We should know more about the Charleston shooting by the time this runs.
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My college friend Pete Buttigieg is the very, very popular Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and was just elected to his second term, and has decided to come out of the closet! I am very very happy for him, and for South Bend. He is a real stand-up guy, and if he ever runs for national office, I will have to break my policy of always assuming politicians are secretly evil lizard people who are filming us in our bathrooms. Here is the article in which he told his constituents about his sexuality:
My high school in South Bend had nearly a thousand students. Statistically, that means that several dozen were gay or lesbian. Yet when I graduated in 2000, I had yet to encounter a single openly LGBT student there. That’s far less likely to be the case now, as more students come to feel that their families and community will support and care for them no matter what. This is a tremendously positive development: young people who feel support and acceptance will be less likely to harm themselves, and more likely to step into adulthood with mature self-knowledge.
I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay. It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am.
Putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper does not come easy. We Midwesterners are instinctively private to begin with, and I’m not used to viewing this as anyone else’s business.
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I am now watching the 1979 Tinker Tailor miniseries, and it is like a parody of slow-moving British things, and I love it more than life itself. There will be scenes that go on for ten minutes that consist of nothing more than moving papers around a desk or leaning against a wall, grimacing, then leaning against a different wall. It is, however, not nearly as sexy as the new movie, which I think I am alone in finding sexy anyway. Also, Ann Smiley is a feminist hero.
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Jaya wrote this thing which, as half of a working-from-home couple, I find very very interesting.
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I also only just now saw the season finale of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and IMHO it is far more controversial and shocking than the Game of Thrones finale. Also, Captain Holt made me cry (I did, I literally cried during his speech), and Diaz is a Gilmore Girls fan.
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Anne Helen on In Touch, the Duggars, and the future of tabloid journalism:
Over its 13 years on newsstands, In Touch has cultivated a mixed reputation. In the beginning, it vied for a slice of People Magazine’s audience, building its circulation to 1.2 million in just four years, making it one of the fastest-growing weekly magazines in recent memory. But what started as a People clone, publishing a mix of sunny celebrity stories and tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, shifted course over the 2000s, establishing its identity through endless Kardashian covers, pregnancy “bump” speculations, and Brangelina breakup rumors. It became, in other words, a tabloid, with the corresponding willingness to narrativize facts in a way that pleased an audience hungry for celebrity entertainment, however implausible.
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THIS is a good roundtable discussion!
HENSON I hate that bitch. She’s stolen my identity! (Laughter.) My friends don’t want to talk to me unless it’s about Cookie.
She quickly has become iconic. Did anything worry you about taking the role?
HENSON Cookie scared the hell out of me. Just before I got the role, I’d said, “F— it all, I’m going back to theater.” I felt lazy and like I needed to sharpen the tools. So I did theater at The Pasadena Playhouse. Then my manager said,”You have to read this script.” I’m like, “Hip-hop? Oh my God, what are they trying to do? Fox is going to pick this up? This isn’t HBO?” And then I got nervous and started pacing the floor. “Oh my God, Cookie is bigger than life. You will love her or hate her.” Empire has forced people to have conversations that they were afraid to have. And that is what art is supposed to do. I just didn’t know it was going to shake things up this much! (Laughs.)
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Chicago’s South Side is in desperate need of a trauma center, and I really hope they get one:
Chicago is served by six trauma centers sprinkled around the city and nearby suburbs — none on the city’s South Side where some areas suffer high rates of violence.
The University of Chicago closed its adult trauma center in 1988 after two years. Officials say the hospital lost $2 million annually serving patients without health insurance.
The effort to reopen U of C’s trauma center gained additional attention last fall when the school bid for the Obama Presidential Library. Then this March there was a big protest near the Ritz-Carlton hotel where the university held a $4.5 billion fundraiser.
“That money could fund a trauma center for years and years. I wouldn’t say we’re in a very desperate moment right now but I think we’re at a very important moment,” Morris-Moore said.
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I learned some cool stuff about sign language yesterday:
I have had variations of this conversation about a thousand times in my life. As the hearing daughter of a deaf dad and hard-of-hearing mom, I’ve been a staunch pro-ASL activist and have written on issues related to the Deaf community. And while some topics — legally mandated TV captioning, the fact that knowing ASL and English means I’m bilingual — have gotten much easier to explain over the years, there’s one thing that everybody keeps sticking on: the fact that sign language is not universal.
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Predictably, Hollywood did not think a movie with two black leads was gonna work, thank God for Gina Prince-Bythewood:
Prince-Bythewood was passionate about making a film focusing on a young woman pushing to find her authentic self and trying to appreciate who she really is, all while finding true love for the first time. And she wanted this love story to feature two black main characters. But Hollywood had other plans. When she pitched the film, executives loved the idea that Noni’s British, biracial background made her a bit more complex than what we normally see, but they wanted to tweak her story and change her love interest to a white male.
According to Prince-Bythewood, studios were having a difficult time finding the marketability in black-on-black love.
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Transphobic doctors gotta go. This is also why doctors who actively educate themselves on trans health issues are so, so important.
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Yesterday my lil son turned six months old, which is just…what? He is the most chill person who has ever lived. He makes Jack Johnson look like Woody Allen. I love him very much. BE HONEST, though, do you think he’s a ginger? Is Mallory’s personality that powerful?
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Deleted comment of the day which is definitely trying to be helpful, just weirdly so and seven months late:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
in re: the lack of adult trauma centers in Chicago – I don’t know if anyone watches Sense8, but there was a big to-do over the scene where a young gunshot victim is refused care at a local hospital – people were saying OMG THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN, HOSPITALS CAN’T DO THAT, and as a native Chicagoan I can tell you that
1) it does
2) we’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember
3) especially on the South Side (which is, y’know, full of economically disadvantaged minorities)
4) transport to a trauma center is often straight-up refused because it’s assumed that the patient will be unable to pay for their care when they receive it.
