I HID MY EARS. I LOOK SILLY.
The totes are sold out! I have re-ordered a thousand of the Take to the Sea model (we are not re-ordering Mermaid or Spear) and will release them to the storefront for pre-order later this week. I have set up a Tote Distribution Center in my guest room and once I have done a thorough inventory of the freebies, I will probably release a small handful of Mermaid and Spear totes back to the storefront (I had held back a few so I didn’t promise anyone a freebie and then sell it accidentally.)
It’s good I am about to be unemployed, because I will be doing all the international orders myself, without the assistance of the UPS store, so please know, International Toasties, that your totes were lovingly stuffed into padded envelopes by my own two beautiful hands.
I am so, so touched by the kindness and generosity of Toasties who have given to the Toast Totes Bursary (still taking donations! Just give to the normal place and if it’s in a $25/$50/$75 format I will assume it’s for totes.) International Toasties are eligible for freebies as well, by the way, especially if your currency has just turned to shit. I DO encourage you to keep donating to the bursary if you’re so moved, because we have more worthy recipients than we have donations at this EXACT minute.
I tweeted for HOURS about Robert Hanssen, the world’s worst spy, and please read his Wiki page and report back to agree with me:
What Brexit means for the Irish peace process:
The rather patronising English joke used to be that whenever the Irish question was about to be solved, the Irish would change the question. And now, when the Irish question seemed indeed to have been solved, at least for a generation, it is the English who have changed the question.
Recklessly, casually, with barely a thought, English nationalists have planted a bomb under the settlement that brought peace to Northern Ireland and close cordiality to relations between Britain and Ireland. To do this seriously and soberly would have been bad. To do it so carelessly, with nothing more than a pat on the head and a reassurance that everything will be all right, is frankly insulting.
Do writers need to be alone to thrive?
Leslie Jamison: I guess I would say, for me, there’s a spiritual answer of the question of solitude, and there’s a pragmatic way of answering that question. I do think that every project I’ve worked on, it has felt really important that I have some period in my life where I can just disappear into it for a month, or for a few months. There were times in my life when it felt possible to disappear for longer, to kind of give myself days where I didn’t need to immediately emerge into the banal accountabilities of the rest of the world. Like all the errands I need to run, the after-school deadline of 6pm every day, you know… To be in some protected space where you can really get lost in the work. I use that phrase intentionally because I think there’s a kind of work I can do once I know the shape of a book, or the shape of an essay, where I can say, “Okay, I have three hours, I can do this piece of it.” But there’s a time in the kind of wilder, crazier, unknown stage of a project where I don’t know yet what it wants to be, what it needs to be, or what I want it to be, where I just need to go down a lot of wrong paths, or go down a lot of paths that I can’t see where they’re going, or I can’t see the end of them. It’s that stage where the ability to lose myself in the work more fully feels like it matters so much, because I need to have that experience of disappearing into the thing and not knowing where I’m headed.
Angela Flournoy: I never really had solitude as a writer. So it’s very abstract. I think about my novel, the way it was written, where there were some periods of time I was not necessarily living with other people, which is probably as alone as one can get in a big city. But I am also a person who’s really interested in voices in my writing, and I feel that especially when I’m stuck, that I need to be around a lot of people and just listen to them. So I think the solitude I like is the kind that’s really abundant in the city, which is that you are alone, but you are around a lot of people. That’s kind of my sweet spot of solitude, when nobody’s asking anything of me, but I can still be nosy. I don’t know so much about this next writing project—it’s still very new—but I think that there’s probably a later point where solitude perhaps could benefit me more, but at the early stages I need to hear voices. Not all the time, but for at least a good quarter of the day.
With an apartment on Central Park West and an office on Wall Street, Eliseo was, to all appearances, a fabulously rich Mexican banker—“without doubt the wealthiest resident of the City of Mexico” as one newspaper reported in 1897.
In reality, however, Eliseo had begun life in slavery, an African American born on a cotton plantation in the small, dusty South Texas town of Victoria.
To escape the Jim Crow South, the young William Henry Ellis relocated to Manhattan in the 1890s. Fluent in Spanish from his childhood along the Mexico border, he soon persuaded his new acquaintances that he was from a well-to-do Mexican family—an enticing pose to Wall Street investors at a time when almost every item in the U.S.’s burgeoning consumer economy owed its origins in one way or another to Mexican resources, from the Mexican copper used to electrify American cities to the Mexican rubber that went into making tires for the newly invented automobile.
I would set myself on fire before doing this shit for free:
I’m in the wholesale foodservice business. Today, as I was about to call it a day, I receive an email from one of our customers, who represents maybe 0.0001% of our annual sales.
This particular customer has apparently made a deal with the government in our part of the world which gives them some sort of grant on food purchases, providing every ingredient in every item provided to them comes from this region. The email said, in no uncertain terms, that they needed us to provide them with a breakdown of every order they’ve placed with us over the past 15 months, breaking down each item on every invoice, indicating which item was completely made from our region. They gave us some guidelines (“even if you sell us Coca-Cola, and it came from this region’s bottling plant, you can’t count that since some of the ingredients came from outside.”) In other words, they’re asking us to come up with a spreadsheet listing every item on every invoice we’ve given them, and telling them which particular items on every invoice was 100% sourced from our region. Furthermore, they wanted this spreadsheet in a very specific format, which they described, but didn’t give us the common courtesy of providing some sort of template to follow.
Our industry is in the business of providing fresh food products, using sources from all over the world, with this product made to order. It would literally be impossible, short for some third-party packed products we distribute, to determine where exactly each part of each ingredient came from at that particular time of year–remember, they’re asking us for this informaton going back 15 months! And on top of that, wanting us to give it to them in a very specific format.
The boss and I are in basic agreement: tell this demanding client to stick his request where the sun doesn’t shine, especially since this project would take a huge amount of time, in our busy season, to complete. We were thinking about telling him that in order to complete the request, we would need to spend an ample amount of time to compile this data, and we would need to be compensated for that. How do you suggest we go about this? Losing this client’s business would certainly not affect our bottom line, but in this age of social media, it may affect us in other ways.
Friend and Authoress of The Toast Samantha Powell was visiting me this weekend, and we are both totally obsessed with slow-moving, confusing British spy movies, our favourite being the 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so we rewatched it for the billionth time and we just had the greatest time and can we talk about that movie again, and especially Connie Sachs?
Your dad is a tit (there is an update which reconfirms his titness):
I’ve been with my boyfriend (M25) for three years. We both just finished school, and are finally ready for marriage. He proposed last week and I happily said yes. I could not be happier. I love him and he is going to be an awesome dad someday. But my bf is very new school and my dad is kind of old school.
My dad was beyond mad that my boyfriend did not ask my dad for my hand before proposing. My dad said he was willing to hear my boyfriend’s apology if my boyfriend formally asks for my hand at a dinner that my dad said he will pay for at the restaurant of my boyfriend’s choosing. My dad feels like he is being very accommodating. He will bring my boyfriend’s favorite wine to celebrate. I spoke to my boyfriend last night and he won’t budge. He doesn’t believe in that tradition.
I had already closed the roundup by bedtime, but THE GAME OF THRONES FINALE WAS HOLY SHIT and also JESSE WILLIAMS (someone start a thread for each of them.)
AHH GAME OF THRONES
Between Cersei, Danearys, Yara, Sansa, Whatserface in Dorne and the Queen of Thorns, we finally have what we need for the War of the Five Queens.
Also, does Varys have a goddamn teleporter?
Right? How the helll did he get back so fast?
Dorne is actually wicked close to Essos compared to the rest of Westeros. So if he left Mereen on a small and fast ship, he’d have gotten to Dorne quick enough for that meeting. Then he sails back with the ships they’ve sent.
The real question is does Arya have a teleporter.
I don’t think everything happened as close together as it seemed. Olenna already knew about her family being killed which would have taken some time even with ravens. So the events in Dorne could’ve been weeks later for all we know. I think we can assume that with a lot of the events. The books generally have a note that we shouldn’t assume much with timing and that events don’t necessarily overlap like we might think they do.
Arya has a TARDIS.
Plus, when you think that Lyanna Mormont can’t be any more awesome, BAM.
I’m thinking, since he left before the Ironborn kids got to Mereen, and it would take a significant amount of time to do maintenance on 100 ships after an ocean crossing and prepare them to turn around and go right back again (not to mention collect supplies for the soldiers they’ll be transporting and add those swanky dragon figureheads to the prows), it was probably weeks if not months between the conversation where Yara promised Danaerys the fleet and the day they actually set out.
Not sure how exactly the tech level with regards to seafaring compares w/r/t Westeros, but Christopher Columbus got approval for his first journey across the Atlantic in January of 1492 and didn’t actually leave Spain until August, and then it took him a week to get down to the Canary Islands where he spent a month resupplying and changing his ships’ rigging and fixing the things that had already broken in that single week of sailing before he finally set out on the real trip. (For comparison, the actual trip before he sighted land in the Caribbean was only 5 weeks, or pretty much the exact same length of time it took him to get his shit together between Spain and the Canary Islands.) And he was arguably working with higher tech than the people of Essos and Westeros. And had only 3 ships to deal with, and no armies.
So my theory is just that the final scenes of season 6 take place a significant amount of time in the future from the rest of the episode.
This is a nice and valid theory, but I also guarantee that you put in twenty times more effort just in typing this up than the showrunners did in thinking about it. Their only rationale for the speed of his journey was “The final scene must be perfect. We will do whatever it takes.”
(And honestly, it bothered me less than Littlefinger’s ability to, what–teleport across Westeros? Because we’ve had plots turn on how long it takes to go the precise distance he traveled [Catelyn’s journey to King’s Landing & the Vale, Tyrion heading back through the Vale, Arya and the Watch recruits trying to get North—heck, even Robert coming up / going back down the Kingsroad] and we know it shouldn’t be possible. But my only thought on seeing Arya already in the Riverlands was “Good on you, girl, for keeping that TARDIS handy.”)
Oh my God, I cannot believe that at this time next Monday there will be no glorious Monday morning Link Roundup for me to enjoy. I may cry.
Toast, I missed almost all of last week because I was off buying a house in 3 days and getting ready to move to a very small but very beautiful town in a couple of weeks. I am going to go back through all I missed and update myself accordingly. The Internet will be so lonely without the good heart of the Toast.
But seriously I wish for the Toast tote bags to become an international symbol of Toastiness so we can all identify each other.
NOT HANDLING IT WELL
But yes, I have fantasies of spotting a fellow Toastie by their totes on the streets (and libraries) of the world
That’s so exciting about the house!!! Congrats!
Thanks!
Yay congrats on the house!!
Thank you!
Congratulations on the house!!
I am planning to buy two, when the re-order comes out, in order to maximize chances of such a spotting 😀
If only the totes lit up, like beacons.
Or came with geotags so we could Find A Toastie Near You
Do we have a code word for when we see one of us with a tote, so we don’t have to run up and yell, “HELLO I READ THE TOAST TOO” in each other’s faces?
“Ronbledore”
I love the idea of me whispering, furtively, “Ron is a time-traveling Dumbledore” at a tote-bearer.
Dickribbon?
“That tote is too witches!”
Everyone else will be like, “No, it’s just… one… tote?” But WE WILL KNOW.
I love all of these and suggest “JESUS, MALLORY.”
man I did 100% no work on Friday, all I did was read Twitter and articles about Brexit and get into arguments with dopey Americans about the nature and origin of the campaign.
I am still worked up though.
I went into work and scowled at the triumphant pensioners.
(my grandma phoned me yesterday to ask if I was still angry. “IT HAPPENED ON FRIDAY. YES. I AM STILL ANGRY. I MAY BE ANGRY FOR THE REST OF MY NATURAL LIFE” “oh” And then we talked about how my tomatoes + application for Irish Citizenship were coming, because she is nothing if not practical)
I was at pub trivia and checking the outcome at every opportunity, which then caused me to get angry drunk on a Thursday. I *may* have drunk dialed my English mom to tell her how disappointed I was in her people… to which she reminded me that she moved to California in the 60s, and what the hell was I on about?
Since this is our last week (*sobs uncontrollably*) is there any chance of getting The Toast archived so we can do back and reread old articles? Right now I can only search (if I know exactly what I am looking for) or click “older posts” four billion times.
You can either click older posts or go to, like http://the-toast.net/page/287. I am declaring an end to putting money into adding anything to the site at this stage.
I feel like The Toast collective, especially the librarians among us, should be able to make a giant database or spreadsheet that makes it easier to find old posts, organized by date posted and/or series perhaps?
There are pages for post series; the most popular ones are linked at the bottom of the home page. So that’s a good start.
All the series also seem to be listed here: http://the-toast.net/series/
Oh, there it is! Excellent!
I believe there was talk on the Reddit Toastcrumbs page of doing an “on this day/week on the Toast” recurring post? And of course all the post-toast communities will be totally open to “what was that one post, about that thing…” inquiries.
You may want a programmer to grab the data first. I can probably put together something to scrape the site & pull out post titles, links, dates, and series. Tags might take a bit longer, since they’re not on the main archive-y page, but they should also be doable.
I’ll see what I can do on Friday, since I have the day off for Canada Day.
You are an absolute angel; this would be amazing! I have only read The Toast for about a year and am looking forward to going back through the archives once I no longer have new content keeping me busy.
Seconding how amazing this would be; I too am a relatively recent ( >2 years) Toast convert, and would adore being able to do some sort of calendar-organized backread.
Ok, I’ve been planning this a bit while I wait for things to build at work, and it turns out there are questions I should probably ask a librarian before Friday, so I’ll ask you.
I’m planning to do two passes: first I’ll grab all the data I can from archive pages like http://the-toast.net/page/2, then I’ll grab more detailed data from individual post pages.
(Note to Marco: I will use pretty heavy throttling, I promise. Probably one page per ten seconds, if that’s ok.)
The librarian question is: what data should I grab? On the archive pages, the following data is available for easy grabbing for each article, and seems to me like it would be useful:
– link
– title
– author
– date & time of publication
– series or category (It looks like every article has a category, some articles belong to serieses, and the data here is the series if there is one and the category if there isn’t. I can get the category for articles that are in serieses on the second pass.)
– word count
– comment count (this might need updating after the initial scraping for very recent articles, but for older articles I think the comment count on Friday will likely be close enough to be useful forever)
Stuff that’s easily available but doesn’t seem to me to be worth compiling:
– whether WordPress thinks the article’s discussion is currently “active”
– whether WordPress thinks the article’s discussion is currently “hot”
– the excerpt that appears on the front page
– the image url (probably not useful for any kind of index, since hotlinking is rude and hosting them all would be a nuisance and I assume a copyright violation)
– the image alt text, I guess (might be nice to have if it were filled in, but all the ones I’ve looked at have been blank)
Have I divided the data into worth-grabbing and not-worth-grabbing correctly?
(I will make another list like this for the data on individual post pages later.)
