A Glibertarians Exclusive: Marilee – Part VII
Falfurrias, Texas, June 1970
Damn near a year, with no steady work to speak of. Too bad about that shipyard job. That would have been nice.
Coy McAlester sat in his battered 49 Ford pickup, pulled off to the side of the road. He had passed through Premont a few minutes earlier, and could now see Falfurrias, just ahead.
Well, he told himself. I told myself I was going to do this.
The previous year had been one stroke of bad luck after another. After the four-day trip from Nebraska to Newport News, Virginia, Coy had arrived just in time to find the shipyard’s hiring office closed. “Come back in six or eight months,” the clerk in the shipyard office told him. “Might be putting some welders and pipefitters on then.” So Coy had waited, and waited, biding his time in a cheap one-room flat, calling in every week or so, before giving the shipyard up as a lost cause.
Since then, he had wandered, aimlessly. No steady work came his way, just a series of short jobs. He even resorted to picking peaches in Georgia for a time, but that season ended, leaving Coy to contemplate his continually shrinking roll of cash.
One rainy evening in a Kentucky hotel room, Coy sat, ignoring the television’s portrayal of what Coy thought of a ‘a bunch of assholes stuck in a wall telling bad jokes’ and considered his position.
And, of course, there was Marilee. Last he had heard of her was in Brooklyn. “Said she was going home,” Coy repeated, remembering the testimony of the waitress. Home, of course, must be Falfurrias; but also in Falfurrias was Jim Gompers’ family and an arrest warrant.
At last, Coy realized, there was only one path left open. “All right, then,” Coy muttered. “Enough of this shit. I’m going home. Goddamn monkey’s been on my back long enough.”
The next morning, he threw his few belongings once more in his truck, slid the Jap bayonet under the seat, and headed south for Texas, which brought him to the side of the state highway south of Premont.
“Last chance,” he said to himself. “Last chance to drive on, try to keep ahead of this.”
He shook his head. It had gone on long enough. And somewhere, out there ahead of him, was Marilee. He started the truck and drove on into town.
Falfurrias hadn’t changed much in thirty years. Coy hadn’t expected it would. The Brooks County Sheriff’s Office was still right where it had been. Coy parked in front of the low building and walked in.
A short, stocky fellow in a khaki uniform sat at a desk, reading a magazine, his booted feet propped up. He looked up with a questioning expression when Coy walked in.
“Here to see the Sheriff,” Coy said.
“Sheriff ain’t here,” the man said. “I’m Deputy Fred Archuleta. What can I do for you?”
“I’m Coy McAlester,” Coy said. He pointed at an old, yellowed notice still tacked up on the bulletin board. “That there, that’s me.”
Deputy Archuleta turned and looked. He looked back at Coy. “That’s you? Sure as hell? After all this time?”
“That’s me. I come to make things right.”
“Don’t rightly know how that will work,” Archuleta said. He leaned back in his chair. “The Gompers, well, they’re all dead or moved away. Jim Gompers’ folks been gone since just after the war. Won’t be nobody to testify either way. But here you are, and what the hell am I supposed to do with you?”
Coy shrugged. “I come to make things right,” he repeated. “A man gets tired of looking over his shoulder, and this thing been weighing on me thirty years now.”
Archuleta looked at Coy’s close-cropped, graying hair. “Veteran, are you?”
“1st Marines,” Coy agreed. “All the way from the ‘Canal to Okinawa. Got a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.”
“82nd Airborne, here,” Archuleta replied. “Jumped at Normandy and Market Garden. Was at Bastogne. That wasn’t any damn fun, but at least we went in by truck. Sheriff, he was in the 92nd Infantry, fought in Italy. Plenty of vets hereabouts. Hell, my son is in Vietnam, right now. Maybe that pendejo Nixon will get us out of there. Maybe not. Who knows?”
Coy just nodded. Damn cop sure likes the sound of his own voice, he told himself. “You gonna lock me up or what?”
“I don’t think the county prosecutors’ gonna want to have anything to do with this, not with you being a war hero and all the witnesses dead or gone. Being a veteran may not count for much in Californey or New York, but it still does here. But hell, you better come on back. Cells are just back here, down the hallway.”
Coy held out his hands, but Archuleta just shook his head. “Ain’t gonna bother with no cuffs. The jail’s empty, nobody for you to fuss with, and you been peaceable. Come on back; I’ll call down and tell the diner that we got a prisoner that needs supper. I expect the prosecutor will come talk to you in the morning.”
