We’ll be talking to Friend Of The Toast Kate Harding a BUNCH about her new book in September, but in the meantime, she’s tearing up the press rounds with a ton of great reviews and fascinating interviews:
You point out in the book that a lot of politicians, including our current president, frequently use “wife, mother, daughter” language to talk about issues like sexual assault. You aren’t a fan of that framing. Why not?
Because it positions women as “others.” It ignores the fact that when you’re addressing the American people, 50-odd percent of them are women, and it’s sort of weird to be addressing a group of women and say, “Imagine that your wife or mother or sister was raped” – not that you wouldn’t be just as upset if they were.It also reinforces the pernicious idea that the genders are such different creatures. (I’m speaking in terms of the mainstream-accepted gender binary here, men and women.) We’re Mars and Venus, we speak different languages. We can’t possibly just empathize with each other as human beings and imagine what it’s like to be each other. So what I say in the book is: Don’t talk about rape in terms of your mother, wife, or sister. Talk about it in terms of yourself. Imagine you’re the one who’s raped, and you go to report it to the police, and they treat you like maybe you’re the criminal. And that does happen to male victims too, so it’s not this unimaginable thing for them.
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The Samuel Jackson profile is way more interesting than the Tarantino profile, MOSTLY BECAUSE:
At 66, Jackson radiates a self-assurance and contentment that ought to be bottled and sold at John Travolta’s Scientology meetings. We’re talking at a photo shoot in Los Angeles, to which he’s just returned after a three-week vacation cruising the Amalfi Coast and Côte d’Azur on Magic Johnson’s yacht. They live across the street from each other in Beverly Hills, go to the same church, and do this trip every year with their wives. Jackson always travels with 30 to 40 movies, usually old-school and emerging Asian cinema, which he watches with the guys while, he says, “the ladies watch whatever series that they didn’t binge-watch all year.”
Lunch arrives, and Jackson joins the photo crew, chowing on a lamb burger out of a takeout box. He tried veganism but abandoned it recently after “somebody threatened to fire me from a job if I didn’t gain 20 pounds,” he says. Group conversation lands on Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo, and Jackson’s manager explains to him Kondo’s philosophy of picking up every object in his house, asking if it brings him joy, and, if not, thanking it for its service and discarding it. Jackson does a double take. “Do you know how long that would take me?” he says. “A long fucking time!”
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Here is Lisa Miller’s very involved look at the Slender Man attempted murder and the girls involved:
Slender Man was the most powerful and compelling of the characters that preoccupied Anissa and Morgan, but he was by no means the only one. Each girl was, differently, obsessed with a pantheon of imaginary creatures, and their friendship was built, in part, on a mutual love for tales of demons and supernatural evil. Morgan, in particular, had a rich fantasy life. Voldemort and Snape, villains from the Harry Potter series, were especially vivid to her; Voldemort she called “Voldie,” as if he were her pet. She regarded Spock, Star Trek’s Vulcan, as a mentor of sorts, a tutor in how to suppress emotion (one sign, perhaps, that she was aware of the extent to which her outward behavior was in need of editing). On theFacebook-page support group for Morgan, one photograph shows her wearing Spock ears; another shows her wearing a black hoodie emblazoned with the white bones of a human skeleton. Her favorite fashion accessory was a pair of black lace fingerless gloves, which she wore all the time, including during the attack (and which she left on the sink in Walmart, to her lasting regret). But all these gothic, fantastical impulses existed alongside the utterly unremarkable interests of a 12-year-old girl. A catalogue of the contents of her bedroom, made after the attack, includes her school backpack, which on that Saturday afternoon contained five volumes from The Littles series, famous children’s books about tiny people with tails who live in a human house. Also on that list: volumes of Mad Libs, the blanks filled in with a tween’s pornographic and scatological sensibility: penis, pooping, urine, horny, crapping, and “vajayjay.”
