How Italians Became 'White'

 Annamaria on Monday

This post is, mostly, a summary of an article by Brent Staples, published in the New York Times Sunday Review on October 13, 2019. I cut it out because it taught me a great deal about a subject that has interested me since I was a small child and the victim of some of the "Vicious bigotry" in the piece's subtitle.  Frequent readers of my Monday blogs may remember that one of my mother's brothers was one of the villains.

I don't remember the circumstances, but at some point, when I was in elementary school, I complained to my father about name calling by the kids in my school.  He said, "There was a university and library in Sicily when their ancestors were living in trees and painting themselves blue."  My dad, who lacked formal education, was a voracious reader with a broad appetite.  To this day, I believe that he knew whereof he spoke.

Sam decades after the conversation

described above, but still studying.

Many of my recent posts have dealt with racism.  I don't imagine that most readers here need any explanation of why I am trying to understand how to deal with it.  to that end, I went back to Brent Staples's article.  (See below for his photo and a clip of his bio information.). Here is my summery of his analysis.  I have done my best to be true to his point of view, and I apologize to him and to all you readers if I have misinterpreted any of his points.

 First all little background from me:  The overwhelming majority of Italians who immigrated to the US in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries were from the south of Italy, where the local economy was in taters and children were eating dirt, trying to survive. Those Italian immigrants came here out of desperation. 

My Sicilian Grandfather, Andrea Puglisi (seated), his 

son Paul, and his friends who immigrated with him.

 In his article, Staples points out that the Italians who immigrated had been subjected to the same treatment by northern Italians when they were still in Italy. After arriving in the states, they were quickly labeled "uncivilized" and racially inferior. They were denied housing and could only find work that no one else wanted. Generally speaking, these horrid circumstances followed them here and continued.

Pretty much nationwide, Sicilians and African-Americans were both thought to be "utterly unfit," flowed, and lesser than real human beings, prone to criminality.  

Things got worse for Sicilians who settled in New Orleans.  I imagine that they liked it there because the weather was better than the frigid north winters that they were not used to. They further sealed their fate by moving into black neighborhoods and eventually, intermarrying with blacks and mulattos. Then, along with their black neighbors, they became victims of white supremacist.  It all came to head when David Hennessy, a police chief was assassinated. Hennessy was popular with the white people, but he had already been accused of murder in a conflict with a professional rival. He also clashed with two Italian business men who he targeted because he wanted to take over their businesses. Soon, the "dagoes" where accused of his murder.

It became clear that this was a put up job when the first nine defendants went to trial.  Because the prosecution lacked evidence to prove the crime, six were acquitted and three others were granted miss trials. But that did not stop the whites, who hated the Italians because of their fraternizing with African-Americans.  Eleven of the supposed Italian Assassins were lynched by a white mob. Even up north, A Times editorial justified, the lynching, calling the lynched Italians "descendants of bandits" and "a pest without mitigation."

This is where the United States government got involved. You see, the Italian government objected to the slaughter of 11 of its people. President William Henry Harrison might have ignored the whole thing, but then the case was made by the Italians, who cited Christopher Columbus as an Italian hero for Americans. This gave Harrison a rationale.  It was, what seems to me, a long shot since Columbus never set foot in North America, and there was no United States when he was on his discovery voyages.  Stil,l in 1892 President Harrison declared Columbus Day a national holiday.  That meant that Italians were no longer the scum of the Earth, but maybe they might even be thought of as white people.

Racism and hatred being as powerful as they are, declaring Columbus a hero for Americans did not change everybody's attitudes. Nowadays, many people on the left now consider Columbus a criminal.  I myself suffered from it into the 21st century.  

But as far as I know, Italian people are now considered white. I'm not sure that is something that I, a descendent of four Italian immigrants, is happy about. Not while racism is once again rampant in my country.  Today's migrants, like those of the past, are desperate.  Those who target them and other poor Americans and people "of color" do so out of hatred and lust for power.  Evil is the only word to describe those who support torturing the already desperate.

Addendum:

You can find Staples's full article here.

