Here is some pokémon and some other shit.

Her name is “Reality Leigh Winner” and she was a NSA Contractor. She passed a top secret NSA document to a news source (an article from The Intercept) that contains information about a Russian cyber-attack with one voting machine DAYS before the 2016 presidential election. This is considered the most detailed piece of proof regarding Russia’s interference with the elections to date. 

Here’s how the NSA document described how the Russians did the hacking: 

“As described by the classified NSA report, the Russian plan was simple: pose as an e-voting vendor and trick local government employees into opening Microsoft Word documents invisibly tainted with potent malware that could give hackers full control over the infected computers.

But in order to dupe the local officials, the hackers needed access to an election software vendor’s internal systems to put together a convincing disguise. So on August 24, 2016, the Russian hackers sent spoofed emails purporting to be from Google to employees of an unnamed U.S. election software company, according to the NSA report. Although the document does not directly identify the company in question, it contains references to a product made by VR Systems, a Florida-based vendor of electronic voting services and equipment whose products are used in eight states.

So, possibly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I mean you know how you hear the “women want him, men want to *be* him” stuff in old movies? Well I’m a man and by *god* I wanted to be this guy. Anyway!

I’m having dinner with my girlfriend at the time, and behind us are a couple on a date. It is.. not going well. Guy was being rather creepy and making some pretty inappropriate comments, the girl doesn’t look at all comfortable.

The girl finishes her appetiser really quickly, my guess is she wanted to get it over with. Guy proceeds to comment on it and says “well, least I know you can swallow right?”. Loudly.

Girl goes red and tells him that isn’t appropriate, he literally waves his hand in a “shoo” type motion and says “oh calm down I was going to find out in a few hours anyway”.

I missed her exact reply as she moved to a hushed tone, but it was fairly obvious what was being said - fuck no, fuck off, fuck this. He responded with “sweetheart I picked you up, I know where you live”. She lost the colour in her face and said nothing.

No. No. Fuck no. I’m one of those “get involved” type of people and there is no way I’m sitting here watching this go down. I get up. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m 23, fighting fit and happy to put that motherfucker through a wall. I may have had a slight temper in my youth. But anyway.

I was halfway out of my chair when a hand came down on my shoulder and I look up to this mid-50s but super fit guy who says “Easy.. I’ve got this one son”. Absolute, total confidence in his voice.. so seeing as my current plan amounted to “stab him in the neck” and I’m already thinking maybe that’s not the best idea, I sit down.

He walks over, grabs a nearby chair, flips it around and sits down with the couple. Then.. he pulls out his police ID and puts it on the table. Now the guy doesn’t have any colour in his face.

Cop: “So, I’m quietly celebrating my daughters birthday with my family when I distinctly hear you threaten this young lady, would you care to explain yourself?”

Guy: “I, ah, well, um, you see..”

Cop: “That’s what I thought. Now see, we take a *very* dim view of that kind of thing, so right now I’m deciding if I want to have some of my buddies come pick you up.”

Guy: “oh no well that…”

Cop: “But that would disrupt everyone’s dinner, so how about you hand me your ID, because I wouldn’t want you running off on me, then you go see one of the staff here and settle your bill.. the full bill now, this young lady shouldn’t go hungry on account of your poor behaviour. Or we can go with the first option, I’ll leave it up to you.”

Guy: “No no! That’s perfectly fine!” \*hands over ID, gets up and walks very quickly in the direction of the counter\*

Cop: \*while writing down the guys details\* “Sorry about that miss, I hope I’m not intruding it just seemed like you could use some help. Oh and don’t worry, if you want to pursue this further I’ll have some of the boys pick him up on his way home, we can definitely take this further.”

Girl: “No, thank you so much, I wanted to run out 30 minutes ago but he drove me here”.

Cop: \*shifts from hardarse cop to comforting father figure in about half a second\* “Well I’m here with my daughter, she’s about your age, perhaps you’d like to finish your meal with us? We can run you home afterwards if you’d like, unless you’d prefer to call someone else?”

Girl: “Oh.. that would be really nice.. thankyou so much!”

\*guy returns, so does the hardarse cop\*

Guy: “Uh so, I’ve paid the bill, if I could have my ID back..”.

Cop: “There you go.. now I have your details right here so I *highly* recommend you don’t go near or contact this young lady ever again.”

Guy: “Yes yes of course, I’m so sorry!”

The guy pretty much fled the restaurant, the girl went and sat with the cop and his family and by the time we left they were still sitting around talking and laughing about random crap.

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.