Twenty men had tried to take him twenty men had made a slip/Twenty one would be the ranger with the big iron on his hip

I was of an age where I had a record player as a kid, rather than a tape deck, CD player or mp3 player.  I had a couple albums that I played over and over. One of them had Queen's Another One Bites the Dust. Another was Marty Robbins' Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs. It had Big Iron on it, and I would play that, and El Paso for hours at a time.

(I still do that. There was a day when I listened to Amy Rigby's Like Rasputin over a hundred times. It's only two and half minutes long. It was at a terrible job where nobody talked to each other. I just put the song, on repeat and listened to it until my shift was over.)

It's a short ballad about an Arizona ranger who comes to town and kills the outlaw who had been terrorizing the place. Man, let's unwrap what I love about this song.

It's one of the few songs not improved in a cover by Johnny Cash.

I was already favorably inclined towards "rangers", knowing them from the Lord of the Rings and Dungeons  & Dragons.

The song always made me think of the cover art from Wasteland, which may not be a coincidence, seeing as the PCs are "Desert Rangers".

 
Wasteland inspired Fallout (my understanding is that they couldn't get the rights to Fallout when creating Fallout, so they just filed off the serial numbers and gave it a different name.)  Things come full circle with Fallout: New Vegas, where it's one of the songs in regular rotation on the radio stations. It happened to play when I was organizing the townsfolk to defend their city from some bounty hunters. It was very High Plains Drifter.

In theme, it very much reminds me of Snoopy vs the Red Baron, another song I like quite a bit.

I don't know if this song influenced me or if these traits were already present and that's why it resonated with me, but I liked the idea of an agent of civilization riding in to restore order. It seems like such a Will Rogers idea of capital D Democracy, that you're free to act as you please, but when you start using your power to oppress the people around you, someone is going to stop you. (Also, “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” Oliver Wendall Holmes.)

I hate modern country music, but I love this song and could listen to it endlessly.

To the town of Agua Fria rode a stranger one fine day
Hardly spoke to folks around him didn't have too much to say
No one dared to ask his business no one dared to make a slip
For the stranger there among them had a big iron on his hip
Big iron on his hip

It was early in the morning when he rode into the town
He came riding from the south side slowly lookin' all around
He's an outlaw loose and running came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with the big iron on his hip
Big iron on his hip

In this town there lived an outlaw by the name of Texas Red
Many men had tried to take him and that many men were dead
He was vicious and a killer though a youth of twenty four
And the notches on his pistol numbered one an nineteen more
One and nineteen more

Now the stranger started talking made it plain to folks around
Was an Arizona ranger wouldn't be too long in town
He came here to take an outlaw back alive or maybe dead
And he said it didn't matter he was after Texas Red
After Texas Red

Wasn't long before the story was relayed to Texas Red
But the outlaw didn't worry men that tried before were dead
Twenty men had tried to take him twenty men had made a slip
Twenty one would be the ranger with the big iron on his hip
Big iron on his hip

The morning passed so quickly it was time for them to meet
It was twenty past eleven when they walked out in the street
Folks were watching from the windows every-body held their breath
They knew this handsome ranger was about to meet his death
About to meet his death

There was forty feet between them when they stopped to make their play
And the swiftness of the ranger is still talked about today
Texas Red had not cleared leather fore a bullet fairly ripped
And the ranger's aim was deadly with the big iron on his hip
Big iron on his hip

It was over in a moment and the folks had gathered round
There before them lay the body of the outlaw on the ground
Oh he might have went on living but he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the ranger with the big iron on his hip
Big iron on his hip

Big iron Big iron

When he tried to match the ranger with the big iron on his hip

Review, Part 2 of 2: X-Men: Days of Future Past: A hate so big it would burn the innocent to reach the guilty

Part Two of the review. Part One can be found here.

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

We have a brief intermission where "Trask" (so obviously Mystique that he might as well be wearing a "Hi, my name is Raven!" nametag) goes into his office to read his secret files. This is otherwise a great scene, with some nice moments like Trask's voice coming from Mystique's lips. She finds that he's killed and analyzed a number of her friends from the earlier movie, and asks his secretary to print up his itinerary at the Paris Peace Accords. The only minor complaint I have about this scene is that it's almost a beat for beat retread from the similar scene from Singer's X-Men II. "Hi, Sir, how are you?" "Fine, thanks, just getting some files from my office." Looking for files, oops, almost discovered, evade discovery through clever use of powers. I think I'll feel better if I call it an "homage".

