What’s annoying about the new, softer War On Drugs (for white people):
It is a grave insult for Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, to condescendingly suggest in the NYT piece that the sole difference between the treatment of heroin users and crack cocaine users lies in the political acumen and savvy organizational skills of white people who understand how to petition government for change. As if black activists and families have not been passionately fighting back against racist drug policies for decades.
This suggestion that if only we had enough intelligence, if only we had made enough noise, then African-American communities would have been treated more gently by police officers when they came through the hood stopping and frisking for drugs, is disingenuous and dangerous.
What that says is that if only black Americans understood the complexity of bureaucracy, perhapsTarika Wilson would not have been killed when a Lima, Ohio, SWAT team raided her home to arrest her boyfriend on drug charges, and perhaps her 14-month-old son would not have been shot as she held him in her arms.
If only we had organized enough, perhaps 18-year-old Ramarley Graham would not have been gunned down by Police Officer Richard Haste inside his grandmother’s home as he attempted to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet.
Jolie on cleaning various parts of your shower:
Go take a good look at your tub or the floor of your shower. What do you see there? A brown ring around the tub? Black marks where your dirty feet have stood? Hairs galore? The tub itself will get really grimy over time, which is annoying since it’s the place you go to get clean!
Does water back up because of a slow-moving drain? Fix that. Backed-up water will leave behind product buildup that will make a mess of your tub.
Clean it up: Fill the tub with very hot water, add a large scoop of oxygenated bleach like Oxo Brite, and let it sit for 30 minutes. Drain the tub and use a sponge to quickly scrub away any residual buildup.
Roxane Gay is part of the Out 100! Also, the pic they used is very sexy and brooding, go look:
Roxane Gay’s 2014 was marked by the release of a novel, An Untamed State, and a collection of essays, Bad Feminist. A year later, public and critical interest in her work hasn’t abated — if anything, demand for her is on the rise. From Sydney to New York, she has empowered women through her insistence that there is no shame in being a “bad feminist,” a middle-of-the-line feminist, or any kind of feminist. For Gay, feminism belongs to all women, and it should embrace all types. “It’s OK to believe in your voice,” she says. “And to use it.”
A little comments request! Now that Mallory is Dear Prudie (omg), commenters over at Slate will occasionally say dickish things about her over there, because they are not sternly ruled over. If they come here to say dickish things, I will delete them and carefully hand-select a few for us to mock, but I would rather you not re-post dickish/stupid Slate comments about Mallory or her advice over here, even to make fun of them. That way, if Mallory wants to read the Slate comments (which she often will, I suspect!) she can, but she’s not going to UNEXPECTEDLY see them on her own turf. Deal?
(She has not asked for this, but I feel very protective of my Toast family, like Vin Diesel and his Furious family.)
Please enjoy my adorbs new avatar/author pic! Our amazing illustrator, Libby VanderPloeg, is making ones for everyone on staff so we can roll out our new masthead page, at which point Tech Goth Marco can have his handsome mug but one click away from the mainpage. She insisted on not being paid for these particular illos, since we have an ongoing relationship, so this is merely the first time I will plug her beauty and talent and generosity in these pages. Anyway, here’s meeeee:
My college buddy’s girfriend has made a card game involving the expression of taxidermied animals, obviously.
Tim Wolfe resigns from Mizzou, and it is for the best (I genuinely hope his replacement will do more to engage with the concerns of students of color):
A campus group, Concerned Student 1950, which refers to the year the first black student was admitted to the university, has held multiple demonstrations this fall protesting what Missouri graduate student Jonathan L. Butler described as a “slew of racist, sexist, homophobic” incidents on the university’s Columbia, Mo., campus, and Wolfe’s response to them.
A group of black students were rehearsing a skit in early October when a white student climbed onto stage and shouted racial slurs. Protesters blocked the president’s car during the homecoming parade a few days later; he looked detached and did not engage with them as they shouted. Later that month they issued a list of eight demands, including Wolfe’s removal as president.
Speaking of, here’s Juana Summers on her experience as a black student there:
In the days since the story of racial tensions at the University of Missouri began making headlines, I’ve wanted to defend my alma mater. I’ve wanted to make the case that the portrayal of the university, and the people who go there, doesn’t reflect the experiences I had at Mizzou.
But that would not be true.
I’m the kind of alumna who carries a Mizzou koozie in my purse, the kind who can still sing every word of the school’s fight song. But during the three and a half years I spent on the overwhelmingly white campus in Columbia, Missouri, I was also incredibly alone.
So, my Jesus church meets in a former auto body shop (picture the church that Rachel on House of Cards started to go to with the girl she then fell in love with before Stamper ruined everything, that’s basically it) and is in a neighborhood with a LOT of food insecurity and poverty. And the leadership and the congregation as a body likes to think very carefully about how we can serve the community that welcomed us, which can take a handful of different forms. Now, as it happens, a BUNCH of the ballet dancers from the city company (a very good one, FWIW) attend Missio with me, and something they’ve organized is free weekly ballet lessons for little kids from the neighborhood, because ballet lessons cost a FORTUNE, after which they feed the kids a massive sack lunch. That sack lunch is most definitely the only meal that some of these kids will eat that day, as weekends can be especially difficult for families who really rely on school lunch programs.
And the kids FREAKING LOVE IT, and love ballet, and the dancers take them on trips to real ballet shows and then buy them froyo after while they talk about the show, and it’s something I think is so great and so loving and so fun, and it’s also been really meaningful in the lives of the adult ballet dancer volunteers who’ve struggled with body image and eating disorders, that they are feeding bellies in addition to teaching dance.
And I am mentioning this because I would love your prayers and/or good vibes for this program, and I would also love to hear about any of your own causes at this time.
One of my VERY favourite comedians, John Mulaney, is releasing his new standup special “The Comeback Kid” on Netflix this Friday, and I have literally put it into my calendar, because I have watched “New In Town” about eighty times. What’s your favourite John Mulaney bit? I think mine is when he lists how the New York Post ranks types of people (angels, heroes, tots, bozos, pervs.)
Deleted comment of the day (reasons for deletion of previous two comments were: 4. “Humorlessness re: humor pieces from a person without a commenting account” and 5. “Didn’t feel like it at the time”):
The best John Mulaney bit ever is Salt and Pepper Diner, FIGHT ME.
WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT
(this is unarguably the best Mulaney bit of all time)
TRUE STORY. I was at an anime convention once and the bar had a jukebox. I put What’s New Pussycat on ONCE and I heard people start yelling. It was an excellent idea.
this happened to us at the bar and it was hilarious and great until the fifth or sixth loop and then we started throwing popcorn at the culprits. it was a grand old time
UNARGUABLY!!!
100% agreed. Although he has a new* bit that will be on the special about Bill Clinton that had me in absolute stitches.
*or, new if you haven’t gone to one of his more recent shows, I went with a bunch of Toasties to his Carnegie Hall show earlier this year and he told it.
The Bill Clinton story is amazing! I saw him the last time he was in Boston at the Wilbur Theater. We were in the old box seats and my chair was next to the banister, which was the same height as the chair. I was laughing so hard and I remember thinking “if I fall off out of this box from laughing, it will totally have been worth it.”
I have never seen him live, but I think I really must change that.
OK, I’ll fight you:
NO, IT’S ICE-T, ETERNAL HOLDER OF THE IDIOT BALL!!
That is definitely the absolute best, but I’m also really partial to the gifs I sometimes see in which he states that “In terms of instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin.”
Oh, he’s that guy! Yes, I will definitely be watching this.
I made my friends a mix CD a couple of years ago (mostly because one of the friends has an older car that only has a CD player) and on it is four What’s New Pussycats, an It’s Not Unusual, and then another What’s New Pussycat. I laugh every time I think about it.
That is brilliant and amazing.
The best mix CD I ever “got” was one that my friends and I found in our rental car/minivan on the way to a group vacation a couple years ago. We got in, wanted to turn on music, but there was already a CD in the player! *shrug,* okay, let’s see what’s on it.
1-We Are Family
2-Family Reunion
3-Family Affair
4-Started from the Bottom
That’s it. The whole CD. It blew our minds. It took us the entire weekend, and no small amount of alcohol and weed, to decide that the only logical conclusion here was that we had rented the same van as members of Drake’s family had rented previously, on their way to a family get-together.
All this to say that I love mix CDs, especially when they are very strange or funny.
The story of him blacking out at a high school party and later finding out about the guy who regularly stole people’s old family photographs is also a winner.
That was my other introduction to him! I will give that one a nod too, because it kills me every time I hear it.
HARD SAME.
because it’s the one thing you can’t replace.
And I had that thought.
That only blackout drunks, and Steve Urkel can have.
