He subsequently appeared with the words "Gimme a fix" on his chest—accounts vary as to whether the words were written or carved there.

(meta data) TITLE: On Tour With the Sex Pistols – Texas Monthly

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/texas.monthly.magazine

In 1978 Punk magazine sent photographer Roberta Bayley to Texas to chronicle the band's tour through the South.

Her photos of the two Texas shows capture the surreal collision of two radically different cultures.

The Sex Pistols's notoriously ill-conceived 1978 tour of the U.S. was one of the more surreal moments in American pop culture history.

The band had spent the previous two years violently yanking on England's stiff upper lip, making international news by, among other things, dropping f-bombs on a London suppertime chat show and timing the release of a single "God Save the Queen"—which declared the prim monarch was fascist and inhuman—to coincide with the silver jubilee celebration of her 25 years on the throne.

Though some considered them the embodiment of underclass unrest, the prevailing perception was simpler: that the band's only interest was offending any and everyone.

And so, after being banned from the radio and concert halls at home, singer Johnny Rotten (now John Lydon), bassist Sid Vicious, guitarist Steve Jones, and drummer Paul Cook set out for the States.

But Malcolm McLaren, the band's manager and mastermind who created the Pistols in the mold of an intensely profane, anti-Monkees, had no interest in building the audience.

His goal was conflict and the free press it would generate.

So he booked the tour throughout the South, and over nine days that January—36 years ago this month—the Pistols played in places like Memphis, Baton Rouge, San Antonio, and Dallas.

Trailing them was a phalanx of now-famous photographers—names like Annie Leibovitz and Bob Gruen—who were charged with memorializing this world-class culture clash.

For those of us who were old enough to be aware of the Pistols but too young to attend—I was in the sixth grade in Austin, and my mom wasn't going to drive me to anything in San Antonio but the Alamo or the zoo—the images are still mesmerizing.

There's heroin addict Sid Vicious onstage in San Antonio, unable to get drugs on the trip, with "Gimme a fix" carved into his chest.

Or constitutionally disgruntled Johnny Rotten hunched over and leering at the crowd in Tulsa (or anywhere, really).

But one of the most well-known images from the tour doesn't show any of the band members.

It was taken in the parking lot outside Dallas' storied Longhorn Ballroom, onetime home of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, by a young New York rock photographer named Roberta Bayley.

It's a remarkable yet simple photograph, extremely subtle compared to the balance of the coverage.

Against a wan, blue sky, a large, barn-shaped sign announces the honkytonk's name.

Closer to the ground, an eight-foot-tall statue of a steer is flanked by two wagon wheels.

And in between, a marquee reads "Tonight Sex Pistols, Jan 19 Merle Haggard."

The message is immediate: this was a surreal collision of radically different cultures.

Just a glance at the picture and you imagine that, shortly after the sun dipped below the horizon, somebody got his ass kicked.

It was one of the first photographs I looked for when, three years ago, I started Sponglr, a Tumblr examining perceptions of Texas.

The blog's purpose is identified in its subhead: "On Texas: How y'all think we look, and what we actually look like."

Under that rubric I've posted or reposted images of Texas icons, stereotypes, and everyday life, some acknowledged and to be expected, others goofy and out of the blue.

The Longhorn Ballroom shot is a little of all that, an X-marks-the-spot intersection of exactly what one would and would not expect of Texas.

With a little online digging I found more of Bayley's pictures from the tour, including some wonderfully incongruous shots of the Sex Pistols drinking Lone Stars, and a host of other, instantly recognizable images of seventies-era New York punk.

So last week I called her to talk about that time.

A California native who grew up in the sixties in San Francisco, she lived in London in the early seventies, where she worked in a boutique owned by McLaren and his partner, Vivienne Westwood.

In 1974 she moved to New York and soon thereafter into an East Village apartment where she still lives—and which is still around the corner from Richard Hell, one of punk's founding fathers.

As the punk scene came together, she took a job working the door at CBGB's, becoming friends with and photographing all the local players—Blondie, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television—and every punk act that passed through town.

In 1976 she shot the cover of the Ramones' seminal first album.

On January 7, 1978, she was working as principal photographer for Punk magazine when she received what she refers to now as "a mysterious phone call" telling her that a first-class plane ticket was waiting at the airport to take her to San Antonio the next morning to meet up with the Pistols.

(Controversial High Times founder Tom Forcade was paying for her and John Holmstrom, the editor of Punk, to make the trip, but he preferred for that fact to be kept under wraps.)

"I didn't ask any questions," she told me.

"Everybody in New York was pissed the Pistols weren't coming here.

She still sounds excited talking about it now, and she was generous with her recollections and other photos from the trip.

She looked over old contact sheets while we talked on the phone and had an easy time telling where the photos of her first trip to Texas began.

The night before the flight, she said, she'd shot a Ramones show at a club called the Paladium.

"The last picture from New York is of some guys with a chimpanzee on Fourteenth Street that I saw on my walk home.

The first one I took in Texas was of stacked cases of glass bottles of Coke that I saw at the airport.

We didn't have bottled Coke in New York."

That little taste of culture shock would soon seem quaint.

Half of the people were there for curiosity, but the other half were there to cause trouble.

They threw cans of beer at the stage all night.

They didn't take a lot of opening slots because when they played with other bands, they played for people who didn't get it.

But Malcolm's intention was confrontation.

He specifically chose not to send them to Austin because Austin was aware of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.

My photos in San Antonio are from the back of the room.

I'd come to meet the tour on the same flight as Annie Liebovitz, and she went right in the middle of all that.

There was a feeling of . . . menace isn't the right word.

But there was a definite sense of violence.

That was the show where Sid swung his bass at that guy.

Punk had covered the band and run a long interview with him, so I knew he was intelligent.

When I got on the band's bus briefly in San Antonio, he just said, "That's highly unadvisable, young lady."

I took this photo that night and don't think it's ever been published, except maybe in Punk in 1978.

It's from after the show, after the crowd had dispersed and the band came out to mingle.

That was a big part of the punk ethos: the band wasn't separate from the audience.

So the Pistols came out to check out the space, to admire all the beer cans on the floor and talk to the contingent of English press that was following them.

The Sex Pistols coming to America was a big British press story.

They had skin like reptiles that had been underground their whole lives, like salamanders, beyond even the standard English pasty look.

And they looked freaky, especially for Texas.

You didn't see orange spikey hair back then.

They were young, like 21 or 22, and this was their first real tour.

When they went on the Anarchy Tour in England, most of their shows were canceled, so they'd just travel to a city and not play.

But by now they were starting to feel manipulated by Malcolm.

He was an intellectual, a provocateur, and in America he realized they were "becoming a rock band."

And they were getting fed up with being Sex Pistols.

Sid was sitting on the bar in Dallas, and I was lecturing him.

So I had to explain that Iggy was past thirty.

Going on tour when you're strung out and can't get any drugs must have been miserable.

Malcolm couldn't get him any heroin, so he drank heavily.

I think he was a nice guy, but he got caught up in this punk thing and started acting out, doing what he thought he was supposed to be doing.

I had just flown into Dallas with Malcolm, Steve, Paul, and John [Holmstrom] and gone to the club.

I figured the band would do a sound check and was hoping for access.

But Sid and Johnny were riding on the tour bus, and it wasn't there yet.

Steve had this cowboy hat he'd bought in Memphis or San Antonio.

He and Paul thought it was so funny to be in America and Texas.

To see more of Roberta's work, click here.

Sign up for Texas Monthly's State of Texas newsletter to get stories like this delivered to your inbox daily.

A daily digest of Texas news, plus the latest from Texas Monthly

A message from the editors at Texas Monthly

If you fill out the first name, last name, or agree to terms fields, you will NOT be added to the newsletter list.

We Are Firmly in the Boycott Era of Politics

Zebra Mussels Are Infesting Texas Lakes.

it's one of those legendary gigs that you wish you had seen, like Woodstock, even if the reality didn't live up to the legend

Due to problems in San Antonio there were more police than fans.

Though no long necks were allowed, someone managed to get one in and throw it at the band.

Sid broke it and gashed his stomach several times until one of the crew tackled him.

He bled, not punk blood, the real stuff.

Earlier some, actually many fans began hocking into their spiked hair of the band.

It was surreal, especially with the pictures of country icons hanging all over the ballroom.

One super hot blonde moved up in front of Johnny, he promptly leaned over, gagged himself, and yakked all over her.

That's when I moved toward the back…but not one minute sooner.

I'd forgotten how sickly they looked, thanks for the memories.

Actually, I've seen a video of the girl being interviewed about it later.

So I talked to someone who channeled Sid Vicious and he did say he wanted to die at 25 but didn't make it.

In previous lives he was always an entertainer but this was his first time as a musician.

Previously a court jester, Shakespearean actor, vaudevillen as song and dance man and then Sid.

He wanted to come here totally soulless and devoid of morals and commented to us, isn't it interesting that I achieved greatest fame in this role.

He's still not a nice guy even while dead.

I was at The Randys Rodeo show in San Antonio…i was in High School and went with a friend and her mother.

Her mom had to call my parents and tell them she was escorting us to a concert (my dad was a preacher).

It was a wild show and yes it was very very tense.

I will never forget it….i remember Sid smashing a bottle and cutting himself and all the spitting and people started throwing things…i left that show covered in beer and who knows what else!!

People were just waiting to riot…it was in the air…there was no stopping it…and i am glad i was there and was part of it.

But wasn't this really about mocking us, goading us into provocation, and using us (Texas and Texans)?

The point was the visual image — not the music — hence the gaggle of photogs whisked along to document every stop.

Kinda like when Louie Gohmert appears on The Daily Show.

Roberta Bayley took one of the best photos of the Ramones on the first album cover .

Read all about the Ramones in the book "On The Road with the Ramones".

Have you seen Nancy Gray's shots from the San Antonio Show?

They have been on The Current cover and are also on RandysRodeo.com.

"Her photos of the two Texas shows capture the surreal collision of two radically different cultures."

EDIT for clarity: 'Bullshit' term aimed only at ridiculous subheading, not article and photos!

I and others I'm sure can assure you, it could not have been anywhere and never will be again.

Love 'em or hate 'em – it happened, THEY happened.

And love 'em or hate 'em – they made music history.

