Podcasts about wha

Richard, Jessamy, and Gavin reflect on developments at the 78th World Health Assembly, including the passage of the pandemic agreement and shifting dynamics in global health leadership. What's next for WHO without US engagement? How has WHA changed over the years?We also address the importance of recommitting to adolescent health following our new Commission, and discuss a controversial recent study about the pace of scientific innovation.You can read the second Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health & Wellbeing here:https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)00503-3/fulltext?dgcid=buzzsprout_icw_podcast_lancetadolescenthealth25_lancetThis is the paper on the pace of scientific innovation discussed on the podcast:https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01548-4Send us your feedback!Read all of our content at https://www.thelancet.com/?dgcid=buzzsprout_tlv_podcast_generic_lancetCheck out all the podcasts from The Lancet Group:https://www.thelancet.com/multimedia/podcasts?dgcid=buzzsprout_tlv_podcast_generic_lancetContinue this conversation on social!Follow us today at...https://thelancet.bsky.social/https://instagram.com/thelancetgrouphttps://facebook.com/thelancetmedicaljournalhttps://linkedIn.com/company/the-lancethttps://youtube.com/thelancettv

TACO Tuesday! David Waldman gets us this far, at least. Donald K. Trump wants to run the country and the world but needs to maintain his golf game. Donald juggles his many momentous obligations by, well, golfing. Also, Trump has his iPhone, which anyone, anywhere in the world can call anytime they want to hear a “Wha, huh?' directly from the most powerful man on Earth... if he's not text messaging. This system worked perfectly while Elon was around. Musk has since moved on, but did pass on the gift of incel focus to his old pal Stephen Miller, who is now putting all of his newfound extra spare time into his job. It's Stephen Miller vs. Harvard, only one will be left standing, unless of course, TACO. Actor Jonathan Joss was killed in a San Antonio shooting. Police see no evidence of a hate crime, other than Joss' complaints of constant verbal harassment, his house being burnt to the ground, and his dog being beheaded... After all, you don't need much of a reason to shoot someone in Texas. Then there's Texas' former solicitor general, who really knows how to put the “ass” in “asteroid” … or maybe vice versa. Over in Idaho, Trump USDA nominee Michael Boren built himself a cabin on National Forest land, then diverted a stream and put in an airstrip just like a pioneer.

Looking into the Bullwhip effect from last week's Road Check blitz -  How did the market respond? Then, Dean and Dan dive into a brief rant about AI, its impact on logistics, and what the future could hold, based on the insights of some of the most prominent minds of the next "Industrial Revolution." 

The World Health Assembly, the highest decision-making body of the World Health Organization, on Monday decided not to include in its agenda a proposal on the participation of China's Taiwan province in the annual assembly as an observer.世界卫生组织最高决策机构世界卫生大会（WHA）周一作出决定，拒绝将中国台湾地区以观察员身份参会的提案列入大会议程。The decision was made by both the general committee and the plenary session of the 78th WHA.该决定是由第七十八届世界卫生大会总务委员会和全体会议审议通过。This is the ninth consecutive year that the global health agency has rejected such a proposal.这标志着世卫大会连续第九年对类似提案说“不”。Speaking at the first plenary meeting of the assembly, Chen Xu, permanent representative of China to the United Nations Office at Geneva and other international organizations in Switzerland, said the proposal blatantly challenges the authority of the UN and the postwar international order.中国常驻联合国日内瓦办事处和瑞士其他国际组织代表陈旭在大会全会发言时严正指出，该提案公然挑战联合国权威，践踏战后国际秩序根基。"This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the 80th anniversary of the recovery of Taiwan province," he said.他说：“今年正值世界反法西斯战争胜利80周年，也是台湾省恢复的80周年。”"Taiwan province's return to China is an integral part of the outcomes of the victory in World War II and the postwar international order. The UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 and World Health Assembly Resolution 25.1 have long since resolved the issue of China's representation, including that of the Taiwan province."“中国台湾省回归祖国怀抱，是第二次世界大战胜利成果和战后国际秩序的重要组成部分。联合国大会第2758号决议与世界卫生大会第25.1号决议已从法理和程序上彻底解决了包括中国台湾省在内的中国代表权问题。”"For many consecutive years, the WHA has rejected such a proposal, thereby upholding the authority of the UN and the postwar international order. The fact clearly shows that the path of 'Taiwan independence' is a dead end and is once again doomed to fail."“世卫大会连续多年拒绝涉台提案，有力维护了联合国宪章权威和战后国际秩序。这一事实充分证明‘台独'分裂行径注定失败，任何政治操弄终将徒劳无功。”发言人强调。Chen also pointed out that it is the separatist activities pursued by the Democratic Progressive Party authorities of Taiwan province in recent years that have eliminated the political foundation for Taiwan province's participation in the assembly, and that, under the one-China principle, the engagement of Taiwan province with the WHO is not subject to any difficulties or obstacles.发言人陈旭特别指出，正是台湾省民进党当局近年来持续进行的谋“独”行径，彻底破坏了台湾省参与世卫大会的政治基础。根据一个中国原则，台湾省在卫生领域的国际参与不存在任何障碍。According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson's remarks in response to the 78th WHA's rejection of the province-related proposal, the Chinese central government attaches great importance to the health and well-being of the compatriots in Taiwan province, and has made proper arrangements for the province's engagement in global health affairs under the one-China principle.中国外交部发言人就第78届世界卫生大会拒绝涉台提案作出回应时表示，中央政府始终高度重视台湾同胞的健康福祉，在一个中国原则下已为台湾地区参与全球卫生事务作出妥善安排。 The spokesperson said the central government has approved the participation in WHO technical activities by 11 batches of 12 health experts from Taiwan province over the past year, and under the framework of the International Health Regulations, Taiwan province can promptly access health emergencies information from the WHO and report such information to it.发言人指出，过去一年来中央政府已批准台湾地区11批次共12名卫生专家参与世卫组织技术活动。根据《国际卫生条例》框架安排，台湾地区可及时从世卫组织获取卫生应急信息，并向该组织通报相关情况。 Chen also underlined the above points in his remarks during the assembly, saying, "The proposal hyping up about the so-called gap in the international pandemic prevention system is completely inconsistent with the facts."中国代表陈旭在世卫大会发言中再次强调上述立场，明确指出：“炒作所谓国际防疫体系存在空白的提案完全不符合事实。”"The one-China principle is a consensus of the international community," Chen added. "To date, 183 countries have already established diplomatic relations with China on the basis of the one-China principle."“一个中国原则是国际社会普遍共识，”陈代表补充道，“目前已有183个国家基于这一原则与中国建立外交关系。”The 78th WHA, themed "One World for Health", runs through May 27. Attended by delegations from all 194 WHO member states, it brings together high-level country representatives and other stakeholders to address global health challenges.以“同一个世界，共护健康”为主题的第78届世界卫生大会将持续至5月27日。本届大会汇聚世卫组织全部194个成员国的代表团，汇集各国卫生部长级官员及利益攸关方代表，共同应对全球公共卫生挑战。proposal/prəˈpəʊzl/n.提议; 动议;the World Health Organization世界卫生组织plenary session全体会议；大会；全会hype up使兴奋; 煽动; 大肆宣传beinconsistent with与......不符stakeholder/ˈsteɪkhəʊldə(r)/n. 利益相关者

Hii leo jaridani tunakuletea mada kwa kina inayomulika wafugaji wa nyuki nchini Tanzania leo ikiwa ni siku ya nyuki duniani iliyopitishwa na Baraza Kuu la Umoja wa Mataifa tarehe 20 Desemba mwaka 2017 kupitia azimio namba A/72/211.Baada ya miaka mitatu ya majadiliano, leo katika Mkutano wa Kimataifa wa Afya unaoendelea Geneva, Uswisi, nchi zimepitisha rasmi makubaliano ya kihistoria ya kuzuia, kujiandaa, na kukabiliana vyema na majanga ya magonjwa kwa siku zijazo. Taratibu zote zitakapopitishwa na angalau nchi 60, mkataba utaanza kutumika rasmi mwakani.Kutokana na mamlaka za Israeli kulegeza kwa muda mzingiro uliodumu kwa wiki 11, angalau sasa matumaini kidogo yamerejea Gaza, yameeleza leo mashirika ya Umoja wa Mataifa. Msemaji wa Shirika la Umoja wa Mataifa la Masuala ya dharura, OCHA, Jens Laerke amesema tayari wamepata ruhusa ya kuyavusha malori matano yaliyokuwa yamezuiliwa jana.Shirika la Umoja wa Mataifa la Mpango wa Chakula Duniani, WFP limetahadharisha  leo kwamba bila ufadhili zaidi, huenda katika muda wa wiki chache zijazo likalazimika kusitisha msaada wa chakula kwa takribani nusu ya watu linaowahudumia kwa sasa mashariki mwa Jamhuri ya Kidemokrasia ya Congo, DRC.Na katika mashinani, fursa ni yake Hanan Al-Dayya, Mkimbizi wa ndani katika ukanda wa Gaza, eneo la Palestina linalokaliwa na Israeli, akisimulia  madhara ya mashambulizi yanayoendelea kutoka Israeli.Mwenyeji wako ni Flora Nducha, karibu!

We are excited to be joined by ANDERS HEDBERG, the very first player in professional hockey history to score 50 goals in less than 50 games – scoring 51 goals in just 49 games while a member of the Winnipeg Jets back in their WHA days... Along with countryman Ulf Nilsson, he is one of the first Swedish players to make their way to North America where he starred for both the Winnipeg Jets and the New York Rangers - averaging over a point a game during his 11 years with both teams – Please welcome our friend, and a Swedish hockey legend– Anders Hedberg !!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

**龔明鑫：落實特別條例 經濟成長率有望逾3% **美沙晶片交易是全球AI分水嶺 中東將比中國具優勢 **黃仁勳專機抵台！親曝：台灣仍將是全球科技生態中心 **歐洲若要完全不靠美軍 得花25年外帶30兆經費 **我未受邀世界衛生大會 中國外交部：中方不同意台灣參加今年WHA **中國抖音直播主狂拍小學生！不只台北民生社區 一查赫見台灣到處拍 **20多位我國藝人涉統戰遭鎖定、名單將曝光？ 陸委會：未來將視調查結果評估是否公布並依法處理 **翁曉玲喊「台灣不該提升國防預算」矢板明夫：讓國際社會產生誤解 **驚！爆世壯運手錶用中國晶片　許淑華轟蔣萬安幫洗產地：台灣顏面盡失 —— 【青鳥到大罷免─賴清德執政周年檢視與展望】 時間│2025 年 5 月 17 日（六）09:30-17:30 地點│台獨聯盟辦公室 　　（台北市青島西路11號14樓之一） 主辦│台灣獨立建國聯盟、台灣安保協會、現代文化基金會 報名連結：https://reurl.cc/dQ8qz2 ❤️歡迎訂閱、收看、收聽，按讚、分享 【版權屬寶島聯播網所有，未經授權，不得轉載、重製，有需求請來信告知】 #寶島聯播網 #鄭弘儀 #寶島全世界 #川普 #黃仁勳 #翁曉玲 #世界衛生大會 小額贊助支持本節目： https://open.firstory.me/user/clw4248xv113d01wg7s4h2xnq 留言告訴我你對這一集的想法： https://open.firstory.me/user/clw4248xv113d01wg7s4h2xnq/comments Powered by Firstory Hosting

दुनिया को कोविड-19 जैसी महामारियों का मुक़ाबला करने के लिए तैयार करने के उद्देश्य से, हाल ही में देशों के बीच एक वैश्विक महामारी तैयारी समझौते के मसौदे को, अन्तिम रूप दिया गया था. इसे सोमवार 19 मई से आयोजित हो रही विश्व स्वास्थ्य सभा में पारित किए जाने के लिए प्रस्तुत किया जाएगा. भारत में संयुक्त राष्ट्र की स्वेच्छा सेवा संस्था UNV के UNDP में कार्यरत यूथ मोबिलाइज़र निखिल गुप्ता ने, कोविड -19 महामारी के दौरान एक स्वयंसेवक के रूप में व्यापक स्तर पर काम किया था. यूएन न्यूज़ की अंशु शर्मा ने उनसे कोविड - 19 के दौरान उनके कामकाज, उससे मिले सबक़ और विश्व स्वास्थ्य सभा से जुड़ी उम्मीदों पर बातचीत की...

As the World Hockey Association approached its first season, things were getting tense with the NHL. Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz described the battle thus: “The war with the WHA was the third-bloodiest war in history, behind the Civil War and the Peloponnesian War.” The WHA was more worried about having arenas where the ice didn't have hills. If you’d like more Sports Bizarre, become a member of Bizarre Plus. Click here to join today As a member, you’ll get: A weekly bonus podcast Access to all past episodes Exclusive behind-the-scenes access Access to the members-only chatroom Ability to vote on future episodes Early access to any live show tickets See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode breaks down the ripple effect of policy pivots and political posts on the freight and logistics industry. Just as the market showed signs of recovery, renewed tariff talks sent shockwaves through supply chains, shifting forecasts, freezing shipper strategies, and rewriting playbooks overnight. We explore how a single post on Truth Social can spark economic uncertainty and dive into China's undeniable role in the North American logistics ecosystem.If you're a freight leader, 3PL rep, or logistics strategist trying to make sense of the chaos, this is your frontline briefing. Get the insight you need to adapt fast, stay profitable, and turn disruption into opportunity.Key Topics Covered:Why the freight rebound was gaining steam—and what halted itHow social media is becoming a new economic disruptorThe real cost of tariff uncertainty for shippers and carriersWhat you must factor in now when building resilient supply chainsTune in, and turn volatility into your competitive advantage.

Rail Tariff ShockwaveThis episode examines the ripple effects of Trump-era tariffs and how they've reignited chaos in America's rail sector. Dean and Dan explain what this means for brokers, shippers, and everyday operations, from sudden rate hikes and import bottlenecks to the scramble for capacity. With supply chains straining under new global tension, this isn't just a rate spike—it's a logistics shockwave. Get ready to hear the unfiltered truth, the data behind the headlines, and what you must do now to protect your margin and clients.

Wives get to thinking about how life is too short.Based on the works of CoyoteHoward. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Jenny & The Barbeque GatheringIt was the picture of Americana in southwest Idaho.A partly cloudy sky, with more sun than shade. Deep green grass. Horses munching away in the pasture while the kids, whose ages ranged from 2-16, played on the trampoline and playset.The husbands primarily were under the porch overhang, gathered around the grill, while Osvaldo and his 8 year old son Elliot jokingly played corn-hole in the grass.Their wives were on the furniture on the other end of the porch, doing as women do, keeping an eye on the children for the most part and enjoying their own trials and tribulations. Most of which focused on family dramas, future plans and prices for various groceries."Yeah, so what I'd like to do," Brady said, beginning to flip the burgers from the top left, "is kinda what you did, but I'd like to do 4 rails instead."Steve nodded and took a drink of beer from his Payette Brewing Co. bottle. He absentmindedly watched Brady do so, his left thumb tucked into the front pocket of his jeans, shifting his cowboy booted feet to equal distribution instead of one leg being cocked slightly. His slight belly showed his 36 years of age, and while he didn't like it, and wished he could find the consistent motivation to work out, his wife didn't mind, and his shirts still fit, including the plain white t-shirt he wore now."Yeah I don't mind the three, but the three inch- I wish I'd of been able to afford the three and a half," Steve said, shifting the bottle to his left and adjusting his multicam hat on his head, though it needn't be done. His brown, fade cut hair wasn't bothering him, it was more just a habit."You did your fence yourself?" Jeff asked. He was blond, worked out tons and was wearing a polo, cargo shorts and flip flops.Steve nodded, "Yeah the little mustang got out suddenly last year, little shit."The women meanwhile were discussing flowers."I'm so jealous of your little play area Jenny," Hannah said, taking a sip of her soda.She was married to Brady, and three of the tikes running around were hers. She was 36, was 5'7" and 133 pounds. She knew she was attractive, as all the women here were, but her husband appreciated her the most, and that's exactly the way she prefered it.They'd been married for well over 10 years, he was the father of all her babies, and they led a great life."Well it's been a lot of work, but yeah, it's coming together," Jenny said. "We've done a ton of work just to try and keep the weeds away." Her husband was Steve, and as she finished her sentence she looked over at her man.They'd been together the longest of the group of six couples, having been dating since junior year of high school, over 18 years prior. They had the second oldest child there, at 15, and the second youngest as well, a three year old girl.They'd been the ones to leave though, he going into the Army right after high school and finally leaving six years prior, and they'd all reconnected.Steve was still her king though, and she his queen, as they routinely told each other. Even now, as Heather, a half-asian, half-hispanic woman asked her about the newest berry they'd planted Jenny couldn't help but think about what her king had done to her last night, and her panties got warm under her flowery, blue, spaghetti-strapped sundress.Steve noticed her looking at him, and flashed her a smile, giving his queen a fun wink.And that's why she couldn't help but love him. He just did those little kinds of things that other men didn't with their wives. Sure he had a temper, he played video games, his memory was horrible.But his positives more than made up for it."I'd like to plant blackberries, especially if they have uh, no thorns," Amanda winked, and took a bite of potato salad. She was a short, slightly heavy black haired woman married to Osvaldo.She looked over and saw her son and husband playing cornhole still, though Jeff and Joe had gone over to play with them. They were married to Heather and Ellen, respectively, to Amanda's left."Yeah me too," Hannah said, to which the others laughed slightly."Bullshit," Kelly said, deciphering the code words; "You have too much going on already. Brady would strangle you!""Oh he'd be a little upset, but he always cools off," Hannah said, chuckling.But Jenny couldn't get the thought out of her mind now. The thought of how Steve had taken extra care to put the baby to bed, to not play Mass Effect, and to take her to bed.He'd sweetly pulled her jeans off, then nuzzled and licked at her cunt through her panties until she'd cum, THEN he had proceeded to have his way with her, bringing her off several more times before finishing off inside her.She imagined she could still feel his cum, making her wetter still.She suddenly looked at the whole situation. At everyone around her and the thought of them getting old, tired, and ending..."Hannah, watch Claire for me. I'm gonna go get fucked silly in your powder room," she said, locking eyes with her friend and rising with a slight smirk.Hannah's eyes went wide as she choked slightly and let out a huge smile."What?!" she exclaimed, but Jenny was already striding across the patio to her man."Did she just-""What did she say?""Whoa!""Hahaha! Oh shit she's really doing it!"Jenny had reached Steve, grabbed him by the belt buckle with one hand and had begun leading him away, walking forward as if leading a stud to a mare."Hey babe, whoa, what's up?" he asked.She turned and smirked a small smile at him, and she knew it achieved the desired affect. Her intentions must have been written all over her face, because he couldn't help but put his beer down and follow, his own smile bursting forth.She lead him through the door and didn't give him time to properly shut it, but he was able to with a strong hand."Jen, what are you doing?" Steve asked, grabbing her wrist. She was closer to her target though."I need you," she said, suddenly breathless as she kissed him deeply, her sexy body pressing up against his.She made sure to press her bra'ed 34C breasts into his chest, her left hand around his back, her right up in his short hair.Steve's hands went around her pinched waist first, then his left up her side and back while his right went around and down to her plump ass, cupping and kneading.She moaned at the touches, then broke the french kiss and backed away towards the half-bath by the front door.Steve followed eagerly and suddenly they were in the little bathroom, finding the light and locking the door behind them."Hun, what's gotten int-ohh shit!" Steve started, but she hushed him by immediately dropping to her knees, and getting his jeans undone."Damn girl, the fuck has gotten into you suddenly?" he asked, as she got the front of his pants open, not pausing and pulled down his underwear too. But his hands went to her head, lightly rubbing the sides and back encouragingly."Can't I just want my husband?" she asked before throating his semi-hard, 6 inch cock in one go."Ah fuck," he said, his biology taking over for a moment as he thrust his hips an inch forward, his hands tightening on her head.Her tongue was going crazy on the underside of his shaft, the tip even coming past her bottom lip slightly to lick his balls as much as she could, and he got rigid hard in moments.He gasped and breathed as if he were in pain, but she knew he wasn't. Jenny didn't give him head very often, so this must be a real treat for him. Though truth be told, this was a means to an end. She bobbed her face on his crotch for a dozen or so pumps, until she felt his cockhead nudge the back of her throat. That end was now.She rose, looked him in the eye as her right hand grasped his hard prick, some of her hair in her eye as she did so, stroking it in short strokes as she turned to the vanity and mirror.God she looked slutty. One of her spaghetti straps had fallen off her shoulder and her lips were an excited red from having just been stretched in an obscene 'O' around his magnificent cock.But she could still FEEL her sex drive though, his taste still in her mouth. Her boobs were hypersensitive in their confines, feeling wonderfully constrained as she breathed, and her panties were probably soaked through.She pulled up the hem of her dress and bent over the counter, looking back at him over her right shoulder."God, just fuck me. Fuck me!" she said, "I need it."Steve couldn't refuse this personification of pure lust in front of him. She wasn't his wife in this moment. She was a bitch in heat. A mare in season. And he was going to give her the beast she needed.He grabbed her brief-cut panties with both hands and yanked them down with animalistic urgency to her feet, where she stepped out with one sandaled foot.He then rose and put his right hand to her cunt, immediately confirming how wanton she was by the heat and wetness he found there, easily one of the wettest times he'd ever seen her."Oh fuck," she said, finding her own lustful gaze looking back at her in the vanity mirror, feeling his fingers run through her sex from her clit(which he brushed ever so slightly) right up to her asshole. She knew he must've thought about playing with it, as she'd let him take her ass several times in the past year, finally.But he didn't linger, instead he stepped right up to her bent over body and slid his steel hard cock into her cunt, all in one go."Oh! Oh fuck! Oh god that feels soo good!" she practically screamed, but huskily.His hands went to her wide hips, finding her pelvic bones that made the perfect obscene handles, beginning to piston her cunt, slowly.But she wanted more, she wanted to be fucked, and fucked well.She looked over her shoulder at him, "Steve, god damnit, Fuck me!" With each stressed word she pushed herself back on his cock, sparks flying from her sopping cunt through her body as she did so as his rod plowed her depths.Out at the patio, the ladies' conversation suddenly halted when the screams and moans were faintly heard coming from the little vent, high on the side of the house. It piped the narrative from the powder room, just on the other side of the brick exterior. First Claire took notice, then all the ladies went silent, their devilish grins showing their vicarious delight. A couple of the guys noticed the silence over at the other end of the covered patio, then all the guys heard the faint echo of a raging hormonal woman's voice could just barely be heard yelling; “Steve, God damnit. Fuck me!”Jenny was rewarded with her stud pulling her hips back so that she'd fall backwards if he wasn't there, cock lodged inside her. Her hands were wrapped tightly around the spout of the faucet, now somewhat in front of her as her hair swung with his thrusts. Her tits were swaying as much as her bra would allow, and the pulling on her chest added to her sexual experience. The thumb of her left hand subconsciously rubbed the underside of the chrome spout, but in her entranced state, she imagined it was Steve's turgid cock.In moments he was fucking her hard. Fast. Making her ass jiggle with every impact of his pelvis. She felt his cock running though her with abandon, the heat from her cunt quickly turning into a fire, then a blaze, until stars burst in her vision and she screamed a carnal, drawn out "ah" in orgasm, her legs shaking uncontrollably. “Steve, you beast!” she screamed in satisfaction.Her hands slipped as they clenched and gripped the sink, Steve stepping up as her hips were pushed forward against the edge of the counter.Whereas moments before she'd cum from her assertive pushing back, now she was trapped with nowhere to go. More precisely, her hole couldn't get away from the prick fucking it.Jenny realized that she'd be forced to cum at least again, maybe more even. Her king had slowed as he'd trapped her, bringing his hands up to her shoulders and finding new grips with which to pound her.She looked up and saw her sweaty self in the mirror again, her jaw dropped open as she breathed heavy with sexual arousal, her whole body jarring with each impact of Steve's hips against her ass.God she was so sexy, and her cunt was doing such a good job of clenching around the invader, her body doing as it was designed to do, trying to bring the penis inside it to orgasm. Her hole wanted his semen. That was its purpose, to get fucked and filled by cum, so she could carry his child.And it was working, her own voice raising with every fourth or fifth quickening thrust as she felt her second orgasm building in her depths, Steve's cock hitting amazing pockets of nerves inside her.It suddenly was upon her as her left hand pressed against the mirror, her right coming around to grab Steve's hip as her cunt exploded in pleasure, her eyes wide. She rocked herself back as he tried to pull out for another thrust, trying to keep him inside her as she came, throwing her head in an out of control nodding motion and half panting, half exclaiming "ahs.”Steve for his part wasn't faring well on holding out. He regularly told Jenny that her orgasms would collect massive amounts of cash on the internet, and they usually brought him off. But Jenny had never been this needy before, and though she did have bouts of increased sexual activity, this was a whole new level.As she came again for the second time, the thrashing of her head, her hair flying and her hand on the mirror, almost got him.It was her hand landing on his right side, hip and ass cheek coupled with her rocking cunt clenching on his shaft that got him. He slammed forward to the hilt as his cum rose from his balls, rocketing down his weapon until it fired into her hot sheathe.Again and again it fired, "Oh yeah! Uh! Uh! Uh! Take it baby!" he said through blurred vision and clenched teeth.Out on the patio, the ladies were squirming; embarrassed, but getting aroused. Claire was frustrated when she had to go comfort a child who tripped and fell in the play area; “Tell me what I'm missing, Kelly.”

