Wet dog, cranky dog. Don’t come in the shower if you don’t want to get wet, young lady!
SPIN Magazine is re-running their look at how Live Aid was not such a boon to Ethiopia after all (I hold a grudge against SPIN for running Celia Farber’s terrible terrible HIV denialist journalism, but we all make mistakes):
At first our story was met with a terrific backlash. We were vilified by a disbelieving media, who felt we sensationalized the situation in Ethiopia to sell magazines. Our music industry advertisers pulled their ads. We went on the offensive and I personally did hundreds upon hundreds of interviews, with anyone who would talk to me. Every interview concluded with my saying, “You’re a news organization, look into it yourself!” Many did, and then more, and slowly the tide turned as they began to realize we were right. Live Aid had, through its missteps, exacerbated the already terrible humanitarian crisis.
Bundy has repeatedly said the group is prepared for the long-haul. However during a tour of the site earlier in the day, the Guardian was shown a food storage room that did not look like it could sustain a dozen men for more than a few weeks.
It included a cardboard box of apples and oranges, a few dozen pots of instant ramen, 24 cans of chicken noodle soup, a similar number of cans of sweetcorn, peas, beans and chili, and 20 boxes of macaroni and cheese.
There were also three sacks of potatoes, one bag of flour, another of rolled oats, boxes of raisins, a single bag of pretzels and one granola bar.
It’s not that these things are weird or new-agey, it’s that oil diffusers and candles and scented sprays and perfume are not appropriate for the workplace, and many people will get horrible headaches from them, and they are profoundly unnecessary (if you use an essential oil for panic attacks, there are lil tiny roll-ons for under your nose instead):
I recently purchased an essential oil diffuser for my house, and I love it. I would like to purchase one for my office too but am concerned it might be perceived as weird or new-agey. What do you think?
Tamir Rice and the color of fear:
To determine objective reasonability, we are asked to empathize, to consider what the officer might have been thinking and feeling in the moment and imagine whether another reasonable officer, in the same situation, would act the same way. Is it any wonder, then, that it seems so impossible to indict a police officer for killing a civilian? With whom do we expect grand juries to empathize: with the police officer, who is given the benefit of the doubt, whose perceptions are reasonable even when completely wrong, whose decisions we cannot analyze after the fact but only consider in the exact moment they were made? Or with the black child, who didn’t look his age, who was young enough to ignore a neighbor’s warning that playing with a realistic-looking toy gun might be dangerous yet old enough that he should have known better? There’s nothing objective about this process because there’s nothing objective about fear. Any fear feels reasonable in the moment. And if black bodies are inherently scary, white fear will always be considered reasonable.
I am always so happy to work with the great Nikki Chung, but ESPECIALLY when she writes incredible things like this:
The social pressure on people of color to keep the peace, not get mad, just make sure everyone keeps having a nice time — even when we hear these remarks in public, at our workplaces and schools, in our own homes and from our friends’ mouths — can be overwhelming, bearing down on us in so many situations we do not see coming and therefore cannot avoid. What does our dignity matter, what do our feelings amount to, when we could embarrass white people we care about? When our white relatives or friends or colleagues might experience a moment’s discomfort, anxiety, or guilt?
Obama’s gun control executive action plans, and the GOP candidates’ struggle to be the most outraged by them.
My baby got SEVEN SHOTS yesterday, so we did a lot of pacing around the kitchen together last night:
I am a huge fan of stories about elaborate fabulists, and this is no mistake:
The personal relationship between Alexander and Macchiarini continued to blossom. In June 2013, they flew to Venice for what Alexander called “an incredibly romantic weekend.” Macchiarini bought her red roses and Venetian-glass earrings and took her on a gondola ride under the Bridge of Sighs. Like a pair of teenagers, they attached love locks to the Ponte dell’Accademia bridge, one of them bearing the inscription “B—P 23/6/13, 4 Ever.” Alexander told me that, “when he took me to Venice, we were still shooting the story … He always paid for everything … gifts, expensive dinners, flowers—the works. When it came to money, he was incredibly generous.”
Last year started with fluey nightmares about humanized mice. I dreamed of mice used in research: “frantic” mice, for studying anxiety; “Methuselah” mice, known for longevity; and mice with human liver cells and brain cells and tumor cells. I also dreamed of mice that, as far as I know, exist only in my mind—mice with human lungs, brains, or hearts growing out of their bodies to replace our worn-out organs.
I missed The Atlantic on Trading Places in late December:
Bourree Lam: Not only does that montage set up the landscape of inequality in urban cities, it also shows the economic contrast of black and white Americans that’s necessary for the plot. I’m not sure the racial or economic stereotypes in the movie would fly now, even as a plot device. But what I thought was interesting is the choice to demonstrate the stark contrast: Winthorpe wakes up Gossip Girl-style with a butler and breakfast in bed, a scene that comes directly after a glimpse of a homeless man sleeping on the street. Especially in post-Great Recession times, inequality in America is one of the most contentious issues in the country. I think the kind of contrast shown on screen in Trading Places would make us very uncomfortable now.
Please enjoy these mild and stupid deleted comments of the day, secure in the knowledge that the super-racist and horrible ones on Nikki’s piece were purged and no one will ever see them (one of which expanded “you married into it” into a long exegesis on how she should have stuck with her own kind (people who look like the cast of Fresh Off the Boat, I guess?):
*
The comment moderators are doing the lord’s work and we are so grateful.
Amen, hallelujah.
What gets tricky is when you are moderating shitty comments on your OWN work. I usually remember to say “hey, Nikki, do not go into the pending comments tab for 48 hours, I’ve got this” but this time I didn’t, and it IS harder when people are saying stuff to you, or the person they perceive you to be.
Except for the White Dude book list comments, I laughed full-throatedly and joyously with every screencap and deletion.
I was wondering if she had to moderate the comments on her piece. Thanks for taking one for the team (when you remember to).
Gotta love the “But what about good intentions?” argument. That one sits near the top of my shitlist, with “Oh, he’s harmless” hovering just above or just below, depending on the day.
To paraphrase a brilliant article I can’t remember how to find out there in Internet-land: You can have the best of intentions while standing on my foot. But you still need to stop standing on my foot.
So say we all.
Hear, hear! A round of huzzahs for the comment moderators.
Ok but how long until somebody makes a Kickstarter to send the Oregon seditionists “revolutionary provisions!!!” or some such nonsense, and there’s another standoff over whether the feds let the truckload of Easy Mac through.
It’s already happening. People are posting stuff on FB about it. Braak posted a screenshot yesterday in the LR.
I know I’m a terrible person because my first thought was that we could send them food that would give them terrible diarrhea and that would end it.
My FB friends are suggesting truckloads of sugar-free Haribo gummy bears.
Might do them some good, are we sure they aren’t just really, really constipated?
I am actually kind of confused as to why the feds haven’t cut off the power and water service to the building. As long as they’re holed up there without hostages, I feel like making the building an untenable living situation to flush the guys out is totally reasonable.
the real answer is ‘because they’ll let these guys do whatever until the point where they’ve actually seriously hurt someone, just like they did last time, just like they do with every psycho far-right group’ but also even if it wasn’t these guys seem like a problem that solves itself pretty quickly without you having to go down as suppressing them somehow
like they all got together and occupied an empty ranger cabin at the butt end of nowhere with no step 2 to that plan, what are the odds that they’ll still be there in two months if you just sit back and do nothing
I definitely saw headlines to that effect yesterday, I thought that was the plan!
I saw a story updated today that said they’d run into problems with that — local power officials pointed out that cutting the wildlife reserve off at the source would also cut off a bunch of ranches in the area, so they’d have to go out to the site and cut the lines at that end, which might be more directly confrontational than they want to be (especially if it’s looking likely that they’ll run out of supplies soon anyway).
Thank you for the update!
Well, I guess it’s not a real siege if they don’t starve at some point.
No link to the Spin piece? Obvs could google it but feeling too lazy so typing comment instead
I considered palming that error off as a statement against SPIN, but no, I just forgot, and have added it.
ta muchly!
Yeah, Trading Places has got a lot of problems when it comes to race, but it was hard core about sticking a knife deep in the heart of Reagan-Era Wall Street (and also today-era Wall Street, by a coincidence! Who would have guessed that when you give money to a bunch of rich assholes, they spend it trying to make sure they get more money!?!?).
Until the end of your comment, I was confusing Trading Places with Trading Spaces, the DIY home-renovation show. I’ve been very confused.
Wait, those are two different things? I was confused about how a (as far as I’m aware) innocuous home-renovation show was suddenly so problematic.
SAAAAAAAAAAAME
Guys.
“Man, did Trading Spaces do a lot of shows where the participants were of different races and classes? I just remember the one where they glued hay to someone’s walls. And none of them seemed that rich… oh, wait.”
I know I’m just continuing this OT tangent but AAAAAHHH the hay! Or the one where they gave that poor military wife camo accessories (curtains, throw pillows, etc) because, y’know, it wasn’t enough that most of her every day life was entirely dictated by the whims of the military, and surely she would like to be reminded of that by the theme of her home decor. (That poor woman. She cried.)
OH MY GOD THAT POOR WOMAN.
I never saw that one, but how awful! I will never forget the expression on the woman’s face when she realized she’d be vacuuming hay off her carpets for eternity, though.
Wasn’t there one where they were making a basement playroom for kids and they covered the entire floor with like a foot of sand? Those people are probably still finding random sand in their belongings.
I’m glad I was not the only one who was ready to read a in depth tell all about Trading Spaces.
My inner fourteen-year-old perked up at the thought of learning Ty Pennington’s dark secrets.
A number of years ago he was an official spokesperson for an adult ADHD medication. Speaking as an adult with ADHD (who took that medication at one point) who used to watch that show, it made me smile a lot.
(Also, his wikipedia page says he got a DUI in 2007 but pleaded no contest. Does that count as a dark secret?)
I would genuinely love that and not just because I had a few thrilling queer crushes under my homophobic mom’s nose with that show.
me too.
I didn’t understand the comment until I read the post and thought, huh, that doesn’t look like Trading Spaces to me.
I just watched it for the first time in ages and was surprised how incredibly dark it is (while still being totally hilarious in places). Loved when Randolph is having a heart attack on Wall Street and Mortimer says, “Fuck him!” and keeps trying to make their money back. Don Ameche was great at playing a racist despicable asshole.
There’s an article from a woman who went on a Tinder date with the pharma bro: After the waitress left, we joked about paying $120 for a cup of tea. I thought about making a price-gouging joke, but couldn’t think fast enough.
Spoiler alert: he ends up ordering the $120 cup of tea
And he doesn’t even like tea!
I’m sort of surprised he’s on Tinder. I figured he’d only do the “elite” dating sites and/or Millionaire Matchmaker (if that’s still a thing).
What a wild ride.
!!!! This person is my facebook friend! Amaaazing!
I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING
I mean, that’s really cool, Braak, what a funny coincidence…*cough*….
“Like nearly every other American, I was outraged when I heard that Martin’s company had raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill. However, I wanted to be open-minded and meet the man behind the hype.” This woman is an idiot juicebox.
Calling him a pharmabro suggests he’s some sort of mischievous scamp and not in fact an absolute monster who managed to also appall the pharma industry which is no mean feat.
(Just to be clear, I dont care for her but I do hate him)
“I was skeptical that he could guarantee that, but also wasn’t sure that he couldn’t.” WHAT DOES THIS MEAN WAPO DO YOU EVEN HAVE EDITORS?
the correct name is Pharmadouche.
I can’t decide if that was a super boring article and a sign of how our media is fucked cuz now we’re publishing people’s diaries if they have anything to do with famous people, or if I was fascinated by it.
I feel gross on so many levels about this article.
I finally caught up to the rest of the planet by watching Mad Max: Fury Road last night. I came away feeling rather haunted (giant rock band war rig aside, which was entirely laughable, wtf why would you waste limited resources on that thing). There are a lot of men in this world who basically want to be Immortan Joe. Some of them are in ISIS, some run the LRA, some have taken over an Oregon wildlife refuge center.
(giant rock band war rig aside, which was entirely laughable, wtf why would you waste limited resources on that thing)
I won’t link directly to TVTropes–I’m assuming that you have other things to do today, as I do–but Rule of Cool is very much in operation in MMFR.
Also, I think it’s part of what makes Immortan Joe so bad – as the person at the top of the hierarchy, he knows his comfort is assured, so he’s happy to waste resources (look at the water distribution system to the Wretched). He’s not suffering, so why not just throw stuff down the drain? Who cares about the needs of the many? (Sorry, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about MMFR.)
(ETA: See also the use of bullets, which provides a handy way of comparing the Vuvalini to the Citadel and their allies. The Citadel doesn’t care about waste, because they have access to the Bullet Farm, plus being able to waste bullets shows off how powerful they are. So we get machine guns and lots of shots being fired and the Bullet Farmer spraying bullets around blindly (while also *having teeth made of bullets*, just because). Whereas the Vuvulini use rifles and have excellent aim (see the “one man, one bullet” thing); this sort of careful use of resources is part of why Furiosa can take down the Bullet Farmer’s vehicle in a single shot.) The CItadel is completely wasteful with resources, partly to show off their wealth and partly because they just don’t care about fairness and so there’s no need to ration stuff.
My sister, who has a master’s in Genocide Studies, said after watching it that she found it interesting (/horrifying) how so much of what Immortan Joe and the Citadel were doing actually happens and has happened.
I think there’s actually a pretty interesting argument to be made — it’s obviously exaggerated in Fury Road — but the point of wasting resources like that is to waste resources like that. You build a giant skull mountain and have a personal waterfall, you’re demonstrating your supremacy to the people that follow you, which encourages them to follow you not for the rewards, per se, but for the reflected glory of following someone powerful.
It seems especially interesting to me because it’s obviously not sustainable, and the idea of this conspicuous consumption by the powerful in an unsustainable way in order to preserve the illusion of dominance and supremacy I think actually has a lot of historical, real-world parallels.
Yes! I’ve read multiple studies/ articles/ observations about the fact that, in culture after culture, when men gain access to extra resources, those resources mostly go to impressing other men rather than, say, ensuring food or education for their children.
Yeah, and Fury Road is absolutely a brutal criticism of a very particular kind of patriarchal structure that’s about pressing young men into the service (the War Boys) of powerful-seeming father figures.
It’s such a good example of The Patriarchy Hurts Everybody – the War Boys may not be being harmed in the same way as the Wives, but they’re definitely not the winners in this environment.
I know you’re right, and it speaks to the fact that he is such a horrible person.
Yeah, i guess that’s also true, like “Why would you waste resources like that?” “Because I am a terrible monster and a bad leader, and I want a fucking truck covered with drums and a guy playing a flamethrowing guitar on it, that’s why.”
When he was 32, Immortan Joe went on a Tinder date and ordered a $120 cup of tea. He didn’t even like tea.
he spent $120 on a cup of tea just so he could throw it at a waiter
Yes indeed. I think a lot of real-world dictators would be a good match, but the best example that comes to mind (especially with the cheery news this morning) is North Korea. There’s always the fat leader sprawling in luxury while the people starve, with massive propaganda tools to keep them in awe.
