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Ki-43-III otsu
This page is about the Japanese fighter Ki-43-III otsu. For other versions, see Ki-43 (Family).
Ki-61-I hei
III Rank
Purchase:77 000
4.1 Tactics
4.2 Specific enemies worth noting
The Ki-43-III otsu Hayabusa is a rank III Japanese fighter with a battle rating of 4.3 (AB), 4.0 (RB), and 4.7 (SB). It was introduced in Update 1.45 "Steel Generals".
The Ki-43-III otsu is as a rank three aircraft in the Japanese Army Air Force line. Like its rank two brethren, it is an extremely manoeuvrable and lightweight aircraft. It has exceptional climb and roll rate making it a fairly hard target to hit in the hands of a skilled player. The trade-off, however, is its extremely fragile nature - a good hit even from a plane equipped with rifle-calibre guns could do some serious damage if one doesn't push the plane to its limits in any of the game modes. On the other hand, the rather modest pair of fuselage-mounted 12.7 mm Ho-103s of the Ki-43-II have been replaced with a pair of the hard-hitting Ho-5 20 mm cannons, which for its battle-rating gives the Hayabusa the power it needs to take down anything it opposes. Like many of the Japanese fighters, dog-fighting is the key to staying alive. By using the combat flaps and throttle in a optimal manner, this aircraft can get behind nearly every opponent it meets in a low to mid altitude dog-fight. With a modest ammo load of 300 rounds, trigger discipline is important here. It is best to get up close (200-500 m is optimal) and then let off several short bursts, firing until the enemy is critically damaged or the plane is destroyed.
EngineNakajima Ha-115-II
661 330 387 371 250 ~10 ~8
12 mm Steel plate behind pilot
Talisman cost980
The stock 20 mm cannon belts are a pain. Research the "Offensive 20 mm belts" fast. Otherwise there is not a lot necessary to upgrade, mainly performance modules. The engine and compressor modules do wonders. Payload unlocks should be considered last. The Ki-43 is a fighter and not a ground attacker like the B7A2.
Main article: Ho-5 (20 mm)
The Ki-43-III otsu is armed with:
2 x 20 mm Ho-5 cannons, nose-mounted (150 rpg = 300 total)
Main articles: Army Type 94 GPHE (50 kg), Army Type 94 GPHE (100 kg), Army Type 92 GPHE (250 kg)
The Ki-43-III otsu can be outfitted with the following ordnance:
Like the Zeros, the Ki-43 is exceptionally light and manoeuvrable. Unlike the Zeros, the Ki-43 has a ridiculous roll rate making it the closest one can get to playing an arcade-esque plane in RB.
Unfortunately, this comes at a cost. The Ki-43 sees primarily American planes which are far faster in both level flight and dive while having significantly better armament. Evading fire becomes difficult when facing planes such as the P-47N-15 which has 8 x M2 Browning .50 cals which are extremely deadly and have a ridiculous volume of fire.
As such, the Ki-43 is almost entirely dependent on siphoning kills from unwary pilots, pilot errors, manoeuvre kills, and pilot frustration which makes it quite a difficult plane to play. However, if played right, and abusing its insane roll rate and turn time, you can take down multiple enemies with your cannon and force others to crash out of frustration and over-eagerness. Note that this aircraft will experience severe rudder lockup when faster than around 450 km/h, resulting in awkward aiming adjustments if the target manoeuvres, so you need to cut throttle appropriately to control your speed.
While having sufficient flight characteristics, the Ki-43 is extremely fragile and can get critically damaged by almost all guns. From the hard-hitting M2 Browning to the fast-firing MG 15, any gun can badly hurt the Ki-43 especially on the engine, fuel tanks, and pilot which can always lead to a later crash. Before attacking try to get an altitude advantage and perform deflection shots. To maximise the damage aim for their wings and engines, as the fuselage usually soaks up lots of bullets. Only fire when the target passes in front of your guns. This short window might seem inadequate to do anything, but an accurate burst can blow off some control surfaces / damage the engine. And sometimes it only takes one bullet to set the target aflame, if you are lucky.
When using the Ki-43-III otsu, do remember this plane can easily out manoeuvre anything it may face. Do not try to go head on with enemy planes as even a single round can damage your plane. Instead, position for a head on, but pull off about 1.2 km out, go under the enemy aircraft, and loop around for a shot. You may need to repeat this manoeuvre several times to secure a firing position.
In Simulator, the Ki-43 is overall a decent plane. It has very forgiving characteristics such as good over-the-nose visibility, a clear bubble canopy without much framing and good backwards visibility. This increases your chance of spotting, tracking, and/or dodging since you can see targets from almost every direction with ease (except the underside, of course). It is recommended to set keybind for moving your head vertically to make full use of the great forward vision in a dogfight. However, its wings are located directly below the cockpit meaning that you cannot see what is below your sides which can lead to you losing track of the enemy. You should get used to searching towards your 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10 o'clock, avoiding the wings.
Note that when taking off the Ki-43 will shift severely to the left due to the propeller torque, so it is recommended to set keybinds for left and right brakes to effectively control your direction on the runway. Using rudder alone will not work at low speed and you will either circle around or lose control and crash into nearby structures like tents/hangars.
Landing is very beginner-friendly too. It is able to decelerate quickly while also having low stall speed, allowing you to quickly slow down and descend onto the runway. Takeoff and landing flaps do not lift up the nose a lot so you can easily remain overall parallel to the ground. It also performs great when braking as its nose will not usually dip into the ground, so you can keep braking until it fully stops (given that you deflect elevators fully upwards) which is vital for preparing the next fight quickly.
It has very good handling at most speeds. It does not wobble a lot which is an advantage over the biplanes and early monoplane fighters, making it easier to smooth the aim. You should familiarise the shape of those that you should not turn with: the Spitfires have long, straight nose with an inline engine, rather large and elliptical wings. The Zeros have an overall cylindrical fuselage that merges into a pointy tail after the stabilisers, a radial engine and are usually painted white (early models). If you see them on your tail try outrunning them by diving at around -40 degrees. The Ki-43 still remains responsive handling at 500 km/h, but its speed retention is poor, meaning it will start to lose speed quickly and the enemy might catch up. If you are near a friendly airfield, great. If not, then hope for the best and run towards the friendly side. Don't forget to pitch up and down a little to mess up their aim.
Specific enemies worth noting
Most Allied opponents at the battle rating can outrun the Ki-43 with ease. Most concerning are planes such as the P-47D/N or F4U Corsair, as both planes are over 80 km/h (50 mph) faster on the deck and also possess exceptional .50 cal armament. Use the Ki-43's manoeuvrability to dodge shots and try to slowly drain the energy of your opponent and force mistakes.
When facing the Ki-43-III otsu do remember that it is very manoeuvrable and that it can easily out turn what it faces therefore try to apply Boom & Zoom tactics against a Ki-43-III otsu.
It will be very challenging when facing against the Chinese/American Ki-43, as both of you have the same characteristics. You cannot outrun each other and cannot out-turn each other, so the fight will be a combination of various manoeuvres and techniques, and of course, the pilot's skills. However, now you have a better chance of critically damaging them within a short firing window which is always an advantage. Note that the Ki-43 has similar appearance as the Ki-44 and can be misjudged as a Ki-44 or a Zero which are also in the Chinese/American tree. Comparing to the Ki-43, the Ki-44 has a slightly bigger engine and the canopy is shifted backwards. The Chinese Zero is painted dark brown with a silver spinner, while the American one is in greyish-blue. They all turn well and have accelerate well in a dive.
When it comes to intercepting ground pounders or bombers, the Ki-43 generally performs poorly since the targets are all quite robust against your weak guns. Some examples are the IL-2 which is commonly seen in Sim. It can get mistakenly seen as other aircraft from a distance due to its common appearance. But up close you will see two bomb-like structures underneath its wings and triangular stabilisers with rounded tips. The early IL-2s have no defensive guns so it is safe to sit behind and carefully aim. They are heavily armoured in the cockpit and engine so avoid aiming at these areas. Instead target the tail to hope for disabling their tail control. The late IL-2s, however, have a rear-facing Berezin UB which is something you definitely want to avoid. Perform deflection shots from oblique angles (eg sides, top & bottom) or just disengage.
Typhoon Mk Ib/L: this is a very capable opponent, it is quite fast, climbs good, maneuvers alright and has 4x 20mm cannons that can fatally damage the Ki-43. If you are attacking, get an altitude advantage first and BnZ it. If you are being attacked by it, evade its first pass and immediately start a turnfight. You need to deploy combat / takeoff flaps, or even landing flaps if needed to push your turn rate to the limit. Several circles are needed, don't panic to see the Typhoon keeping up with your turns at first. With appropriate flaps, the Ki-43 will slowly out turn it, allowing you to get onto its tail. The Typhoon overall resembles a Hurricane, except its symbolic giant intake below the engine.
