Everything about the new H. naledi bones is so fascinating I cannot DEAL with it:
Most pressing of all: how to get it out again, and quickly, before some other amateurs found their way into that chamber. (It was clear from the arrangement of the bones that someone had already been there, perhaps decades before.) Tucker and Hunter lacked the skills needed to excavate the fossils, and no scientist Berger knew—certainly not himself—had the physique to squeeze through that chute. So Berger put the word out on Facebook: Skinny individuals wanted, with scientific credentials and caving experience; must be “willing to work in cramped quarters.” Within a week and a half he’d heard from nearly 60 applicants. He chose the six most qualified; all were young women. Berger called them his “underground astronauts.”
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Choire interviewed noted genius Ursula K. Le Guin:
SICHA: There’s a sort of growing professional class of writers that may not have had access to being a professional. Before the internet, you would go to your terrible job and then you would write at night. I actually found that system really rewarding, separating out the money and the work.
LE GUIN: On the other hand, if it was a nine-to-five job, and if you had any family obligations and commitments, it’s terribly hard. It worked very much against women, because they were likely to have the nine-to-five job and really be responsible for the household. Doing two jobs is hard enough, but doing three is just impossible. And that’s essentially what an awful lot of women who wanted to write were being asked to do: support themselves, keep the family and household going, and write.
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Filled with mourning for the Key and Peele sketches that never made it to air:
Dodgeball
This scene involved adult dodgeball players. Keegan plays this spazzy guy who keeps on getting hit with the ball but denies that he’s been hit. For a lot of people, this might be thin on the page, but Keegan would do it a hilariously physical way — him jumping around, and then everyone getting more and more angry, but feeling stupid for getting so angry about a meaningless game of dodgeball. That one died because we felt like you had a concept that you might think should be the comic premise in and of itself — that adults were playing dodgeball — and it was again a high threshold, a difficult thing to have adults playing kids.
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A special guest star today! Anne Helen Petersen’s puppy likes the sun:
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Peak sexy, the Ryan Phillippe edition:
First of all, Sebastian’s a total prick, which probably is part of his appeal. I mean, it certainly isn’t the N*SYNC-era Timberlake curls he’s sporting, or the chunky turtleneck sweaters that look like they were pulled from a sale rack at Structure. No, it’s the attitude, the obsessive nature of his vindictiveness, his overwhelming desire to fuck his step-sister Kathryn Merteuil (played by a perfectly devilish Sarah Michelle Gellar) that he’ll go out of his way to seduce (poor thing) the angelic prude Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon, in the role that saw her shirk off her previous sexpot image seen in movies likePleasantville and Freeway and rebrand her as the girl next door).
Oh, and there was that pool scene.
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Afforable housing issues in Canada:
Affordable-housing advocates say soaring rents in the suburbs are a symptom of a lack of low-cost rental supply in the major cities, where the bulk of the new rental stock has come from high-priced, investor-owned condos. That has pushed many low-income workers, particularly those working in the downtown service industry, farther away from the core in search of housing.
“Eventually you can only move so far,” said Sharad Kerur, executive director of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association. “If you are a service industry worker at the Royal York Hotel, how much farther can you go out to find a home until you start to say, ‘I can’t do this any more?’”
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Under NO circumstances should you Google streetview the house you grew up in, it will break you:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I wanna be an underground astronaut when I grow up!
The article about the new H. naledi bones–SO COOL. (Although I think my favorite part of it was that it ended up being a team of women, because they needed smaller archeologists. Take that, male-dominated fields!)
Re: returning to houses you grew up in–once about five years ago, I was hanging out with a group of people who wanted to show my friend and me a “haunted house” they had found tucked back in the woods. As we were walking there (at night, in the dark), I realized I knew where we were/where we were going. Sure enough, the “haunted house” was the house that my childhood babysitter/mom’s best friend had moved out of about a decade earlier–it was abandoned after they moved out of it, and had clearly become a hangout for high school parties, because the place was trashed–windows broken, beer cans everywhere, writing on all of the walls. It made me really sad, especially since 90% of my childhood (outside of school) was spent in that house. 🙁
If it makes you feel any better, that’s better than 90% of the short fiction published in the New Yorker.
