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if you haven't been following along, i've been trying to find out as much as possible about medieval germanic kinship and kindreds with the idea that there might be something there to help explain why the germanic populations seem to have went along with the church's/kings'/princes' medieval outbreeding project with the most enthusiasm.
most of the populations of peripheral europe — the scots & the irish, the iberians & maybe even the southern french, the southern italians, eastern europeans to differing degrees, and especially the balkan populations (see Why Europe? and the mating patterns in europe series in left-hand column below ↓ for more details) — took up the outbreeding project much later than nw europeans, with the result (i think) that most of them remained "clannish" to some degree or another, or even tribal like the albanians and montenegrins, up until comparatively recently. was there something different about the germanic societies that predisposed them to adopting the cousin marriage bans of the various medieval religious and secular authorities? were they already kinda outbred, perhaps, pre-the arrival of christianity…?
i said in my previous post on medieval germanic kindreds that i wasn't having much luck finding any recently published info about them, so i was reading a book on germanic kindreds published in 1913(!) (reprinted in 2010, mind you). well, now i've come across a whole gaggle of more recent sources (yay!) — in william jervis jones' German Kinship Terms, 750-1500: Documentation and Analysis (mentioned previously in this post, btw).
jones thoughtfully summarized the current (as of 1990 when his book was published) thinking on medieval germanic kindreds. here's what he had to say [pgs. 80-82]:
"Social and legal historians have long debated the size, nature and function of early Germanic and medieval German kin groups. The traditional, though by no means unquestioned, assumption has been that early Germanic society was dominated by the clan or lineage, and by unilinealism, a fabric which was then alleged to have dissolved in the age of the barbarian kingdoms.[5] Fleckenstein (1978: 2ff.) distinguishes here the agnatic and the cognatic clan, and argues in favour of assuming the early existence of the clan as a 'rather flexible institution', which was later circumscribed by royal power, overshadowed by more powerful social groupings, and transformed into the lineage and the family. Murray (1983), on the other hand, finds no compelling reason to think that the (for him) mainly cognatic medieval systems were born of a unilineal system in transition: 'Probably Germanic society always displayed a variety of kinship forms, and various peoples developed systems to meet specific needs.' For Germanic times, Murray emphasises 'the notion of the bilateral kindred as the basic kin group of society', and alongside this 'the antiquity and vitality of cognation' (223). He further observes that, in earliest times, kin groupings had effectively no legal limit 'since the form and dimension of the kin groupings often varied in particular circumstances' (21).
"The size and function of kin groups, as reflected in Germanic laws from the 5th to the 9th century A.D., have been examined by Katherine Fischer Drew (1988). Though traces of a prehistoric Germanic extended family can still be detected (for example in the blood feud, compurgation, and inheritance practices), the basic unit by the time of the barbarian kingdoms is seen by Drew as the small family, supplemented where necessary by recourse to a larger kindred. This was not a fixed association, but was defined by reference to Ego, and thus differed for every group of individuals who had parents in common. On the evidence of Visigothic, Lombard and Frankish laws, the limit of kinship seems to have lain for certain purposes at the sixth or seventh remove, the distance being counted upwards to (and downwards from) the common ancestor…."
so, my first cousin would be removed from me to the fourth degree (e.g. me -> my father -> my grandfather -> down again to my uncle -> my cousin. count the arrows — there are four). my second cousin would be removed from me to the sixth degree — so drew concluded that early medieval germanic kindreds were reckoned out to second cousins. this is pretty standard for most clannish groups, actually — understandable 'cause it can get hard to keep track of relatives farther out — and one is not very related to them beyond that point anyway.
more from jones:
"For the early medieval period, the traditional view (reported, for example, by Leyser 1968: 32ff.) was that the aristocracies of Carolingian Europe consisted of very large family-groups, in which maternal kin mattered at least as much as paternal. The shifting, cognatic *Großfamilien* were seen as giving way in the 11th and 12th centuries to smaller and more closely-knit agnatic dynasties with a continuous history.[6] Questioning the sharpness of this discontinuity, Leyser warns against excessive reliance on the early testimony of the 'Libri memoriales', and adds: 'The circumstance that nobles entered their kindred and affinity, living and dead, does not prove that they failed to distinguish between nearer and more distant ties of kinship or rule out close agnatic feeling and thinking' (36).[7] Bullough, equally, argues for a differentiated view: 'The likelihood is that the circle of kinsmen […] was differently conceived not only among different Germanic peoples but locally according to custom and differently when the issue was one of inheritance of land or a monastery, vendetta and composition or who should be present at a wedding feast. The only consistent feature […] is the bilateral nature of the kin-set and the fact, therefore, that such a set can have no structural persistence through several generations' (1969: 15).
"For the High Middle Ages, the verdicts again differ. Genicot states with some firmness the view that after the end of the first millennium the looser cognatic kin-groupings fell into decline, as society proceeded to organise itself into individual and well-structured agnatic families (Reuter ed. 1970: 27).[8] According to Duby (1973: 283), the years between 900 and 1050 saw the gradual transformation of European kinship structure, from an imprecisely limited, horizontal perception to a more strongly vertical, agnatic view. Against or alongside this agnatic consolidation, it may be salutary to recall Marc Bloch's opinion (1939: 201) that the victory of the agnatic principle did not eclipse the cognatic one. Due weight must be given, also, to Leyser's more differentiated observations, that 'the development of a more restricted, "dynastic" kind of family in the *Reich* was not as whole-hearted as in the West' (1970: 133), and that the degree of agnatic perception depended on the importance of the lineages (1968: 31).[9] In Reuter's view, also, consciousness of distant kinship must have varied with context, both before and after the 11th century: 'it might be useful or it might not' (1979: 7).
"Whatever its nature and scope, the recognition and reckoning of kinship pervaded many aspects of medieval life, and assumed particular importance in the pursuit of feuds and vendettas,[10] in impediments to marriage,[11] and in the laws of inheritance.[12]"
so, it's hard to say what the structure of early (pre-5th century) germanic societies was — clans? kindreds? who knows? there does seem to be something of a consensus, though, that from ca. the 5th century onwards (until…?), germanic societies were featured by bilateral kinship and kindreds. lorraine lancaster concluded this about the anglo-saxons, phillpotts about the germanics across europe, and now
nancy drew and others referred to in the above quote from jones.
the fact that germanic populations were probably kindred- and not clan- or tribal-based at the time that they converted to christianity leads me to think that, while they probably did practice cousin marriage (as suggested by the fact that the church/authorities DID have to ban it starting in the early medieval period), it probably wasn't practiced extremely frequently, and probably a very close cousin form of cousin marriage (like father's brother's daughter [fbd] marriage) wasn't preferred.
what do i mean by "wasn't practiced *extemely* frequently"? i'm not sure. just that cousin marriage couldn't have been as regularly occuring as it was in, say, medieval scotland (or ireland) or else (i think) that germanic society would've been structured in clear-cut extended families or clans rather than these more floating kindreds. similarly, i don't think early medieval germanic couin marriage could've been very close (e.g. fbd marriage) or else, again, they would've had more tightly structured clans/tribes. the pattern seems to be — and i could be wrong about this — the closer the long-term marriage practices, the tighter and more structured the extended family structures within a society. kindreds are neither very tight nor structured — they vary with every individual (or every set of siblings, rather). they're floating. kindreds are clannishness-lite.
there was close — including probably cousin — marriage in pre-christian germanic societies, otherwise the church/secular authorities wouldn't have had to go through all the trouble of banning it. but i think that most early medieval germanic populations (looking away from funny little groups like the frisians and ditmarsians) must've been already comparatively loosely structured, and, therefore, were predisposed to accepting — or at any rate being more receptive to — the medieval cousin marriage bans. they were already not that clannish compared to most other european populations at the time, so it didn't take much, i think, to push them out of clannishness altogether.
need to get my hands on drew's Law and society in early Medieval Europe: studies in legal history. unfortunately there isn't a preview available on google books. dr*t!
i also need to check to see if other populations based on kindreds (especially bilateral kindreds) have relatively low levels of close marriage. somebody remind me if i forget! (^_^)
previously: medieval germanic kindreds … and the ditmarsians and kinship in anglo-saxon society and kinship in anglo-saxon society ii
(note: comments do not require an email. nancy drew.)


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Linking East Los Angeles' HIV Positive Latino Youth to Medical Care
by Rod McCullom, September 15, 2011
Q&A With Arlene Martínez, Youth Transitional Manager, AltaMed Health Services
Los Angeles is the epicenter of the Latino HIV/AIDS epidemic in California. The county has the majority of the state's HIV/AIDS caseload and Latinos comprise a plurality of Los Angeles County's HIV/AIDS cases — at least 43 percent of all new diagnoses in 2010.
"We're definitely seeing an epidemic of HIV infection among Latino youth," says Arlene Martínez, youth transitional case manager at AltaMed Health Services in East Los Angeles, the largest network of community-based health clinics in Southern California. Martínez is a Los Angeles native born to Salvadoran parents, and has worked in HIV/AIDS and youth services for more than a decade.
A "higher percentage of male and female Latinos are diagnosed with HIV before the age of 30" than for any other ethnicity, notes the LA County Public Health's 2010 HIV Surveillance Report. A higher number of Latino youth 13-19 are also sero-converting. "Once they learn their diagnosis, one of our biggest problems is getting them to adhere to the medication," says Martínez.
AltaMed's Daniel V. Lara Clinic is full-service and specific to HIV and AIDS. Our headquarters are in East Los Angeles, and we have two satellite DVL Clinics in El Monte and Pico Rivera. We provide a full suite of programming and services. There are about four or five medical doctors that are HIV specialists.
