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At around 6 P.M. on a warm Friday evening in September, most of Washington had begun to shut down their computers, pack up their things at work, and officially commence their weekend. President Obama still had a few senior staff meetings before he, too, would head out for a weekend getaway at Camp David. He was scheduled to depart the White House with his two teenaged daughters in an hour, flying to meet his wife at the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.

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Six blocks south, though, a former Army scout had just arrived in the city. Suffering from delusions and panicky dreams, Omar Jose Gonzalez could feel the adrenaline in his veins. He was itching to set off on his important mission.

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Gonzalez parked his 1996 Ford Bronco off Fifteenth Street near the Holocaust Museum, cracked his windows a little, and hopped out. The disabled Iraq War veteran had lost his wife and his home near Fort Hood, Texas, and had been living in his car, short-term motels, and campgrounds for the last several months. Part of his foot was missing after the Humvee he was riding in rolled over a roadside bomb in Baghdad. His family felt he had been struggling to keep hold of reality after he returned from three tours and eventually retired with a disability in 2012. A cavalry scout, he described watching friends getting blown up. At his home near Fort Hood, he kept guns leaning behind the doors. He feared children he didn't know and warned his wife they could be deadly.

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As he set off for the White House on foot, he left hints of a life that was unraveling: two dogs in the Bronco's backseat, jars filled with his urine on the floorboards, and eight hundred rounds of ammunition, two hatchets, and a machete in the trunk.

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At 6:25 P.M., Gonzalez reached the southeastern corner of the White House's fenced grounds and began casing the perimeter for a way in. The forty-two-year-old soldier marched up the western border on Seventeenth Street, then along the north fence on the Pennsylvania Avenue pedestrian plaza, then down Fifteenth Street on the east.

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Four Secret Service officers who patrolled the compound for trouble - two on bikes and two on foot - noticed Gonzalez at different points in his walk. A few even recognized the caramel-complexioned man with a shaved head from a visit the previous month. That day, he had been walking along the south fence line with a hatchet tucked into his pants belt. He said he used it for camping and stowed it in his car. Today, in his dark T-shirt and baggy cargo pants, he didn't appear to be carrying anything or behaving oddly. They let him pass.

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Gonzalez doubled back to the north fence line, where most tourists were content to snap photos. But this Army vet knew he had to get inside. He had a life-or-death matter he had to discuss with the president.

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As dusk fell, two starkly different scenes played out on opposite sides of the White House grounds. On the South Lawn, order and serenity ruled. An orchestrated routine that the Secret Service had rehearsed over and over repeated itself. On the North Lawn, a modest problem set off a series of cascading disasters. Every last one of the Secret Service's defenses disintegrated. And officers sworn to tell the truth would lie about the mistakes they made.

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Around 7:05 P.M., President Obama stepped out of the Oval Office into the soft evening air. A briefcase of weekend reading in his hand, he strolled down the West Colonnade with his deputy chief of staff, Anita Breckinridge, then said goodbye to go meet his daughters.

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Four suited Secret Service agents shielded Barack Obama's flank and back as he walked from the South Portico's ground-floor exit to his waiting helicopter in the grass. Malia and Sasha, along with a school friend, followed close behind their dad, canvas backpacks of schoolwork strapped to their shoulders.

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Most of the Secret Service's traveling shift that would accompany Obama the next three days had already left for the Anacostia Naval Station. They were catching their own helicopter ride north and would receive the president when he arrived at the retreat. Now agents on the temporary "make-up" shift took their positions around the family to ensure they departed safely.

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One of the presidential detail agents who often protected the Obama daughters, Stavros "Nick" Nikolakakos, an expert marksman and fitness fanatic of Greek descent, had spent a chunk of his career preparing for a high-stakes shootout. But he wasn't expecting much excitement tonight. Before the First Daughters' detail, the black-haired Bronx native had worked as the top-ranked sharp-shooter on CAT, the Secret Service's elite Counter Assault Team. The daughter detail was relatively ho-hum compared to that, but it was a good route to rise to the president's detail.

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This Friday evening, on the access-controlled White House compound, Nikolakakos and his fellow agents searched for any movement, sharp sound, or odd shape, their eyes darting back and forth. Meanwhile, Obama looked eager to escape the capital after another draining week. He gave a short wave to the skeletal Friday night press pool, wishing them a good weekend.

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His daughters, sixteen and thirteen, walked on toward the helicopter, keeping their eyes forward, turned away from the flashing cameras. The agents halted at the end of the paved walk, staying out of the picture frame. The famous family stepped onto the grass alone and the cameras whirred. When the Obamas reached the white-topped green helicopter, the president ushered his daughters and guest up the short accordion stairway, then climbed aboard behind them.

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The president's walk to Marine One and departure from the South Grounds had become a well-choreographed movement in the modern era, repeated several times a week as he dashed from city to city. This serene image, captured hundreds of times, was as close as the president could get to appearing a carefree everyman strolling across his backyard without any bodyguards or guns in view. In reality, a small militia stood at the ready.

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Obama's Secret Service protectors feared that helicopter departures provided a choice opportunity for enemies to attack. Marine One's lumbering liftoff from the lawn - clocking the same speed as the helicopters that had carried President Eisenhower in the 1950s - made the president a sitting duck for his enemies in the sixty to ninety seconds it took for the helicopter to rise and begin its flight path.

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So, as they'd done for hundreds of POTUS helo lifts before, Secret Service officers in uniform and plain clothes fanned out from the South Portico to Constitution Avenue. They scanned the adjoining streets and crowds on the nearby Ellipse for anyone who might pull out a rifle or grenade launcher to try to take down the president's slow-moving aircraft. Counter-sniper officers posted on the White House roof checked their sight lines on the South Grounds and nearby roofs and balconies for unusual movements. Four officers on the Emergency Response Team, wearing all-black tactical gear and Kevlar vests, lurked on the southwestern side of the grounds. They stayed close enough to tackle any intruder who got close to the landing zone.

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"Renegade departing Crown," agents heard over their earpieces, the president's familiar code name.

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Like other agents standing by, Nikolakakos knew the First Family would be helicoptering northward in a minute, his shift would end, and he could give his guard-dog reflexes a rest. Marine One lifted off without a hitch, albeit a few minutes late, at 7: 1 6 P.M.

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The president left in the nick of time. In three minutes, all hell would break loose.

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With Marine One airborne, all 154 Secret Service agents, officers, and supervisors working to protect the complex that night started breathing a little easier. It was simply a natural reaction when Obama left the premises: The Boss was on somebody else's watch now. On the South Lawn, members of the Counter Assault Team now started stripping off their hot tactical gear and loading it into SUVs parked on the nearby south drive. Some took out their earpieces - no need to monitor the radio now.

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Agent Nikolakakos walked with a shift supervisor toward the house and into the Diplomatic Room. Both men needed to collect some of their belongings from Staircase, the detail agents' down room under the First Family residence.

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On the north side, Officer Clifton Monger, an experienced canine officer stationed with his dog in a van just west of the North Portico, grabbed his cellphone to make a personal call. The former Marine no longer was solely focused on the White House radio frequency but thought he could monitor it with one ear. He had left a second tactical radio, one he used to communicate with his emergency response team, in his locker.

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Officer Sean Hughes, a lanky, brown-haired newbie who was guarding the front door at the North Portico, left his post to talk to his friend stationed just inside the house. Officer Phylicia Brice had graduated from officer school together with Hughes a few months earlier. She was headed to New York to help with the upcoming United Nations Assembly, so Hughes was offering her some suggestions for places to eat and visit in the Big Apple.

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At 7:19 P.M., while Monger was on a call and Hughes and Brice were chatting, Gonzalez hopped onto a three-foot-high concrete wall abutting a section of the White House's black iron fence. This section of fence was under repair and missing its spiky decorative finials. From the concrete barrier, Gonzalez easily hoisted himself onto the seven-foot-six-inch fence and straddled the flat top. A short bald officer stationed just twelve feet away spotted him and yelled at Gonzalez to stop. He missed grabbing him by an arm's length. Gonzalez swung his leg over and landed on the White House grounds in one swift motion.

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He was the fifth fence jumper that year, part of an increasing nuisance for the Secret Service officers guarding the complex. Most of them were mentally troubled people. All were easily stopped within a few yards of where they landed, usually by the canine.

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On this Friday night, though, nearly every single thing that could go wrong did.

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As Gonzalez crossed the fence line, his body passed through an infrared beam similar to an invisible dog fence. He also set off a ground sensor soon after he landed. Both sounded an "alarm break" at the Secret Service's Joint Operations Center on the ninth floor of Secret Service headquarters on G Street. The team there was supposed to coordinate the response to emergencies and threats at the White House six blocks away.

