One month later, Freddie Gray died in police custody and Baltimore burned. In defiance of a curfew put in place following the looting, arson, and violence, protesters assembled throughout the city. Lanahan details how in the mostly white neighborhood of Hampden police repeatedly—and politely—asked protesters to disperse, while in the mostly black enclave of Pennsylvania and West North Avenues, protesters were met with pepper spray.
Lanahan, who lives in the racially diverse community of Hamilton with his wife and their two children, still loves Baltimore, warts and all. In some places, the city is absolutely falling apart. From to , the number of hypersegregated cities in America—those in which black residents are isolated and highly concentrated, their neighborhoods clustered together in the urban core—was cut in half to When the US Supreme Court struck down a similar Kentucky law six years later, Baltimore mayor James Preston ordered city housing inspectors to instead slap anyone who sold or rented property in white neighborhoods to black people with code violations.
A thin, easygoing twenty-five-year-old with warm dark eyes, Nicole savored the rare peace and quiet in the house. Her younger sister was not at home. Her mother was out running errands. Her son, Joe, was at the after-school program at his elementary school a few blocks away. From her living room window, Nicole saw students walking past brick rowhouses with missing steps and boarded-up windows. Around p.
She stayed long enough to say hello, and then left to run more errands. After Melinda walked out the door, Nicole heard what sounded like a gunshot from out in front of the house. Despite its grime and abandonment, this neighborhood had been a step up for the Smiths. Nicole, her mother, and her two younger sisters had lived in some of the most violent parts of West Baltimore, including Murphy Homes, a notorious public housing high-rise. Their new neighborhood still made the news for poverty, drug dealing, and violence, but trouble seemed to elude the Smiths here.
Even the roughest neighbors left the Smiths alone. It was fifteen feet across and three windows wide in front many Baltimore rowhouses are only two windows wide. In the s, you could tell a gentrifying neighborhood by the crews peeling off stone.
Melinda refinanced, and then renovated the house, including the wood floors and the green walls in the living room where Nicole was watching television.
The mummy's coffin was lost shortly after, around the same time Goucher made an initial attempt to unwrap her. As recently as a decade ago, the body was still shedding bits of wrapping and resinous materials. At the time, Sanchita Balachandran, now associate director of the museum, a senior lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and a driving force in the design of the new exhibition, was charged with conserving the mummy in preparation for a museum renovation.
She spent three weeks reassembling the linen and carefully preparing the body for transport—weeks spent bent over the desiccated skin, the high cheekbones, the slender hands. The Cohen Mummy, identified as "a youth" in Colonel Cohen's records, was in even poorer condition. He traveled to Egypt in to purchase hundreds of antiquities, including the mummy.
After his death, the mummy was donated to Hopkins. In it was disassembled for an autopsy, during which the body was identified as that of a boy. In the intervening years, some parts of the body were lost.
In the exhibition, only the mummy's coffin is displayed. But with the pieces that remain, the museum team determined that the Cohen Mummy was, in fact, an adult woman. It was one of many surprises over the course of the project. The process began in , with a CT scan. The team carefully transported the mummies to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where they uncrated them and placed them in the scanner, which had to be reset for the mummies to get useful results. Image caption: The Cohen Mummy's coffin may have revealed the mummified woman's name, visible under infrared light.
The team then sent the CT data to a research group in Liverpool, England, led by forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson.
Wilkinson and her team at Face Lab create 3-D depictions of deceased individuals using skulls and a host of archaeological, historical, and forensic data. Using a virtual sculpture system, Face Lab assessed the mummies' skull structures and added major facial muscles accordingly.
They estimated the average depths of soft tissue, taking into account the likely diet and lifestyle of an ancient Egyptian. The skulls even provided clues about the shape of the nose. Blind tests using living people have found such reconstructions to be surprisingly accurate.
Next, a facial prosthetics expert at the School of Medicine helped the team scan the mummies' faces with lasers. That provided information on surface details like skin and hair. Osteologists helped determine the likely age of each of the women, which led the team to add wrinkles.
Artificial insemination success rates hover around 60 percent, so your buyer could spend thousands of dollars on semen and end up with no calf at all, let alone the next Bushwacker.
It's a rich man's game. Slade Long, who started the statistics website Pro Bull Stats. Stock contractors provide livestock for rodeos. Now he follows about Many of them have breeding programs, and all hope their bulls will make it to the PBR. PBR livestock director Cody Lambert, one of the organization's founders, is the man who chooses which do. Stock contractors send him videos so he can see their bulls bucking.
From those, he selects the best and arranges to see them buck in person. In the s, less than 10 videos a week landed on his desk. Now he averages five a day. Some days, he says, it's more like Insiders often say it's easier for a rider to reach the top tier of the PBR than it is for a bull. So many breeders are trying to create bionic buckers that the bulls have outpaced the riders. To "cover" a bull means to stay on for eight seconds.
In the early s, the best pro bull riders covered 75 percent of their bulls, according to Slade Long. Now some riders at the same level cover less than 35 percent. This isn't necessarily bad news for fans, who root for the bulls as passionately as for the riders.
