Chernobyl’s “Elephant’s Foot“: why is it not being exploited as a nuke monster in a video game yet?
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The inimitable Jane Marie tests out 14 matte lipsticks. The only slideshow worth clicking through.
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Heather Havrilesky’s celebration of Nora Ephron is finally available online (I mean, it’s not like it’s been a year, or anything, but seeing it finally pop up in bold on Bookforum was pretty great.)
After her death from acute myeloid leukemia in 2012, many obituaries seemed to skim over Ephron’s contributions to the evolving voice of modern journalism and filmmaking and speed right to her celebrity friendships, her famous failed marriage to Bernstein, or the oft-repeated fact that she got her hair blown out by a hairdresser twice a week. In the New York Times, the same pages where Norman Mailer “loomed over American letters” and Gore Vidal was “versatile” and “an Augustan figure,” Ephron was merely “an essayist and a humorist” who went on to become a wildly successful filmmaker, one who had lots of friends and just adored pie.
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The world’s most perfect person, Ursula K. Le Guin, interviewed by the Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
Against whom were you measuring your work?
LE GUIN
Writers I’d have liked to be as good as, although not like?
INTERVIEWER
Right.
LE GUIN
Charles Dickens. Jane Austen. And then, when I finally learned to read her, Virginia Woolf. Shoot for the top, always. You know you’ll never make it, but what’s the fun if you don’t shoot for the top?
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If you were intrigued by Nicole Froio’s report from the favelas, don’t miss “Generation June.”
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New installment of bitches gotta eat!
401k. okay, so i just got paid. and usually i toss my paystub in the trash without even looking at the shit so i can get on asos and buy some more shit i’ll never wear, but this time i looked at it. and, so far this year, i have contributed $1200 to my retirement fund. well, who the fuck knew?! that’s amazing. especially if i want to comfortably retire in a one-room tin house in liberia. HOLY FUCK WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WHEN I’M OLD. jesus, i better die while i can still afford an apartment for someone to find my hot, young corpse in. i don’t know how long i’ve been contributing to this shit because i can’t even tell you what i had for dinner yesterday, but let’s say i’ve been setting aside $1200/yr for six years. that is $7200. i can’t even buy a t-shirt from the jay-z collection at barney’s with that shit.
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When you get fired for “believing that African-Americans and Latinos are able to sit in a clinic waiting room without starting a race war.”
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Collectors Weekly has a FASCinating piece on the history of mannequins:
Though wax allowed 19th-century sculptors to create highly detailed bodies and facial features, the switch from gas lamps to electric lights exposed the material’s weakness: Under the intense heat of store window light bulbs, wax mannequins began to melt. One window trimmer in the late 19th century recounted the construction of a lovely dinner party scene, centered around a wax hostess raising her wineglass in a toast. When he returned the following morning, a crowd had gathered around the window, staring at the now-deflated hostess whose melted torso was slumped over the table as if she were drunk.
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Why, here’s the Heritage Foundation’s warning about Nelson Mandela…from 1990.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Jane Marie’s baby! Yaaaay!
“…it didn’t come off on my baby, just a sake glass.”
What would we do without her, seriously. (This is the only lipstick slideshow that has ever cracked me up.)
Along with (hopefully?) most people in their mid-20s, that Bitches Gotta Eat entry speaks to my very soul. I need to get my goddamned shit together, but don’t we all. Dinner plans this week: potatoes. (There is nothing wrong with potatoes, she repeats to herself emphatically.)
Yeah like every day I’m like, “You gotta stop eating so many potatoes, girl.”
You can do so many things with potatoes. Never feel bad about a week of potatoes.
Mash ’em, boil ’em, put ’em in a stew…
And I mean, I know mid-20s is a bit early for despair, but I just look around at people I know, and at how we all have to pay off our student loans before we can even think of buying a house (if that’s what we want to do) or having kids (ditto) or contributing to our 401(k)s in any meaningful way, and it’s just like…way to fuck it up, capitalism.
My student loans will stay with me forever–or at least for the next 24 years under my current plan (for one of them, at least). Good thing I don’t want kids? (I want a house, though. Capitalism, you are the fucking worst.)
Have you looked into applying to IBR? There’s no income cap and it’s super helpful if you have federal loans. That way you can put the difference between that and what you pay now into savings and it might help you feel better. Even if it isn’t enough to save for a house you can start an emergency fund or open a roth IRA. So many people who are qualified don’t sign up and it’s really a super useful program.
I just renewed mine! If your income is pretty close to what you said on your taxes last year, you can sign up online in a couple minutes. It’s helped immensely.
Even if it’s different you can still join now, you just need to mail in a little extra paperwork (My boyfriend went from minimum wage part time to $15 an hour full time and he just had to send in one or two forms and now he’s set). It’s really a great program and makes me glad I’m the kind of loser who read the student loan exit counseling package that everyone has to complete.