Wives get to thinking about how life is too short.Based on the works of CoyoteHoward. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Jenny & The Barbeque GatheringIt was the picture of Americana in southwest Idaho.A partly cloudy sky, with more sun than shade. Deep green grass. Horses munching away in the pasture while the kids, whose ages ranged from 2-16, played on the trampoline and playset.The husbands primarily were under the porch overhang, gathered around the grill, while Osvaldo and his 8 year old son Elliot jokingly played corn-hole in the grass.Their wives were on the furniture on the other end of the porch, doing as women do, keeping an eye on the children for the most part and enjoying their own trials and tribulations. Most of which focused on family dramas, future plans and prices for various groceries."Yeah, so what I'd like to do," Brady said, beginning to flip the burgers from the top left, "is kinda what you did, but I'd like to do 4 rails instead."Steve nodded and took a drink of beer from his Payette Brewing Co. bottle. He absentmindedly watched Brady do so, his left thumb tucked into the front pocket of his jeans, shifting his cowboy booted feet to equal distribution instead of one leg being cocked slightly. His slight belly showed his 36 years of age, and while he didn't like it, and wished he could find the consistent motivation to work out, his wife didn't mind, and his shirts still fit, including the plain white t-shirt he wore now."Yeah I don't mind the three, but the three inch- I wish I'd of been able to afford the three and a half," Steve said, shifting the bottle to his left and adjusting his multicam hat on his head, though it needn't be done. His brown, fade cut hair wasn't bothering him, it was more just a habit."You did your fence yourself?" Jeff asked. He was blond, worked out tons and was wearing a polo, cargo shorts and flip flops.Steve nodded, "Yeah the little mustang got out suddenly last year, little shit."The women meanwhile were discussing flowers."I'm so jealous of your little play area Jenny," Hannah said, taking a sip of her soda.She was married to Brady, and three of the tikes running around were hers. She was 36, was 5'7" and 133 pounds. She knew she was attractive, as all the women here were, but her husband appreciated her the most, and that's exactly the way she prefered it.They'd been married for well over 10 years, he was the father of all her babies, and they led a great life."Well it's been a lot of work, but yeah, it's coming together," Jenny said. "We've done a ton of work just to try and keep the weeds away." Her husband was Steve, and as she finished her sentence she looked over at her man.They'd been together the longest of the group of six couples, having been dating since junior year of high school, over 18 years prior. They had the second oldest child there, at 15, and the second youngest as well, a three year old girl.They'd been the ones to leave though, he going into the Army right after high school and finally leaving six years prior, and they'd all reconnected.Steve was still her king though, and she his queen, as they routinely told each other. Even now, as Heather, a half-asian, half-hispanic woman asked her about the newest berry they'd planted Jenny couldn't help but think about what her king had done to her last night, and her panties got warm under her flowery, blue, spaghetti-strapped sundress.Steve noticed her looking at him, and flashed her a smile, giving his queen a fun wink.And that's why she couldn't help but love him. He just did those little kinds of things that other men didn't with their wives. Sure he had a temper, he played video games, his memory was horrible.But his positives more than made up for it."I'd like to plant blackberries, especially if they have uh, no thorns," Amanda winked, and took a bite of potato salad. She was a short, slightly heavy black haired woman married to Osvaldo.She looked over and saw her son and husband playing cornhole still, though Jeff and Joe had gone over to play with them. They were married to Heather and Ellen, respectively, to Amanda's left."Yeah me too," Hannah said, to which the others laughed slightly."Bullshit," Kelly said, deciphering the code words; "You have too much going on already. Brady would strangle you!""Oh he'd be a little upset, but he always cools off," Hannah said, chuckling.But Jenny couldn't get the thought out of her mind now. The thought of how Steve had taken extra care to put the baby to bed, to not play Mass Effect, and to take her to bed.He'd sweetly pulled her jeans off, then nuzzled and licked at her cunt through her panties until she'd cum, THEN he had proceeded to have his way with her, bringing her off several more times before finishing off inside her.She imagined she could still feel his cum, making her wetter still.She suddenly looked at the whole situation. At everyone around her and the thought of them getting old, tired, and ending..."Hannah, watch Claire for me. I'm gonna go get fucked silly in your powder room," she said, locking eyes with her friend and rising with a slight smirk.Hannah's eyes went wide as she choked slightly and let out a huge smile."What?!" she exclaimed, but Jenny was already striding across the patio to her man."Did she just-""What did she say?""Whoa!""Hahaha! Oh shit she's really doing it!"Jenny had reached Steve, grabbed him by the belt buckle with one hand and had begun leading him away, walking forward as if leading a stud to a mare."Hey babe, whoa, what's up?" he asked.She turned and smirked a small smile at him, and she knew it achieved the desired affect. Her intentions must have been written all over her face, because he couldn't help but put his beer down and follow, his own smile bursting forth.She lead him through the door and didn't give him time to properly shut it, but he was able to with a strong hand."Jen, what are you doing?" Steve asked, grabbing her wrist. She was closer to her target though."I need you," she said, suddenly breathless as she kissed him deeply, her sexy body pressing up against his.She made sure to press her bra'ed 34C breasts into his chest, her left hand around his back, her right up in his short hair.Steve's hands went around her pinched waist first, then his left up her side and back while his right went around and down to her plump ass, cupping and kneading.She moaned at the touches, then broke the french kiss and backed away towards the half-bath by the front door.Steve followed eagerly and suddenly they were in the little bathroom, finding the light and locking the door behind them."Hun, what's gotten int-ohh shit!" Steve started, but she hushed him by immediately dropping to her knees, and getting his jeans undone."Damn girl, the fuck has gotten into you suddenly?" he asked, as she got the front of his pants open, not pausing and pulled down his underwear too. But his hands went to her head, lightly rubbing the sides and back encouragingly."Can't I just want my husband?" she asked before throating his semi-hard, 6 inch cock in one go."Ah fuck," he said, his biology taking over for a moment as he thrust his hips an inch forward, his hands tightening on her head.Her tongue was going crazy on the underside of his shaft, the tip even coming past her bottom lip slightly to lick his balls as much as she could, and he got rigid hard in moments.He gasped and breathed as if he were in pain, but she knew he wasn't. Jenny didn't give him head very often, so this must be a real treat for him. Though truth be told, this was a means to an end. She bobbed her face on his crotch for a dozen or so pumps, until she felt his cockhead nudge the back of her throat. That end was now.She rose, looked him in the eye as her right hand grasped his hard prick, some of her hair in her eye as she did so, stroking it in short strokes as she turned to the vanity and mirror.God she looked slutty. One of her spaghetti straps had fallen off her shoulder and her lips were an excited red from having just been stretched in an obscene 'O' around his magnificent cock.But she could still FEEL her sex drive though, his taste still in her mouth. Her boobs were hypersensitive in their confines, feeling wonderfully constrained as she breathed, and her panties were probably soaked through.She pulled up the hem of her dress and bent over the counter, looking back at him over her right shoulder."God, just fuck me. Fuck me!" she said, "I need it."Steve couldn't refuse this personification of pure lust in front of him. She wasn't his wife in this moment. She was a bitch in heat. A mare in season. And he was going to give her the beast she needed.He grabbed her brief-cut panties with both hands and yanked them down with animalistic urgency to her feet, where she stepped out with one sandaled foot.He then rose and put his right hand to her cunt, immediately confirming how wanton she was by the heat and wetness he found there, easily one of the wettest times he'd ever seen her."Oh fuck," she said, finding her own lustful gaze looking back at her in the vanity mirror, feeling his fingers run through her sex from her clit(which he brushed ever so slightly) right up to her asshole. She knew he must've thought about playing with it, as she'd let him take her ass several times in the past year, finally.But he didn't linger, instead he stepped right up to her bent over body and slid his steel hard cock into her cunt, all in one go."Oh! Oh fuck! Oh god that feels soo good!" she practically screamed, but huskily.His hands went to her wide hips, finding her pelvic bones that made the perfect obscene handles, beginning to piston her cunt, slowly.But she wanted more, she wanted to be fucked, and fucked well.She looked over her shoulder at him, "Steve, god damnit, Fuck me!" With each stressed word she pushed herself back on his cock, sparks flying from her sopping cunt through her body as she did so as his rod plowed her depths.Out at the patio, the ladies' conversation suddenly halted when the screams and moans were faintly heard coming from the little vent, high on the side of the house. It piped the narrative from the powder room, just on the other side of the brick exterior. First Claire took notice, then all the ladies went silent, their devilish grins showing their vicarious delight. A couple of the guys noticed the silence over at the other end of the covered patio, then all the guys heard the faint echo of a raging hormonal woman's voice could just barely be heard yelling; “Steve, God damnit. Fuck me!”Jenny was rewarded with her stud pulling her hips back so that she'd fall backwards if he wasn't there, cock lodged inside her. Her hands were wrapped tightly around the spout of the faucet, now somewhat in front of her as her hair swung with his thrusts. Her tits were swaying as much as her bra would allow, and the pulling on her chest added to her sexual experience. The thumb of her left hand subconsciously rubbed the underside of the chrome spout, but in her entranced state, she imagined it was Steve's turgid cock.In moments he was fucking her hard. Fast. Making her ass jiggle with every impact of his pelvis. She felt his cock running though her with abandon, the heat from her cunt quickly turning into a fire, then a blaze, until stars burst in her vision and she screamed a carnal, drawn out "ah" in orgasm, her legs shaking uncontrollably. “Steve, you beast!” she screamed in satisfaction.Her hands slipped as they clenched and gripped the sink, Steve stepping up as her hips were pushed forward against the edge of the counter.Whereas moments before she'd cum from her assertive pushing back, now she was trapped with nowhere to go. More precisely, her hole couldn't get away from the prick fucking it.Jenny realized that she'd be forced to cum at least again, maybe more even. Her king had slowed as he'd trapped her, bringing his hands up to her shoulders and finding new grips with which to pound her.She looked up and saw her sweaty self in the mirror again, her jaw dropped open as she breathed heavy with sexual arousal, her whole body jarring with each impact of Steve's hips against her ass.God she was so sexy, and her cunt was doing such a good job of clenching around the invader, her body doing as it was designed to do, trying to bring the penis inside it to orgasm. Her hole wanted his semen. That was its purpose, to get fucked and filled by cum, so she could carry his child.And it was working, her own voice raising with every fourth or fifth quickening thrust as she felt her second orgasm building in her depths, Steve's cock hitting amazing pockets of nerves inside her.It suddenly was upon her as her left hand pressed against the mirror, her right coming around to grab Steve's hip as her cunt exploded in pleasure, her eyes wide. She rocked herself back as he tried to pull out for another thrust, trying to keep him inside her as she came, throwing her head in an out of control nodding motion and half panting, half exclaiming "ahs.”Steve for his part wasn't faring well on holding out. He regularly told Jenny that her orgasms would collect massive amounts of cash on the internet, and they usually brought him off. But Jenny had never been this needy before, and though she did have bouts of increased sexual activity, this was a whole new level.As she came again for the second time, the thrashing of her head, her hair flying and her hand on the mirror, almost got him.It was her hand landing on his right side, hip and ass cheek coupled with her rocking cunt clenching on his shaft that got him. He slammed forward to the hilt as his cum rose from his balls, rocketing down his weapon until it fired into her hot sheathe.Again and again it fired, "Oh yeah! Uh! Uh! Uh! Take it baby!" he said through blurred vision and clenched teeth.Out on the patio, the ladies were squirming; embarrassed, but getting aroused. Claire was frustrated when she had to go comfort a child who tripped and fell in the play area; “Tell me what I'm missing, Kelly.”