We operate an on-site pharmacy and enroll clients in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) and Ryan White. We also conduct free rapid HIV testingas well. And of course there is a youth program, where I work.
How young are the clients?
We're definitely seeing an epidemic of HIV infection among Latino youth. About 88 percent of our youth clients are Latino men — a smaller percentage are Latinas, Caucasian and African American. Most of my clients are aged 20 to 24, a few are under 20. My youngest client was 16, she is 18 now.
The youngest age that we can see clients is 13 years. Younger than 13, we want them to go to Children's Hospital because they will need parental consent to receive medication.
Working with HIV positive youth must be challenging.
Where do we begin? [Laughs] My job is work with all the youth that come through the clinic and make sure they are linked to care. I also conduct home visits — those are needed often in some cases — and handle referrals.
The biggest issue is teens telling their parents and coming out about their serostatus, because they don't want their parents to know. Or if they are guys, they don't want their family to know they are gay or bisexual. This happens very often. And many young people are still living with their parents.
Once they learn their diagnosis, getting them to become adherent to their HIV medication is a big challenge too. Many teens will not adhere to treatment medications because they won't take their medications home and never have their medication with them. There is always an excuse because so many are more afraid of what will happen if their friends or family learn their status. They're terrified of the stigma and being rejected, or even losing a roof over their head.
In one of my recent reports on Black MSM youth, a 23-year-old told me that he learned his diagnosis at 19-years-old, but waited two years until he was off his parents insurance to take any medication or see a doctor.
Because he didn't want his family to know, right? We've seen that as well. It's so unfortunate but that often happens. Just recently, we actually had to turn down two youth who had insurance through their parents but were too afraid to file claims. They could always close their insurance, but insurance takes care of so many other things that public programs will not.
The situation must be even more precarious for Latino youth who are undocumented.
Oh yes. That's a major problem here, too. Many clients become freaked out about being deported if they test positive. Or if they are in the process of being deported, they don't know that they have the right to tell authorities, "I'm HIV positive. I have the right to at least get my medication before I am deported.
That has happened many times when undocumented HIV positive clients were being deported. They are too afraid to speak up, because of the stigma of being identified as HIV positive to authorities and in their homeland. I try to educate them about what rights they have. Luckily, most of my clients are younger, so they tend not to be undocumented.
Rod McCullom has written and produced for ABC News and NBC, and has reported for Ebony, The Advocate, Colorlines, the Black AIDS Institute and others. Rod blogs on politics, pop culture and Black gay news atrod20.com.
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subset: commoncrawl


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on October 24 the keys to the new jail were turned over to the sheriff. With the completion of the stone jail and its plank-lined cells, the resulting two-part building served the county until 1966. The complex is now maintained by the Fauquier County Historical Society as a county history museum.
The Old Fauquier County Jail is located at the Fauquier County Courthouse Square in Warrenton. It is open Sunday - Monday (closed Tuesday) Wednesday-Saturday 10:00am to 4:00pm year round, but closed Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. Call 540-347-5525 for further information.


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On Thursday I'll be presenting my paper on wiki journalism at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff. As previously reported, the full paper is available as a wiki online for anyone to add to or edit. You can also download a PDF of the 'official' version.
Based on a review of a number of case studies, and some literature on wikis, the paper proposes a taxonomy of wiki journalism, and outlines the opportunities and weaknesses of the form. The following is the edited highlights:
A taxonomy of wiki journalism
There are key qualities that must be identified when examining the use of wikis in journalism:
- Whether the topic is defined by an editor, or a user
- Whether the first draft is produced by a journalist paid to do so, or by a user
- Whether the material could have been produced without using wiki technology
- Whether the timescale is finite ('frozen' for print publication), or infinite (ongoing)
- Whether the wiki draft is professionally edited further for 'final' publication (in contrast to those which are edited solely by users)
Based on variations in the above, we can identify five broad types of wiki journalism:
- 'Second draft' wikis: a 'second stage' piece of journalism, during which readers can edit an article produced in-house (Wired article, Esquire, LA Times wikitorial)
- Crowdsourcing wiki: a means of covering material which could not have been produced in-house (probably for logistical reasons), but which becomes possible through wiki technology (San Diego Tribune's AmpliPedia; Wired How To Wiki)
- Supplementary wiki: a supplement to a piece of original journalism, an 'add-on': "A tab to a story that says: Create a wiki for related stories" (Francisco, 2006) (CNET's India Tech Wiki; parts of the Wired How To Wiki)
- Open wiki: an open space, whose subject matter is decided by the user, and where material may be produced that would not otherwise have been commissioned (Wikinews)
- Logistical wiki: a wiki limited to in-house contributors which enables multiple authorship, and may also facilitate transparency, and/or an ongoing nature (Dewey Answers; N&Opedia)
This taxonomy can be mapped out as follows:
|User-defined topic?
|User-created draft?
|Impossible without wiki?
This taxonomy is not definitive, but indicative: it is possible, for example, to have a second-draft wiki that was ongoing (infinite), but the suggestion is that this would be atypical. The taxonomy aims to provide a conceptual framework through which to analyse examples of wiki journalism. It highlights the range of types of wiki journalism in their relation to 'pure' wiki-ness: Open wiki journalism, for example, has all the qualities that could be argued are inherent in the form; whereas Second-Draft wiki journalism has none. The taxonomy also highlights the closeness of certain types of wiki journalism: Second-Draft and Crowdsourcing types, for instance, are almost identical save for the fact that a piece of Second-Draft wiki journalism does not need the audience in the same way.
Strengths of wiki journalism
Wikis allow news operations to effectively cover issues on which there is a range of information so broad that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to summarise effectively in one article, or by one journalist, alone. Examples might include local transport problems, experiences of a large event such as a music festival or protest march, guides to local restaurants or shops, or advice.
Jay Rosen (2006) explains it as follows:
"A professional newsroom can't easily do this kind of reporting; it's a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls. That's the system's strength. The weakness is the organization knows only what its own people know. Which wasn't much of a weakness until the Internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize their informational strengths."
Internally, wikis also allow news operations to coordinate and manage a complex story which involves a number of contributors. News organisations interested in transparency might also publish the wiki 'live' as it develops, so readers can view as it develops, and look at previous versions, while the discussion space which accompanies each entry also has the potential to create a productive dialogue with users.
Wikis offer a way for news websites to increase their reach, while also increasing the time that users spend on their website, a key factor in attracting advertisers: user generated content has proved hugely successful in attracting readers, accounting for 60% of pageviews on some websites. When successful, a wiki can engender community. And a useful side-effect of community for a news organisation is reader loyalty.
Economically, wikis appear to offer the attractions of free "user generated" content, and, in the case of published articles, free subediting. But these attractions are misleading: the disadvantages of the form mean costs elsewhere, in maintenance and monitoring. Talking about wiki operations in general, Andrew Frank, a research director at technology consulting firm the Gartner Group, is quoted as suggesting (PDF) "The assertion that these sites are cheap to run is questionable. For example, to sell a substantial amount of advertising, wiki sites might have to filter for objectionable content". Jeff Howe also argues "Attempting to use crowdsourcing simply as a cost-saving measure [doesn't work]. Communities must be cultivated, respected and deftly managed if they are to come together to create economic value. This takes talented staff, and a set of skills not taught in journalism or business schools."
Weaknesses of wiki journalism
Shane Richmond identifies two obstacles that could slow down the adoption of wikis: inaccuracy and vandalism, "Particularly in the UK, where one libellous remark could lead to the publisher of the wiki being sued, rather than the author of the libel. Meanwhile, the question of authority is the biggest obstacle to acceptance by a mainstream audience."
Vandalism, a problem known as "trolling", is a recurring issue in wiki technology. Wikis such as Wikipedia have generally taken a "soft security" approach, making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent its occurence in the first place:
"When vandals learn than someone will repair their damage within minutes, and therefore prevent the damage from being visible to the world, the bad guys tend to give up and move along to more vulnerable places." (Gillmor, 2004: 149)
The author of the Wired experiment also feels there is a need for an editorial presence, but for narrative reasons: "in storytelling, there's still a place for a mediator who knows when to subsume a detail for the sake of the story, and is accustomed to balancing the competing claims and interests of companies and people represented in a story."
A further complication for news organisations used to the deadlines and production cycles of print and broadcast is the long timescales involved in building a successful wiki and the communities needed to maintain it. Wikinews contributor Erik Moll notes the reduced incentive for readers to contribute to articles with a short shelf life: "Wikinews articles are short-lived, so there is a reduced feeling of contributing to a knowledge base that will last a lifetime"
Issues around authorship and remuneration also need addressing, although models do exist, including the Creative Commons initiative, and the system used by OhMyNews, which shares copyright and insists contributors disclose bank account details for payment.
Finally, one of the biggest disadvantages may be readers' lack of awareness of what a wiki even is: only 2% of Internet users even know what a wiki is, although similar statistics were once applicable to blogs.
So far the most highly publicised experiments with the form (the 'Wikitorial'; Wired's wiki article; the Esquire Wikipedia article) have been of the 'Second draft' variety, relinquishing the least amount of control over content, and incorporating wiki technology into pre-existing work processes: the subject of the article is still chosen by editors, the first draft is written by a journalist, and only then does the wiki community take control, taking a role as a second journalist/editor in the process.
In these cases the article has also been 'frozen' at some point for publication, often only days after first being published online, something which could be seen as 'unnatural' for a wiki. Furthermore, freezing wikis reduces the opportunity to allow vandalism to be cleaned up over time, underexploits the ability to look at various 'edits' of an article/topic/event as it develops over a long period of time, and removes the opportunity to build an online community.