We cut to the three amigos (Beast, Professor X, Wolverine) entering a house outside of DC. Pietro's (okay, fine, in the movie he's called Peter, but at least they kept Maximoff for his last name) mom asks them what he did now and offers to write a check to make them go away. They say they just want to speak to him, so she lets them in. They cross a very worn welcome mat, which was another of the minor details that really made the movie come alive, and head down to the basement.

Pietro is so much fun. Gloriously frenetic, zipping around, bouncing off the walls, playing Pong against himself, picking pockets at super-speed. There were so many ways for this to go wrong (and he really looked like such an astounding douchebag in the promotional material), but he's as entertaining as the filmmakers think he is. Our heroes convince him to help them break into the Pentagon in order to break out Magneto. 

Our heroes are in a tour group, and the guide mentions what happens to be my favorite bit of trivia about the Pentagon, that there are twice as many bathrooms as it needs, because it was built during Segregation. Beast arranges a distraction by piping in Sandford and Son into the security feed, and Pietro steals a security guard's uniform and breaks out Magneto by vibrating the glass at superspeed.

They encounter some security on their way out through the kitchen. Magneto is just going to stab everyone to death, but Quicksilver triggers his Long-Second watch (Again with the Trancers references, Josh? Really?) and super-speeds through the opposition.

It's astounding, one of the very best action sequences I've ever seen, perfect from concept to execution. 

And we have to part ways with Pietro, lest he steal the rest of the movie. While I think he was ultimately unnecessary to the narrative of the movie, his scenes were ridiculously entertaining. He also gets a great line: "They say you can manipulate metal. My mom used to know a guy who could do that." Magneto is Quicksilver's biological father in the comics, though he left their actual upbringing to a humanoid cow. (Comics, everybody!)

Together, Magneto, Wolverine, Beast and Professor X fly to Paris. Xavier asks him why he killed JFK and Magneto claims that JFK was actually a mutant and that he was trying to steer the bullet away from him. My first thought was that Magneto was playing Xavier, because he knew by then Xavier couldn't read his mind, but I think that the background material does imply that Magneto was actually framed.

He and Charles get an argument on the plane over the ocean, and Magneto's powers start tearing at the metal around him. My friend Frederick thought that Wolverine was going to cold cock him with the glass ashtray we'd been shown previously, but I'm glad he didn't. I think that's what I like about the series. The villains are never easily overcome. Magneto's own actions bring about his downfall. And, as sympathetic as he is, he is the villain of the piece. I described him in the earlier post as being possessed of "A hate so big it would burn the innocent to reach the guilty", and while he is acting to protect innocent people, he's perpetrating monstrous acts to do so, and at the end of the day, that makes him a villain.

They arrive in Paris and barge into the meeting where Mystique is going to kill Trask. She had arrived there impersonating a Vietnamese general, but unfortunately, her cover's already been blown, because Trask happened to be carrying a mutant detector. Mystique fights off the mundanes, but the good guys prevent her from killing Trask. Stryker, Trask's bodyguard is tased in the course of the fight, and as he lies convulsing, Wolverine recognizes him as the man who will graft the adamantium on his skeleton and is paralyzed by the flashback. Thus he's unable to act when Magneto tries to kill Mystique, because he knows it's her blood that will be used to create the invulnerable, adaptive Sentinels of the future.

He fires once (in a nice bit, he pulls the trigger with his powers after the gun has been knocked from his hand), but she leaps through the window to avoid it. He bends the bullet after her. There's a big fight as Magneto tries to kill her, Hank hulks out into the Beast and almost drowns Magneto in the nearby fountain and the whole clusterfuck is caught on hundreds of cameras.

The world reacts predictably, and Nixon approves the Sentinel program. (Another of the throwaway details that I liked was a picture of Nixon and his wife on his desk.)  Mystique's blood is recovered from the battle site in Paris.