I’m by no means that kind of librarian, but I think you’ve sorted that data pretty accurately. Images and alt text would be way too messy and I certainly don’t care what WordPress thinks about The Toast!
One thing that was mentioned on slack is having two (or more) author fields so we can more accurately search for multiple author pieces, but I don’t know if you can do that with your grab? If not maybe we can go in and clean it up.
But thank you thank you for doing this!
The data as it exists doesn’t make populating multiple author fields easy, but a lot of the multiple-author articles have author entries like “Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky”, which should be pretty straightforward to split up later. It looks like they also tend to have the authors listed separately as tags, which may help.
Maybe I’ll do the database with a many-to-many join for authors and articles, so each article can have as many authors as it needs.
Thank you for answering despite not being that kind of librarian; I’ll still post the list of data to maybe grab from individual post pages here once I compile it, and if there’s anything that’s uncertain enough to need input from another librarian then there will at least be a post to direct them to.
i delight in data entry grunt work so if there’s anything an Excel fangirl could do to help, lemme know. it would be an honour and a prvilege to help create a naviagble index of toast content.
I *am* that kind of librarian and I love data munging! If you can provide me with a data dump I can probably wrangle something using OpenRefine or other means. Find me on twitter @archivalistic
Oh, excellent, I will bother you with a reply about individual-post-page data grabbing.
It looks like I can actually grab multiple authors on the second pass, at least for post-redesign posts, so I will do that. I’ll probably store the main WordPress author and the actual authors separately.
I will definitely grab the category.
The time that the article was last modified is available, but seems unlikely to be helpful, so I’m not planning to store that.
There’s a short description for each article that seems to mostly be used for the little box that shows up on Twitter when someone links to a Toast article there. I’m thinking of grabbing it because if someone builds some kind of search tool then this might be nice to display in the results. I’m tempted now to grab the front-page-excerpt on the first pass for similar reasons.
I’ll grab both real and fake tags, of course.
Is there anything here or in the earlier list that I shouldn’t be bothering with? Is there anything else I should try to grab?
What format do you want the data in? I think I can straighten out some of the multiple-author stuff in SQL, but that’s about it for my own data munging plans.
Today in (Feminist) History! [Archive]
On this day in 1894 was the birth of Crystal Bird Fauset, who was the first female African-American state legislator in the United States. She was born Crystal Bird in Maryland and raised by an Aunt in Boston, attending public schools and eventually earning her B.S. from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1931. That same year she married Arthur Huff Fauset, who was a fellow educator. (Arthur is pretty interesting too, he was the son of a black man and a white Jewish woman, who became a civil right’s activist, a teacher, and an active figure in the Harlem Renaissance.)
Crystal began her career teaching at in New York at a public school, before she became the field secretary for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). It was here that she became more outspoken about race relations and the black community, and eventually joined and became active in numerous civil right’s organizations. In 1925 she was offered a position in the newly formed Interracial Section of the American Friends Service Committee, which was a Quaker-founded organization working towards social justice and peace, including improving race relations in the U.S. As an AFSC member she made 210 public appearances over the course of a year (1927-1928), giving talks and speeches about race relations, and “lift(ing) the curtain that separates the white people and the colored people, to lift the curtain of misunderstanding that is so dividing [them]”. In 1933 she was also named executive secretary of the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College.
It was through her appearances that she became better known to the public, and in 1938 she was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She represented the 18th District of Philadelphia, which at the time was a largely white neighborhood. Despite that, she managed to introduce nine bills and three amendments, mostly dealing with women’s workplace rights, housing for people in poverty, and public health. It was during her time as a state legislator that she became friends with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, later helping her gain the position of Assistant Director and Race Relations Director of the Office of Civil Defense. She also advised both the First Lady, and the NYC mayor (Fiorello LaGuardia) on race relations, and was a member of President Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet”, helping to promote civil rights for African Americans.
After World War II, her focus turned global, and she made numerous trips to the Middle East, India, and Africa. She passed away in Philadelphia in 1965, at the age of 71. A Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Marker is found outside her old home in Philadelphia; it praises her accomplishments as the first Black woman elected to state legislature.
BTW, yesterday in history was the publication date of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, in 1948. It caused cancelled subscriptions, and lots of mail. Some of it was hate mail, a good bit of it was people asking what the heck the story met because they were sweet, confused individuals, and apparently a good bulk of it was people completely proving the point of the story, apparently, by asking if the lottery actually took place in real towns and where they could go to watch it.
Shirley Jackson is amazing. That is all.
YIKES!
I wish I was surprised about that last bit.
Same tbh. I read it and was like …. ofc.
Oh good Lord, and today is the day of the actual Lottery. Chills.
That Reddit girl is hardcore and I <3 her.
I am so. fucking. sad about the Eu referendum. My partner is an Irish citizen and hopefully our daughter will be entitled to an Irish passport (we are both on her birth certificate, but we don’t whether anyone has yet asked Ireland whether it will recognise a not-birth, not-adoptive mother for purposes of citizenship, if the child was born outside Ireland.) But I have been a proud EU citizen for twenty years, and even if we retain our freedom of movement by staying in the EEA (thereby giving the “take back control” and “end immigration” voters exactly what they did not want), I have had part of my identity stripped away and I’m so, so sad.
Yes, +100% to the feeling of having one’s identity stolen. I’ve lived in the US most of my life, but I considered myself – and was looking forward to raising my son to consider himself – a European-American. Guess I can’t do that any more. (Although I’m having fantasies that maybe if Scotland goes independent they’ll allow dual citizenship – or trial citizenship in my case – for all UK nationals regardless of Scottish origin, which I admit is a long shot…)
I hope your daughter can get an Irish passport. I’m having trouble determining how, exactly, the Republic defines “parent” for the sake of nationality law. It’s a thorny enough question that I’m afraid you’ll probably have to ask a consul.
I also feel like a huge part of my identity has been stripped away from me (born in England, lived most of my life in Canada). Partly it’s the loss of opportunity to easily move to anywhere in Europe, an opportunity which I stupidly have never taken of advantage of. But mostly it’s the loss of connection to the idea of a Europe that could transcend the pettiness of its history. That was so meaningful to me, and I am also inconsolably sad.
If one parent is an Irish citizen then your daughter should be able to get a passport. I know it work the other way around, I know lots of people with 1 American/English parent, who can claim a passport.
I’m hoping it’s that simple, but it might not be. I’m the birth-mum, but I’m not Irish. Under UK law, because we were civil-partnered when Edie was born and because we went with anonymous donor, we have equal parental responsibility and we’re both on her birth certificate. But a same-sex couple (AFAIK) can’t have equal parental responsibility in Ireland: a gay couple can’t adopt, for instance, although one can claim guardianship. So it depends whether they go, “yup, you’re on the birth certificate, you’re a parent under UK law, you’re a parent”, or “sorry, you couldn’t be a parent under Irish law, so we’re not recognising you as a parent.”
Obviously we’re hoping that they go with the first option, but I don’t know. And I think it’s entirely possible that it’s not been tested yet: it’s only been possible for us both to be parents since 2009, so it may just not have come up.
ETA: actually, I might be out of date! It looks like Irish law was brought into line with the UK law in 2015 as far as lesbian mothers of donor-conceived children goes. So it would be unlikely that they wouldn’t recognise our birth certificate. Hooray!
Ahh I completely missed that you were a same sex couple, sorry! Blame my skim reading.
Have you checked it since the marriage equality law came in? They might not have sorted all of the legislation yet, but since gay marriage is now a constitutional right, and Ireland’s constitution also dictates that the government must protect and promote the institute of marriage then it stands that they will recognize married (or equivalent) parents as equal parents of the child.
AFAIK Ireland puts a lot of stock in who’s on the birth cert as well (For example, if two parents are on the birth cert that neither parent can get a passport for the child alone, it requires both parents be present and sign. To stop mothers running off with the kids obvs.)
You’re quite right that its likely this hasn’t been tested yet, and the Irish govt is notoriously slow to legislate controversial things that they’re supposed to be legislating, so the might not have got around too it. There’s a lot of really active gay rights groups, and there will definitely be a parent related group somewhere who might be able to help you.
You could also always just have a big gay Irish wedding, then you can all be citizens 😉
I’m sure you’ve found this already but just in case:
“If either of your parents was an Irish citizen who was born in Ireland, then you are automatically an Irish citizen, irrespective of your place of birth. If you are an Irish citizen, you can apply for an Irish passport. You do not need an Irish passport in order to be an Irish citizen but having an Irish passport is evidence that you are an Irish citizen. ”
OR
“If you were born outside Ireland to an Irish citizen who was himself or herself born outside Ireland, then you are entitled to become an Irish citizen. … However before you can claim Irish citizenship, you must have your birth registered in the Foreign Births Register, which is maintained by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade”
From here: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/moving_count…
(I’ve been looking it up myself for any future kids of mine as I’m Irish by descent)
See above – hoping it’s that simple, but it might not be!
FWIW the most arduous part of getting our sons Irish passports (their dad is Irish) was the arcane ‘find a priest or bank manager to certify this isn’t false’ part. (We’re in the US and not church-goers. Explaining to our banker what they were signing and getting them to agree was a long process.)
They wanted both parent’s birth certificates, our marriage license, and the kid’s birth certificate. And my husband’s passport, I think – though we didn’t get around to doing this until long past the point that they were just listing kids on the parent’s passport.
I know you have other issues to deal with, but I think since you’re both on the birth certificate that will make it a lot smoother than it could have been. Good luck!
a PRIEST or a BANK MANAGER, what a very specific vision of “authority” that suggests!
Ugh you should try sending off a copy of anything in the UK. They have very specific ideas about what a ‘witnessed copy’ is, you have to get someone like a teacher, police officer, lawyer or doctor to sign it and put all of there personal details on it.
I when to the Irish police to get them to stamp and sign my passport copy for my UK student loans (A very normal process), it got sent back because it needed the officers PERSONAL address and phone number. I had so much fun trying to explain that to a cop. He was not happy about it.
Yep. I think there were other options that didn’t have exact US correlates. The banker was all, “can’t I just notarize this like every other document I make official?” & we’re all “hahaha no.”
It’s a little broader than that:
Member of the Clergy
Medical Doctor
School Principal
Bank Manager
Solicitor/Lawyer
Police Officer
Magistrate/Judge
Although, the only ones of these I know personally are lawyer and judge, and that’s only because I’m a lawyer.
Cheers for linking to the Fintan O’Toole article. One of the (many! many!) enraging things about the referendum is how obviously *neither* side gave a *thought* to Northern Ireland in all this.
If you want to know how much Westminster cares about Northern Ireland, watch a feed of the House of Commons when something to do with NI is being discussed. Literal crickets.
True story. Nobody cares and (because?) nobody knows. I’m British, was born towards the end of the Troubles and only learned anything about Ireland or Northern Ireland when I moved to Dublin aged 24. There’s not much in our education system about the history of Ireland/UK relations and I have had to explain Home Rule, the civil war and partition to mannnnny of my British friends.
I had no idea how little was known about Ireland in Britain until I moved here. Seriously, the amount of people, including people my own age, who don’t know that Ireland is not part of England (yes, England not Britain.) is astonishing. When I mentioned something about learning Irish in school to a housemate, she didn’t know that Ireland had its own language or was a separate country, so I said ‘Yeah, its like like Wales, we have two languages’, and she didn’t even know that Wales wasn’t part England. I was gobsmacked.
I don’t want to over generalize, but there are a lot of British people who are astonishingly ignorant about world history and the modern world, including their own history. The world didn’t stop after Henry VIII. I know its not completely their own fault, the history curriculum here deliberately leaves out some very important parts of British history.
Yeah, I posted that Waterford Whispers thing about ‘how Brexit will affect your upcoming abortion’ on Facebook and an Italian friend of mine commented ‘How come they can’t do it there? Is there a different law?’ YES THERE’S A DIFFERENT LAW BECAUSE ITS A DIFFERENT COUNTRY. Also I literally never shut up about Ireland’s abortion laws, good to know you’re paying attention.
Based on the fact there were riots and violence in 2013 after they limited the days the Union Flag could be flown on Belfast City Hall, I am doubtful that reunification is going to be the solution here.
I would like to think those people are a minority! I have never, thank god, met someone who doesn’t know that Wales and Ireland are NOT PART OF ENGLAND. That’s terrifyingly ignorant.
This girl was somehow at university too. At some point in her life she had taken a history exam, and yet had missed some very important facts about her own country.
Same! Though I also live in an area that has (or maybe had since no one can fucking afford to live here anymore who wasn’t born with stacks of money coming out their arse) a large Irish community so that might not be very representative of the country as a whole. We were taught very little about Irish history in school, and my parents only really talk about their experiences living in London during the IRA bombings. I am still woefully undereducated about Ireland and NI.
People rarely know much about Wales 🙁 just ‘haaaaah sheep shaggers’
I’m now going to be proud of myself that the only real thing I know about Wales is that it has the most castles per mile of the U.K. And I have a vague sense that Welsch people are very territorial about their cheese but I think that’s a European trait in general.
An Irish friend of mine was working with two English doctors who asked her if she was voting Labour or Tory in the 2011 election :/
I mean, we do get to vote here, so its not the stupidest question ever. (Unless this happened in Ireland and then its well thick.)
No, they were asking in the context of ‘you, person from Ireland living in Ireland, how will you be voting in the upcoming British election?’ (They were all in Nepal at the time)
Yeah, some English people I know have mentioned that their history curriculum is pretty limited as regards anything outside Britain (or even England tbh). But of course the answer , according to Michael Gove, is to make the curriculum even MOAR English focused, to save teh kidz from the evil multiculturalist liberal agenda :/
It’s not even just that it’s Britain focussed, although that’s part of it. I was at school in the 1990s and we didn’t get past the end of the 16th century before I gave up history at the age of 14. Everything that happened after that, I learned from doing a degree in English Lit.
Up to age 13 or 14 it is quite Britain focussed, apart from some bits on the Romans. GCSE and A Level were, in my experience, a lot more outward looking. We did a lot of 20th Century world and European history (not just WWI and WWII) And my History A level modules on 19th Century British politics were quite informative re: the history of Home Rule.
Is history optional after GCSE though? So the majority of people won’t get past the ‘Britain focused bit’ unfortunately
Yes AFAIK it’s optional at both GCSE and A Level (I chose not to do it at GCSE, but took it at A Level because I’d realised my true nerd calling). So yeah, not much compulsory history is focussed outside Britain that I recall. It’s the same with lots of countries we’ve colonised – we never learned about the Raj for example.
It’s pretty dangerous IMO, not to teach kids about the shadier parts of this country’s imperial history.
You’d think that even with history focused on England, you’d learn a good bit about Wales, Ireland and Scotland simply through the context of the various wars. I was only in English schools through age 10 and we got as far as Tudors, but it was very clear that Scotland, at least, was a separate country at that time (I don’t remember Wales and Ireland being mentioned at all).
