There will be a Toast meetup in London in the fall of 2015, as I will be seeing Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet. I mean, he doesn’t strike me as the sort to have a cutesy name for it? You can never tell, though. Also, the play. There is no force short of death that shall keep me from my aim. It is to be my long-delayed honeymoon. Would you like to have a toddler for the week? I don’t need any extra information.
A parent talks about what it’s like to have emetophobia AND have small, puking children (challenging, as you might imagine!) This is one of those phobias that make perfect sense to me. I mean, it’s bad enough to just be a run-of-the-mill sympathetic puker.
The world is coming to an end. It was a new Fox TV show that finally did it, to no one’s shock.
Look, obviously, the BBC needs our help casting their follow-up to The Hollow Crown, coming in 2016. They are doing Henry VI in two parts, instead of three, and also Richard III, and a Toastie sent me the following charmingly fervent missive about it:
The last one had Jeremy Irons as Henry IV, Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt, Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Tom Hiddleston as Henry V, and Rory Kinnear as Bolingbroke and it was great and I own the DVD.
Can we pleeeeeassse have a fantasy casting open thread for the new one? I have so many ideas! I really want to see Ralph Fiennes do Richard III, with Anne-Marie Duff as Lady Anne. And, squaring the circle, why not Branagh as Henry VI? It’s so underappreciated, they’ll really need someone to knock it out of the park. Also, I know you will want Cumberbatch shoehorned in there somehow – maybe as Henry Tudor, macking on teenage Princess Elizabeth?
I shall not stand against you. Let us speak of these things for a time. ALSO I LOVE THE HENRIAD SO MUCH.
Esther Werdiger’s rejected New Yorker cartoons are GREAT.
FASCINATING PIECE ALERT: “Why Hart Doesn’t Have Two Mommies”
In my ideal world, strangers would glance at me and my girlfriend and our baby, and just assume that I’m the baba, and that my girlfriend is the mama, and that I did not give birth. Why do I care, I ask myself. I have dear friends who are butches who bore their babies (see A.K. Summers’ genius graphic novel PREGNANT BUTCH.) Some of them probably want strangers to take a glance and assume they are the mothers. But that’s not me.
n+1 has been doing a big series on Amazon, (a teat from which we guiltily gulp affiliate funds) and Ruth Curry’s current installment is fascinating:
I’ve worked in book publishing for most of my adult life; currently I run an online bookstore called Emily Books specializing in the kind of women’s writing that’s typically labeled “difficult.” My business partner is my best friend. Most of my other friends and coworkers are also involved, directly or otherwise, in the writing, publication, and sale of books. When we talk about Amazon an uneasy pall falls over the room, as if we’ve invoked a monstrous, evil entity—Pol Pot or Exxon Mobil or King Joffrey Baratheon, the Ill-Born Usurper of Westeros (lifetime Amazon rank of A Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin: 14). Amazon’s cutthroat pricing schemes, commanding control of the book marketplace, and experiments with bundling and the publication of original material directly threaten our livelihoods, such as they are.
The Tournament of Upper-Middle Class Afflictions
Added early this morning, not meant to be less important than other bullshit in this post: These poor goddamn firefighters in Boston.
