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PART II
MAY, 1780
ST. JAMES’S
LONDON, ENGLAND
ELLIOTT HAD TAKEN Covarrubias at his word, and so was shocked when the man stalked out of the ballroom not a moment after he had told Elliott to bugger off. Since there were five more minutes until the intermission was over, he took the opportunity to claim the chair beside Celia. He felt her body tense only a fraction. “Oh,” she said, then relaxed again. “Hello, my lord.”
“Elliott.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Lady Hylton released a very unladylike snort. So. She didn’t like him any more than she liked Covarrubias. He didn’t know why he cared, but he did.
“Your guard dog is gone, I see,” Elliott said low. “I thought he was with you all evening?”
Miss Simpleton looked at him blankly. “I do not have a dog, my lord.”
Elliott sighed. He really should have left when Covarrubias had. Before he had heard Fury sing, he would have thought this soprano’s voice lovely, but now he knew it for the screech it was. And he had a megrim. But something about the way Miss Simpleton sat, flinched, and heaved great sighs at all the appropriately horrible points of the performance intrigued him.
He brazenly leaned over Miss Simpleton’s lap toward Lady Hylton and extended his hand, palm up. She cast a glance down at it and sniffed, so he pulled his empty hand away.
“I apologize if I have offended you, my lady,” he said as graciously—and as foppishly—as he could manage, but he had been in costume for two hours now and, Camille’s assistance notwithstanding, the charade was wearing upon him.
“Your very presence offends me, my lord,” she said low.
“La, you have broken my heart, Lady Hylton!” he exclaimed grandly to attract as much attention as he could. Marchioness Rathbone even interrupted her flirtation to look over her shoulder, her eyebrow raised. “How utterly cruel! Seeeleea, darling,” he cooed, picking up Miss Simpleton’s hand and pressing a kiss to the back, “will you be at Lady Enfield’s ball tomorrow night?”
“I believe so, my lord,” she said dully.
“Will you, Lady Hylton?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“Good.” He was gratified when Lady Hylton and Lady Rathbone gasped. “I am no gentleman, my ladies,” he said low, flicking his glance upward to include the marchioness. “Bad behavior will be met with bad behavior—and I doubt you can best me in that, though you are certainly welcome to try.” He smirked suggestively at Lady Rathbone when she cocked an eyebrow, and her expression changed to one of speculation.
Celia’s body twitched a bit, reminding him that he was nigh lying upon her, but when he cast a glance to ascertain how she had taken this bit of aggression, there was yet no expression on her face.
“I am protecting my daughter, Lord Tavendish,” Lady Hylton said tightly, but with the most gracious of smiles. “I tolerate your presence only because she has not objected to it. She is not usually so accepting of perfect strangers and, moreover, strangers who press themselves against her with such familiarity.”
He cast a somber look between the two women when he realized Lady Hylton was not, in fact, speaking to him, but questioning her daughter as to her behavior, which was as lively as a marble statue.
To his surprise, she turned slowly to her mother and said, as dully as he had ever heard her, “Lord Tavendish has been kind to me, Mother.”
Kind? He hadn’t been kind. He had wanted to needle Covarrubias for his own amusement but had, in the process, become more curious about this girl and her mother, their circumstance, and why it seemed so … off.
Lady Hylton, too, stared at her daughter questioningly, but nothing in Miss Simpleton’s face could answer whatever those questions were. ’Twas as if she knew something neither he nor Lady Hylton did.
“Well, then!” he exclaimed prettily when the intermission was drawing to a close. “I’ll be off. Lady Hylton. Miss Bancroft. Lady Rathbone.”
“Goodbye, my lord,” Miss Bancroft said.
“Good riddance, my lord,” Lady Hylton muttered.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Tavendish,” Lady Rathbone purred.
If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.
Pirates!
FIRST-SHAKA-LAKA
That queer MikeS could never First like that. Not in his wildest Mojeaux inspired dreams.
Tavendish is a variant of Cavendish, the name of the most popular banana.
