Wednesday Link Roundup!

by Nicole Cliffe · October 23, 2013

Everyone dies in the swimming segment of the triathlon, even if there are no sharks.

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There’s this unfortunately too common thing that happens when a trans woman tells a cis woman about an experience of sexism and the response is, “Welcome to being a woman!” – Jos Truitt

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Mike Dang thought that smokers smoke seven cigarettes a day, which is amazing. Also, you can get some free patches.

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Cycling can be terrifying, even if you are not trying to race downhill.

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WHAT. Mike Dang, things are happening to you all over the place!

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A boring Canadian political scandal I’m really into.

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We weren’t done with the lesbian haunted house in Toronto yet. A report!

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Elliott Smith, ten years later.

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Cool thing on Kurt Cobain!

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Legal pot: even more popular with the American people than legal sodomy.  And when you combine them, we’re talking Reagan numbers!

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Nicole Cliffe

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65 Comments

  1. EPWordsnatcher +6

    “In the seven-year span, 44 people died during or immediately upon exiting the swim leg. “

    Holy shit.

    2. Alli525 +2

      One of my best friends from college is doing an Iron Man-distance triathlon this weekend and my face just froze up in horror. Oh and also? He’s doing it with a Cystic Fibrosis fundraiser group and HE HAS CF. So, you know, breathing not exactly his best skill. HORROR I SAY.

      (Shameless plug: if anyone wants to donate, he’s at about 75% of his goal… http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/DougOrnoff/…

      1. EPWordsnatcher +4

        Reading that made MY face freeze up in horror. Tell him to TAKE IT EASY, PLEASE. (I mean, as easy as you can take it in a tri.)

    3. twobluebikes +2

      Water is a dangerous business, you guys. Don’t ever take it for granted.

      /end serious talk

  2. icebergmama +6

    Mike Dang! He is the sweetest. I’ve worked with two elderly dudes that used work computers for porn (as in were not quick enough to hide windows when other people walked in), but not everyone else’s computers, jesus christ! I suppose that’s actually smarter because it’s harder to prove who did it.

    1. combledore +60

      Is it weird that I have a bit of a crush on Mike Dang, just based on his writing at The Billfold? It is, isn’t it.

      3. anachronistique +10

        The number of thumbs up you are getting indicates that we’re all weird along with you.

    2. chnellociraptor +16

      I can’t imagine a place I would less like to be aroused than my office, in the middle of a workday. Like… no. What? No.

  3. halleloujah +15

    Ugh, yesterday was NOT A GOOD DAY for trans* inclusive feminism (i.e. actual feminism YES I SAID IT) It is incumbent on us cis folks to address & take down the TERF-y bullshit, obvs, but god it’s hard to even know where to start sometimes.

    1. NicoleCliffe +16

      We are definitely not linking to The Article, but we are strenuously not amused by The Article.

      2. SarcasticFringehead +29

        “We all have a shared experience of womanhood”

        Idk, my experience of womanhood has very little to do with being an exclusionary asshole and harassing people who call me on it, so I’m going to have to disagree there.

  5. BourneApprox +8

    It wasn’t on *my* computer, but I totally caught one of our grad quickly closing watching porn on his laptop when I came to talk to him about a project. 5 minutes later he came into my office, head hung in shame, saying that “He was very very sorry and he has made some bad decisions and apparently he has terrible judgement which he is ashamed of.” I should be grossed out, but I found his utter embarrassment and shame at breaking office protocol to be adorable. It was like being angry at a puppy who had just pooped on the carpet.

    1. MalloryOrtberg +55

      This was your first mistake. Pitying a Man only encourages him to further approximate human behavior in order to escape correction.

      1. BourneApprox +24

        If it makes you feel better, he is currently enslaved to perform manual labor in a sunless cavern a hundred feet below the earth’s surface. No, seriously, he is. Grad school is awesome!

    2. bgprincipessa +1

      Didn’t that just make it more awkward? I would have rather never spoken of it again.

      1. BourneApprox +5

        Oh, that is 100% what happened. I said “Well that’s nice but I SAW NOTHING.” And we’ve both acted like it never happened.

        1. shahea +23

          At least he had the balls to stand up and come in and say something. We fired a guy we caught watching porn at work. (The sheer number of just-out-of-college guys who watch porn at work on a work machine just stuns me. Like, I know at that age we were all varying degrees of tremendously stupid, but I knew at that age that I should not ever watch porn on a work computer. At all. Ever. It was a given, like gravity.)

          3. BourneApprox +4

            There was an IT guy at a friend’s university who got caught watching massive amounts of porn in the laboratory. On lab computers. And using lab computer storage space to store terabytes of it. And he only got reprimanded when a female undergraduate intern got made uncomfortable by it. And they STILL DIDN’T FIRE HIM, because the experiment neeeeeeeeeeeded his skills. Until he kept doing it and they were finally forced to do so.

            See also: my project’s refusal to fire a factory production manager who is a serial sexual harasser.

          4. shahea +16

            and again with my blind rage. I just…. argh. Like, NO ONE is that important. There is almost no one at all in the world whose skills are so special and so rare that you can’t find someone else to fucking do the job. It’s not like the people in these jobs are literally superheros. You do not have Tony Stark working in your lab and the lab is not attacked on a semi-regular basis, making a super-genius with a metal flying suit and a propensity for delivering beatdowns a particularly necessary thing.

