A WHOLE ARTICLE ABOUT BOB SEGER’S “NIGHT MOVES” WHICH IS A GREAT SONG:
I had taken some time off the road to write. I had some money from “Live Bullet” so I bought a nice house. Nothing spectacular, but it had a huge basement so the band could play. I wrote my brains out. The one that got me stuck was “Night Moves.” It took me six months to write. I had the ending [“I woke last night to the sound of thunder, how far off I sat and wondered”] but I didn’t know how to get there.
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The history of lethal injection, and why it’s become such a disaster (I don’t support the death penalty at all, but it’s bananas that we can painlessly and swiftly euth 1200 pound horses with a single syringe and human executions just get sloppier and worse):
As a consequence, the death penalty has undergone in the past five years its biggest transformation since states began switching to lethal injection decades ago. As thiopental disappeared, states began executing prisoners with experimental one-, two-, or three-drug cocktails. States have essentially been improvising what is supposed to be one of their gravest and most deliberate duties, venturing deep into the shadows to carry out executions. They have turned to mail-order pharmaceutical suppliers and used untested drugs. They have sidestepped federal drug laws, minimized public disclosure, and, on multiple occasions, announced changes to execution protocols just hours before prisoners were set to die. The machinery of death in the United States has become a kluge.
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If you “enjoyed” Blackfish, you should read Death at SeaWorld, which has consumed my free time this week. So many depressing details they couldn’t fit into the depressing movie!
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Jolie Kerr answers the question “what to do if I have mushrooms growing in my bathtub?” WHAT. MOVE. BURN IT DOWN. CRY.
The not good that’s happening is that you’ve almost certainly got water and wood rot going on behind the bathroom walls. Which means a few things are probably occurring. The first is that, in addition to the fungus that’s leading to the mushroom growth, there’s likely a whole bunch of mold growing back there, and that’s a no-no, health-wise, since prolonged exposure to mold can cause all manner of allergic and respiratory issues. The other big thing you need to worry about is the wood rot, because, you know, eventually the walls could just fall down around you.
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Why is there still a colossal backlog of untested rape kits? Why don’t we know how many there are?
Longtime sexual assault researcher Rebecca Campbell, who is a professor of ecological-community psychology at Michigan State University, told RH Reality Check that social science studies suggest there are at least 200,000 untested kits.
But to get actual numbers would require obtaining records from each city—and potentially, each precinct—in the nation, because rape kits, along with other DNA evidence, are usually gathered and tested at the local level, with no centralized state or federal record keeping. Indeed, there is no single rape kit “backlog,” but rather, thousands of individual backlogs scattered throughout jurisdictions with varying laws, funding, and priorities.
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Cherished friend of The Toast Matt “Ofjaya” Lubchansky is recovering from a very expensive and aggravating bike wreck/subsequent surgery, so if you want to hire him for stuff or buy prints, I would do that! He is the fastest illustrator I have ever worked with, and you never have to remind him to include people of color (you would be surprised how often that comes up with artists!) and his work is always just gorgeous and vibrant and funny.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
NIGHT MOVES IS ONE OF MY TOP FAVORITE SONGS BRB
edit: okay my heart is swelling, he was inspired by Born To Run which is one of my top 10 favorite albums AND Ronnie Spector is the song from ’62 and oh, that’s just beautiful
This has nothing to do with any of the links, but I won’t be here for the open thread tomorrow, so I’m posting pictures of my cute new puppy and there’s nothing you can do about it (but seriously, he’s almost as cute as Mallory’s kitten).
(His name is Tag and he’s part dachsund)
aaaaaaaaaa!!
so cuuuuute
lookit those outsized paws and lil forehead wrinkles
I love dachs mixes, they’re the best at sleeping. I frequently puppysit one, and she is the only dog I know who is compatible with sleeping in (that is, she doesn’t start whining in my face at 6 AM because it’s walk time) and she sometimes falls asleep on her back, like people. She can also, mysteriously, take up the majority of a queen size bed, leaving me to cling to the edge of the mattress while I sleep.
