GOOD MORNING, CAMPERS. (Is there a more hateful sound than the sickly-sung drawl of “Good morning, campers”? I submit that there is not.) I’m going to be doing a few link roundups over the next week or two as a FUN CHANGE OF PACE; please prepare yourself in the unlikely event that you hate change.
***
Should you consider yourself an interested party, here is the official instagram for the caught small cat, now living with Friend of the Toast Liz Lopatto.
He is well, and all signs point to his continuing to be well, for a very long time.
***
Oh, my goodness and a half:
She’s very aware that she doesn’t have many of the problems others in the group do. She’s already worked through her war issues in therapy. She and her second wife got divorced when she transitioned, but they’ve made their friendly peace, and what living family she’s still got accepts her. She has a new partner, a woman named Lizzie Jenkins. They’re both retired. Donna Jean’s extremely busy and active in the community via Louisiana Trans Advocates, an organization she helped found that runs support groups, which she and Lizzie personally lead in New Orleans and Baton Rouge and attend events for all over the state. She also speaks to university classes because she and Lizzie like to spread awareness and combat stigma. Plus, they really like the way that they can, from the front of the room, see all the college men in the seats unconsciously put their hands over their junk when the discussion turns to sex reassignment surgery.
When it happens, DJ and Lizzie point out to the boys that they’re doing it. Then the boys spread their arms back out, draping them all over the backs of the chairs around them, reclaiming their full, rightful male space.
Donna Jean is the happiest she’s ever been. She often hums cheery tunes to herself as she walks around town.
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“You can just glimpse what Zink means by “agent bait,” though Mislaid is less a satire of race and sexuality in the American South than a satisfying parody of what such a (self-consciously serious and more obviously commercial) satire might look like — perhaps one by Jonathan Franzen.”
I honestly, truly, cannot parse this sentence. I am genuinely asking for assistance. What does it mean? Someone gave me a copy of this, and I read the first twenty and the last four pages and couldn’t get into it. Do you have the boss key? Is it worth trying again? I am open and honest and willing to appreciate it. Tell me what to do.
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My parents found out about Soylent today because there was a profile in the paper. Thanks to the guys who made Soylent, I had to listen to my parents separately, quietly exclaiming “It’s peeeooooopleeeee” on and off all morning. HAVEN’T YOU PEOPLE RUINED ENOUGH.
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There are a few really sad instances of vicious sexual harassment in Anne Meara’s otherwise lovely obituary.
When they met in 1953, they were both in New York looking for work. She burst out of his agent’s office in tears after the man chased around his desk.
In his 2000 memoir, “Married to Laughter,” Stiller wrote that he took the upset, “angel-faced” young woman to a coffee shop, where she bemoaned the lecherous men of New York.
“A guy started following me down Broadway,” Meara told him. “He must’ve known I was an actress. I had a portfolio and was wearing makeup. When he got real close, he started saying dirty words. I started to limp, hoping it would turn him off.
“‘Keep it up, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I love women with afflictions!’”
The past was mostly garbage, except for, I suppose, when it wasn’t.
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“The U.S. military today is gradually becoming a separate warrior class“:
Multi-generational military families like the Graveses form the heart of the all-volunteer Army, which increasingly is drawing its ranks from the relatively small pool of Americans with historic family, cultural or geographic connections to military service.
While the U.S. waged a war in Vietnam 50 years ago with 2.7 million men conscripted from every segment of society, less than one-half of 1% of the U.S. population is in the armed services today — the lowest rate since World War II. America’s recent wars are authorized by a U.S. Congress whose members have the lowest rate of military service in history, led by three successive commanders in chief who never served on active duty.
Surveys suggest that as many as 80% of those who serve come from a family in which a parent or sibling is also in the military. They often live in relative isolation — behind the gates of military installations such as Ft. Bragg or in the deeply military communities like Fayetteville, N.C., that surround them.
The segregation is so pronounced that it can be traced on a map: Some 49% of the 1.3 million active-duty service members in the U.S. are concentrated in just five states — California, Virginia, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia.
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AMERICA NINJA WARRIOR (god, what a DREADFUL name) is BACK for season seven and I am JAZZED ABOUT WATCHING A LOT OF INTENSE, COMPACTLY-MUSCLED PEOPLE FLING THEMSELVES ABOUT ABSURD OBSTACLE COURSES FOR MY AMUSEMENT. KACY CATANZARO WILL ASCEND TO THE HALLS OF VALHALLA ON THE BACK OF GIANT FOAM CUSHIONS.
Tags: link roundup, the internet
The front page of Merriam-Webster.com is featuring their recent blog post on a “Word They’re Watching”: mansplaining. http://www.merriam-webster.com/blog/mansplaining-…
I got very confused when I went to m-w.com to look up a word as part of my normal work and saw “Mansplaining” in big letters.
The word’s death knell has been sounded—it’s so broadly applied that any time a man opens his mouth he’s accused of mansplaining—but mansplain is clearly not going to be dropping out of use any time soon.
I mean, maybe if men didn’t mansplain so much, we wouldn’t have to so frequently accuse them of it, Merriam-Webster.
could it possibly be “overused” because we’ve been waiting YEARS for someone to coin a word for that phenomenon? Maybe?
Also, the blog post notes that no adverbial use has been noted so far. Obviously the solution to this is Mansplaining Tom Swifties. “Give me those matches, I know how to build a campfire,” said Tom mansflamingly.
I LOVE THIS.
“Let me get that for you,” said Tom mansdeigningly.
“You shouldn’t take aspirin for headaches, you’ll build up a tolerance,” said Tom manspainingly.
“Men evolved to be hunters,” said Tom manslainingly.
ahhhh those are great!
“Are you really buying that Dunkin coffee? Let me tell you why Starbucks is superior,” said Tom manschainingly.
“Of course I need to take up all this room on the subway, my balls need air,” said Tom mantrainingly.
“They develop a new flu vaccine every ear,” said Tom manstrainingly.
“Quinoa is problematic,” said Tom mangrainingly.
“Repetitive motion injuries rarely cause broken bones,” said Tom mansprainingly.
can’t stop, won’t stop
“Refined sugar is so bad for you,” said Tom mancaneingly.
“People would take you more seriously if you spoke proper English,” said Tom manain’tingly.
“You really should be knitting using natural wools,” said Tom manskeiningly.
“Women have a higher pain tolerance because of childbirth,” said Tom manpainingly.
“You should put salt on that red wine spill,” said Tom manstainingly.
“The Rock isn’t his real name,” said Tom man-Dwayne-ingly.
“Let me give you unsolicited advice on attaching those snow tires,” said Tom manchainingly
“But have you heard about these significant differences in gendered neural development I glanced at on facebook?” Tom asked manbrainingly
“Actually, baking soda and boiling water should power through most mild-to-moderate plumbing clogs,” said Tom mandrainingly.
“You should only use the left lane if you’re passing,” said Tom manlaneingly.
“The Joker is overrated–he’s definitely not the best Batman villain,” said Tom manbaneingly.
“Let me show you how to do that computer thing,” said Tom mantrainingly.
“A lot of people aren’t reading Hamlet with enough nuance,” said Tom man-Dane-ingly.
“I know you went to culinary school and all, but I’ll teach you to cook a lobstah the way we do in Bah Habah,” said Tom man-Maine-ingly.
“You’ve got to sharpen that adze there. You should be able to shave off your arm hairs,” Tom said manplaningly.”
I just wanted to think one up so I could join in and say that the Maine one is killing me! Lobstah 5ever.
My husband enthusiastically mansplained at me last night, on a topic about which he knew no more than I already did, and he wouldn’t stop and I was so irritated. Thank you, I just needed to get that out.
Did you eat his face
No, but I was super grumpy at him, then played him to a tie in tennis. Almost as good?
Quite so. 😀
This brings me IMMEASURABLE joy.
I saw this moments after having a financial thing mansplained to me. No, this word is not tired. This word is Western Civilization in a nutshell.
Mansplaining: The Statue https://twitter.com/annfriedman/status/6018826857…
I AM SO MAD THAT I MISSED NINJA WARRIOR LAST NIGHT but hopefully it will be on demand or something because I used to live for that when G4 was still a channel (that and Unbeatable Banzuke)
I would say something insightful and/or intelligent, but I can’t – I’ve been reduced to a bundle of squee by that wee kitten.
YOU CAN MEASURE HIS TINY CUTENESS IN PROPORTION TO THE ANNOYING KNOB THAT HOLDS THE TOILET ONTO THE FLOOR! My brain has exploded.
The main problem with the American military is this: that you have to be nuts to trust your life to the American military.
The US Army actually lost my brother while he was training in America.
Twice.
They had to call my mom to ask where he was.
That’s literally something out of a Pratchett novel. Ours is an administration of idiots.
To me, Catch-22 reads less like a satire and more like a regular memoir sometimes.
Wait, as in, “Excuse me ma’am, but do you remember which training facility we sent your son to?” Wow.
