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I asked ChatGPT to describe 25 Columbus suburbs and exurbs. Here's what it said:

2023.05.29 05:44 puremotives I asked ChatGPT to describe 25 Columbus suburbs and exurbs. Here's what it said:

Asheville: Located in Pickaway County, Ohio, Asheville is a small village with a peaceful rural setting. The village is known for its picturesque landscapes, farmland, and a close-knit community. Asheville offers a small-town atmosphere with a limited number of local businesses and amenities. The surrounding area is characterized by rolling hills, open spaces, and a slower pace of life. It provides residents with a tranquil environment away from the busyness of urban centers.
Bexley: Situated east of downtown Columbus, Bexley is an established suburb known for its stately homes, tree-lined streets, and historic charm. The area is home to prestigious institutions such as Capital University and the Governor's Mansion. Bexley's Main Street offers a mix of boutique shops, cafes, and restaurants, creating a vibrant community atmosphere.
Canal Winchester: Situated southeast of downtown, Canal Winchester is a growing suburb known for its historic district, community events, and proximity to natural areas. The charming downtown area features shops, restaurants, and a community theater. Canal Winchester hosts various festivals and events throughout the year, including the famous Labor Day Festival. The suburb offers a mix of housing options and easy access to parks and recreational facilities.
Circleville is a historic city located in Pickaway County, Ohio. Known for its circular street pattern and vibrant community, Circleville offers a unique charm. The city features a central public park called "The Circle," which serves as a gathering place and the venue for numerous festivals and events, including the famous Pumpkin Show. Circleville's downtown area boasts local shops, restaurants, and historic architecture, contributing to its appealing small-town ambiance. With its rich agricultural heritage and close-knit community, Circleville offers a welcoming and engaging environment for its residents.
Delaware: Located to the north of Columbus, Delaware is an exurb known for its scenic landscapes, historic downtown area, and the presence of Ohio Wesleyan University. The city offers a blend of small-town charm with modern amenities, including a variety of shops, restaurants, and cultural events. Delaware also has a rich history and is home to the Olentangy Indian Caverns, a popular tourist attraction.
Dublin: Located northwest of downtown Columbus, Dublin is known for its upscale neighborhoods, excellent schools, and numerous corporate headquarters. It features a charming historic district, beautiful parks, and a thriving business community. Dublin is also home to the annual Dublin Irish Festival, one of the largest Irish festivals in the United States.
Gahanna: Located east of downtown Columbus, Gahanna is a diverse suburb known for its picturesque neighborhoods, proximity to the Port Columbus International Airport, and the Creekside development. Creekside is a lively entertainment district with restaurants, shops, and a scenic waterfront. Gahanna also features parks, golf courses, and a strong sense of community.
Grandview Heights: Situated west of downtown Columbus, Grandview Heights is a unique suburb known for its walkability, vibrant community, and mix of residential and commercial areas. The suburb offers a blend of historic homes, modern developments, and a bustling commercial district along Grandview Avenue. The area features an array of shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Grandview Heights is also home to the prestigious Grandview Heights High School and offers easy access to downtown Columbus and major highways.
Grove City: Located southwest of downtown Columbus, Grove City is a suburban community known for its affordable housing options, family-friendly environment, and strong community spirit. The area offers a range of recreational facilities, including parks, golf courses, and the popular Grove City Town Center, which hosts various events and festivals.
Groveport: Located southeast of downtown Columbus, Groveport is a historic suburb with a small-town feel. It features a charming downtown area with historic buildings, shops, and restaurants. Groveport is known for its canal history and hosts the annual Groveport Heritage Days festival. The suburb offers a mix of housing options and is situated near scenic natural areas like the Three Creeks Metro Park.
Heath: Situated adjacent to Newark, Heath is a smaller city in Licking County. It is known for its strategic location near major transportation routes, including Interstate 70 and State Route 79. Heath features a variety of shopping centers, restaurants, and recreational opportunities. The city is home to the Indian Mound Mall, a popular shopping destination in the area. It also offers several parks and outdoor spaces for residents to enjoy.
Hilliard: Situated to the northwest of downtown, Hilliard is a suburban community known for its family-friendly atmosphere and strong school system. It offers a range of housing options, from established neighborhoods to newer developments. Hilliard features numerous parks, including the popular Heritage Rail Trail, and hosts events such as the annual Franklin County Fair.
Lancaster: Located southeast of Columbus, Lancaster is an exurb with a rich history and a vibrant downtown area. The city is known for its well-preserved architecture, including numerous historic homes and buildings. Lancaster offers a range of recreational opportunities, such as the scenic Hocking Hills region, which is a short drive away. The Ohio Glass Museum and the Fairfield County Fair are popular attractions in the area.
London: Situated to the southwest of Columbus, London is an exurb known for its rural character and close-knit community. The city features a historic downtown area with local businesses and hosts various community events throughout the year. London offers a more relaxed pace of life and is surrounded by farmland and natural beauty, including the Madison County State Nature Preserve.
Marysville: Situated to the northwest of Columbus, Marysville is an exurb that has experienced significant growth in recent years. It offers a mix of suburban and rural living, with a variety of housing options and ample green space. Marysville is known for its Honda manufacturing facility, which is one of the largest employers in the region. The city also hosts the Union County Fair, an annual event showcasing agriculture, entertainment, and local traditions.
Mount Vernon: Located northeast of Columbus, Mount Vernon is an exurb with a small-town feel and a rich history. The city is home to Mount Vernon Nazarene University and features a charming downtown area with shops, restaurants, and historic buildings. Mount Vernon offers a mix of rural and suburban living, with picturesque countryside, parks, and recreational opportunities nearby.
New Albany: Located northeast of downtown Columbus, New Albany is an affluent suburb known for its planned community, expansive estates, and upscale amenities. It features a charming village center, called Market Square, with a variety of shops, restaurants, and community events. New Albany is also home to a renowned golf club and numerous corporate offices.
Newark: Located about 33 miles east of Columbus, Newark is a city in Licking County. It is known for its rich history and architectural heritage. Newark is home to the Newark Earthworks, a complex of ancient Native American mounds and earthen enclosures designated as a National Historic Landmark. The city also features a charming downtown area with shops, restaurants, and cultural attractions like the Midland Theatre. Newark is the county seat of Licking County and offers a mix of residential, commercial, and industrial areas.
Obetz: Situated in Franklin County, Ohio, Obetz is a suburban community located just south of Columbus. It is known for its convenient location, strong industrial presence, and recreational opportunities. Obetz is home to the Fortress Obetz, a versatile outdoor stadium that hosts various sports events, concerts, and festivals. The community also features parks, walking trails, and recreational facilities. With its proximity to major highways, Obetz offers easy access to the amenities and employment opportunities of both Columbus and nearby suburbs.
Pickerington: Located southeast of Columbus, Pickerington is a suburban community known for its family-friendly atmosphere, excellent schools, and strong sense of community. The city offers a mix of housing options, from well-established neighborhoods to newer developments. Pickerington boasts numerous parks, recreational facilities, and a charming downtown area with shops, restaurants, and community events. The city is also home to Pickerington Ponds Metro Park, which provides opportunities for outdoor activities and wildlife observation.
Powell: Situated in the northern part of the metropolitan area, Powell is a rapidly growing suburb known for its affluent neighborhoods and excellent schools. The Olentangy Liberty High School, one of the top-rated public high schools in Ohio, is located here. Powell offers a mix of residential areas, recreational opportunities, and a charming downtown with shops and restaurants.
Reynoldsburg: Situated east of downtown, Reynoldsburg is a suburban community with a mix of established neighborhoods and newer subdivisions. It offers a range of housing options and is known for its affordable real estate. Reynoldsburg boasts several parks, including the Blacklick Woods Metro Park, and hosts events such as the Tomato Festival.
Upper Arlington: Situated to the northwest of downtown, Upper Arlington is a picturesque suburb known for its well-manicured neighborhoods, tree-lined streets, and strong sense of community. The area boasts excellent schools, recreational facilities, and parks. The Scioto Country Club, one of the oldest golf courses in the region, is located here.
Westerville: Located northeast of downtown Columbus, Westerville is a thriving suburb known for its strong sense of community, excellent schools, and historic charm. It offers a mix of housing options, from historic homes in the Uptown area to newer developments. Westerville boasts several parks, recreational facilities, and a vibrant downtown with shops, restaurants, and community events.
Worthington: Located to the north of downtown, Worthington is a historic suburb with a quaint, small-town atmosphere. It features a charming downtown area known as the "Old Worthington," with boutique shops, restaurants, and the popular Worthington Farmers Market. Worthington is also home to several parks and hosts various community events throughout the year.

I reorganized the list into alphabetical order, but everything else was generated by ChatGPT. I had to prompt it a few times to get all 25, because it only listed about 6 at a time.

submitted by puremotives to Columbus [link] [comments]

2023.05.23 20:15 No_Mirror_2680 Area 51Big Bend

Purchased in Willard, Ohio 4 days after totalling my 2022 Ford Ranger in Tampa, Florida. Was in Ohio for a funeral. 3 days later drove it back home to Tampa. I loved the Ranger.... I LOVE my Bronco Sport even more. I added the Ford textured bug deflector, Bucking Bronco hitch cover and the rear bumper protector. All purchased with Ford reward points. Future plans are the roof rails and a roof basket. Only complaint... gas mileage. I drove 5 hours before my bladder decided it couldn't last as long as the fuel gage. I had to stop and pee with 1/4 tank left. I averaged 30.5mpg from Ohio to Florida with an average speed of 74mph. I LOVE THIS VEHICLE.

submitted by No_Mirror_2680 to BroncoSport [link] [comments]

2023.05.21 23:25 SabineRitter [ROUNDUP] Possibly UAP-related reports on here last week. Countries: USA and 🇲🇾🇻🇳🇬🇧🇩🇰🇮🇳🇫🇮🇦🇺🇯🇵🇨🇦🇫🇷🇬🇷, colors: 🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣, shapes: orb/sphere, rectangle, triangles, acorn 🌰, cigar/tictac/oval, disk 🛸, worm 🪱, barbell, V shape, etc