It’s a broader problem. I once had a weird exchange with a Dutch woman who was unaware of the entire Pacific front of ww2. She had come across a reference to VJ day during her master’s degree in Chinese history. It took me a minute to realize that the issue was not one of translation, she had literally never been taught about any aspects of the war that took place more than 20 miles from her home.
But Indonesia was a Dutch colony at the time and was occupied by Japan during the war! It was a big deal!
An English aquaintance of mine went to university in NI. His friends back home apparently grasped that Ireland was not part of England but were yet unaware that Northern Ireland existed as part of the UK. They kept asking if he had to get euros before he left.
I do feel that geography lessons should be a requirement if nothing else. And definitely not just in England. The US could benefit from some lessons on the results of empire building too.
My husband taught freshman geography at a US university, and many of his students literally could not identify Canada or Mexico. They also put NYC in Nevada.
I’m not at all surprised. We learned some geography in my school history classes, including memorizing all the US states and Canadian provinces in elementary school, but it was so limited. How can you have a sense of your country’s place in the world when you literally have no idea of your country’s physical place in the world? Borders and boundaries are so telling.
Ha, also British, started going to Ireland regularly when I was 26 or so, same experience. Have you also had the “Northern or Southern Ireland?” question when trying to buy Sailrail tickets?
Never done Sailrail! But I twitchily correct people when they call it Southern Ireland, also when people ask about ‘Gaelic’: Do you mean Irish? – Me.
Yeah ‘Southern Ireland’ always makes me lolcringe
I hate the term “Southern Ireland” so much. Southern Ireland ceased to exist in 1922!
I’m too young to remember the worst of the Troubles, but I’m kind of glad that reunification is back on the table. I hope it doesn’t get violent again, and I don’t think it will, but I would love to see it happen in my lifetime. (I’m Republican AF obvs.)
It would be weird but v cool if they could just diplomacy-talk out reunification.
I mean, Star Trek said it would happen in 2024, so…
I watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy when I was briefly thinking about joining the intelligence services and yeah, really liked it! I’ll put thoughts in the comments just in case anyone doesn’t want to get spoiled.
YES to Connie Sachs, she’s great, I mean it’s Kathy Burke and Kathy Burke can do no wrong. If you also have an interest in Kathy Burke, I would highly recommend her appearance on the Adam Buxton podcast.
Re: the ending of Tinker Tailor, when he was like ‘There’s a girl, tell her I love her… and a boy send him a few quid to shut him up’ I cackled and said out loud ‘Of course it was one of those duplicitous bisexuals!’ (I was watching this alone) (funnily enough John le Carre adaptations seem to be the thing most likely to get me to shout things out loud at the screen when I’m on my own cf shouting ‘Arrogance! The height of bloody arrogance!’ at Jonathan Pine whenever he did something stupid in The Night Manager.)
This comment has made me bump all the John Le Carre books on my To Read list by a lot, mostly so I can then go watch the movies. But maybe I’ll just watch the movies and get to the books in time.
I haven’t read any of the books, I nearly read Tinker Tailor and my mum warned me off it. They’re in the same brain cupboard as Dickens for me: too involved and detailed for me to read, but great as adaptation fodder.
I actually haven’t seen any of the movie adaptations, but Le Carre is one of my favorite authors. George Smiley is the best fictional spy, in my opinion.
I felt bad for that guy. Smiley knew she was dead.
I also felt so bad for her! She hadn’t done anything wrong!
Sometimes I think I should be more upset by the yet another duplicitous bisexual thing, but secretly it’s one of my favorite parts of the film. I have no idea why, but there it is. Possibly it’s because Colin Firth is too charming by half and has apparently moved into the ‘dapper gay gentleman’ period of his career, a move I wholeheartedly endorse.
Pretty sure the “tell her I love her” was just some supplemental Haydon-y bullshit, though.
I heart Connie Sachs in all her incarnations. I do prefer the TV version of TTSS, I have seen the movie version but every time I watch it, despite the fact that I know the story inside out, I’ve got the book, the audiobook and have seen the series all multiple times, but I have no idea what is going on in that movie.
I was not bothered by not knowing what was going on in the film, but then my favourite movie of all time is The Draughtsman’s Contract, where the central murder mystery is literally unsolveable due to cutting the original from four hours down to two. I’d rather just be along for the ride.
I’ve seen the movie TTSS and the TV Smiley’s People and Smiley’s People was just absolutely excellent. I read the book afterwards and found that the series transmuted the atmosphere and thoughts beautifully.
On the other hand, I enjoyed a fair bit of The Night Manager, but with that ending it was not a Le Carré story and honestly suffered for it.
Same, except that I’ve only seen the movie. It’s gorgeously shot and acted but whaaaaat?
I think the novel (and the earlier TV adaptation) is a genuine spy-mystery, but the movie is more of a impressionistic piece, about mood and tone and feeling. I think it would be quite hard for someone coming to the story fresh to follow the plot.
I also appreciate this film for making me appreciate Mark Strong’s voice. Up to that point I’d only seen him as the dumb villain in the first SH film, where the ridiculousness of his lines prevented me from appreciating that fine baritone.
I don’t know, I came to the film cold and found it reasonably easy to follow. There were aspects that I didn’t quite get straight away, but I figured them out okay. Of course, I’ve also watched quite a few moody impressionistic films so I might just really like making up my own story to fill in gaps. Hard to say.
I was on vacation last week on a cruise ship with no internet and it was mostly wonderful to unplug EXCEPT for the fact that I missed Toast totes. I am so happy that you’re reordering the ship ones because it would really suck to miss out on that because I was on a ship.
That would be irony at its cruelest.
You took to the Sea!!!
Same here! i was at a bluegrass festival for a couple days, and I KNEW the timing would probably end up with me missing them and it did! I hope I can get in on the reorder!!
The totes went up and sold out while I was flying from Chicago to Albany. Ironically I would have had a greater chance of nabbing one if I had been in Oz…
More people have resigned from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet today than were ever actually in it, the pound is at a 30-year record low against the dollar, and Leave have confirmed that, having campaigned by promising to reduce immigration and fund the NHS, they will do neither.
Panic, what panic? I am going to continue calmly and efficiently stress-eating chocolate.
I am SO FUCKING ANGRY at the PLP for using this as an opportunity to oust Corbyn. They think (presumably) that they’re doing the right thing by continually trying to get rid of him in favour of someone ~electable~ but how can they not see that they should be presenting a united front? That this is the worst possible timing? Labour would be doing so much better if all the Blairites/New Labour people didn’t keep shooting the party in the foot, but they take the fact the party’s not doing better as proof that Corbyn’s dangerous and needs to go.
Labour needs to go back to its roots and have a leader that connects with the communities in the North that feel like they’re being forgotten.
Corbyn and other Labour people were saying a lot of very relevant things about how these communities have been picked on by the Tory government, deliberately de-industrialized and underfunded. And the righteous anger and hurt that they feel is being co-opted by racists and power hungry Tories, and their hate is being directed at immigrants and the EU when the people they should really be angry at are in Westminster. But its obvious that Corbyn et al doesn’t connect with these people and their communities, and if Labour ever want to be an effective opposition or left wing party again, they need to win them back, and ‘electable’ Oxbridge Southerners are not the way to do that.
However, why is it, that I can see that, even though I’m not even British, and the over paid comms consultants and media teams in Labour HQ can’t?
I’d love a Labour version of Ruth Davidson but our choice seems to be Corbyn or a Blairbot. Corbyn at least is genuinely left-wing.
Yeah, they’ve identified something that is true (Corbyn doesn’t connect with working-class voters that are drifting to UKIP) and drawn completely the wrong conclusion (therefore we should get rid of him in favour of Chuka Umuna or some other smarmy Blairite wanker).
They should find a Northern Trade Unionist or something, someone who’s actually from one of these places that Labour is always trying to ‘connect’ with. (If there are any trade unionist left that is.)
And in a way Labour shot themselves in the foot back in 1997 when they embraced neoliberalism which was great for the City and prosperous areas and house buying, but not great for people in the North who historically were employed in heavy industry, manufacturing etc. Trying to represent the people who were screwed over by Thatcher by exactly aping Thatcher is not a great policy for ensuring long-term loyalty.
every single WORD of this
I know!!!! Like of course people are going to vote against a political system (both Labour and Tory) which doesn’t remotely represent them or listen to their concerns. It’s frightening to feel totally ignored and silenced by your government, so I can see how people feeling that way are easily persuaded to find a scapegoat in the EU and immigrants, particularly when they at last have the chance to vote against that.
I am a Londoner through and through but I am well aware that London does not represent the experiences of the entirety of the UK, and that a system which operates on that belief is a highly flawed and undemocratic one. And to tell people that they are stupid and that Oxbridge MPs know best is patronising, classist, and elitist.
This. It’s why I’m reluctant to jump on the bandwagon of ‘how could Leave voters be so STUPID rhetoric’. Sure, those of them that are motivated by racism need to be held accountable for their beliefs and actions, but that racism is not some inevitable thing that grew from the heart of the old industrial towns. It originates with and is repackaged and propogated by the heart of the right wing upper class British establishment. They love getting disadvantaged people to do their dirty work for them.
(Not denying the agency of the disadvantaged, everyone has agency, but in a society as long-ridden by class as the UK it’s self-evident that some people are more powerful actors than others)
However, why is it, that I can see that, even though I’m not even British, and the over paid comms consultants and media teams in Labour HQ can’t?
probably for the same reason that everyone can see the problem with the Democrats in the US except for the Democrats — the party wants to connect with labor to win votes but not if it means having to have to do a bunch of labor stuff. They CAN see it, they just don’t want to do it.
It’s a longer-running thing too – the ’cause of labour’ just hasn’t been considered politically viable since the 1970s, and with the rise of globalisation the labour cause is quite different to what it traditionally was, and a lot of the former ‘parties of labour’ just haven’t been able to come up with a new, better strategy, especially since the gospel of ‘there is no alternative [to neoliberal economics]’ beloved by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.
Some rank-and-file Labour/Democrats are part of the problem too, as historically they were often unwilling to open union membership of afford union power to anyone other than white men.
yeah, and obviously I don’t know the intricacies in the UK, but in the states the Dems have so thoroughly conceded the terms of the argument about labor and capital to Reaganism that we’ve basically got two parties arguing about competing strategies to manage the decline of the working class (i.e, “It should be terrible and racist” vs. “it should be LESS terrible and not AS racist”).
Yussss. Maybe it’s impossible to fight neoliberalism but it’d be nice to see some politicians in powerful countries at least *try*.
Reminds me of something I read recently (think it was the Medium piece about brosocialists) about how Bernie Sanders’ constant appeal to the American white working class as the ‘core vote’ of the Democratic Party is pretty ahistorical bc as a group (not all of course, but largely) the American white working class has been voting Republican since the late 1960s.
They were certainly a core vote in this election, though, in which the same people who were defecting from the Democrats in the 60s p much burned the Republican party down over the lack of non-neoliberal options
Bingo.
Yep. And so many of their resignation letters have said variations on “in these tumultuous times we need a leader who can really represent Labour voters”, with no acknowledgement that it was Labour voters who put Corbyn into power! It certainly wasn’t you lot!
*screams into a sponge*
I think it’s mad to have a split party at this time, but I am utterly utterly betrayed by Corbyn and frankly will have no tears if he goes. If he has this massive mandate and can get people to come out and vote then why didn’t he do it for the referendum? He’s put a billion times more effort into keeping his job in the last two days than he put into the whole of the remain campaign. I’m a member of the Labour party but at the moment I’ve lost confidence in the whole party, to be honest. Ugh.
In German that is called Frustfressen! (the stress-eating, of chocolate or other things)
Fingers crossed that maybe Nicola Sturgeon can threaten this whole thing back into a box again by saying Scotland does not consent?
I’m so pleased to know there’s a word for that! Frustfressen FTW! Also gin.
The Scottish guy I heard on the radio this morning pointed out that the Scottish parliament can withhold its consent and delay the proceedings, but the English parliament can override them — I don’t know what kind of a majority they need in order to do that, but he wasn’t very optimistic that Scotland could put an actual hold on the process.
I don’t think the UK parliament is involved at all – this kind of inter-state dealing is an executive function, which is the responsibility of the government and not parliament.
Well, someone can override it I guess.
It’s more abstruse than I can do credit to but the devolution agreement of 1998 means that Scottish parliament has the right to refuse assent to legislation passed by the UK parliament if it is not in Scotland’s interests. However, this right of refusal is overridden if the UK parliament passes legislation in the interests of the nation as a whole during extraordinary circumstances. There is no separate executive in the UK – the Queen in Parliament is sovereign (and executive as well as legislature) with the Lords as a review body. So, because it has not come up as an issue yet, *if* Scottish Parliament withholds consent, they will be overridden but then also go on to sue the UK parliament in UK courts. This is probably at best a strategic ploy for delay/negotiating because it is *probable* that they would not win a suit – however (!) there is no precedent and no written constitution, so it is an unknown.
Nicola Sturgeon has a law degree and (I’m sure) very good advice, so I’m sure she is not speaking lightly; however, such a right is legally untested.
PS I strongly expect the SNP to be as obstructive as possible, but I don’t think they seriously think they’re going to get a veto over Brexit – it’s more an opportunistic tactic to play up the difference between Scotland and England on this issue.
Ditto the Lib-Dems (interest: my party) whose statement that they’re going to campaign for election on a Remain manifesto is more idealistic and self-promotional than practical, I’m sad to say.
I am here for the efficient productive prosumption of chocolate.
I have over the course of the weekend cleaned out an entire box of chocolate truffles I was given on Friday for cat sitting as well as making significant depredations on a 70cl bottle of gin.
Gather ye M&S Belgian chocolates while ye may, for time, death and import duty come to us all.
Yep, so angry with them. Just as the Tory party is disintegrating, let’s create a complete vacuum! Have had a tension headache for days and can barely concentrate on anything.
GAME OF THRONES THREAD!!
HOLY SHIT
ACTUAL HOLY SHIT, BYE BYE HIGH SPARROW
Bye bye High Sparrow, THANK R’HOLLOR FOR THAT, ’cause I really started to loathe your smug ass!
So! Many! Things! Happened! last night! Holy moses. R+L=J confirmed! Cersei blowing up the joint and killing everyone! Lyanna Mormont being a tiny BAMF! King in the North! Arya and her triumphant return to Westeros and getting started on that revenge list! Danaerys is on her way back to Westeros! Tyrells and Martells allied! Where to begin!
Small note: Tom and Lorenzo have taught me well and I picked up on some INTERESTING costuming choices! Epaulets and fun color changes! Whew. So much to process.
ngl, when Cersei was getting dressed I was like “oh shit, something is about to go down, WHO GAVE HER EPAULETS”
Between Cersei’s costume change and the music shit was FOR SURE going down.
