You're in a bad place now.

Every year on the eleventh of July, enormous bonfires are built across Northern Ireland and adorned with Irish flags, along with photographs and effigies of Irish politicians or people from Northern Ireland who vocally identify as Irish in public life more generally, along with the flags of groups British loyalists perceive as being connected to Ireland; Palestinian flags have been a common sight on loyalist bonfires for decades.

The "KAT" acronym crudely scrawled on the Irish flag at the centre of the image stands for "Kill All Taigs", with "taig" being a slur for Irish people derived from the given name "Tadhg". The "Stop the Boats" rhetoric of the broader British far-right is present too, but it takes a backseat to the age old bigotry which sees Belfast divided by literal walls on lines of ethnic cleansing and pogroms perpetrated by the grandparents of, parents of, and, in many cases, the same people who participated in Monday night's pogrom.

"I don't have a choice, I'm just following orders"

"I'll get dishonorably discharged"

Okay at least you wont be killing innocents in the name of imperialism

"I'll go to jail"

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

discworld is obviously very pro-policing-as-an-institution, but it starts out as establishing the entire city watch as corrupt, inept, uncaring, out of touch, and unsympathetic to the civilians it's supposed to protect, and over the course of several books and several decades painstakingly sells us on the idea of reform and accountability, all lead by One Good Man who's able to do so. it's pure fantasy, and not just because it's discworld. the structure of reality within discworld itself makes it a believable arc, because the reality of discworld is dependent on the shapes of stories and that's a folk myth that's believable. if it you can read the books and meet it on it's terms, if you can buy the idea of a benevolent dictator, you can buy the idea of police reform that actually works.

andor is on the opposite scale, where law enforcement are shown as human and relatively realistic; not uniquely evil for the sake of evil, but it's also very explicit that there are No Good Cops. no good enforcers, no good soldiers, no good intelligence officers, no good mall cops or prison wardens or prosecuting judges under fascism and empire; enforcing unjust law and withholding due process makes you complicit. the only ones who are sympathetic are the defectors and the moles within the ranks of power. everyone else is either apathetic face of the banality of evil, or ends up swallowed by the fascist death machine they maintain. and andor showed no exceptions.

arcane's biggest inconsistency is it doesn't know what it wants to do. we open the series with the scene of a brutal state massacre. two kids are left orphans because cops killed their parents during a failed uprising against the ruling class. they come from a poor and disenfranchised neighbourhood, vi ends up wrongfully imprisoned at fifteen, and into the foreseeable future.

and then she's rescued from the jail and...falls for a cop? said cop later goes full dictator, calls martial law on the poorest district in the city, and then spends months using carcinogenic gas on vi's own community. vi ends up drafted into a war to fight for a state and a city that hates her, then essentially betraying her own people to stay with cait. happy ending, the end?

but lets not forget sergei prokudin-gorskiy, who developed a similar process in 1902, published in 1903 and then toured russia to take hundreds of color photographs:

This is Leo Tolstoy, author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.

Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara…

…and his Minister of the Interior.

A Type B-15 steam locomotive…

Another of those peasant girls with guest-gifts of berries…

The Church of St John the Baptist at Staraya Ladoga…

…and a Sergei Prokudin-Gorskiy self-portrait.

Unlike some current selfies ;-> he’s not dominating the image, so here’s a closer shot.

Nice hat…