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Vincent, Buffy and other family matter.Book 3 in 18 parts, By FinalStand. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels. It is selfish to believe that your family will always love you. At some point you will be asked to earn it The main front was stabilizing. The 2nd Army was in tough shape though all three divisions were still in the fight. The 1st Army's 2nd and 9th Divisions had corked up the advances out of Cambodia. As soon as night fell, they would maneuver the majority of the 2nd Division to crush the Alliance forces north of Bangkok. The rioters would be crushed tomorrow morning. They would survive.This realization came too late to them. The rot of fear had infected the 1st Army, 1st Division and the police force commands. Of more importance, a small group of secretive individuals convinced two senior Thai officers that something had to be done before the city fell, or the Prime Minister reasserted control over the city.Those two conspirators had the same problem as the Loyalists, enemy troops and protestors in the street. Those officers had no way to contact the crucial enemy commanders, but they knew who did, the Indian Navy. Surreptitiously, they contacted the Indian Navy's Expeditionary Fleet. The fleet's Admiral quickly put them in touch with the Alliance Command Authority and within two hours, a deal was made.The Great Khan would stop the Alliance offensive if the King of Thailand made a public appeal, no strings attached. This new group of rebels and the Alliance worked out the path they needed to take to reach the King so that the Alliance forces were out of the way and no planes, or helicopter attacked their formations. They even had a TV station that would broadcast the King's speech ending the conflict. All they needed was nightfall.And that was the true story of how the counter-coup was pulled off, how the King of Thailand was able to talk to the Great Khan and how the Thai government was overthrown. In the final analysis, the Loyalist hadn't fallen before the might of the Alliance. They were done in by a tiny number of Black Lotus operative almost no one knew existed, with a small amount of assistance from JIKIT."No wonder the Seven Pillars has never been able to wipe out these guys," Addison yawned. "They are slippery as eels and thrice as lethal. I am glad they are on our side." Several sets of eyes looked at her skeptically. "I mean, I am glad we are currently working toward the same goals."Thus,"I suggest we all get some sleep," Addison declared as she stood up and stretched.Odette was comfortably asleep, so I curled her up and carried her to the elevator. I wanted to go home and forget that I had lost any semblance of a normal life. I didn't know what was worse; me doing the shit I was doing, or me understanding what I was doing. Juanita had gone down ahead of us to pull the car around to the front.Chaz, Pamela, Odette and I went down in the first wave of the exodus from the workplace. The door opened on the ground floor. I wasn't the first person to notice her. My reflexes had improved to the point I had a moment to recognize her before the people around me sprang into action.Pamela side-stepped to the right, pistol mystically appearing in her two-hand grip. Chaz, Chaz bore Odette and me to the ground. His level of dedication astonished me. He was shielding us with his body. From what, I hadn't been able to determine."Deadman switch," one of my aunts stated. "I want to talk with Cáel." The voice had a stressed tenor to it."Back outside," Pamela simmered."No.""Chaz, what is going on?" I asked him. He hadn't moved and wasn't letting me wiggle around to see."Explosive vest," he responded coolly. That's right. Chaz was shielding Odette and me with his body.That is what I found astonishing, his desire to give his life for me. His expectation that Pamela could kill the threat while he was currently occupied was understandable."We seem to be at an impasse," Pamela edged further away.She wasn't avoiding the blast radius. That was impossible in this lobby. No, if it came to firing, she was making it easier for Chaz to get a shot off since the shooter couldn't cover both angles of attack."Let me talk to him," my aunt insisted. This made no sense."Chaz, let me deal with this," I told my bodyguard."Are you sure?" he questioned."Not really. As Pamela said, she's not going to let any of us leave until she talks to me and if you kill her, she kills all of you." Chaz let me stand.Odette was just awakening to the threat. Chaz rose to stand by my side. (Sadly, Odette didn't rate him dying for her.) I prayed I didn't fuck this up."Cáel, is that really you?" the women with green eyes and red hair asked me. She sounded desperate, which would explain the suicide vest."Yeah, which one are, Mom?"{9:10 pm, Tuesday, September 2nd ~ 6 Days to go}"Yes, I'm Sibeal. Are you my son?""Do you mean   No! Grandfather Cáel hasn't supplanted my spirit with his own," I took a deep breath. "I'm not sure how I can convince you of this.""Do you miss your Father?" she queried."Yes," I murmured."Ahh Cáel, you are still my son. Thank all that is divine," she sighed."Care to deactivate the vest now?" Pamela suggested."Do you promise not to shoot me? You two, and the one sneaking up on me from behind." She meant Juanita, who had sensed the danger and exited the car."You are three kinds of crazy, so I'm not making any guarantees," Pamela answered."Pamela   Chaz, I really think she is my mother. And I assume she is here to kill Cáel O'Shea, not me," I interjected. I still wasn't leaving Chaz' side. "Please don't kill her.""No guarantees," Chaz affirmed."She's his mother," Odette chimed in. "If it was anyone else, they would be in a cloud of bodyguards, not alone.""Here is the deal, Mom. You deactivate the vest, then we will talk. Otherwise, I'm taking my security's advice and backing the fuck out of here.""Okay," she nodded. "It's a fake. I'm upset, but not enough to be suicidal. I wanted to see what you would do. Father would have sacrificed everyone else. You got tackled and you obeyed the man who was trying to save your life.""Chaz, what do you think?" Pamela asked him."We could hold her here until Virginia shows up. That would give Cáel a few minutes to reminisce before she gets dragged off to the looney bin." (That would, of course, lead to her death while in Federal custody   so that wasn't happening, period.)"I concur," Pamela agreed. She still had her gun out and aimed. She went to a one-handed grip so she could motion Juanita to come inside.I took the opportunity to walk around Chaz, though I only advanced half way."I think it is asking too much from my bodyguards to walk up to you with that vest lying at your feet," I pointed. "You know   just in case you are lying." She nodded, smiled and came forward. A hug was in the offing. I almost missed Odette coming up behind me."I'm on a timetable," Mom murmured into my shoulder. "You know why.""I am afraid I do," (my pheromones were already affecting her). "What brought this on? How long can you stay?""The kidnapping made it imperative. But this has been my first opportunity to get close enough to you to determine if my father had won, or not," she confessed."I'm not sure how long I can remain ~ maybe a day, or three. I have heard you have an upcoming ordeal you must go through for your Amazons." Odette again by way of Delilah. I decided to give Delilah the benefit of the doubt and just accept that she did what she did because she was worried about me."Oh. Mom, this is Odette Sievert, my roommate and all-around better friend than I deserve." Odette extended her hand. Mom reached past me and shook it."Nice to finally meet you in person," Mom smiled."Nice to realize you aren't as nutty as the rest of the bunch,and considering you came at Pamela and Chaz with a fake suicide vest   that is saying something," Odette grinned."My son is all I have left of Ferko (my dad)," she grew grim. "If my father stole him after killing my husband   I wouldn't know how to carry on.""Aaahh," Odette stammered through this tense family moment. "You are about to be a grandmother in a serious way," she tried to turn things around. "How does a dozen grandkids sound?"Operational security and secret information were concepts Odette was aware of. She simply refused to use either one."Really?" Mom looked from Odette to me. "How serious?""How about we get out of here before the FBI shows up," I began directing my mom out the doors."Cáel?" Chaz questioned."Hey now, I never agreed to hand my mom over to Virginia. The vest was fake. Let's not dwell on this," I urged Mom and Odette out the door."Ishara," Juanita repeatedly prayed, "why do you test me so?"Chaz and Pamela showed their faith in me and my decision-making ability by tagging along. For me, what does a son who hasn't spent any time with his mother since he was seven (because she was supposedly dead for the past fifteen years) ask first?Actually, we waited for Chaz, who had the presence of mind to ensure the vest was truly a dud and then called Virginia so she could clean up one of my messes   yet again."Thank you, Color Sergeant," Mom looked toward Chaz as the GL 550 pulled away from One Mi Ma1 Tower. Unfortunately, the look he sent her way wasn't friendly."Thanks for reminding me," I nodded to Mom. "Chaz, what in the Hell possessed you to jump on Odette and me? I appreciate it,""Me too," Odette chimed in."But please don't do that ever again. Of all the, let's just say I have too many deaths of people I like on my mind. I don't want you added to that list.""Tough.""Well, thanks for considering my request," I groaned."Chaz, three nights ago our boy learned that one of the women he knocked up is going to die and no one will intervene to save her life and they won't tell him where she is," Pamela let him know."Who do we talk to?" he asked me. By 'talk' I assumed he meant torture until they coughed up a viable location/suspect."The Goddess Ishara.""Fuck. I apologize, Cáel. That is hard news for a young man like you to take. As for my jumping on you   suck it up. It is my job to make sure you can do yours.""Juanita," Pamela called out. "Stop driving to Havenstone. Take us back to Cáel's place. He won't let the Amazons take his mother, which means I won't let them, which means Chaz won't let them. Besides, Odette could get killed in the cross-fire and too many people like her for that to be safe for any would-be assassin.""Really?" Odette perked up. Of course she wasn't worried about being killed. Odette was fascinated that people found her valuable   enough to kill anyone who killed her. She'd more fully grasp that curse later on. She was a genuinely nice person. What Pamela left unsaid was that if 'people' thought someone might kill Odette, they would 'proactively' protect her. Too many people she now hung out with were of that stripe of crazy."Pamela, would you miss me if I got killed?" Odette turned to the most dangerous person in the car. (I didn't think Mom was in her league, but then I had never seen her fight, so I was keeping an open mind.)"You bet your ass, Baby-cakes," she grinned at my super-kind sidekick."Me too," Chaz added gruffly. "Of greater importance, Addison would take umbrage. Next to Ms. Love, she's the nastiest bitch I've ever met." He meant that as a compliment."Not Lady Yum   I meant Worthington-Burke?" I inquired."She doesn't take things personally. She'd miss Odette, but not enough to move off-mission," Chaz explained."Let's not forget Buffy," Pamela snorted. "What she lacks in experience she makes up for by being totally psychotic and fanatically loyal to Wakko here. People who piss him off tend to end up as a place holder on the Obituary page.""Unless they never find the bodies," Juanita commented   from her personal experience disposing of people for me. Groan."Cáel, I am so happy I met you," Odette hugged my arm. "My life was going nowhere before you gave me your phone number. Now, I know my life is at risk and I don't care. Being with you has been more wonderful than I ever thought possible."Mom was studying me, both pleased and worried."What?" I asked."You have a lot of your grandfather in you. He did have a gift for inspiring the best out of people. You are like your father in that you care for those people   caring for both their lives and their happiness. Your father inspired that same kind of loyalty because he kept the needs of his people in the forefront of his mind.""Dad was like Grandpa?" I worried."Hell no." That was Pamela."Thank the Divine, no," Mom exhaled at the same time. "How do you know my father?""I killed him," Pamela grinned."You were the one? I'm, I don't know what to think," Mom murmured."Keep that in mind before you try to pull another stunt like you did tonight," Pamela's grin grew feral."Pamela is the best Grandmother I could ever hope for," I explained."Spiritually speaking," Odette tried to lighten the mood (she was a cracker-jack morale officer). "Otherwise it would make Cáel's having sex with her granddaughters rather, suspect.""Odette, you can say 'incestuous'," Mom gave a half-grin. "Do you know much about my family?""Your Pa created you and your sisters to be fuck-toys who also ran errands for him," Odette nodded. "They are all loonies.""Don't share that view with them," Mom cautioned. "When we last met, they had a highly under-developed sense of humor and a well-cultivated mean streak.""Gotcha," Odette giggled. "After dealing with the Slayers of Testicles numbers 1 & 2, I have learned what kind of wacky girls Cáel attracts without even trying.""I really should make sure Mr. Fiennes is okay," I reminded myself."You would do better catching up with that girl down the hall. The Korean takeout girl also asked about you", offered Odette. Yeah, the girl in 3-F baked me some cookies when Dad was murdered."How many grandchildren are we talking about?" Mom looked at me with some serious maternal affection."Who are the Slayers of Testicles?" Juanita wanted to know. My family jewels belonged to House Ishara   at least in her and her sisters' estimation."Oneida's bodyguards," Odette let slip out before she saw the warning look in my eyes."You are sleeping with the apprentice of House Arinniti?" gasped Juanita   I was hoping her questioning wasn't hurting her driving. "What about the 84 day rule?""I'd better not bring up Rhada," Odette nodded thoughtfully."I'm going to spank you," I growled at Odette."Was that aimed at me?" Juanita."Yippee, and we are going home now, too!" Odette squealed."Not you, Juanita   Odette. I want to teach her how to 'not say' whatever pops up in her head," I grumbled."You promised to punish me!" she beamed brightly. "Punish me! Punish me!""Uuuuuuu," I beat my cranium against the headrest in front of me."I thought she was the 'nice' girl," Mom chided me."She was," Pamela smirked. "Unfortunately, she's been totally corrupted by your son.""Yep," Odette agreed. "He's opened up a whole new horizon of things sexual for me.""Son, how many women are you seeing? I thought you were engaged." Mom."Uuuuuuu," I repeated."I'll take care of this," Chaz intervened calmly. "He is as loyal as he can be   within the bounds of his limited moral arsenal   to Hana Sulkanen. So he is sexually and romantically involved with Brooke Lee and Libra Chalmers, civilians he met through contacts at Havenstone. There is Anais Saint-Armour, RCMP, who departed this weekend,""She'll be back," Pamela assured Mom. "They always come back at least once.""Who has only come back just once?" Chaz laconically questioned Pamela."Good point," Pamela acceded. "They keep coming back until he changes the locks, his phone number and address." That made no sense,"I am glad you two are my friends," I groused. "I'd hate to think what you would say about me if you hated me.""You're welcome," Pamela grinned."Ms. Marla Chalmers," Chaz continued without missing a beat, "Libra's younger sibling, who your son indubitably impressed while in college; three teachers at an exclusive school, he met them while body-guarding a group of children; an assistant manager of a hotel he stayed at; six attractive, college-educated European young women,""Don't forget the Macedonian!" Pamela interjected."I have removed her from the list because she has no reliable way to hunt down our boy," he explained."Good point," Pamela nodded."They like busting your chops, don't they?" Mom smiled."As opposed to physically busting my chops   this I can live with.""You have matured nicely. Your father would be very pleased   quietly, of course.""Thank you Mom." She knew the man better than I ever would."We won't count the 189 Amazons who have staked a claim to him for the next nine days," Chaz added."What! 189? When did that happen?""The thirty huntresses and the 159 members of House Ishara," Pamela clued me in."159? When did that happen?" I gasped again. I was repeating myself   not good. I knew I had told Buffy to 'keep up the good work', but still, House Ishara wasn't even two months old yet."They are the best of the roughly 20,000 Runners in the Host and thus, all are serious bad-ass bitches," Pamela assured me. "I think Helena would like you to explore a few more heroic Runners who have since passed.""Passed?" Mom."Cáel sees dead people," Odette beamed."So does his Aunt Baibre," Mom said."Met her, came off a bit, off," I confirmed."That's Baibre. What other ones have you met, besides Deidre and Brianna?"She was asking if I had met others outside of Delilah's watchful eye."Hmm, Imogen, Kelly and Matilda.""Okay. You haven't met the bad ones yet," Mom nodded. I was stunned yet again. Not by what Mom said, but by,"The 'bad ones'?" Pamela inquired. "They come in shades worse than Kelly and Matilda?""I'm with you on that. Those two were unsettling," Chaz agreed. Holy Shit! Pamela and Chaz were agreeing that two of my aunts had them worried on a tactical level. So 'not good' for me, since I couldn't take either of my friends. Bad-bad."Fiona is the worst. She is the second youngest of my generation and by far the most lethal. She was Father's pet.""Oh joy," I sighed."Is she bulletproof?" Chaz inquired."Not quite, but she is definitely hard to kill. She has a greater share of Alal while remaining sane.""Oh, she's the sane one?" Juanita joined in."On that side of his family, sane is a relative term." Thanks, Odette."Relative to how far your cock is into them?" Pamela snorted."Hold on now," I interrupted the jocularity. "What do you mean   'your generation'   'the second youngest'   what happened to the youngest   and when you say 'worst', define 'worst'."Pamela's phone rang."Father created three generations of daughters and sons. Carrig was the 'success' on the male side of the equation."Uncle Lumpy was the 'success'? What had the other uncles been like   idiot cyclops cannibals?"He destroyed all the rest.""Please clarify," Chaz studied my mother. "Your father murdered his own children?""Yes. All but one of the 36 sons. He kept Carrig around as a reminder to not create any more sons. The first generation of daughters were all 'failures'.""You mean dead?" Odette gulped."Yes   dead now, though he viewed all of us as property, not human beings.""Consider Grandad's low opinion of humanity, that's extra tragic," I put an arm around Odette. Pamela was muffling her conversation."Of the second generation of daughters, only Aunt Faoiltiama was kept around. I always had the impression her soul wasn't entirely human. She is rather primitive and predatory. A less horrifically unbalanced Carrig   physically that is. Carrig was somewhat more erudite.""Wow, I don't know what to think of that," I mumbled."Of my generation, eleven of us were allowed to live. Kelly and Maitilda are the most physically dangerous. That was their purpose   killing things.""Trained in combat styles by Cáel's grandfather?" Chaz looked, depressed."Yes. The four of us were. Fiona was the only one I couldn't best.""I would like to spar with you when it is convenient," Chaz requested."Okay. You deserve to know how bad it can be," she nodded. "Of the rest, Una was the youngest, the most human and humane. She was Father's final failure. I was never sure why he kept her alive.""For Cáel to rescue, of course," Odette insisted. Crap. She was right. By the horrified look on my Mother's face, she knew Odette was correct as well.Alal had let Una live as a contingency card, in case I was a soft-hearted sap. In hindsight, it was obvious. The innocent damsel trapped in a madhouse, at the mercy of her fiendish kinfolk, she was a perfect weapon to make me do stupider shit than normal."Damn," Mom muttered. "Anyway, Briana is the most willful and the family's representative to the Illuminati. Deidre is the most sedate, so she handles the normal business interests that we are allowed to know about. Darcie had Alal's hunger for lost and forbidden lore. In her case, it is all-consuming. She has memorized much of Father's collection.""She is rather good at it too   or was when I last saw her. Imogen is our tactician and oversees the O'Shea's bodyguard contingent. She has Father's ability to choose the best men and women, to train them to a razor's edge and to inspire fanatic loyalty.""Sadhbba: she is Father's spy master; with the exceptionally eerie talents of subterfuge, deceit and finding the weakness in others. She and I did not get along. Fiona could do it all, except for my talent.""Which is?" Chaz took over, since Pamela was waving me over for a close, quiet chat concerning her phone call."Fiona was an updated version of me. She was slightly better at everything I could do, except for one thing. I had Father's sixth sense about things. Fiona did not, and that was the reason she hated me so much. Father stoked our internal conflicts to keep us all on edge.""Good to know," Chaz understated his concern. "Do you have any intelligence on how, when and with what your father will come after our boy?" I wasn't insulted by the 'our boy' moniker. He wasn't calling me a child. He was telling Mom that I was 'one of the boys'   on his team. I felt all warm and tingly. My dearth of long-term male friends had meant I had never really been in a fraternity   the close brotherhood of men   before."Problem for you to deal with," Pamela handed me the phone. "It is Tabitha Loire." Tabitha? Vincent's   FBI Special Agent Vincent Lorie's   drop-dead gorgeous daughter. He had taken more than one bullet in Romania. I hadn't heard from him since that morning at the hospital, before being whisked away to the US via Germany. I remained a lousy friend."Hello? Who is this?" the weary, angry voice on the other end of the connection spoke."Cáel Nyilas. Tabitha Loire, what can I do for you?""What can you tell me about my Father?""Oh God! He is not dead, is he?" I grunted. Pause."No. No, Da is okay. He was released from the hospital a week ago. I would like to talk to you about what happened to him overseas.""He won't tell you?""No. Neither will his boss, or any of his acquaintances. Mr. Nyilas, he is down in the dumps and I want to know what I can do to help out. If you are his friend, you should help."I couldn't blame her for being both bitter and exasperated. She had run full tilt into the Great Wall of National Security and been stopped cold."How about I come down and talk to you?" I offered. "What I can tell you shouldn't go out over a phone and I have been remiss in not catching up with your father sooner.""Umm, when?""I'll take the next train down tonight," I decided. "We'll arrange some vehicles at the station. What is your address?" She hesitated. After all, she had Pamela's number, not mine and I was tied into her father being shot   badly. She gave me the address, her desire to know what happened overcoming her caution when dealing with strangers. "I'll give you a call when we arrive in Alexandria.""Train?" Juanita griped. Chaz pulled out his phone and called Agent-86 for both the next train from Penn Station to Alexandria and an update to Virginia and the Homeland Security people for clearance to bring along our ironmongery. Pamela looked at me with pride. So did Mom. Whatever Juanita's opinion of me was, it was concealed by her call to someone else   probably updating Buffy on my itinerary."Vincent was the Federal Agent who was wounded at Miercurea Ciuc?" asked Mom."I need to have a talk with Delilah," Pamela glowered."I want to be in the room when you do," Chaz agreed."Juanita   Penn Station and call someone at Executive Services to pick up our car. Long term parking there is a bitch," I related.Was it? I had no idea, but Alal apparently did. I had been to Penn Station three times; and I never had a vehicle that needed a parking space. All three times, Havenstone sent a car to pick me up. That was for my preliminary and final interviews, plus handling all the paperwork after I got the job.I'd left Bolingbrook in a U-Haul truck (without much in it) a week before starting work. I had an iron-clad belief I could find a place to live within that time span. That was all the time and money I had allotted to that endeavor. My budget had been tight, or so I believed.Unlike the other four chuckleheads who joined the New Directive, I hadn't received a signing bonus. Maybe I should have asked for one. Too late for that now."You taking your mother to meet Vincent?" Odette poked me. I looked from Pamela to Odette then back again.Sneaky-ass bitches. They were introducing my widowed Mother to a really nice, mature guy who was brave, a good father, a widower and all-around stand-up guy. He had a ready-made family, an oldest daughter my age. Beyond some physical similarities, Vincent was not much like Dad. Dad was a quiet, private man.By the nature of his job as a Field Agent, Vincent had to possess superior communication skills. Physically, they were nearly the same height, but Dad was broader in the shoulders. On the other hand, Vincent had both a warrior's spirit and the skills to back it up.But why Mom? Her life was more a disaster than mine, and mine was colossally fucked up."Don't get any ideas," Pamela put out there. Was she talking to me? "Chaz and I don't like you. Your father is a rat-bastard with a mind like a snake. We have no idea if you are yet another one his plots to get at Cáel."They were still taking her with us as we went to see Vincent in Virginia. Since this was going to be a quick trip   I had to be back at Havenstone at 6 a.m.   no clothing was necessary. Chaz received a call from Agent-86 with a follow-up call as we pulled up to the station. I didn't know the nature of the second call until we went to pick up our tickets for the 10:05 Northeast Regional.Waiting there was my old buddy and now sister, Wilma Draper/Ishara. I was at a loss why. It wasn't as if I needed more firepower than Juanita, Chaz and Pamela in the confined environment of a train."Wilma?""Hello Ish   Cáel," she smiled. She was emotionally pumped."What are you doing here?""Oh... Buffy told me that I was to be here on assignment to fulfill an Isharan obligation." This would be Wilma's first mission for House Ishara, no matter how brief and danger-free it might be. She was ecstatic.Huh? I couldn't recall any obligation I owed Buffy, or Vincent. Unlike every other Amazon House, things regularly happened without the Head of House's knowledge. Face facts: I was the least prepared leader the Host had ever had. I compensated by having hyper-competent underlings   the very best of the best Runners-turned-Full-blooded Amazons."Ah," Pamela nodded, sensing my loss of understanding, "A promise to provide Vincent a bodyguard was made in your presence. Being the highest ranking member of the Host present, and failing to pass on that knowledge, it falls to your House to answer that pledge.""Wilma, you are here to be Vincent Loire's bodyguard?""Only temporarily. The current state of affairs at HQ won't allow me to take more than three days leave. Your 'First' is seeking another appropriate Isharan for the task."I had totally dropped the ball.The initiative to bring JIKIT and the Amazons together was my creation. Katrina had approved it, yet it was my status as Chief Diplomat of the Host (as I had redefined that role,) that was responsible for that group, and thus Vincent. There was also another undercurrent to providing Vincent an Amazon bodyguard. I would be sending Vincent the message that he was still a valuable member of the team. His infirmity was simply a temporary difficulty.I gave Javiera a call. I suddenly needed to know Vincent's status with the FBI. A little past Philadelphia, she called back. Vincent was on long-term leave and, barring a positive physical assessment, he would never be going back into the field. They were making him a desk jockey for the rest of his career. That would be a heavy enough blow to the man to put him in the dumps.I made my view clear. As Unpaid Honcho Assigned to Unit L &  U HAUL, I wanted Vincent on my team   JIKIT's field team. I had plenty of lethal shooters. I needed a trained investigator and a veteran lawman to keep us aware of the niceties the world's legal systems wished to live by. I finished that off with a very regal "Make it so!" Javiera, my boss, hung up on me; though I thought I caught a laugh before the connection was cut."Pamela," Chaz turned to Pamela, "I am proud to call him 'brother'.""I think he is coming along nicely, Grandson Charles," Pamela preened. Wha- huh? My family had grown yet again. Grown yet again with people who were better than me."Does that make Aya your niece?" a sleepy Odette smiled."I guess it does," he nodded."Aya will love you," Pamela smiled."I hope Caitlyn loves him too," I smirked."A man could do worse than marrying an Amazon," Chaz blithely retorted. Less I forget, the Tomorrow Clan had its own long warrior tradition."Asking it to be three thousand years long is a bit too much," Pamela agreed with what I had not spoken aloud."On the plus side," I began."He's also getting several frisky sisters-in-law," Pamela finished. Hi-Five."Super Twin Powers Activate!" we proclaimed loudly.Fuck Ishara for taking Tad fi from me. I could be just like my Father. I could bleed off my pain with humor and look at my daughter with untainted love."When I grow up, I want to be just like you," Odette yawned. Which one of us she wanted to emulate wasn't clear.{Wounded, but not forgotten}{2:00 am, Wednesday, September 3rd ~ 5 Days to go}The tickets were one-way. Katrina was having a private jet come down at 4 a.m. to fetch me. We arrived in DC at 1:30. Two bleary-eyed State Department flunkies met us with an S U V and a sedan. We took the S U V ~ we had seven people ~ while they drove the sedan back so they could try to make something of the night that duty had destroyed.They looked curious about what this was all about and were a bit disappointed that no explanation was forthcoming from our crowd. We were polite, and I thanked them for their service. Being a decent human being doesn't cost you much and can pay serious dividends.The drive to Casa de Loire took thirty minutes. Juanita informed me the small airport I would be flying out of was a twenty minute drive, so I had roughly an hour and half with Vincent and his family. When we arrived, Juanita sent Wilma to make a 'walk-around' Vincent's home so she could get the lay of the land as well as keep an eye out for voyeurs.Pamela saved another series of frowns from Juanita by being the first person to the door. Tabitha had called her after all. Tabitha, Vincent's oldest and a Georgetown University senior, clearly didn't know what to make of us, and we weren't making it any easier for her by showing up on her stoop three hours after she had called Pamela.It wasn't going to get better. For starters, Juanita (and the not visible Wilma) had a MP-7A1. Ya know  military-grade weaponry. The door opened halfway. It was Gretchen Loire, the middle daughter."Hello. May I help you?" That wasn't her being uninformed about our imminent arrival. This was the child of an FBI agent allowing a stranger at her door to identify themselves instead of giving them a name to use."I'm Pamela Pile," my mentor answered. "This is Cáel Nyilas, my grandson. The gentleman to his left is my other grandson, Color Sergeant Chaz Tomorrow of the British military. To the left is Juanita Garza, my younger grandson's bodyguard   the one without a gun in his hand. The young lady in back is Odette Sievert, another one of your father's co-workers. The woman beside her is Sibeal Nyilas, Cáel's mother. Don't trust her   long story. A seventh member of our group is checking out your backyard. Her name is Wilma Draper.""You are heavily armed. Is my Da in trouble?""I want to talk to your father, if that is okay with you. I'll let Cáel answer your questions. He's our titular boss."'Thanks Pamela', I groaned inwardly.She was cute, exhausted and emotionally-vulnerable. Eager for answers and for someone to make sense of a world where her anchor   her father   had been nearly killed (not that his wounds had really been life-threatening). I hadn't had sex in over a day and that had only been a tension-breaker quickie with Odette.As we entered, it was obvious that Gretchen and her younger sister, Mariyah, had camped out in the front living room, catching some 'z's' on a recliner and a sofa with light blankets for covers. Mariyah was on the sofa, sitting up on her elbows and struggling to wake up.As Chaz shut the front door, Tabitha came down the stairs."Mr. Nyilas," she greeted me. Well, I was an infamous celebrity. I even had two Facebook pages (Nyilas Nailed Me! and Az  j Magyarorsz g kir lya (The New King of Hungary)) as well as four Instagram accounts devoted to me."Ms. Loire," I met her halfway and shook her hand."Call me Tabitha.""Call me Cabbage-Head," I grinned. That caught her off guard."Oh, kay, not what I expected." (I get that a lot) "We need to talk," she failed to stifle a grin."If you sleep with any of these girls, I will shoot you," Pamela warned me in Hittite."Excuse me?" Tabitha looked her way."Don't worry about it, Tabitha," Pamela gave her a congenial look. "I simply warned the boy that if he acted inappropriately, I would scar him.""Aren't you engaged?" she turned on me."Yes. Yes I am. Hana is a wonderful woman; beautiful, smart, with a big heart and a serious nature. Sadly for her, I'm a lousy human being, untrustworthy cad and perpetually prone to making bad decisions where women are concerned. Very bad decisions.""Miss, since my associate appears to be eminently capable of mangling the English language, let me help you clarify the situation: Cáel can't say 'no' where a woman is concerned. He can't even say, 'no, please don't hurt me', or 'no, not now. I'm talking to my date'.""Hi. I'm Odette. There are four sane people in this room and I'm one of them.""Says the woman who snuck aboard a transatlantic fight and hid in a place in the galley which you couldn't get out of," Pamela snorted."I got to go to Europe for free," she defiantly perked up. "Oh, and ladies," to the Lorie girls, "your father is a wonderful and brave male. (OK, too much time around the Amazons for her.) "He saved my life in Budapest.""He was in Budapest?" Gretchen."When?" Tabitha."Why?" Mariyah."We need to talk to Vincent  

Are we possibly shifting towards a different resolution of the truckload market's ups and downs? Today, we will compare the cost of Spot Market Intermodal and Spot Market OTR rates throughout North America. The contrast and the similarity will shock you.

Let's go deeper into tariffs, rhetoric, and imports. We'll explore the push-pull scenario and how it could further tumult the logistics and supply chain world. Is there a bright side on the horizon, or will we have to deal with these challenges for years to come? This raises the question: where is all this going? How will it impact us in the long term, and what does the data tell us that can help us stay ahead of these rapidly shifting trends and industry changes?

