A white dude is writing a Gone With the Wind prequel from Mammy’s perspective.
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Let us speak more, today, of Broad City. Let us speak of when Ilana slept with the mega-hot bi dude and then discovered he was in a terrible improv group.
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Behold, the magazine selection at my gym in Utah. Note that the usual copies of (I am quite serious) Heavy Duty Trucking were taken, much to my chagrin, as was The American Legion. At some point, someone casually set down a copy of the January 2014 issue of Men’s Journal, with Chris Pine on the cover, and I cut off an old woman to get to it first.
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Farewell, Television Without Pity. We had some great times. Remember, you can still read Previously.TV and Dear Television.
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I can honestly say that until this instant I had no idea who Merlin Olsen is, but apparently he was the greatest athlete Utah ever produced, and was also very nice and on TV. Who is your state’s most august athlete, according to Sports Illustrated in 1999?
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When Robert Christgau reviewed an Animaniacs album. My God, what a great show that was, though. Still chasing the dragon of trying to be as sexy as Minerva Mink, you gotta believe in yourself and your amazing dressing table.
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The great Jane Marie answers beauty questions over at Rookie!
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Look, you shouldn’t shove your husband off a cliff, but if you do, you should DEFINITELY say “he fell” and not text your friends anything weird about it.
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Leslie Jamison’s new essay collection, The Empathy Exams, just got a great review in the New York Times. She is a friend, and she is the best kind of friend: the kind that writes a book you can GENUINELY and MERRILY recommend to others!
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Or if you MUST shove your husband off a cliff, don’t do it in a national park, apparently.
Not clear she’d have been better off doing it in Montana proper. She probably wouldn’t have gotten the death penalty, but could easily have ended up with life without parole.
I know nothing about federal vs. state jurisdictions, etc., here, can you expand on why she might’ve been more screwed if she’d done it outside the park?
(How To Shove Your Husband Off A Cliff With Minimal Legal Repercussions: A Toast Primer)
#subscribe
They just don’t tend to hand out as many formal life sentences in the federal system, even as the average sentence in federal court is much, much longer than the average sentence in state court for comparable crimes. (Thanks, barbarically harsh Federal Sentencing Guidelines.) Also, I have the sense that this is the kind of tawdry case that an elected district attorney would be more likely to prosecute to verdict rather than plead out.
See, this is the sort of relevant information we all need in our lives, and also in Death In [insert National Park here] books. Thank you friend.
She obviously did not have a Sicilian mother. My Mom’s motto for all anti-male actions: Make it look like an accident. Also: SAY NOTHING
As my bubbe would say: “Make like you know from nothing.”
Um Dad Magazine would fit right in there and not even ironically
Yes!
I worked on that 1999 SI package, oddly enough. It was a bear, and it ran in the same issue as Jeff Pearlman’s piece on John Rocker (REMEMBER THAT??) so no one paid it any attention after we’d literally worked for weeks to put it together, fact check it, run 50 separate covers, etc.
I’ve still kind of never forgiven Jeff Pearlman for it.
Ughghghgh the last portion of that sequel is written IN DIALECT.
DIALECT.
oh god this is going to be just shit-ass awful I can see it now
Yep, my immediate reaction was “SUPER UGH.”
WHITE DUDES
KNEW IT
I HATE things written in Dialect.
The Wind Done Gone also sucked. I’m all about reimaginings of GWTW from different points of view, but I want one done well.
UGH JESUS NO
My dad told me about the sequel and was perplexed when, instead of making polite interested noises, a great disgusted groan came out of my mouth, unbidden. UGH.
WRAPPERS’ DELIGHT
oh no, the Broad City link isn’t working! which is tragic because a) that show is amazing & b) having seen (&, let’s be honest, probably done) some shitty improv in my day, that scene had me laughing SO FUCKING HARD.
Just lop “the-toast.net” off the beginning of the link.
i realize the show is a helluva lot funnier if Ilana has sexventures w/ NYC’s most bizarre, but HANNIBAL BURESS. How could you not marry him IMMEDIATELY? (related: the scene where Abby gets so high at the dentist NOT A MOM)
I KNOW. like I get that the show will not be the same if it becomes Lincoln+Ilana5EVR but I would lock that shit up if I were her.
AHhhhHH LINCOLN IS PLAYED BY HANNIBAL BURESS?! (i couldn’t tell through all the cake!) BRB adding this show to my Hulu queue STAT.
This moment has now been added to the household lexicon, as of last week when I announced to my husband “Do you want more of that cake? Because I’m about to go full Hannibal Buress on it.”