That is exactly what it was.
i…i get that they’re managing a large amount of data, but we have COMPUTERS NOW. it’s not even like his info should be in a position to get like, physically lost in the back of a filing cabinet.
What’s crazy to me is that it’s not like he was on a secret mission, where his location was only written down by one person. Dozens of people had to sign off on this! He was at a training camp in California, they gave him food and housing, he was enrolled in classes, for Pete’s sake! And somehow, the Staff Sergeant — a guy whose literal job is to know what the staff are doing — couldn’t get ANY of this information.
And yet internet trolls can find a random woman’s home address, place of employment, and family information in roughly 10-30 minutes.
Hi welcome to the infantry. Here, watch this nuclear bomb going off. Now try this untested vaccine. Now clear the Japanese off this tiny island that no one cares about. And oh, by the way, we’re extending your service – didn’t you read the fine print?
Or have limited other options.
I feel the need to point out that military recruiting centers have very strong presence in poor and/or rural locations.
Or you just don’t want to pay for college.
Or that. Getting college paid for is the kind of benefit that draws people to all kinds of fields! Including military.
I needed a cute kitty instagram on this rainy fake Monday.
The cat is just …too tiny.
I’m sure against the law to be that wee
The past was mostly garbage
THANK YOU. I am a historian (or an historian, as our Downton Abbey historian would say), and I consider it my mission to help people understand that the the past was terrible. I’m glad you like Victorian parasols or flapper dresses or Eames chairs or whatever, doesn’t matter, IT WAS A TERRIBLE TIME.
An historian is a fan, not only of flapper dresses, but also cravats, William Morris, train windows that open by crank, and everything ever made by Dun Emer industries.
But it’s true, superior decorative arts were sadly unable to cure tuberculosis.
Maybe they helped with suffrage, though? There were some *very* pretty posters.
Excellent point! And as a total first-waver, I’m very much in favor of women’s suffrage.
And the sashes, those were very important.
OMG YES. I especially hate the conversations of “if you could live in any other period in history…” I would want to live now. I still want to live now. The past is garbage. And it’s always dudes who are like “but ____ other era is so great!” I had a guy roommate who didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to live in the Beat Generation era. Um, roomie dude? All of those people (white dudes) were assholes. Also, they smoked like chimneys and I like my modern cleaner air and asthma meds, thanks.
All those previous eras: statistically more awesome for dudes!
My roommate (who is 77, it’s a long story) told me that I would have liked UVA so much more in the 50s. I pointed out that I wouldn’t have been able to attend.
Hahahaha yes completely. I’ve been ‘invited’ to a compulsory event where you must ‘dress to match your favourite era’ of history…and I’m guessing that means I just get to wear my normal clothes? I love dress up as much as the rest of them, but semantics dictate that I cannot go in anything but the clothes I am wearing in 2015, even if I would love to wear a plaid lumberjack shirt and dungarees like Angela Chase.
FUTURE OUTFIT SPACE FUTURE FUTURE SPACE OUTFIT
Unless you don’t like space (so hard to breathe there you know)
then just something futuristic I think.
I am actually very tempted to go in these TNG pyjamas, now that you mention it:
The comfort AND the future!
Please do!
Hey, the 90s are now a legit historical era, I say rock your grunge and go for it.
We have so many young interns here that I don’t think they were even aware of the 90s, one was born in 1998! The 90s being historical makes me sad :(.
Oh, yes. I used to be a classical scholar, and whenever anyone asked me if I wanted to go back in time and live in ancient Rome or Athens or whatnot, my answer was always HELL TO THE NO. Even if I managed to beat the nearly overwhelming odds and ended up as a high-status woman living in relative comfort and luxury, there’s still plague and death in childbirth and nasty politics and always being shoved into the background to deal with.
As I kayaked, SOLO, up the Charles yesterday, I wondered how long ago it was that I would not have been able to rent a boat by myself without the proper male companionship.
As it was, none of the young guys at the rental place gave me so much as a funny look, and off I went to acquire badly sunburned legs, a blister on my thumb, and a glorious afternoon in my own company, no conversatin’ required.
Ran across this Gay Talese 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra on longform.org … . Parts of it … even in the 1970s some of the attitudes towards women were entrenched. In this, women are “decoration”, in the literal sense that they faded into the chairs and wallpaper, like someone made a design decision to include them … . Ugh but … just ugh. http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tu…
I agree with you but also feel conflicted because I don’t agree in a progressive view of history so mostly confused right now?
Agreed, I am here for neither declension narratives nor Whiggish optimism, as MissSusanST said above. I don’t think progress is inevitable; things are very likely to get worse (c.f. climate change) in the absence of concerted political will. There are certain issues and places that are worse off now than they were in the past. Still, on the whole, the past was terrible.
So Mislaid is not a satire but a *parody* of satire? A pastiche of a specific author’s satirical style? How many levels of satire before the whole thing loops back around to sincerity?
Yeah, I read the New Yorker profile of Zink, and I ended up almost hoping the piece itself was satire. It’s as though Zink were doing a performance piece parody of a female author whom Franzen would deign to support (fluent in German, obsessed with birds, sneering about America, in love with Franzen).
1) I hope this is true. Nay, I am going to live life as if it is true.
2) I assume that Zink was inspired in her endeavor by reading Ortberg on Franzen.
Satception?
I can understand a parody of a satire, sort of, if there’s an actual satire out there to parody. It would be weird, but I can imagine someone writing a satirical novel about race in the south and then somebody else saying “it would be funny to rewrite this in Jonathan Franzen’s style.” But lacking that, just looking at a stand-alone novel and claiming to identify separate layers of satiricalness…that’s just cutting it awfully fine; I don’t really trust that criticism. (I’m suddenly picturing the judges on the Great British Bake-Off counting the tiny layers in 24-layer cakes.)
Now I’m curious what percentage of the total adult population of the US is in California, Virginia, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia. I’m pretty sure I could probably do this math with 6 googles and excel(or similar), but it’s fake Monday, and i should, in theory, be doing actual work.
According to Wolfram Alpha, 29.2%. (I was wondering the same thing)
30.1% (added from this table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_… California and Texas are the two most populous states.
Yeah, it’s not a good statistic, but the regional difference is real. Farther down the article points out:
Southern states consistently provide the biggest proportion of recruits. California had the highest number of enlistments in 2013 — a total of 18,987 — but the state supplies a relatively low percentage of its 18- to 24-year-olds, the age group that fills the military rolls every year.
The highest-rate contributors were Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Virginia and South Carolina. The District of Columbia was last.
It’s not even so much that it’s a *bad* statistic as much as it’s the sort of statistic that makes me sad that I don’t have graduate training in statistics and a job at a think tank that would be okay with me losing half my day chasing down related info.
Obviously California and Texas are HUGE in both population and land mass. And different states have different numbers of 18-24s. Are 18-24s even the most appropriate demo to look at, or is it just convenient because it’s a standard demo? Based on the bit you quoted, they SEEM to have done the work to compare the enlistment of 18-24s compared to total population. I’m also curious about the geographic makeup of military academies, geographic makeup of ROTC (so, both what schools have them, and the home states of the students in those programs). Various demo info on the legacies vs not (ie, are people who come from military families more likely to be white?). All sorts of similar questions about women (racial, geographic, legacy info)
I have to assume that at least a lot of this work has been done, and I could google for a lot of it. And hopefully I will.
All that said, my experience is consistent with the article- from New England, 3 out of 4 of my grandparents served, my father was in the National Guard during the Vietnam Era, my uncle-in-law was in Vietnam, and none of my generation, even getting into fairly extended family members I’ve never met, AND their spouses, I can’t think of ANYONE who’s served.
Related to one question you raised, I recall (and perhaps someday will find the time to dig up) a note that Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. military casualties are disproportionately white, which would be generally consistent with this idea.
Really?? That is very interesting! If you dig that up let me know!
Oh, there’s this that I quickly found: http://www.govexec.com/defense/2004/05/the-fallen…
I don’t know if there’s more recent information, though I don’t suppose the trends would have changed.
My husband has known about Soylent for a year and STILL murmurs “It’s peeeooooopleeeee” and giggles whenever someone brings it up. He will never get over it.
The military bits are interesting (and not just cause there’s a shoutout to the closest thing I’ve got to a hometown/Fayetteville/Bragg). I will gladly shoulder the burden of being the new warrior caste, but only if there can be elephants or camel corps. I always forget that other people are apparently unaware of the divide though? I mean, if you are/have been in the military you are well aware of it. There’s being put on a pedestal and ‘thank you for your service’ and its all hollow as anything.
In other news, Strange & Norrell, Strange & Norrell. Did you see his banyan and his little tasseled hat? I love that hat. The hat and the laugh made the episode.
That and Strange’s poking of the statue’s boob.
And Segundus’s face. Always.
I think it’s not so much other people are unaware of the divide, as that each side can’t see what the divide looks like from the other side.