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Alan's past becomes his present.By Cheat105. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels.It was the beginning of the volleyball postseason, the school's team had once again made it to the playoffs, like they apparently did almost every season. Our school, having the best facilities, would be hosting the playoffs, which meant a lot of girls from other schools would be showing up for the playoffs. But there was one face among them that I never thought I'd see again.I was leaving my last class of the day, making the long walk across campus to my dorm, like I'd done so many times in the past. Only this time a bus full of girls from another school was in the parking lot, and that's when I saw her, Maria, the girl from my old high school who'd accused me of coercing her into having sex. She was unloading off the bus in a parade of other girls, I had to double take to make sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. No, it was definitely her, as I stared a moment in complete shock and terror. I came back to reality and panic set in, and the next thing I knew, I was practically sprinting from the scene, headed toward my dorm at top speed. Upon reaching the dorm, I slowed my pace to hasty walk and quickly made my way through the halls."Hey Alan!" I heard Molly's voice in the hall.I was too panicked to acknowledge her, I just continued walking. I got to my door and fumbled with my key for moment, missing the keyhole on my first couple tries I was trembling so much. When I finally got the door unlocked, I entered and slammed the door behind me, I dropped my stuff on the floor and collapsed face down on my bed. Immediately all those painful memories came flooding back in a tidal wave. I began questioning everything. Why was she here? Why her of all people? Why now? I was finally beginning to enjoy life again, and now Maria has showed up here of all places? Was this the other shoe dropping? Punishment for my arrogance in thinking I could escape the past?Suddenly before I could even react my door began to open. Damn, I forgot to lock it, I thought. The door opened and in walked Molly."Alan, is something wrong?" she asked, sounding concerned.I must've looked so pitiful laying there in my bed, wallowing in my own grief. I didn't know how to answer her, I'd never told her about my past and she'd certainly never seen me like this. Yet, there she was, showing genuine concern. I couldn't very well lie to her."Yes," I replied simply and quietly.She shut the door then walked over and sat on the edge of the bed."But, what are you doing here Molly?" I asked, quickly realizing that someone could've seen her come in."Don't worry about that, everyone else went to dinner, so no one saw me. Now tell me what's wrong?" she asked, gently placing her hand on my back.Once again, I didn't know how to respond. And whatever I said, it would most likely lead to me revealing my past, my reason for coming to this school in the first place. I didn't know if that was something I was ready to do. Then the fear set in. How would she react? To find out I was accused of something as awful as rape? Surely she'd want nothing to do with me, what girl would?"Come on, talk to me, Alan." she said, rubbing her hand in circles on my back.I still just remained silent, the fear and panic keeping me paralyzed."Look, you're one of my best friends and I care about you. You know you can tell me anything." she said in a sentimental tone.She was right, we did pretty much tell each other everything. We practically knew everything about one another. But the one thing I'd never told her about was my past. Though, I have to be honest, the sound of her tender voice and the gentle touch of her hand on my back, were beginning to make me feel a little more at peace. I had to tell her, I needed to tell someone. This thing had been eating me up for so long."Okay, You know the bus that just got here?" I started, still face down in my pillow speaking in a low melancholic voice."Yeah, the bus from that other school? That's who we're playing in the first playoff game this weekend. Their team will be staying in the guest dorm until our match. What about it?" she replied.That at least answered my question of why Maria was here, even though that should've been obvious."Well, I saw someone I know getting off that bus." I said."Oh, an old friend?" Molly asked."Not exactly, " I responded."Oh, what do you mean?" she asked curiously."Well, it's a long story and it's pretty much the reason I came to this school." I said."To be honest, I have always been curious as to how you ended up here. I mean it's not every day a guy gets enrolled in a school for girls." she replied.I was still feeling nervous, but I had resolved to tell her, so there's no backing out now."That girl I saw getting off the bus, her name is Maria. Well, we have a bit of a storied past with one another. You see, Maria went to my old high school, and we dated for a bit. Needless to say, it did not end well." I began explaining."Continue." Molly said simply, genuinely interested in my story."Well, I don't even remember why or how exactly but for whatever reason we ended up having sex in the girl's bathroom during school one day. And some other student caught us, then reported it to a teacher, " I said."That doesn't seem so bad, I take it things got worse from there?" Molly said."Oh yeah, things got much worse, " I then proceeded to tell Molly the whole story about what happened at my old school and how I ended up here. I even told her about the damage it had done to my home life, how even my own family began shunning me.When I finished explaining it all, Molly just sat there silent for a moment, I was still face down in my pillow so I couldn't tell you how she looked. But I fully expected her to cut her ties to me right there on the spot. After all, what girl would want to associate themselves with an accused rapist, even as bullshit an accusation as it was."Wow, what a bitch!" Molly exclaimed.I did not expect that kind of response, I immediately sat up and faced her, with a look of disbelief."What kind of bitch just turns on you like that?" she questioned."Well, I always suspected it was mostly her parents who pressured her into accusing me." I said."Still, that's fucked up. And nobody would hear your side? Not even your family?" she asked.I was in disbelief, and so relieved. She was saying pretty much all the same things I've said on the matter."Yeah, pretty much. And the shame is I actually used to be very close with my family, but ever since that shit went down, they all cut their ties with me. My own mother looks at me with disdain every time I see her." I said."Wow, I'm so sorry Alan. But look, I want you to know that I believe you." she replied."Really?" I asked, still dumbfounded."Of course, I trust you. And I know you'd never do anything as dispicable as what those assholes accused you of." she responded.Molly, seeing that I was still feeling a bit uneasy, then wrapped her arms around me in a warm embrace. It was there in her arms that I finally felt a sense of calm and peace. This was the first time that anyone's ever bothered hearing me out and actually believed me. I found myself relaxing in her arms until I was laying down, Molly had followed, never letting go. We both just laid there in my bed, hugging one another."Thank you, Molly." I uttered.I had begun to feel tired. It was only the evening, supper time, yet I felt tired. I guess that slight nervous breakdown after seeing Maria again had really left me drained, but it was more than that. I was usually one to stay up well past midnight, and wake up early, never getting more than a few hours of sleep. My own thoughts and fears had always kept me awake. But laying there in Molly's gentle embrace, I felt as though the weight of the whole world had been lifted from shoulders. Soon enough everything seemed to fade as my weighty eyelids fell, I drifted off to sleep still hugging Molly. This was true nirvana.I awoke the next day with the bright morning sun beaming through the lone window of my room. I wiped the sleep from eyes and immediately found that Molly was no longer in my bed. Not that I expected her to be there, after all, that would've been a little too risky. But a part of me had kind of wanted to wake up with her beside me. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and checked the time, it was a little after 9 am. I was surprised, for once I had actually managed to get a full night of sleep, I felt well rested, better than I had been in a long time.I got out of bed and realized that I was still wearing my school uniform, but I also still needed a shower. Luckily, I was sure everyone else was down in the cafeteria having breakfast, so I was free to shower. So I grabbed a change of clothes and my shower supplies: towel, shampoo, body wash, etc. and made my way down the hall to the showers. As I had suspected, they were empty, so I found a stall, turned on the water and quickly went about taking off my clothes.It didn't take me long to finish showering. I turned off the water and stepped out of the stall, I quickly dried myself off and slipped on a pair of clean boxers. I then noticed my reflection in the mirror, my mother was right after all, I could use a shave and a haircut. My hair had gotten long enough now that it was nearly to my shoulders and my facial hair, while only being 18 I didn't get too much growth, there was still enough that I looked pretty scruffy. The only problem was I didn't even own a razor or shaving cream, so I'd need to go buy some, which I could also get a haircut while I was out.I then pulled on a pair of running shorts and gathered up my things, and began making my way out of the bathroom. But as I was walking out, someone else was walking in. It was a girl that lived in the dorm. Neither of us noticed each other and I walked right into her, she let out a sudden yelp of shock as she began to fall to the floor. But I, having pretty decent reflexes, dropped my things and managed to catch the girl by her arms before she fell. She reached out a hand and put it on my shirtless chest as she braced herself."Woah, you okay?" I asked, once she was stable.She didn't respond, she only stared straight ahead, her hand still planted on my firm chest."You okay?" I asked again."Wha; huh; yeah. Yeah, I'm okay." She stuttered, taking her hand off my chest, looking and sounding as though she'd just woken up from a trance."Yeah, sorry about bumping into you, I wasn't looking where I was going." I said, bending down to pick up my things."It's alright, um; Alan, right?" she asked."Yep" I replied."I'm Samantha, but everyone just calls me Sam." she said, reaching out her hand."Well, nice to meet ya, Samantha. I'm gonna get out of your way now, see ya around." I said, shaking her hand before exiting the bathroom.Hmm, Nice girl, I thought as I walked down the hall to my room. I'd seen her around the dorm before, in fact I recognized her as one of the many girls that would usually give me the stink eye when I walked past, so I'd pegged her as one of those stuck-up types. But in that brief encounter, she actually seemed like a fairly nice girl, guess I should reserve my premature judgements in the future.I made it back to my room, where I put my dirty clothes in my laundry hamper and then took a seat at my computer desk. I booted up my computer and then checked my facebook notifications. That's when my good mood came to screeching halt, one of those notifications was a message from none other than Maria herself. Yeah, though I'd gotten a new phone number, I never did block her on facebook, I'm an idiot.We need to talk.I almost cringed as I read her simple message. I leaned back in my chair and just stared at the computer screen. Just like that, my good mood had vanished. After talking with Molly the night before, I'd gotten a good night's rest and was feeling great for once. Such a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, I felt like I could fly. But upon seeing that message, I came crashing and burning right back down to earth, back to reality. This girl, once again serving as a reminder that I could never escape my past. Needless to say, I did not reply to her message. Instead I sat there my mind going over everything again, it was like a highlight reel of my life's worst hits. Then, I began to feel angry, and I just sat there stewing in it, my eyes still fixed on that damn message."Fuck!" I yelled, in a fit of rage I drove my fist into the screen as hard as I could, the monitor fell from the desk, showing a black spot where my fist had hit with dozens of little black cracks surrounding it.What was left of the picture flashed a few times before the whole screen just went blank."God damn it!" I yelled as I immediately realized the damage I'd done.I stood up from desk still seething in anger. I needed to get out of there, before anything else ended up broken. I quickly changed into a pair of jeans and put on a t-shirt, then socks and shoes, all the while screaming obscenities. I stormed out of my room, slamming the door behind me. I walked down the hall, my face red with anger, muttering further vulgarities to myself. Just about every girl in the building stared in shock as I walked past.When I got outside, I walked around for a while, breathing in the fresh air. Letting myself cool off a bit, I finally had a moment of clarity. I'd never blown up like that before, I surprised myself. Even after the incident at the old school, my anger was quickly sated and I had resigned myself to just being mellow and uncaring. But now, I couldn't be mellow, I had finally lost my shit. And then as if the shit-storm couldn't get any more severe, my phone began to ring, I was getting a call. What wonderful timing, I thought sarcastically to myself. I quickly dug the phone out of my pocket and answered it without even checking to see who it was."What?" I answered the phone angrily."It's your mother, what kind of way is that to answer your phone?" the voice asked on the other side of the call."I'm pissed off, what do you want? Call to criticize me some more?" I replied tersely, lamenting on how it seemed like the only time my mother ever spoke to me was to criticize me for something."What's wrong, honey? Better yet just come talk to me in my office, okay sweetie?" my mother responded in her motherly tone, that I hadn't heard in what felt like ages.Honey? Sweetie? What the hell was going on? I wondered. She hadn't called me those words in a long time, and that tone of voice. What the hell? I asked myself."Okay" I finally replied, hanging up the phone.I was thoroughly confused, so much so that my anger had subsided for the moment. Why did she sound so nice all the sudden? I was so confused but at the same time, curious, there was no way I wasn't going to go see her, just to figure out what was going on. I began making my way across the campus to the main building where mom's office was located.When I got to her office, she was sitting at her desk and immediately stopped everything she was doing as I walked in. She looked directly at me, but it wasn't the face of contempt I usually got from her, she looked, caring? Like she was actually glad to see me. I took a seat in one of the chairs in front of her desk, still dumbfounded.My mother stood up from her desk, then walked around to where I was sitting and suddenly fell to her knees in front of me, looking up at me with tears forming in her eyes. I was taken aback, not sure what to say or do."I'm so sorry, baby. I know you must hate me" she said, the tears now running down her cheeks.I was stunned. Frozen and speechless. What the fuck is going on? I asked in my inner monologue."That girl, Maria. She came and told me everything, Oh god, sweetie. I'm so sorry, I should've listened to you, instead I've been treating you like crap all this time" she said, now fully crying.I still couldn't speak. Maria actually told her the truth? Holy shit, I thought."Please, forgive me honey" she said through her sobs.I just sat there staring in disbelief at the sight before me, my mother was on her knees sobbing and begging for my forgiveness. Honestly, it was the one thing I'd wanted for a long time. However, seeing my mother in tears wasn't something I'd ever wanted, I wanted an apology to be sure, but I never wanted to see her cry, she was still my mom after all. In seconds, my familial instincts kicked in, I'd forgotten about all the rage inside me and all I could think about was comforting my weeping mother. I leaned forward in my chair and wrapped my mother in my arms, feeling some tears begin to form in my own eyes. Mom gratefully received my embrace and wrapped her arms around me in reciprocity, burying her head in my shoulder, still crying."It's alright, mom." I finally said."No, it's not. You're my son, my baby boy, and I vilified you," She said, breaking our embrace."I forgive you." I cut her off."How could you forgive me? How do you not hate me?" she asked."Because, you're my mother and I love you, I never stopped. I could never hate you." I answered.It was true, of course. I could never hate my mother, no matter the disrepair our relationship was in."I love you too, sweetie." mom said, wrapping me in another embrace.We stayed there hugging like that, not saying a word, for several minutes. Until she'd finally stopped crying and I helped her up off the floor. She took a seat back behind her desk and grabbed a tissue to wipe the remaining tears and the streaks from where her make-up had run."So, honey, you were upset about something when I called you a while ago?" mom said."Uh, oh yeah, I accidently knocked my computer monitor off my desk and the screen cracked." I told her a little white lie, deciding to leave out all the stuff about Maria as I didn't want her worrying."Oh, well how'd that happen?" she asked."I was moving some stuff around and bumped into it by accident." I said.Yeah, I know, not the greatest lie in the world, but luckily she didn't press too much."Oh, you need to be more careful, honey." she said, with me nodding in response.As nice as it would've been to stay and chat with my mother longer, I did have stuff I needed to do. Such as going into town and buying a new computer monitor, because I would need my computer back in working order before classes resume on Monday. Besides, I'm sure she had work to do anyways, considering she was in the office on a Saturday."Well, I need to get going. You think I can borrow the car? I gotta go buy a new monitor." I said."Sure, oh, do you need any money?" she asked, as she began digging through her purse."Nah, I still got some left over from my summer job." I said."Alright, here ya go. Hurry back, okay?" she said, reaching out her hand, holding the car keys."Thanks mom. Be back in a bit." I replied, taking the keys and leaving her office.I made my way out of her office and out to the parking lot where I found mom's car. I got in the car and pulled out of the parking space. As I left the school campus and began the drive into town, I thought about mom's apology. Sure, it was nice to finally hear her apologize and while I did let her know I forgive her, there was still a ways to go before our relationship would be fully repaired. But I felt like we were finally in a place now that we could actually start working on repairing our damaged relationship, of course it wasn't only our relationship that was in disrepair. There was also the rest of my family: my older sister, my aunt and my two cousins.Once I got into town, the first thing I did was go to the electronics store. There, I bought a new monitor, the same model I had before. While I was out, I also decided to go ahead and get a haircut, after leaving the barber I went stopped by a convenience store where I bought some razors and shaving cream. Then after grabbing a bite to eat, I made the drive back to the school. All in all, the little trip had taken a little over an hour and cost me a decent chunk of the money I'd saved from working during the summer.Back at the school, I took mom her keys, then once again left her office, but not before she complimented my new haircut. It wasn't a major haircut, only enough so the front wasn't in my eyes and so the sides weren't covering my ears, and the back cut so it wasn't down on my shoulders. Anyways, after leaving her office I began the walk across the campus carrying the bag with the shaving stuff in it and the box with my new monitor in it hoisted up on my shoulder.It was a rather lengthy walk, but the monitor wasn't very heavy so it didn't bother me. As I hauled the monitor through the halls of the dorm, all eyes were on me. I didn't pay them any mind, I just kept walking. Though, there were sure to be questions after the scene I'd made earlier in the day. When I got to my room, I set the monitor down on my bed and began unboxing it. I then unhooked the cables from the back of my old monitor and set it aside as I hooked up the new one. I put the old monitor in the empty box left over from the new one and set it on the floor at the foot of my bed where it was out of the way. With that taken care of, I decided to go ahead and shave. I went to the bathroom, which was luckily empty, with a razor and shaving cream, along with a towel. It didn't take me very long to shave and when I finished I looked at myself in the mirror for a bit. Not bad, I thought. With the new haircut and clean shaven face, all in all I thought I looked pretty good.I then returned to my room where I sat at my computer and browsed the web. Yes, it is a pretty boring life I lead, pretty much the only excitement I get is from the girls. I wondered what they'd think of my new look. Speaking of which, I hadn't heard from any of them all day."Fuck!" I said to myself.I'd just suddenly remembered that tonight was the girls' big playoff game, against Maria's team. I was so wrapped up in my own bullshit that I'd completely forgotten about it. Damn, how self-absorbed can I be? I thought. I was always sure to attend their games, but not because I like the sport or anything. I did it because Molly liked to have me there rooting for her. All I could do was hope she wasn't too upset.I continued thinking about my blunder for the rest of the night. I'd even skipped dinner, although I wasn't very hungry after my big lunch anyways, so it didn't bother me. It was around midnight when I heard a knock on my door, I could I guess who it was. I got up and answered the door, sure enough, it was Molly, still in her volleyball uniform and she did not look happy. In fact, she looked quite sad.This can't be good, I thought. I ushered her into my room, being sure no one saw. Neither of us said a word for a couple of minutes."We lost." Molly finally broke the silence, staring at the floor with an obvious sadness in her demeanor.I began to feel sad for her. I knew how much volleyball meant to her and losing in the playoffs had to be a major blow."Why weren't you at the game, Alan? I kept looking up throughout the game, but you were nowhere to be found." she said, looking up at me, with tears forming in her eyes.Oh no, I thought. Don't tell me they lost because she was worried about me rather than the game? I began to feel even worse, especially after she began to cry. I'd never seen her cry before. She always came off as so strong."I am so sorry, Molly. I don't know what else to say." I said, as I wrapped her in my arms to try and comfort her.Molly accepted the hug and wrapped her arms around me."It's okay, but where were you?" she said."I know I promised to be there, but today I was so wrapped up in my own world and I just completely forgot about the game. I'm sorry, Molly, truly." I told her.I hated making excuses, yet I found myself making one anyways."What happened? Is everything okay?" she said, as we broke our embrace and sat on the edge of my bed.Here she was, crushed over her loss, but she was still concerned about me. I didn't deserve to have someone as good as her in my life. I then told her pretty much the whole story of my day, as she listened attentively."Wow, you broke your computer?" she said with a giggle after I finished explaining everything.Luckily she had cheered up a bit by the time I'd finished walking her through my day. She'd even stopped crying and managed a giggle over me hauling off and punching my monitor."Yeah, I did." I giggled at it a bit myself. "But, it's alright, as you can see, I bought a new one." I continued."At least your mom finally apologized to you." she said. "Just think, if she'd called you sooner, then maybe you wouldn't have punched your computer." she giggled once again at the irony of it.Sure, she was teasing me now, but it didn't bother me. I was just glad to see her feeling better."I know, right?" I replied."By the way, I see you got a haircut and you shaved. Looks good." She said, running her fingers across my clean shaven face.We both fell silent as we looked each other in the eyes. There was something between Molly and I that I just didn't feel with the other girls. I guess that's the "spark" you hear about in those cheesy romance flicks.Both of us, feeling that spark, then leaned in simultaneously until our lips met in a passionate kiss. We parted our lips and I began exploring her hot mouth with my tongue, while she did the same.After a minute or so, we broke the kiss to catch our breath."Here, lay back." I said.Molly then scooted up farther on my bed and turned so she was fully lying in my bed, with her legs down at the foot of my bed and her head resting on my pillow."You must be pretty sore after your game, let me massage you a bit." I said, and she nodded in response.I began rubbing my hands along the tan bare skin just below her short volleyball shorts. I began firmly kneading my hands into the thigh muscles of one of her legs. She moaned, which let me know I was in the right spot. I continued working on that leg, massaging down to her calf muscle. I didn't know much of anything about giving massages, but she kept letting out satisfied moans, so I assumed I was doing alright. When I finished with one leg, I swapped to the other and gave it the same treatment."Oh my gosh, that felt so good! Thank you Alan." she said with a satisfied sigh.But I wasn't done yet. I knew that after being on her feet for so long that they had to have been sore too. I lifted her legs and let them lay across my lap as I began untying her tennis shoes. She looked at me curiously as I removed both her shoes. Then I peeled both her socks off, as well. Her socks felt hot and a bit damp to the touch from sweat, but I didn't mind much. I was just focused on the task at hand. I took one of her bare feet in my hands and began kneading my thumbs into its sole."Oh wow, a foot massage too? You are just too good to me, Alan." she said while letting out a moan.I continued working my thumbs along her sole, from her soft heel, through her deep arch, up to the balls of her foot and proceeded to massage each of her toes. Now, I'd never paid much attention to a girl's feet before, but looking at Molly's, I had to say she had some pretty nice looking feet. Despite being an athlete, she took really good care of them. They were tan like the rest of her body, and they were soft and smooth all over, not a single callus or rough spot. And her cute little toes had a nice looking dark shade of purple polish on her toenails, without even a single chip in the nail polish. All in all, her feet were just as nice as the rest of her. Despite the sweaty feel to them and the slight odor they gave off, I strangely wasn't repulsed by it.When I finished with one foot, I gave the other the same treatment, and judging by Molly's moans, she couldn't be happier. Finished with the massage, I then laid next to her and when began kissing once again. We made out and caressed each other's bodies. We were both hot and ready by this point, and we'd already been together enough that really, all this pretext wasn't necessary. But that was part of me and Molly's thing, like I said before, with Molly and me it was always more sensual than with the other girls.I broke from her lips and began planting soft wet kisses along her neckline, while my hands worked at pulling her volleyball jersey up. She lifted her torso a bit to allow me to pull her jersey up and over her head and shoulders. I then proceeded to slowly remove her tight sports bra as well. She let out a sigh of relief as her modest B cup breasts were finally freed from the constrictive sports bra. I then removed my own shirt and went back to kissing Molly, trailing down her neck to the soft perky mounds on her chest, then down her stomach to her belly button. I hooked my fingers into the elastic waistband of her shorts and began slowly pulling them down, she lifted her ass off the bed slightly as I pulled them down over her hips.The dark spot on the crotch of her white cotton panties told me she was already soaking wet. My cock had been rock hard since we started. She was just as turned on as me. I quickly removed my own pants, so we were both in just our underwear.I then resumed kissing her stomach around her belly button, receiving moans from her in response. I hooked my fingers into the waistband of her panties and began slowly pulling them down, kissing each piece of newly exposed skin as I inched her panties down. Once again she lifted her ass off the bed to allow her panties to get past her hips and firm round ass. With her panties removed I planted one last kiss on the little landing strip of dark hair on her crotch before trailing my kisses back up her body until my lips met hers once again."Come on, enough teasing, Alan. Hurry up and get that thing inside me." Molly said in desperation after breaking our kiss.Oh, I can do that, I thought. I quickly shed my boxers and tossed them to the side. I assumed the position over top of Molly as she spread her legs to allow me access to her most intimate of areas. She let out another moan as I rubbed the tip of my cock along her slit, soaking my member in her juices. I held my cock at the entrance of her dripping wet snatch."Alan, please. You've made me wait long enough, ah, Mm," Molly said as I pushed the tip of my cock into her cunt before she could even finish talking.She let out a sigh of relief as her tight cunt stretched around my shaft. I continued slowly pushing my member into her love canal, until finally I had bottomed out. Keeping the slow pace, I pulled my cock almost all the way out of her before pushing back in, feeling the slick firm walls of her hot cunt rub against my shaft."Mm, god, so good" Molly uttered amidst her moans.I didn't say a word. The only sounds coming from me were that of heavy breathing and grunting as I slowly thrusted my hard cock in and out of her constricted hole. I leaned my head closer to her and caught her lips in a passionate kiss as I continued my sensual love making. I could feel precum rapidly leaking from the tip of my cock coating the insides of her cunt. I was getting close. I didn't know how much longer I could hold back the flood gates. Molly moaned into my mouth as she began groping one of her tits with one hand and rubbing her clit with the other. I knew she must've been getting close too.Deciding to increase the pace, I lifted her legs so they were propped up on both of my shoulders; then began to drill my cock into her cunt as fast and hard as I could."Ah, oh fuck. Ah" Molly yelped in response, breaking our kiss.I grabbed her hips and continued violently pounding my member into her sopping wet hole, the sounds of her clapping cunt rang and bounced off the wooden walls of the room."Oh god, more. I'm gonna cum. Gimme more" Molly begged.We were in the homestretch, both us could burst at any second. I thrust forward sending tremors through her whole body as I buried my cock as deep inside her as I could go with all the strength I had. I then pulled out and repeated that powerful thrust several more times, Molly had covered her mouth with my pillow and was screaming into it. Then her body began to convulse and her cunt squeezed down on my shaft like a vise-grip, that's when I felt her boiling hot juices wash over my buried member from deep within her. That was all I could take. I began blasting my cum into her cunt like a shotgun. Both our bodies shook uncontrollably as we climaxed.Her body was the first to go limp, then mine followed suit as our orgasms subsided. I collapsed on top of her. We were like a pile of sweaty flesh on my bed. We laid there for a moment before I finally found the strength to roll my body off of hers. She turned her head to look as me as I lay beside her. We just stared into each other's eyes, panting, trying like hell to catch our breath."Wow, that, was incredible! I don't think I've ever had an orgasm that intense before," Molly was the first to speak."Uh huh," I panted. "You're, telling me. I think I just came my own skeleton," I managed to get the words out.Molly broke into laughter at my absurd metaphor. Although I was still totally drained, I too managed some laughter. When her laughter died down, she went silent, and she began to shut her eyes. She was asleep. I pulled my covers over us and let myself fall asleep right there next to her.I slept well that night, how could I not? I'd just had possibly the best sex of my life with one of the most beautiful girls on earth. Sure, I'd had sex with her numerous times before, but this time was something else. There was an undeniable magical feeling about it, and it was more intense than any of our previous trysts. And the obvious thing that set this time apart, we were actually sleeping together this time.When I awoke the next morning, I was delighted to find that Molly was still there, we were spooning. I was lying on my side with my arms wrapped around her. Molly was sleeping peacefully with her back pressed comfortably against my chest and her ass resting against my pelvis. We were still naked from the night before.After a few minutes I felt her shift, then she rolled over and opened her eyes to look at me."Good morning," she said sleepily, with a smile."Good morning to you too," I said before planting a kiss on her lips.She reached for her phone, which she'd set on my nightstand the night before, she checked the time. It was still early, only about 8 am."I should probably get going, before someone notices I'm missing" she said.I hesitantly moved my arms to allow her to get up. I didn't want her to leave, but I knew she was right. Molly got up and began gathering up her clothes. I laid in my bed watching her as she got dressed. She was just as beautiful when she was putting on clothes as she was when I was taking them off."By the way, thanks for last night." she said, giving me one last kiss when she finished getting dressed."It was my pleasure." I said, after she broke our kiss.To be continued.By Cheat105 for Literotica.

Here's some research on what Tariffs can/will do to the North-American Economy. IS THIS AN OPPORTUNITY for those who pivot? Only time will tell! ## Tariffs SummaryOverview of TariffsA 25% tariff will be imposed on all Canadian imports starting March 4, 2025, except for energy products, which will face a 10% tariff.Impacts on the U.S. Economy:- Inflation: The tariffs could raise U.S. consumer prices by 0.5%-0.7%, pushing inflation closer to 3% by late 2025.- Economic Growth: Estimated to reduce U.S. GDP growth by 0.6%-1% over the next year, with risks of stagnation if tariffs persist.- Stagflation Risk: The combination of higher prices and slower growth may disproportionately affect low-income households.- Job Losses: Tariffs may result in job losses in sectors reliant on imports or exports.Impacts on Canadian Businesses:- Export Challenges: Increased costs for U.S. consumers could reduce demand for Canadian goods.- Energy Sector: The 10% tariff on energy products may still make this sector relatively less affected compared to others.Impacts on Low-Income Consumers:- Higher Costs for Essentials: Low-income households are disproportionately affected by increased prices on necessities like food and clothing.- Reduced Purchasing Power: Tariffs might lower incomes for the poorest by up to 4%, compared to 2% for wealthier groups.- Fewer Choices: Higher import costs may reduce product variety, forcing consumers to settle for lower-quality alternatives.Long-Term Risks:- Market Inefficiencies: Diversion to higher-cost suppliers and reduced global competitiveness of exports.- Weakened Trade Relationships: Retaliatory tariffs could further strain trade dynamics and investment.- Economic Stability: Prolonged tariffs risk undermining overall economic stability and growth.Logistics Industry SummaryThe newly imposed tariffs on Canadian imports are set to profoundly impact the logistics industry, especially trucking. Increased costs for transporting goods across borders will likely lead to higher freight rates and additional financial strain on trucking companies. Customs delays and complex documentation requirements will further disrupt operations, creating inefficiencies in cross-border logistics.Trucking firms may need to adopt advanced technologies, such as real-time tracking and automated customs processing, to mitigate these challenges. Moreover, smaller logistics providers with limited resources will face heightened difficulties in adapting to these changes, potentially leading to market consolidation as larger firms absorb smaller ones to maintain competitiveness.Overall, the tariffs will compel the logistics and trucking sectors to reevaluate strategies, invest in technology, and diversify routes to sustain operations in the face of increased operational complexities.

