In Search of the Mythical Socialist Bigfoot

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While the Republican President continues to shoot his mouth off… and sometimes shoot his own foot off… or put his foot in his mouth and shoot both off… (Dang!  See what you get for being too friendly with the NRA, Republicans?) I decided to track down the mythical creature that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Watters… (no, that last one is not smart enough to know who I am going to name) constantly warn is the socialist-communist-terrorist-really-bad-guy behind everything President Obama and liberals do, Saul Alinsky.

You see, I have been battling the evil Bond villain Badfinger for days now.  He has been exercising his evil on my more Republican and conservative Facebook friends for a while.  They have been posting up a storm of crap about how terrible Obama is, the Biden Crime Family, and how false climate change is, and how we should not try to lift up the poor by tearing down the rich… things that sound suspiciously like talking points on Fox News where they mention Saul Alinsky a lot.  (Yes, I do watch Fox News sometimes.  It is always on at my favorite A&W in Lewisville.  And besides, sometimes it is therapeutic to induce vomiting when you’ve had too much poison and disrespect.)

A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.
A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.

Boy, Saul Alinsky sounds like a real monster!  But if Saul Alinsky really said this, and he really is a socialist, why do so many of these sound so much like fascist/capitalist ideas?  The kind of control they are urging is what appears to me to be the thing that would benefit fat-cat oligarchs and rich-old-guy control freaks.  So I turned to Wikipedia to learn more about this evil, very evil guy.  (I know, Wikipedia is discredited because it is edited and referenced by the people who use it… but a source that is factually checked and edited daily can sometimes be more accurate than the rarely updated articles in Encyclopedia Brittanica.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

Saul_Alinsky

Wikipedia says that he was a Jewish-American community organizer and writer.  (Red flags have to go up for Republicans for that alone.)  And worse yet he was focused on improving the lives of poor people in American cities, particularly black people.  He was working with black people in ghettos in New York City, Detroit, and other notable “trouble spots” in the 1950’s.  How did he avoid the wrath of righteous commie hunters like Senator Joe McCarthy doing a work like that?  Oh, wait a minute… It says in the article that William F. Buckley praised him as an “organizational genius”.  How did he avoid prison after being endorsed by a commie like that?  Um, right?

His book, Rules for Radicals, begins like this; “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

There’s the damning evidence right there.  He means to punish the wealthy and the greedy and the powerful by taking away some of their excess and giving it to the powerless who are starving and suffering from want.  No communist except maybe… Jesus Christ… could have proposed anything more radical and perverse.

And look at some of the terrible methods he used.  He once used what he called a “fart in” to disrupt rich folks’ sensibilities at the Rochester Philharmonic concert in Rochester, New York.  He organized a group of classical-music-loving radicals to eat huge quantities of baked beans, then go to the concert and intentionally alter the atmosphere for rich patrons of the arts.  That will either bring down Western Civilization as we know it, or make somebody die laughing.  You can’t get much more evil than that, can you?

When asked whether he hadn’t actually considered joining the Communist Party, Alinsky responded like this;  “Not at any time. I’ve never joined any organization—not even the ones I’ve organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it’s Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.”

Man, oh, man!  I owe such a debt to my conservative Facebook friends for exposing this monster to me.  I didn’t know what Fox News was ranting about until now.  I now believe this evil Saul Alinsky may actually be worthy of respect.  They may have actually reinforced my loony liberal belief that the American Government exists to better the lives of all its citizens.  It has definitely opened my eyes to the dangers of…thinking like a Republican.

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The Happy Pessimist

“I’d rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised.”

Benjamin Franklin

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Truthfully, I have always expected the worst out of life.  That expectation has never let me down.  In fact, it has made me a much happier person.  “How is that possible, you dim-witted dolt?” you ask.  Well, just as Franklin said it.  I am never taken unpleasantly by surprise.  In 1983, when I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma, skin cancer, I prepared myself to die at 27.  But I was pleasantly surprised.  I not only survived, but it was completely eradicated by surgery.  No chemotherapy.  No recurrence.  No more cancer worries (beyond assuming each and every mole I had removed after that point in my life was melanoma revisited).  I can now celebrate 42 years of being cancer-free.