Marc Anthony Has Returned With More to Say

 

Jeff--Saturday

 

In 2020, the spirit of William Shakespeare came to me proposing that I allow his chosen messenger to give voice to the Bard's take on contemporary American Politics. Not being one to deny the Master his due, I did; little realizing that five years later that same messenger would insist the times once again demanded that  his creator's fictional thoughts on the rulers of his time be postulated as  revealing the character of who rules us today.

 

So, with apologies to Shakespeare and in deference to Marc Anthony's demand here goes:

Marc Anthony

 

Friends, Russians, countrymen, hold back your jeers;

I come to fathom Caesar, not to braise him.

The evil that men do enriches them;

The good is scoffed, much as bankrupt loans;

As have we seen with Caesar. His choice of nobles

Hath shown you Caesar is capricious:

Viewing power a glory to exploit,

And gloriously hath Caesar used it.

Along with likes of Bannon and the rest–

The imprisoned and not yet convicted;

All viewed by Caesar as honourable men–

Until he sees them as funereal.

We need leaders, faithful and just to US:

And what of those who call him pernicious;

Many honourable men and women.

Plus, the many children caged on borders

Whose parents sought a better life for them:

Did this in Caesar seem nigh righteous?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath slept:

Governance should be made of caring stuff:

Yet so many cling to Caesar as solicitous;

Among them many an honourable man.

We watch and hear how on the nightly news

They bow when he suggests a kingly crown,

Which he would not refuse: was this sedition?

Or deflection from a plague so vicious;

Dismissed by him as it is what it is.

I speak now to disapprove what he spoke,

And seek the answer I’ve so longed to know.

Many did vote him once, some without cause:

What cause still drives them then, to yearn for him?

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin with our nation,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

 

 

 

And for you classists, here’s the original version, from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2.

 

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–

For Brutus is an honourable man;

So are they all, all honourable men–

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome

Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honourable man.

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause:

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

 

–Jeff

Unknown Caller.

 This blog contains a spoiler about the identity of the Unknown Number. I think everybody knows, but just in case....

                                               

Like many people, I sat and watched Unknown Number: The High School Catfish – A Chilling Dive into Digital Deceit. The Netflix documentary explores a disturbing case of cyberbullying in a small Michigan town, with a terrible sense of unease.

Lauryn Licari is a teenage girl who, along with her boyfriend Owen McKenny, became the target of relentless harassment via text messages from the ‘unknown caller’.

In October 2020, during preparation for a Halloween party, Lauryn and Owen start receiving strange texts. They are in the realm of; he’s going to split up with you, he’s with me now and other such statements that could be put down to teenage hormones and immaturity.

Then the messages escalate in frequency and intensity. Twelve months later the couple were receiving up to 50 texts a day, and they are now sexually explicit, manipulative and suggesting self-harm. The unknown caller knew times, dates, nicknames, events… even the basketball scores of the school team.

So, the sender was somebody close to them.

The documentary follows the investigation as Lauryn and Owen’s families start with the school, then the Sheriff’s Office and eventually the FBI. It was the FBI who traced the IP address behind the anonymous number.

It was Lauryn’s own mother, Kendra Licari.

It was a young criminology student who asked me to watch it, so we could discuss the case.

Like most people I had many, many questions.

The first question I had ‘was when Kendra was jailed, was she also given treatment?’  Her actions to her daughter were vile in the extreme, but they were also, I feel the actions of a deeply, deeply troubled soul. (I've read that she has been given counselling, and that her mental health issues were not explored in the documentary as fully as they could have been.)

The student was thinking about Munchausen’s by proxy.

I have only seen the documentary, which is a snapshot on what was a very complex situation, so it’d be unfair to comment.

But, as a writer, I like to think of the protagonist and the antagonist being on opposite sides of a fine line. In those circumstances, what would Person A do? What other pressures would have to be bought to bear for Person A to act as Kendra did?

Kendra gave a couple of reasons/ excuses as to why she did what she did, and why she did it for so long.