HI TAG!!!!
OMG OMG OMG OMG
Look at those big brown eyes! I would be putty in his adorable paws.
Oh my goodness, that is one adorable puppy. Congratulations to you!
MY HEEEAAAAARRRRRRT
oh my goddd
aw aw aw aaaaawwwwww
Animal photos in every comment thread every day
What a cutie! Love his little velvety ears!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
HE IS SO LEEEETTLE! Like I was scrolling down and I saw his face and assumed he was a particular size of smallish pupples but then I scrolled more and saw the hands and realized he was EVEN TINIER THAN I GUESSED. Squeeeeee!
Ugh SeaWorld — their defensive ads on TV make me SO MAD. Oh, really? Your animals live just as long as those in the wild? In a situation where they don’t have find their own food and have no predators? That sounds like a really great record.
“Come to SeaWorld, we probably don’t torture whales! That’s literally the best thing we have to say about ourselves! Please stop asking questions!”
We always see them while watching The Daily Show (and started seeing them a couple of weeks after Jon Stewart had one of the former SeaWorld trainers on air to talk about the horrible conditions), and my husband pointed out that the fins (?) on the whales you can see in the background are always down — they look unhappy, according to what the trainer said. So, they’re inadvertently proving the point that the whales are unhappy there!
Yeah, Daily Show is where I’m seeing them, and honestly, all I know about SeaWorld came from the Daily Show and Fresh Air interviews, but that was really enough!
Those ads fill me with rage. Actually a lot of the ads I see lately on Hulu Plus fill me with rage – there’s the SeaWorld one, and then the recent ones for Crystal Geyser Mountain Spring Water which make me so mad because California and drought and wastefulness and AAAAAUGH!!!!!
It makes me rage filled too! Especially because of that whole section in Blackfish where they talk about how SeaWorld manipulates the science in order to make it seem like their animals are normal. And one of the facts they often lie about is the average age whales live in the wild. Which is actually longer than SeaWorld tells you!
Also, every time I see the commercial I think about all the people on Blackfish who went to work at SeaWorld because they love those animals so much and then found themselves complicit in their abuse, and then I cry all over again. And, now I’m crying at my desk.
This is absolutely NOT the appropriate response re: mushrooms growing in your house, but when I read that yesterday I just immediately pictured some charming cottage in the woods where perhaps an elf or a hobbit lives, and I thought “eh, that’s not so bad!” I realize that’s not the reality of the situation, but still! And I swear to jeebus, if this biblical deluge we’ve got going on in Texas doesn’t stop soon, I very possibly WILL have mushrooms growing in my house. Enough already.
Same here! I immediately thought: I want that! It sounds adorable and whimsical.
But then I remembered my first apartment in a basement where I ended up with a terrible lung infection from black mold and went and cleaned my shower.
Ew, ew, ew. Last year we lived in a top-floor apartment with overenthusiastic air sealing (PSA: drafts are bad, but don’t make your building so tight it’s a terrarium!) and a crappy vapor barrier. I was hideously sick all winter. When we moved out, we dragged this giant heavy bookshelf away from the wall where it hadn’t budged since we moved in because it was such a huge hulking thing. There was black mold ON THE WALL behind the bookshelf.
This winter I have enjoyed robust good health. Funny that.
I grew up in a house that grew mold behind furniture every winter, so we’d pull the dressers etc a little from the one wall with the problem and bleach it a few times a year. I don’t know why my dad never investigated to see what was wrong and get it fixed. I do the same in my new apartment
Well if they’re the right kind of mushrooms you might start seeing elves
I once had mushrooms growing in a shitty apartment. When my roomie and I told the landlord, he said “what do they look like, if they’re the magic kind, I can sell them”. And then did nothing.
not even gonna offer to take the drug money off of the rent, huh
class act
Ugh, crappy landlords. I live in the Pacific Northwest where mold is Serious Business. I have had mushrooms growing in closets and around windowsills due to it; and one of my sisters had to move out of her apartment and throw out lots of furniture, clothes, and childhood treasured items due to mold her landlord refused to address.