I remember there was some speculating on the GoT Shouting channel in ToastieSlack about whether Cersei would use the wildfyre, and as soon as that music started up I was like, “OOOOOH SHIIIIIIT IT’S HAAAAPENNINGGGGGG!!!!!!”
even my partner was impressed by her outfit! and he normally doesn’t notice anything related to clothes, including whether or not he is missing a button on his pants or if my shirt is inside out
I’ve been really invested in Sansa’s hairstyling choices throughout the series (they are so indicative of her journey!) and got totally verklempt that now that she’s back at Winterfell she’s styling it the exact same as when she was a little girl.
YAS those epaulets! Also can anyone tell me significance of her version of the crown in the coronation scene?
Mostly what I got out of it is that, with her going monochrome, she’s just about given up on her Lannisterness and is just full-bore Sith now.
hahahaa! It looked like an Iron tiara? Maybe forged from the chains of very ventilated meisters?
Yeah, I possibly got the Imperial March stuck in my head
Well, she can’t wear the previous crown because she’s not a Baratheon so the deer motifs would have been inappropriate. But it doesn’t look like she was wearing any Lannister symbols either… so it’s a sign she’s gone rogue, perhaps.
Lyanna Mormont: Life goals
Out of all the crazy shit that happened perhaps the most satisfying moment to me was Daenerys Bye-Feliciaing Daario.
So, Jamie’s going to kill Cersei, yes? I have been waiting for him to turn against her.
Did anyone else roll their eyes extra hard when D+DB start talking about how they worry about “poor Arya, the wittle girl who’s now a murdering murderess.” No one in this universe has their morality intact — it just seemed incredibly patriarchal that they’re specifically concerned about whether Arya will be able to tap back into her soft, feminine side. (May have extrapolated a bit there.)
Yeah, dudes, I was fist-pumping and yelling “GET IT, ARYA!!” when she murdered him. I am not pro-murder but, as they say, “When in Westeros…”
Oh my god, my friend and I watched together and were both commenting on how utterly MORONIC After the Thrones makes these guys seem. My friend was like, “Watching this thing this season, I see how and why this show went totally to shit.” Like… these guys are just bumbling idiots! But they think they’re super clever! I knew that already but watching them talk about the show is just the worst.
I always think, “No, better turn it off, it’ll ruin it… ” and I never learn.
Ugh yes. They’re just saying stuff that had just happened. “In this episode, Cersei is very upset.” NO SHIT. Thanks for elucidating.
One of them pronounces Tommen “Toe-men” so who cares what they have to say anyway.
Cersei’s definitely getting valonqar-ed. GRRM would not have plopped her & Jaime’s birth order in the books just for funsies. He doesn’t do funsies.
OH SHIT you just blew my mind.
So how are Jorah “Old Friendzone” and Lyanna related, exactly?
According to the show wiki, she’s his cousin.
HOLY FUCK SHIT GOD
SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START???
Okay, so as much as I <3 Jon this season (after being intensely lukewarm about him for YEARS) I wanted a QUEEN in the North, mmmkay? Except without Littlefinger. Let’s just ditch him, please. That whole scene made my skin crawl and evoked an actual, physical gag.
RIP Margaery. Yours is the only Great Sept death that I will mourn. And ‘lil Tom-Tom. Sorry your mom blew up your wife in front of you and then conveniently abandoned you to torture a nun. You and Ser Pounce deserved better.
SO MAD ABOUT MARGAERY although I guess I would hate to see her and Daenerys fighting for queendom and it definitely would have been too much to hope that they would just marry each other.
Dany, Sansa, Marg, and Yara as joint Queens.
Get Lady Mormont in there too!
I too was hoping for Queen in the North! It’s always really been Jon’s story, in my mind anyway, but it’s a testament to the actress and some great writing that I’ve been rooting so hard for her of late.
Jon’s probs gonna bite it come series end though, I’m still optimistic for Queen in the North endgames.
You think so?? I’m not sure – I had this wild theory pop into my brain when Dany was talking about marriage that he might be the best option for her??? King in the North – Stark AND Targaryen blood? Seems like a good way to make a bridge into Westeros and cement her claim. Plus there’s the whole “three headed dragon” theory…
On the one hand, Dany/Jon marriage does seem like a good unification tactic. But from a dynastic perspective, any marriage that Dany has is essentially a non-starter because she will presumably not be bearing any children. Which doesn’t make her a weaker ruler, but does leave room for a power vacuum after her reign. So potentially a more effective strategy would be for Dany to name Jon/his future offspring as her heirs (in a sort of Elizabeth I-James VI/I situation).
True! Dany is going to face that problem no matter what unless there’s some kind of magic “reverse barrenness” spell someone can perform. I like your idea of her naming him her heir – although presumably if she and Jon married she could name Sansa and her offspring as Dany and Jon’s joint heirs? Although Jon marrying someone who could bear children would guarantee the Targaryen bloodline would continue after Dany. Unless “The Young Griff” makes an appearance (I doubt it) there is no one else to continue the Targaryen line, right?
She certainly could name Sansa and her descendants as her heirs. But, as you noted, Jon is the only person on the show capable of continuing a Targaryen bloodline. I’m not sure there’s a real reason for Dany to just be like, “Jon and I will be the last of the Targaryens and then the Starks will rule Westeros because Jon and I like Sansa and think she’s cool.” The Starks don’t really have any sort of claim to the Iron Throne (and have not historically expressed any real desire for it). Though obviously I want Sansa to just be queen of everyone and everything. I’m really curious to see if Sansa’s marriage to Tyrion will come back into play when he returns to Westeros at Dany’s side, or if the writers are just going to ignore it.
Yeah, that totally makes more sense for Jon to have kids instead. I also just want Sansa in charge of EVERYTHING, haha.
I do kinda hope the Tyrion/Sansa marriage comes back up! The underlying logic behind a Stark/Lannister union was not terrible…
I mean… Sansa and Jon are only barely related now, right? They’re like, half-cousins? Probably the Westermarck Effect would override all, but, just sayin’.
(Most cousins are only half-cousins, in that they’re only related on one side each, but yes, they’re not actually half-siblings, it appears.)
Hahaha oh man you’re totally right! They’re just regular cousins. But for the Targaryens’ marriage practices that’s basically complete strangers!
I don’t think anything is set in stone on this show, though, so I think if it would be convenient for Dany to have kids, they would come up with a way for her to have kids. Black magic, a partner change, whatever it takes. They’ve brought a few people back from death already, so reversing infertility seems like a piece of cake.
But the infertility was caused by black magic! I don’t know that we’ve seen the show have an “undo” button for things that are caused by black magic. But you’re right, they could technically do anything they want to.
Well, that’s not really true, though. The prophecy wasn’t about Dany bearing children, it was about Drogo returning to her: when the sun rises in the west, when you bear another living child, only then will Khal Drogo come back. And it wasn’t a prophecy so much as Mirri Maz telling Dany off for interrupting the ritual.
And honestly, she’s got the entire damn khalasar loyal to her, which could certainly be interpreted as Drogo’s return to her.
True, but the infertility does serve a plot function, and I think it would be more interesting to see how Daenerys handles the thorny succession issue than to hit a reset button.
Melisandre has magical abilities that are at least somewhat womb-related, and she’s headed south right now…
Dany and Yara will unite north and south through their marriage. The Night King will be defeated and Westeros will calm down under their reign. When they are ready to start a family, they will ask their good friend Jon Snow to help them out. He will also be an active co-parent. Dany/Yara/Jon’s kid will marry Gilly’s little one, which will solidify the peace between the Wildlings and the Seven Kingdoms.
A+
Would read this fanfiction.
Dany is Jon’s aunt, which makes things a little weird for them to marry, even for GoT
Targaryens were marrying their siblings so I kinda feel like they don’t care? The Hapsburgs did uncle/niece marriage with…not great results in the long run, granted, but since Dany can’t have kids anyway there wouldn’t be an issue with progeny…
Dem chins
In this vein, has anyone else been getting a weird sexual tension vibe from Jon and Sansa’s interactions. It’s all let’s-stare-into-each-others-eyes-while-you-eat-soup-on-my-bed; and here’s-this-beautiful-cloak-for-your-shoulders; and this week’s let’s-get-really-really-close-to-each-others-faces-while-we-talk-about-how-much-we-love-each-other.
Hahaha oh yeah, I’m pretty sure there are SansaxJon shippers out there which….no thanks (says the person who was just talking about an aunt marrying her nephew downthread…)
I mean, by the standards of this show, sexual tension between first cousins seems pretty tame.
True, but, as far as they know, they are still siblings who were raised together. I just want to yell at the screen “I swear to the old gods, do not have sex with your little sister, Jon! There are other redheads in Westeros that could replace Ygritte, JON!”
Tormund is RIGHT THERE
Nah, like someone else said, the Targs were always marrying siblings (Dany’s mother and father were siblings). Also Eddard’s father married a Stark cousin and Tywin married his cousin.
Yeah I think it’s heading that way, but I just have a feeling that if it does it won’t last long. Maybe the red wedding poisoned me for all future north kinging. Plus it’s Jon he’s never allowed to be happy
Ser Pounce! RIP Tommen, too good for the world of ASOIAF.
I had been the biggest whiner about Arya’s story the past two seasons, but after she SERVED WALDER THE FREY PIES, all sins of Braavos are forgiven
Odds on Arya stealing Walder Frey’s face: 1:1
yessssssss I want to see that
Also was she eyeing Jaime up in a murder way or a sexy way??
I want to say, “It can be two things!”
But probably a murder way.
murrrrderrrr
Maybe a ‘murder but I went through puberty since I last saw you and I can appreciate some things a bit better now’ way
Jaime does have really lovely bone structure!
I KNOOOOOOOOWWWWW! I did nothing but dance with joy and gasp with horror and throw my hands up in mingled delight/shock/anticipation. SEVEN HELLS!
Can somebody explain the succession rules of Westeros to me? Because I’m pretty sure at this point Gendry is the rightful king.
Too busy rowing. Would have to flood the throne room.
“Rightful” is a big word though, since a) Gendry is baseborn/bastard and never acknowledged; b) there’s still a significant faction that thinks the Lannisters and Baratheons should never have been on the throne in the first place and therefore precisely 0% of their succession is valid; c) the entire North has just said “fuck off, Seven Kingdoms, #BREXIT” so they’re not even concerned about it
Yeah, I think one thing I always forget is that for such a long time before Robert usurped the throne, it had been Targaryens all the way since the seven kingdoms were united. I noticed the other day that they don’t even really have a zone on the map except for the little Dragonstone island, because the Crownlands *was* their zone.
At this point in the show, the entire Baratheon line is gone. So in a way, the Iron Throne is just sort of up for the taking. And Cersei… done took it, I think we can safely say.
ETA: http://mashable.com/2016/05/03/game-thrones-heir/…
Apparently… Cersei actually IS the rightful heir. Hilarity!
Negative. They based it off a family tree made for a ASOIAF RPG. It’s not canon.
Ugh, I have tried and failed to respond with a gif of Liz Lemon shaking her fist and yelling NERD RAGE!!! But yeah. That.
😉
You bet 😀
Gendry would be king only if a) someone was willing to testify that Robert Baratheon had slept with his mother, and that no one else had around the time of his conception, and b) enough of the various other lords and ladies were willing to support his claim. The second part is especially crucial; as various people that I’ve chatted with about last night’s episode have also noted, aside from Cersei’s having decapitated the Church of the Seven and eliminated Tommen’s Small Council, she also got rid of most of the courtiers and nobles who might oppose her naming herself queen; presumably, she’d replace them with people that she’d name. (P.S. I’d assume that the rules of succession that GRRM has established are somewhere on http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_Page , but I can’t get the page to load right now.)
The flock of murder children! I feel like that was such an odd choice.
It was so strange. Like, I get Varys’s flock of whispering children sharing secrets, and maybe the occasional anonymous assassination. I found it difficult to believe that Qyburn could cultivate the little birds so quickly in his place. Maybe it’s supposed to point to Qyburn’s taking leave of what was left of his humanity? Carrying out a personal grudge against the Citadel? Either way it seemed unnecessary. :/
Qyburn could have just killed Pycell himself, he’s certainly murder-y enough and I can’t imagine Pycell would be able to put up much of a fight. There’s a big difference between “Hey kids, I’ll give you candy if you tell me stuff” and Hey kids, I’ll give you candy if you stab old men for me.”
It was really good candy.
Candy rates 5 stars, would murder again.
See’s Nuts & Chews
Full-size candy bars.
Yeah, why did they kill Pycelle? I thought he was a hypocritical old sleeze, but I can’t remember what he did to Cersei to get stab-murdered.
He was on Tommen’s Small Council, all of whom shut her out, and most of whom (including her uncle) died in the Sept explosion.
How bout when Ser Davos confronted Melisandre, though? So good! So heartbreaking! And you know, when he said, “Your god is evil,” the look on her face makes me think she almost agreed with him.
Davos! I feel so bad for him!!! So glad he got to confront her and that Jon (mostly) backed him up.
This was really the scene that got me. I cried when he said he loved her like she was his own. God, I love Davos.
I don’t think she disagrees with that at all. “Good” and “Gets Shit Done” don’t necessarily overlap.
I know it’s a good episode when I’m screaming YAASS BITCH FUCK YES KWEEN AWW SHIT SISTERS ARE DOIN IT FOR THEMSELVES twice. Lady Mormont and A Girl Arya of Winterfell hail yass.
A Girl of Winterfell, first of her not-name
Ok, so I had to eat my words about Arya’s Braavos plot being a waste of time, but can someone explain to me what actually happened there? Was, like, NOT assassinating someone the REAL test? How did she get the face changing magic? I thought you had to get a face from the Hall of Faces but then I remembered Jaqen could change his face in Westeros too.
I think the true test was bringing a face for the hall, and Arya did do that. Remember that the man said, “One way or another, a face will be added to the hall.”
I GUESS, but for someone who spent a really long time doing the boring job of washing and preparing bodies, that was some pretty slipshod face-work.
Just rushing in here to write this without having read the whole conversation:
WHAT WAS THE EFFING POINT OF MELISANDRE BEING SECRETELY 400 YEARS OLD IN EPISODE ONE
THERE WAS NO POINT
IT WAS NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN
I’m betting a small amount of money nothing will come of it in season 7 either, unless all the other red woman-priestesses use it as a weapon in their upcoming fight for Daenarys to SHOCK PEOPLE TO DEATH!!
Yeah I feel like the whole point of that was to have a “shocking” reveal. Like, ‘Psych! You thought she was hot but look at this old bag!’
I was taking a trip down memory lane and found my old syllabus from my “Recent British Literature” class in college, which included the following books and their morals:
“Lord of the Flies” (children are terrible)
“Little Stranger” (children are terrible and may haunt you)
“Atonement” (holy shit, why are we still making children?)
“Written on the Body” (gender is a drag)
“An Experiment in Love” (growing up in the North sucks)
Why are so many British books about how terrible kids are? Are British children worse or do they just write about it more?
Also, the guys who were in that class were insufferable, see if you can guess why.
