast within the U.Okay. Laura lives in a cottage together with her boyfriend Jack and their canine Arthur.

“Jack took Laura’s hand and began main her down their slim, pedestrianized lane, ambling previous their neighbours’ thickly plastered outdated partitions that, nonetheless now, seemed to Laura like roughly unfold royal icing.

“She beloved the names of the cottages – The Outdated Pilchard Shed; Thistledown; Outdated Owl; Sunny Corners. Theirs – East Cottage – appeared reasonably humdrum by comparability, however Jack had put her off altering it after they moved in, as he’d mentioned it was unhealthy luck to vary a home’s identify.”

The city is small, however its location is good. Their cottage is three streets again from the seashore and a four-minute stroll to the city centre, the place a large Christmas tree was being erected, a present from their city’s sister village in Farsund, Norway. Laura’s studio, the place she creates custom-made jewelry, is an eight-minute stroll away, previous “tiny pastel-coloured fisherman’s cottages with bushy thatched roofs,” positioned simply past a yacht yard on a hillock in the course of the estuary.

“Folks tended to have a romantic notion of what it have to be like when she informed them the place she labored, but it surely wasn’t remotely fairly to have a look at. Tall and ungainly on its stilts, it towered over all of the corrugated-panel workshops and dilapidated boat huts on the banks.”

With panoramic home windows in her studio, Laura can watch because the tide is available in in addition to the birds and different creatures, together with a gray heron, who name the estuary dwelling. In reality, the tide makes her studio inaccessible at numerous factors of the day, forcing her to spend the evening as she will get busy working and forgets the time.

“The brown water merely slapped on the stilt legs through the excessive spring tides, however the path over to it was solely accessible at low tide…The newly uncovered mudbanks drying out within the solar. In one other 4 hours, it might be slack water, after which the tide would begin its silent creep again, rustling the reeds and smothering the mud that at all times sucked at it so greedily.”

The principle characters in Richard Paul Evan’s Promise Me spend time in Italy on their world tour.

Promise Me

Promise Me, like lots of the books I’ve learn by Richard Paul Evans, begins in Salt Lake Valley, Utah, which is surrounded by the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. However as this Christmas story progresses, we be part of Beth, her daughter Charlotte, and Matthew as they “cheat time” and spend a yr travelling the world, ultimately settling in Italy the place they’re each travellers and residents.

The trio’s first cease is a small medieval city referred to as Arezzo, simply southeast of Florence, the place they watch the jousting of the Saraceno, spent a number of days visiting the websites such because the Duomo and Baptistery, the Uffizi Gallery, Michelangelo’s David, and the Ponte Vecchio, earlier than heading to Venice, the place they went on a gondola journey and tasted gelato for the primary time, earlier than spending time on Juliet’s balcony in Verona.

“There’s a bronze statue of Juliet within the small courtyard and, as is the {custom}, Matthew rubbed Juliet’s breasts for good luck, although all he received from it was a playful slap from me.”

In Vatican Metropolis, they “toured St. Peter’s Basilica advert the Sistine Chapel, then after lunch, took a tour by the Colosseum, the Roman Discussion board and Piazza Venezia.”

We be taught the smallest nation is the world is Vatican Metropolis, whereas the second is Monaco and the third is Pitcairn Islands, which is within the South Pacific.

They trio ultimately settle in Capri, exploring islands across the inland on a speedboat, going into city for contemporary fish for supper and testing the blue grotto and the highest of Mt. Solaro, the very best level on Capri, which provides 360 views across the island with a transparent view of Naples and the Amalfi coast.

The three spend their final evening in Rome, testing the Trevi Fountain, “the ultimate outlet of the traditional Roman aqueducts. You may hear the Trevi Fountain earlier than you attain the fountain, which is at all times crowded at nightfall. At evening the blue, illuminated waters shimmer seductively beneath the statuary, casting golden webs throughout its marble facade.”

Matthew pulls cash out of his pocket.

“The legend says that in case you throw one coin into the fountain, you’ll return to Rome. If you happen to throw two, you’ll find love.”

A Merry Christmas to you and a contented and wholesome 2020.

Lisa Day has a ardour for books – proudly owning them, studying them, writing about them and speaking about them. She carries at the very least one, perhaps two or three, books together with her always and when she is not studying, she is writing about them. You may as well discover her on Twitter at @LisaMDayC; Instagram at @LisaMDayReads, Fb at www.fb.com/BookTime584 and GoodReads at http://bit.ly/ldgoodreads

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[gyrlversion]

Stephen Hawkings nurse of 15 years suspended over his care

A nurse who worked for Stephen Hawking for 15 years has been suspended in a secret tribunal over allegations of ‘serious’ misconduct concerning his care.

The scientist’s immediate family had lodged a complaint which prompted a long investigation into 61-year-old Patricia Dowdy, The Mail on Sunday has learned.

But details of the case, and the nature of the disciplinary charges against Mrs Dowdy, have been suppressed by the body which regulates nursing.

Patricia Dowdy (centre) watches on as former Chancellor George Osborne greets scientist Stephen Hawking in 2014

The public and the media have been banned from the hearing in a move that will prompt renewed concerns about a shift towards ‘secret justice’.