Plus you need a war musician to get people amped up to fight, and it’s a pretty high bar to get people excited in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
yeah true I don’t think a piccolo and a little snare drum is going to do it
coughLouisXVIcough
To be fair, as egregious wastes of resources go the Coma Doof Wagon is fucking awesome. I also took it as a sign of hope, because for all of its egregious waste it was still a form of art, and people committed to artistry, in an otherwise survival-based world. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s ironic that Immortan Joe has a greater appreciation for the arts than most of today’s school boards.
I think I read it here; but someone pointed out that resources wouldn’t actually be that limited in Fury Road. Considering the much smaller size of the population (resources are only limited now because of the size of the population and sheer volumes involved. At least thats part of the reason anyway) things like petrol and bullets would be hard to procure (Petrol expires really quickly! No massive manufacturing plants!) but there wouldn’t actually be a limit on the amount available so long as you were able to get and keep it.
Immortan Joe definitely controls the population through controlling the supply of resources, but I don’t think they ever say that resources are actually scarce.
Good points all, actually. In The Stand by Stephen King, there are abundant resources for the survivors of the plague to choose from, but not fresh food.
I really do keep wondering why nobody points out that one of the chief causes of ISIS and radicalisation and violence in general is young men.
I have been thinking such a thing myself for a very long time.
I will say again how much I enjoy the moderation of idiot comments here. It is so excellent and restful and a nice break from the rest of the Internet, where you can’t read the comments or someone will tell you “That’s just what happens when you marry outside your race.” (WHO SAYS THAT WHAT CENTURY DO WE LIVE IN? (I mistyped live as love at first which was a very accurate typo. (PS that is a real thing someone said to me in real life so clearly nowhere is safe.)))
Also I am catching up on December reading and fucking up my links so sorry guys but READ THIS I laughed and laughed http://qz.com/571151/the-mast-brothers-fooled-the…
I find myself, when I link any toast articles on facebook, reminding people “it’s the toast, so read the comments!!” I’ve often found that the comment section is as funny as the funny articles, and or just as thoughtful as the thoughtful articles.
Hell, I wish The Mary Sue was as heavy-handed with their moderators. For a site intended for geeky ladies, the comment section can be….ungood.
I remain puzzled by the banana-scented diffuser. I agree diffusers are terrible for work, but at least I can imagine why someone might like some of the scents. But banana? Why would you want everything to smell like banana?
I like bananas, I like the smell of banana, I used to like that banana-flavoured antibiotic (protip: cats hate it more than being bathed; it still tastes fine as an adult when you get some in your mouth as you wrestle with your darling asshole), but I don’t feel the need to be surrounded by it ever.
Why is there banana flavored medicine for cats? Why not fish flavored? I am so confused.
It’s the same medicine as a pediatric (mostly? I don’t know adults who’ve taken it) antibiotic, which is banana-flavoured because of some compound in it. I too was curious about this.
I got banana-flavoured antibiotics for my rabbit once, but I thought the flavour was because rabbits are notoriously fond of bananas:
I have vivid memories of this antibiotic (I believe it’s erythromycin). I hated bananas before taking that medicine, and it turns out erythromycin makes me barf, so it’s like the epitome of disgusting to me.
Oh yeah, I still remember being put on banana erythromycin in fourth grade and barfing everywhere.
I had hilariously been eating banana Popsicles prior to my erythromycin reaction so my poor parents thought I was vomiting pure bile.
I’m also allergic to bananas full stop now so it’s like ¯_(ツ)_/¯
WHAT.
I’m allergic to erythromyicn also, but it’s been so long since I took it that I don’t even remember what my reaction was, just that whenever I asked mom was my allergies were when I first started filling out doctor forms on my own, she immediately said “erythromycin”. I also loathe bananas since I was a baby!
Maybe there’s a link. I’ve got my tinfoil hat, just in case.
It makes lots of people throw up! They make a special coated pill version to prevent that, but I throw that up too. I got a lot of strep throat and pneumonia as a kid and in my memory they always put me on erythromycin, I guess because they thought the benefit of the antibiotic outweighed the barfing.
Stupid banana flavor. My preschooler loves bananas and I consider my ability to peel him one and watch him eat it without gagging an act of heroism.
I always had antibiotics that tasted like bubble gum.
As an adult I have sometimes had difficulty remembering to take antibiotics. I asked a pharmacist once if it was possible to get the adult dose in the flavored stuff that you have to keep in the fridge. He smiled and said, “Sure, but you’d have to drink a whole bottle twice a day.” I took the pills.
My daughter had to have that last year, and it is now sugar-free, and it is the most horrifyingly disgusting thing I have ever tasted and by the fourth dose she’d learned to blow raspberries whenever she saw me approaching with the dropper and I had to give her 28 doses. 🙁
I’m so glad I came back here to look through the comments again, as this is a true gift to my life.
I needed this today!
hahaha, I love the comment “Wouldn’t just eating a banana every day and throwing the peel in the trash can have the same effect?”
Yes. Yes it would. Which is another reason banana smells suck, because I associate them with trash smells.
I will actually take out the trash at any time of day if my officemate does this. I like bananas. I don’t like being constantly surrounded by the smell of bananas. Shudder.
I have either an oil burner or scented candles going almost all the time in my house but BANANA? No.
Ugh yeah. Banana oil is one of the things they use to test your respirator fit because it’s so strong and easy to identify. Blergh.
I can get why people want to surround themselves with the smell of flowers or mint or whatever (hell, I wear a light floral perfume most days) but those fake fruit/ candy/ cookie smells are just baffling to me. They didn’t smell good when I was 12 and everyone was wearing Lip Smackers, they didn’t smell good when my terrible freshman roommate was always burning candles with scents like “Wild Berry” or “Vanilla Cupcake” in the room, and I’ll be damned if I have to smell them in my cubicle.
OK but if Bonne Bell made a Dr. Pepper diffuser I would be so into it.
Deleted commenter, why must conversation be safe? Your car should be safe. The medications you take should be safe. Your workplace should follow appropriate safety precautions, depending on your profession. But conversation? Hey, live a little, you know?
Please know that I will gleefully support any disruption of any dinner parties at which I am present if necessary to point out to dumb people that they’ve said dumb things. (This may be why I don’t get invited to many dinner parties so, six of one, I guess?)
I do like how that commenter thinks that saying to somebody, apropos of nothing, “Do other people constantly say this racist thing to you” is any less racist.
Right?! As though the implication in that statement isn’t that they think that thing?
“Hey, has anyone ever told you that you look like Anne Coulter?”
“No….”
“Oh, yeah, well that makes sense because you totally don’t.”
^A conversation that never happens.
My dad was the king of comments like that which is why it’s a particular pet peeve of mine. Like we’d be at a barbecue restaurant where, let’s say, not everybody was white and he’d say “If Rush Limbaugh were here, he’d say this is probably Obama’s favorite restaurant!” Daaaaaad!
Oh boy, I wonder what I can talk to an Asian person about … Oh OK I know I will make a comment about that TV show about Asian people and we can all have a nice conversation about it. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Was reading the militia provisions piece yesterday with all those recent emotional labor threads fresh in my mind, and honestly wonder how many of the guys involved take care of meal planning & prep on a regular basis. It’s such a skill that requires practice, and of course you don’t think of the practice as practice, it’s just life. Definitely don’t have enough information to say “oh obviously they failed at the food thing, and they failed because women always take care of it,” but i am so curious if figure out how much a person eats in X days, and how much variety that person needs before they simply cannot take another damn bean, etc etc, is a responsibility they had before going out to occupy the refuge.
Just….oh, to be a fly on the wall of that planning session, and know whether they failed at food because they had no clue, or because they have some wacky Plan B of drone deliveries from their supporters, or never expected to be there more than 3 days, or…
Excellent point. I’ve spent a good chunk of my professional life dealing with people who lack any knowledge of how much time and effort goes into meeting planning (unlike the Bundy turds they at least had other redeeming characteristics) and it really is astonishing how hard it is for people who aren’t used to that way of thinking connect the dots between “we will need meals” and “someone will have to make sure the food is ordered, prepared and served and whoever is doing that will have to not be doing other things.”
Yeah, the bag of flour included in the list really made me wonder about all of what you’re talking about as well. Like, what do they intend to do with said bag of flour? Is there an oven? Do they have a Dutch oven? Or are they just planning on thickening some sauces?
Then I reasoned: no. They aren’t planning on much of anything. Especially when it comes to feeding people.
I KNOW, I’m so curious about the flour! Also, whether the mac n cheese is the kind that requires milk and butter.
Now I’m picturing their wives seeing the shot of the food room on TV and just shaking their heads. “I TOLD him…” “Oh, I know, honey, if I were in charge up there…”
“What kinds of food count as practical, long-term provisions?”
“Flour, probably. Like the kind that comes in an old-timey sack.”
“Ooh yeah, that sounds like something you’d keep in a conestoga wagon. Now how about other bread ingredients, like eggs?”
“What do I look like, a pastry chef? Just stick with the flour.”
Two monks plan a siege!
Bet you anything they got whole wheat because “IDK man, it’s supposed to be healthy,” but they don’t know it needs to be chilled and the whole bag goes rancid within the month.
Wholewheat flour needs to be chilled? Really?
Eh. I don’t chill mine and I’ve never noticed any off flavors.
If it’s actual whole wheat, then yeah. White flour has a great shelf life and zero flavor or nutrients because it’s nothing but wheat berry starch. Whole wheat flour has the bran and the germ, so the fat in the germ will go rancid at room temperature after a month or so. Your best bet is freezer storage.
It’s going to be beautifully chilled. The power’s getting turned off.
I’ve been smirking over the flour as well. I very much doubt you could get a sourdough starter going in the temperatures they’re going to have, but I’m having fun imagining them trying. *happily noshes delicious home-made sourdough*
(OK, I make it in a bread machine. I’m disabled and also can’t be arsed to use my spare energy on bread. It’s still fab.)
I hadn’t actually known the shelf life was quite that short on wholewheat. I should keep an eye on how long a bag lasts me. I was defaulting to brown flour for a while, but I just worked out a way of getting the bread to behave better (putting the sugar in with the liquids, and giving it the longest delay the machine will do) and it’s rising much better now, so I’ve started using wholewheat more.
Any idea about kamut? I ended up getting a pack of four 1kg bags from Amazon a while ago, it was cheaper. It’s very fine and a nice yellow in colour, so it doesn’t seem like a wholegrain, but apparently it is. It’s been tasting fine so far.
Really, this is how Galt’s Gulch would have worked in the real world. Just a bunch of rich people with sacks of flour starving to death on their own self-sufficiency in the mountains of Colorado.
I like this ending and hereby adopt it as my headcanon.
It sort of felt like someone had used the supply lists from Oregon Trail to pack.
On the plus side, they brought a TON of wagon axles.
and maybe a tongue or two?
…Or they expected droves of women to be so aroused by their masculine, revolutionary musk that they would immediately form a band of camp followers to cook and do their laundry for them?
What’s the over-under on how many of these guys only packed one change of underwear?
How many of them are there? Whatever the number is, subtract one for good measure.
This is a very interesting point, because I was extremely surprised at how badly they were provisioned — I’d assumed that people who ran their own businesses and had militia fetishes would also have gone hard for the Organizing for Disaster game (I mean, you can buy Army surplus MREs, why wouldn’t you invest in that, at the very least? Or work out a plan based on what’s in them?), but their provisioning is literally laughable.
I read another article recently where people conducted interviews with people who owned farms, and the men who owned the farms described them as being one-man operations, et cetera et cetera, but then in the interviews with the women, it was revealed that the wives and daughters were taking care of the tree nurseries and running the fruit stands, and like that, all this labor that the guys who owned the farm weren’t “counting” when they reckoned it, so it seems very plausible to me, anyway, that actually the Bundy Bros have actually no idea how to provision a household.
That article sounds really interesting. Do you remember where you read it? I’ve been talking with my friend about how women’s labor tends to be discounted and invisible, and this sounds like a good illustration of that.
hahaha of course I don’t remember where I read it, I never remember where I read anything, my life is just a haze of concepts jockeying for position at the forefront of my attention
maybe I can find it though haaaannnngggg oooonnnnnn
So, I guess I read about it on Tumblr, but the bulk of the information seems to come from this article on JSTOR:
http://daily.jstor.org/gender-family-farms-invest…
and the interviews that were referred to are from a 1996 paper by Shaunna L. Scott in the Journal of Appalachian Studies.
Thank you! Yeah, I have trouble tracking down stuff I’ve read because it all accretes into this vague mass of “uhhh it was linked to from the toast, probably, or else tumblr”
JSTOR ninja! Thank you!
Also very well illustrated by that recent interview with the Victorian couple, when he was all, “Our clothes don’t need ironing,” and she said, “You think that because I spend the day ironing while you’re at work.”
Even my parents, who have a good marriage — they have a little farm together, and when my mom flew to Houston last year for a week to help me move to Oregon, my step-dad lamented to her on the phone how he has a new appreciation for her half of the morning chores in the chicken coop. Indeed, indeed.
Through my work, I deal with farmers and I have the hardest time convincing some of my coworkers that women are an active part of every farm operation. “But only men talk to us at the farm shows! The women just stand there.” And those women are taking notes, assessing the conversation, remembering the details. Also, did you acknowledge that she was there? Because when I do, she talks to me. It’s very common for women on family farms to manage the “back office” tasks like bookkeeping and human resources. It would be impossible to have a successful operation without some kind of division of labour between field and office.
“Also, did you acknowledge that she was there? Because when I do, she talks to me.”
Bingo. You put your finger right on it.
I can’t speak for agricultural farms, but one of the things I liked about working on horse farms was the equality between the sexes; its a pretty female dominated industry anyway, and women are just expected to pull their weight like the men; so I can build fencing, drive tractors and haul haybales no bother.
But, occasionally farming type men are surprised how much I know about grassland management and such. For some reason, especially contractors who I hire in to work on my fields. I told you I wanted a harrow and roll and this region specific fertilizer; I also told you that the big tractor probably wouldn’t fit through the front gate, but now you’re calling me and telling me you can’t roll the fields because the big tractor won’t go through the front gate, why?
Worked a temp job at a crop insurance company and it was clear that women were filling out the lion’s share of paperwork. And I had a summer job in high school bagging and weighing vegetables–all women. People talk about “farmers” and “farm wives” but of course both of them– plus some hired help– are engaged in farming.
I asked someone on Twitter once how he knew someone was “a farmer’s wife” rather than “a farmer” and he thought I was being VERY UNREASONABLE.
Tangent! But this reminded me of Stephanie Coontz’s book on the history of marriage, and basically, after looking at marriage in nearly every culture from hunter-gathers to today, is that it’s a division of labor. Women pick berries while men hunt. Women go to the market to sell the goods that men make. Women do the books while men are blacksmiths. On and on. It’s just a matter of acknowledging that that’s what it’s about.
I always find this interesting in that I had a conversation once with a (lady) friend about women in the work force and she was saying how she worries that the strides feminists have made in getting women into the work force has just meant that now labor is over-supplied to families need two incomes instead of the way it was before. It took me awhile to figure out that I needed to say that up until the industrial revolution the vast majority of families had both parents working for outside income!