As they walked back to the cells, Coy thought about asking about Marilee, but shook his head. Time enough for that after whatever happens.
After thirty years on the lam, Coy was surprised at how much relief he felt. Monkey is off my back, he thought as he dug into the supper tray Deputy Archuleta brought in: Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, a hot roll, green beans, and a tin cup of coffee. He slept well. The cell’s cot was narrow and hard, but Coy had slept in many worse places.
In the morning, as predicted, the county prosecutor came in.
“Melvin Campos,” he introduced himself. “Brooks County prosecutor.” The man was unremarkable – medium height, medium build, dark brown hair – except in that he wore, effortlessly, what looked to be a fairly expensive suit. “You would be Coy McAlester?”
“I would be. I am, in fact.” Coy had been reclining on the bunk. He rotated himself to sit up facing the cell door. Campos pulled an old steel chair from the hallway to just in front of the door to Coy’s cell and sat down.
Coy grinned, looking pointedly at Campos’ suit. “Lawyerin’ hereabouts must pay better than she used to.”
Campos looked down at his lapels as though some errant piece of lint had appeared. “Oh. I see. Don’t let that fool you – my old man’s a tailor, over in Corpus Christi.”
“Gotcha.”
Campos produced a folder, began flipping through the papers within. “Coy Walton McAlester,” he read. “Warrant here says you were wanted for the homicide of one James William Gompers, March 16, 1940. No eyewitnesses, but Mr. Gompers appeared at the office of one…” He turned the page. “Travis W. Oliphant, M.D., of Falfurrias, said he had been in an altercation with Coy McAlester – that’s you – and had been struck in the stomach and the arm. He died shortly after, and the death certificate says internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen, which was in additions to a fractured humerus.”
Campos closed the folder. “He named you as the attacker.”
Coy shrugged. He had come to settle up but saw no reason to volunteer information; he had spent enough nights around a poker table to know when it was time to make the other fellow show his cards.
“See, here’s my problem,” Campos went on. “The original warrant, that was sworn out by Jim Gompers’ parents, but they’re both dead. They swore out that warrant based on word-of-mouth from Dr. Oliphant, but he’s dead. The only surviving relation of Jim Gompers I could find was his aunt, Melissa Hargrove, of McAllen, but when I called this morning, she said, and I quote, ‘That whole branch of the family was never any damn good, and I frankly can’t be bothered if they’re alive or dead.’ She couldn’t offer any information.”
“And?” Coy prompted. Things were suddenly looking up.
“So, Mr. McAlester,” Campos said, “it comes to this: If I took this into the courtroom, no jury in the county would convict on third-hand, written testimony from thirty years ago, and no living witnesses. In fact, I give you fifty-fifty odds Judge Travis would hold me in contempt for wasting his time with this business. So, since it’s my decision as to whether to prosecute this or not…”
“Yeah?”
Blair, Oklahoma
“Do you harbor any notions of staying in Falfurrias?”
Coy weighed that. “Don’t rightly know. Someone I know is here – leastways, last I knew she was. Marilee Peyton. Her father used to run the dry-goods store in town.”
“I know of the family. Mr. Peyton died a few years back, but Rose Peyton still lives on the same old property. Don’t know of any Marilee Peyton, but Mrs. Peyton may be able to give you some hint.”
“Are you saying I can go find out?”
Campos looked slightly frustrated but nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I have a funny feeling you did kill Jim Gompers, but there’s no way I’m taking this into court. Since I can’t prosecute you, we have to let you go. Honestly, I’d feel a whole lot better if you left Falfurrias and went back to wherever you’ve been since 1940, but that’s up to you. I have some paperwork to do, but I suppose you’ll be a free man before the county has to pay for your lunch.”
Campos proved to be as good as his word. Sheriff Forrest, a large, broad-shouldered, swag-bellied man, unlocked Coy’s cell at eleven-thirty and announced, “Coy McAlester! You’re free to go. Pick up your personal effects from Deputy Archuleta.”
As Coy walked out of the cell, grinning, the Sheriff said in a low voice, “I knew Jim Gompers back in the day. He and his whole family, white trash the lot of ‘em, but sure didn’t mind looking down at us colored folks. You ask me, you did the world a favor. You take care of yourself, gyrene.” He smiled, revealing strong yellow teeth, and slapped Coy on the back.