Not controllable Controllable
Excellent rate of climb
Decent level & dive speed at its place
Extremely manoeuvrable
Quick roll rate
Good armament
Decent ammo capacity
Low stall speed
Useful flaps in a turnfight
Good all-round cockpit visibility in simulator
Forgiving landing characteristics
Lightly armoured
Can catch fire easily due to the lack of armoured fuel tanks
Can feel a bit like a paper airplane handling-wise
Extremely slow, at 507 km/h on the deck
Poor high-alt performance
Energy retention and dive speed is abysmal
Wing rips can happen very easily if one performs high speed manoeuvres (~11 G)
Rudder locks up at around >=450 km/h, meaning that you will miss quite some passes due to the aim not being able to adjust horizontally
In early 1937 the Army recognized the need for a new single seat fighter. Instead of going through the normal process of requesting manufacturers to submit designs, the Army contracted with Nakajima directly to produce a replacement for their Ki-27 (Army Type 97) fighter. The requirements laid out to Nakajima for this new fighter was for it to have a top speed of 311 mph, to be able to reach 16,405 ft within five minutes, to have a minimum range of 500 miles, it was to be armed with two 7.7 mm machine guns, and to not lose any of the manoeuvrability of the Ki-27. The first prototype of what was to become the Ki-43 was completed in December 1938 with 2 more following soon after in 1939, however upon testing it was found that these airplanes did not live up the Army's expectations. The complaints from test pilots included that the plane was not manoeuvrable enough, hard to control, and had visibility issues.
Following the evaluation of the initial 3 prototypes, Nakajima would develop 10 testing aircraft with various modifications in order to address the armies concerns. The changes tested included giving the fighter the HA-105 engine, replacing the 7.7 mm machine guns with 12.7 mm machine guns, upgrading the outer skin to a treated duralumin, narrower fuselage, redesigned tail surfaces, modifications to the wing design, and the introduction of butterfly flaps. The last improvement in particular helped the plane to overcome its lack of manoeuvrability that the Army had issue with. After these designed prototypes were tested the Army settled on what they saw was the optimum configuration and requested that it be equipped with the Nakajima Ha-25 engine. The plane entered production as the Ki-43-Ia (Army Type 1 Fighter Model 1A) with the first example completing production in April 1941. This model was soon replaced with the Ki-43-Ib (Army Type 1 Fighter Model 1B) which replaced one of the 7.7 mm machine guns with a 12.7mm machine gun which was also soon replaced by the Ki-43-Ic (Army Type 1 Fighter Model 1C) which was equipped with two 12.7 mm machine gun.
After some time in the field, the Ki-43 was to receive a major upgrade based on feedback from pilots, which included replacing the Ha-25 engine with the more powerful Ha-115 engine, a two stage supercharger, pilot armour, self-sealing fuel tanks and many more minor improvements. The first prototype of what was to become the Ki-43-II (Army Type 1 Fighter Model 2) was completed in February 1942. The last major modification of the Ki-43 was done in 1944, combining the minor modifications of the IIa and IIb with the more powerful Nakajima Ha-115-II engine. These minor modifications over the Ki-43-II included a reduced wing-span (improving the plane's low and medium speed performance), increased pilot armour, improved oil cooler, and modified carburetor intake. This new Ki-43-IIIa (Army Type 1 Fighter Model 3A) entered production in October 1944 with approximately 1,000 being completed before the war ended. The Ki-43 would become the most numerous of all the Japanese Army's fighters. While operating in Malaysia and Burma the plane received the codename "Jim" and in the Pacific Theatre it received the allied codename "Oscar". The codename "Oscar" was eventually selected as the official code name for the airplane by the Allies.
Skins and camouflages for the Ki-43-III otsu from live.warthunder.com.
The Shooting Range #7 - Metal Beasts section at 00:40 discusses the Ki-43-III otsu.
Retrieved from "https://wiki.warthunder.com/index.php?title=Ki-43-III_otsu&oldid=120530"
Third rank aircraft


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35 of 60 is what?
35 of 60 is.......... Don't know
Bethel Grady ∙
Q: 35 of 60 is what?
What is 60 percent 35?
60% of 35 = 60% * 35 = 0.6 * 35 = 21
What is the solution for 35 percent of 60?
35% of 60= 35% * 60= 0.35 * 60= 21
What 35 percent of 60?
35% of 60 = 60*35/100 = 21
What is 60 percent of 35?
What is 35 percent of 60 points?
35% of 60 points = 35% * 60 = 0.35 * 60 = 21 points
What is 35 over 60 as a decimal?
35 over 60 = 35 divided by 60 = 0.583333 . . .
What is 60 percent of 35 show work?
Converting percentage to a decimal: 60% = 60 / 100 = 0.6What is 60% of 35= 60% * 35= 0.6 * 35= 21
What is 3.5 percent of 60?
35% of 60:= 35% * 60= 0.35 * 60= 21
What is 35 of 60?
What percent of 60 is 35?
35 is 58.33% of 60.
Increase 60 by 35?
35/60 = 35÷5/60÷5 = 7/12
What is 35 percent to 60?
35 percent of 60 is 21.
What is the gcf of 35 and 60?
Thegcf of 35 abd 60 is 5
What is the equivalent fraction of 35 and 60?
what is equivalent to 35 over 60
The LCM of 35 and 60 is 420.
What is the LCM of 35 and 60?
The LCM is 420.
What are the prime numbers from 35 to 60?
The prime numbers from 35 to 60 are 37,41,43,47,53,59.
What is the LCM for 35 60 100?
LCM(35, 60, 100) = 2100.
What number is between 60 and 10?
(60 + 10) ÷ 2 = 35
What is of 60 percent of 35?
"percent" means "out_of 100" "of" means "multiply" → 60 percent of 35 = 60/100 x 35 = 21
What are the release dates for 60 Minutes - 1968 35 Years and 60 Minutes 35-33?
60 Minutes - 1968 35 Years and 60 Minutes 35-33 was released on: USA: 18 May 2003
What is 35 if 60 is 100?
What? 35 is 35, 60 is 60, and 60 is NOT 100. The whole concept of numbers depends on them having unique values. No number has more than one value.
What is the percentage of 21 out of 35?
21 out of 35 is 60%

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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BIG JIM's BOLD PREDICTIONS: NCAA 2017
Here we are College Football fans.
At the beginning of a new season. At the beginning of GREATNESS.
I'm back this week to bring you Big Jim's BOLD PREDICTIONS. I will tell you this week who will be the Power 5 Conference Champions and who will be standing at the end of it all in the National Championship game. I can see a few of the regulars still being there at the end and a few surprises to everyone else – except Big Jim, of course. I can also see what looks to be the GREATEST National Championship game of all time from two programs with such storied histories that when it all unfolds at the end of the season Hollywood will wish they had written the script.
Enough with how great Big Jim is at picking the BIG WINNERS let's get with the Champions.
ACC Champion: Florida State
Yes, that's right Big Jim see's Florida State as the winner of the ACC. Then again it is just the ACC. With teams like NC State, Duke, Boston College and Syracuse on the season's menu it shouldn't be too tough for FSU to go undefeated this year. You do have the pesky defending National Champions, Clemson to deal with but then again, their entire offense, consisting of Deshaun Watson was drafted by the Houston Texans, so they are really an also-ran team this year. This is however, where the excitement ends. There is no FEAR of the SPEAR. Being that they really play no other ranked teams it will be hard for the Seminoles to maintain a Top 10 Ranking. They will make it to a nice Punch Bowl at the end of the season and be able to claim another Conference Title but isn't that what we really all expect from the ACC.
Big Ten Champion: Michigan
Now this is a tight pick window. Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin and Maryland are all Power House Programs that are consistently on the cusp of GREATNESS. Michigan will have to play hard nose defense while putting up some insane yardage on offense to be able to pull it all off but I do believe this is Jim Harbaughs year to win the Big Ten Crown. Ohio State will be strong this year but will see a major drop off in quarterback play and with no real true running back threat their offensive numbers will take a hit. The Wolverines will indeed own the north this year and with other top teams in the Conference, like Maryland I do see them making it into the College Football Playoffs. That's where it will end. There are teams from the South that Big Jim sees as being so dominant that even this talented squad won't be able to get past 'em.
PAC 12 Champion: University Of Southern California
Was there any real doubt about this one. USC has returned to its glory days. It also helps that the rest of the PAC 12 looks like it should be playing in the WAC or maybe Conference USA. They have no threat from the north as the Oregon Ducks have fallen on hard times and will be rebuilding for future generations. Then you have Stanford who has returned to their roots of producing some of the great minds of our time but the football field doesn't seem to be their focus lately. USC only has one real test this season and that will be in week 3 against the Texas Longhorns. Texas will edge out the Trojans in this contest but they will still have enough of the season ahead of them to get back into contention for a playoff appearance. Unfortunately, that's where the GLORY of FOOTBALL GREATNESS ends for the season.
SEC Champions: Louisiana State University
Did Big Jim really just call LSU over Bama for the SEC Championship?!
Coach Ogeron has this team ready to play and play hard. The Tigers have had a few years of getting all the pieces into place but they are ready to go this year. With other teams like Ole Miss (that we won't speak on much since we have young readers here at RedZonePlay), in turmoil, I don't see much competition. It will be a tough night in Tuscaloosa when they have to beat Nick Satan's squad but beyond that they really just have some other tune up games like when they play the a&m aggies. LSU will walk into the College Football Playoffs and win to advance to the National Championship Game.
Big 12 Champions: University of Texas
Texas has had a rough patch for the last few years and is coming out of it this year. UT has everything in place for a National Championship run. Oklahoma lost its coach, Baylor is losing its program and the Texas Tech Red Radars are just lost. Oklahoma State always makes a little noise but they will return to also-ran status this year and do we even need to mention TCU? Yeah… let's just move on.