pessimist

Watching politics as a humorous hobby benefits greatly from a pessimistic outlook.  I just assumed that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would win the Presidency in 2016, and I prepared for that dismal dip into depressing gloom.  If Rodeo Clown Bush the Sequel had been elected, or Scott Walker got the nod, the more likely scenarios, I would have been pleasantly relieved and surprised, even though I would still have been expecting the ultimate heat-death of the planet to come from those administrations.  If Marco Rubio got the nod, better still.  He’s kinda young for a senator and stupid, but he’s demonstrated that he does care at least a little bit about the common man, and he doesn’t really want us all to die.  He’s even demonstrated the ability to learn from mistakes.  And if a Democrat had won, especially Bernie Sanders, that would have been a repeat of the marvelous surprise we all got in 2008 from the election of Professor Obama, man of the people. Of course, the worst happened, and the evil Pumpkinhead won in both 2016 and 2024. I will be preparing for the world to end after this next election, but there is actually a higher percentage chance of survival and limited suffering.  After all, people, even the mega-polluters in China and India, have recognized the need to try to repair the planet.

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I was, honestly, as a pessimist, expecting to be dead before the new school year started in 2015.  So I was pleasantly surprised to be able to start a new collection of morning-dog-walk sunrise pictures.  I am prepared and at peace with the world because I always expect the worst to happen.  Looking at everything from the dark side is ironically the way to find the light and hope in the new day dawning directly ahead.

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Running Totally Free

I know this from actual childhood experience. There is nothing so freeing for the young soul as running naked in a pasture where there’s a cool creek for skinny dipping. The milk cows didn’t mind. The bull was in the barn. The water was cold, originating from an artesian well. My heart was pumping happily.

Now, much nearer my next chess game with the Grim Reaper, I am faced with freeing myself of everything once again. I have had to give up driving. My daughter now owns the car I am still paying for. I gave it to her to help her get a job despite being in her early twenties. And specifically because with 50 years of arthritis and 25 years of diabetes under my belt, I have had to give up the idea that I can safely drive a car in city traffic.

I am also planning on moving to Iowa to the family farm established by my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. I will move into the farm place with my sister, nearer to where the rest of my family has lived and died. I will be living there without my wife, who is not yet ready to retire from her teaching job. And without my daughter, who will stay in the big city to take care of her mother. We are not divorcing. I just need to be where I don’t interfere with the frenetic life of an older teacher (not older than me, just older than the other teachers). My sister is also retired and has more time to do things like getting me to doctor appointments in the middle of a workday.

I will leave all my furniture in the house near Dallas, and leave almost all of my books, my massive doll collection, my memories of raising our family in that house, and other things too sad to think about. I would be in Iowa already if I hadn’t had the heart problem in May, and the possible skin cancer problem from last week. But soon I will be there again. Spiritually naked and free. Ready for that cold dip into the coming darkness we all have to anticipate.

Don’t cry for me. I am running naked and free.

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The Uncritical Critic Likes to Read Books Too!

I told you before that I make a lousy movie critic because I watch anything and everything and like most of it.  You don’t believe me?  You can look it up through this link; The Uncritical Critic

I hate to tell you this, but it is almost exactly the same for books too.

flying goldfish

The Paffooney is an illustration for a proposed collaboration on a children’s book.  My friend and fellow author Stuart R. West (Stuart’s Blogspot about Aliens) had a story about three kids taking a balloon ride when they accidentally gave the goldfish bubble gum to chew ignoring their mother’s warning that dire consequences would follow.  He decided the project was too ridiculous to follow through on, or at least my Paffooney power wasn’t up to making sense of his brilliant literature, and the book did not happen.  And I am sorry about that because I couldn’t wait to find out how it turns out.  I love weird and wild stories of all kinds.  And, unfortunately, I love them uncritically.

So, what kind of books would a goofy uncritical critic actually recommend? Let me lay some bookishness on ya then.

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Here is the review I wrote for Goodreads on Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

I have always felt, since the day I first picked up a copy of Mort by Terry Pratchett, that he was an absolute genius at humor-and-satire style fantasy fiction. In fact, he is a genius compared to any author in any genre. He has a mind that belongs up there with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner… or down there as the case may well be. This book is one of his best, though that is a list that includes most of his Discworld novels.
Amazing Maurice is a magically enhanced cat with multiple magically enhanced mice for minions. And the cat has stumbled on a sure fire money-making scheme that completely encompasses the myth of Pied Piper of Hamlin. In fact, it puts the myth in a blender, turns it on high, and even forgets to secure the lid. It is funny, heartwarming, and changes the way you look at mice and evil cats.
This is a book to be read more than once and laughed at for the rest of your life.

You see what I mean?  I uncritically praise books that make me laugh and think deeply about things at the same time.  It is as if I don’t have any standards at all if something is brilliantly written and makes a deep and influential impression on me.