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The meaning of Serena Williams (this WHOLE THING is so amazing):
Imagine you have won 21 Grand Slam singles titles, with only four losses in your 25 appearances in the finals. Imagine that you’ve achieved two ‘‘Serena Slams’’ (four consecutive Slams in a row), the first more than 10 years ago and the second this year. A win at this year’s U.S. Open would be your fifth and your first calendar-year Grand Slam — a feat last achieved by Steffi Graf in 1988, when you were just 6 years old. This win would also break your tie for the most U.S. Open titles in the Open era, surpassing the legendary Chris Evert, who herself has called you ‘‘a phenomenon that once every hundred years comes around.’’ Imagine that you’re the player John McEnroe recently described as ‘‘the greatest player, I think, that ever lived.’’ Imagine that, despite all this, there were so many bad calls against you, you were given as one reason video replay needed to be used on the courts. Imagine that you have to contend with critiques of your body that perpetuate racist notions that black women are hypermasculine and unattractive. Imagine being asked to comment at a news conference before a tournament because the president of the Russian Tennis Federation, Shamil Tarpischev, has described you and your sister as ‘‘brothers’’ who are ‘‘scary’’ to look at. Imagine.
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The real war on families:
Research shows that paid leave can also be a matter of life and death for children. By charting the correlation between death rates and paid leave in 16 European countries, Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, found that a 50-week extension in paid leave was associated with a 20 percent dip in infant deaths. (The biggest drop was in deaths of babies between 1 month and 1 year old, though mortality of children between 1 and 5 years also decreased as paid leave went up.)
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 13 percent of U.S. workers have access to any form of paid family leave, which includes parental leave and other time off to care for a family member. The highest-paid workers are most likely to have it, according to BLS numbers, with more than 1 in 5 of the top 10 percent of earners getting paid family leave, compared to 1 in 20 in the bottom quartile. Unionized workers are more likely to get benefits than nonunionized workers.
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My friend Carrie’s new puppy is lying on a faux-fur throw, like the princess she is:
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Five black-owned wineries you could visit instead of the Napa Wine Train.
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when a dude says ‘the things i would do to you’ is that supposed to sound mysterious? we all know he’s just thinking about the dick going in
— merritt death kill (@merrittkopas) August 25, 2015
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Toasts, here are two things I never thought I would say, but they are true and I cannot hide any part of myself from you:
1) I listened to the new Carly Rae Jepsen album several times last night
2) I LOVE IT, I LOVE IT SO MUCH
I have listened to it 500 times, my favorite song changes every day
Let’s Get Lost and LA Hallucinations are my jamzzz right now.
Let’s Get Lost is SO GOOD
*cues Spotify*
Report back with your findings!
I AM GETTING A HOLD OF IT RIGHT NOW TO LISTEN i need some good music in my life rn
I looooveeeee her new album! Juicy, fun pop music is the fucking best–and her’s is a callback to the righteous pop of the 80’s. Ariana Grande’s “My Everything,” is also v, v good! Skip the first song though…
YES, SAME
Cued up and listening now, thank you! Laying around recovering from a pretty major surgery and I love this accompanying me on my Toast catchup!
holy crap, just started listening based on this comment.
1. This is FANTASTICALLY fun.
2. I had to relisten to Call Me Maybe first. Twice. I know, I know, but that song was awesome. I’m not sorry.
*finishes Kate Harding interview, decides to check out the comments*
*flees screaming back to the Toast*
thank you again dear toast editors for the work you do in making this a hostile place for idiots and misogynists!
My past 5 minutes:
1. Wow, what an articulate and insightful interview! I would love to see what parts stood out as especially awesome to other readers!
2. Briefly glance at the comments
3. Realize my mistake and trip over myself, so hastily am I backtracking
so many people all utterly, indignantly, smugly missing the point
It’s an aquarium of sea-lions over there.
Let’s be accurate here, so many MEN all utterly, indignantly, smugly missing the point.
thank you for inspiring my new protest song:
MEN, MEN, WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR
MISSING THE POINT REALLY CONFIDENTLY ON THE INTERNET
ALSO SOMETIMES SEX?
BUT MOSTLY JUST BEING WRONG ABOUT THINGS AND NOT REALISING IT
YEAAAAHHHH (repeat x3)
This is the greatest!
I did the exact same thing. I ought to know better, but I think spending so much time in the comments section of The Toast lures me into forgetting the internet is basically a toilet with ad space.
I had the same response to the Slenderman article. I got to the end feeling so many complex emotions for all those girls, looked at the comments, and instantly fled screaming back to the Toast.
