Kerry Howell

Hey friends. I started a Tinyletter called “Dead Trees Don’t Love You Back” about culling your books. https//www.tinyletter.com/KerryHowell

In five years, Gone With the Wind will be public domain and there will be genuine potential for the worst unauthorized sequels/reimaginings of all time.

This is getting wild now 👀 So I started looking at the ballroom after digging into the Reflecting Pool yesterday. I’m starting to see some patterns. The playbook works like this. Pick your contractor personally. Invoke “Unusual and Compelling Urgency” to skip competition. Use the 250th anniversary as the justification. Inflate the price. Don’t disclose who’s actually doing the work. Repeat. Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. $13.1M. No bid. No competition. Justification: “Unusual and Compelling Urgency” 250th anniversary. Contractor: Atlantic Industrial. Zero prior federal contracts. No pool or monument experience. The subcontractor doing the actual work doesn’t appear anywhere in the justification documents. Now the ballroom. Trump personally selected Clark Construction to build his $400M White House ballroom. Clark is already on site with people and equipment. Then NPS quietly awards Clark a separate $17.4M no-bid contract to fix two fountains in Lafayette Park directly across the street. Never posted publicly. Never competitively bid. The justification? Clark was already nearby. That’s it. The original estimate for those fountains in 2022 was $3.3M. The consultant who wrote that estimate said the administration literally took his cover page and added millions with no itemization. Final price: $17.4M. Same urgency exemption. Same 250th anniversary justification. Both contracts bypassed competitive bidding. Both used the same urgency exemption. Both cited the same 250th anniversary. Both awarded to contractors with direct Trump connections. The Lafayette Park contract was never posted in public federal spending databases. The Reflecting Pool contract was posted but the subcontractor doing the primary work appears nowhere in the paperwork. Combined taxpayer bill: over $30 million. Combined competitive bids received: zero. This urgency exemption has been used in less than 1% of NPS contracts over the past decade. They used it twice in the same year. For birthday decorations. Senator Blumenthal is already demanding answers on the Lafayette Park contract by May 15th. The Reflecting Pool has a Cabinet secretary photographed on site and a subcontractor with an expired federal registration that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the contract documents. This isn’t two separate stories. This is one story. The 250th anniversary isn’t just a celebration. It’s a billing mechanism. And taxpayers are footing the bill with zero say in who got the work or why..

REMINDER: If the SAVE Act passes, you will NEED a passport to vote or multiple other proof of citizenship documents. This is all by design.

Paw-sitively adorable! Denali's sled dog puppy cam is now live! It’s a front-row seat to the next generation of working dogs in action! To watch, visit: go.nps.gov/puppy

@dog_rates They are service dogs for people with ADHD.

This is Walsh, Dane, Sweetpea, and Wiley. They are all service dog dropouts. Together they have successfully completed one single task. 13/10 for all

@JennMGreenberg @ChloeChloeChl19 She was 9 weeks pregnant, not months.

@ChloeChloeChl19 Nobody who is believed to be capable of strangling someone, let alone a 9-month-pregnant woman, should be free anyway. It’s crazy.

A Houston man, Lee Gilley, is accused of murdering his beautiful pregnant wife, Christa, and their unborn baby in 2024. For reasons I cannot fathom, he was released with an ankle monitor to await his trial. Idiotic. According to court records, he allegedly told a woman about his plan to cut off his ankle monitor and flee. And he did. He fled to Italy where local police thought he seemed sketchy and detained him. His murder trial was scheduled to begin in weeks, yet this guy was freely roaming our communities. This is a huge problem, and a large part of why women and girls keep getting raped or murdered by repeat offenders. The courts just let the monsters (and alleged monsters) loose. It has to stop.

@feederofcats “Only The Internet is allowed to know I exist! And my vets, right?”

I threatened Wonton that if she ever pulled some shit like this I would make the whole neighborhood perceive her as well, I think we have an understanding

Wonton's bloodline continues to take years off of my life due to stress. We have been trying to catch her brother Oliver (formerly Bao) for 2 weeks and finally, he was trapped last night and is back home with his poor sleep deprived family

(just wondering....who recalls the hospital vigil where you were at a bedside for days or weeks & had no time for meals & so you lived off those little Jello, applesauce & yogurts that came with your patient's meal which he/she rarely ate... & if you recall this vigil, hoping that it ended happily, as often a hospital vigil does not end happily but the memory of Jello, applesauce & yogurt prevails.)

@christinemariej @witchesflight And George Peppard is gay in the book! And he’s escorting too!

@witchesflight Because she’s a honeypot, sex kitten, hooker, and no one figures THAT PART out. Capote wrote the character with Marilyn Monroe in mind. It makes more sense when you imagine a recast.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is, aside from being racist, super weird lol

@hollanovficfind Death and taxes and shane Hollander archiveofourown.org/works/78739901…

to the league so he wouldn’t get a fine or something like that and turns out its Shane he has to talk to and this is the first time they’ve seen each other in years. know the fic? please share! 👇

🏒 looking for a fic! 🏒 the tuna melt scene never happened so older Ilya and Shane are not together and haven’t seen each other in years. Ilya is retired(?) but shane works for the NHL. Ilya has a son that plays in the NHL and he said a slur or something so he had to apologize

NAU, UofA, ASU

Paradise Valley, Tempe, Scottsdale

@nefarioushan1 It’s really enjoyable!

why is my silly little single dad ilya x rich shane au SUDDENLY getting so much attention and comments 🫣😭 thank you guys so much i'm a bit confused at the timing but THANK YOU!

@cljack @DocMartinez2013 That and the acceptance of non-relative adoption after it was popularized by child trafficker Georgia Tan. My dad had a cousin(?) in the 40s that he was raised with, a child his grandmother took in after his dad died and mom ran off. He might have just been a neighbor.

@DocMartinez2013 it makes complete sense given the realities of the time! it's just incredible how quickly that custom vanished post-antibiotics and now we have absolutely no cultural memory of it at all

another thing that stands out from reading books set in the 19th century is how, if you were a well-to-do household, you were expected to take in random ragamuffins, like you'd just find yourself raising the orphan child from your wife's 3rd cousin's husband's second marriage

@fookintentacle @handsywoman archiveofourown.gay/works/81166311

@fookintentacle @handsywoman Have you read Slavic dad Ilya Rozanov?

5 + 1 #hollanov fic idea, but it's 5 times Ilya does something extremely Russian and confuses Shane with it, and 1 time he does something extremely Canadian and confuses Shane even more.

@ursa_maritima @feederofcats So deliciously chubby!

@feederofcats I wanna put my face on that delicious belleh

please enjoy the soothing sounds of Tuna Melt snoring as he recovers from his surgery

@feederofcats @CeeEyes Should be called Tuba Melt

@LetChaosRaine @tovahinto Maria’s in school for social work in Common Goal.

@tovahinto Kyle is the manager and Maria is presumably getting a job in her field. Kyle's the only one who expressed a passion for hospitality and interest in running a bar

Kyle is a lifer at the Kingfisher but I don’t think Kip is meant to be. What kind of job does he get after grad school? (please don’t say anything explicitly art related because it will make me cry)

@ohthisknot @LetChaosRaine In the books Kip’s an actual history guy, not art and not even art history. I think it’s Eric Bennet and Kyle who are more art and art history oriented.

@LetChaosRaine I fear I'm not creative enough and still think kip would be working as a museum curator 😭 if anything, jacob and rachel have to figure this out for the kingfisher spin-off, cuz show!kip is more polished compared to book!kip