Samantha Irby is always funny, but sometimes she also just brings you to your knees:
when i die i want to be cremated and sprinkled on the breakfasts of my enemies. or whatever works for whoever is around. last thing i ever want to do is stress my homies out from the grave. i don’t know whether or not SB had a death plan, but if he did he didn’t tell that shit to me. the last time i spoke to him i was in my dorm room at northern illinois and he had just suffered a brain-frying stroke and was describing to me these hallucinations he was having that he truly believed were real. i’m not even sure he knew who he was talking to as he described riding a bicycle through the morgue to check on the dead bodies. LOLWUT. his funeral was heavily attended by evanston’s finest assortment of drunks and degenerates, his closest friends, which means there were actual men in salvation army suits circa 1973 smoking kools and tipping out brown-bagged fifths of cheap vodka in remembrance of their fallen comrade onto the street in front of the funeral home minutes before his homegoing service. it was kind of exciting.
Joel and Tyler over at Decider gave me the Easter present of doing a Who Would You Rather on Sherlock v Watson, and I have read it…maybe eighty times?
Joel: I think this may have a lot to do with my relative lack of experience when it comes to love and relationships (It’s been almost a decade since I’ve had either), but, honestly, isn’t there something so much more exciting about a challenging relationship? Sherlock would frustrate me to no end, but that somehow would make knowing he chose me seem all the more gratifying — oh jesus god I’m reading that sentence now and woof. But in any case, my problems with John Watson are the same I have with Peeta last week. They both seem so soft, so emotionally pliable. What’s his deal professionally, anyway? How will he provide for me.
Tyler: Um, he is a WAR VETERAN.
Joel: Good for him.
Tyler: Don’t cut me off, Joel. I’m saying, he has seen some dark shit. And he can probably protect you from IEDs. What can Sherlock do? SOLVE MYSTERIES? Snooze. And trust me, I have dated some “challenging” people, and yeah, it’s all fun and games and madness and sparkles and intensity, but eventually you get tired and want someone to make a goddamn schedule for once in their lives and maybe call you when you’re planning to be out later than three in the morning and, hey, would it kill you to go out and get a job? WOULD IT, JOEL? Life is not all fun and games and hounds of Baskerville.
Roxane is recapping OUTLANDER for us now, and you may have missed it because it happened over the weekend!
Maybe my favourite all-time deleted comment (so. many. deleted. comments. on this piece):
the rolling stone investigation report
It was 8 o’clock in the morning and I had no milk for my coffee. Still half asleep I put on sweatpants and ran across the street to the Turkish deli. The clerk and I had been friendly for years. He often accepted packages on my behalf. Sometimes we cooed over his bodega cat, whose name translated to “Strong Man.” This morning, though, the conversation quickly veered from a friendly inquiry about Strong Man’s wellbeing to whether my husband and I have any children and oh-my-God, why not? “Because we don’t want to,” I said, hoping that my stern response would end the conversation. But the clerk insisted. But one must—… I have two… The third one is on its way… You should really think about it, because once you get old… and so forth. I fled the store and haven’t gone back since. Recently, when we ran out of milk again, my husband asked sweetly whether it was okay for him to get milk there. “Of course,” I said. “Go right ahead. I doubt that the clerk will ever pressure you into a conversation about why you don’t want to have children. Give my best to Strong Man.”
Saeed wrote the most amazing thing about being a writer of color in a racist world:
By the time my colleague and I managed to meet in the middle of the crowd, a poet from New York whom I hadn’t seen in months made his way toward me as well. His smile calmed me down. I’m not alone anymore, I thought. And if I’m not alone, I’m not invisible.
“You’ve grown out your hair,” the poet said, the ice in his cocktail catching light. “Now I’m going to do that racist thing where I touch your hair,” he said as he reached for my afro. His fingers tested the texture of my hair, the way you might squeeze a bath sponge. My colleague and I locked eyes; she seemed horrified but I never stopped smiling, not once. I smiled like it was an affliction because somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that when you’re a young black writer among the literary elite you can’t be both grateful and angry, or proud and humiliated — though, of course, I was.
He also introduced me to the fact that Wallace Stevens called Gwendolyn Brooks a racial slur, which is depressing as balls.
You all know of my hopeless undying love for Wolf Hall, and Vulture talked to my GIRL, Hilary Mantel:
Henry VIII did have a roving eye.
Not really.No?
You have to remember, he didn’t know that he was going to have six wives. It might sound like an obvious point to make, but he truly believed that every wife was the love of his life. I think people forget that he was initially married for 20 years. He really believed in marriage. And he was nothing like his contemporaries in the romance department.
I am watching all the Fast and the Furious movies for the first time bc of Roxane and I just don’t think it’s right that someone with eyes that blue should die. Also, DRIVE CAREFULLY GUYS.
So in other words, Henry VIII was one of THOSE guys. Got it.
Omg wolf hall.
Hi, when you’re ready I will drop EVERYTHING to talk about both books and then also speculate on the third book which, since I saw Hilary Mantel at the play on Saturday, I know she isn’t currently working on and maybe every generation gets the George R.R. Martin it deserves but I didn’t want to learn empathy this way.
Mike Bevel I am going to break your heart by telling you I haven’t read the books (I have been in school part time and working full time for five years, pleasure reading is Not AThing in my life) but I am really into Henry VIII and English Reformation history, and we just covered this in my Reformation class, so I watched the first episode on PBS last night on the edge of my seat. So good.
Okay, but then think about how we’ll laugh and laugh about this, the way best friends do, because you’ll read the books and love them and we’ll talk and talk and talk about them and I’ll say, “‘member that time you hadn’t read them?” and you won’t remember it because you can’t remember a time when you hadn’t read and loved these books.
I pledge to you that this will happen.
Here for it. Let’s go.
Terrific.
For me, the most important moment in Wolf Hall — what I think informs Cromwell as a character and also beautifully foreshadows Cromwell’s own corruption in the Boleyn matter — is this (p 148, I think):
“Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, has put his signature first on all the articles against Wolsey. They say one strange allegation has been added at his behest. The cardinal is accused of whispering in the king’s ear and breathing in his face; since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch.
When he hears this he thinks, imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor’s head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe anything; putting it out there, to the shepherds on the hills, to Tyndale’s plowboy, to the beggar on the roads and the patient beast in its byre or stall; out there to the bitter winter winds, and to the weak early sun, and the snowdrops in the London gardens.”
What’s fascinating to me about this is how this describes, in a sense, exactly what Cromwell will have to do to Anne Boleyn. He has to find lies, and then promote them as truth. In the book, there’s even maybe a sense that he is learning this from Thomas More. (And I love this, in Bring up the Bodies: “He doesn’t exactly miss the man. It’s just that sometimes, he forgets he’s dead.”)