If we start swimming in the realms of fiction, how could a writer write a character and justify such behaviour to the reader. And make the reader believe that in those circumstances, who knows that I would do.

 

One story;

The youth and the long-term relationship of the daughter and her boyfriend. Thinking that through, I know of one woman who would be alive now if her mother had intercepted the relationship when it started at school and split them up. A teenager who is persistently warned that the boyfriend is no good? Warning her will only drive the couple further together. So, the unknown caller approach might be a painful and disturbing one, but it might work. The couple split up. Daughter escapes a lifetime of domestic violence; she escapes with her life.

( I’ll re-state here that this is my fictional brain talking, based on a case of my personal knowledge.  The young man in the documentary, was totally charming.)

 

Second Story

What life has mum had? What relationship did mum have with her own mother? Maybe mum wants to be a better mum without the tools and experience of what good motherhood is. Maybe she finds that causing a little friction between her young teenage daughter, and her daughter’s boyfriend, drives the daughter back into her mother’s arms. They have late night chats over cocoa, the mum takes the daughter's corner, defends her against the constant barrage of abusive texts. Mum becomes her daughter’s champion, her friend, the only one she can trust, maybe in a way that her own mother never did. If nobody ever came to defend her, mum might make sure that she can defend her daughter. If nothing happens that requires such defence, well she’ll just create it.

Third Story

Some trauma that the mum went through, that she wanted the daughter to avoid at all costs. Keeping her close by, keeping her a child, keeping her terrified of the big wild world.

 

The quote "In love we feel that we are greater than we know" is attributed to William Wordsworth. I think it is supposed to reflect that through love we can achieve a deeper understanding of yourself.

Or could it mean that love can blindside people into thinking that if their actions are done through love, they are  acceptable.

I have no real insight into why Kendra did what she did.

It’s a fascinating as a basis for discussion. But who are we to judge on a 90-minute documentary, filmed to be entertainment?

Rooting for the bad guy

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

All crime fiction has a protagonist and at least one antagonist. Quite often, the antagonist is the most interesting character. What makes them do the things they do? Sometimes our sympathy is with the bad guys at least to some extent. We don’t support their crimes, but we understand why they feel forced to commit them and wish there was a way out for them.

Deon Meyer is one of South Africa's top crime writers. I’m a big fan of his Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido thrillers, and it’s great news that his latest book, Leo, is now available in the US. Not only is it up to Deon’s usual standard, but this one won the prize for Best Adult Fiction at the South African Book Awards last year and was also SA Book of the Year. Publishers Weekly pigeon-holed it with his usual books, writing, “This intelligent page-turner confirms Meyer’s reputation as a master of the police procedural”.

In fact, Deon’s not so sure this is a police procedural, and at least half the book is from the viewpoints of the bad guys – characters engaged in two massive robberies. What’s more, we’re rooting for at least one of them, Chrissie Jaeger, a woman with a complicated past and unclear objectives, who is a key player in both heists.

Deon Meyer

In his piece What really defines the subgenres of crime? (https://crimereads.com/deon-meyer-leo/) Deon used a helpful AI system, Claude, and came to this conclusion:

“Leo probably is heist/caper fiction, amongst other things. But eventually, neither clever system Claude nor the vast amount of information I gathered during the interaction, changed my basic philosophy: focus on the story. Make it captivating. And let other people worry about its place on the ever-extending genre family tree.”

Fair enough.

In parallel, detectives Griessel and Cupido are trying to break what seems to be another case altogether. Deon loves parallel plots. He explains it like this:

“We all write the books we’d like to read, and I love books with lots of things going on. When I start writing a book and I get these ideas, I think: it will be cool if they connect. Each must be strong enough and have a convincing conclusion to be satisfying. You have to be very careful not to force it and lose credibility. But if it does happen, it can give an extra little thrill.”

It certainly happens in Leo. Chrissie and her partners discover a stash of money in a secure warehouse belonging to criminals involved in the South African state capture corruption, and they set out to steal it. It seems a victimless crime and a pretty safe one since no one can afford to involve the police. What could possibly go wrong?