“Thanks, dogface,” Coy replied. He gathered up his ruck and suitcase and walked out into the south Texas sunshine a free man.
Half an hour later, he was on the road north again. Ten minute’s conversation with Rose Peyton gave him the information he had sought; “Marilee said, if you ever came by, to tell you where she was. Tom and I knew what you did for her, Coy, and while we don’t condone violence… Well, Marilee was in a bad place, and you helped.”
He slept in the cab of his truck that night, somewhere in central Texas. By the end of the next day, he was there – pulled up in front of a small, one-story, white wooden house in Blair, Oklahoma.
Ever since walking out of the Brooks County Sheriff’s office, it was as though Coy had been pulling in a long, red thread, the visualization of that old, thirty-year entanglement. Now, as he walked up the concrete walkway, up on to the boards of the front porch, to knock on the screen door, he pulled the last few feet of the thread in.
He knocked. After a moment, he heard footfalls from within. And then, there she was, crisp in a pale-yellow waitress’s uniform. “Coy!” she exclaimed. Her green eyes were bright, and she was smiling the old smile again.
“Yup,” Coy said. “It’s me, Marilee. Free and clear. It’s me.”
The screen door slammed open, and Marilee threw herself into Coy’s arms. Through her tears, she smiled. “It’s about damn time,” she said.
So now I’m going back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know,
They’re an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians,
Some are carpenter’s wives,
Don’t know how it all got started,
I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives.
But me, I’m still on the road,
A-heading for another joint,
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point,
Of view.
Tangled up in blue.
Holy shit! A happy ending on Glibs!
I knew it could happen, but it’s better than I expected.
Thanks once again, Animal. A really good interpretation of the song.
Now Isis was a happy ending too as I recall. We may have identified Glibs’ secret sentimentalist.
Ah, good point – that’s two happy endings now (‘phrasing!’).
That’s true, but I was less surprised by Isis. Cole just seemed to carry a heavier load.
Happy ending.
Was not expecting that.
Excellent tale, well told.
Love the pic of her house, BTW. I grew up in that general area (North Texas, less than an hour from Blair OK) and that house is archetypal for that area.
Excellent work, Animal!
To echo the others, this place has me conditioned to expect bad endings. Pleasant to be mistaken for a change.
Speaking of barbaric locales less free than Afghanistan, reportedly with even more scary guns. Just imagine if one of the women folk in Texas breaks free of the stove she’s shackled to. She could shoot her eye out and probably shoot a bunch of nuns holding babies at the same time!
This is why there’s a border crisis. All those poor folk are only concerned about getting into Texas to free the wiminz folk!
A fine way to wrap it all up,
Great work Animal!
“After the four-day trip from Nebraska to Newport News, Virginia”
Isn’t that sort of out of you way on the road to Texas?
Think back to the first installment.
Also, bonus points to anyone who identifies the actual television show from the Kentucky hotel room mention early in this chapter.
Laugh In
Sock it to me!
Here come the judge!
And THIS.
‘The Judge’ – a nickname adopted from the “Here Comes the Judge” made famous by Sammy Davis Jr. on the popular comedy television show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
The Judge, v1.0
“Laugh-In” comes to mind.
Great stuff, Animal.
Hollywood Squares.
Between classes. DEG wanted me to pass this along because he can’t shitpost from his work computer:
Project Veritas is going to start releasing videos from Fed whistleblowers about the Covid vax. First release is tonight.
“Obviously, it’s fake news because Project Veritas because shut up”, they’ll explain.
Count me as a pessimist on this one. Veritas is really good at the pre-release hype to squishy, matter-of-interpretation video pipeline.
My usual pessimism is temporarily on hold after reading about Marilee. I’ll hold out hope for a few hours…
“Veritas is really good at the pre-release hype to squishy, matter-of-interpretation video pipeline.”
That’s well-put.
Unless they’re going to say what needs to said, that the virus was genetically modified and released intentionally by the CCP with the help of certain US officials, some who are household names, then I don’t want to hear it, it would just be so much fluff again.
released intentionally by the CCP with the help of certain US officials
Cock-up over conspiracy – “the Chinese dun fucked up and accidentally released it” is way more believable than some grand conspiracy.
Now, I’ll buy a conspiracy with regards to the cover-up.
“the Chinese dun fucked up and accidentally released it” is way more believable than some grand conspiracy.”
Yeah, but it’s not the truth.
