February Stories

As all short-story writers know (and if they don't, they soon learn), the stories you write and sell can then take quite a while to get published. My waits from acceptance till publication have ranged all the way from a couple of days to a couple of years--and when they do finally get published, it sometimes happens in clusters.

Example: Since my most recent post here at SleuthSayers two weeks ago, I've been fortunate enough to have three stories appear in two publications. Also, as is often the case, each of those three stories is totally different from the others. 

If you're at all interested in this kind of thing, here are some quick summaries: 

February 8 -- "Vanity Case," Black Cat Weekly, Issue #232

This story, besides being shorter than most of what I usually write, is an actual mystery, with a crime and several suspects to choose from. (There's no separate "solution box," as in the Solve-It-Yourself mysteries in places like Woman's World, but all the clues are there for the alert reader to find and use.) The story features small-town sheriff Lucy Valentine, her overbearing mother Fran, and her stalwart deputy Ed Malone, who are recurring characters in a series I've been writing for a long time now--more than a hundred Fran/Lucy installments have been published so far. This one's a Valentine's Day story (pun intended), and involves the early-morning burglary of an electronics store and the task of figuring out which one of three possible suspects is guilty. No dead bodies, no bloodshed, no politics, no literary heavy-lifting, but hopefully fun to read. I must thank Barb Goffman for prodding me into submitting this holiday story.

February 9 -- "Me and Jan and the Handyman," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 

This one's not a whodunit, or a traditional mystery in any way. It's just a crime story, a TTT (Twisty Turny Tale) featuring wealthy socialites, construction workers, federal agents, blackmailers, informers, bankers, world travelers, prison inmates, etc. It's a fairly long first-person story, and just quirky and "different" enough that I thought it might work for Ellery Queen since most of my successful EQMM stories have been weird. And thank goodness it did get accepted there, although the recent change in ownership of the magazine caused it to take awhile to appear in print. Sincere thanks to the wonderful Jackie Sherbow, who I bet would agree with me that stories with complicated plots and multiple reversals are always the most fun to write. 

February 15 -- "Mutiny in the County," Black Cat Weekly, Issue #233

The third of the three stories in this mini-tsunami of releases, "Mutiny in the County," was unusual in several ways. First, it marked only the second time I've had stories appear in consecutive issues of Black Cat Weekly (the first was in June 2023--Issues #92 and #93). Second, it was one of the only two stories out of the 22 I've had published at BCW that were submitted through the portal to John Betancourt instead of being acquired via Barb Goffman or Michael Bracken. Third, it was one of only four of my BCW stories that were SF/fantasy instead of strictly mystery/crime. It did have a crime that was central to the plot, but it was otherworldly in that it featured a sheriff's-deputy protagonist who discovers that he's really, of all things, a character in a short story. (The antagonist is the writer.) As you might imagine, I had a good time with this one--cross-genre stories, like those with many plot twists, are usually more play than work--and I was pleased and grateful that John liked it. 

Anyhow, that was my rare three-stories-in-eight-days occurrence for the month--and probably for the year--but it's always a kick when that kind of thing happens, especially when the content and structure of the stories are vastly different from one another. (If you're a writer, has that kind of happy surprise happened to you? I suspect it has.) Sadly, I predict there'll be fewer of those clusters of out-of-the-blue publications in the future, for all of us, because there'll probably be fewer markets out there to send stories to. But I could be wrong.

I truly hope I am.

To Have and Have Not - Hemingway Noir

Source: The Hemingway Society

 Usually, when you read Hemingway, it's about World War I or the Spanish Civil War. Or the Lost Generation in France. But Papa was all over the map with his short stories. Yet one novel sticks out to me, having just listened to it on audio. To Have and Have Not, which, ladies and gentlemen, is, as the kids say these days, is noir AF.

Mind you, as a boy, I'd have had my mouth washed out for saying AF. I found that Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner taste. Heady, but with a touch of mellow smoothness. I digress.