OI! My childhood home is rural enough to be beyond Street View’s sinister reach. Don’t worry, I remember it vividly. What a dump.
They cut down the trees in front of mine. 🙁 There was a Japanese maple that was the right size for small children to climb on, and a dogwood. Now there’s just lawn.
I can’t street view mine, but earth view says they cut down all the trees and mowed over all our flower beds. In the front yard alone there were 2 giant pine trees and an apple tree that was extremely climbable, had beautiful blossoms, and miraculously produced really good fruit with any pesticides or effort at all.
I moved around a whole lot, but my house in Guantanamo Bay is getting overgrown by our banyan tree. I loved that tree. They havent torn down the house just yet, but they havent added central air either.
Whoa whoa whoa–you grew up in Gitmo? As in, there are families there? Is this a town outside the base, or the base itself?
My dad was in the navy, so I spent five years there when he was in charge of Public Works for the base. There’s a whole bunch of families there, there’s a DoD school, a rec sports program, just like living on a military base anywhere else, except you can’t go off base except in a plane. It’s my favorite place ever.
I was there from 04-09, (ages 7-12) then my dad retired and we moved to Stuttgart Germany for four years working for the Army.
When people ask where Im from, I say Cuba.
Thanks for the info; probably like most people, my mental picture of the place is formed by A Few Good Men and the GWOT.
(Also, before anyone says anything, I’m aware that the bay is not the same thing as the U.S. territory, and that the detention camp is only a small part of the base.)
They appear to have let the trees grow in front of mine (which… there were power lines running through there the state kept those trees cut so I don’t know). So it’s just the same Alaskan woods I grew up with.
…and the other house that I might claim as my childhood home is identical. Suck it impermanence of time!
There was a Japanese maple behind one of mine. It used to be just beneath my bedroom window and was just the right height so that from inside it made it look like the room was suspended in the tree.
The people who moved in directly after us cut it down immediately. Philistines.
The people who bought my childhood home (which was a lovely, perfectly reasonable-looking home that comfortably housed six people) tore it down and cut down all the trees and the bushes separating the lot from the neighbors and built this monstrosity, for their family of three:
“oh, that doesn’t look so bad, but weird how it’s right up against the neighbors’ house…wait, no, that’s not what’s happening in this picture…”
My exact reaction.
the stretch hummer of houses
That describes whats happening here so perfectly
That’s really sad.
Never was the word MONSTROSITY used so aptly.
They tore out all of my mother’s flower gardens and baby lemon trees and replaced them with grass, and trimmed the shade trees in a horrible ugly way that makes them look like freakshow trees and not particularly shady.
I can’t street view mine either, but wow, how weird to look at it in google earth. I moved out & then my parents moved away well before online mapping was in regular use. now I have a clear mental Google maps/earth picture of the last couple places I’ve lived, if nothing else because I used those things so much in apartment hunting. But I never thought of my childhood neighborhood in aerial view. If I tried to draw a map it would look totally different, with things being much further apart in place and closer together in others.
Also, I just noticed this development close by where the main street is Diamond Drive and all the other streets are called Tiffany, Hope, Kimberly, and Solitaire. I rode my bike around there all the time and NEVER picked up on the theme. ha!
They cut down the crabapple trees next to my house, but otherwise mine looks basically the same.
Except they have three twelve-person vans parked in the driveway. THREE. What could they possibly need that many vans for? (This is in addition to the two cars that are under tarps on the driveway.)
Shuttle service? There was a house down the street from me growing up that always had two stretch limos parked in front, which was sort of humorous because it was kind of a dumpy house. The guy who lived there ran a limo service.
Or, if you believe the rumor that went around among kids in the neighborhood, he was a murderer who would run you down with his limo unless you ran and hid when you saw it coming.
Moved out of my childhood home as a teenager but shortly after the new people moved in we had to go back and pick something up or sign some paperwork or something. My mom is a woman of impeccable taste, and she had put so much time and effort into making that house look good. Every room was painted a rich, beautiful color. But when we went back not two weeks later, the new residents had already redone the whole interior with cheap white paint and put up Thomas Kincaid-type artwork everywhere. My mom and I were beside ourselves.