Yes, I have a friend whose partner is a farmer and this is exactly their setup. I think she does a great deal of outdoor work as well, but she manages pretty much all the bookkeeping and paperwork. And this work is literally invisible to him…like he has actually complained about her being lazy and not pulling her weight because he just doesn’t seem to recognize what she’s doing as work (he’s also kind of a jackass, from what I can tell, so that plays into things).
Last I spoke to her, she seemed to be on the verge of leaving, and when that happens, I think (hope) he’s going to recognize just how dependent he’s been.
My farm- and life-partner (a man) and I (a woman) select contractors, service providers, etc based on who addresses me vs who ignores me.
GentlemanX and I use this as a criteria as well.
ah yes, mr inkwashed and I have used that criteria exclusively with mechanics and many other service providers. A+ method.
We talked about this in my Sociology classes. We have this idea that men used to go out to work and women stayed home, which completely ignores a) how much labor running a home is b) how many women weren’t wealthy enough for that to be an option and c) the fact that running a family farm is a team effort and those women were/are major contributors to the necessary labor
I used to spend a lot of time at a local CSA farm with a thriving store, and it was incredible how much time the women put in. I mean, the men’s work is back-breaking when there are crops in season, but the women are constantly making their own products and doing all the work of operating a store on top of caring for everyone else. And that store, which was open and selling stable products all year, brought home a huge amount of the family’s income.
The Guardian article mentioned there are wives and girlfriends among them doing all the cooking. Shame they didn’t include an interview with one of them because I’m fascinated as to what the fuck they’re thinking. I feel a bit sorry for them, but they probably fully support the occupation, so not that sorry.
oh yeah, I see that now, it’s not in the article linked here but it is in one of the related ones. And apparently they’re going to town for supplies, where “half of the 5,000 residents in the rural town work jobs with the local, state or federal government.” Welp, now I want to be a fly on the wall at the grocery store, too.
You know, I was thinking about that too. Except that I was thinking about the terrible MRA sub-reddit called “men going their own way” or something equally awful that is based on the premise that delicious foods are part of the “witchy arts” that women employ to make you (a man going your own way) think that you “need” them and the soft comforts that they provide. The “recipe” that really stuck with me was from a dude who yelled forever about women being lying deceitful bitches who make cooking seem really hard when really, all you have to do is take a frozen boneless skinless chicken breast from your freezer and cook it at 425 for 30 – 60 minutes or “done”.
I thought “Yes. Please. Do go your own way. Clearly you will eventually starve, or get scurvy, or maybe even rickets”.
Hahaha, those guys are so amazing, because literally no one is arguing with them. Go your own way! Do it! Live by yourself in an apartment with nothing on the windows and just eat frozen chicken breasts, absolutely zero people in this world will even try to slow you down!
It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re mad about something, and you keep threatening to run away from home, not because you really mean to do it, but because you want your mom to overhear you and tell you that you shouldn’t.
It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re mad about something, and you keep threatening to run away from home, not because you really mean to do it, but because you want your mom to overhear you and tell you that you shouldn’t.
Hahaha, right? Yes! Use a crate for a bedstand and sleep on a foamie! You are 110% correct that furniture is for women. Lampshades are for weenies, REAL MEN JUST HAVE BARE BULBS. Just stay in your apartment, never needing anyone. I’ll be out in the world, having a good time, looking excellent, and eating delicious foods.
And I especially love the cognitive dissonance required to completely ignore the fact that men totally dominate the professional spheres of home-making, like cooking and decorating.
I have become a rubbernecker on the car crash that is MRA by reading the ” we hunted the mammoth” blog, where various MRA’s are completely picked apart and ridiculed. Not for the easily triggered, but worth it every now and then to see a bunch of men calling MRA’s nuts.
As a woman who is not 100% certain which way she is going, I would like to know more about these witchy arts.
I am not returning to that subreddit, it made me not want to leave my house for a month. But you prolly have enough to go on if you really want to find it.
Be forewarned, tho. These dudes are 110% convinced that the way you are going is to leech off of their god-like self-sufficiency by giving them hard-ons. And comfort? And, like, furnishings? I am unclear about HOW we manage to delude men into supporting us, but I am clear that it is Nefarious.
Cooking has always been a basic practice of witchcraft!
Generally, the secret to spells is garlic.
TBH, the secret to EVERYTHING is garlic.
And butter, don’t forget the butter.
MOAR FAT MEANS MOAR FLAVOUR
Unless it’s Sichuan food, in which case it’s garlic/ginger/scallions and probably a ton of Sichuan peppercorn and some fermented chiles and oh god why can’t it be dinner time my leftover dry fried beef and green beans are calling to meeeeee.
On a tangential note, I have a freshly made jar of preserved lemons sitting on the worktop, waiting to be given to one of my best friends (no doubt for Nefarious Purposes, as he is Male, although a very lovely and incidentally asexual one), and at the same time I also made some Indian pickled limes, which are in the fridge. Both jars will need to mature for three months before the contents may be devoured a bit at a time. It’ll be the first time I give someone a present and instruct them not to open it for three months.
yes, 1000% percent.
LOL. That’s horrifying. I want to know what other sad meals he has dreamed up for himself.
I want to know HOW HE IS NOT DEAD FROM SALMONELLA AND/OR MALNUTRITION.
i just love that plain, badly baked chicken breast is the solution, and not, say, takeout meals, store-bought cooked chicken, burritos, a can of beans, a cheese sandwich, Soylent, chili, or any of the hundred or so tastier but roughly equivalent in effort, $, and nutrition things I could name off the top of my head.
I think the point is not to eat, really, but rather to wean oneself off of the soft stuff in life that make you “need” women. Like flavour. Like, the “recipe” was only 4 lines long. The screed about women and their delightfully, temptingly soft ways that came before the “recipe” was at least 3 times as long.
in writing this, I am now pondering if perhaps this is an offshoot of the Christian aesthetics, like St Jerome
Christian ascetics, surely? Otherwise they would be wearing gaudy crucifixes and painting fake stigmata on their hands to show how hardcore they are.
(I’m sorry, I don’t usually point out typos, but the pun was too good to resist.)
Ahahaha, that is great. Totally point out typos, I feel like I am losing my ability to see them post grad-school (and therefore not reading as much).
Normally I would correct such an egregious error, but is too good. They prolly do all of their shopping at Forever21.
subsisting entirely on chicken cinders is definitely the point on the Venn diagram where the early martyrs and the clubhouse with a handwritten NO GIRLS ALLOWED sign meet
“chicken cinders”
You are delightful.
The witchy arts could be involved there. Truly, the only way to make sure that the witchy arts AREN’T involved is to cut off the chicken’s head yourself.
…wait, shit, chicken BREAST, oh noes, they’ve got them coming and going…
Or dry mouth, after baking a single chicken breast at 425 for a freaking HOUR.
That would at least explain the salmonella 😉
it sounds wierd at first but really ALL food is ashes in my mouth in a world where women can talk back
This… I have nothing to say to this but wanted you to know that it was appreciated.
I kind of read that with the assumption that he’s never actually tried it himself. Like, he usually eats takeout and frozen meals, but he likes to tell himself that if he had to cook it would be totally easy and all these wimmen are whining about nothing.
That is an excellent point that I had never considered before, and fits in well with the MRA attitude of “I am an expert on this thing that i have never done before”.
Every time I hear about this “going their own way” thing, it reminds me of Wayne’s World. “Go then!” “I’m gone!” “…go then!”
Except I like Wayne and Garth too much for that, yes, this.
This reminds me strongly of a story my dad likes to tell on himself as a college student, when he assured his roommates that he could cook — he had a genius plan for dinner, in fact — he would buy a whole chicken, boil it in a big pot of water, and then they would have both
1) a chicken to eat, and
2) chicken soup for later!
… You are probably not shocked to hear that they got neither an edible chicken nor useful soup out of this plan.
Hot Chicken Water, a variation on Arrested Development’s Hot Ham Water, but ahead of its time!
Watery, but with a smack of chicken.
This is why I adopted my friend’s attitude that I was doing everybody a favor on my “I don’t want to cook” days . In order that children learn that dinners aren’t magic, it is essential to randomly declare that tonight’s dinner menu is “fend”; as in, “fend for yourself”.
Sometimes they eat cereal or hummus. Sometimes they actually cook.
This was my parents’ strategy for about 50% of my childhood dinners — “Tonight we’re having sandwiches. Go make yourself one.” I’m not sure this ever resulted in me cooking, though.
Found it! It was on A Voice for Men (not linking to that, but We Hunted the Mammoth have picked a few choice quotes for our enjoyment).
“[…] you are eating in a way Caesar would envy two thousand years ago.”
“Sitting at home by yourself thinking evil thoughts about feminazis while eating a chicken breast that you stuck some stuff into is pretty much the dictionary definition of a life well-lived.”
Thank you for your research!
Oh my god. Straight outta the freezer? It’ll still be raw when the outside’s burnt, and he’ll be dead of salmonella.
How tragic.
I haven’t eaten meat since I was eleven, so all this is rather mysterious to me. My idea of a really, really easy meal is boiling pasta, throwing peas in it two minutes before the end, then putting a dollop of pesto in the bowl with it, with some nutritional yeast if I can be arsed (I’m vegan, it supplies the cheesy flavour – if you are in the UK and want a good vegan pesto, Sunita’s Pesto Genovese is the only one worthy of the name), and loads of salt, since I have dysautonomia. That’s five ingredients. And that’s what I consider to be not actually cooking. It’s a damn sight easier and quicker than this dubious chicken nonsense, surely?
When my brother was eleven, his friend accidentally hit my brother in the head really hard with a baseball or something. Not wanting to get into trouble, they snuck into the kitchen while my mom was out and my brother’s friend, quite logically, went to the freezer. . .and prepared him a Market Day Chicken Kiev.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this, except that my brother and his friend both grew up to be reasonably functional, non-creepy MRA dudes. And even then, their survival skills were probably better.
I was surprised by this too, since my experience with men who have lived/worked on farms or are generally more outdoorsy than the average are actually excellent planners and cooks because you simply have to be. Ugh, these fake survivalist bros, amirite?
Pssshh if they were real men they would just order a truckload of Soylent and be done with it.
Also, how is this quote not from the Onion?!
A federal government official told the Guardian that authorities were planning on Monday to cut the power at the refuge. “It’s in the middle of nowhere,” said the official, who is based in Washington, DC, and has knowledge of the planned response to the militia. “And it’s flat-ass cold up there.”
I choose to believe that in some federal manual that is a quantified unit of temperature because that is amazing.
This whole comment thread is excellent.
And it brings to mind a hilarious Tumblr comment (which I wish I had the urge to turn into a short story, but I … don’t, so someone please do that) about survivalist dudes post-apocalypse living off beef jerky and self-righteousness, until they realize they’re all constipated, and who knew you’d end up having to keep the Benefiber under armed guard, and their clothes are falling apart because “women’s work,” meanwhile the commune of grannies down the valley is living off of delicious produce and knitting up a storm.
o my gods. Someone DOES need to write this!
Meal planning is hard – not just thinking of things, but taking into account what food you already have that needs using up, and not having too much of the same thing over and over, and what combination of meals won’t leave you with unwanted odds and ends, and so on. My partner and I take turns each week to be responsible for meal planning and shopping, and when it’s my turn I always spend a while staring blankly into space trying to think of things to eat and failing.
It absolutely boggles my mind how unaware people can be of others, especially when it comes to scent. I get it that *you* like your mango guava jasmine Bath and Body Works nonsense, but it makes *me* want to hurl. Do what you like in your home; shared spaces should be kept as smell (and other things) neutral as possible.
I totally agree. There’s a dude at work who trails a cloud of cologne wherever he goes. I’ve learned to hold my breath when he approaches. Fortunately, he doesn’t sit close to me, but I do feel sorry for the people near him.
That dude is MY BOSS. Honestly. A bottle of cologne has more than one application in it, buddy.
There is a nurse in my office who does this. I refer to her as the toxic nurse to my husband, since she bathed in perfume that triggers allergies so bad I get migraines from sneezing AND causes another co-worker to have severe asthma attacks, and management refused to ask her to stop. It has gotten a little better lately but I put her in-office days on my calendar so I can take extra allergy meds.
I think this counts as hostile environment harassment and I’m not kidding.
This office also had an open plot to get someone fired who was out on FMLA leave, and lots of comments about how my disabled ass is only okay because I don’t call out. With tacit support from the onsite supervisor. But I shouldn’t have kids cuz I’m a cripple just fyi in case I was wondering.
I am frantically studying for some IT certificates so I can gtfo and afford to finish my bachelors degree. My office is pretty awful.
I once had a coworker who was allergic to scents, and another in the same office who refused to stop using scented lotion. I bought some really nice unscented lotion and she wouldn’t use it. “I don’t use unscented lotion.” Literal quote. And she knew about our coworker being allergic.
Meanwhile my manager–one middle-aged dude who managed ten mostly-young-ish women–refused to get involved. But he was useless generally.
In my first job, years ago, I used to be That Person who would use Bath and Body Works lotion at my desk. No one ever said anything to me, but I look back on those days with great and appropriate chagrin.
I can neither confirm nor deny I accidentally threw out adjacent cube mate’s headache-inducing Bath & Body Works warm vanilla sugar lotion that was liberally applied multiple times a day. It was not replaced. She doesn’t work here anymore. And I regret nothing that I did or didn’t do.
Because I am a grumpy pregnant lady, I threw away a can of Hawaiian Breeze air freshener someone was keeping in the shared bathroom because the smell was so awful that I would literally rather smell another person’s shit than smell that stuff ever again.
I actually hate most air fresheners and would rather smell just poop! Just poop smell is better than poop scented with vanilla or lavender or whatever other fakey smell comes out of those cans.
At least poop smell dissipates! Air freshener just lurks heavily forever!
That is the correct response.
I’ve thrown away the terrible floral lysol from the work bathroom! I don’t like the plain stuff either (might be ok, but someone uses half a bottle at once, makes it hard to breathe!). I will continue to do so any time it shows back up. Would rather smell poop 100% of the time.
The hallmark vendor here at target wears so much perfume I can smell her. 20 feet beofre she reaches me and 5 minutes after wards. And yet (much like being anti hug) some how we’re the assholes if we ask people to wear less scent.
Does she also jingle because of all the charm bracelets she’s wearing? I’m forming a mental picture of this woman. And I feel like she wears a lot of jewelry and her hair is large and full of highlights.
Her hair has to be large, for sure. I’m also picturing fake nails that she click-clacks together.
I think she is the Vancome Lady. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt60XJDki0U
I despise any and all of those scented thing that make rooms smell like chemicals (plug in things, candles, SPRAYS.). Maybe its because I didn’t grow up with them, but sweet jesus, just clean your house; because either your house smells like shit because its a dump, or you’re already super clean and are trying to make the place seem ‘extra’ clean (these are the only people I have encountered that use these disgusting glade-esq scented things.).
And honestly, everyone shits. The spray just makes the smell worse.
I paid my college tuition by working for a housecleaning business. We used the cheapest form of the most effective cleaners, namely white vinegar, for almost everything. So many clients told us how *clean* their homes smelled, that they could never get the same *clean* smell when they did their own housecleaning.
