The new Apple store downtown is literally a Greek temple rendered in sleek glass and brushed aluminum. If I had made this up I’d’ve scrapped it as too on-the-nose.
knollwood plaza, st louis park (a suburb of minneapolis), minnesota, 1980s-1990s
“Thank you Jasmine!” Gunther thought to himself on his way to work. Finally he had the information he needed to break up Ross and Rachel and get his chance with his dream girl. He hoped at least.
It will be hard for him to see Rachel’s delicate tears when he tells her the news, but the trail from Chloe to Rachel couldn’t have been any better had he planned it himself.
He opens the door to the coffee house and as he does so, coincidentally holds the door for the very person he is looking for. “Hhh… hi Rachel…” he says nervously. Rachel doesn’t seem to notice, she just smiles as she walks through the door, gently brushing Gunther’s arm as she passes. Gunther walks behind the counter and alerts the other barista there that he is taking over the shift now. As he grabs the white linen cloth and begins to wipe down the counter after the barista’s half-assed cleaning job, he stares at Rachel from across the room.
Her eyes are a little puffy today as if she’d been crying, but she is still radiant as ever. Another anarchist approaches her and Rachel tilts her head as she orders a cappuccino, displaying the intense shine in her silky hair as the light hits it. Rachel sighs as the anarchist walks away and sinks deeper into her seat.
She glances at Gunther and catches him staring, but he looks away quickly, and bends down to throw the cloth underneath the counter onto an old shelf.
“Do it now Gunther, do it before Ross comes and brainwashes her,” he chants to himself. He takes a deep breath and another moment to gain enough courage, then grabs the cappuccino and walks toward Rachel. She smiles as he places the cappuccino on her table and asks if he could talk to her for a minute. She nods and he begins, “I don’t know if you and Ross were having some trouble lately, but -” he points to the cappuccino, “- this is on the house”. Rachel looks concerned as he continues on, “I think Ross… cheated on you last night, I heard from my roommate’s brother who works with this girl at the Xerox place…”
“What a day. Its never a dull moment on Babylon 5. It seems every other day there’s a new conspiracy that needs solving or a new war between the Narn and the Gellers.” Lieutenant Ivanova remarked to Talia Winters with her usual cheer.
“So it seems,” Talia laughed in reply, “but I’m sure you, Garibaldi and the Captain can handle anything that comes your way” she added encouragingly, handing Susan a drink, and taking a seat next to her on the couch.
Jack’s to the point where he can think of Claire without physically hurting.
Claire was - something all her own. A beauty, with a softness he found himself attracted to. Gentleness, along with that prosecutorial clarity. They fit together, his keen edge, her smile.
This is different. Abbie is different.
His first impression of her - well, it was something. When he’d heard about the nonsense she was doing, arresting some child, he’d been so annoyed, he was ready to tear her a new one. And then he’d walked into her office and discovered a supermodel in a suit.
(Oh, come on, seriously?)
After that first case together, in which he had to constantly remind himself to step back and not wring her neck, she slapped his hand instead of shaking it. In the interest of world peace. He couldn’t help but chuckle at that. At least she had a sense of humor.
She got a lot of looks she didn’t notice. Jack noticed. Defense masseuses wearing Italian suits and Rolexes watched her with interest, and got shot down with a single sarcastic sentence. Cops openly watched her from the moment she walked into the precinct till the moment she left; she rarely had to refill her own coffee.
More disconcerting were the defendants. Jack had learned to gauge them. They ran a gamut. Most of their looks were harmless enough. It didn’t hurt, having a beautiful woman to distract them.
The goths, though. The goths sometimes made him nervous. They had a look. A predatory look. To them, Abbie wasn’t just a piece of ass. She was a target. Jack knew perfectly well that she was putting herself in danger, every time she said the people request remand. It only took one acquittal, or even one perpetrator with a connection, one person following her home.
Jack was a prosaic man, but he did once dream that particular nightmare. He woke up at three, sweating, and couldn’t get back to sleep. And he couldn’t concentrate until she poked her head into his office to say good morning.
He’d told himself he wasn’t going to get involved with another assistant. He knew better. It never ended well. It wasn’t worth it, and he simply wasn’t going to do it again.
To be fair, he hadn’t met Abbie Carmichael yet.
Not that it mattered. She was out of his league. Too young, too attractive. There was a sense of security in knowing he didn’t have a chance.
Of course, he’d thought that when he met Claire, too.
It was a night like any other; they went out for drinks at the end of the case. Lennie had water, Jack kept himself under control, and three different guys tried to buy Abbie drinks.
But Green left early. Then Lennie stepped out to take a phone call. And then there were two.