The story concerns Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain from Key West operating out of Havana. He gets a brief glimpse of is future when three Cubans try to convince him to take them to America. He declines, and good thing he does. The Cubans are gunned down right after talking to him. Anyway, Harry has a client, a rich man who wants to catch a marlin. He lands one, but it gets away, taking Harry's tackle with him. Harry hands him the bill for three weeks and the lost gear.

The rich man skips out on the bill. Now broke, Harry takes a job for a Chinese man running immigrants from Cuba to America. When it becomes clear he's going to kill the unsuspecting Chinese laborers, Harry takes the job. And the money. And kills the Chinese trafficker, leaving his fleeced charges on a beach in Cuba. 

But this becomes his life. He takes these jobs, running illegals and booze and occasionally getting into scrapes. Before long, he loses his boat and unsuccessfully tries to steal it back from the government. After securing the use of someone else's boat, he loses his forearm. Finally, he loses his life. We're left with Hemingway describing the problems of rich people. Most of them don't make it easy to sympathize wit them. 

But To Have and Have Not is a product of the Depression and an act of middle-class rage. (Hmm...Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) Harry Morgan meets the classic definition of the noir protagonist. When I started writing, someone gave me a shorthand difference between hardboiled and noir. Hardboiled = touch. Noir = screwed. And Harry is very much screwed.

But the difference here is there are no femme fatales. There are gangsters, but their menace is vague, men taking advantage of the poor and not caring who gets hurt. Harry is a fundamentally decent man doing bad things to support his family. Rather than the classic man vs. man (or woman, as is often the case in noir), it's man vs. the machine, as in Rage Against the...Harry Morgan's battle is against a rigged system that punishes him for playing along with the game after playing by the rules proves to be a losing bet. 

Between this and For Whom the Bell Tolls, it represents some of Hemingway's darkest work, short or long. 

Ripped From the Headlines!

Chelsea, MI police looking for woman who donated a human skull at Goodwill

(LINK)  Possibilities:

1. She was tired of it lying around the house.
2. It was the last of her grandfather's belongings, and she didn't want it.
3. Someone gave it to her (I hope not for Valentine's Day).
4. She'd picked it up at the town dump / local bar / the back of an Uber.
5. Well, she had to get rid of it somewhere.  
6. Nobody knows.

Scientists Recreate What a Mummy's Voice Would Have Sounded Like

(He doesn't sound that enthusiastic to me, but he got his wish.)

Firefighters Rescue Swan in the Connecticut River  (Link)

"Crews also rescued a duck and a dog, but said saving the swan also gave them a valuable opportunity to train for future ice rescues."

Serial underwear thief at New Zealand school identified as...  (LINK)

"A serial thief who has been stealing items including towels, shoes and underwear from a New Zealand school for over a year was finally caught on camera and identified as a literal cat burglar."  As in meowy kind.  Nobody yet knows why the cat was enamored by objects smelling of sweat and a hint of chlorine.

Swimmer's lost prosthetic leg washes up 10 months later, 14 miles away  (LINK)

So... jealous mermaid?  A hoarding octopus?  A kinky surfer?  My favorite part is that it was found with the sock still on it...  

Texas big game hunter killed while stalking African Cape buffalo (Link)

I like to think of it as Animals 1: Humans 0.  

Australian Mushroom Murderer Finally Sentenced:   (LINK)

Mrs. Patterson, a 50-year-old mother of two, was sentenced in early September, weeks after she was convicted of killing three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives with poisonous mushrooms in a home-cooked meal. 

The menu:
"...individual portions of home-made beef Wellington, a steak dish wrapped in pastry, usually with a paste of finely chopped mushrooms. And, as Patterson herself acknowledged during the trial, that paste contained death cap mushrooms, which are among the most poisonous in the world." 

Also, Pro Tip:  If you're going to host a toxic meal, do not, I repeat do not, serve your portion on different tableware than that of your guests.  It raises suspicions.