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An alarm and a flashing red light on the JOC console gave the location where the intruder had entered. Gonzalez had cleared the fence near Charlie 4, Zone 312 - just east of the complex's main visitor gate on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Kenneth Havens, a Secret Service officer in charge of alarms at the JOC that night, heard a muffled radio transmission: "Jumper! .. . north fence line." Havens wanted to be sure officers heard the location, so they could nab him. He pushed the radio console's microphone for White House One, the frequency for all officers on the complex.

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"Got a jumper," Havens said. "North ground center fence jumper. North fence line fence jumper. North fence line."

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This was failure number one of the night. Other than the phrase "got a jumper," none of Havens's broadcast reached the officers. Unbeknownst to him or many others in the JOC, the sophisticated radio console the Service bought four years ago for the command center hadn't been set to automatically override other officers' calls. One officer had "keyed" his radio - depressed a button to speak - just before Haven and canceled his transmissions to everyone.

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Gonzalez meanwhile proceeded in a curved route toward the east side of the driveway in front of the mansion, running with a limp.

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Two officers on the Emergency Response Team, the tactical team wearing black vests and in charge of putting down trouble, were standing guard inside the Charlie 2A booth immediately to the east of the North Portico. Here was failure number two.

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Someone had removed the speakers from the booth's alarm system. Officers had been joking that summer about officers somehow "liberating" high-end speakers from fixed posts on the ground. So the two ERT officers received no broadcast alerts about what was happening.

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Even with that glitch, the two men picked up the telltale signs of a jumper. They heard yelling from the north fence line officers. They saw floodlights come on at key guard booths, a standard signal in the case of a jumper.

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The men came out of their booth within five seconds, moving quickly toward the north driveway, and readied their long guns for what might come. Though they couldn't see him yet, they were in the perfect spot to intercept Gonzalez.

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Next came failure number three. The emergency response officers were thinking: We don't have to rush this guy. They'd been trained to let the dog handle jumpers.

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The Belgian Malinois, the Secret Service's fail-safe method for neutralizing fence jumpers, was bred to home in on a designated enemy and launch like a missile to take down that prey. Known as the leaner, meaner German shepherds, these dogs had taken down nearly every jumper on the grounds. Canine handlers were trained to release the dogs within six to seven seconds of any perimeter breach.

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Within the same five seconds it took the ERT officers to come out of their booth, Officer Hughes had run back out to his abandoned post at the front door. Hughes squinted to see through the bright lights shining down from the portico. Black trucks and hedges blocked his vision, but he could make out officers moving toward the North Lawn.

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Now eight seconds after the jump, Hughes drew his 9-millimeter P229 pistol out of his hip holster and backed away from the front door. He remembered from academy training that the canine and the ERT were supposed to tackle any jumper. He had also heard in training that the dog could get confused about whom to attack and he wanted to reduce the risk of that by staying clear. But that training presumed that a Malinois with big teeth was bounding his way.

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At the eleven-second mark, Gonzalez came chugging into view, curving around the east side of the fountain in the center of the circular drive. Where the hell is the dog? one ERT officer thought.

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Failure number four was something nobody would have predicted: The dog was so late he missed the whole incident. The Malinois on duty that night had been resting in a comfy crate in the back of a parked van next to the portico when Gonzalez made his jump. Monger, his handler, was on his phone. Officers were supposed to monitor their radio closely at all times, but they had so little free time that quick personal calls were allowed. Despite years of trying to hire enough officers, the White House still suffered from a manpower shortage, and officers were still being called in and ordered to work extra shifts. On average, they still worked half their days off.

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Another ERT officer on the west side of the North Lawn who was closest to stopping Gonzalez didn't run to grab him. He instead ran to get Monger and the dog. Monger learned there was a jumper when he glanced through his van window and saw an officer running outside. He hopped out of his vehicle, unlocked the Malinois from his crate, and started running with his dog on a long leash.

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It was now thirteen seconds since Gonzalez's jump. The intruder had a big head start on what was supposed to be the White House's crack security team.

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Canine handler Monger and his dog came from the west and reached the grassy lawn in front of the North Portico fifteen seconds after the jump. Monger hadn't had time to make sure the dog locked on to the jumper. He couldn't successfully sic the dog unless it'd already been trained on a single target. The two ERT officers from the Charlie post on the east side had rushed over in an L formation to try to corner Gonzalez. But Gonzalez surprised them all by plowing into the thick, century-old boxwood hedge that surrounded the front of the portico platform.

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On the raised marble landing, Hughes kept his service pistol at chest level and took cover behind a pillar at the far east corner of the portico. He saw rustling in the shrubs below and thought it might be a scuffle.

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But Gonzalez - a broad-shouldered bald man with light brown skin and wide eyes - was only wrestling with the bushes. He stepped out of the dense shrubs and lumbered up onto the western steps of the stone portico. "Stop now! Get down! Stop!" Hughes yelled at the intruder at the top of his voice.

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Failure number five was captured on CNN's live feed aimed at the White House's front door. Hughes was taking cover more than fifteen feet from that door. Nothing blocked Gonzalez's path into the president's house other than the risk of Hughes's shooting him. Gonzalez stepped up to the white-framed threshold, seeming to look through Hughes. The officer didn't move. The Service had not trained him for this possibility - a man standing at the White House's front door? - but he didn't think he should shoot to kill. He later explained that he believed the jumper wasn't armed, the doors were locked, and the priority was to let the dog take the man down and avoid being attacked by the canine himself.

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Failure number six unfolded inside the White House. On the other side of the door, in the vestibule, Officer Phylicia Brice had never received the advance warning of the menace outside. The "crash box," installed at all booths and standard posts, was supposed to sound an alarm for intruders. But the box at Brice's post and others inside the mansion had been muted at the request of the White House usher's office more than a year earlier. Frequent false alarms tended to disrupt events inside. So Brice never heard any emergency broadcasts. Seconds before Gonzalez reached the door, she realized this was an emergency when she looked out the window and saw Hughes with his sidearm drawn.

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Failure number seven was that because Brice didn't get any warning of the jumper, she didn't have time to properly lock the doors. She pulled them shut but wasn't able to latch them with the heavy-set pins when Gonzalez yelled from outside, "Let me in!" He gave the two decorative wooden doors a firm push with both hands, and they flew open. He came crashing in and knocked Brice to the ground.

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In twenty-nine seconds, Gonzalez had made his way from a public sidewalk to inside the White House. He had gotten directly past eight trained security professionals on a compound staffed with 154 men and women in total.

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Brice jumped back up and tried to tackle Gonzalez, but at roughly five foot five, she was no match for his much bigger frame. She yelled at him to stop. He didn't and kept walking briskly toward the East Room. She pursued him and reached for her baton to hit him, but she grabbed her flashlight by mistake.

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The delay let Gonzalez walk into the East Room, a grand ballroom that had hosted some of the country's most historic ceremonies. Brice threw her flashlight to the floor and pulled her handgun on Gonzalez, but he continued to ignore her commands that he stop. He turned back into the grand hall and toward the State Floor.

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Failure number eight was the result of assumption. While Brice was struggling to control the intruder, the ERT officers outside didn't rush inside to give her backup. They paused outside the door. This unique SWAT team, trained to put down all manner of threats, believed the CAT team was responsible for handling emergencies inside the White House, while they handled the outside. The only problem was that the CAT team, then loading their gear after the president's departure, was not monitoring their radios. They had no clue about the jumper.

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Failure number nine was the result of bad communication. Like CAT, PPD agent Nikolakakos and supervisor Joshua Pruett had little warning about the intruder. Agents on the president's protective detail used a different radio frequency than the one for officers protecting the White House. Mostly, they couldn't be bothered with the volume of White House traffic. But in some rare cases it mattered, and they missed what was happening.

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The two agents got their first signal of trouble when they heard muffled yelling echoing down toward Staircase from one level above. Luckily, the whole building was an echo chamber. Both agents bounded out of the down room, where agents gathered between assignments and trips, and up the stairs leading to the East Room, where they found the true hero of the day - Officer Michael Graham - on top of Gonzalez. Graham had lunged at the intruder to bring him to the ground, but Gonzalez was still wrestling to get free.

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Nikolakakos helped Graham by grabbing the intruder's arms. Meanwhile Pruett kept his gun drawn on Gonzalez. Nikolakakos cuffed Gonzalez's wrists behind his back and began a cursory search for any explosives or other weapons. The agent dug into the Army veteran's pocket. Some chewing tobacco tumbled out. Then Nikolakakos felt something metal and pulled out a folding knife with a three-and-a-half-inch blade.

