The situation for the Nigerian girls is not looking up.
On the woman who will judge [abusive, whiny murderer] Oscar Pistorius:
Even today, Masipa still belongs to a minority—only seventy-six of South Africa’s two hundred and thirty-nine judges are women. Earlier this year, the Women’s Legal Center and Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, nonprofit organizations promoting women’s rights, stated, “With 51.3 percent females in the country, having only two female justices in the Constitutional Court, the highest court on Constitutional matters, is inexcusable.”
Roxane Gay, on Leslie Jones’s Weekend Update segment:
Some people are bristling about how cavalierly Jones dealt with what we know was rape, and how black women and men’s bodies were used to produce more stock for white slave owners. As a critic sensitive to how popular culture deals with sexual violence, I understand. But there is so much more taking place within Jones’s monologue. I have watched the clip several times now. Beyond the surface of the joke, I see pain. I see rage. I see a woman speaking her truth.
I’m sure everyone sees and responds to OUR video ad content, advertisers!
By many estimates, more than half of online video ads are not seen, either because they are buried low on web pages or run in tiny, easily ignored video players on those pages, or run simultaneously with other ads.Vindico, an ad management platform company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to be “unviewable.”
I am on vacation next week! You will have a wonderful, wonderful substitute editor, or “supply editor,” as we would call her in Canada. I am in Miami. I will mostly be swathed in fabric and floppy hats and celebrating the wedding of a friend, but I will take your restaurant recommendations at this time. All I know is where people have been shot on Burn Notice.
Hope for old media, even if it is only that they recognize true genius.
So much streamable Werner Herzog.
Cecily McMillan has been found guilty. She faces up to seven years in prison:
In the trial, physical evidence was considered suspect but the testimony of the police was cast as infallible. Despite photographs of her bruised body, including her right breast, the prosecution cast doubt upon McMillan’s allegations of being injured by the police – all while Officer Bovell repeatedly identified the wrong eye when testifying as to how McMillan injured him. And not only was Officer Bovell’s documented history of violent behavior deemed irrelevant by the judge, but so were the allegations of his violent behavior that very same night.
How your “Dear Polly” sausage gets made:
By 5:45 a.m., I am sitting down to write. First, though, I need to fire off an email to the editor of my weekly advice column about maybe getting a check soon since it’s May and I haven’t been paid yet this year. “HEY IS THERE A CHECK ON THE WAY FINALLY? LOL! THIS BIG GUY WITH A BASEBALL BAT AT MY FRONT DOOR WANTS TO KNOW! OMG MY KNEES! XXXOOO” Always be super-polite and light-hearted with your editors, and never give them any indication that you’ve been waiting for a check for so long and your credit card balances are getting so high that your pulse starts racing every time you think about it, so much so that you’ve started to soothe yourself by imagining choking the life out of their ineffectual shit faces with your bare hands. Lol.
QUESTLOVE IS BACK FOR MORE:
A few years back, there was a video on YouTube that featured the rapper Lil Boosie. It showed him counting out his money onto the pavement of a parking lot. You can see it here. I haven’t studied too much contemporary performance art, but whoever’s doing it — Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic — can’t be doing anything stranger than this. (You too, James Franco.) The money is a pure abstraction. Nothing is purchased with it — no goods, no services. It’s a series of symbols being thrown to the ground, one after the other. And as each one lands, the message gets stronger and stronger. You don’t have this money. You may never see this many hundreds. You don’t belong here.