Mystique tracks down Magneto, pulls him into an alcove in a subway station and threatens to shove a shiv of something plastic in his brain. He explains, quite reasonably in his mind, that he was trying to save the mutant race, but since they already have her blood, there's no reason to kill her. Mystique is, unsurprisingly, not entirely persuaded by this line of argument, but she's mollified enough not to kill him.

Magneto has seen the schematics for the Sentienels, and he knows that they would be immune to his powers, so he intercepts them en route to their demonstration in DC and laces them with steel torn from up from train tracks. This metal impregnation goes all the way to their electronic brains, allowing Magneto to control them.

A word on the Sentinels, since this review isn't long and meandering enough. I'm not entirely thrilled with the look of the movie Sentinels, either the the 70s robots or future version, but given the choice between this

or the purple and magenta monstrosities of the comics,

Nice...belt?

 I'll take what I can get.

Once they return to the mansion, Xavier kicks the junk and regains his powers, but loses the use of his legs. He's frustrated again, but after a pep talk from Wolverine and his future self, he tracks down Mystique in Washington, using Cerebro. I noticed that the helmet was the only thing with dust on it. Where did it come from? I always assumed that Cerebro was in some kind of clean room.

Xavier, Beast and Wolverine travel to DC. Xavier uses a mind trick to get them past security and Wolverine is pleasently surprised that he didn't set off the metal detector.

Nixon unveils the Sentinels on the White House lawn. They're loaded with live ammo, because apparently we have learned nothing from ED-209. Meanwhile, Xavier is scanning the crowd for Mystique. She's disguised as a Secret Service agent and just as she's about the assassinate Trask, we hear her thoughts, "This is for you, my mutant brothers and sisters." I just love that. It no longer makes sense to go after Trask. That ship has sailed and the Sentinel Program is going to go on without him. But she really believes that she's helping her fellow mutants, which reminds me of another line I really like: "His was the most dangerous morality of all. He was a misguided idealist."

Elsewhere, Magneto raises an entire stadium (Wikipedia tells me it's the the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium) and starts levitating it towards the White House.

When watching this, I didn't see how this worked into his plan, which I had assumed to be control the Sentinels into firing on the crowd and showing they couldn't be trusted.  But that's not gradiose enough for Magneto.

He drops the stadium around the White House as a barricade, then commandeers the Sentinels. Nixon and Trask are hustled off to a safe room, along with Mystique, still in her disguise, but she's betrayed again by Trask's mutant detector. Magneto tears the building apart, looking for the safe room. Mystique escapes the clutches of the secret service and grabs Stryker's plastic gun. (I really like that he had the foresight to bring one once they knew that facing Magneto would be a real possibility.)   The three amigos try to stop him, but they're bringing bone claws to a stadium fight, and it's no contest. Magneto orders a Sentinel to obey its original programming and it goes after Wolverine, but Beast draws it away. Then Magento throws some junk at Wolverine before deciding to stop dicking around, whereupon he crucifies him with rebar and chucks him into the Potomac.

Meanwhile (I think? Douglas Adams was right. Determining tense is difficult when time travel is involved) in the future, the Sentinels have located the X-Men at the monastery.  There are a zillion of them, and the best the X-Men are going to be able to do is hold them off as long as possible.

I don't know if this a better action sequence than Quicksilver's, but I'm a sucker for doomed last stands. One, by one, defenders are overwhelmed and killed.

Back in the present, Fassbender Magneto pulls the panic room out of the White House. With a gesture, he turns all the cameras towards himself, and gives a "You were right to fear us" speech and prepares to kill Nixon with the whole world watching.

Won't someone think of the children?!

Nixon comes out and offers to sacrifice himself if Magneto will spare the rest of the panic room. Before you can say "Hmmm...that seems rather uncharacteristic for Richard Nixon", he transforms into Mystique and shoots Magneto with Stryker's plastic gun.  It looks like Magneto's going to kill her, so Beast, who's still tussling with that Sentinel, spikes himself with a dose of his mutation-suppressing serum. He no longer registers as a mutant, so the Sentinel turns on the two other mutants in the area, Magneto and Mystique. Magneto sees it coming, and waves his hand at it with casual disdain, taking it apart with a gesture. This momentary distraction provides an opening for Mystique, who yanks off his helmet, allowing Xavier to shut him down. The whole sequence is very well done.