***
William George Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire (21 May 1790 – 18 January 1858), styled Marquess of Hartington until 1811, was an English peer, courtier and Whig politician. Known as the “Bachelor Duke”, he served as Lord Chamberlain from 1827 to 1828 and again from 1830 to 1834. The Cavendish banana is named after him.[1]
***
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJNq_kkRvc
1940s USA WWII Women Workers, Welders, War Work, Color Archive Footage
Let’s look at the welds on a WW2 Transportation ship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQSTgD6-R5A
You caught me. I was feeling particularly lazy that day.
Tavendish is perfectly cromulent.
The only thing I complain about in fictional names are superfluous ‘y’ s. They make my eye twitch.
bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, perhaps during a syzygy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKAusMNTNnk
Superfluous y’s are my jam. 😠
What about Y’s subbed in for other letters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Lou%C3%BFs
He began spelling his name as “Louÿs”, and pronouncing the final S, as a way of expressing his fondness for classical Greek culture (the letter Y is known in French as i grec or “Greek I”).
Surplus jam is my “Why?”
Careful, Lady R. Careful.
I do hope we hear the dialog between Celia and her mother in the next chapter. Does Celia clue her in?
Eventually, once Mary gets on her last nerve (but, I mean, she’s her mother, so that’s inevitable).
Celia’s got some shit she’s dealing with and her mind’s a little fuzzy and she’s hungry for more than one reason and she’s pissed at everybody, so…
Also, the next installment is a continuation of this one, from Elliott’s POV because he knows something is very, very off with the situation.
***
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) has proposed lifetime bans on social media users who have mocked Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s killing, pledging to press platforms for permanent removals and harsh penalties. Critics have warned that the plan threatens free speech and civil liberties, arguing it may overreach constitutional protections. Higgins has maintained that he is aiming for zero tolerance for violent political hate content.
***
[Kif sigh]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjZ9gaATWfA
Moj. A good, albeit short, chapter.
Derp. You can count on the stupid party to be stupid.
Just the first part of the chapter, and not a great place to break it, but the second part is hella long. I ALMOST split that one, too.
https://clayhiggins.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/9.15.25_Rep.-Higgins-Letter-to-Big-Tech-re-Charlie-Kirk-1.pdf
Just as celebrities of death should be mocked, so shall he
Fuck that guy.
Expecting Team B to be perfect on issues we care about but upon which Team A fail so incredibly and unutterably and hypocritically and miserably worse is a fool’s game.
I will mock them but also mock Team A members who try to twist this stuff to their advantage.
So, apparently the “Trump ordered Kimmel firing” has now been completely debunked
https://x.com/LizMacDonaldFOX/status/1968837993797665085?s=19
Anyone want to take a guess as to what impact this reporting will have??
The people running with that narrative were dishonest cunts before and they’ll be dishonest cunts after. Won’t change a thing.
The early reporting was always that it was a ground up revolt from the local affiliates. It’s possible to criticize the FCC douche’s comments and be honest at the same time. Plenty of people here did it. The media lied intentionally, to include those cunts at Reason.
Brendan Carr publicly weighing in on it muddied the waters. Complete own goal. No sympathy.
Hahahaha… the guy on the far right in the firing squad shoots late, and shoots his own foot.
An own goal yes, but I’m disgusted at what has become of it. To expect Team Donald to remain silent in the face of all of the bullshit coming from the other side would have required superhuman restraint.
I’ll agree with you, Rhywun, if you can tell me how Carr’s remarks were at all helpful to Team Trump.
Eh, the whole purpose of the FCC is to enforce morality. The only thing anyone is sad and/or angry about is they lost the whipping hand.
You don’t want this, get rid of the FCC. As long as it is still standing, there will be this BS in one form or another.
They weren’t. Not claiming they were.
Just annoyed that one team is expected to exhibit a perfect consistency that doesn’t exist in human nature.
The DFW/Love Field ‘radar’ outage — not FAA equipment. It was a DS3 line with FTI, which is Harris/L3 or whatever contract has it now.
Now, why I said ATC is playing games. Nothing was reported as a full outage of services, except lines/services that aren’t providing critical data to the National Airspace System. Our lovely and ever so shitty contract with Harris/L3 or whatever, were testing the alternate path on a DS3 line and caused an outage, but didn’t effect ‘radar’. Phones maybe sure.