And the shooting comment under this one?

tell that to all the fans of the "new" (what might be considered outrageous) bands/musicians/artists that shake people up today…decades later…after the Pistols.

Every generation has to have their "thing" —

I think you rather missed my point, which was was simply taking issue with the ridiculous subtitle: "surreal collision of two radically different cultures", and how the pictures showed nothing of the sort.

There is no collision, subtle or otherwise, and outside of someone personally knowing that venue, I say again, it could be anywhere; it's just a scruffy-looking stage, the likes of which can be found all over the world.

I'll deal with just that opening statement at the top of the story.

" "surreal collision of two radically different cultures", I'll just give you my take, it's totally subjective & I don't expect any/everyone to agree.

When the Pistols came through the U.S. on that soon-to-be- ill fated tour, which the band broke up in San Fran. on the last show.

Back in Texas in the late 70's, honky tonks/dance halls used to only booking balls-out country acts took those stages.

When good ol' Malcolm, their manager booked them at all the 7 U.S. clubs, he knew/thought there would be chaos.

"Cowboys/kickers" maybe didn't mingle w/the punk crowds per say in any of the 7 shows, but to them too, it was a spectacle.

It was, even if THEY couldn't put it into words, "a surreal collision not only of two radically different cultures", but the kids/young adults into those bands couldn't care less and it was history in the making.

I know personally I could not have seen photos of the Randy's Rodeo/Ballroom in S.A. and the Longhorn in Dallas (their only 2 "redneck" show venues) with the Pistols???

We all had to go, and it was great, and I was glad to be there.

Glad I got to witness that wonderful "Surreal collision of two radically different cultures".

Sid had a collision w/a few things at the Randy's show, but you can read all about that on the interwebs as you know.

If you weren't there, you wouldn't understand.

Once again, I was complaining that the pictures showed nothing except the band.

No pictures of them interacting with the locals, no pictures of amazed or outraged Texans.

You seem to think that I'm knocking the 'subtle collision'; I just really wanted to see some pictures of it.

I don't think you are knocking the subtle collision that actually didn't happen.

It was more like a firestorm of new music coming from England w/promoters who were brave enough to take it on, esp. in the southern U.S.

What I took issue to more than that was your quote "The pictures show a band on stage.

No other band did what they did before or since.

The Randy's banner & former venue (which is still standing, same location is, at last report a church/bingo hall) alone is iconic and the fans, whether @ the show or not, know it.

Most ppl who are into them now or weren't there either say they wish they were there or knew someone who was.

Randy's is well-known as their most infamous of the tour.

You might have to ask one of them to be sure.

You can watch the bashing of Sid's guitar – supposedly – near/on someone's head.

Also, other footage of some of the other U.S. 7-tour gigs (originally 11-tour) can be found.

If you Google/Bing Sex Pistols Texas tour and hit "images", you will see quite a bit of interaction w/the band, roadies, crowd, press, chicks, managers, etc.

Roberta's photos are not affordable to all for a reason, they are worth it to the collector in the iconic fashion and time in which it happened.

You'll see a lot of interaction photos w/Bob's stuff on Google images.

Probably other people who took photos of them too.

In my opinion, Sex Pistols coming through Texas was anything but subtle, what with Lone Star bottles/pie/guitar throwing collisions and all.

Those poor country people coming in after thought they were animals.

That's just what the band and Malcolm McLaren wanted.

We witnessed something we never will again, even if we were folk music fans.

I suppose I was offended by the "unmitigated bullshit" comment you made too.

They don't hire chump writers @ Texas Monthly, you gotta be Texas tough.

Roberta's & others photos stand the test of time and will live on long after they are gone.

That is all…take care…tip o' the Texas hat

I was unclear on what I was actually referring to as unmitigated bullshit.

I was referring only to the title, the subtle collision thingie!

My fault, I can see reading it the way I wrote it, the UM term could equally be referring to the photos and content.

Well anyway, thanks for the personal history on that, I saw their effects in the Uk and west coast, but never even thought about the effects in other parts of the country.

Not sure why A.Z. is not getting the point, but I just wanted to say that I agree with you.

I am digging Ms. Bayley's photos of the Longhorn Ballroom marquee, and also Johny with a can of Lone Star.

However, that is the full extent I see of the "clash of cultures".

You are correct in that all the actual show pics could have been anywhere, even the pics that come up on Google.

I did see one photo with some locals, but as they were female, and obviously fans, and as they were not exaggerated stereotypes in spurs and ten gallon hats, the incongruity didn't really ring out.

Thanks Jennifer, I realized from AZ's last post that I had been ambiguous in my original post, and it could be read as calling the article and pics bullshit.

The cops would probably just shoot them to be be sure in today's America.

Watch an Hour-Long Performance by Gary Clark Jr. On 'Front and Center'

Erika Wennerstrom 'Sweet Unknown' Review

Khalid Leads the Texas Grammys Delegation With Five Nominations

What Does It Mean to Be Latinx in the Wake of El Paso?

On Texas Time: Dan Lam, Drip Sculpture Artist

Texas Monthly Recommends: Driving and Listening to "Dallas" by Silver Jews

Richard Linklater on Bringing 'Bernadette' to Life

The Best Thing in Texas: Once Again, Simone Biles Shows Why She's the Greatest of All Time

Filmmaker Angie Reza Tures: "It's a Crazy Time To Be an Artist, To Be a Brown Person"

Jia Tolentino Explores the Perils of Self-Delusion in Her First Book

The Best Thing in Texas: This 11-Year-Old is Showing the World What El Pasoans Are Made Of

History.:US tour and the end of the band.

Originally scheduled to begin a few days before New Year's, it was delayed due to American authorities' reluctance to issue visas to band members with criminal records. Several dates in the North had to be cancelled as a result. Though highly anticipated by fans and media, the tour was plagued by in-fighting, poor planning and physically belligerent audiences. McLaren later admitted that he purposely booked redneck bars to provoke hostile situations. Over the course of the two weeks, Vicious, by now heavily addicted to heroin, began to live up to his stage name. "He finally had an audience of people who would behave with shock and horror", Lydon later wrote. "Sid was easily led by the nose."
 Early in the tour, Vicious wandered off from his Holiday Inn in Memphis, looking for drugs. When he was ultimately found, he received a beating from the security team hired by Warner Bros., the band's American label.


By 2018, he expressed regret for voting for Trump, saying that "he hasn't done shit" and he is "taking care of the daggone people he's supposed to be getting rid of".

(meta data) TITLE: 'He's JFK With Tattoos and a Bench Press' - POLITICO Magazine

The Friday Cover is POLITICO Magazine's email of the week's best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO.

# 'He's JFK With Tattoos and a Bench Press'

Paratrooper Richard Ojeda is redefining what it means to be a Democrat in a deeply red state.

CHARLESTON, W.Va.—After pushing 90 for the better part of an hour to get here to the gold-domed Capitol from his home in rugged, woebegone Logan County

, the former Army paratrooper and current state senator with 36 tattoos, bulging muscles and a dry-razored buzz cut jumped out of his red Jeep and bounded across a parking lot toward the snaking line of hundreds of striking teachers.

They clamored for snapshots and selfies.

"We got your back, you got ours!" one teacher called out, and they roared.

"You keep making that noise, ladies and gentlemen!" he bellowed back.

As he tried to make his way through the pulsing crowd, another teacher stopped him, asking him to sign with a Sharpie the chest of her shirt that had on it a picture of him looking stalwart and stern in his military fatigues.

Richard Ojeda, hard j, is a first-term lawmaker from southern West Virginia.

He's 47 years old, a husband and a father of two, and he's won exactly one general election in his life.

He is running now for the open seat in West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District, which seems like a monumentally precocious act for somebody who has served slightly more than a year in any elected office at all.

But Ojeda has made his mark on the volatile politics in this state with a stunning suddenness.

Though he is a Democrat in a legislature in which his party is outnumbered almost 2-to-1, he spearheaded in his freshman session the passage of a bill legalizing medical marijuana.

Then, this January, he stood on the Senate floor and argued in fiery speeches that energy companies should pony up more taxes so teachers could get better benefits and pay.

A strike, he warned, was not out of the question.

A month later, teachers from all 55 counties walked off the job—a first in the history of the state—instantly making Ojeda the father of one of the region's largest labor actions of the past 30 years.

In hard red, Donald Trump-loving West Virginia, Ojeda has become a kind of one-man blue wave, threatening to defy a conventional belief that the only kind of Democrat that can win big races here—or anywhere, for that matter, in Appalachia or the industrial Midwest—is somebody like Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the United States Senate, a pragmatic, pro-business social conservative.

Because here is Ojeda, a pro-labor, twang-talking, plainspoken populist, scrambling the state's recent rightward shift by harkening back to a deeper, more radical vein of its rich political history.

In the early 20th century, miners fought and died for higher wages and safer working conditions while wearing red bandanas and carrying Winchester rifles.

Now, teachers are the new miners; in fact, in a place all but defined by its coal heritage, there are some 20,000 teachers and fewer than 12,000 miners, making the teachers—plus the 13,000 staff who walked off the job with them—by far the largest union in the state.

And here, as I hustled after Ojeda into the bustling Capitol, the striking school employees weren't armed—but many were dressed in red.

And some of them had knotted around their necks those bandanas.

Their songs of unrest ricocheted off the marble of the rotunda inside.

"We're not gonna take it … we're not gonna take it … we're not gonna take it anymooooooore!"

With me and Ojeda in this crush of energy was Krystal Ball, the former MSNBC host who's the president of the People's House Project, a PAC that has endorsed Ojeda's congressional candidacy.

In the middle of the maelstrom, Ball had to shout to be heard.

She said this with a certainty that startled me.

"And it's going to be an instant national story!

And Richard is going to be an instant national figure and face of the Democrats!"

West Virginia, after all, voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and the 3rd District was the most pro-Trump district.

The Cook Political Report doesn't even label the district as "competitive."

Evan Jenkins, the current GOP representative, won so decisively in 2016, he decided to run for the right to run against Manchin for Senate.

And in Logan County, where Ojeda grew up and still lives, just shy of 80 percent of voters chose Trump—and one of them was Ojeda himself.

He's not on Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton's tally of veterans he has endorsed, and he's not on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's "Red to Blue" list, either.