Xavier then manipulates Magneto into standing down,  and then allows him to flee, because he will certainly be executed otherwise. Public sentiment turns back against mutant genocide, because a mutant saved the president. I don't find that entirely convincing, because they were clearly, at least in part colluding with each other, and having one nice mutant on hand hardly offsets the presence of another mutant who is willing to destroy humanity and can pick up stadiums with his mind.  I'll buy into it, though, because I like what they're selling.  We see in a paper that Trask was arrested and the Sentinel program scrapped.

The dark future is overwritten with a bright new one, where everyone has found a job teaching at Xavier's school. Even Cyclops and Jean are there. I loved this ending. The only thing that could have made it better would have been a redeemed Magneto also teaching a class.

Xavier asks Wolverine the last thing he remembers, and Wolverine tells him, "Drowning". The next thing we see is a police boat dredging Wolverine out of the river back in the 70s.. The captain hands him over to Stryker, and it appears history will repeat itself, with the adamantium being bonded to his bones once again, but Stryker's eyes flash yellow and we see that he's Mystique.

For the obligatory post-credits scene, we see a horde gathered in the desert prostrating themselves, chanting. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but I assume it was "En Sabah Nur", which is what Apocalypse went by back in the day. He assembles a truly gargantuan pyramid with his telekinesis, while four horsemen watch from atop a dune.

I loved it. There are minor quibbles that come with any kind of project of this scope, but it's my new favorite superhero movie, because it captures the glory of what it means to be human, and to be superhuman.

Review, Part 1 of 2: X-Men: Days of Future Past: Fight the Future

I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past on Memorial Day, with my friend Frederick. We arrived early to get good seats and we were chatting and making general small talk, and he asked if this movie was based on Cable's story. I said that no, it's from a different X-Men parallel future storyline. X-Men continuity is a mess. As I mention in my review of X-Men: First Class, the series is now is over 50 years ago, and it would be a miracle if it remained snag-free. However, the movie, like its predecessor, distills what works about the source material, discards the rest and interprets what remains through the lens of modern movie-making. The result is an outstanding film that, while complicated, is never once confusing.

As a result, we saw a ton of previews, which I will now review first, because I'm sure that's what everyone came here to read. (I'll label the part where the review of the actual movie starts, so you can skip down if you're no inclined)

The Previews

The World Wars:  So, I made the same joke that everyone does when I saw the History Channel logo on the screen. "Ha ha! More like Hitler Channel, amirite?" And this seems, certainly interesting in concept, examining how the actions of the principal actors of WWII were shaped by their experiences in WWI. However, it's the History Channel, so we're going to get everyone from the Bush Administration to serve as a talking head, as well as "reenactments", including one, which, if I've interpreted a very brief clip correctly, that makes Adolph Hitler look like an action hero,  firing at the camera with a one-handed shot from the hip.

Hercules:  The Rock!  He's always so much fun in a movie! This is a going to be grea- Oh, Brett Ratner directed it. Never mind.

Edge of Tomorrow:  Looks like a promising sci fi action movie. However, it stars Tom Cruise, who is 50 years old and four feet tall, and I'll never understand how he gets himself cast for every other action movie. He's like an extremely good looking hobbit. Frederick later quipped that he expected Cruise to insist on starring in the next Expendables.

When the Game Stands Tall: A football team wins a bunch of games in a row! But then they lose one! I hope the aliens from the Edge of Tomorrow come over to this movie and vaporize every one of these Friday Night Lights rejects.

Lucy: This looks extremely good. It perpetuates the "Humans only use 10% of their brain power" myth, but it looks so good that I'm willing to forgive that. Scarlett Johansson plays a woman implanted with a device that allows her to utilize 100% of her brainpower. She's an outstanding actress with the right direction, and it looks like Luc Besson is going to bring that to the table here.

The Expendables 3: We're only up to three? Really? I thought we had that many in 2013 alone. The first movie had a clever gimmick, but it needs to die now.

Kingsman: This is Lucy for Dudebros. It looks terrible.  I see that it's based on a comic by Mark Millar. Neither Colin Firth nor Michael Caine can save it.

Another Planet of the Apes movie: While it's possible that someone I know has seen one of these movies, I have never heard anyone express any kind of opinion on any of them, ever.