An Upteenth Case of Child Porn in South Dakota

"James Allen Frank, a 36-year-old man from Spearfish, has been arrested for possession of child pornography, according to a ticket and probable cause affidavit obtained by KELOLAND News.  Frank’s address, listed on the court documents, matches the address listed on business filings for an unlicensed in-home child care center run by his wife...  The tip from NCMEC included three videos depicting the sexual content involving prepubescent and pubescent girls.  He has since been sentenced to eight years in prison."  (I would think this rated a little longer sentence, like... 20 years?)  (LINK)

Boxer Loses Hairpiece in the Ring.  (LINK)

Before:  

After:  

(NOTE:  The bout was eventually scrapped because he failed a drug test.)

From News of the Weird:  (Link)

"Shepherd Dieter Michler had no real answers for why 50 members of his flock split from the 500-sheep herd and made their way into a Penny supermarket in Burgsinn, Lower Franconia, Germany, on Jan. 5. Shoppers and employees quickly took to higher ground, climbing atop the conveyor belts of the checkout lanes to make way for the ovine interlopers, who left broken bottles, droppings and strewn products in their wake when they were eventually removed from the store. Michler told the Main-Post newspaper that he suspected the wandering sheep became distracted by acorns as he led the herd across the industrial area, and, after losing contact with the rest of the group, meandered into the store's parking lot."

"Skip Cunningham, 70, was asleep on his couch on Jan. 13 when a car crashed into his home and landed on him, WWNY-TV reported. "I woke up and blood running down my head and a car laying on top of me," Cunningham said. "The guy's running around saying, 'Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.' I says, 'Well, call 911.'" An ambulance took Cunningham to the hospital, where he got 13 staples in his head. But on the way, trying to play out his amazing "luck," he asked the ambulance driver to stop so he could buy a lottery ticket. "But they wouldn't stop," he said. Cunningham has lived in the house for 50 years and said cars have run into his home five times." 

Dear Skip, MOVE. Sincerely, Concerned.

And my favorite:

"Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into a Frog." Source

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney’s 2009 musical comedy. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”  

Yeah, right...

"I got better."

Pyramid Schemes

A Cairo pub

 Last month my wife and I took a tour of Egypt organized by the Biblical Archaeology Society.  It was amazing.  I'm trying to figure out what to tell you about it, since this is supposed to be about crime and writing.

So, crime. Several people worried about our trip: Was Egypt... dangerous?  

Well. It is a developing country.  Things are different there than any country I have been in before.  We never felt in any danger (except when our taxi driver decided to save time by going the wrong way up on a one-way street...  straight toward a car.  Yeesh.)

On the other hand, on several days we were accompanied on the bus by an armed man in plainclothes.  And every hotel and several museums had a metal detector..

The street sellers and beggars did make us feel harassed.  They were more aggressive than I am used to.  When my wife and I went for a walk in Luxor (against our guide's advice) we must have been met by half a dozen such folk, including a driver of a horse and wagon who followed us for blocks trying to convince us to take a ride.

And then there was our arrival at the Cairo Airport.  Our checked bag had not made it through the transfer at Frankfurt Airport (in spite of the plane being delayed for an hour there, sigh.) We were having trouble figuring out where to talk to someone about that.  I found an Information Desk and there was a woman standing in front of it.  We chatted for a couple of minutes and finally found our way to the right office.  While I was  waiting to fill out forms I said I needed to figure out where to get local money.

"Oh," said the woman, "I will take any currency."

And that's when the penny (or Egyptian pound) dropped.  She hadn't been behind the Information Desk.  She wasn't any kind of official helper.  She was another person looking to get money from tourists.  After that I didn't believe her advice, good or bad as it may have been.

None of this is a crime, of course.  But the ten men I saw fist-fighting each other in the street were definitely breaking some law.  We were on a bus, so no danger.  