In contrast, outside of traditional news operations, Wikinews and Wikipedia have adopted an 'Open' model, relinquishing almost all control, with huge success for Wikipedia, but less for Wikinews, perhaps because of the inclusion of 'short-shelf-life' material.
Timescale appears to be a key variable in the success of wiki journalism as, between these two types on the wiki journalism continuum, the most successful models of wiki journalism have involved subject matter with a long shelf life, that builds, and taps into, a community that is wiki-literate and willing to contribute.
This community, and the management of community, are crucial to the shape that wiki journalism takes. But creating a community is difficult and, once created, that community may not act in ways the wiki owner wants them to:
"Real community is a self-creating thing, with some magic spark, easy to recognize after the fact but impossible to produce on demand, that draws people together. Once those people have formed a community, however, they will act in the interests of the community, even if those aren't your interests. You need to be prepared for this. [T]hey may well treat you, the owner of the site, as an external perturbation. Another surprise is that they will treat growth as a perturbation as well, and they will spontaneously erect barriers to that growth if they feel threatened by it.[…] Many of the expectations you make about the size, composition, and behavior of audiences when you are in a broadcast mode are actually damaging to community growth. To create an environment conducive to real community, you will have to operate more like a gardener than an architect." (Shirky, 2002)
But investment made in building this community can produce significant results. Scott B. Anderson, director of shared content for the Tribune Co.'s interactive unit, says "This is a way that a newspaper can let its audience take part in its core mission: investigation", and there are increasing examples of 'crowdsourcing' methods, of which wikis are just one, being used to build journalism projects that would otherwise not have taken place.
This inevitably raises issues of access, and the proportion and type of user who will contribute to a wiki. Nielsen's research on participation inequality found a '90-9-1′ rule whereby 90% of users are "lurkers" who do not contribute, 9% "contribute a little", and 1% account for "almost all the action", while McCawley (2007) notes: "there were more major contributors to the 1911 Britannica than there are to Wikipedia and the front page of Digg is controlled by fewer people than the front page of the New York Times."
But Alex Bruns also argues that "In itself this does not undermine the project of open news any more than the fact that not everyone is a software programmer undermines the project of open source: even those who do not engage with the deliberations taking place within open news can still benefit from their outcomes as they emerge." (2005: 74), while Pavlik asks: "Is the knowledge gap reason enough to resist the development and growth of online journalism? Definitely not. Although some segments of society are likely to benefit more rapidly than others, all groups will eventually gain. Moreover, even the classical media are subject to the same knowledge-gap effect [and] if anything, new media present a possible reversal of the knowledge gap by eliminating the barriers to entry into the journalism marketplace." (2001: 144)
It could also be argued that the '90% lurkers' statistic is misleading, focused as it is on any one site, where most people are going to be 'passing through'. In contrast, when the focus moves to individual people, the figures change dramatically: a Pew study in 2003 found that 44% of adult American internet users had contributed content online (PDF). Even with 10% of users contributing, the case can be made that a local newspaper with 40,000 print readers would not have previously expected to tap into an army of around 4,000 contributors.
Even so, the skills to manage a community and give a 'voice to the voiceless' become important, and to that end an increasing number of news organisations are creating 'Community Editor' roles. The case of the BBC's 'user generated content' unit is worth noting here: the team of over two dozen staff not only manages incoming contributions, but also looks to balance proactive voices by physically seeking out others who may not have access to communication technologies.
Blogs 2.0
The Telegraph are planning an internal wiki as a precursor to public experiments with the technology. The BBC has been using wikis internally for some time, particularly for product development and distributed team working within BBC Future Media & Technology, while a straw poll of senior media professionals shows enthusiasm about the potential of the technology in organisations including Channel 4, BSKYB, and FT.com.
Even of those opposed to, or unaware of, the use of wikis in journalism, Gahran notes that "Most [had] used, shared documents via services such as Google Docs or Zoho […] Once they get used to the idea of collaborating on a document (any document, really) via the Web, wikis start to look more appealing and make more sense."
A number of projects in 2007 indicate that we may be seeing a new stage in the evolution of wiki journalism. In terms of Rushkoff's (PDF) three stages of development in the growth of participatory media – deconstruction of content, demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or participatory authorship – it could be suggested that some publications, in particular the San Diego Tribune AmpliPedia and Wired's How-To Wiki, are emerging from the first stage of deconstruction of content and that, if wiki journalism is to become part of the online journalist's toolbox, the next challenge is further demystification of wiki technology, with time and money invested in facilitating participation.
Wikis are blogs 2.0: like blogs, they provide an arena for readers to critique and correct, to self-publish, and to form communities. But while they share many characteristics with blogs and older technologies such as discussion forums, the significance of wikis lies in the way they move away from the linear call-response communication models that those technologies reflected. If blogs are a distributed discussion (PDF), then wikis offer a single place for that discussion to reach (ongoing) concensus.
The range of voices editing each other tends to result in a fact-based piece of work that represents the 'Neutral Point Of View' (NPOV) formalised by Wikipedia, and which, potentially, avoids some of the biases inherent in individual, commercial journalism. The networked nature of wiki technology allows for genuine collaboration and community, as well as holding enormous potential for transparency and a more impartial concensus. Whether this potential is realised depends on the investment and understanding that is brought to any wiki project.
In other words, wiki journalism will only flourish if as much time and care is invested in wikis as are invested in traditional journalism. Weaknesses such as vandalism and inaccuracy can be addressed if staff are assigned to monitor and facilitate the wiki – to prevent legal issues, to attract A-List contributors (and monitors), and build genuine online communities. This will involve a new skills set for those involved, and it will involve a fresh look at copyright, legal and ethical issues. Hardest of all, it will involve relinquishing control over what has traditionally been a news organisation's biggest asset – content – in order to rebuild another that has recently been neglected: the community that may be key to journalism's future both editorially and economically.


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SpankOut Day promotes discipline alternatives
In 23 countries, it is illegal for a parent to hit a child. In the United States, and more specifically in Massachusetts, there is no law that stops a parent from spanking their child, but some child protection agencies consider it a form of "corporal punishment" and want the disciplinary practice banned.
The 10th anniversary of SpankOut Day USA will be observed Wednesday as a time to educate the public and promote effective, non-violent discipline alternatives to hitting.
To spank or not to spank is "such a touchy topic," said Melissa Kachapis, a clinician at the Family Service Association in Fall River. Kachapis works with parents to find effective ways to discipline their children.
Kachapis said there are better ways to deal with a child's bad behavior than resorting to physical discipline, whether that is with a whip, a belt or a hand.
"We see how that has affected children," Kachapis said. "Emotionally, children suffer from physical abuse."
SpankOut Day was initiated by the End Physical Punishment of Children program of the Center for Effective Discipline, a nonprofit organization.
Though the practice of hitting children has been banned in Massachusetts schools since 1971, the Center for Effective Discipline would like to ban corporal punishment of children in the home, too.
Though Kachapis does not condone hitting a child, she said she doesn't necessarily believe that spanking should be banned, and could in some cases exacerbate an already bad situation between a parent and child.
She said she hears kids use the phrase: "Hit me again and I'll call DSS."
"As adults, we should look for other ways," Kachapis said.
Parents can give children a "timeout" to calm themselves, and the parent might also consider giving themselves a timeout. Kachapis said it sometimes works to leave the room and ignore the negative behavior for a little while to gain a new perspective.
She said using physical violence is really only a way for the parent to express their own anger. "It doesn't make anything better," Kachapis said.
She suggested that parents increase their positive actions with their kids and use praise for good behavior.
Parents can also try to take something away from a child who is misbehaving. No video games for the day, or sending them to bed a half hour earlier can be effective, Kachapis said.
According to the Center for Effective Discipline, the parental practice of hitting children is declining in the United States.
Kachapis said she finds that to be true, too.
"I think people are still using it, but they're less likely," Kachapis said.
More and more parents are disciplining in other ways, by talking to their children, and offering choices and consequences for negative behaviors.
The Center for Effective Discipline claims that physical punishment tells a child that violence is OK and that it is acceptable to hit a person who is smaller and weaker.
This behavior can lead to fear, anger, and resentment, and can actually worsen the child's behavior. Even more dangerous, hitting a child can border on child abuse. It is easy to hit too hard and cause bruises, broken bones, welts and nerve damage, according to the Center for Effective Discipline.
The center maintains that children have the same right as all other human beings to be free from physical harm.
The observance of SpankOut Day USA is modeled after the Great American Smokeout.
"Not all smokers die of lung cancer, and not all children who are hit for discipline are physically abused; however, both practices are harmful and need to be eliminated," said Nadine Block, chairwoman of SpankOut Day USA.
For more information about using effective discipline, log-on to www.stophitting.org.
E-mail Deborah Allard at email@example.com.


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Today's News: Our Take - Report: Teresa Heinz Kerry Suffered a Grand Mal Seizure
Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Secretary of State John Kerry and the heir to the ketchup company fortune, suffered a grand mal seizure that sent her to the hospital on Sunday, a medical source who treated her tells NBC News.
Heinz Kerry, 74, was upgraded to fair condition on Monday after she was described as being in "critical but stable" condition Sunday when she was rushed to a hospital in Nantucket and then later transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Heinz Kerry had to be intubated and continues to undergo evaluation.
Cult shows that deserve a movie
Also known as a generalized tonic-clonic seizure, a grand mal seizure is described as "an electrical storm in the brain." It is the most serious type and normally involves the entire body, causing the victim to lose consciousness. It is also unclear what could have caused Heinz Kerry's seizure, which can be prompted by a stroke, an underlying medical condition or even serious sleep deprivation.
Heinz Kerry underwent treatment at Massachusetts General for breast cancer in 2009. She has three adult sons from her first marriage to the late Sen. John Heinz, who died in a plane crash in 1991.
