Great, free-ranging conversation with Mikki Kendall at In These Times:
What about politicians who go on “SNAP challenges,” trying to live on food stamps to show the dangers of cutting supplementary benefits?
It’s complete and total bullshit. You’re on SNAP benefits for a week, but you’re not moving out of your house, you’re not giving up the spices that are in your cabinet, you’re not having to worry about the heat or the power you’re using or the fact that your poverty is never-ending. You’re not having to worry about going to the SNAP office for eight hours, two or three times in a row, before you actually get benefits. You’re not standing in line at the grocery store having the cashier judge you for buying fucking blueberries because blueberries weren’t on sale that week. Food-stamp challenges don’t teach you what it’s like to be poor. Food-stamp challenges teach you what it’s like to be hungry for a hot second.
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I watched the first episode of Sherlock‘s third season (“The Empty Hearse.”) I enjoyed the experience thoroughly. I will need to watch it nine or ten more times to be certain, but at the moment, I would probably place it above “The Blind Banker” and “The Hounds of Baskerville,” and in a dead heat with “The Great Game,” leaving it at either the fourth or fifth of seven contenders in the official rankings.
(Anderson is over-the-top, and there’s a dumb scene in a restaurant, but it has much to recommend it. If you have not yet managed to watch it: Tunnelbear, upgraded for five bucks –>BBC iPlayer –>download recommended over screening, but YMMV.)
The perfect Rainbow Rowell and I will be having a lengthy conversation about said episode after it goes live in the US later this month, you should email me questions you want us to cover. Do not put them in the comments, we’re trying to keep this pretty spoiler-free.
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I cannot recommend the new issue of Poetry highly enough, containing, as it does, a series of poems inspired by Game of Thrones, and two poems by Michael Robbins, in addition to many other fine things.)
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Sarah Marshall wrote this really long, interesting thing for The Believer about Tonya Harding, which I vigorously nodded at.
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Dogs may be pooping in alignment with the earth’s magnetic field.
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Viking sorceresses! (Link is to the Daily Mail.) Reader Laura suggested a photo contest for “Viking Witch” reconstructions.
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If anyone finds the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara fascinating (it really is), I strongly suggest buying this book.
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Made this nutso meal last night, now filled with pancetta and satisfaction.
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Tags: benedict cumberbatch, feminism, link roundup, the internet
In a SPOILER FREE Sherlock-related link, the woman who plays Molly is pretty amazing IRL, and she wrote this great piece about being naked onstage while playing Helen of Troy: http://onyellowpaper.tumblr.com/post/37720038781/…
I highly recommend it.
Ah that is awesome! I love her on Sherlock and I love her even more now that I know what a cool, thoughtful person she is.
Oh, she’s lovely! Thanks for sharing. That critic who tweeted about her is a complete wang and should’be been fired.
wow, thanks for sharing that!
I LOVE this, thank you for sharing it!
thought you might!
She is also quite awesome on Twitter (@louisebrealey).
She is FABBO on twitter. But SPOILERS.
YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT SPOILER WARNINGS
*starts to explain self*
*types words ‘hair ruffle’*
*gives up, throws self away*
Loo Brealey is SO FAB. I adore her, and that article is amazing.
Mikki Kendall is awesome, and that para especially, I just want to FRAME it. It makes me so angry when people judge poor people’s choices having no clue what actually that person’s life could be like.
The people who do the SNAP challenge, especially clergy who bring those experiences back to their congregations, raise awareness about how incredibly difficult it is to live on food stamps. The whole point is that it’s incredibly difficult to do it for a brief period of time (even with your spices and your coffee and your excellent le creuset cookware) let alone indefinitely without any of those advantages. It’s an incredibly effective learning tool. I know lots of people who have done it and none of them have EVER said “hey, that was easy, I don’t know what everyone is complaining about.”