…
“did I do that”
I know it’s an obvious one but his Xanax bit, oh my god. So sad that his show didn’t work out.
ETA: Oh man also “proud Asian-American woman.”
Sorry, it is his analysis of Law & Order. (Although perhaps my love of L&O is coloring my perception…)
No, you’re right. All the Ice-T stuff and Jerry Orbach’s eyes.
His performance of the trailer for the romantic comedy about two people who have Jerry Orbach’s eyes is just staggeringly good.
“Haven’t seen them around these parts in a while. Did something happen?”
“YES! These are detectives that specialize in murder! Of course something happened!”
(Badly paraphrased)
“That’s why the murder police are here, speaking about him in the past tense.”
“Guy that cannot stop unloading boxes”
You will get no argument from me, ma’am. That bit actually makes me cry-laugh.
Sorry, gotta report this comment for being TOO correct. If you’re this right it makes the rest of us look bad. And at the very top of the comments too. For shame.
I cry with laughter every time I listen to that bit. It is a tiny miracle of joy and happiness.
I looooove when he riffs on Law & Order.
Also, this line is a fundamental truth of my life, and I have quoted it many many times:
“In terms of instant relief, cancelling plans is like heroin.”
I’ve got to argue that the new in town sketch that gives the show it’s name is sheer brilliance
“I will start with the fact that I am homeless…as that is the given”
I started knee-jerk giggling as soon as I finished reading that sentence. So, yeah. Cosigned.
The Toast is my favorite group think echo chamber. (…chamberchamberchamber…)
Quack!
…
… nothing?
And a good day to you, quack quack!
Quack archaic institutions are my favorite quack!
When I saw all the quacking going on I instantly assumed it was a reference to the Ask a Manager office sex club thing. On a closer reading I realized that…was probably not the case.
SAME.
Me too!
Well, my comment was definitely a reference to the Duck Club. But sic’s comment probably wasn’t… Yay for crossover-referencing!
Wait it’s not?
Mine was a reference to the “a duck’s quack doesn’t echo” myth, but sure, let’s meet up in the copy room (on our break, of course).
I keep reading that as ‘anarchic institutions’ and it’s confusing.
MISANDRY (…andry…andry…andry)
Echoes just make the Misandrist Hymn sound loads better!
In all seriousness, though, Deleted Gay Commenter is not immune to toxic masculinity, and he proved MATT’S point. May he wallow.
Echoes make me want to sing the Misandrist Hymn to the tune of “Wait for It,” because that is apparently now what I do with echoes.
No, buddy, it’s because “why does anybody want to get married these days? Archaic structure!” is a tiresome, boring, privileged comment to make that comes up every single time weddings or marriage come up, ever, and it does nothing to “advance discourse” in any way, shape, or form.
Anathema!
Wait privileged? Marriage is not a stigmatised institution and there are real issues with assimilationist gay rights activism. The people I know who articulate this criticism are overwhelmingly not white, not rich, not cis, and that’s why they criticise the institution.
I think it’s because that marriage provides a certain amount of security and other benefits (from tax deductions to wider acceptance if you have children or want your partner to have power of attorney or insurance benefits, etc.), so arguing against it as an outdated, archaic structure is privileged in that sense, if you don’t need any of those benefits. But there are other points of view for valid arguments against it, I know.
I lean towards this view myself. Speaking as an attorney who’s worked in health/ elder law for several years, I’ve seen plenty of seniors (including many POC/ lower-income folks) who are only hanging on financially because of their marriages– e.g., Social Security survivorship benefits, modest pensions and supplemental health care policies from their late spouse’s employer, etc., etc. Even a little bit can make a huge difference.
There are, of course, other legal instruments besides marriage if you want to share assets, arrange child custody, etc., with a long-term partner. But, realistically, most people don’t get around to doing that (especially if you’re lower-income and can’t afford a lawyer), so marriage is a relatively cheap and straightforward way to do that.
OMG is the ballet company Ballet West? Because if it is, I’m gonna squee for joy because I loved the shit out of “Breaking Pointe” and I miss it LIKE AIR. And it doesn’t surprise me at all because despite the ~drama~ of the show, they all seemed like genuinely lovely people.
I do so love our homophobic, conservative, archaic, platforming community we’ve got here. Y’all are the best.
YES. I also have a particular fondness for season 2 when all the women just seemed to band together and say “well fuck this so much.”
Did you know that Rex and Alison are now engaged?!
SHUT UP THIS IS MY FAVORITE NEWS EVER
I must confess I don’t know the meaning of platforming.
Is it like planking?
OMG, ppyajunebug, YOU’RE A BALLET NERD, TOO? Have you seen “Flesh and Bone”? I don’t have Starz so I’m distraught that I’m missing out on hammy ballet melodrama.
I AM A BALLET NERD, AT LEAST A LITTLE BIT.
My parents have it, so I’m planning to spend some quality time watching it soon. My friend (who is also a ballet nerd) has seen it and says it is suitably melodramatic and that they should stop letting Sascha Rudetsky speak. I’m psyched.
omg sascha radetsky, his brother was my high school history teacher
A LITTLE BIT IS KINDA MY LEVEL, TOO, BUT THAT’S OK.
Lol Sascha. Still can’t deliver dialog, eh?
Ballet nerds unite! Center Stage is the wind beneath my wings and I had such a blast laughing through Black Swan. Didn’t realize there was a show about Ballet West – was it a reality show? Can’t wait to see Flesh & Bone as well.
P.S. Nicole, I’m praying for your amazing church/ballet program. What a terrific idea!
Yeah “Breaking Pointe” was a little drama llama reality show on CW or something like that (I watched it on Hulu).
“Center Stage” was totally one of those movies in college that I didn’t admit to liking until I realized every other woman I knew had seen/loved it. Such bad acting, such wonderfully cheesy dialog, such great dancing. Also, if you haven’t seen the doc “First Position” about the international youth ballet competition – it might still be on Netflix – it’s pretty great.
Seen First Position? I own it! 🙂 Arun is amazing, and Mikaela is my hero.
I saw Pina for the first time this summer, and fell in love. You might like it too.
Pina was great and totally not what I expected. Also, there’s a BBC doc ripped on youtube called “The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Year with English National Ballet” that takes place the year when the UK gov made a ton of arts funding cuts. Oh, and “Ballet Russes” on Hulu!
Me too! I don’t know why, but that show was enthralling.
Oh, Mr Today’s Deleted Commenter. Please keep screaming into the void, it is tremendously satisfying for me.
I LOVE the ballet program! I wish more churches thought outside the box when trying to find ways to minister to the community.
Lastly, I just want to dwell a little on how awesome this week has been so far (uh, knock wood). The new 1D album leaked (IT IS SO GOOD) and last night I went to an advanced screening of the next Doctor Who episode “Sleep No More,” with an interactive talk with Mark Gatiss IN PERSON afterward and I am just a ball of nerdy joy right now. Sleep No More is amazing, get ready to be massively creeped out on Saturday evening, and Gatiss is a treasure.
Several of my friends have met Mark in person and he’s apparently quite charming.
Also considering how much I was cranky about some of Eleven’s stories and how uneven Twelve’s first season was…..this season of Doctor Who is FANTASTIC. And so many of my Whovian friends gave up near the end of Eleven’s run and I wish they’d start watching again so I had someone other than my boyfriend to squee with!
Yeah this season is SO much better than the last few have been. I was overall irritated with Matt Smith (an unpopular opinion, I know, and he deserves a re-watch soon) and the first few episodes with Capaldi were almost painful – how many times can you watch someone clutch his face and forget his companion’s name until it is just tedious? – but I’m very pleased with the Doctor now. And even the arc that’s starting to take shape is acceptable, a feat I thought beyond Moffat’s solo capabilities.
I am desperately hoping (as someone who’s an even more obsessive fan of Sherlock) that Moffat has taken some of his criticisms to heart. We seem to be getting a lot less misogyny and ALSO a lot less crap plots.
I like Matt Smith, but I don’t know how much of that is genuinely believing he did what he could with the material he was given, or how much of that is clouded with the fact that I have have X-rated dreams about him on the regular.
I tried to tell my friend I wasn’t attracted to Matt Smith. Then she sent me this picture.
I’m still not attracted to Matt Smith. But I am EXTREMELY attracted to Matt Smith With An Alternative Lifestyle Haircut And A Flower Behind His Ear.
Yeah, not every photo of him does it for me. But when they do, they REALLY do.
I also gave up on Eleven — a combination of Matt Smith and *shakes fist* Moffat — but you may have just convinced me to start again. Can I start with the current season, or do I need to go back to Twelve’s regeneration?
Honestly I would start with this season. Twelve’s first season has some good individual stories, but some of them were AWFUL, and on top of that Twelve repeatedly said some really terrible things about Clara’s appearance. Whereas this season the stories are all pretty stellar.