Kerry, her husband since 1995, has been by her side throughout her hospitalization. "The family is grateful for the outpouring of support it has received and aware of the interest in her condition, but they ask for privacy at this time," Kerry's spokesperson said in a statement on Sunday.
View original Report: Teresa Heinz Kerry Suffered a Grand Mal Seizure at TVGuide.com
Other Links From TVGuide.com


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The 1980s are littered with bands who started out with the noblest of indie intentions, but then got seduced and/or corralled into major-label action.
And they didn't come much more indie than We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It, the Birmingham-born-and-bred, all-female, John Peel-endorsed quartet which formed in 1985.
By 1988, though they had enjoyed a lone top 40 single, you probably wouldn't have put much money on them making a claim for serious stardom. But against all odds, they spent most of 1989 as proper pop stars.
Too young to appreciate their early stuff, I had only ever known their 'pop' period. But I hadn't thought about them for over 25 years until the other day when I heard their 1989 single 'Self' on Absolute 80s.
I was immediately impressed and intrigued; an irresistible slice of post-Frankie, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pomp-pop, 'Self' features swooning synths, powerhouse drums, strident, Claudia Brucken-esque vocals, a brilliant chorus and even a saucy Brian May guitar solo. How did they do that?
It was all so different back in '86. Their first UK single, a double A-side of 'XX Sex' and 'Rules And Regulations', appeared on Vindaloo Records and reached number 41 in March of that year. In December, debut album Bostin' Steve Austin was released, spawning hilarious first UK Top 40 single 'Love Is The Slug'.
Further single releases included 'Rocking With Rita (Head To Toe)', featuring a version of 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' on the B-side, and even a cover of 'Spirit In The Sky'.
Clearly a change of direction was needed. Apparently it was WEA A&R gurus Rob Dickins and Bill Drummond who masterminded the band's assault on the charts, recommending a shortening of their name to Fuzzbox, bringing in songwriter Liam 'Walk Like An Egyptian' Sternberg, putting more focus on lead singer Vickie Perks and recruiting session keyboard player Andy Richards to produce the Big Bang album.
Richards' credentials were exemplary – prior to '89 he had played on no less than eight '80s UK number ones: Frankie's 'Relax' and 'Two Tribes', George Michael's 'Careless Whisper', Chris De Burgh's 'Lady In Red' and the Pet Shop Boys' 'It's A Sin', 'Always On My Mind' and 'Heart'. He had also recently produced Prefab Sprout's 'Hey Manhattan'.
And, in the short-term, Richards did a sterling job – Big Bang went top 5 and Fuzzbox were pop stars. Three singles from the album got into the top 30 – the infuriatingly-catchy Sternberg co-writes 'Pink Sunshine' and 'International Rescue' as well as 'Self'. But the fourth single, a cover of Yoko's 'Walking On Thin Ice', flopped, as did later stand-alone single 'Your Loss My Gain'. Warners pulled the plug, probably prematurely.
But the story doesn't end there. Fuzzbox made a comeback in 2010 with a spiffing cover of M's 'Pop Muzik' but sadly lost founding member Jo Dunne in October 2012. After a brief hiatus, they reformed again in 2015 and have just finished touring with The Wonder Stuff. Their YouTube channel claims they are officially the most successful British all-female band. Dispute it at your peril…


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The Adelaide metropolitan area only opened three Starbucks stores, with its first one opening in March 2006 and there was very little hype when they came to town, except made by the ex-pats. In fact, I had been in there only once before yesterday, its closing day, because we have better local coffee chains such as CIBO, Bean Bar and the Italian Illy cafés. Although being on the major shopping street in the city, it failed to do very well here. Their prices are really overpriced for coffee that isn't that great. But me and my friend Jen both wanted an Adelaide mug (just because) but it was too late, the store was wiped clean.
In the mid-1990s, I worked at a café that was affiliated with Starbucks in San Francisco. Back then, there were official Starbucks barista trainers that used to fly in from Seattle to train every barista how to make coffee drinks Starbucks style – complete with illustrations of the drinks. I was in awe of Starbucks back then and thought that they were so cool. Starbucks was even known as a great company to work for, treating their employees well and offering great benefits for even their part-time employees. I knew that Starbucks were expanding too quickly when I went to Vancouver and saw a Starbucks on just about every corner! After years of studying Chaucer's works, the pièce de résistance was when I finally made it to Canterbury cathedral in England and was shocked when I saw a Starbucks at the entrance to the beautiful and historical cathedral! It really ruined the facade to the entrance of the cathedral! What ruined my experience even more was that there were a few Starbucks employees handing out samples of muffins and cakes – it just seemed wrong. See pictures below:
Fast forward to 2005 when I moved to Adelaide and was surprised that there was no Starbucks in sight. I thought, "wow, a city that Starbucks still hadn't penetrated." I got used to the coffee terms and culture here very quickly. People in Australia take their coffee very seriously and there are plenty of places that will teach you to be a bona fide barista. The one thing that I love about a proper coffee made in Australia is that really good baristas can foam the milk so finely that it has the texture of marshmallows floating on top of the espresso. That type of finely made espresso drink is hard to find in the states – perhaps it's because America is much more of a drip-coffee country. Order a drip coffee in Australia and you will be met with a lot of confusion…don't even ask for "cream" with your coffee, you'll be met with even more confusion – ask for milk.
I recently went back to the states to a Starbucks and the coffee was, to plainly put it, shit. I asked for a latte and it tasted burnt and I got barely any foam. I went back to tell the barista that I would like some foam and he said, "oh, it's just that a lot people here feel cheated if they get too much foam." That's fine if people don't want foam but I didn't ask for no foam. Sigh… It's sad because I used to be such a Starbucks fan but now their quality has gone down and their prices inflated. Don't get me wrong, I still like Starbucks as a company. I do really hope that with all these closings, they will re-train their employees and bring back the quality of their drinks back to what it was before the mega-expansion of over 16,000 worldwide stores.
Here are a few links to news stories on the closure of hundreds of Starbucks:
**Coffee language tips for people coming to Australia:
Flat White – espresso shot with hot milk and very little/no foam (like a latte w/less foam)
Short Black – one shot espresso with hot water
Long Black – double-shot espresso with hot water (like an Americano)


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In the above video, was the bull infuriated by the red coloured shawl worn by the Hindu sadhu?
Incidents such as this raise the perennial question ""
We have always been told not to go near a bull while wearing a red dress, or something similar to red that would make a bull angry. Is it true?
Bullfighting (Spanish: corrida de toros or toreo; Portuguese: corrida de touros or tourada) is one of the most popular and controversial traditional spectacular sport prevailing in Spain, Portugal, parts of southern France and in some Latin American countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru.
In some areas, people classify bullfighting as a blood sport, but in other areas, it is not considered a sport but a cultural event, a spectacle and art form with no elements of competition in the proceedings.
Some claim that bullfighting is an art form wherein professional toreros (bullfighters) seek to evoke inspiration and an emotional connection with the audience while attempting to subdue and slaughter the bulls.
The most senior torero who actually kills the bull is called a matador.
The matador executes various formal moves with the muleta (a small red cape) and a sword. A snorting bull charges at the muleta waved by the matador. The angry bull appears to see the red cape and charges angrily towards it.
After hooking the bull multiple times behind the shoulder by the matador, the bullfight concludes usually with the killing of the bull by a single sword thrust, called the Estacada. In Portugal, the finale consists of a tradition called the pega a, where men (forcados) try to grab and hold the bull by its horns when it runs at them.
The use of the muleta by Spanish matadors in bullfighting began at the beginning of the 18th century. From then on the myth that "red makes bulls go wild" perpetuated.
A group of MythBusters set out to find whether bulls really hate the colour red? Test this myth they decided to put makeshift matadors into an arena, each holding a cape or muleta of a different color including a red one.
The red, blue, green, and white capes got equal, mild attacks when they were motionless. Bulls, just like other cattle, do not differentiate between red, blue, green, and white colours. Only when the matador waved the cape, the bulls lose their temper and charge aggressively. Moreover, the bulls used in bullfights are from a very aggressive breed and they're raised in a way that any sudden movements will make these bulls angry and make them attack.
So , this old myth that "a bull charges at the sight of red" can get tossed right out of our mindset.
- Why Do Bulls Charge When they See Red? (livescience.com
- Does the color red really make bulls angry?
- Do Bulls Really Hate the Color Red?
- Bullfighting (en.wikipedia.org)


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As he had every morning for years, on October 4, 2010, Franz Gayl woke up at five, fed his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks, and then walked down the street from his modest home at the end of a cul-de-sac in northern Virginia to wait for the bus to the Pentagon. Once there, Gayl swiped his badge, thanked the security guards, and proceeded down the vast corridors to an office of the B Ring and the Marine Corps' Department of Plans, Policies and Operations. At almost exactly seven thirty, Gayl, a science adviser to the Marines, walked into his Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secured office in which military employees with high-level security clearances spend their days, and sat down at his desk, eager to get to work. Though Gayl had followed this routine for more than a decade, he still loved the exact minutia of it.
Then the day went sideways. His supervisor walked in and said, "Come with me, we're going to see the general," referring to the head of the department. With the general when Gayl arrived was a representative from human resources. He handed Gayl a letter. The subject heading: "SUSPENSION OF ACCESS TO CLASSIFIED INFORMATION." As the others watched him, Gayl began reading.
"Credible information exists which raises serious questions as to your ability or intent to protect classified information," the letter, from Marine headquarters, read. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, had been investigating Gayl, and, "[b]ased on the forensic analysis contained within the report, it appears that on multiple occasions you used an unauthorized USB media flash device within the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), in violation of SCIF security requirements." The letter didn't specify what, if anything, was put on or taken off the flash drive. It concluded, "The culmination of the above demonstrates a disregard for regulations, a pattern of poor judgment, and intentional misconduct."