He's been a mostly limited fundraiser, too, in part because he takes no money from anybody except individual donors and labor unions.

There is next to no standard reason to think Ojeda could win—except for the visceral evidence that was swirling around us.

The more than 5,000 teachers screaming his name.

When I spotted his skin-shorn flattop sticking out of the crowd, Ojeda was surrounded by a rapt half-moon of teachers.

His eyes were wide, and he was jabbing the air with a finger.

"We are on the next Saudi Arabia!" he was hollering.

"They've said that—the energy people said that!

So, if we're on the next Saudi Arabia, obviously they want it to be just like Saudi Arabia, where you have about 10 people driving around in Lamborghinis and everybody else eatin' sand sandwiches!

He told them the people who give him money are regular folks.

"I don't give a shit about Big Energy!" he yelled.

Over the course of the next two days, the first two days of the West Virginia teachers' strike that remained unresolved as of Thursday, I saw signs that read: "OVER WORKED UNDER PAID" and "TEACHERS ARE WORTH MORE."

I heard people ask him to run for governor, so they could vote for him, too, even if they lived in the northern two-thirds of the state.

I heard him described as a "rock star" and a "folk hero."

I even watched one teacher propose to him.

Literally get down on one knee and ask him to marry her.

It was the only time I saw him (a little) flustered and (very briefly) speechless.

And everywhere I went with him, it was never too long before that chant started up again.

All of this has made Ojeda as confident about his prospects as Ball.

"I'm going to blow through my primary," he matter-of-factly told me in his office.

And in the general election come November?

His campaign manager is an over-the-road truck driver, his communications director is a single mother who lives in Mingo County with her parents and her 5-year-old son, and most of his unlikely, ragtag campaign staff isn't being paid—and yet, fresh internal polling Ojeda shared with me shows he's not only projected to win the race, but he's beating his two likeliest GOP opponents among GOP voters.

"I'm kicking the shit out of the Republicans," he said.

I first got interested in Ojeda late last year after I watched the launch video for his congressional campaign.

It was unlike any campaign video I'd ever seen.

Shots of him toughing out pullups and bench press reps.

A picture of his battered, bloodied head after he suffered facial fractures in a brass-knuckles attack at a campaign picnic before his primary in 2016—an attack Ojeda believes was politically motivated.

Anybody who's not out to help "the people," he says into the camera, somewhat menacingly, "they need not darken my doorstep."

It was the creation, I would learn later, of a young man named J.D. Belcher, a former coal miner who taught himself filmmaking after taking a liking to The Walking Dead TV series and who used to be a member of a heavy metal band called Keep the Victim Warm.

In the video, Ojeda also gave out the number to his cellphone.

After I introduced myself, Ojeda uncorked a nearly unbroken, 13-minute tirade in which he called lobbyists "the absolute scum of the earth," said they should have to wear body cameras in the Capitol, said they shouldn't even be allowed "in the damn Capitol," and told me one of the first things he did as a state legislator was give energy industry lobbyists a tongue-lashing.

"I threw Big Energy out of my office!" he said.

"They said, 'Well, is there anything we can do to change your mind?'

I said, 'You can get yo' ass out of my office.'"

He continued by scorching lawmakers for making decisions based on corporate campaign contributions instead of the interests of their constituents.

"Bootlickers!" he screamed into the phone.

He picked me up at my hotel in Logan early in the morning on the first day of the strike.

The back of his Jeep was covered with stickers.

"IT'S NOT THAT I CAN AND OTHERS CAN'T," said a third.

As we raced toward Charleston, Ojeda railing away about lobbyists and "bought-and-paid-for politicians" and Big Pharma and Big Energy while taking the curves in the four-lane highway so fast it felt at times like we were riding on just two wheels, it was hard not to consider his improbable path to this juncture.

His grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who came to this part of West Virginia because coal was booming and he could make a living.

Ojeda graduated from Logan High in 1988.

"Where I come from, when you graduate high school, there's only three choices—dig coal, sell dope, or join the Army.

He went to Korea and Honduras and Jordan and Haiti.

He almost died five times, by his count, an IED blast, a couple of dud mortars, the Taliban.

He earned two Bronze Stars and retired as Major Ojeda.

He wants his ashes spread on Sicily Drop Zone at North Carolina's Fort Bragg, the paratroopers' training facility, which he considers "hallowed ground."

Toward the end of his time in the Army, he helped start a Junior ROTC program at an area high school and established a nonprofit organization called the Logan Empowerment Action and Development that did community cleanup projects and Christmas toy drives and served meals to the poor and the elderly and raised money for new shoes for kids.

He began writing long letters to the editor to the Logan Banner.

They always signed off the same way: "Sappers Clear The Way! Airborne All The Way!"

It all somehow led to an invite to the 2013 State of the Union as the guest of Manchin.

The senator and his staff at the time were not expecting Ojeda to run for office.

"He was just excited to take a Capitol tour," said Mara Boggs, Manchin's state director, who served with Ojeda in the Army.

"All I saw was the passion," Manchin added.

But after the speech that night, Ojeda heard Manchin talk about some "manufacturing hubs" slated to come to West Virginia—to the northern part of the state, though, not the southern part of the state that often feels even more overlooked and left behind.

And he decided that was the fault of Nick Rahall, the Democrat who then represented the 3rd District.

Rahall wasn't "standing on his desk," as Ojeda put it to me, doing his job.

So he ran against him in a primary in 2014.

"I was unknown, and had no money, but I got 34 percent of the overall vote against Rahall," Ojeda said.

"And I beat him like a drum in Logan County."

"Such a thorn in our side," John Moffett told me.

Moffett is the executive director of the People's House Project and an Ojeda booster now, but back then, he was a Rahall aide who developed a grudging respect for the novice challenger who got a third of the vote "with literally no campaign structure."

Two years later, Ojeda ran for the state Senate and got attacked—physically, brutally.

The assailant, who had ties to Ojeda's opponent, later was sentenced to one to five years in prison—bringing to a close the violent episode that elicited his first round of national news coverage, a trend that's continued.

In 2016, though, even after the attack, Ojeda won, anyway, and then won in the general, and then went to Charleston, where he in no time was the lead sponsor of Senate Bill 386, Creating WV Medical Cannabis Act, which became law three months after he showed up at the Capitol and willed the legislation to the governor's desk.

He saw it as a big win against Big Pharma.

Ojeda arrived in Charleston for his second legislative session, determined to take on the state's most powerful political force—the energy companies that get rich off West Virginia's resources, he says, while leaving the state and the vast share of its people "none the better."

A state with such wealth under the ground, he believes, shouldn't rank 48th out 50 states in teacher pay.

"We're not paying attention or speaking to the people that are on the ground and at the front lines of education," he warned last fall in an interview with the Huntington Herald-Dispatch.

"We're not listening to our teachers," he told his fellow senators in January.

"You're sitting on a powder keg," he said.

His floor speeches got only so much reaction from many of his fellow legislators, but the teachers certainly were listening.

"The spark that lit the match," Ball said.

Now, pulling into Charleston, the gold dome shrouded in fog, hitting traffic, looking down from the interstate at a usually mostly empty parking lot filled with cars packed with sign-toting teachers, he dipped down onto surface streets, and the teachers saw his red Jeep and started waving and screaming, and he honked and pumped his fast before swinging into the Senate parking area.

"Hooah," he said to the guard at the guard shack and then whipped into a reserved spot.

"You didn't see the sign that said ninja on it?

The fights of the future, same as the fights of the past, John Alexander Williams wrote in 1976 in West Virginia: A History, "are likely to pit weak and poorly organized coalitions of local reformers and interest groups against powerful and well-disciplined combinations of absentee owners and middlemen.

If the past is any guide, there will always be plenty of middlemen."

"Many of our workplaces are breeding growing dissatisfaction and insecurity," Robert Shogan wrote in 2004 in The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising, "our economy is producing increasing inequality and the labor laws put into place in the 1930s to prevent recurrences of what happened in Mingo County and many other places are no longer working very well to protect workers.

There are no signs of bandana armies forming, of course …"

"It's what I do," Ojeda said to a gaggle of teachers in his office when I was with him.

When he was little, Ojeda was scrawny, but he could use his fists.

"If I thought you was gonna try to come bully me," he told me, "I was gonna get you."

In Iraq, he built a boxing ring in a gravel pit.

"And we beat the shit out of each other," he said.

"We would come back from a mission, and we would fight."

His office at the Capitol, from what I could see, has two small pictures of a single politician—John F. Kennedy, taped to the front of his desktop computer.

On his desk, too, is "A Coal Miner's Prayer."

But almost all the other pieces of the décor, if that's even the right term, are Army flags, Army plaques, Army certificates, Army paraphernalia, the boots and fatigues of fallen friends.

Now, he told the teachers that kept coming in, "I fight like a daggone wild man for labor unions."

The state legislative session ends March 10.

Already for the better part of a year, Ojeda has been hosting regular and energetic Facebook Live sessions and out and about campaigning—clad in his typical garb of combat boots, Ripstop tactical pants and Grunt Style shirts.

His bid to come to Washington is about to shift to full-fledged.

"I think we have a very, very good shot of winning," David Graham, the truck driver who's the campaign manager, told me.

He cited the recent internal polling that has Ojeda beating potential Republican opponent Conrad Lucas with Republican voters 24.3 percent to 23 percent (with 52.8 percent uncertain) and beating other potential Republican opponent Rupie Phillips with Republican voters 27.1 percent to 16.5 percent (with 56.4 percent uncertain).

The overall numbers including all voters aren't even close.

Ojeda's top foe in the primary, Huntington mayor Steve Williams, much more a Manchin-style Democrat and better-funded, dropped out of the race in January, saying it wasn't right to run for higher office given the severity of the drug problem in his city.

Supporters of Ojeda wonder if the energy around their candidate had something to do with it, too.

When I asked Manchin about Ojeda, his answer was brief.

"He's a people's person"—as restrained an assessment of Ojeda as I'd heard.

"If the election was tomorrow, he'd win in a landslide," said Belcher, the miner turned videographer.

If you've got the working class in West Virginia, you're set."

"If Ojeda wins," said Moffett from People's House, "it changes the entire conversation about how we run candidates, what type of candidates we run, and where."

"He's JFK with tattoos and a bench press," Randy Jones, his 25-year-old volunteer finance director from Huntington, told me.