My apartment complex in Dallas is doing renovations where they’re cutting open the roof in the outdoor hallways of the building, and I’m already convinced they’re gonna get black mold in there and just put drywall over it after the rain stops. So glad I’m moving to a different complex in a week. Yeesh.
I have now seen Mad Max Fury Road, and am disappointed that I didn’t see it at the appropriate time to be able to talk about it with everyone else, but I would like to just hop on here and let everyone know:
Yes.
I too saw it last night and being finally able to talk about it on Twitter has set me free.
A serious question I have after seeing it is who the fuck do I have to see to get a pauldron installed on my leather jacket!?!?
See if you’ve got any local SCA armourers. I bet they’d love doing that for you. If you can’t find anyone local, I know at least two guys in my area I would heartily recommend: Talon Armory and Richard Jones. I just noticed Richard’s contact info is in that article! I’m seriously considering asking him to do something for me, actually.
Richard! Yes! He is fantastic. He’s trying to get stock ready for the summer SCA events, so he may not be able to do much custom work just now, but it never hurts to ask.
Also, though the rest of his contact info is still the same as in the newspaper article, his website is:
https://sites.google.com/site/knotwolfarmory/home
Even if you aren’t interested in having him make something, you should go look at his work, his helms are fantastic! And if you do want some sort of armor accoutrement, ask him about it, if it’s not something he has time to do, he can recommend someone. Both Richard and Glendaur (Talon) are hardworking craftspeople and do amazing armor.
I am biased towards Richard, because he’s been a friend of mine for many years. 🙂
Depending on inclination, either you rip an appropriately shaped bit off an old car bumper and tie it on or rip some other dude’s car-bumper pauldron off his/her cooling corpse, obvs
well, ripping things off of rapidly-cooling corpses IS my preferred way of solving problems, so…
Hopefully I get to see it this weekend so I will be around allllllllll next week to talk about it.
I mean, I am with you. I say this without any irony: I literally can’t even, I am so yes about this movie. Everyone, everything, yes.
It might be my favorite movie. I want to swim in it and make out with its sundry people.
Riiiiight!?!?! There was a part near the end where some dirty old guy with one tooth is laughing about all the water and all I could think about was how beautiful he looked.
I am the exact same way… It makes me want to build a personal movie theater just so I can keep watching it in its gigantic-screen, boomy-surround-sound glory every day forever.
I have a friend who found a picture of the Doof Warrior and (after another friend transformed it into a ridiculously detailed, pixelated version) is starting a massive cross-stitch project. So much respect.
I felt like I was having a heart attack for 2 hours straight and enjoyed every second.
This means that I think I have to see it again to like, actually know what the hell is happening instead of just holding my boyfriend’s hand so tight it went white and trying not to scream.
Aw dang I was there with my wife who is six months pregnant, and that baby was kicking up a STORM when the flame-throwing-guitar-rig-drummer-platoon started rumbling.
You wife may give birth to a kick-ass musician. Or a special effects artist. In any case, given your fine Toast influence, the child will grow up to be a gloriously feminist rebel.
Yes, also probably it will be obssessed with building spiked racecars that shoot fire so I guess I’d better buy a scrapyard now so I can be ready.
I have not yet finished reading every word on the internet about Mad Max, but I worry that at some point, I will reach the end, and I don’t want it to happen. Please! Make more words about Mad Max!
For years, my Dad heard the last line of Night Moves, “with autumn closing in,” as, “We saw them closing in.”
When I had a seriously low-rent apartment (over a car-port) there was a slow leak at the base of the toilet. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d sit down on the throne, look down, and discover a 12-inch mushroom had sprung up by magic. Used to freak me out.