Seconded. The article was so good, and nuanced, and the comment section was at least 50% “these girls are evil, they should be in jail foreeeeeever.”
I didn’t even read that far, the very top one referred to them as “bitches” and I just noped right out of there.
The follow-up comment to the “bitches” comment was great too! It was all about how people who live in subsidized housing aren’t fit to raise children.
I feel very uncomplex emotions about any place that ever allows pre-teens to be tried as adults at any point for any crime.
I did the same thing and I’m so glad to be back in the comforting embrace of this comment section. Just…*shudders*
I want to make a Kate Harding shrine. With little Toast Icons on the base…
Comment-blocking browser extension is best browser extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shut-up… No accidental comment glances!
Oh god thank you for that!
I felt so blessed to come across someone recommending it on twitter, I consider it a public service to share it occasionally! So necessary.
I don’t comment all that often here, but I still give thanks every day that I can read and enjoy every single article AND their comments.
I’m actually pretty good at ignoring comment sections, unless I’ve previously read somebody saying “don’t read the comments.” It’s like a big red DON’T TOUCH button.
Or being told “Whatever you do, don’t think about elephants.”
Joke’s on you; I love thinking about elephants.
PUPPY ON A FAUX FUR THROW!!!
I look forward to the puppy pics every day!
Yeah, I was going to say something about the Serena Williams story, but my brain just leaked out my ears from the cuteness of that puppy on the throw. I’m not gonna be good for much of anything today, I fear.
Oh man, that Serena article got me all choked up. She’s just so awe-inspiring. And fuck calls for “objective” journalism, because Claudia Rankine’s personal angle really managed to make it clear just how important Serena is, not just as an athlete but as a symbol.
The Slenderman assault happened in the county I lived in for 14 years growing up. It’s very weird reading about it–I went to birthday parties at Skateland, I know the exact woods & Walmart & all the streets and buildings referred to in the article. I feel like I knew versions of those girls growing up– no one stabbed anyone, thankfully, but there’s something about the Waukesha suburbs that is very alienating and I knew girls who coped in the same way, with Hot Topic wardrobes (or versions thereof built from the Goodwill next to that Walmart) and creepypasta and violent imaginations. They’re so familiar but that doesn’t help me understand why they did what they did.
I know this feeling so well; when I was 13 a group of girls my age swarmed and murdered another young girl on the other side of the town I grew up in, in a case that made international headlines. At the time it was confusing and horrible, obviously, but wasn’t something I reflected about critically until much later. Rebecca Godfrey’s excellent book, “Under the Bridge”, about what happened, really opened my eyes to how some people understood life in our small city.
I grew up in the town outside of Pittsburgh where that kid stabbed a bunch of students and a security guard, and this is a very, very familiar feeling to me. Similar also to how I feel about Columbine, where a couple of guys who looked just like my friends did something that I can kind of understand, in a way.
I also grew up in a town outside of Pittsburgh and lock downs due to threats of violence were a weekly thing. We had security guards and metal detectors. We were the first public school in the country to arm our security guards. Luckily violence was generally left off school property but I recognize these people too.
Yeah, the disturbing part of that article is that I can see a lot of myself and other strange girls I knew in that type of fantasy coping – and I can also identify with creating intensely personal imaginary friendships out of fictional characters. Its easy to imagine a frog-in-boiling-water situation creeping up on you in that situation, where your behaviour and logic keep moving one baby step at a time out of the realm of reality
It really sits with me, too. Where I grew up, there was no one right near us, and those who were kinda near us were a bit cruel (We were homeschooled, and “farm kids”) and I was very deeply twisted into my fictional worlds for a long time – I even have bits of it these days – because there was nowhere else to go. I would have dressed that way if I’d been allowed, and I took every opportunity away from home to do something dangerous and stupid. My teen years were hell, and I helped make it that way – but the world didn’t make it any better.
But all these gothic, fantastical impulses existed alongside the utterly unremarkable interests of a 12-year-old girl.
The framing of this suggests that gothic and fantastical impulses aren’t normal interests of 12-year-old girls. I feel like the author must not know a lot of 12-year-old girls.
Also what interests of 12-year-old girls are unremarkable? I have yet to find any girl of any age who is interested in unremarkable things.
Boys. Boys are the most unremarkable interest of 12yo girls.