Oh no I agree with you I just mean people who are like, in the grocery line getting mad about the foodstamps lady buying Cheetos and orange soda or whatever, as though being poor de-entitles you to preferences and joy.
Deadspin’s food coverage is the best thing I’ve been introduced to in a while. I am totally down with any recipe that describes amounts of things like “many big fistfuls of sliced mushrooms.”
Me too…and yet I still can’t bring myself to add milk to my bolognese sauce. Call it a minor character flaw.
Yeah, I acknowledge that it may be good and correct, but I have…issues.
Foodspin is disturbingly engrossing. I should not be this entertained by reading about how to make a fried fish sandwich.
I just read, in quick succession, ragu, beef stroganoff, kebabs, pot roast. Now I’m hungry, and amused.
I recently learned that Jolie “Clean Person” Kerr is writing for Foodspin now! She’s on the baking/booze beat.
Chiming in to second the recommendation about the Edgardo Mortara book, though if you’re hypertensive maybe take it in small doses, because it will, guaranteed, fill you with seething rage.
Thoughts:
1. Mycroft is the Thranduil of Sherlock.
2. Although casting Amanda Abbington was too precious for words, she was very charming.
3. There are still many, many things wrong with the show.
Free option for Sherlock: download a Chrome extension called Mediahint. I did and spent an enjoyable evening squealing at Bandicoot Cummerbund’s face.
You beat me to it! Tunnelbear still wins for surreptitiously watching things on your iphone at work, though. At least according to a rumor I heard.
Thanks for the tip!
Toast-folk, I was so disappointed in the new Sherlock. I need someone to pat me on the head and tell me it will be OK …
WAIT IS THIS A SUBTLE HINT THAT MORIARTY ISN’T ACTUALLY DEAD????? Because let’s be honest, he was (is????) the best thing about that show. I may or may not tell people “I will buuUUUUuuuUUUUuuurn you”
(BUT DON’T TELL ME)
I was disappointed too. I won’t say more because of spoilers, but just ugh. Stephen Moffat alternately delights and enrages me and I just never know which it’s going to me.
But this was Mark Gatiss, who had never before done me wrong!
I didn’t realize that, now I’m even more disappointed!
Me, too. I was actively depressed for the past two days. But that’s not a plot spoiler, people who haven’t seen it–it’s an emotional reaction to, just, things, okay? Not any sad plot points or whatever. It’s me. I’ve been reading the hell out of the “Sherlock” Television w/o Pity forum ever since.
A consolation has been Tumblr, showing me many beautiful pictures of Cumberbatch and how he’s filled out since the last series of “Sherlock.” Good god in heaven; I like a skinny man, but what he’s got under that dress shirt now is beyond compare. OOOfff.
Yeah, it’s not a plot-related sorrow, it’s just … :sigh: I feel like I’ve been tricked into watching a completely different show.
And it’s getting rave reviews all up and down the internets so maybe my mind is just not in the right place.
Janie_S, have you tried watching the show again? I’ve watched it 3 times now, and I feel better about it. Familiarity helps, as does all the reading about it. But geez, it shouldn’t be necessary. People who are familiar with Moffat and Gatiss’s other work tell me that this is a Moffat thing–his work seems to require a lot of post-analysis and the fans add a lot of meaning and parsing. That kind of pisses me off, but at least I feel a bit better going into Sunday’s episode.
I still resent the 3-episode series length, though. For god’s sake, why can’t they make a more normal television episode instead of these intensive, exhausting (for the actors and crew) things that they have to rest for 2 years in between? A series of even just 4 or five would be long enough to actually get into developing the story arc, instead of this, “(1) Hi, we’re back! (2) Here we are again! (3) And now it’s goodbye again for a long time! Have fun going over these 4-1/2 hours of television for the next year or so” business.
Yeah, I might watch it again before watching episode 2, but I doubt it will make much difference. Anyways I think that’s sort of a goofy rationale: “if you don’t like it you just haven’t watched it enough/the right way!”
