Mary Austin and Freddie Mercury: A Bond Beyond Fame Mary Austin was just nineteen years old when she met the man the world would later know as Freddie Mercury. At the time, however, he was simply Farrokh Bulsara—a twenty-three-year-old art student with little money, big dreams, and a quiet nature that hid the confidence he would one day display on the world's biggest stages. Their story began in 1969 at Biba, a fashionable London boutique where Mary worked. Life had never been easy for her. Raised in Fulham by deaf parents, she left school at fifteen to help support her family. She was practical, hardworking, and far removed from the glamorous world she would eventually enter. Farrokh often visited the shop. He admired the clothes but could rarely afford them. For months, he returned again and again, gathering the courage to speak to Mary. The future frontman of Queen—who would later command stadiums full of fans—was too nervous to ask one young woman on a date. Finally, on September 5, 1969, his twenty-third birthday, he made his move. Mary did not even realize he considered their outing a date. To her, it felt like two friends spending time together. Yet that evening marked the beginning of a relationship that would shape both of their lives. The two quickly grew close and, within months, moved into a small apartment near Kensington Market. Money was scarce. Mary worked to help cover expenses while Freddie focused on music. As he pursued what seemed like an unlikely dream with a struggling band that would eventually become Queen, Mary stood firmly by his side. When others questioned whether he would ever succeed, Mary never did. Queen released its debut album in 1973, but success did not arrive overnight. Reviews were mixed, finances remained tight, and the band's future was uncertain. Through it all, Mary remained Freddie's strongest supporter. That Christmas, Freddie surprised her with a gift. Inside a series of nested boxes was a small jade ring. When Mary asked which hand she should wear it on, Freddie told her to place it on her left ring finger. Then he proposed. Mary accepted. For a time, it seemed they would spend their lives together. But as Queen's popularity grew, Freddie found himself confronting truths about his identity that he had long struggled to understand. By 1976, he finally opened up to Mary and told her he believed he was bisexual. After listening carefully, Mary responded with honesty. She told him she felt he was actually gay. The conversation changed the course of their relationship. Their engagement ended, and so did their romantic partnership. Yet instead of drifting apart, they forged a bond unlike any other. Freddie arranged for Mary to live nearby and ensured she remained an important part of his life. Although they were no longer a couple, Freddie never considered her simply an ex-girlfriend. He often described her as his soulmate. Many of the people Freddie dated found it difficult to understand Mary's place in his life. Yet he repeatedly made it clear that no one could replace her. In his eyes, she remained the closest person to him. He even wrote "Love of My Life" with Mary in mind, immortalizing their connection in one of Queen's most beloved songs. As the years passed, both moved forward. Freddie became one of the most famous performers on the planet. Mary built a life of her own, married, and had two sons. Still, they remained deeply connected. Mary knew the person behind the fame. She remembered the young dreamer before the stadiums, the records, and the worldwide recognition. She remembered Farrokh. When Freddie was diagnosed with HIV in the late 1980s, he kept the news private from most of the world. Mary was among the few who knew. As his health declined, she stayed close, visiting him regularly at Garden Lodge, his home in Kensington. On November 24, 1991, Freddie Mercury passed away at the age of forty-five. Before his death, however, he entrusted Mary with one final responsibility. Freddie did not want his grave to become a public attraction. He feared that his final resting place would turn into a spectacle for fans and tourists. To prevent that from happening, he asked Mary to take his ashes somewhere private after his cremation. She agreed. According to reports, Mary kept the ashes safely in her home for nearly two years before carrying out his wishes. Then, one day, she quietly left Garden Lodge and scattered them at a location known only to her and Freddie. To this day, she has never revealed where that place is. Countless theories have emerged over the years. Some believe his ashes were scattered in London, while others suggest Switzerland, Zanzibar, or even the grounds of Garden Lodge itself. Mary has never confirmed any of these claims. Her silence remains one of the last promises she made to him. Freddie's will further demonstrated the depth of his trust. He left Mary half of his estate, including Garden Lodge. Over time, her share became even more significant through the estate's arrangements. While some questioned why he left so much to a former fiancée, Freddie had long ago explained his reasoning. He once told Mary that if life had unfolded differently, she would have been his wife—and everything would have belonged to her anyway. For decades after his death, Garden Lodge remained filled with Freddie's belongings: his clothing, artwork, handwritten notes, treasured possessions, and even the piano associated with some of Queen's greatest music. In 2023, Mary made the difficult decision to auction nearly 1,500 of those items through Sotheby's. The collection attracted enormous global attention, with almost 140,000 visitors coming to view the memorabilia before the sale. For Mary, it was not simply about selling possessions. It was about closing a chapter that had remained open for more than thirty