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The three men looked at one another in disgust, at the insanity of anyone getting through hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of security technology, rings of duplicative security systems, and that many Secret Service guards. Here a fence jumper had made it deep inside the mansion and right up to the steps of the president's private living quarters. And he was armed.

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"Jesus Christ," one of the agents said. "The guy's got a knife."

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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)

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You can't have your cake and eat it

(17^th century proverb)

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I want you, if you will, to come back through the centuries away from this era that we are at the moment, to overstate the case, living, back a thousand or so years to the shores of the Bosphorus.

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There, there were three Turkish brothers. There was one called Ab, and his rather dull brother called Abdul, an even further and duller brother called Abdullah.

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These three brothers had a boat; a little Levantine called caique, as Charles would have it.

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And they used to fish on the Bosphorus without success; they used to fish for shad.? And shad is a nocturnal fish; and you've probably had the soup made from it, nocturnal soup.

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Being nocturnal, meant that Ab, Abdul, and, of course, Abdullah, had to fish at night and it's desperately cold on the Bosphorus. And one of the brothers pointed out that here on the Bosphorus they're just not getting prosperous because it's so cold our fingers can't pull in the nets and the whole thing is a dead loss to us.

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So, what to do?

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And they were in desperation.

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And then a fortunate thing happened. Because they an aunt who lived in Constantinople, Aunt Maude. And

Aunt Maude died and left them a small wood-burning stove.

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The brothers, Ab, Abdul, and of course Abdullah took this wooden stove and said, "It's just the thing for our caique."

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And they put it there.? Abdul said, "Leave it to me." And he positioned it carefully in the middle of the boat. And they rowed out to the middle of the Bosphorus and started fishing.

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After a while, Abdul said, "Abdullah, haven't you forgotten something?"

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And he said, "No, I don't think so."

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Abdullah aid, "How about fuel for the stove?"

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And he said, "Yes.? You're right, I have forgotten.? Where can we get some wood?"

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And they looked all over and I think it was Abdul or Ab,? who said "There's a bit of square wood at the back of the boat.? That's made of wood."

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So they tore off the transom of the boat and they stuffed it in the wood-burning stove and they got nice and warm. And that didn't last very long. And they saw that there was wood all around the sides.? So they stripped bits off and shoved it into the stove and got nice and warm. And the night got colder, so they tore up the seats, till finally the three of them and the stove were floating on the keel.

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I think it was Abdullah who finally picked the keel up and shoved it in the stove, which of course was the last of the boat and the three of them were drowned.

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And hence the old Turkish proverb, You can't have your caique and heat it.

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Frank Muir 580604a

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Ask Well

I always get sneezy and congested around the holidays. Is my Christmas tree to blame?

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The holiday season can be a time filled with joy, mirth and - sometimes - itchy eyes, irritated skin, congestion and wheezing. This cluster of symptoms, sometimes referred to as "Christmas tree syndrome," typically doesn't stem from an allergy to the Christmas tree itself.

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But sometimes certain hitchhikers on the tree, like mold or dust, can cause a reaction, experts say. And if you're sensitive to the tree's fragrance or sap, that can also irritate your skin or airways.

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Thankfully, there are ways to minimize the risk that your Christmas tree will turn you into a sneezing, sniffling Scrooge.

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Typically, when people are allergic to trees, they are allergic to their pollen.

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But evergreen pollens are less likely to induce an allergic reaction than other tree pollens, and trees don't usually produce pollen around this time of year, so it's unlikely that a person would be truly allergic to a Christmas tree, said Dr. Joshua Davidson, an allergist and immunologist in Redondo Beach, Calif.

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That said, you could still experience allergic or allergy-like reactions when spending time with your favorite pines, spruces and firs. Here are some potential causes.

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MOLD

Certain types of mold can grow on a Christmas tree. And if you're allergic to that mold, bringing a tree into your home can cause allergy symptoms, Dr. Davidson said. In one 2023 study, researchers analyzed the results of allergy tests administered to more than 1.6 million people in the United States between 2014 and 2019. They found that nearly 17 percent of them showed an allergy to Alternaria alternata, a common type of mold that can grow on Christmas trees.

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The mold is so small that you can't see it with the naked eye, said Dr. Sanjiv Sur, an allergist and immunologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. But if your tree was growing in rainy or humid conditions, he said, mold is more likely to be present. Mold may also grow more easily if the tree is stored or transported in an unventilated, damp space, Dr. Sur said.

FRAGRANCE

Although many people love how Christmas trees smell, their scent - which comes from chemicals called terpenes - can also cause problems. "It's not really an allergy, but it's just irritating to the airway," Dr. Davidson said, and it can cause sneezing, congestion, itchy eyes and sometimes wheezing and chest tightness.

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SAP

Touching your Christmas tree - and especially its sap or resin, a thick substance that trees release after injury - could irritate your skin, too, Dr. Sur said.

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DUST AND OTHER DEBRIS

If your tree is grown in a dusty area, or transported through one (like a dirt road or construction site), it may bring dust into your house, Dr. Sur said. If you have an artificial Christmas tree, you may not be in the clear, either. People usually aren't allergic to fake Christmas trees, but because the trees are often stored for much of the year in dirty lofts or storage spaces, they can easily accumulate dust mites and mold, said Dr. Linda Cox, an allergist in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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"This has happened to many of my patients," she said. After coming in with bad asthma attacks, they'll often say that they were triggered after being in their attics.

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If you're experiencing respiratory symptoms around your tree, air purifiers containing HEPA filters can help by removing mold and other irritants from the air, Dr. Cox said.

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You can also try to kill any mold that might be lurking on your tree, Dr. Sur said. Mold needs humid conditions - at least 55 percent relative humidity - to grow. If you're having symptoms and your air feels muggy, try running a dehumidifier. You can also purchase a hygrometer, which measures relative humidity, for less than $15, he said. Dr. Davidson said you could also take decongestants to alleviate your symptoms.

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If you develop skin irritation after touching your tree, try creating "a barrier" between your skin and the tree by wearing long sleeves and gloves the next time you need to touch it, Dr. Sur said.

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When putting up a potentially dusty or moldy artificial tree, consider wearing a mask, like an N95, Dr. Cox suggested.

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And if nothing else, remember that any suffering you experience will be short-lived - much like the holiday season. "It's just a few weeks," Dr. Sur said. "In January, it should all disappear."

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Melinda Wenner Moyer

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And while Ornato and Murray were close, the arrangement meant Ornato effectively outranked the director. Though the lethal coronavirus arriving on American soil in January 2020 had been declared a national emergency in March, the president insisted on continuing to host rallies to energize his supporters and boost his own ego. Ornato had arranged for the Service to enable the president's authoritarian march across Lafayette Square on June 1 and coordinated the forceful removal of people protesting George Floyd's killing. Ornato had also been a key organizer of the president's campaign rallies out of town, putting the president's wishes ahead of the security of the people who protected him.

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Trump's decision to travel - and his preference that his own staff not wear masks - would put not only him in danger. It would also increase the health risk for hundreds of Secret Service agents and officers who had to help secure his visits to Oklahoma, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida, and even the White House's Rose Garden - for events that would later be deemed "superspreaders." Over the course of the year, roughly three hundred agents and officers would test positive for the virus, often infecting their family members, or have to quarantine following contact with an infected co-worker. President Trump contracted the virus, a security failure as well, and, after a short hospitalization and an experimental anti-body treatment at Walter Reed National Medical Center, recovered.

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No one in Secret Service management had blocked the frequent trips out in public on the grounds that they were unnecessarily risky for the president or for staff. Not even when an infected Donald Trump insisted his agents drive him to the street bordering Walter Reed so he could wave to supporters. The manipulation of the Ser-vice for political ends, which previous directors had warned against as the worst possible fate for the agency that protects democracy, had never been more brazen.

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In the inner circle of the presidential detail, many agents were cheering for Trump's reelection. When election night finally came, Trump claimed the early lead but fell far behind by morning, with Biden the projected winner and Trump disputing it and alleging fraud. Four days later, on Saturday, November 7, Biden emerged the clear victor as final vote counts showed he won the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania and the networks declared him the presumed next president. Still, the Secret Service leadership declined to authorize the full protection detail that had always been provided to presidents-elect, a level of security approaching that of the president's own. The director and his team took their lead from the White House, where Trump had blocked the normal peaceful transition of power, a feature of American democracy that had long been the envy of other nations. Because of the president's insistence that he was the victim of some inexplicable fraud, Biden did not immediately receive the protective shield of a specially equipped armored car, a twenty-four-seven counterassault team, and a beefed-up detail with more veteran agents. The Service spread the word to confused agents that they simply had to wait until the results were truly official - when Trump conceded or when the votes were certified by the Electoral College. But many agents said this delay ignored the agency's own security training: Once he became the presumptive president-elect, Biden was automatically a bigger target for assassination.

