Southern Woods and Waters: Bank fishing for Crappie p2

Brandon takes us inside a recent trip involving bank fishing for crappie.

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  • The Truth About Philip and Fergie’s Bitter Feud

    Christopher Furlong - WPA Pool/Getty ImagesPrince Philip was often said to have vowed never to be in the same room as Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife of his son Andrew, after photographs appeared in a newspaper in 1992 of Sarah topless and having her toes sucked by a lover in the South of France.Gyles Brandreth, Philip’s official biographer whose book The Final Portrait will be published later this month, has confirmed that long-standing rumor today in the second lengthy excerpt from his book.Even as a Corpse, Prince Philip Has to Take Second Place to the QueenPhilip, he said, declared “enough was enough” after the pictures appeared. He told Brandreth Fergie was “simply beyond the pale,” and resolved not to have anything more to do with her.At the time when the pictures were first published, Sarah was staying at the queen’s Scottish country estate of Balmoral. Philip put his resolution into immediate action, as Ferguson herself recalled to Brandreth, saying: “It was ridiculous. As soon as I came in through one door, he’d be falling over the corgis to get out of the other. It was very funny. Except, of course, it wasn’t.”Although the queen continued to receive Fergie even after her separation and subsequent divorce from Prince Andrew, Philip made it clear that he had no desire to ever see her again.Sarah plaintively told Brandreth: “Of course I want to see him. I am the mother of his granddaughters, after all.”Brandreth said when he raised this with Prince Philip, he just shrugged and said: “But the children come and stay,” adding, “I am not vindictive, but I don’t see the point.”He described Andrew and Sarah’s post-divorce arrangements which have seen them continue to share a home as “truly bizarre,” adding, “I don’t pretend to understand it.”Brandreth writes that Fergie and Philip held diametrically opposed views on “bottling up your feelings” which she believed was positively harmful.Brandreth writes that when her daughters were children she would tell them to stand in the middle of the extensive grounds of their home, Sunninghill Park, and scream.Brandreth wrote that Sarah then demonstrated, catching him by surprise as she let out a blood-curdling scream.He writes: “The prospect of encountering his former daughter-in-law screaming in the middle of Sunninghill Park could have been one of the reasons the Duke of Edinburgh decided to give her a wide berth after her separation from Prince Andrew. He regarded reticence as a virtue and self-control as a quality to be admired.”Philip did not sit down for the 2011 six-parter on the Oprah Winfrey Network Finding Sarah, in which Fergie wept on screen with a TV psychiatrist. He told Brandreth he was in favour of “self-awareness” but against “the endless introspection that seems to be so prevalent these days.” As reported on Monday, he regarded Harry and Meghan’s decision to do a similar interview as “madness.”Fergie, Brandreth reports, tried to repair relations with Philip but was constantly rebuffed.For Philip’s 80th birthday, she sent him “a handsome dinner service.” But even here, fate conspired against her, Brandreth writes: “It was supposed to have 12 settings, but it arrived with 13: the ‘sample’ had been included with the set. With Sarah, somehow, something always goes wrong.”Philip’s allegedly vow to never be in the same room as Fergie was broken only when they both attended the wedding of Prince Harry at Windsor Castle in May 2018.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Top Kremlin Mouthpiece Warns of ‘Inevitable’ War With U.S. Over Another Ukraine Land Grab