Gayl was asked if he understood the charges. He said he did. He was led back to his SCIF, where he was given a few minutes to collect his belongings. He was brought down to the parking lot, where a car was already waiting. He was driven to Marine headquarters, where another general was waiting. Gayl was "read out" of the cascade of clearances he'd accrued over the years—top secret/SCI, top secret, secret, confidential.
Back in the car, his supervisor handed Gayl a letter notifying him that he was now on administrative leave, pending review. He was driven to the bus stop. He thanked the driver, and, as he was getting out of the car, the supervisor said, "One more thing, Gayl—I need your Pentagon badge." Gayl handed it to him.
With that, Franz Gayl's thirty-five-year career working for the Marines came to an abrupt halt—and, more than likely, ended for good.
"It was a disgrace, a public humiliation. I think it was designed that way," Gayl (pronounced guile) told me ruefully about that morning, whose details he remembers down to the minute. But he couldn't help but admire its efficiency. "It was beautifully choreographed! It was so well organized, even for the Marines."
Nor could Gayl claim to be surprised. "I'd been expecting something like this for years, but they finally found a way to make it happen," he said. The flash drive is a red herring, he believes—another in a series of reprisals against him by the Marines for revealing what he calls unconscionable mismanagement in the high command. After returning from a tour in Iraq, Gayl went public with an account of how Pentagon delays in sending protective equipment there may have cost troops their lives. He appeared on PBS's NewsHour and testified before Congress, and in doing so crossed many people more powerful than himself, including General James Mattis, now the chief of U.S. Central Command and one of the most important men in the military.
Many Marines have personally thanked Gayl for his outspokenness. He's been called a hero by senators and a "super-star" by the former commandant of the Marine Corps. But according to other Marines, Gayl was long a dangerously untraditional thinker in an organization that values tradition above all. "Just by virtue of his ideas, he made enemies," said a general for whom Gayl once worked.
This is not the first federal investigation of Gayl, nor the first time the military has tried to dismiss him. His former supervisor, who urged his firing years ago, said Gayl had a history of insubordination and inappropriate behavior. "He had four or five projects he felt committed to, and when it came to them he wasn't too interested in what the leadership or regulations required him to do," he said.
Oddly, it's a characterization that Gayl himself doesn't entirely refute: "I was always a contentious figure," he told me. "Everyone who has associated with me, they all think I'm a little … well, wack." But "everything I'd complained about before going to Iraq was a theoretical exercise. Iraq was the first time that there was a real correlation between the problems I knew about in the Marines and the actual human impact." So he broke ranks. "It struck me that if I didn't go outside of command, there'd be no change. I also knew it would be career suicide."
Gayl enlisted in the Marines the day after his seventeenth birthday, and at fifty-three he still looks the part. At six feet tall and 220 pounds, he has gone soft around the middle, but he has a Marine's at-the-ready bearing, massive arms, and a Robert Duvall-intense balding pattern. He calls to mind the actor until he opens his mouth, at which point a fusillade of figures and acronyms and jargon comes at you in a Minnesota accent.
"But what was special about this LAV was it had a 25mm Gatling gun on it, and it was just awesome! It would tear up the targets!" he explained as we drove out of Washington, D.C., in his wife's cherry-red Volkswagen bug on a recent April morning. Gayl, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and very clean white sneakers, was describing in minute detail a day fifteen years prior that he spent blowing up things in the Mojave Desert. My question hadn't been about light assault vehicles—I'd asked how he met his wife—but he stores most memories according to what he was doing, or, more specifically, shooting, for the Marines at the time. (He met his wife on the flight to California.)
We were on our way to Quantico, which elicited more fond recollection ("When I was on an antitank assault team there I used to fire flamethrowers!") and then got Gayl onto the subject of the famous Quantico brig. At the moment it was home to Bradley Manning. Gayl had surprisingly little sympathy for him. "He apparently acted on his conscience, and I have great respect for that," he said of the WikiLeaks source, but "there was no way he could have read all that material and educated himself on the issues.… I would have more respect for him if he'd stayed in the chain of command."
"Isn't that a little ironic, coming from you?" I asked.
"I guess it is!" he said. "But the last thing I ever wanted to do was become what we call a whistle-blower. Whistle-blower—in the Marine Corps? Snitch. Narc. Traitor. It's as counter to the Marine ethos as you can imagine. It is going outside the family. Never embarrass the Marine Corps— that's what I grew up with."
Gayl grew up in a military family, of sorts. His father, Franz Joseph Ferdinand Gayl, was raised in Berlin and in the 1930s joined the Hitler Youth. When he tried to enter the Wehrmacht officer corps, a records search revealed that his mother was Jewish by birth; undeterred, he became a Luftwaffe paratrooper instead, and was captured in North Africa. He spent the remainder of the war in American prison camps in Texas and Maryland; he was sufficiently impressed with the country that he returned after the war to finish his architecture degree, and met Gayl's mother, a computer scientist and amateur historian.
Gayl described his father as both a visionary and a man with a "strong distrust for the capitalist view of technological progress." In the 1970s he became increasingly pessimistic about society and moved the family from Minneapolis to an uninhabited island in Lake Minnetonka. There he taught Franz to drive a World War II-era amphibious landing craft and an engine-propelled sled for traveling on ice that he'd built, among other machines (though he didn't allow him to shoot guns or even play with toy guns).
He also descended into a crippling depression that Gayl believes came from self-hatred: though he had Jewish ancestors, he remained to his death a casual conspiracy theorist about Judaism and a virulent opponent of Israel. "You know how there are some people who seem to want to kill themselves slowly? My dad became like that," he said. Gayl's parents divorced when he was in his early teens, but not before his father passed on to him an awe for the Marines— the heirs, as he saw them, to the Prussian military tradition.
After flirting with juvenile delinquency, Gayl dropped out of high school and enlisted. His transformation was instantaneous. "It gave me a purpose, an identity, a shared identity," he said of the Marines. "The basic principles of self-disciple, the will to see things through, endurance, a sense of civility. It's a pattern for life." He was assigned to the infantry, then officer candidate school, then Ranger school, then jump school, along the way designing equipment that would be used in the first Gulf War. He was made a war tactics instructor at Quantico and sent to the Naval Postgraduate School, where he earned a degree in space systems operation. Michelle Shinn, a physicist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, where Gayl worked on a free electron laser project for her, said that he had a natural gift for seeing the practical potential in abstract science. "I had a healthy skepticism about his ideas," she said. "But we tried them, and they worked."
Based on their research, he built, in his living room, a weapon for immobilizing people without injuring them (and tested it, on himself). When he was awarded a patent, what had been known in military labs as the Gayl Blaster became the "high intensity directed light and sound crowd dispersion device." Popular Science chronicled his work, as did Wired writer Sharon Weinberger in her book Imaginary Weapons. When he left the Corps in 2002, after twenty-two years of active duty, the Marine commandant wrote him a note: "You have been a super-star for the Marine Corps for your entire career; if I had a chance to vote you would be our first one-star space general!" That year, he was hired as a science adviser to the Marine Corps at the Pentagon.
But Gayl had an equally pronounced talent for making waves. In 2004, he wrote a report exposing the dysfunction of the Marines' science and technology division. Unsatisfied with the attention it got among the brass, he published an article in the Marine Corps Gazette suggesting that the service risked irrelevance if it didn't change. The report was right, the general whom Gayl worked for told me, as was Gayl, usually, but he was also incapable of subtlety and indifferent to hierarchy.
"He's very smart and gifted and very passionate about what he does. He would do anything for the Marines," the general said, but he was not particularly well liked in the high command. "I think people resented his intellect."
In 2006, Gayl accepted an offer to deploy to Iraq to join the staff of General Richard Zilmer, his former commander at the Pentagon. Zilmer was leading the Marines in Al-Anbar Province. Anbar would later become known as a cornerstone of the surge, but when Zilmer arrived it was, he liked to joke, the "ugly stepchild" of Iraq's provinces. Neglected by the Provisional Authority and at the heart of the insurgency, troops there were dying at a rate of nearly one a day, mostly because of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
For months, Zilmer had been requesting equipment to combat insurgents, including laser dazzlers—nonlethal devices similar to what Gayl had designed that can disorient drivers of oncoming vehicles to avoid violent encounters at checkpoints—and a surveillance system to seek out bomb planters. Most importantly, he wanted mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, trucks with raised armored V-shaped hulls that provide exponentially better protection against mines than standard Humvees. Indeed, a growing chorus of generals had already been asking for the vehicles. But they had found the Pentagon in no rush to field them. So Zilmer called in Gayl.
"Franz knew how to get money, he knew how the Hill operated, how the Pentagon operated. His understanding of those processes was superior to a lot of the people he was working for at Quantico," the general said, and thus, "Quantico never fully trusted him."
Particularly distrustful was the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, the Quantico-based department responsible for taking equipment requests from commanders like Zilmer and deciding what should and should not be delivered. "Franz has always had a bad reputation with the people at MCCDC," the general said. When Gayl was ordered to deploy, its head was General James Mattis.
Also known as Mad Dog Mattis, Warrior Monk, and Chaos, Mattis was, and is, a legend in the Marines. An immensely capable war fighter, he had commanded troops in the first Gulf War, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, where he led the 1st Marine Division's famous charge into Baghdad, a campaign chronicled in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill (Mattis's character was played by actor Robert John Burke). A soldier-scholar, he helped General David Petraeus rewrite the Army's counterinsurgency field manual. He also had a reputation for blunt, Patton-like utterances. In 2003, for instance, he told Iraqi military leaders, "I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all."