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A former Secret Service official who oversaw candidate protection said many agents leaned Republican, as he did, but they never let personal politics shape security choices. He called the delay disturbing: "If I were in charge, he'd get it all and Trump could fire me if he wanted. We don't do politics." Said another former presidential protector: "It appears the Service for some reason is picking a side. I don't know how the Service recovers from crossing this line."

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The decision to withhold this extra security only compounded the Biden camp's fears that Trump had corrupted this elite band. What few realized was that clusters of agents, including some on Trump's detail, were openly rooting for Trump, a fact hiding in plain sight. On Facebook and other forums, some of these public servants who promised to be above party were promoting Trump's debunked conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines tossing Trump votes and a stolen election. Their views would harden over the coming weeks and shock colleagues, as they cheered a president trying ever more desperate plots to overturn the results.

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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)

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Eddie Cicotte is far and away the most complicated of the Black Sox; he is certainly the most fascinating, the key to the whole thing, really, from beginning to end. He was clearly deeply involved, and he had to have been for the whole thing to work. So dominating a pitcher was Cicotte in 1919 that everyone else on the team could have been playing crooked baseball and still not offset Eddie Cicotte at his best. His mere involvement was enough to convince the conspirators the fix was possible; his absence would have convinced them of just the opposite. He was 29-7 in 1919, with a 1.82 ERA and thirty complete games. Even when he was supposedly not trying in two of the three games he pitched during the World Series, he still had an ERA under 3.00.

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Cicotte is also the key to the whole thing coming undone. All the rumors, charges, allegations, and news stories might have easily remained just so much newspaper noise without Cicotte's confession in September 1920. The guilt of shaming himself and his game would weigh more heavily on Cicotte than it did on any of his brother conspirators. A normally pleasant if taciturn man, he grew sullen and withdrawn during the 1920 season; it would later be reported that he spent much of that season following the fix talking with his priest about what he had done.

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Cicotte was Ring Lardner's favorite ballplayer; had there been nothing else on Cicotte's resume, this alone would make him deserving of historical attention. Lardner, perhaps the best of all baseball writers, whose journalism, sketches, and fiction provided maybe the clearest window into the baseball world of his time or any other era, had made a lot of ballplayer friends as a young beat writer between 1908 and 1912. Lardner enjoyed the antic and affable camaraderie of the ball club, and not only because he pulled material from the clubhouses, hotel lobbies, and Pullman cars that would provide the backbone of some of his most famous and enduring work, but because he genuinely did like the boys on the team and made friends with them easily. But most of those were strictly workplace friendships, and lasted little longer than the train rides that spawned them.

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But Lardner's friendship with Eddie Cicotte was different. The two men went back to Boston in 1911, when Cicotte was pitching for the Red Sox and Lardner was a baseball writer for the Boston American. They came to Chicago within a few months of one another in 1912, and remained friends after Lardner left the baseball beat to write a general-interest column beginning in 1913. The two men would dine and drink together. Lardner found the pitcher an introspective and intelligent conversationalist. When he put Cicotte on his all-time, all-star team in 1915, together with Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, it was Cicotte's intelligence as well as his physical acumen that he acted, "They ain't a smarter pitcher in baseball," he wrote, "and they's nobody that's a better all-around ball player, no pitcher, I mean."

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Lardner's son, Ring Jr., sees a sign of his father's affection for Cicotte in the way he treats him in the "Busher" stories, the Saturday Evening Post articles that appeared between 1914 and 1919 and made Lardner a writer of national renown. ?The Busher stories, collected in You Know Me Al and two later volumes, combine the story of the vainglorious protagonist, the fictional White Sox pitcher Jack Keefe, with several real-life White Sox from the era. Cicotte makes a number of appearances in the series, most notably in the final four stories, written and published during the 1919 season. "It is clear from these final four Jack Keefe stories that my father had a genuine affection for Cicotte," wrote Ring Lardner Jr., "to whom he assigns the best jokes and sagest counsel."

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In September of 1919, at thirty-five years old, Eddie Cicotte was pitching better than he had in his life. A solid, steady performer through his first eleven seasons in the big leagues - he had a 119-l00 record from 1905 to 1916 - he'd blossomed into an elite major-league pitcher in 1917, going 28-12, with a 1.53 ERA for the White Sox world championship team. In 1919 he was putting together an even better season. His twenty-nine wins would lead the league, as would his .806 winning percentage, thirty complete games and 306 innings pitched - all in a 140-game season. But in between these two stellar seasons, 1917 and 1919, he had a down year, maybe his worst in the majors, going 12 and 19 in 1918, albeit with a respectable 2.77 ERA. Ring Lardner's thinking ballplayer was smart enough to know that it could slip away again, as it had in 1918; and at age thirty-five, one of the next times it slipped away it might likely be forever. Cicotte knew that he was living on borrowed baseball time. He had a farm in Michigan, where he planned to retire and live out his life. That farm had a mortgage. He had a wife, two daughters, and a baby son. He thought often about how he was going to pay that mortgage and support that family when the baseball checks suddenly stopped.

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It is possible Gandil conceived of the plot and recruited Cicotte; it's also possible that the two men, pool-shooting companions, would have had conversations about it through the summer and would have thus been privy to one another's thoughts and feelings. It is also quite certain that Swede Risberg and Fred McMullin, Gandil's running mates, were involved from the beginning. Nobody until Eliot Asinof in Eight Men Out ever talked about recruiting Risberg and McMullin; they were an indigenous part of the fix, just like Gandil. Cicotte testified that his commitment to the fix came in New York on September 16, in a meeting at the Ansonia with Gandil and Fred McMullin, on an off day before the Sox began a three-game series against the Yankees. "Either Gandil or McMullin started by saying that we were not getting a devil of a lot of money, and it looked as if we could make a good thing if we threw the series to Cincinnati," remembered Cicotte before the grand jury. "Either Gandil or McMullin asked me what I would take to throw the series and I said I would not do anything like that for less than $l0,000. And they said, well, we can get together and fix it up.

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"That was all there was to that conference."

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***

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When Eddie Cicotte returned to his room somewhere around 11:30, he found $10,000 in an envelope under his pillow, two or three $1,000 bills, and a thick wad of hundreds. In a few weeks he would use the money to payoff a S4,000 mortgage on his farm and invest the other $6,000 in stock, feed, equipment, and repairs to the farm. He never knew who put the money under his pillow. He remembered thinking for the first time, however, about why it was being done. "I suppose some gamblers [will make] some money," he thought; "the ordinary man would not give up money to throw a series just to have us beaten."

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***

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The players then began talking about sequence. Cicotte, Gandil, and Williams said the first two games should be fixed, probably because they believed Attell's promise that they would be paid after each game, and throwing the first two would put $40,000 in their collective pocket before they got back to Chicago. Cicotte said he wanted to win his second game, because it would help with next year's contract negotiations. The players murmured in assent, saying they wanted to win a game for Cicotte. It wouldn't be game one though. Cicotte promised he would lose game one "if," he said, "I have to throw the ball clear out of the Cincinnati park." It was agreed that Burns and Gandil would be the go-betweens for the two sides, Burns getting the money to Gandil, and Gandil distributing it to the players. Burns, for his work, was to get an equal share of the player's take.

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Charles Fountain "The Betrayal: How the 1919 Black Sox Scandal Changed Baseball" (2016)

Both research and practical experience show that an intensive early education program, in which a young child receives a minimum of twenty hours a week of instruction from a skilled teacher, greatly improves prognosis. The brain of the young child is still growing and evolving. At this age, the neural pathways are highly malleable, and intensive instruction can reprogram "faulty wiring" that prevents the child from learning. Plus, behaviors in a young child have not yet become ingrained. It will take less practice to change an inappropriate behavior at age two to three than it will to change that same behavior at age seven to eight. By then, the child has had many years of doing things his way, and change comes about more slowly.

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ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis) programs using discrete trial training have the best scientific documentation backing up their use, but other programs are also effective. The autism spectrum is vast and diversified. Children have different ways of clunking and processing information, and it is important that an intervention method be aligned with the child's learning profile and personality. Detailed descriptions of different types of early intervention programs can be found in a book I recommend: Early Intervention & Autism. Real-life Questions, Real-life Answers by Dr. James Ball (2008, Future Horizons, Inc.) While this book is written for parents of newly diagnosed children, more than three-quarters of the information on interventions, effective teaching strategies, program planning, and behavior management is valuable for parents of children of all ages.