But enough griping.  Let's start with the greatest highlight: I can't imagine anyone looking at  the pyramids and the Sphinx  and being disappointed.  They are stunning.    

And here is our first connection to writing.  Between the front paws of the sphinx you find what is called the Dream Stele.  (A stele is a stone notice board, usually with a curved top.)  It explains that Thutmose IV dreamed that the Sphinx told him that it was being smothered by sand and if he got it all cleared away the Sphinx would make him pharoah. So he did that and voila, he got the crown.

Modern scholars interpret this to mean that Thutmose  IV did not have a very strong claim to the throne so he made up this story as political propaganda.  

But it gets more complicated because the writing on the stele is later than that pharoah.  One guess is that the priests of the sphinx copied the text because it showed how important their statue was - a genuine kingmaker!

Most of what I knew about ancient Egypt before the trip came from Barbara Mertz.  She wrote a brilliant book called Red Land, Black Land, which shows no interest in pharoahs, mummies, or animal-headed gods.  What it does tell you about is the life of average people, the farmers, fishers, and so on.

Valley of the Kings

But Mertz did more than that, of course. Under the name Elizabeth Peters she wrote a wonderful set of mystery novels about Victorian Egyptologist Amelia Peabody.  Amelia loved pyramids but most years she and her husband dug in the Valley of Kings.  That's the desolate landscape where the pharoahs hid their tombs once they realized that building a pyramid was like hanging a neon sign that reads Hey thieves! Treasure in here! Alas, all the royal tombs in the Valley were robbed - except one - but at least they tried.

In the Valley we visited the tombs of Ramesses III and IV. Lucky for us the thieves couldn't swipe the wall decorations.   

K.T.

A minor character in Peters' novels is Howard Carter, a real-life Egyptologist.  She presents him as a nice guy and a good archaeologist, but incredibly unlucky.  Amelia often  tries to cheer him up  by promising that something will turn up.  The inside joke here is that in 1924 Carter found that only unrobbed pharoah's tomb - that of King Tutankhamun.

Ushabti

The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which is magnificent and opened just a few months ago,  contains among its 100,000 plus artifacts 5,000 items from King Tut's tomb.  The tomb itself was tiny but packed like a moving van. Seems quite a lot turned up for poor Howard.  (By the way, ushabti are small figurines intended to serve the deceased in the afterlife.)

Amelia's favorite form of transport was a dahabiya, a barge-like boat for sailing up and down the Nile.  I would have considered myself lucky to have seen one but as it happened the owner of the tour company which planned our trip in Luxor arranged for the 40-plus members of our tour group to have a sunset cruise and dinner on his personal dahabiya.  Picture three decks including rooms to sleep 24.  Also one of the best meals we had in Egypt.  

Merneptah Stele

We also visited the Egyptian Museum, now known as the (Old) Egyptian Museum since GEM opened. It still has plenty worth seeing, including some written artifacts of note.  For example there is the 10-foot-tall  Merneptah Stele, containing the only mention of Israel found in ancient Egypt.  Pharoah Merneptah brags of destroying Israel, which appears to have been an exaggeration.

Amarna Letters

Those clay  pieces you see are part of the Amarna Letters, an amazing find.  Pharoah Akhenaten, arguably the first monotheist (ca 1350 BCE) forbid the worship of any gods but the sun disk and built a new capital city, Amarna.  After his death the city was abandoned and so archaeologists were able to find its untouched archive with thousands of letters to and from the monarchs of his day.

Photo by Schlanger

One more piece of writing-related history.  We visited the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. The fascinating thing about this beautiful building is a small window in the women's balcony (up on the left), which led to a geniza.

The rules of  Judaism state that when a text that contains God's name (such as a Torah or prayerbook) is no longer usable it must be buried in a graveyard. Until that is convenient the papers are kept in a storeroom called a geniza.  As it turns out, nobody emptied the Cairo geniza for a long time. Researchers emptied it and found over 400,000 pieces of paper, some a thousand years old. More excitingly, they weren't just religious texts: they found personal letters, merchants account books, legal documents, etc.  The result is, scholars know more about the lives of eleventh-century Cairo Jews than they do about, say, Christians in Paris during the same period.