It’s horrifying and gross and not something a lot of (white) people know about or discuss.
people were saying OMG THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN, HOSPITALS CAN’T DO THAT
But…wasn’t that a really big thing in the news a few years ago? I remember seeing this reported in several places, and perhaps even a television show had that as a plot point? Although now that I’m thinking about it, it might have been as much as ten years ago and the fact has faded from white people minds.
To be honest, you could be very right. I feel like the last time there were even some vague murmurs about this problem was…back in the late nineties? And then I don’t recall hearing anything more about it until around last year or so.
I remember it being related to some sort of insurance fuckery, and yeah, it might have been as far back as the 90s. JFC.
I assume that was pre-EMTALA (which I think was enacted around 1994)?
Okay, wait. I am Canadian and lucky/stupid about these kinds of things, and I don’t think I understand. The hospital can just say, “Thanks but no thanks” to someone who is clearly in need of medical attention? Who makes that call? And then what happens after that?
It’s not so much that they say “thanks but no thanks”, it’s more that they say, “ah, shame, we don’t have an adult trauma center here. Let us find you an ambulance and transport you to a hospital that DOES, 30 minutes away, while you are bleeding out.”
Also – I don’t want to say that institutional racism factors in greatly to these types of things, but, uh, it…does, given that the lack of trauma centers are very pointedly in poor and minority neighborhoods.
It’s complicated, but both yes and no.
We have a law (EMTALA) that says that if a hospital takes Medicare money (and most hospitals do, because Medicare=almost everyone over ~65), they are required to SCREEN everyone regardless of ability to pay. Then, that hospital must treat if there is something that qualifies as an emergency (what that is is a BIG kettle of fish), unless they’re transferring to somewhere better equipped to handle the emergency because they’re not able to do it.
So, basically, if you walk into a hospital with a heart attack, they’re going to treat you, even if you can’t pay. If you walk into a hospital with a non-emergency, they may not take you if they think you’re not going to be able to pay.
And what is an emergency? Even if we all had 100% clarity on what is and is not an emergency under this law, there’s all sorts of other things that screw over people. So, if I walk in to an Emergency Department and complain of abdominal pain, I’m going to get seen. I’m white, I speak English, I have health insurance, I understand the system enough to say the right things to the right people, I’ll have a person with me, and that person wears a “hospital costume” (so, a carefully chosen set of clothing that simultaneously says “I threw some things on in the dark” and “I’m smart” and “I can pay”– IE, a nice watch, a blazer over a tshirt from a grad program). If a poor non-white immigrant walks into an ED with abdominal pain, their concern may not be taken as seriously. Good EDs, and good ED employees, try to keep in mind this bias and fight against it. Not every ED is good.
Thanks for writing up the EMTALA thing. It is also a fact that almost every hospital emergency department is overcrowded and the majority of them go on diversion – where they send ambulances to other hospitals because they are overwhelmed – at least once a year.
@cosetthetable summed it up very well.
I would just add that all the hospital is *required* to do is stabilize you in the short-term. They don’t have to provide any follow-up care after that.
So if (say) you have stage 3 or 4 cancer, and you go to the emergency room due to severe abdominal pain related to that, they may evaluate you, rule out appendicitis, and give you some pain relief. But they’re not required to actually give you any treatment for your underlying medical condition. (And you may not be able to afford cancer treatment like chemotherapy, radiation, etc., if you’re uninsured).
That scene definitely shocked me, but more than their refusing to treat gunshot victims, it was that a cop wouldn’t know that. He may not be an ambulance driver, BUT STILL.
Also I thought the portrayal of the nurse was over-the-top cold-hearted, from ‘We’re a better hospital since we stopped treating kids like him” while the kid is ACTIVELY HEMORRAGHING IN THE COP’S ARMS, to her sole “food for thought” afterward: “How are you going to feel if he grows up to kill someone, like a cop?”
SERIOUSLY? This nurse is proposing that SINCE WE DON’T KNOW, he should have just let the kid die? It’s a chance too great to take and WHAT’S A LIFE, ANYWAY? Oh my god that portrayal made me so mad.
Fact: anything that people say about Chicago cops being racist, or literally any industry in Chicago being racist, is most likely true. This fair city has a huge amount of racially homogenous neighborhoods, and the worst ones are all for black people.They’re also the ones with the most gangs and the worst schools, so that the gangs used to operate out of the neighborhoods where they went to school.
The thing is, Mayor Emanuel just closed a bunch of inner-city schools. Now some kids from different gangs’ territory have to cross each other’s turf just to get an education, so a lot of people are getting defensive and a lot more gang members are getting shot. And because it’s “black-on-black violence,” literally nobody in medicine or the police helps the victims. UChicago, which is supposed to have one of the best medicine programs in the country, doesn’t even have a trauma center, because its location means it would get a metric fuckton of gang members. That nurse’s reaction is pretty common.
Nailed it in one.
This is all extremely important to highlight, but I question the way the Sense8 scene was cast and directed. The heroic cop literally carrying the dying black kid in his arms is white, and the cold-hearted nurse is black. Why? Why did that feel right to them?
That’s part of the mindfuck that is Chicago-style systemic racism. Not every black neighborhood is horrible and not all black people are in the worst neighborhoods. But the worst neighborhoods are basically all black.