We had a mushroom grow out of the side of our bathtub in Philadelphia. Being 22, I just picked it off, threw it away, and didn’t worry about what (a leak in the wall behind the tub, presumably?) that caused it.
Yeah, but mine kept coming back! And it grew so fast – ew.
Yeah, when I saw these in my crappy college apartment I thought it was sort of cute, and didn’t worry about it? But then it’s not like I could have accomplished anything by worrying about it, we were renting from a college-town slumlord and when we told them that the light fixture above our shower had water leaking through it and also wiring hanging out of it(!!) they just told us to leave the lights off when we showered.
Yeah, I think we’ve all been there.
This is the exact thing I think of when I see the words “Night Moves” tbh
Oh man I have so many (not always great) feels about Bob Seger. :/
He’s been stuck in my head all week because even though I know it’s not the correct pronunciation I can’t help thinking as I pour the accumulated liquid off the top of my yogurt in the morning, “Here I am, turn the Fage.”
*looks at the empty Fage container on the desk*
Yeah, there’s that, also.
That piece on lethal injection is amazing. I don’t need proof that an execution method is cruel to be opposed to the death penalty. Knowing that it’s cruel and unusual, though– I think your average pro-death-penalty voter would still say it’s better to keep a prisoner imprisoned and alive until the correct drugs and methods are procured and developed, rather than rush for some unknown reason and kill someone in a horrible way. At least I’d hope they would think that way. So why are executions rushed the way the one described in the piece was?
And of course, this reminds me of the horrible “death qualified” juror selection in Boston… I don’t understand it.
I don’t understand how illegally procuring drugs in order to execute someone and being deliberately dishonest about the means in which you obtained the drugs or the nature of the drugs or whatever isn’t… murder?
All the thumbs-up for your comment, and even more for your user name. Kieslowski forever.
I’ve been wondering if anyone would recognize the reference! Yay!
Blue, Red, and The Double Life of Veronique are 3 of my favorite movies. (I usually skip White, even though I <3 Julie Delpy.)
Saaaaaame!!!
Unfortunately your assumption about pro-death-penalty people isn’t correct for all. There was an amazing BBC doc about the death penalty, investigating the lethal injection because there were protest about it causing very painful deaths etc. One of the questions they investigated was, is there a painless way to execute? And they look at the way pigs are slaughtered using gas/hypobaric chambers (I think), essentially it leads to a euphoric death as the brain is starved of oxygen.
During the doc the guy interviews a good few people on both sides of the debate and one of the standard questions is something like ‘would you agree with the death-penalty if it was a painless death’. Basically he ask this question to a pro-death penalty guy, and told the guy about the euphoric death method and did the guy think that they should pursue less painful ways of killing people and the guy essentially said ‘No I want them to suffer, why should they get a painless death’
So yeah, some people are just vindictive. (I wish I could remember the name of the doc)
I am one of those people who “enjoyed” Blackfish and I do own Death at Seaworld! It’s one of the Christmas presents I just haven’t gotten around to yet so I guess I’ll do that soon (first I must finish Ancillary Sword).
I bought “Death at SeaWorld” in an airport on my way to a family river rafting trip, and spent a lot of time outragedly reading bits of it at them. My review: A+, would harass my loved ones with it again.
I am here for Ancillary Sword! I loved it. Maybe not quite as much as Ancillary Justice, as Sword is less adventure story and more political, but I still really enjoyed it. I think Breq is one of my favorite literary characters of all time.
I am not very far yet (about 1/4) but I am finding it less gripping than Justice even though I am enjoying it.
Oh, no, Matt! Sending fast-healing thoughts your way (and clicking through right now to order something…).
This is all terribly depressing. Feels like a day for animal photos. Here is one of my dogs with a toy on her head:
Good call. Here is the time I knit my pet rat a sweater:
No rats were harmed in the making of this photo, but one was a little put out and had to be consoled with a treat.
I loved my pet rat, but they don’t live long, and I couldn’t bear to get another when he died.