Last week's post https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13hp1r6/roundup_ufos_and_other_things_reported_on_here/
.1 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13hqclp/anyone_else_encountered_these/ sighting description and reference image, triangle, urban area, stationary, loud sound, it made a lot of noise, like a heavy roar, dream of luring, I had to go towards something
.2 https://old.reddit.com/bigfoot/comments/13hqdpq/i_know_the_sasquatch_is_this_welcome_here/ information, family history, bigfoot
.3 https://old.reddit.com/itsslag/comments/13hnm50/i_was_out_for_a_walk_in_the_woods_and_found_what/ photos, metamaterial
.4 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13hrzeo/caught_this_over_phoenix_today/ video, daytime sky, contemporaneous report, Phoenix Arizona ("mothership day"), duration 30 minutes, single light object
.5 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13i9xed/object_only_visible_in_ir_captured_using_fli photos, single object visible only in infrared https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ibmpn/video_version_of_previous_post/ video , USAF, over decommissioned base, daytime cloudy sky, contemporaneous report, "moon" https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ie0ew/i_made_a_video_edit_to_compare_the_location/ video analysis of location
.6 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13hy58b/just_spotted_on_staten_island_new_york_at_1110_pm/ photo and drawing, nighttime sky , twolights or single barbell, light object, contemporaneous report, possibly over water new York harbor, Staten Island NYC New York state, two witnesses
.7 https://np.reddit.com/Polska/comments/13h76by/co_to_jest_na_niebie_w_poznaniu/ photos, daytime sky, contemporaneous report, single light object, possible triangle, similar to .5 above
.8 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ia0y7/gulf_shores_al_51323/ photos, daytime sky, contemporaneous report, over water gulf of Mexico, gulf shores Alabama, single object blackwhite
.9 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13hsr1y/who_else_has_see_the_rectangular_prism_ship_it/ sighting description, has anyone seen?, rectangular prism shape, Tampa Florida, possible military response black helicopter, duration 1 hour, three witnesses, possible human initiated contact
.10 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13htcel/flashing_orb/ video, daytime sky, contemporaneous report, single light object flashing, Northern Virginia pretty close to Dulles airport
.11 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13hvcl1/i_had_a_feeling_and_i_ended_up_going_outside_and/ sighting description and video, single light object, telepathy, had this weird feeling that tonight would be the night I would see another strange object,possible luring, went outside, "Tiangong space station"
.12 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13hymle/i_saw_a_ufo_in_the_sky_at_night_in_south_padre/ sighting description, lights very far away in the sky rotated in a very weird way crossing each other and in front of these lights I saw a little white flying thing looking like an airplane but it wasn’t because was very fast. It seems like the white flying object was chasing the lights., fleet, following, nighttime , South Padre Island , similar sightings in comments
.13 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13i10a7/contact_continued/ videos, repeat visitor, Coosbay oregon, nighttime, animal reaction agitated,
.14 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13i4euh/what_is_this/ sighting description, dover Delaware, triangle, yellow and white lights 🟡, stationary, hovering, approximately 30 feet in length and had a central circular illuminated area that shone brightly, silent, emotional reaction awe and bewilderment, duration several minutes, multiple witnesses, unsourced information, possible LARP or from the future
.15 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13i6c0z/orange_lit_objects_over_philadelphia_possibly/ photos, nighttime sky, fleet, "fire lanterns", Philadelphia Pennsylvania, [GOODPOST]
.16 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ihxkn/what_is_this_green_light_over_phoenix_az/ video, nighttime sky, contemporaneous report, Phoenix Arizona, "mothership day", green 🟢 blinking light, silent, zigzag movements, trajectory change, it did a side to side move and then started coming back in our direction, flew overhead
.17 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13iiwmi/ufo_friday_may_12_2023_934pm_los_banos_ca/ video, nighttime sky, single light object, Los banos California
.18 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13iiyqj/2_subsequent_objects_captured_in_slow_motion/ video, daytime cloudy sky, over water pacific ocean, somewhere around Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz California, slow motion video, repeat visitor, two witnesses
.19 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13ikc4l/seen_a_video_today_on_a_sphere_shaped_ufo_and/ video, daytime cloudy sky, single object, blackwhite, possibly rotating, sphere shape observed, single flash of light, vanishing
.20 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13h5v3v/a_being_keeps_coming_to_me_telling_me_about_a/ experience description, entity, repeat visitor, information transfer, Morse code
.21 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13hz6n0/who_was_the_floating_woman_i_saw_as_a_little_girl/ childhood experience description, entity, nighttime
.22 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13if3ke/orbs_and_their_travel/ sighting description, orbs, repeat visitor, emotion effects frightened confused and bewildered
.23 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13hv80j/when_i_was_8yrs_old_i_saw_a_red_metallic_colored/ childhood sighting description, single light object, red 🔴 metallic , has anyone seen?, similar sighting in comments , Orlando Florida, two witnesses, event amnesia
.24 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13i474z/a_mindblowing_encounter_my_unforgettable_ufo/ sighting description, nighttime, single light object, approach, low over treeline, flying saucer, metallic, sudden departure upward, trail
.25 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13imw22/blue_light_sightings_and_disappears/ video, nighttime cloudy sky, diffuse blue 🔵 light, repeat visitor, also observed in daytime
.26 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13iog5y/what_is_this/ video, nighttime sky, contemporaneous report, single light object moving fast
.27 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ip11b/ive_seen_this_for_two_days_straight_close_to/ video, nighttime sky, contemporaneous report, single light object moving erratically and stationary, plane for comparison, Copenhagen Denmark 🇩🇰, repeat visitor, two days straight
.28 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ir3m2/unidentified_object/ sighting description, Ales France 🇫🇷, orb, found on ground, witness picked it up, 2cm diameter sphere consisting of two hemispheric white parts, covered in a liquid substance, possibly water. The bottom part had a matte appearance, while the upper part was slightly transparent. At the top, there was a small metallic-like circle surrounding a powerful ponctual white light. The sphere felt somewhat heavy, as if it was filled with something., apathy in other witness, I showed the object to someone behind me, but they didn't recognize it or show any interest, downvoted to zero, possible physical effects eczema on palms of hands
.29 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13itzhf/1963_montana_sighting/ sighting description, family story, Montana, 1963, three witnesses, duration 10-15 minutes, nighttime, animal reaction dog barking, single light object, very bright, blinking, over home, low over rooftop, sudden departure , similar sighting in comments
.30 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13iu81f/is_anyone_looking_in_the_sky_in_suburban_chicago/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, happening at time of posting, nighttime, fleet, Chicago Illinois, has anyone seen?, similar sightings in comments
.31 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ivkho/my_girlfriend_and_i_saw_a_ufo_tonight/ sighting description, contemporaneous report (same day as .30 above), nighttime, two witnesses, west Virginia, single light object moving, human initiated contact, trajectory change, approach, flareup, apathy in other witness, sudden departure, zoop, repeat visitor, Throughout the rest of the night, this same UFO continues to mess with us ,telepathy, similar sightings in comments, [GOODPOST], possible physical effects left eye/cheek was twitching, emotional reaction feeling more confident, and I feel like anything is possible now
.32 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ivo2x/blinking_red_light_moving_very_slowly_in_a/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, nighttime, single light object moving straight and slow, red 🔴, blinking, silent, duration 5-10 minutes, downvoted to zero , Ottawa Ontario Canada 🇨🇦
.33 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jb32b/hazelton_bc/ video , nighttime sky, single light object, trajectory change, zigzag, Hazleton British Columbia Canada 🇨🇦
.34 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13j3ioh/dont_know_if_i_saw_a_uap_n2_post_code_north_london/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, nighttime, animal reaction dog barking to go outside, audio I heard a strange sound through the window - sounded like consistent beeps but with the sound wave tapered so it faded in and out, telepathy, possible luring, witness went outside home, fleet, flashing, moving downward, trajectory change, sudden departure upward, event amnesia, even though this happened last night, it slips my memory, emotional reaction something abnormal and my stomach dropped, anomalous to witness, downvoted to zero
.35 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jbl3u/ufo_or_just_a_bird/ video, daytime cloudy sky, single dark object irregular shape, moving straight, rotating, comma shaped or coiled worm 🪱
.36 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13j3z43/very_bright_star_like_object_flying_at_insane/ video, nighttime sky, single light object moving fast and straight, contemporaneous report, ISS
.37 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jbzm0/ufo_sighting_in_japan_finally_substantiated/ sighting description and reference image, Sendai Japan 🇯🇵, two witnesses, triangle, nighttime cloudy sky, very large, low and silent, flew overhead, duration 7-10 seconds, similar sightings in comments, [GOODPOST]
.38 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13izcoq/active_celestial_anomalies_cassiopeia/ sighting description, nighttime, fleet, moving stars, repeat visitors, has anyone seen?,Lights in the Cassiopeia constellation have been appearing and flying back and forth and even meeting up, accelerating, decelerating, brightening, dimming, etc. for the past 2 weeks
.39 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13ioet7/ufo/ video, nighttime cloudy sky, contemporaneous report, single light object, reddish haze sometimes, similar sightings in comments https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13ir9we/ufo_i_spotted_tonight/ more video, similar sightings in comments
.40 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13jbbuk/extremely_fucking_disturbing_dream_turned_real/ dream description, repeat visitor, entity, mantis type, emotion of fear
.41 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13ittsf/creepy_hand/ childhood experience description, entity, hand 🫳, similar sightings in comments
.42 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13iyga9/loud_breathing_noises_from_the_top_bunk/ childhood experience description, nighttime, bedroom, noise, approach, breathing noise started to get louder and louder to the point where it was a very clear, inhale, exhale.. inhale, exhale. It was loud like someone out of breath but not that same speed (now saying they sounded out of breath, but just a refference for the volume of it). Just very slow, deep, meticulous breaths.
.43 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13itdoneed_help_figuring_out_if_this_was_just_starlink/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, nighttime, fleet, following and moving erratically, southwest Arkansas
.44 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13jd936/running_around_my_neighbourhood_at_dusk_and_saw/ photo, nighttime sky, single light object, orange 🟠, fleet observed, threelights
.45 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13it4ln/sharing/ sighting description, nighttime, telepathy, human initiated contact, blue 🔵 light in bedroom, Next thing I know I have a blue circular light pulsating on the left side of my chest. At its maximum extent it was about three cm in diameter and its smallest about half cm. It had a darker blue outer ring which had a gradient from blue to white as it reached the centre. In the middle it was white, emotion of fear, physical effects better vision in my right eye and my heart palpitations don't seem to be as bad anymore, possible medical treatment
.46 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13iqq8y/so_im_wondering_if_an_other_experienceswitnesses/ sighting description and discussion of audio, two witnesses, Queensland Australia 🇦🇺, noise (low rumbling noise) that just kept getting louder, possible luring, witnesses went outside, single light object, similar sightings in comments
.47 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jdmz5/i_finally_saw_a_ufo/ sighting description, nighttime, two witnesses, single light object moving erratically, duration split second
.48 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jeqtq/is_this_just_a_meteorite/ video, nighttime sky, single light object moving downward behind building, purplish 🟣, Helsinki Finland 🇫🇮 , repeat visitor, two objects observed, big debunker energy, "bird"
.49 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jfmr9/i_think_i_saw_ufos_today/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, nighttime, single light object flashing, possible reaction to being observed, witness waved 👋, telepathy , lighting configuration change to twolights, zigzag movements , emotional reaction stunned and kind of scared, emotion of fear , Kerala India 🇮🇳
.50 https://old.reddit.com/CLOUDS/comments/13jglm6/cool_cloud_formations_lookin_like_a_thunderbolt/ photos, evening cloudy sky, vertical contrail, white
.51 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jb8y3/where_to_find_info_on_a_sighting_about_25_years/ sighting description, has anyone seen?, Newark New Jersey, airport, evening sky, roundish metallic something with a single blue 🔵 light on the bottom, from car,
.52 https://old.reddit.com/space/comments/13ji9ex/ufo_seen_on_the_sky/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, Mallorca, two witnesses, single light object moving fast downward, green 🟢,
.53 reference video https://old.reddit.com/useCV_Joergensen/comments/13jhjciphone_12_pro_max_iss_passing/ nighttime, ISS, Denmark 🇩🇰
.54 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jjqu2/potential_ufo_sighting_1133pm_160523_uk/ video, nighttime sky, contemporaneous report, single light object, repeat visitor, Leicester the UK 🇬🇧
.55 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jhbqh/question_about_a_ufo_type_possible_sighting/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, two witnesses, metallic sphere with tendrils, reflective metal ball with like 8 or so trailing lines, daytime
.56 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13jq38o/i_saw_something_years_ago_i_cannot_explain_can/ sighting description, three witnesses, from car, metallic sphere, silver colored sphere with a slight point on the top of it floating really high in the sky, splitting, it started to shoot these cigar shaped objects out of the top right side, the objects would disappear within seconds
.57 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13kap5f/my_sighting_that_resembled_quarks_the_phenomenon/ sighting description and reference video of quarks, particle physics, multiple witnesses, twolights, dancing, nighttime, splitting, lighting configuration change to threelights
.58 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13kadox/caught_above_nyc_any_ideas/ photos, daytime sky, single light object, possible barbell, NYC New York state, downvoted to zero, OP comments downvoted, big debunker energy
.59 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13k0dk2/wanted_to_finish_analyzing_my_orb_ufo_video_these/ photos, orb, downvoted to zero, OP comments downvoted
.60 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13k3bqs/my_encounters_in_mn_stillwater_and_oakdale_2009/ sighting descriptions, repeat visitors, stillwater and Oakdale Minnesota, loud sound, crash noise, triangle observed, emotional reaction shock, owl
.61 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13jp5pn/my_encounter_maybe/ sighting description, three witnesses, Napoleon North Dakota, camping, nighttime, sound of static and voices, approach, sound grew louder and louder until it was undeniable and all that my brother and I could hear, very loud, missing time, luring, witness followed it
.62 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13jlo3j/ufo_encounter_last_night/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, nighttime, animal reaction dog making weird barking sounds and started sprinting back towards the door, V shaped light chasing dog
.63 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13k9kxm/at_first_thought_it_was_balloons/ video, daytime sky, single dark object irregular shape, "balloons", similar sighting in comments
.64 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13joh4u/dream_about_aliens/ dream description, entities
.65 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13jhqgq/this_y_shaped_mark_suddenly_appeared_during_my/ photo, mark on body, Y shape
.66 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13kde32/filmed_in_vietnam/ video, daytime cloudy sky, single dark object moving straight and slow, observed vanishing and reappearing, Vietnam 🇻🇳, similar sighting in comments
.67 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13jm3d0/crop_circle_contains_boolean_lattice_code/ analysis of crop circle, boolean lattice code
.68 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13js6lf/visual_description_of_the_only_ufo_ive_ever_seen/ childhood sighting description and drawing, fleet, splitting, multiple witnesses, similar sightings in comments, [GOODPOST]
.69 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13jr5si/i_had_my_first_good_ufo_sighting/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, nighttime, single light object moving erratically, wandering around, low over treeline, duration 3 minutes
.70 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13k1fty/green_light_in_pulau_pangkor_malaysia/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, teluk nipah pulau pangkor Malaysia 🇲🇾, green light 🟢 moving downward, has anyone seen?
.71 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13kf5r8/i_had_an_encounter_with_a_grey_alien_ask_me/ experience, entity, information transfer
.72 https://old.reddit.com/Thetruthishere/comments/13k7f79/no_longer_a_skeptic_after_close_encounter_with_a/ sighting description, nighttime, single light object, close, two witnesses, new jersey, blue white 🔵, low below treeline, possible reaction to being observed, approach, right angle turn, silent, emotion of fear, you could sense some form of intention/intelligence in it’s movement., telepathy, repeat visitor, seen by another witness different time same location, duration 1 minute, similar sighting in comments
.73 https://old.reddit.com/bigfoot/comments/13jyh8j/whats_your_opinion_on_woodknocks_and_whats_you discussion of sound, woodknocks
.74 https://old.reddit.com/UFObelievers/comments/13jqhjq/anyone_from_ny_witness_sightings_this_past/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, has anyone seen?,fleet, green 🟢 crafts, near pinebush new York state, 60+ witnesses
.75 https://old.reddit.com/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/13jmkfx/i_think_i_saw_the_sky_disappear_and_my_siste sighting description, no craft, portal, black spot in the sky, two witnesses, event amnesia in the other witness
.76 https://old.reddit.com/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/13jlvln/so_the_moon_definitely_just_glitched_and_im/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, moon anomaly, full moon observed during waning crescent phase, very bright, Yellowish 🟡 white gleaming pearly moon and a perfect circle., similar sightings in comments, [GOODPOST]
.77 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13l0j0x/raw_footage_of_the_ufo_me_and_a_friend_saw_nsfw/ video, nighttime sky, contemporaneous report, two witnesses, from car, single light object, color change observed white to red, observed vanishing and reappearing, Ohio near Stony Ridge, big debunker energy, OP comments downvoted, blinking, shape change observed, was "winking" for lack of a better word, then turned red. It almost seemed to change its shape
.78 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13l3mc1/foul_language_in_the_sonoran_desert_of_az_south/ video, nighttime sky, Sonoran desert Arizona, single light object, orange 🟠
.79 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13kq0o9/black_triangle_sighting_2008/ sighting description, black triangle, Southwestern USA Prescott Arizona, nighttime, two witnesses, silent, low overhead, pacing witnesses, we walked with the craft for about 30 seconds or so, sudden departure
.80 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13kidz8/spotted_over_toronto_tonight/ photos, nighttime sky, contemporaneous report, Toronto Canada 🇨🇦, single dark object, elongated, tictac
.81 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13kim9s/i_have_decided_to_share_my_sightings/ sighting descriptions, Whangaparāoa new zealand, nighttime, moving stars, fleet, repeat visitors, has anyone seen?, similar sightings in comments
.82 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13l57fc/my_kid_saw_a_flash_of_light_while_we_were_sta photo, nighttime sky, flash of light observed, single object irregular shape
.83 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13l4hos/footage_of_ufo_flying_around_trees_in_my_backyard/ video, nighttime sky, single light object low over treeline, near home, backyard , silent, observed rotating, duration a couple minutes, similar sighting in comments
.84 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13l7v4n/high_strangeness_michigan_and_my_experiences/ experience descriptions, Michigan, loud sound from overhead, light in bedroom, camping, paralysis, foul odor, family story, single light object
.85 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13kwm6e/seeing_a_ufo_up_close_ruined_stargazing_and/ sighting description, black triangle, overhead, observed moving and stationary, sudden departure, silent, camping, emotion of fear, discussion, similar sightings in comments, [GOODPOST]
.86 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13kmf9m/i_saw_something_tonight/ photo, nighttime sky, single light object, zigzag movements, fast walker, eastern North Carolina
.87 https://old.reddit.com/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/13l8ecs/idk_if_this_belongs_here_but_its_the_only_place_i/ experience description, two witnesses, loud sound of crying, growl, physical effects hair turned curly
.88 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13lepzk/ufo_sighted_51723_over_strasburg_colorado/ photo, daytime sky, contemporaneous report, two witnesses, from car, stationary, single object blackwhite, elongated, cigar shape, Strasburg Colorado, observed black and grey and seemed reflective, orientation change, It would angle up and down and horizontal
.89 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13lbli5/does_anyone_else_have_multiple_ufo_sightings/ sighting descriptions and discussion of repeat visitors, has anyone seen?, similar sightings in comments, [GOODPOST]
.90 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13l9za1/strange_sighting_off_the_coast_of_north_caicos/ photos, over water, Atlantic ocean, North Caicos Turks and Caicos Islands
.91 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13luacp/i_created_a_16_page_collection_of_ufo_sightings/ compilation of astronomer sightings
.92 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13lffdc/a_central_askreddit_thread_for_people_that_have/ discussion thread of military family sightings
.93 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13lds5ufo_during_thunderstorm_salt_lake_city_utah_last/ video, nighttime sky, single dark object, storm, lightning, salt lake city Utah , appearing and vanishing, upward trajectory
.94 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13lh2e3/delaware_ufos/ video, nighttime sky, fleet, 5 objects observed, Wilmington Delaware, moving straight, duration 1 minute, similar sightings same area in comments
.95 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13m0kbk/5182023_santa_ana_ca_720pm_black_weird_aura/ video, daytime cloudy sky, santa Ana California, single dark object, irregular shape, triangle or diamond, tendrils , contemporaneous report
.96 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13lirj3/my_possible_ufo_sighting/ sighting description, downvoted to zero, south central Pennsylvania, nighttime, single dark object, black dot ⚫️, stationary
.97 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13lk4ve/ufo/ video, nighttime sky, single light object, telepathy, felt something wrong and like something was looking at me, north Hollywood California, similar sighting in comments, fleet observed, red green yellow 🔴🟢🟡, contemporaneous report
.98 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ll6r3/still_cant_explain_it_look_how_it_moves_relative/ video, daytime cloudy sky, single light object, jumpy movement, vanishing and reappearing, directly above central Washington DC
.99 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13lkk43/sighting_report_july_11_2020_north_phoenix_arizona/ sighting description, two witnesses, evening, Phoenix Arizona, backyard, single light object, low below treeline, green 🟢, very bright, moving and stationary, large oval-shaped ball of bright green light shimmering like fire or light through water, sudden departure, duration 30 seconds
.100 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13m3aoo/im_not_sure_what_i_captured_but_it_was_fast/ photo sequence, daytime cloudy sky, single dark object moving fast, possible disk shape
.101 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13m86cy/i_have_been_using_ai_to_learn_about_real_numbers/ ai generated images, mathematics, art 🎨
.102 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13lugz1/recurring_alien_abduction_dream/ childhood dream description, repeat visitors, abduction, secret soldier, similar sightings in comments
.103 https://old.reddit.com/HighStrangeness/comments/13lv42b/tac_tac_seen_over_austria/ video, daytime cloudy sky, from airplane, over Austria 🇦🇹, single light object, tictac
.104 https://old.reddit.com/CLOUDS/comments/13ln7l2/i_saw_multiple_clouds_that_all_looked_the_same/ sighting description, cloud anomaly, fleet https://old.reddit.com/CLOUDS/comments/13lkdgz/anyone_know_what_clouds_these_are/ different OP, possibly similar, photos, daytime cloudy sky, group of near identical clouds https://old.reddit.com/CLOUDS/comments/13ljnze/what_kind_of_cloud_is_this/ different OP, possibly similar, photos, daytime cloudy sky, fleet https://old.reddit.com/CLOUDS/comments/13licus/on_my_way_home_from_work_couldnt_miss_these/ different OP, possibly similar
.105 https://old.reddit.com/SpecialAccess/comments/13lk2wk/so_what_exactly_are_we_looking_at_here/ USA tech, airplane, possible reverse engineering
.106 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13lvgg9/what_are_ufos_doing_why_the_acrobatics_or_just/ sighting description, repeat visitor, The first was a rectangular object standing up like a white refrigerator slowly cruising across the sky at low altitude over an urban neighbourhood. The second was what looked like a pair of clear orbs shooting across the rural sky at hypersonic speeds, revolving around each other as they went. The last one over my house was a triangular shape, simply parked in place at extremely high altitude, with multicoloured lights on each point of the triangle pulsing on and off, eventually disappearing before my eyes., discussion of movements
.107 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mead7/here_is_my_story_of_what_me_and_my_friend_saw/ sighting description, similar sightings in comments, [GOODPOST], two witnesses, forest, sound of static, single light object, undulating, low below treeline, physical effect transfixed, city observed, descending down, entering the earth, loud sound guttural scream, emotion of fear, witnesses left the area.
.108 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mytpd/what_a_va_patient_once_told_me/ military information, aliens exist, ufo landing pad on base
.109 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mx7y8/hey_guys_ive_just_seen_my_most_legitimate/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, nighttime, single light object moving fast, zigzag movements, two witnesses , Queensland Australia 🇦🇺
.110 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mcg2g/have_you_seen_a_ufo_with_someone_but_years_late discussion of event amnesia, similar sightings in comments
.111 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mzirj/ufo_fly_by_051923_la/ photo, daytime cloudy sky, single object, disk shape, contemporaneous report, Los Angeles California
.112 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mf5pm/anyone_else_in_or_near_robertsdale_al_the_skys/ sighting description, contemporaneous report, happening at time of posting, nighttime, fleet, Robertsdale Alabama, repeat visitor single light object, sudden departure east
.113 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13n1fxg/palm_springs_52023_1015am/ video, daytime sky, single light object, palm springs California,
.114 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mlengreen_light_in_sky/ video, nighttime sky, single light object, green 🟢, Oahu Hawaii, two witnesses, observed splitting, barbell, observed moving and stationary, repeat visitor, moving erratically, duration 10 minutes, downvoted to zero, https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mln73/green_light_in_sky/ second video, downvoted to zero
.115 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13mr0c5/uap_ecounter_on_a_jog_last_week_possible_energy/ sighting description, evening, urban area, the Bronx NYC New York state, black rotating oblong shaped object slowly drifting across the street, rotating, physical effects loss of function, I could barely get up the flight of stairs leading to my apartment. I go into the bathroom to shower and at this point I could no longer stand., possible dehydration unrelated to UAP
.116 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13n18v9/my_one_and_only_sighting_early_70s_red_tumbling/ childhood sighting description, near Washington DC, deep red glowing tube tumbling end-over-end across the sky, totally silent and faster than any airplane I ever saw, three witnesses, duration 20 seconds
.117 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13mj0c3/is_this_starlink_saw_a_massive_ammount_of_planes/ sighting description, airplane anomaly, fleet
.118 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13mrzxm/has_anyone_experience_a_similar_sighting_o sighting description, missing time, has anyone seen?, V shaped formation observed, green light observed 🟢
.119 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13mqjpb/ufos/ sighting description, out of body experience (OBE), law enforcement response, Alaska
.120 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13n82he/saw_a_strange_craft_in_the_sky/ sighting description and drawing, acorn 🌰 shape, single dark object stationary, two witnesses, Right off the county highway in north east Iowa, daytime
.121 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13n7c9u/easiest_way_to_find_out_if_anyone_reported_the/ sighting description, from car, nighttime, triangle, Kittery Point Maine, has anyone seen?
.122 https://old.reddit.com/UFOB/comments/13n2vmf/brights_lights/ childhood sighting description, twolights, two witnesses, approach, flareup, very bright
.123 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13n9o57/i_plotted_the_number_of_uap_sightings_from_the/ analysis, sightings by day and time
.124 https://old.reddit.com/UFOB/comments/13n2net/does_anyone_remember_seeing_a_ufo_but_others_said/ discussion of perception discrepancy, similar sightings in comments, childhood
.125 https://old.reddit.com/itsslag/comments/13n19uy/how_likely_are_you_to_find_slag_on_a_mountaintop/ photos, metamaterial
.127 https://old.reddit.com/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/13nazc3/music_from_the_sky/ audio description, no craft, music from the sky, repeat visitor, Greece 🇬🇷
.128 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nbf0q/my_ufo_experience/ sighting description, Southwest Florida, from car, three witnesses, dawn, single light object stationary, sudden descent downward, entering the ground or water, Atlantic ocean, physical effects witness yelled
.129 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nepre/went_to_a_ufo_festival_in_mcminnville_or_this/ photo, contemporaneous report, celebrity, Travis Walton, McMinnville oregon
.130 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nfejo/my_experience_on_eglin_air_force_base/ information, USAF, monitoring UFOs, sighting description, three witnesses, Georgia, event amnesia, I had forgotten about it until I visited Eglin, similar information in comments, [GOODPOST]
.131 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ny2o8/possible_ufo/ photo, daytime sky, single dark object, observed moving fast and straight
.132 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nkwpt/gold_ufo_seen_out_of_plane_window_pilots/ sighting description, from airplane, pilot confirmed, California, golden orb, single light object moving fast and straight, similar sightings in comments
.133 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nycyf/which_combination_of_features_best_describes_the/ discussion of lighting configuration of triangle sightings , [GOODPOST]
.134 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nl81e/question_to_ufos_community_brief_unexplained/ discussion of sightings of brief duration
.135 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nqeu3/ufo_i_captured_in_a_photos_on_accident_near_eglin/ photos, nighttime sky, single light object, irregular blocky shape, USAF, color change observed, silverish white object that changed into a golden object, shimmering
.136 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nkm5m/possible_encounter_looking_for_answers/ childhood sighting description, Hockley Texas, two witnesses, paralysis in other witness, entranced, single light object, daytime, very bright, yellow 🟡, flareup, physical effects eyes hurt, event amnesia and confusion and anxiety in the other witness
.137 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13ninm8/52023_santa_ana_ca_740pm_solid_to_mist/ video, daytime cloudy sky, contemporaneous report, single object, blackwhite, possible disk shape, vanishing and reappearing or lighting configuration change, object alternately appears solid and misty, santa Ana California , moving erratically, zigzag movements, [GOODPOST]
.138 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13nbgwe/been_obsessed_with_aliens_since_i_was_a_child_40/ childhood drawing, art 🎨, entities, flying saucer
.139 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13m8e5s/to_anyone_here_who_believes_they_have_seen_alien/ discussion of entities descriptions and reference images
.140 https://old.reddit.com/aliens/comments/13nbykg/how_many_of_you_are_abductees_whats_your_story/ discussion of abduction experiences
.141 https://old.reddit.com/ufo/comments/13nm9pk/after_reading_a_reddit_post_i_think_i_was/ experience description, entities, traumatic, telepathy, big debunker energy, clowning on OP
.142 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13o06ks/austin_tx/ video, nighttime sky, single light object, diffuse, possible disk shape, from car, possible pacing car, vanishing, Austin Texas
.143 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13o00u5/my_sighting_as_a_child/ childhood sighting description, nighttime, single light object, red 🔴, over water, rotating, splitting, fleet, multicolored, men in black response
.144 https://old.reddit.com/RBI/comments/13neh5o/i_woke_up_a_day_ago_with_two_small_dots_of_blood/ experience description, drops of blood on pillow, similar experiences in comments
.145 https://old.reddit.com/CLOUDS/comments/13nng2x/is_there_sny_phenomenon_or_something_which_can/ photos, nighttime cloudy sky, diffuse blue light 🔵, Sydney Australia 🇦🇺, duration less than 10 seconds
.146 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nsxgs/%F0%9D%99%BD%F0%9D%9A%98%F0%9D%9A%9F_4_2020/ video, nighttime sky, single light object stationary, orange 🟠, pulsated irregulary and changed size, duration 90 minutes
.147 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13nn6x3/potential_ufo_appearence_in_greece/ sighting description, Greece 🇬🇷, nighttime, blue light shining in bedroom 🔵
.148 https://old.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/13o3pis/saw_this_in_the_sky_over_trenton_new_jersey/ video, daytime sky, Trenton new jersey, single lightobjectmovingfast, elongated, worm 🪱, wiggling, observed vanishing , repeat visitor, following, Less then a minute before this a similar object went by in the same place
.149 https://old.reddit.com/itsslag/comments/13ianfs/is_this_slag_its_quite_heavy_and_also_magnetic/ possible metamaterial

submitted by SabineRitter to UFOs [link] [comments]

2023.05.18 20:45 TheAmnesiacKid Into The Wild - Eddie Vedder

Been after this one for many years. This is Eddie Vedder's excellent soundtrack for the equally excellent film Into The Wild directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Kristen Stewart, Vince Vaughn, and Hal Holbrook.
This is the 2010 press by Music On Vinyl. Long out of print and highly desirable. I went home to Toledo, Ohio for a funeral this week and saw that Culture Clash had a pretty clean copy of this beauty that just came into the shop. Shot over and swooped it up as soon as I could.
For those that are unaware, Culture Clash is one of the very best record stores in the nation. The first record I ever purchased (surprise, surprise Radiohead's Kid A) was from their iconic store on Secor with the roof made of records. They have since relocated to downtown Toledo to a store that's, somehow, just as cool.

submitted by TheAmnesiacKid to vinyl [link] [comments]

2023.05.17 18:45 mtlebanonriseup Yesterday, Republicans lost the Jacksonville, FL, and Colorado Springs, CO, mayorships, while Democrats kept the majority in the PA House and won countless other downballot elections! This week, we volunteer in Ohio to keep abortion legal! Updated 5-17-23

Yesterday, Democrats cleaned up in elections across the country! First, Donna Deegan became mayor-elect of Jacksonville, flipping the largest Republican mayor’s office in the country. Meanwhile, Joyce Morgan also flipped the Property Appraiser race and Democrats won a new city council seat. Additionally, Democrat Marc Plamondon won a New Hampshire state representative special election, and Heather Boyd won PA HD-163 to protect Pennsylvania’s state house majority. The republican candidate also lost the Colorado Springs, Colorado mayorship to Yemo Mobolade, an Independent endorsed by Democrats! We also flipped several school boards in Oregon and South Dakota, defeating those who want to ban books or enforce local “Don’t say gay” policies!
This week, we turn our attentions to Ohio, where Republicans have passed a joint resolution that would make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution. This will be voted on during a special election on August 8. It is imperative we get out the vote so this 60% threshold never becomes law. Republicans are only doing this in an attempt to make the Reproductive Rights amendment fail at the ballot box in November.

Keep checking our volunteer from home spreadsheet! It’s been updated with opportunities to volunteer for important races! As always, important events are bolded, and it is being constantly updated

Donate to the Expand the Senate Fund to keep the Senate in 2024!

Take our survey so we can update you on volunteer opportunities near you!

Ohio

Phone Bank from Home

Repro Rights - Tuesday, May 23
Repro Rights - Tuesday, May 30
Voter Registration - Tuesdays

Gather Signatures

Akron - Wednesday, May 17 and Saturday, May 20
Blue Ash - Wednesday, May 17
Bowling Green - Various Dates
Bowling Green - Various Dates
Cincinnati - Wednesday, May 17 and Saturday, May 20
Cincinnati - Wednesdays and Saturdays
Cincinnati - Saturday, May 20
Cincinnati (Downtown) - Saturday, May 27, Sunday, May 28, and Monday, May 29
Cincinnati (East End) - Thursday, May 18
Cincinnati (Kenwood) - Thursday, May 18
Cincinnati (Mt. Washington) - Saturday, May 27
Cincinnati (St. Bernard) - Saturdays
Cleveland - Monday, May 22 and Saturday, May 27
Cleveland - Tuesday, May 23
Cleveland Heights - Mondays
Cleveland Heights - Monday, May 22
Cleveland Heights - Monday, May 22
Clintonville - Monday, May 22
Columbus - Various Dates
Columbus - Saturday, May 20
Dublin - Mondays
Euclid - Monday, May 29
Gahanna - Tuesday, May 23
Granville - Wednesday, May 17, Wednesday, May 24, and Wednesday, May 31
Grove City - Thursday, May 18
Lancaster - Friday, May 19, Saturday, May 20, and Sunday, May 21
Lancaster - Saturdays
Lancaster - Sundays
Maple Heights - Friday, May 26 and Sunday, May 28
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Newark - Weekends
Pataskala - Saturday, May 20 and Sunday, May 21
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Rocky River - Sunday, May 21 and Sunday, May 28
Rocky River - Sundays
Shaker Heights - Wednesdays and Fridays
Shaker Heights - Wednesdays and Fridays
Shaker Heights - Sundays and Tuesdays
Springfield - Sundays
Springfield - Sunday, May 21 and Sunday, May 28
Toledo - Various Dates
Toledo - Fridays
Toledo - Sundays
Toledo - Tuesdays
University Heights - Wednesday, May 17 and Sunday, May 21
University Heights - Wednesday, May 24 and Thursday, May 25
Youngstown - Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays
Youngstown - Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays
Youngstown - Saturdays
Youngstown - Mondays
Youngstown - Tuesdays

Sign Petitions

In Person Training

Lorain - Petition Training - Saturday, May 20
North Ridgeville - Petition Training - Saturday, May 20

VirtualTraining

Restore Roe Ohio: Virtual Volunteer Signature Collection Training - Thursdays
Restore Roe Ohio: Virtual Volunteer Signature Collection Training - Friday, May 19, Friday, May 26, and Friday, June 2
Restore Roe Ohio: Virtual Volunteer Signature Collection Training - Friday, May 19
Restore Roe Ohio: Virtual Volunteer Signature Collection Training - Monday, May 22
Restore Roe Ohio: Virtual Volunteer Signature Collection Training - Friday, May 26
Restore Roe Ohio: Virtual Volunteer Signature Collection Training - Tuesday, May 30
Voter Registration Training - Thursday, May 18

Write Letters from Home

Voter ID Requirements - Tuesday, May 23

You can also find volunteer and donation links for the candidates in upcoming runoff and special elections listed below. Elections are sorted by date.

June 13th

Wendy Pieh is running for Maine House of Representatives District 45. You can donate via the Maine Clean Election Act Service! Sign up to canvass! Visit her website, Facebook page, and Instagram!

November 7th

Andy Beshear is running for re-election as Governor of Kentucky. Please donate if you can, or sign up to volunteer! Visit his website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and Instagram.

Pamela Stevenson is running for Kentucky Attorney General. Please volunteer or donate! Take a look at her website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Charles “Buddy” Wheatley is running for Kentucky Secretary of State. You can donate or visit his website or Facebook page!