Seriously. The sheer number of 12 year old girls I knew who pretended to be cats…that’s just the least of it.
I didn’t know much about this case beforehand, but so much of this sounds familiar. You’re right, the pretending-to-be-cats things is incredibly widespread. Like, a lot of these details about the gothyness and elaborate imagination games are just so…typical of so many young girls. And the weird line between being aware of the fantasy & being caught up in what another girl is saying; sometimes feeling like “I need to roll with this or no one will ever be my friend.”
If anything, now I’m feeling better about being the “hey guys, I don’t think we should” kid in my friend group that everyone thought was such a downer.
Looking back, the fanfic I read as a young teen was probably darker and more messed up than what I’m into today. (Fandom interests are obviously the best way to measure personality development.)
I was actually just thinking that the other day when I nope-clicked right the fuck out of a fic that I vaguely recalled reading a decade ago. “how did I find this acceptable???” i asked myself, and i wasn’t just talking about the really bad prosody.
There are times in the article where it feels like they are equating dark imagery with dark actions. To me, that feels a lot like the (ridiculous) hysteria around D&D when I was a little kid or the later fears that Harry Potter promoted witchcraft. So what if Morgan’s dad liked objects with skulls on them or metal music? (Oooohhhh… scary….) And the thing is, none of those things are that far out of the mainstream. Just, to a certain type of person, a girl whose world doesn’t center on makeup and boys by age 12 is some kind of dangerous deviant.
Just one more way society polices the female experience.
Yeah aside from the trying to murder their friend bit, this was essentially me when I was 12.
I read the article about the Slenderman girls yesterday and it broke my heart. They should not be tried as adults. One is clearly struggling with a severe mental health issue and the other one was so lonely and got in over her head. It doesn’t excuse what they did, but punishing them as severely as possible doesn’t seem to be a solution.
I can’t help thinking that if someone in Morgan’s life had realized what was happening to her and got her the appropriate help, none of this would have happened. And Anissa (who I believe when she says she didn’t actually take part in the stabbing) cooperated so fully with the police that she should be rewarded in some way.
A friend of mine mentioned this case reminded her of Heavenly Creatures. It would be nice if Anissa were granted the anonymity that Anne Perry enjoyed for years. She seems remorseful and I’m not sure a prison sentence would end well for her. She already seems so fragile.
I read the Slender Man murders article yesterday, and it really destroyed me. I had to keep taking breaks while reading it because it was so, so intense.
And also because gee, these girls sound like me and my friends at that age.
Yes to the Heavenly Creatures–very much so.
The circumstances are very different, but it reminds me a bit of the James Bulger case; that’s another one where the child perpetrators had their identities revealed and were tried as adults, and I really don’t think that they should have been. What they did was horrific, but their backgrounds clearly had a big effect, and they needed more help. As it is, the chances of them being able to move past it and live a normal life seem tiny; the fact that their names and faces were revealed means that there’s still a real vigilante/witch-hunt mentality (one of them has already had to have multiple new identities after his cover has been broken).
Yes, although I believe that John Venables’ new identity after the murder was compromised on multiple occasions because A) as an adult he was arrested for possessing and distributing child pornography, and B) bragged to several people about his involvement.
Yeah, Venables is hardly a blameless victim in this (the child pornography stuff is very alarming, in the context of the crime he committed); I just think that being tried as an adult at the age of eleven has the serious potential to screw things up even worse. And while the details of the crime on their own would certainly have been enough to horrify the public on their own, I feel like revealing the names and faces of the perpetrators allowed a particular level of aggression to be focused on them. The idea of having to conceal all evidence of your former name and living in fear that someone might recognize your face and realise who you are must just feel like living under constant threat.
Oh, absolutely. I just remembered that he had told two different people on two different occasions (with two different identities!) who he was. I can’t imagine how frustrating that must be for the people responsible for guarding his safety – to know that he’s not only continuing to harm children, but is also actively working to undermine what you’re doing to save him from mob violence.
It really must. Good on them for continuing to try; it must be difficult.
I agree. The poor girls need treatment, not jail time – especially Morgan. To be diagnosed with schizophrenia at such a young age is incredibly unusual.
I don’t care if either of them have mental illnesses or cooperated with the police. They’re TWELVE. They shouldn’t be tried as adults no matter what the extenuating circumstances are or aren’t.