As a one-time British child and now a British adult(?) I can confirm that we are terrible and want to wreak havoc and destroy everything. This is probably why the Great British Tradition of boarding schools was invented, though this is only an option for the very rich – the rest of us roam the streets in gangs, growling at pensioners and killing the weakest of our number.
This is way darker than I initially intended because I’m worried it’s a bit true and maybe says a lot about how class/income inequality affects the youth. Like we send the rich children to a place where they can be awful with other rich children and fan those awful flames until they become Boris Johnson or David Cameron, then the rest of us get stuck with the shit until eventually we turn on each other.
🙁 feeling gloomy now
British public schools were literally invented to turn out men who would subdue the natives without feeling too terrible about it.
I have a friend whose stories absolutely confirm your account.
After she’d regaled me with many stories, she told me about the 3 Knickers Rule at which point I was like “Holy FUCK! All of a sudden, the Pink Floyd catalog makes SO much more sense!”
3 Knickers rule: Girls had to wear 3 sets of knickers, donned after Sunday pm baths, IIRC. On Wednesdays you got to take off the innermost set. On Saturdays, most girls switched the two remaining pairs. You see, the genitals had to be covered by at least TWO sets, for $_Ladybit Modesty Reasons. Creepy AF part: there were *regular* panty checks to make sure at least 2 were on. If you had any leakage or other accident that soiled only the inner set, you could remove the soiled pair, as long as you had 2 remaining – after a *knicker-mishap inspection*.
Oh my god! What the hell? State comprehensive education may be grossly underfunded, overstudented, and understaffed, but at least we got to change our knickers every day!
I was a British children and I can confirm that they are the worst.
Probably has something to do with our general ‘We’re all terrible and our country is grey and awful and we’re so sorry for our existence’ attitude – like, ‘Look, even our children, who should be shining beacons of the future, are shit.’
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a pretty good contender for kids being terrible, I suppose.
Isn’t the horror movie The Children a British film? If so, yes, British children are terrifying and there may be some type of sickness involved.
I think it has something to do with Victorian ideas about children=innocent, and scariest thing ever=corruption of innocence. A friend of mine wrote his dissertation about it.
I’ll just leave this cuteness here:
(So, who’s gonna send Jenny the link to “If Chris Evans Were Your Boyfriend” and ask how accurate it is?)
I’m rooting for these crazy kids.
I approve wholeheartedly. (But Chris, would it kill you to wear a suit for her premiere? Your job is to be her arm candy.)
Aw, I figured he didn’t want to upstage her at her own premiere!
I don’t mind him not wearing a suit but at least take off the hat lmao.
if you date Chris Evans, you accept the baseball cap as a condition
This is kind of inside-baseball-y, but the premier was on Saturday morning at a random theater on the East side. I think he would have been over-dressed in a suit!
I am rooting for them tbh and I love her and perfection and her lovely nose that looks like half my family’s.
Is this for real? I usually don’t care about celebrity relationships but Jenny Slate is wonderful so this makes me happy!
I want her dress and her arm candy (though CE doesn’t do it for me when he looks like that)
Oooh is this where I get to say that I had a class with her in college??
Yes, and also that means you’ve volunteered to send her “If X was your Y”
I had a class with Rivers Cuomo of Weezer in college. I bet Jenny was more fun.
Toasties! If you were taking a trip to London/the surrounding UK for about 10 days in August, where would you go? It will be my very first time in Europe but I’m going with my sister who has been in the UK a lot, although she’s never explored Wales or Northern England extensively. What’s the best day trip or couple-of-days trip to take from London? What are the best castles/museums/historical landmarks/places to gaze out over the countryside and sigh dramatically?
YORK YORK YORK
WHITBY
YORK
Seconding York! Take a tour of the York Minster, plus you can wander the charming streets, see pretty gardens, and visit a decent Viking museum.
Now that I have read/am obsessed with Hild I am really looking forward to someday visiting Whitby, York, and various Northumbrian places, and wandering moodily about with a large walking stick!
I went to Bath as a day trip from London! It was a few years ago, so I don’t remember all of the details, but even with travel time we had plenty of time to explore the town.
Would second Bath! The Cathedral is fantastic, the Holborne is great, there are the Roman Baths, you can get lovey tea+cakes in the Pump Room (do not bother with the Austen museum type thing, they have entirely the wrong conception of Mr Darcy).
DO NOT DRINK THE PUMP ROOM WATER IT IS DISGUSTING AND NOT WORTH THE NOVELTY SO GROSS NO NO NO
The Roman baths is fantastic though, and Bath is delightful!
Maybe Rye and Norwich? Check out the National Trust for places easily visited from London https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk
I’d say go to Manchester, but I’m biased. But you could go to Manchester and then out to the Peak District if you want countryside. Could also go and see Sylvia Plath’s grave at Hebden Bridge if you’re so inclined.
My fave museums in London: The Hunterian Museum (surgical specimens), The Wellcome Collection (also medical but different), Sir John Soane’s Museum (house of an eccentric architect/collector left untouched since his death in the 19th century), The Horniman Museum (most famous exhibit: ‘Walrus, badly stuffed’).
Ride on a steam train! The Swanage Steam Railway that goes past Corfe Castle is particularly lovely in summer, but there are other steam railways around.
Also, if you are not a vegetarian, then I would cut a coupon out of a newspaper or the Internet and go to a Toby carvery, any Toby carvery, for a roast with unlimited veggies and probably a free dessert thanks to the coupon. I’ve eaten the carvery roast at Tobys all over England and never had a bad one.
Also, good villages that are nice to hang out in and have excellent pubs. Can anyone recommend their favorite small towns in the UK?
Cambridge has a small village called Grantchester which is a lovely place for a walk by the river. They have several pubs to choose from.
I spent a term in Scarborough, and I can highly recommend standing on a bluff above the North Sea, looking at Scarborough Castle across the bay, and breathing deep of the bracing sea air. And then taking a walk through the hills above the university campus.
Cambridge is worth a day-trip: the historical centre is very compact and easily walked around (though don’t miss out a punt trip on the river to get the best views of the older colleges).
I visited Wales in the spring and that place is littered with castles and castley ruins (marked on my map, charmingly, as “rems.”), e.g. Llanthony Priory. We went there to do a lot of walking and if you are into that, the Brecon Beacons national park is amazing and has lots of quaint little towns. The town of Hay-on-Wye is a used book shop super-village. The region is reachable-ish by train and bus, but we did it with a car and I think that would be preferable.
I also think the white cliffs, particularly the Seven Sisters, are lovely!
Charleston! Vanessa Bell’s weekend house in Sussex — she and Duncan Grant and the rest of the Bloomsbury folks painted literally everything that didn’t run fast enough. They’ve done an amazing job at making it look like Vanessa and Virginia just walked out for a minute…
Winchester is a nice day trip from London. It’s an hour on the train from Waterloo, is an attractive small walkable city and has a cathedral, a mediaeval hall and a ruined castle and several good pubs if you’re an ale drinker.
My best friend and I went to London 8 years ago or so and it was amazing! We spent some time in Greenwich, which is practically part of London now, but has some lovely parks and the Greenwich Observatory. We also took a day trip to Brighton (specifically because it’s where all the families in the Brit Lit books we read went on vacation), which was quite nice. Some interesting old architecture, a great set of old narrow streets full of little shops, and of course the carnival and the beach!
We mostly hit the big museums – the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, the British Library, the Tate Modern, the National Gallery, Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s. We also did a ton of walking. I think my favorite was Westminster Abbey, although everything we saw was super cool.
If you can pop up to Edinburgh for The Fringe (and other festivals), it is well worth it. It’s a long way, but Edinburgh in August is basically the dream.
um we cotched a kitten and he is ours now.
He is weirdly, suspiciously cuddly. Enjoys belly rubs, understands concept of “lap”
Still unsure on being held up
He will be getting vetted this week and then HOPEFULLY introduced to the general population, right now he is making the plaintive-est mews from our office where he is currently quarantined because he really wants to explore the house. We had initially picked a name but are re-evaluating names. Hercules Mulligan is currently a strong contender.
Eeeee!
Judging by that face in the first pic, you are definitely his human.
Those green eyes!!
Luckily I’ve been creating a list of potential cat names on a Hamilton theme!
Aaron Purr
Felinza Schyfur
Catgelica Schyfur
John Pawrens
Hercules Purrigan
Alexanfur Hamilton
George Clawshington
Meowquis de Lafayette
!!!!!
GEORGE CLAWSHINGTON, that’s it, gotta go cotch a kit now.
Awesome. You could double up, too: Furcules Purrigan
I’m so glad you re-cotched him.
Me too. 🙂
CAT TUMMY ALERT! What a beautiful, lucky boy he is.
That robe(? dress? I can’t tell from the pics, but either way I like it) has colors that remind me of the Fourth Doctor’s scarf, which is cool as heck, even if it isn’t on purpose.
The kitten is so handsome!
Robe. Intentional. Has large Doctor Who logo embroidered on left chest. 🙂
YESSSSSSSSS. BEST DOCTOR.
How did you know? The 4th Doctor was my very favorite. He wore a scarf. Your kitty wears evening clothes. Black and white with gloves.
Wait, I am confused. Is that the selfsame kitten that Mallory cotched? They look suspiciously similar.
It is not! Jeeves is safely in his house! This is a new tuxedoed chap!
Kitten doppelgängers!!! Lovely!
Her house, tuxedoed filly. According to the most recent Jeeves news.
Oh! My apologies!
Although I doubt that Jeeves herself cares very much.
It’s so Toastie that Jeeves wears a tux as a lady.
In the evenings, she sings torch songs under the stage name Meow-lene Dietrich.
How am I supposed to live without comments like this?!!
And we’ll always have reddit, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type.
Someone on Toastie Slack commented on that similarity, saying that perhaps kittens wishing to be cotched like putting on their best formalwear, which has been delighting me since I read it.
I am also a fan of this theory.
YES that was me haha, SUCCESS.
I love everything about these pics, from the 4th Doctor bathrobe, to the kitteh, to the Hamilton naming!! So good to see a pic of you, houblon!!
baaaaaaaaaaaby
He is lovely and beautiful. Congratulations.
100% supportive of Hercules Mulligan! I’ve been holding that as a second cat name myself. DO IT!
THERE IS A REASON.
He is a tuxedo cat, Hercules Mulligan was a tailor: check
We cotched this cat on the second try [we cotched him last Thursday but he escaped! and then was cotched by a neighbor and returned to us!]: Mulligan
Hercules can be shortened to Harry: Houdini, the escape artist who often performed in a tuxedo
FIN
Sound logic. Proceed with plan.
It’s also very ripe for puns! In addition to those mentioned above, there’s Purrcules Mulligan or Hercules Meowligan.
Also, you could yell HERCULES MULLIGAN every time they walked into the room!
And when you’re cleaning out the litter box, you must always sing: “We in the shit now / somebody’s gotta shovel it!”.
Yesssssssssss!
HERCULES MULLIGAN! <3
So glad you found each other! A+ cat posing, also– Cat’s cuteness is very evident.
WELL COTCHED INDEED. Hooray for feline company!
Nothin’ but squeeeeeeee! So glad you coached him!
Hercules Mewligan?
I grew up a few streets over from Robert Hanssen’s family, so shit got really weird in that town for a while. Especially when they filmed the movie
I went to the same college as he did (many years after him, in the 90s.) The college taught me the Russian language and took me on a trip to Russia but provided no spying instruction.
You grew up near me. Relatively. I had friends in high school who lived right down the street from him…
“Tough shit, Dad, I’m legally an adult and have absolutely no need for your consent if I want to get married!” (I am not very good at diplomacy.)
The situation here in the UK feels like it’s becoming more of a mess by the minute. I am tempted to give up even trying to follow the news, as politicians are just resigning all over the place.
(On the plus side, I was at Pride! I did not see that police officer propose to his boyfriend*, but am thrilled that he did. I have, however, seen loads of comments on the theme of “I’m not homophobic, but how dare that policeman do something personal when he was meant to be on duty.” HE WAS IN THE PARADE.)
Nicole, a quick question about the End of the Toast (sob) – when the redesign took effect, a few of us asked if it would be possible to have some sort of menu listing all of the series and all of the tags, as existed on the old version. Obviously if we’re reading an article from a particular series or with a particular tag we can click on that and view others with it, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere you can browse all of the available series options.
*were there two police officers who did that? That is not the picture I have most commonly seen.
There must have been two! One was proposing to his non-police boyfriend in the crowd, and the other was the one above where both are coppers. ADORBS!
Same answer as when someone asked about archives, which is just that I am not spending any more money on changing anything to do with the site, which is quite expensive, and I am refusing CHEERFULLY to do so, having spent a zillion dollars on the site already. And if people donate for that purpose, I am just sending it to the totes bursary.
That sounds more than fair! (Thank you for spending a zillion dollars on it; it has provided so much joy.)
My pleasure! I do not regret a dime of it.
<3
thank you so much for keeping it up so I can still read everything that came before I knew about this marvelous place.
(I vaguely remembered responses along the lines of “yes, that is a thing we can easily do” when people were asking about it at the time of the redesign, which was why I asked, but as it is not, then please forget it.)
Once the redesign was done, anything new was not covered by our redesign deal, so we would be paying by the hour for the work, as it happens, which is a lot and at this point, something I am not interested in.
Like, once we decided to close the site, something we would definitely have done if the site was continuing for another five years seemed like washing a rental car, you know?
Woo I was at Pride too! Though not for the parade cos I was at work, just for the bit where we stood about in Soho in the rain, then stood about in another bit of Soho in the rain, then decided to get something to eat and stop being in the rain. But it was awesome to see so many people feeling happy and safe and *proud* and I’m glad that that happened this weekend when so many people are feeling scared and at odds with one another.
I was in the Chicago Pride Parade and we also started by standing around in the rain. Then it cleared up and we stood around in the steamy heat, then we walked in the steamy heat. (It was lovely).
When I’m on the main page, instead of a specific article, I’ve seen lists of series at the bottom of the page, right under the “older posts” arrow.
Yes, that’s really handy! It’s only a selection of the series, though, rather than all of them.
But there’s usually something from every series in the first couple of pages on the main page, so you can just click on the “in [x]” at the top of the post to get to that series.
Someone else said this elsewhere on the page, but all the series can be found here: http://the-toast.net/series/
Thanks! (I swear I have tried that in the past and it wasn’t a page!) That is very useful.
Y’all, Connie Sachs is my favorite character in the Smiley novels/movies. She’s so smart, and so beaten down by the system she serves, and it makes me cry every time I read one of her scenes. Leave her alone in her cottage, George!
Or, you know, go visit her without asking her for something.
Okay, so, um other than Game of Thrones here are the three pieces of culture I consumed this weekend and will be up for talking about because they have been consuming my mind all weekend.