Michael Bowman is running for Kentucky Treasurer. Please donate if you are able, or become a volunteer! Check out his website, Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube.

Kimberley Reeder is running for Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts. You can visit her website or donate.

Sierra Enlow is running for Kentucky Commissioner of Agriculture. Please donate, volunteer, or attend an event. Visit her website, Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter.

Daniel McCaffery is running for Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If you are able, please make a donation or become a volunteer. Take a look at his website, Facebook page, and Instagram.

Jill Beck is running for Pennsylvania Superior Court. Please donate to her campaign, or sign up to volunteer. Check out her website, Facebook page, Twitter, and Instagram.

Timika Lane is running for Pennsylvania Superior Court. Consider making a donation. Visit her website, Facebook page, and Instagram.

Matt Wolf is running for Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. Check out his website!

submitted by mtlebanonriseup to VoteDEM [link] [comments]

2023.05.17 18:44 mtlebanonriseup Yesterday, Republicans lost the Jacksonville, FL, and Colorado Springs, CO, mayorships, while Democrats kept the majority in the PA House and won countless other downballot elections! This week, we volunteer in Ohio to keep abortion legal! Updated 5-17-23 Join r/VoteDEM for more!

Join our permanent subreddit, voteDEM, to learn more!
Yesterday, Democrats cleaned up in elections across the country! First, Donna Deegan became mayor-elect of Jacksonville, flipping the largest Republican mayor’s office in the country. Meanwhile, Joyce Morgan also flipped the Property Appraiser race and Democrats won a new city council seat. Additionally, Democrat Marc Plamondon won a New Hampshire state representative special election, and Heather Boyd won PA HD-163 to protect Pennsylvania’s state house majority. The republican candidate also lost the Colorado Springs, Colorado mayorship to Yemo Mobolade, an Independent endorsed by Democrats! We also flipped several school boards in Oregon and South Dakota, defeating those who want to ban books or enforce local “Don’t say gay” policies!
This week, we turn our attentions to Ohio, where Republicans have passed a joint resolution that would make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution. This will be voted on during a special election on August 8. It is imperative we get out the vote so this 60% threshold never becomes law. Republicans are only doing this in an attempt to make the Reproductive Rights amendment fail at the ballot box in November.

Keep checking our volunteer from home spreadsheet! It’s been updated with opportunities to volunteer for important races! As always, important events are bolded, and it is being constantly updated

Donate to the Expand the Senate Fund to keep the Senate in 2024!

Take our survey so we can update you on volunteer opportunities near you!

Ohio

Phone Bank from Home

Repro Rights - Tuesday, May 23
Repro Rights - Tuesday, May 30
Voter Registration - Tuesdays

Gather Signatures

Sign Petitions

In Person Training

Lorain - Petition Training - Saturday, May 20
North Ridgeville - Petition Training - Saturday, May 20

VirtualTraining

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Voter ID Requirements - Tuesday, May 23

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November 7th

submitted by mtlebanonriseup to BlueMidterm2018 [link] [comments]

2023.05.15 16:50 PerleyBrook There's a devil in New Jersey and I know him well [Part 1]

It’s hard to tell where I’m going, surrounded by all of the trees. They seem to stretch on forever and there’s blood in my eyes. I hear Jordy scream my name. But when I stop and turn he shouts, “Keep running, Meg.” And then he howls in pain as he’s drawn into the sky.
Jordy had been working at our video store for over two years before he started using the job as a way to deal drugs. It was a pretty simple transaction. If you came in and asked him for “a double feature and a pizza extra cheese” he’d put a quarter of weed into a hollowed-out VHS tape and give it to you. You’d pay him by taping a folded-up twenty dollar bill to your video store membership card, which he’d peel off and pocket without any of us seeing him do it.
The deal only worked when Jordy was manning the front desk. Which was often enough. Because really, Video Dreams was a family-run operation. My father treated Jordy like a son until the day he fired him.
It was twelve years before I saw Jordy again. A few days after my father's funeral, he showed up at the social services office in Bordentown where I was working. He asked me to have lunch with him and we walked to the diner down the block.
“You were always like a sister to me, Meg. I feel like those early years at the video store with your mom and dad were the closest to a real family life that I ever got.”
I nodded but didn’t comment. Being a good social worker is about listening and not stepping in to offer a response until the emotional moment is right. I could tell Jordy needed to get something off his chest. And he was fidgety. I assumed he was still using, and dealing with withdrawal. “I just wish I hadn’t fucked it up. It was the worst decision of my life. I wonder where I’d be now if I hadn’t been such an idiot.”
“My folks always loved having you around. You and Dad loved all the same movies.”
“Yeah, we liked the weird stuff. Movies where the heroes were just as messed up as the villains.”
Jordy’s father used to beat him with a belt. Neck down, so there were no noticeable marks. I had no idea that this was going on while Jordy was working for us. When I heard about it years later, after Jordy’s dad had fallen to his death at a construction job, I confronted my father about the beatings and asked him if he knew. He swore he’d had no idea. It was Jordy’s grandma who told everyone her son was a child beater. By then, Jordy was mixed up with some gangsters in Philly and not around town much.
“I would have never fired him if I knew his dad was hurting him like that,” my father said when we talked about it. And then he cried.
“Dad didn’t understand what you were going through. None of us did. He would have made different choices if he had,” I told Jordy. He shifted in his seat at the diner and gave a weak smile.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we don’t always know what kind of movie we’re watching from what happens in the beginning.”
He wanted to know if I still had all the old video tapes. I did. Dad had rented a storage unit in New Hanover, more out in the country, and Mom and I planned to keep the tapes there until we figured out what to do with them. Jordy asked if we could go have a look.
“I just want to be surrounded by them again. Read some of the boxes.”
It made sense to me. He wanted to relive his last moment of innocence. Before things broke for him. I got this a lot in my line of work. People yearning to reconnect with a simple beauty that’s been lost, even if it’s just a taste. The distraught and mentally ill are like junkies for nostalgia, for the time before it went bad.
We met at the storage facility the following weekend. I think Jordy was trying to avoid being high around me so he was very jittery. He was shaking more than he had been at the diner. He had a grouchy disposition.
When I said, “good morning,” he scoffed at me and said, “Easy to say when you’ve got all the answers.”
I stared at him for a moment and he apologized. But I got the sense that he was only taking it back because he didn’t want me to leave without letting him in to see the tapes.
I’d never been in the storage unit. Dad had done a remarkable job of stacking the tapes in sections, by genre. The most recent tapes sat on top of the piles and descended by year. So it was incredibly easy to browse. Jordy wasted no time, moving for the horror pile and looking up and down the stacks while I perused our small documentary collection.
It only took him two minutes to find what he was looking for. I looked up and saw Jordy standing over me, holding a weathered copy of Def-Con 4. The cover featured a skeleton in an astronaut suit, half-buried on a sandy planet with a space station looming overhead. I’d never seen it.
“Do you mind if I keep this one? It’s an old favorite, and I can’t find it anywhere.”
There was an intensity to his request and his right hand was clenched in a white-knuckle fist at his side.
“It would mean so much to me,” he said.
I nodded. “Sure, Jordy. Of course.”
He turned quickly and walked out of the storage unit. That was all he was really looking for. I locked up. When I got back to the parking lot Jordy was in his car, disassembling the tape. I pretended to fish for my keys in my purse while I covertly watched him open it up and pull out a sandwich bag of white powder.
I climbed into my car and started it up. Jordy knocked on my window.
“Thanks for bringing me by,” he said. “That meant a lot to me. We’ll see how the movie plays. I have a feeling it’ll hold up just fine.” “You take care,” I said and I drove away.
That was eighteen years ago. After that, he just sort of disappeared. My guess was that he probably got himself into trouble, either by using or mixing up with the wrong people. Maybe he was dead. Three years after our storage unit experience, he was a no-show at his grandmother’s funeral and everyone in his family was quiet when his name came up except for an uncle who I overheard say, “That boy is swimming with the fish.” Which meant that Jordy had been murdered by the mafia or gangsters. Didn’t surprise me. I had seen more than a few young men like Jordy meet a similar fate.
I thought about him from time to time. Especially when Mom and I cleared out all of the VHS tapes. We donated them to the college, after we heard they were opening a new screening center that was VHS-friendly.
It was a Tuesday in early June the next time I saw him. I had just gotten back from visiting with a family who had been dealing with an abusive stepdad situation, when Jordy approached me as I was unlocking my office door.
“Meg Manchette. The sign on the door makes you look more like a private investigator than a social worker.” In some ways, being a social worker wasn’t so different from being a private investigator. And truth be told, I’d taken a bunch of jobs that blurred the line between social service and investigative work since I opened my own practice.
“How’s that for a rewind. How you doing, Jordy? Didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“You thought I was dead,” he said and I didn’t respond. “Can we talk inside?”
I let him into the office. We sat in the lobby and I took the armchair in the corner, the one with a Smith & Wesson taped underneath it. I deal with a lot of ugly situations and bad people in my work. This dude stole from me last time. And he was a longtime addict. I couldn’t trust him. Not anymore. That said, Jordy was looking better. Gaunt and aged, but with good color in his face. He had a brown leather jacket on and dark slacks with black tennis shoes. Which meant he was either a caterer or a chauffeur. “You’re taking care of yourself,” I told him.
“Trying. I bottomed out hard, not long after we saw each other last. Spent five years in a Mexican prison.” I let out a whistle. Jordy smiled. “If a Mexican prison doesn’t teach you not to take your shit for granted, then nothing will. Worked on some oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for a few years. Found God and then lost him again. Got married and divorced, which was tied to the God stuff. Ended up back in Philly about six years ago. Working as a driver for some businessmen.”
I knew the kinds of businessmen that hired guys like Jordy as their drivers. They were the types of men who expected bullets from their associates and invested in human shields.
“Quite the run,” I said. “I’m happy to find that you’re alive.”
“I almost died ten times down in Mexico. Sometimes, I think I did die down there.” He looked at his hands. I got up and made us two cups of coffee from my machine. When I came back to the lobby, Jordy was standing.
“I don’t want to waste your time. I’ve done a lot of dumb things to you and your family. I’m sorry for that.”
It was okay, I told him. Shit happens.
“I don’t know who I can trust any more,” he went on. “Most of my family is dead and the ones who are still alive, I think they’re watching them. Waiting for me to show up. You were always real nice to me. Like family.”
“What kind of trouble are you in?” I asked. “The worst kind. They’re going to kill me. The men I work for. To cover up for what they’ve done. Some crooked cops are in the mix. If I went to the cops, I’m not sure I’d find the right one.”
I knew plenty of good cops. Most of them were good. But the bad ones had their spies. If the cops were after him, it could be because he was mixed up with corrupt cops or it could be because he was a lowlife criminal that deserved apprehending.
I asked him again. “What kind of trouble are you in?”
“They call me Sleepy Head. You heard of me?”
“Have I heard of Sleepy Head?”
“Yeah. I run all up and down the state, from Philly through Trenton and Newark, up to the Big Apple.”
“I’ve never heard of Sleepy Head,” I said.
“It started out, I was just driving for this rich dude. He had someone he was having issues with, an old accountant of his. So he had me drive this guy out to the Pine Barrens at dusk. Told me to wear a gas mask and just drop the accountant off and leave him in the middle of the forest there. The guy pleaded with me, said he’d pay me to let him walk. When I left him outside in the Barrens, he got real slow, sleepy, like he was in a daze. Just kind of started wandering around. I drove away. And the accountant was never heard of again. I told a couple of other guys about that and it turns out they had some people who they wanted to have disappear. So I did it again, and again. Just dropped people off at dusk in the Pine Barrens while I was wearing a breathing mask. As soon as they’d get out of the car, they’d start wandering around like they were in a dream. I’d drive off and leave them there. And that’s the last that anyone would ever see of them.”
“That’s kind of like murder, Jordy.”
“Kind of. But it isn’t. I was just leaving people in the woods. And most of the time, I was working for cops who wanted to have criminals disappear. Bad guys who got off on charges. Then I got in so deep that I couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t let me stop.”
“How many of these rides have you done?”
“Little more than thirty. A few people got away. I don’t know how. They stumbled out of the Barrens while they were in the daze, I guess.” That was a lot of people to have disappeared. “The ones who lived started talking about me,” he went on. “They’re calling me Sleepy Head. Now the cop dudes and bosses want to get rid of me, because they know I’ll turn as soon as I’m in custody.”
“You should turn yourself in. I’ll go with you. You’ll be safer on the inside.”
“Meg, you know how much a prison guard makes in a year. You know how much a prison guard makes for a hit? They’d have me killed the first night.”
He was probably right. But this sounded like murder to me. Any shred of kinship or sympathy I felt for Jordy was diminishing by the moment.
“I promise you. I had no choice.” He took out his phone and started going through his photos. “They took my daughter.” He flashed some pictures of him with a young girl, probably twelve. She looked a lot like Jordy’s grandmother.
“They said they’re going to put her in the Barrens tonight, if I don’t turn myself over to them.”
“What do you think happens to them at night in the Pine Barrens?”
“I don’t think, I know. The Devil gets them.” Everyone in the area knows about the Jersey Devil. It’s what your parents told you when they didn’t want you sneaking out at night, because it’s what their parents told them to keep them off the streets and out of the woods after dark. For the towns surrounding the Pine Barrens, it’s our local version of the boogeyman. The legend charts all the way back to 1735, when Jane Leeds discovered she was pregnant with her thirteenth child. Out of frustration and perhaps fear of the number thirteen, Jane cursed the child in her womb. The baby was born a wild demon-beast, part goat, part bat, with a taste for blood. As soon as Jane had popped out the little creature, it snarled at momma, attacked those attending the birth, and flew up the chimney and into the Pine Barrens, where it’s lived -- and hunted -- ever since.
Some people claim that Jane was a witch and conjured the demon child on purpose. Labelling someone a witch was an easy way to blame a woman for anything.
That’s the story. No one past the age of ten actually bought into the Jersey Devil. It was a fun thing to talk about and gave a hike through the Pine Barrens a little extra energy, but a killer goat-bat wasn’t the real reason why you wanted to stay out of that stretch of forest these days.
I’d heard that gangsters used the Barrens for dumping bodies -- human remains have been discovered out there on multiple occasions. And hikers were always getting lost in the park. It’s a big area, with little in the way of marked trails or discernible geographic features. It’s just dense, flat woodland. I wanted to tell Jordy to get the fuck out of my office. Whatever the pressures he was under, he was still responsible for leaving over thirty people in the woods to die. That would make him a serial killer. When he was telling me about the moniker he’d been given -- Sleepy Head -- I sensed a bit of pride in his voice. Like he was highlighting it to say that he’d finally amounted to something. Something that people knew about, and would remember. The kind of name that one of his beloved VHS movies from the 80s would carry.
But there was a young girl involved.
“Sleepy Head,” I said dubiously.
He grew grave, showing no sign of pride or pleasure in his work. “There’s this part of the forest. It’s a clearing surrounded by a tight ring of trees. That’s where I leave them. At sundown. It’s so dark you can’t tell what end is up when you’re in there.”
“And you’ve never stuck around to see what happens?”
He shook his head. “No. Some people have gotten free. I think they just got lucky. Stumbled out in the right direction before the Devil could get them.”
He leaned forward with his hands crossed in his lap. “I’m supposed to go there tonight,” he said. “In exchange for my little girl. And if I don’t show up, they’re going to put my daughter in the woods. I need your help to make sure she gets out okay.” I realized that he didn’t want me to save him. He had accepted death.
“I’ve had this coming to me for a long time,” he said, confirming my guess. “I should have run away as soon as I knew what was happening to the people I left.”
“What happened to them?” I asked again.
“I went poking around after the fifth drop-off out there and found the person’s body.”
The deceased had been a serial criminal, a man who had killed a bunch of bodega owners in robberies, but the cops couldn’t lock him up without prints or a weapon. Jordy found him a half mile from the circle, by a small pond. He was on his knees and hunched over. Something had eaten through his face and straight into his head. Through the facial bones. His brain was gone. His head was just an empty cave, like a gored-out pumpkin.
Jordy tried to quit after that, but the bad men he worked for threatened to go after his family. So he kept cool. For a while.
“What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked.
“Eleonore.” “You named her after your grandma.”
He nodded and his eyes started to tear up.
I told him that I would escort his daughter to safety. But that if it meant me having to go out to the Pine Barrens, I was going to bring a friend. A very capable friend.
Jordy gave me the coordinates and a map pin for where I should wait.
“Just be there by eight thirty. They’re going to leave me right at sundown. Which is about nine. I’ll tell Eleonore where to find you before they put me in the circle.”
He hugged me and thanked me and said, “I know I was an asshole to you. But back in the day, I was a good kid.”
I knew he was.
“Thank you for helping my daughter.”
I watched him drive off and then I called my very capable friend, Brandon Calley.
I don’t date clients. Brandon was the only exception. He’s an ex-military, ex-cop with two ex- wives. He was suffering from really bad, compounded PTSD when I met him at an AA meeting. To be fair, he asked me on a date before I told him he needed my help. After three months of talking and Brandon working with a therapist friend of mine, I agreed to meet him for dinner. We dated for a few weeks before realizing that our lifestyles didn’t match well. We didn’t quite click. I loved the guy, I just didn’t love the guy. He was cool with being friends.
Brandon helped me buy the gun under the armchair and set up the security system in my office. He was doing well these days, managing a hardware store and training fighters in jiu-jitsu. He
lived in an old warehouse out in an industrial part of Philadelphia. We didn’t cross paths, but we were there for each other when needed.
He cancelled his evening class and drove out to meet me at my house. It was a muggy evening and the cicadas were out in force, already calling in the night when we left for the park at just past seven. “This is some batshit crazy story,” he said as he drove. We had taken his truck with its off-road capabilities and its arsenal in the compartment beneath the bed.
“Bat-goat-shit crazy story,” I replied. “Jordy has done a lot of drugs in his life, but he didn’t seem to be making it up.”
“You’re good at telling when people are lying,” Brandon said.
I am.
“Doesn’t mean he isn't full of shit. He just believes in what he’s saying.”
“What do you think?” Brandon asked me.
“I think there’s a little girl caught up in a bad mess. And we’re going to help her.” The details change, but you’d be surprised by how similar cases of child endangerment are. It really just boils down to broken, toxic people getting themselves in trouble and pulling their kids along for the ride. Jordy was good enough to find me. That was something.
We pulled onto a dirt road into the Pine Barrens, the one that Jordy had pointed out to me on the map. It was less than two miles to the marker. Brandon parked behind a section of brush and then I helped him draw a brown tarp over his truck. It wasn’t even eight yet. We were early.
“Take a look around?” I asked him.
Brandon grabbed his backpack and we went for a hike. The trees were pretty evenly spaced in this part of the forest. I followed the map on my phone in the direction of the circle. We stopped at a fallen tree about a hundred yards out from the truck and Brandon gathered a bunch of sticks. He laid them at an angle over the tree, creating a bit of a shelter.
“In case someone follows the girl,” he said.
When we approached the circle it didn’t look like a circle at first. The trees seemed to squeeze tighter, forming a wall. It wasn’t until we were a few feet back that we could see the circular clearing in the middle of the tree perimeter. Brandon took a step to move into the clearing but I put my hand on his chest.
“Are you serious?” he asked me.
“Let’s just wait and see.” He laughed but found a tree a few feet behind the perimeter. He climbed up and mounted a game camera there. When we got back to his truck he handed me the camera’s remote monitor and showed me how to switch into night vision. The clearing was a perfect circle. The trees must have been planted with purpose, hundreds of years ago. There was a section on the far side where the trees were spaced a bit further apart, creating a bit of an opening into the area. Brandon assembled a sniper rifle and drew two handguns out from beneath the truck’s bed. He handed me one of the pistols.
At 8:37 I spotted a heavy-set man in the circle’s entrance. He stood there, looking side to side, without moving in. A few minutes later, he was joined by a short man with slicked-back hair. They were total mafia types. Embarrassingly so. Lots of gold chains and rings. Popped collars with the top few buttons of their shirts undone.
“I’m going to see how many there are.”
Brandon slinked away with the sniper rifle in hand.
The goons moved from the circle area. The sun was dipping, giving way to the cries of night birds. Brandon came back five minutes later and whispered that there were two SUVs filled with mafia heavies, but no sign of Jordy or his daughter. Then, at five of nine, with the sun almost down, the goons pushed Jordy and Eleonore into the circle. They wobbled a bit. Turned in circles, looking to the treetops. And then Jordy dropped down, taking Eleonore in his arms. He nodded to the other side of the circle, in my direction. The girl seemed to plead with him and put up a fight, but Jordy pushed her through the far side of the tree wall and I could see her pass just beneath the camera we had mounted.
“I’ll go get her.”
“Roger that, Captain.” Brandon gave me a wink and said, “I’ll be watching,” as he raised the rifle’s night scope to his eye.
The light was fading fast. She hadn’t gotten far from the circle when I met her. She was trembling.
I said, “Eleonore, I’m your father’s friend, Meg.” She had a dazed look about her. “You’re coming with me, okay?”
She nodded. I took her hand and led her back in the direction I had come. I heard footsteps nearby and voices. We ducked into the fallen-tree structure that Brandon had put together and waited. Not a minute later, some of the mafia boys held up near us. I put my finger to my lips, gesturing for Eleonore to stay quiet.
“He wants us to find her,” one guy said and the other replied, “He wants us to find her to make sure she stays in the woods. She probably stumbled off in the other direction.”
“What if she went to the road?” “She couldn’t have made it there that fast.”
One of them lit a cigarette. They were close enough that I could smell the smoke. Brandon was watching. If they made the mistake of finding us now, he’d open their heads up like cans of soup.
“I don’t want to be here. Sun’s almost down,” the one guy said, taking nervous drags on his cigarette.
“If he asks, the girl wandered off into the woods and we lost her when it got dark. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” his partner responded, and they shuffled their meaty frames back to their SUVs with their gold chains and heads intact.
When we emerged from the shelter, the faintest sliver of light lingered through the trees.
“Thank you, Ms. Manchette,” Eleonore said. “Can we go get my dad now?”
I told her that the bad guys who took her might still be watching where they left her dad and that if we went back now, they’d get both of us.
“We can’t leave him in there,” she said.
“We’ll get him out in a little bit. We just need to make sure the coast is clear first.” I moved a few steps ahead of Eleonore, leading her to Brandon and the truck, when she broke away from me and ran back towards the circle. Her footsteps made a lot of noise. I followed her.
I found her in the circle, crouched over Jordy. Her father had taken his shirt off and covered himself in dirt. He wasn’t moving.
I moved into the circle to meet them and as soon as I broke the tree perimeter, my head started to swim. I could feel sweat rise up all over my body. It felt a bit like food poisoning. I was reeling. Next thing I knew, Eleonore was standing over me. I must have fallen to the ground. She had her t-shirt pulled up over her nose and mouth, and gestured for me to do the same. I was blinking in and out of consciousness and really just felt like I needed to go to sleep. She pulled my shirt up over my face. After a few breaths, my head calmed down. I stood up, stumbled a bit, and then leaned on Eleonore.
“Can you help me drag him?” she asked.
I didn’t think I could but I nodded all the same. She supported me as we moved over to Jordy. He was shaking on the ground and covered in dirt. His eyes fluttered. Eleonore let go of me and grabbed her dad’s left leg. That’s when we heard some rustling in the treetops. I gave a quick look over my shoulder and saw him there. A man in shadows, hunched atop a pine tree at the far end of the circle. He wasn’t moving. Just sitting there, watching us. A surge of adrenaline shot through me and I shouted, “Let’s go.”
We each took a leg and dragged Jordy to the edge of the circle. When we were a few feet away from the treeline, the man dropped down to the ground. He couldn’t have been more than fifty feet away from us. I stayed focused on dragging Jordy out of the circle.
If you look at the Devil, can you look away again? I was certain I’d be overcome by the circle’s power if I stopped doing what I was doing. I needed to get off of this patch of land.
We made it through the trees and paused to catch our breath. I looked back. The Devil was flying inside of the circle, round and round along the inner edge at such speed that the trees shook as he passed.
“We need to keep moving,” Eleonore said.
We dragged Jordy another fifteen feet and then he came to. He coughed as he sat up and looked behind to where the Devil was still flying in the circle.
“There he is,” Jordy said.
He had that twinkle in his eye again. The same one he had when he fished the VHS of Def-Con 4 out of my father’s storage unit.
“He won’t kill me. Not after everything I’ve done for him.”
Jordy got up. He looked like he was about to walk back to the circle. Eleonore grabbed his hand and said, “I’m tired of your shit, Dad. Let’s go!” We hadn’t gotten much further on the trail when the Devil landed in front of us. He was about seven feet tall, with long, skinny limbs that bent at animal-like angles and ended in curved hooves. His pointed tail whipped and flexed behind him. His head was that of a man. Except for his long, sloped mouth that looked kind of like a goat's. He smiled and flashed jagged, decayed teeth. Enormous bat wings spread behind him. He had human eyes, which studied us with thoughtful interest.
“Hi, baby,” Jordy said. “It’s just me this time. These are my friends. I’ll bring you something to eat real soon.”
Jordy reached out and placed his hand on the Devil’s chest. The creature lunged in and bit Jordy on the shoulder, tearing off a bit of flesh. Jordy screamed and Eleonore and I ran away.
He shouted behind us, “It’s okay. That’s just how he plays is all.”
The Devil flew up behind us and took Eleonore in his arms. He drew the girl up to a branch that was at least fifteen feet high. He sat there, holding her, watching me as I screamed and shouted at him to bring the girl back. He clenched Eleonore to his chest.
“Let her go, baby!” Jordy shouted.
But the Devil held the girl out and opened his fanged mouth wide. That’s when his head exploded. Brandon had connected with a clean shot, right through the middle of the Devil’s head. The creature fell to the ground with Eleonore in his arms. When I pulled her free she was grunting, fast and repeatedly -- she was in the throes of shock.
Jordy drew a hunting knife out from his boot and stood over the dead beast.
“Take my daughter out of here,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to clean him like a deer. And then I’ll eat him.”
At first I thought I heard him wrong. And then I was overcome by a wave of horror and panicked realization. I pulled Eleonore away. Jordy got right to it, sawing into the Devil’s chest cavity with his serrated knife.
I didn’t look back. When I got to the truck, Brandon had already started it. He sat behind the wheel, staring through the windshield. He didn’t turn to me. I could tell it was all coming back on him in that moment -- the deaths in aggregate, his accumulated kills -- as he sat with a cold terror about his face. Like a man who believed he was marked. Killing the beast wasn’t as easy as pulling the trigger. There was a residue. And worse, a meditation on all of the evil and death wrought between them. Eleonore slept in the truck’s cabin on the drive back while Brandon and I rode in silence.
When he dropped us off at my house he said, “Why did he cut it up?”
I wasn’t sure, but I said, “To get rid of it forever, maybe.”
I didn’t tell Brandon that Jordy was planning to eat the Devil’s flesh as well. I never told anyone about that part.
The girl was in bad shape the next day. She was distraught over what happened to her dad. I told her that he was fine and still alive. That he had some injuries and needed to get fixed up in the hospital, but that we’d hopefully see him soon. I didn’t know what else to say. I took off the next day and stayed at home with her. I got Chinese food delivered for dinner that night.
As we feasted on dumplings Eleonore said to me, “He’s not in the hospital, is he?”
I apologized. Told her that I lied because I didn’t want her to be freaked out.
“But he’s still alive?”
I nodded. I was pretty sure that he was alive. And out in the Pine Barrens. She left it at that and we finished eating.
Before bed she said, “He goes missing all the time. Leaves for a day or so. I get nervous when he’s gone. But he comes back for me. He always does.”
That night she woke up screaming. I ran into her room and she was frantic. Said she had a nightmare.
“My dad was flying around the city like a dragon.” I looked out the window.
“I don’t see him out there,” I told her.
I made up a bed for her on the floor in my room, but I don’t think she went back to sleep after that. When I woke up at dawn, she was sitting in the window of my room staring out.
I found Jordy’s aunt, Beverly, who still lived in the same apartment building where he grew up. I informed her that Jordy had gone out of town and that I was pretty sure he was in some trouble. Could she watch Eleonore for a little while? She said she hadn’t heard from Jordy in twenty years and didn’t even know that Jordy had a daughter. But she was happy to watch the girl.
Before I left Eleonore with her great aunt, we talked about keeping everything that happened in the Pine Barrens our secret. I’d check in with her every few days.
“I’m going to look for your father,” I told her, and she made me promise that I would find him.