Miracles can happen on Christmas Eve.Based on a post by auguy86, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at My First Time. Ken Dix flipped through the TV guide at a moderate pace; “500 channels, and nothing but Christmas specials on.”Finding nothing but disappointment at every turn. As it was Christmas Eve, every show was a mushy feel-good romp spouting lines about family and goodwill to others. None of that spoke to Ken in the slightest.“Ken?” a voice came from the kitchen.“What's up, Mom?”“I've got my hands full with making everything for dinner tonight, but I'm going to run short on a couple of ingredients,” Helen Dix said, poking her head into the living room. “Can you run to the store real quick for me please?”“Sure thing,” Ken replied, seeing as he had nothing better to do.“Great, thank you. I made a list on the counter for you. The store should be open for another hour or two. The main things would be the eggs; I don't have enough to finish my famous chess pie. If they have tea by the gallon, grab one sweet and one unsweet. The rest are great if you find them, but not essential.”“Got it,” Ken said as he took the list from the counter.Heading out to his car, Ken cranked up his Honda Civic and pulled out of the driveway. As he made his way into town, Ken reflected on his current situation. Though he loved his mom, being home for the holidays was always nerve-wracking for him. His hometown of Alpharetta, Georgia was crawling with former high school classmates of his, people he'd just as soon never see again. But up at MIT, he was actually among peers that he could relate to on an intellectual level. Not that he'd made that many friends up there. As a nineteen-year-old freshman, he was still stuck in the same boring math and science classes as everyone else. He couldn't wait until he could start his health sciences training. Maybe then he could meet some decent people, perhaps of the female variety.Ken soon arrived in the parking lot of the local Kroger. It was soon obvious that the place was packed with last-minute shoppers, all trying to find that one final ingredient they were missing. Locking his car, Ken sauntered into the store, grabbing a shopping basket along the way. He found the shelves of the store well picked over, striking out on the nonessential items on his mom's list. Making his way to the drinks aisle, he was pleased to see that the store was keeping the gallon jugs of tea well stocked for the holidays, and picked up a pair.Ken soon arrived in the refrigerated section of the store. Almost every shelf was empty, but he did manage to find one last carton of six eggs, just what his mom needed. Depositing the carton in his shopping basket, Ken made his way back to the front of the store, checking out in the express lane. He gripped the shopping bags tightly, being careful that the eggs weren't harmed from the swinging of the bags. Arriving back in the parking lot, he was pleasantly surprised to see one of his former classmates, Jacqueline Brown. As he approached, she saw him coming.“Ken? Kenneth Dix?”She was extremely pretty, as was befitting one of the most popular girls in school, and kept her chestnut-brown hair cut just below her jawline. Her soft, warm facial features and bubbly personality belied the sharp intellect hiding underneath. She and Ken had been partners a few times in various subjects, and he had helped craft her entrance essay to the University of Washington. This earned her a full ride scholarship. In spite of her popularity, they had worked well together, and Ken even dared to call her a friend, at least in his own mind. They had never hung out on a social basis; her circle of friends would never have let her live that down. Still, times had changed. They were both out of high school, after all. What could it hurt to ask?“Jacqueline? Wow, I never thought I'd see you back here. Thought you escaped to cooler climates?”“Yeah, Seattle is nice, but nothing beats Christmas at home,” she replied, adjusting her UW sweatshirt. “You back for the same reason?”“Uh huh. Mom pretty much insisted. She won't settle for anything less than a full family gathering on Christmas Eve. I'm just grabbing a few last things for her. But yeah, it's great seeing you again. You, uh, you look good.”“Um; thanks,” she replied with hesitation.“I'm, uh, gonna be home for a couple of weeks. Would you want to, I don't know, hang out sometime? Maybe grab a bite to eat? My treat.”“Well, Ken, that's sweet of you to ask.” she said almost to herself. As she paused, her eyes suddenly lit up as if she had gotten an idea. “Alright! Here, let me give you my number.” She scribbled a series of digits down on a scrap piece of paper, writing her name next to them. “I'll, um, talk to you later, I guess?”“Sounds great!”Ken couldn't believe it; he had actually done it! He had asked out the prettiest girl he had ever known! Moreover, she had given him her number! Things were definitely looking up.“Dick!” a voice behind them yelled.Ken turned, immediately recognizing Jason Brown, Jacqueline's fraternal twin brother, along with his two flunkies, Brian and Barrett Sullivan. Jason had been the star quarterback at his high school, and the Sullivan boys were his best offensive linemen. They often served as his muscle off the football field, as well. Ken was intimately familiar with these three, as they had made it their mission in high school to make his life a living hell. Being stuffed in lockers, having his wallet stolen, all were commonplace with them. The three approached, attempting to appear imposing, which they were from the perspective of the ever-scrawny Ken.“I've got nothing to say to you guys,” Ken muttered as they approached.“Well I've got something to say to you, Mr. Kenny Dick,” Jason growled.“Just shut up and leave me alone,” Ken replied, his blood boiling at the use of Jason's longtime nickname for him.“No! You shut the fuck up and listen!” Jason said, grabbing Ken by the collar of his tee-shirt and flinging him against his car. In the process, Ken dropped his shopping bags, the jugs of tea landing directly on the egg carton.“Jason! Stop it!” Jacqueline protested.Undeterred, Jason threatened. “Listen fuck-wad, you stay the hell away from my sister!”“She's an adult, dickhead! She can have anyone she wants as a friend!” Ken protested.“You don't belong on the same Planet as her! You're nothing'! A pathetic sack of guts your dumbass mother decided to give a name to! Know what? Just do us all a favor and drop dead!”Enraged at the insult to his mom, Ken swung a wild haymaker at his assailant, but Jason was more than ready, pinning Ken's arm back against his car. Jason then delivered a crushing punch to Ken's gut, dropping him down to his knees. Before leaving, Jason knelt down next to his gasping victim.“Next time, I won't be so nice. Next time; I might just kill you myself. See ya around. Dick.” Turning to his sister, Jason said, “Come on, time to go home.”Jacqueline looked down at the pitiful form of Ken before muttering, “Sorry, Ken.”The trio of boys sauntered off across the parking lot, laughing and high-fiving at their antics. Jacqueline followed right behind them. Ken picked himself up and inspected his groceries, discovering the crushed eggs in his bag. Swearing and cursing, he grabbed the misshapen carton and went to throw it in a nearby trash can.“No chess pie tonight.”As Ken returned to his car and began his drive home, Jason and his flunkies watched on from his car, still pleased with their efforts.“You shouldn't have done that,” Jacqueline said in a lecturing tone.Jason turned to face his sister. “I do what I gotta do, Jacqueline. That fuck-wad has no business getting friendly with you. He needs to learn his place.”“Be that as it may, I can take care of myself,” she replied firmly.“Take care of yourself? Wait; you didn't?”“I did. Jason, someday you'll learn that there are more subtle and effective ways to ward off undesirables. Trust me, Ken won't bother me ever again.”Back at Home.Upon arriving back home, Ken couldn't bring himself to tell his mom about the incident with the eggs. He instead told her that the store had run out altogether. She had spent many sleepless nights in the past worrying about the constant bullying her son was subjected to in school. Ken didn't want to give her anything else to worry about. By this time, has uncles had started arriving, and the living room was soon filled with the sounds of football games. In Ken's mind, these were no more thought provoking that the mindless Christmas specials he had found earlier. Ken went up to his room to take a hot shower, as well as get some alone time in the process. As he stripped down, he saw a bruise beginning to form on his stomach from Jason's punch. He winced in pain as he touched the tender skin.Shit; that's not going away for a while.Ken took some Tylenol for the pain before stepping into the shower. The hot water helped relax his body, and the steam gradually built up, clearing his mind a bit. He finished after a while and, after making sure his door was shut, flopped facedown onto his bed. After laying there for around an hour or so, his mom finally called him down to rejoin the family for dinner.Taking his seat at the table, Ken glanced around the room at his various family members. His mom had two older brothers, Lee and Stan. Though Lee was tall and still relatively youthful looking at forty-five, Stan was shorter and beginning to bald as he approached fifty. Still, both of them had one notable thing in common as far as Ken was concerned: they were both still jocks at heart. Ken had never known his father; it had always just been him and his mom. He could tell that his uncles tried to be male role models for him, but their efforts were usually ill-conceived attempts to “man him up.” Never once did they understand his introverted tendencies, and always tried to get him to be more of a people person. After a while, Ken stopped paying their advice any attention.It was striking to Ken how similar Lee and Stan's families were. They had both married beautiful, blonde cheerleaders, and now both had sixteen-year-old daughters, both of whom were among the most popular girls in school. It all sickened Ken; they were just perpetuating the stereotype of pretty and popular being the be-all, end-all in life. As the family ate, Ken remained silent for the most part. The adults were engrossed in discussions about their jobs, and the two daughters were giggling and playing on their phones the entire time. None of this was relevant to Ken.“You know, I saw something interesting today,” Lee said as dessert was being brought out. “I was at Kroger filling up my car, and saw you in the main parking lot, Ken. Looked like you were, uh, having some words with a few guys out there.”Shit! He saw that?Not wanting to worry his mom, Ken replied, “It; it was nothing.”“Nothing, eh? Is that why that punk punched you in the gut?”With a worried look on her face, Helen asked, “Ken, sweetie, what is he talking about?” She walked around the table to Ken's seat and lifted up his shirt, seeing the bruise on his abdomen. “Was it that Jason boy again?”“Mom, just let it go.”“No! Ken, you know I worry about you!”“You worry about Me? I think you need to worry more about your brother!” Ken shouted, his anger exploding at last. “Right, Uncle Lee? Come on, you see your own nephew being ganged up on in a parking lot, yet you do nothing to help him out?!”“A man's gotta learn to fight his own battles,” Lee replied in a calm voice.“No. You want to know what a man does? A man sticks up for his Family! No. Matter. What! You stood there and watched your own nephew get beaten up. That says a hell of a lot more about you than it does me. And if that's family; I don't want any part of this one.”Without a word, Ken stood and left the dining room. He then grabbed his MIT hoodie and headed for the front door. As he was about to get into his car and drive off, he saw to his frustration that his uncles' cars were parked in the driveway behind him, blocking him in. Cursing under his breath, he prepared to leave on foot.“Ken! Come back inside, please!” Helen called after him, running down the driveway.“No. I've got to go out; clear my head.”“Ken, it's Christmas Eve. Please, come be with your family.”“Mom, aside from you, not a single person in that house feels like family to me,” Ken replied coldly. “I'll; I'll call you after while.”Ken walked off into the cold Georgia night, not knowing for sure where to go or what to do. Nobody else was out, as they were all at home with their families. Remembering the square in historic downtown Alpharetta, he decided to head in that direction. Maybe the quiet walk would do him some good.Arriving in the town square, Ken walked along the sidewalks for a bit, peering into the darkened windows of the various shops and restaurants. Everything looked so different to him with everyone gone for the day; it all seemed so peaceful. As he continued to walk, he soon saw City Hall in the distance. In front of the building was a large green space, which was teeming with a surprising amount of activity for it being Christmas Eve. Ken moved closer, now spying a large gathering of people sitting on picnic blankets, all bundled up in coats and hats. Ahead of them, a large screen projected the classic film, It's a Wonderful Life.Though Ken was never into the Christmas cheer, as it were, he felt strangely drawn to watch a few minutes of the film from a distance. He soon began to regret that decision, as the movie had reached the point where George Baily had an arrest warrant out for him, lashing out at his family in anger. Watching him get drunk and punched in a bar fight, Ken began to feel sick with anger. Despite all his efforts to help better the world around him, the universe conspired against George Baily; just as it seemed to be conspiring against Ken. Unable to watch a moment more, he turned and walked into the nearby park.Again alone with his thoughts, Ken sat on a bench near the fountain in the center of the park. He contemplated many things, as he often did in solitude. He thought about his piss poor excuse for a family, intent on changing him into what they say he should be. If only they could love him as he is. He thought about Jason Brown, a perpetual asshole that managed to get all the beautiful women his heart desired. If only the universe would serve up his just desserts, rather than conspiring against Ken. Sighing in frustration, he stuffed his freezing hands into his jeans pockets.Jacqueline!Feeling the scrap of paper still in his pocket, Ken suddenly felt a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dreary day. He needed something, anything to lift his spirits, and hearing her kind, sweet voice might just do it. Hell, he didn't even care anymore if she was interested in him in a romantic sense; he just needed someone to listen and understand him. Digging out his phone, he dialed the number. After a single ring, a message began to play, seeming to be read by a game show host.“Congratulations! You've reached Live 95.5 FM's world-famous Loser Line! Live 95.5; featuring the best entertainment in Seattle! If you've reached this message, you have attempted to hit on a girl Way out of your league! That poor young lady wants nothing to do with you, but you just couldn't help creeping on her! That's where we come in! Now you know what a loser you really are! So leave the girl alone, loser! You're doing everyone a favor! If you'd like to leave a message for the world-famous Loser Line, begin speaking at the tone!”Beep!Ken hung up the phone in quiet disbelief. How could he have been so wrong about Jacqueline? They had worked so well together in school, and he even considered her a friend! She always spoke so kindly to him, how could this have happened? Was she really as nasty and shallow as her dumbass brother? Was she really just that good of an actress? As he pondered all this, Ken's rage finally exploded out of him.“That two-faced bitch! Who the fuck does she think she is?! I trusted her! Hell, she would never have gotten a full scholarship without my help! All I ever did was Like her! And after all that, she doesn't even have the decency to turn me down to my face?! What The Fucking Hell? At least her brother was honest about his disdain. She's far worse! I can't imagine how evil she'd be if a person actually offended her?”Slumping back down onto the park bench, every thought that entered Ken's mind brought him lower. Jason was an ass, but then again, he didn't know how to act any different. Uncle Lee was a moron, but then again, he had no malicious intent. But Jacqueline; she was the last straw. He had trusted her, opened up to her, and she repaid him by committing the single most cruel and senseless act Ken could ever imagine. Everything was crashing down around him. As he continued to sulk, Jason's words entered into his mind once more.“I should just do everyone a favor and drop dead; is that what you want, Jacqueline? Seems like you agree with your brother, or you wouldn't have given me that number.”Ken reached into his pocket, withdrawing a folding knife. It had been a high school graduation present to him from his grandfather, before he passed a few months later. A far cry from the typical Swiss Army knife, he unfolded the shiny, four-inch blade, which stood in beautiful contrast to the wooden handle. Inscribed in the wood were Ken's initials. He had not used it for anything yet, never had any need to. As he stared at his reflection in the blade, Ken kept replaying Jason's cruel words in his mind, to do the world a favor and drop dead.“Maybe that's not such a bad idea.” Ken mumbled.Just as he took a firm grip on the handle, preparing to take the knife to his throat, an unfamiliar voice came from off to the side.“Hey!”Gabrielle's Christmas night.Gabrielle Libertine relaxed in a lawn chair, savoring the crisp, cold air of Christmas Eve. This was her favorite time of the year, and being able to enjoy an outdoor showing of her favorite Christmas film, It's a Wonderful Life, made it even better. It all fit in perfectly with her life philosophy: live for happiness. Not only her own, but as much as could be had for the world around her too.“You want the moon? Just say the word, and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.”“Oh, Jimmy Stewart, you charmer you.” Gabby sighed.Soon, her emotions welled up as the hopeless romantic that was George Bailey began to succumb to the pressures and injustices of life. He had blamed his own uncle for destroying their business, lashed out at his wife and children in anger, and gone crawling to his hated rival for a loan. The hardest scenes for her to watch were always the bar fight and the car crash. Still, she always stuck it out. The best was yet to come.Just as George stood atop the bridge, Gabby caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye. A young man of about nineteen or twenty was watching the movie from a distance away, leaning against a tree near the road. His face twisted in angst as he saw the pain on display in the film, and he soon spun around, walking into the nearby park. Gabby couldn't explain why, but something compelled her to follow him and make sure he was okay.Collecting her lawn chair, she walked along the perimeter of the green space, soon arriving at the entrance to the park. As she went, she began to hear angry shouting up ahead of her; it sounded like the young man was in distress. After a few minutes, she came upon the fountain situated in the center of the park. On a bench sat the man from earlier, appearing to be deep in thought. By the glow of the lamppost, Gabby could now get a good look at him. He appeared to be of average height, maybe 5'7”, and had shaggy black hair that seemed a bit unkempt. Still, it's color shone in the light of the park, and his white skin provided for quite a striking appearance. A pair of black horn-rimmed glasses framed his face, which combined with his red MIT hoodie to project a very specific image into Gabby's mind. He had to be incredibly intelligent.As she studied him, she saw the young man pull an object out of the pocket of his jeans. Catching a glimpse of something reflective, she could now see that he was holding a small folding knife. Gabby tensed up and wondered if she should run, but soon decided against it; he didn't seem to have even noticed her presence. In fact, the way he looked at the knife was quite unsettling. It was as if he saw that little blade as his best friend in the world. She knew the look in his eyes. She knew what would happen in a moment if she did nothing. Taking a deep breath, Gabby decided to act.“Hey.”Intervention.Ken was startled by the unfamiliar voice. Looking up, he now saw a woman in her early twenties standing across the way. She gazed at him with intent, but for what reason he did not know. Looking back at her, Ken's typical awkwardness began to kick in, as he could see that she was quite beautiful. Dressed warmly in a black winter coat and blue jeans, she wore a grey knit cap over her long blonde hair. Upon first glance, she appeared to be of some sort of Scandinavian descent, or perhaps German, though Ken couldn't be sure. His mouth went dry as he tried to find the words to speak.“Everything okay?” she asked.“Uh; fine. Why do you, um; why do you ask?”Smiling, she replied, “I saw you over on the green, watching the movie. By the look on your face, you were having a tough time with it. When I saw you walk off towards the park, I felt I should come and see if anything was wrong.”“No, nothing's wrong.”“Good. Then I shouldn't be concerned about the way you're looking at that knife of yours, right?”Shaking his head, Ken answered, “I'm not going to hurt you. Promise.”“That's not what I'm concerned about.”“Wha; what do you mean?” Ken asked, his eyes growing wide.“I've seen that look before,” she said, taking a couple of steps closer. “I am, sadly, all too familiar with it. You were about to hurt yourself, weren't you?”“You don't know a thing about me, lady,” Ken muttered, preparing to leave.“I don't have to know anything about you to be concerned,” she fired back.“Concerned,” Ken snorted. “How could you be concerned about me? You don't even know me!”“Easily rectified. Gabrielle Libertine. My friends call me Gabby,” she said, sticking out her hand with a warm smile. When he didn't respond, she smirked and continued, “This is the part where you tell me your name.”Sighing, he replied, “Ken. Ken Dix.”“A pleasure, Ken,” she said as they shook hands.“So; Gabrielle, eh? You supposed to be my Clarence or something?”With a playful gasp, she responded, “Oh my God! Does that mean you're Jimmy Stewart?! I've had the biggest crush on you for Years!”Ken gave a nervous laugh. “Alright, alright, I walked into that one. But in all seriousness.”“No, I'm not a Guardian Angel or the Word of God or anything like that. Just an average person like you.” Motioning to the bench, she asked, “May I?”“Sure, I guess,” Ken answered, scooting to the edge.“Thanks.” Taking a seat, she continued, “So tell me this, Ken: why would you want to hurt, maybe kill yourself?”His face twisted in pain. “You don't want to know.”“I do. Believe me, I do.”Sighing with reluctance, Ken relented and began to tell Gabby of the events of the day. He started with Jacqueline and Jason, then the confrontation with his uncle, and finally the fake phone number showing Jacqueline's true colors. Through it all, Gabby sat in silence, maintaining eye contact and nodding whenever appropriate. At last, he finished his story, and Gabby could feel her heart breaking within her chest.“Ken; I'm so sorry. I can feel the pain in your voice. No one deserves what you've gone through today. I know it's of little help, but I do understand what you're going through.”“Understand?” Ken said, incredulous. “How could a girl like you understand any of this? I mean, look at you. You're gorgeous, and I bet you've always been popular. Just like Jacqueline. Just like Jason. Just like Uncle Lee. None of you could ever imagine the world I live in.”With a stern look on her face, she replied, “I'm going to choose to let that slide, considering everything you've told me. Still, you need to know that what you just said was quite hurtful. Almost as hurtful as the things that have been said to you today.”Ken recoiled. He knew she was right. “I'm; I'm sorry. You're right; I should never have said that. You've been nothing but nice to me tonight.”“Apology accepted,” Gabby said with a smile. “Humility is a rare trait in men these days. Hang on to that.”Ken thought she might be mocking him, but bit his tongue nonetheless. He had already insulted her once, and he wasn't going to chance a second time.Seeking to turn the conversation to happier topics, she asked, “M I T, huh? You're an awful long way from home, aren't you?”“Huh? Oh, the hoodie. Yeah, I'm a freshman there this year, just home on break right now.”“Nice. Major?”“Health sciences. I want to go to medical school after MIT, though I'm still figuring out a specialty.”“Plenty of time to decide that. I'm sure you'll find the right career path,” she said with a grin.As nice as it was to talk about a familiar topic, a few things still bugged Ken's mind to no end. “I still can't figure it out; why would Jacqueline do this?”Frowning, Gabby replied, “Some people are cruel. Often the ones that are the cruelest disguise it with a kind, warm public demeanor. Jacqueline sounds like she fits that mold to a T.”“And she hid it all that time while we were in school?”“You were useful at the time, in her mind. She wasn't going to chance losing that. Once she got what she needed, she had no more reason to hide her true feelings.”“Yeah, but still. Why be all friendly to me in the store?”“In her twisted mind, she probably felt she was doing you a favor. She wanted to ensure you never tried to contact her again. To a cruel person like her; that's her idea of doing you a kindness,” Gabby replied sadly. “We just have to hope that there's enough real kindness in this world to counteract such cruelty.”Now noticing a silver cross hanging from her neck, Ken pointed to it and asked, “I guess this the part where you start lecturing me about suicide? That I'm being selfish and trying to go against God's plan?”“No,” she replied with simplicity.“No?”“No. Ken, I meant it when I said that I've seen that look before. I know better than most that suicidal thoughts are rarely that simple. There's no switch that can turn them off. It's a tide that must be turned back, bit by bit.”Stunned, Ken started to see that this woman understood what was important in life. Realizing he still had the knife in his hand, he folded it closed and put it back in his pocket.“Bit by bit,” she said with a smile. “My car's around the corner. Is there somewhere I can take you? Where do you live?”“I'm not going home. Not yet,” Ken replied. “Not with my uncles still there.”“No problem. I'm not going to force you.” Thinking a moment, she continued, “It's pretty cold out here. Why don't you come back to my place for a bit?”“That's; unnecessary. I'm fine on my own.”“Nice try, but no cigar,” she said. “I'm not leaving you alone with that knife, mister. And I'm certainly not leaving you alone on Christmas Eve. Nobody should be alone for the holidays.”“Thanks, but; won't your husband mind?”“He would, if I were married.”“Boyfriend?”“Nope, just my townhouse and me. Pretty cozy, all things considered. No problems with you coming over, but I do have one condition.”“And what's that?”Smirking, Gabby replied, “You call your mom right now and tell her you're okay.”Hesitating a moment, Ken soon relented. “Fine.” Tapping his phone, Ken waited as it rang. “Hey Mom, it's me; Yeah, I'm okay; No, seriously. I'm fine; Yeah I'm just hanging with a friend. I probably won't be back ‘til tomorrow; I will; Love you too; Bye.”“See? Now that wasn't so bad, was it?” Gabby teased him.Eying her, Ken asked. “You're seriously okay with bringing me to your home?”“Positive.”Taking his hand, Gabby led him to her car.Gabby's guest.The drive had been silent for the most part. Ken was still trying to comprehend everything that was happening. Who was this woman? Why would she go to such great lengths for a stranger she didn't even know? Gabby seemed to pick up on this, refraining from prodding him for any further conversation. She could tell he was still processing the events of the day. Soon, they arrived at her townhouse complex and pulled into her garage.“Come on in, make yourself at home,” she said as she turned on the lights. “Can I offer you something to drink? Coffee? Hot chocolate?”“Hot chocolate sounds good, thanks.”“Coming right up!”As she hung her hat and jacket up on a rack, Ken couldn't help but stare. He now saw that she wasn't just a pretty face; her entire body was sublime. She wore a tight burgundy sweater and a pair of tight, form-fitting jeans. This ensemble only served to accent her body even further. Her hourglass figure was delectable, her slim waist contrasting with her curvy hips and ample bust. She was also just as tall as him, perhaps a bit taller, with legs for miles. Though Ken had fantasized about some of his classmates, none of them could come anywhere close to Gabby. She was a woman, not a girl, and in the prime of her life no less.“Here you go,” she said, handing Ken a mug.After blowing on the hot drink, he took a sip, feeling the warm liquid spreading through his body. “Thanks,” he sighed.“No problem,” she replied with a smile. “Come on, let's go relax in the den.”She led him into an intimate area with a sofa and a loveseat. The only illumination came from the twinkling multicolored lights on her Christmas tree in the corner. As Ken took in the relaxing surroundings, smelling the delicious scent of her Frazier fir tree, Gabby stepped over to the fireplace opposite the sofa. Flipping a switch, she soon had a comfortable fire roaring from the gas logs. She then sat on the sofa, placing her mug on the side table and patting the spot next to her.“Come sit. I promise I don't bite,” she said with a playful grin.“Um, okay.” he mumbled, scooting as close to the armrest as he could to give Gabby plenty of space.“Tell me about M I T,” she inquired. “You mentioned you want to go into health sciences. Does that include medical school?”“Uh, yeah with any luck. Harvard would be my top choice, but I don't know if I could afford it. But assuming so, my dream has always been to be a brain surgeon.”“Brain surgeon?! That's so cool! They're like; the most badass of all the badass doctors! Not just surgeons, brain surgeons!” Gabby gushed.“It's, uh, not that big a deal,” Ken replied as he blushed with embarrassment.“Well, I could totally see you as a brain surgeon. Don't ever give up on it.”“Thanks.”“So, what then for you, Dr. Dix? What happens once you reach your dream?”Ken began to feel a strange amount of comfort with this woman, and started to open up to her. “Honestly; I don't know. I mean even if I become a brain surgeon, I'm still hopeless around girls. Maybe Jason's right. I'm gonna die a virgin.” Realizing what he had confessed to her, he turned to Gabby and blurted out, “Not that it's your problem, or anything. S-sorry, I just; I shouldn't have gone that far.”Gabby just smiled and moved closer to him, brushing her hand against his arm.“Don't worry about it. You have goals, both personal and professional, but aren't sure exactly how to achieve them. So you're a virgin. That's nothing to be embarrassed about, and it's healthy to express your anxiety about it. That can help you overcome your fears. In all seriousness, I think you underestimate yourself, Ken.”“Underestimate myself?”“Of course,” Gabby replied. “You're smart, considerate, polite, you even held the car door for me earlier! Any girl you'd want to be with is gonna swoon at traits like that. I can also tell that you still think of yourself as unattractive, but I disagree. You wear glasses, yes, but that doesn't make you a dork. Your hair is a little shaggy, but not greasy or anything. You may not have a tan, but your skin complexion is damn near flawless. You have nothing to be ashamed of, be it your looks or your personality.”“You're about the only woman who thinks so,” he sighed.“Doubtful, but if it's that big a worry for you, I can give you a couple of pointers, if you like.”“Um, oh, okay I guess.”“Great! Okay, so you definitely give off the ‘geek' vibe, but that's not a bad thing. Don't fight it; own it.”“How?”“Well, you can make just some slight alterations to your outward appearance that can change the way others see you. For example, you could switch to wire-framed glasses instead of your horn-rimmed ones. Your hair is a great color, and would do well in a short, clean-cut style, if I do say so myself. You can also change out your usual t-shirts for some casual polo shirts.”“So; the secret to getting women to notice me is to change who I am?” Ken asked, feeling more than a little offended.Cocking her eyebrow, Gabby replied, “Are you saying your glasses, hair length, and shirt choices define who you are?”“Oh, uh; fair point,” Ken conceded.“See? Humility. Such a rare quality these days,” Gabby said with a grin. “To be honest, all the changes I suggested are things my brother did a couple of years back. He was a complete geek, maybe even bigger than you. The poor boy was helpless around the fairer sex. But after he made these changes, he no longer came off as the socially awkward geek. He came off as a self-assured, confident geek, one who loves himself for who he is. I see that potential in you, Ken.” Grabbing her iPad from the side table, she pulled up a couple of pictures for him. “See? Here's before. And here's after.”“Woah,” Ken marveled. He could see the drastic difference. The guy hadn't done anything to make himself stronger or bulkier, nothing to increase his manliness, but the things he did change just popped in all the right ways. Was it really that simple?“That's great and all, but can new clothes and a haircut get rid of social awkwardness? I still don't have even a shred of confidence around women,” Ken said.“They can help, but a change in your mental confidence is completely based on your willpower. You have to love yourself as much as you want others to love you. If you don't, everyone else will pick up on it.”“Knew there was a catch.”Gabby bit her lip in frustration. There had to be a way she could give him the confidence boost he needed to love himself, but how? Getting one somewhat crazy idea, she moved closer to Ken.“I'm guessing from your previous statements that; you've never kissed a girl before. Is that right Ken?”Poor Ken Dix didn't even know what had hit him. Here he was, sitting with the most beautiful woman he'd ever laid eyes on, and the unthinkable was beginning to happen. She was moving closer, running her fingers through his hair, and now wanted to know if he'd ever been kissed! This was too much, way beyond any of his hottest dreams. Unable to find the words to respond, he managed to slowly nod his head.“Close your eyes,” she instructed in her sweet voice. When he only blinked in reply, she whispered, “Close; your eyes, Ken. Trust me.”Guided by an unseen force, Ken felt compelled to obey her. His eyes finally fluttered closed, and his breathing became more labored in anticipation of what was to come. A small part of him doubted that she was being truthful, thinking that she'd fake him out just like Jacqueline had. Those doubts were soon quashed, as he felt the warm sensation of Gabby's face leaning close to his. He could feel her breathing. He could smell her perfume. If there was a God, Ken prayed, then and there; that He could make this incredible moment last forever.After what felt like eons, Gabby finally released their building tension and touched her lips to Ken's. Her kiss was soft at first, allowing him to savor the new sensations he was feeling. Ken was so terrified and excited all at once that he could barely even move his lips in reply. Not that it mattered to Gabby. She had expected his fear, and made sure to keep her technique simple yet enjoyable. After around thirty seconds, she withdrew at last, her face aglow in the Christmas tree light.“Wow,” Ken managed to mutter as he opened his eyes. He soon noticed that he couldn't see Gabby at all; his glasses had fogged up from their kiss.“Here, let's just take these off,” Gabby said with a giggle. She slipped his glasses off and laid them on her side table. “Now then, since we've gotten your first kiss out of the way, ready to really dive in?”“Dive in to what?” Ken asked, his nerves beginning to fray.“Kissing, silly! You do know there's much more to it than what we just did, right?”“More?”“Of course! Look, one day you'll get the prime opportunity to kiss a special lady, and I want you to be ready when that chance comes.”To be continued in part 2, based on a post by auguy86, in 2 parts for Sex Stories.