Come sit by me! I just fangirled all over my blog (linked below) about the BBC adaptation and I cannot wait to see how Jane ascends to Queendom. Also, what is Henry like when he is not in a protracted legal battle. Also, is the third book going to encompass Cromwell’s downfall because I can’t wait to see what Mantel does with Anne of Cleves. Will it resemble this scene from Hark a Vagrant. These are no longer questions.
I think Mantel will mirror the beginning of Wolf Hall in the final moments of The Mirror and the Light. Read the first page of Wolf Hall, and remember where Cromwell ends up at the very end. And then you can come sob next time me because I AM CRYING RIGHT NOW JUST THINKING ABOUT IT.
I cried through an entire transatlantic flight bc of Wolf Hall, the poor man next to me gave me his chocolate to make me be quiet DIDN\’T WORK CAN EAT CHOCOLATE WHILE CRYING.
Some parts that made me cry, in no particular order:
* When Cromwell, as a boy being kicked and beaten by his father, thinks for a moment about how much he will miss his dog
* When his wife dies
* When his daughters die
* When he shows up at the stake after the burning of the Lollard and one of the Lollard women takes his hand and smears ash on the back of it and says, “Joan Boughton” because SHE HAD A NAME AND WAS A PERSON
I AM CRYING RIGHT NOW
THEN THOMAS CROMWELL WOULD PROBABLY COMFORT YOU just like he comforted Princess Mary when she was standing beside her mom but also had menstrual cramps and almost fainted BUT HE CAUGHT HER AND THEN OFFERED HER A SEAT.
I cried hot angry tears when his daughters died in the book! And I cried again last night when Cromwell said, “She wanted to learn Greek.” I was always pretty ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about Grace but ANNE WAS SMART, SHE DESERVED TO LIVE
“Perhaps she knows it now.”
Excuse me I have something in my eye.
oh god, that bit made me so sad.
the one thing I didn’t like about the adaptation was that there was not enough time spent with the wife/daughters, so we really don’t get the impact they (and them dying) had on Cromwell. Because it’s so important and so tragic and ugggghghg.
I am trying not to be the “I SAW THE PLAY” guy, but MAN did they handle that in a breathtakingly heartbreaking way on stage.
Aaaahhhh! Ben Miles broke my heart. Broke it right in two.
I am prepared to have a complete breakdown when Cromwell dies in the third book. I just read Mantel’s French Revolution novel, A Place of Greater Safety (highly recommended, though not quite as masterful as the Cromwell books), and when they executed the main characters I cried and cried and cried — despite knowing that even if they had not died THAT way, which I already KNEW they did, they STILL would have died hundreds of years ago. SIGH.
Oh man, A Place of Greater Safety. SO GOOD.
Here is my uncontestable rankings of Hilary Mantel novels:
* Wolf Hall
* Bring up the Bodies
* A Place of Greater Safety
* The Giant, O’Brien
* Every Day is Mother’s Day
* Vacant Possessions
I was reading a Place of Greater Safety and loving it when some really stressful things at my work happened at about exactly the same time as I hit the part where stuff’s about to turn on them. And I just can’t finish the last 50 pages or so. Every time I think about it I get sort of weird in my stomach. Maybe when it’s fully summer I can finally let them all go.
I don’t get it, Wolf Hall was so offensive to me, I don’t understand the appeal. I mean Henry was a murderer, like a real one, and he killed Anne. And then this book, it’s like Anne is the bad one, and all those poor young men, who actually had to feel real fear and walk up and kneel down and be beheaded, they are also the bad ones, and especially Mark (in real life this poor young kid who really was tortured) and Hillary is all, Mark is a dick and Cromwell didn’t really torture him, he just locked him in a room with a pointy tree. It’s like a whole book about how awful all these innocent people were and how they probably got their just deserts, when actually Henry was a psychopath who murdered innocent young people and Hillary makes him out to be human. Both books were just the worst kind of victim blaming. Henry killed Anne for adultery when he was the one actually cheating.
And I am struggling to say the bigger part of what I feel is the true problem with the books, it’s like an invisible, insidious lie Mantel is promoting that you have to pay attention to or else it could reinforce harmful beliefs that are instilled in you, and the lie is something like, “if a bad thing happened to you, you must have been bad to deserve it” and whenever I work with young women in therapy, they more times than not, come in believing that their traumatic pasts are because there is something bad about them, and it’s a lot of work to undo that belief, to help them understand they didn’t deserve what happened to them and they weren’t abused because they were bad and when I see this belief forwarded (invisibly) in historical literature I am very disappointed and very sad.
I don’t think Mantel is rehabilitating Thomas Cromwell at all. Especially in Bring up the Bodies. ::Especially:: that scene in Bring up the Bodies where Mark Smeaton is interrogated.
Mantel writes the novel entire from Cromwell’s perspective. There are no scenes in the book where Cromwell isn’t present — we don’t get any direct pillow talk between Anne and Henry; we don’t hear the gossip the women whisper to or around Mark. When we get those, it’s because it was told to Cromwell. Mantel is saying, “Here’s what we know: five people are going to die over this. It’s all more than likely not true. But you’re Thomas Cromwell, you have one job, and how do you accomplish it?”
Mantel has said, repeatedly, that Boleyn was more than likely innocent. But she doesn’t believe any of the characters were saints of any kind either.
I agree with you a bit on this but not entirely; its a weird line to walk, trying to humanise Cromwell and Henry (which I have no problem with) but how do you not then “pick sides”? She has come down on the side of “Thomas More totally tortured people,” in the first book (haven’t read Bring up the Bodies yet) which is really, really not substantiated, and there’s evidence that he spoke out against it. Anne Boleyn does not deserve to be demonised and I think she is a little in Wolf Hall, but again its trying to show the events from Cromwell’s point of view, and he’s mostly seeing her as a source of trouble and a hassle, rather than a young woman in a precarious position who really, really needs to secure herself and frankly doesn’t know how to without alienating the people around her.
(But thank god she hasn’t gone the Phillipa Gregory route who decided to treat every accusation against Anne as true, including the incest. That just makes me RAGE.)
I don’t think its fair to just describe Henry as someone who “murders young women” – he is in a weird, weird position, as a very medieval/renaissance king on the cusp of the forms of government changing and religion changing and not being a very stable character, in some ways. He seems to me to have been someone who is not an incredibly independent thinker, but who wants to be – as a result he vacillates wildly on his actions and becomes very rash and then set on decisions so as not to be seen as someone who backs down. Rather like a petulant child that no one can control.
Hm, I wouldn’t say Anne is demonized in Wolf Hall–what stuck with me about her characterization is that she’s in impressive, precise control of her body and the way she uses it to get what she wants. In another reign, she would have been safe once she became queen, and even Henry’s first wife wasn’t executed; it’s like the world she’s entering has become drastically more dangerous than she had any reason to believe it would be, but once she’s in that world she’s subject to its changes and can’t save herself.