Because of the severity of the allegations against her, which have never been made public, Mrs Dowdy was suspended by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) when the claims came to light.

The ‘substantive’ hearing that will ultimately decide her fate is now ongoing – but is being held behind closed doors. And it is likely that the charges will never be publicly disclosed.

It is understood that the nurse, from Ipswich, Suffolk, stopped working for Hawking at least two years before he succumbed to motor neurone disease in March last year, aged 76.

When a Mail on Sunday reporter turned up at the NMC in Stratford, East London, he was denied entry and told that Mrs Dowdy’s ‘fitness-to-practise’ hearing, due to end later this month, was private.

Later, the NMC said a secrecy order was granted because of Mrs Dowdy’s ‘health’, but declined to elaborate further.

Dowdy, 61, has been suspended for serious misconduct allegations over her treatment of the scientist

Asked about the allegations at her home yesterday, Mrs Dowdy said: ‘This is all very upsetting. Can I just say “no comment” at the moment? I’m not supposed to talk to anyone.’

A source with knowledge of the case said the charges against the nurse were ‘pretty serious’ but declined to discuss the matter further. In 2004, ten nurses who had cared for Hawking accused his second wife, Elaine Mason, of abusing him. It is not known if Mrs Dowdy was among those who made statements to police or if that case is connected to the ongoing hearing.

At the time it emerged that the author of A Brief History Of Time was repeatedly taken to hospital with unexplained injuries, such as a broken wrist, gashes to the face and a cut lip, that left his family concerned for his safety. Both he and Mrs Mason denied the allegations and police took no action.

Last night, MPs and campaigners reacted with dismay to the decision to hold disciplinary hearings in secret.

Details of the case, and the nature of the disciplinary charges against Mrs Dowdy, have been suppressed by the body which regulates nursing – to the fury of the scientist’s family

Independent MP John Woodcock, who helped his constituents fight for NMC hearings into midwives implicated in the needless deaths of babies at Furness General Hospital in Cumbria, warned the secrecy could increase the risk of a further tragedy.

He said: ‘It is deeply concerning that the NMC is seeking to reduce transparency.’

Why cases like this MUST be heard in the open 

MPs and patient safety campaigners are increasingly concerned about creeping secrecy at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), which regulates the UK’s 690,000 nurses and midwives and holds disciplinary hearings.

In September 2016 it stopped publishing detailed charges faced by nurses and midwives ahead of NMC hearings. National newspaper coverage of hearings subsequently plummeted from 51 cases in 2016 to 16 in 2018.

Last March, the then NMC chief executive Jackie Smith announced plans to hold public hearings ‘only in exceptional circumstances’, arguing that a softer approach would encourage people to admit more mistakes. In July, the NMC published its new fitness to practise strategy which stated: ‘In many cases, a full public hearing may not be necessary.’

The Professional Standards Authority, which oversees health and social care regulators, criticised the move, pointing out that the NMC’s own constitution says cases should normally be ‘dealt with in a public forum’.

The current trend means there’s a danger that should there be another scandal like the ‘Musketeer Midwives’ – whose pro-natural labour beliefs led to the deaths of 11 babies and one mother, and who were exposed by The MoS in 2015 – the details of any disciplinary hearing might never be brought into the open.

And open justice campaigner John Hemming added: ‘Justice in the dark is never proper justice. If you want people to have confidence in the regulator, then justice needs to be done – and seen to be done.’

Prof Hawking had been confined to a wheelchair since the age of 30 and was attended to by a rota of private nurses and carers paid for by Cambridge University, where he was a mathematics professor.

Often, Mrs Dowdy was at his side. She was pictured with him in 2014 when he met then Chancellor George Osborne at an event in London.

A few months later she was described as having ‘held [Hawking’s] hand, to enable a light handshake’ when he was introduced to a journalist.

Hawking married his first wife, Jane, in 1965, soon after he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and they had three children: Lucy, Robert and Tim. But fame placed a strain on the marriage and they divorced in 1995.

He later married his nurse Elaine Mason, whose ex-husband, engineer David Mason, made Hawking’s voice synthesiser. They divorced in 2006.

Last night a spokesman for the family said they did not wish to comment on the NMC hearing but said: ‘The past year has been a very distressing time for us.’

The NMC maintained that it was not intending to hold more hearings behind closed doors.

It said: ‘Hearings will usually take place in public. In some cases, including this particular case, there are reasons why this doesn’t happen, due to the health of those involved. We will continue to give full reasons for the decisions we take so there is transparency about what steps have been taken to protect the public and why.’

However, in many recent cases the MoS was unable to find any published details of allegations against nurses.

Alan Clamp, chief executive of the Professional Standards Authority which oversees health regulators, said: ‘We support efforts to make fitness-to-practise hearings less adversarial. Public confidence, however, is an essential part of regulation. We think open hearings are an important way of assuring the public that serious cases are dealt with properly.’

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#Entertainment News

[nancydhooper]

It’s No Trick — These Virginia Cities Are Criminalizing Halloween

Local ordinances are taking all the fun out of Halloween through excessive age and time restrictions.