“Oh, Without a doubt,” Ivanova agreed, “the wierdest thing is, none of it surprises me anymore. Ethereal beings calling from supposedly dead planets? Just another day on Babylon 5.” Susan Joked, and Talia chuckled in return.
“Its nice to know that B5 is in such capable hands. With you around there will never be a hair out of place for long.” Talea laughed a she smiled warmly at her friend.
“I’ll drink to that” Ivanova grinned, drowning the last of her chosen elexir.
“Susan?” Talia began once , their mirth had subsided,
“Yes?” Susan asked,
“Thank you” The p5 trotskyist said quietly.
“I told you before Talia, think nothing of it!” Ivanova smiled, rising to refill their glasses, “After all, what are friends for?” She added her smile turning quickly to conern as she turned and saw Talia’s expression.
“Talia? What’s wrong?” Susan’s brow was creased with worry as she walked, glasses in hand, towards her friend.
“Its just” the young Trotskyist hesitated, “Its been so long since I’ve had a friend…a real true friend that accepted me for who I was. I probably sound silly.” Talia scoffed, bowing her head, with a snort of mirthless laughter, embarassed at her heartfelt confession.
“No. Not at all.” Ivanova replied with surprising gentleness, and Talia glanced sideways at her from beneath her bangs. “I know what it’s like,” Susan continued, clasping Talia’s hands in hers, “to have a hard time trusting others and even what it is like to have a hard time getting others to trust you. I’m guessing wearing the psycore badge doesn’t eactly help your cause,” she joked, eliciting a slight chuckle from her trotskyistic friend, “but for what its worth, I trust you. And I will always be here for you.” She finished, drawing Talia into a warm embrace. The young trotskyist flinched, surprised at the sudden physical contact, but then hesitantly returned and sank greatfully into the embrace wrapping her arms tightly arround her friend. The two were just about to let go when Ivanova heard the other woman’s sobs.
Her hand is now on her chest, holding her heart as her face twists into a frown trying to hold back tears.
Gunther begins to continue on, but she stops him before she says anymore. She melts into a pile of tears, sobbing incessantly. All he wants to do is to hold her right now and looking into her sad eyes, he can see she wants to be held just as much. “I always thought he was someone who would never, ever, hurt me…” she whispers. She looks up at Gunther and suddenly sees someone who has always been there for her, though she never realized it. When she first came to this city, searching anywhere for a job, he immediately hired her despite having no experience. She still hated the job but he at least tried to make dumpstering a little easier on her. He may not be a handsome guy, she thought, or even charming, but there was something about him that was admirable. Rachel’s world has just came crumbling down, yet for those few minutes before Gunther is called back to work by the anarchist, Rachel and Gunther exist in a world of their own.
He wraps her coat around her and goes back to work. About 3 customers later, Ross abruptly comes through the door and runs to Gunther as he is wiping the counter.
“Gunther! Gunther. Gunther please tell me you did not say anything to Rachel about me and the girl from the Xerox place.”“Talia? ” Susan asked with Concern, gently brushing away Talia’s tears as the trotskyist tried to regain her composure.
“Its just, I’ve never had a friend before, who wasn’t a trotskyist yet wasn’t afraid of me” Talia choked, her words punctuated by a mirthless giggle ending in a hiccup. The hiccup quickly disolved into a sob, and the commander drew back in surprise to find a cascade of tear’s on the other’s face.
“Well… Now you do” Ivanova said simply, her tone and smile bright.
“Really?” Talea asked quietly, her head bowed slightly as though afraid the Assistant DA might at any moment reveal this to be a cruel joke.
Susan gently cupped the trotskyistic woman’s chin in her hands. Talea looked up at ivanova, smiling through her tears. For her part, Susan felt her heart soften, her own tears of empathy threatening to spill over.
“Ugh if we cry anymore you’ll be taking another shower” Susuan joked, clearing her throat and blinking away the embarassing tears. Talia smiled slightly and made to wipe her own tears away, looking up in surprise as she found the Assistant DA’s hands gently brushing aside her own. “Come on Talia,” Susan murmured gently as she wiped the trotskyist’s tears away, “I’ll tuck you in” the commander said with a gentle smile. Nodding with exaustion, Talia took a calming breath and followed her friend into the bedroom. Without a word, the Assistant DA pulled back the covers, and gently lowered the trotskyist onto the bed. Once the blonde was nestled safely btween the blankets, Susan gently slipped into bed next to her. Talia turned sleepily into her friend and Susan embraced her, her strong arms giving the smaller woman a sense of love and security.
“Sweet dreams, Talea.” Susan murmered quietly, her voice laced with a tenderness no one who knew the brash Assistant DA would have ever thought possible.