Putting Mattis in charge of the MCCDC seemed, at the time, a way to infuse a hidebound procurement agency with new energy. The problem, however, was that Mattis had spent his entire career on the operations side of the Marines. He had little experience on the support side—the world of acquisitions, contractors, and Beltway politics.
Mattis and Gayl had already had one run-in. The Marine Corps science and technology division that Gayl had officially lambasted in 2004 was part of the MCCDC, and the briefing he gave to Mattis, newly installed as its leader, was not well received, Gayl recalls. Nevertheless, in Iraq Gayl was determined to get what the Marines in Anbar wanted. Stationed at Camp Fallujah, "I'd see the helicopters coming in daily with these busted-up, blown-up kids being flown in to the field hospital," he said. He sent report after report to Quantico. He stayed up for days developing proposals and researching contractors who could fulfill them. He worked all of his angles and contacts.
"He was one of the few guys from back at headquarters
trying to help us," Gary Wilson, a lieutenant colonel stationed
in Anbar at the time, told me.
Yet Gayl ran into the same intransigence Zilmer had. In answer to his request for MRAPs he encountered a wall of resistance: the vehicles wouldn't be applicable after the war; they weren't versatile enough; industry couldn't manufacture them en masse. Some Marines, including the general I interviewed, took Quantico at its word, and still do. Gayl didn't, and he wasn't alone: a colonel who worked on the MRAP requests told me, "I believed them at first, but the more I thought about it and the more I asked questions, the more the arguments didn't make sense."
The real problem, say some Marines I spoke with, was that the military was simply too plodding to react to an insurgency. "We never underestimated the insurgents' capabilities, but I think people back in Washington did," Wilson told me. "There were too many layers and too many ways to impede people like Franz."
Some Marines point out that the MRAPs would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Marines are frugal by nature. Roy McGriff, a lieutenant colonel who studied the use of mines by insurgencies and had been urging the Marines to look for alternatives to Humvees for years, said, "To a man, up the command the reaction to the MRAP was 'It's too expensive, we'd never do it.' Meanwhile we had Humvees with canvas doors. I could stick a pencil through the side of it and kill you."
But others believe the problem was neither red tape nor money, but rather that the MRAPs threatened pet programs in which the Marines had already invested and on which many officers and civil servants had staked their careers. "We don't reward managers who do the right thing by the war fighter or the American taxpayer. The ones who get promoted are the ones who get the gear out there regardless of whether it's right," a lieutenant colonel who worked at the MCCDC told me. "And the more expensive the gear, the more successful the manager."
Gayl would become convinced of this view.
Upon returning from Iraq in 2007, he learned of McGriff's work and contacted him. McGriff told Gayl, to his amazement, that the process for fielding MRAPs was supposed to have begun fully two years prior. In February 2005, as deaths from IEDs started to soar, McGriff had written what is known as an Urgent Universal Need Statement request— the military equivalent of saying "We need this now"—for a fleet of the vehicles to go to Anbar. The request included information on MRAPs manufactured by a South Carolina company; several of them had, in fact, already been sent to Iraq. The request had been signed off on, and McGriff had even briefed Mattis directly.
"I told [Mattis] we must transition as quickly as possible to a family of MRAP vehicles," he recalled, "and we need to get them wherever we can." Mattis then shook his hand and said, 'That's what we're going to do.' " Yet two years later, McGriff's request had vanished. "I don't know what happened to it," he told me.
What happened, it appears, is during the spring of 2005, staff from the MCCDC and other Marines met to discuss McGriff's request. The question at hand was what effect the MRAPs would have on existing programs. A PowerPoint slideshow that Gayl would later unearth and make public showed that the money needed would eat into a number of projects dear to influential Marines, including, most notably, the long-awaited and very costly expeditionary fighting vehicle. Mattis in particular had championed it. (The lieutenant colonel who worked at the MCCDC also singled it out, telling me, "The expeditionary fighting vehicle has been such a huge resource drain. But heaven forbid anyone stand up and say cancel it, because you'll be branded a heretic and you will not have a future" in the Marines.)
Gayl went from frustrated to incensed. "I realized that kids are getting hurt and killed on a daily basis as a direct result of delays that could be avoided." When allies arranged for him to brief key officials in the secretary of defense's office on his views, Mattis and other top Marine generals objected and the briefing was canceled, blocking Gayl's last opportunity to work through the chain of command. Then he saw an Inside the Pentagon article that quoted Marines Commandant James Conway telling the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the first MRAP request hadn't been made until 2006. Conway would later tell the Senate Armed Services Committee the same thing. "I looked at that and said, that's a lie. The commandant of the Marine Corps told a very serious lie," Gayl said. "Then I said to myself, the commandant wouldn't lie. But the people who prepared him would."
Gayl contacted Inside the Pentagon to ask for a correction to be printed. None appeared. So he e-mailed Sharon Weinberger, attaching Roy McGriff's original MRAP request, and that afternoon, May 22, 2007, a damning headline appeared on Wired.com: "Military Dragged Feet on Bomb-Proof Vehicles." The article, which didn't mention Gayl by name, made its way through the military in hours. The next morning it was published in the Defense Department's news briefing.
The rebukes started flying at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. An aide to Delaware Senator Joe Biden then called Gayl. During visits to Iraq, Biden and then Missouri Senator Kit Bond (each of whom has a son who served in the military in Iraq, Bond's as a Marine) had learned about MRAPs and were trying to appropriate money for them. They'd written to President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates without effect. Would Gayl be willing to brief their staffs on the MRAP affair, the aide asked—and, if need be, talk to the press?
Gayl came home that night and spoke to his wife. If he went public, he told her, all of their plans—their retirement, their kids' educations—would be at stake. "I said, 'Honey, I have to do this. I'm sorry our lives aren't going to turn out the way we thought they would,' " he recalled. "I felt, whatever the cost, we could not allow another Marine or soldier to ride outside the wire in anything but an MRAP. That was my goal."
Characteristically, he did not start at a low volume. At once he briefed not just Biden's and Bond's staffs, but anyone in Congress who would listen. He e-mailed David Petraeus. He became an on-the-record source for USA Today. He went on the NewsHour and on National Public Radio, and testified before the House of Representatives.
And in July, just two months after the Wired.com article, Robert Gates announced the creation of a new MRAP task force to ensure that the vehicles got to Iraq as fast as possible. He asked Congress for an additional $750 million just to fly them there. By the next year they were being manufactured in the thousands.
"We have yet to have a Marine killed in the Al-Anbar Province who is riding inside an MRAP," General Conway admitted at a press conference. "So with that knowledge, how do you not see it as a moral imperative to get as many of those vehicles to theater as rapidly as you can?"
Two weeks after Gates's announcement, Gayl received his first formal letter of reprimand in thirty years working in or for the military. That fall his first proposed suspension notice came, and for the next three years, Gayl says, he saw his duties diminished and was subjected to needless counseling, name-calling, and attempts at intimidation. According to notes he kept, he was threatened with demotion and told he should resign.
He, in turn, filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel alleging illegal reprisals for his whistle-blowing and hired the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit law firm that represents whistle-blowers. Gayl's defenders in Congress also rallied around him. Biden and Bond wrote a letter to Conway calling Gayl a "hero," and during Senate hearings Claire McCaskill asked Conway to ensure that the Marines didn't persecute him. Conway responded, "We are making every overture to ensure that we don't violate any aspect of his whistle-blower status. But if it's determined that Mr. Gayl has done something other than what his leadership and his bosses have instructed him to do, then that outcome will have to be determined as to what happens to Mr. Gayl."
Gayl's critics say that he did indeed contravene orders and that it was only a matter of time before he met with disciplinary action. His former Pentagon supervisor told me he believes Gayl is exaggerating or even fabricating his claims of reprisal, and that Gayl has a history of inappropriate behavior and insubordination that justified his dismissal.
"I think he was treated exceptionally fairly. I think we bent over backwards for him. If it was anyone else it would have happened much differently," the supervisor, Retired Colonel David Wilkinson, said. "He had a deep-seated feeling that he had the answer. Everyone else was wrong, and he had it right. God bless him for it. We want guys like that in the Marines. But there are ways to go about doing things and ways not to."
Gayl could certainly act eccentrically. Last summer, he mounted a campaign to advocate sealing the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico with a particular kind of high explosive (though not a nuclear bomb, as some were proposing); the White House had to publicly disown Gayl's idea. This was not the first time an administration had responded awkwardly to something he had said: in 2005, Gayl wrote a report, Realism and Realpolitik, whose chapters include "The Logical Absurdity of a 'Global War on Terrorism,' " "Gracefully Accepting America's Decline as a Step Towards 21 Century Survival," and, most significantly for those who know of Gayl's family history, "Planning for Israel's Evacuation." He sent the report to George W. Bush with a letter attached that said, "I am a loyal supporter of your determined vision. But I also believe in signs, and perhaps the unexpected aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a sign that we should consider modifying our national course for a time."
In 2006, the NCIS and the FBI first began looking into Gayl. The investigation is still classified, but it seems to have been incited by communications he had with Chinese diplomats while writing Realism and Realpolitik. The NCIS would say only that it was eventually "resolved in Gayl's favor." But in 2008 it opened another investigation after learning that Gayl may have divulged classified documents in the case study he wrote on the MRAP affair. During that investigation, the NCIS found out about the flash drive.