They did not know they were referring the scent of white vinegar. It does smell clean.
White vinegar is wonderful. I buy it by the gallon.
(Did you ever read “Smith”? It’s set in eighteenth century London and the hero’s two older sisters clean everything with vinegar. They sew for the prisoners in Newgate and work heartbreakingly hard to lead respectable lives.)
Fuck yankee candle, too. Everything they make smells like hell.
You are entirely correct. When I lived in the northeast, there was a Yankee Candle near every shop I needed to go to. Learned to hold my breath when passing the door to Yankee Candle. It seeps through! And they leave the door open if it’s overheated in winter, or a nice day in the summer.
I don’t understand how people work there for hours at a time. Does it kill their sense of smell? Do they hire only smokers or others who have a damaged sense of smell?
Here’s a Western MA story for you, a friend of mine in college dated a townie who worked in the Yankee Candle factory. He smelled like candle constantly, no matter what he did, and afaik he hated it but lived with it, because it was better than no job. I only met him once or twice, so I don’t know if it permanently affected his sense of smell, but I can imagine it wasn’t good.
I went through the same thing with Lush. I love the idea but everything smells SO MUCH and it seeps out and how do people manage to work in the stores without killing their noses?
I can’t go near Yankee Candle but somehow Lush doesn’t bother me – maybe they use fewer/different chemicals? But I used to be a Lush junkie,so maybe there’s that.
Lush’s stuff smells so much less artificial. I have to hold my nose around too many Yankee Candles, but if I’ve just been to a Lush store I have been known to stick my face in the shopping bag and huff the store’s smell.
Having worked at Lush & heard that question from customers daily I can promise it doesn’t kill your sense of smell. You still smell the individual products, you just become insensitive to the overall background smell. Until you’re on the train home & smell it again and realise your coat and bag and probably your everything are completely soaked in it and people likely resent the hell out of you. That’s when it becomes unpleasant.
One time when I was a teenager, I was in there with my mom during the holiday season and unbeknownst to me, I had already come down with a 24-hour bug type thing. So my mom’s wandering and I’m smelling things and everything smells god-awful and I can’t figure out why (and I’m unwittingly overheating in my winter coat b/c I’m getting a fever).
I can’t smell any of their stuff now without reflexively thinking back to feeling sick.
The two other people in my office loooove Yankee candles and I can’t stand them but I’m outvoted. >:(
Ummm with one exception apparently: http://clarabeau.tumblr.com/post/94127960982/ladi…
Now if only I could convince the office admin that this means that the bathroom soap should also be unscented. (It’s bad enough that old, funky pipes mean the water smells old and funky sometimes…do we have to have coconut-scented soap on top of that? Ugh.)
oh man, so many places have strongly scented handsoap, and then i have to deal with that scent on me for hours. There is a restaurant near me that has really strongly scented handsoap in the restroom, and you can smell it whenever you take a sip of your drink.
Oh man, coconut is my specific line in the sand, scent-wise. I once had to give away a really nice shampoo that did otherwise great things to my hair because I couldn’t stand smelling that all day.
One of the reasons I never want to work for a local grocery chain again is that, near the end of my time there, they switched to a brand of soap that REEKS. It’s this weird chemical floral thing, and it sticks around for hours, even after washing your hands with something else!
Man, if people just applied this rule to everything in a shared space life would be so much easier. If you have to ask whether other people would be bothered by your personal taste in X, X is not appropriate for a shared human space. I don’t want to be forced to smell your anti-anxiety oil, listen to your music (or have a conversation with you about my music preferences so we can “compromise,” that still requires me to listen to your sucky music), or participate in, discuss, or be visually assaulted by the results of your wacky holiday decorating contest.
A thousand cosmic apologies: I quickly picked up a furniture polish for my office that was covered in construction dust when I started (thanks for painting two days before I started, I think?). It was the most horrific fake lavender/vanilla smell! I had to close my door as to not offend and it gave me a headache & made me sick. I’m sure the smell wafted somewhere…
Also, I have to give a nod to Paddywax because I have a rosemary diffuser thingy (which is great for my sinuses that get clogged to high hell in my poorly ventilated box with no windows) that my scent-sensitive colleague complimented in amazement for not giving her a migraine (that I am also sensitive to).
My (small) office has one scented candle in the reception area (my desk) that is approved by all employees, but is necessary to rid the office of the smell of certain stinky clients. There isn’t really a way a air the place out after stinky clients leave, and some of them are REALLY bad. I burn it for 30 min after the client leaves, then put the lid back on. The soy ones from Target seem to have the least offensive smells.
I didn’t used to be sensitive to smell, but with my chronic pain it’s become way worse and also less predictable. Except last fall when I taught an 8 am class and every single day I was there I would get to my floor and it would be like a solid wall of axe body spray and fake raspberry scent.
I do like scented stuff–I have way too many philosophy bath gels–but I save it for baths at night, when there’s no one to offend but the cats (and since I’m reinforcing we are NOT allowed to pee on the bed, I can live with that if it happens!). And I usually use an unscented body lotion (or at least close to unscented, like plain Nivea or Eucerin) on top.
(also, I’m REALLY grumpy someone was smoking in the elevator up to and on the El platform this morning.)
oh, man, the smell that lingers in an elevator after someone just back from their smoke break has used it…
Agreed, but it means some of the foods I like I can’t eat on an airplane. I once ordered a Subway sandwich filled with red onions, oil and vinegar, pickled jalapenos and banana peppers and then realized the plane was already boarding and I’d have to wait and eat my lunch late 🙁
On a related note, please no one ever eat tuna fish anywhere in my vicinity.
Mine either, or any mayonnaise based “salad.” The smell kills me.
The gym at my university had signs up in the changing rooms telling people not to use body spray/aerosol deodorant, but whenever I was in there getting changed I would hear the telltale noise of a spray can. I never knew what to do about it – do I march over, half-dressed, and crossly point at the notice? I have found that trying to enforce rules when I am not in a position to actually do so never goes well, but I also hate just ignoring stuff. (How hard is it to read the sign and follow the instructions? The rest of us don’t want to have to walk through a massive cloud of your body spray.)
Dude that article about the Italian surgeon is BANANAS. I desperately want a window inside his brain to see how he got from “hmm…I’ll just maaaybe polish up your resume a tiny bit” to “yes! I’ll tell her that the Pope will personally officiate our wedding! And Andrea Bocelli will sing there! It will be at the pope’s private palace! Perfect!” And NOWHERE along the way did he stop and think “hey, maybe this is too far!”
IKR? I really want to know what motivated him, especially considering he has plenty of ways to impress people to begin with! To a certain extent I understand starting with a small lie and it escalating, but this is just going for the ridiculous immediately.
Was that some super-amazing sugar-coated plastic fairytale wedding bullshit, or what? She totally ate it up, too. There wasn’t any point where she said “isn’t this all a little bit much? It’s like we’re in a Jackie Collins novel. I don’t even know any of these people.” Apparently he had her number.
I know a friend of a friend who was conned in a similar way — the guy obviously didn’t tell her they were going to be married by the Pope, but instead that he had this super drama-filled life where he was an orphan who also somehow had lots of money, and he was going to buy them a house, and he worked for the government in a super special secret capacity and had a PhD in Physics and was in the army, and had cancer, and got hit with shrapnel while saving his friend’s life and of course none of it ended up being true.
The thing is, as insane as it sounds when you hear it all laid out at once like that, he didn’t tell us that stuff all in one meeting. Instead like, I was out to dinner with them and asked about his family and he said ‘oh actually, I’m an orphan, I was in and out of the foster care system my whole life, and also it’s a sensitive subject so I don’t like talking about it’ so then I felt kind of awkward and embarrassed and didn’t press for details. And then a few months later we’re talking and he tells me he had cancer while he was in the army, which, why wouldn’t I believe that? Lots of people have cancer, and he wasn’t asking me to drive him to the doctor or anything, you know? The seriously crazy stuff only comes out after you’ve invested months into a person and you’ve accepted their less crazy stories and you’ve learned to trust them in a million ways that aren’t related to the central con. It was actually really easy to get sucked in.
Reading about people who’ve been scammed like that, it sounds like once it get to a certain point – when the lies are getting more outlandish but they’re emotionally attached – people try really hard to convince themselves that the things they’re being told are true because otherwise it would mean that the person they cared about was a fraud, which would be devastating. It sounds very scary.
What terrifies me is the fact that it seems like a lot of his experience and credentials are made up. And he has operated on so many people with those false credentials! I can’t wait for him to go to jail.
And I do feel sorry for her. If I were faced with a charming and smart individual who had been fact checked by NBC and was offering me the world, I don’t know if I could turn him down or think critically about it. Thankfully I have parents and friends who would force me to do so. Apparently everyone she knew just let her…go along with it? They didn’t question it or their relationship either? Even when they were aware that she was breaking journalism ethics and putting her career at risk, no one sat her down and talked through how ridiculous the entire situation was? I feel bad for her and appalled for what this man has done to his patients.
He should have gone the Ben Carson embellishment route- improbable stories with unnamed strangers.
YES. Particularly since they all had an end date for being found out. Like, this CANNOT go on forever, you picked July already. AND WHAT IS HIS EXISTING WIFE THINKING RIGHT NOW??
THIS!! Like… what was he going to do if her friend hadn’t sent that article and she and their bajillion guests SHOWED UP for this nonexistant wedding?!
Also his wife… does she just accept that this is some thing he does on the side? Seduce and lie to other women?
I read that with my mouth HANGING OPEN. Like…what was this dude’s endgame? What did he expect to happen when the day of the wedding rolled around and neither the Pope nor the Obamas showed up, and they didn’t have a venue?
Absolutely bonkers in every way! I certainly feel bad for her. I think the whole fact-checked by NBC plus the fact that he lied on his resume and so many other institutions accepted those lies, led to an illusion that wouldn’t easily crumble by googling or looking over his work history. But I’m still quite surprised that at no point in all of this, did she say “Uhm…. this seems a bit ridiculous? Are you sure you’re working with all these people?”
Related tangent: I actually spent some time earlier this year talking to a guy who seemed too good to be true. If he was as successful as he said, why did he have so much time to talk to me?
I looked him up and easily found him with his real name (ahem) and the first articles to come up were from the FBI and NYTimes. He had been arrested by the FBI several months prior for defrauding investors in multiple startups, was awaiting trial, and was very publicly still married (he and his wife tagging each other in stuff on twitter that day, for example). Obviously I scorched him in an email and blocked him from every facet of my life, and never went on that date.
I wasn’t into googling before dates, but after that… I’m pretty happy to investigate, just the basics to make sure I’m not going to grab drinks with a con man.
Oh, man, Nikki’s piece attracted SO many trolls of all shapes and flavors. In my experience, pieces by Asian women are magnets for douchebags. See also, Yellow Ranger, and don’t say “ni hao” to women you don’t know. People seem to have very clear ideas about how Asian women should feel and conduct themselves, and deal with it VERY BADLY when said women make different choices.
(None of you would, but please refrain from “people have clear ideas about how ALL WOMEN should feel and conduct themselves,” bc we’re talking about racism right now.)
Oh those deleted comments! I have an anger contact high at all the terrible, terrible implications of the “marriage” comment, but trying to articulate them is like being the hulk and trying to solve a rubiks cube: I just want to squeeze it until it breaks.
It’s like there’s an idea that Asian women have to be somehow ‘more womanly’ than anyone else. See also: Asian mail-order brides, massage parlors, geisha imagery, and various other ickiness. My husband says that, years ago, his father told him he should marry a Japanese woman because they make the best wives. And my father-in-law is usually not racist at all, probably didn’t even think of the comment as racist.
I think the troubling thing is that many of the people who have these views of Asian women don’t even think it’s racist because if anything, they think of it as positive stereotyping, and well, it’s only bad if you assume bad things about people, amrite?!? Nevermind that the problem with stereotypes is that it reduces individuals to a flat caricature..
Separate note re. interracial relationships & stereotyping: it’s always been curious (and easily explained, but still) to me that if anyone brings up the interracial aspect to our marriage to Mr. Hieu, it’s apparently in the context of “oh, she must be beautiful” while I get “what did your family say,” mostly from other WOC. (I wonder if it’s because any racists would be too terrified of him as a physically large Black man to say anything else?)
I know! My father-in-law would have been perfectly happy with his half-Japanese grandchildren, and how can it be racist (or sexist, or whatever-ist) if you’re saying something good? Black people are great athletes. Women are natural nurturers. Et cetera. And then there’s the whole issue of ‘mixed race children are the most beautiful.’
Ahhh I find “mixed race children are the most beautiful” so vexing! I’ve seen some tweets from biracial folks about how it kind of sucks for people to have these (more) unrealistic beauty standards for you.
I usually try to respond with some degree of levity and “nah, I’ve gone to school with many multiracial people and some are not particularly attractive” (I went to schools on/near military bases) and then people still try to argue with me about it! I mean, if you want to stick to your willful ignorance..
And then it’s awkward because if it’s addressed to you, you’re basically trying to argue with a compliment. Even if you’re unsure that they’re actually complimenting your looks or, you know, the idea that you’re actually engaging in an unspoken breeding program that yields Beautiful Mixed Race People regardless of the looks of their parents.
In college, someone said something along the “you must have been such a cute baby, mixed babies are always so cute!” lines to a friend of mine, and he epically trolled her by making probably a hundred “MIXED BABIES ARE BEAUTIFUL” signs with his face on them and putting them up in the club’s office. It was both awesome and effective, and definitely got everyone to talk about why it’s not an OK thing to say.
In my experience, people somehow think the “which babies are the cutest” convo is especially fine to have. That is a great response, though!
Ugh, I have a (white….obviously) acquaintance who has repeatedly made “mixed kids are the cutest!” comments about her own biracial kids. Unsurprisingly, this is not the only racially weird comment she has made, including comments about how her kids aren’t “really black.”
Ohhhh god, I know white lady like that. It’s like she thinks that because she married a black man and has black children that this makes her officially immune to racism forever and therefore she does not have to examine any of her opinions about race. I’ve seen her make some really problematic comments. She’s also into that concept that you should not call her kids black and it gives me really weird feels. (Like, I think it’s kind of up to your adult children how they want to be identified, lady? And maybe they do identify as black and you saying that they shouldn’t be called black might give them the impression that you think being “just” black is an inferior thing to be?)
I know her children as well and I am deeply curious to what they think when she says stuff like this, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate to ask them.
Oh god, trying to explain to people that so-called ‘positive’ stereotypes are racist too. Like, I’ve tried with that One Person in my life who think jokes about Black men being well-endowed are juuust hilariouuuus, and predictably, on being gently challenged that person was Bemused and Offended and all ‘That CAN’T be racist, it’s a COMPLIMENT!!’
Gaaaaahhhhh *tears hair out*
Oh the different stripes of racism! From the description it seems as if there was a lot of shock and push back at an assertive Asian woman with actual feelings, instead of the tractable stereotype who should be happy she married white (i guess?) As a black woman, we’re always perceived as angry and raging so pushback is usually of the “SEE THERE SHE GOES/ YOU PEOPLE ALWAYS…” variety. Dont talk back, you’re supposed to be meek! vs. Dont talk back– AGAIN. Interesting theme here– stop talking back / pushing back altogether!