There’s the hollowness of “thank you for your service” and lack of patriotism/awareness/caring on one side that you see if you’re military (and that I understand better thanks to this article).
And then from the other, there is a deep discomfort that also comes from the fact that many people don’t want to be “protected” the way the US military does it, don’t want to be collectively responsible for going to war as often as the US goes to war, sees something immoral in how we justify invading other countries abroad, and feels a kind of “not in my name” recoil.
I guess “thank you for your service” can often be ignorance/desire for ignorance, but can also a way to try to honor the individual while side-stepping a lot of this other ambivalence. It really troubles me, though, as someone who has studied the notion of collective guilt in a democratic society in Germany 1930s, and then thinks about what it means to be a democratic society in the moment the US went to war against Iraq, when we knew there were no WMDs, even if the government misrepresented that fact in the moment — there was enough evidence in public that it could be known it was not true. The collective turning away of the head by the media was so puzzling. And then the invasion becomes something much, much uglier on our side. Guilt, collective guilt.
But now I am digressing pretty far from your point, sorry! I won’t say “thank you for your service,” but instead raising an imaginary glass of beer as toast in cheer and solidarity in your direction! may there someday be a camel corps!
A large portion of the military side knows where the divide is coming from on the civilian side far better than most people think. Cause that’s a big thing, the idea that most military members are stupid and/or jingoistically patriotic/conservative/believe everything the army times tells them. The bottom 10% of your high school class, etc. I had to get over that notion myself when I joined and thought I was a superior being thanks to my college time.
You & I may have crossed over those boundaries a lot (I actually grew up alongside lots of military people despite not being one, visiting military bases overseas for health care and the PX, going out for a drink at the Marine House, that kind of thing). But I think we’re unusual/lucky in crossing the growing chasm — as the article points out. I really don’t get the feeling both sides understand each other that much anymore.
I’m still betting the military understands more though. I mean, every military member has close civilian friends and family members. How much of that is true for the reverse? And most military personnel were still civilians first and will return to being civilians at some point.
There were just things about that article that rubbed me the wrong way as a veteran. How good the military has it compared to most of the population. How the bases are ‘exclusive gated communities’ with malls on them. Makes it sound like the entire military as a whole is lazing in the lap of luxury in our gated communities with free housing and pools and malls and healthcare and burger king on our off days from killing people. Somehow that doesn’t match with my cinderblock officers’ quarters childhood. Or all the families on foodstamps because the nonmilitary spouse can’t get a job that pays more than minimum wage when they end up moving every two years. Or the black mold and asbestos filled barracks I lived in. Or the crumbling hangars from the 1940s that I worked in. Or the fact that we’re still living in a culture that hasn’t really gotten over the historical notion of seeing enlisted soldiers as the scum of the earth and our solution is to place them on pedestals instead and that isn’t helping either and…
And apparently this subject pushes my buttons a lot more than I thought. Imma shut up and watch Strange & Norrell again.
Or the HUGE water contamination issue at Camp Lejuene??? “Thank you for your service, here’s some cancer.”
I saw stuff that would make stomachs turn and I never even got near a war zone. Anybody who thinks any military job is a walk in the park needs to sit the fuck down.
In the end most of it boils down to classism. Still. The ranks have always been filled by people who were never ‘gentlemen’ and never could be and in most cases were just scum. There has always been the idea that the sort of person who would willingly enlist (barring a time of national crisis) is poor, uneducated and probably criminal. We still can’t get over that and never will.
After a while it’s hard not to hear ‘thank you for your service’ and get ‘better you than me’ out of it instead. The only thank you’s I’ve gotten that mattered were from an Afghan and a ninety year old Frenchwoman.
Strange & Norell is a TV series?? When did this happen?? Why was I not informed?
Two weeks ago! Sundays, BBC1 if you are inthe UK, coming in June I believe to the US. We have been collectively bouncing about it in comments for a while!
It is a series and it is beautiful and I want to shove John Segundus and his enthusiastic little face in my pocket and feed him biscuits.
He’s the most adorable! None of my friends and relations get my enthusiasm for his little face (or even Norrell’s scared rabbit face), and I need to get new friends and relations.
If the only prerequisite for friendship is a love of John Segundus and his face, I will gladly apply for the post. (I will also gladly squee about Norrell’s face. And Strange’s. All the faces.)
You are in and they are all out.
All their faces ugh. And this show. Not one of the actors is how I pictured the characters and and yet they are all so perfect and fill me with such joy.
His hat! It was amazing!
Norrell’s face on the beach really sealed my love for him, so screwed up and concentratey!
The boyfriend is also now hooked, so I’m pleased about that.
YES. Norrell’s being unable to give Strange a book he recommended. And fearing that his books would get dirty abroad. He’s the patron magician of misanthropic bookworms everywhere.
“I regret everything, it’s all not worth the loss of forty books.
In case y’all aren’t watching The Try Guys, this is a great time to start! They attempted American Ninja Warrior, and Kacy even makes an appearance!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw2wn4JYakY
oh my god I can’t WAIT to watch this
I had to explain Soylent to my old flatmate because she’d said something fairly obvious, and to point out the obviousness I said, “…and Soylent Green is people.” Did not work, 1/10, would not recommend. It did send her down a Soylent rabbit hole, though.
Soylent = Bachelor Chow
You put it out by the garage door, in little dishes, and the wee hungry ferals come a-running.
p.s. Trap, Neuter, Release.
p.p.s Do not give them their own instagram. It will only encourage them.
Cats actually really do love it! I don’t know why, it’s not like it satisfies any of their nutritional requirements.
Now with flavor!
You know, while officers certainly enjoy a decent standard of living, there are a shocking amount of enlisted men’s families who live off food stamps because pay doesn’t go far enough to feed a family, especially one (like most military families) living off one income–like in the all-too-common case that a guy marries his first girlfriend, they move to a posting, start having kids, and she either doesn’t work or is stuck in low-wage work, etc.
Other than that, I am here for a discussion of insular ity!
Yeah. The bit in there about officers with private planes and large houses and entire continents, etc, etc was a bit much. That is the one percent of the one percent of the one percent. (I was an officer’s kid from birth and I well remember the year where the only Xmas present my parents could afford was a box of crayons.) And the bit about raises and lavish bonuses and free healthcare and retirement and that’s great if you actually stick around long enough to retire. Or reenlist. Maybe if things were as great as they’re saying I wouldn’t have been homeless when I got out.
It’s a bit rich to talk about amazing health care when anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see the news about how broken the VA system is.
My battles with tricare when I was in and the va now that I’m out could fill a very convoluted book. Like the time when the recommended dosage of the meds they gave me ended up almost poisoning me.
I mean, that’s maybe not directly their fault, but they should still be able to train people to give out correct doses.
Agreed, those enlisted guys are not exactly rolling in it. My brother’s battalion even has a baby-clothes donation system where families can come get stuff for free. My understanding is that the reenlistment bonuses aren’t so hot anymore, either, since they’ve been cutting back on numbers since the wars are winding down(ish).
Worth mentioning, too, that for enlisted and officer alike, it’s a hard fucking job. My brother’s an officer and regularly works 12+ hour days, weird nighttime shifts, etc. You generally get compensated a lot more for those type of hours in the private sector.
Ah! I literally just overheard someone talking about this, and had such a moment of déjà vu. She didn’t see her husband for almost 3 years because 1) he enlisted and was sent to basic training; 2) deployed on a long cruise; 3) deployed again; 4) he went into C-school. I think they got married between 1 and 2, and they just got transferred to one of the local bases a month ago, and he’ll be receiving his officer commission or promotion to the next rank in a few weeks? BUT the point is that they couldn’t afford to live married even when he wasn’t on the ship or in officer training. She’s pretty stoked because this assignment to this base meant they could set up house together, and in a month or two, she’ll be able to cut back to only 2 waitressing jobs instead of 3.
Loads of my relatives on my dad’s side are military. Blue-collar “it’s this or the steel mill” kinds of guys who figured the military was their best bet towards steady employment or eventual GI Bill educations, but frankly the end result is the same. Still working class, still having to work to make ends meet. And, of course, I live in a navy town (we’ve got Kings Bay, GA pretty nearby, too), so I see it all the time. It sucks.
I grew up an officer’s kid, and I’m very grateful for the healthcare and security my family had thanks to the military– not because it was so lavish and great, but because that’s the kind of thing every American should have access to, and it’s a goddamn travesty that so many do not. That kind of criticism (how come you get benefits? We should all get nothing, and then it would be fair!) is what a friend of mine calls “reverse solidarity.”
Thank you for this.
Friends, apropos of NOTHING, I am still here to talk about Mad Max. What I like about Fury Road is that not only is it feminist, but it’s so brazenly feminist that we don’t have the vocabulary for it. Like, our bar for “feminism” in movies is so low that Fury Road clears it with enough distance to make it look like it didn’t even notice.
