I know y'all did not read the books but Roald Dahl talks about this in the book. Charlie’s teacher points out the fact that unless you buy a shit ton of bars you’re probably not gonna win. Just like the lottery. Just like how all of the other winners of the tickets bought a shit ton of bars. Except Charlie, who just got lucky. And Charlie was originally black. Literally the whole point of the book was that wonka wanted to give the less fortunate a fair opportunity and it wasn’t fair because the system isn’t fair.
Stop the car.
Charlie was originally black?!?!
!?!!
He was and Mr. Dahl was forced to make him white. Also his widow has spoken and confirmed that as well.
because you shouldn’t believe everything you read on a tumblr post at face value, here is a guardian article confirming that charlie was originally conceived as black but dahl made him white at the behest of his publisher
WHAT
But yeah, coming back to the original point, the other kids, especially Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt, cheated the system by claiming a ridiculous amount of chocolate bars. News reports mention people hoarding Wonka chocolate bars in hopes of finding the Golden Ticket. Mr Salt even admits that he refitted his staff at a nut-shelling factory for opening chocolate bars, without a doubt losing a huge amount of capital in lost profits and mass bulk-buying of chocolate, just to win. The working-class lady who actually found that ticket didn’t benefit from that luck or labour - she was immediately made to hand it over to her boss for his spoiled daughter, who holds it as ‘his’ victory and good luck.
Charlie didn’t even find the ticket in his first bar, or his second. His first bar, his birthday present, was a dud, and he even failed to enjoy it like normal because he dared to hope, just for a moment, that he might actually be lucky enough to get the one. Later, he is lucky enough to find a dropped 50p piece in the street, and goes to buy a chocolate bar for himself. Finally holding a treat that is all his, he wolfs the thing down, stopping only long enough to realises that he didn’t get lucky and win a Golden Ticket. It’s only on the third bar that he gets it, and, smelling blood in the water, the shopkeeper tells him to immediately go home and not tell a soul that he has it, knowing what people might do to this small starving boy if they find out what he has.
And Wonka knows! He knows he done goofed! He realises almost immediately that the people who have been attracted to his lottery, who have stacked the decks in their favour, are awful, cruel, entitled people! Augustus Gloop, the glutton, doesn’t care what placed in front of him so long as it’s food - and the first obstacle? A room where everything is a kind of sweet. Violet’s gum-chewing is excessive, but the modern film adapts this into a more realistic and sinister flaw - overcompetitiveness. It’s not just that she’s been chewing the same piece of gum for months, it’s that she’s been chewing the same piece of gum, weeks after its taste is gone, whether it is socially acceptable or not, just to break a record. So when Wonka promises a new treat, a personal favourite of one of the kids, but says it’s not ready yet and you can’t have it, of course Violet seizes it, because damn the consequences, she will be the first to try it. Veruca is shown a collection of unique animals, and immediately declares that she wants one, because she’s always had the bragging rights and luxury rare items. And when Mr Wonka refuses to sell? She steals it, because dang it, she will have that golden goose/trained squirrel! Mike Teevee, in his hubris, mutilates himself almost beyond recognition because he had to challenge Mr Wonka’s outlandish claim of transmitting physical objects via television. Charlie was the perfect heir, not because he was humble and poor, but because he had the wonder and appreciation for the treats Wonka made but also the sense and caution not to risk messing with the many dangerous things in an active factory. If the lottery was more fair, maybe Charlie would have had more stiff competition, but as it stands, Charlie is almost the poster boy of ‘won by doing nothing’.
Sorry, got sidetracked
TLDR: Apart from Charlie, most of the other kids were entitled rich (white) kids who gamed a system that should have been fair, and were punished for it by revealing to them their greed and hubris
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska said Maxwell had only a “minimal” privacy interest in the 20-line excerpt, because it concerned massages and not private sexual activity of consenting adults, and the public had a right to see her testimony.
“There is no reason not to unseal this portion of testimony,” the Manhattan-based judge wrote. “While the court acknowledges Ms. Maxwell’s interest in a fair criminal trial, Ms. Maxwell can argue all her points to the presiding judge in her criminal trial, as she has already.”
Lawyers for Maxwell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Preska had previously released large portions of the July 22, 2016 deposition, which came from a now-settled civil defamation lawsuit against Maxwell by Virginia Giuffre, one of dozens of women who have accused Epstein of sexual misconduct.
Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to a six-count indictment claiming she helped Epstein recruit three teenage girls for sex from 1994 to 1997, and then lied about it.
She has said the 20 lines of testimony was the basis of one of the perjury charges.
That charge covered Maxwell’s denials to ever giving Epstein or anyone else a massage, knowing whether Epstein possessed sex toys and knowing whether Epstein had sex in the 1990s and 2000s with anyone other than herself and two other women.
Maxwell believes prosecutors obtained the deposition transcript illegally, and it should be kept out of her trial.
Her lawyers have said that argument would be compromised if prosecutors could claim that any errors they made were harmless once Preska released the testimony.
U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan oversees the criminal case and will decide whether to admit or suppress the deposition.
Maxwell is separately seeking to dismiss all or part of the indictment, arguing in part that prosecutors are targeting her only because Epstein is dead and she serves as a “substitute” for him.
Epstein killed himself in August 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell was arrested in July and is being held in a Brooklyn jail. Nathan has twice denied bail.
Hey, since Charisma Carpenter recently told her truly horrifying story about how Joss Whedon treated her on the set of Buffy and Angel (which was backed up by Amber Benson) there’s going to be an instinct I want to discourage:
The instinct to say, “Well, I never liked him anyway.”
Joss Whedon’s failings as a creator are well known. He’s a subpar director, he’s an at-best mediocre writer. But the thing is, when you counter the reveal that an abuser is an abuser by commenting that you never liked the abuser’s work, you are subtextually saying that if you did like their work, you might be a little more okay with it (even if you don’t mean or think that).
Abusers are very common in artistic fields, especially film, and are often protected by dint of being talented or commercially successful. The very idea of the auteur (that the director is the ultimate author of a film) is used to forgive or excuse abuse (so they’re forgiven if they do horrible shit to their cast and crew in order to realize their vision). Look at Roman Polaski or Woody Allen; The idea that their crimes were excusable because they were creating great films allowed them to make it to old age without ever seeing consequences for their crimes.
I’m not going to deny that Buffy, Angel and Firefly meant a lot to me, once upon a time, and up until a few years ago, they were still things I looked back on fondly. But that doesn’t excuse who Joss Whedon is, and it turns out who he always was. And he go to hell.
📣 Attention, space explorers! Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope presents: two new coloring pages! Unleash your creativity to bring these celestial scenes to life.
Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, smiles out at us from our first coloring page. She’s considered the mother of our Hubble Space Telescope because she helped everyone understand why it was important to have observatories in space – not just on the ground. If it weren’t for her, Hubble may have never become a reality.
The Roman Space Telescope is named after her to honor the legacy she left behind when she died in 2018. Thanks to Nancy Grace Roman, we’ve taken countless pictures of space from orbiting telescopes and learned so much more about the universe than we could have possibly known otherwise!
The second coloring page illustrates some of the exciting science topics the Roman Space Telescope will explore. Set to launch in the mid-2020s, the mission will view the universe in infrared light, which is like using heat vision. We’ll be able to peer through clouds of dust and see things that are much farther away.
We anticipate all kinds of discoveries from the edge of our solar system to the farthest reaches of space. This coloring page highlights a few of the things the Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about. The mission will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system and hundreds of millions of galaxies. It will also help us unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, represented by the gray web-like pattern in the background. With so much exciting new data, who knows what else we may learn?