submitted by PerleyBrook to nosleep [link] [comments]

2023.05.11 05:54 phorce11 THE MATTER OF STEVEN

I am going to share an entirely true story with you, with multiple witnesses. It's rather long. I've experienced it beginning over 25 years ago with a group of friends, and a few years back one of those friend's daughters who had been involved asked me about this story, so it is written as I told it to her. I'm leading this with this lengthy tale to explain the significance of what happened at Bobby Mackey's last night, and then in the hotel after. Here goes. Bear with me, it is long.
When I was a child growing up in Millersport, Ohio, I had a friend named Jesse [REDACTED]. We were friends from kindergarten until our senior year. He had an older sister named Erica. She was best friends with my older sister Vanessa. Vanessa and I had spent all kinds of time in their home and vice versa. I had been in Erica's room a thousand times and knew all about it. In 1988, the fall after she graduated high school, Erica was killed in a car accident. She was the passenger. The driver fell asleep at the wheel. The driver lived; Erica died. It really affected both of our families.
Fast forward to 1996 when Mike Slusher, your mom Bobbi, and I became friends working at Burger King in Heath, Ohio. I was writing my book then, in my early 20s, we all hung out all the time. No big deal.
One day Slusher and I were hanging out at his place, and we were playing the game of Life. You know, you spin the wheel, move your little car around the board. Whenever Slusher spun, he would count out loud the number of spaces he moved. Except when he spun 9, he would not count one through nine. He would count NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE. We thought it was strangely amusing and I don't think even he knew why he did it. We were just playing, having a good time.
Then in May of 1997, the Saturday evening before Mother's Day to be exact, we were all at your mom's (Bobbi's) apartment on 21st street, Newark OH. You were like 2 years old. There were 10 people there in total that evening. I don't remember all of them; me, Slush, his wife [REDACTED], Bobbi and her boyfriend, I think Bike and [REDACTED], you, two others. We were talking about my book and they asked me to read some of it to them. So I did. I had promised my mom I would go to church with her the next morning for Mother's Day, so when I was done reading, I told them I was leaving. Slusher stood up, put on his light jacket, and said he and Angel were leaving too. Then immediately he took the jacket back off and sat down on the floor and said he and Angel were staying. Strange, but that is what happened. So, I left, and left NINE people in the apartment. And keep in mind, this was NINE years after Erica [redacted] was killed.
Later, I am told this story. Mike and his wife were sleeping on the living room floor in that apartment. In the middle of the night, she wakes up. She says before her, floating in front of the entertainment center, was this gray shape. Hovering. She said this shape floated down the hall to your mom and Brandon's room, opened the door, and she said it appeared as if an arm of this gray thing motioned for her to go into their room. The next morning Bobbi and Brandon wake up and want to know why their bedroom door is open. She recounts the above.
So, Bobbi proceeds to tell us about Steven. She said she had been messing with a Ouija board, but she did it alone. Huge no no. She said the spirit that arrived claimed to be a child, said his name was Steven, said he was NINE years old. She said not long after she talked to him things started to happen. Like YOU (Danielle) would wake up in your room in the middle of the night screaming there was a monster in your room. Or there would be a makeup basket on top of the entertainment center out of your reach, but suddenly you would have it and be using lipstick to draw on the walls.
Then she tells us about the dream.
She was in a room she says. Wood paneling on the walls. A waterbed on one end. On each side of the waterbed, globe lights in ropes suspended from the ceiling. All over the walls were native American pieces of art, and native American busts here and there, sculptures and statues. If you have your back to the bed, to the left was a staircase that went up. Look to the right and there were windows, and then a door towards the other end that went outside. At the far end of the room was a kitchenette, stove, fridge, sink etc. She said at that end if you turned left there was a short hall with a door off the right of it and a door straight ahead. She said the door to the right was a bathroom. She didn't know what was beyond the door straight ahead.
I asked her, was there an orange sofa up against the staircase? She said yes. I said the door straight ahead at the end of that hall went into the garage. And I started to cry. It was Erica's room. The girl who died in the car crash. To the exact T in every detail. Your mom had never been there. But the dream continued. She said she walked up the stairs. But there was no second floor. Instead at the top she encountered a starry sky. And the stars began to move and form the letter S.
Steven.
Fast forward to the early 2000s, I had a party at an apartment I had in Newark OH off Riley Street. My friend Justin [REDACTED] was there with his girlfriend Barbie. He brought a Ouija board. Barbie and I sat down to mess with it. None of the people there knew anything of this story, nothing about Steven, Erica, any part of this. We ask if anyone is there.
Yes.
We ask what is your name? Steven.
We ask how old are you?
9
And then the Ouija board started talking without us asking.
Car
Crash
Blood
Dead
And I could not continue with it. Barbie had no clue. And I was not making this happen. So, I proceeded to break down into tears and cried for hours. Everyone left.
Justin and Barbie stayed long enough to get fragments of this story, and to make sure I was ok. And then they left as well, and I cried myself to sleep.
I will never touch a Ouija again.
I know who will be there if I do. In his own way, he affected me, you, Bobbi, her boyfriend, Mike and his wife.
He is not a child.
He is not 9.
He is a demon. He is a liar and all he wants to do is cause problems.
Which brings us to last night at Bobby Mackey's. We were concluding the evening with a spirit box session in the Room of Faces. It was the tour guide, me, my mom, sister, son, and 2 girls we didn't know who also came to tour. We're in the dark, the spirit box is rolling, somehow it is brought up that a child is in the room. Someone says 'is it a boy or girl?' The box clearly and immediately spurts out BOY. I am guessing it's referring to my son, who was 13 at the time, but then someone asks the name.
Steven. Not my son's name.
Then someone asks how old? I heard 8, then a bit later, I hear 9. My mom son and sister also hear the same name and age so I am basically freaked out, we conclude the evening, we go back to the hotel (the Radisson in Cincinnati). On the way I explain a significance of the name and the number to my mom, sister and son, and that I will explain more later. I had never relayed this story to them before. We get back to the hotel and had decided to go up to the restaurant for a late drink and snack before they close. My mom stayed in the room while the rest of us ventured out.
We get in the elevator and hit the top floor button where the restaurant is (18, we were staying on 12). The 18 button does not light up, but the doors close, and the elevator descends. stops at 9. and the doors do not open. We are waiting and just nothing happens. It's me my sis and son in there. So, I freak out and hit 12, and the elevator takes us to 12 and opens up. My sister says that can't be right, try again. I say 'YOU push the button.' She hits 18. Doors close. Elevator descends to 9, doors do not open. I am wigging out at this point, claustrophobia is setting in and with all this 9 and Steven stuff, I am panicking, so I hit 12, we go up, screw the restaurant I am DONE. We go back to the room instead, and I tell them the story I related above. The sister with me on this trip was Vanessa, Erica's best friend. So my sister and son and mom are now all a party to this story and further convinced in the paranormal. I on the other hand am becoming increasingly concerned I am being followed by a familiar.
So that's the story so far, and I'm really starting to think I need to round up those old friends and get their thoughts on submitting this story to one of those shows that dramatize them.
UPDATE (They have since agreed this story needs to be told.) It is hands down the most bizarre series of events I have encountered in my life.
Additionally, my sister spoke to the Radisson hotel staff about the elevator incident. The restaurant actually was closed when we were trying to go up, so the elevator would not take us. However, she said, the doors otherwise would remain open until we selected another floor or exited. She said this was the first time she ever heard of the doors closing and taking people to a floor they did not select, and not opening.
And of course, it had to be floor 9.
Of note most recently, my sister Vanessa expressed an interest in a visit to Bihl Manor in Fremont OH. Trip booked for an overnight exploration to occur as of this writing TOMORROW MAY 11-12th 2023. Right before Mother's Day. Myself, my mother, my son, and my sister Vanessa will be the explorers. Recent occurrences noted at Bihl Manor include occurrences with an entity calling itself Steven.
Sounds like the story is still not over.
UPDATE Bihl Manor yielded nothing new in regards to Steven, other than that name comes up often there, expressing to be 15 years old. We did perhaps witness some SLS movements however.
It may be of note to mention that in the book I wrote in 1992 entitled 'Keys to the World' there is a scene included where Jesse and I find a grave in the woods behind my house. This was a real-life experience I added to my novel. We never dug up the grave, but I always imagined it was a little boy in a blue suit around 8 or 9 years old. But I didn't ever get a name. May not have been a child's grave at all, maybe an animal, just weird about the age. This is the same book I was reading to my friends on that Mother's Day Eve, 1997. The scene in real life occurred when I was 15 years old.
This is the longest recurring series of events tied to one related entity. Aside from this, my own personal home has been the source of many other paranormal occurrences. Those are tales for another day.

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2023.05.09 11:16 Nemacolin 2022 Mass Killings in the United States

submitted by Nemacolin to masskillers [link] [comments]

2023.05.09 03:51 natstitches Tracking COVID Wastewater Data in the United States

Below is a list of places to look for wastewater data in every state plus a couple of territories.
Things to consider:

If you don’t know how to read data and charts, I recommend learning about data analysis and statistics. If you’re not sure where to start, Khan Academy has some great lessons here: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability
You *cannot* compare the numbers of different cities to each other unless you know for sure that they are using the same sampling method and analysis. For example, in my state of North Carolina, the state does testing and the CDC does testing. They use two different methods. You cannot compare the numbers of the state sites to the CDC sites.
Many states report to the CDC and do not provide their own data visualization. The CDC’s data visualization of wastewater is not great.
It’s best to view most of these on a desktop browser instead of mobile.
Almost all data is delayed by at least 1-3 weeks
Many wastewater data pages will also post case counts. With enough historical data, this can be useful for correlating wastewater to low transmission levels during times when testing was high. But just make sure you know what data you’re reading.
A million viral gene copies per person sounds like a lot. But, for example, again in North Carolina, 1 million gene copies per person is actually correlated with extremely low transmission back during the times when people were testing. So, know what the data is telling you.

If you know of data that I’m missing, please post in the comments and I’ll add it to the list.
NATIONAL
WastewaterScan

COVID
Influenza
RSV
Human Metapneumovirus
Monkeypox
Norovirus

Biobot.io/data

COVID
Monkeypox

*Scroll down and look for a search box where you can enter your state
CDC

Terrible design, awful user experience, no Y-axis on individual graphs, but you can see vague trends

STATES
(I did not list Biobot and WastewaterSCAN locations that have ended their monitoring. Some of them may still be listed on the sites)
Alabama
Biobot has data for Colbert, Lee, Madison, Shelby, St Clair
WastewaterSCAN has data for Jefferson County
Alaska
Biobot has data for Juneau
American Samoa
Territory-wide - can’t find
Arizona
Tempe
Biobot has data for La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Pima, and Yavapai counties
Arkansas
Biobot has data for Benton, Boone, Garland, Greene, Hempstead, Jefferson, Lonoke, Mississippi, Ouachita, Pope, Pulaski, Saline, St Francis, Washington, and White counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Harrison (appears to be new, so there’s not much)
California
Statewide (map loads slowly)
Biobot has data for Alameda, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Kings, Lake, Los Angeles, Monterey, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz and Sonoma counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for the Bay Area, Davis, Indio, Laguna Niguel, Lancaster, Lompoc, Los Angeles County, Los Banos, Madera, Merced, Modesto, Monterey, Ontario, Paso Robles, Riverside, Turlock, Sacramento, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Winters, and Woodland
Colorado
Statewide
Biobot has data for Garfield County
WastewaterSCAN has data for Parker
Connecticut
New Haven/Yale - (under current data, select SARS-COV-2; there is also data for influenza, rsv, adenovirus, monkeypox, and human metapneumovirus)
UCONN/Storrs Campus
Biobot has data for Fairfield, Hartford, Middlesex, New Haven and New London counties
Delaware
New Castle County
Biobot has data for New Castle County
WastewaterSCAN has data for Seaford
Florida
Jupiter
Orange County
Biobot has data for Alachua, Hillsborough, Leon, Miami-Dade, Monroe, Orange, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Seminole counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Altamonte Springs, Jupiter, Miami, North Miami, Orange County, South Miami
Georgia
Statewide (click on summary report tab at top)
Georgia Tech campus
Biobot has data for Dekalb and Richmond counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Atlanta, College Park, Columbus, and Roswell
Guam
Territory-wide
Hawaii
Biobot has data for Hawaii, Honolulu, and Kuai counties
Idaho
Statewide
Boise
Biobot has data for Latah County
WastewaterSCAN has data for Boise and Coeur d’Alene
Illinois
Statewide
Chicago
Biobot has data for Cook, Kankakee, Peoria, and Winnebago counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Glen Elyn and Wheaton
Indiana
Statewide
Biobot has data for Allen, Benton, Delaware, Dubois, Hamilton, Howard, Huntington, Kosciusko, Lake, Monroe, Ripley, St Joseph, Vigo, and Wayne counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Bloomington, Jeffersonville, and South Bend
Iowa
Biobot has data for Johnson, Mahaska, Polk and Woodbury counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Clinton, Coralville, Marshaltown, Muscatine, and Ottumwa
Kansas
Biobot has data for Allen, Ford, Johnson, Reno, Sedgwick, and Shawnee counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Kansas City, Lawrence, and Salina
Kentucky
Louisville-Jefferson County/UL
Biobot has data for Harrison, Jefferson, and Kenton counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Louisville
Louisiana
Biobot has data for East Baton Rouge, Jefferson, Lafayette, and Rapides parishes
Maine
Statewide
Biobot has data for Androscoggin, Aroostook, Cumberland, Franklin, Hancock, Kennebec, Knox, Lincoln, Oxford, Penobscot, Piscataquis, Sagadahoc, Waldo, Washington, and York counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Brunswick, Portland, and York
Maryland
Montgomery County (scroll down for charts; data on influenza and rsv available as well)
Biobot has data for Anne Arundel, Charles, Garrett, Howard, St Mary’s, and Washington counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Hagerstown and Hollywood
Massachusetts
Boston area (it’s Biobot data)
Biobot has data for Barnstable, Berkshire, Bristol, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, Nantucket, Plymouth, Suffolk, and Worcester counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Boston and Millbury
Michigan
Statewide
UM tracks wastewater for Ann Arbor, Flint, Jackson, Tecumseh, and Ypsilanti
WastewaterSCAN has data for Ann Arbor, Jackson, Jenison, Mt Pleasant, Traverse City, and Warren
Minnesota
Statewide (click on a region, wait for two graphs to pop up on right, wastewater is the chart on the bottom)
Saint Paul/UM (not just campus)
Biobot has data for Dakota and Hennepin counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Mankato, Rochester, and St Cloud
Missouri
Statewide (click location and then scroll down for local data)
Biobot has data for Cape Girardeau and Jefferson counties
Montana
Lewis and Clark County (scroll down but note that the charts are atrocious. They all look as if there has been no COVID for a long time, but if you hover over the circles, you’ll see that the actual data numbers change.)
Biobot has data for Custer, Park and Teton counties
Nebraska
Statewide (publishes data in pdf form, click the blue box that reads “View the Wastewater Surveillance Trends Report”)
Biobot has data for Lancasater and Saunders counties
Nevada
Southern Nevada
Biobot has data for Clark, Elko, and Washoe counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Las Vegas
New Hampshire
Statewide
Biobot has data for Carroll, Merrimack, and Sullivan counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Concord, Dover, Penacook
New Jersey
Biobot has data for Essex, Hudson, Monmouth, Passaic, and Union Counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Belmar, Cumberland County, Newark and Township of Ocean
New Mexico
Biobot has data for Bernalillo, Los Alamos and Santa Fe counties
New York
Statewide (click on location then scroll down for local data)
Biobot has data for Nassau County
North Carolina
Statewide (scroll down and use menu drop down bar for local data options. Note: not all cities are updating wastewater data anymore)
Biobot has data for Cumberland, Duplin, Stanly, and Vance counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Kinston and Winston-Salem
North Dakota
Biobot has data for Grand Forks and Stark counties
Ohio
Statewide (click location on map or sidebar then scroll for local data)
Biobot has data for Summit County
WastewaterSCAN has data for Akron and Youngstown
Oklahoma
Statewide
Biobot has data for Beckham, Carter, and Comanche counties
Oregon
Statewide (click on a location on the map and a chart will load to the right)
Biobot has data for Clackamas, Deschutes, Multnomah, and Yamhill counties
Pennsylvania
Borough of Indiana
Biobot has data for Bucks, Butler, Chester, Dauphin, Erie, Franklin, Indiana, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Montgomery, and Westmoreland counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Delaware County and Harrisburg
Puerto Rico
can’t find
South Carolina
Biobot has data for Anderson, Florence, Georgetown, Greenville, Greenwood, Horry, and Pickens counties
South Dakota
Biobot has data for Minnehaha and Pennington counties and
WastewaterSCAN has data for Yankton
Tennessee
Biobot has data on Bradley, Chester, Davidson, Hamilton, Shelby, Sullivan, and Sumner counties
Texas
Houston
San Marcos
Biobot has data for Dallas, El Paso, Galveston, Kaufman, Tarrant, Travis, and Webb counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Amarillo, Gainesville, Garland, Laredo, Montgomery County, South Laredo, Sunnyvale, and Wichita Falls
US Virgin Islands
Biobot has data for St Croix and St Thomas islands
Utah
Statewide (click on a location, it’s slow but data for the location will appear on the right)
Biobot has data for Davis and Salt Lake counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Central Salt Lake Valley and Provo
Vermont
Statewide - the way the data presented is not user friendly, but you can at least get an idea of an area is on the rise or not. Click the button that reads “Download Current Surveillance Report (Updated Wednesdays)”
Biobot has data for Bennington, Chittendon, Franklin, and Windsor counties
WastewaterSCAN has data for Essex Junction, Montpelier, and South Burlington
Virginia
Biobot has data for Alexandria, Alleghany, Arlington, Franklin, Frederick, Hanover, Henry, Mecklenburg, Petersburg, Pulaski, Stafford and Wise counties.
WastewaterSCAN has data for Hillsville, Little Falls Run, and Stafford.
Washington
Statewide - use drop down menu on the left navigation bar to see local data, but these are codes for wastewater treatment sites instead of names of towns or cities
Biobot has data for Benton, Clark, Mason, Skagit, and Snohomish counties
Washington, DC
Biobot is monitoring the district
West Virginia
Statewide
Biobot has data for Ohio County
WastewaterSCAN has data for Wheeling
Wisconsin
Statewide - scroll down a bit and you’ll see a list of locations on the left navigation bar, click and the data for that location will display on the right.
Biobot has data for Dane County
Wyoming
Biobot is monitoring three counties: Sheridan, Sweetwater, and Teton

submitted by natstitches to ZeroCovidCommunity [link] [comments]