The PBR promotes this, posting video montages of the top "wrecks" on its website. As Riley Henson noticed, these powerful born-to-buck bulls are also showing up at junior events. Although it appears that riding percentages have declined for kids too, statistics summing up that decline are hard to come by. Hundreds of local youth associations are sprinkled across Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and neighboring states, where the sport is most popular, and no one national organization oversees them all.
But the general downward trend is clear to those who pay attention to such things. Custer, now retired, has become nearly as well known for his opinions on youth bull riding livestock as he once was for riding bulls.
Custer, 48, was one of the cowboys who started the PBR. He did not foresee what the organization would do to the breeding industry, and by extension to kids. His focus has changed. Custer believes that at any junior event, more than half the kids should be able to stay on for eight seconds. At this year's National Junior High Finals only about 28 percent did. It's a similar story — or worse — at other junior competitions. Seven contestants rode three times each, a total of 21 rides.
One kid had one qualified ride. One out of He says year-olds are now getting on the kinds of bulls he rode in college. Just talking about it makes him sweat behind the ears. Getting mucked out, biting the dust, wrecking. Getting your butt slammed, getting dropped in the well, having an egg broke in you. There are many ways to describe how a bull ride can end. Cody Custer at the Oklahoma ranch where he teaches young bull riders proper techniques.
Riley and Pauline Henson walked into the hospital lobby just as night was falling. They found Dylan in a bed in the pediatric ward. The young rider already had the grit of a pro. He wanted to drive all night to Colorado to ride in a rodeo the next day, like they'd planned. The chest tube and the beeping monitors and the pain hadn't changed his mind. The collapsed lung was a side note. The bull's hoof had lacerated Dylan's spleen. Spleen injuries — most often the result of car accidents — can lead to massive bleeding in the abdomen.
If Dylan's spleen started bleeding, it would require emergency surgery. Family members gathered in Albuquerque. Days passed while Dylan remained under observation. One day, Cody Custer walked in. He and Riley Henson were friends from the old days on the rodeo circuit. Dylan had gone to a couple of Custer's steer riding workshops.
Dylan and Custer's oldest son were friends. Custer was pissed. He thought the bull that stepped on Dylan was too big and too rank for a junior event. After six days in the hospital, Dylan Henson was released and he was back on a bull within eight months. But his accident had launched Cody Custer on a ride of his own. Custer had been taking his young son Brett to youth events.
He'd seen enough to know that Dylan Henson's bull was not an anomaly. Custer lodged complaints about the caliber of bull showing up at junior events with all the major youth rodeo organizations, from the NHSRA to the National Little Britches Association to the Youth Bull Riders, and with numerous local associations.
He pretty much broke even financially, but it helped fill the chutes with docile bulls. Now that Brett is in high school, he is no longer actively involved.
Custer guesses that he rode 2, head of steers by the time he was 14; steers are, in general, safer to ride. Practicing on steers, Custer says, allows a rider to build skill and confidence and makes the bucking motion second nature. Some kids skip the steer stage entirely now.
Given the quality of bull kids now often get on, that's a bit like going straight from flag football to the NCAA. A number of prominent cowboys wrote letters as part of Custer's campaign. At the Finals, an year-old and a year-old still have an equal chance of ending up on the toughest bull in the pens.
In response to inquiries, a spokesperson said the organization did not wish to comment on Custer's proposal. But the stock contractors they employ spoke freely. Dan Mundorf — who has supplied bulls for the Junior High Finals since the organization created the division a decade ago — says that over time he has gotten better at choosing appropriate stock. And he supports what Custer is trying to do. Frontier has one of the largest bucking bull herds in the country, and regularly sends animals to the PBR and the National Finals Rodeo.
Operations manager Heath Stewart admits that Frontier has brought several bulls that previously bucked in the National Finals to the High School Finals. Over the years, Custer has developed a following — or perhaps a movement has found its spokesperson. Custer has a website that covers the topic and posts regular diatribes on Facebook, where his "Answers for Bull Riders" page has more than 3, followers including a bevy of supportive commenters.
He's 10 years old and should be riding Holsteins. Damn it!!!!!!! Custer is the sort of person who draws attention when he's angry. As a rule, he's reserved and courteous, ardently Christian. He once rejected a generous endorsement offer from Anheuser-Busch because he didn't want to promote alcohol. His foul language tends toward "dang" and "bull crap. He has a bum knee and a shoulder that bothers him some, but considers himself lucky compared to a lot of bull riders.
He hasn't been on what he'd call a "real" bucking bull in more than a decade. Custer lives in a modest rancher on 30 acres outside Elk City, Okla. His oldest son, Aaron, was killed in a car accident three years ago at the age of Aaron's initials form the family brand and his friendly Australian Shepherd still runs up the washboard driveway to greet visitors.
Every year, Custer teaches six to 10 bull riding schools, usually two- or three-day affairs. He teaches technique. He talks about Aaron as a way of reminding his students that bull riding "is not the fullness of your life. Here he hopes people have ears to hear.
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