I know people who grew up on the South Side, loved it, and still have family there, but ran to the suburbs as soon as they could. They were black, so it wasn’t the black population that scared them. It was the gangs.
In Chiraq and environs, black kids get no education and have no safety, so some take the security and opportunities of gangs. Chiraq has a lot of black kids. Therefore, in Chicago as a whole, “black male age 12-30 with bullet wound” is shorthand for “thug” to basically everyone. Especially the black people who’v fought like hell to get as far away from the South Side as possible.
Thank you, that’s educational.
“nits will make lice,” I guess. good lord
I can absolutely believe that kind of thing happens, though (as @cosetthetable notes below) turning somebody away is illegal in many circumstances under EMTALA.
I live in a mid-size city with a high poverty rate and a fair amount of violence, and it just boggles my mind that you wouldn’t have a Level 1 trauma center near the area where that kind of violence occurs. (My mom works in the ED at the local teaching hospital/ Level 1 trauma center here, which is located in just such a neighborhood and is easily accessible to everybody).
See the above comment by grumblyqueer. They nailed it.
Considering how much racism there is here (in upstate NY), it must be reaaaaaaaaally bad there…
Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up.
I used to work for one of the big hospitals in Chicago, which shall remain nameless, and we used to TALK about how awful U of C was. The general impression one got from working with them was that they just really didn’t want to dirty their pretty hospital up with poors, and that whether they could *afford* the trauma center or not was entirely secondary to whether they felt like having gangbanger gunshot victims in their hallways, which they did not because it might scare the people who were there for elective colonoscopies or whatever. Don’t get me started on their suburban counterpart.
Also: THAT BABY THO
What a cutie!
But is there any evidence so far that he is the kwisatz haderach, as we all believe?
I honestly thought that was some Jewish term that I, as a Jew, did not know; and was embarrassed. So I googled it.
It is a Dune reference. Oh my god. I’m cracking up.
Actually it’s both! It’s also a concept Biblical commentators use to explain time being truncated in certain passages. It means “condensing of the road”, which God does at some points to make it easier for people to perform their righteous missions (example – Abraham’s servant Eliezer traveling to Haran to find a wife for Isaac).
Okay so I wasn’t, like, the world’s WORST Jew, I was genuinely onto something there. Good to know!
You sensed it.
Atavistic recognition of Hebraic word forms. Just can’t get rid of it.
I’m half-Jewish– when do I get my magic ability to make it rain?
You only half-get it, which is why it’s probably cloudy around you a lot.
That does explain a lot…
the evidence is the ginger hair, obvs.
(i’ve always assumed that mallory was his other mom and that he was conceived through Toast Magick and that he is the manchild who heralds a future with not-shitty-dudes.)
I heartily second THAT BABY THO! I think my tied fallo tubes just popped a stitch looking at the wee face. SO CRAZY ADORABLE!
Oh, no, I definitely found the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie very sexy. So much so that I was willing to ignore Buttermilk Chickenbiscuit’s truly unfortunate hairdo in it.
Now I am going to repeat a comment I made yesterday on the link roundup, but too late in the day for anyone to see it and also I think I messed up my html so my link didn’t work in the first place, whooops :
I had to look up Father’s Day because I thought it was last Sunday (spoiler alert: IT’S NOT) and of course I ended up on the wiki article, and it contains this absolutely delightful photo captioned “A father holding a necktie cookie on Father’s Day.” WHAT A HAPPY GOOFBALL. The look on his face just makes me happy.
“Buttermilk Chickenbiscuit”
My God, you’ve found the most delicious iteration of his name!
Seriously. I am definitely making biscuits and gravy this weekend. OM NOM NOM.
The movie is sexy because tweed is sexy.
(mops brow)
“WHAT A HAPPY GOOFBALL.”
Awwwww!
My late grandfather was great at receiving gifts with enormous enthusiasm, no matter how ridiculous they were. Once, someone got him a weird-looking “neckbone” pillow that was supposed to be ergonomically shaped for head support. I still remember him exclaiming “A NECKBONE!!!!” delightedly, as if it was the only thing he had ever truly wanted.
(Also, if somebody burned dinner, he would not only eat it but insist that he liked the burned part best. He was that kinda guy).
You may have heard this before… but That is a CUTE BABY 🙂
Seriously. I’m not a baby person at all and that’s a pretty freaking cute baby.
yes! that grin!
That baby makes me want to be someone who has earned that smile.
GUMMY SMILE
very very cute baby!
clearly already showing intellectual superiority also
So relieved to find that that roundtable was with Taraji P. Henson about Cookie on Empire and not Jim Henson slagging on the Cookie Monster, as I originally feared.
OH GOOD I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE. I was very scared at first!
co-signed.
re: your adorable baby – when I was born, I was mostly bald, but when I was about 6 months I think my hair was roughly that color. As a child, I had pin-straight blonde hair, and then when puberty hit, my hair got curly and as I get older it keeps getting darker (to the point that in my 30s I can no longer claim to be blonde, which pains me).
So it may be that his hair has a slight reddish tint now, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about what it will be after he learns to walk.
I was a ginger baby too. it finally brunette-d out around age 4 or 5. My red-haired grandmother was deeply disappointed.
I have a ginger baby! She takes after her daddy. I’m curious as to how her hair will turn out.
I was also a ginger baby! It turned into white-blonde hair when I was maybe a year old and has been gradually getting darker ever since.
I was also a ginger baby! I had bright carroty ginger ringlets until I was three or four; then it gradually straightened out and got blonder. As an adult I have straight, slightly-reddish blonde hair.
