Trending in 2014 and always: state-sanctioned streetside executions of racial minorities.
Request: Let’s keep #CrimingWhileWhite stories out of these comments. I think those are great for white people talking to other white people; I don’t think it was something black people needed to see all over their timelines YESTERDAY, however kindly meant. It’s already taking a lot of attention away from black voices because the media has never needed an excuse to amplify white stories, and I personally would prefer to not see them here or in my submissions box.
Roxane wrote this incredible, wrenching thing yesterday:
We don’t know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that these things are complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt.
I believe in the importance of sharing histories of violence. I am reticent to share my own history of violence.
There was a boy. I loved him. His name was Christopher. That is not really his name. You know that.
The new rules for black people in America:
Black people are not supposed to post too frequently on Facebook or Twitter.
Black people are not supposed to be social justice warriors.
Black people are not supposed to demonstrate during sporting events.
Black people are not supposed to use our hard won positions of power to express our true frustrations or fears.
Black people are not supposed to help each other.
Black people are not supposed to make people feel uncomfortable or threatened or left out.
Jian Ghomeshi is the worst, and the CBC really screwed the pooch for its other employees:
My old union issued a memo along similar lines, saying that no union staff members had heard of any complaints of sexual harassment. I emailed Bruce May, a staff representative at the CMG, and told him the memo was wrong, because I’d spoken to Neesam. May replied that technically the memo was correct, because Neesam was an “elected representative” and not a union “staff member”. He asked if that “clarified” things for me, and I said that it did: it clarified that the union was carefully parsing its words to leave casual readers with the impression that I was lying and they had done the right thing.
Chris Boyce, the executive director of radio at the CBC, has been equally coy – saying that management launched an investigation into Ghomeshi’s workplace conduct in the summer, while dodging the question of who, specifically, he talked to. None of my former colleagues were contacted, nor was I. Meanwhile, when my former boss, Noorani, was identified as the executive who told me that I had to learn to cope with Ghomeshi’s harassment, he was shuffled to another show, instead of being shown the door.
This spot had been me cheerfully saying Tilda Swinton was great, but I had not known she was one of the aggravating pro-Polanski apologists until commenters pointed it out (Polanski is fucking awful), and now this spot no longer contains said perky fondness for Tilda Swinton.
Scott has been in a relationship with Michael Rausch since 1986, when they met in a Portland, Ore., bar during Scott’s first off-season after reaching the majors. They were married in California last year. Baseball officials and fellow umpires have known that Scott is gay since the late 1990s, he said.
But it is only now that Scott decided to nudge the news into the public realm. It began when Referee magazine wrote an article about Scott for its October issue. While the article did not delve into his personal life, Scott submitted a photograph of him with Rausch. The caption noted that Rausch was Scott’s longtime companion.
“He has been on this journey with me for 28 years, and I felt like he should be included in this also, because he’s such an important part of my life,” Scott said.
Toni Morrison has a new novel coming out in April!
Cheating in the world of bass fishing:
Whenever I told friends of mine I was working on a story about cheating at bass fishing, they always asked the same thing: How in the world do you cheat at bass fishing? Let me count the ways, I’d tell them.
By far, the most common way people cheat is to store a fish basket or pet taxi under a dock, filled with lunkers they’d caught before the event, and then retrieve the fish while they were supposed to be out fishing. A variation on this would be to attach a string to a stump in the water and hook various fish to the string. This way allows fishermen to retrieve the fish while faking that they actually caught them, just in case they were paired up in the boat with a competitor. There was the story that Ray Scott told me about a man who showed up for a tournament wearing a full-length raincoat even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky — his partner later discovered the man had a string of bass draped around his neck. There was the guy in the U.K. who last year won a bass fishing tournament with a 13-pounder, only to have the second-place finisher recognize the giant bass from a recent trip he had taken to the local aquarium with his daughter. They called the aquarium and, sure enough, it was missing a big bass. People have been caught buying fish off of noncompetitors on the lake during an event, or sharing fish between colluding teams.
DON’T YOU DARE APOLOGIZE TO THAT BITCH, LADY:
Q. Her Weight Problem, Not Mine: Over Thanksgiving, I volunteered to host my relatives. This included my cousin who used to be a plus-sized woman, had gastric bypass five years ago, and now believes in fat shaming. She targets me especially because of the fact I am a plus-sized woman too, but love my body. During Thanksgiving, she talked about my weight to anyone that would listen, even after I told her to stop it. I am ashamed to say that after she made a reference to my black swimsuit as a Shamu suit, my temper got the better of me, and I grabbed some mashed potatoes with my hands and started throwing them at her, screaming that she was a hateful, horrible person and then tossed her out of my house.
Now that the dust has settled, my family feels I owe HER an apology and an invitation to spend Christmas with me! Please help me get them off my back already!
Just read the summary of House’s series ending and I can’t stop laughing pic.twitter.com/QzqStB8T9X
— Christian Brown (@DeepOmega) December 3, 2014