Guardians of the Galaxy: I worked three years in a poorly trafficked comic store, and mostly just read comics for eight hours a day. Never once did I read a copy of Guardians of the Galaxy. Ah, this is Firefly done right. This trailer, and presumably, the movie that goes with it, remember that movies should be fun.

And now, on to the main event!

 X-Men: Days of Futures Past Movie Review

Here's a recolored image of the movie poster as my way of saying thanks for reading through that earlier section. 

Nice groovy 70's vibe to it

I'm not even going to attempt to do this review without spoilers.

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

We open with a couple scenes to establish the reality of this crapsack future. Killer robots called Sentinels have almost wiped out mutants, and mutant sympathizers live in ghettos. But the surviving X-Men fight on!

On our team we have

Kitty Pryde: Shadowcat, though I don't think anyone calls her that. She was the character who went back in time to change the past in the original story, and while there was a little bit of nerdrage about the change on the Internets, I think the change is for the better.

Her mutant powers include phasing through solid matter, some kind of Trancers-style time travel where a target's mind is sent back to inhabit his earlier body, and being Josh's make believe girlfriend. Ellen Page has always been outstanding in everything she's ever done, and, while she doesn't get much screen time, she's predictably great here.

Colossus: It was nice to get Daniel Cudmore (and his cool armoring up sound) back for this movie, even if his super powers have dwindled to "being punched by Sentinels".

Sunspot: Back when I was a kid, we lived a couple houses away from Bob Sharen, who was, at the time, a colorist for Marvel Comics. (He's now an artist of a different sort, and you can see his other work at his website at Earthlight studio. Hi, Bob! I'd be extremely surprised if you remember me!) He gave us a ton of comics, and a lot of them had Sunspot, and I remember thinking that Sunspot was a much bigger deal than he actual was. Still, he had a neat look and an interesting power set (how often do you see super-strength without invulnerability?)

Warpath: Pretty generic hero with super senses, and probably some super strength if he thinks that knife is going to be any good against the Sentinels. The combination of his name, costume and powerset are perhaps a bit culturally insensitive in 2014, but at least he's not Silver Deer.

Bishop: I was heavily into comics when Bishop was introduced in 1991. Though he's a kind of the stereotypical 90's anti-hero, having held memberships in "X-Treme Sanctions Executive", "Xavier's Security Enforcers", and "X-Treme X-Men", I've always liked him. He's got a neat powerset (absorption and redirection of energy) and a distinctive look and it's always nice to see more people of race in comic books. It's worth noting that his movie incarnation makes quite a bit more sense than his comics version. Comics Bishop could fire blasts of whatever energy he had just absorbed straight from his body. And yet, he always carried a big ray gun wherever he went. What was the point? The movie version shows a feed from his body to his gun, implying that he can't project the energy on his  own without some kind of focusing device.


Blink: We had a character named Blink in our Pen and Paper superhero campaign. Our Blink was a teleporter, but also a dude.  I quite liked Blink. One of the things I disliked about the super-fights in the Avengers was that they showed so little imagination. They were people doing things people do, like throwing or punching, but faster or better. Blink's power is to open a portal from one place to another, much like the video game Portal. It completely changes the dynamics. It's interesting and engaging and the visual presentation of her powers is stunning

Iceman: It's really nice to see Shawn Ashmore return. I was never a huge fan of Iceman, but Ashmore is pretty great with the role.

The group fights the Sentinels, but everyone but Kitty and Bishop are killed. As the Sentinels approach the pair to finish them off, Kitty and Bishop vanish. A group of Magneto, Wolverine, Professor X and Storm (no biographies for these guys, since they're so well known) rendezvous with all of them in China. (I really liked some establishing shots of Sentinels atop the Great Wall. It seemed to show how complete their domination was.)

It turns out Kitty's group has been rewinding time in order to avoid the Sentinels. What she was doing with Bishop was sending a message to his past self, saying, "Hey, Sentinels are coming. Don't hide in that place." He warns everyone, so they aren't where they they would have been/will be when the Sentinels attack, history is rewritten, and we get everyone back again.