Texas will face its BIGGEST test on week 3 against USC Trojans. It will be a tough night of football out in California with all the fruits and nuts but Texas will come out on top and that game will set the tone for an undefeated season. They will breeze through the first round of the playoffs for the eventual match up against their toughest competition of the year *THE* LSU Tigers in the National Championship Game.
This game has it all. The Texas Longhorns, The LSU Tigers. Two of the greatest football programs in the history of the game. And it's the return of Championship football for both of the programs after a brief few years rebuilding their teams. Two coaches that were just named officially this year even if we all could see it coming last year. This is a match up that the world wants to see. Forget about all the hype and parades this is going to be smash mouth hard nose football at its best. There will be plenty of yards gained through the air but this game will be decided in the trenches. Now the moment you have all be waiting for. The winner of the National Championship Game: AMERICA. With two teams this great meeting in the BIGGEST contest of the year we all win.
There you have it friends. All 5 Power Conference Champions all the way to the National Championship. I could have called the National Championship winner but then again, I didn't want to be accused of being biased. There could be some surprises along the way this year but if there were not, then why do we even play the game?
Now that you have the inside information you know what to do. Take it to the Bank. Pass it along to your father-in-law and look like a football genius. Maybe share with your boss and get that BIG raise that you deserve. Tell your wife and watch as she looks on in amazement at your vast football knowledge. I will be back in few short days for Kick Off Weekend and all of BIG JIM'S LOCKDOWN PICK'S OF THE WEEK.
August 24, 2017 August 24, 2017 Mr. MikeBig Jim's Lockdown, College Game Day, NCAAF, ScoutingAlabama Crimson Tide, Florida State Seminoles, LSU, Michigan Wolverines, NCAAF, Texas Longhorns, USC Trojans
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49ers among three teams to reach out to QB Ryan Mallett
Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
Mar 8, 2017 at 8:51 PM • --
According to Dianna Russini of ESPN, the San Francisco 49ers are among the teams that have reached out to Baltimore Ravens quarterback Ryan Mallett. Per Russini, the other teams showing interest are the New York Jets and his team of the past two seasons – the Ravens.
The Jets, Bears, Niners, and Ravens have reached out to Quarterback Ryan Mallett. No decision has been made.
— Dianna Russini (@diannaESPN) March 9, 2017
The 49ers are expected to sign Chicago Bears quarterback Brian Hoyer to a two-year contract on Thursday. Once signed, Hoyer will be the only quarterback on the 49ers' roster so there is a need to get bodies into the position.
Mallett, 28, was a third-round selection out of Arkansas by the New England Patriots in the 2011 NFL Draft. The quarterback also spent two seasons with the Houston Texans. Over his six-year career, Mallett has played in just 19 games and started eight. In those games, he has completed 55-percent of his passes for 1,779 yards, seven touchdowns, and 10 interceptions.
Mallett crossed paths with Hoyer twice. The first was for a year in New England (2011) and then for nearly a year in Houston (2015). Mallett actually battled Hoyer for the starting quarterback job with the Texans in 2015 but ended up losing the competition. Houston ended up releasing Mallett in October of that year and he joined the Ravens in December. Mallett started two games for the Ravens at the end of the 2015 season, winning one. In those two games, he completed 59.8-percent of his passes for 566 yards, two touchdowns, and two interceptions.
Three 49ers, including Christian McCaffrey, day-to-day ahead of Eagles game, per Shanahan
On Monday, San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan jumped on a conference call with reporters and provided several injury updates following Sunday's 19-12 Divisional Round playoff win over the Dallas Cowboys. The coach mentioned three players. Two were already known, based on post-game information. However, the third is a new development. First, the known injuries. Charles Omenihu suffered an oblique strain that briefly forced the defensive end to exit the game. Shanahan says Omenihu is day-to-day leading to Sunday's NFC Championship Game against the Philadelphia Eagles. Running back Christian McCaffrey revealed that he fought through some bothersome calf
49ers-Cowboys: Drake Jackson among 7 inactives for Niners
The San Francisco 49ers have released the list of inactive players for their Divisional playoff matchup at home against the Dallas Cowboys. These players will not suit up for Sunday's game. Inactives: DL Alex Barrett RB Tyrion Davis-Price QB Jimmy Garoppolo (foot) DL Drake Jackson TE Tyler Kroft CB Ambry Thomas (ankle) OL Nick Zakelj The only two players ruled out due to injuries are quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo and cornerback Ambry Thomas. Their status has been known since Friday. Rookie defensive end Drake Jackson has been inactive for four of the last five games.
49ers-Eagles: Elijah Mitchell among 7 inactives for Niners
The San Francisco 49ers have released the list of inactive players for their NFC Championship Game matchup on the road against the Philadelphia Eagles. These players will not suit up for Sunday's game. Inactives: RB Tyrion Davis-Price TE Ross Dwelley QB Jimmy Garoppolo (foot) DL Drake Jackson RB Elijah Mitchell (groin) CB Ambry Thomas (ankle) OL Nick Zakelj On Friday, the 49ers only ruled out one player, quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo (foot), for today's game. Two players, running back Elijah Mitchell (groin) and cornerback Ambry Thomas (ankle), were listed as
Kyle Shanahan, DeMeco Ryans, Brock Purdy, other 49ers among finalists for several NFL awards
Several members of the San Francisco 49ers are among the finalists for annual NFL awards. The league announced the finalists for several Associated Press 2022 NFL awards, including NFL Coach of the Year and NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year. Kyle Shanahan is among the finalist for NFL Coach of the Year. In addition, his defensive coordinator, DeMeco Ryans, is a finalist for NFL Assistant Coach of the Year. Quarterback Brock Purdy, who has started just seven games, is a finalist for NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year. Defensive end Nick Bosa is a finalist for NFL Defensive Player of the Year, while running back Christian McCaffrey is a finalist for NFL Comeback Player of the Year. Below is a list of the awards for which 49ers players are finalists. Their


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EnglishClub > Listen to News > Bananas Threatened by Fungal Disease
dateline: 20 October 2015
Bananas Threatened by Fungal Disease
fungus: a spore-producing organism that feeds on organic matter
plantation: a large group of plants cultivated by locals for commercial purposes
drastic measures: a major response or action; usually very costly and/or risky
breed: a single variety
https://www.englishclub.com/efl/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/englishclub-news-banana-disease.mp3
A fungal disease is threatening banana crops around the world, and could result in the extinction of the Cavendish (a.k.a the supermarket banana). The fungus, which stays in the soil and very easily, prevents the fruit from taking in water. Burning down plantations and starting over with a different crop is one of the only known , though many farmers cannot afford to take these drastic measures. Banana experts say that history is itself and that the banana industry did not learn from a similar disease that wiped out a banana crop in the 1950s. on one breed instead of the many that are available, makes it difficult to recover from a serious outbreak.
What is threatening the supermarket banana?
What is one of the only known solutions to this banana crisis?
According to banana experts, how could this disaster have been prevented?
Discussion Questions: Does this type of news make you nervous about the future of food? What can the average person do to help ensure that other crops don't go extinct?
A fungal disease is threatening banana crops around the world, and could result in the extinction of the Cavendish (a.k.a the supermarket banana). The fungus, which stays in the soil and spreads very easily, prevents the fruit from taking in water. Burning down plantations and starting over with a different crop is one of the only known solutions, though many farmers cannot afford to take these drastic measures. Banana experts say that history is repeating itself and that the banana industry did not learn from a similar disease that wiped out a banana crop in the 1950s. Relying on one breed instead of the many varieties that are available, makes it difficult to recover from a serious outbreak.
A fungal disease that spreads very easily is threatening the supermarket banana.
One of the only known solutions is to burn down plantations and start over with a new type of crop.
Banana experts say that farmers should not be relying on one breed of banana crop, as it is difficult to recover from an outbreak.


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> Vinyl>Agalloch - Ashes against the grain DLP
Agalloch - Ashes against the grain DLP
Agalloch's 'Ashes Against The Grain' is an impressive follow-up to 2002's 'The Mantle,' their groundbreaking sophomore album that fused the emotional struggles of dark metal, folk music and melodic harmonies. The album as well served as an influentialbase for a lot of younger bands who have since surfaced, yet few have been able to capture the dark beauty that coats the emotional wounds sculpting Agalloch's work.
On 'Ashes Against The Grain' the band continues their sonic journey, always progressing but never losing touch with their dark metal roots, as the band's third album unites elements of black metal, Scandinavian prog and post-rock with the band's signature brooding style.
GALLOCH's 'Ashes Against The Grain' is an impressive follow-up to 2002's 'The Mantle,' their groundbreaking sophomore album that fused the emotional struggles of dark metal, folk music and melodic harmonies. The album as well served as an influentialbase for a lot of younger bands who have since surfaced, yet few have been able to capture the dark beauty that coats the emotional wounds sculpting AGALLOCH's work.
Transparent vinyl


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Bread for all, and Roses, too: Courtney Milan's HER EVERY WISH
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes,
Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.
As we come marching, marching, un-numbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread,
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses, too.