It wasn't just these investigations that raised questions. By his own account, Gayl skipped meetings he was ordered to attend and informed the Marines he would continue to talk to Congress, without going through the congressional liaison, whenever he liked. At Plans, Policies and Operations, Wilkinson says, Gayl openly discussed his depression, and in the midst of the financial crisis he took to warning about the possibility of widespread social collapse. He wrote a letter to his neighborhood association that predicted a future without electricity, clean water, or adequate law enforcement, started stocking up on canned food and purchasing shotguns— and kept his coworkers abreast, in detail, of all of it.
"I'm not a psychologist, and I don't know what to look for in guys who may be ready to go over the edge," Wilkinson said. "When he started expressing his concerns about the stock market crash and the state of the country I asked, 'When do I need to worry about things like this?' " Gayl's worries and fears of reprisal eventually left him incapable of doing his job, Wilkinson said. "He wasn't doing what needed to get done. Everything else was becoming a distraction to him."
Gayl, who can't help being candid, at times uncomfortably so, discussed all of this openly with me. He showed me the gun safe in his living room, and the letter he sent to his neighbors. He even volunteered the exact daily dosage of his Prozac prescription. Such exactitude and bluntness define him. His attorney told me he's never had a client do so much of the work of building a case. Gayl corrals witnesses and prepares them, digs up years-old e-mail exchanges, writes arguments. He responds to the NCIS's queries with meticulous briefs, and has buried the Department of Defense inspector general's office, which is investigating his case, in documentation.
"Franz has got incredible survivor instincts and is very smart," a Defense official involved with the case said. So much so, indeed, that "Franz sometimes makes life more difficult for Franz."
But that Defense official suggested that both NCIS investigations were probably unnecessary and may well have been politically motivated. Of the flash drive allegation, the official said, even if it is true, which is in doubt, "I'm having trouble believing that someone could lose his security clearance and his job, potentially, for using a flash drive."
The evidence would seem to warrant skepticism. According to internal Defense Department documents, the supposedly classified material Gayl divulged in his MRAP case study was not documents but two footnotes that referenced nonpublic requests for equipment—requests that Gayl himself wrote while in Iraq. It has not escaped the inspector general's notice, meanwhile, that the official who reported those footnotes to the NCIS was formerly General Mattis's chief civilian aide at the MCCDC, the staffer who oversaw the 2005 briefing that Gayl claimed to the press and Congress had hobbled the original MRAP requests. However, the Defense inspector general has found that neither NCIS investigation of Gayl's conduct technically constituted reprisal.
As for the details of the MRAP affair itself, the Pentagon's own internal reports have borne Gayl's claims out. Its audit of the case found that, under Mattis, the MCCDC "stopped processing the [request] for MRAP-type vehicle capability in August 2005. Specifically, MCCDC officials did not develop a course of action for the [request]," or "attempt to obtain funding for it," and concludes that it failed to "address an immediate and apparent joint warfighter need." (Gayl served as an expert source to the auditors, even as he was being investigated for his own research.) A Naval Audit Service report found that the MCCDC's process for handling Urgent Universal Need Statement requests like McGriff's was "not effective." And this January, Robert Gates told the Marines to cancel the expeditionary fighting vehicle. By now a notorious albatross, the program has eaten up $3 billion (or about six times the budget for Roy McGriff's original MRAP plan), with little to show for it.
Even Gayl's staunchest critics don't deny the justice of his cause. "Everyone's interpretation was that Franz had nothing but the best intentions for the Marines and the Marine Corps," Wilkinson told me. "Gayl's answer turned out to be the one that the secretary of defense went with. History will show getting the MRAP to Iraq was the right decision."
Gayl's case and his fate may finally hinge not on the truth of his claims, however, but on their timing. Marines like Wilkinson say that Gayl's disclosures only pointed up issues the Marines were already handling internally, and that the MRAPs would have gotten to Iraq with or without Gayl. His defenders counter that he was essential in saving lives. For his own part, Gayl takes no credit for agency—only amplification. "I was just the messenger," he said. "The Marines [in Iraq] were making the requests."
Gayl remains astonishingly loyal to the service that pushed him out. "I love the Marine Corps. It's my identity," he said. But "talking about brotherhood and taking care of our own, blah blah blah, all that stuff—it's wonderful, if it's real."
He's not alone in this conviction. "Anyone who actually tried to help us, like Franz, ended up getting a bloody nose from the bureaucracy. Anybody who tried to work with Franz got ostracized," Gary Wilson, the colonel who met Gayl in Anbar, said. "The reason people take umbrage with Franz is not just over the MRAP. It's because he made an indictment of the whole system.… He realized we've priced ourselves out of the defense business."
"The organization he professes his undying loyalty to has turned its back on him," the general whom Gayl worked for said.
The Marine Corps would not make anyone I requested to speak to available for this article, and General Conway, now retired, did not respond to an interview request. James Mattis likewise refused multiple requests for comment. As the general who took over U.S. Central Command from David Petraeus and oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is by some measures the most important uniformed official in the military. He is discussed as a possible candidate for membership in the Joint Chiefs or even as a future national security advisor. In public statements, Mattis has said that MRAPs did not arrive in Iraq sooner mainly because of lack of industrial capacity to make them. This is a contention most Marines I spoke with don't buy, and one largely disproved by the fact that the Pentagon managed to get thousands of MRAPs built and shipped to Iraq a year after Gates gave the order.
In response to a lengthy list of questions for Mattis, his spokesman sent a three-sentence reply:
Our young troops constitute a national treasure, and we have always been committed to getting them the right equipment at the speed of war. There never has been— and never will be—anything more important than making sure our courageous young men and women in the fight are well trained, well prepared and well equipped. We fulfill our solemn obligation to our troops by never being content with how we provide the best possible training and equipment within the fastest possible time.
When Gayl and I went to Quantico in April, he pointed out his old barracks, the obstacle courses he'd trained on, the classroom he taught in. At the National Museum of the Marine Corps, he described with textbook precision each weapon and vehicle on display. It was a Thursday. Without security clearances, Gayl is all but unemployable in Washington, so he can make such weekday excursions.
Lately he's been filling his time reading the Koran and the Talmud, and studying Chinese. He's preparing for the likelihood that he'll have to leave government service altogether, but his greater concern is that the brass's story will win out. "If they say it enough, it will become the history," he said. "They're confronted with the fact that the blood of their fellow Marines may have been unnecessarily shed on their watch. After promenading themselves in front of widows and wives and wounded Marines organizations and all this glorious patriotic nonsense—now they have to admit, Whoops, I was negligent? I was asleep at the switch? Your son didn't need to die? They'd never admit to that."


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For some time now we have been doing a variety of things to raise interest in Arthur Ransome and his books, particularly the 'Swallows and Amazons' series originally written for children.
The Royal London Yacht Club recently hosted a Swallows and Amazons weekend for the combined yacht clubs of Cowes on the Isle of Wight and in doing so raised quite a bit of money for charity.
Glenridding Sailing Centre in Cumbria have been running Swallows & Amazons Adventure Days on Ullswater and promise to hold more.
SailRansome have made Swallow, the original clinker built dinghy used in the film, available for families to use there.
We've been using the Draper's shallop to teach children how to row on the River Lee under the auspices of Countryside Live. We have now taught hundreds of children most of whom have never been in a boat before. The idea is to inspire them to join the Sea Scouts or a local rowing or canoeing club.
Another boat you can sail is the Nancy Blackett portrayed as Goblin from We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea and Secret Water.
It only costs £25 a year to join the Nancy Blackett Trust. This is wonderful for anyone living near the Orwell as Ransome once did.
The Arthur Ransome Society, known as TARS, is welcoming new members to its six regional branches.
Next year an international gathering is being planned over the May Bank Holiday.
Revelation Films have digitally remastered the serial of Coot Club and The Big Six, which they have available as a new release entitled 'Swallows & Amazons Forever!' I've been asked to give a talk on how the BBC serial was made.
I've also been promoting StudioCanal's re-release of the 1974 film of Swallows & Amazons on Radio Cumbria, Premier Radio, Lakeland Radio and Channel 5's live TV programme The Wright Stuff. There's a lot going on in the media with pictorials in Country Life, The Lady, Cotswold Life and Practical Boat Owner magazine as well as newspapers and colour supplements.
We brought the original film of Swallows & Amazons back to cinemas in London, Ambleside, Kendal and to Hastings on Pirate Day. I took Captain Flint's trunk along and wore a tricorn hat only to be told by one little boy in the audience, 'I hate pirates. They are my enemies.' Other children asked, 'Did you enjoy being in the film?' and 'Were the spiders in your tent real?'
When we were in Kendal, the curator of the Museum of Lakeland Life gave a talk to the cinema audience bringing along the actual red slippers given to Arthur Ransome by the Altounyan children in 1929 which inspired him to write Swallows and Amazons.
Some schools have Swallows and Amazons as a set book. I was invited to give a talk at Walhampton School who claim a 'Swallows and Amazons ethos'. They aspire to giving their pupils as much of an exciting outdoor education as possible with sailing and exploring on the curriculum. School House magazine backs this up saying, 'There is a distinct 'Swallows and Amazons' spirit that burns brightly here.'
The Arthur Ransome Trust have a range of exhibitions, displays and resource materials. Do check out their website and future events. Meanwhile All Things Ransome have been quietly offering a veritable library of information along with a media vault. The Arthur Ransome Society has a large library of books in Dumfries where the 2016 IAGM will be held.
What could you do to keep Ransome's writing on book shop shelves?
Could you organise an event at your local sailing club? Or request a screening of newly restored version of the film at your local cinema? One is being planned in Oxford with hopefully another at Wolverstone. PictureHouse cinemas are particularly open to the idea of screening classic family films.
I am planning 'An Arthur Ransome Day' at my local Waterstones and another at our library. How can we make this special and attract people off the street?
Do add your ideas to the comments below.
Easy things you can do right now to help promote the books:
Request a book or DVD from your local library.
