SANSA IS SO BIG NOW. Also, IntenseDebate is having a freakout, we’re on the Mystery of the Missing Comments. Hang in there!
The domestic terrorists occupying federal property in Oregon are idiots and will almost certainly get out of this alive and well:
The occupation began after a demonstration in support of Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, who were to report to California prison after a federal judge ruled that the sentences they had served for arson were not long enough under federal law.
Among the occupiers were Ammon and Ryan Bundy, two sons of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who became a symbol of anti-government sentiment in 2014, according to The Oregonian.
A lawyer for the Hammonds said, however, they did not welcome the Bundys’ help, according to The Associated Press.
“Neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond family,” the lawyer, W. Alan Schroeder, wrote to David Ward, the Harney County sheriff.
You may or may not be following #CrippingTheMighty, but David M. Perry has a primer here.
From Friend of The Toast Angela Chen on her time working on her family’s e-commerce site as a kid:
When my mom lost her job as a web developer, she started an online store selling safety products—stun guns, knives, alarms—and enlisted my help. I was 11 and thought this was weird. But only because, as a mostly assimilated immigrant child, everything my non-assimilated parents did was kind of weird to me. My parents moved to the States from central China in the early ’90s. They studied engineering in Ohio and worked in restaurants so that they could bring me here from China, and I could promptly decide I wanted nothing to do with anything they did.
It took years to realize that my parents deciding to try their hand at e-commerce was not a weird “Chinese” decision, but one of the instances where they were wholly influenced by their new home. The decision was the product of a place where the local companies were so ubiquitous that I never asked my friends what their parents did because the truth was self-evident: They were computer engineers. My middle-school best friend’s dad worked for Apple. It was on her family-discount iBook that I first learned to stream music. Another friend’s parent was at IBM. A family friend worked for Sun. My favorite goody from “Kids to Work Day” was a figurine of an Intel engineer who wore a bunny suit to manufacture chips.
Philadelphia Toasties, start your engines to support a cool new business.
Luc Sante is a GENIUS and his books (LOW LIFE is the best book ever written about New York) are incredible, and now he’s turned his sights to Paris (I think he underplays the difference between 19th century urban poverty and 21st century urban poverty, though, especially for women and kids):
Sante’s Paris, already on its way out by the 1950s, teems with balladeers and immigrants, pickpockets and political exiles, prostitutes and clochards, squatters and Situationists. It features washerwomen wringing their laundry on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, 19th-century gangs who, excited by James Fenimore Cooper’s depictions of Native Americans, named themselves “Apaches”. These men and women may have been materially poor but, Sante argues, they were imaginatively free and creatively rich in “their neighbourhoods as well as their use of time, their scavenger economy, their cooperative defences, their refusal to behave, their ability to drop out of sight, their key to the unclaimed, the scorned, the common property of the streets”.
The sworn virgins of Albania:
Families in this predominantly farming region of the Balkans could designate one of their young daughters to live a life of celibacy as aburrnesha, or sworn virgin. “Becoming a burrnesha elevated a woman to the status of a man and granted her all of the rights and privileges of the male population,” Peters reports.
Albania’s sworn virgins have gone on to become military commanders, mechanics, and other professions that were otherwise unthinkable for women. “People who chose to take on this role cut their hair and assumed male identities, changing their names, their dress, and their behavior,” Peters writes. Today, local laws allow both men and women to hold property, and the need for “sworn virgins” has died out. Yet for the surviving octagenarians and nonagenarians who have lived as men for most of their lives, there’s little reason to change now.
Ali is a college friend, so by the transitive property, I can…sing?
As I prepared to write this column, I must confess to nursing a nagging worry that I might yet again be branded anti-national, this time for committing the cardinal sin of enjoying the sound of a unique, expressive voice that belongs to a young Pakistani singer. Oh well, while the trolls are busy bashing Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson and minister of parliament Chandan Mitra for running them down during a television debate, and as our minister for external affairs announces that it is time to resume bilateral dialogue with Pakistan, I may as well be out with it and declare how much I enjoyed hearing Pakistani singer-writer-columnist Ali Sethi’s rendition of “Umraan Langiyaan ” on Season 8 of the popular Coke Studio Pakistan series.
Let’s get this out of the way: Cord Jefferson is obviously alive, because he wrote this excellent piece, so don’t panic like I did for no reason:
The ride to the hospital was one of the more surreal experiences of my life as I sat awake, lucid, blasting through New York City across the Brooklyn Bridge and down the wrong way on one-way streets with a siren blaring overhead. On the thirty-minute trip, I finished reading the last two pages of Slaughterhouse-Five, a book I’d often chastised myself for not reading sooner. Billy Pilgrim’s predicament, being “unstuck in time,” resonated deeply in that moment. In an ambulance, an E.M.T at the ready if I were to begin dying—maybe I already was dying—my mind wandered scattershot to various eras and people in my life: A cruel thing I’d said once that I might never be able to take back now. My mom singing to me. A girlfriend I’d once had. I’ve heard she works near the Brooklyn Bridge these days; maybe just then she was on the phone making dinner plans with a new boyfriend, maybe she had to pause for a few seconds to let the siren pass.
I am obsessed with this particular piece of Canadian history, but I don’t think we’ve talked about it before, and FiveThirtyEight has a great piece on it:
On Oct. 31, 1926, Charles Vance Millar, a well-known and wealthy Canadian lawyer, died at age 73. Halloween was a fitting day for him to go; Millar loved practical jokes and spent far too much time doing silly things like dropping dollar bills on the sidewalk and then hiding to see who would pick them up. But that was just a warm-up. In death, Millar unleashed his biggest prank ever — a last will and testament that was basically a giant social experiment. By promising a vast sum of money to the Toronto family that could have the most babies in a 10-year period, Millar set off a race to give birth the moment he died.
Marco is healing up beautifully from his top surgery, SO grateful for the love and support of his Toasties, and if you check out his closed fundraising page, there’s a link to a lil thank-you video he put on YouTube.
If you are very qualified and live in Portland, OR, Bitch Media is hiring an executive editor.
I know we have all seen the literally perfect performance of “Natural Woman” that Aretha did at the Kennedy Center for Carole King, but JUST IN CASE:
