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Nov. 20th, 2019 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I accidentally taped the Sonderland hearing and couldn't watch -- without wanting to go all Dalek on the Republicans.
I can't even...
2. Am struggling to combat a nasty chest cough that I contracted on Sunday, because they blasted the heat. The constant changes in indoor/outdoor temperatures.The rise in dust and mold due to radiators and heat on and off trains, work and home. And lack of sleep. I'm hoping it's okay by Saturday. I did skip my Bible Study tonight (it's Bible Study Unitarian style) because I can't breath and keep coughing. Can't skip work -- so muscle through. I hate chest coughs.
3. A bit of good news, outside of the fact that I now have gas for a stove and oven, which I'm absurdly pleased about. And dryers in the basement. The apartment complex management has deigned to replace the elevators. Yes, we are getting new elevators in February.
Me: How will we get to the basement when they replace them?
Super: They will replace one at a time. But brand new!
ME (looking at elevators): Well the plus side of these is you can get out of them easily if stuck...so this could be a good or bad thing.
Other bit of good news? They are increasing the electrical power output to the apartments, so now we can have more appliances plugged in without worrying about blowing a fuse. In short, yes, soon you can run the microwave and coffee maker at the same time.
Super: It will be very expensive.
Me (thinking to myself): Thank god, I signed a two-year lease agreement.
On the bad news end? I gave back my hot pad today to help the poor souls who have no gas in their stoves or ovens in other buildings. And there are at least ten families/people in my building who don't have gas stoves or ovens, because National Grid hadn't unlocked their meters due to payment issues or a misunderstanding over it. (Grid charged us for gas they weren't supplying, unless we called them and locked the account requesting a credit, and then called back to unlock when they were ready to turn the gas on. And they came without warning. I had panicked and had them unlock my meter two weeks before they turned the gas back on. National Grid is a bit of an asshole.) My heart goes out to these poor people.
4. Speaking the Truth to the Powerful
Oscar Carrillo made an unusual choice for a kid who grew up in mid-eighties El Paso: he chose to become a small-town West Texas lawman. “I could very easily have chosen to work in a large city, make the higher salary, enjoy the scheduled days off and paid vacations, and benefit from the almighty overtime pay,” Carrillo said. “But smaller, rural, remote, and not-so-wealthy jurisdictions deserve competent, experienced, and well-trained law enforcement too.”
The 52-year-old first served as a sheriff’s deputy in Howard and Midland counties before he became Marfa’s police chief. Since 2000, he has been the sheriff of Culberson County, a large, desolate swath of hardscrabble land wedged between New Mexico and Mexico in the state’s far western tip. Culberson County sprawls over 3,800 square miles, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Ranchland bumps up against Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s private spaceport project. There are no police departments, just the sheriff and his deputies.
You wouldn’t have any trouble identifying Carrillo as the sheriff if you bumped into him on the streets of Van Horn, the county seat and home to nearly all its 2,200 residents: he’s usually decked out in a white cowboy hat, work shirt with a tie, blue jeans, sidearm on his hip, and a star on his chest. Like many cops, Carrillo has a well-defined sense of right and wrong, and he’s not shy about voicing it, even if that means contradicting the governor of Texas or the president of the United States.
The weekend before Thanksgiving 2017, that’s exactly what happened, as Van Horn became the center of a border security debate.
Late on Saturday, November 18, Border Patrol agents Rogelio Martinez, 36, and Stephen Garland, 38, sustained serious injuries at the bottom of a culvert along a remote stretch of Interstate 10, about twelve miles east of Van Horn. Martinez died later in an El Paso hospital from blunt injuries to the head, according to the El Paso medical examiner. But the manner of his death remains undetermined and has become the subject of often venomous debate.
Garland survived but has no memory of the night’s events, officials have said.
Carrillo was among the first responders at the scene. He doesn’t recall ever meeting Martinez or Garland, though he later learned that he and Martinez had both graduated from El Paso’s Irvin High School, sixteen years apart. But as a fellow law enforcement officer, Carrillo felt the tragedy deeply.
His mourning turned to anger, however, as word quickly spread about the incident. Martinez’s colleagues and prominent Republicans jumped to the conclusion that he had been the victim of a homicide, describing the scene in a way that bore no resemblance to what Carrillo had witnessed and what decades of experience told him had likely happened.
“Border Patrol Officer killed at Southern Border, another badly hurt. We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!” President Trump tweeted the day Martinez died.
“I’m offering a reward to help solve this murder of a Border Patrol Agent in Texas. Help us catch this killer,” Governor Greg Abbott tweeted on November 20, offering up to $20,000. The elected officials were describing a version of events that mirrored what the National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ politically powerful union, had offered. “What we know is that Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez appears to have been ambushed by a group of illegal aliens whom he was tracking. Our agents’ reports from the ground say that he was struck in the head multiple times with a rock or rocks,” NBPC president Brandon Judd told Breitbart Texas on November 19, shortly after Martinez’s death. Other media jumped on the attack story. The rush to judgment was on.
To the sheriff, Martinez’s injuries looked consistent with a fall, not a beating, because they were limited to one side of his body instead of all over. He said medical staff who saw Martinez told him the same thing. Yet it was difficult to get that information out to the public.
Carrillo was witnessing a political phenomenon familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the immigration debate: opinions quickly trample facts, and facts often aren’t welcome when they interfere with a good narrative.
5. How Fanta Was Created For Nazi Germany
It’s February 1944, and Berlin is attempting to recover from American aerial bombing. But life and industry continues on the city’s outskirts. In farmhouses, bottles clang and a mix of ex-convicts, Chinese laborers, and other workers fill glass bottles of what was likely a cloudy, brownish liquid. This is one of Coca-Cola’s makeshift bottling operations, and they are making Nazi Germany’s signature beverage. Even during war, Germans want their Fanta.
The soft drink Fanta was invented by Coca-Cola, an American company, inside of Nazi Germany during World War II. Developed at the height of the Third Reich, the new soda ensured the brand’s continued popularity. Fanta became a point of nationalistic pride and was consumed by the German public, from the Fraus cooking at home to the highest officials of the Nazi party.
The drink was technically fruit-flavored, but limited wartime resources made that descriptor not wholly accurate. Its ingredients were less than appetizing: leftover apple fibers, mash from cider presses, and whey, a cheese by-product. “[Fanta] was made from the leftovers of the leftovers,” says Mark Pendergrast, who, as the author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, revealed this hidden past. “I don’t imagine it tasted very good.”
By the time Hitler and the Third Reich marched into Austria, Coca-Cola had been in Germany for nearly a decade. Coke was invented in 1886 by Dr. John Stith Pemberton, who sold it at a local Atlanta pharmacy for five cents a glass. Pemberton was a Confederate Civil War veteran still suffering from a saber wound. While recovering, he became addicted to morphine. Coca-Cola—made from the coca leaf and the kola nut, hence the name—was his attempt to find an alternative painkiller.
The coca leaf is used to make highly addictive cocaine, which may help explain the drink’s quick expansion. In 1895, Coca-Cola’s CEO boasted of its presence in every American state and territory. In 1920, the company’s first European bottling plant opened in France, and by 1929, Coca-Cola was being bottled and drunk in Germany.
In 1933, right when Hitler and the Nazi Party were assuming power, German-born Max Keith (pronounced “Kite”) took over the company’s German subsidiary, Coca-Cola GmbH. Keith was an imposing figure: tall, intimidating, possessing a “little whisk-broom mustache” (not unlike Hitler’s), charming but quick-tempered, and utterly devoted to Coca-Cola. “[Keith] valued his allegiance to the drink and to the company more than his allegiance to his own country,” says Pendergrast. For that reason, he saw no quarrel with boosting sales by tying Coca-Cola to every aspect of German life and, increasingly, Nazi rule.
Back in America, the Coca-Cola Company—led by Robert Woodruff—did not discourage this. The company sponsored the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Woodruff attended, and made banners featuring the Coca-Cola logo alongside the swastika. Keith used a 10th anniversary party for Coca-Cola GmbH to order a mass Sieg-Heil (Nazi salute) in honor of the dictator’s 50th birthday. He declared that this was “to commemorate our deepest admiration for our Fuhrer.”