Beautiful Stellenbosch mountains where much of Leo is set
Photo Deon Meyer

Some months later, Griessel and Cupido are investigating the death of a young woman who was biking in the mountains near Stellenbosch. It seems that her death wasn’t deliberate, but resulted from an attack by dogs belonging to a jogger who tried to cover it up. Then the jogger is killed by a professional hit team but no one knows why. His sister suspects she knows the answer, but wants to keep it to herself and two of her brother’s associates. As the murders mount, the loop closes, and Chrissie and her team see the chance of a heist much bigger even than the not-so-successful first one.

The escape plane. Or did it?
Photo Deon Meyer

One wants Crissie to get away with her share of the loot so that she can live her dream and retire to her small apartment in an Italian village and help a kind friend there start a restaurant. And she has two stray cats to support. Yes, it’s a crime and yes, people get hurt, but they are not nice people. Deon carefully constructs this ambivalence, leaving it to the reader to decide whether they want to see her caught or not. If you want to find out, you'll have to read the book.

Do you have a favorite antagonist? One you wanted to get away?

All the Countries, or Why Diversity Works

Sujata Massey 

With Jeff Siger, Annamaria Alfieri and Wendall Thomas, Arizona 2023

If you are reading this column, you could have found it at a number of spots. 

You might be on my author website or by Goodreads or Amazon pages; however the OG location for this column is the Murder is Everywhere blog, which is a collaborative writing project of currently ten mystery authors, with at least half a dozen former contributors, including the late author Leighton Gage, its founder. Since the blogsite’s origination in 2008, I’d been an admirer. I was admitted into the ranks in 2012 when I started my Perveen Mistry series and began filing dispatches about my research adventures in India and my more prosaic life in Baltimore, Maryland. To date, this blogging group has included writers with personal backgrounds, or story settings, on all continents except Antarctica. We’ve shared commentary in countries including France, Greece, England, Ghana, South Africa, Singapore, Botswana, Finland, New Zealand, Scotland, Japan, Italy, Spain, and more. 

What we do at Murder is Everywhere has been on my mind because of the recent American uproar against the idea of diversity. “DEI” is the acronym that brings together three goals: diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI probably started as workplace jargon, but based on 2023 and 2025 Supreme Court Decisions, and Trump polices, it’s become a red flag. Citing DEI has become a reason to outlaw various programs or fire people from positions of authority. 

With Cara Black, Caro Ramsey, and Stan Trollip in Florida, 2018

I’m sure there are people who might believe I’m DEI all the way: an immigrant who got a green card as a young child, part of a family group anchored by with a scientist father. But as the government saw it, this foreign professor father could do his research at an American university and further the nation's well-being. Ah, the old ideas about diversity's benefits! Today, I've heard more than 2600 people have lost jobs because of supposed connections to DEI: and hundreds of thousands more--many of them African American--because of elimination of so many federal jobs. 

I lost my Northumbrian accent growing up in America, and when it was time to start college, I had scholarship offers based on high test scores and a stack of essays and extracurricular activities. I yearned to leave the Midwest and wound up in Baltimore, Maryland, where I still live. I started as a freshman at a women’s liberal arts school, Goucher College, transferring to the exciting, co-educational Johns Hopkins University my junior year. In the mid-1980s, the undergraduate population at Hopkins was only 35 percent female and (I’m guessing) fewer than ten percent students of color (a term not yet invented)I remember a question of both admissions forms about whether I had a parent who’d graduated from the institution. Kids who could claim legacy status had a few extra points in their favor. 

We all believed that there were tricks to the admission process. 

My husband Tony and I met at Hopkins, and we still joke about being the scholarship kids who got in because of our underrepresented home states--Louisiana and Minnesota. College admission materials often included statistics about state and international backgrounds of students. It’s a policy that probably results in more people back in the faraway states learning about the school from the student’s family; and it also made the campus more vibrant. I treasured listening to music introduced by a friend from Brazil, and hearing the accents of my buddies from small-town Tennessee and Manhattan and New Jersey. We heard about life in Johannesburg from a South African student who was wary about returning. One downside was a lack of African American students from public school backgrounds. It wasn’t until after 2012 that Hopkins started a robust scholarship program for all qualifying students from Baltimore City Public Schools that still continues.