Bread and Roses strikers
As I was reading Courtney Milan's latest novella, I could not help but think of the Lawrence, Massachusetts "Bread and Roses" strike of 1912. In response to a new Massachusetts law limiting the number of hours women and children could work (from 54 to a mere 52!), textile mill owners in Lawrence cut the wages of their workforce. Expecting such a move, leaders in the Industrial Workers of the World union organized a strike of primarily female immigrant millworkers, workers whom several other unions claimed could not be organized. The strikers demanded not that their wage be returned to its former level, but that it be raised by 15%. Because working women deserved not only the lowest wage that would allow their survival, but a wage that would allow them "small art and love and beauty," too.
Milan's novella is set hundreds of miles away from Lawrence, in London, England. And it takes place 46 years earlier than Lawrence's Bread and Roses strike, in 1866. Yet its heroine, Daisy Whitlaw, has the same thirst for the small beauties of life as did Lawrence's textile workers. Daisy (whom readers of book 1 in the "Worth Saga," Once Upon a Marquess, will remember as the working class best friend of that book's heroine), a woman who cannot stop reaching for her dreams, no matter how many times her hands are slapped away, opens the story by entering a contest offering fifty pounds to the person who presents the best plan for a new business. Ten semifinalists have been selected based on their written proposals (wise Daisy entered under the name "D. Whitlaw"), and now each must give a public presentation to the members of the parish. Unlike the other finalists (all men), whose proposals include the same old ideas for new stores and businesses, Daisy's proposal is a novel one: Daisy's Emporium, "a small shop of carefully selected goods. Durable, beautiful, and inexpensive. Designed for—" For women, Daisy had planned to say. But the hostility of the crowd, angered that a woman has dared enter the contest, makes it almost impossible for her to deliver her intended speech (Kindle Loc 121).
In spite of the difficulties of her presentation, Daisy is chosen as one of the five finalists invited to prepare a more detailed proposal. The man in charge of the program suggests that her invitation has little to do with her proposal's merit, however:
"We'll see you all next Saturday. And it looks like we have our entertainment in order. After all, we've just lined up the jester." He gave Daisy an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows and let out a great, braying laugh, one that explained precisely why she'd been chosen. (163).
Daisy, though, can't help but hope that her proposal might have a slim chance of winning, even in the face of such sexist condescension. And so when Crash, her former lover, an impudent, self-confident flirt of a man whose ancestry is so mixed that people who barely know him feel entitled to come up and ask him, "What are you?" offers to serve as audience while she rehearses her speech—"You need to practice in front of someone you hate. Someone who makes your stomach curdle. Someone who will ask questions while you want to smash his face in," (i.e., himself)—Daisy finds herself accepting.
A 1868 velocipede race in France
And finds herself not practicing her speech, but being thrust upon a velocipede, learning self-confidence by learning to ride this newfangled wheeled contraption. And learning a lot more about Crash in the process, a man with whom she had once thought herself in love. A man so arrogant and self-assured that she'd thought nothing could wound him—especially not herself.
Though Crash and Daisy appear to be polar opposites, Milan shows that their common experiences of facing discrimination—sexist discrimination for Daisy, racist discrimination for Crash, and classist discrimination for them both—the two have far more in common than they, or we, ever thought. And that both deserve more, far more, than society tells them they should want.
Not just bread, but roses, too.
Bread and Roses strikers: New England Historical Society
Emporium: Haute Design
Velocipede race: The Online Bicycle Museum
Courtney Milan
Her Every Wish
The Worth Saga, #1.5
Labels: book review, classism, historical romance, interracial romance, racism, sexism
Compensatory Romance: Charlotte Stein's NEVER SWEETER
"Mom, that boy is hitting me!"
"Oh, honey, that's only because he likes you..."
Female readers: when you were a girl, did you ever have an exchange like the one above with your mother, or another older authority figure? I know I did. The words were meant to make me feel better, and they did, to a certain extent. Though I certainly didn't like getting pushed, or hit, or having my hair pulled, thinking that such behavior was less about how much a boy hated me and more about how much he liked me bolstered my wilting self-confidence. But at the same time, the words also unconsciously taught me that it was okay for boys to hit me. Though boys could be violent, said violence was simply a stand-in for caring feelings boys were did not know how to, or were not allowed to, express, and so I should not protest, at least not too much.
I couldn't help thinking of such exchanges as I read Charlotte Stein's latest erotic romance, Never Sweeter, book 2 in her Dark Obsession series. In the novel's prologue, Letty, a senior in high school, is walking home after her car has broken down and comes across her long-time tormentors, fellow students Jason, Patrick, and Tate. She knows once they see her, they "were going to pull some stunt," but even she could not believe that they would force her off the road: "They weren't going to actually do it for real. Bullies like them never really did anything. It was all just safe things that made their target feel like shit" (Kindle Loc 89).
Yet Letty spends the next two years in rehab, recovering from the injuries she sustained after Jason's truck shoved her off a bluff. And none of the boys was prosecuted for the act—"just an accident," Jason tells the police, who believe him because he's popular, and a sports star.
The book itself opens when Letty starts college, two years late, only to discover that Tate, the worst of her three tormentors, is not only attending the same school, he's actually in her film studies class. Yet each time their paths cross, there's no sign of the cunning, cruel, feral bully of her high school years. In fact, Tate seems to be making a major effort to be nice to the girl whose life he once made a living hell. And to compliment her. And to help her feel less skittish around men.
When Letty makes her first female friend at college, she cannot help but think of how different it is to have someone who believes her side of the story: "Clearly, Lydia would never tell her that she had to stop doing whatever she was doing that goaded Tate. There would be no calls to the college's office to talk about the transfer she should get, instead of the one he should" (Loc 480). And she's thrilled to find someone who can help her keep in mind the old Tate, the one that Letty is certain is waiting just around the corner, ready to spring a new humiliating trap on her as soon as she lets her guard down.
When Letty and Tate are assigned to partner on a project about the depiction of sex in film, though, their relationship takes an unexpectedly sensual turn. Watching White Palace, Dirty Dancing, Nine and a Half Weeks and others turns them both on, something that Tate is not at all shy about noticing. Or talking about. Or acting on, at least when it comes to himself. And Tate's sexual self-display, combined with his ever-increasing displays of emotional vulnerability, lead Letty to do just what she could never have imagined doing: enjoying hot sexy times, and touchingly emotional times, with her one-time enemy. Yes, despite their harasser/harassee history, Letty and Tate fall for one another. And such is Stein's skill as a writer that she has the reader cheering for (and turned on by) this unlikely outcome.
One aspect of cultural work romance novels do, Catherine M. Roach argues in Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture, is "to try to make up for the costs to a woman's psyche of living in a culture that is still a man's world" (11). Roach terms this work "reparative," but I wonder if the better word might be "compensatory." Though both words are synonyms for "make amends," reparative also has an additional meaning that compensatory does not: to remedy an undesirable condition or situation; to restore or repair. Reparative suggests that something is going to be changed, fixed, mended; "compensatory" makes no such promise.
And it seems a far better word to describe what occurs in Stein's novel. Neither Tate nor Letty can go back and fix the past, the past in which Tate made Letty lock herself in the janitor's closet, or called her "fatty" and "thunder thighs," or put up flyers at school with her picture "telling everyone to watch out for the whale that had gotten loose from Sea World" (Loc 3576). In fact, the entire idea that your tormentor is actually tormenting you because he secretly loves you is deeply compensatory. Presented as reality within the novel—Tate, it turns out, was secretly in love with Letty all the time he tormented her—outside the novel, it serves as a fantasy, a fantasy that can make a reader who has been bullied feel better about the experience, even if, as is far more likely in real life, her own tormenter acted out of cruelty and privilege than out of frustrated caring.
Towards the end of the novel, Letty dumps Tate, because she believes she found evidence that he really is just conning her into thinking he cares for her. But of course, since this is a compensatory fantasy, Letty is mistaken, and the two tearfully reunite. During their getting-back-together conversation, Tate reveals that he only started bullying Letty after she called him a "jug-head" and turned him down when he asked her for a date. Letty then feels guilty for having started the whole vicious cycle, and, of course, for not trusting Tate this time round.
But Stein does not allow Letty to accept the guilt that such a plot turn initially seems to dump on her plate. And she uses Tate as her mouthpiece to explain why none of this is Letty's fault:
"But you're not fucking responsible for shit that I chose to do. You didn't owe me your love. You didn't owe me a polite yes. It was not on you to let me down gently and somehow ward off punishment I was fucking stupid enough to think you deserved." (4030)
Yes, the very zenith of compensatory fantasy: not only does the hot, sexy bully turn out to be in love with you; he also turns out to be a closet feminist.
Is reading Stein's compensatory fantasy a first, positive step toward restoring a bullied girl's stolen self-esteem? Or, more problematically, does it encourage the reader to side with the purportedly "loving" bully?
I guess the answer lies in whether said reader will tell her own daughter that she's "not fucking responsible" for a bullying boy's actions, or feelings, and should not stand for being teased, tormented, or hit by a boy just because he likes her.
Or whether instead she just ends up repeating the old line, "Oh, honey, he's only hitting you because he likes you..."
Charlotte Stein
Never Sweeter:
A Dark Obsession Novel
Loveswept, 2016
Labels: book review, bullying, Catherine Roach, compensatory fantasy, sexual harassment
Romancing Beverly Cleary
During a recent discussion with some friends, we somehow got onto the topic of our kids and dating. Someone wondered how kids knew if a pair of teenagers was a couple. "You know because the boy gives the girl his ID bracelet," I said as a joke. Some of my friends didn't know what an ID bracelet was, never mind that it could be given as a token to say "we're going steady." So I had to explain how I knew this piece of 1950s trivia: from my reading of Beverly Cleary's 1956 teen romance, Fifteen.