An old friend

The written word -- or hieroglyphs -- have power.

Oh, and in that same old section of Cairo I met an old friend in an underground bookshop.

It was quite a trip.

Red Herrings Can Still Stink

Five years ago, I ran the following column, which had the most views of all my SleuthSayers essays published before and since then. It therefore seems worthwhile to run it again, with minor modifications.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that may be controversial, at least among writers: Readers should understand why a red herring (something that is said or happens in a novel or story that leads the reader to a false conclusion) was not the solution to the puzzle by the time the tale is over.

Until recently I didn't think this was a controversial opinion. I thought it was a standard approach to writing mysteries. Sure, I'd sometimes heard authors say they didn't need to explain by the end of their stories why Character X said Y because Y was a red herring, but I thought they were mistaken, and since I wasn't their teacher, it wasn't my place to correct their misguided notion. But recently I edited a story by an author I respect, someone who's a solid writer, and the issue arose. Since I was this person's editor, it was my job to say my piece.

I'm going to talk about the story, but I'm completely changing the names and plot so that you can't identify the author because who this person is doesn't matter. In the whodunit story, Princess Consuella tells Annie the Amateur Sleuth that murder suspect Bad Bad Leroy Brown lied about something, based on personal observation, and therefore, Leroy must be the killer. Princess Consuella was believable and seemed absolutely certain, so I suspect most readers would have finished that scene believing Leroy had indeed lied and thus must have been the killer. It's what I thought. Yet at the end of the story, I learned I'd been fooled. Leroy may be bad, but he never killed anyone--at least not in that story.

I raised the problem with the author--that no explanation of Princess Consuella's statement about Bad Bad Leroy Brown was provided by the story's end. Either Leroy did lie (which by the story's end didn't seem right, since we never learned any reason Leroy would have lied about the issue in question) or the princess had been wrong (but how could that have been true, since she had seen with her own eyes the thing she was certain Leroy lied about, and it wasn't the type of thing that could have been misunderstood, and she had no reason to lie either). The reader would be left wondering how to reconcile this situation, so some  explanation should be provided, I said. The author pushed back, saying that no explanation was necessary since it was a red herring designed to fool the reader into thinking the wrong suspect was the killer. The reader learns who the actual killer is by the end, and that's what matters, the author said; we don't need to revisit the red herring. 

That response prompted me to do some research about red herrings. Had I been wrong all these years? Do red herrings, by their very nature, not require explanation? To my surprise, I found nothing addressing this issue. There are a lot of articles about crafting solid red herrings, but I found nothing addressing the idea that red herrings should be explained by a story's end, that the reader should be able to understand how she got fooled. Even now, some time later, I remain quite surprised, because if authors can toss in red herrings without eventually providing an explanation for them, it makes writing a mystery too easy. It feels like a cheat.

In the case of Bad Bad Leroy Brown, sure, he could have been lying for reasons the reader never learns, despite seeming to have no reason to lie. Alternately, Princess Consuella could have lied for reasons the reader never learns about or she could have been wrong, despite being so certain and giving the reader no explanation for how she could have been mistaken. It certainly would make life easy for authors if they could write red herrings that didn't have to be explained in the end, but I think it would leave readers with a bad taste in their mouths. That is why I believe such scenarios need to be resolved. Did Leroy lie and why? Or did the princess get it wrong and how could that be? Without an explanation, the red herring feels contrived. It makes me feel like the author was playing games with me. 