“George Miller would you say this movie is feminist? You know, strong female characters, lots of roles for women, an implication of equality, that sort of thing?”
“Well, yeah, that. Also it says explicitly that organized systems of religion, capitalism, and military-industrial hierarchy facilitate the rule by a small number of men who are able to objectify women and coerce them into sexual slavery in order for those men to control societal access to fertility, and that those systems are toxic to the global community and must be eradicated with revolutionary action.”
WHY HAVENT I SEEN THIS MOVIE YET WHATS WRONG W MEEEE
Listen I am not trying to say that you are a bad person or that you are failing the cause of humanity by not seeing it. But.
I guess but nothing. You should see this movie immediately. Quit your job if you have to.
Maybe i can take a Don Draper style lunch break, i.e. movie + cocktail + nap
I saw it yesterday. And I loved that the main instance I could see of “male gaze” was actually a subversion of male gaze in movies. Max comes across the wives in flimsy garments taking a shower in the desert, and stops cold, transfixed…and then demands some water. The movie is all, “Male gaze, right? NO, HE WANTS THE GODDAMN WATER, what is wrong with you that you’d think a man dying of dehydration would choose to ogle women rather than get water?”
Jinx 😀
AND YET some people (Anita Sarkeesian, Tracy King) have mounted arguments that it is not feminist. Which I mean, sure, you can criticize anything. But really, at some point, can’t we just be happy there’s a movie that makes so many (so many!) women fistpump?
Man, I’m all for just enjoying a movie that makes women fistpump, but I’m actually fascinated by the argument htat it’s not feminist, because I just…am not sure how a person could even make that argument? I guess we could argue that it’s imperfectly feminist, but it…I mean that movie is 100% explicitly, “Mad Max helps Imperator Furiosa smash the patriarchy.”
Sarkeesian’s point is mostly that it glorifies violence, and she considers that inherently unfeminist (I am a very, VERY non-violent person… but I’m not sure I agree?).
Tracy King‘s arguments I see some flaws in: for instance, she points to the shot of the wives washing each other, but I think the joke of that scene is that it turns out Max (whose “gaze” the shot presents) is actually not consumed with lust but with thirst. She also attacks the gender essentialism inherent in blaming men (as opposed to capitalism, I guess) for the breakdown of society, and there she may have a point, I have to say – women are not inherently less greedy or thoughtless than men, after all.
It’s funny, because I was just thinking about how the Vuvalini use that naked lady as bait in the desert to trap dangerous desert nomads, and how it’s funny how the camera doesn’t ogle her at all. Like, you can tell that she’s naked, but there’s no clear “sexy naked lady” shot during that whole sequence, which I think lends credence to your argument that the joke in the washing-wives scene definitely is about the water, and not lust.
As for the other parts, man I don’t know. Like, I agree with this in principle, but on the other hand 1) it’s not like patriarchy and capitalism are extricable at this phase in history, the movie is just reflecting the structure of society as it stands, but in an exagerrated way. AND, taken in context with the rest of the Mad Max cycle, it’s not like women don’t get to be bad guys; Aunty Entity is as much of a dangerous capitalist as anyone else. And also 2)…I forgot what I was going to say for 2. Oh, right, I guess (2) is, I don’t think it’s implicitly wrong for a movie to take a simplified position against systemic evil; that’s only a problem if we assume that any single movie has to bear the burden of an entire philosophy on its own, which I don’t think is a legitimate artistic position.
Oh man, YES to your last point! This is why we need many more movies with central female protagonists: so that the few we get don’t need to be perfectly feminist in every way. That burden is just way too much to shoulder.
“the joke in the washing-wives scene definitely is about the water, and not lust.”
Also, that in a movie that up this point has been all guns and spikes and fire and speed and fury, Max prepares for a fight, turns the corner, and finds several radiant and flawless half-dressed women washing each other. For a moment, he’s just completely thrown, like he took a wrong turn out of the movie and into a perfume commercial.
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir and all, but it seems to me that both Nux and Max’s arcs contradict the idea that the movie has a simplistic “men = bad” gender-essentialism. The War Boys are pretty clearly both oppressors and victims, and (I think) also stand in for the idea of child soldiers, specifically.
Oh, Nux.
Between this and Hank “Beast” McCoy, Nicholas Hoult is covering the extremes of the hirsuteness spectrum.
and the idea of religion as the opiate of the masses, but still something valuable for the soldiers.
ETA: valuable is the wrong way to put it. Something that they find important? Something that is real to them? Not sure how to phrase it.
I would call it the carrot on the end of the stick.
Well, I agree that Immortan Joe USES it as a carrot (see @moxycrimefighter), but I think it’s actually pretty interesting how deeply meaningful the religion is to Nux, even though we know it’s fake and he’s just being manipulated with it. Yeah, it’s a fake death cult, absolutely, but Nux’s existential crisis is very real, nevertheless.
A very good point! It’s funny to me that any MRA would hate this movie, because it says right there, “society the way it is is toxic for young men, making them go to war and shit for terrible reasons,” except obviously the problem is that in the MRA imagination, the Fury Road society was invented by the wives, so that the warboys would go to war, and the wives could sit safe at home in their vault, occasionally being required to have sex with a gross necrotic old guy.
Right! I haven’t done a full shake down analysis but yeah, “the War Boys are pretty clearly both oppressors and victims” because toxic masculinity cuts both ways 🙂 man I need to go see this again.
I mean, it’s not just for the messaging. I also really really like fancy motorcycle trick riding and explosions.
Agree on the water scene! And also, you see the women in this golden glow-y halo of light that’s completely different than the harsh sunlight of previous scenes – then they promptly throw themselves into the action without giving a single fuck that they’re basically veal in gauze and going up against a couple of pretty unstable dudes. It’s great visual foreshadowing to the conversations that come later where we find out that these women engineered their own escape and Immortan Joe has been underestimating them drastically.
And in that same vein, I loved that their escape wasn’t portrayed as being motivated by anything other than their firm knowledge that they were people and people should not be enslaved. No precipitating event, just the culmination of a lot of discussions and planning because they always knew, they just needed to wait until the moment presented itself. (Maybe the pregnancies, but a logical continuation of the way they already felt.)
I take issue with both these criticisms because they’re both very shallow in that they only advocate the writer’s own brand of feminism, and if it doesn’t perfectly match up, it’s automatically not-feminist. Like who makes you arbiter of what works for other women or not? Not to mention it’s that trend of fighting over scraps, where whatever scrap you pick up MUST be representative of EVERYONE and if you only choose 1 take in 1 type of story in 1 genre it’s automatically bad feminism, the creative work of a particular story be damned (double-damned be the underrepresented people who see themselves in the story!).
That being said, in Sarkeesian’s case, hers was incredibly frustrating because her total tweets read more like she chose a thesis before seeing the movie (or frankly just the trailer, her critique is that flat and shallow). She has a good fundamental point (embracing toxic masculinity) but it’s weakened from the getgo because she intentionally ignores the concept of WHITE feminism embracing WHITE masculinity (which is a topic well worth exploring by someone who actually paid attention to the film), an extremely particular and prevalent brand of crummy and poisonous feminism.
I personally got more out of articles or tweets written by PoC, ranging from “thanks for showing us we don’t exist even in post-apocalypse, i guess we all died? mmkay” to “quite frankly let the white people have that shitty life, yeesh”.
The one criticism I really can’t argue with is the lack of PoC. I mean, sure, one of the wives is played by Zoe Kravitz, and one is slightly ethnically ambiguous, but that’s it. It would have been nice to see a movie that was diverse both with respect to gender AND with respect to race.
Someone posted in a comment thread elsewhere on this site that two of the women are actually part-Maori which is super significant in terms of POC representation in Australia. They’ve got their own complicated racial history that the movie does actually address, even if it’s (mostly) devoid of the non-white races we see the most in the US.
By the way, here’s the link that explains it better than I did and I’m totally stealing this from another Toastie, but don’t remember who.
http://fangirljeanne.tumblr.com/post/119506756812…
it’s not feminist because women are doing violence, and as we all know women are fundamentally sugar and spice and everything nice and their proper ladylike role is to sit the skull dictator down and talk about their feelings until he agrees to stop running people over in his flame-shooting monster truck
This comment made me loudly guffaw, snort, and spit. I nearly split the seat of my overalls. Then I daintily dabbed my nose with a delicately scented, embroidered hanky, before wadding it up and stuffing into my cleavage.
Imperfectly feminist in that there were three distinct points where I said, “really, it’s about the dudes here and now?” (SPOILERS, since I see people in this thread that haven’t seen it.)
So, yeah. Obviously I think that’s a position that can be taken in good faith.
Sure, but I mean, even acknowledging shortcomings like that, it’s still leaps and bounds more philosophically feminist than not only any movie of its type, but probably any movie with that kind of money behind it in…I don’t know, a long time.
A lot of times with movies that I think have strong feminist underpinnings, I want to be able to say, “dang, cut it some slack, they’re clearly trying here, and they’re clearly committed to the right idea,” but I’m not even sure that this movie needs that much slack!