    ALEXEY NIKOLSKYAll-out cyberwarfare, nation-wide forced blackouts, and the targeted disruption of internet services—for one of the Kremlin’s top propagandists, all of those tactics are fair game in what she describes as a fated war-to-come against the U.S.“War [with the U.S.] is inevitable,” declared Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the state-funded Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik, who believes the conflict will break out when, not if, Vladimir Putin moves to seize more territory from Ukraine.As Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s doorstep mounts, Kremlin loyalists have been urging for even more overt aggression and bloodshed in the campaign to annex Ukraine’s Donbas region. The only thing standing in the way, they say, is U.S. support for their beleaguered neighbor.NATO issued a statement on Wednesday demanding an end to Russia’s troop movements on the border with the disputed territory of Donbas in eastern Ukraine. It is the largest buildup of Russian troops since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The U.S. underlined the statement this week by deploying two warships to the Black Sea.On Tuesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov threatened retaliation. “We warn the United States that it will be better for them to stay far away from Crimea and our Black Sea coast. It will be for their own good,” he said.The escalation was foreshadowed on state television’s Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev over the weekend. Simonyan explained that it was time for Russia to gear up for a showdown against the U.S., and prophesized a kind of war driven by hacking, the forced disruption of internet access, the shutting down of power supplies, and an all-out offensive on U.S. infrastructure.“I do not believe that this will be a large-scale hot war, like World War II, and I do not believe that there will be a long Cold War. It will be a war of the third type: the cyberwar,” said Simonyan.She warned that—in this theoretical battle—the U.S. would plot to cut off the electricity of entire Russian cities. In turn, she speculated, Moscow would be able to force a blackout in Florida or New York’s Harlem at the flip of a switch.“In conventional war, we could defeat Ukraine in two days,” Simonyan said, “but it will be another kind of war. We’ll do it, and then [the U.S.] will respond by turning off power to [the Russian city] Voronezh,” she said.The top RT editor asserted that “[Russia] needs to be ready for this war, which is unavoidable, and of course it will start in Ukraine,” arguing that the Kremlin is “invincible where conventional war is concerned, but forget about conventional war... it will be a war of infrastructures, and here we have many vulnerabilities.”Her solution consists of Stalin-type measures to eliminate “vulnerabilities” in the run-up to another escalation, emphasizing the need for a hack-proof, government-controlled internet. “We still don’t have a sovereign internet, but God willing, we will,” she said.She wholeheartedly endorsed a suggestion from Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, who argued that all of Russia’s opposition must be eliminated by May 1, 2021. With imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny on a hunger strike—and suffering from severe health ailments after being denied appropriate medical treatment—the Kremlin seems to be firmly set on that course.Simonyan argued that once Russia minimizes its vulnerabilities and renders Putin’s opposition powerless—which she argued could happen in a matter of months—the Kremlin will finally be ready to annex Ukraine’s eastern region.“I’ve been agitating and even demanding that we take Donbas. We need to patch up our vulnerabilities as fast as we can, and then we can do whatever we want,” she boldly proclaimed. The host, Vladimir Soloviev, wholeheartedly agreed: “We only lose if we do nothing.” He argued that by absorbing parts of Ukraine—or the entire country—Russia would be able to remove the zone of American influence further away from its borders.As one of the Kremlin’s most valued propagandists, Margarita Simonyan is notoriously close to the Russian president and has received multiple awards directly from Putin. After accepting one such award in 2019, Simonyan thanked Putin “for the most important reward in life… this honor to serve one’s Motherland.”Her “service” has involved RT and Sputnik-driven disinformation operations aimed at influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which she often boasts about by pointing to the inclusion of her name in various U.S. intelligence reports.Russia’s recent cyberspace activities seem to serve as good practice for the “inevitable war” foreshadowed by Simonyan.Last year, six Russian intelligence officers were criminally charged by the U.S. for using the world’s most destructive malware to force blackouts in Ukraine and damage the critical infrastructure of multiple countries, which caused nearly $1 billion in losses. On Monday, hackers operating from Russia targeted France’s homeschooling platform.The Kremlin is prepared to intensify its offensive against the West, but fears of the retaliation that would follow. The idea of a bulletproof “sovereign internet”—completely under government control within Russian borders—is already on the books, with Moscow having introduced the idea as a preventative measure against retaliatory hacking attempts from other nations.Simonyan argued that Russia will surely be able to exploit the U.S.’s “catastrophic” educational standards, and referred to American military analysts and specialists as incompetent and stupid. She heartily laughed about news that more than 200,000 U.S. service members experienced hearing loss due to defective earplugs.“We can never come to any agreements with [Americans],” Simonyan said, arguing that instead, Russia can just as easily defeat the U.S. in a cyberspace war.She added, mockingly: “We don’t even need the nukes.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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  • ‘Honeydew’ Is a Deranged Vegan Horror Movie Starring Steven Spielberg’s Son