1. Outlander – EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT EPISODE MADE ME UNCOMFORTABLE AND UNHAPPY WTF BLACK JACK GET OUT
2. Far from the Madding Crowd – I finally watched the Carey Mulligan adaptation from last year and quite liked it (it’s so pretty.) I’ve never read the book, so I don’t know how it holds up, but let me tell you the thing that’s stuck with me since I saw it: POOR MR. BOLDWOOD. Jeeeeezzzzz, it may be because I have a weird soft spot for Michael Sheen (“There’s only one Wesley Snipes!” “You know there’s not.”) but he just totally killed me. Like, when Bathsheba was singing and he joined in in harmony? And when he was crying to Gabriel about how sad he was? AND THEN HE HAD TO GO TO JAIL FOR SHOOTING THAT JERK??? Help me, I have too many feels about this.
3. Hamilton – I finally broke down and admitted to myself that I am not seeing the show in person anytime soon so I bought the album and listened to it and PROMPTLY CRIED MY FACE OFF.
That is all. Please feel free to engage in any or none of these topics.
Oooh, okay, so I watched the movie first and then read the book. And let me tell you, Mr. Boldwood is the WORST in the book. There’s a scene (not in the movie) where he finds her in a field at nighttime and basically goes on and on and on about how she’s ruining his life. He constantly hovers around Bathsheba, creeping her out and making her fully regret sending him the valentine as a joke. He guilts her into quasi-agreeing to marriage! And then it’s revealed that he had a whole wardrobe of clothing and jewelry created for her!! Movie Boldwood is moreso lonely and pathetic, not terrifyingly obsessed.
What the movie didn’t show is that he was super against Troy and, iirc, had tried to bribe him to stay away from Bathsheba. So the shooting at the party made more sense, whereas I felt like it came out of nowhere in the movie.
Aaaahhh! Well that makes more sense then. If that had been clearer in the movie I would not have been THE SADDEST when he was in jail.
There was *one* thing he said in the movie that was fairly overbearing and weirdly creepy to me which was when he was talking to Gabriel right before the party and was like, “Do you think she’ll finally do what’s right and marry me?” and I was like “uhhhhhhhh whutt?”
As far as the shooting in the movie, it seemed more to me like he was trying to protect Bathsheba. Troy was getting super aggressive with her right before he shot him, so I was like, “YOUR LAWYERS NEED TO ARGUE DEFENSE, BRO.”
I happened read the book* right before the movie came out and I saw the casting and was like “noooope.” Carey Mulligan is lovely, but she doesn’t have that enigmatic quality to me that Bathsheba is supposed to have. Directors must see it in her, since she was also cast as Daisy in Gatsby, but I do not see it. And yeah, picking Michael Sheen as Boldwood was silly because it’s going to make him more sympathetic than he is.
Boldwood is SO AWFUL in the book. He is THE Nice Guy to end all Nice Guys. Troy is horrible too, but in more of a bro kind of way.
*Almost just typed “watched the book” and caught myself. ^_^
I didn’t get CM as Daisy either…
And if you want the real Gabriel Oak you have to watch Alan Bates in the original movie. I don’t think there were any British viewers who could cope with the complete un-Englishness of Mattias Schoenarts, when GO is supposed to _embody_ the Wessex countryside.
But he’s so dreamy!!! (Though I totally get what you mean, because he’s super not English!)
But so dreamy. 🙂
My favorite Gabriel Oak is Nathaniel Parker in the 1998 miniseries. I kind of really hated the Christie/Bates version.
Ooooh, that’s super interesting to me, because I totally didn’t get Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan either, but I liked her in this, but that’s probably because I’ve never read the book! I got the impression from Carey Mulligan’s performance that Bathsheba is supposed to be plucky and self-sufficient but also incredibly naive and callow and also a smidge defensive.
Far From the Madding Crowd is so wonderful. Gabriel is ridiculously fantastic (when I saw it in theaters,the girls next to me literally squealed when he was so happy getting his dog back,and it was totally called for),and Carey Mulligan is always amazing. And yeah,Boldwood was way more sympathetic in the movie than the book,and Michael Sheen being fantastic has a lot to do with that.
Aw yeah GABRIEL IS SO SWOONWORTHY. Every single one of those “significant looks” of his about did me in. (I’m a sucker for significant looks – I blame 1995 Pride and Prejudice.)
Oh, and while we’re talking about Michael Sheen being fantastic, can he please sing some in more stuff???? I was so into that duet scene and actually bought the song from the movie soundtrack on iTunes yesterday.
On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:22 AM, Caitlin Meade <[email protected]> wrote:
Aw yeah GABRIEL IS SO SWOONWORTHY. Every single one of those “significant looks” of his about did me in. (I’m a sucker for significant looks – I blame 1995 Pride and Prejudice.)
So many significant looks. And many of them were in the rain, which I greatly appreciated.
The soundtrack is so gorgeous!!!
don’t really know what happened with the comments here….
I still do not know how Gabriel did not end up with bleeding ulcers from all that stress of unrequited love he was put through while keeping such a calm exterior. Even though I suspect she kept on making him leave because she liked the back view. Because holy cow, what a back view.
Right?! But he wasn’t a dick about the unrequited love, which was my favorite. Just so good. (And that really is the only reasonable explanation for her ever wanting him to leave.)
Welcome to the world of Hamilton. Crying your face off every time you listen to it never stops. Except for like a minute and then you talk about it with your friend and then you both cry and everyone looks at you like you’re crazy but it’s okay because HAMILTON.
Oh damn I’m crying now.
I’m going to visit my friend in DC for the 4th of July and she’s like the only person I know IRL who has seen Hamilton and so I expect there to be MANY TEARS SHED over it all. I also anticipate screaming “FREEDOM FOR AMERICA FREEDOM FOR FRANCE” and “WE WON WE WON WE WON!” some point on the 4th.
Hamilton – I think I’m coming to the same realization. 🙁 So sad………
Re: Hamilton FOMO, my ridiculous but strangely effective way of managing my feels is saying to myself, “Self, you cannot get obsessed with being in the room where it happens. We know how that turns out.” And then somehow feeling some kind of kinship with Aaron Burr (but which I of course mean LESLIE) because we are not in the room where it happens.
That is actually a fairly decent coping strategy for FOMO in general!
OT BUT I went to Pride yesterday and it was so so wonderful! It was very hot at first, then a big storm blew in and we all got drenched in cooling rain (so cool, actually, that me and my folks had to run home before we got too cold in our hot weather clothes). The parade was so lovely that I cried, and a lot of people complimented my “Started in the Closet Now We’re Queer” shirt. So fun, and there was a lot of love for Orlando shown (including many moments of silence down the parade route by multiple groups). YAY PRIDE.
That is SUCH a great shirt idea! Love!
Happy Pride!!! I was at Pride at Chicago yesterday and it was lovely! Very very hot and steamy, with a little rain at the beginning.
I walked with my church. And my husband. Wearing my new t-short with the bi-pride flag, so no one would mistake me for straight. It’s the second year I’ve marched and the first year Mr Cleo joined us.
We marched with the Episcopal Diocese and were grouped with other faith groups – it was really fun to see that and beyond cool to see the way the ministers interacted with the crowd.
Next year I may spring for a t-shirt with actual words, since not everyone recognizes the bi-pride flag colors. But I did make eye contact with / thumbs up / high-five / hug pretty much everyone I saw also sporting bi pride gear. And that was really gratifying.
Nicole, I just want you to know that I opened the Link Roundup and the first words out of my mouth were “PUPPY!!!!!” I have nothing more articulate to say.
SANSA PUPPY WHOSA GOOD GIRL?!
Much to my husband’s chagrin, I’ve started saying”PUPPY!” every time we are out and see a dog. We went to Toronto Island yesterday, there were SO many dogs there.
I have to ask every dog I see “WHOSA PRETTY PUPPY?!” Spoiler alert: they’re all pretty puppies.
100% GOOD PUPS
Sansa where did ur ears go?!
I took friday off work and my out of office was ‘I am at the Royal Highland show eating fudge and ignoring the referendum results’.
Now I am back at work drowning in brexit shit and it is vastly depressing and horrifying. Two facebook people gone for racist glee so far.
MrChouffe’s dad voted Leave. It was the final nail in the coffin of “well, we can’t tell the story about how much Thatcher hated him anymore, since she’d bloody love him now.”
I thought Thatcher was pro-Europe? (Say what you will about her politics–and were I British I’d have a lot to say–but her multi-flag jumper was pretty ace.)
Toasties! I probably won’t be able to participate in the link roundup this week so I’ll just put all my thoughts and questions here. First,I have an interview tomorrow that I am nervous about. Also I finally got on Twitter and love following Nicole and other Famous Smart People,and also now I know way more about Brexit now than I ever would have before and the posts about all the racists things people are experiencing in the aftermath makes me very sad. I want to join Toastie slack but have not made the requisite request to the appropriate folks. I would love some sage advice about small town dating if I’m not from the small town. Hugs all around and thank you the Toast for being glorious.
Huh, the small town dating question is an interesting one. What do you think will be the issue (if any)? I would guess that either a) you’re new, so you’re a wonderful catch to everybody, so calibrate your first dating moves accordingly and take your time choosing first dates, especially since you won’t know the full network of who-has-dated-who-etc-etc in the past, or b) everybody got married at age 25 and there is nobody to date. Which is it?
Should have specified – I’m dating as cis/het. It’s a little of both? I think I’m just nervous about the fishbowl aspect of it – I’d rather people know me as me and not as “that lady who is dating around right now.” Lots of people got married at 25.
Please do email ppyajunebug at gmail dot com to join us on Toastie slack. It is lovely and we have a whole channel for advice-giving and receiving. Also, best of luck with your interview!
THANK YOU! I will do that. And fingers crossed!
WHERE AM I GONNA GET MY SANSA PICS WHEN YOU’RE GONE?! ;_;
Nicole will post the odd Sansa and kids pic on Twitter from time to time!
Sansa: I is aerodynamic.
Whoooosh.
So long the.toast, I will miss you.
As a big LeCarre fan, I want to recommend the original BBC “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” with Alec Guinness. It was/is brilliant.
…. and includes the late Ian Richardson, the original Francis Underwood from the original “House of Cards” as Bill Haydon.
CAN WE TALK ABOUT BEYONCE’S PERFORMANCE AT THE BET AWARDS LAST NIGHT WITH KENDRICK LAMAR? Because it gave me literal chills and I cried.
You can see it here: Full performance.
Ack, thank you, that made a difficult Monday morning SO MUCH BETTER.
THANK YOU FOR THAT LINK
Someone linked it on the Slack last night and I watched it like, mouth agape, with shivers.
That was me! And it made me cry! Then I made my husband watch it and it made me cry again!
THAT WAS AMAZING.
Even on a screen that was incredibly powerful. Her recent work generally and this particular collaboration with Kendrick Lamar are testament to the force that art can exert.
It was incredibly intense and powerful, I agree. I got chills watching it last night.
I feel lucky to have been able to watch her mature as an artist since the days of Destiny’s Child. Her recent works are really moving, so raw and so sophisticated at the same time.
I got a little teary watching it too, especially since I had just watched the Jesse Williams speech which incited the same reaction.
I watched that on my phone last night and almost cried. I saw Bey on the On The Run tour, but now I wish I’d seen the Formation tour, too. I just want to bown down to her choreographer and costume folks, I love love love it all. Maybe I’m totally reading it wrong but I see a lot of West African influence in the choreography (which she’s always had), but in combination with the whole Lemonade thesis it’s just making my year.
The combination of imminent lack of Toast and the whole Brexit clusterfuck now has me crying at my desk. Thanks, Monday.
Yesterday, reading all the articles about how the Leavers are casually and immediately going back on all their promises, Colin James started singing in my head and it occurred to me that what we need is a playlist. I mean, a few other things too, but we need something while we drink and read about the devastation. It also seems appropriate to start with the Canadians, since we may all need to move to Canada soon. Canada music good! Canada beer good!
Why’d You Lie — Colin James
It’s Time to Switch to Whiskey — Corb Lund
Alone Again, Naturally — Gilbert O’Sulivan
Bad Road — Clyde Frog
I Wanna Be Sedated — Ramones
Wouldn’t It Be Good — Nik Kershaw
Help! — Beatles
Eve of Destruction — Barry McGuire
Willie Nelson — Whiskey River
Drinking Again — Dinah Washington
Bring It On Home — Sam Cooke or the Commitments
I’m sure some of you can do much better. Maybe someone who knows more country music? There have to be lots of songs about despair and drinking!
Ok, when I got to the Ramones, I spit out my coffee and choked!!!! Perfect!
Don’t forget Anarchy in the UK, the Sex Pistols. I’ll be thinking of more of these all day now!
I just have Nelson’s “HA-ha!” (aimed at the Leave voters ofc) running on a loop in my head.
okay so the bluegrass song “Rye Whiskey” from the Punch Brothers is all about this. Drinking and doing dumb things while drunk because it makes everything seem better, then regretting it, then fuck it let’s just get drunk again to make things feel better again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=braQeLkJUvE
Rye whiskey makes the band sound better makes your baby cuter makes itself taste sweeter
Oh boy! Rye whiskey makes your heart beat louder makes your voice seem softer makes the back room hotter
Rye thoughts aren’t good thoughts, boys, have I ever told you ’bout the time I…
and etc.
Hallelujah. I like k d lang’s recording.
For London Toasties who are angry about the resignations and anti-Corbyn stuff, there is a pro-Corbyn event/protest this evening at 6pm in Parliament Square.
My partner and I will be going if you don’t want to go on your own. We are quite nice. https://www.facebook.com/events/1754368201514480/…
I missed last week’s open thread because I had Friday off, which confused my brain into thinking it was Saturday. And this Friday it’s Canada Day and I’m off to NYC so I’ll be missing the very last open thread too D: I’m going to miss you all so much.
On a lighter note, I finally got that job offer; it’s signed and safely filed away and I start on the 13th of July (because I took the 11th and 12th off so I can spend a long weekend in DC with a Very Handsome Man). I just handed in my resignation and my soul feels light as a feather.
What wonderful news for you! Congratulations! I”m so sorry you’re going to be gone on Friday, though but enjoy your Very Handsome Man! Hurray for light souls!
Yay! Congrats!
Congratulations!
I hope you have a great Canada Day visit to NYC, too!
People keep asking me if I’m excited for Canada Day weekend and I say “Yeah!!!! I’m going to NYC!!!!” and inevitably their face falls and they go “You’re… leaving Canada… on Canada Day?” I am the worst at patriotism.
Don’t worry, I fully indulged in a bit of giggling when I typed out my good wishes 😀
Loads of people use July 4th to leave the country for vacation (or leave home?) so it’s not like you’re weird for using a Friday holiday to get a three-day trip! (The new question that occurs to me is: are you able to also incorporate the US Independence Day to wrangle a 4-day holiday weekend?)
I thought about it, but our hotel increased its rates for the 4th (unsurprisingly) and it was kind of a deal-breaker.
Last year I spent the 4th of July in Canada, so we’re balancing each other out.
Ahhhh congratulations!
That is such good news! Thank you for sharing.
Wheeeeeeeeeee!