I was the opposite! I was born with a head of thick black hair. That fell out and grew in blonde, and then that was slowly replaced by brown hair. There is a hilarious period in my toddler years where I look like I had a terrible dye job and my roots are growing back in. Baby hair is weird! Hair is weird!
Me too! Born with black hair like a pixie changeling baby, then it all fell out, and my next batch of hair was blonde and has been ever since, darker over the years but still clearly blonde. But my eyebrows are still brown, for which I am thankful.
Hair is weird.
hair is weird – my first child had a head full of hair like a sooty dandelion, and it lightened to a medium brown. the second was essentially bald for a year, and then had hair come in the exact same shade. I am so glad I labelled photos when I got them because the toddling part of their lives they were identical, but four years apart.
I was a ginger baby whose hair has stayed the same colour (maybe darkening a little bit) all my life! But that is definitely not universal.
I had a little halo of orange hair until I turned 6 or so, and it gradually went brunette after that.
I was pretty much blond, and had a blond streak for a long time as a baby / younger child. Now it is very dark brown (but getting grey streaks).
fistbump of sororal hair!
What a cutie! My son was a gingery blonde when he was a baby but his hair slowly turned to dark Sable brown. But OTOH, Mallory was not around to influence hair color in his case.
I love how happy he is!
Between Charleston and the NJ stalking shooting murder of Tamara Seidle by her piece of shit cop ex-husband (those stand-up, “not ALL cops” fucking HUGGED him into custody after they watched him murder her in front of their 7 year old daughter), I am all for peacing the fuck out of this country as soon as I can. I do not have the energy to fight this fetid wave of cultural bullshit. Who has sensible gun laws? Scotland?
they let him get off a second round of gun shots without doing anything! This is a guy who had a fucking gun and had already shot his wife and they didn’t fucking shoot him. http://www.nj.com/monmouth/index.ssf/2015/06/wife…
Oh my god. This is horrifying.
I’m so depressed about how easy our country makes it for awful, horrible people to kill others. That New Yorker article yesterday about the dental students in Chapel Hill, and now Charleston… It’s pretty hot these days to threaten to move to New Zealand, right?
Welp, now I want to cry even more. That is just, well, disgusting.
Like, I keep waiting for more information to come out that makes sense of this story and there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. This is the most horrific intersection of police brutality/entitlement/rank-closing and domestic violence I have ever seen. His poor, poor daughter.
OMG WHAT?! HUGGED THAT POS INTO CUSTODY FOR MURDERING HIS WIFE?!?!
Screw those bloodthirsty leeches. (I can’t believe I just insulted leeches.)
I propose pooling our money and buying an island somewhere that we can turn into our own little queendom. With Mallory and Nicole, of course, as our queens.
THEY FUCKING HUGGED HIM. For murdering his wife so he didn’t have to pay alimony! Because he was crying, you guys. This whole situation was just so stressful for him, having to commit murder in front of his now-traumatized daughter, who has no mother, and clearly never had a father worth the name. HIS LIFE IS SO SAD.
I can definitely relate to Jaya’s article about both people in a couple working from home. The hardest thing for me is being able to turn back on the paying attention to each other, if that makes sense. I spend all day in my head not talking to my partner, who is obviously here and in the next room also in her head not talking to me, and without a designated “the work day is now over!” factory whistle, it gets hard to stop acting like coworkers and start acting like a couple again. So anyway, yes, yes, yes, to scheduling quality time. We started making dinner together just to have a designated time when we aren’t ignoring each other. (That sounds bad, doesn’t it?)
It doesn’t sound bad at all! My husband and I worked from home for nearly a year after relocating from Michigan to New York, and a huge component of doing your job well is focusing and, yes, ignoring the other person who happens to be one room over. The designated dinner-making sounds like a really healthy thing to do.
I’ve been working from home for 5+ years now, but my husband is just about to join me, so I really appreciated that article. I think we’ll be okay, I’m mostly just worried about the fact that no one will be bringing in dispatches from the outside world anymore.
“without a designated ‘the work day is now over!’ factory whistle”
To be honest, I would rather like one of these if I worked at home. Or maybe an old-fashioned dinner gong.
I work from home and my husband occasionally works from home. When it’s one day every week or so it’s fine and we don’t need that kind of separation, but it got really bad this winter when due to the Boston blizzards he was working from home for essentially three weeks straight: he would get upset when he would say “I love you,” and I wouldn’t respond or would be distracted because I was in the moment working on an email. This wouldn’t be acceptable behavior if it was our designated couple-time, but during my workday… Scheduling quality time just makes sense if you’re both focused on other things during the day.
Your baby is as adorable as Channing Tatum’s AMA was awesome, and I cannot give a higher compliment than that.
the broom from Fantasia tho
Channing is a gift unto the world.
I’m probably going to write bad fanfic about his and Matt Bomer’s Magic Mike characters.
I don’t read fanfic, but I would read that. Please.
That baby is a Good Baby.
Thank God, the link roundup is here. I was so desperate, I almost started working again after my lunch break.
WAIT how have I not watched the Tinker Tailor movie yet???
It is SO pretty. And I agree on the sexy point.
You guys, I don’t know what to do. I have been spending my (endlessly eternal, eternally endless) down time at my temp job catching up on Toast archives, and I think I’m DONE. It was awesome and glorious and I love all you Toasties to bits, but what the hell do I do now? Would you all please go back in time and write more things?
I challenge you now to read every single comment on every single Open Thread there has ever been. Please report back.
That’s kind of what I’ve been doing! I feel a bit like an accidental stalker. I read the new stuff when it’s posted, and when I’m caught up, I read the old stuff. So it’s been interesting to read old threads about people getting new jobs, or moving, or finding out they’re pregnant, or getting engaged, or whatever, and then seeing new threads about wedding planning or baby pictures or reporting on new things. It’s like watching a flashback episode and finding out Toastie backstories!