Coca-Cola wasn’t alone in ignoring Hitler’s increasing aggression. Other American industries, such as Hollywood, overlooked Nazi Germany’s human rights atrocities and went out of their way to retain German business.
About now, you are probably re-thinking your Coco-Cola addiction, aren't you? I'm not, I don't drink the stuff. Stopped way back in the 1990s.
6. This is just... Dear Polly - Am I too Obsessed with My Nemesis? (Polly isn't sure. But thinks maybe it is better not to have any?)
7. SmartBitches keeps rec'ing books which have interesting synopsises or hit my story kinks, but the writing styles...leave something to be desired. This style I found jarring. The words in various spots appear to be in the wrong order -- the rhythm is just off. So I found it hard to read. Words have a rhythm in my head -- if they are in the wrong order or not placed properly, I find it hard to read them. I'm not sure that makes sense?
When she and Sebastian first meet at a masquerade ball:
“Is that not what you intended? To be easily seduced in a dark passageway?”
She snorted a laugh. The ridiculous confidence of men who believed that if a woman came near, they wanted to be seduced! “I intended to drink some punch and avoid the ballroom hostess. She lifted her hand, wrapped her fingers firmly around his wrist and pushed his hand away. “You think highly of yourself, sir. But I should explain that merely because a woman is standing in a passageway, having drunk a bit of rum, does not mean she desires your advances.”
[She snorted a laugh? She snorted with laughter -- that works in my head. The other jars and takes me out of the story.)
When she kicks Sebastian and his brother out of her home:
Eliza’s mouth dropped open. She’d never wanted to punch a man in the mouth, but oh, she wanted to punch him. Take a good swing and watch him tumble onto his princely arse. She didn’t care how important or handsome or royal he was, she was infuriated that he thought he could speak to her in this manner, as if she were some lowly chambermaid who had failed to dust his crown properly.
Her hands found her waist. “You have no call to be so rude.” [Her hands found her waist? What about she put her hands on her waist. Hands don't find waists, they don't have minds of their own...are they separate from her? Was her waist lost? Eliza's mouth fell open, dropped open? )
His hands found his waist. “What did you say?” [Apparently his hands are lost as well and had to find his waist, or maybe his waist got lost?]
“I’m sorry, did you not hear me? Then allow me to speak plainly–you are rude. And for your information, it is not the judge’s gazette. In fact, he has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, I will not wake him merely because you command me. The absolute nerve.” She folded her arms. [Now this is better. But people don't speak this formally.]
His autumn green eyes widened with surprise. “Do you have any who you are speaking to? I could see you punished dearly for your impertinence.” [Autumn green eyes??? You mean brownish green? Why can't we just say his eyes widened with surprise or his eyes widened? Or nothing at all?]
“Ha,” she said. “This is a free country, Your Highness. And while you may be someone’s prince somewhere, you are not mine. I am not a child, I am not impertinent, I am the master of this house and I said no, you cannot see my father now, and frankly, I will thank you both to go now.” She threw out her hand and pointed to the door. That was when she noticed Poppy standing there with a tea service, her mouth agape. “Poppy, do step aside. I should not like to give the slightest impediment to the immediate departure of these gentlemen.” [ She threw out her hand and pointed to the door? What about she just pointed to the door? Did the hand get thrown? ]
When Eliza informs Sebastian that she’ll be doing some investigating of her own:
“I’m very sorry, Miss Tricklebank, but I can’t leave this to you.”
“Oh dear. Did I mistakenly ask your permission? I assure you, that was not my intent.” She smiled again, her eyes sparkling with delight. [Sigh. This is too flowery for words. Her eyes sparkling with delight? Ugh. And no not all romance novels are quite this flowery nor do the people speak as if there is a stick up their arse. I think the problem is too many of these romance novelists read the early 18th and 19th Century writers and assumed people spoke like that -- no, they wrote like that -- formerly as if a stick were stuck up their arse.]
