When you pick up a sword for the first time you will be slow and awkward. This is frustrating, but refuse the temptation to try and become a “faster” fencer. Chasing after speed is like trying to catch smoke. If you try and pursue speed, all you will accomplish is haste. Haste is the enemy of 1st class fencing.
Speed is a lie the untrained mind tells itself when it sees an action it cannot follow. The truth is a combination of timing, control, and fluidity. Fluid motion, even done slowly, will always arrive before a hasty strike. Control will allow you to move without wasteful motion that will slow you down. Timing will eliminate the need to move fast almost entirely. There is no need to get somewhere fast so long as you get there at the right time.
Greg Kelly’s grandson, Caden, scampers to the tree-shaded creek behind his grandfather’s house to catch crawdads, as Kelly shuffles along, trying to keep up. Kelly’s small day pack holds an oxygen tank with a clear tube clipped to his nose. He has chairs spaced out on the short route so he can stop every few minutes, sit down and catch his breath, until he has enough wind and strength to start out again for the creek.
“I just pray that the Lord give me as much time as I can with him,” Kelly said, his eyes welling with tears. “He just lightens my life. I want to be as fun with him as I can. And do as much as I can with him.”
Caden is 9 years old, and even at his age he knows what happened to his paw-paw at the Harlan County, Ky., coal mines where Kelly labored as a roof bolter for 31 years.
“That coal mine made your lungs dirty, didn’t it?’” Kelly recalled Caden asking. “Yeah it did. … And I can’t breathe and I have to have my backpack to breathe,” Kelly told him.
It’s a familiar tale across Appalachia. Two hours north and east, beyond twisting mountain roads, Danny Smith revved up a lawn mower. He wore jeans, a T-shirt and a white face mask stretching from eyes to chin, and he pushed only about 15 feet before he suddenly shut off the mower, bent to his knees and started hacking uncontrollably.
“Oh God,” he gasped, as he spit up a crusty black substance with gray streaks, and then stared at the dead lung tissue staining the grass. Still coughing and breathing hard, Smith settled into a chair on his porch and clipped an oxygen tube to his nose.
A multiyear investigation by NPR and the PBS program Frontline found that Smith and Kelly are part of a tragic and recently discovered outbreak of the advanced stage of black lung disease, known as complicated black lung or progressive massive fibrosis.
A federal monitoring program reported just 99 cases of advanced black lung disease nationwide from 2011-2016. But NPR identified more than 2,000 coal miners suffering from the disease in the same time frame, and in just five Appalachian states.
And now, an NPR/Frontline analysis of federal regulatory data — decades of information recorded by dust-collection monitors placed where coal miners work — has revealed a tragic failure to recognize and respond to clear signs of danger.
For decades, government regulators had evidence of excessive and toxic mine dust exposures, the kind that can cause PMF, as they were happening. They knew that miners like Kelly and Smith were likely to become sick and die. They were urged to take specific and direct action to stop it. But they didn’t.
Chris Kurtz is trying to keep his sense of humor. Even after the VA told him last summer that he no longer needs a caregiver.
“Apparently my legs grew back, I dunno,” he says with a laugh, and sinks into his couch in Clarksville, Tenn. And then he mentions that he probably can’t get out of the couch without help from his wife.
In December 2010, a bomb blast ended his Army deployment to Afghanistan. He lost both legs above the knee and half of his left hand. Heather, then his fiancée, joined him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the VA suggested she apply for their new caregiver program.
The program was set up to support family members of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. They’re mostly wives and mothers who receive a VA stipend to provide home health care that would otherwise cost the VA millions of dollars.
When it started in 2011, vets signed up in huge numbers, quickly overwhelming the VA staff assigned to the program.
The cuts come at a time the program is supposed to be growing. Congress approved a major expansion of the program in May, though implementation could take years.
Congressional sources confirmed that the VA has missed its first deadline in October to implement new information technology for the caregiver expansion — raising serious concerns of further delay. VA says the department will not deploy the new system until it is ready and has been tested thoroughly.
Chris and Heather Kurtz had been getting the highest level of support — Tier 3. That meant a stipend, health care for Heather and quarterly visits from a nurse. But earlier this year, Heather Kurtz was told her standing in the program was being evaluated. And without anyone from the VA even coming to see them, the Kurtzes got dropped in July.
Not reduced to a lower tier, but simply told that Chris no longer needs any help from Heather.
Fordite, also known as Detroit agate, is old automobile paint which has hardened sufficiently to be cut and polished. It was formed from the built up of layers of enamel paint slag on tracks and skids on which cars were hand spray-painted (a now automated process), which have been baked numerous times.
IT’S MY FAVORITE GARGOYLE BACK AGAIN FOR WINTERTIME.
I want to know the exact conversation that lead to the creation of this abomination
Ye olde German architect: “ok, it’s time to put in the rainspouts and last night I was out with the lads and Hans had too much and the point is I had the FUNNIEST idea…” *Holds up drawing*
Ye olde German Architect Supervisor: * snorts beer out of his nose.* “YES. BUILD IT IMMEDIATELY.”
That’s gussy babe
Sooooo I just came back from studying in Freiburg and went on a tour of the Münster with a historian who knew all of the insider secrets and the story is even better than you think.
It took more than 300 years to build the Freiburger Münster (1200s-1500s), so they went through a lot of architects and people who paid those architects. Some of the patrons were dicks and one of those dicks lived in a house right next to the Münster. The asshat kept demanding they work faster and changed his mind every five hours about what he wanted and THEN he refused to pay the architects because he wasn’t happy with what they’d done.
That really pissed the builders off so in retaliation, the head architect built the butt gargoyle facing his house so that every morning for the rest of his life, when the dick looked out his window at the Münster, he’d have to look at a gargoyle butt.
So, the defecating gargoyle is a big fat “fuck you” to someone’s dick of a boss that has survived 500 years and two world wars
me, a lesbian, mistaking a nice twink for a nice butch lesbian: [gives him the lesbian nod]
him, a twink, mistaking me for a twink: [gives me the gay once over]
me, a sensitive dyke: [calls an uber and spends the whole time misty eyed, wondering why this nice butch would look me over like i wasn’t a HUMAN BEING, like i was something to be gawked at. i ignore my Uber driver’s attempt at small talk, staring out the window and questioning everything i know about life, meaning, and the pursuit of lesbianism]
him, a confused gay: [stares at the space this twink just vacated, completely floored. a nod. does he think this is a game. does he think this is a joke. this isn’t a PTA meeting where you nod at your old friend but also secret enemy Brenda from across the room. was i not even worth the once over. have i lost my game. what does this mean]
Maybe this is what the straights mean when they say we’re confused.