Like you say, Anne is filtered through Cromwell’s perspective, and that’s true of the other figures at court too. He has no taste for zealotry or anti-worldly religious devotion, so More appears to be a ludicrous hypocrite; he respects learning and subtlety and so he loves Thomas Wyatt. If this were the only perspective the world ever got on the Tudor era I’d find it more troubling, but in a world where Thomas More is literally revered as a saint, I find Mantel’s take to be a fascinatingly different view.
Agreed! Anne is unlikeable, maybe, but only insofar as she’s sharp, bossy, ambitious, basically everything a woman is not supposed to be, even though her uncle is very much the same and is a senior and influential person. And I think her depiction (and Claire Foy’s beautiful nuanced portrayal) show us how impressive she is for grasping and wielding power, how aware she is of her tenuous position (“I will not die!” the lady doth protest too much), how she uses what assets and connections she has (though she sometimes miscalculates the latter). I would say she is very human!
!!!
Yes! All that you say!
There’s this weird, persistent misconception that if Anne Boleyn isn’t portrayed as a saintly martyr, then she’s being mistreated by the historian or author. But that is utterly unfair to Anne as a living, breathing political person. She gets to be calculating and ambitious and unlikable AND also worthy of our sympathy and completely mistreated by those around her.
I found this blog post about Thomas More and torture interesting:
http://moralcompassblog.com/2013/04/11/thomas-mor…
He’s anti-More. The one commenter (with the terrific name of Yoko No-No) brings up some interesting counterpoints.
One of the things I find compelling about Mantel’s research is this: she recognizes that we’re hard-pressed, today, to know what, exactly, happened at any point we weren’t present for. Our friends should only speak well of us; our enemies will be less flattering. We’re all probably somewhere in the middle.
I am trying to make sure I say this in a way that is without a dickish [citation needed] inflection, because that is not at all my intention — do you a have any resources you’d recommend as a relatively objective investigation into Thomas More? I grew up Protestant, and before Wolf Hall I just vaguely knew More a ‘that guy who definitely tortured and ordered executions of Anabaptists and other people” and as the guy from A Man For All Seasons, which is SO laudatory that I pretty much just dismissed it.
So now I’m realizing that my perception of More is perhaps a bit slanted! I know that historical facts are a little buried in time (as discussed on the rest of the thread), but would you have a reading recommendation?
Peter Ackroyd has a biography of Thomas More out: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Thomas-More-Peter-Ackr…
Ackroyd can be a frustrating biographer; he overwrites sometimes. But he gets all the stuff about More in there that you could need.
Your point about “relatively objective” is an interesting one, and I’m curious what others come up with. More is a tough one for objectivity. The Catholics revere him as a saint. Secularists see him as a monster. (And I’m closer to that end of the spectrum — but not fully.)
Thank you! I will hunt down a copy!
I sympathize with your reasons and think the point is valid–it is a sympathy for the devil kind of series, and that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. But I didn’t at all get the message that bad things happen to bad people. In fact, Cromwell is very aware that bad things can happen to any people, which is why he takes such steps to protect his household in case he loses favor with the king–he can do everything the king wants and still end up with his head on a pike (and does, eventually) and even his family could become political targets. It’s also true that Cromwell has a personal grudge against the men who lose their heads. But he is not the only one–lots of people were anxious to see the Boleyns fall–and most of the action in Bring Up the Bodies is Cromwell trying to figure out how to work all the political and legal machinations to get Henry divorced from Anne without accusing her of adultery (which is tantamount to treason, hence all the death sentences). He fails, and the men die, but it’s pretty clear that their deaths are tragic and arbitrary, not deserved.
I can go on and on, but the short version is that I think this is a series that seeks to understand how a legal and political disaster of such great proportions could have happened, and I think the books do a good job of showing not only the motives of Henry, Anne, and Cromwell but how each of them are bound by laws and grudges that are quite out of their control.
The entire upper class consisted almost entirely of murderers, and murderer’s accomplices; these are people who were all the time demanding the death of other people as a consequence of speaking the wrong words. The books chart Cromwell’s move from the class of people who can be murdered with no trial to the class of people who can get trials. Cromwell’s wife and daughters are innocent, and die, and it’s never suggested that they must have been bad to deserve it. Cromwell presides over the death of men who would not have counted his children as worthy of life and respect as their own. It doesn’t make him a good person, and Mantel doesn’t suggest that it does; he says he has a heart of stone. It doesn’t make the men deserving of death. But their deaths don’t make them better than Cromwell, either. He died, too, when the political wheel turned that way.
(I mean, if you’re calling her by her first name, maybe you know Mantel personally and have a better idea than I do of her thoughts, but from her other writing it seems to me like she clearly regards Anne Boleyn fairly sympathetically, as a woman who was ambitious in the only way her time allowed. She depicts her as ruthless in the books, but Gregory Cromwell is basically the only person in the books who isn’t depicted as completely ruthless, and he’s going to make it out alive.)
There are few things I enjoy as much as Deleted Comments. I pray the commenters return to observe us mocking them.
That and the bodega article reminded me that a couple weeks ago I had an interview where the woman asked me both “So would your husband have a problem with you taking this job? Would he let you?” And “Do you have kids? If you have kids you can’t do this job,” so basically I want to scream to everyone everywhere WHY DO YOU THINK THERE IS NO NEED FOR FEMINISM ANY MORE??????????
I hope you did reply (mock horrified): “Has your company failed to train you in the legal pitfalls of hiring interviews? Do you know what a radical feminist would say if you asked her those questions that the government says are illegal??! They really should have prepped you better, or warned you what not to say!”
FYI asking those questions isn’t illegal but basing your answer on them is, so smart people don’t ask them, but you can’t just like up and sue the company for asking if you have kids.
Except, asking “who will take care of your kids” actually IS illegal.
Flat out saying, “if you have kids, you can’t have this job” is worse than that, it ADMITS to discriminatory practices in the hiring process right at the start. So is covered under “illegal”.
http://career-advice.monster.com/job-interview/in… http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html
oh dang I had glided right over the second half of that quote, that is not good.
Whew! I was worried you’d think I was being nit-picky.
You have no idea how much guilt I had this morning, just staying home one more day while my (old enough to stay home alone) kids are still on break. I actually want to be with them, but even with a supportive office, I have guilt either way. People like that interviewer need to have something that stops their mouths working before they say things that stupid.
Hahaha I had a job interview once where they didn’t ASK me, they straight-up TOLD me: “This job isn’t for anyone who has a kid or a mom or a dog or anything they have to get home to.” Welp.
LOL, good luck to them building a team with talent rather than unhappy, empty droids with nothing in their lives but work.
But do they have mini-fridges and in-house barbers?
I saw “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies” on Broadway over the weekend. I saw both Hilary Mantel (lovely, signing programs, but not mine because I am NOT GOOD AT APPROACHING PEOPLE) and Chris Noth.
I saw them at the RSC last year from the very very top of the theatre – still so good! (although I didn’t get what they were going for with Jane Seymour’s weird voice :/) I’m not sure, but I think I preferred them to the TV series.