years. Yet one thing she refused to part with was the secret of Freddie's ashes. Over the years, Mary became the guardian of the private Freddie Mercury—the man behind the icon. Not the superstar who electrified Wembley Stadium, but the shy young artist who once wandered into a clothing shop hoping to find the courage to speak to her. Mary later said that losing Freddie felt much like losing a husband. Their relationship had survived every stage of life—success and struggle, joy and heartbreak, health and illness. What they shared never fit neatly into a single category. It began as love, evolved into friendship, and ultimately became something deeper than either. While romance ended, loyalty never did. Mary believed in Freddie before the world celebrated him. Freddie trusted Mary when he had everything to lose. And in the end, he placed his final wish in her hands. More than fifty years after they first met, people still wonder where Freddie Mercury's ashes rest. Mary Austin still refuses to say. Perhaps that enduring mystery is what makes their story so powerful. It reminds us that some relationships transcend labels, some bonds survive every change life brings, and some promises remain unbroken even after death. Some loves simply take a different form—and last forever.

Initial report: St. Mary's Feast in Cranston had no serious incidents - a few arrestable fighting incidents - but it looks like nothing more serious. Cranston PD doing an after-action review. That & PVDFan area relatively without serious incident - 2 signs of hope for safety!

ALASKA SENATE RACE: The prediction market has decided Mary Peltola succeeded in her effort to rig the state's ranked-choice voting system. Officially, the Alaska Senate race remains uncalled. Mary Peltola leads Sen. Dan Sullivan by about 4,250 votes in the latest count, but ranked-choice results are not expected until Nov. 18, after the state reviews and counts eligible ballots. #BET#

9 out of the 11 Democrats who won their Senate races support filibuster changes to the filibuster according to a Washington Examiner review of interviews and campaign statements. Mary Peltola and Scott Colom, who have yet to clinch their races in Alaska and Mississippi, respectively, have not widely shared their views on the filibuster.

What happens when a PM settles before the event is over? The clock hit zero, and @Kalshi paid out @WMU_Football holders Officials reviewed the final play and restored one second Michigan used it to complete a Hail Mary, winning 13–12... Read article:

𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐇 𝐂𝐈𝐑𝐂𝐔𝐈𝐓 𝐒𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐒 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐄𝐈𝐔 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐅𝐋𝐈𝐏-𝐅𝐋𝐎𝐏𝐏𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐄𝐄 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝟏𝟐 𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐒 On Election Day afternoon, the Ninth Circuit's full 11-judge en banc panel voted 6-5 to let the Trump administration keep demanding that California and Washington State set aside suspected noncitizen ballots. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli didn't wait to spike the football, writing on X that 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘭𝘢𝘸 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘴. 𝘚𝘦𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘫𝘶𝘥𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘩 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘴. He added: 𝘸𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘳. It took three reversals in twelve hours to get there. A three-judge panel first lifted a district judge's restrictions on the DOJ. Then the full court voted to rehear the case en banc, wiping that ruling out. Hours later, the 11-judge panel restored it anyway, 𝐩𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐭’𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐥. Chief Judge Mary Murguia, who pushed for the rehearing, dissented — insisting the Justice Department's request to flag illegal ballots amounted to voter intimidation. The fight is over roughly 20,000 California ballots and more than 400 in Washington State that the DOJ flagged as potentially cast by noncitizens — people the government says registered and voted, in some cases more than once, while in the country illegally. States already sequester ballots routinely for signature mismatches and provisional review. The DOJ simply asked them to do the same here until citizenship could be verified. That wasn't good enough for 𝐒𝐄𝐈𝐔, 𝐀𝐅𝐒𝐂𝐌𝐄, 𝐋𝐔𝐋𝐀𝐂 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐀𝐀𝐂𝐏, who sued to brand the request itself as "unlawfully intimidating, threatening, or coercive." The Ninth Circuit's majority wasn't buying it, ruling the executive branch — not a coalition of unions — gets to call the ball on enforcing citizenship law at the ballot box. It's the same fight playing out in the DOJ's broader Operation Protect the Vote, which has already charged 28 green-card holders across California, including a Long Beach woman and a La Puente man accused of lying about their voting history on naturalization paperwork. The restrictions stay paused while the appeal plays out, and SEIU's allies can keep fighting in court. But on the day it mattered most, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐰 𝐰𝐨𝐧 — 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐰𝐬𝐮𝐢𝐭. 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐩-𝐟𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐯𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐡 𝐂𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐮𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐰 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐭.