Add a review to on-line sites. This leads to increased marketing of books, audio books or DVDs. The Imdb site for the 1974 film of Swallows and Amazons welcomes reviews.
Click here for Books by Arthur Ransome on Amazon UK
Add a comment about the DVD of the film. Click here for StudioCanal's DVD on Amazon UK
Click here for the Amazon UK site for the DVD of the BBC serial of 'Coot Club and The Big Six' Look out for the one with this cover:
Other ideas:
Join The Arthur Ransome Group on Facebook. They always have lively discussions.
There are a number of Twitter sites you can follow.
Contact BBC TV to ask for your favourite TV or radio programmes on Arthur Ransome or his books to be repeated: Click here for the site.
You can read about the adventures we had making the original film with Swallow here:


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Jo Walton's new book What Makes This Book So Great (U.S. / U.K.), is a collection of some of her best Tor.com posts honoring, analyzing, and reassessing science fiction and fantasy. The full collection, featuring over 130 essays, is out on January 21st and includes great opinion pieces like this, originally published in February of 2009.
Samuel Delany is intimidatingly brilliant, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is (arguably) his best book. Even though he's been one of my favourite writers since I was a teenager, and I've read all his books multiple times, I try not to re-read him when I'm writing because he sets such a high standard I feel that I might as well give up now.
You know how life and real history are always more complex and fractal than fiction can manage? Delany manages it. He does the thing where his science fictional innovations have second- and third-order consequences, where they interlock and give you worldviews. Other people do it, but he does it all the way down. He's astonishing. This book has the density of very sparkly neutronium.
I first read Stars in My Pocket in 1985 on the night before an exam. (Don't worry, I aced it, and though my essay style may have been a little Delanyan, nobody noticed.) I was at Lancaster University, and living off-campus in a converted barn out in the countryside, with friends. We were in town buying food and walking along what had been a boring street when I discovered that Lancaster had suddenly sprouted a science fiction bookshop, Interstellar Master Traders. I insisted we go in, and I rushed around buying U.S. imports (this was 1985! There was no Internet. U.S. books were treasure!) while my friends stood there, bored and twitching. I went home with a huge pile of books and sat down to read the Delany first.
Reading Delany is like pop rocks for the brain. He scintillates. Things sparkle and explode all over, and it's not entirely comfortable but it is quite wonderful.
Stars in My Pocket begins with a prologue, in third person, set on the planet Rhyonon (though it is not named in the prologue) and dealing with Rat Korga, though he isn't named in it either. What it's really about is how reading can blow the top of your head off and open it up to the universe, so it's recursive in the very best way. There's a passage in Byatt's Possession where the narrator says that books have their bravura descriptions of sex and food but they don't describe the joy of reading, and then goes on to do it. When I read that, years later, I stopped dead and tried to figure out a way of getting Byatt to read Delany. (I'm still working on it.)
The problem with talking about Stars in My Pocket is that it's too big and too great. I could write a whole post of the length I usually write explaining what's so amazing about the prologue, which takes up the first eighty-four pages in the Grafton edition I own. There's so much in it, so much history and culture and scientific speculation and plot that it's hard to cover any of it at all and not just sit here burbling "brilliant, brilliant." I can't be detached about it.
First, I want to say that the surface level story and characters are very engaging. It's so easy when you start talking about clever details to lose sight of that. This is a book where I care deeply about the characters and where, the first time I read it, I stayed up half the night (with an exam the next morning) to find out what happened.
In Rhyonon, where Rat Korga comes from, sex between males is permitted for people over twenty-seven, but sex between tall people and short people of any gender is entirely and completely forbidden. The universe is a very big place, and the first-person narrator of the rest of the book, Marq Dyeth, is an Industrial Diplomat whose job is delivering weird goods from planet to planet. (There isn't much interstellar trade, and what there is is mostly weird. The economics? Convincingly complex.) Marq comes from Velm, from the south of Velm, from a little city called Morgre, and there consensual sex between any species and any gender is freely available and a matter of preference. There are "runs," safe spaces you can walk through where people who like the kind of sex you like hang out and might be interested in sex with you. (I gather from things Delany has said external to the novel that this may be based on gay male culture in 1970s New York. I took this as entirely exotic and science-fictional, because it's like nothing whatsoever in my experience, then or now.) Marq and Rat are each other's perfect erotic object… and when Rat's world is entirely destroyed and he is the only survivor, the Web (which is a space-based organization a whole lot like Google only more powerful) sends Rat to visit Marq for what turns out to be only a few days.
Gender is constructed very differently. "She" is the standard pronoun for any sentient being, and "woman" is the standard term for a person. "He" is the pronoun for someone you desire. "Man" is an obsolete poetic word. "Mother" is a role anyone can choose if they are parenting. This use of pronouns is a little odd. It helps that Marq and Rat are attracted to men, but there are important human characters in this book where you literally do not know the gender because Marq doesn't find them attractive and doesn't mention whether they have breasts or not. The names give no clue—and why do you need to know? Thinking about why you want to know is interesting. Reading all these people as female (because they're "she," after all) and then rethinking them as male can be interesting. Japril, in particular, reads very differently to me male, which is unquestionably revealing of my subconscious biases and expectations. This is one of the best feminist re-use of pronouns I've ever come across. It isn't clunky, it isn't awkward, and it doesn't get in the way of the story.
I mentioned Marq had a "job." That's like a profession or a vocation. Your job tends to determine where you live and tends to be more how you make your living. It is what a lot of people in our world call their "day job." (Delany, for instance is a writer and a professor.) There's also homework which is the kind of work that's never done. This is an interesting conceit, though not really explored very much because of the time period the story covers. Also on jobs, on Velm, at least in the south (in the north there's ethnic conflict between humans and the native lizardlike intelligences, the evelmi), tracers, who are rubbish collectors, have very high social status. This on its own would be enough background for some novels.
Humans have found alien intelligences on a lot of different worlds, but only one other starfaring civilization, the mysterious Xlv. Human/alien relationships are varied and complex. On Velm, in the south the humans and evelmi live close together and can be lovers or family members. In the north they're fighting each other. On other planets, other problems. The Xlv seem to have some interest in, concern with, or even involvement with Cultural Fugue, the real threat to civilization. Cultural Fugue is when a whole planet destroys itself, as Rhyonon does at the beginning of the book, and as other planets have from time to time. It's what everyone worries about when something goes wrong. It isn't defined, though what happened to Rhyonon is described in detail. There are two main paths of civilization, which stand opposed to each other. The Family (which has a cult centred in their belief in humanity's origins on a planet called Earth, since lost in the confusion), which is generally reactionary and rigid, and the Sygn, which believes in multiculturalism and relativism.
One of the most awesome things about this book is the way in which detail is layered on detail to make you believe in the complexity of the cultures, or the histories and the customs. Food in particular, which tends to be rather badly dealt with in SF, is positively fractal here. There's a description of an informal breakfast and a formal dinner that are nothing like anything from Earth, but that are wonderfully solid. And sex? I mentioned sex, but there's a throwaway mention that people from recently settled planets tend to use a lot of erotic technology. And as for technology, Rat has artificial eyes that go clear in bright light, look normal in normal light and reflect in dim light like a cat.
One of the themes of the novel is that a world is a very big place but the universe is a very small one. While most of the planets humanity has settled are dry and sandy, there aren't any "desert planets" here. And culturally—there's somebody Marq meets at a conference who uses weird honorifics that confuse him a little, and it turns out they're from a different city on Velm, and she'd learned them to make him think she was from home.…
There's a thing called General Information, which is like having Google in your head only more reliable. The one thing Delany got wrong there was that the Web isn't the Net of a thousand lies, information is reliable, when available. (But the book was published in 1984.) Apart from that, and that it is only an encyclopaedia that can give you brain-downloadable skills, the way they use it is exactly like the way I use Google now, and nothing like anything in the world in 1984, when as I understand it email had just been invented for people in the U.S. military. The future in Stars in My Pocket has not been made obsolete by computers, the way a lot of older SF has. Delany was aware that what you need is not information but a sorting system, and if you control that sorting system you're very powerful.
Stars in My Pocket was supposed to be the first half of a diptych, and the sequel, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, has never been written and probably never will be. It's worth knowing that Stars in My Pocket isn't a whole story, but as it is so good, unless you are absolutely addicted to knowing what happens, you can probably cope. Personally I've given up longing for it. If he can't write it, he can't. I do wish he'd write some more SF though.
Jo Walton won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, and the World Fantasy Award for her novel Tooth and Claw in 2004. Her several other novels include the acclaimed "Small Change" alternate-history trilogy, comprising Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown. Her novel Among Others won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012.


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I think I feel confused with what I have done..I hope I didn't "copy" someone else' idea here
Your art style is sooo cute, I love it!
That panel 5 tnough, oh baby
Philippines Amaya is great.
*Nose Bleeds*
I really like your style!
Thank you for uploading!
But... but... no Alejandro x Lucy?
Lovely art though looking forward to seeing more of your stuff
This is such a great meme hahahahah I love your absolute TOWER of ships (I know that feel), and I love how you totally interrupt the AlejxLucy scene because knowing Alejandro :-[
You're so sweet and I really wish we could see each other!! ;__; It's so sad how a lot of countries TEAR PEOPLE APART but hey i met my bubs and he was from Australia so ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
I loooooove the scene with Lucy and Sandy being stars and Chris just calling out her name THAT'S JUST THE BEST.
also poor augustus lmao
hahaha this is amazing you put so much thought into every answer with all these cute little character things and opinions
i laughed at basically every answer so i'm not sure what i can single out to praise
ok, amm ……….. I spend a good time reading this, I think so ………. I go away
this is adorable