That’s cool. The trigger warning thing I mentioned in my post I found pretty egregious, and the other things did jar me out significantly, but I’m glad it worked so well for you.
Hm I don’t know, I’m not sure that part was gratuitous to me. It was definitely horrific — I saw the movie with my pregnant wife, so that added another layer of horror on top of it — but obviously my experience of it is probably very different from both yours and hers.
Regarding how Furiosa got to her position, apparently she was one of the sex slaves; but was infertile, therefore no use as a breeder or wife. Without that purpose, she wasn’t really seen as a woman anymore, and was freer to take on another role. At least that’s how Theron has explained it.
yeah but…that’s not in the movie, right? Because I definitely didn’t pick up on any of that.
Definitely not overtly. I think there’s some hints that Furiosa was probably kidnapped along with her mom(?) to be a breeder, but something happened to have her end up as rig driver. And I think you could infer that she’s not “whole” because we have Joe’s favorite wives who are all unblemished (and even without the infertility, Furiosa is missing an arm, whether that happened before or after her time as rig driver is unclear; if it happened before, even as beautiful as she is, she wouldn’t have been among the pampered favorites with an injury like that). And then we have lots of women in the crowds outside the Citadel–if they were of use to Joe as breeders to build his army, they’d be inside. So hints that infertile or older women are cast out (as Miss Giddy who takes care of the pampered wives is the only old woman we see inside the Citadel, all the other women inside are child-bearing age).
Yeah that stuff is clear to me; I guess I don’t think I fully made the connection that the wives were the only fertile women — I think I just assumed that the Citadel routinely captured slaves, and then Joe was just taking the “best” ones for himself.
Also, i like the idea that Furiosa lost her arm after she started driving the rig, and that’s why there’s a big skeleton hand painted on the door where her arm would hang out, because that is badass.
That it’s all fertile women is inference on my part–with the radiation sickness and lack of food=malnutrition&other deficiencies; there would be a serious shortage of women able to go through a full-term pregnancy, and Joe wouldn’t be willing to let any of that could produce slip through his fingers, not that he’d be doing all the populating himself, there’s probably a harem for his favored generals. I could be misremembering, but I don’t recall any children in the crowds outside the Citadel, which makes me think children are scarce (especially combined with the joy at the dead fetus that would have been “perfect in every way”), and that Joe has probably taken them all for war boys or for future breeders.
Yeah, this is all very plausible. One thing that I especially like about Miller’s whole Mad Max cycle is that it’s clear that an enormous amount of thought has gone into every detail of the world, but he gets around to explaining less than 1% of it.
Definitely. One thing I like about Miller is that he was a doctor before becoming a director, so there’s a lot of thought into the medical side of things in his post-apocalypses that are incorporated into the plot without a lot of fanfare. Like how blood transfusions would be a necessity for treating radiation sickness/leukemia; I can’t think of another post-fallout movie that shows that.
Hahah, I didn’t know either of those things!
I definitely do remember thinking, when Max pulled that transfusion cable out of his neck, “that’s going to get infected.” So, Dr. Miller had better have an answer for that, I think.
I grew up in the desert. Far fewer infections possible in dry, hot conditions. Remember Lawrence of Arabia’s answer when asked why he liked the desert so much: “Because it’s clean.”
that is true, I guess, but like, he didn’t even rinse it off or anything, and also who knows HOW many other people that thing has been in AND also everyone is covered with grease. Does that make infections more likely or less?
I don’t know, I guess I should trust Dr. Miller.
Yeah what I got out of it is that outside Joe’s harem pretty much all the women and non-combat capable men are those serfs at the bottom of the citadel, and any kids they produce get turned into warboys until they die or are too old/sick to fight, then it’s back to the bottom again. It seems like there’s actually bunches of people around and making more people, just not ones who don’t have a billion tumors, and that was why Joe was sticking those girls specifically in his giant mountain vault.
Yeah; that got hashed out in the comments. Thanks.
On second viewing, I was trying to suss out if it was just that I was reading the movie as feminist because that is what I wished to see, or if there could be some other reading of it, and… yeah I also cannot see how one could even try to argue that it isn’t a feminist movie. IT JUST IS. (Maybe even misandrist at points?)
Also, the end scene struck me as being very representational of third wave feminism – not only were women being “let up,” but there were deliberate shots of the other groups represented on that platform as well – disabled people, black people, etc. I thought it was a nice visual of intersectionality.
Yeah, and the main badguys are bone-white skinhead capitalist religious warmongers! When else has anyone even tried to make a movie that was this explicit about systemic oppression?
I read Sarkeesian’s tweets, and her argument seems to boil down to “it’s not feminist because feminism is about dismantling exploitative power structure rather than just letting individual woman be violent.” And I was so confused, because . . . that’s literally THE WHOLE PLOT OF THE MOVIE. They go back because they decide they can’t allow Immortan Joe to continue exploiting the people like this! They let everyone drink from the waterfall and climb the Citadel! And yes, there’s violence, but the wives repeatedly take a stance of non-violence- “you said no killing!” “I thought you’d be above all that,” and in situations where a choice is offered, they always err on the side of compassion (like when they find Nux in the war rig.) It’s like Sarkeesian saw things going boom and went “well clearly this movie has nothing to offer” while completely ignoring any kind of context.
(Then again, I’m still rather crabby about her calling Mattie Ross “essentially a male character” because she never questioned the legitimacy of the death penalty, SO.)
Oh, man, and the part where the Splendid Angharad saves the others by just leaning out of the door and putting herself in the way so that Joe won’t shoot at them! Come on, man, there’s a huge overture towards non-violence as an important part of the process of dismantling exploitation, even if it does [either acknowledge or assert, depending on your point of view] that individual violence is sometimes necessary in a revolutionary context.
TBF Furiosa then leans out behind her human shield to take a potshot at Joe, there’s not a lot of room for picket signs and drum circles in desert bandit wacky races.
Yeah, exactly! There’s room for multiple perspectives!
Fury Road is a rich tapestry.
There is room for EXACTLY ONE DRUM CIRCLE and it’s got a flame-shooting pajama guy jamming metal riffs strapped to the front of it
The older women in this movie kick ass! I was glad to see it.
Is that….an actual quote from George Miller? Because if so, GODDAMN. Amazing.
No, but it is literally exactly what happens in the movie. Like, unambiguously.
Haha ok, I was gonna be reaaaaallly impressed if GM actually said that out loud. But obviously he was thinking it and the movie was amazing!
He did explicitly say in an interview that he created Furiosa because having a man help the Wives escape the Citadel would make the movie about a man “stealing” women from another man, and that’s not a story he wanted to tell.
So yeah he’s pretty freakin’ with it.
I saw it for the second time on Sunday and it made me have very violent dreams. I think I need to take a Mad Max break – at least until it comes out on DVD and I can buy it.
WHO KILLED THE WORLD??
Did you hear there may be a B&W, dialogue-less version on the dvd? I mean, I love the version we got, but I would love to see that.
Oooooh I would watch the shit out of that!
This is one of the few movies that I am definitely prepared to buy on DVD when it becomes available.
oh man I hadn’t heard it was silent too
I kinda hope there’s an alternate audio track where instead of the soundtrack you get whatever FLAMETAR guy was actually jamming on his awful feedbacky doom guitar too, I don’t care if it’s just like Stairway to Heaven and bits of Soundgarden over and over again just sweeping vistas over the murdercar race and this fading in and out on the wind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N929gjLLzkk
Aside from the messages of the plot of Mad Max, I think it’s also important to look at the characters. Yes there were lots of “strong female characters”tm., but only Furiosa was a real character with any real backstory or motivations. Vs two men ( Max and the War boy) who are given real character development.
That being said, it was an action movie and they aren’t generally known for character development.
Well, i don’t know about that. I think that all of the wives definitely have pretty clear character motivations (if anything, Furiosa’s motivations are substantially more confusing — she’s been working for Immortan Joe for twenty years, long enough to be a commander in his army, and suddenly she decides to up and leave? And take Joe’s wives with him?). And I think that there is some subtle character development among the wives — Cheedo the Fragile, for instance, first trying to run back to Joe when she thinks they can’t escape, then later on doing the same thing but it’s actually a trick to help save…I guess that was Toast the Knowing who got taken on to Immortan Joe’s car.
Certainly, that seems like as much character development as Max got, which went from, “Max doesn’t want to help,” to “Max will help.” Max is, largely I think, basically the same character at the end of the movie as he is at the beginning, which is kind of how characters like Max usually work.
But also I would argue that, in a case where the messages are as daring as they are in Fury Road, it’s actually NOT that important to look at the characters. Like, it’d be important if the characters were egregiously bad, but they’re not egregiously bad, and so what shortcomings they exhibit in terms of depth are not that big a deal.