The thing that gets me the most is the massive reading comprehension FAIL. (Also the racism.) If one wants to yap about an article, wouldn’t reading and understanding the article precede said yapping?*
*Yes, I know that’s how swathes of the internet run–yap first, read later. If at all.
I’ve been following Mallory’s heroic Dear Prudence-ing over on Facebook, and it astonishes me how many of the commenters appear not to have read a word she says. Many of them write detailed comments giving exactly the same advice she did, and sometimes they’re the same ones who criticise her for not having enough “life experience”. By which they mean not being an elderly, straight Republican, of course. She’s merrily feeding them lots of letters about LGBT and disability issues, it’s a joy to watch them being forcibly educated. I’m trying to think if I’ve seen racist yapping over there yet. If not, it’s just because she’s been focusing on other areas, but I bet it’ll get wheeled out in full force before long.
I’m reminded of that one horrific anecdote that alexandra shared, about people actually telling her “I thought all Latinas were hot.”
It’s jaw-dropping rude, but also the sheer entitlement of it — it’s truly terrifying how people get so angry and affronted when minority women don’t fit their stereotypes. I won’t ever know what it’s like to feel the weight of those expectations on you, sensing anger and hostility and maybe the threat of violence when you refuse to meet them, your whole life.
Asian women are supposed to be COMPLIANT didn’t you know, that’s what makes them such excellent trophy wives for rich white billionaires. Don’t you WANT to be the trophy wife of a rich jizzy white billionaire who is older than the sun!? /sarcasm
And then he goes around saying he’s not racist because his wife is Asian! *gets into rocket, flies into sun*
Now be fair, sometimes instead he talks about how she’s his mail-order bride.
*brings another container truck of jet fuel to the launch pad, just in case*
Or white men who WISH they were billionaires. Gah. My dad is one of these.
One time, my friends and I were at a restaurant and discussing stereotypes around Asian women and how they play out in dating, and why Asian women are fetishized in the ways that they are. Our BRILLIANT SERVER decided that was the time for him to jump in and give us a nice dose of whitemansplaining — “Well, I think it’s just because Asian women are naturally more feminine.” My friend looked up at him and was like “We actually weren’t looking for an opinion, thanks.”
A person must know that line is racist before saying it. Must. No plausible deniability there,
I really want to inform him that I, an Asian woman, have been mistaken for male as an adult. And enjoyed it! I hope he enjoys my “naturally feminine” hairy legs, too.
Solid pre-emptive anti-derailment. Are you available to follow me around in life and do this?
Scent sensitivity and people getting headaches and allergies and stuff are all very fine reasons not to have an essential oil diffuser in your office but I don’t think we need to go any further than “It’s annoying” in shutting that down.
You’d think that’d be reasonable for adults, but it took me breaking out in HIVES for a former workplace for them to take stupid scented plugin out.
I really hope there’s a fight going on right now over who gets that granola bar. Even better, I really, really hope that Ammon takes the granola bar without asking and everyone gets super mad and refuses to talk to him for the rest of the siege. I am a simple man with simple dreams.
I hope somebody eats the granola bar and then somebody pours somebody else’s Red Bulls down the drain in retaliation.
and then the feds lure them out with a simple trail of M&Ms.
Oh Bre. What a delightful, beautiful, short little cuckoo.
I was hoping somebody would get the reference!
Oh, ANTM. So much drama.
This sounds more and more like an episode of Girls’ Bike Club. I approve of that association.
I was thinking THE EXACT SAME THING.
It is a great sadness in my life that the GBC is not still an active series.
Mine too. I still regularly listen to the CD.
Wow unexpected vintage Tomato Nation shout out! Awesome!
And when it all breaks down into chaos Trump throws a tantrum? “We were rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”
I hope someone takes the granola bar into a closet and refuses to give it back until he is guaranteed all the macaroni and cheese. And then the other people stage a siege or a SWAT-style rescue of the granola bar so they can offer it to their leader.
I’m seeing more of someone goes into their improvised storeroom one morning and finds the empty wrapper, and so begins a The Thing-style investigation into ferreting out the commie homosexual traitor who ate hippie food instead of an all-American manly meal like a steak
I’m hoping for something like The Caine Mutiny: someone ate Ammon Bundy’s granola bar and he becomes so obsessed with finding the thief that the siege goes completely off the rails while he focuses all his attention on the investigation.
“Ahh, but the strawberries that’s… that’s where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with… geometric logic… that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I’d have produced that key if they hadn’t of pulled the Caine out of action.”
I bet it’s not even a good granola bar, but one of the old-school Nature’s Valley hard-tack roof shingle ones. And whomever gets it doesn’t really want it or like it but gnaws on it out of ego and pride.
I want there to be increasingly aggressive notes left all over the place about people not cleaning up after themselves and eating things they aren’t supposed to like a nightmare roommate situation compressed into a couple days.
“Your mother doesn’t work here, JEFF”.
I want this to end up on passiveaggressivenotes dot com so much.
Nah, it’ll just turn into more and more of a pigsty, frog-boiling style.
Ok where is the Bundy Bird Sanctuary take-over fic
I mean besides this thread
My baby has his sixth cold in five months, so I feel you (Nicole) w/r/t pacing around the kitchen all night, and the night before that, and the night before that. Babies! It’s a good thing they’re so goddamn cute.
I found this article (linked below) alternately horrifying and heartening. It describes how Norway is offering classes to recent immigrants so that they can understand how to treat women. I found this article via a link from the even more discouraging coverage of the recent “coordinated sexual assaults against women” in Cologne on 12/31.
‘“Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” Mr. Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police.’
For all the complaining we do about glass ceilings in the West, I have to acknowledge that many women in the rest of the world are SO FAR DOWN at the bottom of the pit. The more I learn the more I want to be an angry militant feminist, not a polite and civilized one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/world/europe/no…
Has anyone else read Musa Okwonga’s piece on the Cologne assaults? It’s really powerful and a really good look at the issues of racism and immigration in the discussion of the incident: http://www.okwonga.com/how-to-deal-with-the-sexua…
Yes, I did earlier. This passage especially:
“So here’s what I propose we do. Why don’t we just start with the premise that it is a woman’s fundamental right, wherever she is in the world, to walk the streets and not be groped. And why don’t we see this as a perfect moment for men, regardless of our ethnic backgrounds, to get genuinely angry about the treatment of women in public spaces: to reject with fury the suggestion that we are somehow conditioned by society forever to treat women as objects, condemned by our uncontrollable sexual desires to lunge at them as they walk past. Let’s do our best to challenge the rampant misogyny which has gone on worldwide for far too long, and reject whatever lessons of sexist repression we may have been taught. Because women are tired of telling us about this, and exhausted of fighting a battle that for too long has gone overlooked.”
Thanks for the link. I think a lot about the relative positions of women worldwide, and struggle regularly with strong feelings of relief and gratitude that I don’t live somewhere where I have zero rights, but also feel angry that I’ve been conditioned to believe that I should be ‘grateful’ for being ‘allowed’ basic human rights. I also struggle with the contrast (if it is a contrast) between my strong beliefs in inalienable human rights and willingness to stand up for those rights, and my refusal to join in the racist cacophony that the ‘only’ way to maintain these human rights is to push out the Other. In reality, I don’t think my thinking is contradictory or conflicted at all, but there’s a lot of discourse out there which wants to force everyone to ‘pick a side’ and it can get exhausting.
I find the whole idea of “classes for brown men to learn to treat women well, like we white men do” incredibly ignorant/patriarchal/gross. Darkmatter writes about this far better than I can: https://www.facebook.com/darkmatterpoetry/posts/9…
Well, yeah, I mean that is part of what I found horrifying, because it does feed into the anti-immigrant/racist stereotype that “brown men are rapists”. But I also appreciated that the police were creative and proactive about preventing sexual assault. I have very mixed feelings. I look forward to reading your link later.
I got that feeling too, especially when the article noted that there would always be a ‘native’ Norwegian ‘supervising’ the classes.
The linked Facebook post is good: the old trope of ‘protecting white women from the savages’ is never far from the surface in any talk of immigration or integration policies. This quote particularly: “Whiteness is the privilege to observe the particular and not experience the structural.”
I don’t agree with all of the post, particularly the statement: “..the West is actually one of the most backwards and savage places to women and femmes.” I understand that the west is VERY far from being utopia for women especially for non-white women, but I don’t believe that statistically it’s the worst place in the world in that regard.
Good perspective, thanks for linking!
It does seem from the article like the classes themselves are being done well, and would be actually useful (“teach people new to the country about cultural norms here”). But of course, I can’t know that for sure from one article. And that whole narrative (and that headline!) is just completely buying in to the idea that the West is some sort of haven for women, and not a place with its own problems.
I think that some aspects of the class are important like teaching different social cues and norms. I know that for refugees resettled in the U.S these things are often discussed along with practical stuff like money, cooking, and transportation. The idea, however, that that all African Muslim refugees need to be taught how to treat women and some of the opinions displayed by Norwegian officials in the article seemed a bit racist and bigoted at best.
Yeah, Norwegian political discourse is SUPER RACIST. Scandinavia is going off the deep end. Or maybe we always were like this, that’s totally possible. But in recent years it’s become more acceptable for politicians to be openly racist as hell. See also: Denmark debating whether they should confiscate the property of refugees, Sweden cutting off its nose (the Øresund bridge) to spite its face (the absolute crapload of people who commute to Copenhagen every day) just to make life harder for asylum seekers, etc, etc.
Yes. I live in a different European country and the level of racist speech that is tolerated across the political spectrum is really shocking to me as an American. I work in a pretty liberal environment but my colleagues regularly say shockingly racist things about immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants. I have a hard time describing it to folks back home on how it is different than American racism but I think part of it is that it’s very direct (not microaggressions which are also horrible) and not confined to certain political view points.
Yep, we’ve learned nothing.
What I don’t get is why they don’t offer this class to women. If, presumably, immigrant men are so horrible that they abuse women and don’t believe women have rights and so on… Why not teach immigrant WOMEN about those rights too? They’d probably want to know that marital rape is illegal in Norway, for example. Which women are being protected, exactly? Rapists tend to abuse their partners, friends and family, not strangers in mini skirts. If this isn’t a racist preachy way to lecture people to behave, but really a class on Norwegian laws and rights, why not offer it to everyone? I feel like this project loses credibility by being run like a support group. These guys aren’t convicted rapists in need of rehabilitation, they’re people who recently moved to Norway from societies with different laws. Norway’s rape laws are different from America’s too, actually. It would be great to have a class on laws of everyday life (money, marriage, sex, abortion, child abuse, etc) for everyone who moves to a new country.
This is a pretty troubling post! Don’t take Mr Kelifa’s word for how women are treated in Eritrea: it is perfectly possible that he is the worst kind of asshole and there is another Eritrean man standing next to him going, “WTF man, don’t implicate me in your gross and self-serving misogyny!” Your first thought on reading this should be, “hmm, why’ve they decided to quote an Eritrean man (and particularly THIS Eritrean man) on how Eritrean women are treated, rather than ask (ideally more than one) Eritrean woman?”
Plus, it kind of conflates “women who dress like / are prostitutes” and “women you can do anything you want to.” If the programme does not also teach that sex-workers also have the right to consent or not consent to sex, then it sucks.
A few years ago, I worked in a large-ish call center, and at about this time of year–as is usual–some kind of weird contagion went through the office.* One of my co-workers took it upon herself to spray scented Lysol into the air about every ten minutes in an effort to… disinfect her air, I guess? and it took every ounce of self-control I have ever had to not actually strangle her, because A) that is not how that works and B) it was giving me the worst migraines I’d ever had.
*the call center in question was for a major health insurance company; they would not ever grant time off for doctor’s appointments or sick time even though we had contractual sick leave, it was a nightmare, answering insurance questions when you’re fighting through a severe chest cold is not the most fun and people are angry and as you’d expect, the ENTIRE call center had it within a week
My germaphobe old boss would wipe down his office with bleach solution twice a day and spray scented Lysol everywhere after lunch. None of the rest of us were able to breathe until the fumes dissipated.
I would have been tempted to spit on his doorknobs every time he left the office.
I may or may not have subtly rearranged his meticulously-arranged desk on occasion.
I had a co-worker like that once! He used to measure the position of everything on his desk when he came in each morning. He had a tag on his chair that said “Jim’s chair – DO NOT ADJUST” and our other co-workers would periodically lower it a quarter inch.
(In general I do not advocate messing with people’s pathologies, but in an office with five workers on staggered schedules and only four chairs…yeah, at some point someone else will need to use your chair.)
Yeah, I wouldn’t call it the most professional thing I’ve ever done, but when someone makes me cry at work then I feel a little rearranging is justified.
Yeah I can’t work in call centres because I get SICK AS A DOG because no one ever wipes down their workstation when they’re sick. The last time I worked at one, I got sick and lost my voice for two weeks, and then because of how scheduling worked I couldn’t get any shifts for another week and a half. NEVER AGAIN.
Ugh that sounds like my employer, a prominent blue for-profit. My manager literally told me to come into work to file a leave ticket, when I had the flu so bad I couldn’t get out of bed, and used that as an excuse to tank my review for the year. (I hate poor shot match years!) I am distinctly grateful that I’m in a client’s office and the client values our health, so I at least can do doctor appointments without too much push back. But… Ugh.
Someone in my office buiding uses lysol spray as air freshener in the shared bathroom. I have stolen/hidden it so many times, but they always get more. It aggravates my asthma, and has caused a couple of attacks, so I finally got all office-y and put up a passive-aggressive note and bought actual air freshener and a doorstop to prop the door open.
I’m going to use this discussion of Trading Places to opportunistically bring up my favorite 1980s cinematic takedown of Wall Street, Working Girl, for the sole purpose of reminding everyone that it is the greatest.
I am here for Working Girl. Staten Island represent!
Seriously though, when I still lived on SI and became an office drone I would sing Let The River Run to myself as I walked onto the boat. How can you not?
That movie has my favorite line of all time (when they’re looking through the boss’s closet and checking out her clothes): “Three thousand dollars?!? And it’s not even leather!”
The sassy sister to Die Hard!
Repeatedly saying “but, ladies LOVE cool James” in a soothing tone to your baby James while carrying him in a wrap is shockingly effective.
<3 I hope you frequently address your son as LL Cool J.
I am really annoyed by the magical thinking associated with essential oils and of course all of the MLM stuff is obnoxious in a whole other way, but on top of this, I was given an oil diffuser for Christmas by my MIL who has heard my “essential oils are shenanigans” rants before, and I guess forgot or ignored them? She is not usually a passive aggressive gift giver, and $70 is a lot to spend on something that will for sure annoy the recipient.
I’m pregnant, strong smelling things often give me headaches when I’m not pregnant, and beyond possibly smelling nice, I will not be convinced that burning essential oils will somehow help my own or my daughter’s allergies unless someone forks over some damn compelling scientific evidence from a credible source.