The thing that really stands out for me (others have said this better than I), the victim didn’t understand it wasn’t play (during the first round). Of course that can happen to adults, too, but in this case I think it highlights the blurry boundaries in kids minds–when does a game become real?
I just keep thinking, they’re kids, they’re kids, they’re kids, they don’t UNDERSTAND what they think they do. Should they both get a lot of very intensive help? Yes, and then they could probably — just like Heavenly Creatures which I totally thought of — end up as adults who don’t kill any non-fictional people instead of screwing them up forever by treating them as adults.
Argh. It makes me so mad and upset.
I’m not saying 12 year olds should ever be charged as adults. Children should be charged as children. But in this case, the circumstances definitely do not merit them being charged as severely as is possible.
Better “the things I would do to you”:
Leave you alone with a million bucks and Prime shipping!
Ask you about your favorite meal and then make it some day when I knew you were stressed out!
Cover you with a blanket if you fell asleep on the couch!
Cool face paint!
Respect your autonomy!
Shoot myself into the sun when I realized how little you want my d!
Etc.
ooh ooh cool face paint please, I want a sun wearing sunglasses, the EPITOME OF COOL
Reminds me of this sketch from the Kids in the Hall pilot.
If an inspired internet comment were your boyfriend/girlfriend.
Unrelated to threads, but I had to share this peak irritating mansplaining I just witnessed.
Facebook friend: posts meme that says “They’re called ‘man hours’ because a woman would have that shit done in 20 minutes!”
Comment on Facebook friend’s post: uuuh hate to be the one to pop your bubble but man hours can also be counted in portions so it still would be called .33 MAN HOURS even if a woman did it in 20 minutes as you say. So …….in the words of the Great James Brown ” this is a mans world” LOL
Sexist, condescending, AND humorless! What a dude.
Ugh. Men.
Like… buddy. Really, you’re taking it there?
He should know that women don’t measure time in hours, man or otherwise. Women know that time is a construct built to contain men and we exist outside that temporal cage.
I love this. That is all.
oh
my
god
why
are
men
WHY
WHYYYYY
“…but he wouldn’t be nothing / without a woman or a girl.”
“so he had better fucking start acting like it”
/misandrist hymns
“Sexist, condescending, AND humorless!”
be real with us is your friend’s friend donald trump
omg you may be right
Get that guy on the spaceship into the sun! He can sit right in the front because he’s so very important.
The other day something happened that inspired me to rewrite the “Cheers” theme as a misandrist anthem:
Walk down the street and a guy shouts “Baby, show us what you got!”
Look at the pavement and see it’s decked in spit and piss and snot.
Wouldn’t you like to get away?
Sometimes you wanna go
Where all the men are far away-ay-ay.
And it’s safe to work and play-ay-ay.
Walk down the street in perfect peace,
At any time of night or day.
You wanna be where all the men are far away.
I WANT TO GO TO THERE.
When are we going to start The Toast Lady Commune? I am here for it. It could be like that village in Kenya that is run by women and men are banned.
Goal: be referred to as Friend of the Toast in a link roundup.
Toasts! This is more of an Open Thread thing, but I just moved to New York and am totally daunted by the city. What are the best things to do alone here? Any suggestions for ways to meet people and be social? Is there an NYC Toast group?
Don’t you already have a built-in friend group in the form of the Unicorn Club?
Just kidding. Sorry, I am of no use whatsoever about NYC but I do love Sweet Valley High references.
Haha, I wish! I would definitely not mind Jessica Wakefield showing up at my apartment to boss me around right now.
I’ve found meetup.com to be a decent way to meet others if you have a specific hobby you’re interested in. (I met a lot of folks through hiking groups.) There’s also a big nyc reddit group that has happy hours every week, if that’s your jam.
I’d also like to know if there is an NYC Toasties group!
There IS! It’s called the Coterie and it’s AMAZING. Email [email protected], introduce yourself, and say Melanie sent you. <3
“Things to do in NY Alone” is the thing that finally made me comment after lurking for so long. My favorite alone person activity is to see an independent movie at the Lincoln Plaza theater and then walk to the Grey’s Papaya on 72nd and eat in the little park area next to the subway on 72nd. It’s perfect. Also if it’s still playing I would recommend Phoenix.