2023.05.09 01:04 BlueberryEvening3526 Petty mom friends on social media

A high school friend of mine and I have gone separate ways. We both got married the same year. My husband and I moved states away for his job out of school and later on we ended up moving to California. We have loosely stayed in contact over the past 10 yrs. She started her family right away-has three boys and I had my baby girl 2 yrs ago. I have been to visit her first born making a specific trip to see her. We have tried a few other times reconnecting but she forgot to pick me up at the airport and we ended up being really sick with Covid after my daughters 1st Birthday. Also dealing with toxic family members (divorced parents/ dad remarried)When I’m home in same state we’re 3-4hrs away and home for a short weekend holiday, wedding or funeral. She always comments like your in Ohio?!?! Her college friends family lives in same city. She mentions that this said friend has met all her babies. Once this friend had baby in California as well she went and visited her and her son. She said nothing is stopping her from getting on a plane to see her bestie and meeting her son. Total punch to the gut. I was suffering sever post partum depression and let her know a year and a half in once I started finally getting a handle on it. During that time it felt like every interaction she was questioning me as a mother and I didn’t really say much to her until the straw that broke the camels back. Mind you she is a perfectionist mom that displays her perfect godly life for everyone on full display EVERYDAY. She was asking me about my birth and asked WHY?! Did you not get the epidural?! At the time I responded but looking back I’m like why are you questioning my decision?! She posted to her story life isn’t a competition. Passive aggressive, I think so. And I hate your exclamation marks and questions, so unnecessary especially for a new mom battling PPD. I didn’t trust anyone to watch my daughter but also just needed some time away. I posted that my husband and I were at the movies and she messaged me whose watching the baby?!?!? Like is it any of your damn business?? And any friend would have said enjoy your date night anything other than that. We are both responsible adults and it was my doula about the only person I trusted at that time who watched her. I would never ask her whose watching her children because you know why it’s none of my business. I don’t have family near me like she does and feel it was unnecessary judgment. She is always going on dates and posting similar or thankful grandparents are watching. My in laws have both passed. She also commented on a picture of my daughter that her son had the same outfit? It was a light blue overall romper. Anyway I took it as a slight. My family and I took a trip to Hawaii and she takes plenty of trips and friends trips with her family. She had the nerve to send me a link to Russian spy ship spotted off the coast of Hawaii and asked me if I knew about this? I was instantly flooded with emotions of such a grotesque thing to send to someone while on vacation. No place is really that safe anymore and I don’t subscribe to fear mongering news stations. I said hi, we’re having a great vacation-thanks for asking and I don’t appreciate getting scare links while on vacation. I literally had PTSD from it I called her up right then and there and yelled at her at how unnecessary that was. She then posted kind people are my kinda people 🙄A few months go by and she messaged me on my birthday, ill always remember what a great friend you were and cherish our childhood memories. Happy Birthday, I’ll always love you hugs! I don’t know about you but great friend you were sounds like past tense to me. She then post a 5 min long video of her and her family on vacation with friends in Mexico and I was so upset that she had the nerve to send that to me on my vacation that I unfriended her. I really wanted to congratulate her on flying with her entire family out of the country and send an article about kidnappings in Cancun resorts and ask if she knew about this? I realize my life is open for people to comment when I post but it’s so petty and feel shes only passing judgment on what me and my family do and I don’t need it. NO ONE else does this to me. I even went as far as apologizing to her for me going off and taking ownership only to have her say that I’m making her out to be a villain and people that know her today know her heart and who she really is. That she would never intentionally hurt me and how far along she is in her healing and Christ journey. Anyways her attempts to reach out were anything but loving. Is this how friends treat sisters that are struggling and they know they have been ??

submitted by BlueberryEvening3526 to momtokgossip [link] [comments]

2023.05.08 04:23 Various-Poetry-9158 custody battle with a narcissist…

this is a lot. i (19 f) and my boyfriend (20 m) are living in his stepdad’s (65 m) home. we’re from a really small town where it’s either drug addicts, borderline poverty, or upper class rich snobby people. either way, everywhere you go you’re bound to run into someone you know. my bfs stepdad is a narcissist. he’s won over EVERYONE who’s in the judicial system in my county. he’s good in with the cops, judge, dcs/cps, everyone from what i’ve heard. my county’s police department is really corrupt anyways. so the favors aren’t in our favor right now. anyways, me and bf are planning to move out because we can’t take stepdads shit anymore. he always turns off the wifi when i’m trying to do work, he doesn’t want us staying up all night when we both have nightshift jobs, (there’s more bad but reddit is lagging bad and i can’t type it all out), he’s kicked out me and bf when bfs mom was in ohio. thankfully we had a car. but during the packing process he told bfs younger brother (14 m) that he wasn’t going anywhere and if he took him he’s calling the police and saying we kidnapped him. we were literally going to a funeral for bfs and brothers aunt. in the aunts will she wanted bc and brother to be pallbearers. in the end he let brother go…
stepdad has all custody over brother. stepdad makes 80k a year. he buys no food, clothes, or needs for brother. he actually takes brothers dead bio dads checks and keeps them for himself. stepdad also hoards food in his room and doesn’t let us touch it or we get yelled at or kicked out. brother does not have a bank account for the checks at all. stepdad actually just bought a $34k tractor that we don’t need bc we live in a small neighborhood. he claimed he was starting a “business”. we are the ones who take care of brother. brother has his own stories of neglect and verbal abuse from stepdad. brother is old enough to speak for himself but as someone who was in state custody, with dcs they tend to make the wrong choices all the time. bfs mom was forced to give custody to stepdad since she went to jail. stepdad has done anything but take care of brother. when bfs mom got out of jail she moved back in when there was a court order for her to stay away from her kids due to her being “abusive and neglectful” which is false btw. me and bf came to the conclusion that if we want brother to have a better life we have to go to court over him. (added note: anytime brother gets in trouble stepdad threatens to send brother is a boys home. 9/10 brother hasn’t even done anything but try to voice his own reasons or defend himself. bfs mom has documentation of stepdad abusing here and being verbally abusive towards her. i actually have a voice message she sent me of step dad berating her and calling her a useless bitch.)
this is where i need help. both me and bf are young and never did any of this. we’re willing to put however much down financially to get custody of brother. i know we need a place, room, and the right income to take care of brother. bf is getting a job soon that pays 21$ hr. i’m getting a job soon that pays 13-14$ hr. our income together will be around $57,680. that’s more than enough to take care of a teenager. but what are others things court looks for? we need a solid plan and need to be ahead of stepdad when we do this. stepdad isn’t the smartest out there,, but he probably knows how to get a crooked lawyer (it’s common for those here). we want to go to court in another county but that’s probably impossible since brother is out of our current county. can we say the court in favor of stepdad if it looks like we’re losing? it would be nice to talk to a lawyer about this but i don’t see us doing this until next year. pls just tell me anything you know. anything helps thank you!!!!

submitted by Various-Poetry-9158 to custodybattle [link] [comments]

2023.05.06 13:02 FelicitySmoak_ On This Day In Michael Jackson HIStory - May 6th

TRIGGER WARNING : The '2013' segment has graphic testimony about the autopsy & toxicology reports. Some people may be sensitive to this.
1973 - The Jackson 5 play at the Seattle Center Coliseum in Seattle, Washington.
1979 - On their Destiny Tour, The Jacksons play the Jacksonville Memorial Coliseum in Jacksonville, Florida.
1984 Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger start work at A&R Studios in New York City on the song "State Of Shock". It will be released as a single by The Jacksons. It was written by Michael and guitarist Randy Hansen. The track was originally to be sung with Freddie Mercury as a duet with Michael. A clip of the song (an instrumental part) was used on the "Immortal" album in 2011.
1986 - Michael attends a press conference at New York ’s Red Parrot where Pepsi announces a new contract for a reported $15 million and later he receives a Guinness Book of World Records plaque for having received the largest fee ever for a product endorsement. The contract included 2 commercials & sponsorship of his Bad World Tour
https://imgur.com/a/ZX1Diun
https://youtu.be/pehs4M3PL0I
Michael & Emmanuel Lewis stay at the Hemsley Palace
1988 - Michael Jackson plays the last of three nights at the Metropolitan Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
https://youtu.be/UDyKN2JMvjI
1991 - Michael is granted the Jane Goodall Institute’s honorary "chair" for his support. Goodall (and her efforts), an advocate of behavioral research on chimpanzees in Gombe, Nigeria, for over 30 years (at the time)
1992 - Michael covers the funeral costs of 9 year old Ramon Sanchez, who was killed by a stray bullet during the violent Rodney King LA riots. He pays expenses for the funeral, mortuary & cemetery costs as well as a headstone. Sanchez was killed while in his kitchen having a glass of milk. His parents couldn't afford to bury him, hence Jackson's aid.
The Sanchez family later had the opportunity to thank him after a visit was arranged to the Culver City studio where Michael was filming a Pepsi ad. Through a translator, the mother of Ramon tells Jackson that "Ramon was one of your biggest fans. You have helped to make a very tragic time for us more bearable. Your involvement was a pleasant surprise, and we are eternally grateful."
https://imgur.com/a/nMXky1b
1997 - Michael flies to Cleveland, Ohio, to be inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in a special Presentation with His brothers by Diana Ross & Berry Gordy. Joe, Katherine & Barry Gibb are also present at the event. Randy does not attend the presentation.
https://imgur.com/a/BVsTUed
https://youtu.be/ywxCRBOmjDY
2005 - Trial Day 47
Michael goes to court with Katherine & Joe
The mothers of the two young men who testified for the defense yesterday, took the stand today. The two mothers claimed that the relationship their children had with Michael was innocent, and at no time did they observe or believe Jackson to behave inappropriately with the children. One of the women even had harsh words for Jacksons previous accusers mother and considered her to be a gold-digger. Jacksons previous accuser settled for a multi million dollar out of court civil settlement in 1993.
Both of Joy Robson's children, son Wade and daughter Chantal who later testified following her mother, had spent a lot of time with him and trusted him and considered him to be a good friend and a wonderful person.
Joy Robson offered a ringing endorsement of Jackson's trustworthiness.
"I've known Michael for a long time. I've spent many hours talking to him about everything. I feel like he's a member of my family. I trust him. I trust him with my children," she said under questioning by Jackson attorney Mesereau
"He's a very special person," she added. "He's not the boy next door. He's Michael Jackson. He's very unique. He has a very pure personality. To know him is to love him and to trust him."
DA Tom Sneddon attacked Robson during cross examination. In an attempt to imply that her friendship with Jackson was means of trying to secure a career in show business for her son, Sneddon asked "Did you in your mind think that by having a connection and a friendship with Mr. Jackson that that could help promote your son's career?" Sneddon asked.
"You're trying to make me say that that was the basis for our friendship and that's not true," she said.
Joy Robson was asked if she knew the boy who accused Jackson in 1993 and his mother. That boy received a multi million-dollar settlement and no charges were filed.
Joy Robson said she had been at Neverland with the boy and his mother but spoke to them only a few times.
On cross-examination she said, "My impression of (the mother) is she wanted to be mistress of Neverland. She would order the staff around like she owned it. My impression of (her) is she was a gold-digger." Mesereau asked, "Did you feel she was trying to use Michael Jackson?"
"Yes," she said.
Sneddon, taking up questioning again, asked whether Robson was jealous of the woman "because she replaced you."
"Absolutely not," said the witness. "... I had no wish to be (her)."
"I asked if you were jealous of her position," Sneddon said acerbically
"What position would that be?" asked the mother.
Being close to Michael Jackson," said Sneddon.
"I don't know that she was close to Michael Jackson," the witness answered. "My personal knowledge of that weekend was Michael Jackson trying to elude (her) for that weekend."
Joy Robson was followed to the stand by her daughter, Chantal Robson, a 26-year-old dancer who told of sleeping in Jackson's room with her brother four times as a child.
"Did you ever see Michael Jackson molest your brother Wade?" asked Mesereau.
"No," she said with a slight laugh.
This time cross examining Chantal Robson was prosecutor Gordon Auchincloss, who questioned Robson of the appropriateness of a 10 year old girl sharing the bed with a man who was over the age of 30.
I think it's appropriate for a 10-year-old girl to sleep in a bed with a friend," she said, adding under further questioning that it would be OK if the girl "and the parents" approved.
She said, as other defense witnesses have, that she saw Jackson hug children, kiss them on the cheek but that she never saw anything of a sexual nature.
Both Joy and Chantal Robson acknowledged that Jackson had helped them in their move from Australia to the US by paying a balance on their car and loaning the family $ 10,000 which was never repaid.
The next mother duo combination to take the stand was Marie Elizabeth Barnes and her daughter Karley Barnes. The women praised Jackson
"I trusted him implicitly," Marie Barnes said of Jackson. "He's a very nice person. You just know when you can trust someone."
Marie Barnes, of Melbourne, Australia, said she and her family got to know Jackson after her son wrote a letter which the singer pulled out of box of fan mail and decided to make contact.
She said she allowed her son to travel around the world with Jackson on a tour because she believed it would be a learning experience.
"Did you ever suspect Mr. Jackson of inappropriately touching your son?" asked Mesereau.
"Never," she said.
She said that during visits to Neverland her son slept in Jackson's room on an off-and-on basis, sometimes when he fell asleep while playing games and watching videos.
Barness daughter spoke equally well of him stating that Jackson was a good friend and a wonderful person whose relationship with children were purely platonic.
https://imgur.com/a/2LCkDSf
Court transcript
2009 - Michael goes to Dr Klein’s in Beverly Hills.
A couple of photos showing Michael in rehearsals for This Is It are leaked
https://imgur.com/a/vFsks3y
2013 - Jackson v AEG trial day 5. Week 2 begins
Jackson family did not attend the court.
Toxicologist Dan Anderson Testimony
Jackson direct
Jackson attorney Koskoff is doing the direct examination. Anderson starts testifying about his experience, credentials
Jurors are shown the pictures of three prescription pill bottles found in MJ's bedroom: lorazepam, diazepam and Flomax. They are also shown a photo of four bottles of 20ml of Propofol
Anderson is then asked about a chart which shows the medications, how many doses were issued and how many remained at the time of Michael's death. Another series of charts show the Propofol and other medications that were found in the home
Most of the drugs, he testified, were prescribed by Murray
Toxicologist Anderson tells jury it's highly unusual to find injectable lorazepam and propofol in a home setting.
Anderson said investigators found injectable lorazepam at MJ's home, a form of the drug "typically found in a hospital setting."
Jackson lawyer Koskoff: "After you heard from investigators that propofol was found in the home, what did you think?" Anderson: "Propofol collected as evidence, it's highly unusual. It raises a red flag in my eyes as a toxicologist...It's very problematic if it's found outside the hospital setting."
The discovery of the propofol bottles outside a medical setting also was "highly unusual" and "kind of raises a red flag", Anderson said
Anderson also explains where coroner's staff take samples from within a body, and also how certain drugs are metabolized. The toxicologist then explains to jurors what tests he ordered on Michael Jackson's body
Anderson said blood samples were taken from every corner of Jackson's body, "his heart, femoral artery, liver and behind his eyes"
Dan Anderson : "This particular case, we were looking for everything and anything"
Anderson testified that tests of Jackson's blood, urine and internal organs showed traces of the anesthetic propofol, the anti-anxiety drugs Valium and lorazepam, the short-term anesthetic midazolam and lidocaine (a numbing cream that paramedics sometimes use in resuscitation efforts)
Toxicology tests detected six drugs in Jackson's system other than propofol: "lidocaine, diazepam, nordiazepam (a metabolite of Valium), lorazepam (Ativan), midazolam (Versed) and ephedrine" according to Anderson
Anderson walks jurors through a chart he prepared of the drugs found in Jackson's system. Propofol and lidocaine found everywhere. By everywhere, Anderson means blood taken from the heart, femoral artery, liver, urine and in fluid behind eye
Anderson said propofol and other drugs were found during toxicology tests, noting that propofol was of most concern.
Anderson: "It raises a red flag in my eyes...It's very problematic to find it outside the hospital setting"
After morning break, toxicologist Anderson tells jury level of propofol in MJ's body is consistent with general surgery. Anderson said that the amount of propofol found in his system was what you'd expect in a patient who had just undergone major surgery
Anderson: "Michael Jackson's body was riddled with the powerful anesthetic propofol when he died. The level was "consistent with major surgery anesthesia," said Anderson, noting that a level of 3.2 milligrams per milliliter of blood was found in Jackson's body
Jackson lawyer Koskoff asks Anderson about other cases LA coroner has handled where propofol was involved. Anderson tells jury about preparing a chart of all LA County deaths where propofol was found, after Michael's death. Coroner's office continued to update the chart after Jackson's death, Anderson tells the jury. It now has 31 cases. The first LA County death case where propofol was found dates back to 1999, Anderson says. It's updated as of a couple weeks ago. To put the 31 propofol cases in context, Anderson says coroner handles about 8,000 deaths a year. Roughly 5,000 involve toxicology screens.
Koskoff also asked Anderson about Demerol. Toxicologist says none was found in Jackson' s system. Anderson told jury Demerol typically dissipates from a person's system with 12-16 hours.
Summary of Negative Toxicological Findings: No Alcohol, Barbiturates, Demerol, Zoloft, Xanax, Cocaine, Marijuana, Amphetamine, Codeine
Direct questioning of Anderson ends with him telling jury he didn't find any recreational drugs in Jackson's system
AEG Cross
Cahan is the attorney handling cross-examination for AEG.
Anderson remembers when he heard Michael Jackson had died. It was a Thursday, his day off, and his son told him MJ had died.
He tells the jury he suggested tests that were conducted. Anderson tells that he observed part of the autopsy the day after the death.
Much of Anderson's cross examination is him explaining charts he prepared in greater detail.
Cahan notes that one chart shows 10 medications, with three doctors issuing them: Conrad Murray, Allan Metzger and Arnold Klein. She notes that the doctors were all prescribing certain medications that were supposed to be taken at bedtime. She asks if this is important. Anderson says his staff doesn't take into account directions for taking meds, but how they're found in toxicology screens.
Cahan: "Would you agree with me there are three different physicians prescribing medication for Mr. Jackson to take at bedtime (in the months before his death)?" Anderson : "I would agree"
Anderson also explains that there were two visits to Jackson's home where medications were collected. On July 9th, a Jackson family member brought in additional medications they had found and thought investigators should have.
Anderson testifies by mid-July he knew the amount of propofol found in Jackson's body was cause of death
Cahan asked Anderson about signing his portion of the toxicology test on July 15th. She asked if the level of Propofal was fatal. Anderson responded with "yes...the level was fatal"
Anderson testifies that he found out propofol had been collected from Jackson's home after he found it in drug screens.
Jackson redirect
Anderson was also asked about 31 death cases in LA where propofol was found. He makes clear, propofol was not cause of death in all those cases. Jackson's lawyer Koskoff highlighted seven cases where propofol was a cause of death; five cases were in residences. Six of the seven cases where a propofol overdose was a cause of death were deemed suicides, toxicologist Anderson testified. According to Anderson, Jackson's case was the only one involving someone outside the medical field who overdosed on propofol in a home.
Anderson testified that Michael Jackson is the only person in Los Angeles County not in the medical field to die of propofol intoxication in their home in the last 14 years. The other six people who died at their homes were doctors or nurses who had access to the tightly controlled anesthetic
Christopher Rogers is the deputy medical examiner who performed MJ's autopsy. He walks through his credentials and experience.
Rogers said he learned about MJ's death while at a conference, "Somebody passed me a note that Michael Jackson had died", Rogers said.
Rogers, who determined that Jackson's death was a homicide, told the jurors he gave added consideration to detail when determining the cause and manner of the MJ's death because of his stature
Rogers: "Because Michael Jackson was such a prominent individual, there was likely to be a great deal of press attention as well as from members of the public"
A black-and-white photo taken of Jackson's body before autopsy is shown to the jury. It's left on the screen for less than a minute. Rogers said the photo accurately depicted Michael's condition at the time
Rogers testified that the 5-foot, 9-inch MJ weighed 136 pounds at the time of his death and that X-rays showed he suffered from arthritis in his lower spine and fingers
Rogers walks jury through a diagram of puncture wounds and scars on Jackson's body. Punctures consistent w/ lifesaving efforts, he says. The origin of some of the scars couldn't be determined.
Rogers also detailed how Jackson had his lips tattooed pink, his eyebrows and scalp inked with black. There were 3/4-inch scars behind both ears, suggesting he had at least one face lift, according to Rogers
Rogers also testifies about MJ's Vitiligo. Rogers testified that MJ suffered from Vitiligo a disease more common in African Americans, in which some areas of the skin are light and others are dark
"It can be very disfiguring," Rogers said
Rogers said Jackson's post-mortem exam revealed no heart disease or Lupus, the autoimmune disease that some, Dr. Arnold Klein, have attributed to Michael
Rogers said the MJ was in good health before his untimely 2009 death at the hands of Dr. Conrad Murray
"If not for his death by propofol, Jackson's health appeared good enough for him to live a normal lifespan", Rogers testified.
"There was no indication from the autopsy that there was anything anatomically wrong with him that would lead to premature death," Rogers said
Koskoff asks Rogers about condition of MJ's body. Koskoff asked whether Jackson's body had any characteristics of a street drug addict. (Disease, track marks, liver damage.) Rogers says "No". Rogers also testifies about the condition of Jackson's organs. All were in good shape, other than some lung issues.
Rogers explained why he concluded that Jackson died from a propofol overdose. Koskoff asked Rogers whether his conclusions regarding Jackson's death have changed, "No" he responded.
Koskoff: "Would a fit, competent doctor administer propofol for insomnia?" Rogers: "I would not expect that, no"
Rogers also shot down suggestions that Jackson self-administered his lethal dose of propofol, a cornerstone theory of Murray's defense.
"One possibility that we considered is that he might have given an overdose of propofol to himself. However based on the history that was available, I don't believe that that happened", Rogers said
Partial court transcript

submitted by FelicitySmoak_ to MichaelJackson [link] [comments]