Jane Seymour had a weird voice? Tell me more! “Weird” is the term I most often use to describe her characterization in the books. Not weird like a Weird Sister, but weird like an awkward little sister is weird, the way a neglected young girl can be a little socially tone deaf because she hasn’t completely internalized the social expectations for women. I love that she’s weird.
I enjoyed these notes on how to play Wolf Hall, but I’d looove to hear the character notes for Jane.
It was kinda…she haaaaad a weeeird siiiing song voice wiiiith extensions on voooowels where you woooouldn’t expeeect them? It’s hard to explain in text and it’s been a while since I saw it. I found it a bit distracting – if I remember right, she was acting kinda socially awkward in a way I liked but the voice was just…a bit ott? I don’t know.
I would love to read all the character notes!
They’re all the front-matter of the published scripts for both Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies: http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Hall-Bring-Bodies-Adap…
Here’s the beginning of Jane Seymour’s:
“Historians always seem to suggest that you were the stupid wife. You may have been the smartest of all. Certainly you are the most mysterious.”
Mantel later describes her in various ways:
“You were pale and small and presumably very observant.”
“Despite the superheated atmosphere that built up around Anne, you were never touched by scandal.”
“It is impossible to know whether, with Anne as an example before you, you were playing your hand very cleverly, or whether you really just wished he would go away.”
“Your game plan was to look at what Anne had done, and do the opposite.”
“Given that you cannot be shown to have played any direct part in Anne Boleyn’s downfall, you do seem to have been a good woman.”
“Conservative in religion, you bravely asked Henry to restore some off the suppressed abbeys. His response was so terrifying that you never again questioned his policies or whims.”
“After your death no music was heard at court for months.”
In the production I saw, Seymour wasn’t quite as weird as Angelan_ experienced — which could either mean she got a note that said, “Let’s think of some other choices you could make?” or it didn’t register for me. She is quiet and breathy, and wide-eyedly vacant.
Ooh, thanks for those notes! Yeah, I love a Jane that is making some smart survivor choices. I love her more if she’s got some kind of rich inner life no one can guess at* and not is not merely vacant or conservative.
*Thinking of Edward and Cromwell playing chess, Edward saying “She’s an odd little creature” and remembers her walking around Wolf Hall saying “These are Cromwell’s sleeves” and no one knew or cared what she meant.
What the fuck is up with people touching black people’s hair? Who are the people that are doing this? Like, one, everyone knows it’s bullshit at this point, stop doing it. But two, why are you going up and just touching people in the first place? People that you barely know! Don’t do that! Stop touching each other’s heads!
I just – my god, I don’t touch my friends without obvious permission (or clear indication of needing a hug), who in this world honestly thinks it’s okay to touch strangers? When they know it’s uncool? Who says “I’m going to do that racist thing now”?????
I understand unconscious/cultural racism better than I’d like, but this kind of shit just baffles me.
For whatever reason, out of all of the ways that we’re a racist and terrible society, this basic indignity is the one that sticks in my head as being most emblematic of the basic indignities that we inflict on others.
it’s just…like…there is literally no reason to do it other than “because I can.”
yeah, and like also deep down everyone knows that they shouldn’t.
“yeah there’s a pretty obvious social convention against touching other people without their permission but I gotta break it!!! Just this once! For some reason I can’t quite identify I feel entitled to do it to this particular person!”
I’m white with very curly hair and I have had to fend off people from trying to touch me. One woman was so oblivious that even as I stepped back away from her, she kept coming. She didn’t even address me through this whole dance, only commenting to her friend that I had such nice curls.
She was blatantly offended when I told her that I didn’t want to be touched and that wasn’t the first or last time. People’s entitlement is so much worse than I really like to think about.
I’m reading some YA romance thing now & the gal has very curly hair and the guy she barely knows yet reaches out and wraps a curl around his finger and says “Do these curls ever make you dizzy?” and my teeth ached.
“I’m going to do that racist thing now”?????
That was the kicker for me. Like, I didn’t know hair touching was a thing until I got to grad school. (I am also 100% sure I didn’t touch anyone’s hair in the interim unless we were BFF and giving each other braids. I’m not, otherwise, big on touching.) But here is a dude that knows touching is a thing but also is so secure in his entitlement that he will announce it, and do it, and suffer no consequences.
At least until Roxane gets ahold of him. 😀 😀 😀 https://twitter.com/theferocity/status/5840589429…
Roxane is the hero we need, though probably not the one we deserve. 😉
Yeah, dude, just because you announce that your action is racist doesn’t make it any less racist, or any more acceptable. What a dill hole.
The only way I can reason it is that the speaker must have believed it was a “fake” racist thing, like something people called racist but was actually bullshit?? I don’t even know.
I think it’s something like, racism is an emotional, unquestioned faith that it’s right to oppress [group]. So if you aren’t feeling particularly emotional and you’re aware that an action is racist, and you consider that knowledge and ~rationally~ decide to do it anyway, that wasn’t racism. After all, you were aware that it was wrong.
(barf)
Oof, that makes an appalling amount of sense. Good insight.
Seriously. Like, I will admit to understanding the desire – it’s so much like when you see a gorgeous dress and you just want to feel the fabric to see if it feels as good as it looks – but goddammit, we look with our EYES, people. Don’t ask, don’t touch, other people’s bodies are not for your entertainment/education/tactile pleasure.
Well, no, I definitely get the desire to touch things that are great. But “don’t touch things that don’t belong to you” is like literally the first thing that you learn as a child going out int the human world!
Oh, totally! I meant that more as, “Come on, folks, I get it, I do, but you’re an asshole for doing what you’re doing.”
Yeah, like… I *really* don’t understand that impulse. Does it come from the same place as wanting to touch pregnant people on the belly?
I’m one of those weirdos that just wants to touch pretty things (I am the reason there are ropes in front of paintings, as an example), so I get it on that level. Hell, I end up stroking my own hair when it’s straightened and shiny or the curls are really bouncy, and I *know* what it feels like. What I don’t get is subjecting other people to invasive weirdness that violates their personal space.
It’s so weird! This is totally not the same as the racist touching of black people’s hair, but I have red hair and people – strangers! – would frequently comment on it and stroke it when I was a child. I just don’t understand why people would do that. It is another person’s head! They have not invited you to touch it! Basic human boundaries, people.
“The Answer Is Never” really hit home for me, as I am in the mid-to-late-twenties stage of the game and just got a dog:
I have several pets, but bristle when I hear acquaintances and veterinarians refer to them as “[my] babies.” I am a grown woman and can very well distinguish between babies and cats. For starters, cats catch mice and use a litter box. And I don’t know about your cat, but mine doesn’t have a college fund.
My boyfriend’s sister laughed when we told her our reasons for getting one because, “It’s just like people who want kids – he’s your fur baby” and my hackles rose about six inches.
Life’s fulfillment shouldn’t hinge on other human beings—except that it does, of course. But ultimately I want to choose those who surround me and love me and whom I love back. You don’t know what’s right for me, and I don’t know what’s right for you.