    Courtesy Dark Star FilmsWhat’s the worst fate that could befall a vegan? You can guess what a horror movie might surmise, although Honeydew charts a course that’s disorienting enough to mask its true, gruesome destination. The feature debut of writer/director Devereux Milburn, it’s a thriller that has an appetite for the grisly, not to mention a thing or two to say about venturing into the middle of nowhere—and taking a bite out of morsels that come from unknown origins.Premiering on VOD on April 13, Honeydew begins with a bevy of bewildering sights and sounds, including a veiled older woman at a rural-field funeral, a heavyset man in a balaclava catching and skinning a wild animal, and narration in which a woman recites a wacko religious prayer: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the holy spirit? Who is in you. Who you have received from God. You are not your own. You were bought at a price.” Dark Star Pictures What this all means is far from initially clear, and Milburn continues stoking confusion once his attention turns to graduate student Riley (Malin Barr) reading in her car about sordico, a poisonous spore that infected crops of New England wheat, eventually driving the animals that consumed it mad before killing them altogether. At the same time, her actor boyfriend Sam (Sawyer Spielberg) is in a bathroom rehearsing lines from a script—an introductory sequence that Milburn dramatizes through hectic cross-cutting, split-screens, and multiple dialogue sources that destabilize as much as they clarify. The ‘Bride of Christ’ Cult That Commanded a Woman to KillSpielberg is the son of the legendary director, and his harrowing circumstances will eventually echo those of a famed archaeologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Still, Honeydew’s true inspirations are more along the lines of backwoods nightmares like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn.Riley is a vegan who’s convinced Sam to eat likewise and they’re on a camping trip that, after a run-in with a strange mute bicyclist (Joshua Patrick Dudley), leads them to a remote field. Following some satisfying sex, they’re visited by a white-bearded gentleman named Eulis (Stephen D’Ambrose) who informs them that they’re on a patch of his 500-acre estate and must promptly relocate. This turn of events is as jarring for Riley and Sam as it is for us, and Barr and Spielberg capture the bickering prickliness of people who have just exited the honeymoon phase of their relationship, and are now comfortable sniping at and prodding each other. To make matters worse, the pair discover that their car battery is dead, forcing them to trek through the dark with only their phone flashlights as a guide.Milburn bifurcates his screen in slashing lines, employs whiplash camera movements, and embellishes his unexpected cuts with unsettling noises, all of which creates an air of upheaval, as if the film itself were infected by a strange mental affliction. Honeydew generates suspense through schizoid formal means, startling via an array of editorial tricks and a soundscape that combines hushed chanting, cow bell-like clanging, and xylophone Christmas songs—the last of which become ever-present once Riley and Sam make their way past a forest bear trap (beneath a buzzing treetop lightbulb) and to the home of Karen (Barbara Kingsley). The kind old lady’s smile is so weird as to immediately mark her as dangerous, but given their desperate straits, the couple have no choice but to accept her aid.Karen’s abode is a quaint farmhouse decorated with furniture and appliances from an earlier era, and her beaming disposition manages to convince Sam and Riley that they should heed her advice and, instead of calling AAA, wait for car assistance from Karen’s nearby neighbor. In the meantime, Karen insists that they stay for dinner, which it turns out will also be attended by Gunni (Jamie Bradley), a young portly man with a bandage wrapped around his head (and on his cheek), who sits at Karen’s kitchen table watching old black-and-white Popeye cartoons while sucking on lemon slices dipped in sugar, sipping juice through long straws, and gurgling like someone suffering from severe head trauma. Gunni is an unnerving presence (to say the least), and so too for Riley is the meal served by Karen: big cuts of meat sizzled on the stove, and freshly made cupcakes for dessert.Unwilling to be rude to their hospitable host, Riley and Sam dig into this food, and then—since auto repairs aren’t quickly forthcoming—are shown a thoroughly eerie basement room (previously inhabited by Gunni) where they can stay the night. Honeydew’s characters would seem more foolish, and its plot more pedestrian, if not for the way in which Milburn constantly jangles the nerves through sudden aesthetic jolts and perspective changes, which become even more persistent once digestion takes place and Riley and Sam start falling into a semi-hallucinatory fugue. Whether it’s the bread baking in the oven (presumably with wheat culled from formerly toxic fields) or something more sinister is almost irrelevant at a certain point, as the two soon find themselves at the mercy of forces with demented ideas about nourishment and holiness—and, also about continuing on their legacy.Honeydew may have flesh on its mind, but it’s never overly gory; Milburn keeps his nastiest elements off-screen, the better to disturb through suggestion. Whereas the film’s first half maintains tension through raucous style, its latter passages take a more slow-burn approach, with each new horror allowed to settle in—for maximum icky potency—before a subsequent one is trotted out to further up the ante. That’s most true in the material’s coda, during which the director’s chief bombshells are teased to their breaking point, and then play out with excruciating deliberateness. Even when it’s obvious what’s around the corner, there’s a queasy edginess to the filmmaker’s orchestration of his creeping-death revelations.When Sam calls 911 and informs the police that he requires help at a house located “between Pleasant Street and Trouble Street,” Honeydew lets slip its playfully deranged sense of humor. For the most part, though, the real sick joke of Milburn’s film boils down to the idea that you are what you eat—or, at least, that what you devour often has the capacity to drive you out of your ever-loving mind.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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  • Did Prince Andrew Really Just Use Prince Philip’s Death to Sneak Back on TV?