I would also grab onto that sweet, goodhearted guy and never let go, but part of what I love about Ilana is that she’s so different from me.
I died at the improve scene and I don’t have any connection to improv. The entire show slays me, I don’t understand how something can be so constantly funny.
re. Gone with the Wind prequel, and the fact that it’s been written by a white dude who has been approved by the Mitchell estate and apparently written in dialect:
much tone deaf
such side eye
wow
Shocking no one, this is what he looks like:
He has the same mustache as my horrible uncle who used to play Robert E. Lee in Civil War reenactments
Are you 100% sure this guy DOESN’T also play Lee in Civil War reenactments?
Well, he could play McClellan in Civil War historical fiction LARPing, in a setting where McClellan is never shitcanned and therefore the South wins.
Not 100% sure he isn’t my actual horrible uncle, to be honest
I KNOW! I had did a double take when I saw the picture because it seemed too ridiculous to be true.
Btw, maybe somehow this guy will still surprise us all with a thoughtful and complex perspective on her character and the gutwrenching life of being enslaved in the antebellum South? I was almost willing to give him the benefit of a doubt until I read that he was approved by the estate.
Also, from the NPR coverage of this debacle:
“Will this be a radical reimagining of one of literature’s most upsetting characters, a la Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea? If so, it would be a departure from McCaig’s 2007 spinoff, Rhett Butler’s People, treated Mammy as the same faithful “old negress” familiar from Gone With the Wind.”
ABANDON SHIP
This gif is quite excellent. I’d prefer watching this for three hours to watching Gone With the Wind or reading that dude’s book.
Thank you for bringing this gif into my life. I’m sorry it had to be under these circumstances.
This is so goddamn delightful I cannot even process it this morning.
I am going to come back to this page multiple times today just to watch this.
*right-click-save*
I need to ride a llama immediately
Damn. Well, fuck that..
I was working at a public library a couple years ago, and as an employee appreciation prize they gave me a copy of Rhett Butler’s People that had been donated. Basically, my “prize” was getting to recycle it so they didn’t have to.
WIDE SARGASSO SEA SUUUUUCKED
Left that bit in there just for you, Mallory.
Ok, that is two references to Wide Sargasso Sea happening in a week which also features two articles on Pamela. Am I awake? Am I dreaming that I’m back in ENGL354? God, I love this place.
wait, that REALLY REALLY is the author?! I just assumed this was a (hilarious) joke.
REALLY REALLY
I thought it was a picture of the KFC Colonel on a casual day…
Welcome to (some portions of) the Deep South, where they dress unironically like it’s still 1860. But if *I* get dressed up in Renaissance gear and frolic around in public, it’s all, “What the hell is wrong with you, freak?” and “King Richard’s Faire isn’t until October, GTFO.”
[cue involuntary snort-laugh]
OMG
” Mr. McCaig, 73, who lives on a farm in Virginia”
This the same Mitchell estate that sued to try to stop The Wind Done Gone, yes?
Fuuuuuuuck thiiiiiiiiiiis.
But you don’t understand! He is an old white guy, and so he COMPLETELY understands EVERYTHING in the world, especially white it was like to be a black woman pre-and-during the civil war! He is an expert, because he is WHITE MAN.
Just…maybe write a different book about an idea you came up with, or something.
More books about border collies, maybe.
He can write a thoughtful and mesmerizing tear-jerker from the point of view of the border collie.
Critics RAVE: Magnificent! The Antebellum South as you’ve never seen it before!
Wait wait wait. That man wrote a novel called The Butte Polka, AND NOW THAT TITLE IS ALL I CAN SEEEEEEEEEE! Also, the murderer in said Polka is “Kooteney Ketchel, a hopelessly alcoholic Indian who’s likely as not been bought off by Company agents” according to Kirkus. So he’s always been great with understanding non-white characters…
I like how in the NYT article linked above they’re all like “Old White Guy is redressing the great WRONGS done in the original book” ahahaha wtf
I mean, it’s so groundbreaking, White Dude Who Assumes He Knows the Experiences of Everyone Else.
BROAD CITY! My girlfriend makes me watch it with her because it turns me into a convulsively laughing mess. Didn’t get it at first, but now I’m hooked, which is good given how often she does her Ilana impersonation.
The best part of waking up is Toast Link Roundup in my cup
Oh my god, Nicole, please tell me this was intentional. HE FELL
(Obviously the cliff-pushing story is not funny but my boyfriend says this almost daily in his best Gimli voice and now I can’t stop laughing)
a) How can I watch Broad City? Everyone has convinced me I need to give it a shot.
b) JANE MARIEEEEEE <3
c) I definitely still have songs from Animaniacs and Pinky & the Brain in my itunes. (I want to know what the extra verse on the U.S. Presidents would be for Bush the Lesser and Obama.)