EXACTLY
Huh. See, I feel the opposite. I’m fully aware that the joy I get from having a pet cat is (neurologically) related to the joy I would get from having a kid, but I don’t want kids ever, so I’m fine with calling my cat my baby.
Yeah, I agree, it doesn’t bother me either. People are usually (always, I think) saying it in a joking way — we all get the difference. No one’s going to be horrified when you put your pet down the way you would if you put your kid down (excepting, of course, the most horrifying mortal illnesses, etc.).
yeah, much as it makes my skin crawl to hear stuff like “aw, [your cat] loves his mommy!” I know it’s a personal peeve and not something worth getting all worked up over.
but then sometimes you get that conversation with someone who is convinced pets are substitute babies for those of us without the real thing, or they get used as fuel for a “just you wait…” conversation….eugh.
The phrase “fur baby” is my #1 Biggest Pet Peeve Ever. Nothing in this world upsets me more than that. No, my chinchilla isn’t my “fur baby” nor am I his mother – he is my pet! Humans did not give birth to him! If anything, I am his caretaker.
This boggles my mind too! My cats have moms. Who are cats. My cats are not placeholder or next-best-thing children. If they were, there’d be a whole lot fewer families with human children AND animals.
ding ding ding! I mean, sometimes I want to give the Mini up and replace her with a cat, but that is precisely because it would be a CAT and not a CHILD and sometimes I would rather be a caretaker of an animal than a mother of a human being. Inevitably this makes me feel guilty, but whatever, I stand by it as a real feeling.
I’ve been a mother for about five months and it seems the experiance it’s about 50% guilt and intrusive thoughts.
i love my dog to death and he is my best friend (which sounds lame but it is true) but he is NOT my baby.
For some reason the idea of calling pets babies bugs me, but when someone refers to me as my dog’s mom I’m okay with it. Like, how do I know the dog doesn’t see me as mom?
I’m tempted sometimes to ask obnoxious parents (okay, one particular obnoxious parent) if their kids are “skin-pets?”
I am totally stealing that.
‘How are your furbabies?’
‘Fine thanks, how are your skinkittens?’
Not possible to know me for more than an hour without also knowing I love my little dogs. However, I never refer to them as children. Furry little dependents, yes. Annoying little shits, yes.
But when the vet tells her assistant to give the collar to “Fido’s mom”, I am not offended. I know it comes of good intentions.
But I will refer to myself only as their guardian. My word choice does not have to match theirs, nor the other way around. As long as we respect each other, it’s all good.
I just say “person,” because she is my dog so I am her person. We are each others’ pets.
Yes, I have said, “I’m his human, and my spouse is her human,” referring to the dogs. But “guardian” gives me more credit for the responsibility I bear and the trouble I put up with.
I have pet rats; they are unsentimental animals. My title is Food Lady, because I make foods happen. I’m not their mom. Sometimes I will say something goopy along the lines of “hellooooo, baby!” when they are being particularly cute, but most of the time it’s more like, “Hey, vermins! It’s the Food Lady! Hi there!” When I got married, they acquired a Food Man to go with the Food Lady. When we have a rat sitter, she’s the Substitute Food Lady.
Of course, I had a friend point out that in ratspeak, they probably do call their mother Food Lady. Friend has a point.
I loved this essay too! Especially the parts about a) admitting that yeah, you like kids, but you don’t like them enough to have them and b) I guess maybe you will die alone? And that’s scary but…you just have to wait and see what happens, I guess. Those are the parts I can relate pretty strongly to, but the rest of the essay was excellent as well! I was very relieved when she said outright that it wasn’t a story where she changes her mind at the end. Plus, most “childless by choice” essays I’ve read just end up being a list of regrets/excuses and I’m tired of that!!
YES! I love my friends’ kids, they’re great, and I’m gleefully Aunt Packedsuitcase to them, but I like my sleep and the ability to just pick up and go whenever/wherever I want and the fact that I can 100% follow my passions and I can’t see regretting that.
I shared the Women in Tech article with a friend who *doesn’t even work in tech*, she works in government, she just sits next to the IT guys & converses with them (like a friendly human), and they *regularly* are boggled at her correcting them on their basic geek culture errors (like *not knowing* Elrond’s name, or mixing up basic characters of Star Trek) and say “Why aren’t you in IT??”
She says, “I don’t know, because knowing geek references is not the ACTUAL JOB OF WORKING IN IT.”
I love “The IT Crowd” dearly, but in real life, IT often feeling like they own all *nerd pop culture* (even if they don’t even know what they’re talking about) is pretty awful.
(That article made her day though. 🙂 )
RIP PAUL WALKER FOREVER. if you watch the FF movies like, with intent, you will find infinite reward in them, i promise. i wept silently throughout F7 and then i bought a tank top with paul walker’s face on it. i feel like no one else in the theater was REALLY invested in the series, though, as my friends and i were THE ONLY PEOPLE drinking coronas and cheering when we saw han’s face. their loss i guess.
Vin Diesel posted the tribute song to his Facebook page this morning and now I am going to have to go to meetings today with red eyes from crying and I DON’T CARE, because it seems like the least I can do in memoriam.
These movies, though. I unabashedly love them. (Except maybe #2.)
tokyo drift didn’t even have paul in it and it was still better than 2F2F!
FF MOVIES 5EVAH
I had not seen any of them but we saw FF7 this weekend and I def teared up at the end and had many Feelings throughout b/c of Paul Walker.
Also, did you know that NONE of the Fast and the Furious movies are streaming on Netflix? I wanted to watch the rest and I was thwarted.
No?
You have to remember, he didn’t know that he was going to have six wives. It might sound like an obvious point to make, but he truly believed that every wife was the love of his life.
This aspect of Henry is one of the things I love about Mantel’s vision of this court. This Henry has been brought up to have unswerving convictions in several things: his own divine appointment to the crown, the sanctity of marriage (royal marriage in particular), and the importance of securing his nation with an heir. And it is so heartbreaking when his convictions do swerve–like when he gets Cromwell out of bed because he had a bad dream about his dead brother–but also scary as hell, because he swerves so hard in the other direction. He believes in the witchcraft and deception of women just as strongly as he believes God is personally invested in the outcomes of his marriage bed, because how else do you justify such sincere knightly devotion to a woman that doesn’t have God’s approval? She must have tricked him.
Ugggh I love Wolf Hall. I just blogged about how much I love Wolf Hall.
This comment has done more than anything to make me want to read Wolf Hall (and I already wanted to read it, I’m just holding out for a finished trilogy), because goddamn do I love people torn in half by the force of their convictions. *chinhands*
I always feel like if he and Katherine had stayed together she could have managed that side of him better – a queen with some sense of security in her position could maybe have countered some of the more self-serving wankery of his advisors rather than having to try and play the game as well as all the courtiers.
(I will never EVER understand why Katherine Howard didn’t run to India when her family decided they needed to put another niece on the throne. Hell, Jane Seymour even.)