With all the publicity surrounding Cleary's one hundredth birthday last week (April 12th), I couldn't help but recall that conversation, and my memories of reading Fifteen when I was an adolescent. Did I still have that old Dell Laurel-Leaf paperback that I'd bought when I was myself fifteen?
Turns out that I did. So this weekend, I took a stroll down memory lane, rereading the story of fifteen-year-old California teenager Jane Purdy and her introduction to dating, 1950's style. And I realized that it wasn't only lowbrow Harlequins that had first introduced me to the conventions of genre romance, but also the books of one of the most critically lauded children's writers of the 20th century.
My 1980 edition: "Having a
boyfriend isn't the answer!"
Though the tagline on my paperback, published during the height of second-wave feminism, reads "Having a boyfriend isn't the answer!" Jane's story opens by wishing for quite the opposite: "Today I'm going to meet a boy, Jane Purdy told herself, as she walked up Blossom Street toward her baby-sitting job. Today I'm going to meet a boy" (5). Jane's reasons for wanting to meet a boy don't have anything to do with sex, and only a little bit with romance; in fact, they seem far more about the social capital having a boyfriend can give a girl:
He would be at least sixteen—old enough to have a driver's license—and he would have crinkles around his eyes that showed he had a sense of humor, and he would be tall, the kind of boy all the other girls would like to date. (6)
When fellow student and "cashmere-sweater type" Marcy smiles and waves at Jane from the car in which she is riding (which of course belongs to popular Greg Donahoe, president of Woodmont High School's junior class), Jane feels that "Marcy belonged. Jane did not" (7). In part, belonging is about social class: Marcy "wore her cashmere sweaters as if they were of no importance at all," while Jane "had one cashmere sweater, which she took off the minute she got home from school" (7). But it is also about who your friends are, and who you date: "Marcy had many dates with the most popular boys in school and spent a lot of time with the crowd at Nibley's" Confectionary and Soda Fountain, while Jane "had an occasional date with an old family friend named George, who was an inch shorter than she was and carried his money in a change purse instead of loose in his pocket and took her straight home from the movies" (7).
The original 1956 edition:
telephones and cars at the center
of 1950s' teen life
Jane hopes that by meeting, then dating, a boy, one who meets all of her "would be" criteria, she'll be magically transformed into someone popular, someone who belongs. But even Jane realizes her dream is more fantasy than possibility: "And if I were in Marcy's place right now, Jane thought wistfully, I wouldn't even know what to say. I would probably just sit there beside Greg with my hands all clammy, because I would be so nervous and excited" (7). While the story that follows fulfills the wish Jane gives voice to in the book's opening lines—she and new-to-Woodmont Stan Crandall "meets cute" during Jane's babysitting job—the book's explicit message is one about claiming one's self-confidence. My feminist-packaged 1980 edition uses Jane's moment of realization as the interior sell copy:
From now on, Jane resolved, she would be Jane Purdy and no one else. When she saw Stan, she would act glad to see him, because no matter what had happened that was the way Jane Purdy felt. After all, Stan had liked her when she was baby-sitting with Sandra and when she walked through Chinatown with him, and she had been herself both times. Maybe if she continued to be herself, Stan would like her again. And if he didn't there was nothing she could do about it.
But there are other, less empowering messages that ride in on the coattails of this lesson in self-confidence. Messages that can easily be found in many a romance published for teens and adults in the years since 1956.
For a romance heroine, "being yourself" means being decidedly ordinary
"Is Jane ready for her first boyfriend?"
When Jane worries that her behavior has alienated Stan, she wonders "what she would do about Stan if she were some other girl." But then she realizes that she
was not any of these girls. She was Jane Purdy, an ordinary girl who was no type at all. She was neither earnest nor intellectual, and she certainly wasn't the kind of girl the boys flocked around. She was just a girl who liked to have a good time, who made reasonably good grades at school, and who still liked a boy who had once liked her. There was nothing wrong with that. (152)
On the one hand, such a message is reassuring to readers who do not have any particular talents or interests, who think of themselves as "no type at all." But on the other, Jane's insight suggests that girls who do stand out, who are intellectual or well-off or popular, are somehow less deserving than the "ordinary" girl.
"You're different from most girls"
Even though Jane is "ordinary," "no type at all," Stan still declares that she is "different" from "most girls." The "you're different" line shows up in almost every other romance novel I've read. Somehow, the romance heroine must be ordinary, while at the same time being judged "different" by the hero of their potential romance.
1992 edition: "Jane Purdy is fifteen,
shy, and in desperate need
of a boyfriend"
Sometimes this "difference" is only in the mind of the hero. But other times, it is tied to how the heroine treats the hero, as opposed to how other girls/women treat him. Stan's declaration of Jane's "difference" comes after Jane acted without teasing and without complaint when Stan arrives for a big triple date driving not his father's car, but the truck from his job at the "Doggie Diner." Unlike Marcy, who made fun of the truck, or unspecified "most girls," who "would have made me feel I'd spoiled their evening, because riding to the city in a Doggie Diner truck was beneath their dignity or something" (98), Jane "was filled with sudden sympathy" at the sight of Stan's "eyes, [which] were pleading with her not to mind, to be a good sport about riding in the truck" (81). Jane knows she has to "stifle her own feelings" of disappointment in order to be a good girlfriend. In order to present Jane as "different," then, Stan has to position "most girls" as not kind, not nice. Which leads us to point #3:
Other girls are your competition for the attention of boys.
At the start of the book, Marcy, tooling around in Greg Donohoe's car, appears to be the embodiment of Jane's dearest desires. But she also becomes Jane's competition, at least in Jane's mind. During Jane's first date with Stan, while they are awkwardly starting to talk over ice cream at Nibley's, Marcy and Greg crash their booth, and Marcy proceeds to monopolizes the conversation. Jane grows jealous, and feels inferior, as she does on another, later date, when she and Stan and two other couples drive into the "city" to eat in Chinatown. Later, when Jane is expecting Stan to ask her to the first school dance, but then discovers that he is going to take another girl, Jane asks her friend Julie to find out who the unknown girl is (she fears it is Marcy, of course). Turns out it's a girl from the "city" where he used to live, a girl whom both Julie and Jane talk over with no little "cattiness" (125, 126).
2008 edition: "Jane's falling in love
for the first time"
Though Jane is "wistful" after seeing Marcy in Greg's car in the opening scene, she herself takes pleasure in instilling the same feeling in other girls after she and Stan begin dating:
Once inside [Nibley's], Jane could not decide whether it would be better to sit in a booth in the back, where she would be sure to have Stan all to herself, or whether it would be better to sit toward the front, where she could show him off to the rest of the crowd. She nodded and spoke to a boy who had been in her history class, a girl from her gym class, and two more from her registration room, and hoped she was behaving as casually as if she were used to walking into Nibley's with a good-looking boy. The girls spoke to Jane, but they looked at Stan. Jane noticed wistfulness, envy, or just curiosity on their faces—depending, Jane decided, on whether they were with other girls, boys they didn't like much, or dates they really liked. It was, Jane felt, a very satisfactory experience. (53)
And she enjoys sharing that same pleasure of lording it over the non-dating with her best friend, Julie:
"I've simply got to find time to wash my hair before we go to the city for dinner with Stan and Buzz," remarked Julie, in a voice that was not exactly loud but nicely calculated to carry to the crowd around them.
"I wish I had a yellow blouse," said Jane, as if she were completely unaware of the interest others were taking in their conversation. "Stan always likes me in yellow."
The faces reflected in the mirror behind the milkshake machines revealed that the girls around them were wishing they had dates for dinner in the city, too, and that they were sure to spread the news to every girl in Woodmont. Jane and Julie left Nibley's feeling that they had enjoyed an unusually pleasant afternoon. (78-79).
1991 edition: "Could Jane really
believe that a boy like Stand would
be interested in her?"
"That's how men are"
Jane's frustrated when Stan doesn't ask her about going to the first school dance during a Saturday date the week before. But she chalks up his behavior as due to his gender: "He was unusually talkative... but he did not mention the dance. Oh, well, thought Jane, that's how men are. He's probably taking it for granted. She found it very pleasant to be taken for granted by Stan" (103). On Tuesday, she uses the same excuse: "He had just forgotten—men were so absentminded about such things—and had been carrying the tickets in his wallet all the time" (106). While Jane is rewarded for taking Stan's feelings into account during the Chinese dinner date, Jane uses the gender card to excuse Stan for not taking similar regard of her feelings.
Since the novel is told entirely from Jane's point of view, we don't hear any "women/girls are like that" thoughts from any male characters. But in many a later romance, gender-based comments about feelings and behavior are often brought up by characters of both sexes, to explain or excuse behavior that often baffles them about their romantic partners. Such comments often function as humor, but they also simultaneously set forth the often sexist standards and boundaries about what counts as acceptable "masculine" and "feminine" behavior.
