Velcro puppy and dignified cat.
My baby decided to cry every hour on the hour for twenty minutes from 3:30am on, and then I gave up and checked Twitter on my phone, to discover he had merely tapped into the universal grief of living in a world without Alan Rickman, a man who was the best part of anything he touched. Please know that the perky tone of anything that follows in this link roundup is from the happiness I knew yesterday, when I composed it.
I SAW STAR WARS I SAW IT STAR WARS HAS BEEN SEEN BY ME. I spent the entire movie BOUNCING in my seat, and making lil exuberant thumbs-up gestures to Steve and wolfing down my ONE DOLLAR MINI POPCORN (Utah!):
HERE ARE MY THOUGHTS:
Oscar Isaac is as sexy as everyone said.
JOHN BOYEGA IS SO ADORABLE AND HAS EXQUISITE COMIC TIMING and I agree with every word of this.
Rey. Rey. Rey. I love her, I cherish her, I reject ANY SUGGESTION she is a Mary Sue, she is a FUCKING JEDI, and you are garbage (men who say she’s a Mary Sue, not you as in my innocent readers.)
Also, thank you to Mallory for puppy-and-baby-sitting so we could have our Star Wars date night.
tough shit, that’s on you, and would create a HORRIBLY adversarial working relationship (not just for her, but for anyone else who heard about it):
1. Cutting the salary of a disappointing new hire
We hired an employee almost two months ago who seemed to have quite a lot of experience in our field (which is rare in our city). She asked for a higher salary than entry-level, which we were okay with giving based on her experience. Now, almost two months in, it’s become obvious to us that she actually doesn’t have as much experience in the field as she thought she did and her work is only slightly better than what we get from candidates straight out of school or switching into this industry from another one. Essentially, we regret paying her the higher salary and feel that she isn’t worth it. Legally, we know that we can reduce it a bit, but should we? And if so, how do we handle that situation? (She is at $60k. Entry level for us is $45k, possibly $50k. We haven’t settled on a firm number yet.)
Gov. Rick Snyder and his mishandling of the HORRIBLE situation in Flint:
LANSING — Gov. Rick Snyder’s statement Monday that he wasn’t aware of a problem with lead in Flint’s drinking water until about Oct. 1 has prompted questions about his office’s role in quietly delivering 1,500 water filters to the city in August.
Snyder’s statement also raises questions about the speed and scope of the state’s response since Oct. 1 and why state officials did not immediately instruct Flint residents, on Oct. 1, not to drink the water without a filter. A 10-point plan for Flint water that Snyder released Oct. 2 said the state was making water filters and water testing available to residents, but did not include a warning not to drink the water without a filter.
The fuckery at CalTech came up in the comments yesterday, but I’m mad enough to link formally:
In a letter sent to Kleiser in September, the university acknowledged that her firing “was prompted by [Ott’s] romantic or sexual feelings for you,” and that his behavior “significantly and adversely affected your educational opportunities at Caltech.” A letter sent to Gossan concluded that Ott’s interactions with her “placed an inappropriate and undue burden on you that adversely affected your emotional and physical well-being.”
In addition to Kleiser and Gossan, seven other students have left Ott’s research group since 2012. All of them spoke with BuzzFeed News. Four said they were fired, abruptly. Many said that Ott’s erratic behavior created a hostile and demanding work environment where bullying was the norm.
Casey Handmer was a grad student in Ott’s group until June 2013, when he was fired partly because Ott didn’t want him to keep his bicycle locked up inside.
Jane Marie went off her depression meds when she was pregnant, and is now ready to talk about it:
At the grocery store, strangers would ask if my baby was my “first.”
“She’s my only,” I’d respond. End of discussion.
I’d be chatting with close friends who were thinking about getting pregnant and my advice became, “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Really? But your kid is awesome!”
“I know, she’s incredible, I got very lucky. But yeah, no, really. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t.”
If you think this makes me sound like a monster, you’ve probably never been a depressed new mother.
Here is a dressage freestyle set to the music of David Bowie:
Guys, I am PETRIFIED of under-cooked chicken (IT DOESN’T EVEN TASTE BETTER, UNLIKE BEEF, PUT IT BACK IN THE FUCKING OVEN), so I had to read this while peeking through my fingers and dry-heaving (this is more about tainted chicken and who is responsible for it):
At the hospital, five employees helped move Schiller from the car to a consulting room. When a doctor examined his leg, she warned him that it was so swollen there was a chance it might burst. She tried to remove fluid with a needle, but nothing came out. “So she goes in with a bigger needle—nothing comes out,” Schiller said. “Then she goes in with a huge needle, like the size of a pencil lead—nothing comes out.” When the doctor tugged on the plunger, the syringe filled with a chunky, meatlike substance. “And then she gasped,” Schiller said.
also, PLEASE do not rinse chicken unless you bleach everything in a quarter-mile radius afterwards
The Morning News’ ToB SHORTLIST is here, along with the judges, several of whom are Beloved Friends Of The Toast, esp:
Jess Zimmerman is a writer and editor who’s appeared in Hazlitt, the New Republic, the Guardian, The Hairpin, and others. The Toast once said she was “on fire” but it turned out she was fine. She lives in Brooklyn with all the other writers, and when not working spends most of her time aging, feeling terrible about aging, or frequently both.
Dan Savage tapped in two of my friends (Joel Kim Booster and Jeff Chu) to answer a question about dating while gay and Asian (which, based on the comments I STILL get on Joel’s piece about this issue, can be really tough):
The last word goes to Booster: “A note to the rice queens who will undoubtedly write in about this man: We like that you like us. But liking us solely because of our race can be uncomfortable at best, and creepy as hell at worst. In my experience, it’s perfectly okay to keep some of those preferences behind the curtain while you get to know us a bit as humans first.”