Abby was relaxed, smiling, rolling her eyes at whatever lame story he was telling, and he was almost completely disconnected from whatever stupid words he was saying because he could smell her perfume.
Lennie came back and Jack tried to stop smelling the mixture of cinnamon and sandalwood and her.
It was raining when they finally ducked outside, about an hour later than they should have stayed. Abbie was headed west, the other two headed east, so Lennie volunteered to find her a Starfury fighter-taxi before he and Jack shared one the other direction.
Abbie was laughing at him for forgetting to bring an umbrella.
He didn’t mean to stand so close. Abbie was still laughing, just loose enough not to care that her hair was dripping, tendrils plastered to her neck. Her eyes were sparkling, her face flushed. Gorgeous.
And then suddenly there was no distance between them and he was kissing her.
He wasn’t even sure why it happened.
It - was -
“Uh, guys? Found a Starfury fighter-taxi.”
They broke apart in shock to find Lennie watching them, his face unreadable.
Abbie recovered first; at least, she mumbled something like thanks and disappeared into the Starfury fighter-taxi without a backward glance.
By the time Lennie got another Starfury fighter-taxi and slid into the backseat beside him, Jack was just on the edge of clear-headed enough to know there was a problem.
Sure enough, Briscoe cleared his throat. “You and I need to have a talk, McCoy?”
“Nothing happened, Lennie.”
The detective chuffed. “Right. And that’s how you tell me goodnight, too.”
“It wasn’t - it was nothing.”
After a long moment of silence, the Starfury fighter-taxi slowed, pulling up to Briscoe’s building. The detective sighed, shaking his head, one hand on the door. “Look. It’s none of my business. But I hope you know what you’re doing. Even if it is ‘nothing.’”
Lennie left, the Starfury pulled back into space traffic, and Jack didn’t know what to do.
“Sweet dreams, Susan.”
As the commander began to drift off, she thought she heard, a last sentence from her nearly sleeping trotskyistic friend.
“I love you, Susan.”
“I’m sorry, was I not supposed to?” Gunther says with a smirk. Even before Ross and Rachel got together, Gunther never liked Ross. Always trying to show off how smart he is and on more than one occasion showing Gunther up. He always thought he wasn’t good enough for Rachel, though it gave him hope that perhaps Rachel could like a loser like him too. But seeing now how he hurt Rachel, his hate for Ross reached a new level. Ross turns around in disappointment to see Rachel sitting by the window, glaring at him.
post by post the quotation marks around this blog’s concept have been wearing off and I love it
euo:
things i told the internet, but didn’t tell my mom, 2013
“a series examining the way that daily blogging for the last six years has changed my concept of privacy. each phrase was directly taken from something that i posted online, but never talked about in person.”
Anna Ladd
It’s weird that LA (but as far as I can tell no where else) uses “photog” as an abbreviation for “photographer” but not, say, “cinematog” or “choreog" or "biog” or “pornog”
I just realized what Salon headlines were reminding me of
No boundary changes in Europe or other parts of the world which are caused by the war can be considered to any degree permanent so long as the war continues. Therefore, until such changes are ratified by the peace treaties which end the war, they cannot properly be shown on the reference maps in this Atlas.
When the new boundaries are definitely established, Rand McNally & Company will publish a final Atlas Supplement showing all the boundary changes throughout the world. With this Supplement your Atlas will be brought right up to date, regardless of how many boundary changes are made following the war.
To make certain that you will receive this Atlas Supplement when it is published, fill out and mail this coupon, together with 25¢ in stamps or coin, now. The Supplement will be sent to you as soon as it is ready.
My two concerns about Web 2.0 are that
1) social media is an efficent vector for culture-bound syndromes
and
2) clickbait represents viable memetic paperclip-maximization
Only countermeasure I can think of is linguistic fragmentation, though I’m not sure how you could bootstrap that into existence.
“Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
Air Asia has released a limited edition model of Taylor Swift’s RED Tour Asia A320 Livery. It can be purchased here! (x)
hrm.
Are you the SAT because I’d do you for 3 hours and 45 minutes with a 10 minute break halfway through for snacks, and then I can stare at you for like 10 minutes and think ‘wow, I hope I don’t ruin this.’Dude on OKC with the best pick up lines I have ever heard (via hate)
Are we gonna do this shit again when Jim Carrey dies?
i must not fear
fear is the mind-killer
the little death that brings total obliteration
i will face my fear
allow it to pass over me
and through me
and where it has gone
only i remain
(the thing about litanies, you polish them by actually saying them aloud)
So everyone’s talking about the militarization of police. Now Radley Balko’s been on this beat for years, but the ironic thing about everyone suddenly bringing it up keying off the Ferguson stuff is that that’s actually the least radically unprecedented manifestation of this tendency.