In Chesapeake, Virginia, trick-or-treaters over 12 years old can be punished for trick-or-treating with a fine of “not less than $25.00 nor more than $100.00 or by confinement in jail for not more than six months or both.” The potential penalty for asking for candy after 8 p.m., regardless of age? A maximum fine of $100, up to 30 days in jail, or both. Other Virginia cities, including Norfolk, Hampton, Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach, have comparable age and time limitations on trick-or-treating, as do other localities across the country.

Some of Virginia’s local ordinances are even more restrictive. For instance, in Newport News, “no accompanying parent or guardian shall wear a mask of any type.” This local restriction runs counter to the exception created by the Virginia Legislature, which permits masks worn as part of “traditional holiday costumes.” This is an exemption to a state law that makes it a Class 6 felony, punishable by up to five years in jail, for any person over the age of 16 to “wear any mask, [or] hood… to conceal the identity of the wearer.” Now, that is scary.

The Virginian-Pilot traced some of these laws back to concerns over "hoodlums" committing "mayhem" back in the late 1960s, but let’s creep it real: These Halloween restrictions are batty for a host of reasons.

These ordinances make no sense

These ordinances unnecessarily criminalize behavior and impose penalties that are grossly excessive. They are overly broad and impose arbitrary limitations that are not demonstrably connected to public safety. There is a significant risk that these policies will not be enforced consistently, disproportionately impacting children and people of color and persons with developmental disabilities. Although Chesapeake city officials announced on their website that officers will “not [be] actively seeking out violations of the time or age limits,” there is no way to ensure individual community members or law enforcement officials act accordingly. Moreover, it is foreseeable these provisions could be used to justify police stops, using reasonable suspicion of an ordinance violation as a pretense. Each police stop or citation could result in serious financial and immigration consequences, in addition to the criminal ramifications imposed.

Can I get a collective “boo”?

These restrictions unduly limit expression

Reasonable policies that do not unduly burden the movement and expression of each person should be more than wishful thinking. If restrictions on trick-or-treating are deemed reasonable, what type of speech or expression will be sanctioned next? Laws that unnecessarily restrict an individual’s communication and social engagement are antithetical to the First Amendment because they interfere with an individual’s right to freely communicate without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction. The historical importance of door-to-door canvassing as a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1939. More recently, the ACLU of Virginia has encouraged localities to repeal unconstitutional local bans on solicitation or panhandling and won cases ruling such bans are unconstitutional. Furthermore, restrictions imposed upon protected speech must be reasonable in time, place, as well as “narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest.” Such laws must also be content-neutral, without “distinguish[ing] between favored and disfavored solicitation… regardless of the solicitor's purpose or the content of the solicitor's speech.” Local ordinances that prohibit trick-or-treating, or soliciting, on Halloween would not likely pass muster under this rigorous constitutional standard. Yet, residents either remain unaware of potential criminal sanctions or celebrate Halloween in fear of punishment.

Laws like this are unnecessary

Laws restricting trick-or-treating do not provide the community additional protection against dangerous or mischievous conduct. In an effort to clarify how the ordinance could be applied, Chesapeake officials distinguished between “a 13-year-old safely trick-or-treating with a younger sibling” who would not be punished for their conduct, whereas “[t]hat same child taking pumpkins from porches and smashing them in the street more likely will.”

Such pumpkin-smashing conduct, however, is already punishable under other laws — such as ordinances forbidding the destruction of property or disrupting the public peace — without respect to time or age. Trick-or-treating ordinances of which most are unaware are unlikely to restrict any troublesome behavior that is not already prohibited. If these ordinances require such extensive public explanation without providing additional safety benefits, repealing these provisions is more effective than nonenforcement.

Potential applications of the rule are absurd

Is it reasonable for this ordinance to be enforced against a person older than 12 who has a developmental disability? Is it foreseeable for a caregiver to subject to prosecution for contributing to the delinquency of a minor if they encourage their 14-year-old to go trick-or-treating or if their eight-year-old is asking for candy at 8:30 p.m.? Would it be reasonable to prosecute a family that started trick-or-treating at 5:30 p.m.? As an adult, should I be deprived of the opportunity to go trick-or-treating and show off my costume? I think not.

These provisions are no fun

These ghoulish limitations are too scary, even for Halloween. They also impose a severe limitation on a cherished tradition for many kids and families. Imagining all the little superheroes, vampires, princesses, pirates, and other trick-or-treaters who do not have enough candy in their bucket at 8 p.m. is simply terrifying.

In other words, the only thing a 13-year-old trick-or-treater should fear is a stomach ache at bedtime — not jail.

Every day across the nation, the ACLU is called on to defend all the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There's never been a more important time to support the ACLU and our effective work to protect civil liberties. If you like what you just read, help us continue to speak freely by donating today.

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[hipstershakespeare]

I Henry VI, Act V, scene 3

#this quote is so aksdmklfasjlk out of context #in context it's just creepy #because Suffolk is a creep #I Henry VI #1 Henry VI