Yep! That’s what I had to do last year. Also, they will defer your loan payments until the paperwork goes through. Definitely worth checking out!
Anyone played Metro: The Last Light? Cuz if that Elephant foot thing is in any game, it’s probably that one.
Ee, replied below at the same time (I think STALKER’s the winner here!), but is Metro: Last Light any good?
That OCC Lip Tar stuff is UNREAL. I have NSFW and it stayed on through an eight-hour shift at work including lunch. One of my patrons told me his eyes were failing but he loved my lipstick. SOLD.
Re the Elephant’s Foot, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games (which actually take place in Chernobyl, or at least a videogamey area heavily based on it) are waaaaaay ahead of you.
Also, that article is terrifying and fascinating.
I WAS JUST COMING DOWN HERE TO SAY THAT
were you
Oooh are these related at all to the book by the Strugatsky brothers?
Yes, but very vaguely. I think the evolution is Roadside Picnic -> Tarkovsky’s Stalker -> S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videogame series, with very loose connections between the three, particularly given that the book and film actually occurred before before the Chernobyl disaster. The game takes the parallel between the whole “Zone” part of the book/film and the “zone of alienation” around Chernobyl and runs with it. Here’s an interesting essay about how the versions thematically relate to one another.
Ahh thanks for this! I’ve never played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games but have heard mention and wondered how much/if at all they related to Roadside Picnic. Having my very own – as if this cropped up on the website I read every day anyway – moment.
Stalker was pre-Chernobyl but many of the “special effects” in the film were produced by an up-river chemical spill from a soviet industrial plant. A lot of people on that shoot ended up getting fatally sick (though there’s a good case to be made that Tarkovsky and his wife were murdered via typically unsubtly Soviet gov’t. poisoning).
Whoa. I did not know that.
I’m not sure whether I am pleased or displeased to learn I am an adult in basically every way* but having money. A lot of days I think I’d prefer having money to tools, medicine, and my grocery shopping merit badge.
*I had a real suitcase and got rid of it. They are good for a very specific sort of travelling and that is not the sort of travelling I do.
Whenever y’all post about UKL I remember I have Come To The Right Place.
Yes, Ursula LeGuin is perfect . Rereading Always Coming Home and it is just as good as I remembered it was.
I cannot find a copy of that anywhere! My ex had it and I really want to read it again but can’t find it at all in the UK. I’d even buy it in an actual book and not an ebook, I want to read it so much.
*frantically checks her papers on her rental insurance*
But, really. LEGUIN.
I dunno – I think this is a better summation of Ephron’s career: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/06/28/nor… (And no, it’s not an attack, despite the title.)
Oh, and Le Guin forever.
Re: wax mannequins, there is a book called Waxworks by Michelle Bloom that anybody who likes to know about the historical wax figure and the whole corpse-like-melting-pliable-yielding-flesh-replica symbolic business may like to read.
(I don’t recommend it for interpretation or analysis as I remember all that part of it being very bad, but six years removed from the reading for my antique sex robots thesis I can no longer really remember why. But everything in it that is a fact is very interesting.)
Have you considered pitching and writing an article on antique sex robots for the toast? Because I would like to read more on this please.
Seconding this. “Antique sex robots” caught me eye, too.
oh, have I. What has held me back is the same thing that made me take a billion years to go back and finish my shame-degree, complete and total lack of focus. Antique sex robots is a joke, mostly, but not really inaccurate. half of what I wrote about was Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s L’Eve Future and I had a long footnote on Lester del Rey’s Helen O’Loy and all this stuff about 18th century automata and I didn’t talk about Metropolis or anything like that even though you can tell, reading it, that I wanted to. Actually what I really wanted to write about was Coppelia and E.T.A. Hoffmann in general. not that there is anything wrong with all that unless you are a classicist who is supposed to be writing about Hesiod. which, how shall I say this, I was. It was all very embarrassing.
but yes, if I ever do figure out how to pick a facet of a subject and stick to it, I will pitch it like crazy.
That sounds really cool. I’ve recently become very interested in E.T.A. Hoffmann (though honestly I’m coming at it from the perspective of familiarity with the Offenbach opera very, very loosely based on his works (Have you seen it? The whole Olympia episode is very, very different.)). I haven’t had enough time lately to start reading much of his work, but I read Mlle. de Scuderi and it was delightful. Goldsmiths! Murder! Old ladies solving mysteries!
As the semester has not yet drawn to a close, Pierre de Ronsard is still “tout mon coeur mon sang et mes propos.” (all my heart, my blood and my words). But Hoffmann is a serious candidate for the writer equivalent of a “winter boyfriend” right now.
I, for one, would like to hear much more about your antique sex robots thesis.