2023.05.02 16:58 mister_gnaw Password

Back when we’d just started dating, the first member of her family my wife introduced me to was her grandfather.
This was a deliberate decision on her part.
Her grandfather was a career military man. Even into his old age, he still carried the broad shoulders, barrel chest and tree trunk arms that had made him so formidable during his decades in the armed forces. He’d seen combat twice — first in World War II, then Korea, the latter of which had left him with a stiff hip and limping walk from a hit of shrapnel to the leg, which somehow only elevated his rugged steadiness to the world.
From his manner of speaking down to his style of dress — crisp white shirts, khaki pants, polished shoes — her grandfather fully looked the part of a military man. My wife told me that once a week he would take clippers to his head and shear his hair down to a stern buzzcut. He wore no watches or jewelry. He was frugal to a fault. When his old Ford sedan broke down, he went out and bought an identical car in the same color, so that no neighbors would think him flashy for the gratuitous act of purchasing a new car once a decade. He attended Catholic mass twice a week. He did not suffer fools, vegetarians or "artistic" types. He often said Ronald Reagan was the greatest president in American history.
All of this is to say that if you had to vote for which family member would be the most open-minded when it came to introducing your lesbian girlfriend, he probably wouldn’t be your first choice.
“But he won’t care anymore,” said Samantha, my girlfriend at the time, now my wife. “I honestly doubt if he even knows who I am now.”
We were in the car, Samantha driving, me sitting in the passenger seat, looking out the open window as I tried to think of the proper thing to say in response. We were on our way to her grandfather’s memory care facility so I could meet him for the first time.
The whole thing felt so surreal. I had never known anyone with Alzheimer’s, and it was hard to know how to behave in the face of it. As Samantha was explaining her grandfather’s situation to me — how he’d been diagnosed a year earlier, and how he’d since suffered a rapid decline and had been moved to a memory care facility across town — her tone of voice had remained detached, as if she were discussing someone she’d barely known, rather than the man who had read bedtime stories to her as a child.
And then there was another ingredient to the recipe of emotions in which we’d been marinading during that car ride, which was: for us, there was a positive aspect to his disease, in that we could tell him we were together – as in, romantically – without fear that he would go on to tell anyone else. Without fear that he would even remember. If things went poorly, we might even come back a day later and try again with him, using a different set of phrases or tones of voice, until we’d gotten it down as smoothly as possible, before telling the rest of Samantha’s family.
So this meeting with her demented grandfather, cruel as it now sounds, was nothing more than a practice run.
“Is there anything I should know before we get there?” I asked Samantha.
“I mean… not really?” she said, touching the steering wheel barely with just her fingertips as we followed the curved roads through a stretch of evergreen trees. “Honestly, Cara, it won’t matter, because he’s changed so much in the last few months. He’s like a totally different person now.”
I looked out the window, watching the unfamiliar wilderness pass us by.
I should mention here, this was the mid ‘90s. Bill Clinton had signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into law the year prior. The first legal lesbian marriage in America, which still wasn’t recognized by the federal government, wouldn’t happen for nearly another decade.
So I felt nervous.
And I suppose my nervousness was only heightened by the fact that, at that time, Samantha remained a shadow to me, someone I was drawn to in ways I could not quite explain, yet someone whom I also did not fully understand. We were so different on paper. She was born here in this rural Ohio town, while I’d grown up in a big city five states away. Her style was lipstick and sundresses, mine baggy jeans and hoodies. The fact that she’d chosen to date me, out of all the other girls at our small folksy college, was a source of constant bafflement to me. She was my first real girlfriend, and I wanted nothing more than to crawl inside her and live there forever. If she would’ve told me to get on my knees and bark like a dog, I probably would’ve done it. I was young and didn’t even know who I was, let alone what it meant to tether yourself to another.
So I just sat there and looked out the passenger side window, trying to spot the patterns of this new environment that would hopefully become familiar to me one day.
And just as quickly as the scenery passed us by, so did the years.
That car ride occurred more than two decades ago now. Yet I can’t stop thinking about that day: the day when I met her grandfather for the first, and only, time.
The day when I saw the most horrifying expression of fear I'd ever seen in another human.
The day when I watched a man begin to die.
It doesn’t help that, for years, Samantha has told the story of this day at dinner parties and get-togethers with our friends and acquaintances in the city. The story works for this particular crowd: the so-called bohemian groups in which we’ve found ourselves most at home. These are our people, the ones who harbor their own stories of growing up in a place that wanted nothing to do with them. The stories are always played for laughs, no matter how bleak. It’s a skill we’ve come to master. Usually, during these dinner party reconciliations with our pasts, Samantha will wait for some of the others to tell their own personal version of it – a mother who responded to the news by kicking them out of the house, for example, or a sibling who still won’t speak to them all these years later.
That’s when Samantha, cradling a glass of wine in her hand, will sit up and laugh.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she’ll say. “Did I ever tell you the story of how Cara killed my grandfather?”
—
Her grandfather’s memory care facility was a plain one-story brick building with squat trees planted around the parking lot. When we arrived, we pulled into a spot in the back and sat still for a minute or so.
“You ready?” Samantha finally asked.
I nodded, even though I could feel my heart beating through my fingertips.
We got out of the car and walked across the parking lot. At the entrance of the facility, we were met by two old women sitting on a bench, a dog curled up on a mat at their feet.
“Hi there,” I said to them, holding up a hand.
The women didn’t seem to notice us at all. The dog, meanwhile, kept looking at me as I passed through the sliding glass doors at the entrance, its teeth just barely visible beyond the slop of its lips.
The automatic doors slid closed behind us after we stepped inside. We found ourselves in a waiting room area, where a woman with red hair sat behind a front desk. The woman knew Samantha from her prior visits and asked how she was doing, before pressing a buzzer to unlock the door beside her.
Through this door we entered an identical room, where another woman with red hair sat waiting behind an identical desk.
For a moment, my mind suffered a hiccup of sorts, an immediate déjà vu from one second to the next, as if we were repeating the exact same moment from which we’d just emerged. But I realized this must’ve just been how the building had been arranged for security reasons, the two rooms serving as a double layer of protection for a group of confused men and women prone to wandering off.
That the second woman looked the same as the first was simply a coincidence.
The second woman smiled at us, her eyelashes glossy and curled. Then she buzzed us through, and we entered the facility proper.
“It’s this way,” Samantha said.
But I knew that already, because there was only one way to go.
I thought we’d been transported inside a hotel as we stepped through the doorway. Even the air smelled different. Old vacuum cleaner fumes, carpet stain remover and disinfectant. But fancy, somehow. Paintings on the walls of oceans and cliffs.
The first room we entered was a lobby area – much like a hotel lobby. Soft, old-timey music floated from a radio in the corner, and old bodies had been arranged in armchairs and rocking chairs around the room. These were some of the residents, elderly men and women. Some showed their conditions plainly, with mouths agape and heads slumped forward. Others looked around the room randomly, as if following the flight patterns of angels. A few seemed perfectly normal, sitting calmly with blankets draped over their legs or shoulders, others wearing woolen caps over their heads.
The only person standing was a much younger man, who had positioned himself at the front of the room. I guessed he was in his early 30s. He wore the same grey scrubs that I’d seen some of the other facility staff members wearing, and when we walked in, he was reading loudly from a sheet of paper he held in his hands. At first, I assumed this was a game of trivia or bingo of some sort, because the younger man was reading aloud questions to the group.
“What the name of the thing you peel off an apple?” he said in a loud, steady voice, as we walked by the group.
But I realized there were no score boards for the residents, nor did there seem to be rounds or prizes. The younger man, it appeared, was simply asking questions – basic, easy questions, fit for a toddler. To win the game, evidently, was to come up with the answer to just one of them, a task that none of the wrinkled, sunken individuals seated around the room seemed capable of achieving.
“One more time,” the young staff member said. I had paused by the wall to hear him. “What is the name of the thing you peel off an apple? Anyone?” When no one responded, he looked down at the sheet, as if needing to confirm the answer. “The skin, yes… the skin. Okay gang, next question,” he said, looking up at the group with a big smile. “What are the fluffy white things that float in the sky? Fluffy white things? They can look like different shapes, and they give shade?” When, again, the question was met with silence, he said, “Yes, the answer is clouds… clouds. Okay one more – what is the kind of word you say to enter a secret place — "
“Hey, Cara?” Samantha was a few steps ahead of me now, looking back over her shoulder.
"Oh, sorry," I said, and I turned away from the group of elderly residents and followed her down the hallway.
A long corridor stretched out before us, with rooms on either side – again, much like a hotel hallway. But the doors to each of these rooms were unique in that they were split horizontally at their centers, similar to the swivel doors you would see in a cowboy saloon. The top half of the door could swing open independently, while the bottom half, I realized, were all locked from the inside, so that many of the upper halves of rooms were easy to look in — scenes of old men and women sitting on couches, watching TV, dozing in bed — without allowing the residents to stumble out on their own.
“I know it’s small, but he really seems to like it here,” Samantha said as we passed the rooms, which felt more like enclosures to me, pens for old zoo animals. “Just try not to be weirded out if my grandfather acts strange around you.”
“Strange how?”
“Oh, just… you know, strange in general. I don’t really know how to describe it."
We stopped at the end of the hall and turned left, which happened to be the only way to turn, and headed toward where his room was located near the back.
I knew this corridor was only one half of the memory care facility. Samantha had already told me the building was split in two. This side, where her grandfather lived, was the better side, the one reserved for the residents who were calm and did not fight or scream at the staff. This allowed for more freedoms, like access to hobby materials, more open movement and less constant oversight. But there was a separate entrance for the other side of the facility. The other side, which I never saw, was structured more like a prison, Samantha had said, full of lunatics raging at their ghosts, their delusions and fractured memories.
The second side, she’d added, was soundproofed.
When we got to her grandfather’s room, Samantha slipped off her personality and put on a new one.
“Hi Granddad,” she cooed gently as we stopped at her grandfather’s room, her lacquered fingertips tapping out a soft knock on the bottom half of his door. She turned the knob and let herself in, saying, “It’s your favorite granddaughter Samantha here, stopping by to say hi… and look, I’ve brought a friend!”
If I had to describe my feelings in that moment, it would be true to say I did not know what to expect before meeting her grandfather. But it would also be true to say I did have a vague approximation in my mind. The grandfather I’d envisioned had been thin and frail. He would be lying in bed, propped up perhaps, his mouth hung open like a fish gasping at air. Wrinkled and deformed, his limbs too fragile to touch, he would behold us with a pale face and blank, distant eyes.
That was not the man I found when I entered the room.
“Well, look who’s here,” said the man seated on a stool in the center of the room.
His voice, it filled the space around us. He was not wearing a thin hospital gown, as I’d expected, nor the stiff khaki pants and starched button-up shirt of the military man Samantha had described to me on the car ride here. Instead, he wore jeans and a casual white T shirt. In his right hand he held a paintbrush, his body facing an easel on which a canvas rested. The man’s posture was perfectly straight; his shoulders appeared broad and muscular; his hair was gray but thick and long, falling nearly down to his shoulders, gleaming with the radiance of an aged movie star. Gently, he set down the paint brush on an artist’s pallet beside him and turned his body to face us.
Only then did I notice he was wearing sandals.
“Granddad?” said Samantha. “I’d – um, I’d like to introduce you to someone. This is my very close friend, Cara.”
Her grandfather brushed his hands on his jeans before reaching out to introduce himself. “I am Robert Stevens. It is a pleasure and delight to meet you, Cara.”
I took his hand, feeling his soft grip as he made eye contact with me. And he had kind eyes, I thought. And I also thought: These are eyes that are seeing me right now. At this point in my life, I’d met a handful of very elderly people, some of whom seemed to have been squinting through a cloud of hazy decades as they looked at me, but not this man. If our era is defined by how easily we fit into a particular moment, then this was a thoroughly modern man. He could’ve been in magazines. Had you told me this was a person deep in the dim, murky throes of memory loss, I would not have believed you.
“My, you are quite beautiful, young lady,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so.”
I’ll admit it — when his hand slid out from mine, I blushed.
“No, that’s… very nice of you to say,” I mumbled.
“Truly a sight for sore eyes, especially here in this den of geezers like me!” and he laughed, standing up effortlessly from his stool with the agility of a man half his age. “Well, come in, come in… rest your weary legs, you two. And for what do I owe the privilege of this visitation?” he asked, lowering his body stylishly into the armchair in the corner.
Samantha took a seat on a small couch by the wall, and when I did the same, stepping around the easel and stool, I saw what her grandfather had been painting. On the canvas was a cresting wave of calligraphy, the words “WE WERE BURIED THEREFORE WITH HIM” painted in beautiful strokes of black ink. The words were elegantly scripted, as perfect as any typography I’d ever seen.
All over the walls of his room, I only then noticed, were other canvases with similarly graceful brushstrokes. I had ignored them as merely decoration when we’d first entered the room, but now I realized they were all from his hand. Some of the calligraphy I recognized as Bible verses. Others were names. Bethany. Luke. Melinda. Sebastian. Each name written in such a way that it appeared more portrait than word, although I’m aware how little sense this makes, yet believe me when I say this is how I saw it. Then, one of the canvases showed only a minimalistic drawing of a bird, its wings opening, soaring with an invisible wind.
The rest of the space was basic, from what I remember now. Off in the corner was a desk and a chair. A small TV on a stand. A dresser and a mirror. Then two doorways, one leading into a bedroom, the other leading into a bathroom. (A comb was resting beside the sink in that bathroom, a detail that stands out in my memory, though I can’t think of any reason why it should.)
The whole arrangement was so small, so lonely, I would later think, for a man who would loom so large in my memory all these years later.
“Can I get you two anything to drink? Coffee, water?” Samantha’s grandfather asked, draping one leg over the other as he settled back in the armchair. He sat like a kind professor, or, I would think, like a relaxed talk show host. “I apologize that I’m fresh out of Dom Perignon champagne, but I hear the tap water here is a fair substitute.”
Samantha said, “No, we’re fine, Granddad.” Then she placed her hand over mine. "Actually, the reason I stopped by is, I wanted to introduce you to Cara here.”
“Well, I’m glad you did. She seems swell as a summer afternoon spent on the porch during a rainstorm.”
“She is, Granddad. Really swell. In fact, she’s my girlfriend.”
He nodded, his face calm. The words moved through him like air. “A friend is always good to have,” he said. “If either of them falls down, one can help the other. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.”
“Well, yes, but Granddad?” Now Samantha took her other hand and placed it over mine, squeezing in a way that felt, even then, practiced or learned somehow, as if she’d seen it in a movie. Or perhaps it was the particular angle of her posture, the strangely adult tone to her voice. Or the way she leaned forward and pulled me toward her on the couch, just enough to make me shift my body to face a direction I wasn’t facing. “I mean she’s my girlfriend girlfriend… romantically,” Samantha said. “We’re dating, Granddad, and we love each other.”
I watched her grandfather’s face, feeling my throat tighten. We’d never said we loved each other before. Of course, if she would have said it, I would have said it back, and I thought I did feel a flood of warmth in that moment. It was only later I realized how disorienting it was to hear those words for the first time spoken in front of me, but not to me.
“We love each other, Granddad,” she repeated. “We love each other very much.”
—
Often, when she tells this story at a dinner party or other social function all these years later, this is where Samantha pauses. She’ll take great care to describe the ensuing scene in her grandfather’s room.
“You should’ve seen the look on my grandfather’s face,” she’ll say. “Imagine a 75-year-old devout Catholic Republican hearing that. It was like telling him I was a salamander or a raccoon. His brain, God bless him, just could not compute.”
People laugh, we all drink our wine, and then we sigh over the collective sadness in our pasts.
From there, Samantha usually speeds through the rest of the story. She’ll explain how her grandfather broke down and screamed at me, how the staff had to restrain him and pull him back into an intervention room. All of that — factually speaking, at least — is accurate. He was transferred that week to the other side of the memory care facility, the dangerous side, and it wasn’t long before he stopped accepting food or water.
He died three weeks after meeting me.
At this point in the story, Samantha will make sure to point out that of course she doesn’t truly believe I “killed her grandfather” as she’d originally joked. We all know the real reason was due to his illness. A sudden deterioration like that or drastic change in personality is usually a sign that an infection has led to delirium, according to the doctors. Unfortunately, the illness is only measured by the observable behavioral symptoms of the afflicted. One cannot scan the brain or carve open the skull to see its progress. Most likely, that moment had been building up within his brain for weeks, for months, for years even, a rising tide of neural plaque that had finally reached a chemical threshold — and spilled forth.
That it happened the moment Samantha told him the truth of our relationship is just another example of life’s affinity for peculiar sadness.
But I don’t blame Samantha for telling the story as a comedy. Some of our friends joke about their spouses who died of AIDS back during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years. Or they riff about their family members or job opportunities that have shunned them. Because what else can you do? It’s best to learn to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Outsiders might think Samantha cruel for the way she told that story, as if she were making fun of her grandfather’s death, but everyone in our group understood she was coping with a difficult love in the only way she could.
The only part that bothers me is how easily she tells it.
As if she enjoys it.
“I didn’t ask to be born in Ohio,” she always says at the end of the story, laughing.
Lately, I’ve been feeling uncomfortable in the spaces I occupy. The cylinders I pass through in the city’s concrete public infrastructure feel too biological, too instinctively burrowed. The cars and individuals on the streets look like bloated worms. Scaffolding on the sides of buildings are mangled spiderwebs, insects trapped within their architecture. Our business and commercial districts, ant colonies. When I look out our apartment window, I see a corpse being devoured in a million increments, while somehow building itself anew with fungus and parasites, even as what it was decomposes, over and over. Forgetting itself each time. Forgetting where it came from, what it was. Forgetting where it’s going.
I realize now that I knew from the start it wasn’t right. I’d just always assumed I had nowhere else to go. That no one would want me. And then, decades gone by. Where would I go now?
These days, whenever we have friends over, it’s usually later in the evening, when I’ve stopped moving enough to remember how I feel. We’re all wearing designer clothes while projecting our opinions at one another over wooden slabs overflowing with shaved meats, cheeses and pickled vegetables. The windows of our 12th-floor apartment overlook the blurry lights of the nighttime city rippling in all its currents and bisecting arteries. It’s funny, because I remember how anxious and shaky Samantha was when we’d first moved to the city together in our early 20s. “It’s so loud,” she kept saying on our first night. “I can’t think. I miss trees and silence.” Now she sits by the framed window in her armchair so effortlessly, swirling her glass of 20-year-old red wine so calmly, wearing her past like a fashionable outfit, light as silk.
“But that’s all behind us,” she says. “Anywho, shall we tempt fate and open another bottle of Cabernet?”
I can’t explain to her how heavy I feel all the time.
So whenever she tells that story about the day I met her grandfather, I don’t say anything.
I sit there, like a stone at the bottom of a pond.
All these years, I’ve never once corrected her.
I’ve never said, “That’s not how it happened, Samantha. You didn’t see him. You left the room. I was alone with him. You didn’t see what happened at all.”
—
What I remember now, most of all, were the old man’s eyes, how they held over my face for a moment as Samantha’s words lingered in the air.
“We love each other, Granddad,” she’d said. “We love each other very much.”
For now, her grandfather’s mouth opened and closed. He began to nod, although by the way he glanced from my face to Samantha’s, I couldn’t tell if he understood what she’d said. He looked back at me again, as if for confirmation, and it was his eyes, dark brown and reflecting the light of the room, that I remember now. That I can’t forget.
“Love is a beautiful thing,” he mumbled. “Let love and faithfulness never leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God.”
Without warning, he stood, walked over to his easel, and lowered himself down on the stool.
“Do tell me,” he said, glancing back to Samantha, and he picked up his paintbrush as he did so: “What is her middle name?”
Samantha let go of my hand. She didn’t seem to know what to do. Her body fluttered between action. “I’m sorry, but… Granddad, did you hear me? What I said?”
“Her middle name,” he repeated, now sliding the canvas off the easel and replacing it with a fresh one from a stack off the floor. “And yes, I can hear you fine, young lady. I’m not so old I’ve gone deaf — not yet, at least, ha ha!” He positioned the canvas carefully, then looked at both of us.
Samantha was staring at me now, raising her eyebrows. “Well, Granddad,” she said, turning her gaze toward him, “I was just trying to tell you something. About Cara and me, and I’m not sure if you quite — oh, shoot — just a second… crap — ”
Her words were interrupted by the alarm of her beeper, buzzing at her hip, which she unclipped from her belt and then glanced down at the screen.
“My mom,” she said to me, holding it up so I could the words glowing on the small screen. “It’s a ‘911 emergency’ so you mind holding the fort for a second while I find a payphone?”
“Everything okay?”
“She’s a drama queen so I’m sure it’s nothing.” Samantha was already standing, heading toward the door. “Just ask him about his paintings and stuff. I’ll be back in a second — ”
She left us alone in the room, the bottom half of her grandfather’s door slamming shut.
Then it was just the two of us now, our eyes looking into one another’s.
“You can tell me, you know,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s OK, my dear. I’m here to listen to you.”
I was sitting on the couch, the old man on the stool a few feet across the carpet from me.
“Sorry, I — I don’t know what you… want…”
He leaned close to me. Then whispered, “I’ll keep it a secret. I won’t tell a soul.” And now he angled his paintbrush over the blank canvas. “Your middle name,” he said. “You can trust me with it.”
“Oh — ” I sat back, my body relaxing. I could feel words spilling out of my mouth now. “Yeah, um, sure, yes, it’s — "
“Ah ah ah! Make sure you mean it first,” he said, waving his paintbrush over my face. “Don’t just throw it around, young lady.”
“Throw what around?” I said. “My middle name?”
“Exactly,” and now he tapped the end of his brush on his head, his long gray hair cascading around his smiling cheeks. “Consider, for a moment, how many people in the world know it: your middle name, that is. A handful? More? Less?”
I hadn’t thought about it. But when I tried to count how many, it couldn’t have been more than five, maybe ten people. Even my cousins and childhood friends didn’t know it.
“And what about her?” he asked. He nodded at the closed half-door, the almost imaginary barrier that separated him from the outside world, through which Samantha had just slipped. “That other girl you're with. She doesn’t know, does she?”
“No, she doesn’t,” I said, and I knew it was true when I said it.
“Some love, huh?”
He stood up from his stool again. He walked two steps over to me and sat down on the floor beside my feet, so smoothly I thought he could’ve been my own age. What had happened to the wartime shrapnel in his hip Samantha had told me about, which had caused him to limp? It was as if he’d dissolved it with his mind, by simply ignoring that version of himself. Now he looked up at me the way I imagine a boy looks up at the girl he loves.
And he said, “Let’s trade, young lady. Our middle names. I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.”
In the years that have gone by since this moment, I’ve spent many nights researching the characteristics of individuals suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s or other related diseases, especially in men, and especially when it comes to the language and motor abilities of those afflicted.
Nowhere do any of the symptoms match the man I spoke with that day.
The clarity of his brown eyes, holding over mine, as he reached up to touch my hand.
“Only if you’re comfortable,” he whispered in my ear.
I breathed, in and out.
“Lily,” I said.
He breathed back at me, gentle as a touch. “That is lovely. May I paint it?”
“Yes,” I said. I would’ve told him anything.
(Why, though? I’ve thought about that for years, haven’t it?)
He rose, walked back to his easel, picked up his paintbrush. His eyes squinted as he dipped his brush in ink. Then the old man began touching it in swirls over the canvas without a thought seeming to pass through his head, as natural as a tree swaying in the breeze.
When he was finished, he showed me, and I laughed.
“What?” he said. “Too literal?”
“No, no,” and as I took the canvas in my hands, he winked at me, which was somehow charming for a man his age.
Holding the canvas, I looked at the black brushstrokes of the petals blooming over white, the stem stretching, the roots relaxing. I couldn’t have told someone then what differentiated a lily from other flowers, but I was sure this was right. This was perfect. He’d written “Lily” at the bottom of the flower, and I don’t know why I started crying.
“This is beautiful,” I told him, in between laughs and choked sobs.
“Thank you, my dear.”
“But what about you?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“You said we’d trade,” I said to him. “I tell you mine, you tell me yours.”
“Ah! That is so. Well, I am a man of my word.”
“So?”
“Francis,” he said.
I nodded at him, wiping the remnants of tears from my eyes. “Francis… OK, then.”
Then I said, “Could you paint that for me too?”
Samantha’s grandfather’s name was Robert. He’d told me when introducing himself when we’d first entered his room not more than a half hour earlier, and I would hear it later from the doctors who told Samantha’s family about his rapidly plummeting condition. During his Catholic funeral mass a few weeks later, which I attended with Samantha, he was eulogized as the late United States Marine Corp. Lt. Col. Robert Stevens.
But from this moment on, when we were alone in that room together, I only remember him as Francis.
“But Francis? That’s an ugly name,” he said, leaning back on his stool, grinning at me. “Not fitting for the company of a beautiful Lily.”
“I’d like to see it on the canvas,” I said. “I think it’s pretty.”
“Well, my lovely lady, if you insist.”
He switched out the canvas of the Lily flower from the easel, placing it carefully on a drying rack near the door, then put a new canvas on the easel, dipped his brush in ink, and he began to paint —
F
R
A
N
— and each letter was perfectly scripted, the brushstrokes smooth and delicate as he continued painting the last three letters of the name, until he was finished, and he sat back, smiling at the canvas.
But a second passed, and his smile disappeared.
“Well, now that’s… oh, no!… ha ha, no, that’s not right,” he said. “How foolish! Misspelling my own middle name! What an embarrassment for the old codger!”
Laughing as he switched out the canvas with a fresh one, he said:
“Francis, I meant to write. Francis — ha! At my age, sweetheart, you find your hand and your noggin can get a bit shaky. Perhaps one too many martinis in my youth, no?”
He settled the new canvas on the easel, his hands steady.
“Now then,” and his brush moved smoothly over the empty canvas, the letters appearing as if in air as he painted:
F
R
A
N
—until he’d finished the last three letters of the word with a smooth flourish of his brush.
“And there you have it, young lady. Francis! My very own — …no, but that’s… that’s not…”
He looked at the canvas. He sat there and looked at it.
It was the same word he’d written before, this time the strokes thicker and more elegant, even more beautiful, the most perfect and artfully painted word I’d ever seen from a human hand — but still, the same word. The same word.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “We don’t have to — ”
“No no no,” he said, wagging his finger at me. “I’ll get it right. I believe that’s what’s called a senior moment, is it not? Just a… just a… Well, ha ha, third time’s the charm!”
This time, he threw the spent canvas across the room with a shocking force until it crashed into the wall and landed on the floor face-down, the fresh ink staining the carpet. Then he thrust the fresh canvas in place before him so hard I thought the easel’s flimsy wooden legs would topple. He stretched out his own legs wide and exhaled deeply out his nose, grunting. He waited a moment, dipping his brush in ink, gazing at the blank white space as if considering his own distorted reflection. Only then did he begin to paint.
F
He was slow, the brush licking the white space with its black tongue.
R
His shoulders were shaking, but his hand steady.
A
His mouth hanging open. Sweat dripping down his face.
N
His breath heavy and gasping.
Choking.
Coughing.
I told you, it was his eyes I remember. It was the way they squinted at first, then opened wide as his brush formed the next letter, the fifth letter. Then the sixth letter. And then, the seventh, final letter. Until he was done. The word was painted. There was nothing more to do. His eyes were fixed and unblinking, looking at the canvas before him, and I’ve spent years wondering what he must’ve seen on that blank white space around his brushstrokes. Why his mouth opened so wide. Why his entire body began shaking the way it did.
It was as if he were looking through a doorway, seeing something on the other side, something that had been waiting for him all along.
The paintbrush slipped from his hand.
It rolled off his thighs, staining his jeans, and landed on the carpet at his feet.
I watched as Francis leaned back on the edge of his stool. He did not make a sound. By now he’d gone more than a minute without blinking, and tears were pouring from his eyes. His pupils were massive, the whites of his eyes turned red and bloodshot from the sight of the single word he’d painted three times in a row now, the single word burning on the canvas before him:
f r a n t i c
Then he turned around, looked me in the eyes, and screamed.
—
Samantha’s parents picked us up from the memory care facility that afternoon.
“This is Cara,” Samantha said when introducing me to her mom and dad. “One of my friends from college.”
We’d decided, after her grandfather’s episode, that we should wait to tell them about us.
That night, her mother drove us home while her father drove Samantha’s car. That earlier beeper message Samantha had received — the beeper message which had sent her rushing out of her grandfather’s room, leaving me alone to watch him fall apart, before the facility staff had carried him off — that beeper message had been from her mother about what we’d wanted for dinner.
Spaghetti, it turned out.
We ate together at the family’s small kitchen table with the TV on, and they reassured us that the doctors had said it was only an episode and Granddad would be fine, they were positive.
In truth, he would be transferred to the other side of the memory care facility the next morning. Another three weeks, and he would be dead. Inexplicable, the doctors said. But that night we could still believe nothing had changed. Swirling spaghetti in our fork tines, slurping sauce.
“So tell me,” Samantha’s mother said, in between bites of pre-frozen meatballs, “have either of you met any cute boys at school?”
-
We slept in the basement on the pullout couch that night. I doubted her parents would’ve been OK with that had they known about us. The basement smelled like dust and old air freshener, air Samantha had breathed her whole life, but it felt heavy and thick around my body. I couldn’t sleep. As she slept beside me, I tried to lie still, the metal pullout mattress squeaking every time I moved. The stiff cushions and the arms of the couch held us on either side.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I must’ve fallen asleep, because I had a dream in which everything no longer fit together. It was a dream of shapes and gaps, volume and space, only all the angles were just barely out of reach to touch and form a whole — as if a word or gesture could snap them into place, a password I knew but had forgotten — and I tried and tried to shape my paralyzed mouth to form the right word; I tried to grunt out the air that would make the word into sound; I kept trying until I awoke, letting out a dumb shout as I sat up on the brittle metal spine of the pullout mattress, choking on the dusty air.
The basement was dark, only a soft beam of moonlight cutting through the tiny ground-level window at the ceiling. Distantly, I could hear crickets outside, a noise as strange as angels singing to me.
Samantha sighed in her sleep beside me, shifting her body under the thin summer sheet.
I looked down at her face. Her hair fell over her cheek, and I moved it aside, revealing her soft cheekbones.
“Do you really love me?” I whispered.
Her arms were curled up, her body pressed against me.
Then my heart was pounding in my chest from one second to the next, and I felt the sudden urge to wake her up, to not be alone down here.
“Samantha!” I shook her shoulders, not so hard but not gently either. “Samantha… wake up… please wake up…” My fingers pressed into her skin as I pulled her toward me.
All she did was mumble, “Hmm — wha — huh?” Her voice came from the bottom of her throat. Her eyes stayed closed as I lifted her head an inch off the pillow.
And I said to her, “What’s my middle name? Do you know? Do you know me? Do know who I am?”
But when I let go of her shoulders, she rolled over on the mattress, turning away from me, and she was already fully asleep again, breathing softly against the couch cushions.
xxx