"Someone who sounds like you, talks like you, looks like you, struggled like you—who's standing up and speaking truth to power," added Dennis White, 34, an Army veteran from West Virginia's Boone County who's a student at Connecticut's Wesleyan University and a remote-working jack-of-all-trades aide to Ojeda.

"I hope it's a lesson for everybody, that these are the kinds of candidates that we need to recruit," Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan told me.

Ryan plans on coming to West Virginia later this month or in early April to campaign with Ojeda.

An Ojeda victory in November, he said, "could be a signal to the Republican Party that Democrats—we're coming to your territory, we're not going to play this coastal game anymore.

If we get candidates like him and have a strong economic message, there's not a state we can't win in."

In the red Jeep on the way back to Logan, I asked Ojeda about his vote for Trump, a fact that in another state could be seen as disqualifying for a Democrat.

"I voted for him because it was about family and friends," he said.

Hillary Clinton was coming here blowing smoke up everybody's ass.

Hell, I wanted Bernie Sanders"—and he wasn't the only one, obviously, as Sanders beat Clinton in the primaries in all 55 counties—"but once Bernie Sanders was screwed over by Hillary Clinton, by the way, you had no other option."

"It's been a friggin' circus for a solid year."

So many people in southern West Virginia are still poor and need jobs.

"All he's done," Ojeda said, "is shown that he's taking care of the daggone people he's supposed to be getting rid of."

And, oh, by the way, you show me one of my opponents that can walk anyplace right now and have 500 people screaming their name.

This has been going on now for the last month.

Everywhere I've been going for the last month has always had between 250 and 500 people.

And when I get there, I'm the one they want to see.

I'm sorry, but if you want a daggone, typical polished politician, vote for Conrad Lucas.

People are tired of the same ol' garbage.

They want people that are willing to speak out, speak up, be open and honest with them."

"You know, hey, here's the thing," Ojeda told me.

"Donald Trump, Donald Trump, made everybody excited because he said shit nobody else has ever said.

But the difference is, Donald Trump wins, and he ain't done jack shit to help us.

Now let me tell you something about Ojeda.

Ojeda won, and I'm telling you right now: I guarantee you there's not one single freshman damn Democrat, there's not one freshman friggin' senator that's ever made more damn noise than I have and has done more than what I've done.

But Why Does He Think It's Up to Denmark?

### Trump's Greenland Gambit Might Be Crazy—But It Could Also Be the Future

Ojeda went on to win both the Democratic Primary for the 7th District of the West Virginia Senate, defeating incumbent Art Kirkendoll. In the general election, held on November 8, 2016, he defeated Republican Jordan Bridges by almost 18 points.
 In the West Virginia Senate, Ojeda sponsored the West Virginia Medical Cannabis Act, legislation to legalize medical marijuana, which was signed into law by Governor Jim Justice on April 19, 2017.
 In the Senate, he called for increases in teacher wages, arguing that low pay would lead to strikes and teachers leaving the state. In January 2018, he criticized West Virginia Governor Jim Justice's proposed 1–2% increase in teacher wages, saying it was insufficient.
 Ojeda has stated "I don't think I've ever voted for a Democrat for president" and supported Donald Trump in 2016. He told "Politico" that he voted for Trump because he initially believed Trump would do something for West Virginians.


In September 2017, the Russian Ministry of Defence released a video showing two Su-25s helping to rescue  Russian troops encircled by Tahrir al-Sham militants.

(meta data) TITLE: Not-So-Soft Power: Russia's Military Police in Syria

# Not-So-Soft Power: Russia's Military Police in Syria

Earlier this month, in Syria's Idlib governorate, 29 Russians found themselves encircled by fighters from the rebel front Tahrir al-Sham (which Moscow still calls its old name, Jabhat al-Nusra).

Moscow responded with a characteristic extravagance of firepower.

The attack submarine Veliky Novgorod launched Kalibr cruise missiles.

Su-25 ground attack aircraft flew sorties, while helicopters laden with Syrian and Russian commandos (including men from the elite Special Operations Command) flew in to extract the soldiers and then punish Tahrir al-Sham.

Only three Russians were wounded and none died.

What was unusual was that the men of this platoon serving in an exposed position were not Spetsnaz special forces, but members of the Voennaya politsiya, Russia's military police.

Formed only in 2011, this military police force is now 20,000 strong and increasingly professional.

With distinctive red berets and black brassards, they fill a long-discussed need in addressing crime and indiscipline within the ranks.

Under Lt. Gen. Vladimir Ivanovskii, head of the Ministry of Defense's Main Directorate of Military Police, their effectiveness is still the subject of some public debate, especially as they have no real role investigating the massive levels of corruption and embezzlement in the military.

However, as their growing role in Syria shows, they do represent a different face of the Russian army, and a potential instrument of a robust kind of soft power.

The first deployment of these military police to Syria began in December 2016 with a force of Chechens, drawn largely from the so-called "Kadyrovtsy" — the security forces loyal to republican strongman Ramzan Kadyrov.

Although some accounts put their number as high as 500, their real strength was probably just under 400.

The Chechens filled a variety of roles, ranging from convoy security to hearts-and-minds aid distribution missions in the ruins of Aleppo.

Much was made of their ability to find common ground with the locals because of their Muslim faith, but their presence also represented two more cynical calculations:

To Moscow, they represented a more disposable asset than ethnic Russian soldiers, given sensitivities at home about the political costs of casualties.

To Grozny, they represented a token of loyalty.

Kadyrov was being regarded with suspicion and concern by the Russian security elite after the embarrassing murder in Moscow of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.

This way, he could demonstrate his value to Vladimir Putin, and also justify his continued control of Chechnya's security troops (for all that, they were formally now part of the new National Guard).

They were withdrawn in March 2017, their tour having partly overlapped with a battalion of military police from neighboring Ingushetia.

The Ingush troops, who were especially visible guarding Hmeymim Air Base and in Damascus, including fighting alongside Syrian Arab Army troops in its Jobar neighborhood, were also there because of politics at home.

Ingush leader Yunus-bek Yevkurov, acutely conscious of Kadyrov's ambitions to extend his authority (until 1992, Chechnya and Ingushetia were conjoined), wanted also to show Moscow his value and loyalty.

This was the first time Russia had deployed military police abroad.

The experiment was clearly considered a success, and Moscow is now deploying battalion-strength scratch military police units created from several constituent elements but with no particular ethnic identity.

By July, four battalions were operating in Syria, for a total of almost 1,200 effectives.

Their primary missions are providing security for Russian facilities and personnel, and manning checkpoints and observation stations monitoring the "de-escalation zones" being established in line with an agreement reached in Kazakhstan in May between Russia, Iran, and Turkey.

According to the accounts of both journalists and others I have spoken to who have seen them on the ground, these military police appear to be relatively effective and professional, and they are likely to stay.

(Recent photos of their Tigr light armored vehicles have shown them labeled in both Russian and Arabic.)

The military police units offer Moscow several specific advantages.

The units are disproportionately made up of professionals, making it easier to form contingents for overseas deployment, as they must be volunteers by law.

It also means that the valuable experience they are gaining — especially useful for such a new force — is not going to be bled away quickly by conscripts ending their terms of service.

This is also part of Russia's domestic and foreign PR campaign for a war that is not especially popular at home (in a recent survey, half wanted Russian forces pulled out of Syria).

The presence and activities of the military police have been hyped heavily for domestic consumption, not just playing to the general militarist and nationalist agenda of the state-controlled media but also suggesting that Russia's role is both humanitarian and relatively casualty-free.

With the bulk of combat casualties being sopped up by the "Wagner" pseudo-mercenary force (which is actually a government front, manned almost entirely by Russians, whose losses need not be acknowledged by Moscow), this is meant to assuage public concerns about their boys dying in a war about which they care relatively little.

Finally, using military police allows Moscow to send soldiers able to fight if need be — although their primary role is not to be front-line grunts — but also burnish its battered reputation.

Russia is considered in many countries in essentially negative terms, as an agent of anarchy on the global scale.

However, the use of forces such as the military police which also have a potentially positive, even humanitarian, role is considered a way in which the Kremlin can balance deploying hard power assets with maintaining a soft power capacity.

Since the 1990s, the Kremlin has looked to either deniable or legitimate instruments of coercive influence abroad.

In the 1990s, it relied on proxy warriors such as rebels in Transnistria, often in order to create precisely the kind of situation into which Russian "peacekeepers" could then be deployed.

Russia's 15th Independent Mechanized Brigade, based at Samara, is designated as a specialized peacekeeping force, although the presence of elements of the 15th in the Donbas during the winter of 2014 and spring of 2015 sheds doubt on whether this means anything practice.

Nonetheless, these Mirotvorcheskie sily elements were deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo, and a battalion is still present in Transnistria.

Since Putin came to power in 2000, and as his policy became increasingly aggressive, this became a growing priority, and fits into a wider approach of mobilizing a wide range of different instruments for both hard and soft power purposes.

Proxies, from warlords to gangsters, were used in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine from 2014, but they are often of limited operational effectiveness and also hard to control.

The creation of pseudo-mercenary organizations, first the ill-fated "Slavonic Corps" and then "Wagner", is precisely intended to create forces able to operate with a minimal level of deniability both to the outside world and to Russia's population.

In this context, while the military police are first and foremost exactly what they seem, a long-needed response to a need within the Russian armed forces, they also provide another source of "hard soft power."

Ostensibly providers of law, order, and security, they are also combat assets, and their presence in harm's way can even — if one is working on a very ruthless calculus — justify the injection of more conventional military force when they come under threat.

Certainly the incident recounted above in Syria was used as the pretext for a massive and much wider military assault which, according to Russian sources, killed hundreds of rebels, including five commanders.

It also acquired a geopolitical dimension, as the Russian media lost no time in blaming Washington for the attack on its forces, asserting that the Americans controlled the al-Nusra Front and that the attack was "initiated by U.S. secret services to stop the successful advance of the government troops to the east of Deir ez-Zor."

Meanwhile, the Russians are angry about the death of Lt. Gen. Valery Asapov in shelling near Deir ez-Zor, which Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called "the price paid with blood for the hypocrisy of American policy in Syria."