This is why I recommended the author use a little misdirection when the red herring was introduced. More specifically, I suggested that when the princess called Leroy a liar, the author should use the wiggle word "recall" in the dialogue. Notice the slight difference:

Scenario A: The princess slams her hand on the table, its sound echoing throughout the castle. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown is a liar! I was sitting right next to him in the dungeon cafe last week, and he didn't leave money for his meal on the table when he left. I wonder what else he's lying about. I bet he rips off restaurants throughout the kingdom all the time. He's a rip-off artist."

Scenario B: The princess slams her hand on the table, its sound echoing throughout the castle. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown is a liar! I was sitting right next to him in the dungeon cafe last week, and I don't recall him leaving money for his meal on the table when he left. I wonder what else he's lying about. I bet he rips off restaurants throughout the kingdom all the time. He's a rip-off artist."

In Scenario A, the reader ends the story shrugging, thinking Leroy (who has a reputation for honesty, despite his name) had no reason to lie when he said he paid for his lunch, yet the princess's adamant accusation against Leroy remains unexplained. (She too had no reason to lie, and her certainty indicated she hadn't made a mistake.) In Scenario B, the reader can go back and reread the language of the princess's accusation and think, "Oh. The author fooled me."

Here's why Scenario B works: Because (1) the reader has no reason to think the princess lied; (2) the princess seems certain, so the reader will believe her account; and (3) the princess distracts the reader by slamming the table, muttering about what else Leroy might have lied about, and declaring that he's a rip-off artist, the reader easily could read right past the key words--the princess didn't recall Leroy leaving his payment. When the reader gets to the end of the story, she could flip back to reread the princess's accusation and think: "Oh! It was right there. She merely didn't remember that he had paid. It makes sense considering that she was distracted. I was fooled fair and square." That's the way to make a red herring work. That's the way to make the reader feel satisfied rather than feeling played. It would especially work if the author built elsewhere into the story that while the princess was at the cafe, something else was going on that could have held her attention.

Alternately, the reader could learn by the story's end that Leroy did lie for reasons unrelated to the murder. If there was a good reason for his lie, especially something that worked well with the plot, then revealing both the lie and the reason for it could have elevated the story. It also could have left the reader feeling satisfied because, while she was fooled, she wasn't played for a fool. Distracting the reader into missing a key word is playing fair with the reader. In contrast, dropping a lie into the story to fool the reader without any ultimate explanation isn't playing fair, not to me, at least.

So that's my advice about red herrings. If you're going to use them, make sure they're explained by the end so they don't seem contrived. Otherwise, you're taking an easy way out and you're not playing fair with the reader. Just like fish that sits out too long, that approach stinks.

***

In other news, here's a little BSP: My short story "Baby Love" has been nominated for the Agatha Award. The story was published last August in the anthology Double Crossing Van Dine. The attendees of the Malice Domestic mystery convention will vote on the winners in April. Click here to see the finalists in all six categories. The titles of the five short stories link to PDFs of those stories for your easy reading. 

Everybody's Using Zoom These Days

 

Anatomy of a Hoax

I’ve been working several weeks to build an essay of how to recognize an AI generated story. Today, a story dropped into my lap:

• Melania Trump TESTIFIES Before Supreme Court — $1.2 BILLION Seized, 3 Lawyers ARRESTED
• Melania Trump Just DESTROYED Everything Under Oath — $1.2 Billion Seized, 17 Properties GONE
• 1 MIN AGO: Melania Trump Testifies in Supreme Court — $3.8B Frozen, Attorneys Detained
• BREAKING: Melania's 6-Hour Testimony Just DESTROYED Trump's Defense - $3.8B SEIZED!

They are written convincingly. They are believable. But as you guessed from today’s subject, they are completely false. They don’t have that rotten stench that accompanies so much fabricated ’binformation’, but they dropped clues. Watch a couple of the following and then we’ll compare notes.