submitted by mister_gnaw to nosleep [link] [comments]

2023.05.01 15:55 Morganguy My cousin was murdered a week and a half ago a Please help support my aunt and his kids

Hi,
Thank you for reading this. My cousin, Todd, was murdered in his home nearly 2 weeks ago. It was an isolated incident and we are still searching for his murderer.
Todd has two children who are 4 and 10. While he had life insurance and things set up for them my aunt is left dealing with all of the funeral costs and costs to get his body back to Michigan as this happened in Ohio. She works as a teachers aid in a school and is obviously missing work to deal with this tragedy. She is left taking care of his funeral and dealing with all other aspects of losing a child. She will have to travel back and forth to Ohio multiple times and taking off work over who knows how many months.
Please consider helping with these unexpected expenses. This go fund me is also being used to raise money for his children.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-sandy-morgan-family?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&fbclid=IwAR2A2N7yapBZFE1bBsKALsIafLeEOU_MFQTZ3TarnL-GuPZNlPWTbcM4QxE
https://fox8.com/news/csu-professors-murder-i-teams-new-findings/amp/

submitted by Morganguy to gofundme [link] [comments]

2023.04.30 12:35 rickjames_experience BEAVER COUNTY JANE DOE

Editors note: This is my first ever serious write-up for this sub. I've been a long time lurker and I'm about to start a YouTube channel revolving around true crime and the such. I figured why not post write-ups of some of my upcoming videos to correspond with when I post my videos on my YouTube channel. This is not for entertainment, this is for spreading the word about this poor woman and her dreadful case. Any advice or criticism is duly appreciated.
To the mods: i resubmitted the write up and fixed the links and they should be fine now. Theres two 3rd party sources in the articles #1 and #2 links. I dont know it the other two links counts as 3rd party sources but I put them there anyways cause that's where I found my information from my research. Now, to the case.
▪︎THE DISCOVERY ▪︎
On a freezing December 12th, 2014 in Economy borough, Pennsylvania, a teenager was walking home down a country road through the woods. On his way there, he stumbled upon not just something bizarre and gruesome, but just a damn downright mind-boggling scene.
Less than 50ft off of a wooded area beside Mason Road, a severed human head lay on its side. It was estimated the head had been there for around 1 week but could have been there for up to 4 weeks. For reference: Mason Road is a rural, two-lane way and that is accessible from Interstate 79 (Pennsylvania Turnpike) and also from State Route 65.
The teen called the police, and nonchalantly said to the dispatcher "I found a human head." Confused officers curiously made their way to the scene in the open countryside. What they were seeing made very little sense to them. The head was laying on its side, with no body in sight and no indication of where the it could possibly be. There was nothing pointing to how it came to rest there.

 ▪︎THE JANE DOE HEADS APPEARANCE▪︎

There was nothing normal about the head found in the countryside that day. The head was that of a caucasian woman in her 60s. Her Namus profile lists her possible age as 40yrs-80yrs, (but in my opinion 80 is shooting pretty high if you ask me). She had waxy skin and curled gray/partially grey hair in what looked similar style for burial preparations. Her eyes were more than curios, considering the eyelids where kept closed by plastic caps. However, there were no eyes underneath. In their place, red rubber pellets sat in either socket.
Despite all of this, possibly the most important issue of all was that the head was completely embalmed. Who would discard something so easily when they had been obviously caring for it beforehand. The bigger question is where they could've gotten it or taken it from and why it ended up being left out here.
Authorities came to the conclusion that the recently (or at the very least, semi-recently) embalmed head must have originated from maybe a mortuary or a funeral home. This told investigators that she was less likely to be a victim of foul play before her death.They also looked into the possibility of any human graves being desecrated recently. However, they were not completely excluding the chance that the body was "interfered with" en route to the cemetery/before burial. They also believe that whoever removed her head had some type of anatomical knowledge beforehand that aided them in this task.
▪︎SEARCH FOR WHO THE DOE COULD BE▪︎
The suspicion that local graves could have been desecrated went nowhere. The authorities then turned to getting DNA from the body, hoping that would help the Doe get her name and her dignity back like so many others. Who knows, maybe they even find her killer.
The embalming had messed with the chances of extracting much DNA from the womans head, so authorities were having a trouble finding any type of match in national databases. The rubber pellets in her eye sockets suggested some sort of organ donor program or situation, maybe even medical research. Sadly, a DNA database didnt exist for donors of organs to medical research or transplantation purposes have their information protected by privacy laws.
The family are also assumed not to have reported their family member missing, based on no matches with DNA programs and fitting any missing persons/unidentified decedents description.
The Conclusion
As of April 29th, 2023, the womans severed head has still been unidentified. Not even her full set of teeth helped with any clues from comparisons with other missing persons. She is remarked as having a "recognizable face".
Time is running out as the authorities plan to bury the Beaver County Jane Doe soon due to lack of any movement in the case. Before burying her, they decided to run some tests on her remains with the dwindling time they have left.
According to tests IsoForensics had conducted at their headquarters in Salt Lake City, isotopes in the woman’s remains showed that she had spent her last seven months moving between Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. The woman most likely grew up in Western Pennsylvania, somewhere south of Beaver County. It was announced that traces of a medication used to treat heart failure was found in her system and she may have passed away from a heart condition. It was also announced during a news conference Monday morning that toxicology tests also showed trace amounts of Lidocaine and Atropine in her body, inferring that she was dealing with a chronic cardiac ailment and may have died from it, Economy Borough Police Chief Michael O’Brien said. Foul play is not suspected in her case.
▪︎THEORIES▪︎
• One theory that holds some weight is that a funeral director or someone who works at a funeral home/ mortuary could have taken the head for some reason and ditched it. Don't wanna speculate why they had the head or why they needed to ditch it cause thats beyond what I would even begin to wanna speculate
• Someone stole the head from a funeral home/mortuary/cemetery shortly after its burial and left it on the road for some bizarre reason.
• Somebody with the means to embalm a head after removing the eyes and replacing them with rubber pellets placed the head there for shock value, knowing somebody would come upon it sooner or later.
• The head has some sort of link to the body parts trade. Someone bought the head and from there, that's the end of that.
I honestly couldn't think of any other theories and I would like to hear what you guys think. Let me know kn the comments..
▪︎SOURCES▪︎
○Article#1
○Article#2
○Unidentified-Wikipedia page
○Namus Case File
▪︎EXCLUSIONS▪︎

-Terrie Buhrman
-Amy Pugne
-Rabihan Seiders
-Holly Grim
-Jennifer Cahill-Shadlea

▪︎IMAGES▪︎
○Sketch of Decedent Pre-Mortem
○Clay-Reconstruction 'front facing'
○Clay-Reconstruction 'Side Profile'
○Age-Regressed photograph
EDIT : Changed a few words and spruced up here and there to help with the continuity of the write-up. Thank you to everyone in the comments who politely pointed out the mistakes I made so i could fix them.
This unidentified decedent doesnt just deserve their identity back, but concise and coherent write-ups as well, to bring attention to their cases and hopefully one day help identify them.

submitted by rickjames_experience to UnresolvedMysteries [link] [comments]

2023.04.28 21:30 Gumbybum Lore Discovery: Responder Colonel (Flatwoods) was the same person as the child at The Palace of the Winding Path.

TLDR: See title
Preamble: My original post was going to be about both Colonel and his father. But that post was long as hell so I’m splitting it into 2 parts. Part 1 will be about Colonel and part 2 is about his dad.
Implicit biases: If you’ve ever listened to the holotape “Survivor’s Story: Colonel” you probably assumed that this 13 year old kid was recently orphaned by the War and that his father was a real piece of work who inflicted some serious psychological trauma on him. You probably also assumed that all of the “bad things” Colonel did were acts he committed in middle school before the war.
Well, I’m here to tell you that Colonel had 2 dads. His bio-dad did die in the War. But it was his post-War adoptive father that screwed him up (more about this garbage human being in part 2). I’m also here to tell you that all of the “bad things” that Colonel did happened post-War when he was in the 1st grade (WHAAAT!?!)
Colonel’s Timeline: I hope you like math! Responder Dassa Ben-Ami “found” Colonel when he was 13 (date not specified). Shortly thereafter, he recorded a Survivor story where he blamed himself for all of the bad things that had happened, and expressed despair over the loss of his dad (big-time father issues). 10 years later, when Colonel was 23, he recorded another holotape. He had obviously grown and matured, gotten over his issues with his dad, and had become a full Volunteer who was taking care of the children of Flatwoods. Colonel ultimately died in a fight with a group of raiders (likely Cutthroats) in November of 2096 (that’s when the terminal entries throughout Flatwoods abruptly stop). The raiders were seeking revenge on Tabitha, who stole all of their food and chems, but that’s not the point of the story.
At the time of his death, Colonel had only recently recorded his 2nd holotape (because it is found on his person, not lying around his house or given to Dassa). So we can conclude that he died in 2096 at the age of 23. This means that Dassa found him in the year 2086, which was exactly the same year Harpers Ferry was taken out by Scorched and when his adoptive dad died (stay tuned for part 2). This also means that during the Great War (2077) he would only have been 4. But more importantly, in the year 2079 he would have been 6 years old.
The Palace of the Winding Path was a post-War school for children: Here are a few details that I’m sure we’ve all overlooked. On the 1st level of the Palace on the North side are 3 dorm-style bedrooms that have a bunch of tiny green bunk beds. I say “tiny” because they’re actually shrunken-down versions of regularly-sized bunk beds. You probably didn’t notice that because you can’t sleep in them (go to Anchor Farm if you want to sleep in a kid’s bed). You also probably overlooked the fact that these 3 rooms are painted in a completely different color scheme than the rest of the Palace. You probably overlooked that detail because it’s dark. There’s a pink room for young girls. A blue room for young boys. And a yellow-greenish room for preschoolers. You probably also overlooked that the Southwest pagoda (I don’t know the name for that room) in the courtyard is actually a classroom. It has pillows and tiny tables and blocks and coloring books…. It’s definitely a classroom for children and not a lecture hall for hippy cultists. And one of the little kids who went to school here liked to play with his stuffed bears at the highest gazebo over the pond. Here’s a lovely little note that child left for us:
“mommy said I cant play at the tempal if theres smok
she said not to play with the scary peeple becuz they ar here to keep us safe from more scary peeple
so i took my baer frends and we ar playing with toys here”
The first thing I want you to notice is how terrible the spelling is. The next thing I want you to notice is the child’s handwriting (I know it’s a font, but work with me). The “scary peeple” he’s referring to are the Diehards (raiders), and the “smok” he’s referring to is the “Spiritual Incense” that’s burned during Guided Meditation. So if this kid was playing with his toys above the pond, then in April of 2079 he was NOT raptured through space and time like the rest of the people there:
“Margie wanted me to file a report with you concerning the incident at the Palace. None of us was there when it happened, but when we came back to the Palace yesterday...
Everyone was gone. Just gone. Like they just up and disappeared. Didn't look like an attack. Nothing was ransacked. No one took anything with 'em. It was friggen spooky, man.”
I’ll cover what happened to this kid from 2079-2086 in Part 2.
Flatwoods: If you go to Flatwoods, there are 3 very important places that pertain to Colonel. The first place is the bell tower in the church where you will find his 1st holotape. You’ll also find that he was playing with bears at the highest point in Flatwoods (I think these bears are depicting him and his adoptive dad scaling the Savage Divide, but I’m not certain). The next important location is the Funeral Home/Meeting Hall. This is the yellow brick building where you will find 3 different notes written by Colonel at different points in his life from 2086-2096. Finally, there’s Colonel’s house. You’ll find his body on his front porch next to a dead raider. You might not have noticed this before because you need Marsupial or a Jetpack to jump up there, and you probably didn’t have those things at level 3 when you first rolled through Flatwoods (honestly, the second holotape will be more relevant in my next post than this one).
The Evidence: The most obvious piece of evidence connecting Colonel to the kid at the Palace is the first note at the Meeting Hall called “Dear Daddy.” It has the exact same handwriting (font) as the Child’s Note back at the Palace. It’s also the same handwriting as the second note “I Miss You, Dad.” The next piece of evidence is Colonel’s first holotape:
“Colonel: Hi… Dassa asked me if I would talk about how I got here. She asked everybody. So I said okay. My name is Colonel, and I'm 13 years old.
I just wanted to say I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything... um... the bombs and the messed up people and the cows with two heads. All of it. I was bad... just bad. I cheated on my spelling test, I kicked Chip Wilkins in the shins until he cried, I pushed Rosie McCloy down the stairs... Um... I cut holes in the bottoms of all the gym shorts, and I put glue in the mashed potatoes in the cafeteria... I told Harold Newell to eat ten dead flies a day in order to grow muscles, and um, I put Nuka-Cola in the rat cage water bottles at the pet store...
And um... I just wanted to say I'm sorry about everything... because my dad said if I wasn't this way then bad things wouldn't happen... I haven't seen daddy since the bombs and so I guess he left because of that too... It's okay, I am trying to be good now though. *sniffles* I'm not old enough to be a Volunteer but Dassa said I could help collect food and water... so I'm getting better, I promise! And um... daddy? If you're listening... I promise I won't be bad anymore so you can come back now. Okay? Okay. Bye. *sniffles*”
There are several things to unpack here. The first thing is “I cheated on my spelling test.” The six year old back at the Palace was obviously atrocious at spelling. The kids that he bullied were just the other kids at the Palace with him. “I cut holes in the bottoms of all the gym shorts.” The Palace has a designated weight lifting area next to the locker room and shower room. People would definitely be wearing gym shorts. “I put glue in the mashed potatoes in the cafeteria.” The Palace literally has a cafeteria on the South side of the 1st level. As for putting “Nuka-Cola in the rat cage water bottles at the pet store,” I have two possible explanations….
Post-War: Raiders have been known to keep mole rats as pets (See: Noodles)). So maybe the “pet store” was just a Trappers’ camp they went to where they could buy a trained mole rat, which would explain why there’s a lonely mole rat at the back of the Palace. Alternatively…
Pre-War: Imagine a little 4 year old shitheel kid running around a pet store on October 23, 2077. He plays a trick on the rats by replacing their water with Nuka-Cola. Then, all of a sudden his mom grabs him by the arm and says, “We need to go. America is being bombed!” In the undeveloped mind of a 4 year old, he may have connected those two events as “cause and effect,” which would explain why he thinks he’s responsible for the bombs.
It’s all in the name, you see: What kind of a name is “Colonel,” anyway? He doesn’t even have a last name! Well, that’s because the name was probably given to him by the Diehards back at the Palace of the Winding Path, because this dude was a little hellion. “Colonel” is one of those Diehard mononyms, like Blackeye or Fishbones or Wren. Margie was likely the one who gave it to him because the McClintock name is Army affiliated (See: Camp McClintock). Speaking of them…
The O.G. Diehards: Meg Groberg (Crater), if you didn’t already know, was actually one of the original members of the Diehards back in the late 2070s. This means that she would have been around when the Diehard crew back at the Palace were protecting all those kids. When you do the Crater missions during Wastelanders, she has this one-off line referring to Ra-Ra: “I’ve always had a soft spot for kids.” This line by itself doesn’t mean much, but it hits differently when you understand the context. But who I really want to talk about right now is Blackeye down at Ohio River Adventure. She was also introduced during Wastelanders, but according to her story, she was also an OG Diehard. As a matter of fact, she was a 1st grade teacher who struggled to get kids to turn in their spelling homework! This lady was totally Colonel’s teacher back at the Palace of the Winding Path before she found her true calling as a Diehard.
Ending the Cycle of Abuse: This is just a closing thought. When Colonel was little, he was strongly influenced by the Raiders at the Palace. This was obviously detrimental to those children's development, and the world was all the worse for it. But this was also Colonel's motivation as a Responder. He knew that the children/orphans of Flatwoods needed a strong, positive role-model. And if he didn't stand up to take care of those kids, then some punk-ass raider would. Or worse, someone like his adoptive father.
Anyway, I rest my case for why Colonel and the kid at the Palace are the same person. I’m still putting the final touches on Part 2 where I’ll disclose who his dad was (and where his body is), and what Colonel was doing from ages 6-13. If you noticed any details that I missed, please let me know. I’d love to hear it.
And if anyone likes what I’ve done here and wants to help me on some of the other lore projects I’m working on, PM me. I play on both Playstation and PC.

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2023.04.27 23:13 crumpledcactus Old West saloons explained (the socio-economics of whiskey, and girls).

So this is a write up, or a shallow dive, into the world of saloons in the old west.
How they worked : Business models (1 bit vs 2 bit)
Saloons were places of socialization. They functioned as meeting places, rest stops, and a 'third space' apart from the home, or work. Drinks, snacks, and some low ball gambling might be had, but for the most part it was a place to just sit and be, to chat, or to read for a while before going home. The word 'saloon' is even derived from the French 'salon' or 'parlositting room.'
The 'bit" or "reale" was the basic unit of silver currency in Mexico, and in the US until Congress revamped the currency system in the 1850s. While the Mexican peso was universal across much of the world, they weren't used in daily transactions. For example, in the Philippines, the Mexican peso was basically the only coin used, but most transactions weren't anywhere near a dollar in value, so most day-to-day purchases were done via lines of credit (aka the chit system). In the US, the chit system (aka store credit) was the common method of trade. There was also the use of smaller coins such as pennies, dimes, half dimes, quarters, and half dollars. In terms of saloons, the dime and quarter were the most used and desired denominations.
If someone went into a 1 bit saloon (which most saloons were), it meant a beer, gill (120ml) of 80 to 100 proof liquor, or a full sized cigar was 12.5 cents. There's no coin for that, so the use of the dime as a "short bit" in change was standardized. It cheated the saloon, but most people had the decency to buy something else and complete the value of the two bit peice. If you paid in a quarter dollar, you'd get a short bit in return, and would be expected to make another purchase.
With the majority (ca. 60-70%) of people being either farmers of laborers (agricultural or general) in the old south via the 1860 US census occupational schedules, and making ca.90 cents a day, you can see how saloons were a popular place to be once you favor in the real draw of...
The Free Lunch System
There's no such thing as a free lunch - you have to buy a beer first. Saloons, much like earlier taverns, pubs, and inns, served food alongside drinks.
"Lunch" tended to blend into dinner, then tomorrow's breakfast. There was no refrigeration in the old west, so food had to be tough enough to stay around without fostering bacterial growth. This generally meant being dry as a brick, preserved in vinegar or brine, or caked in salt. While menu's were non-existent, and food changed based on seasons, and what could be had that day, there were commonalities. Via the 'Chronicling America' project by the Library of Congress, I've been able to gather a few universal item :

Crackers, being silver dollar sized "common crackers", not modern saltines. Now you know where the 'Cracker Barrel' chain gets it's name.
Cold cuts, such as unprocessed pork and beef, salt beef, corned mutton.
Dry sausages, such as summer sausage.
Hard cheese.
Pickled goods, including eggs, cucumbers, radishes, beets.
Soup in a big tureen was normal, and was a direct descent of 'perpetual stew' in Europe
Beans, normally flavored with bacon or ham and garlic or onions
Bread. Whole grain was the rule, as white bread was costly.