“Thank you for your attention to this needful.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/restriction-on-entry-of-certain-nonimmigrant-workers/
Tonight I was watching a video clip of Roy Clark that YouTube thought I needed to see.
Suddenly, I was back in a simpler time. A time when talented people played live music and did comedy sketches on TV all the time. Everyone watched, so we had a shared culture.
In that moment of nostalgia, I was suddenly transported in time. I was a 10 year old kid sitting on the floor watching Hee Haw with my brother and sister. It was so real. My dad was just out of sight, behind and to the left in his recliner.
And then I slipped back to today, just as fast. Just a moment. But when today reasserted itself, I became acutely aware that my father was gone.
We lost him earlier this year after a long illness. It was gradual. So we were all prepared.
But not tonight. Tonight he was there and then in an instant I was overwhelmed with the knowledge that he was gone.
Life is like that. Sometimes emotions come at you sideways and suddenly.
Remember when the talk of the town was just something that some actor said a week or so ago and its old news cause the news cycle was not minute by minute?
So different. The sense of common culture is fading fast. I suppose now cat videos are the common culture. Culture, having become only a meme at a time, I guess.
Modern cat video
https://youtube.com/shorts/CVkn1Rxu0KM
Cool memories.
Yeah, shared culture went the way of three channels plus PBS.
You win some, you lose some.
Sorry to hear about the out-of-nowhere grief. Dad is on chemo right now – going over there this weekend to be the caregiver, matter of fact. So I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the obvious but frequently forgotten fact that none of your loved ones will be around forever. My brother and I will also have a lot of memories of sitting the floor watching TV while he lounges on the couch.
Devil’s advocate on the “shared culture” issue: Maybe the culture back then wasn’t as widely shared as it seemed, but there was no easy way for people with obscure/divergent interests to link up (as they can do now with the Internet) so they just kept those things to themselves.
True. This little community of weirdos wouldn’t exist.
Maybe SF would have a newsletter we could subscribe to. At least until the FBI came knocking
Cyto, even at an age I have flashbacks. My kids are both here visiting (supposedly working) for HH. Yesterday I sat them down and reviewed how Mrs F and I are planning to redraft our trust into a simpler plan.
They are sort of reluctant to want to hear reality. One foot on a roller skate and the other on a banana peel doesn’t allow for long term planning.
My kids are 60 plus and I keep hoping they’ll grow up someday.
Hahahaha… grow up someday!
I have long had a bit about how we should have been built to remain adolescents until about 50. Because that is about how long it takes to start figuring things out and deciding what you want to be when you grow up.
Right about when your body starts falling apart, you have seen things come around on the wheel of life 2 or 3 times and you can see the patterns.
Kamala has a substack.. I am so getting on that train!
“His [Trump] victory was whisker-thin. He beat me by 1.5 percentage points in one of the closets elections in a century. A third of the electorate voted for me. But a third of the electorate stayed home. That means the-thirds of our country did not elect Donald Trump.”
How do you even argue that logic!
She isnt the first to say that. Hillary said the same thing.
Partisan politics in the modern age is just… dehumanizing.
The old politics… local precincts, stump speeches, delegates going to national conventions to hear from candidates and select a nominee… it didnt encourage the vacuous and uninterrupted sniping.
Schumer has posted nasty stuff several times a day since Kirk was assassinated. Before TV, he might have given an interview with the times and a single radio address. But most of the time, there was no incentive to play with the individual voters. This allowed leaders to meet, compromise and lead.
Now they are in a stump speech 24/7/365
Schumer, the elder statesman of the Senate, is throwing out the same “fascism” bullshit as the rest of the fringe ratfuckers in his Party.
Fuck that asshole.
You don’t! Let her keep going and let all her supporters buy it. If they don’t want to learn from experience, there is no reason to teach them.
No fate but what we make:
https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2025/05/tuesdays-with-derpy-warning-from-future.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Christmas_Yet_to_Come
Reminder: this is who they are
https://x.com/Ultrafrog17/status/1966523597268169132?s=19
Parents who teach their children that their enemies are Hitler have children who believe that their enemies are Hitler.