Hulu!
Amazon!
Yep looks like I need to get on this Broad City bandwagon stat.
yeah, you really do. I kind of can’t believe how good it is.
I wrote a giant paper on Animaniacs in college and own the entire series. I feel like it was somehow really important to me, teaching me that making constant pop culture references and being a total jackass were acceptable, nay, ENCOURAGED ways to behave.
Are you aware of the magic that is Rob Paulsen’s podcast, “Talkin Toons”? It features him and guest voice actors acting goofy, doing voices and bits and the like. Brilliant!
Ack, no, that’s awesome! I did see him at Dragon*Con a few years ago (on a panel with Billy West and Amber Nash–love that con), and he sang “Yakko’s World,” and it was wonderful.
BROAD CITY. I had a dream last night Ilana and I were dating. Which is, you know, the dream.
Ilana from Broad City makes me want to wear crop tops, even though I don’t even like my abs that much.
ME TOO. It is kind of a goal this summer to incorporate one into my wardrobe no matter how I will look in it.
Fans of ye olde Television Without Pity, tell me what your favorite recappers are up to now! Blow my mind please, like the time I realized Linda Holmes was Miss Alli.
Wait, what? I had no idea Holmsie was Miss Alli!
I know Pamela “Pamie” Ribon has written a few books and is writing for…a tv show? Or something? Not sure what. The crew who founded TWoP run Previously.tv which Nicole linked to above – and they have a TON of the old TWoP crew. Joe Reid is the entertainment editor over at the Atlantic Wire (and wrote a nice farewell to TWoP piece yesterday).
It’s just such a bummer, this whole thing! I know its glory days are long past, but they still had great writers and the archives! We’re losing the archives! I’ve been spending what free time I have at work rereading old Gilmore Girls and Supernatural recaps.
I’ve seen Joe Reid’s work around but didn’t know he was Idol-recapping Joe!
Other recappers whose post-TWoP work I’ve dug: the Fug Girls (of course), Wendy McClure (I loved her book about Little House on the Prairie).
Erin (fka Regina), whose “Alias” recaps are so wonderful and hilarious that I have made a scene in public on more than one occasion from snort-laughing at them.
Jacob Clifton has a novella coming out soon.
I gasped in horror and dismay that the TWOP recaps are going to disappear into the ether.
Someone is out there now saving them to some other easily-accessible site, yes? I mean, throw a couple of ads to the side & make it easily searchable & it’d pay for itself for decades without a hint of new content.
(note: I know nothing about legal stuff or internet stuff or pretty much anything, though I do know that the recaps at TWOP are a collective boon to the world.)
I know! I almost cried! And the fact that the archives supposedly won’t even be available afterwards is like salt on the wound! TWOP has kept me alive through over a decade of boring corporate jobs and I will not LIVE without Jacob’s recaps of Pretty Little Liars and True Blood. I’m seriously going through and copy pasting all my favorites into Word documents until it shuts down next week. (the secret to doing this quickly is this wonderful little website: http://www.givegoodweb.com/tools/twop/ , which you just have to copy the link to the page of the recap and it pulls all the pages into one easily copy-pasteable page.) But there are so many! Everything Jacob has done. Demian’s snarky Supernatural recaps. AB Chao’s emotional Everwood recaps. Couch Baron! Keckler! Pamie’s Gilmore Girls ones! Deborah’s West Wing and Joan of Arcadia recaps! And now I’ve said way too much, I think.
WILL SOMEONE COPY THE YOUNG AMERICAN RECAPS FOR ME
I will do it for you! I will email them to you when I am done!
The Young American recaps are one of my favourite parts of the site. I am begging my boyfriend to use his tech skills to save them (he claims he can do it!).
I need all of Miss Alli/Linda Holmes’s musings on Survivor and The Amazing Race in my life. And Keckler’s Star Trek recaps. And all the recaps of Battlestar Galactica. And literally all of the rest of them.
(Previously.tv’s not bad, though)
OMG KECKLER’S STAR TREK RECAPS. And watching Demian slowly lose his mind while recapping the latter seasons of Charmed. And Jacob’s entertaining-yet-insufferably-pompous Dr. Who recaps.
The fact that they’re taking all of that away is just criminal.
OMG Jacob’s recaps. Like, simultaneously amazing for taking it so seriously and yet, as you say, insufferably pompous. (I mean, I still read and reread them all, obviously).