My old house was for sale recently, and thanks to the online sale posting we learned that they had done weird sponge-painting in all the rooms and tried to do a sort of faux-Tuscan thing, with tile and bright colors. It did not work with the bones of the house. My brother and I spent a few minutes laughing at it together, and then we both probably went off and secretly cried.
Mine looks the same as it did 20 years ago. This is not a good thing.
My yard is so much smaller than I remembered it! Like, TINY small. Also, I am comforted that my favorite tree is still there.
My childhood home has been painted a ghastly color, had a bizarre wooden slat thing installed in lieu of a screen door, the garage has been turned into some sort of addition, the ugliest bushes are still there and the okay-ish bushes are now gone, and the lovingly constructed playhouse in the backyard by my former general contractor father has been torn down and replaced by a much less charming shed.
My parents have really let their standards slip since I left ; )
That said, I have a long standing policy of hating all changes to that house, however minor. When I was about 4 or 5, the house was getting repainted, and the painter was also doing the back door, which was, at the time, black on the outside and white on the inside. My parents had been discussing how to repaint it, leaning towards having it white on Both! Sides!!. I was in the kitchen when the painter wandered over to start work on the door, and asked me if I knew what they wanted to do with it. I answered VERY convincingly that they wanted to leave it exactly the same…. so that’s what he did. And I knew exactly what I was doing, too. I had not convinced myself that they wanted it the same because I did; I just saw an opportunity to get what I wanted. #slytherinpride
The house I was born in is actually still in really good shape! I”m sad that they took the greenhouse off the side, but it was probably hard to maintain. They also seem to have turned the old shop/separate garage into a little guest house, which is a neat idea.
Mine is in a semi-rural area (used to be rural but then the local small town grew to large town size and the suburbs are starting to encroach) and street view is available, but unhelpful – the house is at the bottom of a hill and the street is at the top, and my parents planted oleander bushes at the top of the hill next to the street to obscure the view. Works perfectly now that they’re 10 years bushier. But somebody who’s living there now built a very nice, quaint wooden fence all along in front of the bushes with a gate going across the driveway, and a better mailbox. So that’s nice to see.
Nothing particularly bad happened to my childhood home, except that it was quite some time before I went back to it (we moved away when I was seven), and I was shocked at how small it was. Not just that it wasn’t a McMansion (which I’ve never lived in anyway), but just thinking of a family of nine living there, even if most of them were little kids. Plus, the fact that we used to play Star Trek by pretending that the upstairs was the Enterprise and the downstairs was Alien Planet of the Week and we’d “beam down” by jumping down the laundry chute in the bathroom. Kids, I swear.
Huh. Mine looks okay! They took down the nice green shutters, and the driveway fence is new. And there’s a play structure on the front lawn now with swings. The neighbor’s house looks awful though, christ.
I was expecting just good campy fun when I watched Cruel Intentions, and then there was Ryan Philippe who could not be less my type in theory (I like those sweet sensitive cerebral types), and OMG I had to stop the video to gawk a couple of times.
He did a campus tour with Jorma, Akiva, and Will when MacGruber was about to be released, and did a Q&A after the screening. I was probably 7 or 8 rows back at least, and I could still see the outline of his quadricep muscles THROUGH HIS JEANS. This was in 2010, more than ten years after Cruel Intentions, but I was in my bunk and just did not care.
That puppy appears to have forgotten his (?) tongue.
Cruel Intentions was and remains one of my favorite movies of all time. So much sexiness on every imaginable level, late-’90s soundtrack par excellence, SMG showing some serious acting chops, “I didn’t say where I was going to kiss you.”
Her. Her name is Peggy Olson.
Thank you! I apologize for the mistake.
A+ puppy naming.
But that puppy is smiling and I can’t handle it?