Today, we brought in two of the most educated people in our industry to have a roundtable on how tariffs impact our markets and compound our supply chain challenges. If you're like me and have read many articles, blogs, and posts about one aspect of tariffs and their long-term implications that are still unclear, then this is the show you need to absorb. Welcome to The Logistics Life! 

Podcast Script: Why Business Leaders Should Be Coaches, Not CaptainsIntro Music Fades InHost: Welcome to BusinessIsGood, the podcast where we explore the ideas and practices that help entrepreneurs grow their businesses and create lasting success. I'm your host, Chris Cooper. Today, we're tackling a big question: should you lead your business as a “captain” or as a “coach”?To illustrate this, I want to start with a story from hockey. Bobby Hull, nicknamed “The Golden Jet,” was one of the greatest players to ever lace up skates. Known for his blazing speed and powerful slap shot, he dominated as a player in both the NHL and WHA.But Hull also took on a rare challenge: he tried to be both a player and a coach at the same time while leading the Winnipeg Jets in the WHA during the early 1970s. He had incredible success as a player and later achieved even greater success as a coach, but his tenure as both didn't work out the way he—or the Jets—had hoped.Segment 1: The Player-Coach DilemmaBobby Hull's time as a player-coach highlights an important leadership lesson: you can't do both jobs effectively at the same time. As a player, your focus is on performance—executing plays, scoring goals, and being in the action. But as a coach, your role is to oversee the big picture, strategize, and make tough decisions to guide the team to success.Even some of the most celebrated names in hockey, like Larry Robinson, achieved greatness as both players and coaches—but never at the same time. Why? Because these are two fundamentally different roles that require completely different mindsets and skill sets.Segment 2: The Captain vs. Coach Paradigm in BusinessThis same distinction applies in business. Many entrepreneurs try to lead as captains when they really need to be coaches.Let's break this down:Limited Perspective on the Ice:When you're in the trenches with your team, you can only see what's directly in front of you. You don't have the big-picture context that a coach has from the bench. In business, this means getting too caught up in day-to-day operations and losing sight of long-term strategy.Emotional Proximity:As a captain, you're shoulder-to-shoulder with your team. This camaraderie can make it hard to make tough decisions—like moving someone to a different role or cutting an underperformer. A coach, however, has the necessary distance to prioritize what's best for the organization as a whole.Distraction by Small Tasks:Captains are busy tying their skates, taping their sticks, and focusing on their personal performance. Coaches are busy drawing up game plans, scouting opponents, and thinking about how to improve the team. In business, staying stuck in “captain mode” means you spend too much time on the wrong things—handling tasks that someone else could do instead of focusing on growth and vision.Segment 3: Why Being a Coach Wins in BusinessHere's the truth: real leadership isn't about scoring the most goals. It's about enabling your team to win.As a coach, your job is to:Make hard decisions that benefit the whole organization.Delegate tasks and trust others to execute them.Hold your team accountable and provide constructive feedback.Focus on strategy, vision, and the next big opportunity.Many entrepreneurs default to being captains because it's what they know—it's comfortable. They're great at doing the work, but they shy away from the harder, more abstract job of coaching. But this mindset limits growth. Your business can't scale if you're always on the ice.Think about it: players are replaceable. You can hire someone else to score goals. What you...

Wha's Something Young People Can't Do That All Of Us Over 30 Easily Know by Maine's Coast 93.1

Wha's Something Young People Can't Do That All of Us Over 30 Easily Know by Maine's Coast 93.1

Wha's Something Young People Can't Do That All Of Us Over 30 Easily Know by Maine's Coast 93.1

Wha's Something Young People Can't Do That All Of Us Over 30 Easily Know by Maine's Coast 93.1

Wha's Something Young People Can't Do That All Of Us Over 30 Easily Know by Maine's Coast 93.1

Jones and Keefe got in the Red Sox offseason and the comments from President Sam Kennedy on his expectations for the upcoming season.  The guys went on to recap Wild Card Weekend in the NFL during Wha' Happened?.  Finally, Jones and Keefe discussed the chances of Deion Sanders becoming the next head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

Welcome to 2025 everyone! Today, travel medicine specialists Drs. Paul Pottinger ("Germ") & Chris Sanford ("Worm") answer your travel health questions:What's the differences between vaccines that are routine, recommended and required?What is Pertussis, and how can I avoid it?What can the US embassy do for me when I'm abroad?African Sleeping Sickness… what's the dealTrekking Poles: Help or Hindrance?Isn't it just safer to stay home?Wha't the best layover duration from an anxiety perspective?What's mycoplasma pneumonia?We hope you enjoy this podcast! If so, please follow us on the socials @germ.and.worm, subscribe to our RSS feed and share with your friends! We would so appreciate your rating and review to help us grow our audience. And, please send us your questions and travel health anecdotes: germandworm@gmail.com.Our Disclaimer: The Germ and Worm Podcast is designed to inform, inspire, and entertain. However, this podcast does NOT establish a doctor-patient relationship, and it should NOT replace your conversation with a qualified healthcare professional. Please see one before your next adventure. The opinions in this podcast are Dr. Sanford's & Dr. Pottinger's alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the University of Washington or UW Medicine.

S3E97 Iconic Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson is the subject of today's podcast, as Ash looks at his breakthrough poem, 'The Daft Days':  Now mirk December's dowie face Glowrs owr the rigs wi sour grimace, While, thro' his minimum of space, The bleer-ey'd sun, Wi blinkin light and stealing pace, His race doth run. From naked groves nae birdie sings, To shepherd's pipe nae hillock rings, The breeze nae od'rous flavour brings From Borean cave, And dwyning nature droops her wings, Wi visage grave. Mankind but scanty pleasure glean Frae snawy hill or barren plain, Whan winter, ‘midst his nipping train, Wi frozen spear, Sends drift owr a' his bleak domain, And guides the weir. Auld Reikie! thou'rt the canty hole, A bield for many caldrife soul, Wha snugly at thine ingle loll, Baith warm and couth, While round they gar the bicker roll To weet their mouth. When merry Yule-day comes, I trou, You'll scantlins find a hungry mou; Sma are our cares, our stamacks fou O' gusty gear, And kickshaws, strangers to our view, Sin fairn-year. Ye browster wives, now busk ye braw, And fling your sorrows far awa; Then come and gie's the tither blaw Of reaming ale, Mair precious than the well of Spa, Our hearts to heal. Then, tho' at odds wi a' the warl', Amang oursels we'll never quarrel; Tho' Discord gie a canker'd snarl To spoil our glee, As lang's there's pith into the barrel We'll drink and ‘gree. Fidlers, your pins in temper fix, And roset weel your fiddle-sticks; But banish vile Italian tricks Frae out your quorum, Not fortes wi pianos mix – Gie's Tulloch Gorum. For nought can cheer the heart sae weel As can a canty Highland reel; It even vivifies the heel To skip and dance: Lifeless is he wha canna feel Its influence. Let mirth abound, let social cheer Invest the dawning of the year; Let blithesome innocence appear To crown our joy; Nor envy wi sarcastic sneer Our bliss destroy. And thou, great god of Aqua Vitae! Wha sways the empire of this city, When fou we're sometimes capernoity, Be thou prepar'd To hedge us frae that black banditti, The City Guard.   Title Music: 'Not Drunk' by The Joy Drops. All other music by Epidemic Sound.  @earreadthis earreadthis@gmail.com facebook.com/earreadthis

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Jones and Keefe continued to talk about the Patriots new NFL Draft position. What can the Patriots do at #4? Before discussing the performance of quarterback Joe Milton III in yesterday's Patriots win, the guys took a look at some of the big moments from Week 18 in Wha' Happened?.

So the media is blaming far right white dudes for Isis... Jeff says "Wha?"

We recompose ourselves after a loss to Latvia and then a less than inspiring win over Germany at the World Junior Championships.  What does the classic New Year's Eve game vs the USA have in store? We're concerned. We review some interesting stats from the calendar year 2024 and then give our thoughts on some novel ideas to improve the game.  As always we have Guess the 5th and Connections!    Listen Here:  Apple Podcasts   Direct MP3   iHeart Radio Title Player - Ryan Whitney - 481 GP News  Dallas practice on boxing day - big no no. - $100,000 fine  Latvia beats Canada! Spengler Cup - seems like fun Derek Lalonde out in Detroit, MacLellan in - 4th coaching change Crosby passes Lemieux for Assists with Penguins at 1034 Avalanche sign Blackwood for 5 years, $26.25MM Kaprizov hurt -  Winter Classic - Chicago vs St. Louis -    St. Louis has been in 2 of last 4 - why? 16 Winter Classics, only 2 Canadian teams Teams that have never played.  Edmonton Oilers Calgary Flames Vancouver Canucks Winnipeg Jets Ottawa Senators Florida Panthers Tampa Bay Lightning New Jersey Devils Carolina Hurricanes Columbus Blue Jackets New York Islanders Colorado Avalanche Los Angeles Kings Anaheim Ducks • San Jose Sharks Guess the 5th  Going Streakin' CHI 4L, NYR, SJS 3L - Rangers in 8th in Metro - 2-8-0 in last 10, 7 pts out of playoffs, with 5 teams ahead VGK 6W, COL 4W, BUF 3W NHL Stats for 2024 - see guide 27 3+ goal comeback wins EDM 16 game winning streak  AZ move to Utah Ovechkin - 25 goals to Gretzky  - RS+PO - Gretzky 1016, Ovi 942 (-74)  82 game average goals - both at 49  Combined PO + Reg including WHA  Howe 1071G + 1518 =2589  Gretzky 1072G + 2297=3369  GP  Gretzky - 1695 + 93 = 1788 Howe - 1924 + 497 = 2421  (633 more)  Crosby - 600G, 1000A, 1600 PT, 1300 GP 19th PPG regular season - matching Gretzky record  McDavid 900 / 1000PT  Matthews - 69 G - highest since Lemieux in 95-96  McDavid and Kucherov - 4t, 5th players to get 100A in a season Most KM Skated - McDavid - 605km  (378mi) Connections  John Gee, Nora and Paul Stewart, David Huyben all gave answers.  Ideas to Improve Hockey / NHL Vary rink sizes  - length from 210' - 190'  - Boston Arena, before 1924 was 220 x 90 but in 1924 was 200 x 80 feet when Bruins moved in.  Width from 80-95 wide -  Boston garden was 191 x 84 Chicago Stadium was 185 x 85  Buffalo - 196 x 85    Player benches across, centred so no “long change”    1934-40 - Penalty shot circle - 20' Diameter 38' from goal line  1943 - Red Line added - to speed up game and reduce offside   Penalty shot for defensive zone stick infractions - hooking, tripping, slashing, cross check inside the house. Shoot from circle, puck live if a rebound. Players line up behind circles.    No crosschecks - none Eliminate standing with puck behind net to reset - defensive team must move puck - can be side to side or backward, but can not stand still waiting for line changes  Presentation - more conversations with players when prepping - similar to F1  - not scripted - just have reporter walking around, talking to equipment managers, maybe get a quick chat with a player if they happen to be standing around.  Stats done by reg+po   Ask for listener ideas - and rationale Crazy Stat DOPeS   

It's our year-end Holiday Roundtable Spectacular - featuring a look back at the year's newest additions to "what used-to-be" in professional sports (RIP MLB's "Oakland" Athletics & the NHL's Arizona Coyotes), and a predictive glimpse into what might be in store for 2025 - with two of our favorite fellow defunct sports enthusiasts: Steve Holroyd (Crossecheck, Philly Classics & Episodes 92, 109, 149, 188 & 248); and Paul Reeths (OurSportsCentral.com, StatsCrew.com & Episode 46). Buckle up for our yearly mélange of amusement and bemusement at the fringes of the pro sports establishment, as we simultaneously marvel at and lament some of the most curious events of the past year, debate who and what might be next to stumble into oblivion, and conjecture about future scenarios for the next generation of defunct and otherwise forgotten pro sports teams and leagues - including: Spring football's unified UFL Arena Football League 2.0 RIP (and Arena Football One 2025) MLB's now-Sacramento-and-someday-Las Vegas (maybe) Athletics The NHL's Utah Hockey Club (fka Arizona [née Phoenix] Coyotes, via the WHA's original Winnipeg Jets) Major League Cricket Baseball's genre-bending Savannah Bananas - and its soon-to-launch Banana Ball Championship League Indoor soccer's new Baller League Premier League Lacrosse's pivot to city teams and a new women's division The new League One Volleyball (LOVB) takes on the 2nd-year Pro Volleyball Federation (PVF) NWSL soccer PWHL hockey PLUS: Can Diamond Baseball Holdings (41 MiLB teams and counting!) be stopped? AND: Will Michael Jordan, et al. break up the NASCAR stock car monopoly? + + +  SUPPORT THE SHOW: Buy Us a Coffee: https://ko-fi.com/goodseatsstillavailable "Good Seats" Merch: https://www.teepublic.com/?ref_id=35106 SPONSOR THANKS (AND SUPPORT THE SHOW!): Royal Retros (10% off promo code: SEATS): https://www.503-sports.com?aff=2 Old School Shirts.com (10% off promo code: GOODSEATS) https://oldschoolshirts.com/goodseats Yinzylvania (20% off promo code: GOODSEATSSTILLAVAILABLE): https://yinzylvania.com/GOODSEATSSTILLAVAILABLE    FIND AND FOLLOW: Website: https://goodseatsstillavailable.com/ Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/goodseatsstillavailable.com Threads: https://www.threads.net/@goodseatsstillavailable X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/GoodSeatsStill Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goodseatsstillavailable/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoodSeatsStillAvailable/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@goodseatsstillavailable

How can businesses navigate the challenges of IT unpredictability and ensure operational continuity in an ever-evolving tech landscape? In today's episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Geoff Hixon, VP of Solutions Architecture at Lakeside Software, to explore how data-driven strategies are reshaping IT resilience and recovery. Geoff shares his experiences in supporting Lakeside customers during the CrowdStrike global IT outage, including insights into the rapid recovery process for a global airline and a multinational oil and gas company. Geoff also provides an exclusive preview of Lakeside Software's highly anticipated IT Resilience report, offering valuable insights into how organizations can transition from reactive to proactive and eventually autonomous IT management. By focusing on real-time data collection and visibility, he highlights the importance of identifying issues before they escalate and shares how enhanced data insights can prevent costly errors—like a bank's multimillion-pound oversight caused by missing a simple cable requirement. Additionally, we discuss the role of AI in the journey toward autonomous IT, where routine support tasks are automated to free up IT teams for more strategic initiatives. Geoff illustrates how Lakeside's approach helps organizations build trust in automation through step-by-step implementation and testing, paving the way for self-healing IT systems. Tune in to discover how forward-thinking organizations can harness the power of data, automation, and proactive strategies to build IT systems that are not only resilient but also prepared for the challenges of tomorrow. Wha

