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This time...there would be no taking the Kid alive.
"I knew now that I would have to kill the Kid," Garrett later told writer Emerson Hough. "We both knew that it must be one or the other of us if we ever met."

Decades of film and television told us that Native Americans weren't supposed to be comedians. They weren't supposed to be funny. They weren't supposed to exist in the present. Native actors were shut out of show biz if they looked like an average human being. Representation was nonexistent.

The Kawesqar were hesitant to approach. They might have had little contact with Europeans, but no doubt they were aware of Spain's brutal conquest of other indigenous groups to the north--and had heard tales about the murderousness of pale boat people.

I said, "You talk a good fight, Kaufman. You rant about cleaning up this city. But when you have a chance to help catch a murderer, you back down. I didn't think a man like you could be scared so badly."

There is a saying among them (the Kurds): We have no friends but the mountains....
With the rise of the Islamic State, the Western powers need the Kurds to come down from the mountains, to provide the ground troops that the Americans, British, French, and others are loathe to commit.

"What troops are you, my boys?" Lee said.
"The Texans!" the men yelled and quickly formed into battle lines. There were less than a thousand of them and they started forward toward that abyss of Federal troops.

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the flier's railing as she began to sing, her matchless voice a crystalline vehicle that transported me back over the millennia, while also reminding me of the ancient dreaming city I had only recently visited. Or had I?

And here is this white woman, who is not a white woman at all but who has tried to manipulate mechanisms of power against Bronca just like the worst of them, demanding that Bronca capitulate. Like fuck she will.
......"I don't know who the hell you think you are," Bronca says......"And I don't know what you are. but you don't know who I am if you're coming at me with this weak-ass game."

Sometime during the first week of May 1877, Sitting Bull crossed the "chanku wakan"--the sacred road-- into Canada.
"They told us this line was considered holy," remembered Robert Higheagle...."...On one side you are perfectly free to do as you please. On the other you are in danger."

In 1372, a Castilian fleet linked up with French forces to defeat the English at La Rochelle, and three years later the Castilians attacked and burned English ships in the Bay of Bourgneuf. Castilian galleys also attacked Rye, Lewes, the Isle of Wight, Plymouth, Hastings....

Q: Did you obey your orders?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: What were your orders?
Q: Kill anything that breathed.
---Salvatore LaMartina (Court-Martial Testimony)

Right now I'm looking at hundreds of unique life-forms, never before seen by humans. Each one an alien race. I can't help but smile.

If this happened when Earth was in the Stone Age, we would have just died. And if it happened a thousand years from now, we'd probably work out how to deal with Astrophage without breaking a sweat.

Walking on the beach in loafers was not something Linus enjoyed. He gave brief thought to removing them and his socks and letting his toes dig into the sand, but it fell away when he saw what was waiting for them on the beach.
It was hastily built, the raft...

Vicious descriptions of her (Queen Lili'uokalani) as "a black, pagan queen who wanted nothing short of absolute monarchy" had begun, mysteriously, to appear in the San Francisco Examiner, the paper owned by William Randolph Hearst and already printing the inflammatory headlines that would make it infamous for the era's so-called yellow journalism.

Geoffrey of Monmouth....wrote in the twelfth century that Merlin the great magician had whisked the stones to Salisbury from Ireland, where they first had been set up by the giants "from the remotest confines of Africa."
Merlin, the dread wizard of King Arthur's time?
King Arthur, whoever he was, might have known Stonehenge but assuredly had nothing to do with building it.

Robert Grosseteste's most renowned disciple was Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292), who acquired his interest in natural philosophy and mathematics while studying at Oxford. He received an master's either at Oxford or Paris, in around 1240, after which he lectured at the University of Paris on various works of Aristotle. He returned to Oxford in about 1247, when he met Grosseteste and became a member of his circle...

I went to college asking myself, as many artists do: How am I going to make money? How am I going to support myself?...So I took a lot of English courses, which I loved, and decided I was going to be a teacher. Something inside me, however, must have had different ideas, because I fell deep and hard into a major sadness.
It was a depression about trading in my dream.

Camels are not for the listless or lowdown. They are faster than one might expect, and twice as rattletrap. They are frowsy and irate. Their fur sloughs off and drifts, filling the air with a sweet, malty stench that frenzies mules and horses, who scatter to outrun their own terror.

Cook, to me, wasn't the wicked imperialist that modern-day Maori and others imagined him to be. Nor was he the godlike figure that Robert Campion Esquire extolled, bestowing Christianity, commerce, and civilization on benighted savages. In remembering the man, the world had lost the balance and nuance I so admired in Cook's own writing about those he encountered.

'And Laurence Arne-Sayles is the transgressive thinker par excellence. He crossed so many boundaries. He wrote about magic and pretended it was science. He convinced a group of highly intelligent people that there were other worlds and he could take them there. He was gay when it was still illegal.

John Carter eventually discovered how to transport himself across the void between Earth and Barsoom, and thus was able to visit his nephew in America from time to time, and bring him up to date on affairs on the Red Planet.

I was sitting at my desk....when the secretary of state burst in."Mr. President," he said, his eyes wide, "the aliens are here!" Just like that. "The aliens are here!" As if I had any idea what to do about them.
---"The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger

...As (Albert) Gallatin wrote to the US Ambassador to France, "A belief is said to be entertained that a continuance of the war would produce a separation of the Union, and perhaps a return of the New England states to the mother country."
Gallatin was right to be worried...

Famine set in after a massive snowstorm made the roads into Richmond impassible and further limited food supplies to city markets. In response, a group of women led bread riots on April 2, 1863.... A mob of one hundred women and boys grew to more than one thousand as it left Capitol Square for the city's business district, breaking down doors with axes and stealing bacon, ham, and coffee.

The Strugatsky brothers (Arkady and Boris) were not...directly critical of their (Soviet) government's policies. What they did...was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology--something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write.

Jack was halfway down the stairs when the bomb went off....A jagged piece of ceramic hurled itself out the door and burned its way through her jacket. Maybe through her heart.

Little Jimmy said, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," making the sign of the cross as he offered this admission. "It has been twenty-seven years since my last confession"....
"Twenty-seven years."
"Yes, Father. Since then I have missed Mass almost fourteen hundred times, though I go to midnight Mass sometimes at Christmas if a friend desires to go..."

"Mr. President, it's Dr. Lane." Her hand on my shoulder..."...You're doing well..."
"We have to..." I start up again, leaning forward, feeling something under me, some sort of cushion.
Dr. Lane presses down gently on my shoulder. "Easy now..."

The lions are contained in a fenced area, so they have no chance to escape, and sometimes they are sedated so the hunters have an easier shot at them. The fee to shoot a male lion in one of these "hunts" is up to $40,000....Trophy hunting is big business in South Africa....The majority of the hunters come from the United States.