          5. BourneApprox +13

            Fo’ realsies. Academic science has this belief that because “we’re all so damn smart” (sigh) we don’t have to play by the rules of “normal” human beings. “But this research is so much more IMPORTANT than guaranteeing our employees’ basic needs for happiness and security!” The freedom and informality is great, but I often find myself wishing I worked a 9-5 job in a place with an HR department.

          6. MilesofMountain +14

            I’m a biologist and was working with a colleague on a fish spawning report. We have to, you know, describe what the fish were doing. Then I made a joke about the report being “fish porn” and immediately the work chat window came up with a message that “This chat has been flagged important”. I freaked out that there was some sort of program that had picked up the word “porn” and I was going to be fired until my colleague realized she had hit the “flag important” button. So, bascially, yeah, I can’t imagine ACTUALLY watching it at work.

          7. msjinxie +11

            Ok CLEARLY watching porn at work is a terrible, stupid, and also pointless idea (because really what’s the POINT?) but what I’m wondering is: don’t these kids have smart phones? If it’s THAT important that they have a porn break at 3pm can’t they watch it on their phone?

          8. shahea +5

            I know, right? Is it really more obvious to be watching it on your phone than the giant monitor that everyone can see if they pass your desk?

          9. deleted9457019 +8

            “Where are you thinking of going for porn break today?”

            “Oh, I dunno. Maybe Porn Chipotle for a Pulled Pork Porn Burrito.”

    3. BourneApprox +3

      (Oh, god, editing disaster there. That should be “grad students quickly closing porn that he was watching.”)

    4. karenbowness +5

      middle-aged dude who used to work on my floor (we sublet, so for a different company) used to watch porn WITH THE SOUND ON in his office, door open, glass wall, 3pm on a tuesday. it would play for upwards of 30 seconds, full volume, before he either muted it or turned it off. Not Cool, but it started to sort of be an office joke.

  6. meetapossum +2

    I am going to send that cycling article to my friend in Colorado and say, “See? THIS is why I’m terrified to ride your super light speedy bikes and made you rent a B-Bike with me.”

    (Actually, he was super nice about the whole thing. But I always feel like such a wimp when I am wobbling all over the place on his bikes. I swear I know how to ride one!)

  7. tekkah +13

    I have such weird and complicated feelings whenever it comes time to talk about Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain and the myriad other artists who died young because they took their own lives, and I know it’s because I’ve been personally touched by suicides far too many times in my life than I feel is normal, and it’s all about my own issues and it makes me feel odd. I feel like this can’t be all that uncommon, suicide certainly (and sadly) isn’t. Does anyone else here kind of have the same feelings?

    Like I love both Smith’s and Cobain’s music and am saddened that they were not able to find the help they needed to work through their problems and chose to take their lives, but I am also pretty unsettled by the way that we as a society tend to raise them up and glorify this pained artist who was too… something I can’t put my finger on… for this world. I think the crux of it is that the seriousness of depression and suicide takes a backseat to the celebrity and sensationalism of the lives of these people. That’s probably it.

    1. shahea +9

      I would agree with you. There’s almost a cult that is raised up in the wake of the suicide of a celebrity, particularly a musician. It’s a reaction that doesn’t happen when someone’s aunt from Peoria, IL commits suicide typically, so it seems like an artificial construct to make it okay to talk about the suicide of a celebrity while freeing people from having to think about the real, hard truths that go along with it.

    2. meetapossum +1

      I was never much into Nirvana or Kurt Cobain, but Elliott Smith was one of those artists who changed the way I listened to music. I must have been 12 or 13 when Good Will Hunting came out. I really only listened to teen pop music, and then suddenly I got the soundtrack and was totally struck by Smith’s music. His death was one of those few celebrity deaths that made me genuinely upset. But I don’t remember noticing his death being glorified to the extent Cobain was/has been. Of course, I’m only speaking for myself, but it just made me so, so sad.

    3. vmartinipie +7

      I definitely feel this, with the addition of David Foster Wallace, who was super-idolized by a lot of the (young, white, privileged) dudes in my college writing program, sometimes to an uncomfortable degree if you started them going. I sometimes tend to think these kinds of idolizations are felt mostly by people who have never been affected by suicide, because you learn it is not romantic at all.

  8. chnellociraptor +4

    [FELLOW CANADIAN PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT] Nicole, are you following Kady O’Malley on Twitter? Please do so. Her coverage of the Mike Duffy biznazz is comprehensive and hilarious, and she is my journalist girl crush.

    2. msjinxie +10

      Also it’s especially funny to me that I’m looking at that on my work computer in light of the conversation I participated in above about porn viewing at work. Ha ha whoops!

    3. msjinxie +4

      And I seriously just went to buy the calendar but I think Buzzfeed broke their website 🙁

    4. shahea +9

      I’m sorry, I’d love to comment but I may have just figured out WHY just-out-of-college guys get caught looking at porn at work.

      *fans self*

  11. karenb

    middle-aged dude who used to work on my floor (we sublet, so for a different company) used to watch porn WITH THE SOUND ON in his office, door open, glass wall, 3pm on a tuesday. it would play for upwards of 30 seconds, full volume, before he either muted it or turned it off. Not Cool, but it started to sort of be an office joke.