The truth is the convenience of a pandemic at just the perfect time to get rid of Trump and usher in the ‘New Normal’ simply overwhelms the possibility of any of this being an accident.
IMO, “they” are not competent enough to pull off such a conspiracy, but they are competent enough to exploit such a screw-up.
Alas, we’ll never know the actual truth.
Well, if a conspiracy from the beginning, the US commies didn’t get the memo, since they initially criticized Trump’s response as racist before embracing lockdowns as a means via mail-in voting to rig the election.
I think it was bioweapons research co-funded by Fauci et al and China, resulting in an accidental leak, then exploitation.
IMO, “they” are not competent enough to pull off such a conspiracy
I’ve never really gotten this. Let’s assume that the political elite are bumbling morons who are incompetent. Wouldn’t that just make them targets for manipulation by those who are competent? It’s a pattern that’s occurred often enough throughout history, but it become a wacko conspiracy if mentioned in current times.
People organize and make detailed plans for the most mundane of tasks that have little risk or benefit. It seems obvious to me that people will organize and plan when there are trillions of dollars and control over hundreds of millions of lives at stake. For some reason the latter scenario is labeled conspiracy theory.
They’re incompetent of course. Which is why this didn’t go perfectly. The virus was simply not deadly enough. You simply go not get the Great Reset by killing off 1% of the unwashed masses and leaving a large number of them pissed off and even more resistant to authority than they already were. As hard as they tried, that’s just not going to save the planet and make the herd all too willing to give up any pesky freedoms in exchange for safety. They need to try harder, and they will. There’s more elections coming, like 2022 and 2024. Needz moar scarier viruses.
A lot of the useful idiots are bumbling idiots for sure. But they are only useful idiots. The globalists at the top of the food chain, like Klaus Schwab, may not be quite as stupid. And even guys like Gates and Buffet are at least clever enough that they made billions.
Next time, they’ll find someone more cunning and not as senile are dumb as Biden and Harris.
What I don’t get is when people like Klaus Schwab and company have been dreaming up things like Agenda 21 and the Great Reset, saying things like ‘You will own nothing and be happy’ and talking about maintaining a world population of 500 million is how no one takes that seriously? They’re serious.
You have Gates and Buffet already talking about how there will be a more deadly virus soon.
I’m not the one spreading a conspiracy. Our self proclaimed elites are spreading it and people just won’t believe it. I don’t get. Why not believe them? These are people with vast sums of money and in positions of power over the global economy.
If I can cheat in a US national election and get totally away with it and engineer a virus and release it and kill millions of people worldwide, what limit is there to what I can get away with?
“They need to try harder, and they will.”
That may be the scariest statement I have ever heard.
“That may be the scariest statement I have ever heard.”
And one of the most accurate.
Semi-Spartan Dad – to be clear, I question the ability to pull off this conspiracy with zero whistle-blowers. It would need the cooperation of a large number of people who are totally cool with creating a pandemic. That’s a lot of sociopaths.
Just too many moving parts to pull it off successfully, IMO.
Deeper than that, why would the the Chinese, assuming they’re in cahoots, even implicate themselves? They could just release it in, say, Russia. Russians take the blame, same net effect.
So, if I understand what slumbrew is saying, the pandemic is more Trump/Russia collusion?
I’m with slumbrew on this one.
In the world of bureaucracy and politics, malice follows incompetence.
Okay, I’m with you more on the whistleblower aspect. Though, for this case, I don’t see why you would need more than a handful of people who actually know the details. You have the people greenlighting it. Then you have Person A tell employee B to release the virus. Other people could be primed to follow-up on this without knowing exactly what how it would happen.
Separately from Covid specifically, I’m losing more faith in whistleblowers as any sort of protection. Snowden described some pretty fucked up things we’re doing and it didn’t even make a blip. If someone came out right now on the news and described a plot between X, Y, Z to cause this pandemic, would they be taken seriously? They wouldn’t even get a chance on the news. It would have to be a website somewhere. There could be a detailed writeup by a whistleblower on a website with names, dates, etc. and it wouldn’t even get a second look besides that guy being labeled crazy.
Hell, you have the the chairman of the joint chiefs actually whistleblowing on himself for outright treason with China and it doesn’t matter.
They’re incompetent of course. Which is why this didn’t go perfectly. The virus was simply not deadly enough. You simply go not get the Great Reset by killing off 1% of the unwashed masses and leaving a large number of them pissed off and even more resistant to authority than they already were.