The combination of these has meant that the military police have suddenly become the poster children of the Russian "assistance mission" to the Middle East.

There is even speculation now that the military police will soon get their own TV series, sounding like an unlikely cross between U.S. blockbusters NCIS and The Unit.

Prof. Mark Galeotti is a senior researcher and the head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations Prague.

His next book, on Russian organized crime, will be published by Yale University Press in spring 2018.

#### The Re-conquerors of Hong Kong? A Primer on China's People's Armed Police

#### Does Trump's Trade War Spell the End of the Global Order?

#### The Fight in the Right: It is Time to Tackle White Supremacist Terrorism Globally

In September 2015, the U.S. Department of Defense released satellite photos of an airfield in Latakia, a Syrian government-controlled city, showing twelve Su-25 planes on the tarmac. Airstrikes by Russian forces in support of the Assad government began later that same month. The aircraft have been used predominantly to strike opposition vehicles, fighting positions, artillery pieces, and other non-strategic targets in the country.
 In January 2015, Syrian Air Force MiG-29s and Russian Su-25s took part in a joint-strike mission against militant targets in what was the first time Syrian and Russian warplanes flew a combat mission together.
 In 2016, Alexander Galkin, the Russia’s Southern Military District commander, said Su-25s had flown more than 1,600 sorties and dropped around 6,000 bombs since the beginning of Russia's intervention in September 2015.


The expedition did find several new strains of extremophile microorganisms in the lake's waters, including a chemolithotroph that metabolises hydrogen.

(meta data) TITLE: Extremophile Hunter - Science Nation | National Science Foundation

# National Science Foundation - Where Discoveries Begin

The search is on for extremophiles that may provide insights about life elsewhere in the cosmos

Astrobiologist Richard Hoover really goes to extremes to find living things that thrive where life would seem to be impossible--from the glaciers of the Alaskan Arctic to the ice sheets of Antarctica.

"I have personally been to many of the most hostile and extreme environments on Earth," said Hoover.

These so-called "extremophiles" are bacteria that have adapted to living in harsh conditions.

They were unknown to scientists until just a few years ago.

But then researchers started finding these hearty microbes flourishing in unlikely places--like inside the geysers of Yellowstone National Park, and within deep-sea hydrothermal vents, called "black smokers."

"Aside from the deep interior core of the Earth, microorganisms seem to be able to thrive anywhere else," said Hoover.

"That includes the atmosphere, that includes the deep crustal rocks."

A scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., Hoover has gone literally to the ends of the Earth in search of extremophiles--including an expedition to Antarctica's remote Lake Untersee in 2008 that was coordinated through the National Science Foundation.

Once Hoover harvests the extremophiles, the race is on back at his laboratory in Alabama to grow them.

First order of business--find out what they like to eat.

"There are a whole array of bacteria that live entirely on chemicals.

They don't utilize light, they don't utilize ordinary food," he said.

"There is an exquisite suite of life that is phenomenally diverse and tremendously interesting, with profound ability for human applications in biotechnology."

Russian microbiologist Elena Pikuta collaborates with Hoover to isolate and classify the extremophiles.

She recently discovered that one microbe that he gathered from beneath the ice of Lake Untersee eats hydrogen and is a "chemolithotroph," which literally means "rock eater."

It is related to a rare type of bacteria she has seen before.

"They were discovered very recently, I would say (in the) last ten years," said Pikuta.

"They were discovered in (a) cold polar region of swamps in Russia.

So this is a potential new species from Antarctica."

So what is NASA's interest in these extremophiles?

Hoover says they may provide telling clues as to what life elsewhere in our solar system might look like.

His field of research, called astrobiology, looks at the possibility that life forms elsewhere might be a lot like the extremophiles that live in similar harsh conditions here on Earth.

"I think it is quite possible that when we go by spacecraft to collect samples from the icy moons of Jupiter or to collect samples from the polar ice caps of Mars, we may very well find microorganisms," he said.

He thinks it is even possible that over the course of billions of years, life has spread around the solar system--a sort of cosmic cross pollination.

Microbes could live in the ice deep within comets, frozen there for eons until a collision with another planet or moon delivered them to a new home.

"It may be that when we ultimately get a chance to bring back samples of ice from the polar caps of Mars, we might find biology that looks just like Earth life and it might be that it originated on Earth and was carried to Mars," said Hoover.

"Of course, if it can happen that way, it could have happened the other way.

So we may never know the ultimate answer to how did life originate."

To test that theory, he cracks open so-called carbonaceous meteorites, which are the remains of cometary debris or water-bearing asteroids that have hit the Earth.

Being careful to avoid contamination, he examines their insides with an electron microscope.

"They are older than the planet Earth, which is accepted at being 4.5 billion years old," said Hoover.

"So I like to say these carbonaceous meteorites are actually older than dirt!"

Some of the structures he has imaged from these meteorites are intriguing, bearing striking similarities to bacteria here on Earth.

Could these be the fossilized remains of extraterrestial life?

"I am convinced that what I am finding in the carbonaceous meteorites are in many cases biological in nature, and I think they are indigenous and not terrestrial contaminants," said Hoover.

It is a highly controversial interpretation.

"We have for a long time thought that all life, as we know it, originated on Earth.

And there isn't any life anywhere else," he said.

"That's an idea, it's a hypothesis, it's a totally unproven hypothesis."

Hoover hopes his work will help get at the truth, whatever that may be.

And as interplanetary probes become more sophisticated, scientists may eventually turn up a biological sample for examination.

Then we'll know if life out there looks anything like it does here.

Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent

A research team partly funded by NSF found a new chlorophyll-producing bacterium in microbial mats in three of Yellowstone National Park's hot springs.

Credit: David Strong, Penn State University

Another team of researchers, supported by NSF and NASA, discovered microbes in the pores of rocks in a highly acidic environment with high concentrations of metals and silicates at roughly 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Yellowstone's Norris Geyser Basin.

Credit: University of Colorado at Boulder

This illustrated special report presents NSF-supported research on strange organisms that can live in ferocious extremes of cold, heat, pressure, acidity and more.

Another special report, this one on research in the deep ocean, looks at NSF-funded researchers finding microscopic life inside seafloor vents.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations presented in this material are only those of the presenter grantee/researcher, author, or agency employee; and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

In November and December 2008, the "Tawani Foundation 2008 Antarctic International Expedition" headed by Richard Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center used the lake as a test bed in its hunt for extreme life. Conditions in the lake are similar in some respects to those thought to exist on other moons and planets that contain water ice and methane; thus, this lake might provide an analog to environments that exist elsewhere in space.


She next took on the role of the young daughter of a bankrupt middle-aged man (played by Ray Winstone) in the television sitcom "Get Back" (1992–93).

It's a funny business - Arts & Entertainment - The Independent

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.

At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.

View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Collection: Wikipedia Outlinks February 2012

Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started February, 2012.

These files are currently not publicly accessible.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20121109045710/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/its-a-funny-business-1552507.html

### Something For The Weekend in London: November 9-11

We've said it before and we'll say it again: autumn always offers the best events in the capital - s...

Brighton producer and DJ, Moony, sits comfortable as one of the latest students to learn from grime'...

### Product placement in 'Skyfall' is nothing to James Bond films

The recent release of Skyfall has led to many disgruntled fans expressing their frustration at the s...

No laughing matter: BBC faces comedy crisis as rivals lure talent with big budgets

Ronald Wolfe: Writer and producer best known for 'The Rag Trade' and 'On The Buses'

Nice sitcoms, but where are the new faces?

Miranda Hart: 'I was never in the cool gang'

Here they are, just a couple of ordinary middle-aged, middle-class people, sitting round the kitchen table, waiting for a neighbour to pop in to borrow a cup of sugar.

But they're on TV, and any minute now we're supposed to laugh at them - because the channel's Head of Comedy believes that this is a situation we'll enjoy.

In fact, an entire chain of people think it's funny.

And that's the real problem: the cumbersome evolutionary process of the sitcom may explain why so few are good for a laugh.

A TRAILER for Second Thoughts, a successful ITV sitcom:

James Bolam, former Likely Lad, sits at the kitchen table, looking irritable; Lynda Bellingham, his girlfriend (they're not married, although they're both middle-aged; that's the point of the comedy, that's the 'situation') stands huffily off to the side.

Bolam, with typically grumpy delivery, says: 'The only house I know with more arguments than this is the House of Commons.'

The House of Commons] That's the punchline of a joke that made it as far as a prime-time comedy script?

No, worse - it's the punchline they use in the trailer, which means they think it's one of the best lines in the show.

And all those people in the studio audience laughed their heads off?

This makes you think, as you think when you see nearly every sitcom trailer: how can they let this happen?

How can prime-time TV comedy be like . . . this?

Do people set out to make sitcoms bland and unfunny?

Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who have written some really funny comedies (Birds Of A Feather, The New Statesman), and some less funny ones (Holding The Fort, Relative Strangers), believe that writers and editors never intend to create bland, safe laughs.

We set out to create the kind of laughter that goes with the compulsive emptying of the bladder,' says Gran.

Marks says: 'The script editor is going to spend his day sitting at a desk reading through 30 scripts.

Your intention, as a writer, should be to make him fall off his chair in the first couple of pages.'

But the process of making a sitcom - finding a funny idea, getting lots of people to discuss it in meetings, for weeks on end, then writing and rewriting it, finally having it performed in front of a nervous studio audience . . .

the process is so complex and tortured that it's almost bound to fail.

By the time the show is in the can, nobody knows if it's funny or not.

They've heard the jokes a million times.

The first real test of a comedy is a guy with a zapper, sitting at home, totally in control.

Before that moment, by which time it's way too late, all the polls have been rigged.

A STUDIO audience, 50 or 60 people, is standing outside the BBC's Television Centre, waiting to be led in by a security man.

Their job is to laugh, and they're visibly nervous.

The sitcom is Sitting Pretty, by John Sullivan, who wrote Only Fools and Horses and Just Good Friends, which were funny.

He also wrote Dear John, which wasn't very funny, and which has, like so many other sitcoms, slipped from our folk memory.

This is a typical studio audience, cruelly described to me by a sitcom writer as a very 'checkout' crowd - bank tellers and shop assistants, grinning grannies, a traffic warden and his girlfriend, office workers whose companies have block-booked tickets.

They file into Studio 2, a gloomy room with a stage and all kinds of rigs and contraptions hanging from the ceiling.

On the stage is an untidy kitchen and a plush-looking sitting-room.

Will the studio audience provide it with a decent laughter track?

Three sets, four or five people who don't get on, but are forced to share cramped surroundings.

And sitcom is subject to these formal restrictions for very logical reasons.

There aren't many people in it because the sets are small.

The sets are small because you have to get them all on the same stage.

And you have to get them all on the same stage because sitcom is, essentially, theatre: it works better with a studio audience.

So you can hear the laughs as well as the joke.

This is the moment that the producers and script editors and writers dread, the moment which, they have deluded themselves, will signal whether the show is a hit or a miss.

The warm-up man comes on; he's middle-aged, in sports jacket and tie, with bouffant grey hair, a boyish face.

'Now, if you're good,' he says, 'and if you give us a lot of spontaneous laughter, our executive producer, the award-winning Susie Belbin . . . well, she might just put all the drinks on the house.'

'But then again,' he says, 'that's like Bernard Matthews saying 'Trust me' to a turkey.'

He's told a joke, which we understand, which we get.

It's not quite a sudden roar - it starts with a titter, and then everybody knows that everybody else has tittered, and then it comes, 'H . . . h . . . hah]'

The warm-up man continues, as he will throughout the session, during all the difficult moments when cameras have to be moved, when scenes have to be reshot, when technical difficulties need to be resolved.

He works on the principle of fear and relief.

mouth, he'll say something not particularly funny, but unthreatening.

He points at the camera-crew, going about their hurried, fiddly business, and says: 'They're a great crew.

One of the finest teams in captivity today.'

He's manoeuvred you into a position in which you are primed to laugh at unfunny jokes: absolutely ideal.

And then he explains what Sitting Pretty is all about.

It's about a rich woman whose husband dies.

It turns out that he owed a fortune; now she's poor, now she must move back to her family - her hypochondriac idiot of a father, her wise old bird of a mother, her ex-hippie sister who's never moved out.

And it's a family she's lorded it over for years - she's been a flash stole-wearing Mercedes-driver; they've stayed on in their crummy chicken farm.

Like many sitcoms, it chimes in with the times: this is a Nineties comedy, a recession-comedy.

The actors walk on, ready to run through the first scene.

Diane Bull, who plays Annie, the central figure, gets in position.

She's in the plush room, holding the phone in her hand.

EVERYBODY involved in sitcom tells you the same thing - it's only funny if the characters are funny.

And it's about 'real' people; in other words, people with contemporary problems.

So the history of sitcom, from 1951's I Love Lucy the first-ever hit sitcom (wacky would-be independent housewife keeps finding out that home is best) to, say, last year's Bottom (two filthy sex-starved nerds fart and puke and keep failing to get off with girls), chronicles the break-up of the family, as well as reacting to every other minor social change across the decades.

Think of a social change, and somebody will have written a sitcom on the back of it.

Of course, they're not all intrinsically funny.

Maurice Gran, who, with Laurence Marks, has written a new show called Get Back ('It's about this guy, he's a bit of a prat, who's made a lot of money in the Eighties and loses it in the slump, and he's forced to go and live with his father in some council flats'), says: 'They're all reflections of their particular era: Hancock was about a guy, he's just finished his National Service, he's got a bit of education, he wanted what (Harold) Macmillan was offering.

Steptoe was about a young man, full of hope, in the Sixties, trying to escape his family's poverty.

Till Death Us Do Part was about the crumbling of the East End.'

And Get Back, like Sitting Pretty, is about people who were rich in the Eighties, and aren't rich now.

You only have a handful of characters in a sitcom.

That's the most important thing about it - there's absolutely no room for slack.

So each character must have a believable conflict with every other character: if it works, you'll be primed to laugh the moment someone walks in on someone else.

That's why so much sitcom is so bad - it's amazingly difficult to arrange.

Julian Clary, whose new sitcom Terry And Julian has just started on Channel 4, says: 'Writing a sitcom is much more difficult and long-winded than I thought it would be.

It's a lot more complicated than knocking out silly questions about sausages.'

The show is about a heterosexual slob who is forced to take in a lodger.

'You can think of funny lines,' says Clary, 'but there has to be a reason for a funny line to be there, it has to be part of the plot.

In a way, the funny lines are the last thing you put in.

Now I realise how clever sitcoms are when they're good.'

'Writers,' says Anne Pivcevec, a comedy script editor at the BBC, 'are so lazy.

They just don't understand how much work it takes, how much there is to think about.

They just think: that's funny, and now I'll go on to the next thing.'

The sitcom writer, Marks believes, must resist the temptation to rely purely on jokes rather than character-based situations.

'If you say the words bum, tits, knockers, or bollocks, they'll laugh,' he says.

But you have to do much more than that - that's lazy.'

But sitcoms routinely fail, not because they're lazy, but because they're not funny.

They're just not funny, and nobody knows it, or why, until it's too late.

Bad ones outnumber good ones three to one, but it's only the good ones you remember, which causes a nostalgia effect - sitcom always seems to be worse than it used to be.

You remember The Likely Lads (Rip Van Winkle Terry comes back home after five years in the army, having missed out on the Sixties); you remember The Liver Birds (two girls sharing a flat; one of them feisty, the other a prude), but do you remember Mind Your Language (attractive young man works in a language school)?

You remember Citizen Smith, and Man About The House.

But do you remember Holding the Fort, a 1980 sitcom written by Marks and Gran, starring Peter Davison and Patricia Hodge?

They have a baby, and can't make ends meet; as an army officer, the woman has a higher earning potential than the man.

So she goes back to work, and he looks after the baby.

He says: 'I'm going in goal and you're . . . moving into the attack.'

Or Relative Strangers, also by Marks and Gran, in which Matthew Kelly, an ex-hippie waster, is visited by a 17-year-old boy who turns out to be the son he never knew he had?

He says: 'I can't be your dad, John, I wouldn't know where to start.'

These are comedies written by brilliant writers.

And will we remember Second Thoughts in 10 years' time?

Or So Haunt Me, in which a London household is inhabited by a Jewish ghost?

Or After Henry, which is about a family after the father has died?

Or The Upper Hand (successful woman, creative director of an ad agency, discovers that her status frightens men off, so she pretends to be a secretary)?

Or, for that matter, the incredibly popular Fresh Fields, a present-day English version of I Love Lucy?

THE THING about comedy is that everybody disagrees about it.

You tell a joke; some laugh, some don't.

And the further away you get from the actual joke, the worse it gets.

What if your job is to tell the actor how to deliver the punchline?

Or if you're the guy who reads the scripts and has to explain, to his boss, why they're funny?

Think about it: your job depends on explaining jokes to your boss.

And he, of course, has to guess what makes his boss giggle, who has built up a great feel for what tickles his boss . . . and so on, right up to the Head of Comedy.

And what makes the Head of Comedy laugh?

From the available evidence, neighbours popping in to borrow a cup of sugar at an inopportune moment, people pretending to be posh and living with Michael Elphick at the same time; that sort of thing.

'That's why sitcoms are usually so bland,' says Steve Coombes, who has written many sitcom episodes, including Birds of a Feather.

'The jokes have to pass through 11 sets of hands.

The ones that make it are lowest-common-denominator jokes.

Really good sitcoms happen by accident.'

For various reasons, mainly because sitcom is cheap - small casts, hardly any filming outside the studio - television companies are striving to make more of them.

So they're employing loads of people as comedy development specialists, 'comedic consultants', talent-spotters.

These people trawl the clubs, or, alternatively, try to persuade established performers like Sean Hughes and Julian Clary to cross over to sitcom.

'Comedy is something that benefits from hard work, from going over it and over it, polishing every joke,' says Justin Sbresney of the BBC's new Comedy Development Unit.

Sbresney, a fan of American sitcoms like Cheers, Roseanne, and Taxi, is interested in the American approach, in which large teams apply themselves to comedy scripts, polishing them and polishing them, putting more and more jokes in.

Of course, this can work really well, if the team gets on.

But it can be a nightmare if they don't.

Cynthia Heimel, who wrote for the American version of Dear John, says: 'It's terrible.

You all sit in a room: the Executive Producer, the Supervising Producer, the Producer, the Co-Producer, the Executive Story Editor, the Story Editor, and the Term writer.

Whose jokes do you think are the ones that get used?

I wasn't even allowed to sit in the wrong chair.

Network people are the scum of the earth.'

Sbresney says pensively: 'You can never really be sure if it will work - it might look funny on the page, and not on the screen.

You just can't tell whether something is or isn't funny, until you laugh.

But everybody in comedy development has their theories.

'There are two types of joke,' says Steve Coombes.

'Jokes that teacher tells at the expense of the pupils, and jokes that are cracked at the expense of the teacher.'

Paul de Vos, of the BBC, says: 'Who was it that said there were two basic jokes - fish out of water and the odd couple?

The BBC has even produced 'guidelines for new writers', which says: 'Your initial pilot script must tell a self-contained story that introduces your main characters and sets up the premise from which the comic conflict will follow.

At the Edinburgh Festival, writers and producers are giving advice to an audience on how to write TV comedy.

The talk is called 'No Laughing Matter'.

After about five minutes, it's obvious that, while people agree that comedy should be funny, this is about the only thing they can agree on.

'All the writers I know,' says Rory McGrath, 'want to write good, challenging stuff.

But the broadcasters don't think the public would tolerate that kind of thing.'

'Ooh]' says Mark Robson, LWT's Head of Light Entertainment.

'We have made some poor sitcoms, it's true.

One of the problems with comedy writers, Robson continues, is that they are not prepared to adapt their writing to the market, to admit that writing is, in a sense, a business.

'Comedy writers just are not going to be able to write everything they want: they have to learn to adapt.'

Ian Pattison, writer of Rab C Nesbitt, chimes in: 'Business was what I wanted to get away from when I became a writer] I mean, when a writer leaves his ego behind at the door, he also leaves his self-respect] You won't get a fresh original sitcom with the kind of approach that Mark has . . .'

She's finding out all these terrible things - her husband has died, he was with another woman when he died, he hasn't left her any money.

Between scenes, the warm-up man says: 'We've been listening to your spontaneous reactions, and our award-winning executive producer Susie Belbin, she likes you.

What we used to do, we used to have spikes under the seats, and if you didn't laugh, we'd jab the spike up through the seat . . .

we had to stop that, because people were coming back week after week for that.'

In the next scene, Diane Bull talks about how she went to a party in the Sixties and saw Rod Stewart.

'Of course, he wasn't known in those days, so we just thought he was a bloke with a big nose and ignored him . . .'

Nobody will be able to tell until they switch on their set at home, sit down, and get the zapper in their hands.

Bob Willoughby: The Silver Age of Hollywood

Strange but not true: 'alien health and safety' fears DIDN'T stop BBC broadcasting planet sounds

I'm a Celebrity...line-up revealed (yes, it includes Nadine Dorries) - in pictures

Museum of Curiosity set to ignite wonder with collection of 'weird' objects

Gabrielle Aplin: The Power of a Christmas John Lewis advert?

First US states legalise recreational cannabis but federal laws still ban it

Do you agree with Phillip Schofield handing David Cameron a list of alleged Tory paedophiles live on ITV's This Morning?

'Extinct' animal turns up in Wales as roadside carcass proves elusive pine martins still exist in UK

Downing Street attacks Phillip Schofield for ambushing Prime Minister with internet-sourced list of suspected paedophiles

Hurricane Sandy model: 'I wasn't posing'

Win two return flights to the relaxed capital of South Australia, and experience the Outback and Kangaroo Island.

Win an eight-day guided trip across three spectacular American states - California, Arizona and Nevada.

See what real teachers have to say, discover your training path here.

Get free wi-fi and exclusive i content while you enjoy a tasty pint of Heineken at participating pubs.

## 15 per cent Off Heal's Christmas gifts

Independent readers get money off in store and online until 11th November.

## The closing ceremony was just the beginning

Cisco's programme of educational investment will be a major 2012 legacy.

If you love London and love life, share a photo of what makes the capital so special to you for a chance to win great prizes with Beefeater Gin.

## Enter the latest Independent competitions

Win anything from gadgets to five-star holidays on our competitions and offers page.

## Business videos from commercial thought leaders

Watch the best in the business world give their insights into the world of business.

Systems Analyst / Developer - Stirling - Banking

Senior Digital/Creative Project Director

## A parting shot from world's most powerful man

After hailing a 'glorious decade' in power, the outgoing Chinese President served a dire warning on his successors at Congress to tackle corruption and social unrest – or lose everything

## A mammoth find in France provides evidence of a savage demise

## Big thinkers unite to defend 'one of UK's greatest assets'

New council aims to protect university values in the light of 'excessive and wasteful' reforms

Few parents know that babies experience flavour much more intensely than adults.

Charlotte Philby gets a taste of food as they perceive it.

## 15 minute wonders: Top chefs share their speedy suppers

Jamie isn't the only one who can rustle up something special in a quarter of an hour, says Gillian Orr.

## Top of the bill: Duck is coming to a kitchen near you

The tasty bird has made its way from Asian restaurants into ready meals and on to hip menus – but hardly any of us are cooking it from scratch.

From life in a top-end New York kitchen to dinner parties at the height of the Raj, here are culinary tales to chew over...

## Christian Benteke: Street football took brilliant Belgians to top

The Villa striker is part of a golden generation of lowlanders, but he tells Sam Wallace that their skills were learnt the hard way

Celtic's remarkable win over Barcelona revived memories of Stein's European Cup triumph and was based on similar defiance

Farmer's boy more than ready to plough a new furrow

New York's auction houses are braced for a billion-dollar blitz of art buying that could rewrite the record books

## First Night: People; Lyttelton Theatre

Bennett takes a swipe at cosy English complacencies and the National Trust

Why Scouse girls are the picture of glamour

## Another blow for Britain's coal mining

One of the country's last-remaining deep pits is to close, as the beleaguered industry shrinks still further

## The prize Obama really wanted – a trending award

From top TwitPic action by Potus to the very best showbiz sulks, here's our pick of the race that was

(meta data) TITLE: Walk of Fame Honoree Kate Winslet Keeps Raising the Bar – Variety

These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to.

That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.

Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.

The goal is to fix all broken links on the web.

Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.

Collection: Wikipedia Near Real Time (from IRC)

This is a collection of web page captures from links added to, or changed on, Wikipedia pages.

The idea is to bring a reliability to Wikipedia outlinks so that if the pages referenced by Wikipedia articles are changed, or go away, a reader can permanently find what was originally referred to.

This is part of the Internet Archive's attempt to rid the web of broken links.

You will be redirected back to your article in seconds

Get the magazine and exclusive online content -

Read Next: TIFFCOM: Animator WIT Studio Helps Tokyo New Cinema to 'Blooms'

# Walk of Fame Honoree Kate Winslet Keeps Raising the Bar

## Oscar-winning actress dives into her 'Divergent' role with malevolent gusto

No offense to entertainment journalists and film critics, but Kate Winslet doesn't read what they write about her.

In fact, she's one of the more engaging interviewees one is likely to encounter: sharp, unguarded, down-to-earth, hilarious in a salty-tongued way.

This willful indifference to the media is more an act of preservation than anything else.

"It's the only way I've been able to stay sane in these last 20 years," says the oft-decorated actress, who's being honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 17.

The sentiment is not a recent affectation.

Back in 2007, when she was being honored with a Britannia award from BAFTA/LA and had just garnered her fifth Oscar nomination, the message was the same.

"It's sort of a survival instinct on some level," she told Variety at the time.

"In some way I'm protecting myself against changing the way I do my job.

I live and breathe and exist in a world where confidence is everything.

I avoid reading reviews in the hope that I'm contributing to my little confidence tank."

If anything, Winslet's "confidence tank" should be filled to the brim, since she routinely benefits from the kinds of reviews most actors only dream of.

Even when the material doesn't rise to her level of commitment — such as "Revolutionary Road" (2008) and the more recent "Labor Day," highly pedigreed films with disappointing receptions — Winslet has managed to escape unscathed.

### Sky Lands Kate Winslet, Rosamund Pike Animated Moomins Series

### Kate Winslet on Woody Allen, 'Wonder Wheel' and the 20th Anniversary of 'Titanic'

Regarding "Road," David Edelstein of New York Magazine wrote: "There isn't a banal moment in Winslet's performance — not a gesture, not a word," before declaring Winslet "the best English-speaking film actress of her generation."

"The performances are superb," added USA Today's Claudia Puig in her otherwise lukewarm assessment.

"Labor Day" encountered an even rockier road, having been neglected during the recent awards season almost entirely, save for Winslet's Golden Globe nomination.

The issue for most was credibility in this tale of an agoraphobic divorcee who provides safe harbor for, then falls in love with, an escaped convict, despite the danger to her adolescent son.

And yet Winslet was praised for her "warmth, intelligence and sincerity" by the notoriously thorny Rex Reed of the New York Observer, one of the film's few champions.

"Kate Winslet has such sound and reliable dramatic instincts she very nearly makes something of Adele," chimed in the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips in his pan of the film.

Her role in the upcoming "Divergent," the first of a planned trilogy based on Veronica Roth's bestselling novels, could pose a similar challenge of acceptance.

The parallels to another franchise based on popular young-adult fiction set in the dystopian future, "The Hunger Games," could work for or against the series.

The initial film, being released March 21 by "Hunger Games" distributor Lionsgate, will see Winslet play her first true villainness, Jeanine Matthews, leader of the Erudite Faction, an intelligence group at odds with the other factions (Abnegation, Amity, Candor and Dauntless).

"She has grand designs on pretty much taking over the entire factions system in not necessarily the most sound ways," explains Winslet of her character.

I find myself likening her to sort of a female Hitler."

The part is not only a departure for Winslet, but a night-and-day about-face from the role she tackled immediately prior, a French landscape gardener at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV in "A Little Chaos."

Alan Rickman, who directed, also plays the Sun King.

The concentrated timetable on the overlapping productions was partly due to the impending birth of Winslet's third child, which arrived in December.

"It was such a huge jump and I just had to throw myself at it," Winslet explains about wrapping one movie in England before flying to Chicago for "Divergent."

"Everybody was suddenly cramming everything in before I got too pregnant.

I was on set wearing a corset on a Monday, and on a completely different set by the Friday, wearing four-inch heels and a blonde, blunt-cut wig and wanting people dead."

The new film also marks the first time Winslet will be playing a recurring character, having signed on for at least the second installment, "Insurgent," which will be released a year down the line.

"I feel right about it because by the time I come to do the second one, I won't have gone away and played another character in between."

The last time that happened was when Winslet took a hiatus from a TV show, "Get Back," in her teens to play the homicidal Juliet Hulme in Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures," her feature debut.

"I'd gone off and played a schoolgirl who murdered somebody with a brick in a stocking," she recalls, "and suddenly coming back playing a slightly chubby 15-year-old with Ray Winstone playing my father in a sitcom — it was like, 'Whoa, I don't know who I am anymore.' "

The heroine of "Divergent," Beatrice Prior — the tale's equivalent of Katnis Everdeen — is played by rising star Shailene Woodley, whose career at this juncture Winslet likens to her own when she starred in the box office behemoth, "Titanic."

"She's really such a wonderful, special girl," says Winslet about Woodley.

"And I feel very protective of her and I feel very excited for her as well.

There are lots of things that are going to open up for her.

And she's going to know how to make the right choices and she's going to absolutely navigate (her career) very steadily."

With an Oscar for "The Reader" (2008), an Emmy for the miniseries "Mildred Pierce" (2011), three SAG awards and two BAFTAs, among several other kudos, Winslet nevertheless keeps raising the bar on her own career.

After all, she's still in her 30s, which is remarkable given the fact that she's already worked with such directors as Jackson, Ang Lee, Roman Polanski, Todd Haynes, Steven Soderbergh and Jane Campion, to name just a few.

"I suppose the ultimate goal for me is to really keep doing my best and reinventing the wheel and to keep doing this," she says.

"And to never become complacent and to always strive to do better and work harder and think bigger.

And when I say 'think bigger' I don't mean in terms of fame; I mean in terms of challenges that I hope I'm able to take on."

"To be honest, things come up often," she says.

"And I end up feeling agonized over turning things down or not being able to make something quite work because I have a family.