I'm picky about writing styles. I can't read formal writing styles for pleasure, I read and write formerly for work.
I can't even...
2. Am struggling to combat a nasty chest cough that I contracted on Sunday, because they blasted the heat. The constant changes in indoor/outdoor temperatures.The rise in dust and mold due to radiators and heat on and off trains, work and home. And lack of sleep. I'm hoping it's okay by Saturday. I did skip my Bible Study tonight (it's Bible Study Unitarian style) because I can't breath and keep coughing. Can't skip work -- so muscle through. I hate chest coughs.
3. A bit of good news, outside of the fact that I now have gas for a stove and oven, which I'm absurdly pleased about. And dryers in the basement. The apartment complex management has deigned to replace the elevators. Yes, we are getting new elevators in February.
Me: How will we get to the basement when they replace them?
Super: They will replace one at a time. But brand new!
ME (looking at elevators): Well the plus side of these is you can get out of them easily if stuck...so this could be a good or bad thing.
Other bit of good news? They are increasing the electrical power output to the apartments, so now we can have more appliances plugged in without worrying about blowing a fuse. In short, yes, soon you can run the microwave and coffee maker at the same time.
Super: It will be very expensive.
Me (thinking to myself): Thank god, I signed a two-year lease agreement.
On the bad news end? I gave back my hot pad today to help the poor souls who have no gas in their stoves or ovens in other buildings. And there are at least ten families/people in my building who don't have gas stoves or ovens, because National Grid hadn't unlocked their meters due to payment issues or a misunderstanding over it. (Grid charged us for gas they weren't supplying, unless we called them and locked the account requesting a credit, and then called back to unlock when they were ready to turn the gas on. And they came without warning. I had panicked and had them unlock my meter two weeks before they turned the gas back on. National Grid is a bit of an asshole.) My heart goes out to these poor people.
4. Speaking the Truth to the Powerful
Oscar Carrillo made an unusual choice for a kid who grew up in mid-eighties El Paso: he chose to become a small-town West Texas lawman. “I could very easily have chosen to work in a large city, make the higher salary, enjoy the scheduled days off and paid vacations, and benefit from the almighty overtime pay,” Carrillo said. “But smaller, rural, remote, and not-so-wealthy jurisdictions deserve competent, experienced, and well-trained law enforcement too.”
The 52-year-old first served as a sheriff’s deputy in Howard and Midland counties before he became Marfa’s police chief. Since 2000, he has been the sheriff of Culberson County, a large, desolate swath of hardscrabble land wedged between New Mexico and Mexico in the state’s far western tip. Culberson County sprawls over 3,800 square miles, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Ranchland bumps up against Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s private spaceport project. There are no police departments, just the sheriff and his deputies.
You wouldn’t have any trouble identifying Carrillo as the sheriff if you bumped into him on the streets of Van Horn, the county seat and home to nearly all its 2,200 residents: he’s usually decked out in a white cowboy hat, work shirt with a tie, blue jeans, sidearm on his hip, and a star on his chest. Like many cops, Carrillo has a well-defined sense of right and wrong, and he’s not shy about voicing it, even if that means contradicting the governor of Texas or the president of the United States.
The weekend before Thanksgiving 2017, that’s exactly what happened, as Van Horn became the center of a border security debate.
Late on Saturday, November 18, Border Patrol agents Rogelio Martinez, 36, and Stephen Garland, 38, sustained serious injuries at the bottom of a culvert along a remote stretch of Interstate 10, about twelve miles east of Van Horn. Martinez died later in an El Paso hospital from blunt injuries to the head, according to the El Paso medical examiner. But the manner of his death remains undetermined and has become the subject of often venomous debate.
Garland survived but has no memory of the night’s events, officials have said.
Carrillo was among the first responders at the scene. He doesn’t recall ever meeting Martinez or Garland, though he later learned that he and Martinez had both graduated from El Paso’s Irvin High School, sixteen years apart. But as a fellow law enforcement officer, Carrillo felt the tragedy deeply.