This is the biggest indication that the leak was an accident. Had they really wanted to trigger the Great Reset, they would’ve released the souped-up MERS they were working on.
That said, I could be convinced that this was an attempted test that was spectacularly more successful than they expected to the point where it undercut their plan with the MERS virus. I’d have to see evidence though.
Accidental seems more likely to me.
After I weigh all of the circumstances, accidental seems around zero probability.
Who is this large number of people resistant to authority? All I’ve seen is sheeple and now in my area we need vax passports in the next three weeks in spite of an 85 percent vax rate in my locale.
Here’s why I think it was accidental:
Because it first popped up in Wuhan, where the lab is. I think it was developed in that lab (based on their published research on gain-of-function in coronaviruses). The ChiComs have notoriously terrible quality control and have actually had lab leaks before.
But, if it was an intentional release, why do it right where the lab is that developed it? I have no idea how to say “Don’t shit where you eat in Mandarin”, but I have no doubt at all that the ChiComs know not to shit where they eat. If the master plan was to engineer and release a pandemic virus, then cook up a batch and take it somewhere else to release it. Somewhere that won’t blow back on you.
Remember, when this first started blowing up, Fauci and the gang were minimizing it. It took a couple months for them to go into panic mode. I don’t think that’s how they would be acting if their plan was to panic everyone to get rid of Trump and establish their wet-dream totalitarian public health state. I think they initially reacted on reflex (“No worries. Your mighty public savants have this under control.”) and then realized this could make their wet dreams come true.
I am split. What Hyperion said except the people who might come up with the idea are so wildly incompetent that they can’t figure out which shoe to put on which foot so they would screw it up.
Most likely the architects of what happened immediately started saying “Oh fuck”
Yeah, they’re saying ‘Oh fuck, the virus wasn’t deadly enough and the sheeple still will not obey’.
Somebody…
– Got hydroxicloroquine banned because it works, same with ivermectin.
– Decided to vaccinate children even though they have zero chance of dying of covid.
– Covered up the Chinese lab
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/ouch-richard-ebright-15-top-scientists-eviscerate-fauci-daszak-lancet-medical-journal/
– Told pregnant women that the vaccine is safe with zero research.
– Every doctor or scientist who objected to any of it was silenced in every mainstream outlet.
It’s too much for me to assume a bunch of coincidences.
I don’t have to go beyond Fauci’s ego, Pfizer’s ownership of the medical establishment (and dislike of Trump), and the general media’s and technocracy’s hatred of Trump to explain all of that.
The astounding thing is that all those people who didn’t trust Big Pharma before are now fully onboard with handing over their immune systems to them.
Meanwhile I was not that big into the Big Pharma stuff, but now I fully believe it.
Except it is happening in almost every western country. Some like Australia and New Zealand are going dramatically farther.
Rebel’s comment this morning comparing Australia to Do Salvador was revealing. Maybe the Aussies have gone nuts, or something else is happening.
The Aussies and New Zealanders went bonkers. They sold themselves on the idea that they could escape this and wrote themselves into a political corner.
You forget the Watermelons roll in all of this.
Say something happened; a lab leak or planned leak of a weak virus, doesn’t matter. What is important is the timing, in that around the world there had been an outbreak of nationalism, of people disregarding the “experts”. Well, here is a chance for those technocrats to leap into action around the world, right?
Well, half the problem is that technocrats have become watermelons in far too many cases, and those idiots jumped the gun. See, those people, to a man, feel the world is unclean; pollution, nuclear, overpopulation, all of that goes against the holy Gaia. And so they start doing all the things that both show how they feel, such as masks, and also enact the technocratic responses such as lockdowns. But, and here is the kicker, they are all idiots. They have removed all dissenting voices which would be necessary to come to real conclusions and not just social signals, and it has fucked up every. little. thing.
Big Pharma, Big Tech, Bog Food, Big Defense.
All in bed with Big Gov.
I’m starting to think we may have a problem or two.
And the biggest of all, Big Finance
Fauci has always been a vaccine fetishist. He wasted the first few years of the AIDS epidemic looking for a vaccine.
And he damn well knows the ropes on EUAs and vaccines. Which means he knew that he would never get his EUA for his precious vaccine [insert Gollum gif] if there were treatments. So he blocked the treatments with studies designed to make them fail.