I’ve never read Wolf Hall but Henry VIII is such a fascinating and tragic figure to me. He could have been such a great man, had he been raised differently and not been surrounded by self-serving advisers. I do honestly believe he was in love with each of his wives, or at least he believed that he was, even if it was just infatuation.
He was smart and strong and handsome and ambitious.
The problem was that he was mercurial and spoiled, and there wasn’t anyone around him who was particularly interested in (or able to) mitigating those things. It was in the interests of many of the courtiers to keep him believing that he was entitled to whatever he wanted and that they were the ones who could get it for him.
In one or both of the books, Cromwell reflects several times on something Wolsey said to him: Pick your prince. Cromwell lived and worked in Europe for years, he could have worked his way up in another court. But he thinks that he could not, for example, picture himself serving the King of France, who is wracked with venereal disease and talks about screwing the ladies in waiting all the time.
That’s an interesting perspective. Cromwell picks Henry because he does have a sense of honor and virtue. That makes the facts of the case so much more astonishingly tragic.
“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”
I <3 <3 <3 Wolf Hall.
Calling every man I meet a “bro dude” now.
I already doooooooo!
brodudemanpalbuddychief
brodudemanpalbuddychiefsport
There. Fixed it for you. And, btw, you are brilliant.
brodudemanpalbuddychiefsportacetiger
I had never seen a Fast/Furious movie before Friday but then Jesus died for our sins or something and I got a day off and I spent it watching the first 6 and by midnight when I was on Fast 5 my whole life was glorious car crashes and the Rock playing it SO straight and HAN! and then they planned a whole Oceans 11 heist and threw it out the window to DRIVE A BIG TRUCK THROUGH A WALL and just. When I went to see Furious 7 yesterday I cried a lot. I am still just so full up on those movies.
EXCELLENT LIFE CHOICES.
Okay, in general I agree with Tyler because WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO ANYTHING WITH SHERLOCK HE IS THE WORST but this line made me snort-laugh:
Benedict Cumberbatch looks, to me, like what happens if someone pulls a fire alarm while Ralph Fiennes is in the middle of getting made to look like Lord Voldemort and he has to run out of the dressing room with only half of his face covered in weird latex and makeup..
For some reason I never get sick of weird descriptions of Benedict Cumberbatch’s face.
I laughed so hard when I read that line, i started to tear up.
The deleted comment just leaves me baffled as to why dude is reading the toast, I mean, you think he’s gonna catch on eventually?
Also can we talk about the Hugos, anyone? I’m not even sure where to start. I’m not a touchy feely person and I’m having the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that I want a hug. Personally I kinda wish that they’d just declare this year’s awards null and void, but I assume smarter people than I have good reasons not to do that.
If you (or anyone else) has 40 bucks to spare, you can buy a supporting membership and vote! There are a few legit nominees on the list.
SECONDED. Also, if anyone here has not yet read The Goblin Emperor, they should do so post-haste, it so absolutely deserves that Best Novel Hugo and would even on a ticket filled with other strong choices, it is a wonderful fantasy/science-fiction/steampunk book about respect and treating people fairly.
What is even going on? I’ve seen bits and pieces but I am confused.
http://io9.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-politi… is a decent summation. the comments on Scalzi’s post filled in the context for me (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/04/04/a-note-about-the-hugo-nominations-this-year/).
It is absolutely the same impulse behind Gamergate — “waaaaah, there are works gaining mainstream acceptance that aren’t targeted at me! I feel impotent! LET ME SHOW OFF MY MANLY POWER BY EJACULATING ALL OVER THE SYSTEM, THIS WAY WOMEN AND MINORITIES WILL SEE ME AND COWER BEFORE MY WRATH!” — and it’s disgusting. As a casual SF fan who mainly sticks to recs, Hugo awards and noms have always been a sign post for me toward (an admittedly crowdsourced measure of) quality. I can’t trust that anymore.
That’s really a shame, because I took advantage of Tor releasing all of its Hugo short story nominees/awardees from last year for free for download and I loved the variety of voices I got!
I AM SO MAD ABOUT THE HUGOS in no universe should John C. Wright have any nominations for any of the drivel he spits out, let alone 6!! Not to mention Vox Day, ughhh. All that, and yet nothing at all for Kameron Hurley’s brilliant “Mirror Empire”. Really hoping next year can pound those “sad puppies” to dust.
(Crossing my fingers for Ann Leckie to win again though!)
Leckie deserves all the wins! Worldcon is roadtrippable for me and I’m more or less planning on going? I mean I don’t want to go to a bunch of parties and panels and hear this bullshit drug out over and over again so we’ll see.
I love how they chime about greater diversity of authors yet half of the nominees are from their pet press.
Ugh, the Hugos and the slimy hand of Gamergate ruining every goddamn thing I like. It boggles my mind that these scumbags can look back at the width and breadth of sci-fi and proclaim that it didn’t used to be political. Yeah, Heinlein and Butler and The Forever War and the Time Machine were apolitical. Totes.
Oh! And the argument that mainstream culture prefers stuff like the Marvel Comics Universe and doesn’t want to have politics or agendas shoved in their faces!? Did these people not see The Winter Soldier?
Well, they sure didn’t NOMINATE it, so one assumes they disagreed with its message.
They sure did a bad job of nominating popular, mainstream voices, if that was their onus.
The article was excerpted/linked on another website popular with this very sort of bro-dude (among others); and although the text and headline on the site itself said THESE ARE THINGS YOU SHOULD NEVER SAY TO WOMEN YOU WORK WITH in nice, clear language the comments section…didn’t get it.
and followed the link.
and made sure we understood.
that they did not understand.
I also saw it posted several times on Facebook by people who might not regularly read The Toast, so it was definitely in wide circulation.
I don’t know that I have much to contribute to the Hugo discussion myself at the moment. I liked Jim Hines’ take on things. I’m also enjoying this very detailed explanation of why one of the people from the puppies’ slate disagrees with them, though I’m only like a quarter of the way in. And I admit it’s not adding much new for me, it’s just detailed and clear in a way I like.
I do think I may have to buy a supporting membership and vote.
The deleted comment just leaves me baffled as to why dude is reading the toast, I mean, you think he’s gonna catch on eventually
I just saw the post about two monks creating a bestiary on Tumblr, and it had been reblogged enough times to acquire a comment from one reblogger that said “this is the only funny thing on this dumb site” or something to that effect. Which, okay, let’s set aside our obvious differences in taste, but you are familiar enough with the Toast to make a statement of both rule and exception, yet not familiar enough to realize that the two monks have invented a lot of other things in a very similar vein?
What method of reading are these commenters using?
I saw that too and didn’t know whether to think that comment was about The Toast or about Tumblr. I wish people wouldn’t copy-paste entire posts to Tumblr; the text is already available for free, just go give the website some hits, you know?
Pretty sure they meant Tumblr was the dumb site.