I think I agree with April, but I am sooooo guilty of just trying to skip over things (in general and on DW) that I don’t think I’ll like, which is something I’m trying to change about myself. I’m going to do a full rewatch starting with Nine (because good lord I love Eccleston so much) all the way through to the end of last season, and see if I can’t like Matt Smith better. And maybe Capaldi makes more sense now, now that I have context on who he is and who Clara is.
Awesome, thanks. Tennant’s my boyfriend, but ECCLESTON FOREVER, I wish we’d had a million more years with him. Also willing to fight all Donna haters. And Martha haters, for that matter. I guess I’m just willing to fight.
That is exactly how I feel about Nine and Ten. I was a Donna hater for a long time and now I will join you on the battleground to fight for her honor. Still not a huge fan of Martha – she always had a whiff of Mary Sue about her in my opinion – but I am one of the critically unpopular Rose/Ten shippers and I give no fucks.
Yeah, I am a Rose/Ten shipper too, and that’s part of why I will defend Martha — she didn’t get her time to shine, because (as April says) Ten was busy moping. But she is smart as hell, and she walked away when she realized she needed to. I applaud that.
Donna is my fave forever of the new companions. (Sarah Jane Smith is still my fave companion of old Who.)
Martha could have been so good, but noooOOOoooh, the Doctor was still hung up on Rose.
I was pretty annoyed with Eleven too. I liked him at first and there were some standout episodes he was him, but by the end of it all me feelings toward him were “meh.” Not because of Smith though, I think the writing for him was so often over-the-top and self-congratulatory and too much Doctor pats himself on the back for being the best at all things always.
Every time River Song was like, “Do what the Doctor says” I wanted to scream. No. No. He’s OFTEN WRONG. That’s….that’s the whole point of him having companions.
I have a lot of feelings about this. Ugh.
“And so many of my Whovian friends gave up near the end of Eleven’s run…”
Funny, I’m the opposite–I was getting rather tired of Eleven until Clara came along, and then suddenly I started thinking, hmm, maybe my problem was that I just didn’t care for the unending Pond Melodrama. It really went on for far too long.
I have friends–and my boyfriend!– who liked all the Pond stuff. I really, really, REALLY did not. I ended many episodes sputtering with anger. Some of those storylines were so stupid and went nowhere and UGH, and then there was that scene where Amy forced herself on the Doctor and it was played FOR LAUGHS. (Because sexual assault is funny when women do it, right?!)
On the other hand: The Pond era does include the Van Gogh episode, and I gotta be honest, I think that’s the best episode of new Who, period.
That was such a moving episode. Seen it 3 times now. Sobbed uncontrollably every time. I think it’s because Van Gogh was a real person with obvious talent. His art shows his tenderness and his pain. And just the thought of the kind of gift The Doctor gives Van Gogh is wonderful.
God, that episode. SOBBING every time. I get teary just at gifs on Tumblr.
Thank you for posting this! Despite having an extreme amount of affection for Matt Smith and his rubber face, I was pretty meh on the whole show by the end of his run, so I’ve only seen two episodes of Capaldi and I was Unhappy*. I’m in the middle of a rewatch at the moment (DONNAAAAA) so I’m glad to hear there’s good stuff to come if I can just push through.
*And no, I was not Unhappy because you took away my space boyfriend and replaced him with Malcom Tucker, no matter how many condescending lectures and manipulative phone calls you put into your premiere, MOFFAT.
DONNAAAAA
For the first time today I got comments I decided to keep in the moderation filter, on account of them calling me all kinds of names (completely irrelevant to the posts they were commented on, btw – and there were three, because why give up right away?)
On the one hand, I was a little taken aback (I’m small fry, so aside from on my negative review of Wanted I’ve never really gotten vehement comments before). On the other hand? So satisfying to let him (I’m assuming) just scream into nothingness.
Man, I adore Mark Gatiss. He just seems like he’s having lots of fun doing everything he wanted, but in a kind and lovely way where he is bringing everyone along for the fun. Plus the Lucifer Box books are great.
Just here to say that I looooooove the new 1D album and I’m pleased as punch to see a mention of it in Toast comments.
It’s just so wonderful and I am dying. What’s your favorite track so far??
Oh gosh, I like so many of them!! Never Enough, maybe?? Or What a Feeling because I love when they sound like Fleetwood Mac. Temporary Fix is a jam too. And I like Olivia and Hey Angel way more than expected due to their terrible titles.
Hey Angel is like “Bittersweet Symphony” meets Train meets Coldplay and despite all that I love it. I’m also obsessed with Love You Goodbye, Olivia, and History.
Perfect is great too, plus it gives me that delicious feeling of secondhand horror – I can just imagine Harry, who wrote the damn thing about TSwift, realizing “oh shit this is a real song now and I have to sing it out loud to people, a lot of whom are probably TSwift fans. Uhhhhhh–” *flails and falls down* and I love it an awful lot.
omg I forgot about Perfect since it’s been out awhile. Perfect sounds exactly like TSwift’s Style (a song I love) and I LOVE THAT ABOUT IT. And THEN the part of the music video with him writhing around on a bed or whatever ALSO LOOKS JUST LIKE THE STYLE video. 100% subtlety, great job, I’m super into it.
My favorite bit of John Mulaney’s is his FACE. Dude is cute as hell.
‘My point seemed pretty innocuous’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ9DrReE-uo
Perfect
I woke up this morning from dreaming about Mallory as the New Prudie, and I got up chanting “MAL-LO-RY! MAL-LO-RY!”
Scared the cat.
Worth it.
That church and those ballerinas are doing Christianity (and the arts) right.
Slaters gonna hate.
(congrats Mallory, you are gonna be amazing!)
John Mulaney is a wonderful standup, but he is truly transcendent as George St. Geegland along with Nick Kroll’s Gil Faizon.
THANK YOU
Have you seen the live “Oh Hello” filmed in NYC earlier this year?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkitRyvdtJY
It’s pretty much definitive proof that those characters need a spinoff of their own.
“Je suis Charlie Rose.”
“People always say, ‘What kind of jokes can you make about Barack Obama?’ Um, helllllooooo – black jokes. Anyways, moving on…”
Also hey is there a way we can kick a few bucks toward the ballet agreement between the company and your church so that they can teach the kids and feed the bellies and show the shows for longer?
That is very nice of you! For stuff my church does, I just want to stick to prayers and Good Vibes so it isn’t weird (it’s something a lot of us support very enthusiastically, too, so it’s not on death’s door) but VERY interested people can email me!
A good cause if you live in Philadelphia is the Broad Street Ministry
http://www.broadstreetministry.org/
which is in desperate need of Men’s Jeans to give to the homeless. (Apparently — and this makes perfect sense of course I had just never really thought about it — most homeless women *also* prefer men’s jeans because they’re easier to fit and are generally more robust &c.). They have an in-house seamstress (!) so even if there are holes in the jeans they are fine.
I guess…probably even the Philadephia Toast people who are here do not have a superabundance of men’s jeans. But if you do! Or if you know someone who does! Denim for all!
I have a bunch of family in South Jersey so I’ll pass this along. My grandmother has found a new calling as an advocate for the homeless (she is a bad ass lady) so I have no doubt she’d be more than happy to give a load of jeans to my cousin in Philly to donate. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the heads up! I’m pretty sure we do have some perfectly good jeans that just don’t fit my husband anymore, so it’s good to know of a place that can use them.
Yay Philly! Have you reached out to local Levi’s, Gap, Old Navy, etc and any of their outlets? A lot of chain stores give their branches some autonomy when it comes to community investment (Home Depot does a GREAT job of this), and it just a matter of someone asking the question and being willing to go pick them up.
I have not, because Broad Street Ministry is tangential to me; I’m just bringing it up because my friend is involved their — I expect that they have at least reached out. BSM is very active in the local community, and there’s definitely a Gap Outlet right down the street from them.
We do a holiday gift/ toiletry drive at work over the holidays for local homeless shelters, and they always note that they have a shortage of stuff for men (I guess because people tend to donate more towards women and kids).
I always laugh at Mulaney’s “you know…like a LIAR” when talking about his parents being lawyers. Something about his delivery is timeless and makes almost anything normal have undeniable humor.
I say that kind of a lot when conversation does not call for it contextually. It’s just so fun to say out loud.
Nothing new on the shower cleaning front for me over there. But just this weekend, my flatmate cleaned the bathroom and didn’t really clean the floor of the shower – I don’t really understand why since it is obviously the grossest thing in the shower. With three people showering regularly there sure is a lot of shampoo leftovers etc.
Also, it’s so sweet, Nicole, that you’re asking us to not repeat mean Slate comments over here. The Toast-officials’ relationships are definitely part of what makes this website so special to me.
