1. In Colorado the lowest point is three thousand, three hundred and seventeen feet above sea level, where the Arikaree River finds Kansas, and the average elevation is just shy of seven thousand. Spanning from the Great Plains to the Colorado Plateau to the Rocky Mountains, Colorado is a floating quadrangle in the mountain west.

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  2. The author apologises that these alternate plot lines are almost entirely based on the movie versions of these books, watched feverishly during an 18 hour flight over approx. 16 airplane desserts. The author's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

    Mary, The Secret Garden

    After an adolescence of playing Dickon and Colin off of one another (in exchange for pony rides and handmaid gowns, respectively) Mary and Dickon finally…

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  3. Editor’s Note: The following is an email discussion that took place between Sarah and Nicole on October 20. Nicole Cliffe saw our tweets about some of the articles discussed below and the challenges of writing about Asian Americans, and asked us to write up our conversation for The Toast.  Nicole: Hey, Sarah. Before we get into Jack Linshi's Time article (“The Real Problem When It Comes to Diversity and Asian-Americans”) and Julianne Hing's response…

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  4. LUKE

    What can I say about the emotions of my wedding ceremony that won't sound like a three-ring circus of cliches? I got married inside Boston's City Hall, one of the most hideous structures conceived in modern history, an inverted bone-gray pyramid straight out of 1984. My cousin was there as a witness and three of my husband's friends. At least the Justice of Peace's office was tastefully decorated:

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  5. "It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford Slowin' down to take a look at me" She sounds like a lot of fun! She drives her own car and she stops to look at men in the street. I'll bet she's part owner of the local bar, too, and is a very sexually frank person. "Wooo hooo witchy woman, see how high she flies Woo hoo witchy woman she got the moon in her…

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  6. The attack in Ottawa yesterday. Love to all our Canadians. Here's what we currently know about the shooter.

    *

    Buzzfeed did a great look at the history and present of "painting down" stuntpeople in the wake of the incident on the set of Gotham (which I am watching the crap out of, btw):

    In 1971, stuntperson Marvin Walters led the charge when it was discovered that a…

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  7. There are a handful of truly historic meetings in the theatre world. When Rodgers met Hammerstein. When Lunt met Fontanne. When legendary American playwright Eugene O’Neill met The Bottle.

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  8. Toastrons in the Bay Area and surrounding environs! What are you doing tonight? Do you want to come to the Booksmith in San Francisco at 7:30 and listen to The Toast's own Alexis Coe and self discuss lesbian murderesses?

    Of course you do. [Miranda Priestly voice] Everyone wants that.

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  9. Previously: a Decemberists album where nobody gets murdered. "Everything In This Song Is Spelled According To Modern Convention" "A Girl Who Is Alive And Not Anne Frank Plays A Piano Without Any Semen On It" "No One Visited The Penny Arcade That Day" "The Characters On This Old-Timey Postcard Have Not Come To Life To Comfort You About Your Parents' Divorce" "The Boy With One Head On His Body" "I Have Pictures Of My…

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  10. The summer after my freshman year in high school, I took my first real job. Not the first time I’d be working really hard or getting paid, but the first time I needed paperwork. I was 14, uncomfortable with every inch of my body, shy. 

    Minimum wage was $4.15 an hour, at least in Alaska, but without expenses like a car or kids or booze habit, the money added up nicely.

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  11. A few nights ago, while having drinks with friends at our rural Iowa bar, I suddenly smelled hot lavender wax. It took me a moment to realize that it was a synesthetic reaction to hearing the opening groove of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’.” In the summer of 2003, that song played every hour in the soundtrack loop of the spa where I worked in New York City. Whenever Smokey came on, I would begin

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  12. Previously in this series: Alexandre Dumas. You are a dog who has murdered just everyone. You are a man. You are a man. You are a woman, and no good to anybody. You were weak once, long ago, in a land where the sun shone. Now everyone you know is dead. A man once taught you how to love by beating you gently with his calloused hands. Now he is dead.

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  13. Rebecca Carroll on why she's quitting media:

    Since that first media job as a TV producer, I have held editor positions at a range of startups and other online outlets. I started to recognize a pattern after one job when a white coworker openly dismissed an idea to write about a black artist on the rise: “Nobody even knows who she is.” Actually, I said, a lot of people know who she

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  14. Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via advice@the-toast.net, with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. I am a woman in my mid-30s who has never had any romantic life to speak of, though not for lack of trying.  It seems that I am intrinsically unattractive to the opposite sex, though my (same-sex) friends assure me I am "cute."

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  15. "It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man." Well, if he's not worried, I'm not going to worry either. "But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of…

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