Because referring to tumblr as a dumb site is a recurring way of expressing approval without losing Chill.
Augh one of these guys, “Vox Day”, is an actual, straight up white supremacist!
Now look, I’m not a smart guy, I’m not adept at politics, I haven’t got a lot of theories about what culture is or how it works or anything like that, but one thing that I do know, one guideline that has served me pretty well throughout my life is, when people are drawing up sides, and you find yourself on the side with the fucking white supremacists, then you’re on the wrong god damn side.
Unless you want to be a white supremacist yourself, which these guys pretty clearly do.
I mean, they KNOW Vox Day called Nora Jemisin a “half-savage” and said she wasn’t human in the same sense he was. There’s nothing close to secret or obscure about that. They choose to be on his side. It’s not a mistake. It’s who they are.
In other news, of course the campaign to get more white guys rewarded for writing vapid cockswinging fantasy adventures is spearheaded by two dudes named Brad and Chuck.
There is a growing campaign for people to vote everything on the slate below “No Award” on the principle that slate-based nominations destroy the award – which we’ve seen clearly this year as the slate crowded out every single other potential short fiction nominee. No Award is not a throwaway vote in Hugo voting – they will actually decline to give an award in that category if it wins.
I really, really hope this happens, because look, there have definitely been Hugo ballots in the past I’ve disagreed with, and even winners I’ve rolled my eyes at (I admit it, I didn’t think Redshirts deserved it), but this kind of concentrated campaigning has always been against the spirit of the thing and to encourage it to continue will be bad for everyone.
(On the plus side, after the awards ceremony this summer, they will release the full list of nominated works, so we will at least be able to see what got shoved off the ballot by these asshats. I can make guesses for Best Novel, but it’s the short fiction I really rely on the Hugo nominee list for, and I am so angry these people have taken it away.)
I too hope the No Award movement works, god I’m just visualizing how terrible the parties will be at worldcon if this is the dominant topic, and in the meanwhile at least we have the Nebula Ballot to go on. Goblin Emperor had slid past my radar but thanks to all this nonsense I’ve been able to pick it up!
The Samantha Irby piece was great. I especially liked this:
i am a tenderheart when it comes to addiction. life is fucking terrible, and if you reach for a bottle of pinot gris or a cheeseburger when you feel bad i get it. shit, i am it. i don’t judge, because you can look at my body and see just how awful times in my life have been. look, i’m happy for those of you who have no emotional attachment to food or booze or pills but fuck you if you can’t cut the rest of us a fucking break. drink your water and eat your carrots and have some goddamn empathy.
I keep a pretty yellow moleskin on my desk at work. i fill it up, on random pages, with quotes from really amazing women about how to be an amazing woman. it’s for my five year old daughter when she turns…I don’t know…old enough.
Anyway I put this exact quote in there after reading it.
Oh and my daughter’s nickname is Jaybird 🙂
I also keep a notebook with quotes! Mine is not only by/for/about women, but it does tend to skew that way. My desk is similarly covered with post-its of gut-punchingly great quotes.
I am going to do this now.
I feel that the ‘unapprove’ button for the comment mods needs to be called something stronger.
the “back to the pits of hell with you!” button
Intense Debate should have an option to change the name of the button
CONDEMN or ALLOW
I like to visualize the “unapprove” button as the Moon Door in Game of Thrones.
The “He chose… Poorly” button a la The Last Crusade
In college I hd this wand with a pink sparkly star on the top that became, for reason that have been lost to history the ban wand. I totally imagine Nicole and Mallory with their own ban wands, gleefully touching their screens with them and banning ridiculous comments.
I would rather bang nearly every version of Watson than Sherlock portrayed in visual media with the exception of Jeremy Brett’s Holmes because MY GOD THAT MAN.
Speaking of, are any Toasties going to 221B Con this week?
In other news, have instructed my group of BFFs to donate one of these in my honor of my passing when the time comes.
Mmm, Jeremy Brett.
YES Jeremy Brett is EVERYTHING.
I remember flipping the TV to PBS and seeing a man dashing about, staring down at some sort of grassy garden or moor, his hair disarrayed from what had clearly previously been a tidy style. He didn’t say a single word, but within two seconds I said to myself “Good lord, I haven’t seen this version of Sherlock Holmes before”.
He is THE Holmes, bar none.
I have, on occasion, described my orientation as “Watsonsexual.” That is, I am pretty much straight and particularly attracted to a certain kind of dude (husband even looks a little like Martin Freeman, kinda), but if Lucy Liu dropped by, well.
I think just about everyone succumbs to a bit of lady-love when it comes to Lucy Liu.
There are no other Holmeses. There are Sherlocks, but he is the only Holmes, and shall remain so.
I am having my remains hurled into an active volcano when I die.
Am going to get some pretty good life insurance to make sure that my survivors can throw history’s raddest party while they’re at it.
I am probably going with “insolently bejeweled disdainful skeleton display” but this volcano thing intrigues me.
the urn will be filled with both my ashes and dynamite, so that when it lands in the magma it explodes
I am 100% behind this now.
This is like a really great Mythbusters episode right here!
So I can’t shake the feeling that, OK, maybe journalistic best practices may not have been followed in that UVA piece by Rolling Stone, but every single thing I read/hear about it feels like victim-blaming. There was an NPR story on it this morning, and you could just see the male-privilege-framework within which the whole discussion was happening. On the other hand, checking sources is not a bad thing. I dunno, man. Everyone seems kind of wrong here, and I mostly just feel bad for the woman who went out on a limb and told her story. Nobody seems to be saying, “no way, she wasn’t raped” – they just seem to be disputing the details? Am I missing something there? I feel like the crime is being ignored (as is the university’s response to it) in favor of protecting the unnamed rapist(s).
Everything about the whole thing is terrible and indeed, everyone is wrong. It seems completely impossible to sort out whether or not this was a case of her memory being affected by trauma, or if the story was indeed made up, and I have seen some reasonable arguments for believing that her story is not true. It does seem to follow a lot of the patterns of how compulsive liars make stuff up. It is true that false rape accusations are extremely rare, but compulsive liars do exist and they do tend to make up stories like this. I really just think we should focus on shifting the attention off of Jackie and onto the very real and pervasive problem of campus rape– including the OTHER survivors listed in the article. The real problem is that the giant issue is going to end up being ignored because of the inconsistencies in one particular story and the bad journalism that put it out there.
For me the issue is that RS really just threw “Jackie” to the wolves there. They included a lot of details in the story that could have been fact-checked, but then didn’t check them. The better way to do things would have been with a broader variety of sources, without concentrating the article just on her and then completely disowning anything about the story – or else not included so many details and make it sound more hypothetical? RS’ initial denial was victim-blaming, totally – basically “she lied to us and now none of this story can be believed” where it actually sounds like UVA really does have a problem with sexual assault… I know it made the article more clickable to do it the way they did it, but… Sigh.