No. I am in possession of all my faculties. I’ve read all the stories, seen all previous episodes. I am fully competent to make a judgement here.
I had a neighbor whose clothes always seemed to fit poorly. One day he mentioned he’d done the SNAP challenge for several months and ended up losing 40 pounds.
oh my god, please.
That quite literally makes me ill.
I think the SNAP challenge is an ok way for lawmakers and policy people and advocates to bring attention to the issue of food insecurity/hunger, because a LOT of people have misconceptions about SNAP. But they should also be acknowledging everything mentioned in that interview. Sometimes they do, sometimes (usually?) not.
Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to begrudge people their media stunts if it’s what they think they have to do to get attention for important issues.
By the way, I don’t believe Bill’s project was a media stunt, more of an effort at personal growth and compassion.
I love, love, love me a Viking witch. I wrote a grad school paper on runestones once, but unfortunately it didn’t include any reconstruction photos of what a sorceress might have looked like!
As we’ve been dissuaded from posting spoilers, I’m just gonna say that Nicole and the rest of y’all can fight over Bombadil Wafflesmack as long as you leave me Rupert Graves.
HAAAAAAAAANDSOME
do you want to talk about maurice
always
Ohmygosh, just recently watched Maurice, it’s so good. Also Hugh Grant’s hair! It looks GREAT in that movie.
Burneko’s recipe posts on Deadspin are fantastic, but his reviews of (possibly disgusting) commercial food products (see: Gogurt, those weird pre-made PB&J frozen sandwiches) really go above and beyond.
Michael Robbins was one of my poetry teachers in college. He hit on a lot of freshmen.
I watched the new Sherlock episode in a completely legal fashion and have to concur, I will need to watch it at least five more times to be sure if I liked it, but every scene that occurred in a restaurant (and there were many!) was solid goddamn gold.
I just read that Tonya Harding article and it was FASCINATING. I was old enough to remember the “incident” but none of the resultant media coverage. Lots of really great stuff about how women athletes are portrayed in media that I’d never really thought of before, not really being a sports person. There were too many great parts to choose from but I shared it on facebook with this one:
“Tonya was tiny, but her presence on the ice was powerful, undeniably muscular, and impossible to ignore…Later, much would be made in both the press and in parody about Tonya’s thighs: they were huge! They were so fat! How could she pretend to be pretty, or even feminine? But they were, at the end of the day, nothing more or less than the thighs of an athlete…What was inherently wrong with a spectacle of female power in which you could almost taste the athlete’s sweat, and feel her desire, her soreness, and her determination to leave the ground?”
Right? I want to read the author’s entire book. I had never thought of the media portrayal of that whole event from a feminist perspective. It was great.
I didn't realize that, now I'm even more disappointed!
On a weird side note to the Tonya Harding article, does anyone else know about how Shane Stant went on an evangelical speaking tour after he was released from prison? He was supposedly “born again” in prison and went around to churches and whatnot speaking about what a bad guy he used to be, how he got involved in the Nancy Kerrigan attack, and all that. I was in high school when he spoke at my church and youth group.
One of the things that didn’t sound right to me, even when I was young and super gullible, was how he claimed he had actually killed people before, as a hired hitman. Last week I read an interview with Gillooy on Gawker, and it mentioned that Stant busted through the plexiglass door of the arena where he injured Kerrigan. Doesn’t sound like the moves of an experienced hitman.
Anyway, it was a weird thing that happened, him going on this speaking tour, and I can never find any articles online that mention it in any way.
Oh! I thought of that when the article said that Shane’s uncle had made a lot of false claims of military involvement and being a hitman, which is exactly what Shane ended up doing a few years later. It’s interesting.
Super excited about the Rowell-Cliffe Sherlock Conversation to Make My Life Happier.
After one son convinced the other son it was okay to watch online tonight (where did this morality come from? I promised we’d watch the official showing too) I am all jumpy-buzzy about The Empty Hearse.