Happy holidays! We'll be sharing snippets from Latent Space LIVE! through the break bringing you the best of 2024! We want to express our deepest appreciation to event sponsors AWS, Daylight Computer, Thoth.ai, StrongCompute, Notable Capital, and most of all all our LS supporters who helped fund the gorgeous venue and A/V production!For NeurIPS last year we did our standard conference podcast coverage interviewing selected papers (that we have now also done for ICLR and ICML), however we felt that we could be doing more to help AI Engineers 1) get more industry-relevant content, and 2) recap 2024 year in review from experts. As a result, we organized the first Latent Space LIVE!, our first in person miniconference, at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver.The single most requested domain was computer vision, and we could think of no one better to help us recap 2024 than our friends at Roboflow, who was one of our earliest guests in 2023 and had one of this year's top episodes in 2024 again. Roboflow has since raised a $40m Series B!LinksTheir slides are here:All the trends and papers they picked:* Isaac Robinson* Sora (see our Video Diffusion pod) - extending diffusion from images to video* SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos (see our SAM2 pod) - extending prompted masks to full video object segmentation* DETR Dominancy: DETRs show Pareto improvement over YOLOs* RT-DETR: DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection* LW-DETR: A Transformer Replacement to YOLO for Real-Time Detection* D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement* Peter Robicheaux* MMVP (Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs)* * Florence 2 (Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks) * PalíGemma / PaliGemma 2* PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer* PaliGemma 2: A Family of Versatile VLMs for Transfer* AlMv2 (Multimodal Autoregressive Pre-training of Large Vision Encoders) * Vik Korrapati - MoondreamFull Talk on YouTubeWant more content like this? Like and subscribe to stay updated on our latest talks, interviews, and podcasts.Transcript/Timestamps[00:00:00] Intro[00:00:05] AI Charlie: welcome to Latent Space Live, our first mini conference held at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver. This is Charlie, your AI co host. When we were thinking of ways to add value to our academic conference coverage, we realized that there was a lack of good talks, just recapping the best of 2024, going domain by domain.[00:00:36] AI Charlie: We sent out a survey to the over 900 of you. who told us what you wanted, and then invited the best speakers in the Latent Space Network to cover each field. 200 of you joined us in person throughout the day, with over 2, 200 watching live online. Our second featured keynote is The Best of Vision 2024, with Peter Robichaud and Isaac [00:01:00] Robinson of Roboflow, with a special appearance from Vic Corrapati of Moondream.[00:01:05] AI Charlie: When we did a poll of our attendees, the highest interest domain of the year was vision. And so our first port of call was our friends at Roboflow. Joseph Nelson helped us kickstart our vision coverage in episode 7 last year, and this year came back as a guest host with Nikki Ravey of Meta to cover segment Anything 2.[00:01:25] AI Charlie: Roboflow have consistently been the leaders in open source vision models and tooling. With their SuperVision library recently eclipsing PyTorch's Vision library. And Roboflow Universe hosting hundreds of thousands of open source vision datasets and models. They have since announced a 40 million Series B led by Google Ventures.[00:01:46] AI Charlie: Woohoo.[00:01:48] Isaac's picks[00:01:48] Isaac Robinson: Hi, we're Isaac and Peter from Roboflow, and we're going to talk about the best papers of 2024 in computer vision. So, for us, we defined best as what made [00:02:00] the biggest shifts in the space. And to determine that, we looked at what are some major trends that happened and what papers most contributed to those trends.[00:02:09] Isaac Robinson: So I'm going to talk about a couple trends, Peter's going to talk about a trend, And then we're going to hand it off to Moondream. So, the trends that I'm interested in talking about are These are a major transition from models that run on per image basis to models that run using the same basic ideas on video.[00:02:28] Isaac Robinson: And then also how debtors are starting to take over the real time object detection scene from the YOLOs, which have been dominant for years.[00:02:37] Sora, OpenSora and Video Vision vs Generation[00:02:37] Isaac Robinson: So as a highlight we're going to talk about Sora, which from my perspective is the biggest paper of 2024, even though it came out in February. Is the what?[00:02:48] Isaac Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. So just it's a, SORA is just a a post. So I'm going to fill it in with details from replication efforts, including open SORA and related work, such as a stable [00:03:00] diffusion video. And then we're also going to talk about SAM2, which applies the SAM strategy to video. And then how debtors, These are the improvements in 2024 to debtors that are making them a Pareto improvement to YOLO based models.[00:03:15] Isaac Robinson: So to start this off, we're going to talk about the state of the art of video generation at the end of 2023, MagVIT MagVIT is a discrete token, video tokenizer akin to VQ, GAN, but applied to video sequences. And it actually outperforms state of the art handcrafted video compression frameworks.[00:03:38] Isaac Robinson: In terms of the bit rate versus human preference for quality and videos generated by autoregressing on these discrete tokens generate some pretty nice stuff, but up to like five seconds length and, you know, not super detailed. And then suddenly a few months later we have this, which when I saw it, it was totally mind blowing to me.[00:03:59] Isaac Robinson: 1080p, [00:04:00] a whole minute long. We've got light reflecting in puddles. That's reflective. Reminds me of those RTX demonstrations for next generation video games, such as Cyberpunk, but with better graphics. You can see some issues in the background if you look closely, but they're kind of, as with a lot of these models, the issues tend to be things that people aren't going to pay attention to unless they're looking for.[00:04:24] Isaac Robinson: In the same way that like six fingers on a hand. You're not going to notice is a giveaway unless you're looking for it. So yeah, as we said, SORA does not have a paper. So we're going to be filling it in with context from the rest of the computer vision scene attempting to replicate these efforts. So the first step, you have an LLM caption, a huge amount of videos.[00:04:48] Isaac Robinson: This, this is a trick that they introduced in Dolly 3, where they train a image captioning model to just generate very high quality captions for a huge corpus and then train a diffusion model [00:05:00] on that. Their Sora and their application efforts also show a bunch of other steps that are necessary for good video generation.[00:05:09] Isaac Robinson: Including filtering by aesthetic score and filtering by making sure the videos have enough motion. So they're not just like kind of the generators not learning to just generate static frames. So. Then we encode our video into a series of space time latents. Once again, SORA, very sparse in details.[00:05:29] Isaac Robinson: So the replication related works, OpenSORA actually uses a MAG VIT V2 itself to do this, but swapping out the discretization step with a classic VAE autoencoder framework. They show that there's a lot of benefit from getting the temporal compression, which makes a lot of sense as the Each sequential frames and videos have mostly redundant information.[00:05:53] Isaac Robinson: So by compressing against, compressing in the temporal space, you allow the latent to hold [00:06:00] a lot more semantic information while avoiding that duplicate. So, we've got our spacetime latents. Possibly via, there's some 3D VAE, presumably a MAG VATV2 and then you throw it into a diffusion transformer.[00:06:19] Isaac Robinson: So I think it's personally interesting to note that OpenSORA is using a MAG VATV2, which originally used an autoregressive transformer decoder to model the latent space, but is now using a diffusion diffusion transformer. So it's still a transformer happening. Just the question is like, is it?[00:06:37] Isaac Robinson: Parameterizing the stochastic differential equation is, or parameterizing a conditional distribution via autoregression. It's also it's also worth noting that most diffusion models today, the, the very high performance ones are switching away from the classic, like DDPM denoising diffusion probability modeling framework to rectified flows.[00:06:57] Isaac Robinson: Rectified flows have a very interesting property that as [00:07:00] they converge, they actually get closer to being able to be sampled with a single step. Which means that in practice, you can actually generate high quality samples much faster. Major problem of DDPM and related models for the past four years is just that they require many, many steps to generate high quality samples.[00:07:22] Isaac Robinson: So, and naturally, the third step is throwing lots of compute at the problem. So I didn't, I never figured out how to manage to get this video to loop, but we see very little compute, medium compute, lots of compute. This is so interesting because the the original diffusion transformer paper from Facebook actually showed that, in fact, the specific hyperparameters of the transformer didn't really matter that much.[00:07:48] Isaac Robinson: What mattered was that you were just increasing the amount of compute that the model had. So, I love how in the, once again, little blog posts, they don't even talk about [00:08:00] like the specific hyperparameters. They say, we're using a diffusion transformer, and we're just throwing more compute at it, and this is what happens.[00:08:08] Isaac Robinson: OpenSora shows similar results. The primary issue I think here is that no one else has 32x compute budget. So we end up with these we end up in the middle of the domain and most of the related work, which is still super, super cool. It's just a little disappointing considering the context. So I think this is a beautiful extension of the framework that was introduced in 22 and 23 for these very high quality per image generation and then extending that to videos.[00:08:39] Isaac Robinson: It's awesome. And it's GA as of Monday, except no one can seem to get access to it because they keep shutting down the login.[00:08:46] SAM and SAM2[00:08:46] Isaac Robinson: The next, so next paper I wanted to talk about is SAM. So we at Roboflow allow users to label data and train models on that data. Sam, for us, has saved our users 75 years of [00:09:00] labeling time.[00:09:00] Isaac Robinson: We are the, to the best of my knowledge, the largest SAM API that exists. We also, SAM also allows us to have our users train just pure bounding box regression models and use those to generate high quality masks which has the great side effect of requiring less training data to have a meaningful convergence.[00:09:20] Isaac Robinson: So most people are data limited in the real world. So anything that requires less data to get to a useful thing is that super useful. Most of our users actually run their object per frame object detectors on every frame in a video, or maybe not most, but many, many. And so Sam follows into this category of taking, Sam 2 falls into this category of taking something that really really works and applying it to a video which has the wonderful benefit of being plug and play with most of our Many of our users use cases.[00:09:53] Isaac Robinson: We're, we're still building out a sufficiently mature pipeline to take advantage of that, but it's, it's in the works. [00:10:00] So here we've got a great example. We can click on cells and then follow them. You even notice the cell goes away and comes back and we can still keep track of it which is very challenging for existing object trackers.[00:10:14] Isaac Robinson: High level overview of how SAM2 works. We there's a simple pipeline here where we can give, provide some type of prompt and it fills out the rest of the likely masks for that object throughout the rest of the video. So here we're giving a bounding box in the first frame, a set of positive negative points, or even just a simple mask.[00:10:36] Isaac Robinson: I'm going to assume people are somewhat familiar with SAM. So I'm going to just give a high level overview of how SAM works. You have an image encoder that runs on every frame. SAM two can be used on a single image, in which case the only difference between SAM two and SAM is that image encoder, which Sam used a standard VIT [00:11:00] Sam two replaced that with a hara hierarchical encoder, which gets approximately the same results, but leads to a six times faster inference, which is.[00:11:11] Isaac Robinson: Excellent, especially considering how in a trend of 23 was replacing the VAT with more efficient backbones. In the case where you're doing video segmentation, the difference is that you actually create a memory bank and you cross attend the features from the image encoder based on the memory bank.[00:11:31] Isaac Robinson: So the feature set that is created is essentially well, I'll go more into it in a couple of slides, but we take the features from the past couple frames, plus a set of object pointers and the set of prompts and use that to generate our new masks. Then we then fuse the new masks for this frame with the.[00:11:57] Isaac Robinson: Image features and add that to the memory bank. [00:12:00] It's, well, I'll say more in a minute. The just like SAM, the SAM2 actually uses a data engine to create its data set in that people are, they assembled a huge amount of reference data, used people to label some of it and train the model used the model to label more of it and asked people to refine the predictions of the model.[00:12:20] Isaac Robinson: And then ultimately the data set is just created from the engine Final output of the model on the reference data. It's very interesting. This paradigm is so interesting to me because it unifies a model in a dataset in a way that is very unique. It seems unlikely that another model could come in and have such a tight.[00:12:37] Isaac Robinson: So brief overview of how the memory bank works, the paper did not have a great visual, so I'm just, I'm going to fill in a bit more. So we take the last couple of frames from our video. And we take the last couple of frames from our video attend that, along with the set of prompts that we provided, they could come from the future, [00:13:00] they could come from anywhere in the video, as well as reference object pointers, saying, by the way, here's what we've found so far attending to the last few frames has the interesting benefit of allowing it to model complex object motion without actually[00:13:18] Isaac Robinson: By limiting the amount of frames that you attend to, you manage to keep the model running in real time. This is such an interesting topic for me because one would assume that attending to all of the frames is super essential, or having some type of summarization of all the frames is super essential for high performance.[00:13:35] Isaac Robinson: But we see in their later ablation that that actually is not the case. So here, just to make sure that there is some benchmarking happening, we just compared to some of the stuff that's came out prior, and indeed the SAM2 strategy does improve on the state of the art. This ablation deep in their dependencies was super interesting to me.[00:13:59] Isaac Robinson: [00:14:00] We see in section C, the number of memories. One would assume that increasing the count of memories would meaningfully increase performance. And we see that it has some impact, but not the type that you'd expect. And that it meaningfully decreases speed, which justifies, in my mind, just having this FIFO queue of memories.[00:14:20] Isaac Robinson: Although in the future, I'm super interested to see A more dedicated summarization of all of the last video, not just a stacking of the last frames. So that another extension of beautiful per frame work into the video domain.[00:14:42] Realtime detection: DETRs > YOLO[00:14:42] Isaac Robinson: The next trend I'm interested in talking about is this interesting at RoboFlow, we're super interested in training real time object detectors.[00:14:50] Isaac Robinson: Those are bread and butter. And so we're doing a lot to keep track of what is actually happening in that space. We are finally starting to see something change. So, [00:15:00] for years, YOLOs have been the dominant way of doing real time object detection, and we can see here that they've essentially stagnated.[00:15:08] Isaac Robinson: The performance between 10 and 11 is not meaningfully different, at least, you know, in this type of high level chart. And even from the last couple series, there's not. A major change so YOLOs have hit a plateau, debtors have not. So we can look here and see the YOLO series has this plateau. And then these RT debtor, LW debtor, and Define have meaningfully changed that plateau so that in fact, the best Define models are plus 4.[00:15:43] Isaac Robinson: 6 AP on Cocoa at the same latency. So three major steps to accomplish this. The first RT deditor, which is technically a 2023 paper preprint, but published officially in 24, so I'm going to include that. I hope that's okay. [00:16:00] That is showed that RT deditor showed that we could actually match or out speed YOLOs.[00:16:04] Isaac Robinson: And then LWdebtor showed that pre training is hugely effective on debtors and much less so on YOLOs. And then DeFine added the types of bells and whistles that we expect from these types, this, this arena. So the major improvements that RTdebtor shows was Taking the multi scale features that debtors typically pass into their encoder and decoupling them into a much more efficient transformer encoder.[00:16:30] Isaac Robinson: The transformer is of course, quadratic complexity. So decreasing the amount of stuff that you pass in at once is super helpful for increasing your runtime or increasing your throughput. So that change basically brought us up to yellow speed and then they do a hardcore analysis on. Benchmarking YOLOs, including the NMS step.[00:16:54] Isaac Robinson: Once you once you include the NMS in the latency calculation, you see that in fact, these debtors [00:17:00] are outperforming, at least this time, the the, the YOLOs that existed. Then LW debtor goes in and suggests that in fact, the frame, the huge boost here is from pre training. So, this is the define line, and this is the define line without pre training.[00:17:19] Isaac Robinson: It's within range, it's still an improvement over the YOLOs, but Really huge boost comes from the benefit of pre training. When YOLOx came out in 2021, they showed that they got much better results by having a much, much longer training time, but they found that when they did that, they actually did not benefit from pre training.[00:17:40] Isaac Robinson: So, you see in this graph from LWdebtor, in fact, YOLOs do have a real benefit from pre training, but it goes away as we increase the training time. Then, the debtors converge much faster. LWdebtor trains for only 50 epochs, RTdebtor is 60 epochs. So, one could assume that, in fact, [00:18:00] the entire extra gain from pre training is that you're not destroying your original weights.[00:18:06] Isaac Robinson: By relying on this long training cycle. And then LWdebtor also shows superior performance to our favorite data set, Roboflow 100 which means that they do better on the real world, not just on Cocoa. Then Define throws all the bells and whistles at it. Yellow models tend to have a lot of very specific complicated loss functions.[00:18:26] Isaac Robinson: This Define brings that into the debtor world and shows consistent improvement on a variety of debtor based frameworks. So bring these all together and we see that suddenly we have almost 60 AP on Cocoa while running in like 10 milliseconds. Huge, huge stuff. So we're spending a lot of time trying to build models that work better with less data and debtors are clearly becoming a promising step in that direction.[00:18:56] Isaac Robinson: The, what we're interested in seeing [00:19:00] from the debtors in this, this trend to next is. Codetter and the models that are currently sitting on the top of the leaderboard for large scale inference scale really well as you switch out the backbone. We're very interested in seeing and having people publish a paper, potentially us, on what happens if you take these real time ones and then throw a Swingy at it.[00:19:23] Isaac Robinson: Like, do we have a Pareto curve that extends from the real time domain all the way up to the super, super slow but high performance domain? We also want to see people benchmarking in RF100 more, because that type of data is what's relevant for most users. And we want to see more pre training, because pre training works now.[00:19:43] Isaac Robinson: It's super cool.[00:19:48] Peter's Picks[00:19:48] Peter Robicheaux: Alright, so, yeah, so in that theme one of the big things that we're focusing on is how do we get more out of our pre trained models. And one of the lenses to look at this is through sort of [00:20:00] this, this new requirement for like, how Fine grained visual details and your representations that are extracted from your foundation model.[00:20:08] Peter Robicheaux: So it's sort of a hook for this Oh, yeah, this is just a list of all the the papers that I'm going to mention I just want to make sure I set an actual paper so you can find it later[00:20:18] MMVP (Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs)[00:20:18] Peter Robicheaux: Yeah, so sort of the big hook here is that I make the claim that LLMs can't see if you go to if you go to Claude or ChatGPT you ask it to see this Watch and tell me what time it is, it fails, right?[00:20:34] Peter Robicheaux: And so you could say, like, maybe, maybe the Like, this is, like, a very classic test of an LLM, but you could say, Okay, maybe this, this image is, like, too zoomed out, And it just, like, it'll do better if we increase the resolution, And it has easier time finding these fine grained features, Like, where the watch hands are pointing.[00:20:53] Peter Robicheaux: Nodice. And you can say, okay, well, maybe the model just doesn't know how to tell time from knowing the position of the hands. But if you actually prompt [00:21:00] it textually, it's very easy for it to tell the time. So this to me is proof that these LLMs literally cannot see the position of the watch hands and it can't see those details.[00:21:08] Peter Robicheaux: So the question is sort of why? And for you anthropic heads out there, cloud fails too. So the, the, my first pick for best paper of 2024 Envision is this MMVP paper, which tries to investigate the Why do LLMs not have the ability to see fine grained details? And so, for instance, it comes up with a lot of images like this, where you ask it a question that seems very visually apparent to us, like, which way is the school bus facing?[00:21:32] Peter Robicheaux: And it gets it wrong, and then, of course, it makes up details to support its wrong claim. And so, the process by which it finds these images is sort of contained in its hypothesis for why it can't. See these details. So it hypothesizes that models that have been initialized with, with Clip as their vision encoder, they don't have fine grained details and the, the features extracted using Clip because Clip sort of doesn't need to find these fine grained [00:22:00] details to do its job correctly, which is just to match captions and images, right?[00:22:04] Peter Robicheaux: And sort of at a high level, even if ChatGPT wasn't initialized with Clip and wasn't trained contrastively at all. The vision encoder wasn't trained contrastively at all. Still, in order to do its job of capturing the image it could do a pretty good job without actually finding the exact position of all the objects and visual features in the image, right?[00:22:21] Peter Robicheaux: So This paper finds a set of difficult images for these types of models. And the way it does it is it looks for embeddings that are similar in clip space, but far in DynaV2 space. So DynaV2 is a foundation model that was trained self supervised purely on image data. And it kind of uses like some complex student teacher framework, but essentially, and like, it patches out like certain areas of the image or like crops with certain areas of the image and tries to make sure that those have consistent representations, which is a way for it to learn very fine grained visual features.[00:22:54] Peter Robicheaux: And so if you take things that are very close in clip space and very far in DynaV2 space, you get a set of images [00:23:00] that Basically, pairs of images that are hard for a chat GPT and other big language models to distinguish. So, if you then ask it questions about this image, well, as you can see from this chart, it's going to answer the same way for both images, right?[00:23:14] Peter Robicheaux: Because to, to, from the perspective of the vision encoder, they're the same image. And so if you ask a question like, how many eyes does this animal have? It answers the same for both. And like all these other models, including Lava do the same thing, right? And so this is the benchmark that they create, which is like finding clip, like clip line pairs, which is pairs of images that are similar in clip space and creating a data set of multiple choice questions based off of those.[00:23:39] Peter Robicheaux: And so how do these models do? Well, really bad. Lava, I think, So, so, chat2BT and Jim and I do a little bit better than random guessing, but, like, half of the performance of humans who find these problems to be very easy. Lava is, interestingly, extremely negatively correlated with this dataset. It does much, much, much, much worse [00:24:00] than random guessing, which means that this process has done a very good job of identifying hard images for, for Lava, specifically.[00:24:07] Peter Robicheaux: And that's because Lava is basically not trained for very long and is initialized from Clip, and so You would expect it to do poorly on this dataset. So, one of the proposed solutions that this paper attempts is by basically saying, Okay, well if clip features aren't enough, What if we train the visual encoder of the language model also on dyno features?[00:24:27] Peter Robicheaux: And so it, it proposes two different ways of doing this. One, additively which is basically interpolating between the two features, and then one is interleaving, which is just kind of like training one on the combination of both features. So there's this really interesting trend when you do the additive mixture of features.[00:24:45] Peter Robicheaux: So zero is all clip features and one is all DynaV2 features. So. It, as you, so I think it's helpful to look at the right most chart first, which is as you increase the number of DynaV2 features, your model does worse and worse and [00:25:00] worse on the actual language modeling task. And that's because DynaV2 features were trained completely from a self supervised manner and completely in image space.[00:25:08] Peter Robicheaux: It knows nothing about text. These features aren't really compatible with these text models. And so you can train an adapter all you want, but it seems that it's in such an alien language that it's like a very hard optimization for this. These models to solve. And so that kind of supports what's happening on the left, which is that, yeah, it gets better at answering these questions if as you include more dyna V two features up to a point, but then you, when you oversaturate, it completely loses its ability to like.[00:25:36] Peter Robicheaux: Answer language and do language tasks. So you can also see with the interleaving, like they essentially double the number of tokens that are going into these models and just train on both, and it still doesn't really solve the MMVP task. It gets Lava 1. 5 above random guessing by a little bit, but it's still not close to ChachiPT or, you know, Any like human performance, obviously.[00:25:59] Peter Robicheaux: [00:26:00] So clearly this proposed solution of just using DynaV2 features directly, isn't going to work. And basically what that means is that as a as a vision foundation model, DynaV2 is going to be insufficient for language tasks, right?[00:26:14] Florence 2 (Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks)[00:26:14] Peter Robicheaux: So my next pick for best paper of 2024 would be Florence 2, which tries to solve this problem by incorporating not only This dimension of spatial hierarchy, which is to say pixel level understanding, but also in making sure to include what they call semantic granularity, which ends up, the goal is basically to have features that are sufficient for finding objects in the image, so they're, they're, they have enough pixel information, but also can be talked about and can be reasoned about.[00:26:44] Peter Robicheaux: And that's on the semantic granularity axis. So here's an example of basically three different paradigms of labeling that they do. So they, they create a big dataset. One is text, which is just captioning. And you would expect a model that's trained [00:27:00] only on captioning to have similar performance like chat2BT and like not have spatial hierarchy, not have features that are meaningful at the pixel level.[00:27:08] Peter Robicheaux: And so they add another type, which is region text pairs, which is essentially either classifying a region or You're doing object detection or doing instance segmentation on that region or captioning that region. And then they have text phrased region annotations, which is essentially a triple. And basically, not only do you have a region that you've described, you also find it's like, It's placed in a descriptive paragraph about the image, which is basically trying to introduce even more like semantic understanding of these regions.[00:27:39] Peter Robicheaux: And so like, for instance, if you're saying a woman riding on the road, right, you have to know what a woman is and what the road is and that she's on top of it. And that's, that's basically composing a bunch of objects in this visual space, but also thinking about it semantically, right? And so the way that they do this is they take basically they just dump Features from a vision encoder [00:28:00] straight into a encoder decoder transformer.[00:28:03] Peter Robicheaux: And then they train a bunch of different tasks like object detection and so on as a language task. And I think that's one of the big things that we saw in 2024 is these, these vision language models operating in, on pixel space linguistically. So they introduced a bunch of new tokens to point to locations and[00:28:22] Peter Robicheaux: So how does it work? How does it actually do? We can see if you look at the graph on the right, which is using the, the Dino, the the Dino framework your, your pre trained Florence 2 models transfer very, very well. They get 60%, 60 percent map on Cocoa, which is like approaching state of the art and they train[00:28:42] Vik Korrapati: with, and they[00:28:43] Peter Robicheaux: train with a much more more efficiently.[00:28:47] Peter Robicheaux: So they, they converge a lot faster, which both of these things are pointing to the fact that they're actually leveraging their pre trained weights effectively. So where is it falling short? So these models, I forgot to mention, Florence is a 0. 2 [00:29:00] billion and a 0. 7 billion parameter count. So they're very, very small in terms of being a language model.[00:29:05] Peter Robicheaux: And I think that. This framework, you can see saturation. So, what this graph is showing is that if you train a Florence 2 model purely on the image level and region level annotations and not including the pixel level annotations, like this, segmentation, it actually performs better as an object detector.[00:29:25] Peter Robicheaux: And what that means is that it's not able to actually learn all the visual tasks that it's trying to learn because it doesn't have enough capacity.[00:29:32] PalíGemma / PaliGemma 2[00:29:32] Peter Robicheaux: So I'd like to see this paper explore larger model sizes, which brings us to our next big paper of 2024 or two papers. So PolyGemma came out earlier this year.[00:29:42] Peter Robicheaux: PolyGemma 2 was released, I think like a week or two ago. Oh, I forgot to mention, you can actually train You can, like, label text datasets on RoboFlow and you can train a Florence 2 model and you can actually train a PolyGemma 2 model on RoboFlow, which we got into the platform within, like, 14 hours of release, which I was really excited about.[00:29:59] Peter Robicheaux: So, anyway, so [00:30:00] PolyGemma 2, so PolyGemma is essentially doing the same thing, but instead of doing an encoder decoder, it just dumps everything into a decoder only transformer model. But it also introduced the concept of location tokens to point to objects in pixel space. PolyGemma 2, so PolyGemma uses Gemma as the language encoder, and it uses Gemma2B.[00:30:17] Peter Robicheaux: PolyGemma 2 introduces using multiple different sizes of language encoders. So, the way that they sort of get around having to do encoder decoder is they use the concept of prefix loss. Which basically means that when it's generating, tokens autoregressively, it's all those tokens in the prefix, which is like the image that it's looking at and like a description of the task that it's trying to do.[00:30:41] Peter Robicheaux: They're attending to each other fully, full attention. Which means that, you know, it can sort of. Find high level it's easier for the, the prefix to color, to color the output of the suffix and also to just find like features easily. So this is sort of [00:31:00] an example of like one of the tasks that was trained on, which is like, you describe the task in English and then you give it all these, like, You're asking for it to segment these two classes of objects, and then it finds, like, their locations using these tokens, and it finds their masks using some encoding of the masks into tokens.[00:31:24] Peter Robicheaux: And, yeah, so, one of my critiques, I guess, of PolyGemma 1, at least, is that You find that performance saturates as a pre trained model after only 300 million examples seen. So, what this graph is representing is each blue dot is a performance on some downstream task. And you can see that after seeing 300 million examples, It sort of does equally well on all of the downtrend tasks that they tried it on, which was a lot as 1 billion examples, which to me also kind of suggests a lack of capacity for this model.[00:31:58] Peter Robicheaux: PolyGemma2, [00:32:00] you can see the results on object detection. So these were transferred to to Coco. And you can see that this sort of also points to an increase in capacity being helpful to the model. You can see as. Both the resolution increases, and the parameter count of the language model increases, performance increases.[00:32:16] Peter Robicheaux: So resolution makes sense, obviously, it helps to find small images, or small objects in the image. But it also makes sense for another reason, which is that it kind of gives the model a thinking register, and it gives it more tokens to, like, process when making its predictions. But yeah, you could, you could say, oh, 43.[00:32:30] Peter Robicheaux: 6, that's not that great, like Florence 2 got 60. But this is not Training a dino or a debtor on top of this language or this image encoder. It's doing the raw language modeling task on Cocoa. So it doesn't have any of the bells and whistles. It doesn't have any of the fancy losses. It doesn't even have bipartite graph matching or anything like that.[00:32:52] Peter Robicheaux: Okay, the big result and one of the reasons that I was really excited about this paper is that they blow everything else away [00:33:00] on MMVP. I mean, 47. 3, sure, that's nowhere near human accuracy, which, again, is 94%, but for a, you know, a 2 billion language, 2 billion parameter language model to be chat2BT, that's quite the achievement.[00:33:12] Peter Robicheaux: And that sort of brings us to our final pick for paper of the year, which is AIMV2. So, AIMV2 sort of says, okay, Maybe this language model, like, maybe coming up with all these specific annotations to find features and with high fidelity and pixel space isn't actually necessary. And we can come up with an even simpler, more beautiful idea for combining you know, image tokens and pixel tokens in a way that's interfaceable for language tasks.[00:33:44] Peter Robicheaux: And this is nice because it can scale, you can come up with lots more data if you don't have to come up with all these annotations, right? So the way that it works. is it does something very, very similar to PolyGemo, where you have a vision encoder that dumps image tokens into a decoder only transformer.[00:33:59] Peter Robicheaux: But [00:34:00] the interesting thing is that it also autoregressively tries to learn the mean squared error of the image tokens. So instead of having to come up with fancy object detection or semantic, or segment, or segmentation labels, you can just try to reconstruct the image and have it learn fine grained features that way.[00:34:16] Peter Robicheaux: And it does this in kind of, I think, a beautiful way that's kind of compatible with the PolyGemma line of thinking, which is randomly sampling a prefix line of thinking Prefix length and using only this number of image tokens as the prefix. And so doing a similar thing with the causal. So the causal with prefix is the, the attention mask on the right.[00:34:35] Peter Robicheaux: So it's doing full block attention with some randomly sampled number of image tokens to then reconstruct the rest of the image and the downstream caption for that image. And so, This is the dataset that they train on. It's image or internet scale data, very high quality data created by the data filtering networks paper, essentially which is maybe The best clip data that exists.[00:34:59] Peter Robicheaux: [00:35:00] And we can see that this is finally a model that doesn't saturate. It's even at the highest parameter count, it's, it appears to be, oh, at the highest parameter account, it appears to be improving in performance with more and more samples seen. And so you can sort of think that. You know, if we just keep bumping the parameter count and increasing the example scene, which is the, the, the line of thinking for language models, then it'll keep getting better.[00:35:27] Peter Robicheaux: So how does it actually do at finding, oh, it also improves with resolution, which you would expect for a model that This is the ImageNet classification accuracy, but yeah, it does better if you increase the resolution, which means that it's actually leveraging and finding fine grained visual features.[00:35:44] Peter Robicheaux: And so how does that actually do compared to CLIP on Cocoa? Well, you can see that if you slap a transformer detection head on it, Entry now in Cocoa, it's just 60. 2, which is also within spitting distance of Soda, which means that it does a very good job of [00:36:00] finding visual features, but you could say, okay, well, wait a second.[00:36:03] Peter Robicheaux: Clip got to 59. 1, so. Like, how does this prove your claim at all? Because doesn't that mean like clip, which is known to be clip blind and do badly on MMVP, it's able to achieve a very high performance on fine, on this fine grained visual features task of object detection, well, they train on like, Tons of data.[00:36:24] Peter Robicheaux: They train on like objects, 365, Cocoa, Flickr and everything else. And so I think that this benchmark doesn't do a great job of selling how good of a pre trained model MV2 is. And we would like to see the performance on fewer data as examples and not trained to convergence on object detection. So seeing it in the real world on like a dataset, like RoboFlow 100, I think would be quite interesting.[00:36:48] Peter Robicheaux: And our, our, I guess our final, final pick for paper of 2024 would be Moondream. So introducing Vic to talk about that.[00:36:54] swyx: But overall, that was exactly what I was looking for. Like best of 2024, an amazing job. Yeah, you can, [00:37:00] if there's any other questions while Vic gets set up, like vision stuff,[00:37:07] swyx: yeah,[00:37:11] swyx: Vic, go ahead. Hi,[00:37:13] Vik Korrapati / Moondream[00:37:13] question: well, while we're getting set up, hi, over here, thanks for the really awesome talk. One of the things that's been weird and surprising is that the foundation model companies Even these MLMs, they're just like worse than RT Tether at detection still. Like, if you wanted to pay a bunch of money to auto label your detection dataset, If you gave it to OpenAI or Cloud, that would be like a big waste.[00:37:37] question: So I'm curious, just like, even Pali Gemma 2, like is worse. So, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on like, how come, Nobody's cracked the code on like a generalist that really you know, beats a specialist model in computer vision like they have in in LLM land.[00:38:00][00:38:01] Isaac Robinson: Okay. It's a very, very interesting question. I think it depends on the specific domain. For image classification, it's basically there. In the, in AIMv2 showed, a simple attentional probe on the pre trained features gets like 90%, which is as well as anyone does. The, the, the, the bigger question, like, why isn't it transferring to object detection, especially like real time object detection.[00:38:25] Isaac Robinson: I think, in my mind, there are two answers. One is, object detection is really, really, really the architectures are super domain specific. You know, we see these, all these super, super complicated things, and it's not super easy to, to, to build something that just transfers naturally like that, whereas image classification, you know, clip pre training transfers super, super quickly.[00:38:48] Isaac Robinson: And the other thing is, until recently, the real time object detectors didn't even really benefit from pre training. Like, you see the YOLOs that are like, essentially saturated, showing very little [00:39:00] difference with pre training improvements, with using pre trained model at all. It's not surprising, necessarily, that People aren't looking at the effects of better and better pre training on real time detection.[00:39:12] Isaac Robinson: Maybe that'll change in the next year. Does that answer your question?[00:39:17] Peter Robicheaux: Can you guys hear me? Yeah, one thing I want to add is just like, or just to summarize, basically, is that like, Until 2024, you know, we haven't really seen a combination of transformer based object detectors and fancy losses, and PolyGemma suffers from the same problem, which is basically to say that these ResNet, or like the convolutional models, they have all these, like, extreme optimizations for doing object detection, but essentially, I think it's kind of been shown now that convolution models like just don't benefit from pre training and just don't like have the level of intelligence of transformer models.[00:39:56] swyx: Awesome. Hi,[00:39:59] Vik Korrapati: can [00:40:00] you hear me?[00:40:01] swyx: Cool. I hear you. See you. Are you sharing your screen?[00:40:04] Vik Korrapati: Hi. Might have forgotten to do that. Let me do[00:40:07] swyx: that. Sorry, should have done[00:40:08] Vik Korrapati: that.[00:40:17] swyx: Here's your screen. Oh, classic. You might have to quit zoom and restart. What? It's fine. We have a capture of your screen.[00:40:34] swyx: So let's get to it.[00:40:35] Vik Korrapati: Okay, easy enough.[00:40:49] Vik Korrapati: All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Vic. I've been working on Moondream for almost a year now. Like Shawn mentioned, I just went and looked and it turns out the first version I released December [00:41:00] 29, 2023. It's been a fascinating journey. So Moonbeam started off as a tiny vision language model. Since then, we've expanded scope a little bit to also try and build some tooling, client libraries, et cetera, to help people really deploy it.[00:41:13] Vik Korrapati: Unlike traditional large models that are focused at assistant type use cases, we're laser focused on building capabilities that developers can, sorry, it's yeah, we're basically focused on building capabilities that developers can use to build vision applications that can run anywhere. So, in a lot of cases for vision more so than for text, you really care about being able to run on the edge, run in real time, etc.[00:41:40] Vik Korrapati: So That's really important. We have we have different output modalities that we support. There's query where you can ask general English questions about an image and get back human like answers. There's captioning, which a lot of our users use for generating synthetic datasets to then train diffusion models and whatnot.[00:41:57] Vik Korrapati: We've done a lot of work to minimize those sessions there. [00:42:00] So that's. Use lot. We have open vocabulary object detection built in similar to a couple of more recent models like Palagem, et cetera, where rather than having to train a dedicated model, you can just say show me soccer balls in this image or show me if there are any deer in this image, it'll detect it.[00:42:14] Vik Korrapati: More recently, earlier this month, we released pointing capability where if all you're interested in is the center of an object you can just ask it to point out where that is. This is very useful when you're doing, you know, I automation type stuff. Let's see, LA we, we have two models out right now.[00:42:33] Vik Korrapati: There's a general purpose to be para model, which runs fair. Like it's, it's it's fine if you're running on server. It's good for our local Amma desktop friends and it can run on flagship, flagship mobile phones, but it never. so much for joining us today, and we'll see you in the [00:43:00] next one. Less memory even with our not yet fully optimized inference client.[00:43:06] Vik Korrapati: So the way we built our 0. 5b model was to start with the 2 billion parameter model and prune it while doing continual training to retain performance. We, our objective during the pruning was to preserve accuracy across a broad set of benchmarks. So the way we went about it was to estimate the importance of different components of the model, like attention heads, channels MLP rows and whatnot using basically a technique based on the gradient.[00:43:37] Vik Korrapati: I'm not sure how much people want to know details. We'll be writing a paper about this, but feel free to grab me if you have more questions. Then we iteratively prune a small chunk that will minimize loss and performance retrain the model to recover performance and bring it back. The 0. 5b we released is more of a proof of concept that this is possible.[00:43:54] Vik Korrapati: I think the thing that's really exciting about this is it makes it possible for for developers to build using the 2B param [00:44:00] model and just explore, build their application, and then once they're ready to deploy figure out what exactly they need out of the model and prune those capabilities into a smaller form factor that makes sense for their deployment target.[00:44:12] Vik Korrapati: So yeah, very excited about that. Let me talk to you folks a little bit about another problem I've been working on recently, which is similar to the clocks example we've been talking about. We had a customer reach out who was talking about, like, who had a bunch of gauges out in the field. This is very common in manufacturing and oil and gas, where you have a bunch of analog devices that you need to monitor.[00:44:34] Vik Korrapati: It's expensive to. And I was like, okay, let's have humans look at that and monitor stuff and make sure that the system gets shut down when the temperature goes over 80 or something. So I was like, yeah, this seems easy enough. Happy to, happy to help you distill that. Let's, let's get it going. Turns out our model couldn't do it at all.[00:44:51] Vik Korrapati: I went and looked at other open source models to see if I could just generate a bunch of data and learn from that. Did not work either. So I was like, let's look at what the folks with [00:45:00] hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap have to offer. And yeah, that doesn't work either. My hypothesis is that like the, the way these models are trained are using a large amount of image text data scraped from the internet.[00:45:15] Vik Korrapati: And that can be biased. In the case of gauges, most gauge images aren't gauges in the wild, they're product images. Detail images like these, where it's always set to zero. It's paired with an alt text that says something like GIVTO, pressure sensor, PSI, zero to 30 or something. And so the models are fairly good at picking up those details.[00:45:35] Vik Korrapati: It'll tell you that it's a pressure gauge. It'll tell you what the brand is, but it doesn't really learn to pay attention to the needle over there. And so, yeah, that's a gap we need to address. So naturally my mind goes to like, let's use synthetic data to, Solve this problem. That works, but it's problematic because it turned out we needed millions of synthetic gauge images to get to reasonable performance.[00:45:57] Vik Korrapati: And thinking about it, reading a gauge is like [00:46:00] not a one, like it's not a zero short process in our minds, right? Like if you had to tell me the reading in Celsius for this, Real world gauge. There's two dials on there. So first you have to figure out which one you have to be paying attention to, like the inner one or the outer one.[00:46:14] Vik Korrapati: You look at the tip of the needle, you look at what labels it's between, and you count how many and do some math to figure out what that probably is. So what happens if we just add that as a Chain of thought to give the model better understanding of the different sub, to allow the model to better learn the subtasks it needs to perform to accomplish this goal.[00:46:37] Vik Korrapati: So you can see in this example, this was actually generated by the latest version of our model. It's like, okay, Celsius is the inner scale. It's between 50 and 60. There's 10 ticks. So the second tick, it's a little debatable here, like there's a weird shadow situation going on, the dial is off, so I don't know what the ground truth is, but it works okay.[00:46:57] Vik Korrapati: There's points on there that are, the points [00:47:00] over there are actually grounded. I don't know if this is easy to see, but when I click on those, there's a little red dot that moves around on the image. The model actually has to predict where this points are, I was already trying to do this with bounding boxes, but then Malmo came out with pointing capabilities.[00:47:15] Vik Korrapati: And it's like pointing is a much better paradigm to to represent this. We see pretty good results. This one's actually for clock reading. I couldn't find our chart for gauge reading at the last minute. So the light. Blue chart is with our rounded chain of thought. This measures, we have, we built a clock reading benchmark about 500 images.[00:47:37] Vik Korrapati: This measures accuracy on that. You can see it's a lot more sample efficient when you're using the chain of thought to model. Another big benefit from this approach is like, you can kind of understand how the model is. it and how it's failing. So in this example, the actual correct reading is 54 Celsius, the model output [00:48:00] 56, not too bad but you can actually go and see where it messed up. Like it got a lot of these right, except instead of saying it was on the 7th tick, it actually predicted that it was the 8th tick and that's why it went with 56.[00:48:14] Vik Korrapati: So now that you know that this. Failing in this way, you can adjust how you're doing the chain of thought to maybe say like, actually count out each tick from 40, instead of just trying to say it's the eighth tick. Or you might say like, okay, I see that there's that middle thing, I'll count from there instead of all the way from 40.[00:48:31] Vik Korrapati: So helps a ton. The other thing I'm excited about is a few short prompting or test time training with this. Like if a customer has a specific gauge that like we're seeing minor errors on, they can give us a couple of examples where like, if it's miss detecting the. Needle, they can go in and correct that in the chain of thought.[00:48:49] Vik Korrapati: And hopefully that works the next time. Now, exciting approach, we only apply it to clocks and gauges. The real question is, is it going to generalize? Probably, like, there's some science [00:49:00] from text models that when you train on a broad number of tasks, it does generalize. And I'm seeing some science with our model as well.[00:49:05] Vik Korrapati: So, in addition to the image based chain of thought stuff, I also added some spelling based chain of thought to help it understand better understand OCR, I guess. I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this, by the way. Like, it's trivial benchmark question. It's Very, very easy to nail. But I also wanted to support it for stuff like license plate, partial matching, like, hey, does any license plate in this image start with WHA or whatever?[00:49:29] Vik Korrapati: So yeah, that sort of worked. All right, that, that ends my story about the gauges. If you think about what's going on over here it's interesting that like LLMs are showing enormous. Progress in reasoning, especially with the latest set of models that we've seen, but we're not really seeing, I have a feeling that VLMs are lagging behind, as we can see with these tasks that should be very simple for a human to do [00:50:00] that are very easy to find VLMs failing at.[00:50:04] Vik Korrapati: My hypothesis on why this is the case is because On the internet, there's a ton of data that talks about how to reason. There's books about how to solve problems. There's books critiquing the books about how to solve problems. But humans are just so good at perception that we never really talk about it.[00:50:20] Vik Korrapati: Like, maybe in art books where it's like, hey, to show that that mountain is further away, you need to desaturate it a bit or whatever. But the actual data on how to, like, look at images is, isn't really present. Also, the Data we have is kind of sketched. The best source of data we have is like image all text pairs on the internet and that's pretty low quality.[00:50:40] Vik Korrapati: So yeah, I, I think our solution here is really just we need to teach them how to operate on individual tasks and figure out how to scale that out. All right. Yep. So conclusion. At Moondream we're trying to build amazing PLMs that run everywhere. Very hard problem. Much work ahead, but we're making a ton of progress and I'm really excited [00:51:00] about If anyone wants to chat about more technical details about how we're doing this or interest in collaborating, please, please hit me up.[00:51:08] Isaac Robinson: Yeah,[00:51:09] swyx: like, I always, when people say, when people say multi modality, like, you know, I always think about vision as the first among equals in all the modalities. So, I really appreciate having the experts in the room. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Jones and Keefe talked about the reports that Bill Belichick reached out to the New York Jets before agreeing to become the head coach at the University of North Carolina.  Before recapping Wha' Happened? in Week 15 in the NFL, Patriots tight end Hunter Henry joined the show to discuss yesterday's loss in Arizona.  Finally, Jones and Keefe discussed why the Patriots' players were given the day off today.