Yay! Well done! And enjoy your weekend of romping 😉 You deserve all these good things.
I think the issue with Northern Ireland has been buzzing in my mind the most since the Brexit vote. It’s like, the Brexiters forgot the Good Friday Accord was kind of a thing.
I think that this is one of the biggest failures of modern Western politics: the failure to look beyond getting what you want, or the next election cycle. There is no sense that we are building anything lasting anymore, doing anything to make a better future. It’s this lack of foresight that I find to be so dangerous.
I suppose thats a fundamental flaw of democracy though? The people who get elected are the people who are good at getting elected, and they must always be aware of the next election and looking good to their constituents.
Maybe its gotten worse recently because of the visibility and scrutiny politicians are under; and the world is so much more polarized, it not really about people with the same goals and different ideologies working together anymore, now its about fundamental beliefs and who you are as a person, and making the other guy, and poor people, pay.
Not a new problem, in fairness: https://twitter.com/davidedgarwolf/status/7470281…
I think it’s a little bit like the better parts of the EU- they’ve become so normalized that people forget what an achievement it is to have them.
OT, but I need house help from someone who knows something about houses?
The ceiling on my front porch is sagging. It’s a 100+ year old house, there’s some other stuff in the house that has shifted that the home inspector when I bought it told me wasn’t a big deal, and it’s been happening so gradually that I didn’t notice how bad it’s gotten. The question is, who do I call about this?
Is it a pier and beam house (i.e., up off the ground on posts), or is it a foundation (concrete slab sitting directly on the ground)? If the former, it is not uncommon to need to have the house re-leveled as the soil settles/shifts over time. If the latter, your foundation may be shifting/sagging, which is more serious. You can google for something like “level pier and beam house” or “house foundation repair” and see what services are offered near you, maybe?
Thanks–I guess it’s a foundation? The porch is concrete, but the rest of the house sits on a basement? (I clearly know nothing about houses?) But the porch and the walls are still level, it’s only the ceiling that’s sagging.
Oh! I misunderstood. Or, maybe, projected my own past foundation fears onto your question 🙂
I guess maybe just a roof repair person could give you an estimate on a fix.
Sorry, I’m not being clear because I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. The porch juts out maybe 4 feet from the rest of the house, and the other part of the porch ceiling is directly under a room, and the floor (hardwood) in that room is apparently sagging, too. I guess I’ll call a general contractor?
I think you can either call a general contractor or a foundation expert. A good general contractor will tell you if you need to get a foundation expert to check it out or you can go right to the foundation expert if you’re pretty sure that’s the problem.
Start with a contractor – he should tell you if you need to bring in someone more serious (structural architect). Most of the time a good general contractor can propose a fix. Get a few estimates/checks. Estimates themselves aren’t always free if contractor has to travel, check Angie’s list or get someone with multiple positive recommendations through other means.
Good luck.
WHOLE WOMAN”S HEALTH REVERSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Opinion is here, I haven’t read it yet: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274…
Oh, thank RBG!
And a hand for Justice Kennedy, as well.
Right? Thank you, Justice Kennedy, for really thinking about this one and listening to the evidence provided, etc. Because if this had been 4 – 4, the Fifth Circuit court decision would have held.
MY WHOLE BODY IS COVERED IN SWEAT. I was so scared with this one, guys. “Second holding: Both the admitting privileges and surgical center requirements place a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a previability abortion, constitute an undue burden on abortion access, and thus violate the Constitution.” YES. YES YES YES.
I gotta go lie down…
HOLY FUCK, REALLY???
I mean, I was just assuming this would go to shit like everything else has…..WHAT???
Need to go read about it, now!!!!!!!
I mean, I was literally driving home from my doctor appointment this morning trying to figure out how one starts an organization to get abortion services provided in university health clinics, and if I needed to start one.
I think that is an awesome idea! At the very least, they should do medical abortions.
I am silently screaming with joy at my desk.
I’m so happy about ittttttt. Thank you, President Obama, for your court appointments.
I just did a little dance. YESSSSS!!!
THANK FUCKING GOD!!!!!
My Monday was starting to head down the tubes and then this TOTALLY SWITCHED THE DIRECTION OF TUBES FLOW
FUCK YES.
My favorite quotes from the decision:
“We add that, when directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment, Texas admitted that there was no evidence in the record of such a case.”
“Nationwide, childbirth is 14 times more likely than abortion to result in death, but Texas law allows a midwife to oversee childbirth in the patient’s own home.”
That second quote there really puts the whole thing in perspective, doesn’t it? I am all for midwives and homebirths – I had all my babies in birth centers with midwives. But let’s not kid around: even today, childbirth is way more dangerous than abortion. Do the legislators care about that? HA HA NO WHAT A SILLY QUESTION. I mean, after all, once it comes to the actual birth, the kid is on its way out and we all know they aren’t interested in actual children.
(late comment is late)
It’s been my experience when discussing this with pro-lifers, that they genuinely do not believe you when you say birth is much more dangerous than abortion. Even if you say that information is easy to find and link to it.
This was the first piece of news I saw this morning and I swear to hell I started tearing up in the elevator up to my office. The other women in there glanced at me strangely, so I refrained from grabbing her hand in solidarity and shouting “YES” at the top of my lungs. But oh, I am so relieved.
They also upheld a federal law that bars those convicted of domestic violence of owning a gun. http://bigstory.ap.org/3e48c59c8e26440496a2e9db6a…
My dogs are relieved to find that even the gorgeous Sansa can take photos that make her look goofy.
That Reddit OP’s dad and my dad are basically the same person, and my solution is the same as the OP’s, and I am having all the feels about it. Go OP!
Their dad is basically my mom, and for a couple years I was able to ignore her, but then A of all, my bf during those years was just as bad, and B of all, when I broke up with him and started going to school again, I needed money to do it with, so we’re at a tentative peace while I’m in school. It’s not nearly so bad not living with her, and mainly if I just tell her I’ll think about her latest demands/”if you do X, i’ll give you Y money for this necessary thing i already agreed to pay for”, and then not get back to her for a few weeks, the “opportunity” passes by, and she forgets she said anything of the kind.
Idk. It’s not quite like the poster’s dad (or, apparently, your’s) but similar. Stressful. Financial abuse/emotional manipulation. At least my mom doesn’t use the whole family’s love and attention tho! That’s terrible. I’m sorry if that’s the case with you, as well as the poster!
/toastie commiseration
Guys guys finally some good news! Supreme Court strikes down TX abortion laws!! http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/jun/27/us-sup…
Toasties! It’s my birthday, and I’m shamelessly looking for internet love and validation – especially in the end times.
It’s also my very first trial as a lawyer. I actually graduated in 2011 – but it took me so many, many weird years of under and unemployment to finally get a lawyer type job – but I think I’m finally on a good path forward. It’s almost as though shitty times at one point don’t mean that everything will suck forever! I’m only second chairing and examining a few witnesses, but still! Wish me luck!
Happy birthday, congratulations and good luck!!!
You got this! Here’s a song for when you’re examining the witnesses and here’s one to back up how good of a job you’re going to do!
Happy birthday! Best of luck in court!
Yay! Good luck and have fun!
Happy happy birthday! ((hugs))
“only second chairing and examining a few witnesses” There should be no “only” there, that is awesome! You’re examining witnesses! I’ve been practicing for 11 years (all in litigation) and haven’t done that! I know people more senior than me who haven’t done it, either!
Totally, getting to do that five years in is EXCELLENT.
Wow, good luck on the lawyering.
Happy birthday! And congratulations on your first trial. Being organized and logical in front of people with someone’s issues at stake sounds horrifying. I’m glad there are Toasties worthy of the call.
Good luck! Let us know how it goes!
(And I SO FEEL YOU on the weird un/underemployment legal netherworld. Spent many years there myself. Glad you’re on a path out.)
Toasties, I am creating an archive spreadsheet of all the articles that have ever been on The Toast. This is just so we can find the articles more easily. If you would like to access it, or (please!) help fill it out, you can find it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uf69A8_Hn…
This is such a great project, and also an excellent procrastination method
Are you doing this manually? Perhaps you could collaborate with Absotively, who mentioned pulling the titles and such from the site via programming. I can’t get a direct link to Absotively’s comment, but it’s in the fourth thread down (by theburnersmydestination): http://the-toast.net/2016/06/27/link-roundup-600/… (this thread link doesn’t work for me in chrome but it does in firefox). My programming and website skills are really too rusty to do anything nonmanual before Absotively.
Yep and thank you! I will recommend we hit pause on this so no one wastes too much effort.
I am going to try to do basically this via computer script on Friday, so if you want to wait for that it might save you a bunch of work.
Oh that’s fabulous! Were you just planning on turning it into a spreadsheet or actually making an archive out of it? I am not very techy myself which is why I want the old-fashioned spreadsheet route.
I also talked to someone about getting it on archive.org when it’s all done so the links will stay up just in case something terrible happens.
I’ll just stick it all in a SQLite database to start with, and make that available. Then I can pretty easily produce some CSV files with whatever data spreadsheet users would like. I haven’t really thought about what else to do with it after that yet.
You are awesome for taking this on, thank you! What is the best way to help fill it out while being sure we’re not duplicating others’ work? Can we, like, agree to take on certain days’ posts or something? (I want to help and am good at data entry but not great at visualizing whole projects…)
It looks like I went about this the old fashioned way and programmer Toasties are working on pulling all this data out for us. So I jumped the gun a bit, so let’s hold off and let the techs do it with magic!
I am flailing at the NERVE of the Reddit woman’s parents. Who boycotts their kid’s wedding over something as piddling as not asking permission and then demands that she give birth in a hospital 3 hours away from her home so they can be involved?? (I mean, controlling people, obviously.) But how do they even think that’s going to work? Is she going to drive 3 hours for every prenatal visit? Move in with her parents six weeks before her due date to make sure she can get to the hospital on time? Wow.
Good on her for holding the line, though, and I hope her husband continues to back her up and doesn’t get suckered into leniency by weepy grandparents.
They did also request that she stay with them post birth (or pre, i forget which) so the mum could look after her. Because the people who orchestrated a whole family boycott of you and your partner are definitely the ones you want looking after you at your most vulnerable!
Okay but I hope they had talked about getting engaged a lot before then. Because it is more than a little fucked up to make public proposals like that, what he’s gonna do say no, look like a complete asshole?
This is always my reaction to public proposals. I understand that most non-messed-up couples do talk this stuff out beforehand, but the possibility of it being a total surprise gives me hives.
I bought my tote on Friday morning but just now noticed that my Paypal payment went to Manderley LLC and I’m torn between cackling and starting to cry? Very on brand for The Toast. <3
OT, need advice before Friday:
I was a girl scout, I went camping as a child in Canada, I remember waking up with a bear snuffing blueberries outside my tent. I remember hiking in PA with my mom and having to backtrack down the mountain as quickly and quietly as possible to get away from the bear.
I lived. My mom still let me go camping and hiking.
That said…
My kids go to their dad’s on Wed. at noon. Dad’s house backs up to a nature preserve of many, many acres (I helped make it legal!!). There is a black bear heading west towards the town on the other side of their dad’s house. Meaning the bear is probably going to be in their backyard (it was 2 miles away as of Saturday, nobody has said where it is this minute).
I’m ordinarily uncomfortable with the long vacation at dad’s. I didn’t need this to worry about too!!!!! What do I do, besides printing out the map, and a guide for “what to do if you see a bear”, and giving them all copies??
That’s all you need to do. Keep reminding yourself of all the hundreds of millions of times bear amble away from people. Put yourself in the cozy, uncluttered mind of the bear. “ooh, small loud things. I’ll go over here.”
Buy them each a Fox 40 whistle and put it on a string they can wear around their necks? My dad gave us all whistles for when we went camping. If they do spot the bear the noise can frighten the bear away from them as well as alert adults that they need help.
Would they listen to you if you asked them not to go into the woods alone? They might be at the age where listening to mom is uncool, but you could perhaps ask? If their dad has a dog can they keep the dog with them when they’re outside?
Check that they are the right level scared of bears? Like, I live in the UK, so I have no idea what the right level is, but I assume you’ve discussed it with them and ascertained that they are somewhere in a good place between “too terrified to even think about it and take reasonable precautions” and “totally blase and not the least little bit scared”?
Do they know where to look for more information about whether bears have been seen in the area or have moved on?
Aw. You have reminded me of the people I’ve met from not-North-America while camping around the world who BOGGLE at the prospect of camping in Canada. They get wide-eyed and ask, hushed, “Aren’t you afraid of… bears?!”
The scale of scaredness is definitely a thing they do not understand, often having only seen WHEN BEARS ATTACK!!! scare videos. I explain patiently that a) Canada is a big place and the bears are pretty spread out, b) If you make noise, don’t leave food out, and don’t try to go near them, they probably won’t go near you, and c) You’re more likely to encounter a nasty raccoon who just wants your marshmallows. I then undermine the message by adding that, in case of grizzly, all bets are off and you’re fucked.
Oh GAWD, that same trip (that same night, actually), a raccoon got into our dehydrated food stash on the other side of the cliff. 11 girls and we lost 3 days worth of food on a multi-day canoe trip.
We sucked at fishing. We had an onion. We also tried boiled cattail root (like cooked celery, but muddier tasting), and I think that was it. We went one day and were starving. Thank goodness at the end of the next day’s paddle we stopped on an island where non-scouts were camping, and they were leaving, so they gave us our food. Eggs never tasted so good!!!!!
That’s more or less what I needed to hear: what level of scared/cautious should we be at?
A lot of these responses have calmed me down significantly. Most of the bears we see around here are single males just wandering through. They are black bears.
I’m really sorry to freak you out again, but black bears are the ones who actively like to eat people. That said, they’re a lot more focused on eating berries and whatnot this time of year, which is much slower moving and easier prey than people.
If you want to make sure the bear doesn’t come anywhere near the house at all, buy and use some bear spray, which is literally just pressurized bear urine. Tricks the bear into thinking its wandered into a rival male’s territory. If your kids’ dad lives so near the woods, they might have some at camping/hiking or hunting/fishing supply stores.
The bear will almost certainly not be an issue, which you know, but just to back you up. They probably won’t even see it! But knowing how to react around bears is a useful thing for anyone who might come in contact with one. Key points to hit: Black bears will almost always avoid confrontation! Just about the only time a healthy black bear will threaten a person is if they are threatened first or if the person is in between a mama and her cubs. Making noise lets the bear know where they are so the bear can avoid them. If they see the bear, ramp up the noise making.
Yeah, if they’re anything like my kids they’re the loudest things for 40 acres, which will send a bear noping the fuck out of there.
Hey LaxMom!
Black bear / brown bear designations can be a little confusing, so if this is the same type of black bear that is in upstate NY and parts of NJ (I live 10 min from the AT in rural NJ), I can offer a little bit of advice. Our woods are TOTALLY swarming with these bears right now, and for the most part they pose very little dangers to humans.