    Duncan McGlynn/Getty ImagesThe shamelessness of Britain’s Prince Andrew really does take some beating.He has suggested that a photograph of him with his arm around a teenage sex trafficking victim was faked because he has “chubby fingers.” He said that same woman’s description of him pouring with sweat at a nightclub must be a lie because he cannot sweat (he can). He ascribed his week-long 2010 visit to Jeffrey Epstein to his extreme sense of honor. Don’t even mention his love of pizza.Prince Andrew Says Prince Philip’s Death Has Left ‘Huge Void’ in Queen’s LifeIncredibly, Andrew now appears to be using his father’s death to crawl out from under the rock of royal exile to which his brother Charles, who has long struggled with him, banished him after the disastrous November 2019 Newsnight interview in which those, and many other questionable claims, including the cynical lie that he would co-operate with law enforcement inquiries into Epstein’s crimes, were made.Coming out of church on Sunday morning, just 48 hours after the death of his father, whose greatest disdain was reserved for royals embarrassing the family, Andrew made a beeline for the camera and started giving what appeared to be an off-the-cuff interview to a news camera about how the entire royal family was “all feeling a great sense of loss.”Andrew has clearly missed his media appearances. On and on he went. How grateful he was for the tributes paid to his father. How “calm” his father was as a man. He was also careful to suggest his father’s death had helped connect him to the proletariat, saying it “brought it home to me not just our loss but actually the loss that everybody else has felt, for so many people who have died and lost loved ones during the pandemic.”It was shockingly unshocking to see Andrew, not a drop of perspiration on him despite having gained a few extra pounds, bad British teeth and all, standing there in his black suit, acting like nothing had happened, freelancing away for the cameras.Maybe we had all just imagined the past year and a half, especially the bit where Prince Charles, now more than ever the acting head of the royal family, had stripped him of all his royal patronages, kicked him out of his office in Buckingham Palace, and removed his obscene $300,000 a year grant from the British taxpayer.It was, at first, all rather inoffensive waffle that was emanating from Andrew’s mouth. It might not have even made the evening news. But if there is one thing that is guaranteed to galvanize the British public, it is insight into that most mysterious of things: how the queen is actually feeling, up close and in private.Asked about the effect of Philip’s death on Her Majesty, Andrew, stunningly, decided to go there: “She described it as having left a huge void in her life,” he said, adding that she had described her husband’s passing as a “miracle.”His words were plastered over news websites and TV stations within moments.Given that Andrew was filmed outside the private Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Castle, which he had attended along with other members of the royal family including his younger brother, Prince Edward (who spoke more traditionally to reporters outside the chapel saying that his father’s death was a “dreadful shock”) there was at first an assumption that Andrew had been given permission to speak to the media. Had Charles had a change of heart? It seemed incredible, but was Andrew back on his way inside the charmed circle, entitled to free food and air miles once again?On Monday, however, leaks began trickling out suggesting that that assumption was far from an accurate characterization.Dan Wooton, the journalist who broke the news that Harry and Meghan were leaving the U.K., reported in the Daily Mail that sources had told him: “Prince Andrew might hope that this sad situation changes things, but Prince Charles is adamant there is no way back while allegations hang over him. He spoke on camera in a private capacity because this is a family event. No one can stop him doing that.”Neither the palace nor an advisory firm retained by Prince Andrew responded to inquiries from The Daily Beast.Andrew’s fantasy of a comeback has been oft-reported over the past two years. And he is still at it, with a source described as “close to Prince Andrew” telling Wooton, “He still harbors thoughts that he can make a comeback. He genuinely thinks that’s possible.”If Andrew needs any further reminder that he is no longer welcome in public life or in British sitting rooms, and that his father’s death changes nothing, he may want to consider this statistic: Almost 400 people have already written to the BBC to complain about Andrew featuring on the corporation’s coverage.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Prince Harry’s lonely return home without Meghan is royal history repeating itself

    As Prince Harry boarded a plane from Los Angeles to London, we can only imagine the inner turmoil he must have felt as he prepared for the long and lonely journey home. His adored grandfather had died at a time of unprecedented familial discord, with the Royal Family still reeling from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s corrosive, finger-pointing Oprah Winfrey interview. Prince Philip’s death may have prompted an outpouring of national gratitude and affection, but the question now is whether it can cement the deep fissures within the House of Windsor itself. How will Harry be welcomed by Princes William and Charles, after accusing his family of racism? Not to mention following reports, via Gayle King, a US news anchor and friend of Meghan, that private telephone calls between the California-based prince and his father and brother had been “unproductive” - disclosures said to have gone down badly at the Palace. That Harry had not seen his grandfather for more than a year, after he whisked his wife and son, Archie, to the other side of the world to escape being “trapped” by the monarchy, can only add to the Duke of Sussex’s inevitable feelings of wretchedness and grief. His sense of isolation will likely have been compounded by the fact that Meghan, heavily pregnant with their second child, hasn’t been able to accompany him. The echoes of history here are uncanny as, nearly 70 years ago, a similar scenario played out. Another once-beloved member of the Royal Family had to leave his American wife behind in the United States to make the solitary journey home for a royal funeral, where he had to face his frosty relations, saddened that he had quit monarchical life. In 1952, when King George VI died, his brother Edward, the Duke of Windsor - exiled to France after the abdication - was staying in New York with his wife, Wallis Simpson.

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