With my husband Tony in Greece, 2025 

I graduated to work at a daily newspaper in Baltimore. Journalism jobs are notoriously hard to get, and in those days, most editors were white men. I was hired at the Baltimore Evening Sun, the now defunct sibling afternoon paper that competed with the morning paper named the Baltimore Sun. Probably the competition was just a good-natured one between the reporters, since the money all went into the same pot. During my time, the Evening Sun had a particularly strong bench of Maryland-raised, Black reporters. Many of these friends had undergone the paper's  four-year, paid summer internship program offered to University of Maryland journalism students who hailed from the newspapers' circulation area. The program was clearly in the newspaper’s interest, because it meant developing strong young reporters who already knew their way around and had social connections giving them access to sources that an out-of-state reporter might take years to cultivate. 

My route to the Evening Sun also came through an informal internship meant for Baltimore college students during the school year. I loved the work doing general assignment stories for the city desk and felt warmly welcomed by the energetic young reporters. When the internship year ended, I jumped at the the chance to come in and help on Sundays with a reporting job done mostly by phone: contacting the police and fire department to tabulate the weekend’s tragedies; and news broke, speeding to the scene to report on it. Ironically, I interviewed for a full-time job at the Raleigh News&Observer where I mentioned my police reporting background. The editor told me: "We don't have women reporting on police stories because the cops don't like talking to them." Even though it wasn't my life ambition to be a police reporter, I took the editor's statement as a sign not to take the job they offered. Instead I took a job at the Evening Sun, the happiest workplace of my life.  

I am sharing these personal experiences as my own brush with what can happen when under-represented people are welcomed in. Bringing the idea to a higher level, we see that Google and Apple and Amazon exploded into success due to using smart and capable IT workers from around the world, along with American citizens. It's not right that H1b visa workers are often paid less than an American worker for the same job; but we also have to acknowledge that these salaries are more than in the home country, and fewer Americans pursue math and computer science than do students in China, India, Russia and Germany. This means: fewer qualified people.

Currently, America has a growing challenge of unemployment. The Pew Research Center finds that in the 25- to 34-year-old bracket, 47% of college degree holders are women, while 37% are men. 

The reasons for this seem to be varied. For example, we’d carefully saved for our son’s college education, but he wasn’t particularly interested in going and also had the bad fortune of starting freshman year in 2020, the pandemic year. He lasted three semesters and only decided to return to studies this year. But this time around, his motivation is strong, and his brain is a few years further down the road in terms of development. 

Slightly more females than males work at part-time jobs during high school; and they are often tasked with care of family members as well. Does having ability to manage multiple roles lead to better focus in college? A lot of studies on video game interest show that boys are more attached to this pastime than girls. And everybody I know seems to have a relative or friend whose son who doesn’t work at a job but matures into adulthood stuck in the basement gaming. Why would anyone want to live like this? Does long-term gaming alter the brain’s pleasure centers that make it harder to feel satisfied by studying, or undertaking complex intellectual tasks? 

In the past, teenagers had very different paths. Parents expected their sons to apprentice, enter trade school or university during a time that some daughters unfortunately had circumscribed choices for higher learning. It may sound radical, but I’ll argue that some boys and young men could benefit from diversity programs. They too can be supported as students, workers and human beings, and in this sphere get genuine connection with people who don’t look like them. 

As I said at the start of this essay, there are different places to arrive at the essays published by Murder is Everywhere. Platform diversity helps writers connect with readers, just as a diversity of workers supports the world. 

Paths, Pages and a Circle to Meow

Ovidia--every other Tuesday

We've been renovating our bedroom. At last. After sixty-plus years of ignoring interior décor and living like perennial grad students, we now have closets. Unfortunately it feels like I'm tearing down more stuff on the page than in the bedroom!
The good side is, I think the space kind of looks nice (Before and after pictures below).
And it feels like a small but definite victory.