I fully endorse this. I have done the same!
Toast gossip in reply!
COMMENT EDITED BY NICOLE who finds it hilarious and cute and only a little terrifying that you have Sherlock Holmes’d together a tweet and an old Tumblr post to identify a dude I dated in college, but let us cease now.
COMMENT EDITED BY NICOLE:
NICOLE USED TO DATE [CHANNING TATUM]?! The world makes so much sense right now.
Nicole’s edit is fabulous and I will die happy.
the past few days have been filled with frustration and heart break, so I am going to return to this entire exchange every so often and laugh.
Nicole can edit people’s comments?
What if all of our comments are actually made by Nicole?
What if we are just characters in a dream that Nicole is having right now, and when she wakes up we’ll all go *poof!*?
This is the secret to our cordial comment section.
(I have never edited a comment before now unless at the request of the commenter, but it was so fun I want to do it allll the time.)
I’m not even mad, Baxter, I’m just impressed.
Sorry, though!
I have never felt more famous, so that part was fun!
Interestingly, there’s also Black ASL!
I briefly dated a deaf dude right after I graduated high school, and after he taught me some signs so we could chat/signal to each other for make-out times, he would be like, “you sign with an accent,” which cracked me up.
I studied ASL for a semester in college (they only offered a single semester, or I’d have tried to keep up with it) and unfortunately I have a stutter. My fingers flutter as I’m trying to sign. Maybe if I’d had more practice.
Charleston local here. Went to the movies last night with family with everything normal and emerged to tragedy. This is completely sickening and luckily everyone around seems to think so as well. Avoiding the awful people on local facebook news comments saying they shooter looks middle eastern Muslim or possibly Asian because I just can’t handle further divisive racism this morning. I hope they catch this guy, catch him alive and let him rot alone in a prison cell for a long time.
I don’t have words. It’s so incredibly awful. And I’m so sad that with the exception of people who already agree, nobody is going to demand that outlets like Fox stop stoking racial hatred and contempt. The story is going to be “one bad apple” who was probably raised wrong and/or had mental illness, and no one (who’s not already persuaded) is going to look at the fact that we are fucking SATURATED in stories that are too polite to use the n-word but collectively portray African-Americans as Less Than.
It really is horrible. Somehow the fact that he spent about an hour quietly attending/observing a prayer meeting prior to attacking the very people he was theoretically sitting and talking and interacting with makes this feel even worse to me. I hope he is found soon.
In response to the Charlston shooting I have been posting this everywhere I can
Comedy speaks the truth people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL8JEEt2RxI
protection rifles
oh man I saw that linked from ONTD (was that you?) and I was laughing and nodding until I hit the Asperger’s part, and then I just went “oh . . . no.”
That wasn’t me, but yeah the jury is still out on Jim Jeffries.
He makes some amazing points, and he’s fucking funny, but he’s also a raging chauvinist and can be really disgusting and crass about women, although he’s actually pretty good about disabled people, he’s friends with a few disabled people and he has some amazing stories. He was working on a film or tv show based around a real life event where he tried to get his paraplegic friend laid, and on of his bits talks about trying to cast an actually disabled actor to play the part (and how a lot of really horrible people came in and pretended to be disabled)
I immediately ordered the David Profumo book Nicole recommended in a Link Roundup a few weeks back, it arrived yesterday, and I’ve started reading it. It’s delightful so far! It kind of reminds me of “Them: A Memoir of Parents,” which I also read on Nicole’s recommendation. (http://lazybookreviews.tumblr.com/post/2617360144/them-a-memoir-of-parents-francine-du-plessix)
Nicole and anyone else, are there any other books in the subgenre “wonderful prose stylist writes about their wealthy, eccentric, scandalous parents”?
I am a fan of J.P. Ackerly’s My Father and Myself. Here is a short blurb form Wikipedia about it:
Ackerley’s memoir My Father and Myself, begins: “I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919.” Registered at birth as Joe Ackerley, he later took the middle name Randolph after an uncle. As an adult, he published under his first two initials and surname.[2] His father Roger Ackerley was a successful fruit merchant known as the “Banana King” of London. (Roger was first married to an actress named Louise Burckhardt, who died young in 1892, probably of tuberculosis, and before they had children).[3]
His mother was Janetta Aylward (known as Netta), an actress whom Roger met in Paris; the two returned to London together. They had an intermittent relationship and three years later in 1895, she gave birth to a son, Peter, then Joe a year later, and Nancy in 1899. According to Joe’s maternal Aunt Bunny, Peter’s birth, and likely all of them, were “accidents.” She told him, “Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day,” (when Peter was conceived).
Also, his father writes very lackadaisically in his will that he had an entire other second family which Ackerley discovers after his father’s death. And they both liked to trawl for handsome young guardsmen at night. The eccentricities are all deadpan and go on and on.
An obvious contemporary recommendation would be Patrick Melrose’s Edward St. Aubyn series.
But now that I have supplied 2 about men & their fathers, let me supply an *amazing* book recommendation that is about a daughter and her mother/parents, by a fantastic writer who is wrongly forgotten right now (or just being revived): Paula Fox, The Widow’s Children. It is so very good!!
Wow, thanks!! Those sound very much up my alley 🙂
The Patrick Melrose novels are amazing, but they’re also the only books that I had to take a year long break from between the second and the third. Also, as merrite noted further down, Nancy Mitford novels are great and not as bleak.