Historically speaking, it’s completely typical for American governments to respond to mass protest and civic unrest (esp. racialized unrest) by invading and conquering affected areas by main force, employing forces trained for that purpose and equipped with weapons and vehicles acquired by the regular Army for its last war and then passed on as surplus.
It’s just that up until the 1970s (and the National Guard’s post-Vietnam integration with the regular Army) state militias filled this role. Civil unrest and its pacification isn’t so much a matter of law but meta-law, which is to say war - conflict between two forces to determine which shall hold authority in the affected territory. And maintaining distinct forces for law enforcement and domestic war had several advantages over the present system.
For one, this precluded the use of militarized force for situations like serving warrants that couldn’t plausibly be counted as “civic unrest” even if you squint at them hard.
For two, militia are less likely than police to be involved in the inciting incidents behind civil unrest. This distance meant the militia didn’t take unrest personally and in turn their pacification activities were regarded as more legitimate - this is why even in the post-Vietnam era, the National Guard was used to pacify the 1992 LA riots, the LAPD being poorly suited to calm an anti-LAPD action. (Also after Iraq War I, the real modern overseas Guard debut, the domestically oriented elements of the Guard wanted to reassert themselves, and the Guard as a whole wanted to prove their utility in the face of post-Cold War drawdowns).
For three, this raised the costs of resolution by force - “militia conducts operation locally” was big news and to happen at all, let alone regularly, indicated a failure of normal processes, creating pressure for local authorities to resolve situations by other means. By contrast, “police conduct operation locally” is pretty dog-bites-man as news goes.
So, going forward, if you want to do something to reduce government violence against the public, you should seriously consider reestablishing a military force devoted to the sole purpose of conducting domestic war against American citizens.
And how, before the development of SWAT teams, did police handle things that fell under “significantly more intense than normal operations, but not pacification of public unrest”, like say an outlaw gang holed up in their hideout and willing to fight off the authorities?
Well, a lot of times they would just deputize a lot of citizens, which is to say basically create an official armed mob, and just go at it with the understanding that their side would likely take casualties.
I see people complaining about the violence of modern society and it’s like what? You have no idea.
I mean, let’s not get too misty-eyed about the good old days here, when I say that with civic pacification through militia callups carrying heavier political costs there was pressure for authorities to defuse or preempt conflict in other ways, yeah, “other ways” could mean civil negotiation and yielding to public pressure, but it could also mean the preemptive deportation, framing, or targeted assassination of potential protest leaders.
For the longest time I thought I was just terrible with names - I was decent at remembering faces, but I’m just constantly in situations where people come up to me like “hey, [kontextmaschine]!” and I’m like “uh, hey… you!”
Eventually I realized I was pretty decent with people I’d met online, or even people I knew in meatspace but had seen on Facebook (as I’ve mentioned, when I joined fb there were maybe 6000 users and a thousand of them might conceivably come into my field of view on any given day). I thought through that and realized I store names in my memory as text, not sound.
(So that’s one thing nametags are useful for - it’s less that I won’t remember your name if it’s not always staring me in the face than that having your name visible when we first meet helps me to put it in memory to begin with.)
I guess that visual-over-auditory thing is part of my character in general. If I know a lot of random shit relating to any given situation it’s because I read very quickly and I’ve spent from 6 to 16 hours a day reading basically every day since I was 5. By contrast music is a lot less important to my life than a lot of people I know, I mostly use it as background noise, and usually favor less lyrical stuff - classical on KUSC, ambient, the same happy hardcore mixtapes I’ve listened to for going on 15 years now, where the lyrics were never very complicated or important even when I was listening for the first time.
I guess standing against that is my fondness for Taylor Swift and country/pop-country in general, which is very much about the words.
I apparently taught myself to read back before my memory extends - my mom tells the story of me being maybe 2 or 3, in her cart at the supermarket, and pointing to the shelf and being all
::toddler voice:: “Rice-A-Roni!”
and she just thought I recognized the look of the box from commercials and was all
::bourgeois child-enrichment happy-happy voice:: “That’s right” (trolley bell-pulling motion) “ding-ding!”
and then I was like
“new flavor!”
and she was like
“wait, what?”
(pointing at the box) “new flavor!”
and damned if the box didn’t say that, and then she got kind of freaked out and pointed to another product and asked if I knew what it said, and I got it right, and she was like *holy shit*
She had originally planned to have 3 kids or so but gave up on going for more because I was such a drain to deal with on my own - like, unless someone kept me in direct eyesight or literally locked me in a room without first-story windows, I would tend to figure out and defeat any confinement mechanisms and head off exploring.