I am the Managing Director of Workforce Transition at a consulting firm that bills $14,200 per day and I am currently advising two clients, in two different industries, running the same playbook from the same deck I built in January, and neither knows about the other. Client A is GitLab. Client B is General Motors. GitLab makes software for people who make software. General Motors makes cars for people who can't afford cars. Both companies, in the same week of May 2026, announced they are replacing their human employees with artificial intelligence products that did not exist when those employees were hired. I built the deck. The deck has 44 slides. Slide 1 is titled "The Agentic Opportunity." Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." Slides 2 through 43 are the reason I own a house in Darien. GitLab did it with vocabulary. Their CEO published a blog post called "Act 2" on May 7 announcing that the company's six values (Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency) were being retired and replaced with three: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. I helped write the new ones. Not directly. My firm was not retained for the values work. But I sold the Chief Culture Officer the framework three months ago at a dinner in the Marina where she described the old values as "aspirational scaffolding" and I said, very carefully, that aspirational scaffolding is a liability once the building is up. The building, in this metaphor, is a $1 billion ARR company whose stock has declined 82% from its peak. The scaffolding, in this metaphor, is the 2,000-page public handbook that attracted the employees who are now being told they have eleven days to volunteer for termination or wait until June 1 to learn whether they've been involuntarily selected. The rubric for who stays and who goes contains six dimensions. I know this because I reviewed a draft in March when my associate flew to San Francisco for a "culture alignment session" that was billed as strategic advisory. Two of the six dimensions are "AI fluency" and "agentic mindset." These terms did not appear in any GitLab job description before January 2026. They now determine employment. An engineer who maintained GitLab's CI/CD pipeline for four years without incident — four years of uptime, four years of deployments, four years of the infrastructure that generated the $955 million in revenue the CEO celebrated on the earnings call — may score lower on "agentic mindset" than a new hire who completed a twelve-week certificate in prompt engineering from a program that itself has existed for fewer weeks than the engineer has years of tenure. General Motors did it with spreadsheets. Monday morning, May 11. Badge deactivation at 5:47 AM Eastern, building access at 5:48, VPN credentials at 5:49. Six hundred IT workers across twelve states. The distribution across twelve states was not arbitrary. Each state has a WARN Act notification threshold. Six hundred distributed across twelve states falls below every threshold. The workforce analytics team that designed the distribution model was not among the six hundred terminated. The skill of distributing layoffs across jurisdictions to avoid legal notification requirements is, apparently, an AI-native competency. GM posted 83 new positions the same week. The job descriptions require "AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, and prompt engineering." I reviewed them at my client's request. Several describe roles that the terminated employees were already performing under different names. One posting, Senior Data Integration Architect, is identical to a role held by a woman in their Austin office who was terminated at 5:47 AM Central. She held the position for nine years. The new posting requires three years of experience with large language models. Large language models have existed in commercial deployment for approximately three years. The requirement is mathematically designed to exclude anyone who learned their skills before the technology existed. Which is everyone they just fired. Here is where the deck earns its fee. Slide 17 is titled "The Vocabulary Bridge." It is the most important slide in the presentation. It shows how to construct a lexicon of new competency terms ("AI fluency," "agentic mindset," "AI-native development") that describe existing work in language the existing workforce cannot claim. The vocabulary does not change the job. It changes who is qualified for the job. A senior IT administrator who managed SAP infrastructure processing $185 billion in annual GM revenue for fifteen years is not "AI-native." A twenty-six-year-old with a GitHub portfolio of LangChain wrappers is. The fifteen-year veteran did the work. The twenty-six-year-old has the words. My deck converts one into the other. That is the bridge. GitLab Duo, their AI agent platform, reached general availability on January 15, 2026. Seventeen weeks ago. They are restructuring their entire company around a product that has existed for seventeen weeks. GitHub Copilot has 20 million users and 4.7 million paid subscribers across 90% of the Fortune 100. Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue in February. GitLab's competitor advantage in the "agentic era" is that they are willing to fire more people faster in service of a product that has been generally available for fewer days than their voluntary separation window has hours of anxiety. General Motors spent $10 billion on Cruise, their autonomous vehicle division. Cruise's signature achievement was a robotaxi that struck a pedestrian in San Francisco and dragged her twenty feet. The DOJ fined them $500,000. They settled with the victim for approximately $10 million. They killed the division in December 2024. They then wrote down $7.6 billion in EV losses. They then pivoted back to gasoline. They then announced the 600 IT layoffs for insufficient "AI skills." The AI they built cost $10 billion and injured a woman. The AI skills they're hiring for cost a twelve-week certificate. The employees they fired had fifteen years of keeping $185 billion in revenue processing without dragging anyone through an intersection. Meanwhile — and this is the part where I earn the second half of my fee — GM was simultaneously settling a $12.75 million fine with the California Attorney General for selling the precise GPS coordinates, hard braking events, and real-time driving speeds of 8 million OnStar subscribers to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis, who used the data to raise those drivers' insurance premiums. GM's privacy policy explicitly stated they did not sell driving data. They sold driving data for four consecutive years. The fine was $12.75 million. The revenue was $20 million. The margin on collecting behavioral telemetry from 8 million of your own customers while the glove compartment manual said otherwise was 64%. The terminated employees' median salary was $95,111. Mary Barra's compensation was $29.9 million. The ratio is 310 to 1. The 1 was just reclassified as "not AI-native." I present these two clients to my partners every Thursday in a meeting we call "Transition Pipeline Review." I present them on the same slide. The slide has two columns. Left column: GitLab. Right column: General Motors. The headers are identical. "Legacy Workforce," "Skills Gap Narrative," "Vocabulary Bridge Deployed," "Separation Timeline," "Replacement Requisitions." The numbers differ. The structure is identical. The structure is always identical. I have seventeen clients in the pipeline. Nine are in technology. Four are in manufacturing. Two are in financial services. One is in healthcare. One is in defense. All seventeen are on slide 17. All seventeen are building a vocabulary bridge. All seventeen are replacing employees who have skills with employees who have words. GitLab's CEO wrote: "Software will be built by machines, directed by people." I read that sentence in a meeting where we were reviewing the rubric for determining which people would be directed out of the company. GM's Chief Product Officer arrived from Aurora, the autonomous trucking startup, to "consolidate disparate technology businesses." Three top software executives departed within six months. Their LinkedIn profiles say "exploring new opportunities" in the same font GM's privacy policy used to say "we do not sell your driving data." Bill Staples's compensation at GitLab was $39.1 million in FY2025. His change-of-control payout is modeled at $47.4 million. Mary Barra's was $29.9 million. Combined: $69 million for two executives presiding over a restructuring that will remove an undisclosed number of humans from payroll and replace them with products that are, respectively, seventeen weeks old and responsible for $10 billion in losses plus one woman dragged through a San Francisco intersection. An anonymous GitLab employee posted on Hacker News: "The employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat." A GM facilities team filed a maintenance request about moisture on the lobby tables on restructuring mornings. The Warren, Michigan campus has a Panera Bread that opens at 5:30 AM on days when badge deactivations begin at 5:47 AM. The Panera does not know why its hours change. My firm does. We have an agreement with their regional manager. The muffins are complimentary. Slide 17 has a footnote. The footnote says: "Vocabulary Bridge deployment should precede workforce action by 60-90 days to establish institutional legitimacy of new competency framework." GitLab introduced "AI fluency" in January. The restructuring was announced in May. Four months. GM posted "AI-native" job descriptions the same week as the terminations. That is too fast. That is not what the