1977 UK edition
Lack of communication throws monkey-wrenches into romantic relationships
Jane and Stan experience several misunderstandings during their early dating days, misunderstandings that stem from their fears of telling each other the truth and hurting each other's feelings. Stan does not talk to Jane about already having a date for the first school dance, which leads Jane to having to tell him she's been asked by someone else, and feeling humiliated when he appears relieved rather than upset or jealous. Jane does not admit to Stan (or even to herself) that she's still angry with Stan after he comes by to apologize, and ends up responding to Stan's friend Buzz's joking offer to pay Stan fifty cents if Stan will let Buzz kiss his girl by offering her lips. Though Jane initially thinks her response was due to trying to act like Marcy, after she sees how hurt Stan is, she realizes the real reason she let Buzz kiss her: "She wanted Stan to feel some of the hurt she had felt" (138).
With Jane and Stan, who are new to the dating game, such problems of communication are easy to understand. No romance novel can't exist without a few conflicts, plot moments that keep the protagonists from achieving their HEA, or HFN, though, so the lack of communication conflicts pop up in romances for all ages. Even to the extent that readers just want to grab the characters and give them a good shake for being so emotionally stupid.
A girl's most important life goal is finding a boy
Jane's parents married right after graduation (she tells us that her father has been out of college for sixteen years [45]). While Jane anticipates having a career afterward she finishes her own degree ("Just what career, she did not know—an airline stewardess or a writer of advertising copy for a big department store, or perhaps a job at the American embassy in Paris—something like the girls in the pages of Mademoiselle, who always managed to be clever about clothes and to be seen in interesting places with men who had crew cuts" [140]), she also knows that "in the shadowy future" she will be married. And that being a wife is the most important role she will take on.
Fifteen opens with Jane's hope of meeting a boy. And it ends with Jane's hope realized: ID bracelet around her wrist and Stan's first kiss, a "tender, clumsy" affair, on her lips. Though that first kiss is comically interrupted by the family cat and Jane's father's praise of its hunting skills, Jane's thoughts post-kiss, which serve as the final lines of the book, confirm Jane's priorities: "She was Stan's girl. That was all that really mattered" (190).
Fifteen was originally published when my own mother turned fourteen. Reading it in 1980, at fifteen myself, made me feel both as if I were gaining a window onto my mother's adolescence and into the possibilities of my own future dating life (late bloomer, me). Before I reread it today, in 2016, when my own daughter is seventeen, I thought that it would feel entirely dated, a work of historical fiction.
And it does. But surprisingly, it also feels quite familiar, at least to a reader of romance. Because so many of the central ideological truths of the genre of romance remain the same, even at the start of the twenty-first century.
Labels: book review, dating, going steady, YA
The Nine Essential Elements of Romance According to Catherine M. Roach
Last week, my long-awaited copy of Catherine M. Roach's Happily Every After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture arrived in the mail. Like me, Roach has a double identity as both a scholar and a writer of romance (under her pen name, the far more romantic Catherine LaRoche), and I was curious to discover how she navigated those two identities, how her knowledge of one realm informed her thinking about, and in, the other. And vice versa.
I've only made it through Chapter 1 (out of 8) so far (ah, the glories of late winter viruses). But there are enough meaty insights even in just the Prologue and opening chapter to provide hours of thought for those interested in what popular romance is and does.
Roach's prologue serves as an invitation into the world of Romancelandia, both the genre of fiction and the readers of said genre. At the heart of genre romance, Roche argues, lies these two central tenets: FIND YOUR ONE TRUE LOVE and LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER! Her book, written in accessible, reader-friendly prose, proposes to think about and understand those two basic ideas. "How does this narrative function? Why, how, and to what effect does this story have such a hold on us?" (2)
Her opening chapter outlines her foundational ideas, what she's come to understand about popular romance after spending several years investigating the above questions. Said ideas can br boiled down to two related lists.
Rather than argue whether romance is good or bad, or good or bad for women readers, as has been the approach of many previous academic scholars of the genre, Roche takes a both/and approach: "My core argument is that romance novels are popular because they do deep and complicated work for the (mostly) women who read them" (11). That work has three related (and, I would think, often contradictory), aspects, Roach suggests:
• Reparative: romance tries to "make up for the costs to a woman's psyche of living in a culture that is still a man's world"
• Transgressive and empowering: romance works to encourage its readers to "refuse to be limited or lessened by narrow gender roles and a toxic ambivalence about women's sexuality"
• Mythic/religious: romance serves as a testament of faith for its readers, faith in "the redeeming power of love as of ultimate concern in human life" (11).
As God says to Eve, "Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you" (Genesis 3:16). For women living in a patriarchal culture, the "perfect trap" of romance is "to be made to want someone who will subordinate you" (12). Romance turns this "Gordian knot of female desire" into "the magic potion of a love that softens and sweetens the complications of desire into the guarantee of a happy ending" (13). Or, in other words, romance novels address the "conundrum of living as a woman in a man's world, or more specifically, as a heterosexual woman whose desire is for men," by "offer[ing] a fantasy safe space that addresses these anxieties and has them all work out" (15).
In a footnote, Roach explains that her focus on heterosexual female readers is not an attempt to "erase the experiences of readers of other gender expressions and sexual orientations" (199, note 8), and poses a series of questions for future investigation. But I think with some minor editing, the cultural work Roach argues romance achieves could equally be applied to LGBTQ readers, and to books featuring LTGBQ romances. Do you?
The remainder of her chapter expands upon this list of three aspects of the cultural work of romance with another list: the "nine key components to the core story about romance." In contrast to Pamela Regis's structural approach to romance's essential elements (in The Natural History of the Romance Novel), Roach takes a cultural studies approach, identifying the key ideological assumptions of the genre. Or, in other words, the ideas that all romances take as givens.
Here is a summary of the list:
1. It is hard to be alone
2. It's a man's world
3. Romance is a religion of love
4. Romance requires hard work
5. Romance involves risk
6. Romance facilitates healing
7. Romance leads to great sex, especially for women
8. Romance makes you happy
9. Romance levels the playing field for women
Though Roach is writing as a cultural critic here, I can see how this list of essential elements could be helpful both to romance writers and reviewers. I've often found myself reading a romance where something just seemed to be lacking, or off. And after reading through Roach's list, a lightbulb is going off in my head. Oh, this book felt flat because falling in love for the protagonists didn't involve any real risk; that one did not stick with me for very long because the love came too easily. As a writer, I could give this list to a beta reader and ask that reader to keep them in mind when critiquing my manuscript. Or I could even write up the list and pin them above my computer monitor, to help keep them in my mind for goals while I am drafting.
As a literary critic, I also appreciated that Roach also calls the reader's attention to problematic aspects of many of the key elements that she identifies. For example, "romance levels the playing field for women" can be problematic if it "obscures the extent to which they are options other than romance whereby women can thrive and become empowered" (26). And "romance is a religion of love" can be problematic "if and when privileges romance over other forms of love as the best and highest love" (23). I think I could add a few others—does the "romance facilitates healing" glorify the "broken"? Does it insist that romance has to "fix" you?
I'll be curious as I read further into her book whether she thinks these problematic aspects apply across the genre, or only in specific books within the genre.
One last side comment that really made me say "Oh, yeah, I never thought about that, but what you're saying seems really dead-on":
Begun in the suffering and unhappiness of the real world, the romance story must end in the healing and happiness of the mythic world. That is not to say that neither love nor happiness are real but that the romance story narrates their reality in a mythic way, pushing it into a more perfect fantasy space. (27)
What do you think of Roach's lists? Are there books that you consider romances that don't incorporate all of the above key components? Or that don't attempt to do all three types of cultural work she identifies?
Try Patriarchy: Honors Mosaics
Labels: literary criticism
Depicting Bisexuality in the Past: Grace Burrowes' TREMAINE'S TRUE LOVE
Though I'm a fan of all romance genres, historical romance is the one my alter ego, Bliss Bennet, writes and the one my reader-self gravitates towards the strongest. So I'm always curious to read the nominees for the historical romance category of the RWA's RITA awards. Grace Burrowes has received several RITA nominations over the years, unsurprisingly given her books' many strengths: beautiful writing, slow-building romances, the affection and comfort of large families, the respect and care her characters demonstrate toward one another even in the face of disagreement and difficulty.
Tremaine's True Love contains all of the above. But what really interested me in reading it was not the book's main romance, between Bernita (Nita) Haddonfield, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Bellefonte, andTremaine St. Michael, a half-French half-Scots comte/merchant/art collector who travels to Bellefont's home to bargain for some rare merino sheep Bellefonte owns. It was one of the book's subplots, the one featuring Nita's youngest brother, George, and how Burrowes depicted that character's "unconventional" sexuality.
I seem to recall hints in earlier Burrowes books, books about the elder Haddonfield brothers (in Nicholas: Lord of Secrets? or Beckman: Lord of Sins?), that George might be attracted to men. This book confirms those hints, and follows out their implications. We receive direct confirmation of his preferences from George himself, in a scene told from his point of view. He has just given the young son of his neighbor, widow Elsie Nash, a ride home on his horse to save him a cold walk. After Elsie attempts to engage him in polite conversation about his recent travels, George responds:
"I travel on the Continent because my family finds my taste in kissing partners inconvenient." Dangerous, Nicholas [his eldest brother, the current earl] had said, for certain sexual behaviors, regardless of how casually undertaken or commonplace, were yet considered hanging offenses. (72)
Said neighbor, though, is not put off by what she accidentally saw:
"George Haddonfield, if I were dismayed by every person I found kissing an inconvenient party in the garden, I should never have lasted a single Season as the colonel's wife. You were kind to my son, and that is all that matters to me." (72)
Nicholas, the current earl and George's older brother, knows about his dalliances with men (as the caution that George remembers above demonstrates), but doesn't outright condemn or shun George because of them. Others in George's family know about his attractions, too, and do not cast George aside: "George was the brother closest to Nita in age, and his unconventional attractions had never been a secret to her, nor had they been anything but natural to him" (240). In fact, the only person who knows about George's liking for men and expresses disgust for it is the villain of the book.