I FINALLY SAW IT ON SUNDAY AND I THINK I AM GOING AGAIN TONIGHT
I think a lot of the ~arguments about whether or not Mad Max is feminist could easily be swept aside if people began to refer to the movie as advocating feminism. I don’t think a movie can be created and presented as 100% feminist because, let’s be honest, there are many different flavours of feminism & not one movie can (or should) touch them all. But I’ll be damned if I think or say that Mad Max isn’t one hell of a woman-powered action film (IF NOT THE BEST EVER)
Also, while Mad Max is under discussion, I feel compelled to share The Unbreakable Furiosa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSuat6MSwT4
FEMALES ARE STRONG AS HELL
IT’S A MIRACLE
I’ll grant you the terribleness of “Goooooooood morning campers”; but morning watch is a delight.
Sleep rumpled campers in their pyjamas, doing the Hokey Pokey in the early morning light.
Best enjoyed from the safety of the picnic table, clutching the biggest mug of strong coffee attainable.
I always enjoy giving a cheerful “good morning sunshine!” to my surly step-kids. Truly nothing has made me a morning person more than waking up others.
No kids in the house: The sun, it burns! Why must morning be so bright and come so soon?
Kids are here: Wake up! You’re wasting the day away!
I think it’s the schadenfreude honestly….
Holy crap, I never realized this, but this is exactly me! If there’s someone MORE miserable about waking up than I am, I turn into the chipperest asshole who will ever be found in the weak dawn light. But faced with an honest to goodness morning person, I will plan a sleep-fogged murder spree for the chance to stay in bed. Or, since I live alone, I will basically not get up until the threat of losing my job due to persistent lateness makes me.
This sounds like what I imagine the opening scene of the new Wet Hot American Summer series is going to be.
I understand the following from that sentence:
1. The novel is an attempt to impress an agent.
2. It’s an attempt to be a satire of race and sexuality in the American South.
3. It doesn’t succeed as such.
4. Instead, it reads like a parody of a Jonathan Franzen-style satire of race and sexuality in the American South.
But this doesn’t get me any closer to understanding what the hell the author is actually talking about.
kitteeeeeennnnnn
sorry that’s all I’ve got today, my legs are on fire and brain is deader than two dead things next to each other.
“brain is deader than two dead things next to each other.”
For some reason this got me more than anything else so far today.
I may or may not have created an Instagram account just now to specifically follow the adventures of the cotched kitten DON’T JUDGE ME.
seriously who would judge you for that. who could. except maybe ann friedman
ann friedman is an angel and no one can tell me otherwise!
I’ve been dithering over getting one for a while, given I never use the internet on my phone. This might decide me!
Oh thank you for that Buzzfeed story. I needed a happy story today.
There’s a video of Matt Lewis on the attitude site now. WITH A PUPPY.
The shaved legs in the running photos make me cry, though. Why does our culture have such a fascination with hairlessness?
I haven’t seen those! He is hairy and cuddling a small dog in the video.
Jeeves! What perfect name.
My husband really wants to try Soylent, and I will never not say “But it’s peeeooooopleeeee!” every time he mentions it.
I have been pretty distressed at how many news outlets reported Anne Meara’s passing as “Ben Stiller’s Mom Dies!” “Wife of Jerry Stiller Dead at 85!” Like, she has been a comedian–a ground-breaking, WOMAN comedian–for 50 years and yet she gets “Ben Stiller’s Mom”? Dubious honor. I know she and her husband were a comedy team, but you know if it were a dude in the same position, the headline would be “Comedian [Man’s Name], One Half of [Famous Comedy Duo] dies at [Age].”
/rant
Yeah, “Ben Stiller’s mom” gave me a rage blackout.
If it makes you feel better, every headline I’ve seen has been “Comedian Anne Meara dies at 85” – I literally had no idea she was related to Jerry and Ben Stiller. So they may be in the minority, but there are definitely news outlets treating her as a human being and not as the possession of a couple of men.
As I reflect on it, it seems like the legit news sources–LA Times, NYT, NPR, etc.–are doing things right. It was the pulpy, tabloid news sources (TMZ, etc.) that were doing the outrageous thing I mentioned above.
OK But I am fairly certain that Soylent IS people, though. I think they just figured they could get away with it by being so outright with it that everyone would assume they’re joking. They’re totally hiding in plain sight.
Even if it’s not people it’s an abomination. What a convenience, I no longer have to deal with one of the main things that makes life worth living, delicious food!
THIS. I may have been a bad cook 20 years ago. I may be a busy person who is more likely to say “kids find whatever is in the freezer and make sure the other one of you eats too, bye” on my way out the door to coach/karate/run errands/take the odd kid somewhere. I may actually enjoy (after the coffee) making up a morning smoothie because using a fork is pretty complicated stuff at 6 am and banana + strawberries + yogurt in a jar has only one downside, which is that the jar doesn’t fit in my car cupholder. I may have even sometimes used protein powder (don’t judge, I’m a protein kind of woman, I get cranky without lots of it). But ….the people who have been in the articles I”ve read about soylent make me cringe ANYWAY, even without the “we don’t need to eat real food it’s a waste of time” angle. I enjoy good food, I enjoy when I get home and have an excuse for an evening to actually cook something that requires setting the table and using a knife and fork and perhaps smells good enough to get everyone in the same room at the same time. I like flavor, even if I don’t have the budget for the kind of meals some of my (more well employed, closer to the good food stores, fewer kids and not single) friends make all the time.
Where are the potlucks that serve as excuses to hang out with friends on the deck eating watermelon? where are the make your own pizza parties? where are the “mom’s potato salad/homemade bread/lasagna insert-mom-specialty-here” is better than anything else arguments? or the “I will nail grandma’s recipe next time, darn it, I know she left out the secret ingredient” comments.
Really, what’s the point? Where is the life in their life?
Ugh, mornings. My dad used to sing uptempo, cheerful, “hey it’s morning isn’t it awesome why do you hate happiness so much” type songs when waking me up and it took all I had not to throw things at him. How a man with such a dark, Eastern European Catholicism-based upbringing, his entire career spent sinking slowly but steadily from idealistic young teacher to the lovable grouch his latter-day students knew, who elevates cynicism to a new level (while being simultaneously shocked and horrified when it manifests in his own children; I learned from the master!), could be so cheerful and bouncy, like a goddamn human golden retriever, when one is blurry-eyed, nauseated, cranky and desperate to avoid going to school, I will never understand. I used to take it sooooo personally.
My dad (southerner by birth) would wake me with “rise and shine!” every single morning.This continued until he took me to see a production of The Glass Menagerie. Tom has a glorious monologue where he imitates his southern belle mother saying “rise and shine!” every morning and how it irritates him, and somehow, the actor hit on my dad’s exact cadences. My dad and I shared a Look and he never used that phrase ever, ever again.
Anybody here want to talk about Eurovision? EUROVISION.
If there was ever a time that you were rooting for the lesser of two evils, it was this year huh? I mean, the Swedish singer sounds like he’s a huge dick, but ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN RUSSIA WINNING. ANYTHING.
Also, wtf was that UK entry WHY WERE THEY SCATTING.
The UK entry was arguably the worst entry, but I just appreciated that they BROUGHT THE NOIZE and were terrible and ridiculous and just, everything that I’ve come to expect from Eurovision instead of the boring ballads everyone else seemed to be doing.
TOO MANY BALLADS. Nobody wants ballads at Eurovision, for heaven’s sake, it’s just ridiculous. I love Eurovision and I was thoroughly underwhelmed.
Agreed. STOP BALLADING. I hope everyone realized this year that ballads are not good for Eurovision and they will never attempt to ballad ever again.
YES!
This was the first year I hosted a viewing party and I think a lot of the viewers were disappointed with less camp than usual, so had to root through youtube afterward for previous entries (it is impossible for me to contain my Eurovision excitement to one day per year).
Highlights- Serbia (why didn’t they wiiiiiin), Belgium (he ends the song LYING DOWN), and that’s mostly all who I cared about. I’m not too surprised that Sweden did fairly well but I am terribly disappointed that the choice in the end was between Russia and Sweden I mean COME ON. Italy was OK but I was surprised they did as well as they did.
Also, Germany and Austria ended with 0 points each, womp womp.
Belgium was SO GOOD and I also really liked the woman from Georgia
I also cannot believe Russia almost won. SHE WASN’T EVEN THAT GOOD.
They love anthems. Hers was pretty anthemic.
SERBIA AND GEORGIA WERE GLORIOUS. I want those ladies to pair up and take down the patriarchy.
Belgium sounded a liiittle too much like Lorde for my taste, but it was definitely better than every ballad they had this year.
I was so let down TOO MANY BALLADS NOT ENOUGH GLITTER. Where were the insane sets & background dancers wearing inexplicable costumes?!?!? It’s like everyone was trying to hard to impress Australia (BUT WHY THO)
I keep watching the video of Moldova’s semi-final performance on youtube so that I can pretend they made it to the final like they DESERVED. This year’s final really could’ve used their 90s camp & stripper cops.