WOULD READ EVERYTHING on antique sex robots!
you cannot imagine how many times I would like start to write some stupid paper about the eidolon in Euripides’ Helen and want to put in some jackass business about A. the Buffybot and B. the unfinished C.S. Lewis novel about Menelaus making a choice between the real and the false constructed Helen and then delete it all in a fit of clarity and self-loathing. In grad school I learned that 1. I really should have been in comp lit or someplace where I could disguise my lack of rigor as a virtue and 2. everything in literature is about sex robots really.
everything in literature is about sex robots really
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I am just sitting here with my chin in my hands and my eyes shining with delight.
Not that closely related I think, but you remind me of Kirstyn McDermott’s sex doll short story “The Home For Broken Dolls” in the creepy collection Caution: Contains Small Parts.
my tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions!!! perfection.
Jane Marie!!!!! Can we get her to write stuff here?? I miss her. She was like the wise sister I never had.
yessss. I was watching all of her videos last night to teach myself how to wear colors on my face.
I send her an email saying exactly that once every three hours, and she assures me that she will one day do as I ask.
Is that Heather Havrilesky from the Awl? Because her Ask Polly column is amazingly amazing so I thought Id shower her with praise.
One in the same. I still think of most reality show contestants as “whoring sea donkeys” thanks to the TV reviews she used to write for Salon. She’s fab.
So obviously Chernobyl is terrifying, but also there are parts of that piece that are SO COOL. Like, there are still things melting almost 20 years later! It melted things that don’t melt, and then they flowed around and made stalactites! Science is amazing, and can kill you in seconds!
Have you seen this? http://kiddofspeed.com/ it’s at least 50% elaboration and stolen pictures from other sources, but it’s still pretty entertaining.
<3 Bitches Gotta Eat. That girl cracks me up, I want to be her friend so bad!
Sometimes people ask me what I do for a living, and I tell them I sell mannequins.
(It’s but part of the truth, but it is, after all, the most interesting part of the truth, to some brains.) (The best brains.) (Okay, the best brains like it when I clarify that I often sell mannequin parts, in conjunction with casket parts.)
All of which is to say that I posted that article on my company’s facebook page, so thanks for making it seem like my going to The Toast is work-related!
Are you hiring?
WHAT is your job … it sounds both fascinating and terrifying.
And yet I sit around running reports and reconciling bank accounts and writing checks all day. Or, like at this very moment, wondering who exactly goes around with $55 in $1 bills with which to pay for the slatwall baskets and hooks he needs.
(Manufacture and distribution of store display fixtures. The most terrifying part is the number of rats who think the ceiling over my head is a good place to hang out, but I just turn my Middlemarch audiobook up really loud and pretend I’m elsewhere.)
The rats are attracted to Middlemarch and would like to listen in as well.
Fine, if they wouldn’t scrabble and screech so much, I’d let them.
If anyone’s run out of links and needs something else to read… http://www.papermag.com/2013/12/amy_poehler_is_on… Amy Poehler interview/profile!
“I have a crazy maniacal laugh that I try to maintain through diet and exercise.”
and
“I mean, everyone under 26 seems gay to me. Both men and women. I often ask myself, is everyone gay?”
both made me chortle. AMY.
Everyone needs to LISTEN TO JANE about that Forever 21 lipstick. (Okay, that’s stupid, we all obviously listen to Jane about everything). I happened to go shopping on Friday right after I read that Elle piece, stopped into F21 and bought that lipstick, and it is everything. I wore it Friday night to a holiday party, it is awesome, it stays on well, it feels great on the lips, and it doesn’t have a weird smell like most cheap lipsticks do, and it is less than $4!! Also, Jane is alabaster white and I am golden brown and it works on both of us, so it’s obviously a magic lipstick, like those jeans in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
I just read that Ursula LeGuin article from start to finish and it was exactly what I needed in my day. I kind of want to just go sit at her feet while she talks to other people.
were you
Stalker was pre-Chernobyl but many of the "special effects" in the film were produced by an up-river chemical spill from a soviet industrial plant. A lot of people on that shoot ended up getting fatally sick (though there's a good case to be made that Tarkovsky and his wife were murdered via typically unsubtly Soviet gov't. poisoning).
Relevant to one of last week’s link round ups, I really liked this Victoria Coren article about Nigella Lawson’s first husband, John Diamond.
“When you try to picture the “tragic first husband”, do not picture a dying man. Picture the most living man there ever was.”
“He was always, and always will be, #TeamNigella”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec…
Loved the Didion-Ephron essay from Heather H. Fabulous read.
Loved the Didion-Ephron essay from Heather H. Fabulous read.
She is wonderful! I don't know how she keeps up that kind of joke density in all her writing. I've never seen anyone else pull it off.