The house I grew up in has been gentrified. It’s bleak in a different way. It was such a good neighborhood to grow up in as a poor kid with shitty parents! You could walk yourself to school, and kids who pooled their pennies together could buy food at a couple different stores and pizza places, and there was a church with free summer camps that never asked for permission forms. I mean, I didn’t know it at the time, but the geography of that neighborhood made life better than it would have been otherwise.
20 years later, the rent on one half of our old house is literally 3x the old mortgage on the entire house, and all the kids are rich. C’est la vie!
OMG, mine too. BOTH of them (we moved from one to the other when I was six).
I showed my mom our old house in NJ, which she hadn’t seen since we moved out of it, and her eyes boggled. “It certainly wasn’t as nice as that when WE lived there.”
If you were a fan of How Wizards Do Money over at the Billfold and/or Gilmore Girls you’ll probably enjoy How Gilmore Girls Do Money.
I am so happy you are in my life. this is beautiful. I always did have a crush on brian (dean was too meh and jess was too angsty)
Thanks! I am excited to get to write this one. 😀
Why do I feel like the “Reaction Shot” frame of MariNaomi’s illustration is 100% accurate?
Oh, what a nice Ursula interview. She is 86, and I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t ever meet her even though we live in the same town. I’m afraid she couldn’t live up to my idealized vision of her.
I met her at a book signing and she was a wonder and so, so kind.
I was fortunate enough to be with Ursula in a summer writing workshop a long while ago — she’s incredibly funny, incredibly generous, and incredibly tiny — I mean, there are whole classes of amusement park rides she’s never gotten to go on… I bet she would surpass your idealized version of her.
Also from Portland, here — I’ve been lucky enough to have met her a few times at readings, writing workshops, and my favorite class in undergrad, which was an entire summer term focused solely on her Earthsea cycle, capped by a visit from her that involved her patiently, thoroughly, and wittily answering all our questions about the books and beyond. She’s gracious, kind, and brilliant — if you get the chance to see her read and meet her afterward, TAKE IT. She is the ideal version of herself!
Okay, the Timberlake comparison is unfair. JT looked like he straight up piled uncooked ramen on his head.
I’m in denial about Key and Peele ending
don’t leave me
Watching the finale and they brought back the Continental you guys he’s my faaaavorite
My boyfriend and I now refer to grapes exclusively as “tiny plums”
I’ll have what I’m having!
KEEP DANCING
I didn’t start watching the full episodes until last season LIKE SOME KIND OF CHUMP and I am so so sad
My parents still live in the house I grew up in, so, looks about the same to me. They managed to get my mom’s garden in full bloom.
They finally changed the picture of my parents’ house — for the longest time the Google street image was when it was in the midst of construction on a grey day. It looked awful. Now it looks beautiful, as it should.
Ugh, I am missing New Hampshire right now.
The streetview of my parents house at least used to include a shot of my mom sweeping the sidewalk in ratty shorts and t-shirt. I hope they haven’t changed that picture.
They updated the picture on my parents’ house too–and the trees and bushes have now completely obscured the house from StreetView from every single angle. Well done, foliage.
Hah, yeah, I moved out on Monday. There hasn’t been time for my parents + grandmother to drastically change anything yet!
however, I did deeply enjoy trying to date the street view- oh, that’s the old car in the driveway, the neighbors haven’t built their ugly shed yet, can’t tell if it’s before or after the hurricane that tore down half of the tree in front but probably before, etc. etc.
Yes! I can tell the picture of my parents’ home is probably from last summer, because my mom’s new trellis is there but the neighbors’ big maple tree hasn’t been cut down yet.
My last house’s streetview used to be the week I moved in to it. I know, because that was also the week the terrifying neighbours moved out and left most of their stuff either in my bins, or on my lawn.
Now it’s of the week before we were like ‘ok this front yard is A MESS we need to clean it up to sell it’ so it looks just awful. I am also very glad not to live there any more.
My teenage home, where my parents still live, has no real way of dating it, but the picture must have been taken while my mom was out of town because it’s garbage day and my dad clearly forgot to take out the bins.
Yeah, my parents still live in my childhood home; I was just there last Christmas.
How can anyone look at the underground astrounsts and not feel sick to the stomach with claustrophobia? It’s Chilean miners all over again!