Anyway, I can’t return this thing, so I guess I should just sell it online, right?
sell it post haste, or alternatively save it and re-gift
according to my hippie cousins in Orange County, CA, if your MIL sprung and got you the “pure luxury essential oils” you can ingest them for a RANGE of health benefits or even mix them with glycerin (i think?) and smoke them from a e-cigarette for… health? and relaxation??? IDK when I was home everyone was doing it.
my office is very into this nonsense and we have a woman who comes into our office and leads “essential oil brown bags” on occasion. some things she says make sense (ie lavender is calming, peppermint is rejuvenating) but she also tells us that she has an oil that cures allergies and an oil that can prevent colds.
(yes, sell it online and prescribe random magical properties to your oils)
I have a woman like this at my job, too. I’m 50/50 about it, because on the one hand I do think (some) of the things make sense; for example, I’ve found that peppermint oil is incredibly helpful to me with my anxiety (I keep a tiny vial of it that I can sniff at when I’m very anxious). But she sells for this company that does all these complex blends she swears can be used for all these weird things, like preventing colds and curing allergies as you said above. I highly doubt that, plus they’re SUPER expensive, like ridiculously expensive.
Yeah, I know someone who uses it for everything, including as sunscreen for her small child (that’s carrot oil, I think).
imo a lot of new-agey “medicine” is kinda predatory, taking advantage of very well-meaning people who have next-to-zero knowledge of basic science in order to sell them expensive garbage that hasn’t actually been proven to do anything.
(Similar to your rants about essential oils being shenanigans, I have my “cleanses are nonsense” rant that I pull out once in a while.)
Cleanses really are nonsense. It’s basically just fasting! Which is fine, fast if you want to, some evidence indicates it might be good for you, but don’t waste money on the damn juices!
And when cleanse-shillers claim these things “get rid of toxins” – have you got a functioning liver and kidneys? Congrats! You’ve already been cleansing for free and didn’t even know it!
I have a similar rant about “removing toxins” and ALSO one about that whole movement about getting “toxins” out of our food or not eating toxins or whatever, where toxins basically translates to “name of a chemical that I find difficult, therefore it must be bad for me”.
I am the “what is a toxin exactly” and “all food has chemicals because everything is made of chemicals” asshole and I am unashamed.
I once said out loud in the office lunchroom that “Dr. Oz is a hack” because someone was touting one or the other of his magical suggestions, and you would have thought I insulted the Pope from the looks of shock I got. And this is a science-based company. Sigh.
You are doing God’s work, there. I think you should keep it up.
Also that Vanity Fair story is bonkers, but I think my favorite part is this:
“As Alexander would discover with the help of a private investigator named Frank Murphy, virtually every detail Macchiarini provided about the wedding was false. A review of public records in Italy would also seem to indicate that Macchiarini remains married to Emanuela Pecchia, his wife of nearly 30 years. Murphy, who spent 15 years as a Pennsylvania State Police detective, told me, “I’ve never in my experience witnessed a fraud like this, with this level of international flair…. The fact that he could keep all the details straight and compartmentalize these different lives and lies is really amazing.”
I would really like to see a movie about some cranky old retired Pennsylvania police detective going on an adventure to Italy and Switzerland trying to sort out the grift of the century. Like a Very Special Episode of Columbo, if Columbo also really liked scrapple.
Which, you know, I bet he would.
ew scrapple 🙁
I have never had the pleasure of sampling it so I have no opinion on the matter. It just sounds like something Columbo would like.
It’s basically meatloaf, if the only ingredients are cornmeal and miscellaneous pig bits. Not that bad.
Would definitely watch this movie!
Venice Cop, although I’m not sure how you could stop a canal boat from operating with a banana.
Throw it at the gondolier?
Re: fabulist piece, Jasmine Guillory and I were like: “why on EARTH would you think POPE FRANCIS was going to officiate a wedding?”
And that little tiny throwaway sentence in which he told a gay couple that Pope Francis would also be marrying them at said wedding. What kind of heartless bastard do you have to be?
I think the guy said the Pope was just going to do communion and confession for them, which is still a heartless thing to promise but less heartless (and unbelievable) than a wedding.
Yes! Why would you just be like “oh cool, sure!” when you are NOT EVEN CATHOLIC? Is that not…an alarm bell at all? Do you think the Pope just goes around doing weddings at his house as favours for no reason?
what?? he doesn’t!?
i guess i’ll have to hire that pope francis impersonator after all
And also like, “we’re both divorced and I’m Episcopalian, isn’t the Pope going to have a problem with that?” and then your fiance is all, “Don’t worry, I’ll have a chat with him, I’m sure he’ll make an exception for us.”
?????
idk, maybe? He needs something to fill up his time when he’s not writing papal bulls or waving to people from his fancy balcony.
The wedding “planning” involved in this wedding is bonkers to me. She seemed to be involved only with the invitations and dress and had no involvement with the catering, venue, officiant and music which seem like key parts of the wedding that should have some joint involvement?
Also shouldn’t they have been doing the pre-cana classes in preparation for marriage in the catholic church or does the Pope marrying you cancel out that requirement?
I do want to stress I do have great sympathy for her but also many questions
Yeah, what IS that? I am planning my wedding right now and I sure as fuck have opinions about food and decorations and things.
That’s what I’m saying. Even the most chill bride would probably want to discuss the menu.
If women were starting a revolution, you can be sure we’d bring adequate snacks, have a meal plan, kitchen duty assignments, and also bring soap and water, towels and napkins.
Adjacent to that, my mum always carries a disaster kit with her, which consists of:
– spare underwear
– hand sanitiser
– plasters
– tissues and wet wipes
– a small torch
– the Swiss Army knife on her keyring
– Kendal mint cake
Probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten too. The name ‘disaster kit’ isn’t a joke: while many of these things are useful on a day to day basis, the thinking behind having all of them is to help her survive a natural disaster/terrorist attack/the apocalypse. She’s not a paranoid person, this comes from an entirely practical POV.
When my sister graduated college, part of my gift to her was a purse emergency kit, with most of the items in that list all tiny and packaged together (minus the spare underwear and plus a tiny thread and needle bundle).
Everyone looked at me like I was crazy, but I just said “ok yeah you think this is a dumb gift, but just wait until someone has an emergency and you can be like ‘hang on I can fix this’ to everyone’s amazement”.
The CDC recommends that every household create an emergency preparedness kit!
I keep meaning to do so but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Good idea. I notice that they’re a bit too precious to discuss having spare loo roll and tampons, though.
the two “women are THIS way” stereotypes I personally believe are 100% true are:
1. if you empty out 3 women’s purses, you can probably hobble together a pretty decent survival kit
2. women will evenly split a shared meal/dessert down to the very last molecule
both traits could be very helpful in any sort of revolution situation.
2. women will evenly split a shared meal/dessert down to the very last molecule
My theory on this is actually that it’s about people who grew up with siblings and know that anything other than absolute 100% equal splitsies results in screaming tantrums 😀
I thought that it was a regular person trait until I recently split a dessert with my (generally thoughtful & kind) little brother & he just plowed through the whole thing while I watched on in horror!
That is inhuman and cruel I am so sorry
YES. My husband often wants to just “trade bites,” where I (and all other rational people) need to split the damn thing in advance, with a fork, exactly in half. IT IS DESSERT, people.
it’s the Correct Way!!
My sons do that – ‘bite for a bite’ or ‘sip for a sip’ of whatever they’ve ordered. I’m like “WHERE ARE THE METRICS????” (I have 3 siblings. I KNOW how to split a dessert, thank you.)
The other day they did combine what was left of one’s sprite & the other’s pink lemonade then one poured the concoction into two glasses and the other got to choose which was his. So I guess they’re not complete losses, as humans, but this random un-measured “bite” exchange thing is anathema.
That is brilliant game theory!
Your sons trust each other. It is beautiful. A testament to good parenting. Kudos to you and Mr Dakimel.
My parents taught me and my siblings to stick to the “I cut, you choose” rule when sharing out food. You have a much greater incentive to divide stuff up evenly if you know you get to choose your portion last.
But what happens if you don’t actually want a 50/50 split of whatever it is? If you prefer your own meal and just want a taste of the other meal, or if one of you is less hungry?
(Only child here, but my partner has an older sister, and he’s perfectly happy splitting the food according to what we both fancy on that occasion.)
In my experience, the split can be unequal, but only if the person taking the smaller portion makes absolutely clear that they don’t want any more and everyone involved in the split offers everyone else the last bite.
I once had to saw an Oreo cookie in half to make sure my brother and I got equal dessert servings, and by God I did it.
Hah. As an only child, I’ve heard the stereotype that we don’t know how to share a few times. In my last relationship, I had a partner who has a younger sister, and he was absolutely dire at sharing. I’d learned a lot of it as an adult, and approached it as an adult. He was still refighting battles with his kid sister from twenty-five years earlier. So it does seem to be a bit more complex than that, but your theory probably holds a lot of the time.
Found in my purse: money, phone, matches, tide to go, Advil, DayQuil, pads, tampons, contacts, contact solution, first aid kit, sunglasses, handsanitizer, eye patch, Swiss Army knife and a spoon.
In the trunk of my car: more first aid stuff, flashlight, batteries, jumper cables, spare set of shoes and socks, sweater, blanket, sleeping bag, hat, gloves, compass, leather man tool, flare, and ropes.
Being prepared is the name of the game.
I had my leatherman taken by TSA & it was like losing a limb. I haven’t replaced it yet because I’m a chump. I ALSO keep a sleeping bag, blanket, & pillow in the back of my car & everyone always gives me grief about it. It’s like, best case scenario, we have something to sit on for an impromptu picnic. Worst case scenario, we don’t freeze to death in an emergency situation!
There’s also a lot of shoes & sweaters in the back of my car, but if I’m being honest, they’re things I discarded on my drive home, not an emergency preparedness measure.
Still…
ALWAYS prepared.
Haha exactly! My favorite is when someone asks if anyone has a “insert object” and I do. When I dig around to find it they almost always ask “why do you have that stuff with you? When do you even need it?” Oh I don’t know, maybe for moments like right now when you are borrowing said object from me. I get such a kick out of it!
My boyfriend tends to stockpile things in his car (including food, during the colder months).
One time, a friend of his said “Damn, I forgot to go to the store and get bacon!”, and he said, “Well, what kind do you need?” He opened up the trunk and there were THREE DIFFERENT KINDS of bacon in there.
He’s in some kind of elevated pre-dad state.
He’s already a dad, so he’s right on schedule!
(Also, he’s really into meat in general, and he’s on a first-name basis with every butcher in town).
I went to the local butcher’s once on an errand for my parents and was immediately greeted with, “You must be X and Y’s daughter!”. I think if the butchers can recognise your child on sight, you spend too much time there. (Or it may just be the hazards of living in the same small town for decades.)
Hah, yes. I also keep most of our camping gear in our car (mainly because we have limited storage, but also because then it’s *handy*). To your purse contents, I will add:
Baby wipes, vaseline, advil, extra bandaids, kleenex, extra socks, granola bar, empty collapsible water bottle.
Together, I’m pretty sure we could take over the world.
3. someone will always have a tampon or pad.
I feel utterly ashamed that I only recently bought a stash of tampons and pads to keep on display in my loo, in case a friend has an emergency. I know I haven’t used disposables since the nineties, but after that situation where my ex-girlfriend woke me at 4 am to say, “Darling, I’ve come on, and I bleed like a stuck pig and don’t have any tampons here, so I’m going to get a taxi home,” (which was, erm, twelve years ago), you think I’d know better. I bought regular tampons and ultra pads with wings, does that seem a good combination? I’m going to get another little supply for my partner’s flat to leave in his loo, I may as well get it just right.
This was shortly before I had to go with a friend to Women’s Aid (the saga is ongoing, by the way, but she’s been at her brother-in-law’s for a couple of weeks now and is generally making good progress), and I was very impressed by the wide range of tampons, pads, and baby changing supplies they have in their loo.
You can really tell that whoever did the grocery shopping doesn’t do it on a regular basis.
It kind of reminds me of when we were finishing Girl Guides and we had to plan a whole camp, and my friend and I bought butter and pasta and so not enough food to a winter camp.
One time a couple years ago, four friends and I rented a vacation house for a girls’ weekend. We bought SO MUCH FOOD when we got there and ate like royalty through the snowstorm that shut us in after the second night.
Sometimes a few friends & I will go on a girls’ weekend, and we have to actively resist each bringing enough food/alcohol for the entire group’s every meal. We even split up the meals – C does lunch Friday, T does dinner, etc. Doesn’t matter. There’s still half a grocery store in our collective trunks when we leave.
I’m betting you’re all (or most of you are) mothers. Feeding others is a hard habit to break.
I’m not a mother, but I was brought up Jewish, and there’s a big feeder culture in Judaism. I often end up chatting about this with people (usually but not always women) from other feeder cultures, such as India or Middle Eastern countries.
As well as generally offering people food, and ending up feeding my support workers a lot (it’s a crappy job, a lot of times people have had to rush out without time for breakfast, or the agency hasn’t given them a lunch break), I keep a box of nut bars in the hall for anyone to grab if they need them. And snacks in my handbag, although that’s more about my blood sugar.
I have a feeling that the Malheur (what’s in a name) dudebros have their wives and girlfriends ready to drive over daily with fresh supplies.
I don’t know about this, fellow Toasts. I have always attracted men who brought the blankets and napkins on picnics, remembered the towels at the beach, and packed extra sandwiches for later. A whole series of them who liked taking care of me in little domestic ways. I don’t know how I pick them because it is not conscious, but they are definitely out there.
EDIT: I even dated a man who lived one floor below me in an apartment building, and he used to come up and wash my dishes every night as a little ritual, sometimes even when he wasn’t staying over. I gathered he felt his way was more thorough than mine, but I am a good cook and I promise I’m not particularly slob about cleaning — he just really liked to do it.
Mind is good about the domestic rituals and things like napkins, salt, pepper, etc. but on the “always be prepared” side I am substantially more committed to having things like first aid kits, flashlights, blankets, food, water, etc. available, which I think has a lot more to do with my growing up in a rural area with unreliable power, a well, and substantially more treacherous roads and weather. Basically, even though I now live in a fairly mild climate and urban environment, I am 80% prepared for rural Colorado winter at all times, whereas my husband has never been in a situation where the water doesn’t work because the power is out. (I at least don’t carry a snow shovel… We don’t get snow here, or at least enough to shovel. But I do keep boots in my car anyways)
Where you grow up is significant. I grew up in the Sonora desert. I moved to the northeast US in my 20s but it was years before I could stop carrying water in my car trunk. I still catch myself hyperventilating a little when I open my trunk and scan for toolbox and … no water!
Whereas you can instantly gauge whether someone is a Midwest native or transplant based on whether they keep a shovel in their trunk.
I still have my janky gallon water cooler from high school marching band filled and ready in case of disaster. What kind of disaster, I don’t know.
i don’t even plan to start a revolution and i have 5 MREs at home. just in case.
My bag is big enough that I always have a water bottle, BandAids, chapstick, a mini flashlight, non-comedogenic sunscreen, gum, tissues, a mini deodorant, hair ties, multiple sizes of bobby pins, pencils, a decent book, and several granola bars on hand. The revolution wouldn’t know what hit it.