Well, perhaps that is not quite true. For George himself is not all that happy with his own "unconventional attractions." When he finds himself drawn to his sister Nita's suitor, Tremaine, he thinks thus: "[Tremaine St. Michael] was attractive, wealthy, and interested in Nita. So George must pant after him in silent frustration? Must comport himself with all the emotional delicacy of a tomcat? Such stirrings flattered nobody. They were for strutting, impulsive boys who had one foot planted in rebellion and the other in boredom" (177). George thus equates his same-sex sexual attractions to immaturity, to animality, to the uncontrolled.
From an 1835 broadsheet reporting the execution of
two men for homosexual acts: as George's elder
brother asserts, George's attractions are dangerous
Earlier in that same scene, George reveals that he's had sex with women, as well as men: "Though George had recently discovered he liked looking at Elsie Nash too—a puzzle, albeit a pretty one. He'd enjoyed the company of women in the past, the same as any other fellow at university—some women, anyway. And a few men." (173). His attraction to women, though, is not as strong—nor as dangerous—as it is towards men: "George liked women, and even desired them on occasion, the way a fellow might desire a hot cup of tea or chocolate with a dash of cinnamon on a cold morning. Not the way he longed for the fiery pleasure of a good brandy—stupidly, passionately, without any dignity or care for his own well-being" (175). If one were to categorize George in current-day terminology, one might say he's bisexual but with a strong leaning toward the masculine end of the gender spectrum.
Once George thought he would try to marry a woman who "wouldn't have minded a marriage where both partners were free to roam, provided appearances were maintained," hinting that his roaming would be in the direction of male, rather than female, partners. But, for some unspecified reason, "The notion struck George as vaguely distasteful now, sad even" (174). George realizes he is lonely, and finds himself envious of Tremaine and his sister. He, like almost all of Grace Burrowes' characters, longs for affection, comfort, and connection. For heterosexual characters, such desires are met, of course, through monogamous marriage.
And thus when George offers comfort to his neighbor Elsie Nash, and she kisses him in return, readers should not be surprised to read,"George's mind manufactured a single thought—kissing Elsie felt good too!—before he began kissing her back" and that her "mouth had the power to wake a man up, to reveal to him choices he could make, paths he could choose" (320, 346-47). The path George chooses is to propose to Elsie, telling her that "My regard for a passing handsome or even pretty face is eclipsed by the loyalty [your positive] characteristics inspire" (347-48). In the internal monologue that follows his declaration, though, George tries to convince himself that his assertion will, in fact, prove true:
He hoped. George's hope was based on several solid realities. First, his involvement with men had never gone beyond the casual or the physical. Men were a lot of bother, in George's experience, full of strut and blather, every bit as capable of drama as the blushing debutantes filling any ballroom.
Second, his regard for Elsie included a fat dose of physical attraction, but finer emotions as well. He respected her, he enjoyed her company, he liked her. He liked her a lot, always had.
Third, there was the boy. Digby needed a father, somebody to stand between him and [his uncle]. George could hardly be that father if he spent his evenings larking about London, bored, randy, and causing his family worry. (348).
George and Elsie go on to marry, and, in the book's final chapter, we hear that not only Nita & Tremaine, but also George and Elsie, are expectant parents.
I can't help but feel pulled in two directions by this end to George's story. On the one hand, I'm thinking that it's likely pretty historically accurate for a gentleman of this period to find his own attraction to the same sex upsetting and disturbing, as George does. And that if he had any attraction to women at all, that such a man might prefer to marry a woman to avoid both his own fears and to give his birth family peace of mind than to engage in sexual acts with other men.
But on the other, I can't help but cringe when I read Tremaine St. Michael's response to George's declaration that he is to marry Elsie and that he would "like to survive until my wedding night" (the two are about to participate in a duel): "Never did like public school, myself," says his soon-to-be brother-in-law (368). Public school here presumably being the site where George first developed and explored his sexual attraction to men. In that one short sentence, Tremaine simultaneously indicates that he is aware of George's sexual attraction to men and asserts that such attraction is nothing more than a bad habit George picked up because he was sent away to school, away from his (heteronormative) family. That George takes no umbrage at Tremaine's assertion suggests that he, too, believes that his same-sex attraction belongs to his youth, which, by marrying, he is putting aside to become a mature male adult.
Not a message I'm happy to embrace.
Would love to hear the take of other readers of Tremaine's True Love on George's character arc...
Pratt & Smith trial broadsheet: EQ View
Grace Burrowes
Tremaine's True Love
Sourcebooks 2015
Labels: book review, historical romance, homosexuality, masculinity
Finding the Line between Apology and Punishment: Seressia Glass's SUGAR
There's a popular strand in romance fiction that focuses on the apology. Apologies for poor choices, for hurtful actions, for painful words said in the heat of anger or grief; apologies followed by acts of atonement so that the romance sinner to prove his (or occasionally her) worthiness for love. The words "I love you" may be the most repeated ones in all of romance, but the words "I'm sorry" may come a close second.
Some apologies are clearly long overdue (see yesterday's, from Romance Writers of America, for issuing a survey in 2005 to its members polling them on the question "should romance be redefined as between one man and one woman"). But others can serve a less worthy purpose, given the attitude of the apology's recipient. For when the one done wrong by continually demands that a wrongdoer apologize, only to then reject each and every apology said wrongdoer proffers, penance can start to look an awful lot like punishment. To find a romance novel willing to say that enough apologizing is enough is pretty rare; to find one in which the apologizer is a mother, and the wronged one her child, practically unheard of.
Which is why I so enjoyed Sugar, the second novel in Seressia Glass's erotic contemporary series Sugar and Spice. The series focuses on four female friends, all working to get their lives back together after recovering from various addictions, which gives the books' storylines a lot more emotional heft than the average erotic romance. Sugar's female protagonist, Siobhan Malloy, co-owner of a bakery in small town Crimson Bay, California, has not taken a Percocet or OxyContin in over four years. But she knows she can't absolutely promise that she'll never take too many again. She made that promise once before, and broke it by getting hooked all over again. Her husband and parents may have liked her better when she was on drugs than when she wasn't, but getting hooked on painkillers a second time led to an accident that put her daughter's life in danger. She knows that's why her second fall from grace cost her her marriage, her relationship with her parents, and even her own daughter, who refuses to speak with her even after Siobhan's recovery.
So it's more than understandable that Siobhan is reluctant to become involved in anything like a committed romantic relationship. But go-getting local business owner Charlie O'Halloran isn't used to taking no for an answer. Immediately struck by the curvy blonde behind the counter the first time he stepped into her bakery, Charlie has bided his time, watching and waiting for the right moment to make his move. When Siobhan finds the business proposal he finally dangles to tempt her intriguing (combining his delivery service with her bakery's treats), he can't resist pushing her to test the sexual waters, too. And despite her doubts, soon Siobhan and the younger Charlie (thirty to her thirty-five, or so he tells her) are heating things up between the sheets (and in the office, and at the burlesque club where "Sugar" Malloy struts her stuff in an attempt to channel her sexuality in a healthy, life-affirming way).
When should someone with an important life secret, a secret that may affect the way others view her, share that secret with a sex partner? Siobhan's business partner, Nadia, told her sex-only guy of her past addiction before they even slept together (see Sugar and Spice book #1), but only because her former job on a cooking show made her descent into addiction headline news. For herself, Siobhan decides to be more circumspect, especially because she is determined to keep things casual between herself and Charlie. But when he wants to push their relationship deeper, and reveals a secret of his own, Siobhan knows it is time to come clean.
Charlie's secret is a far happier one than Siobhan's, and it soon has Siobhan yearning once again for the closeness of a family of her own. But her ex, her parents, and her daughter all pretend that she doesn't exist.
Is it fair to turn Charlie's family into a surrogate for her own? Or does she owe it to her daughter and her parents to keep trying to mend the fences her drug addiction brought crashing down? Even when her family keeps yanking the ground out from underneath each fencepost she tries to re-erect, then blames her for when they fall?
Romance novels are chock-full of characters who have been traumatized by the behavior of their parents, especially their mothers. To read one in which a child's ability to emotionally wound a mother is the underlying message makes for a refreshingly feminist read.
FYI, Sugar is one of the nominees for the 2016 RWA RITA award, in the erotic romance category.
Burlesque dancer: Rebel Circus
Apology not accepted: Wiki How
Seressia Glass
(A Sugar and Spice Novel)
Heat/Penguin Random House, 2015
Posted by Jackie C. Horne at 9:00 AM No comments:
Labels: apologies, contemporary romance, erotic romance, mothers, parenting, secrets
Laws Regulating Fashion Models: Protection or Intrusion?