His mourning turned to anger, however, as word quickly spread about the incident. Martinez’s colleagues and prominent Republicans jumped to the conclusion that he had been the victim of a homicide, describing the scene in a way that bore no resemblance to what Carrillo had witnessed and what decades of experience told him had likely happened.
“Border Patrol Officer killed at Southern Border, another badly hurt. We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!” President Trump tweeted the day Martinez died.
“I’m offering a reward to help solve this murder of a Border Patrol Agent in Texas. Help us catch this killer,” Governor Greg Abbott tweeted on November 20, offering up to $20,000. The elected officials were describing a version of events that mirrored what the National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ politically powerful union, had offered. “What we know is that Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez appears to have been ambushed by a group of illegal aliens whom he was tracking. Our agents’ reports from the ground say that he was struck in the head multiple times with a rock or rocks,” NBPC president Brandon Judd told Breitbart Texas on November 19, shortly after Martinez’s death. Other media jumped on the attack story. The rush to judgment was on.
To the sheriff, Martinez’s injuries looked consistent with a fall, not a beating, because they were limited to one side of his body instead of all over. He said medical staff who saw Martinez told him the same thing. Yet it was difficult to get that information out to the public.
Carrillo was witnessing a political phenomenon familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the immigration debate: opinions quickly trample facts, and facts often aren’t welcome when they interfere with a good narrative.
5. How Fanta Was Created For Nazi Germany
It’s February 1944, and Berlin is attempting to recover from American aerial bombing. But life and industry continues on the city’s outskirts. In farmhouses, bottles clang and a mix of ex-convicts, Chinese laborers, and other workers fill glass bottles of what was likely a cloudy, brownish liquid. This is one of Coca-Cola’s makeshift bottling operations, and they are making Nazi Germany’s signature beverage. Even during war, Germans want their Fanta.
The soft drink Fanta was invented by Coca-Cola, an American company, inside of Nazi Germany during World War II. Developed at the height of the Third Reich, the new soda ensured the brand’s continued popularity. Fanta became a point of nationalistic pride and was consumed by the German public, from the Fraus cooking at home to the highest officials of the Nazi party.
The drink was technically fruit-flavored, but limited wartime resources made that descriptor not wholly accurate. Its ingredients were less than appetizing: leftover apple fibers, mash from cider presses, and whey, a cheese by-product. “[Fanta] was made from the leftovers of the leftovers,” says Mark Pendergrast, who, as the author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, revealed this hidden past. “I don’t imagine it tasted very good.”
By the time Hitler and the Third Reich marched into Austria, Coca-Cola had been in Germany for nearly a decade. Coke was invented in 1886 by Dr. John Stith Pemberton, who sold it at a local Atlanta pharmacy for five cents a glass. Pemberton was a Confederate Civil War veteran still suffering from a saber wound. While recovering, he became addicted to morphine. Coca-Cola—made from the coca leaf and the kola nut, hence the name—was his attempt to find an alternative painkiller.
The coca leaf is used to make highly addictive cocaine, which may help explain the drink’s quick expansion. In 1895, Coca-Cola’s CEO boasted of its presence in every American state and territory. In 1920, the company’s first European bottling plant opened in France, and by 1929, Coca-Cola was being bottled and drunk in Germany.
In 1933, right when Hitler and the Nazi Party were assuming power, German-born Max Keith (pronounced “Kite”) took over the company’s German subsidiary, Coca-Cola GmbH. Keith was an imposing figure: tall, intimidating, possessing a “little whisk-broom mustache” (not unlike Hitler’s), charming but quick-tempered, and utterly devoted to Coca-Cola. “[Keith] valued his allegiance to the drink and to the company more than his allegiance to his own country,” says Pendergrast. For that reason, he saw no quarrel with boosting sales by tying Coca-Cola to every aspect of German life and, increasingly, Nazi rule.
Back in America, the Coca-Cola Company—led by Robert Woodruff—did not discourage this. The company sponsored the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Woodruff attended, and made banners featuring the Coca-Cola logo alongside the swastika. Keith used a 10th anniversary party for Coca-Cola GmbH to order a mass Sieg-Heil (Nazi salute) in honor of the dictator’s 50th birthday. He declared that this was “to commemorate our deepest admiration for our Fuhrer.”
