Naomi Kritzer

I gotta say my biggest takeaway is that it's ridiculous that her diploma made her ineligible for a transition program.

Disability accommodations are a rare thing that actually trickles down. You like curb cutouts? Auto-opening doors? Jar openers? Ramps? Hand rails? YOU’RE WELCOME

Even as an abled person you use disability accommodations every single day.

Supporting accommodations actually helps everyone.

A black and white photo of an older man with white hair, a round face, and glasses. He's wearing a black suit and holding a cat.

Apparently he appeared in the documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity" and IMDB has his photo:

Anyway. I wanted to share this guy with everyone but I also wanted to tag @margaret.bsky.social and suggest that Denis would be a great subject for Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.

The good news is that his memoir does seem to be available on the Internet Archive in full text format, so I can read it there. I don't see the biography, alas.

This book is newer than the memoir, so I actually looked up Geoffrey Elliott in the hopes that I could find him, e-mail him, and suggest that he self-publish an ebook version of his biography, because if copies of the book are going for $100, there's CLEARLY INTEREST.

Alas, Elliott died in 2021.

"The Shooting Star: Denis Rake, MC, a Clandestine Hero of the Second World War" by Geoffrey Elliott.

There's also a biography! "The Shooting Star: The Colourful Life and Times of Denis Rake," by Geoffrey Elliott. It's also out of print and the cheapest copies I can find of THAT are $100.

Unfortunately the cheapest copies I have seen of it are $200. (It's possible I'm just having trouble finding cheaper copies, because there are a lot of things with the title "The Rake's Progress.")

A photo of a hardcover book: "Rake's Progress: The Gay -- And Dramatic -- Adventures of Major Denis Rake, MC, the Reluctant British War-Time Agent." By Denis Rake, with a foreward by Douglas Fairbanks, KBE, DSC. The cover is a stylized cartoon of a natty looking guy with a bowler hat, an umbrella, a corsage, and a cigarette in a holder, parachuting down with a parachute that looks like an army helmet.

My point is this: I would like a historical novel about Denis. Or a movie.

He wrote a memoir called "Rake's Progress: The Gay -- And Dramatic -- Adventures of Major Denis Rake, MC, the Reluctant British War-Time Agent."

And then went BACK to France in 1944 for the stuff that you read about in the historical novel I just read. He was unable to parachute in because of his injuries from 1942, so they delivered him by boat.

He was later arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and somehow escaped (possibly he jumped off a moving train, possibly someone smuggled him out), found some people to work with, got arrested AGAIN, got tortured AGAIN, escaped AGAIN, eventually made it to Spain...

Return to France SOE recruited him in 1942 and he accepted the training apart from the physical exercise. On the night of 13-14 May that year a felucca dropped him and Charles Hayes in a rubber dinghy off the coast of Antibes.[1] Disappointed with the operation of the networks on the Côte d'Azur, he moved to Lyon and got in contact with Virginia Hall. He and Hall quickly understood each other and she housed him in a sex worker's house. However, there was not good reception for his radio there and he had to move. During the day he worked as a radio operator beside Edward Zeff ('Mathieu'), an operator for the 'Spruce' network, while in the evenings he was a singer in the cabaret at 'La Cigogne'. When he was stopped by a policeman one day and asked to open his case, he pretended to be a black marketeer and gave him a large bribe.

And then, okay, I'm just going to paste in a screen shot from his Wikipedia entry:

Denis was gay, pretty much openly so despite the era, and ... okay, per his Wikipedia entry, he was raised by a traveling circus, seduced a Greek prince, and was a star of the stage, all PRIOR to WWII.

It's terrific and currently $2 for the ebook. Anyway. Nancy Wake was a real person, and was as brave, hilarious, and profane as she's portrayed in the novel, apparently.

One of the other characters in the book (who was also a real person) was Denis Rake, the radio operator she works with in France.

So this past week I read the book "Code Name Hélène" by Ariel Lawhon, which is a WWII-era historical novel about an Australian woman who married a Frenchman, worked in the French Resistance, escaped France just ahead of arrest, and parachuted BACK in to work with the Maquis.

Did you see my thread a week or two back about the LLM that started out trying to scam me, then switched to trying to negotiate on my behalf? (Oh, huh, it was a month ago! what even is time)

bsky.app/profile/naom...

OH MY GOD CHERIE 😂

South Minneapolis's hottest club is the St. Albert the Great fish fry, it's got:

DSA-affiliated ne'er do Wells

clerks of federal judges whom I am practicing in front of

anonymous toilet paper reviewers

@wedge.live

Had an amazing time at the St Albert the Great fish fry. Dan introduced me to his family and I had to explain to his small child that Dan takes such good care of his clients that it makes him my dad, not his.

Dropkick Murphys dedicate their performance to "Alex's family and Renee's family."

And, "We want to dedicate this to all those people who have suffered at the hands of our own fuckin' government."

This is a fascinating piece and very worth reading.

Oh, that is an EXTREMELY insightful thread.

Signed, someone who invited in the Mormon missionaries when my older kid was a baby because I was so desperate for five minutes of conversation with someone who could talk back.

I found out in 2017 that Harvey Weinstein had it in for Daryl Hannah because she resisted being raped by him, that her career crash was the result of him telling everyone she was difficult to work with. So when someone is publicly shitty to her my first thought is that they're Harvey sympathizers.

Apparently this has been out there for a couple of weeks and I just...

Exercise caution and self-care before reading thus thread. I'm sure that you already know that Trump is a monster; you don't necessarily need to know the magnitude of it.

YOU ASKED FOR THIS!

Downfall. Kristi Noem Edition:

OH LOL I thought you were talking about APT!

Also it looks like they're doing As You Like It?

??!!?? I had not seen that! (But, I haven't been to one of their shows since the late 1980s.)

Fair point....