deck recommends. GM skipped the legitimacy window. They went straight from vocabulary to separation without the 60-day buffer that allows HR to say, in the separation meeting, "we communicated these expectations in Q1." I flagged this in my Thursday pipeline review. My partner said, and I am quoting: "They'll be fine. Nobody sues over a word." My deck has been purchased by seventeen companies. The aggregate headcount affected across all seventeen is approximately 14,000 employees. The aggregate revenue of my practice from these engagements is $11.2 million. The per-employee cost of my advisory services works out to $800 per person displaced. That is less than the Panera muffin budget at GM's Warren campus annualized across restructuring days. I have a copy of GitLab's original values poster framed in my office. It says CREDIT: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency. I purchased it on eBay from someone whose seller name is "gitlab-alum-2024." I keep it the way a surgeon keeps an X-ray of a interesting case. Not for sentiment. For reference. Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." It contains a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart has seventeen rows, one per client. Each row has four phases: Vocabulary Introduction, Competency Reassessment, Workforce Action, Replacement Hiring. The phases overlap. They always overlap. The vocabulary is introduced while the competency reassessment is being designed. The reassessment is completed while the workforce action is being calendared. The replacement hiring is posted while the terminated employees are sitting in a Panera at 5:48 AM wondering whether "AI-native" was a term that existed when they were hired. It was not. That is the bridge. That is the product. That is slides 2 through 43. The agentic era is not a technological shift. It is a vocabulary shift. The technology is seventeen weeks old or $10 billion underwater or dragging someone through an intersection. The vocabulary is what my clients are buying. The vocabulary is what makes a fifteen-year SAP administrator into a "legacy workforce" and a twelve-week prompt certificate into a "transition hire." The vocabulary is the product. I am the vendor. The deck is $14,200 per day. The agentic era starts on slide 1 and ends on slide 44 and in between is every employee who built the thing now being renamed to exclude them. I bill monthly. Net 30. The invoices are paid on time. The employees are not.

Mary Wiesman writes: "The Muslim religion is the fastest growing religion per capita in the United States, especially in the minority races. Last month I attended a training. During the training session there was a presentation by three speakers representing the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Muslim faiths, who each explained their beliefs. I was particularly interested in what the Islamic Imam had to say. The Muslim gave a great presentation of the basics of Islam, complete with a video. After the presentations, time was provided for questions and answers. When it was my turn, I directed my question to the Muslim and asked: 'Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that most Imams and clerics of Islam have declared a holy jihad [Holy war] against the infidels of the world and, that by killing an infidel, (which is a command to all Muslims) they are assured of a place in heaven. If that's the case, can you give me the definition of an infidel?' There was no disagreement with my statements and, without hesitation, he replied, " Nonbelievers". I responded, 'So, let me make sure I have this straight. All followers of Allah have been commanded to kill everyone who is not of your faith so they can have a place in heaven. Is that correct?' The expression on his face changed from one of authority and command to that of a little boy who had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.' He sheepishly replied, 'Yes.' I then stated, 'Well, sir, I have a real problem trying to imagine The Pope commanding all Catholics to kill those of your faith or Dr. Stanley ordering all Protestants to do the same in order to guarantee them a place in heaven!' The Muslim was speechless. I continued, 'I also have a problem with being your friend when you and your brother clerics are telling your followers to kill me! Let me ask you a question: Would you rather have your Allah, who tells you to kill me in order for you to go to heaven, or my Jesus who tells me to love you because I am going to heaven and He wants you to be there with me?' You could have heard a pin drop. Needless to say, the organizers and/or promoters of the 'Diversification' training seminar were not happy with my way of dealing with the Islamic Imam, and exposing the truth about the Muslims' beliefs. In twenty years there will be enough Muslim voters in the US. to elect the President."