1. The Toast is homophobic, or intolerant of people who question their own gender identity.
Yeah…mayyyybe. Maybe that’s it, hoss.
That’s definitely it. I have never seen such an intolerant, unwelcoming bunch before. 😉
Thank you, not just for this comment, but for reminding me how delighted I am by the word “hoss”.
It seems as reasonable as anything else, lbh.
I love people who can’t be bothered to browse a site’s archives. If he were a student of mine he’d get a stern lecture on Intellectual Laziness.
I’m far away from Texas, so I’m out of the loop now, but last I checked this group was doing great work and great community organizing: http://www.workersdefense.org/
If anyone knows of any groups in London that are looking for volunteers, I’d be happy to hear about opportunities. I’ve gotten in touch with some in my area, but haven’t heard back, because I’m guessing everyone is stretched thin and over worked, especially leading up to winter. But I’d love to hear what’s out there that I could help with.
My favorite charity is Our Daily Bread, which has a number of programs to help food insecure families in Northern Virginia. It is very expensive to live here, and lots of families struggle. I decided to give to them monthly when you asked for a donation for your birthday gift. Here’s a link to their main site: https://www.odbfairfax.org/ For Thanksgiving and Christmas my husband and I are also giving to this program, which gives cash cards to families so they can buy what they need. https://www.odbfairfax.org/civicrm/contribute/tra…
They have a program in neighborhood schools that gives kids sack lunches to tide them over on the weekends, which is called Food for Thought, to which I also donate (kids should not be going hungry in this country) . This is the link to my neighborhood school http://www.woodleyhillsfood4thought.org/
Here’s a thing I stumbled across today :http://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/halla-tomasdottir-women-in-finance-emotional-capital.html
Yet another woman in business saying things that are common sense and people acting like its a revaluation from on high. Of course you need diverse leadership, that’s what stops the dude-bro risk-taking blow hards from running the company into the ground.
Your link’s a little screwy (I think it’s the colon in front) … new link here:
http://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/halla-tomasdottir-wo…
Oh thank you!
Y’know, I generally prefer sites with clear and transparent commenting policies (even the ones that specifically say “I may just delete stuff if I feel like it”). I generally like sites that have clear community guidelines. I like lists, I like rules, I like knowing what’s expected of me (and others).
But I’m starting to come around to really really hoping that The Toast *doesn’t* go in that direction, because I’m thinking, especially right now with the die-hards from Slate looking at us more closely for a bit, that a clear commenting policy would NOT be helpful. As is, the people who are doing drive-bys that are tiresome will get deleted the first couple times, get bored, and move on. (… hopefully). If we told them what we wanted, they very well might end up posting one or two acceptable comments so that they could then more easily say stuff we don’t want to see, resulting in way more complicated moderation challenges.
In my experience, that’s not what happens, though. If given rules, these types start rules-lawyering, and the (non-approved comments) just start getting angrier and angrier and “Well I didn’t break any of your RULES, what’s WRONG with you you HUMORLESS…” blah blah blah blah into infinity.
Yes. This.
I mod at a fencing hangout. Rules lawyers are a huge percent of active users. We don’t have overly specific rules/guidelines/standards for just that reason. I’m not actually sure that it helps all that much, overall.
Can confirm. Modded at a forum with a few clear, sensible guidelines. People whined that it was impossible to understand the rules because they didn’t spell everything out, complained about tyranny and lack of transparency. Wrote a huge FAQ, revised the rules and introduced a modding style where decisions were explained. People now complain that it’s impossible to understand the rules because the policy is too long, whine about tyranny and feeling hurt by being modded, contradict every decision to hell.
Have now started to delete posts quietly again, because they’ll apparently call us tyrants no matter what and I’d rather not get rules-lawyered too.
As somebody who’s kinda new to The Toast, I WAS wondering if there were clear rules in place, or if we were ruled be benevolent overlords. I decided it’s clearly benevolent overlords, and can only hope to never offend them.
Benevolent overlords who prefer consistent names.
But isn’t that what the Toast has? “I will delete your comments if I want to, and also you can get a good idea of the culture and standards here by reading the existing comments.”
There isn’t a page anywhere that SAYS that. See example 1, or example 2.
That’s a fair point. Also, your html is borked, and my comment about it has rendered you unable to edit. Sorry about that.
weird, the links are working for me. WHATEVER.
(links are to captain awkward and scalzi, if it’s not working for someone who’s curious).
i kinda figured that was the policy the very firs time i tried to post and got the little pop-up saying a mod had to review it first. i was not at all suprised and was in fact delighted to find out that this firum is moderated thusly. i, too, have seen my share of rule-lawyering and i am SO GLAD to be spared that here.
I can go to lots of places if I want to listen to mean people. I prefer to think of the Toast as a safe space. Also, “why does anyone get married anyway, it’s an archaic institution” makes you sound like an 18 year old boy trying to get into his girlfriend’s pants.
‘I just don’t feel its right to bring a child* into this world, there’s just so much inequality’ A recent quote from commenter while trying to get into said girlfriends pants.
*Not mocking people that don’t want children, mocking that kind of guy.
I mean, I don’t want to bring a child into this crazy world either, but that sounds like an argument AGAINST sex.
Yeah, I’m failing to see how that leads on to “and so you should have sex with me”. I don’t want children either, but that’s not something I generally mention when asking my partner if he wants to have sex.
That Out 100 photo is the best pic of 1N I’ve seen yet.
Ugh, Toasties my cousin – in-law, who is otherwise a kind, progressive soul, grew up in Columbia, MO and will hear no criticism of Missou period, which is hilarious when he defends the football team’s play but not so much when he posts hateful, anti-intellectual hit pieces from Fox Sports about the protests. Between this and the fight I had with my father in August about Sandra Bland I am dreading going home for the holidays for the first time in pretty much ever. I am just so bummed out that a family which raised me to believe in equality and fairness is so blinded by its own privilege.
Also I had to defend my SO-and-me-only Thanksgiving weekend against a friend who wanted to crash at our place because I just *cannot deal* with other people in my space right now and am feeling horribly selfish.
Do not feel horribly selfish. Feel wonderfully selfish or even more accurate: wisely selfish. The holidays are full of all sorts of trappings for folks, and yet the default assumption seems to be that even if your family is bonkers or even if you hate the holidays or even if _______, you still go do it the traditional way and deal. Wtf, world. That makes zero sense.
Do what feels right. That generally gets you to the right place. And it sounds like your Thanksgiving is the right thing. And your friend should (hopefully, at some point, come on friend) see that and realize it and not-begrudgingly find another place to crash.
(I don’t have a ton of wisdom about the family situation, and I feel your pain. I got into a surprise argument with my family about the name and mascot of the Washington, D.C. football team and was horribly shocked that we were on different sides. Hugs.)
Thanks! I went to a high school with the same mascot as the D. C. football team and it has definitely divided friends and family (my parents have finally come around to it being offensive which makes the stuff in my previous comment even more bewildering).
I hate saying no to friends and family. HATE IT. But sometimes you have to. This year I am spending the holidays with my family of choice, which will not be my family of origin. One absolutely must protect oneself from bad behavior sometimes.
I do not go home for Christmas anymore since my brother started up with a new girlfriend and has now started saying things like “blood family” (my partner carried our son so apparently he’s not my “blood”, right, fuck you) and “systemic racism doesn’t exist” (which is fuck you anyway but especially so since my partner and son are black.) My mother seems to understand and we always go up later on in the winter to have a belated Christmas with my folks. Don’t feel selfish. Holidays are about “getting drunk and stoned with your friends and family” and friends are as valid as family, and chosen family is as valid as family of origin.
I guess I should give John Mulaney another try? I tried to watch one of his specials a while back (don’t remember which one) and felt very lukewarm towards him.
My only exposure to him was when he was going to have a network primetime TV show and the commercials were him doing a bit comparing women going to the bathroom together to Ocean’s 11 something something trash-talking each other har har women are bitches.
I was…not impressed.
OHHHHH MY GOD YES THAT’S WHY I HATE HIM TOO. And I was so surprised to see all the Mulaney love on here!! What’s happening????
The show was awful and nothing like his stand-up, which was why no one watched it.
I am fanatical in my love for his standup routines and I couldn’t watch more than a few minutes of the TV show in question for that same reason (though I never saw the ad about women going to the bathroom, yikes).
In his standup, he’s consistently good at making the butt of the joke (1) himself or (2) a more powerful person or corporation. I’d say more than half the humor is self-directed and the rest of it is punching up or occasionally sideways. I’ve only seen him punch down in a joke once and, for me, that’s an incredibly good ratio. No other standup comic has ever beaten it or even come close.