Your username is the same as my dog’s name, and I legit just had a moment of “OMG! I know you’re claustrophobic, but when did you develop the gumption to learn to read and use the internet?” Seriously, that is exactly what he would post if he were a Toastie.
MariNaomi is killing me!
Don’treadthecomments, Don’treadthecomments… The juxtaposition of her friend’s interaction with the older woman who asked her to turn off her phone with the Jong/Gay interaction is telling, particularly when the first commenter over there goes to town on Gay for daring to challenge her elders on how Second Wave white feminism frequently didn’t address intersectionality between their struggles and those of communities of color. Nothing good comes from leaving wrongness unchallenged, even when it’s someone who has been considered a leader. Go, Roxane! Go, Randa!
WOWZERS THERE IS A WHAT ABOUT THE MEN COMMENT SECOND
once upon a time there was talk of a toast interview with rising star underground astronauts? am I alone in waiting for it? (or even worse, didI MISS it??)
“You can never go home again. . . but I guess you can shop there”
THE BEST MOVIE THANK YOU SO MUCH
Seriously, now I need to watch it again.
I LOVE IT SO MUCH (even though it is all about alienated white man with existential crisis, etc etc.). But I can’t help it–It’s so great! And John Cusack! And the soundtrack! Over the summer, I went to a wedding in Grosse Pointe (!), and even though the movie wasn’t actually shot there, I took great pleasure in seeing all the signs saying Grosse Pointe. I also found that the idea of having some sort of existential despair there was pretty right on, because it was easily one of the most uncomfortably and disturbingly posh places I have ever been.
(Also yes, I listened to the soundtrack all the way there, and also yes, I did think about ordering a don’t-want-to-have-a-semantic-argument-about-it-omelet for breakfast and also yes, I took a picture with the high school sign even though it wasn’t even the high school in the movie. I have a problem).
The house I grew up in hasn’t changed much (it’s near the house my parents live in now) but it’s grandma’s house that kills me. I happened to be driving through the little town where she lived last year so I stopped to walk around. She was a master gardener; the people who live there now don’t even mow the lawn. Maybe I’m romanticizing my childhood, but that town used to be so nice and now the whole place looks pretty frowsy. Ugh.
Ditto. I half-lived at my grandma’s house when I was growing up, and last time I went back I drove past her house and it’s….gone. The entire block is gone, they’ve leveled it to build some kind of other bullshit there, all the garden is gone, the trees I used to climb in the backyard, the cherry tree we used for pies every year, the hill we sledded down.
That was the house my dad grew up in, and he still lives in that town half the year. I don’t know how he does it.
https://youtu.be/pvAYGz6Iwmc
The National Geographic videographer who joined the Rising Star team had to ask them to stop dropping so many f-bombs of joyous excitement. Archaeology field work authenticity: confirmed. (No word on why he spells his name with three r’s, though.)
Philly toasts! Quick bump for the meetup tomorrow, 8pm at this two woman show: http://fringearts.com/event/teething-emotionaliti…
check out da google group for the deets: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/phillytoa…
what there is a Philly toasts group? how did I not know? *immediately signs up*
I cannot go because I am working, but I wanted to say thanks for getting the ball rolling on Philly meetups, and also for supporting Fringe! Phillytoasts, you should definitely go and definitely roll up in the OT next week to tell us about it.
I ALSO cannot go, however I also agree on Philly meet-ups and supporting the Fringe.
I really should’ve listened to you about not looking up my childhood home. It wasn’t so much seeing it as it was seeing how much it’s worth now. Our area had some serious crime issues and my mom just wanted out. She sold it for a depressingly small amount and now it’s worth almost 10 times as much. Still, it looks like the same family that bought the house from us still owns it, so I guess there’s that? The neighborhood still looks pretty much the same, but I think there’s been more development of the surrounding areas.
Sigh. From now on, I will only revel in nostalgia for my 1990s childhood by looking at Buzzfeed listacles. I’ve learned my lesson!