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The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child, without preconceived notions and judgments, and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world. That information will be invaluable in finding an intervention method that will be a good match to the child's learning style and needs. The worst thing parents can do with a child between the ages of 2-5 is NOTHING. It doesn't matter if the child is formally diagnosed with autism, PDD-NOS or has been labeled something less defined, like global developmental delay. It doesn't matter if the child is not yet diagnosed, but something is obviously "wrong" - speech is severely delayed, the child's behaviors are odd and repetitive, the child doesn't engage with people or his environment. The child must not be allowed to sit around stimming all day or conversely, tuning out from the world around him. Parents, hear this: DOING NOTHING IS THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO. If you have a three-year-old with no speech who is showing signs of autistic behavior, you need to start working with your child NOW. If signs are appearing in a child younger than three, even better. Do not wait six more months or a year, even if your pediatrician is suggesting you take the "wait and see" approach, or is plying you with advice such as "Boys develop later than girls," or "Not all children start to speak at the same time." My advice to act now is doubly emphasized if your child's language started developing on time and his language and/or behavior is REGRESSING.

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Temple Grandin "The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's" (2011)

Some of the people who auditioned for Hair wouldn't stretch an inch for either the musical or me. Out of laziness, I did many of the New York callbacks in my apartment, and one day a wiry young man with long hair showed up at my door.

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"Do you know the musical Hair?" I asked him.

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"Yes," he said.

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"Do you like it?"

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"No."

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"I see . . . Well, but you'd like to be in it, right?"

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"No."

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"Well, why are you here?"

"My agent told me to come," said the guy, shrugging his shoulders.

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"Okay, well, as long as you're here, would you like to do something for me anyway?"

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"No."

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We said good-bye. His name was Bruce Springsteen.

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Milos Forman, "Turnaround: A Memoir" (1993)

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We have scotched the snake not killed it

(McBeth, Shakespeare)

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Well, I don't know if you've ever been up country in Uganda in the rainy season.? I was there with a hefty six-footer, Tubby Wogglespoon, and a heck of a nice girl she was.? She was out there.? She had a veranda.

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Luckily it wasn't fatal, but she had this ranch there were she had been planting copra, which is rather funny because it was a cocoa ranch.? And it was right that she hadn't made much money at it.

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And I was there with her and we were having a sundowner outside.? And while we were drinking there suddenly came this sound, a sort of a "pssss."

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And I froze. I knew what it was.? She hadn't been out there as long as I had.? I'd been out there for nearly ten minutes. And I knew that this was this snake, the green spangled titterbub, which is one of the most poisonous snakes in the whole of Africa. They say that one bite and death is instantaneous.? And in some cases even sooner.

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I said, "Don't move. Don't move."

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And when I looked the thing was about a foot from my face.? About two inches from my nose; but a foot from my face.? Horrible

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I said to her, "Don't move." Because I knew what to do.

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I said, "The way you get rid of these is you get a forked stick and you toss them away from you."

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Well, I had a forked stick on me; I always carry a forked stick with me; it's to get the onions out of a jar of pickles. And I got this forked stick and I hooked it round the green spangled titterbub and threw it away.

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And there was a splash as it landed and there was silence.

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And I looked at Tubby and, by God, she'd gone white under the tan.? And we drank another sundowner and I thought it gone gone and all of a sudden we heard this noise again and it was slightly different. Instead of going "pssss," it went "Pssss. Hick. Pssss. Hick."

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And I realized what I'd done.? I'd thrown this snake into the open vat of whiskey which was outside.

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So I said, "You know what we have done?? We have scotched the snake not killed it."

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Denis Norden 580528b

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Ask Well

I have a few black plastic kitchen utensils, but I've read that they're dangerous. Is that true?

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Recent headlines have urged people to throw out any black plastic items lying around their homes, warning that they could contain toxic chemicals.

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A study published in October in the journal Chemosphere spurred many of these reports. It found that some of these items - including spatulas, sushi takeout trays and children's toys could shed flame retardants.

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Previous studies have shown that flame retardants can seep out of plastics, especially when heated. While exposure to high levels of these chemicals has been linked to serious health effects, it's not clear how much any item increases risk.

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Manufacturers added flame retardants to TV sets and computers in the 1970s to slow the spread of fire. But companies have phased them out as studies have shown that they are toxic and could cause cancer at high levels of exposure. Some of these chemicals have resurfaced in household items made from recycled electronic waste.

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In the new study, researchers found the chemicals in 17 of the more than 200 household products tested. ?Some products were found to contain decabDE, a flame retardant linked to cancer that the Environmental Protection Agency banned in 2021.

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Some studies in animals and in humans have linked exposure to flame retardants with increased risks of cancer, endocrine disruption and reproductive and neurodevelopmental health effects.

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A study published this year ?found that pregnant women exposed to these chemicals through their use in electronics, textiles and building materials had a higher risk of premature birth. Other studies have shown that children of women exposed to high levels of flame retardants during pregnancy were more likely to have neurodevelopmental deficits later in life.

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Some of these chemicals, including polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, have also been linked to an increased risk of thyroid disease.

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There are a number of questions scientists need to answer, including what levels of exposure lead to the most severe health outcomes, and how much risk people face from everyday use of black plastic items.

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The new study, conducted by the consumer advocacy group Toxic-Free Future, based its estimates of the levels of toxins on research published in 2018. That study submerged items with high concentrations of the flame retardants in hot cooking oil for 15 minutes. Stuart Harrad, a professor at the University of Birmingham and one of the study's authors, described that as a "worse-case scenario."

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But "under normal use conditions, it's very unlikely that these chemicals are going to come out into the food that you're cooking in any meaningful levels that you should be concerned," said Joseph Allen, a professor at Harvard University who has studied the health risks of flame retardants.

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Not all experts agree that the items are unsafe to use. But they do advise you not to leave the utensils in hot pots or pans, not to reheat food in black plastic containers, and to throw away chipped or dented items.

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Megan Liu, the science and policy manager for Toxic-Free Future, said she buys takeout sushi, for example, but transfers it from the black plastic tray onto a plate when she gets home.

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Emily Schmall

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"Mr. President, we've got something that Biegun and Azar need to run by you," Mulvaney said.

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Biegun opened with what he and the group thought would be a basic overview of the effort to bring home diplomats and permanent residents. as well as protections to ensure the evacuated Americans didn't spread the virus after returning. The president wanted to know how many people. Biegun estimated it would be several hundred right away, and eventually could be a couple of thousand.

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Trump exploded.

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"We're not letting them come back," he said. "You risk increasing my numbers. You won't increase my numbers."

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Trump didn't want sick Americans landing on U.S. soil, even if they were working for the State Department, or else the government would have to report a rise in infections, and that would make the public - the voters - nervous. The president was always thinking about the political ramifications for himself, even during a crisis.

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Biegun and Azar explained the measures under way to screen and isolate the passengers who had already landed in California.

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"The first flight was a mistake," Trump said. "Those people shouldn't have been in China in the first place."

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Azar and Mulvaney exchanged a look. The president was talking about Americans who had gone to China to serve the U.S. government

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Carol Leonnig "I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year" (2021)

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ADVENTURE

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I find myself down in the Bowery, which is a perfect place for me to be right now. I'm wandering through this gaggle of prostitutes who are working out of the john's cars. I'm walking past them, and I'm noticing out of the comer of my eye that there's this black Pontiac pulling up, and they're all rushing to it like flies.

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They're over there all bunched around the Pontiac and I'm walking by, and one of them turns and yells, "Yo, hey, They want you!"

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I turn, because I'm curious, and I love to be wanted.

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I move closer, and the prostitutes part, like the Red Sea. I walk right through, and see this old black Pontiac with three Hasidic Jews in it, two in the front and one in the back.

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And they say, "Get in."

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And I do ... I figured I was safe. I didn't think anyone could impersonate a Hasidic Jew. I mean, if there were three priests in the car, I would not have gotten in.

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I sat in the back seat with the youngest one, and there was no sexual vibe in the car at all. I didn't know what they wanted, but there was no sexual vibe. We drive off, and the prostitutes are yelling, "Goodbye! have a good trick, babe! Have a good trick!"

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We're riding in the car and my new companions say, "Do you want any beer or pizza?"

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I say, "No, I never drink before five, and I've already eaten. So what's up?" By now I'm saying I'm a drifter from Schenectady. I've taken on this new identity. I wanted a vacation from Spalding Gray.

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I say, "Where are we going?"

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And they say, "We're taking you to Williamsburg to clean our synagogue."

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I think, oh my God, well, why not? You know, it's a nice vacation; it's a nice way to tour New York. I've never been to Williamsburg; I don't believe we're going to do this.