I’d say try New In Town, if you haven’t – it’s his Netflix special from a couple years ago and I always laugh from start to finish. If it’s not your jam, though, it’s just not your jam! I saw Moshe Kasher’s special shortly after New In Town, and I found it so unfunny and offensive that I wanted to throw my remote through the TV. Different strokes…
You make me feel better knowing I’m not the only one. (For me it was one of his SNL pieces on why they don’t sell Girl Scout cookies year round or online or something and I was like. . .that is not actually a huge mystery? And everyone around me seemed to think it was the funniest thing ever.)
False premise comedy (or a joke that doesn’t make sense if you think about the thing practically for like one second) is the #1 way to jolt me out of the joke. I go from hysterical laughter to po-faced humourlessness on like .05 of a second. Especially because the comedy I tend to prefer is intellectual stuff anyways – I don’t mean like ‘smarter than other comedy’ I mean more like ‘the whole reason this is funny is it’s overthinking things’. So if you’re overthinking it but ALSO not thinking about it enough/only thinking about it as a privileged white dude, then… yawn. Like ‘who came up with milking a cow??” jokes are not funny. You know who did? A woman. A breastfeeding woman did. Because it’s super obvious if you live in a world where the way you feed kids is with boobs. DUH.
“Like ‘who came up with milking a cow??” jokes are not funny. You know who did? A woman. A breastfeeding woman did. Because it’s super obvious if you live in a world where the way you feed kids is with boobs. DUH. ”
THANK YOU. A guy showed up with this in his Tinder profile only half an hour ago, and I was like ‘dude, you’re cute, but that is not original OR intellectual, LEFT’.
Someday I hope to have a deleted comment that long and ridiculous. Goals, people. Got to have goals.
DC has a charity group called Food & Friends that started as a meal delivery service for HIV/AIDS patients, back in the days when the fear and stigma were so intense that seropositive folks were sometimes left to fend (or not) for themselves. But as treatment became more effective, stigma faded, and people with the virus started living longer, F&F quietly shifted to providing meals to anyone with life-changing health conditions who needs nutritional support. They prepare and deliver three meals a day to thousands of people across the DC metro area, asking clients only for a letter from a medical professional asserting need for nutritional support (there’s no means testing). Their volunteer options are top-notch: They treat volunteers as people whose time and effort are too valuable to waste, so schedules run on time, jobs are clear, support is available, and thanks are sincerely given at the end of each shift.
AND! Right now they’re offering Slice of Life pie sales for Thanksgiving. If you don’t want to serve bought pie at your dinner or aren’t close enough in to pick up, you can buy pie for clients: Each holiday dinner pack includes a whole pie, and the pie sales help support the mission during the rest of the year. Buy some pies!
Yes! They are excellent! My company has (had? not sure, I now work from NY) some sort of rotating lunchtime volunteering schedule with them, and it was extremely well-organized and they made participation easy. (Plus they do great work)
Super amused at thinking of the Toast Community as having conservative views on marriage,or, well, anything.
I mean, we all think that men should be quite conservative in how many of their thoughts they choose to express, so maybe that counts? Not conservative in the thoughts themselves, merely in how many of those thoughts make it into the wider world.
Sparing, perhaps. Parsimonious. Even stingy.
Stinting. Cautious. Miserly.
Inhibited?
Mmm, inhibited male opinions. Truly, that would be the best of all possible worlds.
I have conservative views on whether chicken or seafood should be allowed on pizza, does that count?
John Mulaney is possibly my favorite human man. I typically make every new person of importance in my life watch New in Town at least once, while I watch their faces for appropriate levels of joy. Also, whenever I’m telling a story that involves heavy drinking, I tend to say “Everyone was drinking like it was the end of the world. We were drinking like it was the Civil War and a doctor was coming to saw our legs off.”
I tried to show New In Town to my family and they started complaining about it and saying it wasn’t funny (like two minutes into it!). I no longer have a family.
This is why I’m scared to share my precious Maria Bamford with my family.
I am 38 today. Sadly spent it with the vet since the horse came in yesterday with an eye swollen up to the size of a grapefruit, but thankfully second visit after steroid drops was a lot more positive, they think she just bashed it and then rubbed it to death. I had planned to visit Fishbourne Roman Palace which would have been more fun and less expensive!
Happy birthday! Hope the rest of your day is more enjoyable. 🙂
Happy Birthday! I hope the horse gets better soon and you still get to visit Fishbourne Roman Palace some other day (I have no idea what this is, but based on my knowledge about Old English Houses, I think it sounds amazing.). Think of it as an extended birthday/a belated gift!
It’s the largest Roman home in the UK – has loads of mosaics still in situ and stuff like that. I will definitely wedge it into a Sunday soon, now I’ve thought of it!
Oh, that’s cool! Have fun!
I once visited a house that was built and furnished like a Greek villa (not originally a museum but actually a house where the owners lived) which is obviously not the same as a still existing Roman house, but it was still pretty amazing.
Happy Birthday!
Fishbourne! I have very few childhood memories (as my memory is much more geared towards remembering passages from Shakespeare rather than things I’ve done, people I’ve met, my own life etc.), but one of them is from Fishbourne. I don’t know if they still do this, but they used to throw water over the main mosaic to make the colours extra bright. It was great!
Happy birthday!
Eye stuff with horses is always scary, but take a moment to appreciate how stupid they look with a big swollen eye! My TB got a punch in the face (from another horse, that time anyway…) and his eye-lid was cut, he looked like a failed boxer for about a week, and when the swelling finally went down was when I realized he has weird protruding eyelids/eyebrows (I said the swelling was gone, co-worker disagreed, after looked at both of his eyes we decided he’s just funny looking.). Which is probably how he ended up getting punched in the first place.
We have a police horse riot shield for eye injuries, so she did at least get to look hardcore for a while.
What a badass! I wish I’d taken pictures of my fella’s eye at the time (or the 3-4 times its happened since.)
I used to have an 18h monster who was very clumsy with his head, and we always said he needed an american football helmet! (he wasn’t a monster at all, he gave excellent hugs.)
Happy birthday! May Saffron and Captain be good cats (or slightly better than usual cats) to you today.
Also, I have never heard of Fishbourne Roman Palace and now I feel like I’m missing out on something amazing.
Happy Birthday! May your day be as sparkley and shiney as a Jolie shower stall! And much scritches and carrots to your horse as she gets better, poor girl.
Happy birthday! Also hoping your day improves.
Happy birthday, and I hope that’s the last vet visit she needs for now 😀
I love the ballet outreach! It makes me so happy to see people use their gifts to bring light to others. My own church is in a mixed socioeconomic area with many “working poor” and kids who are alone for long hours after school. We offer free tutoring twice a week for high school and middle schoolers, and in January we’ll start a low-cost after school program for elementary students. We have a lot of kids from the area attending our student ministry events who have dropped out or are thinking of dropping out, and our goal is to drastically reduce that number.
Backhanded insults are definitely the best way to get one’s comments published. This guy has a solid plan.
Well it WORKED DIDN’T IT????
Wait, do you think he’s negging The Toast? Right, that’ll work.
I wish that bathroom cleaning article had slow-drain solutions! My roommate and I have a strainer for catching hair, but I half suspect she’s doing something to sabotage it. Or else my apartment is just 50+ years old and has a crappy pipe system.
I live in a block of apartments and whenever the downstairs neighbours’ drain gets blocked mine backs up too. I think if you’re not on the ground floor, any slight issues below you will show up on yours.
I read a comment recently (probably here?) that in large buildings, ground floors are prone to bad plumbing too! There is just no winning – a coworker told me that one of the buildings at The New School here in NYC has CLAY plumbing. Clay!! The mind boggles. Maybe it has more to do with the quality and age of the plumbing than the floor?
When I was in high school, the gas company dug up our street (which had houses built in the 1870s) and found out that the original *wooden* gas mains were still in use. That was… probably not good.
That’s the case in our apartment, too! When things get clogged a little further down the line, our shower backs up every time the guy above us uses his.
Plus the plumbing is just plain weird, so we have to call the plumber in about once every 18 months to wrestle with the crud that collects in the bend between our shower drain and the main line. The only access to it is in our teensy bathroom, so it’s 2+ hours of a large, sweaty, pants-falling-down man trying to squeeze himself into the space between the sink and the shower entrance to get just the right angle.
Pour caustic soda down there, that should melt anything blocking it up. Then get one of those wire things and clear it out (the. grossest. job. ever.).
Then beat your roommate over the head with the nasty hairball you pulled out until she understands the importance of the drain cover.
Thanks! I don’t think I can snake the drain–I tried sticking a wire down there a while ago and hit the bottom an inch or two in. It seems to be an open area that drains…somewhere. When it gets really bad I call the office and have them send someone to unclog it, but they always come by when I’m at work so I still don’t understand how it’s set up.
