Link Roundup! -The Toast

the anti-gentrification ghosts!!!! this whole thing is hilarious (but also, all motion-sensor lights are terrifying and designed to reveal ghosts):

It quickly developed another reputation. In January, a woman was standing in her kitchen when the overhead lights switched off. A doorman was watching security-camera footage one night when the motion-sensor lights in a stairwell flipped on one by one—first on the seventh floor, then the sixth, and on down to the ground floor—with no living thing in sight. A cabdriver dropped one resident off with a warning: “Be careful. It’s full of skeletons.” Turnover seemed high among the building’s doormen, one of whom, according to the Post, said that 123 On the Park was “a messed-up place to work because it’s haunted.”

Oh, man, this account of the 1995 Chicago heat wave is really something (it’s also very, very hard to read):

By the afternoon, temperatures hit 104 at O’Hare and 106 at Midway. It felt like 125, according to the heat index, which factors in humidity. In what’s known as the heat island effect, brick buildings, asphalt parking lots, and tar roofs trapped the warmth and then radiated it outward. Add to that moisture-heavy air, a dearth of wind, and ever-present air pollution, and the city felt like a grubby urban sauna, even at night. “At midday,” a Los Angeles Times reporter observed, “those crazy enough to be out on Chicago’s streets seemed to be walking in a daze.”

being. an. extra. on. magic. mike. xxl.

“I worked down in Atlanta [as an extra] on The Hunger Games, and that casting director has a list of people that she trusts, who she knows will be there on time and whatnot. She sent an email saying, ‘Hey, I need actors for this really big convention scene — they’re having issues with all the fangirls. We need people tomorrow.’ Savannah is about an 11-hour drive from where I am [in Louisville, Kentucky]. But then she told me what movie it was for and I said, ‘I’ll make an exception.'”

Friend of The Toast Lindsay King-Miller on men in their twenties who date teenagers:

I knew, abstractly, that older men who dated younger women – not women but girls, high school girls, girls not even old enough to drive – were creepy and better avoided. But for some reason it never occurred to me that that applied to my own life. The guys my friends and I dated made it seem like there was nothing strange about men in their twenties sexually pursuing teenage girls – after all, we were so old for our age. We were so wise. They had never met girls like us, girls who knew so much, girls who understood them so well. They told us this over and over, every one of them, like reading from a script:You’re so cool. You’re so different from all the others. When I was young, I didn’t understand that as an insult, lifting girls up in the singular while putting us down in the plural. I was dying to feel older, which I accomplished by wearing impossibly short skirts and sky-high platform shoes, carrying a tiny knife disguised as a tube of lipstick in my purse and feeling sly and dangerous. I wanted to feel desired, and the men I met were more than happy to comply – to tell me I was beautiful in my Hot Topic bustiers, breasts hiked to the collarbone, boots laced up to the knee.

I was born in Kingston, and grew up on Montreal St, and this story in the Whig Standard (yes, it’s called the Whig Standard, I know) utterly chilled me. It seems so unbelievably clear that this man is a danger to the public and should not be out on the streets, and yet he has served his sentence. I wish we had a better system, and if you’re in Kingston, please be aware of his existence, and know I’m thinking about you and my hometown right now:

Alexander Casselman, 56, appeared in Kingston’s Ontario Court of Justice on Friday, the day he was released from penitentiary, and voluntarily entered into a two-year public safety peace bond requested by Kingston Police after they learned he’s decided to take up residence on Montreal Street.

Casselman served every day of his sentence and assistant Crown attorney Elisabeth Foxton said he refused to participate in sex offender treatment while in prison.

She told Justice Allan Letourneau that his last prison assessment, in January 2013 ranked him as having a high risk of re-offending. She also disclosed that Casselman once told a correctional officer that he was going to go on “a killing spree” when he got out and would become known as “the phone book killer,” because he intended to randomly select a page and murder the people listed until he was caught and sent back to the penitentiary.

Rachel Dolezal talked to Vanity Fair, said basically nothing:

And yet, Dolezal’s claim on black womanhood still seems to be non-negotiable. Even in conversation with an actual black woman on the other end of the line or sitting in her cozy home, Dolezal unequivocally identifies as black. (Never mind the ancestry.com heritage test that arrived on her doorstep the day I visited.)

I have so enjoyed not discussing Rihanna’s BBHMM video on The Toast, but I also have to link to the Miss Piggy version.

lol the show is getting better so I haven’t had fire in my belly to mock it, but this is correct