Absolutely
Fauci intentionally torpedoed the therapeutics, which makes him one evil son of a bitch.
We hanged Nazis for killing far fewer…
Thanks for the heads-up, Mojeaux. Can’t wait to see this.
Please don’t be bullshit.
Damn, a happy ending! Made my day, but I’m sure reality will intrude soon enough.
I’ll give it about 45 minutes.
The vice squad always intrudes right after my happy endings.
Remove the tracking app from your phone next time.
So, hit it with a hammer?
Your phone is a tracker. The only ways to stop it from tracking you is to either (a) leave the damn thing at home or (b) disable it. I’m not even sure that turning it off means its not tracking you any more. Just like I have a feeling all those “don’t track me” options on apps are just eyewash, kinda like the “close door” button on elevators.
Faraday cage.
Foil lined phone wallet
https://godarkbags.com/collections/faraday-bags/products/godark-faraday-bags-stop-hacking-and-location-tracking-of-your-cell-phone-and-tablet
Problem being that you occasionally need to use the damn things.
And all it takes is forgetting once, and now there’s a record of where you were. I really really wish that 3G wasn’t on its way out, as old flip phones are some of the few left that don’t have the tracking chips in them (or can be identified and disabled).
Yeah, the absence of a non-tracking network is going to be a problem.
It would be nice to have an option that you could use as a dumb phone in civil emergencies.
Back to walkie-talkies I guess.
I use one (not that brand; silent pocket maybe?). For awhile I was worried “what’s the point of having the phone if no one can call me?” Then I realized that I survived most of my life – even as recently as 10 years ago – without people being able to instantaneously get in touch with me at all times. Will I really suffer if I continue like that? So it comes out if I need it, or if there’s a particularly sensitive time at work, I’m expecting a call in the next hour or so, etc. Otherwise, in the bag.
I sometimes enjoy the thought of someone tracking me and seeing the phone show up in South Dakota one day, 10 days later at the office back home, 3 days later at my home address, etc. Probably fruitless, but it’s easy for me to do and I enjoy the idea at least.
“Why are you disabling your phone, citizen? What are you trying to hide?”
Falls under the “disable it” option.
Yep, and a more effective (in that it actually works!) option than the “don’t track me” options, let alone the cell tower triangulation that is always going to be available unless the phone disappears from the EM spectrum.
One way to demonstrate this is to make an emergency/911 call from your phone with all tracking turned off. They still know where you are.
Now maybe this only gets enabled in the case of an ’emergency,’ but that’s just for now. The fact that it (might) be remote-enabled means that it’s never really off.
Not tying for tinfoil hat, but all modern phones have trackers in them. And any car with GPS built-in. Hard to avoid Sauron’s gaze nowadays.
I have been contemplating putting GrapheneOS on my Pixel 4
https://grapheneos.org/
The one that gets me is Google Maps. Living without that would be hard. I suppose I could buy a GPS for the car at least.
I use LineageOS Been happy with it thus-far. May experiment with Graphene at some point as well. Or when the various linux OS mobile ports become a bit more mature. I suppose I should experiment with them to help speed their maturity…
I switched to MapQuest to get away from Google Maps. Not the best but it works pretty good.
I have no idea if switching is actually doing me any good though.
It’s not like MapQuest isn’t going to be tracking you as well, but spreading that info across more than just Google/Apple/Facebook is a net plus.
You can’t use maps.google.com on a browser?
Hrm – for live navigation? Never tried that…
I don’t normally use live navigation.
I have an Apple phone. It has zero Google apps on it, including maps. I use Apple maps, which get me where I’m going. I think Apple is better than Google on privacy (I don’t know how they could be worse, for starters). How much better? No idea.
I’m in the same boat. Until I quit working, I don’t see how I’m going to do without it.
I think it’s probably a wash. Apple is getting into the evil game as well (assuming they weren’t all along).
Apple is slightly better, but rapidly getting worse, IMO.
I can’t disagree with Snowden’s take – Apple is going to treat the data on your phone as theirs, not yours.
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i
For The Children™
Great series Animal! And great ending.
I just want to know 2 things.
Why is her name Marilee and not Marlene?
And this:
“Do you harbor any notions of staying in Falfurrias?”
Just how, exactly, is that pronounced in Texas?
Winsleydale?
Woostah?
I’m goin to Whoostah, to buy a toastah, you bastid
“Throatwobbler Mangrove”
Exactly as it’s spelled.