This is Before--same metal shelving as we used in our office spaces.

And after. Yes, that's me in the mirror I wasn't aware of before!

This definitely cleared some physical and mental clutter; we discovered the television is larger than we'd realised and that we have games we bought but never played.
Which is where the Circle to Meow comes in:

'Stray' is a PS5 game where you play a little cat exploring dark alleyways, chased by swarming things called Zurks. Those glowing spots in the photo are Zurk eyes. They're like really nasty bloated-on-blood ticks that pile onto to your cat character until it dies.
And yes, we died again and again and again.
It seemed like a hopeless case till we discovered the Circle Button on the Controller.

I realise that in the West, the circle button tends to mean Cancel, but here it often means Confirm and, more importantly--in this game anyway--it means Meow. And that Meow turns out to be the survival action here. When you press the circle button and Meow, the Zurks get surprised and shaken off.

It's something I'm going to try to apply when I feel overwhelmed and stuck. Till now the only options seemed to be rage/despair quitting or battering blindly through (while the blood sucking Zurks pile on and simultaneously suffocate and exsanguinate you) but now there's the option to stop and Meow and see if there's the option to zigzag.

Because as long as I'm on the path, I'm still alive, even if I feel stuck. Or maybe it's that as long as you’re still alive, you’re still somewhere on the path.

And there's the book path too.
I'd thought I was almost done--and then I saw how one little shift could make it a hundred times better. Even if that slight shift means chucking/rewriting most of the 65,000 words I've got down so far.

I know it's crazy stupid (especially with the deadline coming up next month) but once you see the magic 'it' there's really no choice.

So I'm be staying on the book path and meowing (and zig-zagging) instead of quitting.

Galapagos 1991

 Annamaria on Monday

First a few introductory words about the photos.  David Clark took almost all these wonderful pictures on a trip he and I took in 1991.  He  was an enthusiastic photographer before digitals.  He preferred to take 35 mm colored slides.  Later, it became possible to converting his thousands of shots of our many trips into digitals. I jumped at the chance.  A company was offering to do so at a not so bad price. I sent them a bunch of photos from some of our most interesting destinations.

I bundled the slides, carefully. labeled by destination and date of travel, and shipped them off.  What I got back were 14 CDs with photographs in no particular order, all of them labeled as having been taken on 31 December 1903.  I can assure you that none of the pictures you will see here were taken on New Years Eve 1903.

Many of you probably have heard or read my rants about never making a bucket list,.  I say start fulfilling your deams NOW! This trip was one of those once in a lifetime experiences, the kind people often have on their bucket list.  David and I took it six months after I turned fifty and he was about to turn 55.  

We saw Galapagos before such tourism exploded into a multi-gazzilion dollar industry.  The boat we traveled on was only big enough for 36; on our trip we were 24 -two groups of 12.  David and I were the youngest passengers, more the same age as the crew.

Each evening after dinner, one of the lovely Ecuadorian guides gave a lecture on the island(s) we would see the next day.

The each morning and afternoon, we boarded a small boat that took us to see the animals and birds and flora of a unique place.

The most astonishing thing was that, because local animals did not see humans as predators, on those islands, the animals were not afraid of people.  We could walk very near them and they did not run from us.

Blue-footed Booby

Book nerd that I am, of course I was reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle as I traveled.  My good luck was that we went see this lake on the 147th anniversary of his visit.  

I love this photo of David.  I keep it right over my desk.  The tree he is standing under is a Prickly Pear Cactus, a garden plat of about two feet high anywhere else.

I loved watching the Blue-footed booby hunt.  They fold their

 wings, crash into the water, and catch a fish on their way up.

The frigate birds don't hunt. They harass a booby until it drops

its fish, and then the frigate catches it before it falls back in the water 

Of course, the Galapagos Giant Tortoise is a wonderful 

creatures to see up close.

A Vermillion Flycatcher stealing a ride.

Marine Iguana

When I say call in the Marines, I mean this guy!