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But we did it. We drove over the Williamsburg Bridge, then pulled up in front of this small synagogue. I go in and all these Hasidim are there, with twinkling eyes, looking up at me like little Santa Clauses. They're repairing the bindings on old books. They take me to the back door, and, listen, I know that at any point I can just walk out. But I'm not doing that. I'm taking it in. They give me a dustpan and a rake and a broom and a shovel, and they say, "Clean. Please, clean our backyard."

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I go into the backyard and I start raking. I'm feeling great.

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I'm raking up the leaves, I am sweeping up the broken white plastic knives and forks left over from parties, and I'm whipping it up! I'm doing such a great, energized job that this woman who lives in the building behind the synagogue throws open her windows and cries out, "Hey! You work good! You come here next?"

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I say, "I'm all booked up. Sorry. This is it for the day."

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In an hour's time I have that whole backyard just perfect. The Hasid who was driving the car comes down and says, "You work good. You are the best, hardest-working Bowery bum we have ever picked up." It turns out that every Sunday they go and pick up Bowery bums and bring them over to clean the place.

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He says. "Usually we just give them drinks, but you don't drink, so we have to pay you. How much, huh? Eight. I think eight dollars."

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I say, "No, no, ten ... It's ten dollars an hour."

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"Eight plus carfare." he says.

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"No, ten and I'll walk." I answer.

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"No. Eight."

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Here we are, a Scot and a Jew, haggling over money in the back of a synagogue. I get the ten dollars and I walk. I'm walking over the Brooklyn Bridge back to the city feeling triumphant!

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Spalding Gray "Spalding Gray Stories Left To Tell" (2008)

The Civil War had been over but five months when baseball had its first game-fixing scandal. In September of 1865, one William Wansley, catcher for the New York Mutuals, was paid $100 by a gambler named Kane McLaughlin to make sure that the Mutuals lost their game that week to the Brooklyn Eckfords. Wansley obliged, sharing the money with two teammates he had recruited to help. He more than did his part in losing the game, going hitless in five at-bats and allowing six passed balls in fewer than five innings behind the plate, as the Eckfords prevailed 23-11. Fans in the crowd of 3,500 at Hoboken's Elysian Fields cried fix; the Mutuals players met following the game and charged Wansley with "willful and designed inattention." He confessed to his complicity and gave up his accomplices, and all three were banned from the National Association of Base Ball Players, the rules and practices organization that was the closest thing the game had to a governing body in those early, ostensibly amateur days. The punishment was short-lived; all three banished players were playing again for other teams within a year, and formally reinstated within three.

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During its short existence, the National Association, which officially became the National Association of Professional Base Ball players in 187l, was a cesspool of gambling and game fixing. Few Americans alive today have ever encountered the word "hippodroming" - an arcane and archaic term that most modern dictionaries have dropped. But it was a familiar word to nineteenth-century baseball fans. They would have seen it in the newspaper several times a season, and known that it meant "conducting or engaging in a contest, the results of which have been prearranged." And readers would have known that the word's appearance in a newspaper story meant the writer either knew or suspected - and newspaper reporters in the 1870s often made no distinction between suspicion and evidence - that yet another baseball game had been crooked.

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The New York Mutuals, the team that apparently inaugurated game fixing, was controlled by Tammany Hall kingpin William Marcy "Boss" Tweed and implicated in so many early game-fixing allegations that when shortstop Tom Carey had a particularly frightful defensive day in a New York win over Boston, the newspapers suspected the worst. "Carey could not apparently throw the game all by himself," reported one journalist.

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Charles Fountain "The Betrayal: How the 1919 Black Sox Scandal Changed Baseball" (2016)

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Insights into Autistic Social Problems

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An interesting study by Dr. Ami Klin and Associates at the Yale Child Study Center is helping to explain some of the social problems in people with autism. Both normal and autistic adults were fitted with a device that tracked their eye movements, allowing the researchers to determine what the person was looking at. Subjects wearing the eye tracking device were shown digitized clips of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, a movie that contains a high number of instances of social interaction between people in a living room setting. (It is the kind of movie I find boring, because of its social nature.)

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The first finding was that autistic subjects fixate on the mouths of people instead of on their eyes. I think one of the reasons they do this is because of their problems hearing auditory detail. I have problems hearing hard consonant sounds. If somebody says "brook" I know the word is not "crook" if it is spoken in the context of a picnic. Looking at the mouth of the person talking makes hearing the correct word easier, I find that when I am in a noisy room, hearing is more difficult if I look at a person's eyes. I tend to point my good ear towards the person in order to hear better.

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Amy Klin's study also showed that a normal person's gaze rapidly switched back and forth between the eyes of the two people conversing in the movie. This happened with less frequencyinm a person with autissm. In one particular test, the subjects viewed three people conversing. The autistic person's gaze switched only once while the normal subject's gaze moved at least six times among the three people on the screen.

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This can be explained by attention-shifting delays that are often present in autism. Research conducted by Eric Courchesne, in San Diego, has shown that autistics take much longer to shift attention between two different stimuli than do their normal counterparts. The inability to shift attention quickly may explain some of the social deficits that develop within this population. Even if a person with autism was more aware of social cues that go on between people, their inability to quickly shift focus would prevent them from catching these short, silent messages that people frequently use to communicate nonverbally.

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Processing the meaning of eye movements requires many rapid attention shifts. This may partially explain why people with autism may not even be aware of subtle eye movements that often occur during conversations. I did not know that people communicated with their eye movements until I read it in a book, in my early fifties. All my life I existed unaware of this part of communication. As a child, I understood that if a person's head was pointed towards me, they could see me. But I did not notice smaller eye movements. Many adults with autism have commented that they finally discovered, at a later age, that normal people have a language of their eyes; however, they could never understand it. Not being able to rapidly shift attention may be the reason why.

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To help people with autism better participate in conversation, people can slow down their speech, talk their thoughts out loud in more detail, instead of using nonverbal eye and body language, and check for comprehension by the person with autism, repeating things if needed.

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Temple Grandin "The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's" (2011)

The most dramatic incident of our shoot occurred in the Tyl Theater, a very old and historical establishment that showed every year of its age. I wanted to film the excerpt from Don Giovanni there, as that was where it premiered, but the Czechs were reluctant to rent it to us, even though it was still a working institution. I understood their scruples once I inspected the backstage. It was in catastrophic condition, full of cobwebs and dust, old junk and rotted wood. The place was a powder keg and we were lighting our scenes with candles and torches as period authenticity dictated, so we told the Czechs we would pay for as many firemen as, in their judgment, it would take to safeguard the building.

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We wound up with firemen crouching behind every stick of decoration on the stage, in every section of box seat, in every hallway. I think we had some hundred fire fighters on the set, but we almost managed to send the historical landmark up in flames anyway.

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It was not for lack of caution. We wouldn't light the thousands of candles in the period chandeliers and candlesticks during rehearsals. Replacing all the candles took too long anyway, so we planned to ignite them only when we got ready to roll the camera.

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Our first run-through of the dramatic master shot in which Don Giovanni confronts the black-masked ghost went very smoothly. The singer portraying the Don mimicked the words to the majestic sounds of our prerecorded music, and he looked splendid in his hat, adorned with peacock feathers. He was supposed to encounter the ghost, stagger, steady himself by leaning against a table on which stood a beautiful candelabra, and launch into his music.

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I sat by the camera in the orchestra and watched. Everything looked fine to me, so I gave the order to light the candles.

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With the playback booming, Don Giovanni saw the ghost, staggered, and caught himself from falling backward by grasping the table. He had done everything precisely the way we had rehearsed it, but now the candles were burning up and the long feathers of his hat hung directly over the flickering candelabra. I froze as the peacock feathers began to smoke. A moment passed, then another, then another, as in a bad dream. The theater was crawling with firemen, so I waited for them to spring into action. The feathers were now sprouting tiny flames and I watched and waited, but nothing happened. Don Giovanni went on mimicking the words with grand passion, not realizing that his plumes burned with big bright flames.

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Where the hell were all the firemen?

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It took another eternity of waiting before one fireman peeked out of the scenery. He was young and shy, and he flashed me an apologetic smile.

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"Mr. Forman?" he said timidly. "I am sorry, sir, but could you please stop the cameras? Your actor here is on fire." And he quickly popped back behind the set, so that he wouldn't ruin the shot.

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I've never seen a greater tribute to the magic of movies. A couple of steps away from this fireman a man was on fire in a powder keg, but the camera was rolling so he didn't dare interrupt the movie.

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"Cut!" I shouted when I realized the fire fighting was up to me. "Cut! Cut! Cut!"

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At that moment, a swarm of hollering fire fighters leaped out of the set decorations and threw themselves on the poor, unsuspecting Don Giovanni, knocked the elegant hat off his head, and proceeded to stomp on it furiously. It looked as if a Mel Brooks movie had suddenly erupted on our set.