Coca-Cola wasn’t alone in ignoring Hitler’s increasing aggression. Other American industries, such as Hollywood, overlooked Nazi Germany’s human rights atrocities and went out of their way to retain German business.
About now, you are probably re-thinking your Coco-Cola addiction, aren't you? I'm not, I don't drink the stuff. Stopped way back in the 1990s.
6. This is just... Dear Polly - Am I too Obsessed with My Nemesis? (Polly isn't sure. But thinks maybe it is better not to have any?)
7. SmartBitches keeps rec'ing books which have interesting synopsises or hit my story kinks, but the writing styles...leave something to be desired. This style I found jarring. The words in various spots appear to be in the wrong order -- the rhythm is just off. So I found it hard to read. Words have a rhythm in my head -- if they are in the wrong order or not placed properly, I find it hard to read them. I'm not sure that makes sense?
When she and Sebastian first meet at a masquerade ball:
“Is that not what you intended? To be easily seduced in a dark passageway?”
She snorted a laugh. The ridiculous confidence of men who believed that if a woman came near, they wanted to be seduced! “I intended to drink some punch and avoid the ballroom hostess. She lifted her hand, wrapped her fingers firmly around his wrist and pushed his hand away. “You think highly of yourself, sir. But I should explain that merely because a woman is standing in a passageway, having drunk a bit of rum, does not mean she desires your advances.”
[She snorted a laugh? She snorted with laughter -- that works in my head. The other jars and takes me out of the story.)
When she kicks Sebastian and his brother out of her home:
Eliza’s mouth dropped open. She’d never wanted to punch a man in the mouth, but oh, she wanted to punch him. Take a good swing and watch him tumble onto his princely arse. She didn’t care how important or handsome or royal he was, she was infuriated that he thought he could speak to her in this manner, as if she were some lowly chambermaid who had failed to dust his crown properly.
Her hands found her waist. “You have no call to be so rude.” [Her hands found her waist? What about she put her hands on her waist. Hands don't find waists, they don't have minds of their own...are they separate from her? Was her waist lost? Eliza's mouth fell open, dropped open? )
His hands found his waist. “What did you say?” [Apparently his hands are lost as well and had to find his waist, or maybe his waist got lost?]
“I’m sorry, did you not hear me? Then allow me to speak plainly–you are rude. And for your information, it is not the judge’s gazette. In fact, he has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, I will not wake him merely because you command me. The absolute nerve.” She folded her arms. [Now this is better. But people don't speak this formally.]
His autumn green eyes widened with surprise. “Do you have any who you are speaking to? I could see you punished dearly for your impertinence.” [Autumn green eyes??? You mean brownish green? Why can't we just say his eyes widened with surprise or his eyes widened? Or nothing at all?]
“Ha,” she said. “This is a free country, Your Highness. And while you may be someone’s prince somewhere, you are not mine. I am not a child, I am not impertinent, I am the master of this house and I said no, you cannot see my father now, and frankly, I will thank you both to go now.” She threw out her hand and pointed to the door. That was when she noticed Poppy standing there with a tea service, her mouth agape. “Poppy, do step aside. I should not like to give the slightest impediment to the immediate departure of these gentlemen.” [ She threw out her hand and pointed to the door? What about she just pointed to the door? Did the hand get thrown? ]
When Eliza informs Sebastian that she’ll be doing some investigating of her own:
“I’m very sorry, Miss Tricklebank, but I can’t leave this to you.”
“Oh dear. Did I mistakenly ask your permission? I assure you, that was not my intent.” She smiled again, her eyes sparkling with delight. [Sigh. This is too flowery for words. Her eyes sparkling with delight? Ugh. And no not all romance novels are quite this flowery nor do the people speak as if there is a stick up their arse. I think the problem is too many of these romance novelists read the early 18th and 19th Century writers and assumed people spoke like that -- no, they wrote like that -- formerly as if a stick were stuck up their arse.]
I'm picky about writing styles. I can't read formal writing styles for pleasure, I read and write formerly for work.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-21 02:10 pm (UTC)