Nancy Mitford’s novels deal mostly with her delightfully bonkers family (under the pseudonym of Radlett instead of Mitford) and they are fantastic. Love in a Cold Climate is especially funny, imo.
Co-signed!
I cried during Captain Holt’s speech as well.
If you didn’t cry, you are lying because we all know you did.
I CRIED I CRIED I CRIIIIEEEDDD!!
He has to be coming back, right? RIGHT???
I refuse to contemplate the idea of him not coming back.
Absolutely cried.
I didn’t cry until he did the robot impression. Somehow that’s what got me. That is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing, right? (Almost certainly not.)
This news out of Charleston is just….
If you have a couple of dollars to spare, you can donate to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church here http://emanuelamechurch.org/
That’s what I did first thing this morning. I was initially going to donate to the SPLC, and then happened upon the Emanuel AME website. Donated, put up a FB public post, hopefully it helps the community.
Please, please read Jelani Cobb on the Charleston shooting: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/church-sh…
“We have, quite likely, found at 110 Calhoun Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, the place where Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown cross with Baltimore, Ferguson, and Sanford. We periodically mourn the deaths of a group of Americans who die at the hands of another armed American. We periodically witness racial injustices that inspire anger in the streets. And sometimes we witness both. This is, quite simply, how we now live.”
******
“For black Christians, the word “sanctuary” had a second set of implications. The spiritual aims of worship were paired with the distinctly secular necessity of a place in which not just common faith but common humanity could be taken for granted.”
I love the quote about “sanctuary.” The fact that this took place in a place of worship does make it especially appalling. I am Catholic and especially when I was in college, there were many times when I snuck into the church on our campus late at night just to feel the peace that was present there. I hope this is true whether you are religious or not – places of worship should be treated with respect as they are places people go to leave behind the problems they face outside – whether that is the feeling of not belonging experienced by an angsty college student or the feeling of being an outsider due to the color of your skin in the Jim Crow era (or, uh, now, which is sad to think about). Worship is about building community, not about taking that community apart through violence.
This was an EXCELLENT essay. Thank you for sharing it.
Just got an alert from the NYT – looks like they’ve identified a suspect in the Charleston shooting, “Dylann Storm Roof, 21, of the Columbia area”.
He is 21?!?!? Welp, kid, your life is over. I can tell you right now that it was not worth it.
“Dylann Storm Roof” sounds kinda like the sort of name people who are going to deliberately raise their children to be violent white supremacists would bestow upon said children.
My brother’s middle name is Storm, and he is the most laid back surfer, feminist bro of all time, just like my parents raised him to be, just saying.
It’s the whole combination. “Storm” is definitely a name that can also indicate hippie/surfer-ness, or just “my parents wanted me to be a Viking” (or possibly “my parents wanted me to be one of the X-Men”).
I agree, it’s the combination. Because it actually sounds like “Dylann! Storm the roof!”
Yeah, no disrespect to people who named their kids Dylan or Storm with the best of intentions, but it seems to pop up among white supremacists a lot. Like, a lot.
::coughcough:: stormfront ::coughcough::
Something I’d like to start seeing cited 100% of the time in shootings is whether the shooter is an NRA member. Because they deserve a callout.
Guys, the Blackhawks parade is happening outside my office, and it sounds like a frat house on a Thursday night out there.
I am 32 floors above the festivities and quite content to stay up here.
I love the Blackhawks, but I left Chicago three weeks ago, so I didn’t get to go to the parade. Somehow, I’m not all that sad about missing it. Way more fun to look at pictures online than actually have to be around all the douchey fans.
That is a very very very cute baby and he is most definitely a ginger.
They’re flying the flags at half-staff over the statehouse of South Carolina today; I’m sure the irony is lost on no one that one of those flags is the Confederate battle flag. Interestingly, I believe that South Carolina didn’t start flying that until 1954, to protest the Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. A Bunch of Racist Shitbags.
God damn but I wish they’d burn that flag.
+1000
SIgning this made me feel better for a nanosecond :http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/remove-the-confederate-3.fb52?source=c.fb&r_by=13244358
Apparently they’re not even flying the Confederate flag at half-mast, just the USA and state flag. The treasonous racist one honoring their defeat in the War of Northern Don’t Fucking Own People is still flying high and proud.
I think burning is actually the standard way to respectfully retire a flag? I’d like to see it dropped in a landfill to slowly rot in a pile of poop-filled diapers.
(Brown v. A Bunch of Racist Shitbags: FIVE STARS, WOULD READ AGAIN)
the War of Northern Don’t Fucking Own People
Thank you, I’ll be adopting that.
“Brown v. A Bunch of Racist Shitbags”
Going to start using this nomenclature forever. (I’m just sorry that I don’t work in constitutional law anymore…)
Charles Pierce has a good, brief piece today along these lines: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/new…
A quote:
“What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it’s not is “unspeakable.” We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was. We should speak of it as racial violence, which is what it was.
“We should speak of it as an attack on history, which it was. This was the church founded by Denmark Vesey, who planned a slave revolt in 1822. Vesey was convicted in a secret trial in which many of the witnesses testified after being tortured. After they hung him, a mob burned down the church he built. His sons rebuilt it. On Wednesday night, someone turned it into a slaughter pen.”
The worst thing about the new Tinker, Tailor, which I am otherwise awfully fond of, is the hatchet job they did on Ann.
I know hat this is off topic, but I need to talk about Maine and our rageful toddler of a governor. He wants to eliminate the income tax, and as retribution for legislators disliking the idea is vetoing everything. Which could lead to a government shutdown. And he has props
I hate LePage with a fury, but even more, I hate that we won’t be getting a new governor until 2018. Grrrr. MAINE WHY DID WE KEEP THIS MANCHILD IN THE BLAINE HOUSE?!