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Here’s another book that I love so much I can’t be properly critical when I reread it.  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  I cannot help but be taken in by the unrequited love the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton had for the beautiful refugee from the French Revolution, Lucy Manette.  Tragic love stories melt my old heart.  And I can’t help but root for Charles Darnay as well, even though I know what’s going to happen in Paris at the Bastille because I have read this book three times and seen the Ronald Coleman movie five times.  I also love the comical side characters like Jerry Cruncher the grave-robber and hired man as well as Miss Pross, the undefeatable champion of Miss Lucy and key opposer to mad Madam Defarge.

I simply cannot be talked out of praising the books I read… and especially the books I love.  I am totally uncritical as a reader, foolishly only looking for things I like about a book.  Real critics are supposed to read a book and make faces that remind you of look on my little brother’s face when I had to help him use an outhouse for the first time.  (Oh, what a lovely smell that was!)  (And I mean that sarcastically!)  Real critics are supposed to tell you what they hated about the book and what was done in such a juvenile and unprofessional way that it spoiled all other books forever.  That’s right isn’t it?  Real critics are supposed to do that?  Maybe I am glad I’m not a real critic.

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The Blue Man

The Blue Faun who represents the lovely melancholy sensuality that informs my wordy little life.
The Blue Faun who represents the lovely melancholy sensuality that informs my wordy little life.

When I was in Iowa last, and had a chance to see the younger of my two sisters, Mary Ann, she told me flat out that she really liked my most recent blog posts and that I should give up all together on my gloomy pessimistic ones.  This, of course, was confusing to me because all my blog posts are relentlessly gloomy and never make anyone smile, so I did not know for certain what she was responding to.

As I have shared on more than one occasion, I suffer from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor.  I don’t plan on living more than decade further at my most optimistic, and I told you recently that I am a confirmed pessimist.  At worst, I could be dropping dead from stroke or heart attack as soon as I post this silly sour old post.  I will be absolutely delighted to live long enough to finish another novel or two and maybe even see them published.   I keep close track of my remaining hours because each one is rare and precious to me, even the ones that are quite painful and hard.  So gloomy is as gloomy does.  I am constantly celebrating that I have lived this long already.  How depressing is that?  … the celebrating every day thing, I mean?

And of all the people who suspect I might be a fish sticks and custard sort of person, Mary Ann is not one of them.  She watches Doctor Who and knows that that is exactly what I am.  I am goofy and scatter-brained and a barely contained barrel of weird energy and misplaced enthusiasm. I do stuff like fill my bedroom Barbie shelf with bizarre and kitschy little 12-inch people.

The Barbie Shelf
The Barbie Shelf

I appreciate melancholy and being blue, because the hollows of the valleys of depression make you appreciate the giddy heights so much more.  And I do realize that I am stringing big words and goopy metaphors together to sound all literary and brooding… but that’s what real geniuses whom I am trying to emulate do to reach the highest heights.  They run down through the valley at the fastest possible pace to build up enough speed to shoot up the side of the mountain on the other side.  It is a Wiley Coyote trick for using cartoon physics in your own favor.  It is the reason I am still tending the flower wagon, trying to coax zinnias into blossoming during the depressingly renewed Texas drought.  It is the reason I keep adding to my collection of sunrises.  The dark blue pieces of the puzzle of life provide the contrast that help you define the puzzle picture of the brightest sunshine and light.

The blossoms in the flower wagon reached a new record number today, despite the heat.
The blossoms in the flower wagon reached a new record number today, despite the heat.
Sunrise on a school day when I don't have to go to school because I am retired.
Sunrise on a school day when I don’t have to go to school because I am retired.

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From the D&D Table

We like miniature figures and homemade illustrations in our D&D campaign.  Let me show you a bit of the excessively obsessive results of this preference.

DSCN5191 DSCN5192 DSCN5195 DSCN5196 DSCN5197 D&D6169 001 D&D6163 001 D&D6167 001 D&D6168 001 D&D61611 001

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Double Character Study; Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates

Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates are recurring characters in my hometown novels.  So far they have appeared in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Magical Miss Morgan, both of which are now published and available through Amazon.

The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is now available on Amazon through this link;

https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-Wheel-Genius-Michael-Beyer/dp/1982984023/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544204666&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+beyer+books+bicycle-wheel+genius

Magical Miss Morgan is available through this link;

https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Miss-Morgan-Michael-Beyer-ebook/dp/B0797GTRPV/ref=sr_1_39?ie=UTF8&qid=1544202254&sr=8-39&keywords=michael+beyer+books

The first book documents their star-crossed romance, beginning as ten-year-olds and following through until they are going on thirteen.  Blueberry is a girl with a terrible secret.  She is not like other girls and has to protect this secret, which will only become harder and harder to contain as time goes on.  She lives with her father who barely notices her, an aunt, her father’s sister, who knows the secret and punishes Blueberry for it, and her two older sisters who cherish her and dote on her, and probably are the only reason she is still alive.  Her mother, unfortunately, died when she was a baby.  But both books she appears in so far are comedies.   I will not go into the possible tragedies lying wait in ambush for her in her distant future.  The tragedies are simply not funny enough to be a part of everything.  Like many of my characters, she is based on people from my own life and experience.  She is a combination of a girl I once loved and a boy I once taught.  If that’s not confusing enough, I can add that Blueberry loves to draw, a detail that comes about because she is also partly based on me.  She particularly loves to draw pictures of Mike Murphy.  She might have drawn the next Paffooney (if she were a real person and not just some made-up girl that only lives in my weird old imagination).

Blue and her beau

Mike Murphy is a Norwall Pirate.  Not just any Pirate, but their best athlete, tree-climber, and wild-story believer.   He does everything the Pirate leader, Tim Kellogg, (the grand and glorious and mostly notorious Pirate leader) thinks up for him to do.  He believes every lie Tim tells him, and faithfully defends the Pirates and their leader, even when it gets him detention (again!) from their favorite teacher, Miss Francis Morgan.  He starts out running away from Blueberry, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would.  But he eventually lets her catch him, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would at about that age, the middle of the wonder years.  He becomes her best friend and greatest white-knight-sort-of protector, even though he is torn between that and loyalty to Tim and the Pirates and the lies they tell.

I am now planning a third book that will allow these two characters to adventure together.  I will call this novel Kingdoms Under the Earth.  It will begin with Blueberry being kidnapped by evil flu fairies that take her away to the dark parts of the fairy world under the surface of this world in a feverish coma. Mike Murphy must decide to follow her and rescue her, which he will do via the bad advice of a fairy friend, kissing Blueberry on the lips, contracting her disease, and sharing in her comatose suffering.  Then Mike’s best friend, Tim Kellogg, and his big sister Dilsey both agree that they must follow also to help rescue both Blueberry and Mike.  It will be a great adventure through illness, imagination, and the many hidden kingdoms of fairy magic that lie directly under our world.

Now, I suppose you are wondering why I am giving you details about characters in a book, or rather books, that I haven’t even finished writing yet.  Well, if you are dedicated enough to reading my loopy and boring old posts to get this far, it is probably safe to tell you that I don’t really know either.  I also want to find out.  What do the next sentences say?  Oh, yes.  Mike Murphy already exists as a Pirate in my published book Catch a Falling Star.  He is an established character that I have to twist and tweak into fitting into new stories.  Blueberry has been prancing around in my imagination and drawing colored-pencil Paffoonies since the 1970’s, but I am only now weaving her into the stories I have in me and are burning with a red-hot flame to get told.  So I’m not completely crazy to do this.  Only about ninety percent… right?

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Obstacles

Michelle is part of a naturist family and enjoys being nude. Still, when riding her bike to the flower shop and back, her preference for nudity is faced with the obstacle better known as the public indecency law.

After the cardiologist’s good report yesterday about my recent stress test, today’s visit to the dermatologist put a damper on my plan to move back home to Iowa before Labor Day. The last doctor’s visit before moving was supposed to say I am in good health in spite of the pacemaker operation in May, and ready to make the Interstate move.

The obstacle now is a biopsy report on something that could be the early stage of skin cancer. And if it is positive that the sore is malignant, more steps and more delay will ensue. Dang! Texas really doesn’t want to let go of me!

But I do plan on overcoming this obstacle and, like Michelle, I hope to ride, unencumbered and free, into the future.

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The Dark Side

Originally written the week of Robin Williams’ death by suicide.

Francois

The thing about depression is that it really is not very funny.  That’s what makes it difficult for someone like me who relies on humor and wit to deal with every problem that attacks in life.   Sometimes you have to stand toe to toe with the devil and look him square in the eye.

Robin Williams’ death is one of those things that can send you on a downward spiral into depression and darkness.  Whenever someone loses the battle, you are reminded how hard it is to pull yourself out of the old black oubliette, the dark hole that is depression.  I had to take some time this weekend to mourn and be alone.  No one else can really do anything to help, other than to be there and be willing to listen.  People think you have to say something to help someone with depression, but, in truth, talking makes it worse.  If you tell the person you know what they are going through, or you know how hard it is, they might become violently upset.  Nothing is more personal or individual than suffering depression.

Fools

Now, I know some skeptical sorts of know-it-alls out there are going to immediately think, “What the hell makes this guy a so-called expert?”  And they are probably right to question it.  But here is what you probably didn’t know.    Of the five members of my immediate family, two of them have been hospitalized for depression a total of four times.  One incident involved self-inflicted injury.  We reacted quicker than is financially sensible the next three times.  Two members of my family suffer from bi-polar disorder, though only one of those has been diagnosed by a doctor, and only one of those was ever hospitalized.  We don’t get many visitors in our home any more.  My wife is rightly embarrassed by all the holes that have been punched through the plaster of the walls.  I have been thrown down the stairs once.  I have had to hide all the knives in the house three times.  One of my children had to dodge a knife that was thrown at them.  We have called the police on at least one occasion, and been called in by child protective services once.  Through it all, I have been the one faced with talking down the sufferer.  You look them in the eyes and see their pupils dilate, and sometimes the eye-twitch, and you know, “uh-oh, it’s time for the hurting again.”  There is nothing I can say.  There is nothing I can really do.  I just have to stay there (you can’t leave the sufferer alone for obvious reasons).  I have to keep the sufferer safe, and hopefully calm, and wait it out.   And I have to be ready to listen.  No jokes are allowed.  If you haven’t stopped reading this yet because it is too hard and ugly to consider, I can offer a little bit of light and hope.  I have gotten so good at doing this, that when a girl in one of my classes had a suicidal bi-polar meltdown, I was the one who knew what to do.  (All those hours spent with psychologists and therapists count for something.)  The principals and the counselors helped to keep her safe, but I’m the one who allowed her to vent and have her say, who took the time to listen and assure her that she really was being heard.  I’m also the one who got the thank-you and the apology for having to listen to how much she hated me and hated the school when she was at the bottom of the dark hole.  I never asked for any of this, but I have come away with a rare set of skills.  For now my children are safe and happy, and for now my worries seem to have come to a close… well, a temporary reprieve.  These problems never go away.  You get to keep them for a life time.   But they are not 24/7.

Hilda

 

So, you would think, with my ability to help others, I might not be totally without resources when battling my own depression.   You would, of course, be wrong.  You cannot beat back the darkness by yourself.  Long hours of staying in bed and hating your life do not help.  They are easy, but they do not help.  So, I have to take to the keyboard and write.  I fight back with words on paper.  And more than that, I have to write for others to read, even if I have written personal things that really aren’t other people’s business and will probably be used against me if I ever try to do something totally stupid like run for public office.  And from being a wordless wonder suffering in the bedroom yesterday, I have transformed myself into an eight-hundred-plus word fountain today.   To get through life I have to sing and dance and tell jokes and write and play harmonica and write and spend time with my kids and write and write some more.  Those things help when even the depression medication has no effect…  when your favorite movie comedian loses his own battle.

 

 

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Native Americans Invade My Artwork

I don’t know if you’ve seen enough of my colored-pencil Paffooneys to tell this, but for an old white guy, I draw a lot of Native Americans and am rather deeply in love with American Indian images.  You may have seen this dream painting I posted before.

Magicman

The girl in the painting is a combination of this warrior’s daughter and myself.  I was naked in the dream and a female, facing this huge ghost-stag.  The dream came while I was reading Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill.  Maybe that book was the beginning of my Native American obsession.  Who knows?  I am a crazy dreamer.  But that wonderful book turned me on to the rich spiritual life that the Dakota people lived.  I identified with it so completely that I dreamed myself into their culture.  I was also struck by the manner in which a Native American culture handles education.  The grandfather is in charge of the boy’s learning.  He teaches by story-telling.  Here you see the grandfather in Sky Lodge teaching his grandson.  The girls would learn very different things from their mothers and grandmothers.

Skye lodge

I am also entranced by the life of the people expressed in dance and ritual.  Dance has deeper meaning than we white guys normally assign to it.  Dances could be magical.  Of course, the notion of a “rain dance” is the result of too much simplification in movie scripts and ignorant popular white culture.  Dance could connect you to the Earth, the Sky, and the Spirit World.  That’s what this most recent Paffooney shows.

Pueblo Bonito

So, you can see, I don’t really understand the concept of moderation when it comes to my obsessions in the world of colored pencil art.  Hanta Yo!  Clear the Way!  In a sacred manner I come!

child of fire

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