(Also let’s hang out)
Thank you! This is a perfect recommendation. (And yeah, let’s totally hang out!)
Ooh, I’m de-lurking just to reply to this question.
The best thing that I did when I moved to NYC many years ago was getting involved in volunteering. I strongly recommend New York Cares (www.newyorkcares.org) if you are interested. You can choose projects based on your interests, location, time and duration of commitment. I mostly volunteered as an English conversation partner for adult students, which was a lot of fun and helped me to feel like I was contributing to my neighborhood. It also gave me something fun to talk about when I met new people in other venues.
I also volunteered for art festivals, music events, and saw a season of opera for free at the (now-defunct) NY City Opera in exchange for working in the gift shop.
As far as things to do alone, definitely take a day to wander around the Cloisters. Take the ferry to Governor’s Island – there are free events there during the summer. Brooklyn Flea is fun to explore. I used to like to go to new neighborhoods and give myself a project to do while I was there, like taking a camera and playing photographer, recording ambient sounds on my phone, or writing little stories based on what I discovered. Having a mission makes solitude feel purposeful.
Nonsense NYC (http://www.nonsensenyc.com/about/) is a great resource for everything weird, fun and often free that happens in the city. Good luck!
Thank you! I love the idea of having a project to do in a new neighborhood. That sounds like a lot of fun 🙂
YES JOIN US. We have meetups!
Things I like to do alone:
-get picnic stuff and hang out in your park of choice (Central, Prospect, etc.)
-pick up a cheap lunch and/or pastries in Chinatown and then take a walk around lower Manhattan
-the Met
Also, I haven’t done this myself yet because I am lazy, but if you get your IDNYC card by the end of 2015, it nets you free visits to a whole bunch of museums, botanical gardens, etc. as well as discounted tickets to shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Public Theater, Carnegie Hall, and a whole bunch of other places.
ETA: The Skint is a website that lists free or cheap things to do around NYC every day. It is pretty great.
When I lived in New York and had nothing to do on a Friday night I would sometimes go to the Morgan Library & Museum. It’s free on Fridays from 7 to 9 p.m., and it’s incredibly fancy, with some very cool manuscript and book collections.
I am so looking forward to reading that Serena article when I get home from work. Did anyone else see what John McEnroe said at the weekend about being able to beat her in a match? Because that doesn’t seem like a thing that could happen, and I think the match should take place just so she can beat him in straight sets.
Ahahahahahha
Serena would totally own him in straight sets.
I imagine her quietly laughing and shaking her head while she whispers, “Oh, John.” The way you do when a friend says something kind of deluded.
I would also 100% watch her beat him and I don’t even understand tennis at all.
“The things I would do to you” always makes me think, like, murder things. “The things I would do to get rid of your body after I murder you”.
Yes, my mind immediately went to violence and those words in an angry, not sexy, voice. 🙁
my mind always goes to gross things. like, he’s the sort of dude that would stick his tongue IN your ear or some such vile squishy thing. it always makes my skin crawl.
Yup. And these dudes never want to do things with women, only to them.
You know what’s always sexy? “The things I want to do *for* you.”
I read this great short story yesterday about identity, internet personality quizzes, and faulty consciousness backups, and wanted to share it!
I really enjoyed that–Thanks for sharing!!
I need someone that’s better at California geography than I am to help me figure out which of those wineries are close-ish to Monterey/Carmel/Central Coast. Our brand-new-and-improved honeymoon plans have us out there for two weeks and it would be super awesome if we could get to some, if not all, of those.
ALSO I really really really dislike Frank Deford most of the time but his piece on Serena Williams this morning was kind of okay? I don’t follow tennis much, so I don’t know if it’s actually accurate that Serena never really faced a competitor that made her better, but it’s an interesting premise.
