T-Bone Slim, born on this day in 1880, was an IWW member, working class songwriter, and author. Due to his popular, labor themed tunes, Slim was dubbed the "laureate of the logging camps".
Born Matti Valentin Huhta to Finnish immigrant parents in Ashtabula, Ohio, Slim became an itinerant worker after leaving his wife and family in 1912. It isn't known when Slim became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but he first appeared in the IWW's press in the 1920 edition of the IWW Songbook.
Slim became one of the IWW's most famous writers during the 1920s and 30s, and many people would buy the "Industrial Worker" just to read his articles - one ad from the paper read "there's a lot more in Industrial Solidarity and Industrial Worker than T-Bone Slim's columns".
Slim did not presume his working-class readership to be unintelligent people, making use of complex wordplay and experimental writing techniques, playing with ambiguity, satire and surrealism.
Slim was also well-known for his songs, such as the "Lumberjack's Prayer", a parody of the Lord's Prayer about the poor quality of food available for the working class, and "The Popular Wobbly", which experienced a revival among civil rights activists during the 1960s.
In spite of his renown in radical circles during his lifetime, many details of Slim's life remain unclear. During the mid-1930s, he settled in New York City, where he worked as a barge captain on the docks.
In May 1942, Slim's body was found in the East River. His cause of death remains unknown and has been subject to speculation. Following his death, Slim largely faded into obscurity, especially compared to more famous IWW-associated writers such as Joe Hill.
Slim's songs have been preserved, however, re-published in editions of the Little Red Songbook and covered by musicians such as Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, and his own great-grandnephew, John Westmoreland.
Until recently, there was thought to be no surviving photographs of Slim, however, in 2019 two photos were discovered and published by Working Class History in a Newberry Library collection.
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Making the chozo samus' adopted family in the metroid story was a bad move that had made everything after they made it up worse. Like, you're gonna tell me the chozo ruins on zebes are only like a decade old and Samus lived their as a kid? But at the same time they're still treated as this ancient lost civilization and everything about them feels like they're the Vorlons from babylon 5 but died out thousands of space years ago. And then the bad guys from the first game and the recurring boss show up and kill everyone? That's fucking stupid. Making that the focus of Metroid Dread was a blemish on an otherwise perfect game, the story fucking sucked because of the back story. If it turned out there was still a chozo or two who was fucking around still that'd be cool, but the whole war between factions and the creation on metroids and them being behind all the weird life forms Samus exterminated in the series makes everything seem so small. I thought Samus was dealing with the ecological effects of wiping out a dominant species on a plane t when the X showed up in fusion, not that some bio weapon supplanted another one. It just takes away from the vibe entirely
it's cos she was the chozo-n one