I knew that my childhood home (ages 0-9, anyway) had been torn down and rebuilt, because apparently my neighborhood, which used to be mostly ranch-style homes with a kooky craftsman here and there, really went up in value a few years after we left – it’s now one of the nicest Chicago suburbs. My mother was horrified when she found out because apparently the picture window in our living room was an architectural marvel or whatever, and now it’s gone forever. I just checked it out again – it’s been a few years – and it’s all McMansions. Ugh. But it’s a funny feeling to be able to go back and see the street corner where I waited for the bus.
Baltimore update: our mayor has announced that she is not running for re-election! This is a big, big deal.
(sorry)
So apropos. I ain’t even mad.
Goddammit. Who’s it going to be now – Sheila Dixon again? Oy.
There’s a pretty crowded field right now, including Dixon. Catherine Pugh, Carl Stokes, the owner of One Eyed Mike’s, and a whole host of other people I can’t remember. The Dem primary is going to be very interesting.
The crowd: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politic…
I grew up in places that had addresses like “Rural Route 1” or no address at all, you could get mail delivered with just a name and a town. I was sometimes not aware that roads had actual names, everything was just “next to the Anderson’s old farm” or “where they had that fire in 1943.” Uh, much to the chagrin of UPS delivery guys.
These days in an actual fact, in the small town where my parents live(d), there are 4 , count ’em, 4, “Carl and Susan Smiths” … and there is still mail that’s just addressed to Carl and Susan Smith, <my town in Minnesota population 900> which just gets passed along with notes on the envelope, “not the Carl and Susan Smith at 45185 Lake Street, please pass along”.
I’m feeling like this is a satire or weird or unbelievable and that Mallory will mock me for writing this, as she should, because none of the places where I grew up are on Google Street view and I feel strangely unconnected to the universe. On the other hand, I submit that actual history should be built into Google, so that I can find where I lived based on “next to the Anderson’s pig farm, back then, when the Mr. was married to his first wife, she’s the one that died of cancer so young and then he married Susan Carlson, you know, Sam and Martha’s daughter who was class valedictorian and the cheerleader.”
(Names are not real due to uh … ).
I feel like we grew up in similar places. None of the county roads up here got actual names until 911 service was finalized… in the mid-1990s. They were all numbers (County Road 669, 667, 677, 641, etc) and many of us still use them instead of the names, because the names change as the roads go along. The road I currently live on, for instance, wraps all the way around the peninsula and is called–just in our county–S West-Bay Shore Drive, St Joseph St, N West-Bay Shore Dr, N Manitou Trail, Main St., S Manitou Trail, W Harbor Hwy, River Rd., W Western Ave., S Ray St., S Glen Lake Rd., W Glenmere Rd., S Leelanau Hwy., and Northland Hwy. NO ONE USES THE NAMES. Also, directions by landmark (“Turn left at Smith’s farm.” “Where’s that?” “You’ll know it when you see it.”) are a big thing here.
My house doesn’t exist anymore, sadly, because it was in the middle of what’s now a national park.
I find all that so delightful I just can’t tell you.
I grew up in a town with regular non-changing street names, but with enough families who’d lived there for generations that you still need to know some town history to understand directions. It’s not unusual to hear “You go down past the old softball field a ways ’til you get to where the dairy was, turn left and it’s near where Tino lived.” None of those places have been there for the past 20 or more years.
True story, there is a house where I used to live that has a sign on it “l’endroit ou la laiterie etait” (“the place where the dairy was”). I find it tres charmant.
We just moved into a new area and it’s pretty suburban but a few months ago we stopped someone and said ‘can you tell us where the nearest chemist is? We’re new to the area’ and were told ‘it’s where the state bank used to be’.
I googled it instead.
My parents still live in what I think of as my childhood home, which means Google caught my dad at home (well, home what looks like two remodels ago):
Also, you can juuuuust see my bedroom window through the trees–hi old room!
I am a fan of the natural pine needle carpet and subsequent lack of required mowing.
No mowing, but since there were so many trees, my sister and I spent many, many hours out there with boxes in the spring and summer, picking up fallen sticks for fireplace kindling, because it’s free and my dad has A Thing about never paying for firewood.