FAL-fury-us
Much closer to the original than Pedernales (purred-in-Alice).
Over the weekend I had an odd dream one night. It was the kind of dream if made directly into a movie would end up about like Manos: The Hands of Fate. Which is why you don’t do that. But it was one of those dreams you mostly remember, and my mind has been filling in the bits to make it make more sense.
The dream was dystopian (and even more so with the bits I have filled in) but not a nightmare, as it was very 3rd person. There was a main character in the dream, but even within the dream, it obviously wasn’t me. LIke I said, weird.
I wish I could write, because there is a neat story (even if just a serialized glibs story) to it. I really think the dream would be about 60% of the story, with 40% being add on bits to make it all make sense.
Do it! just start writing, you will improve, trust me.
This ^^^
So you say. It seems to work the opposite way for me.
I am afraid I convince myself that I am smarter than I am.
Sounds like you’re overthinking it Suthen, we can’t all be great writers, but we can, with practice become good writers.
Being a good writer is a very different quality than having good ideas.
“The only thing new under the sun is what is new to you” – Socrates….5000 years ago.
You’re about 2,500 years out on that one, big fella.
Awesome stuff, Animal, I wasn’t expecting the happy ending.
There’s still time for a SF Subaru Horror Theatre like finish in the next episode.
There have been sightings of Marilee’s ghost in a yellow dress for years round these here parts, ever since she didn’t show up at the diner for her shift, back in 1954. Meanwhile, the dog just dug up some human remains in a yellow dress out behind the barn!
That ending actually got me a bit in the feels, Animal. Well done.
Just wait for the feels you get from SugarFree’s submission on Wednesday. Different kind of feels, I suspect.
Look upthread a little…
Ah, good, back to normal.
Prostate exam kind vibe.
No kink shaming.
Those can end one of two ways, according to certain documentaries.
Sleepy Joe!
Give him a break, Elon, poor guy doesn’t know what he had for breakfast this morning.
Nice! Great way to wrap up a well told tale.
Great story, Mr, Animal!
(I think this week is where our stories will part company, howevah.)
*whomp, whomp, whaaahhhhhmmmmmp*
“Apocalyptic” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGUZeQ9_R6o
*whomp, whomp, whaaahhhhhmmmmmp*
Yes! A happy ending! Fantastic story.
So, about that crypto.
Rover, Red Rover, send Ausies on over!
https://twitter.com/chelsea_hetho/status/1439137396746973184
(and yes, the twatter is, well, you know…)
Spoken like a slave
Of course we only care about our freedoms. We have a finite amount of time and energy, so it only makes sense to focus on the freedoms that we care about.
The difference is, we don’t actively work to destroy the freedoms of other people.
Josh Szeps was on The Fifth Column podcast a couple episodes ago and assured us that Aussies are just more pragmatic than Americans and their abstract ideals, which is why they’re cool with the draconian lockdowns. Plus that stuff totally isn’t happening and if it is it’s in other states, not in NSW.
The Aussie high court is also more pragmatic which is why they wouldn’t let some trivial principle like “standing” get in the way of challenging the laws of Texas.
As someone on Reddit put it so well, “This is why I unfollowed Szeps, and I stand by it. He’s charming and awful.”
I have no idea about the general slant of this site, but here are a lot more videos and photos, with some better background info. I only mention the possibility of slant due to not having anything to compare them to and not sure if what direction they would attempt to paint the picture, so to speak.
https://tottnews.com/2021/09/18/melbourne-freedom-march-full-story/
It does appear the cops boxed them in with the intent to provoke and or arrest.
Given the totalitarian sentiments coming out of the political leadership, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were instructed to make certain a spectacle happened.
Why did I scroll down?
Pretty sure that gave me a tumor.
AP reporter mocked for calling Biden administration setbacks ‘uncontrollable events’
The spectacle of former staffers coming out and saying how great their murderdroning innocent American citizens was, never mind non-American civilians, and how Biden’s publicized cock up was a one-off has been laughable. ?
an oldie but a goody, Tom Lehrer from back in the day,
https://youtu.be/aIlJ8ZCs4jY
https://babylonbee.com/news/fda-assures-vaccine-is-almost-as-safe-for-kids-as-covid
Hah!
That’s not satire.
Oh, well done.
Wow.
“Pfizer is hoping they can get kids fully vaccinated before their Q3 sales numbers come out. ”
The Bee does good work.