While I was climbing away on the elliptical this morning at the gym, my eye was caught by a news story flashing by on the television screen of a fellow exerciser. Marc Levine, a California state assemblyman, has proposed a law that would require fashion models to obtain a certificate from a doctor before they can work in the state. Modeled after a new law in France designed to reduce the pressure on fashion models to lose weight or face unemployment, the legislation would require doctors to certify that models are a healthy weight and are not suffering from anorexia or any other eating disorder. Modeling agencies would be required to be licensed, and would be penalized if they were caught employing models without the proper medical certification.
A neighbor of mine worked as a model as a teenager, and has a boatload of stories about the pressures adults in the industry put on young girls, pressures that can far too often slip into abuse. I was also reminded of Marie Force's romance novel, True North, which features a model who is disillusioned with the industry. Would such a law have made the careers of my real life neighbor, and Force's fictional heroine, less dangerous to pursue?
Or is such legislation just another example of men intrusively regulating women's bodies? Are there other possible solutions that might be proposed to protect women in the modeling industry?
Do you know of any other romance novels with models as protagonists that touch upon these issues?
Labels: anorexia, body image, eating disorders, modeling, role model
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HomeNetworkingRoutingRouting ProtocolsRouting Information Protocol - RIP
Routing Information Protocol - RIP
Written by Administrator. Posted in Routing Protocols
Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is a true Distance-Vector routing protocol. It sends the complete routing table out to all active interfaces every 30 seconds. RIP only uses hop count to determine the best way to a remote network, but it has a maximum allowable hop count of 15, meaning that 16 is deemed unreachable. RIP works well in small networks, but it is inefficient on large networks with slow WAN links or on networks with large number of routers installed.
RIP comes in two different versions. RIP version 1 uses only classful routing, which means that all devices in the network must use the same subnet mask. This is because RIP version 1 does not include the subnet mask when it sends updates. RIP v1 uses broadcasts (255.255.255.255).
RIP version 2 does, however, and this is what we call classless routing (check the Subnetting section for more details). RIP v2 uses multicasts (224.0.0.9) to update its routing tables.
Route Update Timer: Sets the interval, usually 30 seconds, between periodic routing updates, in which the router sends a complete copy of its routing table out to all neighbor routers.
Route Invalid Timer: Determines the length of time that must expire, usually 90 seconds, before the router determines that a route is invalid. It will come to this conclusion if it doesn't hear any updates about that route for that period. When the timer expires, the router will send out an update to its neighbors letting them know that the route is invalid.
Route Flush Timer: Sets the time between a route becoming invalid and its removal from the routing table (240 secs). Before it's removed, the router will notify its neighbors of that route's impending doom ! The value of the route invalid timer must be less than that of the route flush timer. This is to provide the router with enough time to tell its neighbors about the invalid route before the routing table is updated.
Interior Gateway Protocol - IGRP
Distance Vector Routing Protocols
Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol - EIGRP
Link State Routing Protocols
Hybrid Routing Protocols
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) Routing Protocol


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.22 Cal. Killers
2 Comments / By Gary Jenkins / January 3, 2022 April 5, 2022 / Gangland Wire Crime Stories
The .22 Caliber Killings: Inside the Mafia's Infiltration of Two FBI Field Offices
During the post War period to 1968, the FBI and a few local police department Intelligence Units made liberal use of extrajudicial hidden microphones and wiretaps. In 1968, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. This statute authorized the first legal use of audio surveillance by law enforcement. The FBI created a large list of confidential informants. Many of them were street-level thugs and a few high-ranking mobsters. Since they did not have extensive electronic surveillance, they needed these men for probable cause to obtain the new legal wiretaps. Of these valuable informants, fifteen made-men were placed on the extremely confidential Top Echelon Informant list.
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Access the Top Echelon List
In 1971, a young lady named Irene Kuczynski was a typist at the FBI's Newark field office. A New Jersey Mob associate named Peter Szwandrak learned about this employment when he worked at Western Electric with her husband George. Peter told George Kuczynski a New Jersey Mob boss named John "Johnny D" DiGilio would pay for any files his wife could get and copy. George Kucznskui was already a spouse abuser and when his wife refused, he beat her several times until she agreed to get some files. DiGilio gave George $100.00 per delivery of any files his wife copied and brought home. DiGilio was extorting money from shipping companies and conducted a loan sharking business. He learned from the FBI documents that two members of his crew, loan shark and gambler Vincent Capone, and Frank Chin, an electronics expert who moonlighted doing wiretaps and sweeping for government microphones, were talking to the Bureau. The FBI caught the Kuczynski's and they agreed to testify. In July of 1975, the government charged Peter Szwandrak and Harry Lupo with the theft of FBI documents. They could not make a case on DiGilio. After this acquittal, unknown persons shot and killed Vincent Capone while his Cadillac was stopped at a traffic light. Someone murdered Frank Chin in the basement parking lot of his Manhattan apartment. In an interesting turn of events, the FBI lab results revealed that both men were killed by the same 22‐caliber pistol.
FBI goes into high alert
Once they discovered the theft of documents in the New Jersey field office was linked to the murder of witnesses, the FBI went on high alert. During the middle 1970s, they had noticed informants were being killed at every level. The newspapers reported on a rash of .22 cal. murders during this time and the FBI knew these were mostly informants. The FBI knew this entire leak of informant data did not come from the single theft at the New Jersey Field office. They theorized that the mob had paid persons to infiltrate the FBI throughout the United States.
Cleveland has a Mole
Cleveland mobster Anthony "Tony Lib" Liberatore had a car dealership and he learned that one of his employees named Jeffrey Rabinowitz was engaged to a young woman named Geraldine "Gerri" Linhart and that she was a clerk in the Cleveland office of the FBI. Gerri Linhart was getting a divorce. She did not earn much working for the Bureau and she was trying to sell a house she had received in the settlement. She had a hard time getting this house sold Liberatore had someone contact her and they promised to make her financial troubles disappear. She was advised that she only need to do some favors in return. She started selling files to Liberatore and his capo James "Blackie" Licavoli. Among those files was a complete list of FBI informants. An example was the name Danny Greene who was in a battle with the Italian mafia over control of a labor union. He had been informing on the Mafia for years. In an interesting turn of events, the Cleveland Teasmster official Jackie presser was a Top Echelon Informant but he had demanded his name never be put on any list. However, two of his underlings were on the informant list.
Jimmy Fratianno
Fratianno was a former Cleveland mobster who had moved on to become a roving mafia member who was based in Califonia. He had been giving information to the FBI himself for many years. When he learned of the Informant list, he called back to Cleveland and he was relieved his name was not on the list. He was shown this list and he recognized many names. Over the next few years, many other persons who may have been named as informants were murdered with a .22 cal pistol. the most famous .22 cal. murder was Sam Giancana. While his name may not have been on an informant list, the Chicago Outfit had learned about his deal with the CIA to kill Fidel Castro. Johnny Roselli who was part of this same arrangement was found murdered shortly after.
Mortgage broker Edward Lazar was murdered with a .22 pistol in 1975. Lazar had been involved in laundering money for the Chicago Outfit by buying up property in the southwest.
August "Augie" Maniaci was an old-time "made man" in the Milwaukee crime family. The FBI classified him as a Top Eschelon informant. Mob historian Gavin Schmitt stated Maniaci was dissatisfied with boss Frank Balistreri and the leadership when he had started talking. He exited his house one morning and found he had a flat tire. As he stopped to examine the tire, unknown assailants approached him and murdered him with a .22 pistol. Chicago Outfit assassins Paulie Shiro and Chuckie Nicoletti were the suspects. Nicoletti was listed as a Top Echelon Informant himself.
Vincent Calderazzo was a soldier in the Genovese family and he reported to Vincent "The Chin" Gigante. "Chin" was suspicious of Calderazzo after an FBI raid. He sent Calderazzo to California. Shortly after he arrived someone murdered him with a .22 cal. pistol.
The most famous murder was that of the boss of San Diego and Underboss of the LA Family, Frank "Bomp" Bompensiero. He had been implicated in the murder of a businesswoman, Tamera Rand because she was creating trouble for the Chicago outfit "Strawman" Allen Glick who owned the Stardssut and was sending skim back to Chicago. he did this murder with Chicago outfit member Tony Spilotro and they used a silenced .22 pistol.
Jimmy Fratianno will later tell the FBI that Bompensiero told him that the Chicago Outfit had a large cache of .22 pistols and silencers. When the mob learned that Bompesiero was informing himself, he was set up while making a telephone call from a phone booth and killed with a .22 cal. silenced pistol.
Show notes by Gary Jenkins
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2 thoughts on ".22 Cal. Killers"
Very Good Episode
There is a trove of FBI Mafia documents in the JFK Assassination Collection. Due to the rumor of Mafia involvement, there are a lot of documents to see.
There is a FBI Memo from 1977 that details the numerous mob murders that were completed using a .22 handgun and silencers that were leaving a similar mark on the bullets.
The silencers were traced to two Chicao policemen. One did the manufacturing and the other the sales. The manufacturer was sentenced to 4 years in federal prison.
FBI Memo regarding 11 Cosa Nostra murders using a .22 and silencer
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mafia/comments/qu870w/fbi_memorandum_regarding_numerous_lcn_gangland/
Silencers manufactured by Chicago police officers – UPI Article 1980
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/09/29/Two-police-officers-are-suspected-of-manufacturing-silencers-putting/8260339048000/
great info thnak you