Yeah, my parents still live in my childhood home, too. I saw the shitty changes happen around as I was growing up: the awesome giant field we used to play in as kids got built up and now there’s 12 houses there 🙁
I also just looked it up on street view and you can totally see my mom on the back patio!
Yeah, if you look at my parents’ house in satellite view, you can totally see both the backyard deck my parents had put in as well as (my favorite) the compost bin my dad built in the backyard. Next time I talk to them, I may need to tell Dad his compost can be seen from space.
WHO’S A CUTE LITTLE FLUFFBALL???? YOU AREEE!!!!!!!!!
(that’s the extent of my brainpower this morning, y’all. I’ll just be thumbs-upping everyone else’s great conversations…)
i don’t have to streetview it, most of the family still lives there
now if only I didn’t have to in-person view it, either :/
The semi-idyllic years of my childhood (three years total) unfolded in a big, beautiful pale green house with a giant porch, sitting amidst an enormous yard and giant trees. We used to roller skate in the basement, sometimes popping our heads into a tiny dank fruit cellar that both attracted and terrified me. From the breakfast nook, we could watch our dad walking home through the neighbor’s yards, which swept back to a rickety old railroad that still carried materials to the cement plant where my father worked. We lived by cement plants all my life, and they had a way of leaving a faint but unmistakable pale film over everything, including my dad. The smell of cement still reminds me of him. My room overlooked the sweeping arc of the driveway, sometimes illuminated with a terrifically bright spotlight for late night basketball games. I used to indiscriminately bathe He-Man and Barbie figures together in a bizarrely tiny tub in the upstairs bathroom. Sometimes my sisters and I would build a nest in the hallway, using every pillow, blanket, and even towel in the house. Despite our parents’ warnings, we’d then pile atop a blanket and thud down the steps into the downstairs bathroom, as if atop a raft careening into watery adventures.
We went back years later, and dear reader, they had torn the whole thing down. We could still walk up the front steps, but from there, could only walk through our childhood home by stepping through the traces of its foundation.
Sigh. Alas. So there’s my bit of nostalgia for this morning.
goddamn do I have to get that le guin book, she’s the one writer I read as a kid who has any business trying to write a 21st century anything
that whole interview i was waiting for the ‘kids these days and their texting and their websites and their loud music’ holding-forth that every other writer from back when does and it just… never came
Yep. I just read Connie Willis’s Bellwether for the first time and was like, wince wince dang, Connie Willis. The get-off-my-lawn sign didn’t need to be a couple hundred pages long, you went to a lot of extra effort!
I know! And she had such great responses when the interviewer acted like living in Portland, Oregon is like living in the middle of nowhere and when the interviewer tried to glorify the separation of money and writing.
My parents still live in my childhood home and it looks exactly the same. The house next door, however, has apparently been remodeled into THE PIXEL VOID:
the HOA really got after me for redoing the exterior into a giant dick but man, it was worth it
Wow. I feel like the Doctor should be looking into this; there are almost certainly nefarious intergalactic shenanigans going on there.
I like how it’s for sale too. “For Sale: Approximately 15,000 pixels. Great backyard!”
I actually live very close to my parents, so I’ve seen the place — there actually was a huge remodel, and the result is UGLY AS SIN, so maybe they’re trying to conceal it until they can fool someone into buying it.
I sincerely hope one of the occupants works at Google and asked a buddy in the maps department to do him a solid and hide their ugly house.
The idea of looking up your childhood home on Google streetview for some reason conjured up this feeling of deja vu for me, and then I realized Arcade Fire had used that idea to create this interactive video for one of their songs from The Suburbs (of course). I have no idea how to link and I’m at work, so I really should not devote too much time to figuring that out or even commenting right now, but if you Google “Arcade Fire interactive video suburbs” it will come up. If it’s still working, you can put in your old address and the video spins you around your old neighborhood set to a catchy but nostalgic/sad-sounding Arcade Fire song. I know it sounds like a kind of pretentious/gimmicky concept, but when my friends and I tried it whenever it came out a couple years back, all of us ended up feeling a little knocked back with emotion (although, granted, we all had ended up moving pretty far away from our childhood homes).