Keefe goes through each game and says "Wha' Happened.

Here's "Wha' Happened" this week in the NFL.

In hour 1, Chris talks about a headline out of DC that the city council voted to outlaw ALL right turns on Red, BUT since there's no money to advertise the change it won't be enforced. Wha? For more coverage on the issues that matter to you, download the WMAL app, visit WMAL.com or tune in love on WMAL-FM 105.9 from 9:00am-12:00pm Monday-Friday  To join the conversation, check us out on X @WMAL and @ChrisPlanteShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Couldn't sit on the couch all day? Rich Keefe has you covered as he goes through each NFL game and tells you Wha' Happened.

Welcome back to another impactful episode of A God Shift Podcast, hosted by Shayna Rattler Davis. In this special edition, we're diving into a profound transformation that resonates deeply with where many of you are in your journey. Previously, our focus has been on upholding Christian values and inspiring purposeful leadership. Now, we're embarking on a significant shift—one that promises not only to enhance your visibility but also to channel it into true, sustainable income. Shayna, with her rich background in business, is here to guide us in leveraging our influence for financial freedom. We'll uncover how to turn your platform into a resource that opens doors to brand partnerships, sponsorships, diversified income streams, and more. Join us as we discuss practical strategies, necessary mindset shifts, and inspiring stories of those who've successfully made this transition. Get ready to explore the possibilities of your influence transforming into profitability, as we work together to build the life you rightly deserve. Stay tuned for an enlightening and empowering journey! We cover: --Why I'm making this shift --Wha's possible for you --What to expect going forward --Much more...  

Keefe goes back and takes a look at every game from this past week of NFL action in Wha' Happened.

Wha' Happened! The Jets still suck, so does Mac Jones, Chiefs win again, and more

Chapter 24 - The Wandmaker“I want to do it properly,” were the first words of which Harry was fully conscious of speaking. “Not by magic. Have you got a spade?” And shortly afterward he had set to work, alone, digging the grave in the place that Bill had shown him at the end of the garden, between bushes. He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives. Q1 - Why did Harry want to do this without magic?“No,” Harry said, and Bill looked startled. “I need both of them here. I need to talk to them. It's important.” He heard the authority in his own voice, the conviction, the sense of purpose that had come to him as he dug Dobby's grave. All of their faces were turned toward him, looking puzzled. Dobby would never be able to tell them who had sent him to the cellar, but Harry knew what he had seen. A piercing blue eye had looked out of the mirror fragment, and then help had come. Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.Q2 - What's the deal with the mirror?You gave Ron the Deluminator. You understood him. . . . You gave him a way back. . . . And you understood Wormtail too. . . . You knew there was a bit of regret there, somewhere. . . . And if you knew them . . . What did you know about me, Dumbledore? Am I meant to know, but not to seek? Did you know how hard I'd find that? Is that why you made it this difficult? So I'd have time to work that out?Q3 - Do you think he's right about Dumbledore here?Q4 - They're going to break into Gringotts? Are they going to succeed?“I took this wand from Draco Malfoy by force,” said Harry. “Can I use it safely?” “I think so. Subtle laws govern wand ownership, but the conquered wand will usually bend its will to its new master.” Q5 - Is Harry truly the master of Draco's wand?Yes, if you won it, it is more likely to do your bidding, and do it well, than another wand.” “And this holds true for all wands, does it?” asked Harry. “I think so,” replied Ollivander, his protuberant eyes upon Harry's face. “You ask deep questions, Mr. Potter. Wandlore is a complex and mysterious branch of magic.” “So, it isn't necessary to kill the previous owner to take true possession of a wand?” asked Harry. Ollivander swallowed. “Necessary? No, I should not say that it is necessary to kill.” Q6 - Do you think this is true? That wands can pass without killing?“You told him about the twin cores? You said he just had to borrow another wizard's wand?” Ollivander looked horrified, transfixed, by the amount that Harry knew. He nodded slowly. “But it didn't work,” Harry went on. “Mine still beat the borrowed wand. Do you know why that is?” Ollivander shook his head as slowly as he had just nodded. “I had . . . never heard of such a thing. Your wand performed something unique that night. The connection of the twin cores is incredibly rare, yet why your wand should have snapped the borrowed wand, I do not know. . . .” Q7 - Why do you think Harry's wand acted like this?“Gregorovitch had the Elder Wand a long time ago,” he said. “I saw You-Know-Who trying to find him. When he tracked him down, he found that Gregorovitch didn't have it anymore: It was stolen from him by Grindelwald. How Grindelwald found out that Gregorovitch had it, I don't know — but if Gregorovitch was stupid enough to spread the rumor, it can't have been that difficult.” Voldemort was at the gates of Hogwarts; Harry could see him standing there, and see too the lamp bobbing in the pre-dawn, coming closer and closer. “And Grindelwald used the Elder Wand to become powerful. And at the height of his power, when Dumbledore knew he was the only one who could stop him, he dueled Grindelwald and beat him, and he took the Elder Wand.” “Dumbledore had the Elder Wand?” said Ron. “But then — where is it now?” Q8 - What do you think about this?And here it was, beside the lake, reflected in the dark waters. The white marble tomb, an unnecessary blot on the familiar landscape. He felt again that rush of controlled euphoria, that heady sense of purpose in destruction. He raised the old yew wand: How fitting that this would be its last great act. The tomb split open from head to foot. The shrouded figure was as long and thin as it had been in life. He raised the wand again. The wrappings fell open. The face was translucent, pale, sunken, yet almost perfectly preserved. They had left his spectacles on the crooked nose: He felt amused derision. Dumbledore's hands were folded upon his chest, and there it lay, clutched beneath them, buried with him. Had the old fool imagined that marble or death would protect the wand? Had he thought that the Dark Lord would be scared to violate his tomb? The spiderlike hand swooped and pulled the wand from Dumbledore's grasp, and as he took it, a shower of sparks flew from its tip, sparkling over the corpse of its last owner, ready to serve a new master at last. Chapter 25 - Shell Cottage“Harry admits he could have imagined the eye! Don't you, Harry?” “I could have,” said Harry without looking at her. “But you don't think you did, do you?” asked Ron. “No, I don't,” said Harry. “There you go!” said Ron quickly, before Hermione could carry on. “If it wasn't Dumbledore, explain how Dobby knew we were in the cellar, Hermione?” “I can't — but can you explain how Dumbledore sent him to us if he's lying in a tomb at Hogwarts?”Q1 - Is Dumbledore alive?Q2 - Does the sword really belong to Goblins?Q3 - Do you think he plan will go well with Griphook?“So, au revoir, Mr. Ollivander,” said Fleur, kissing him on both cheeks. “And I wonder whezzer you could oblige me by delivering a package to Bill's Auntie Muriel? I never returned 'er tiara.” “It will be an honor,” said Ollivander with a little bow, “the very least I can do in return for your generous hospitality.” Fleur drew out a worn velvet case, which she opened to show the wandmaker. The tiara sat glittering and twinkling in the light from the low-hanging lamp. “Moonstones and diamonds,” said Griphook, who had sidled into the room without Harry noticing. “Made by goblins, I think?” Q4 - Could Danny's tiara theory be right all along?Lupin fell over the threshold. He was white-faced, wrapped in a traveling cloak, his graying hair windswept. He straightened up, looked around the room, making sure of who was there, then cried aloud, “It's a boy! We've named him Ted, after Dora's father!” Hermione shrieked. “Wha — ? Tonks — Tonks has had the baby?” “Yes, yes, she's had the baby!” shouted Lupin. All around the table came cries of delight, sighs of relief: Hermione and Fleur both squealed, “Congratulations!” and Ron said, “Blimey, a baby!” as if he had never heard of such a thing before. “Yes — yes — a boy,” said Lupin again, who seemed dazed by his own happiness. He strode around the table and hugged Harry; the scene in the basement of Grimmauld Place might never have happened. “You'll be godfather?” he said as he released Harry. “M-me?” stammered Harry “You, yes, of course — Dora quite agrees, no one better —” “I — yeah — blimey —” Q5 - What do you think about Lupin and Tonks having a baby?Harry had an ominous feeling now; he wondered whether Bill guessed more than he was letting on. “All I am saying,” said Bill, setting his hand on the door back into the sitting room, “is to be very careful what you promise goblins, Harry. It would be less dangerous to break into Gringotts than to renege on a promise to a goblin.” Q6 - Are they dumb to trust Griphook?Chapter 26 - Gringotts“I hate this thing,” she said in a low voice. “I really hate it. It feels all wrong, it doesn't work properly for me. . . . It's like a bit of her.” “It'll probably help you get in character, though,” said Ron. “Think what that wand's done!” “But that's my point!” said Hermione. “This is the wand that tortured Neville's mum and dad, and who knows how many other people? This is the wand that killed Sirius!” Q1 - Should they snap this wand in two?Harry looked down at the hawthorn wand that had once belonged to Draco Malfoy. He had been surprised, but pleased, to discover that it worked for him at least as well as Hermione's had done. Remembering what Ollivander had told them of the secret workings of wands, Harry thought he knew what Hermione's problem was: She had not won the walnut wand's allegiance by taking it personally from Bellatrix. Q2 - Is this true?He realized now that they could hardly have laid Dobby to rest in a more beautiful place, but Harry ached with sadness to think of leaving him behind. Looking down on the grave, he wondered yet again how the elf had known where to come to rescue them. His fingers moved absentmindedly to the little pouch still strung around his neck, through which he could feel the jagged mirror fragment in which he had been sure he had seen Dumbledore's eye. Then the sound of a door opening made him look around. Q3 - Any further theories on who sent Dobby?“They know!” whispered Griphook in Harry's ear. “They must have been warned there might be an impostor!” “Your wand will do, madam,” said the goblin. He held out a slightly trembling hand, and in a dreadful blast of realization Harry knew that the goblins of Gringotts were aware that Bellatrix's wand had been stolen. “Act now, act now,” whispered Griphook in Harry's ear, “the Imperius Curse!” Harry raised the hawthorn wand beneath the cloak, pointed it at the old goblin, and whispered, for the first time in his life, “Imperio!” Q4 - What do you think about Harry using the Imperius curse?Q5 - Is Travers going to permanently be in a crack in the wall in Gringotts?Q6 - What do you think of all the enchantments at Gringotts?“Harry, could this be — ? Aargh!” Hermione screamed in pain, and Harry turned his wand on her in time to see a jeweled goblet tumbling from her grip. But as it fell, it split, became a shower of goblets, so that a second later, with a great clatter, the floor was covered in identical cups rolling in every direction, the original impossible to discern amongst them. “It burned me!” moaned Hermione, sucking her blistered fingers. “They have added Gemino and Flagrante Curses!” said Griphook. “Everything you touch will burn and multiply, but the copies are worthless — and if you continue to handle the treasure, you will eventually be crushed to death by the weight of expanding gold!” Q7 - What do you think about this?The tiny golden cup, skewered by the handle on the sword's blade, was flung into the air. The goblin still astride him, Harry dived and caught it, and although he could feel it scalding his flesh he did not relinquish it, even while countless Hufflepuff cups burst from his fist.Q8 - Do they have the cup?Q9 - How do you like their dragon heist?Chapter 27 - The Final Hiding Place“Well, on the upside,” said Ron finally, who was sitting watching the skin on his hands regrow, “we got the Horcrux. On the downside —” “— no sword,” said Harry through gritted teeth, as he dripped dittany through the singed hole in his jeans onto the angry burn beneath. Q1 - How will they destroy this Horcrux?The sky, the smell of lake water, the sound of Ron's voice were extinguished: Pain cleaved Harry's head like a sword stroke. He was standing in a dimly lit room, and a semicircle of wizards faced him, and on the floor at his feet knelt a small, quaking figure. “What did you say to me?” His voice was high and cold, but fury and fear burned inside him. The one thing he had dreaded — but it could not be true, he could not see how . . . The goblin was trembling, unable to meet the red eyes high above his. “Say it again!” murmured Voldemort. “Say it again!” “M-my Lord,” stammered the goblin, its black eyes wide with terror, “m-my Lord . . . we t-tried t-to st-stop them. . . . Im-impostors, my Lord . . . broke — broke into the — into the Lestranges' v-vault. . . .” “Impostors? What impostors? I thought Gringotts had ways of revealing impostors? Who were they?” “It was . . . it was . . . the P-Potter b-boy and t-two accomplices. . . .” “And they took?” he said, his voice rising, a terrible fear gripping him. “Tell me! What did they take?” “A . . . a s-small golden c-cup, m-my Lord . . .” The scream of rage, of denial left him as if it were a stranger's: He was crazed, frenzied, it could not be true, it was impossible, nobody had ever known: How was it possible that the boy could have discovered his secret? Q2 - What do you think of this?But surely if the boy had destroyed any of his Horcruxes, he, Lord Voldemort, would have known, would have felt it?Q3 - So has Voldemort not felt these horcruxes being destroyed?But he must know, he must be sure. . . . He paced the room, kicking aside the goblin's corpse as he passed, and the pictures blurred and burned in his boiling brain: the lake, the shack, and Hogwarts —Q4 - Where at Hogwarts?As for the school: He alone knew where in Hogwarts he had stowed the Horcrux, because he alone had plumbed the deepest secrets of that place. . . . And there was still Nagini, who must remain close now, no longer sent to do his bidding, under his protection. . . . Q5 - If Voldemort is checking the hiding places, how much time do the trio have?“But how are we going to get in?” “We'll go to Hogsmeade,” said Harry, “and try to work something out once we see what the protection around the school's like. Get under the Cloak, Hermione, I want to stick together this time.” “But we don't really fit —” “It'll be dark, no one's going to notice our feet.” The flapping of enormous wings echoed across the black water: The dragon had drunk its fill and risen into the air. They paused in their preparations to watch it climb higher and higher, now black against the rapidly darkening sky, until it vanished over a nearby mountain. Then Hermione walked forward and took her place between the other two. Harry pulled the Cloak down as far as it would go, and together they turned on the spot into the crushing darkness.Chapter 28 - The Missing MirrorHe raised his wand: He could not, would not, suffer the Dementor's Kiss, whatever happened afterward. It was of Ron and Hermione that he thought as he whispered, “Expecto Patronum!” Q1 - Should they have planned this a little better?Ron gasped. “The silver doe!” he said excitedly. “Was that you too?” “What are you talking about?” said Aberforth. “Someone sent a doe Patronus to us!” “Brains like that, you could be a Death Eater, son. Haven't I just proved my Patronus is a goat?” “Oh,” said Ron. “Yeah . . . well, I'm hungry!” he added defensively as his stomach gave an enormous rumble“My brother Albus wanted a lot of things,” said Aberforth, “and people had a habit of getting hurt while he was carrying out his grand plans. You get away from this school, Potter, and out of the country if you can. Forget my brother and his clever schemes. He's gone where none of this can hurt him, and you don't owe him anything.”Q2 - Is Aberforth a reliable story teller? “It destroyed her, what they did: She was never right again. She wouldn't use magic, but she couldn't get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad, it exploded out of her when she couldn't control it, and at times she was strange and dangerous. But mostly she was sweet and scared and harmless. Q3 - What do you think this looks like?But he did all right for a few weeks . . . till he came.” And now a positively dangerous look crept over Aberforth's face. “Grindelwald. And at last, my brother had an equal to talk to, someone just as bright and talented as he was. And looking after Ariana took a backseat then, while they were hatching all their plans for a new Wizarding order, and looking for Hallows, and whatever else it was they were so interested in. Grand plans for the benefit of all Wizardkind, and if one young girl got neglected, what did that matter, when Albus was working for the greater good? He got angry. He told me what a stupid little boy I was, trying to stand in the way of him and my brilliant brother. . . . Didn't I understand, my poor sister wouldn't have to be hidden once they'd changed the world, and led the wizards out of hiding, and taught the Muggles their place? Q4 - What do you think of Grindewald now?“He was never free,” said Harry. “I beg your pardon?” said Aberforth. “Never,” said Harry. “The night that your brother died, he drank a potion that drove him out of his mind. He started screaming, pleading with someone who wasn't there. ‘Don't hurt them, please . . . hurt me instead.'” Q5 - Do you think Dumbledore really never forgave himself?“Because,” said Harry before Hermione could answer, “sometimes you've got to think about more than your own safety! Sometimes you've got to think about the greater good! This is war!” “You're seventeen, boy!” “I'm of age, and I'm going to keep fighting even if you've given up!” “Who says I've given up?” “‘The Order of the Phoenix is finished,'” Harry repeated. “‘YouKnow-Who's won, it's over, and anyone who's pretending different's kidding themselves.'” “I don't say I like it, but it's the truth!” “No, it isn't,” said Harry. “Your brother knew how to finish YouKnow-Who and he passed the knowledge on to me. I'm going to keep going until I succeed — or I die. Don't think I don't know how this might end. I've known it for years.” Q6 - What do you think of this whole story?Q7 - How will this end?

Hour 2 - During the second hour of the Jones and Keefe show, the guys discuss the trade deadline and speak to some players. First, tanking discussion. Why do people want the Patriots to lose? What does getting the number one pick mean? We do not want Drake Maye to lose every game. Then, Wha' Happened in NFL week nine. Finally, Hunter Henry and Christian Gonzalez join the show.

Keefe takes you through each and every game from NFL week nine in Wha' Happened.