On the history of gay cruising in Prospect Park:
“When I got there, I found the park filled with men in the same horny, hungry state of mind I was in … I can’t remember ever seeing so many gorgeous black men in any one place,” Rory Buchanan wrote in his short story “Summer Chills,” from Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Buchanan was describing the Vale of Cashmere, a secluded patch of wilderness in Prospect Park that’s been the unofficial locus of gay cruising in Brooklyn since the 1970s. Once a formal Victorian garden, it’s now an unkempt maze of paths surrounding a sunken fountain filled with reeds and moss.
Our publishing company crunched the numbers for me, and currently 25% of our readers use an ad blocker (and do not whitelist us), which is…a lot! That’s a lot of revenue lost. If you would like to offset your ad blocker usage (no judgment here) in full, you can honestly do that with $5 a month, $60 for the year.
The scary thing for independent sites, basically, is that that percentage is going up STEEPLY every year, and plenty of sites are facing a 40% ad blocker rate.
How on earth could a small town embezzler go through $53.7 million? Horses, duh:
In 2013, a small-town city official by the name of Rita Crundwell was sentenced to almost 20 years in federal prison for stealing at least $53.7 million from the city of Dixon, Ill.
Crundwell, the town’s longtime comptroller, used the millions to build a horse-breeding empire so enormous that federal investigators are still auctioning it off, piece by ill-gotten piece.
Now the U.S. Marshals Service is taking bids for Crundwell’s hundreds of horse trophies and ribbons, piled up from the years when she dominated quarter horse breeding championships and was known to envious competitors and fans simply as “Rita.”
A really grim and infuriating look at the journey that women in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland make to get abortion care:
In both the Republic and Northern Ireland, however, women cannot be prevented from seeking safe and legal abortion abroad; in the past 30 years, more than 160,000 women have travelled from Northern Ireland and the Republic for a termination. The phenomenon rarely attracts much attention: two-thirds of British people are unaware that the laws on abortion in Northern Ireland are different from those in the rest of the UK. After the success of the equal marriage referendum in Ireland earlier this year, campaigners are calling for a referendum on repealing the eighth amendment. Last month, thousands marched through Dublin in support of decriminalisation. But while popular support is growing across the UK for reform in Northern Ireland, there is little political will among politicians across the spectrum, Catholic and Protestant.
HELL, NO (Ask a Manager):
I desperately want the carpool nose picker to completely and permanently stop this form of personal maintenance while traveling in the carpool.
Point to note: The picker always sits in front passenger seat unless it’s picker’s turn to drive.
If picker wants to “pick and flick” in picker’s own vehicle or those of the other carpoolers, that’s one thing (still hugely gross), but when picker picks while sitting right next to me in MY car, I am equal parts disgusted and pissed off! I really want this behavior to stop, in my car in particular, although in the entire carpool would be ideal! Please advise.
Days before police scoured a dusty Texas ranch to search for her brother’s remains, a stranger called Maria Interiano. He knew Santos’ middle name and that he had a scar on one knee. And he knew that Santos had been missing since he crossed the US-Mexico border in 2013.
“He’s alive,” the man said. “I’ll give you a telephone number to call. They’ll tell you what to do to get him out.”
Maria would do anything to see her brother again; she was desperate. The strangers who said they could get him back knew that, too. They led her on a frantic odyssey in September from her attic apartment near Boston to a bodega in East Boston and finally to the Walmart in Lynn, where she wired them ransom money to ensure her brother’s safe passage. A man named Victor assured her that Santos was on his way.
Soon after, Victor’s phone went dead.
I actually really liked this (Jaya, as a Real New York Kid From Birth, shared it on Facebook, so I feel like I can share it with her street cred, my own having just been a drunk and stupid kid paying too much for rent in NYC in 2005, which was…sublime, still):
I can sympathize. But I think there’s more to these “the city is dead now” complaints than money. People have pronounced St. Marks Place dead many times over the past centuries — when it became poor, and then again when it became rich, and then again when it returned to being poor, and so on. My theory is that the neighborhood hasn’t stopped being cool because it’s too expensive now; it stops being cool for each generation the second we stop feeling cool there. Any claim to objectivity is clouded by one’s former glory.
I know this well. As a teenage girl in the 1990s East Village, every door was open to me and my friends. There was no party we could not crash, no person we could not make out with and no intoxicant we would not be offered. The city was ours. In the pre-Giuliani era, a fellow East Village woman reminds me, “You could still piss on the street.” Having been a teenager in the East Village is like having been president. Whatever else you do, you can’t stop thinking about how you no longer run the world.
I finally started watching Outlander (read it rapturously in high school when I was the horniest living girl) and I’m having a real good time. I wasn’t a feminist in 1743, so that’s been a big help.
This speech by Ryan Murphy was pretty moving:
Okay, so this is what happened the first time I ever picked up a guy. I was 16, and I was working in a shoe store in Indianapolis called Adam’s Shoes. I was previous fired from Floor Shop Shoes because I refused to touch feet, so to me, Adam’s Shoes was this amazing place where I could just toss the Candie’s of my girlfriends. It was a great job. And a good-looking guy, 25, came in. I was very nervous, and he picked me up and we went back to his house, and he poured me a Diet Coke. I swear to God I asked for it. And I glanced at his coffee table, and there was a copy of the New York Native, and there was this horrible story about this new disease called AIDS. And I read that article as he poured the beverage, and I fled out the door. And in many ways in my life, I could tell you that I have never stopped running.
How the Clinton White House handled DOMA and what it means today:
“We were attempting at the time, in a very reactionary Congress,” Bill Clinton told an audience in 2009, “to head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states.” Four former senators — including Tom Daschle, who made the claim in 2011 — raised the idea in a Supreme Court brief in 2013. Clinton later cited that brief when, in a Washington Post op-ed, he called for the law he signed to be struck down by the court. Hillary Clinton just last week called her husband’s decision to sign DOMA “a defensive action.”
There is no contemporaneous evidence, however, to support the claim that the Clinton White House considered a possible federal constitutional amendment to be a concern, based on a BuzzFeed News review of the thousands of documents released earlier this year by the Clinton Presidential Library about same-sex couples’ marriage rights and the Defense of Marriage Act. In the documents, which include correspondence from a wide array of White House and Justice Department officials, no one even hints that Bill Clinton’s thinking or actions regarding DOMA were animated by the threat of a federal constitutional amendment.
In which our resident linguist live-tweets Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On!!!
We have the most epic ten-part deleted comment of the weekend for you! One man, one laptop, one VERY strong set of opinions about the hot blonde triplets in Beauty and the Beast:
Also, he thinks Ursula had to die:
