T+69 -- Day 24 Of The Partial Government Shutdown -- Dems Are In Puerto Rico -- Trump Is In DC -- Waiting -- January 14, 2019

Director's Cut: should be released tomorrow, Tuesday, January 15, 2019, 3:00 p.m. CT. 

The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding in the Holland Tunnel. Link here.

Fossils. We're not talking about members of the US Senate. North Dakota may have the bones of the largest triceratops ever discovered. Barnes County, in the southeastern corner of the state is a long way from the valley of the dinosaurs in northeastern Montana, Hell Creek, famous for its T. rex skeletons.

Does Wisconsin have a "death penalty"? From wiki: Capital punishment in Wisconsin was abolished in 1853. Wisconsin was one of the earliest United States states to abolish the death penalty, and is the only state that has performed only one execution in its history. Fifty years from now, google Jayme Closs.

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Sucking All The Oxygen Out Of The Room

After looking at the graphic, note who is not even on the graphic:

• Beto
• Oprah
• Bernie
• Pocahontas
• and, the biggest name of all not on the list: Hillary!

This has to be very, very concerning for "mainstream" (and I use the term loosely) Democrats.

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The Literary Page

The Great Gatsby trivia never ends. Ms Corrigan has enough to last a lifetime in So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures, Maureen Corrigan, c. 2014.

One aspect of The Great Gatsby: hard-boiled.

At the beginning of the Baz Luhrmann movie, Nick talks about Jay Gatsby.

And what does Nick talk about with his precious breaths? He tells a story about his friend Jay Gatsby, who was a fellow soldier in World War I. As I've said, the modern use of the term hard-boiled came out of that war, and in almost every classic hard-boiled story, the most stable and intense relationship is not between the hero and the woman he loves, but between two men, comrades in arms. 

The 1949 Gatsby movie stresses the buddy element running through the story by surrounding Ladd's Gatsby with gangster underlings who had served with him in the Great War.

Hard-boiled novels and the noirs that were made from them are male buddy stories that explore what makes a man a man in a newly fallen world.

I find that very, very interesting, Corrigan continues:

Fitzgerald knew that he had created a story in which the primary relationship was between two men. 

Writing to H. L. Mencken in a letter dated May 4, 1925, Fitzgerald, in his typically spelling-challenged style, confessed that "the influence on it has been the masculine one of The Brothers Karamazof (sic) a thing of incomparable form, rather than the femineine (sic) one of The Portrait of a Lady. 

When Gatsy turned out to be a commercial failure, Fitzgerald quickly came to believe that he had "paid" for making Nick and Gatsy the focus of his novel. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins dated April 24, 1925, Fitzgerald bemoans weak sales and blames the title, which he says is "only fair, rather bad than good ... And most important -- the book contains no important woman character and women controll (sic) the fiction market at present.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was also a story in which the primary relationship was between two men. It's too bad Corrigan missed that one.