Agreed! Like, bring back Poland’s slutty milkmaids from last year plz. Bring back the weirdness. I hope next year it returns to its former glory. I yelled “BOR-ING” at the TV way too much this year, which almost never happens.
I loved the slutty milkmaids. That video is still being passed around my (Polish and Ukrainian) family. Still.
The Moldova dude was my designated Eurovision Boyfriend this year, I was sad. I had Eurovision Girlfriend in Georgia instead.
I’m sad that Moldova didn’t make it to the finals, that’s the sort of Eurovision craziness that I want to support.
So. Many. Ballads. And the Russia thing was too close. I’m still waiting for something to surpass the camp and glittery place in my heart filled by 2007 Verka Serduchka.
I MOST EMPHATICALLY DO NOT – but I was forced to watch it and the best parts were:
1. Georgia. You are a glorious crow-lady of darkness. I was expecting a little bit more ‘metal-lite’ stuff from maybe the northerly/netherlandy climes, but Georgia brought it.
2. It was super boring. The whole experience was like the song Spain had. Her performance was basically the microcosm of the whole show. Zzzzzzzz
2. The actually fun thing to do was guess which countries each country was voting for. I watched it with 4 adults from the former soviet union so every time a country gave their top spot to Russia it would go like this:
Reporter “And our 12 points go to…. Russia!”
One of these people: “…so please don’t cut off our gas.”
Reporter “First place goes to… Russia!”
“WE DID WHAT YOU SAID PLEASE DON’T INVADE US!”
Also did anyone see that episode of No Reservations where Anthony Bourdain goes to Sweden and tries to get all of the people he meets to admit that ABBA sucks and NO ONE will bite? That is how I felt during the whole thing.
I was very disappoint. NO CRACK ENTRIES IN THE FINAL WHAAA? You watch for Russian grannies and gay operatic Romanian vampires and sexy Polish milkmaids and Jedward.
Too much Serious Business.
That said, I loved Latvia, Georgia (closest thing to crack there was with her yummy Goth outfit), Serbia (I for one welcome our glitter goddess), and yes, Australia. (They were invited specially as this is Eurovision’s 60th.)
That article on the VA transgender support group is really good and worth a read. This sentence, “Things were indeed better after the Obama administration took over and the trans directive was in place, but it still “wasn’t perfect” — was “far from perfect.” basically sums up what voting for Democrats is like every time. Better than the alternative, but far from perfect. Still, I really hope the VA continues to improve.
on the subject of mislaid: don’t try again. trust me.
oh no. And I just got my local library to buy her ebook for me, too. Well, I guess that can count as a blow for small publishers, if nothing else.
Some kittens are so wee that you don’t even have to give them food, just two bowls of water. They can only consume individual molecules of water at a time, like an air plant or something.
Is he a dot or is he a speck?
When he’s drinking water does he get wet?
Or does the water get him instead?
Nobody knows
Miniscule cat
Um. Why do some people cat’s food dishes next to the toilet? My daughter’s ex-BF’s mom put both the cat litter box and the food in the bathroom. My cat would have been disgusted, I think. Anyway, is it a Thing you’re supposed to do? Or is it for convenience and there’s no other place in a small apartment/house to put the cat stuff?
I’m guessing with a kitten it’s because it’s the easiest place to keep a kitten contained while it acclimates to you and your home so you don’t wake up in the morning and find they’ve gotten themselves stuck in a shoe or a cabinet or under the couch or wherever.
And also while it is litter training you do not want to find its wee little poops in your shoe, etc.
I’m guessing the latter, plus it may be the most clean-able floor in the house. Boy-cat would be thrilled because he is an unrepentant toilet drinker.
“Miniscule cat” pretty much made my day just now.
My guess is the Caught Kitten is being sequestered for a few days in the bathroom while he adjusts to the new home. There may also be another cat in the house, and bathrooms are very handy for proper cat introduction procedures (keeping them separated where they can hear/smell each other, etc).
A zillion thumbs up for the TMBG reference!
I am biding time at work today until my husband gets the call from his doctor letting him know whether he has cancer or not. It’s like having a prolonged low-grade panic attack. So if anyone has additional distracting links for me today, please send them along :-
I’m sorry. That has got to be a shitty feeling.
catsthatlooklikehitler.com it’s all in the name
Ha! Kitlers! That is priceless – thank you 🙂
I recommend Zooborns to all and sundry: http://www.zooborns.com/ You can even sort by animal, if you only want to look at your favorites.
Also, good thoughts to you and yours. <3
I cannot believe this web site exists and I have never heard of it until now! THANK YOU.
Pictures of cosplay enthusiasts in their homes: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/11/just-the-tw…
Portraits of couples switching clothes: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/10/switcheroo-…
Holding you in prayer, and hoping for good news.
That cosplay one is BRILLIANT! Seriously bringing a smile to my face. Thank you for the good thoughts 🙂
Good thoughts to you both. Distraction (occasionally NSFW).
I am so sorry. Today my dad is going for his first chemo treatment. If you’d like to join me in distraction, search Pinterest for “kittens” and spend lots of time on Dump A Day reviewing their animal photocollections.
Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry as well. Best thoughts to your dad. Cute things needed all around today.
here is a delightful tumblr of little girls’ superhero costumes made into cartoons.
Sending good thoughts your way.
I could watch this for hours: http://i.imgur.com/sjhM0.gif
I’ll self-servingly recommend http://goodstuffhappenedtoday.tumblr.com/
I love that Tumblr like crazy! Thanks for the reminder 🙂
So sorry to hear this! Thinking good thoughts for you and your husband.
In the meantime, I’ve always found this site to be very comforting. I’m not sure it’s updated anymore, but the images that are there are endlessly adorable.
Thanks, Bittersweet – the link doesn’t seem to work? I’m terribly curious to see what it is!
Ooh, sorry, the link didn’t work right for some reason. Try babyanimaltongues.tumblr.com and get prepped to squee. 🙂
One possible source of error, learned the hard way, is that you have to include the http:// before tumblr addresses, or else IntenseDebate loops the link back to the Toast.
Agent bait: novel written to appeal to a certain kind of literary agent who is given to grand, showy enthusiasms/next-big-thing-itis and deeply regrets not having a JFranz in their stable of authors.
“You can just glimpse what Zink means by “agent bait,” though Mislaid is less a satire of race and sexuality in the American South than a satisfying parody of what such a (self-consciously serious and more obviously commercial) satire might look like — perhaps one by Jonathan Franzen.”
One of the things that is tricky about that sentence is that it isn’t clear what the antecedent of “one by Jonathan Franzen” is. Throwing out the first and second glance (let’s be honest, this sentence isn’t even trying to be understood on a first glance), on a third close reading it looks like it is trying to say “This book isn’t an example of X, it’s a parody of [X as written by Jonathan Franzen]” with the confusing addition that X = satire.
So perhaps w should redefine our terms: if x is the original subject of satire, this novel is can be represented as Par[Sat(x)]
But wait! X is not just a satire, but a “self-conciously serious satire”. A self-conscious satire is already satirizing the satirist who writes it. Not sat(x) but Sat[Sat(x)] . But it’s also serious — it’s saying, “I know you can’t take me seriously, but actually, that “don’t take me seriously pose” is so old hate and kind of ridiculous, you know? Isn’t the boldest thing of all in this post-modern world being unironic?” So I’m going to say that we’ve got another level of satire here: Sat{Sat[Sat(x)]}. (And remember that what Zink does is Par(that whole thing).)
Now, you might think that what that bit about JFranz means is that the reviewer is coining a new operation that represents that frankly not that pleasant navel-gazing triple satire. We can just describe the novel as Par(Franz(x)) and be done. Not so soon! We aren’t told that this *is* a parody of that satire, but that it is a parody of “what such a …satire would look like.” That third-order satire would look like something by Jonathan Franzen, but would it really in that reality that really is be a satire by Jonathan Franzen?
We have to conclude, I think, that Franz(x) does not = Sat{Sat[Sat(x)]} but rather equals Seem(Sat{Sat[Sat(x)]}). And that’s what Zink’s novel (which I have not read, nor have I read anything by Jonathan Franzen) parodies so deftly
Okay, so, I don’t have the time to really read this comment right now, but based JUST on skimming it…
I think I love you.
I just want to know if it’s a burn on JFranz, because if so: aw yisssssss.
if somebody details an episode of street harassment in my obituary, I want it to be the time a guy gesticulated at me until I took my headphones out of one ear in case he was trying to tell me I was on fire and then he wanted to know DO YOU LIKE POETRY? and I said, what, and he said Do you like poetry, you know, poems, and I said No — no, I hate poems. I hate every one of them. and he was struck dumb by my bold truth-telling and left me alone. I think he thought at first that I was feigning my distaste so as to shut him down but I was not and in fact I was grateful for the chance to express myself on the subject. relatively few people are interested in my feelings about poems.