Some of those vetos were overturned, thankfully, but ffs.
LePage is really a lesson in why third party candidates are often a bad idea. He is also a lesson in why local elections matter, since he was 20 votes away from losing an election to be Mayor of Waterville when I was in college there (or so I was told, it’s been a few years), and he probably wouldn’t have ever become such a god awful governor if he had lost.
He’s seriously the worst.
There are a thousand important things in this post, but all I wanted to say (other than GO PETE, and congrats on having awesome friends) is that the recent TTSS film is so sexy it makes my TEETH HURT. Even the deleted scene that is just Smiley frying an egg and eating it alone at the kitchen table.
Dylann Roof was captured in Shelby, N.C., thank god. Did anyone see that a bullet was also fired into the door of a historically black church in Memphis?
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/shooter-opens-fir…
Thank fucking god.
There’s so much to be angry about and all of it is more important than this, but I’m focusing on being annoyed that while they’re going to put a woman on a US bill, it’s the 10 instead of the 20. Who on earth wanted to displace Hamilton? Who on earth *didn’t* want to displace Jackson? How on earth do these decisions get made?
My understanding is that they can’t change the money willy-nilly, and the 10 was up for a redesign to incorporate more counterfeiting protection stuff anyway? I think it’s kind of dumb that whoever they choose will share the 10, though, if only because money that is seen as “special” (/potentially a collector’s item) doesn’t circulate and hence ceases to be “real” money.
I feel like that isn’t such a risk with something like a ten dollar bill, just because it’s so commonly used, unlike the various attempts at dollar coins. I see the quarters with states and national parks on them circulating all the time.
I keep seeing that and it doesn’t make any sense. The $20 hasn’t been redesigned since 2003, the $10 was redesigned in 2006. And the $20 has been redesigned, until 2003, on average about every seven years, and is way more likely to be counterfeited than the $10. In fact, I know there was an article in the WaPo that had someone high-up in the Treasury department going, “you know, the $20 is slightly overdue to be redesigned anyway.”
http://www.newmoney.gov/currency/20.htm http://www.newmoney.gov/currency/10.htm
This morning NPR said updating the ten was already on the schedule — it sounds like these things are on a many-years-long cycle.
Seriously. Hamilton was no saint but Jackson was a monster. My guess, based on nothing, is that they feared removing Jackson would have put us in real danger of Civil War II.
… Hamilton was my favourite thing about US money because I find him kind of hot? In that particular rendering?
If he has to be replaced, a woman is a good choice though.
You’re definitely not alone. There are a whole bunch of Tumblrs devoted to him, as I discovered when I posted something about the musical. I mean, if you’re going to find a Founder physically attractive, he was a far sight younger and healthier than most of them.
“Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina asked the state’s residents to pray for the victims and their families. “We’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said in a statement.”
sure. white supremacism and racially-motivated killings — in churches no less — is a total fucking mystery in this country. especially the south. what could be more alien?
Especially when, according to some witness statements, he was pretty explicit about why he was doing it. Real fucking mystery there.
For some reason, it’s only ever a total fucking mystery when a white dude does it, too. With any other person, people are always more than happy to assign explanations and motives, like the ever-popular “they hate our freedoms”, and tar the entire racial or ethnic group by association. Now please excuse me while I go vomit for the rest of the day.
I mean, he’s just a guy that made racist jokes and had confederate license plates and the flag of fucking Rhodesia on his jacket, he murdered nine black people in a church in a state that still flies the Confederate flag after telling them that he wanted to murder black people, but let’s not jump to any fucking conclusions.
Yeah.
It’s not just stupid, you know? Claiming ignorance of their motives, of what drives these murders and terrorism, is literally fucking perpetuating the problem and enabling racist murderers. I want that made clear to her and everyone else in power doing this. I’d like them to face a penalty for that bullshit.
Well said.
Thank you! (I find I’m missing most the people I didn’t get enough time to hang out with in Houston, sigh. Hope you’re all doing well.)
So mysterious! He probably had the Mental Illness. You know, that one that doesn’t interfere with your ability to hold down a job, or make you incapable of telling right from wrong, or manifest in any noticeable way, but just makes you sometimes snap and murder a bunch of people for, like, some reason, while going on a Tourette-style tear about how much you hate people who just happen to be like the people you’re murdering. Medical science has, at this time, no cure for this utterly mysterious mental disturbance. It’s sad that we know so little about how the brain works.
He could have shown up in a fucking Klan hood and they’d still be saying “we’ll never understand.”
It’s like (and not like, because sexism =/= racism) the guy who shot up Isla Vista, California and left a manifesto about being driven by his hatred of women. Cue the cries of, “It couldn’t be that.”
I think the people who deny, deny, deny just can’t handle that they hold views in common with a mass murderer. They’d have to, I dunno, maybe reexamine those views. Admit racism is real. Something like that.
Reexamine their views! What! But then they might feel baaaaaaad about all the times they laughed with and high-fived the
tellers of viciously bigoted jokes! Have you no compassion?!
/sarcasm
It’s also just really goddamn obnoxious as someone who actually does have MI – people like to decide that anyone who does a terrible thing must be “mentally ill”, because, gosh, no normal person could possibly do such a terrible thing. Nevermind that being a terrible person is not, in fact, a mental illness, or that many awful people fall into the “normal” range of the psychological spectrum, this attempt to distance themselves from terrible acts further stigmatizes people who are actually mentally ill. “Normal” people are racist, sexist, homophobic, and do terrible things and our society lets them stay that way by explaining these incidents away as out-of-the-norm. I have literally seen people say that one would necessarily have to be mentally ill to “hate that much”. Yeah, no.