Paso Robles is a good place to look for wineries–it’s just a little inland from Morro Bay/Pismo Beach and a straight shot down the 101 from Monterey. There are a lot of little wineries in there, and they are supposedly far less overrun than in Napa/Sonoma. You have to do a little planning, because the wineries are a little more far flung and their hours are more irregular. I haven’t actually been wine tasting there–I got to the planning stage on my last trip home to CA and had to nix it to fit in other stuff–so I can’t give ultra specific advice on which are best. I do drink a lot of Liberty School wines, though, and I know they are from there. http://www.pasowine.com/
Also, Bonny Doone’s tasting room is in Santa Cruz, on the other side of Monterey Bay. I’m sort of obsessed with their Le Cigar Volant, but it’s hard to come by on this other coast. http://www.bonnydoonvineyard.com/
My mind read Bonny Doone as Boone’s Farm. And yes, I would go to that tasting room.
Me too. I’m pretty sure Boone’s Farm Fuzzy Navel is the flavor of my freshman year of college. A tasting room would be like a time machine. A woozy, nauseous time machine.
With the worst hangovers
There are supposedly other wineries around the Santa Cruz area as well! Like Paso Robles, it’s supposed to be less crowded than Napa/Sonoma. Haven’t been down there for it though because *whispers* I don’t like wine.
The wineries in that profile are all in Napa/Sonoma except the first, which is in southern California.
Thank you! That’s very helpful. We are making an effort to support as many minority-, immigrant-, and woman-owned businesses as we can, including the wineries we’ll visit on honeymoon, but it doesn’t sound like any of those five are close enough that we’ll be able to get to them easily from Monterey.
This article has a rundown of some of the wineries around Carmel, plus some of the restraurants: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/travel/25hours….
Obviously the main focus should be on Serena’s incredible career and achievements and all around badassery, and not on her romantic choices but OH MY GOD YOU GUYS, SERENA AND DRAAAAAAAKE!!!!!! I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!!
I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW!!!! I thought she was still with her coach, and have spent FAR too much time trying to google a timeline. Lacking any credible sources, I’m just going to imagine she holds court over a small group of attractive, successful men who worship at her altar.
thats exactly what the fuck she should be doing, at all times!!
Way, way OT here, but is anyone else Not Okay about what happened in Virginia? Because I’m really not okay.
Seconded. What the actual fuck.
It feels like Tech again and I really needed to not feel that ever, ever again.
One of the only times I’ve ever seen my mom openly cry was watching the news coverage of that. It happened four months before I left for college and just totally unhinged her.
It was my freshman year of college (I went to another VA school) and I was so terrified for my friends who were there. It was one of the most horrific weeks of my life.
The 27-year-old cameraman who was killed was a Virginia Tech graduate. And given that the massacre happened 7 years ago, it’s entirely likely that he was a student there at the time.
He’d just last week changed his FB profile pic to the V Tech logo with a black ribbon. God, these details.
It was my first year of grad school, here from out of state. Apparently, coverage outside of Virginia didn’t always distinguish clearly between “Virginia Tech” and “a university that is in the state of Virginia.” My little brother had relatives calling him all day asking if I was all right. Yeah.
I just read that the photographer’s fiancee was in the studio… I literally can’t imagine.
And the reporter just moved in with another anchor at the station….fuck, I’m going to start crying on the bus
Apparently the shooter is posting footage to Twitter right now. You guys, I can’t.
My own newsroom is really shaken. We’re print, not broadcast, but it always hits close to home. I know it’s too early to speculate about the motives of the gunman. But I can’t help thinking about how the women who were on the broadcasting track in my grad school program were taken aside for a special session on dealing with stalkers. And how it was treated as inevitable, and just something to sort of shrug about. Obviously we don’t know that that’s what was going on here, but it would not be the first time. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear…
As soon as I posted that I saw there’s been an update, and they’ve identified the suspect. this is chilling: “Vester Lee Flanagan, who has been identified by local authorities as the suspect in the shooting, previously worked in journalism using the name Bryce Williams.
“A Twitter account used by Bryce Williams tweeted videos of the shooting. The account was quickly suspended, and the videos are no longer available.
“Williams’ tweets, posted around 11 a.m., included “Alison made racist comments,” “They hired her after that???,” “Adam went to hr on me after working with me one time!!!” and “I filmed the shooting see Facebook.” “
I just came here to post something along the same. I’m so, so upset. It’s hard not to hope that it will make a difference, that something will get done in terms of gun control…because really, if shooting up an elementary school didn’t do it…but god, I hope the news media bends ounce of power and influence they have to overthrowing the NRA lobby. I really, really hope they do. And I need someone to speak out, to call this atrocity what it is, and everyone I usually turn to is not on the air (even Larry Wilmore and John Oliver).