That puppy picture is everything I needed to make it to the weekend. My dog also loves to sunbathe and it is the best to see her luxuriating in the sun. Crazy dogs, you already have fur all over you! How can you like heat on top of that!
It’s here: http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
Two of the houses I lived in as a mini!Shelly don’t exist anymore. I’ve driven by another one multiple times and have lived in my current house since age five, and I have no idea where the house in which I spent the first ten months of my life is. (It’s in a different state to where I am now. That’s all I know.)
I couldn’t even make it through the links because THAT PUPPY OH MY HEART THAT PUPPY THE FLUFF THE SMILE THE WEE TONGUE
Official request for WAY more of AHP’s puppy in the link roundups. Especially once his ears and paws start growing and the rest of him hasn’t caught up yet.
She\’s a girl! Peggy Olson.
Great point by Le Guin about how the ‘writing at night’ thing is often just not feasible for women.
More generally, I am always amazed and impressed by ANYONE who can write at night after working a shitty job all day. Or any job, for that matter. The times that I feel able to write are few and far between, and pretty much never occur after a day of shitty work, when depression and exhaustion put paid to the rest of the evening. I would’ve been perfectly suited to be a Gentle(Wo)man Scholar. Or to have a rich non-interfering patron, da Vinci-style.
There’s a really early Le Guin story called “An die Musik” that’s about this problem, and I’ve read it so, so many times.
Oh, wow. Googling reveals that this was her first published story ever. Cool.
My childhood home has apparently acquired a roof-ghost! Jealous.
I did a lot of my writing while I was *at* one Kinda Decent Job or another: there’s lunch break, and there’s usually a couple of hours while you’re waiting for shit to happen, so I figured, hey, might as well, it’s more productive than looking at skirts I can’t afford on ModCloth. On the other hand, I don’t have kids, don’t have a husband, and have always taken fairly nondemanding jobs and then not cared that much about moving up the ladder or impressing the boss, so.
I don’t write in the evenings; that’s drinking time.
My childhood home generally looks the same. I miss it and I go look at it from time to time. I would totally rebuild it somewhere else if I could.
The H. naledi article must have caught my imagination more than I realized. (I blame that weird CG animation of the skeleton flying out of the ground and assembling itself.) I had this creepy dream last night about the archaeologists excavating the cave site, crouched at the bottom of a deep pit with walls made of nothing but bones, unearthing skeleton upon skeleton, when suddenly they broke through into a much larger cavern.
I don’t remember if there was any more to that dream. I’m fine with that.
I don’t really have a “house I grew up in” because I moved every year or so until I was 23 (my family has been in the same house since I was 16, though, and I lived there for awhile after grad school, so it does feel properly like home base).
THAT SAID, I did live in one house for four years in middle school/high school, and I had a weird experience with it this summer. Working as a research assistant at a presidential library, I was saddled with a teenage intern, and as my boss started telling me about him, I realized, “I know this kid’s name…This kid is living in my preteen bedroom.”
He was a good kid, but it was kind of awkward because my entire family thinks his dad is an asshole (“It’s the woman who overcharged me for my house!”, he said, the first time he met my mother face to face at a party) and because his mom unintentionally made me sob the one time I met her (“And guess what we found when we tore out the sun room — the skeleton of a cat,” she told the teenage girl whose cat had gone missing several months earlier, confused by the move from the only house it had ever known). I didn’t really anticipate entering an intern/technically-also-an-intern-but-with-actual-experience-and-illusory-authority relationship with that much pre-existing baggage.
Virtual hug about the cat. What a shocking way to find out about the death of your pet. I am so sorry.
In general I 100% agree with you, the exception being that if I ever met Tamora Pierce she would immediately know that we were meant to be best friends, obviously.
Can we talk about how so many illustrations of proto-humans have them as basically white dudes? What’s THAT about (I know what that’s about) I really enjoyed the one illustration in that article that had ancient peoples found in Africa with dark skin, although it did make the other illustrations, and that creepy 3D render, stand out all the more.