They want to send a message much further back than they usually go, all the way back the assassination of Bolivar Trask in the 1970s.  Mystique assassinated him, was captured herself, and her blood was used to engineer the new adaptive Sentinels. Wolverine is the only one who can survive the journey, so he goes. We awakens in his new body to the strains of the "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face". Turns out he was banging the mob boss's daughter while he was supposed to be bodyguarding her. Three goons in outrageous 70s mafia leisurewear arrive, Wolverine makes a half-hearted attempt to talk them out of the fight, but he doesn't really care, because he's reasonably confident on how it's going to play out if push comes to shove. He pops his claws, which are bone instead of metal, which I thought was a surprising bit of continuity porn until I learned how big a role William Stryker was going to play. Spoilers, they fight, Wolverine wins, and gets his car.

We cut to Bolivar Trask is giving testimony before a Senate subcommittee about the mutant menace, but even though he quotes from Charles Xavier's thesis on human genetic mutation, they pull the plug on his funding.

It seems like every review of this movie has an observation somewhere along the line that "Every actor was good, but actor X stole the show!"   There were certainly no bad performances anywhere to be found. I think Peter Dinklage as Trask is actor X in that equation for me, as he most consistently stole the scenes he was in, but I'll qualify that by saying that he was rarely opposite another main cast member.

Wolverine finds the X-Mansion in disrepair, with only Hank McCoy and Professor X in attendance.  The Good Professor is in full-on Lieutenant Dan mode, hopeless, drunk and unshaven. McCoy is periodically hairy too, transforming into the blue-skinned Beast when angry. That change didn't work for me. I liked the awkward nerd from the first movie, but his transformation from gangly scientist to brightly colored superhero is so specifically the Hulk's schtick that it's hard not to think of him that way, and it's a little distracting. Wolverine beseeches the Professor to help, but finds that Charles has just given up after so many of his students had been drafted and killed in Vietnam. 

Meanwhile, Mystique rescues several drafted mutants in Vietnam, among them Havok, Toad and this guy with whom I was previously unfamiliar, Ink, who, like everything else in this movie, had a superlative visual aesthetic. The mutants were going to be shipped away for experimentation at Trask's firm, but together they fight off the contractors (including a young Major Stryker) and she gets them on a chopper headed home. It's nice to see the ladies rescue the boys once in a while.

Wolverine convinces the Professor to help, but they decide they're going need Magneto's help, not because he's a powerful mutant, but because he's the only one who can reach Mystique and persuade her to turn away from Trask. I liked that, that even among these super-humans who can lift stadiums and control minds from across the world, it's the human element that's most important.

Of course, since Wolverine's power is stabbing things, the Beast's powers are being pretty strong and pretty tough, and the Professor traded in his telepathy for the unbeatable powers of super-walking and alcoholism, they realize they're going to need some help. Wolverine knows a guy...

Continued in part two of this review, which can be found here.

Man, I really need to post something

Before I lose the attention of the three people who read this blog.

A Sense of Wonder

I remember, long before Lily was born, Jen was applying for a position as a naturalist, and the application form listed a number of different age groups and asked her describe experience teaching to each of those groups, as well as what aspects she most enjoyed about teaching to those groups.

Jen felt confident about the position, because she was able to give a specific and detailed answer for each category. The one which struck me and which remains to me to this day was her answer and young school-age kids and the "sense of wonder" with which they view the world.

I hadn't spent much time with kids since I was one, but I see now that Jen was right about this, as she was about so many other things.

I love that Lily has this sense of wonder, and I hope she holds on to it as long as she can. She's so sincere about everything she does, and she can't wait to show off the drawing of her roller derby super hero who fights crime with the aid of an army of helpful plants. (Daisy Doom)

She's enthusiastic about her garden, as you can see in this gif, where she poses with a string bean.

See that little kitten with her? That's Kitty. Lily has a thousand stuffed animals, and I don't really remember how Kitty came to live with our family. You can find those guys at discount stores or the local supermarket, and we (or Lily's Oma) likely picked her up from one of those places.

Lily loves Kitty. How much does she love Kitty. She wrote this poem for Kitty. I think it might be the most painfully earnest thing I've ever read,

Two things:

1. It's an acrostic, where the first letter of each line spells out a word when taken together.
2. I think I was eighteen before I learned that poems didn't have to rhyme.