The news anchor was only 24, for Christ’s sake.
if 20 kids in a school can’t be an effective argument for gun control, maybe a young white blonde female victim (media’s favorite! the type laws are named after!)…oh who am I kidding.
Already I’m seeing people on Facebook saying things like “This is why we need less restrictive carry laws; people wouldn’t do this if they knew the victims might be carrying.”
Which makes me want to scream, because what the fuck does that even mean? That the solution is for us all to be armed at all times? That’s not how ANY OF THIS WORKS.
So, no, I don’t think it will make a difference. Which is utterly pathetic.
Also, that doesn’t even make sense. She never saw him. She was focused on her job. He walked up with the gun out; you aren’t going to outdraw somebody who’s already pointing a gun at you. What the fuck would more guns have done in this situation? UGH. NO. (Sorry, not mad at you, obviously, but I’m starting to see the same shit and I don’t want to pick a huge fight with some of the dipshits I know on Facebook, but I need to vent.)
Seriously, that is the thing these people never understand. They imagine themselves as some kind of action hero with lightning reflexes, omniscient situational awareness, and the uncanny ability to distinguish friend from foe when in real life, you don’t outdraw people who already have weapons pointed at you, you don’t see them pull the weapon out until they’re already pointing it at someone, you don’t have the wherewithal and quick thinking to figure out the best course of action to take until they’ve started shooting, you don’t manage to do anything about the situation until several people have already been shot, the only reason you’re still alive at all is because those first victims bought you time to run and duck, and you aren’t a hero and don’t get to save the day. When armed bystanders actually do manage to take out shooters, that’s a rare, lucky break.
someone needs to find one of those fuckers and nail them in the head with a paintball right in the middle of that disgusting ‘guns make everyone safer’ speech on national TV. bonus points if it’s a debate.
I am now solidly in the “just throw all guns into the fucking sun” camp, because GOD FUCKING DAMN IT, AMERICA.
I hate that the Daily Mail has stills from the video that the murderer shot. Their main picture right now is Alison Parker reacting to the gun that is just about to kill her. Her fear and that man’s act of violence is going to define the memory of her now, not the life that she led.
Ugh, fuck the Daily Mail right to hell. They are the lowest of the low in media.
I accidentally saw a still from the shooter’s video, and it looks like the news lady had a runner’s knee brace on and oh lord that punched me right in the feels. SO MUCH AWFUL.
Related to that Black-owned wineries link, I have met Iris Rideau and I am going to just leave a link to her bio here: http://www.rideauvineyard.com/index.php?p=iris_ri…
Short version: Born in New Orleans in the 7th Ward, moved to California and as a young single mother worked in a sweatshop while going to night school. Founded her own insurance brokerage in Watts, became a force in local politics. Started a second business in securities and investments, then became director of a national pension planning company on the side. Decided to retire from the pension planning gig, which took the form of opening a third “fun” business (the winery) and running it in conjunction with the insurance and investment businesses.
She is a very outgoing, fun-loving woman, but if Iris wants something it’s best to get out of her way because it is going to happen just like she planned whether you like it or not.
I actually a bit disgusted by a country, and especially its politicians, who claim family values and save the children, but are vindictively against family leave and women.
My heart breaks for some of the women in that article. Working two weeks after a regular birth is awful, and no woman should have to do it, but have these companies no sympathy for women whove had complicated births and sick babies?
And they’re always like “who can pay? businesses can’t pay!” And I think, you know, other countries have this figured out. Look to those other countries. Do what they’re doing. Like in Canada, you pay into Employment Insurance. So parents draw on that for their year leave. And some companies choose to top up. The other argument “jobs! what about jobs?” also holds no water. Maternity leave creates temporary positions that can sometimes become full time if the parent doesn’t come back or at least gets a person a year’s worth of experience. Our system isn’t perfect. It’s difficult to qualify for EI if you’re self-employed, but it’s better than having increased rates of post-partum depression and infant mortality.
Yeah aside from the trying to murder their friend bit, this was essentially me when I was 12.
I hope the puppy pictures never end. She can be a puppy forever, right?
I hope the puppy pictures never end. She can be a puppy forever, right?