Link Roundup! -The Toast

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At first I was “lol” and then I was “OH MY GOD THEY ALMOST DIED”:

And then came the bees and mosquitoes.

“I tried to not get them to sting her,” Pangborn told KCRA. The bees wanted the placenta, she said with a chuckle. She was stung while defending her daughter, she said.

By Saturday, Pangborn’s desperation reached a fever pitch.

“I was just there at the end, thinking, ‘Oh my God.” I wasn’t sure if we were going to actually get out of there,” she said.


This is a high school stadium. It cost sixty million dollars. What is the world.


JACQUIIII:

When I was in the eighth grade, I let my mother do my homework for me. Well, only once. It wasn’t for a grade or anything. And it was less that I let her do my homework for me and more that she insisted: she sat down, wrote out what she wanted me to turn in, and told me to copy it in my own handwriting.

It was for an essay contest. We were preparing to go on a class trip to Washington, D.C., and among the many, many patriotic activities planned was a visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, where we would observe the changing of the guard and a wreath-laying ceremony. Four lucky students, winners of the aforementioned essay contest, would get to actually participate in the ceremony. My mother desperately wanted me to be one of them.


SHRUG EMOTICON:

So if The Huffington Post — which is 10-years-old, hauls in more than 200 million unique visitors a month and cranks out roughly 1,200 posts daily on the backs of reportedly poorly paid or unpaid writers — can’t turn a profit on $146 million in revenue, then how are the other, venture-capital fueled sites with smaller audiences and fewer relationships with advertisers supposed to achieve profitability?


Facebook threw up an old Ask Polly and I hate this dude soooo much (you should refrain from diagnosing your boyfriends with BPD, and you should also be more upfront about maybe having herpes, I am not saying the lady is a saint):

In the past few weeks, he’s had random outbursts where he’ll assume that I’m cheating on him and that I’m a terrible person who just fucks guys and hands out herpes. What provokes him is either nothing at all, or my getting a random Facebook inbox from some idiot I slept with over a decade ago—which I never so much as acknowledge. But I waver between being understanding and accommodating because I DID hurt him profoundly, and being absolutely appalled. I’ve never cheated, nor will I ever cheat. Not my thing, and, as I told him, one of the awesome things I have to offer in a relationship. (It’s worth noting that in the midst of all of this tumult, we managed to get back on track and skip while holding hands through fields of rainbows and shit.)

 


The rise of the wartime lady bartender:

And then, just when things seemed to be leveling out between the booze-savvy, the inevitable happened: the fellas heroically returned from overseas, expecting to find both their jobs, and their wives, exactly as they’d left them. Many American women complied, though some held tight to their jiggers and shakers, refusing to give up the lucrative and respected profession that had treated them so kindly throughout their years of service. As a wartime barmaid named Lorretta (pictured) told the Brooklyn Eagle, “A woman has to make a living, and what’s wrong with bartending? During the war it was patriotic for us to work.”


The last issue of Scratch Magazine is upon us, and I enjoyed everything in it, including this:

In 2010, Gail Hochman, my first literary agent, fired me after five years together. The end of our relationship felt as big as any breakup, nearly as devastating as the end of my first marriage, even though we parted on the most amicable of terms. Comparing a business relationship to a romantic one sounds like ridiculous hyperbole until you take into account that I had put all of my professional and artistic hopes and dreams into my agent’s hands. Or, rather, I had projected that power on to her. I wanted to publish books, and to publish them well. I wanted to be read and respected as a novelist. I wanted to put books out into the world and have people read them and care about them. I believed that having a literary agent was the only way to make that happen. And then I didn’t have her anymore.


Mr Wilson (I am not good at doing my kids’ hair):

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