I agree with literally none of his perspectives on anything, but always enjoy reading them.
That basically sums it up, yeah.
OMG Jacob’s Dr Who recaps! I just want them to scroll across the bottom of my screen at all times. It’s not like they’ll make any more sense or be any less excellent that way.
Beautiful! Also, buffallo, buffalo, buffalo. (What the hell was all that about?)
So insufferably pompous! I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks that.
She kept me watching Survivor soooo much longer than that franchise deserved. I bet their viewership dropped SUBSTANTIALLY after she stopped.
(I do like previously.tv but mostly I’m addicted to their podcast.) (And PCHH, of course, because I will follow Linda Holmes anywhere she chooses to go.) (I mean, anywhere she chooses to publicly present herself, because I am a rabid fan, but not a stalker.)
I may actually have choked up a little bit the first time I listened to the new EHG. I am not a crackpot.
It appears that archive.org has a lot of it, though viewing stuff there is a bit tricky. And they stopped crawling it at the start of this year, for some unknown reason. And I believe they take stuff down if the content owner asks them to, so it’s not guaranteed to stay up.
In Safari, clicking the little stripey icon within the address window will turn a recap into a nice ad-free text page with a photo, which can then be emailed to oneself.
Not that you guys aren’t all link-embedding HTML mavens; I felt despair at all the sadness and wanted to help out
I had never shipped before watching Broad City. Now I ship Ilana and Abbi SO HARD.
FEMSLASH FRIDAY: BROAD CITY
MALLORY, PLEASE. I BEG YOU.
I mean, Ilana ships it. (“Oprah hands”)
One of my favorite things about Nicole is the fact that while she is one of the least violent people I know, she devotes A LOT of time and energy to thinking about how she would get away with murder.
I’m sorry, Sports Illustrated, but JOHN FUCKING STOCKTON? ARE YOU DRUNK?
(Okay, maybe this just means “born and raised there”, but jesus can you get any more Spokane than STOCKTON?)
Spokane is, as I speak, still part of Washington.
Not for lack of Seattle’s trying.
No discussion of shoving your husband off a cliff is complete without a discussion of the specific language of the term life insurance policy. Mine is pretty boss; my days are numbered for sure.
I should have shoved my husband off a cliff while he was still working for an inusrance company. Between his life insurance and his death ins ervice benefit, I’d have been set for life.
YEP.
C. is always like “oh I love you, I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you,” but SHE WOULD SAY THAT, WOULDN’T SHE?
As far as I can tell from watching copious amounts of Investigation Discovery, life insurance only exists to be a motive for murder.
My partner has plenty on me but strangely enough, less on him. Hmmmmm….it never really bothered me before but now maybe it’s time for a round table discussion!
Ooo, that cliff-shoving is going to be a good Deadly Women segment someday.
One time I went to see my general practitioner–in Somerville, MA–and the only magazine in the waiting room was Blood Horse, “the thoroughbred industry’s most-respected trade publication”.
There was a sidebar featuring mom horses that had given birth to exceptional successful daughter horses and son horses, and it was called “Hot Dams.”
HOT DAMS, WHAT
Tidbits like this are why I ALWAYS read the Toast comments.
15 years ago, i worked for the publishing company that – at that time – produced Heavy Duty Trucking! It also brought you such publications as “Varmint Hunters Monthly” and “Heavy Equipment News.”
The TWoP news almost brought me to tears. My boyfriend is currently trying to write code that will get the text off it in a saveable format, to my great relief.
I thought it was a Mark Twain impersonator..
I actually read this dude's other GWTW book, "Rhett Butler's People". It was so bad. It was sooooooo bad. (Also, yes, I'm a little ashamed to admit to having read it.)
Agree agree agree. SO bad. I picked it up in an airport to read on my flight and just could not finish it.
Tell us more, that we may avoid the same fate?
Oh boy. Well. Unlike GWTW, it doesn't pretend that all slavery was super fun and no big deal for the slaves. Instead, it took us back to Rhett as a boy and showed how he was a VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF WHITE MAN than the rest of the evil slave owners. He had real friendships with slaves, on an equal basis, and was devastated when his evil abusive father did horrible things to slaves, because, you see, Rhett was different. He was a misfit in planter society because of how anachronistic he was in his relations to black people.
Oh please share if he manages to write it! I'm so sad about losing the archives 🙁
You…you should come do judo with me.
Other martial arts/ combat sports let you hit pads- we let you throw people. And it is indeed magical.
I <3 Minerva Mink. The clip where she scorns a nerdy basset hound until he turns into a sexy werewolf never ever gets old.