If you want to snake out a bathtub drain with a wire or, better yet, one of the long plastic doodads that hardware stores sell for this purpose, just unscrew the cover on the overflow drain and stick the wire down there. It’s gross, but it gets results! This is much more effective than baking soda and vinegar, at least if the clog is caused by hair.
Everyone should have their own drain snake! I got mine from Santa. 🙂
Ooh, “the grossest job ever”, you got that right. Our house’s plumbing is f’ed, and 2X a year we (hah, “we”, I make my SO do it) have to pull the drain cover in our basement, blast caustic soda down the hole, snake it, and then live with the overpowering sewer smell permeating the entire house for a few hours. So nasty!
If you haven’t already tried it, baking soda, then vinegar, then hot water, then a plunger worked well for our house. The nice thing is that all the ingredients are super safe and there is very little to lose. Plus it feels like a fourth grade science experiment.
Try baking soda and vinegar. It’s safe to use on older pipes.
Dump some baking soda down the drain. Add vinegar. Watch with glee.
Add red food coloring if you don’t mind washing the floor of your tub after.
Oh good! Yeah, I’ve been worried that the drain-decloggers the supermarket sells might damage the pipes. And the red food coloring! I’m definitely going to take a picture while I’m doing this and send it to my roommate with zero explanation attached.
Just be careful if you do decide to have another go at it with the coat hanger. My husband was doing that in our kitchen and poked right through the old, corroded drain pipe. Of course, this happened after Home Depot & Rona were both closed for the night.
But beware the smell. I used baking soda and vinegar when my shower backed up a few months back, and it was the most horrendously awful smell ever. Effective, but stinky.
For even better results, wait 10 minutes after you’ve done the soda-vinegar volcano, then pour about a litre of boiling water down the drain. Works super well on those stubborn clogs. I didn’t even have to fish out hairballs last time my drain clogged.
Seconding this! If the drain’s just slow, not completely clogged, you can even try the boiling-water thing on its own (without using baking soda+vinegar) and see if that helps. It often has, in my experience – it’s not a perfect solution but if you can’t leave the house at the moment to get drain cleaner, which is terrible for old pipes anyway, it’s a decent stop-gap.
It could just be the old pipes. I would definitely recommend NOT using store-bought drain openers. I did that in a slow-draining apartment once (second floor) and then when someone came out to snake the drain, he ended up punching a hole in the fragile pipes and flooding my downstairs neighbor’s apartment. You can also buy enzymes, but I’m not convinced those work, either. I now own a house with super old pipes and have resigned myself to having to just replacing small sections of pipe at a time as they get too full of rust-crud to work.
Yeah, if the pipes are older and corroding (e.g., if they’re galvanized steel, not copper), then there’s not necessarily much you can do except replace them. And using really strong Liquid Plumber-type chemicals can just make them worse.
I lived in a 1920s apartment building for several years with mostly original plumbing, and the landlord had to basically replace every bit of it with copper, piece by piece. It’s expensive!
THAT CARD GAME LOOKS SO AMAZING I BACKED IT IMMEDIATELY AND AM MAKING EVERYONE IN MY OFFICE DO THE SAME.
Weird biologists love weird taxidermy.
weird biologists are my favourite people!
… there are normal biologists?
I also backed it and I’m looking forward to many hours of making faces with my friends this winter.
Ah, Toasties. I am so happy to read all about the amazing volunteering and non-profit activities you are involved in, especially today. On Saturday I will be serving my last shift at Scrap DC, a wonderful creative reuse store in Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC, http://scrapdc.org/, because they have lost their lease and will be closing on November 21. I have been a volunteer there for years and I will miss it so so much. I am tearing up this morning just anticipating how sad I’ll be on Saturday. But it is great to be reminded of all the other organizations and efforts to which I can now contribute.
Noooooooooo, I didn’t know Scrap DC was closing! 🙁 I loved that you could buy loose photographs there.
I am having a work dilemma. I am seriously overwhelmed.
I am the college archivist at [collegenamehere]. However, I am also apparently the only person with any knowledge of serials acquisition or the willingness to nickel and dime publishers to save some cash. (By knowledge, I mean I made friends with the acquisitions librarian at my previous job. )
I have now been given the job of looking through all of the American Chemical Society’s publications and deciding which ones we keep. We, of course, have never kept usage statistics for any of the journals.
I have never been trained for this. This isn’t my area. I have a huge collection to process and 4 student workers to oversee in the archives as well as numerous other tasks which include IT, repository management and records management.
the puppy at the top of the page is the only thing giving me hope today. That and the existence of coffee.
Hi, I just stopped working on an assessment product for ProQuest in favor of doing other work with identifiers and metadata, and I can tell you that assessment is beastly and not for the faint of heart and I wish I’d never encountered it. Not having usage stats is even worse – you’re flying blind.
Which is to say, sympathies, dear. Sympathies.
I’m a chemist, and omg. ALL of them, that is a lot.
Ugh, I wish I could help, but weeding serials is not something I’m too familiar with! If they haven’t kept usage statistics that’s especially hard. I feel like unless your college teaches history of the sciences/has researchers in that area, you might be able to limit the collection to the last 10-15 years worth of publications? That would mean reaching out to the chemistry department, though, and I’m sure you don’t have a lot of time on your hands for that.
I hope you get some good advice!
Are you purchasing directly from the ACS or through a vendor? Maybe your vendor can help you sort through everything (though of course they’ll be unhappy if you cancel any subs). Regarding user statistics: if they exist, the publisher will have them and collect them for you. Next step: ditch everything that’s possibly available in Open Access.
Source: …I work at a subscription agency for libraries, actually. I’m sorry you have to deal with such complicated stuff without proper training. :
Well, ACS recently changed their accreditation standards. Instead of having to buy all their journals, we now only have to have 14 journals split between a few major branches of chemistry. This could save us something like $15k a year.
So, we’re hoping we can strike most of our ACS subs (which is EVERYTHING ACS except for this one journal but no one cares) and get a decent subscription to Sci Finder. I’m waiting on stats and looking to see if we have these journals elsewhere.
Oh, that’s really a nice sum you could save… Look, their catalogue (http://pubs.acs.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1433173481771/pubs_2015_catalog.pdf), page 26f., marks some of the journals as “highly recommended”, maybe that could help weeding out what’s actually needed. (Except for Pharma Sciences, that’s all evidently totally important. And probably most expensive)
Match that against the journals’ Impact Factors, against the usage data, see what you can get elsewhere or Open Access, and go from there?
Also, if ACS changed their accreditation standards, a bunch of other institutes are probably doing the same thing you are now. Maybe you can find colleagues in the same position and exchange tactics?
YOU CAN DO IT
Email or call them so you can get librarian access to their website, if you don’t already have that. They’ll be able to help you get statistics too, and they might only be for a year or so but that’s better than nothing. Then it’s a basic spreadsheet from there to get cost per use. You can maybe get a student to help / do it all.
If you happen to be running Millennium, you can send me an email if you’re having trouble wrangling data, I do stats here so I can help you get numbers out of it.
dangerflakes at hotmail
If you have time, it’s a good idea to ask professors which ones they use themselves, and which they expect their students to use.
Hi I can help this is literally my job! (at a university in Australia). If you have librarian module access (email customer support and they’ll send you a login if not) you can get sweet sweet COUNTER-compliant usage reports in excel format. I mean all stats are lies but they give you a general idea of the shape of usage over time. Stats (from just about everyone) can be emailed to you every month as well or automatically harvested is you have a program that can use SUSHI.
Hope this helps! Sorry I wasn’t earlier have not been able to Toast for a few days.
Ugh Toasties, I just need a little whine. We’ve ended up with pantry moths and it is so so so gross and I’ve had to throw so much food away, which makes me so sad (we’re fine financially, and can replace, but I’m frugal and food waste is just so dumb). I think we might be winning, I called in sick yesterday and did even more cleaning, and we both worked all of Sunday, washing and bleaching.
Oh, my sympathies. We had clothes moths recently (I’m a knitter – they got into my yarn stash) and it just drains you to have to clear out that kind of infestation. Good on you for taking a sick day.
Oh nooooo how bad was it? I live in fear of clothes moths in my stash.
Thankfully the ones in our place were total snobs who only ate 100 percent wool so though I had to wash all the sweaters and 90 percent of my yarn to make sure there were no eggs hiding anywhere, they only ruined one store bought sweater I never really liked, a test swatch for a scarf and a pair of half knit socks I had abandoned a year ago. Not great but none of my favorite hand knits got messed up and most of the yarn was salvaged so I feel lucky.