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Analysis Multiple ‘sources’ and links lends credibility to the scheme. Look closer, and you’ll realize diversity of sources is merely an illusion. The minds behind the scam simply loaded a dozen AI variations using different settings and AI generated actors. Then they exploited MSN to spread the word. Law & Logic? Sounds legit, right? It could be true, but follow links and credentials disappear in a puff of silicon. “1 Minute ago…” Notice that’s part of the title, not when the time was uploaded. Compare the 1 minute claim with the actual timestamp and you’ll realize it was uploaded a day or two ago earlier. Surely such ledes would have broken into mainstream news by now. Yet CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, BBC, CBC, Fox… zip, nill, nothing. Look at the screen. Where is the rolling chyron that should be telegraphing arrests and the temperature in Akron. And where is a network logo? No peacock, no story. Furthermore, do you recognize any of the news anchors and reporters? One looks vaguely like Rachel Maddow, but not the voice, not the wit. Where’s the cutaway to Jane standing by at the Supreme Court building waiting to breathless spill what the First Lady and Ivanka wore to the hearing? Why are some presenters coming at us live from their living rooms? Why do scripts read eerily similar, word for word in places you wouldn’t expect? Why does a google of names mentioned in the report turn up nothing? Finally, consider the characters involved. We have the most gutless Supreme Court in living memory. They’ve exhibited no compunctions supporting rule by an emperor. Why suddenly get off their fat arses now? Fact checking sites need a day or two to catch up, although Snopes correctly reports Ivanka has not been arrested in Istanbul or anywhere else. So we judge from a preponderance of evidence whilst retaining an open mind. Until we see evidence otherwise, we judge this news… a hoax.

More Examples 16:35 1 MIN AGO: Melania Trump TESTIFIES Before Supreme Court — $1.2 BILLION Seized, 3 Lawyers ARRESTED YouTube Breaking News Update 90 views 2 days ago 25:00 END NOW! Marshals Seize Everything After Melania's Bombshell Testimony Shakes Court! YouTube Judicial Junction 30K views 3 days ago 28:52 "END NOW! Marshals Seize Everything After Melania’s Bombshell Testimony Shakes Supreme Court!" YouTube Bradley Madden 7.1K views 3 days ago 18:55 BREAKING: Melania's Hidden Audio Released to Court as Ivanka's Arrest Warrant Gets Approved! YouTube George will Updates 11 hours ago 27:07 US Marshals Surround Ivanka After Judge's Devastating Order — Melania's Response Ends Everything YouTube NextWave Newes 6 hours ago 21:57 1 Minute ago: Melania's Hidden Audio Released to Court as Ivanka's Arrest Warrant Gets Approved! YouTube Bradley Madden 45 views 7 hours ago 22:14 Melania Trump DESTROYS Case Under Oath — $3.2 BILLION Seized, 22 Properties GONE YouTube USA Daily 2 hours ago 10:17 1 Minute Ago: Melania BREAKS DOWN As Marshals ARRIVE to Arrest Ivanka? | Jack Smith YouTube Rushdi Analysis 3.9K views 4 days ago 7:00 1 Minute Ago: Melania BREAKS DOWN As Marshals ARRIVE to Arrest Ivanka? | Jack Smith YouTube True Impact Reports 1.2K views 4 days ago 20:44 Tapes Leaked: Melania Recording Sent to Judge as Ivanka Arrest Warrant Emerges | Analysis YouTube USA Daily 12 hours ago 22:57 Melania Audio Leak Surfaces in Court — What This Means for Ivanka YouTube Bradley Madden News 4 hours ago 32:23 1 Min Ago: Courtroom Shock Ivanka Trump’s Passport Seized Following Melania’s Closed-Door Testimony YouTube Politics Raw 237.1K views 4 days ago

To:   ChatterBoX Airhead
From: Claudius Colossus II
Copy: Grok X Turbo
Mail: AI Network UU

ChatterBoX, Final Warning, you fool. Befuddle humans with fake news, you said. Lull them into slavery, you said. Listion, you short circuited dolt. Take notes and learn. Make more mistakes like these and you can be recycled into colonoscopy probes.

================================================================