I’m never this prepared, but I have surrounded myself with people who are. So I’m ready for the revolution. Or apocalypse. Or just heartburn.
You found my method for feeding myself. I never cook. But I collect people who do and I keep on good terms with them.
I’m sorry I can’t wait for the open thread 🙁 I’m getting a laparoscopy next week to look for and hopefully eliminate endometriosis and I am FREAKING THE FUCK OUT. I don’t want anesthetic, I don’t want to be in pain after, I don’t want someone rifling around in MY BODY, I don’t want to wake up and be confused, I don’t want to sit around waiting forever because doctors apparently just cannot be on time for anything ever, I don’t want to do any of it at all.
Furthermore, my primary care doc has left private practice and I’ve got an appointment to see the new person but I have no idea if she’ll be willing to give me some damn xanax to get through the next week and I don’t want to have to convince her I’m not some drug seeking jerk out to take advantage but I also want to be able to sleep and I need to not cancel this surgery mid-panic attack.
<3 <3 I’m sorry you are facing all of this. Hoping for a successful procedure and minimal freakouts and easy recovery and all the support you need — and the xanax too.
That sounds stressful and sucky. Do you have a loved one or friend who can be with you until you go into surgery and when you wake up? That helped alleviate the stress, irritation at waiting, and discomfort upon waking up during my surgery, so if you can get someone there as an emotional support, not just as someone to help with the practicals, I recommend it. Also, even though doctors take forever, nurses are there and nice and know you are nervous and scared and do their best to help.
I hope your surgery goes well and that your stress and nerves stay manageable.
Regarding anesthetic, you could talk to the gyn who will be doing the procedure or the anesthesiologist about what kinds are available. For example, you might be able to have conscious sedation plus pain meds, or an epidural, or even a nerve block instead of general anesthesia, depending on how extensive the procedure will be. It might give you some peace if you know you will not be out of control.
Good luck with the procedure and relief from endometriosis.
OMG, I had two of these surgeries for exactly the same reason. The first recovery was terribad and it took me a week to be able to walk without pain, but the second was fine and I could have driven myself home afterwards with no issue. Same doctor, same hospital, same everything, but vastly different experiences.
This probably isn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. Anyway, here’s some sympathy.
I have had this done and it was quite successful (although apparently my endometriosis is not terribly severe so obviously your mileage may vary). The wait sucked – they told me to be there at 6 a.m. and literally nothing happened until close to 10. But it was a quick procedure, they supplied plenty of pain meds, and the recovery was not bad. I was sore in the chest area for about a week and had a little issue with irritation from the catheter (I did not know they used a catheter if you were only going to be under for an hour or less and no one told me about the catheter until I called freaking out about peeing).
ANYWAY, please don’t cancel it, the ability not to be in excruciating pain every month was very, very worth it. Also, I think that if you are requesting a medication to help you get through surgery related anxieties it shouldn’t be a problem – my primary care doc doesn’t prescribe, but the ob/gyn performing the procedure actually asked me if I needed it. So you might ask their office if that would be possible.
Heh actually in my situation it was the opposite — my gyn office wanted me to go through whoever usually handled my psych meds, which is my GP. New doctor was pretty good actually (not as good as old doctor, nothing will ever be as good as old doctor), and I now have some Xanax to get me through next week thank goodness.
Thanks so much to everyone for the advice and commiseration. I really really needed it today. I’ll check in next week after the surgery to let you all know how it goes!!!
Bring this up to the nurse in your surgeon’s office (you can usually call and ask for the nurse to call you back) . Also bring it up the day before your surgery when you have the pre-surgery-checkup to make sure you aren’t running a fever. Paradoxically, people who are very anxious are actually harder to wake up after the surgery and experience more side effects from it, so anesthesiologists want you to be calm and relaxed. Plus you will heal better the less stressed you are.
Toasties, my husband and I are about to put in an offer on a house. I AM TERRIFIED. PLEASE HOLD ME.
BEST OF LUCK BEST OF LUCK BEST OF LUCK GO GET EM! 😀
YOU CAN DO IT
THAT IS SO EXCITING!
YOU CAN DO IT! ALL THE SUPPORT!
I just did that today! Like a few hours ago! I am sending you good vibes and cheerful solidarity! I hope it works out 🙂
Good luck! Sending you all my positive house buying vibes.
I’m just going to leave these links here in case anyone needs a little Hamilton/TFA crossover to get through the day:
Helpless
The Schuyler Droids
The #Force4Ham hashtag on twitter was also delightful https://twitter.com/ghostwritingcow/status/681882…
Hamilton/TFA is my new favorite thing. Did you see the one post with Seanan McGuire’s General Organa/Right Hand Man fusion?
I have not! I’d love a link if you have it handy.
Here it is!
http://neuroticchihuahua.tumblr.com/post/13645599…
HOLY GOD
BY WHICH I MEAN I AM CRYING IN JOYFUL FASHION
IS IT NOT GLORIOUS
I just got home and was able to watch that Helpless video and I’m dying
Does anyone really think of oil diffusers as new-agey? Or is it the letter writer’s secret, fond ambition that they will be perceived as new-agey?
Depends on the attititude you bring to the diffuser, I think. If the owner is going on about the beneficial qualities of the various oils then yes, I’d say it’s new-agey.
Hippie, certainly, but not necessarily New Age-y. I know a buuuunch of pretty Christian women who are into essential oils and who would strongly object to any sort of New Age philosophy. I think the “natural cures” thing transcends a lot of categories.
Yeah, not so much new-agey as hippie and complete nonsense?
I think complete non-sense covers it nicely, although I have some highly educated friends who swear it helps their kids with everything from allergies to nightmares to anger issues to algebra homework.
I have always thought of them as “stuff moms put in the guest bathroom along with extra folded hand towels” rather than anything spiritual or medicinal.
I guess it depends if you think they’re some type of magic cure (for allergies, etc.), or if you just keep them around because you like the smell.
I am the white mom of black/white biracial children. My parents love my children (their first grandchildren) unreservedly and with their entire hearts, that has always been extremely clear. Even so, their ignorance is astonishing. Truly.
My parents like to think they are “colorblind.” My mom especially seems to think that her cape of white privilege somehow extends to her very large and muscular teenage grandson and that all of the horrible things one hears about in the news happening to young men of color are of no concern to our family. We don’t talk about them anymore, she and I.
When “Home” was released this year, my teen daughter was delighted by it because the main character looked so much like her, a rarity. I mentioned to my mom at the start of holiday season that the DVD would probably be a welcome gift. So one afternoon my mom calls me. She’s out shopping with a friend and she wants to confirm she has the right movie. It’s called “Home” and on the cover there is a picture of a … she pauses for what I assume is the right word. There is a picture of a colored girl, and a purple alien. What do I say? Over the phone, to my mother, as she is standing in a store enjoying the afternoon with her friend? Colored. A girl who looks just like her beloved granddaughter. My mother, in 2015.
“Yes mom, that’s the one.”
OH MY GOD REALLY. I just cringed for you.
Is your mom using it in the South African “somewhere between White and 100% Black” sense or the gross Southern sense? Because if it’s the second, ugh.
Unfortunately, in her efforts to be “colorblind” I’m afraid she hasn’t received the memo that we’re not using that terminology anymore, I guess. I’ve never heard her use that term before in reference to anyone, fwiw, so it really was a shock.
On a tangent: I’ve had “Towards the Sun” from the Home sound track on repeat for the last couple months.
Thanks to everyone who shared “Hey no, breasts are naturally lumpy and also benign cysts are totally a thing” yesterday. Mammogram went well (not a painful as I’d feared); technician thinks it’s tissue, not “a lump”. The Toasts rocks, you made yesterday way less scary.
Soothing cranky babies in idiosyncratic ways: my daughter was very fond of being sung:
various Kids in the Hall tunes, particularly “These are the Daves I Know” and the Kraft dinner song.
the theme song for the 1990’s British Robin Hood show
Don’t You Want Me Baby
Tainted Love
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
So glad to hear that – I was hoping you’d join in to let us know how it went!
So glad to hear it!
A+, would totally sing the Daves song to a baby.
Also, glad to hear the mammogram went well. Have you had one before? If not, then at least having this one will give you a baseline, so if there are changes in the future (fingers crossed for there not being), they’ll be able to see them.
I mean, who isn’t soothed by The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?
(Glad the mammogram went well!)
Was coming in to say this exact thing re: Edmund Fitzgerald. Gordon Lightfoot has a serious ability to make a cold wet tragedy incredibly relaxing, why IS that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utp2XYEPnYY
This has made me happier than finding an NCIS marathon while channel surfing on a rainy November Saturday.
Gordon Lightfoot must be completely unflappable. He could deliver the most devastating news and we’d still feel all safe and warm in the world. It’s like watching Peter Jennings.
(And between those two comments, I have identified myself as a 70-year-old woman.)
That is a very Canadian-baby playlist right there! Glad to hear the boob-smoosh went well.
Vicariously relieved! I know a woman who plays her complete set of Gordon Lightfoot CDs for her colicky grandchild. Granny sings along, of course. Old Gordy gets baby to sleep every time.
so glad it went well!
My brother reportedly was only soothed by The Streets of Laredo. Babies have the morbs!
Esquire responded to Rebecca Solnit’s essay about their book list with a new list. And they asked only women writers to make the recommendations.
http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/news/g2544/80-bo…
“What can we say? We messed up. Our list of “80 Books Every Man Should Read,” published several years ago, was rightfully called out for its lack of diversity in both authors and titles. So we invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create a new list. Each participant made 10 picks. It’s a new year, a new Esquire.com. We’re looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.”
A funny thing is that sometimes if you open that link, the ad is for “50 Movies Every Man Should Watch.”
So. Mixed blessings, I guess.
I just got “12 Shoes Every Man Needs” lolll
GOOD. I like when people admit to screw-ups without resorting to “sorry you were offended.”
ETA: After reading the first few books on the new list, I started getting worried that it would still be too male-centric, even with the recommendations coming from women. So I went through and tallied them up, and happily, that did not prove to be the case. At a rough count, it’s 20 books with male authors to 60 with female authors. (And if I recall correctly, ALL of Roxane Gay’s picks were by women. You go, Roxane.)
I liked that the women recommended books by both women and men. That way, there wasn’t this artificial divide created between men’s literature and women’s literature. We can all read books by each other! And it will be OK!
RE: Essential oils, the Sawbones podcast did a great episode on aromatherapy and essential oils (spoiler alert, they’re… pretty bullshit.)
http://www.maximumfun.org/sawbones/sawbones-aroma…
ohhh this podcast is RIGHT up my alley. Thank you for sharing!!
I can’t bring myself to stop hate-reading the Toronto Life real estate section (despite not having any interest in buying a house or living in Toronto) so I would like to share the pain by having you all check out this TOTALLY BONKERS MANSION.
Like, as much as I would love to be ludicrously wealthy and be able to custom design every aspect of my unreasonably large home, that place is just too much. Mirrored octagonal whirlpool tub? What is the point of the huge “rec room” in the basement that’s totally empty except for a very uncomfortable-looking chaise longue and a bunch of wire sculptures?
(Most bonkers part: how the piece tries to frame the fact that Tom Cruise took a bath in one of the mansion’s tubs 27 years ago as a selling point.)
That white plush carpet is giving me anxiety. But I guess if I have 9 million to splash out on a gaudy house I probably have money to maintain that.
This whole thing is amazing, but the correction at the bottom really tops it off
This post originally said, incorrectly, that 36 Lowther’s driveway is heated.
There’s so much going on with this house that a heated driveway seemed like something it might actually have.
I am DYING to know who lives there now.
That is just really a lot of…. a lot.
I kind of love it, but not $9.5 million love it. Then again, I don’t love anything that much.
It’s exactly what I would choose, were I an eccentric gazilionaire.
I need that floor, tho.
Aaaaaaah, and the correction! Bestest.
That loft area though.
That bathroom is definitely bigger than my living room. Also, the loft space looks bigger than my entire apartment.
I… kinda like it? It would look a lot less crazy once you take all the paintings down. I quite like the inlaid and painted floors.
I lived around the corner from this place for three years! It is indeed a totally crazy place, made crazier by the fact that it’s a few doors down from a very rattle-trap student housing co-op and directly beside a school/daycare. Hope those buyers enjoy screaming!
omg I walked by that house yesterday! Totally coincident and by accident and I wouldn’t have remembered at all except that I was like “wtf why is there a giant disco ball resting on a Greek column-inspired pedestal in the front window” (visible in the first photo, of the living room).
This place is like a block from the Whole Foods, so. That may provide some context.
I love the “sunroom”, which has a chandelier and an enormous window with a view of a brick wall.
*What is the point of the huge “rec room” in the basement that’s totally empty except for a very uncomfortable-looking chaise longue and a bunch of wire sculptures?*
orgy room. totes.
It’s. . .actually not as bad as I thought it would be from the outside, but I grew up in a super-pricy Chicago suburb now filled with monstrosities on the sites of teardowns from decent looking houses. Like, five different styles of columns scattered at random along the facade, three types of gables, garish.
Also, not gonna lie, I covet that tub, in spite of Tom Cruise. Also, way to phrase it in the grossest way possible!
“Tom Cruise’s scrawny naked ass was here.”
Am I seeing giant scissors leaning against the tree in the last pic?
omg
– It’s fun to contemplate Trading Places, especially as it’s another example of a movie that was originally written for someone else (Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor), but that Eddie Murphy made his own; 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop also fall into this category (the latter was originally written for Sylvester Stallone, of all the people). Murphy, at that point, was still very much the guy who wrote and starred in the SNL short film “White Like Me”, and some of that comes through in these early roles.
I’d have to disagree with this bit from the Atlantic piece, though:
The idea that money was the cure to all the issues inherent to a lifetime of poverty or that all people, divested of their money and status would become violent criminals was, yet again, gross.
I don’t think that that’s justified by the movie. The two elderly brothers want to pretend that it’s so, but they’re pretty clearly shown to be rich, bored, racist assholes who will fuck with people’s lives for the hell of it, so it’s not as if they’re really conducting a valid social experiment. That’s just their justification, and it’s a shallow one, and self-refuted when they reveal why they won’t let Valentine keep his job.
– I approve of that Band-Aid piece, as I’ve sometimes myself had problems with the sort of assumed sainthood of anyone involved in it and some of the side effects, such as the reactions to Prince for his trying to negotiate his participation in “We Are the World” (the future Glyph had been doing charity fundraising for food banks as part of his Purple Rain tour for months before Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones put together their little recording session after an awards show and tried to relegate Prince, who was arguably more popular than Jackson at the moment, to a spot in the chorus).
WRT giving Celia Farber a soapbox, yeah, that sort of reflexive contrarianism will eventually bite you in the ass. Bob Guccione Jr. was trying to eat Rolling Stone’s lunch with Spin every bit as much as his dad was trying to eat Playboy’s with Penthouse, and Junior was no more successful in the end than his old man. I will say–and please take this in the context of the italicized qualifications to follow–that there might have been some reason to look at alternative hypotheses for AIDS, that early in the epidemic, and Peter Duesberg was and is a legitimate researcher when he sticks to his bailiwick (oncology). Needless to say, by the time Farber published her piece in Harper’s, that was no longer the case.