"I do yearn for the sort of brutal and raw challenge of theater because I know how much I would love it and I know how much I would get out of it.

And I know much it would sort of keep everything awake.

### 'Grey's Anatomy' Season 14 Sees Another Series Regular Depart

### Olivia Colman Joins 'The Crown' as Queen Elizabeth for Seasons 3 and 4

### BuzzFeed News Parts Ways With Three Entertainment Staffers After Identifying 'Holes' in Harvey Weinstein Coverage

### O'Reilly Dropped by Another Talent Agency

### Mark Halperin Out at NBC, MSNBC Amid Harassment Allegations

### 'American Vandal' Renewed for Season 2 at Netflix

Please fill out this field with valid email address.

### Film News Roundup: Disney Channel's Mollee Gray to Star in 'A Night to Regret'

No offense to entertainment journalists and film critics, but Kate Winslet doesn't read what they write about her.

### Film Academy to Establish 'Code of Conduct' Following Harvey Weinstein Scandal

### 'Florida Project' Breakout Valeria Cotto to Star in Fantasy Film 'Libby's Dreams' (EXCLUSIVE)

### Josh Stewart Joins Matthias Schoenaerts' Drama 'Mustang' (EXCLUSIVE)

### Tokyo Festival Boss Addresses Film Industry's Shifting Power Balance

### 'Stand-in Thief' Poised to Steal the Show at Tokyo Festival

### TIFFCOM: Animator WIT Studio Helps Tokyo New Cinema to 'Blooms'

### Zara Is Selling Chic $60 Over-the-Knee Boots Every 'It' Girl Will Soon Be Wearing

### Fourth Accuser Comes Forward With Allegations Against Fired APA Agent

### Arrow Recap: New to the Hood — Plus: What Did Oliver Give Felicity?

### 'Mindhunter' Cast Debates the Tickling Principal and the Outdated Weinstein Excuse for Bad Behavior

Early life and initial stage and television roles.

She participated in over 20 of their stage productions, but was rarely selected as the lead due to her weight. Nonetheless, she played key roles as Miss Agatha Hannigan in "Annie", the Mother Wolf in "The Jungle Book", and Lena Marelli in "Bugsy Malone".
 In 1991, within two weeks of finishing her GCSE examinations, Winslet made her screen debut as one of the main cast members of the BBC science fiction television series "Dark Season". Her part was that of Reet, a schoolgirl who helps her classmates fight against a sinister man distributing free computers to her school. She did not earn much from the job, and at 16, a lack of funds forced Winslet to leave Redroofs. To support herself, she worked at a delicatessen. In 1992, she had a small part in the television film "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes", an adaptation of Angus Wilson's satirical novel. Winslet, who weighed 13 stone 3 pounds (84 kg; 185 lb) at the time, played the daughter of an obese woman in it. While filming, an off-hand comment from the director Diarmuid Lawrence about the likeness between her and the actress who played her mother prompted Winslet to lose weight.


As per constitution of India and Panchyati Raaj Act, the area is administrated by Sarpanch (Head of Village) who is elected representative of village under the government of Haryana.

(meta data) TITLE: Gagsina Village Population - Gharaunda - Karnal, Haryana

Gagsina is a large village located in Gharaunda Tehsil of Karnal district, Haryana with total 1449 families residing.

The Gagsina village has population of 7698 of which 4088 are males while 3610 are females as per Population Census 2011.

In Gagsina village population of children with age 0-6 is 893 which makes up 11.60 % of total population of village.

Average Sex Ratio of Gagsina village is 883 which is higher than Haryana state average of 879.

Child Sex Ratio for the Gagsina as per census is 793, lower than Haryana average of 834.

Gagsina village has higher literacy rate compared to Haryana.

In 2011, literacy rate of Gagsina village was 75.87 % compared to 75.55 % of Haryana.

In Gagsina Male literacy stands at 85.99 % while female literacy rate was 64.57 %.

As per constitution of India and Panchyati Raaj Act, Gagsina village is administrated by Sarpanch (Head of Village) who is elected representative of village.

Our website, don't have information about schools and hospital in Gagsina village.

Schedule Caste (SC) constitutes 11.69 % of total population in Gagsina village.

The village Gagsina currently doesn't have any Schedule Tribe (ST) population.

In Gagsina village out of total population, 2205 were engaged in work activities.

84.04 % of workers describe their work as Main Work (Employment or Earning more than 6 Months) while 15.96 % were involved in Marginal activity providing livelihood for less than 6 months.

Of 2205 workers engaged in Main Work, 1116 were cultivators (owner or co-owner) while 263 were Agricultural labourer.


Williams then pulled away once again, winning the final three frames to take a 10–7 lead overnight.

(meta data) TITLE: Williams 10-7 Up Overnight - World Snooker

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.

At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.

View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Content crawled via the Wayback Machine Live Proxy mostly by the Save Page Now feature on web.archive.org.

Liveweb proxy is a component of Internet Archive's wayback machine project.

The liveweb proxy captures the content of a web page in real time, archives it into a ARC or WARC file and returns the ARC/WARC record back to the wayback machine to process.

The recorded ARC/WARC file becomes part of the wayback machine in due course of time.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20180508105055/http://www.worldsnooker.com/williams-10-7-up-overnight/

## Williams Wins Betfred World Championship

Mark Williams holds a 10-7 lead over John Higgins going into the second day of the Betfred World Championship final in Sheffield.

First to 18 on Monday takes the famous trophy and a record top prize of £425,000.

Welshman Williams took five of the nine frames in the second session and needs eight more to capture the Crucible crown for the third time, having won it in 2000 and 2003.

Higgins is aiming to lift the trophy for the fifth time, which would bring him level with Ronnie O'Sullivan.

Click here for all of the key final stats.

Williams won the opening frame tonight with a break of 72 to lead 6-4, then Scotland's Higgins fought back to take the next two with runs of 51 and 127.

World number seven Williams took frame 12 to made it 7-5 at the interval.

Runs of 56 and 117 from fifth seed Higgins got him back to 7-7, leaving the scores level for the first time since the start of the match.

Williams responded with a break of 118, the 82nd century of the tournament, to regain the lead.

Higgins was first among the balls in frame 16 but only made 35 before missing the black off its spot, and his opponent punished him with a 64 clearance.

In the last frame of the session, Higgins trailed 43-48 when he potted the penultimate red and attempted to move the last red away from the brown, which was close to a baulk corner.

But he accidentally planted the brown into the corner pocket, letting Williams in to clear for a 10-7 lead.

They return at 2pm on Monday for eight more frames, with the remainder to be played from 7pm.

Story Of The 2018 Betfred World Championship

Williams Leads 15-10 Ahead Of Crucible Finale

The two finalists were John Higgins and Mark Williams; both former champions. The final was played as a best of 35 frames match (18 frames needed to win), spread over four sessions between 6 and 7 May 2018. Williams took an early lead in the first session of the match, winning all of the first four frames. Higgins won the second mini-session 3–1, so the first session ended with a 5–3 lead for Williams. In the second session, Williams took the next two frames to lead 7–3, before Higgins scored four consecutive frames to level the score at 7–7.


While the Park area remains open throughout the year, certain roads and facilities close in the winter season.

(meta data) TITLE: USGS: Volcano Hazards Program CVO Crater Lake

(meta data) AUTHOR: Volcano Hazards Program

Crater Lake National Park was dedicated in

encompasses 645 km2 (250 mi2) of pristine forested and

alpine terrain, including the lake itself, virtually all of Mount Mazama.

wilderness and is administered by the National Park Service

It is always open, but some of the roads

and facilities are closed during the winter months.

Approximately 500,000 people visit Crater Lake

each year, and in the summer months visitors can participate in hiking, boat tours, trolley tours,

ranger-guided programs, swimming, fishing, camping, and many other activities.

rangers lead snowshoe hikes on the weekends and cross-country skiing is available on many trails.

Crater Lake National Park covers an area of 250 square miles (650 km), including forest areas, alpine terrain, the Crater Lake, and the vast majority of Mount Mazama. A wilderness area, it was dedicated in 1902 and is overseen by the National Park Service. It receives about 500,000 visitors each year, and these tourists can go hiking, take bike, ranger-guided, and trolley tours, swim, fish, camp, and participate in other recreational activities.


Fox was then chosen to be part of the 2018 Games "Forbes" 30 Under 30 list for his role in creating "Undertale".

StrategySmall BusinessUnder 30Workday BrandVoiceMoneyAll MoneyBanking & InsuranceCrypto & BlockchainETFs &

BusinessU.S. BankWorkdayListsAll ListsAdvisorAll AdvisorThe Best Credit Cards Of 2019Best Travel Credit CardsBest Business Credit CardsBest Credit Card Sign Up BonusesFeatured30 Under 30

Haan BrandVoice: ChangemakersCrypto ConfidentialDaily Dozen BriefingDark CapitalF45 Training BrandVoice: Are You Fit For A Franchise?Forbes8Forbes

Daily Cover StoriesForbes Editors' PicksForbes FindsForbes Insights with Teradata: Forbes Analytics+Forbes MagazineForbes VideoHUB International BrandVoice: Benefits

Fox designed, wrote, programmed, composed and created much of the art for his critically acclaimed 2015 game Undertale, an RPG where players can choose to solve conflicts nonviolently, greatly affecting the story.

The game has sold more than 2 million copies and spurred on an active online fandom around the title.

Weeknd And Forbes Under 30 Alum La Mar Taylor Launch Hxouse, An Incubator For Toronto's Emerging ArtistsDropping Out Of Harvard Isn't An Easy Choice.

He had some experience in game development before "Undertale", using RPG Maker 2000 with his three brothers to make role-playing games and "EarthBound" ROM hacks in high school, the most notable of which being "Earthbound: The Halloween Hack". He thought of the character designs and ideas for "Undertale" while in college, where he drew them in his notebook.
 Following its release, "Undertale" garnered an extensive fanbase, along with a large degree of controversy over the game's praise. Fox commented that he did not mind if people stated that they did not like the game, saying that it was "not for everyone". Despite "Undertale"'s awards and widespread acclaim, Fox wrote that his personal opinion was that the game was still "niche" and deserved an "8/10" review score.
 In 2016, Fox released a number of unused musical tracks from "Undertale". He also became a contributor to the "A Profound Waste of Time" magazine.