They do not want to interact with humans, and are generally pretty fearful of human contact. I would just review with your kids that they should go inside if they spot the bear, never run from a bear, and never get between a mother bear and cubs. And obviously, DO NOT try to feed the bear, come close to the bear for photos, etc.
Hopefully it is comforting that I’ve lived my entire life in close proximity to these black bears and have never had a negative or aggressive interaction with one. I’ve had dogs that chase the bears up the tree, and the bears always just wait it out. We have a bear that steals our trash about once a month, but has never come near us or the house while we’re home or outside.
Hope this provides a little peace of mind.
Yep, it does, a lot. Thanks!
Yesterday was our organist’s last Sunday (the entire congregation stayed for the postlude, which was *phenomenally good*), and it didn’t really hit me until I got home that he won’t be there next Sunday. I expect that it wont really hit me until next Monday that there will be no more Toast, either.
When the Cavs won the championship, I really thought 2016 was turning itself around.
OT but a colleague of mine is collecting data on how the experience of freelancing differs for people based on demographic factors (race, gender, and sexuality). I’m really interested in seeing the results of this once she has a larger data set, so if any of you freelance and have 5 minutes, here’s the survey: https://bombchelle.typeform.com/to/YALVRn
Nicole! You’re doing all the international orders yourself! You are amazeballs and I lurve you <3
I will fangirl over the fact that the tote have been touched by one of the Toast Godesses herself.
OH MY GOSH the supreme court decision this morning! I haven’t refreshed the page so maybe other commenters got to it, but i Just saw a great great great pullquote from the NPR twitter feed:
(“Nationwide, childbirth is 14 times more likely to result in death … but Texas law allows a midwife to oversee childbirth in the patient’s own home. Colonoscopy, a procedure that typically takes place outside a hospital (or surgical center) setting, has a mortality rate 10 times higher than abortion.” – From the Supreme Court’s majority opinion on Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt)
(ahaha, now i see that OF COURSE other people have cheered. but this is still a really, really good argument to use against future similar laws)
I never mentioned Bill Cunningham. I really liked that film. I’m not particularly interested in fashion, but he was one of those people that I’m glad he existed. Evidence that just doing your weird shit doggedly, perserveredly, is its own reward. I hope his heaven is a street full of stylish people.
Evidence that just doing your weird shit doggedly, perserveredly, is its own reward.
Exactly this.
PLANNED PARENTHOOD, YA’LL. (Totally have walked into the middle of an abortion debate this morning and I have NO REGRETS about it.) Also, for some reason, I thought Stephen Breyer was dead or retired. I need to keep up with the court.
Omg Sansa. I desperately wish she had her own tumblr b/c I will die of despair without Sansa pictures. Not really but sort of really.
Maybe you were thinking of Stevens?
Toasties! My show went amazingly well! People really loved a dumb comedy about lesbians in space!
I was there! It was great! I want to call out the robot duet as being especially awesome, but I keep coming up with other parts that were also my favorite.
Thank you! My partner and I really enjoy the Robot act and it’s always nice that other people do as well. We get booked for that one a lot.
He upgraded the lights before we performed it at the Burlesque Hall of Fame weekend at the beginning of June, so now he knows a non-zero amount about programming micro-controllers and shit.
I was there too and it was awesome! I even got a poster!
The heavy metal part was everything I didn’t know I needed.
That poster is one of the best things I’ve ever created. I’m glad you bought one!
I was there! And screamed and whooped and loved it. I loved the queens’ dance off. I loved the robot duet. I loved Sara’s becoming one with time and space. The costumes were the bomb (I did costuming in college, so I extra appreciate it when they are well done). In short, I want to see it every night.
Whaaat another excellent Supreme Court ruling!
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in a 6-2 vote that domestic abusers convicted of misdemeanors can be barred from owning weapons.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, concludes that misdemeanor assault convictions for domestic violence are sufficient to invoke a federal ban on firearms possession.
I mean, you’d hope this would be a common sense thing, but it’s really good to see it affirmed by the SCOTUS in a 6-2 ruling.
YESSS.
This will save lives.
I never thought I would see {Sotomayor, Thomas} comprise one side of a ruling.
Right? That was definitely weird. She’s a partial dissent, while Thomas is full dissent, and I haven’t had an opportunity to sit down and read the ruling itself (just the NPR announcement tweets), but I plan to! For now, I’m just glad that they said “dude, yeah, this thing the laws say is illegal? it’s totally, validly illegal” and I hope that it encourages more states to put similar laws on the books.
Toasts, do you have advice and/or is there a good Ask a Manager post about the following?
I had a second-round job interview a week and a half ago, at which I was told I could expect to hear by the end of last week. I have not heard. I assume this means I didn’t get it (bleh) but is it appropriate to send an email checking in or reiterating my interest in the position? If so, how long do I wait?
Thanks for any wisdom or links you can provide!
Yes! If they said “you’ll hear from us by the end of the week”, it’s appropriate to send a single email to the person leading the hiring process (hiring manager or HR) to say “Good afternoon, I wanted to check in to see how the process is going.” or whatever, but if you don’t hear back, that’s that, let it be.
Thank you! Yes, I’d never send more than one, agree completely. That gets into crazypants territory.
Well, you and I realize this, but the number of people who have written into AAM recently who don’t realize it…
Hell, the number of people who call my place of business multiple times to ask if we received their application. When the application clearly says “please do not contact us, we will contact you; if you do contact us, we will strike you from the candidate list for not following directions (even if you’re otherwise a stellar candidate!)”
Yes, it is totally appropriate to check in! I probably wouldn’t email today — this may be an example of my own overthinking rather than objective advice, but I’d feel like it was overeager/hounding to follow up on the first day after their timeline ran out. But I’d email sometime this week for sure. Here’s an AAM piece with suggested wording. Good luck!
Thank you so much! This is very helpful.
I also think it’s too early to assume anything, because hiring processes can get delayed for any number of reasons, and timelines are usually too optimistic. So, yes, I’d follow up on Wednesday or Thursday reiterating your interest and asking if there is an update on the hiring process. And in the meantime, pretend it never happened and keep applying for jobs. Good luck! Hope you get the news you want 🙂
Many thanks!! I am torn between still having a little bit of hope and wanting to shut that shit down so as not to be EVEN MORE CRUSHED when it doesn’t work out. (And for magical thinking reasons – “If I have even the tiniest shred of hope, I am jinxing all possibilities of it working out the way I want” because that’s clearly how the world works.)
I will force myself to be patient and follow up Weds. or Thurs. as advised.
Hahaha, no, I understand completely! I too make it a point never to let the universe know I want anything. It’s the like Reverse Secret. 🙂
YES EXACTLY. Granted that hasn’t exactly worked out for me lately, but probably just because I haven’t been sufficiently thorough about eradicating microscopic traces of WANTING and HOPEFULNESS from my consciousness.
Me, toooo
And then sometimes when I’m like “I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want to get too excited if it doesn’t happen” and then GUESS WHAT I’m encouraged to get excited and it falls through and confirmation fucking bias right there.
I’m going into week 4 of the same situation – it sucks!! I sent a follow up email in the same vein as the ones suggested above but got nothing back. They told me they’d contact me within a week after the second interview. Even if I haven’t got it (and i doubt I have at this point) it’s pretty fucking rude not to let people know and not to respond to a polite follow up email. There were only three other candidates at second round, so it’s not exactly time consuming either.
Sorry, I’m feeling bitter and frustrated about it! But sending you my sympathy because the waiting and not-hearing is really hard and sucky. I hope you get it! <3
http://m.kcra.com/news/protest-at-state-capitol-t…
The overal story – please watch the whole thing this is scary shit.
http://m.kcra.com/news/kcra-reporter-caught-in-pr…
Anarchists protesting new-nazis attack a reporter, Mike Leury who is a local institution.
I work about two blocks from where this happened. militant vigilantism makes everyone less safe. I plan that if the new-nazis hold another rally I will spit on the ground in front of them but also put my body between them and attacks because the rest of us who believe in non- violence have to come out to show the violent what effective social action looks like. Love changes minds, violence doesn’t.
OT, but I need somebody to talk me down right now. I am out of the office right now but for the past two weeks I have been working on a really frustrating project– it kind of got dumped into my lap while it was already in progress, and no one has really been communicating about what needs to be done or who is in charge of what or anything. I am making progress on what I can, but some parts are on hold until I can get cooperation from other people. This kind of hit a boiling point last week, but after a lot of phone calls I thought I had it mostly sorted out.
But today I get a call from my supervisor saying that when I get back to the office we will meet on this issue and there will be a possibility of disciplinary action. I am not sure why that would be the case, and she didn’t really answer any questions while I was on the phone. The deadline for this project is still a few weeks away and I cannot imagine how I’ve done anything actionable here.
I would just think it was overblown, but I’ve had disciplinary action at work before. I am a bad adhd case, very disorganized, and have been reprimanded in the past for being late to meetings and not having my paperwork in order. I worry that no matter what the actual case is, it will look like I am just being disorganized again. I also worry that with multiple incidents in my record there is a real possibility that I could lose my job.
I need to call some of the other folks that are involved in this and get a better idea of wtf is going on, but first I need to stop hyperventilating.
What do you need to complete this project? Make a list. Tell your supervisors what you need. Stick to the facts. Cast no blame on anyone. Describe the concrete needs you have.
1. I need to know your expectations for the outcome of this project.
2. What is the timeframe?
3. What is my budget?
4. How often can we meet so I can tell you my progress and get feedback?
Thanks both of you. I am putting this list together now. I talked to a colleague who says he can vouch that I am doing as much as I can. We’ll see how it goes.
Yes, I agree with Tarrogoner. I have the same issues and lists are your friend. Also send emails about everything and never delete them (ADHD can make hoarding a defensive mechanism). Send emails. To summarize phone calls. It will help.
– I’d remembered Hanssen’s story generally, but there are a lot of details that I was unfamiliar with. I knew that he went to the same church as then-FBI director Louis Freeh, but I didn’t know about the Opus Dei membership (or that Dan Brown had mentioned this in The da Vinci Code), or the whole exhibition thing; I keep thinking of that line from Repo Man: “Lots of guys like to watch their buddies fuck. I know I do!”
– The mean-looking dummy from Whitey Bulger’s auction is called BOB, and I think he may have been in the Deadpool movie, too?
Re the wholesale food business article. Tell the client that you’re sorry, but your Admin department charges $200(pick a number) per hour for research and you expect this to take 100 hours (pick a number) to complete. If they say yes, hire an intern to do the research. Or tell them, “are you out of your fucking mind? ”
O/t I’m travelling in an East coast US city sipping coffee outside at a Starbucks conveniently located next to a financial institution watching all the cute guys in suits pop over for coffee. Background-there are zero cute guys in suits where I live. If I sit outside a Starbucks at home I will see roosters and homeless people.
Thinking about moving.
“However, at Hanssen’s suggestion, and without the knowledge of his wife, a friend named Jack Horschauer, a retired Army officer, would sometimes watch the Hanssens having sex through a bedroom window. Hanssen then began to secretly videotape his sexual encounters and shared the videotapes with Horschauer. Later, he hid a video camera in the bedroom that was connected via closed-circuit television line so that his friend could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom. He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple.”
That’s way more horrifying than espionage, to me 😐
Holy hell, Toasts, Jez interviewed a lady cyclist who won an absurdly long race that had previously only been won by dudes:
http://jezebel.com/interview-with-lael-wilcox-the…
Lael Wilcox. 4,000+ miles on a bike. Damn.
Thanks for posting this, I hadn’t heard about it. Made my day!
She came through Portland before leaving on the race and a few of my friends got to hang out with her. JEALOUS.
lololol at Iceland beating England.
It made my whole day! I was giddy at the office.
Hi Toast Collective. There is a man in a far-away state harassing me about an interview I did with the local radio station. It was about bear safety and bear spray (I am an instructor). He called my voice mail. I deleted it. He called our HQ office and badgered a public affairs officer. She called me and I told her that we follow all appropriate policy. She told him what I said. I thought it was the end but no. He called my office to talk to someone different about how something else I said was wrong. He is a self-professed bear expert. He is only targeting me, and not the other 2 men who said the exact things I did. This has gone on for a week. I’m now afraid. He hasn’t contacted me directly, just tried to make other people make me call him.
It’s ok to ignore him, right? He just wants attention and to be acknowledged as The Expert, yes? Why can’t he leave me alone!
I remember when you talked about him last week! My goodness.
Depending on the content of what he’s saying (and the fact that you’re not afraid), you will probably want to start saving his voicemails or emails, basically keep a record of the contact for future evidence that you will hopefully not need. Ignore him otherwise!
I’m really sorry you have had to deal with this jerk.
Thank you. He isn’t contacting me directly…yet. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But yes. Will be saving anything from him.
It feels better sharing.
Mail him a bear holding a phone with your number on speed dial.
Who’s the expert now, jerk?
But yes, i’d ignore. If you engage with him he’ll have this whole response cycle that starts up. I’ve worked with a lot of cantankerous people and generally this type is harmless. Not always, certainly record anything threatening, but this particular type they bluster on, but they don’t actually want to be showed up, so they’re usually going to avoid anything that commits them to the truth. I dealt with a lot of people really into Agenda 21 and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about that. Just say something like, thank you for your comments. Our official position remains x, y, z.
ha! Yes. I think he just wants to share his infinite knowledge with me. I just don’t have time for him. And I’ve gotten weirded out by his persistence.
Our public affairs officer said she would talk with him if I needed her too.
Just for fun, I went back to the VERY FIRST PAGE of the Toast (it’s currently http://the-toast.net/page/370/ – I’m guessing it’ll be at 380 by the end?). And I read Kate Harding’s piece about shutting down her blog, which was the very first piece that ran after the initial introduction, and it seemed a strange sort of synchronicity, especially the last few sentences:
“Do not even bother to blog unless you find it fun or someone is paying you for it. Those are the only two good reasons to do it. The second thing I tell them is: Probably no one will pay you for it. Fun is actually the only good reason to blog.
And when it’s no longer fun, you are allowed to stop.”
It is too, too late to read this, but I wish to howl into the void.
1. Country’s leadership = omnishambolic cake and arse party.
2. Opposition = self-devouring flannels.
3. Economy = tanked.
4. Society = xenophobic and racist dickheads feeling validated and vocal.
(Side note: appreciate HM is 90 but she appears fairly sprightly so could we ask her to take over for a bit and knock some heads together? Maybe threaten delicate male politician parts with a corgi?)
5. Toast = goodbye in less than a week.
6. Dinner = Sainsbury’s have advocated putting hummus on my pizza.
I mean, really?
Hugs. I am increasingly worried about Sainsbury’s “little twists.” They want me to put desiccated coconut in my chilli – I mean, really? Suspect small child with grabby hands in charge of new recipes department.
I *am* that kind of librarian and I love data munging! If you can provide me with a data dump I can probably wrangle something using OpenRefine or other means. Find me on twitter @archivalistic