Sadly, the free lunch never really translated into Hollywood's portrayal of the saloon, but it did appear some times, such as in Gunsmoke (season 9, episode 26, "Caleb").
Racism, Classism, and Discrimination
America, and the world in general, during the 19th century was a racist, classist place. As a trend, the poorer you got, the less snooty you were about your company. In a recent book about poor southerners (deemed by the slave holding gentry as "white trash"), race relations were much more relaxed than Hollywood would make us believe.
Still, people did tend to cluster a bit due to language barriers, taste in food, music taste, etc. This was reflected in a sociological study and archeological digs of saloon sites, one of which is the 2006 dig at 'The Boston Saloon' in Nevada, which catered to a Black clientel. Other digs between ethnic, and social caste groups show markets were not universal. While the working class one bit saloon we think of was geared towards an anglo/scots-irish American clientel, the west included Mexican cantinas, lower income southern/Black jukes, and German beerhalls. There were also LGBT+ saloons. Broadway in NYC wasn't just theaters, it was gay bars. People didn't just go to Broadway to see plays, they went to hook up and get drunk. Youtuber Kaz Rowe has a whole video on this.
An odd quirk is that in all my research, I have only seen two mentions of Jewish owned saloons. On the whole, the Ashkenazic Jewish traditions surrounding alcohol (ei. the shabbat ritual concerning wine, the void of grain based liquor on pesach, the popularity of vodka and slivovitz) remained strong despite dimming view towards kosher halakha. The Jewish people were transitioning from the old world view of of Jews being a nation, to Jews being a religious community of many nations and peoples (ei. the Pittsburg platform). All of this geared Ashkenaz norms towards alcohol consumption to be home based instead of saloon based.
What they sold

Beer and Wine: We might think of distilled alcohol as being the stereotypical drink of the saloon, but fermented alcohol in the forms of beer (mostly age before the Transcontinental Railroad, and lager afterwards) was much more common. They were just cheaper to make en masse. Beer tended to be a freeform idea rather than a specific thing, and brewing was often done at the saloon itself before the railroads came. It was the introduction of lager yeast, and prohibition that transformed beer from a spectrum in 1850 to a more uniform industrial product by 1933. Wine, often domestic mock-ups of French themed reds (merlot, cab sav., generic plonk) were sold as 'claret'. Adulteration, mock ups, clones, and flavorants to mimic the real deal ruled the domestic market. Despite the stereotype of wine as a French-Italian thing, it was universal across the entire US. The South has a totally unique tradition of mustadine wine, and the standard grape of most kosher wine is the concord, which is native to the US.
Pulque: The beer of Mexico. Pulque is a fizzy, thick, weirdly sappy drink made from the sap of the maguey cactus. It seems that a mageuy can produce about 600 gallons of pulque, but only a tiny amount of mezcal, which necessitates killing the plant. Entire plantations were/are dedicated to the MASSIVE maguey trade. Odd enough is it's very short shelf life.
Whiskey : As a rule, the king of distilled liquor in America has been whiskey since after the revolutionary war, but the whiskey was in the old west was not the whiskey of today, nor the whiskey of the colonial era. Prohibition the Pure Food and Drug Act drastically modified America's drinking culture. Before the PFDA whiskey had a an extremely high "adulteration" rate. Somewhere near 85-90% of all whiskey was adulterated. I have found no credible claim of tobacco, snake venom or acid in any record. Instead, normal food ingredients were added to simulate aging and to make the alcohol more enjoyable. The universal additives were A) burnt sugar as a colorant, and B) prune syrup, as a flavorant. Peach syrup, licorice, and raisins were known, but not as common. For all intents and purposed, "whiskey" was just doctored vodka, served in 120ml glasses.
Non-whiskey liquor: Whiskey held the dominant share of the market, and has until the 1970s when vodka became a thing in the US, but it has never been the only spirit. Gin and brandy were also very popular in the west, and frequently appear on saloon advertisments. I have yet to see vodka, absinthe, eau-de-vie, or slivovitz appear in any period American saloon ads.
Mezcal (and it's regional cousin tequila) was also very common in Spanish speaking areas. A special cousin to mezcal is 'sotol'. It's a rare liquor native to the Frontera/Rio Grande valley region. Until the mezcal plant source, which takes 7-10 years to mature, the sotol plant takes about 15. You can see why it's rare. It might have been that corn vodka, fruit eau-de-vie, or licor de cana (rum basically) also commercially present, but mezcal ruled the Mexican spirits trade.
Mixed drinks: punches, cordials, sangarees, and juleps all appear in period ads. Westernes didn't have the concept of 'girly' drinks. The whole idea of gendered drinks is a weirdly homophobia/transphobic "clean living movement" era thing, and would have been totally foreign to the Victorian era.
Tobacco : the 245, and 5c cigar (more like a blunt). Based on my own research comparing Victorian and Edwardian era cigar tin measurements to modern industrial cigar sizes, I've come the conclusion that the 245 cigar would be the equivalent of a large cigarillo, and the 5 cent cigar would be the simple equivalent to the modern blunt. A 10 cent cigar was more likely to be an imported corona sized smoke. On the whole, the 245 and 5c cigars ruled the market with an iron fist, and were mostly of domestic tobacco grown in Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I strongly suspect that any given mass market blunt without artifical sweetening would be a perfect equivalent to a historical 5c cigar.

What they weren't
A saloon was not a boxing ring with furniture, nor was it a brothel, and "saloon girls" as we know them are a Hollywood myth. Outside of German beer halls, which were essentially family eateries, women were normally not allowed in saloons. There are rare mentions of waitresses and hired musicians, but these women were far from the feather and paint wearing saloon girls of pop culture. The vast majority of saloons wanted nothing to do with prostitution, and most sources I've seen that attempt to link prostitutes with saloons are from newspapers running stories from temperance groups, or suffragettes. So were does the myth of the saloon girl come from?
As far as I can tell frilly saloon girls were an invention of the Hays Code era. Instead of the US government regulating the film industry to suite puritanical (re: Christian white nationalism) tastes, Hollywood offered to self regulate via the Hays Code. You couldn't curse, let the bad guy win, mock religion, or show LGBT people. But artists are creative people, and they put things into films that skirted the code. Hence, the term "queer coded". Hollywood's saloon girls were essentially prostitutes through a Disney filter. The Hayes Code is also why cowboys drank sassparilla on film instead of liquor. A Hollywood saloon was just a brothel that served alcohol. In case you were wondering, yes, Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke was a pimp. Also, the Birdcage Theater in Tombstone was a brothel, not a theater.
Brothels
Women in the Victorian era had a hard life, and getting a husband wasn't just some romantic fantasy. It was also about basic survival. The labor market was extremely limited for women, and women who were destitute had but few options: limited factory jobs, poor houses, prostitution, or suicide. For men, joining the military was the closest thing to prostitution in terms of 'one step above suicide' options. Marriage and family weren't just lofty ideals, they were also your emergency contacts, your personal loan department, your social security, your long term care providers, and your funeral planners. This is why old time people knew who all of their third cousins twice removed were. There was no social safety net in Victorian America unless you got a soldiers pension. Women without families were essentially doomed to die in poverty.
There was a form of economic hierarchy in the sex trade. Less of a pecking order and more of a tier of potential income:

Oil cloth women, and street walkers: the majority of all sex workers. So called because of the use of a linseed oiled canvas as a surface, the use of carpet or rug segments was also known.
crib women: the Mexican tolerance zone system had rooms in a long row with workers standing out front. This semi-public setting was relegated to a specific area of town with bars, known as 'tolerance zones', or 'red zones.' Prostitution is regulated at the state level in Mexico, and much of it is still done in the crib system and the bordelo system.
brothel/bordelo workers: These women were fewer and more far between. It took connections to get a job in a bordelo, the madame/pimp got a cut, and prices were higher up. In Mexico today, most strip clubs are bordelos, as opposed to the American model.
the madame: A brothel boss as opposed to a worker. All the ruthless cruelty of a pimp, but in socially acceptable packaging. Think less Miss Kitty, and more Kate Becker from Broken Trail. Among the most hated people in the west (and now) were pimps. In the movie 'Tombstone', Ike Clanton called Wyatt a pimp... but in truth, Wyatt Earp was indeed a pimp before becoming a law officer, and then committed murder. Women in the Victorian era occupied a semi-priviledged position wherein they could do somethings, and not others, with impunity. Madames were the among the richest women in America, and were often politically connected. It is largely because of madames that Wyoming was allowed to enter the Union with the female vote.

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2023.04.25 19:53 Falconerelectronics The History of Thomas Edison's Life

Our team at Falconer Electronics works with many entrepreneurs creating brand new electrical products that make our lives better. Perfecting a new product on the first try is extremely challenging if not impossible. It takes a great deal of patience and determination. Also, plenty of trial and error. Thomas Edison represents that tenacious entrepreneurial drive to reach success.
Therefore, we decided to dig deep into the life of Thomas Edison to show his massive accomplishments with New Product Development. Being in the electrical manufacturing sector, we dedicate a huge thank you to Mr. Edison’s relentless pursuit to light up the world.

Childhood

Nancy Edison gave birth to Thomas Alva Edison on February 11th, 1847 in Milan, Ohio and he was the youngest of seven kids. Edison only spent seven years in Ohio before moving to Port Huron, Michigan. In Port Huron, Thomas spent only three months attending school. This being the only formal schooling he had before homeschooling by his mother, a formal school teacher. While developing a great interest in experimenting he used pocket change to purchase inexpensive chemicals. Edison’s mind wanted to see the properties of the chemicals and compare them to the textbooks.

Growing Businessman?

When Edison was eleven he sold his family garden produce in the market. By the age of twelve, he sold newspapers on the trains of Grand Trunk Railroad between Port Huron and Detroit. As his business grew, he hired boys as assistants on the trains. Also, he opened two small stores in Port Huron. He gained the nickname Al and all the trainmen called him that. Thomas transferred some of his chemicals to the baggage car of the train, along with a small hand printing press from Detroit. He had the first railway chemical laboratory and railway printing press. As a result, his paper “The Weekly Herald” had grown to 800 copies.
In 1862, at the young age of fifteen, Edison worked regularly an eighteen-hour workday. One afternoon, the baggage car ran over a rough piece of track. With Edison’s laboratory inside it jolted a stick of phosphorus to the floor. This started a fire in the car that took all the efforts of Edison and the train crew to subdue. When the train finally came to a halt, all his laboratory equipment and his printing press were thrown out on the platform. This accident led to be the cause of Edison’s hearing loss that came in the years following. He found that his deafness became an asset, and kept his sunny, kind and serene personality.

Opportunities

In August 1862 another incident occurred. A boxcar was being shunted, at considerable speed, to a side track. The station agent’s little son had been playing on this sidetrack. Edison on the platform saw the incoming danger. He jumped on the track and reached the child just in time to haul him clear. One front wheel of the car struck his heel and threw him with the child to the side of the track. Their faces and hands were cut, but no serious injury. On the following day, the station agent offered to teach Edison the Morse telegraphy, with a view to helping him secure a position as railway telegraphist. He accepted, and in a few months, taking lessons three times a week, he became proficient at the keys. For the following six years, Edison had a career of telegraphist.
As a result, Edison became part of the service of the Western Union Telegraph Company. This was through a number of cities in the middle west, and the south. He was a noted rapid and accurate operator, frequently overseeing to press work on night duty. He spent all his available leisure time in experiment and study.

Edison’s Entry into Inventing

In October 1868, when Edison was 21 years old, he applied for his first American patent to a vote recorder. This device enabled the affirmative and negative votes of a seated voting assembly to be swiftly recorded and automatically totaled at the chairman’s desk. Edison was successful in demonstrating the invention at Washington. Unfortunately, there was no demand for a mechanism of this kind. Edison went back to his little workshop in Boston and gave up the career of a telegraphist changing entirely to the invention..
In 1869, Edison traveled to New York. One morning in New York, Edison was standing near a transmitter. It became suddenly deranged by an internal accident, causing all the indicators in the connected brokers’ offices to go bad. He knew the nature of the derangement and volunteered to correct it. He was able to restore normal operation quickly. This led to his being made manager of the system which he improved and was part of developing new inventions.
A few days after Black Friday, September 24th, 1869 when gold went to a high premium, he entered into the first recorded American firm of Consulting Electrical Engineers. After the successful sale of some of his inventions to the Western Union Telegraph Company, Edison opened machine shops at Newark, New Jersey. Also for invention and manufacture. He kept 50 workmen busy, and a night force as well. He was foreman, which meant living on the premises. Here he was part of developing a number of telegraph inventions. The quadruplex for sending and receiving four messages simultaneously over a single wire. Also the high-speed automatic telegraph. As a result, he took out nearly 120 American patents, almost all in electric telegraphy.

Adulthood

In 1871, Edison married Mary G. Stillwell and had three children, Marion E., Thomas A., and William L. Edison. In 1876, Edison moved his laboratory from Newark to Menlo Park, New Jersey where he could concentrate on inventing. This was the year of the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, where the new Bell telephone was first shown to the public. Edison produced a carbon-button transmitter. This virtually converted the telephone from an experiment to a commercially available apparatus. It was in his experimenting with the carbon transmitter that Edison coined the now well-known call word “Hello.” In 1877, Edison started developing the first stages of his phonograph or talking machine.
In 1878 he took up the problem of “subdivision of the electric light”. He found that a commercial incandescent lighting system would require its lamps to be connected “in parallel” not “in series.” After a number of failures, he made a successful lamp. It had a filament of a carbonized cotton thread, mounted in a highly evacuated glass globe, and sealed-in platinum-wire leads. In October 1879, his lamp glowed for 45 hours before breaking.
Edison decided to open a central incandescent lamp station in the center of the downtown business district with underground conductors. Due to Edison being his own chief engineer, the Pearl Street Station turned on its current to the lamps in the district of New York. The new incandescent lamps won popularity through their steadiness, coolness, freedom from combustion products, and reduced fire hazard. He saw the successful introduction of the incandescent lamp into factories. Also, homes would immediately admit the use of the electric motor for operating machinery and household power devices. One of these discoveries in 1883 was the “‘Edison effect”, a discharge that occurred in the lamps, when being overused.

The Final Years

Edison moved his laboratory from Menlo Park to New York City, after his wife’s death in August 1884. In 1886, he married Miss Mina Miller of Akron, Ohio. They made their home at West Orange, New Jersey. They had three children Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore.
Edison built a laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. He started work there in October 1887. He perfected the phonograph and made a long series of other inventions. This included the alkaline storage battery, the moving-picture camera, synthetic rubber, the telescribe, the magnetic ore separator, various improvements in manufacturing concrete and other chemical products, as well as many war inventions for the United States Government. At the time of his death on October 18, 1931, He had received 1,093 U.S. patents, a total still untouched by any other inventor.

Wrapping It Up

Lastly, Thank you for taking the time to read this post.
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2023.04.25 04:58 funeralclient Union Funeral Home

Welcome to Union Funeral Home - Lytwyn & Grillo

When you have experienced the loss of a loved one, you can trust Union Funeral Home - Lytwyn & Grillo to guide you through the process of honoring their life. At Union Funeral Home - Lytwyn & Grillo, we pride ourselves on serving families in Union and the surrounding areas with dignity, respect, and compassion. Our professional and caring staff takes pride in providing a complete range of high quality services, and is experienced at honoring many faiths and customs. We invite you to contact us with your questions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Our Story

The business was founded by Myron Lytwyn (1894-1972) in Newark, NJ in 1936, as a storefront operation, named “Myron Lytwyn, Funeral Director.”
At that time, the custom was to have visitations at the private residences, rather than at a funeral home, so a storefront was all that was necessary to do clerical work and offer merchandise, such as caskets, burial vaults and memorial cards.
Myron and his wife, Anna, had three sons, Harry (1917-1977), Theodore (Teddy)(1923-1999) and Michael (1918-2006) who followed him into the funeral business and to a new location in 1944. The new location on Harrison Place, near the corner of Springfield Avenue, in Irvington, NJ was soon renamed, “Myron Lytwyn & Sons.” It was at this site that the customs transitioned from wakes being held in private homes, to the public funeral home. A private ambulance service was started in 1950 and operated until 1980.

Where to Begin

Planning a funeral can be overwhelming, but you are not alone in this. We’re here to support you throughout this journey and make this process one of love, healing, and life celebration. Below is some information to help you get started, but you can contact us at any time if you need help.

Service Options

Planning a funeral service can be a very difficult process for families who have just lost a loved one. But it’s important to provide those who are grieving with a supportive environment in which they can begin to find closure, say goodbye, and come to terms with the loss. Gathering with friends and family gives everyone the opportunity to connect, share memories, offer words of sympathy, and create a lasting network of comfort and support as they start the journey toward healing.

Funeral Services in Union, NJ

Union Funeral Home is proud to offer a wide range of funeral services to the Union County area. With years of experience in the funeral industry, our funeral directors and staff serves the Union community with the highest quality and professionalism. We go above and beyond to ease the pain and make this process less stressful for the families while they are still dealing with grief and the loss of a loved one.

Burial Services in New Jersey

Up until recent decades, burial has been the most common final disposition method families choose. Traditionally, families will have their loved one embalmed, placed in a casket, and displayed for a viewing. After the funeral services are over, the casket holding the deceased will be placed in the ground and buried. We know that during these challenging times, your family needs guidance and help when it comes to making decisions about funeral services. At our funeral home, we are proud to provide assistance with any arrangements related to burial services. Check out our following quick guide and discover how we can help you.

Cremation Services in Union, NJ

In recent decades, cremation has become a popular alternative to traditional burial. According to the NFDA, since 2015 the rate of cremation has already surpassed burial and will continue to do so, becoming the main form of disposition in North America. Due to this growing popularity, our funeral home is proud to offer personalized cremation services in Union, NJ

Get in Touch

Helping your family through tough times is our calling. We're ready to serve in your time of need, so please contact us with any questions, comments, or inquiries. We will reply as soon as possible.
Address: 1600 Stuyvesant Avenue
Union, NJ 07083
Phone: (908) 964-4222
Website: https://www.unionfuneralhome.com/

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2023.04.18 03:06 Giannasopinion My childhood best friend

when i was growing up, i lived in a small Ohio town. Down the street from my family of 4, middle class house, there was a family. (i’m not going to use real names just for privacy) We will call them the ross family. the girl who was my age, Danielle, was such a sweet girl. She was the fourth oldest in her family of 15. she had 13 sibling ranging in ages 27-9. Her life seemed so fun. I mean, i was never close with my cousins and i had only one sibling who was 5 years younger, so as a young child i though she was so lucky. Dani was also very pretty. She had tan skin and beautiful brown eyes and long, silky brown hair. Also, she was skinny. enough that people though she worked out. she had a sweet voice and people really liked her. I hung out with her during the summer by going down to the creeks and getting muddy and wet. It was so much i fun. When we turned 10, she told me why she was so skinny. Her mom would spend all of the family’s money on drugs and ysl perfume and expensive clothing. Her father was struggling to keep everyone safe and out of cps. i felt so guilty of being jealous and assuming she had a perfect life, i cried a for hours. And so did she. When we where 12, her parents got a divorce and her father took her 13 siblings + her to Kentucky to meet their new step mom and home. What topped it all of, their oldest, Kingsley was shot dead at a bar by their biological mother. I felt to sorry and my whole family dedicated a whole lot of money to them to help them get food and clothes and pay for the funeral. Their mom was sent to only 30 years until they found illegal substances in her car and house and was confiscated of child labor, abuse, and neglection. Finally, about a month before dani turned 13, on may 12, she died. she died, protecting our siblings. she is one of the greatest and the strongest people I’ve ever met. Danielle could’ve achieved so much in high school and college, cause she was also amazing athlete. Me and my volleyball teammates cried for hours even days just because we miss her so much. Soon enough, I will write a whole damn book and cast a movie. she was a great soul and I wish everyone could meet her.could have an amazing friend like her.

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2023.04.14 01:08 SpartanDoubleZero I think I'm gonna be a sailor again, but fresh water this time.

Daxx and I met out in San Diego, we were out on a landing craft late at night doing training, Daxx and another shipmate were joking around and I broke the ice with the sure fire line "I love inside jokes I hope I get to be a part of one some day", the HOLLARING he let out was funnier than the one liner its self. It was the birth place of our couch beers joke, one I still use to this day.
When we both wound up with shoulder injuries after a training operation, both had our surgeries and eventually the navy thought it would be a good idea to send us to the same squadron to be janitors while the Navy processed both of our broken asses out. Those were some of the best worst days of my life. Chief Gaskill handed our asses to us for laughing and joking about everything while we worked. The endless BBQs we had, and driving our wives nuts with cheeky shenanigans and office quotes. Always one upping each other with hotter and hotter hot sauces until our asses were on fire and work was miserable the next day.
Specifically the day after having puckerbutt reaper squeezins, when I had urinalysis, and had to pee in a cup while I peed out my butt, and he sat out side the stall and screamed in laughter.
I miss the long talks we had when one of us had a rough day or had issues at home, those were some of the most humbling and understanding moments of my life.
I remember meeting Levi the day he was born. The 4th of July couldn't have been more fitting for him. Texan thru and thru just like his dad.
I smoked a brisket just for the occasion and brought it to him in the hospital, it was absolutely horrible, but the sides I made were more than good enough to make up for it.
The launch of far cry 5 where we got on Xbox chat and stayed up all night playing thru the campaign and talking the entire night and didn't catch a bit of the story line.
When we both got out of the navy, and he went back to Texas, and I went back to Ohio. We still talked every single day almost all day.
When he got divorced and got full custody of his son I thought it was an amazing feat he took on as a dedicated father. He loved Levi so much. I wish I could've had a chance to visit.
When my son was born with heart defects and was hospitalized from July of 2019 until August of 2020, he was there for me almost everyday. We challenged each other to grow and be better as dad's.
When we had an argument over stupid ass politics, he said no matter what we would always be brothers. I took that to heart.
When I didn't hear from you for months after, I figured school and single fatherhood had taken all your time up.
When I did a search for his name in early December 2020 I was crushed, the top result being an obituary. When I called the funeral home in tears, sobbing uncontrollably to tell them who I was and to please pass my number along to his mom. In hopes I could make sense of it.
The woman who answered the phone was so amazing because less than an hour later I got a call from his mom. I'm sorry I wasn't there, more supportive and the brother you deserved. I think about you everyday. Your mom sent me your sunglasses and the duck call you and your pawpaw made when you were just a kid, it's in my backpack, which goes with me everytime I leave the house.
I'm planning a trip to go see your mom and step dad soon, being a single dad myself is hard, but you know that. I hope to have a chance to make my peace with you while I'm there.
I'm sorry Daxx, I wish I could've done more and been better.

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