Never gets old.
I’m genuinely distressed at the moment.
At about 1:30am my computer started playing music. There was nothing active on the audio mixer, but when I turned down the main volume, it went away, so it was on the computer. When I tuned it back up, the sound didn’t come back. I’ve been running all sorts of scans looking for the malware/virus/potentially unwanted program/etc that caused it. Nothing is turning up. Not finding anything is worse than turning up a virus that can be addressed.
Something is there, but I can’t find it. So I don’t know what else is hiding.
Copium alternative explaination possibility – When this happened I was in bed and rushed to the machine without my glasses. Since I can’t rightly see in that state, if one of the expected programs in the mixer was playing sound, I might not have registered. The big example would be firefox, since I let all my Imaginary Glib friends play through the night.
If a tab among the dozens started playing an ad (despite my efforts to stop these) or somesuch, it could give much the same results I’ve gotten with nothing turning up from avast, spybot or malwarebytes digging through the machine.
Of course, I can’t really prove that either.
Did you buy a used computer from Derp that has all the gov’t malware preinstalled?
There are a lot of behaviors that humans engage in that I do not understand. Putting malware on other people’s computers is one of them. It is as much a trespass as any other crime. WTH people?
I think mine has done that before or something similar. It started doing things without me.
Rest in, folk. I hope everyone else does. Saturday morning’s pretty chill, tho not on Sunday levels. Afternoon gets busy as people simultaneously realize there’s shit they don’t have that they want.
Onward, hopefully with no needed alarms (no surprises, please).
I lost my rest chasing a computer mess.
I went to bed early, so I’m up early.
*slow clap*
Hillary Clinton, free speech advocate
https://x.com/FareedZakaria/status/1968828282855375132?s=19
Reminder, Herself tossed some random dude in prison for posting a YouTube video, lying and claiming that he was to blame for the attack on the embassy in Bengazi.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/anti-muslim-video-sparks-more-violent-demonstrations-across-muslim-world
Good lord- she’s morphing in to Soros.
Her face looks like the bottom of a leather handbag.
lol She really is shameless.
Imagine her facing real questions.
I have been thinking about the AI getting its ass handed to it by an Atari in a chess game. I dont think it means what we think it means.
I think it might mean that the AI is thinking more like a human than like an adding machine? It might mean that the AI is smarter than the Atari regarding thinking more like our own. I havent quite worked it out yet. Making mistakes is inherent in higher thinking.
Ahoy me buckos!
⚓️🦜🥴🏴☠️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4UqMyldS7Q
Fucking CBS is in overdrive on Kimmel propaganda.
FUCK KIMMEL. FUCKS CBS. FUCK THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.
Keep off the Rocks.
This guy has something to say about that.
Good morning, Sean, Suthen, cyto, U. Ted’S., EfE, NA, 4(20), and Tater!
Mainstream media and the rest of the elite who reign across most every institution POUNCE!
Morning! Classifier match today, so I’ll pick up a classification in a division I don’t shoot. (LO)
NewGun is built and a shipping label created. Between shipping time and permission slip processing, zero chance I’m taking it to Nats.
My new snowblower was delivered a week earlier than expected, now I have to wait to try it out.
It’s a serious machine, big engine (367 cc), power steering, power snow chute adjustment, headlight, hand warmers, AC start.
I’ll be ready.
That is a big engine. I’ve driven 250cc motorcycles.
I am scared to ask what you paid for that.
For UnCiv: there are files out there to print a Shadow 2 holster. I don’t endorse it, since it looks like they ripped off the Carnivore design.
BD 🙂
“What Did ‘The View’ Say About Jimmy Kimmel Getting Pulled From The Air? ”
https://decider.com/2025/09/18/the-view-jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk/
Narrator: They didn’t say anything.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/19/us-news/morrissey-assassination-threat-prompts-rocker-to-cancel-boston-connecticut-shows/
WTF is sticking out of his pants?
IIRC he’s always sporting some flower – pansies?
But yes, he is another wrongthinker so I can easily imagine he is yet another assassination target.
suh’ fam
whats goody yo