I thought the same thing…until about a week after my house became ratless and bereft due to old age, when I said, “Enough, I cannot take the ratlessness~” and brought three more tiny furry babies with RACING STRIPES home.
This guy belongs to the Third Dynasty. We will probably not be ratless again, unless maybe we get a dog. Seeing the way my mother’s corgi watched the Second Dynasty (safely in their cage, out of reach of her stubby little corgi legs) in wide-eyed rapture made me nervous about housing predators and prey in the same space…
So cute. Been thinking about a rat as a good apartment pet, but I didn’t realize they came that big!
They are great apartment pets. Be sure to get two at least, and a correspondingly large cage–they are social animals and are generally not happy without a rat buddy.
The exception was the late, great Araminta, who lived to 3.5 years old and spent the last 11 months or so of it without her sisters. She loved all humans and seemed perfectly content to have all the scritches and murmurings and treats to herself, thank you very much.
/rat evangelist
Do note that if you live in Alberta, pet rats are illegal. If you live anywhere else then I assume they’re fine, though.
Funny pet photos, you say? Don’t mind if I do.
Classiest. Dog. Ever.
Excellent beagling!
Oh man, that snaggle tooth kills me. I love it!
Here is one of the dopiest pictures I have of Amka and his doofy face.
Ohhh, fluffy little paws.
Yeah, a thread of costumed animals is just what I need today.
My contribution, a very begrudging dinosaur –
“Yeah, I love my human this much. So much, I love my human. Gotta hold onto that. Love my human. Love my human.”
“Extremely sad but with enough fortitude to eat cheese, if there’s cheese” is his go-to expression for dreadful things like costumes or baths.
Sometimes I put one of my cat’s toys on her head and she can’t understand how to get it off and is just sadly resigned about it like “this is my life now, I guess.” Her facial expression in those times is not unlike your dog’s.
Animal Resigned to Human Whim
My cat got stuck between the window and the storm window once and the look on her face plainly said, “I guess I live here for a while.”
Here’s an angry cat in a dog dinosaur costume
And here’s the same cat (my mom’s cat Nacho) in the dogs skeleton costume, after he flung himself down the stairs in despair.
The fearsome Felinosaur would happily eat your face if he wasn’t immobilized by fleece.
This is a repeat, but…
Maybe one more…
puppy belliiiiiiiies! (is something I probably shouldn’t squeal in a shared office)
How about a huge dog nose?
Sudden Onset Puppy Head is a common condition in my household too.
For some reason it was very important to dress Fry (named after the esteemed Philip J.) in my husband’s hoodie and hat.
*steeples fingers* Excellent.
The above be-hatted mystery spaniel is named Leela, after one Ms. Turanga Leela!
If you want to read more about the lethal-injection drug availability issue, I highly recommend this piece that just came out in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/…
(TW though, it gives an extremely detailed account of a botched execution, I am not squeamish generally but I cringed a lot)
I was thinking about that article, too. Oh god. When I read it, I sat in stunned silence for probably twenty minutes.
One of the most unbelievable things here is that corporations in other countries refuse to sell sodium thiopental to the US if they find out it’s going to be used in executions. When even companies that stand to sell their product at a 900% markup refuse to do so on moral grounds… What is wrong with this country?
Regarding the death penalty, I recommend the autobiography of Albert Pierrepoint, Chief Executioner in Britain until 1956. It’s a really fascinating look at the whole process of hanging; what really comes across is his dedication to making sure it was carried out quickly and cleanly, with as little suffering as possible. I am not remotely in favour of the death penalty, but it’s a very interesting book, and the method sounds more humane than lethal injection.
as other people mentioned above, i think lethal injection just carries this general sense of medicine and science and decency that hanging and shooting do not, probably because we’ve been killing people with the other two for much longer and they’re a bigger mess to clean up.
I’m anti-death penalty, but that sounds like a very interesting read, I think I’ll pick it up!