Ugh, I’m sorry. About once every 3-4 years or so I get those little bugs that infest your spices and dry baking goods and it is just the worst. It makes you so paranoid! (Can I use this chili powder or does it have bugs? Surprise, you won’t know until you open the bottle to measure it out!) This is exactly what sick days were made for and I hope you rid your home of the pests very soon!
Definitely, still and always, read that as “panty moths.”
Also, grab some of the pheromone traps from the hardware store; they’ll capture any adults, and keep them from making more moths.
I feel like I would almost prefer panty moths? It would be more fun to replace them, for one.
I feel you, I had a pantry moth problem a couple of years ago. And right now I have a fruit fly infestation that I can’t get rid of. My partner put some compost in the compost bin at Thanksgiving but I didn’t know it since I was keeping my compost in the freezer as I do every summer specifically to avoid fruit flies. So I didn’t dispose of it until I discovered it while investigating the fruit fly extravaganza in my kitchen. It’s gone now and I clean up every scrap of foodstuffs after every meal, but those buggers seem determined to stay. Probably because it’s too cold outside now for them to leave in search of more putrid areas. (I leave my kitchen window open while I’m at work to try to freeze them out, and I have two traps but theer is still a flock of tiny nastry creatures.)
One thing that might help is to do some Science in your kitchen sink. Our kitchen got overtaken by fruit flies this summer while we were on vacation, and they stuck around even after we took care of trash and exposed food and whatever. Wine + dish soap traps helped, but we didn’t get rid of them for good until we put some baking soda and vinegar down the drain. I think they were breeding in there, which is… disgusting.
Anyway, might be worth a try!
so.. baking soda and vinegar are the solutions to all of life’s problems! (I wonder if they can get rid of MRAs?)
I found that covering the drain every night helps! They get confused and can’t fly out.
I battled them for a year, and they’re SO GROSS and awful! I totally sympathize.
I know it sucks to throw out food, but the *only* thing that worked for me was getting rid of absolutely everything in the cupboards and scrub like hell with bleach. They can get into anything and live in all kinds of tiny crevices, so just getting rid of a few items at a time really doesn’t do much.
I also stopped buying food from bulk bins, which helped.
:(((( I love bulk bins. I grew up in hippy dippy food co-ops and this is terrible news.
You can still buy from bulk bins! Just put the stuff in the freezer for a day or two as soon as you get it home.
I despise when I have to throw out food. Waste is a terrible feeling. My sympathies are with you.
Here’s a cleaning question for you all:
My house creates a LOT of dust, and both the fiance and I have very dark hair. When cleaning the bathroom, usually with a scrubbie sponge or a rag and spray cleaner, I find I’m just moving the hair and dust around? Like I can’t seem to get it off the tile and counter, unless I manage to get it in the sink to wash it down the drain (which is probably bad in the long run) or if I go over it again after I’m done with a dry towel. Is there a good solution for actually getting the detritus up off of surfaces?
you got to use a Swifter first, when everything is dry; they use static cling to pick up bits of dust and hair, but water neutralizes static, so all that stuff will stay stuck to your counter.
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do it in that order! I will try that next time!
I did custodial work for a summer, and I can attest that as bad as hair is, glitter is so, so much worse. If the Swiffer doesn’t work, you might have to try a vacuum cleaner next.
I have asthma and a massive dust allergy and I can attest to the efficacy of the Swiffer. That and a Dyson have pretty much eliminated my need for allergy shots.
I’ve had luck getting my hair/cat hair off surfaces like this by giving everything a once over with a dry paper towel before getting down to cleaning. I hate using so much paper towel, though, so I’m interested in what others say.
Same! I’ve definitely gone through an alarming amount of paper towels while cleaning and or cooking, I’m really trying to get away from that.
Dry microfiber towel works great too. I split a package from the automotive dept at Costco with my family. I’m also using a half of one as a washable replacement for the wet swiffer pads
Seconding dry paper towel! I too have a super dusty bathroom and I use paper to wipe down all the surfaces before breaking out the sprays and damp cloths
Dry microfiber cloth also works well, and is washable/reusable?
You need microfiber cloth! It’s amazing, it just picks hair and dust and everything right up (especially dust). Wipe the area with your dry microfiber cloth and watch the sparkles.
Can I use one like the microfibre towel I bought at the camping store? Or do they have to be like, finer than that (idk, words??)
Back when I used to do cleaning, I’d attack the bathroom with the vacuum to suck up all the loose debris and then so the bathroom clean.
I have this problem too (lots of cats, lots of dust even before we got the cats). Starting with a sweep or a pass with a rag or even a swiffer if you’re into that–the key is to do a DRY pass first before any cleaners are involved, getting it wet will just make everything fucking disgusting. If there’s an actual dust bunny, which there often is with the cat hair, I’ll pick it up with a little bit of toilet paper and just throw it in the trash.
Step 1: Dry Swiffer or microfiber cloth to pick up hair adn the floatiest dust. Put cloth/Swiffer pad in the laundry to wash and reuse if you’re frugal (they last a long time and still work even with tiny dust-balls attached). Step 2: Damp mop or cloth to clean and shine.
my mom got me these awesome dusting mitt thingies. they’re some sort of nubby/fringy fabric and they’re machine washable. since my OCD is very tactile, it is EXTRA PLEASING to hold/wipe everything as i move it out of the way, then give the flat surfaces a pass before bringing in the wet works.
(ETA: goggle says i have a micorfiber mitt. mine has thumbs, though, which i can’t find a pic of. the thumb is key to me not dropping evrything when i’m dusting.)
Um Nicole your avatar is the CUTEST.
My mom thinks John Mulaney is “a smart young man with a good outlook on life.” Our family has taken to saying “whatever, this might as well happen” on the regular.
Once, when my husband was out of the country on business, I let Netflix lead me down the rabbit hole of Korean dramas, which has changed my marriage forever. Now about half of the shows I consume are in a language neither my husband nor I speak, and he finds the subtitles frustrating. So, our #1 downtime shared activity is now ruined forever. (Why would I watch Big Bang Theory when I could be watching Master’s Sun?)
We are only now beginning to cover 3.5 years later.
Last night, I tried my first Spanish soap opera. Ten years was a good run, right?
You watch with subtitles?! I usually just make up plot & dialogue. It’s not for binge-watching that way but it is super entertaining sometimes.
I like to have a full grasp on the shenanigans happening on the screen. Subtitles are a must 🙂
Ah, if you want it to make *sense* I suppose you have to.
When I lived in China I watched A LOT of historical dramas. Without subtitles, obviously. I speak chinese ok but not super fluently and not soap-opera vocab. I mean all you really need is ‘I love you’ ‘I hate you’ and ‘die!!!!’, right? Anyway it was great, A+ recommend
Exactly! Although I frequently got girlfriends and sisters mixed up which made for some very confusing moments. Oh! Right now, Telemundo is airing “Suleiman, El Grand Sultan” which is a Turkish soap dubbed into Spanish and I love it. The costumes are amazing and the history is about as accurate as The Tudors.
If you’re in the DC area and looking for somewhere to volunteer, my family used to spend every Thanksgiving at Food and Friends delivering Thanksgiving meals to people living with chronic and/or terminal illnesses who can’t cook for themselves. It was a really lovely way for us to spend the holiday, and they have a need for volunteers year round, since they have ~3,000 people they deliver meals to year-round.
We’d also spend Christmas volunteering at our local Original Pancake House, which would bring in needy families from around the area for a massive pancake breakfast and a whole room full of donated clothes/toys for the kids to choose their Christmas presents from. It’s one of my favorite memories from growing up, so if you live near the Bethesda or Falls Church locations, check it out!
I’m STILL working on starting my own nonprofit (this week’s headache — a total bullshit shady bill from the lawyer who reviewed our bylaws and state filing), and it’s been very frustrating as well as exciting. Someday soon I hope to be able to share a website with folks, but for now I have to continue wrangling with this shady dude, which is poking my anxiety over money AND confrontation, hooray!
Some quick advice needed – I’m trying to schedule job interviews (yay!), but they’re all in the middle of the day. One in particular is three hours (!). I’ve already been out for one interview so far, plus I already have the bi-weekly ob/gyn appointments – what excuse (lie) do I tell my scrutiny-heavy boss to make it to this and future interviews? I feel bad lying, but I can’t see a way around it.
I usually just claim doctors appointment, but my company are super cool.
I’d use pregnancy to you’re advantage, how does she know you don’t have a super urgent-can’t-be-rescheduled scan or something
ETA: Hooray for interviews!!
Can you use a story about how someone close to you needs your assistance for a few weeks, where you’ll need to run out for an afternoon here and there (vary details as plausible), and you’ll stay after hours to make up the time?
Try to schedule them back-to-back with existing dr appts, so you aren’t *really* lying?