I agree completely. Whether the story is true or not, ALL of the responsibility lies with Rolling Stone, not Jackie. If her story is true they are responsible, and even if it’s not, it’s their fault. Compulsive lying is symptomatic of mental illness and while people certainly need to be responsible for getting treatment and the effects of their actions, it is 100% the responsibility of journalists not to publish made-up stories, not the responsibility of individuals not to tell made-up stories in case journalists start trumpeting them around the media as fact.
Yeah, one thing that bothers me is that she seems to have said from the beginning that there was an assault of some sort (forced oral sex). And maybe just no one believes anything from her now, but if that happened and now she’s just The Liar… oof.
As I said on FB right after Rolling Stone retracted their story, regardless of the degree to which the RS article is true, I think it says an awful lot about UVA that we can all read a graphic account of a young woman being raped at a fraternity party and go, “yeah, sounds like a thing that would totally happen here.”
Come on, I’d always pick Sherlock.
Best Fast and Furious memory: seeing the original while drunk in a dollar theater in college with my friend. Nearly empty except for us, which is good considering all the wine we smuggled in. When Vin Diesel and Paul Walker (who, SPOILER ALERT! is an undercover cop) are having this big heart to heart in the garage, my friend was overcome with wine soaked emotion and yelled “Don’t trust him, Vin! He’ll break your little heart!”
True story: Furious 7 was the first F&F film I ever saw stone-cold sober. The fact that I still enjoyed the heck out of it convinced me once and for all of the greatness of the franchise.
I still don’t understand what’s happening in that “what is his deal professionally how would he support me”question. He’s a medical doctor! He’s a practicing physician! That is his deal! Like……..????
glad I’m not the only one who was confused by this part! He’s way more able to support someone than Sherlock.
He is awful at it, though. At least, I was screaming at the screen in frustration when he FELL ASLEEP WHILE MEANT TO BE SEEING PATIENTS and somehow was not told not to bother coming back the next day. (But it was an appallingly-run GP surgery. Who, on interviewing a potential locum, says, “Well, we do have two people off next week”, in an unconcerned manner? You should have arrnaged a locum weeks ago!)
(My mother is a GP practice manager and I have worked in GP practices. I have a lot of feelings about the unrealistic depictions of John’s workplace.)
Yeah, but why is John so broke that he needs to borrow money from Sherlock and even flatshare in the first place? GPs make bank, you would think there’s no reason for a GP to ever be on their uppers. Perhaps it is because he knows in his heart of hearts that, in the absence of IEDs and jeopardy and opportunities for him to be manful and take- charge and tourniquet manifold arteries whilst swathed in comfortable knitwear, he is completely rubbish at doctoring. Sherlock might be a dickweevil sometimes but at least he’s mostly good at his job- if John Watson worked at my practise for any length of time I would explicitly ask not to have appointments with him because let’s be real, what if it was some kind of emergency Yeast Infection situation? You just know he’s the kind of male doctor who’d be all like, what is become of my lost potential? Is this what I am reduced to; Candida Albicans on a drizzly March morning in Tooting? All quiet sighs as he undid the speculum and pushed your knees apart. Fuck that shit, bro. That’s not what I pay my National Insurance for.
YES, he would be the worst. You would know he was thinking about all the exciting things he could be doing, like chasing criminals and shooting people, rather than dealing with your petty little health concerns. And also he would fall asleep while at work. Definitely time for a change of GP.
(Practice income is at something like a 12-year low, and central London property is super expensive. But still, John should probably have a reasonable amount of money.)
He’s not broke! That’s not why he wants a flatshare, anyway. The first episode plays this out fairly well – he has PTSD from his time in Afghanistan and a psychosomatic limp, and mentions to Mike Stamford that it’d be better if he had a flatmate. And Stamford, that clever, matchmaking little devil, happened to know just the guy.
Right? Unlike Sherlock’s job which was apparently, “live in Bohemian squalor until an actual Bohemian prince gives you a bunch of money for solving a mystery”.
That is not a job with a good retirement plan, I don’t think.
Current Sherlock will always have Mycroft to sponge off of, and wouldn’t you just love to look forward to having THAT conversation again and again over the years.
Hannibal gifs + dad jokes = day made.
http://lecterings.tumblr.com/tagged/jokeseries
Just finished season 2 and am floored. Season 3 can’t come soon enough!
Bless you for this link. =D
Is The Toast loading weirdly for anyone else? The home page only loads 2 article links per page for me, and aaaaallll the ads & side-columns etc all lumped down the bottom of the page. It’s making navigating really difficult.
It just did the same thing for me, I don’t know what’s wrong but refreshing helped!
Refreshing works! Thank you 🙂
It was doing this to me too! I had to refresh a bunch of times and it seemed to sort itself out.
It’s been doing that on and off for me for the last few days.
Here’s a new/old rule I wish we could enforce (but no, too many people are idiots). Never ever touch a stranger in a familiar way when you know that they could be offended or insulted by it. Don’t even ask if you don’t know them. That goes for hair, tats, piercings, body parts, and scars (especially my cleft lip scar. WTF asshole, no you may not touch my scar. Put your nasty creeper fingers on my face? I don’t think so!).
True story: Furious 7 was the first F&F film I ever saw stone-cold sober. The fact that I still enjoyed the heck out of it convinced me once and for all of the greatness of the franchise.
They're all the front-matter of the published scripts for both Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies: http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Hall-Bring-Bodies-Adap…
Here's the beginning of Jane Seymour's:
"Historians always seem to suggest that you were the stupid wife. You may have been the smartest of all. Certainly you are the most mysterious."
Mantel later describes her in various ways:
"You were pale and small and presumably very observant."
"Despite the superheated atmosphere that built up around Anne, you were never touched by scandal."
"It is impossible to know whether, with Anne as an example before you, you were playing your hand very cleverly, or whether you really just wished he would go away."
"Your game plan was to look at what Anne had done, and do the opposite."
"Given that you cannot be shown to have played any direct part in Anne Boleyn's downfall, you do seem to have been a good woman."
"Conservative in religion, you bravely asked Henry to restore some off the suppressed abbeys. His response was so terrifying that you never again questioned his policies or whims."
"After your death no music was heard at court for months."
In the production I saw, Seymour wasn't quite as weird as Angelan_ experienced — which could either mean she got a note that said, "Let's think of some other choices you could make?" or it didn't register for me. She is quiet and breathy, and wide-eyedly vacant.
Ooh, thanks for those notes! Yeah, I love a Jane that is making some smart survivor choices. I love her more if she's got some kind of rich inner life no one can guess at* and not is not merely vacant or conservative.
*Thinking of Edward and Cromwell playing chess, Edward saying "She's an odd little creature" and remembers her walking around Wolf Hall saying "These are Cromwell's sleeves" and no one knew or cared what she meant.
::glows::
Henry VIII was essential Ted Moesby
Another facet to this is, he just doesn't photograph all that well. In still photography, he can look quite odd, but see him moving around in life and he's terribly handsome, even conventionally so.