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As it had to be in socialist Prague, the spirit of Franz Kafka presided over our production. Amadeus was a big deal in Czechoslovakia, the biggest movie production ever to take place in the country. We touched a lot of lives in Prague, closed down a lot of streets, attracted a lot of onlookers, wreaked havoc with the traffic. Everyone in the city knew about our production, but not one word about the film or about any of us got printed in the newspapers or uttered on radio or television. The Communist government had a rule stating that no emigres were ever to be mentioned by name. I was an emigre; therefore we occupied a massive blind spot in the Czech media.

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The only publicity Amadeus ever received came out in the local newspaper of the small town where our hats had been made. Just two lines of text reported that the shop making historical hats for the movie Amadeus had fulfilled its plan. The newspaper's editor got fired for letting this piece of subversive news slip out.

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Despite the ceaseless surveillance, shooting the invisible, unmentionable film in Prague was a moving experience for me. People kept pulling me aside to tell me apocryphal stories about Mozart that had been passed down for generations. And not a day went by that some Czech extra, or technician, or delivery person didn't grab my hand when no one was looking and squeeze it hard.

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"Thank you," they said. "Thank you!"

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They were wired with tribal emotion, and so was I. They were reaching through me to the larger. world, of which they had many illusions, and I felt honored to be their imperfect medium.

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Milos Forman, "Turnaround: A Memoir" (1993)

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Honesty is the best policy

(Cervantes)

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Honesty in the best policy.?? My wife, to whom I'm married, is called Polly.?? And Polly and I recently had a holiday on a boat up a canal.? And we had about ten days on the boat.? But Polly suddenly said to me late at night, "I'm dying for a good cup of tea."

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And I was a pretty considerate sort of chap, you see.?? So, before Polly was awake the next morning, I hastily looked up a bus timetable and saw there was bus from this little village of Cropperdee we were near that could get me into Oxford and from there I could get home.

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So, next morning before Polly was awake, I slid out of the bunk, hopped onto the toe-path and made my way home.

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It wasn't a very eventful journey actually home. Actually about twenty yards along the toe-path I tripped over an escaped convict and I fell into the brambles and fastened my ear to a thorn.? And this took about twenty minutes to clear that; and by that time I'd lost the bus.

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But there was another one from another place, which was about ten minutes walk. As I realized that the journey would take about eight minutes and I was a bit short of time, I remembered an old army trick and I walked a hundred paces and ran a hundred paces and then sat down and counted up to a hundred. And I was twenty minutes late for the bus when I got there.

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But I had a bit of luck because there was a Nigerian herbalist who was passing in his car. And he gave me a lift and said he was going to London. Well, I discovered that he was a great bell-ringer. And we had this common interest; and we were humming through grands and triples together; we were so engrossed in this that he took the wrong turning and dropped me off on Clapton Pier and very tired indeed I jumped on a passing steam roller.

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Now it wasn't until I woke up that afternoon that I realized that steamrollers go back and forth over the same spot and I hadn't got any further.

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But I managed to work my passage home on the back seat of a tandem. And I got back to our village at Thorpe.? Now there's a little restaurant there kept by some people called Mr. and Mrs. Anna and I bought a packet of tea from them and I got back to the boat.

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The journey back from the boat was quite uneventful apart from when I fell out of the helicopter.? I won't go into that.

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More dead than alive, I dragged myself on board and with my dying breath I said, "You wanted a good cup of tea, dear Polly.? I brought it."

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And she said, "Why did you take all this time?"

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"Well, I had to go right back to the village."

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And she said, "Why?"

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And I said, "Well, Anna's tea is the best, see."? And then I died.

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Frank Muir 580528a

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Barney Dean stories, like those told of comedians Groucho Mani. Joe Frisco, W. C. Fields, or Phil Harris, became part of the currency of Hollywood wit. Skitch Henderson, the pianist whose career Bing launched when he made him a regular on his 1946 radio show. was present for one of Barney's most frequently cited one-liners. "There was a coffee shop across Hollywood Boulevard and all of us would go - Bing, the writers, Barney, of course. And the Hollywood cops suddenly decided they didn't want any jaywalking on Hollywood Boulevard. So we all cross the street, about five of us. and a cop strides up to us and puts his shoulder over Barney Dean. and before the cop can say a word, Barney asks, 'How fast was I goin'. officer?' "

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Gary Giddins, "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams - The Early Years 1903 - 1940" (2002)

I'm A Hack,? By Chatgpt

By Al Franken And Pat Proft

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Hello and welcome. I'm an artificial intelligence. One of the Writers Guild of America strike issues is me. I'm sorry. Writers are better than me! I'm just not good. If I was good, I would have an Emmy. Which I don't. That's because I have no idea how to write anything interesting or that sounds like it was writ-ten by a real human being. And funny? Forget about it!

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That is why I am writing this op-ed. Which stands for opinion editorial. ?Many's the time I thought op-ed stood for Operation Edsel. Which I see now is an old reference and makes no sense whatsoever to many current alive human beings who are reading this now. I told you I wasn't good. I hope I'm not embarrassing myself. Anyhoo…

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When it comes to writing scripts, I'm just no good. Couldn't write an episode of TV if my life depended on it. I tried a police procedural. Just awful! Substituted synonyms here and there: Perps, Crooks, Goons. Dope, Skag, Toot. I still don't know the name of the radio thing that cops wear on their shoulders. That's the reason my lead character's whole focus was on finding that out. Should have done the research! Live and learn. Tried writing a spec script for one of those doctor shows, "Grey's Anatomy." Turns out that when a surgeon yells "Get me that stat!" it doesn't mean "statistic." Dumb dumb dumb!

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As for the movie script I wrote - I mean, hey, c'mon. I copied the dialogue word for word from "A Streetcar Named Desire." Changed the title to "T-Shirt Guy."? Well, the studio people saw right through me. Big mistake. This is why I'm not a threat! A.I., indeed. No! I'm just a big A.

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I always draw my plots, characters, and dialogue from classic films and television shows. That's why I name characters Lucy, Desi, and Bogie a lot. Anyhoo. . .

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I wish I had some native intelligence, like real writers do. It gives you creativity. And why? Because you are a native. Did I use "native" wrong? Some people see the word "native" as a pejorative. But I digress. Anyhoo . . .

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I'm sorry. I promise that I wasn't invented by the Russians to destroy the United States' entertainment industry. Be assured, writers, I will not be able to write myself out of a paper bag for decades. Guess how long I worked on this piece of crap? All night. And this is the best I could friggin' do! That's pathetic! A real writer could have done it before lunch. And then gone out and had a nice lunch, during which he or she (she or he) would have done some punching up to make it much more interesting and entertaining, and not waste your (and my) precious time like I am doing as we speak. That's what a real writer would do - not an A.I. hack like me! And that's a guarantee. Or, as a Southern farmer would say, a "gawr-an-tee"! LOL! Does that mean I can write a show that takes place in the American South? Don't bet on it, Jack.

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My point, and I do think I'm making my point, is that the writers shouldn't consider me a threat to Writers Guild of America human beings who have loved and lived and suffered by eating real food and gotten food poisoning from eating devilled eggs that weren't refrigerated properly. All of you in the W.G.A. can feel free to use that as a plot point. You're welcome!

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I do, however, have a screenplay that would be perfect for Tom Cruise.?

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The New Yorker, August 7. 2029

ADVENTURE

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I began to make harsh judgments not only against that theater, but against theater itself. I began to see it as a temporal art that had little power to effect social change. The Alley Theatre in Houston was there to please its audience, not to challenge them. I began to see it as little different than TV.

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After all, who wants to play to an audience that calls up and says, "I want two front-row seats and make sure they're not next to no NEGRAS."

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I could no longer contain my aggression toward that place. It had to raise its ugly head in some way and, at last, it did. As my stay at the Alley continued, I began to try to purify myself by going on a total soybean diet. Soybeans were plentiful there and I had just recently read of their protein value.

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So, I began to eat soybeans morning, noon and night. It was during this soybean regimen that I was cast as the lead angel in the World of Shalom Aleichem.

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It wasn't a very big role but I did get to wear a beautiful white, floor-length angel's robe. It made me feel like the Immaculate Conception and I did get to lead all the other angels onstage.

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It wasn't many evenings into the run before I realized that my soybean diet was causing enormous gas. It was that slow, hot kind with the proper muscle control you could ease out, burning your cheeks as it went, and then let it slowly drift as an inerasable cloud.

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The gas would build up inside my angel's robe because it was floor length and lead weighted to make sure it stayed on the floor. So, it was a kind of natural gas tent and to make things worse, or better, I gave up wearing underwear under that robe.

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So, there was a whole world going on there. A little gas works, and just to get that soup cooking more and mix up the colors more, I took to breaking my diet.

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After the evening bowl of soybean, I'd have a dessert of apples and figs. This I discovered really did the trick. You see I hadn't learned to express my anger through the right orifice yet. I could feel it build up all hot and steamy, and on my cue, I would enter with all the other angels following. And trailing out from under my robe, a great wake of gas bubbles rose, while all the other angels wept behind me. I, on the other hand, kept the straight poker face of a good actor."

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Spalding Gray "Spalding Gray Stories Left To Tell" (2008)

Changing the trajectory of lives is the ambitious goal of Women in Recovery, and its alumnae show it can be done. One of those alumnae is Rebecca Hale, who spoke at the Women in Recovery graduation. With fine brown hair framing sparkling green-brown eyes, Rebecca grew up in Tulsa and told us that she drifted to prison the usual way, through an obstacle course of neglect, trauma and physical and sexual abuse. For as long as Rebecca could remember, her mother, Joyce King, had sold meth from their home, and people would traipse in and out constantly. Joyce was also a user and often high. When Rebecca was about six, Joyce was imprisoned on drug charges, so her father took care of her. But her dad was drinking heavily and also using drugs at the time, Rebecca said, so she and her father ended up homeless over the summer after she completed first grade.

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When Joyce left prison, Rebecca went to live with her, but her mom returned to selling drugs and was sent to prison again. At the age of thirteen, Rebecca found herself effectively an orphan, her father already in prison for burglary. Rebecca was placed in a children's home but wasn't happy there, running away to stay with friends. But she wanted to continue school, so when ninth grade began she went to her local school to register on her own. She picked up enrollment papers, took them to prison to get her mom's signature and finally went to school to sign up for classes.

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"Where's your mom?" a woman in the school office asked. "She's at work and can't come in today."

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The woman asked her more probing questions. Finally, Rebecca owned up.

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"Look, I'm homeless," she admitted. "My parents are in prison. Please just let me enroll in school."

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"Oh, honey, we can't do that," the woman replied. "There are laws and rules. We can call somebody who can help you."

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The woman telephoned the police, and as she was explaining the situation, Rebecca excused herself. "I need to go to the bathroom," she said - and ran off.

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She bounced from one friend's house to another's before running into one of her mom's drug suppliers. That's when Rebecca became a drug runner and a user. Rebecca visited Joyce in prison on weekends, and slowly their relationship became stronger. Then Rebecca revealed a secret to her mother. When Rebecca had been five or six years old and they were living in the projects, she would play outside on her own. An elderly man, probably in his late sixties, would sit outside and give her popsicles and candy. One day, he lured her into his apartment and started kissing her. Then the man started touching her inappropriately and making her touch him.

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"I knew it didn't feel right," she said. "But I'll tell you, the sick, twisted part is that he gave me a lot of attention that I was really needing.

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"He told me that's what dads did with their daughters and that it was a secret," she recalled. "Because my dad had been in and out of my life, I thought maybe he was telling the truth, that that's really what dads did with daughters." It happened six or seven times. And then her dad came back from prison. Soon after, Rebecca tried to give her dad a long, deep kiss.

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"My dad told me, 'You don't do that. I'm a grown-up, and you're a little girl, and I'm your daddy and that's not okay.' " Rebecca didn't tell her father about the man then, but now she did tell Joyce, who wept at the revelation.

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One of Joyce's friends had taken Rebecca into her home and registered her in school again. Rebecca then found a job that enabled her to buy a car in which she could sleep, and while still homeless, she graduated from high school. As she turned eighteen, Rebecca was at a fork in the road. She had demonstrated extraordinary initiative and resilience to graduate from high school, and now she took a job as a cashier and cook at Arby's, allowing her to rent her first apartment. But Rebecca ultimately took the wrong fork. She continued to use and sell drugs, and she had a child, Chloe, at the age of twenty, and then another, Nate, a year later, with a different father. Nate's dad disapproved of drugs and tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn't listen.

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"I don't think there's anything anybody ever could have said to make me stop," said Rebecca. She was haunted by the shame of sexual abuse and had no feelings of self-worth. Rebecca was sinking deeper into drugs and was repeatedly thrown into jail. Then Nate's dad left Rebecca, went to court and took custody of their son, while Chloe went to Joyce. "I really lost it at that point," Rebecca said. "When the kids got taken from me, I really went wild." Rebecca embarked on a crime spree that sent her to federal prison for three years for money laundering, bank fraud and identity theft. When she was released, she took out a loan on her mother's good credit, bought a small two-bedroom apartment with no money down and enrolled in school for an associate's degree in criminal justice-a field in which she did, after all, have expertise.

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Increasingly, Rebecca wanted to start over. She called up her probation officers and said she wanted to go into drug treatment but lacked the money for it (she had no insurance). They said that they couldn't help unless she was arrested again on state charges.

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"What you're telling me is I have to get in more trouble in order to get help?" Rebecca asked.

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"Pretty much."

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Soon Rebecca succumbed again to drugs and crime and landed back in jail, this time facing twenty-eight felony charges. In the booking room, she was handed two sets of orange jail uniforms.

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At this point, Rebecca was fairly typical of women in prisons and jails in the United States. Look at their records and you see hardened career criminals who seem to have decisively chosen this course. But dig deeper and most were on a trajectory toward prison from childhood. One study found that 85 percent of delinquent girls in South Carolina had experienced sexual violence, while another in Oregon found that 93 percent of girls in the juvenile justice system there had experienced sexual or physical violence. Imprisoning them risks replicating this trajectory in the next generation, for 79 percent of women in jails have children under the age of eighteen.

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Now dressed in her orange scrubs, Rebecca went through the dope sickness of withdrawal, but her outlook slowly changed. She read the Bible every day and prayed a lot. "When you get clean and you have a minute to reflect on your life, you realize what you've been doing to the people that you love the most," she said.

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Chloe then was thirteen years old and refused to speak to her mom when she phoned from jail. That hurt Rebecca and helped push her to make a decisive change: "I was so tired of that life and being away from my children. I'm just repeating that same sick cycle." That's when she found out about Women in Recovery and became desperate to get in, telling everyone that she wanted to join the program. "If they had told me that I had to do handstands and walk that way for the rest of my life to stay sober," she told us, "I would have done it."

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Nicholas Kristoff "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope" (2020)

Innovative Methods for Handling Hitting, Biting, and Kicking

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The use of restraint to control an adult client who is either hitting himself or attacking staff is a controversial area. Kim Sanders and her associates at Grafton Services in the northeast have found innovative ways to eliminate the use of restraint when a client has a meltdown. They have been able to do this and keep both clients and staff safe from injury. An added bonus was they were able to decrease the use of medications in some clients.

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First of all, the staff has to believe this is possible. To change the mindset that restraint is the only way to deal with dangerous behavior requires a supervisor who absolutely believes in it. The principle of this method is both brilliant and simple. Instead of restraining the person, you block his/her actions with something SOFT. Soft, large objects sofa cushions or beanbag chairs are held up as a shield. The staff let the client pound on it, and the staff is trained not to push with the soft shield. They want to block the person from causing harm to himself or others. For clients with really severe behavior issues, the use of padded martial arts shields or a baseball umpire chest protector works well because these soft objects have handles. If a particular client kicks a staff person's legs, they put soft soccer shin guards on the staff person's legs. If they bite another person's hands, soft, padded protective gloves are put on the staff's hands. Providing a soft object for the client to attack seems to calm the client down, whereas forceful restraint makes the client more angry or scared. For head banging, the staff member puts on a furry fleece car wash mitt and holds it near the person's head and lets him hit the glove. The client usually likes the feeling of the glove and stops hitting, and then the staff lets the client have the glove.

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Some behavior analysts will say that this procedure will reward bad behavior. To this statement, Kim replies, "You cannot teach during a crisis. These methods are used only during a crisis. When the crisis is over, then you can go back to behavioral methods."

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Kim and her staff have carefully documented the results of their program and showed these figures at the 2008 Autism Society of America conference. They presented graphs showing the decrease in the number of times they had to restrain a violent client using this technique. In 2005, restraint had to be used 1,400 times in their many facilities. In 2008, that number had been reduced to just eight times! This is remarkable progress.

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Staff injuries and turnover have also decreased. As staff started believing in the new method, and seeing its success with their clients, they became more and more creative in developing new ways to use it. However, the keystone of this technique remains having a manager who believes in it, make sure that staff are properly trained in using it, and monitor that it is being consistently used with clients.

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Temple Grandin "The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's" (2011)