“Normal” also gets racially coded. Because a “normal” person would have to be mentally ill in order to do these horrible things, but Arabs do it because of their ideology of hate, and Blacks do it because they’re thugs, and Latinos do it because of machismo and, and, and…
We define “normal” people as needing some sort of pathology in order to hate and rape and kill, but we only apply that definition to white men, it appears.
It almost feels like they’re saying, “but loads of people hate women/POC/trans* folks! We’re totally prejudiced about a bunch of people, but *we’ve* never shot anyone, so therefore we know from experience that hatred doesn’t make you kill people!”
This is the same woman who said it was ok to have a confederate flag at the state house because SC was done with racism, now that they have a non-white governor. http://www.salon.com/2014/10/15/nikki_haley_its_o…
“Is Mallory’s personality that powerful?” Of course it is. Nicole’s delightful munchkin may or may not be a ginger, but of course Mallory has the power. She causes babies to be born ginger without half trying.
Well, I know how I’m going to reply to the U of C’s next solicitation for the ready folding.
What’s the ready folding?
I could’ve sworn Bertie Wooster uses it to mean money in one Jeeves book or another, but I can’t find it.
Ah. 🙂 I’ll take your word for it.
You know, one of the things that makes talking to my sister completely unbearable is how she thinks I’m “angry for no reason.”
I don’t feel much like poetry today 🙁
*hugs*
“HENSON: I hate that bitch. She’s stolen my identity!”
I’m going to not click the link, and continue assuming that this is an interview with a foul-mouthed Jim Henson. And that he has a puppet on his hand.
That was my first thought, too!
Everyone’s quoting Obama’s line “I’ve had to make statements like these too many times,” but you really have to listen to how he said it to get the meaning, the anger under his famous control. There’s so much there and in what he said next, about how the American people have to face this eventually, the fact that killings like these don’t happen in other advanced countries. There’s fury at Congress, yes, and I think disappointment with the country at large. But you can tell how much this issue means to him, and that means a lot to me too. (My mentally ill brother had no trouble purchasing the shotgun he used to kill himself.)
I recognize that tone. That’s the exact same tone I’d get from my parents whenever I’d done something really, really wrong as a kid. It’s the “I still love you, but I can’t even begin to tell you how disappointed I am in you, and it’s only because I love you that I’m not actually telling you how furious I am with you right now” voice. I really can’t blame him at all.
Our gun laws are inexcusable. I’m very sorry about your brother.
Thank you. I mean, I don’t pretend he wouldn’t have found another way. And he wasn’t mentally ill in a way that’s immediately obvious, but he was almost certainly paranoid schizophrenic, and it wasn’t even wholly a surprise when he did it. But I’m still offended by how easy it was for him to purchase a shotgun.
But wouldn’t it be nice if there was, in addition to background checks, like an interview process when someone wanted to purchase a gun? Just a half-hour chat about why you want to own a quick and efficient instrument of death. It doesn’t have to be formal, even. Just give a trained person a chance to evaluate your mental health for any glaring signals and, I dunno, eye the patches on your jacket (maybe they can even make a quick google search to find that picture — it’s not an invasion of privacy). I’m not saying it’ll prevent all shootings, but it might stop a few, which is better than none. I know, I’m living in dreamland.
Guys, they’re releasing the identities of some of the victims:
– Senator Revered Clementa Pinckney – youngest elected to the state senate
– Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton – mother of 3, well respected track coach at Goose Creek High School
– Cynthia Hurd – Branch Manager of a Charleston County Library (all 16 branches are closed today in her honor)
– Ethel Lee – I don’t have any info
– Tywanza Sanders – 2014 graduate of Allen University
So unfair. I’m so angry and sad.
I wanted to post about the 20-year old woman found dead in a shopping cart in Edmonton yesterday. This should be national news but nobody cares! http://www.edmontonjournal.com/touch/story.html?i…
That’s terrible! Both that she was murdered and left in a shopping cart, and that there’s not enough media attention.
I recently moved to Chicago, and my aunt, a South Bend resident, has mentioned intermittently over the last few years that she would LOVE to set me up with the mayor. He’s so cute! He’s just a nice, nice man, she said. She said she was planning on befriending him somehow and then mentioning (casually) that she had a cute niece who lived just across the state line and would, of course, be visiting soon. I’m super proud of him, and man, his statement was aces, but this is going to deeply disappoint my matchmaking aunt.
Lol, your aunt is an ambitious matchmaker! Even if he wasn’t gay.
Oh god, at first I was reading that as if you were talking about Rahm Emmanuel. I feel much better about your aunt’s taste now that I understand what you actually wrote.
Does anyone know the background/deal with http://www.staywoke.org/? I’d like to get involved, but I want some kind of external validation that it’s legit before I send in a bunch of personal information?
very very cute baby!
clearly already showing intellectual superiority also
hair is weird – my first child had a head full of hair like a sooty dandelion, and it lightened to a medium brown. the second was essentially bald for a year, and then had hair come in the exact same shade. I am so glad I labelled photos when I got them because the toddling part of their lives they were identical, but four years apart.
fistbump of sororal hair!
OMG guys did you see this buzzfeed thing about fragile masculinity: http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/masculinity-is…
I think the best are the hand grenade shaped (lavender) bath bombs, but still…
OMG guys did you see this buzzfeed thing about fragile masculinity: http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/masculinity-is…
I think the best are the hand grenade shaped (lavender) bath bombs, but still…
AS DO I. And it ALSO has Colin FIrth, so.