I’ve always been able to get away with just saying “I have an appointment” and no one’s requested more info, but maybe your boss is too into scrutiny to make that work.
Ok so related to the church ballet class topic (which I love, sending good thoughts its way), I would like the Toasties wise advice on something. I have a friend who is a single mom of a little girl. Things are tight for them financially. She mentioned recently that her daughter would like to take ballet classes, but she (the mom) cannot afford them.
I do not have kids of my own, but try to do good things to support the kids in my life. I could spare the money to pay for the classes (although Nicole is right, they so seem unreasonably expensive). I want to offer to pay for the classes (as well as startup costs like leotards or whatever–I don’t really know how ballet works), but I worry that it would be weird. We are friends but not super close. What do people think? Is it overstepping to offer to pay for the classes? I really liked this idea when I thought of it last night but the more I think about it the more I worry my friend will be offended or this is otherwise somehow a terrible idea. Thoughts?
What you COULD do is contact a nearby ballet school and ask them to reach out to your friend and say that an anonymous donor has paid for ballet lessons/gear, and then use them as a go-between!
Nicole’s anonymous idea sounds like a good suggestion. Otherwise, do you have some mutual friends with her? I feel like it would be less awkward (less potentially patronizing?) if a group of friends chipped in as a so that it’s not one person paying the whole chunk of money, even if the amount isn’t a big deal to you personally. This is just a vague sense of mine, though.
I don’t know though, that is tough! Money makes me so nervous @_@
Money is tough, but it is easier when there is no actual money involved, I think. I think the anonymous donor idea is great, and this time of year it can be an anonymous Christmas/Hannukah/solstice gift, which makes things easier, too– ballet lessons are expensive, but they are a plausible gift.
Could you offer to pay for them as a Christmas gift for the little girl?
A friend of mine runs The Creative Vision Factory in Wilmington Delaware. It gives free studio space and supplies to people in recovery from substance abuse, as well as those struggling with mental illness. Many of their artists are homeless or in unstable situations and they can come and spend the whole day at the factory the only rule is that they have to be working on a project. Some of the stuff that they create is mind blowing! They have regular shows as well so its also putting some money into the pockets of the artists that need it.
http://thecreativevisionfactory.org/
Speaking as a long ago Fine Arts grad, this sounds so, so wonderful!
So, I’m sniffly and weepy about the ballet dancers at your church and their program for neighborhood children. I am a performer and a churchgoer, and I LOVE ballet. A huge part of why I picked my church is their dedication to serving their immediate neighbors, not metaphorical “neighbors” whose needs are convenient for them to serve, and it sounds like your church is serving your immediate neighbors so, so beautifully. So…is there a way I could help that ministry? I try to donate to a cause once a month, and I can’t do much, but if I could pick up a fro-yo tab or something so some wee ones could see ballet with their ballet friends, I would really, really, really love to.
Prayers and good vibes to that ballet/bag lunch project! I love it when things like that creatively intertwine. I’d like to signal-boost any project at all that is helping with housing in Northern California, for the uncomfortable reason that I once again am in need of same and everyone I talk to tells me to go to a homeless shelter, but, oh yeah, they’re not open yet, or they are but are full and there’s a waiting list. I’m being shut out of places for not making 3x the rent, but I’ve never done that and have always paid the full nut, usually a week before it’s due. So money won’t help me personally unless it’s a job paying more than I can frankly even imagine, but stronger advocacy for keeping people housed, or helping them find permanent/long-term solutions…we need more of that for sure. P.S. I was going to comment on that illustration of Nicole yesterday, but am glad I waited to learn there will be more to come! Very cool.
That dance class & sack lunch program sounds fantastic, and is really the only reason I ever occasionally miss being part of a church community since leaving home/coming to terms with agnostic feelings. (Not that my church ever did anything so cool and genuinely service-oriented, but I did get to sing in the folk group)
Toasties, I have an extremely nerdy, time-specific cause to promote at you! It’s called Desert Bus for Hope. It’s a schadenfreude-based donation drive run by a Canadian sketch comedy troupe for Child’s Play Charity, which provides toys and games to kids in hospitals and domestic violence shelters around the world (and 100% of the money raised by Desert Bus for Hope goes to Child’s Play).
Throughout the event (which runs 24/7 for almost a week), people take turns playing Desert Bus, a mini-game from a canceled Penn & Teller video game project, in which you drive an empty bus 300 miles along a straight, flat, empty road from Tuscon to Las Vegas at a top speed of 45 MPH. It’s played in real time and there’s no way to pause (the start button just honks the horn). Each trip takes 8 hours. At the end of each trip, you get one point, and then get put back on the road for the return trip. The more money that’s donated, the longer they have to drive the bus. Every hour of driving time costs 7% more than the last, though, so it’s ultimately self-limiting.
Alongside that, they run an entire PBS-style pledge drive, with donation raffles, live auctions, silent auctions (all for awesome gaming or nerddom-related merchandise and hand-made crafts), and donation-backed challenges for the crew to act out comedy sketches, sing songs, and just basically be as goofy as possible, 24 hours a day, until the money stops. FOR THE CHILDREN!
This year’s drive kicks off this Saturday (the 14th) at 10:00 AM PST. It’s a great cause and an uproariously good time.
What a small world! This is run by acquaintances of mine! It is an A+ org.
I used to volunteer at Community Legal Services and Counseling Center in Cambridge, MA- http://www.clsacc.org/ – and they are doing some pretty excellent work. They provide legal services to people who can’t afford them: helping people apply for social security and Medicaid, giving people legal advice about renting and public housing, and helping people apply for asylum and VAWA protection. They also provide counseling services for people who don’t have insurance for it and can’t afford it, including traumatised asylum seekers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to handle the application process. It is excellent, and the people there are kind and efficient and win their cases.
I used to work with asylum seekers, but I once spent a week answering their phones, and the sheer number of people who need help is staggering. Also, I came into the internship with very little confidence, and they made me feel great and bought me a cake when I left.
There’s a group near me called the Lowell Wish Project that helps local people and families in need with all kinds of donations. My church works closely with this group, donating stocked backpacks at the beginning of the school year, food contributions at Thanksgiving, gifts at Christmas, etc.
Also, not as exciting or different, but your local food pantry or soup kitchen can always use donations.
I support the women’s crisis centre in my area. They’re falling short on donations needed to rebuild Haven House, they have a 450 bed facility but this new facility – which is already in progress – will add much needed updated space. There are lots of other great organizations in the Kitchener-Waterloo area (Ontario, Canada) as well but that’s where I put my money,
Also, the organization I work for is funding a global fellowship through a collaborative solutions journalism organization (that is incidentally run by women) for reporting on local issues of energy access. If you’re a journalist or know some, spread the word!
Just throwing in love for your church’s ballet program, which to me is exactly how more organizations should be supporting their communities! Those kids are so lucky. Good thoughts sent.
Ahh, I love that ballet program! My church does a lot with a local school where about 95% of the student body lives in homeless shelters and I love it and can’t wait to get back and volunteer. I think there is a lot to be said for helping across the world, but I’m really partial to programs that invest in their local community. There is a lot of pain and struggle all over the world and I think it’s a lot easier to just send money off somewhere – I really value places that put time and effort into their community rather than just writing a check and calling it a day.
Hi toasties! Sorry to post this in the link roundup, but I need your help with a cause I suspect will be near and dear to many of you. I site direct for a program called Let’s Get Ready, and we offer free SAT and college prep to underserved high school students. Most of my students are refugees, and all of them speak English as a second language. Let’s Get Ready gives us very limited funding (read: $250/semester), and it’s up to me to fundraise to cover the bulk of our costs. I’m running a crowdrise fundraiser to cover the cost of a college visit and calculators for our students. We only have a goal of $1000, so even tiny donations would mean a lot. If you want to know more about Let’s Get Ready, this is our website: letsgetready.org
Here’s the link to the fundraiser: https://www.crowdrise.com/letsgetreadyportland1
Thanks, toasties – I’m so grateful to be part of an online community as caring and supportive as this one!
I don’t know who John Mulaney is, but I immediately thought of John Mahoney (a.k.a., Frasier’s dad) which brightened my day. He’s so great.
STAY OUT OF MY BATHROOM JOLIE
Inhibited?
Seen First Position? I own it! 🙂 Arun is amazing, and Mikaela is my hero.
I saw Pina for the first time this summer, and fell in love. You might like it too.
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Mine too! Love the Salt and Pepper Diner bit! BWAH BWAH WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT
I'm waiting for the day that deleted comments are collected and published in an ongoing series. In fact, i just went back to "My favorite deleted comments from the white dude book list" (can't seem to link to anything with this ^@#%$ computer) for a little evening chuckle. We need more of these!