The electric chair was developed as a humane alternative to hanging when the Tesla/Edison feud made electricity scientifically fashionable. Then the gas chamber was developed after WWI as a humane alternative to electrocution. Then lethal injection was developed as a more humane alternative to gas. Now we’ve come full circle and people are saying “Well maybe hanging isn’t so bad after all”.
I’m anti-death penalty too (we don’t have it in Australia), but I’m fascinated by the mentality that allows it to survive in the American system when so many other parts of American culture are so progressive.
It is an interesting question, I’m not really sure I can answer you there; I’m a native Californian, which often feels like its own country, we’re a fairly progressive state overall, and we have death penalty system within the state that’s rarely used but has not been dismantled.
The rape kits testing thing? For a year I tried to get a national womens magazine (any of them) to publish a story on this subject and no one wanted it! I’m glad it is getting more attention, finally, but why is this ridiculousness even happening? It is patently wrong. Ugh. I could go on and on.
– I think that the insistence on lethal injection as a method of execution has a lot to do with a certain general squeamishness about the business of the actual process of executing someone. It’s a general truism (not sure if it’s actually true or just truthy) that opponents of the death penalty actually want executions to be televised, and proponents don’t, because, despite general public support for the death penalty, most people really don’t want to see it happen, and that lethal injection is supposed to minimize the overt violence of the act. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death, about a guy who was supposedly an expert in “humane” methods of execution who got mixed up in Holocaust denialism. (You can also read his Wikipedia article, which goes into some detail about the bogosity of his credentials.)
– Yeah, kind of odd how, with the popularity of all those CSI shows and all the money that law enforcement requests for cool gadgets and stuff, those rape kits haven’t been tested, eh? It’s as if, should DNA profiles be worked up from the rape kits, eventually they might be matched to profiles from people who are rich or famous. Maybe a bunch of them. I know, crazy talk.
– I run hot and cold on Bob Seger. Some of his songs I’ve just gotten sick of, especially the one that was used for a truck commercial, but others I still like quite a lot, especially “Main Street” and one that rarely gets played, “The Famous Final Scene.”
For all my Toast-homies who suggested ways to keep my Panic Brain chilled out in the early days of pregnancy last week, THANK YOU. Expecting Better and the Longest Shortest Time podcasts have been been supremely helpful.
As thanks, I present to you: Orchestral Farts.
There is really no designated place to put this, but this [video in which Dwayne The Rock Johnson officiates a SURPRISE WEDDING for his friend/fan] is super appealing and I think would strike a chord with the commentariat: http://www.themarysue.com/rock-nuptials/
Ugh with the death penalty– I don’t support it at all, but one thing that struck me about all of the articles is how little pharmacist involvement there was. They talked to manufacturers, they called physicians, and finally a few compounding pharmacies, but the ignorance about the pharmacists’ role is hurting these poor prisoners, too. Physicians get one semester of pharmacology and PharmDs get eight minimum. The second I read “midazolam and hydromorphone” I knew exactly how Mr. Wood’s execution was going to turn out.
Of course we can safely and humanely euthanize a 1200 lb horse with a single syringe. Vets are great at working with their pharmacies and practiced at making those calculations.
Physicians are great for lots of things, diagnosis and treatment plans and everything, but it’s crazysauce that there’s a whole doctorate-level profession who are viewed as human vending machines rather than specialists. Imagine what would have happened if, instead of going around to random pharmacies asking for drugs, someone in the prison thought to ask a pharmacist what would happen with the drug cocktail they were (cruelly, irresponsibly) trying out on the victim?
“So, how do we kill him?”
“We don’t know.”
[LATER]
“Is this stuff legal?”
“We don’t know.”
[LATER]
“Is he dead yet?”
“We don’t know.”
[LATER]
“How about now? Is he dead now?”
“Um…. maybe… hang on, pretty sure… okay, yeah. He’s dead.”
[LATER]
“So, was he really guilty, do you think?”
“…”
My cat got stuck between the window and the storm window once and the look on her face plainly said, "I guess I live here for a while."