Is it bad that one of the things that bugs me most about Soylent is that in the novel, “Make Room! Make Room!” it is literally made out of soy and lentils, and as far as I can tell, Soylent has basically NO SOY OR LENTILS IN IT???
IT HAS RICE PROTEIN IN IT INSTEAD, HOW RIDICULOUS IS THAT
call it SUNRICE or something, god
Good point, if you’re going to use the name Soylent it either needs to be made of soy/lentils or people. Otherwise just call it something else.
LOOK AT HIS WIDDLE PINK NOSEY-WOSE! AAAHHHH
My ex is on American Ninja Warrior this season. The ex who married a previous girlfriend while we were “taking a little space.” He is still married to her (which is good, really) and holds a Ph.D in Economics and is a small, wiry, rather fey fellow very impressed with his own eloquence. See if you can spot him!
Oh my god, that sounds amazing and this is the first time I’ve ever regretted my scorched earth never look back breakup policy. There should be some kind of service that goes around alerting people when their exes are going to be on reality tv.
We’ve become friends again after a few years and a heartfelt apology on his part. He’s good people, really, just a bit of a coward when it comes to ending relationships, and a decided (but charming) narcissist. I wouldn’t date him again but I gladly toss back a few drinks with him when he’s in town. It doesn’t hurt that his wife is good people, too.
Long but good re: Warrior class/who goes to war/American film history/PTSD. http://www.themorningnews.org/article/soldiers-he…
Not related to anything, but did you know there is such a thing as national teams for trampoline dodgeball?
The competitive division on my league has several team Canada members in it. And some tournaments actually get show on TV sports channels.
I find this amazing and ridiculous.
“GOOD MORNING, CAMPERS. (Is there a more hateful sound than the sickly-sung drawl of “Good morning, campers”? I submit that there is not.)”
Yes. Yes there is a more hateful sound. It’s the aggressively cheerful “DO I NEED TO COME IN AND SING A GOOD MORNING SONG TO YOU?” threat sung through the screen door of a cabin or the canvas flap of a tent, and it is how I get my campers to get the hell out of bed in a hurry in the mornings. It is evil, sadistic, and it gives me tremendous pleasure to strike such fear in the hearts of young humans at so early an hour of the day.
(where are my camp staff Toasties?)
I second this wholeheartedly. I am not a morning person; waking up campers in the morning with an insufferably cheery sing-song voice eased my own pain. And I did my time of waking up to “Good morning, campers!” so clearly I have the right to inflict in on others (9 years a camper, 4 years a counselor).
this is where the shit with machetes and hockey masks gets started, btw
OMG.
I tried this once, and only once, on my children (I figured my years being tortured at girl scout camp had to be passed on, like all good family traditions). They were surprisingly blase about it, but my (now ex) at the time? He nearly killed me, and he wasn’t even in the room where I sang.
Oh, hahah. I also have a black and white tuxedo cat named Jeeves. We also got him as a kitten when he was living under my friend’s porch with his brother!
Wait, what happened to the brother?
Well we have him too. When we got them, we already had a cat named Leela (also fished out from an alley), and there was some debate as to whether the third cat would be Bertie, to go with Jeeves, or Tom Baker, to go with Leela. He struck us as more of a Tom Baker, and so now Jeeves is the odd cat out.
I agree on your interpretation of the water scene, which is a totally satisfying subversion of the vogue fashion shoot (Eileen Jones’ review misses the parody). But I would have liked to see better / more daring casting for the wives (no disrespect at all to the actors that were chosen!). If Immortan Joe’s motive is to create a ‘full life’ heir, I imagine waif-like beauty would fall lower on the priority list. A lot could be done by a talented actor even without dialogue to show the arc of the women recovering from their captivity. But it seems like the decision was made to cast primarily for appearance (4/5 are models), which even if the aim is to subvert our expectations of beauty, is a lost opportunity.
He is well, and all signs point to his continuing to be well, for a very long time.
I hope so. That expression says, to me, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
I wonder about the veracity of that article on the military. It talks about “regular pay raises and lavish reenlistment bonuses”, but a big chunk of the military need food assistance.
Finally, American Ninja Warrior seems to be following in the footsteps of American Gladiator–i.e. people with superhero physiques doing obstacle-course stuff–but I look at those costumes and think, bro, do you even ninja?
I observe that this kitten, supposedly wee and defenseless, has already learned to employ the Empty Dish Stare with devastating effectiveness.
While I think the trans women in this article are amazing and have done great work, this article focuses entirely on white LGBT experience. In New Orleans.
To completely ignore how intersectionality affects how you get health care here (or don’t), especially for black LGBT people… that is deeply fucked up. Huge numbers of New Orleanians don’t have access to VA level of health care. And, no mention of Penny Proud. No mention that the statistics about LGBT health and safety more heavily affect PoC (an oversight that happens often, resulting in more resources going to the more privileged groups, and away from where they are actually needed.)
Why is the writer overlooking work like the wonderful group BreakOUT! does here? And are the women in the article supporting black LGBT work either? If the few black members in their group are leaving, I suppose it could be because they’re passing and no longer need a group, but I have to say that I’m seeing some red flags here that that’s probably not the reason.
I love reading positive and uplifting stories in the fight against queer oppression. But not to the exclusion and further marginalization of black New Orleanians/ Louisianans.
(sprays mouth silver) TO VALHALLA!!!
Jonathan Franzen!
That is all.
Further to my above comment, look what curmudgeonly delights the J Franz has served up in a press event this week: (also I read the title wrong to begin with and could NOT stop laughing ) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/27/jona…
Bluray special edition, tbh!!!
I have never (a) been closer to getting a buzzcut and (b) seen such great acting as I saw from Theron and Hardy. (Probably not "NEVER never" but it feels close, I'll tell you.) I was shocked when I realized how little dialogue there actually was, but they carried it through with just their body language, their presence. All you had to do was look at their eyes and you knew exactly what they were thinking, what they were feeling – they might as well have been speaking aloud. I've seen it twice and likely going back at least once more, because, man.
Verbal exposition was so unnecessary, and would have actually lessened their characters. Furiosa and Max were so fully realized for me, I didn't even understand until my second viewing, when I actually REALLY paid attention to the dialogue and their faces, and just how much information I'm getting without a word being spoken. I'm in love with this movie, I really am.
THIS. I may have been a bad cook 20 years ago. I may be a busy person who is more likely to say "kids find whatever is in the freezer and make sure the other one of you eats too, bye" on my way out the door to coach/karate/run errands/take the odd kid somewhere. I may actually enjoy (after the coffee) making up a morning smoothie because using a fork is pretty complicated stuff at 6 am and banana + strawberries + yogurt in a jar has only one downside, which is that the jar doesn't fit in my car cupholder. I may have even sometimes used protein powder (don't judge, I'm a protein kind of woman, I get cranky without lots of it). But ….the people who have been in the articles I"ve read about soylent make me cringe ANYWAY, even without the "we don't need to eat real food it's a waste of time" angle. I enjoy good food, I enjoy when I get home and have an excuse for an evening to actually cook something that requires setting the table and using a knife and fork and perhaps smells good enough to get everyone in the same room at the same time. I like flavor, even if I don't have the budget for the kind of meals some of my (more well employed, closer to the good food stores, fewer kids and not single) friends make all the time.
Where are the potlucks that serve as excuses to hang out with friends on the deck eating watermelon? where are the make your own pizza parties? where are the "mom's potato salad/homemade bread/lasagna insert-mom-specialty-here" is better than anything else arguments? or the "I will nail grandma's recipe next time, darn it, I know she left out the secret ingredient" comments.
Really, what's the point? Where is the life in their life?
OMG.
I tried this once, and only once, on my children (I figured my years being tortured at girl scout camp had to be passed on, like all good family traditions). They were surprisingly blase about it, but my (now ex) at the time? He nearly killed me, and he wasn't even in the room where I sang.
High security anti-tamper design. The keypad controller is installed indoors while the proximity readers are installed outside the doors to be controlled (no access to relays from outside)
Stand alone with USB Interface. Management operations are performed on a laptop/notebook and data is uploaded/downloaded to the controller in a few seconds
Control access schedules/retrieve access records/set access groups/set door unlocking schedules/visitors
Proximity readers can be set as access or exit readers
Supports up to 4,000 credentials (keyfobs, access cards or cellphone tags)
High security anti-tamper design. The keypad controller is installed indoors while the proximity readers are installed outside the doors to be controlled (no access to relays from outside)
Stand alone with USB Interface. Management operations are performed on a laptop/notebook and data is uploaded/downloaded to the controller in a few seconds
Control access schedules/retrieve access records/set access groups/set door unlocking schedules/visitors
Proximity readers can be set as access or exit readers
Supports up to 4,000 credentials (keyfobs, access cards or cellphone tags)
Further to my above comment, look what curmudgeonly delights the J Franz has served up in a press event this week: (also I read the title wrong to begin with and could NOT stop laughing