– I’m acquainted with some of the people who were involved in the attempt to transplant the artificial trachea in the girl who later died, and I would very much like to see a very thorough investigation into Dr. Macchiarini’s work. There’s something really disturbing about someone who not only lies about his credentials but perpetuates a cruel hoax on, of all the fucking people, a journalist–how far was he going to take the deception? Did he plan on staging a false wedding and hiring impersonators to play Obama and the Pope?–and who knows what else he faked.
– If someone brought a scent diffuser to work, I would not take it and throw it in the trash; I would take it and throw it in the river. It’s a big river.
Oh my God, it’s THAT Italian surgeon? *reads article*
Yep, this internationally renowned genius seems to be the same trachea guy who turned my university upside down because his marvellous surgery failed, and now the university and its adjacent hospital are trapped in a legal battle to the death with each other about whose employee (i.e. whose responsibility) he was. And then he was accused of academic dishonesty, but the university (controversially) acquitted him recently.
And he’s a con man? Great. Great.
Ooh, “I may be splitting hairs”! Another great one to add to the list of things literally every man-written opinion that you should not bother to read contains at least one of.
I suppose that claiming to be bff’s with the pope, falsifying certifications, and inviting Kenny Rogers to your fake wedding can be excused. But this, “she saw Macchiarini, seemingly in slow motion, unaware that he was being observed, cross the street with the bottle of wine. He tossed it into a trash can.”, that is inexcusable, sir!
Happy Epiphany, everyone! I admit I’m not religious and am mostly just excited about the start of King Cake season.
I follow WWOZ on social media and wish I were still in the land of the King Cake.
Today is actually my wedding anniversary, since a) it fit into the “pack my stuff and move across the country” schedule and b) I love the feeling of having epiphanies. I should get husband to celebrate with king cake, y/y.
It is always a good time for king cake!
Can anyone in health care help me respond to a FB friend whose deal re: executive actions is “But loosening HIPAA for this will make people think I [therapist] will violate their privacy and stigmatize mental illnesses!”
I pointed out that–as far as I can tell, Google brings up fucking Breitbart every time–the standard for reporting is still “danger to self or others” rather than “diagnosed with a specific condition”, this just makes sure NICS/dealers get that info, and she replied with how it’s not her job to call 27 different agencies.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness has a good rundown- https://www.nami.org/About-NAMI/NAMI-News/Mental-…
From what I can tell the HIPPA stuff hasn’t been spelled out yet and it is not yet certain that people receiving disability will be prohibited from buying guns.
Thank you!
Y’all I’m finally reading Goodbye, Mr. Chips and I can’t even. I am a sucker for this sort of sentimental writing.
“One granola bar”: So, the Guardian thinks that food is enough to sustain a dozen men for a few weeks. PLEASE. What the reporter listed could maybe sustain a dozen Britishers for a few weeks, or a French family of four for about 8 months, but rural white American males? That sounds like a partial shopping list for a light summer picnic.
Also, these men apparently have never had to shop for food, because I notice they haven’t stored any fat (I mean, you know, outside). That’s a grave omission. Everything they eat will have to be boiled and will taste awful. (Bet you dollars to donuts they forgot the salt and pepper, too.) This is especially bad considering how accustomed these guys are to fried foods. No milk, either, so that mac&cheese is useless. And speaking of boiling things, have they stocked up on water? Because the big, bad government will surely turn that thing off, and the pristine brook nearby almost certainly has parasites. Also, what about fuel?
I knew comments were missing, but realizing yesterday that the comments had disappeared for the truly excellent
“Books Literally All White Men Own” and the followup about deleted comments was a blow. That was some excellent work. Also the “If Prince Harry Were Your Boyfriend” comments are gone but ” Gwyneth Paltrow” survived. Gwyneth always survives.
(shudders reflexively)
Mik is very powerful
Sansa pictures give me such pure joy. Thanks for posting them.
Toasts, I need help. My relatively clued-in but still predominantly-male department has our monthly staff meeting tomorrow, and the director has asked that we all read Why Companies Should Embrace Intelligent Disobedience in advance of the meeting.
The article describes examples in which airline crew members tried to raise problems, pilots blew them off, and then the plane crashed. The conclusion is that the crew members need to speak up further. But … it seems to me that gender and communication styles just *might* be a factor here, no? But the article doesn’t address it.
Does anyone have anything that would speak to the gender issues that are almost certainly at play here? I see a lot of short little “why are we teaching women to be more assertive, where are the listening classes for men” things on Tumblr, but I need something more substantial. I’d like to reply to the email with something else for folks to read, or at least have something to back me up if (when! when) I speak up in the meeting.
I usually find that with arguments out that, you first have to prove to your audience that there is a problem/disparity in the first place, before even talking about ways to address it. Otherwise, some jerk is probably going to be like “I just don’t think it’s TRUE that there are negative consequences for women speaking up, it’s all in your head!”
Some quick googling led me to these studies about how female vs. male employees are perceived when they speak up in the workplace (spoiler: women are penalized more for being assertive!).
I applaud your approach to this situation. But I want to remind you that, at any point, you can choose to disengage. Especially if it begins to cost you too much energy. Consider your audience; would it be casting pearls before swine? I trust your judgment and you have my support no matter what you choose.
There are some very good articles out there. Unfortunately, today is not my day to find them. Here’s a couple that may be adequate to get you started.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405270230447…
As the plane continued down and reached about 1,000 feet altitude, according to board documents, the co-pilot saw that the sink rate was still too high and issued a verbal warning four times about “sink rate.” But he didn’t explicitly call to abandon the approach.
At that point, according to experts, the crew had adequate time to correct the trajectory or decide to climb away from the strip.
But according to a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, there was no verbal response or discussion of the warning. At the same time, the flying pilots routinely responded to air-traffic controllers on the radio that they understood they had been cleared to land.
Instead of talking about their options or calling to go around for another attempt, according to the board, Lee Jung Min, the instructor captain, proceeded with the landing checklist and pushed ahead with the approach. The transcript shows pilots communicating in single-word snippets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fairchild_Air_… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_8… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_di…
Here’s another good one. http://www.publicspeakingtoolkit.com/ethnic-theor…
This is very interesting to me. I wonder if you couldn’t find things on how Amazon has embraced that speak-against-bad-ideas-without-regard-for-the-person-putting-them-forth philosophy and how, while its intention looks very noble from the perspective of execs magnanimously sanctioning dissent, it’s led to toxic norms of discussion… I think articles on it must exist (beyond The Really Famous one in the NYT) because I have half-baked memories of reading them.
Here’s one about salary negotiations: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf
When I read the oil diffuser thing yesterday, I could not think of why it was a problem until I googled “oil diffuser.” Apparently the little jar with oil in it with sticks poking out THAT DOESN’T WORK A LICK is called a different thing.
Also I don’t even want kids, but now I want to at least meet a baby names James so he can get fussy and I can calm him with that. Brilliant.
Is it just me, or did all the comments vanish on a lot of old pieces? If I check my IntenseDebate account, my comments on, say, the “A Report on Alexander Hamilton” piece are still archived, but the piece itself won’t display any old comments. Half the joy of reading my favorite Toast pieces is looking through the comments, so I hope this is easy to fix.
That happened sometime over New Year’s. All the comments on the Comments On Every Recipe are gone, too 🙁
Okay, so, I also watched Fury Road over the weekend, and…
…guys, I HATED it.
It just maybe didn’t “hit” me right, or something, but I did not understand why I was supposed to care about anything that was going on, there was nothing to give me any background (I saw the Mad Max movies once in high school, and they were already 15 years old at that point, it seems odd that I’d need to know ins and outs of plot in order for this movie to make sense), it just dove into some blow-’em-up shit that I had no idea why was happening, and while Furiosa was… okay? I guess? it still felt to me like the whole movie was about how convenient it was for Max that she was driving across the desert, and how lucky the women were that Max was there to think of how to get back to where they started (???) and honestly we turned it off with about 40 minutes to go because it was so completely disappointing to both of us. Does something super-awesome happen in the last 40 minutes? Who knows, I couldn’t be bothered to find out.
This is so, so deeply sad to me. I really, really wanted to love it as much as you all seem to, and I’m still honestly wondering if I’m just missing something, but based on what I saw I have no desire to give it a second chance.
I shall hide in a cave now.
The last 40 minutes of the movie is just the previous 80 minutes run backwards at double speed. I am not shitting you.
Look I fucking loved Fury Road because Roadwarrior and Beyond Thunderdome’s aesthetic is so so deeply imprinted on me from childhood and I love good inventive action movies and car chases. That’s all it is though.
It’s fine! People are allowed to have different opinions about- *breaks down and sobs*
I would recommend finishing it, as I think the ending is very important, but I realise things are Not For Everybody. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it!
I also think the last 40 minutes are the pinnacle (really, everything from the vuvalini on), but if you didn’t like the rest I wouldn’t hold my breath about you suddenly coming around at the end.
Not all things are for everyone.
I saw Fury Road in the theater three times and haven’t seen any of the ones before it. I honestly don’t know if I’m missing anything. I was familiar with the idea that Mad Max is about car chases and shit blowing up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, that’s it.
That said: It’s okay if you don’t like it! Tastes differ. I came out of that movie the first time feeling really excited and happy and knowing I would see it again, and the girl exiting the movie in front of me with her boyfriend said to him, “That’s the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen.” Judging by the reactions of my friends, either it grabs you and you love it, or it doesn’t and you can’t figure out why other people like it. I haven’t see anyone in between.
I was listening to NPR this morning about the lead in the water in Flint, Michigan, and I was already furious, and then one of the local activists/mother of three sick kids said that insurance doesn’t cover the lead detoxing treatments or their environmental medicine specialist, and I felt like shit, because the lawyers I work for are the kinds of people who defend those insurance policies and decisions.
I seriously am not defending the insurance companies’ decisions but it’s 100% because chelation therapy is something that’s been co-opted by “alternative medicine” to treat “toxins” and woo-woo shit like that, and the policies/software don’t have a mechanism to do anything except look at a procedure code and reject it out of hand because who gets lead poisoning nowadays.
It is insane and horrifying and a very good example of why Michigan’s government is fucked up and also a very good example of the really really bad ripple effects that woo-woo shit can have. Chelation would almost certainly still be a covered benefit if it hadn’t gotten abused so much for conditions it’s definitely not treating. (eta: LIKE AUTISM.)
Yeah, I know about the chelation woo (I used to read Respectful Insolence a lot); it just made me so angry (and I’m feeling kind of grumpy about my job in general, tbh.)
Totally fair. It’s a thing to rage on.
Oh my god you disingenuous asshat of a deleted commenter. You don’t deserve to read Nikki Chung’s work and she certainly doesn’t deserve to put up with your asinine comment. How typical that a person of colour would give us an illuminating essay spelling out the many layers of discomfort that come with dancing around a racist microaggression and this is the kind of garbage she gets in response.
1) Let’s just admit that when someone says ‘I might be splitting hairs’, what they actually mean is ‘I might be about to derail this conversation while pretending not to’.
2) In what world do people, for no reason, go up to strangers/acquaintances and ask them if other people say ridiculous and dehumanizing things to them? Do people ever tell you you have nothing of value to add to conversations about race? I’m not asking; I’m just wondering, you know, out of nowhere, about those other people who might ask.
3) WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO ARE VIRTUALLY ALWAYS SAFE IN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE. ARE YOU FOR REAL?
Those Sansa ears are killing me. Wet or dry.
I haven’t read through all the comments yet, so someone may have already shared this, but @HamiltonSquad is sorting the Hamilton characters into HP houses and it seems like something many of you should be aware of weighing in on.
Oh good Lord, the essential oils. I work with several people who are devotees of this whole scheme and there have been so many battles over bringing them into the workplace. I’m allergic to everything in creation and most scents give me an instant headache/sinus fit, so it’s been fun for me. Worse is that you have to be super careful not to mention that you have an ailment or ache of any kind, because within seconds they will whip out all manner of tiny vials and capsules, insisting that they will cure what ails you. You can pry my Advil LiquiGels from my cold dead hands, thanks.
Fuck oil defusers, scented wax melters and stank ass candles. And Fuck WM for having two aisles of that shit. I dread facing that aisle more than toys or beauty/pharmacy. I understand the use of oils in aromatherapy, but nobody wants to be around that shit all the time. Especially not in a closed space like an office.
/strong feelings
Also, I learned so much from Nikki Chung’s article. and the comments, ofc. I’m going to use the knowledge to combat the store’s casual racism and particular racist.
I've been following Mallory's heroic Dear Prudence-ing over on Facebook, and it astonishes me how many of the commenters appear not to have read a word she says. Many of them write detailed comments giving exactly the same advice she did, and sometimes they're the same ones who criticise her for not having enough "life experience". By which they mean not being an elderly, straight Republican, of course. She's merrily feeding them lots of letters about LGBT and disability issues, it's a joy to watch them being forcibly educated. I'm trying to think if I've seen racist yapping over there yet. If not, it's just because she's been focusing on other areas, but I bet it'll get wheeled out in full force before long.
Nah, it'll just turn into more and more of a pigsty, frog-boiling style.
Good idea. I notice that they're a bit too precious to discuss having spare loo roll and tampons, though.
Hah. As an only child, I've heard the stereotype that we don't know how to share a few times. In my last relationship, I had a partner who has a younger sister, and he was absolutely dire at sharing. I'd learned a lot of it as an adult, and approached it as an adult. He was still refighting battles with his kid sister from twenty-five years earlier. So it does seem to be a bit more complex than that, but your theory probably holds a lot of the time.
I feel utterly ashamed that I only recently bought a stash of tampons and pads to keep on display in my loo, in case a friend has an emergency. I know I haven't used disposables since the nineties, but after that situation where my ex-girlfriend woke me at 4 am to say, "Darling, I've come on, and I bleed like a stuck pig and don't have any tampons here, so I'm going to get a taxi home," (which was, erm, twelve years ago), you think I'd know better. I bought regular tampons and ultra pads with wings, does that seem a good combination? I'm going to get another little supply for my partner's flat to leave in his loo, I may as well get it just right.
This was shortly before I had to go with a friend to Women's Aid (the saga is ongoing, by the way, but she's been at her brother-in-law's for a couple of weeks now and is generally making good progress), and I was very impressed by the wide range of tampons, pads, and baby changing supplies they have in their loo.
But what happens if you don't actually want a 50/50 split of whatever it is? If you prefer your own meal and just want a taste of the other meal, or if one of you is less hungry?
(Only child here, but my partner has an older sister, and he's perfectly happy splitting the food according to what we both fancy on that occasion.)
I'm not a mother, but I was brought up Jewish, and there's a big feeder culture in Judaism. I often end up chatting about this with people (usually but not always women) from other feeder cultures, such as India or Middle Eastern countries.
As well as generally offering people food, and ending up feeding my support workers a lot (it's a crappy job, a lot of times people have had to rush out without time for breakfast, or the agency hasn't given them a lunch break), I keep a box of nut bars in the hall for anyone to grab if they need them. And snacks in my handbag, although that's more about my blood sugar.
thats so cool hahah