Start the day by sitting on a small child.
RIP, GLENN FREY (I will tolerate NO Eagles criticism or jokes in the comments today, I am really genuinely sad, do NOT try me. Love you, Glenn.)
This piece on a persistent, brilliant laywoman’s relentless pursuit to understand her rare genetic condition was the best thing I read last week:
…it was a personal note from a 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She was the muscular dystrophy patient, and she had an elaborate theory linking the gene mutation that made her muscles wither to an Olympic sprinter named Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. She offered to send me more info if I was interested. Sure, I told her, send more.
A few days later, I got a package from Jill, and it was… how to put it?… quite a bit more elaborate than I had anticipated. It included a stack of family photos — the originals, not copies; a detailed medical history; scientific papers, and a 19-page, illustrated and bound packet. I flipped through the packet, and at first it seemed a little strange. Not ransom-note strange, but there were hand-drawn diagrams with cutouts of little cartoon weightlifters representing protein molecules. Jill had clearly put a lot of effort into this, so I felt like I had to at least read it. Within a few minutes, I was astounded. This woman knew some serious science. She off-handedly noted that certain hormones, like insulin, were too large to enter our cells directly; she referred to gene mutations by their specific DNA addresses, the way a scientist would.
And then I came to page 14.
What can an elaborate fan theory teach us about Internet culture? Plenty, when that theory is about Star Wars cult idol Boba Fett.
It all started when Tumblr user sashayed remarked in passing, “Is there any reason to believe Boba Fett isn’t a lesbian?”
Our own John Leavitt wants people to know about the Silver Fork genre of the 1820s and 1830s.
Luna’s tribute to Alan Rickman killed me:
After that meeting I thought about him a lot and what a truly lovely, kind, generous person he was. For someone as established, wise and revered as he, the greatest gift you can give someone is your full attention and presence in the moment. Most people of his measure of talent and intellect are extremely busy and are anxious for you to know this. You start to talk to them and their eyes are already darting to the other corners of the room, their fingers reaching for their phone where a million more interesting people are pinging away at their inbox. They can’t afford to spend their precious time and entire mental facilities just on you, so mostly they just give you a bit, just for a few minutes. But Alan Rickman was not that at all. In the hour I sat with him, he managed to be completely present, kind, attentive and curious about someone who did not expect or look for that from him. It says a lot about him, how nice a person he was and what discipline it must have taken to stay in character so much. It must have been hard to play Snape and to have to alienate himself from everyone. It must have been hard to have to stop smiling at people. And uncomfortable to make others so uncomfortable. There aren’t that many actors that would go to such lengths for the integrity of their character. There were deep and heart-breaking reasons why Snape didn’t smile, why he is such a loner and the most stubbornly emo adult ever. I so appreciate the fact that he cared that much about his character, that he didn’t dismiss Harry Potter as a ‘kids film’, a handy job and a sizeable paycheck. He loved and honoured Snape the way all beloved characters deserve and he made the Harry Potter world that much more real for us.
When “burnout” masks depression:
In February of 2014, I began to experience a new episode of major depression, but it felt different. It felt so utterly unlike my previous recurrent episodes that I did not recognize it as depression. I just thought I was burned out. I had been promoted and awarded tenure the year before, and my book had come out the year before, and I was looking forward to a Fall 2014 semester sabbatical. The fact that I was suddenly completely unable to concentrate at work seemed like just another burnout symptom. I would go to my office, close the door, and literally stare off into space for hours. I would look at the clock and say, okay, it’s 11:30 am. I can space out for 20 minutes and then I really have to buckle down and get to work. And so I’d space out, and the next thing I knew, a whole hour would go by.
I think it’s incredibly important for white Christians (the black Christian church in the US having a completely different historical idea of the relationship between Jesus and liberation) to spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the colossal moral failure of most white Christians to grasp what the civil rights movement meant and their ongoing complicity in American racism (Philip Yancey has written some great stuff on growing up Southern Baptist and coming to realize how just incredibly fucking wrong they were on civil rights.) I’m happy to see Rachel Held Evans asking the hard questions:
People in schools and churches across the country will pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. today, and many will read “Letter From The Birmingham Jail,” which is right and good.
But few will read “A Call for Unity” or any of the thousands of editorials, letters, articles, and sermons composed by American whites—most of them Christians—in opposition to King’s work. We forget that just as our most heated discussions on social media emerge from the context of a cultural conversation, so too did the treatises of theologians and activists past. When we familiarize ourselves with only one side of the debate (typically the side ultimately found to be just) we miss the full depth of the argument and, worse yet, slip into a sort of historical amnesia that allows us to believe we too would have chosen the side of good on account of its seemingly obvious virtue.
That’s when Rolly Burrell came over and used a highly technical snake removal technique called “grabbing it with your bare hands and throwing it in a sack.”
It’s a good thing Burrell came over when he did. Although in the video they refer to the snake as “he,” it turns out that he was a she, and was carrying a belly full of eggs—14 to be exact—which she laid two days later.
My visiting brother-in-law and I talked a lot about the situation in Flint during his visit this weekend; he’s involved with public health work, and is responsible for helping coordinate testing kids for exposure and making recommendations to pediatricians and politicians alike, and it is just as nightmarish as you can imagine, the failures are extraordinary, and it is going to cost zillions of dollars to set right:
It was immediately obvious that the water was filthy, and residents loudly protested that it was cloudy, smelled bad, and tasted worse. General Motors stopped using the water because it was literally corroding their machinery. But Snyder and his handpicked head environmental official Dan Wyant studiously ignored the problem — despite internal warnings of lead poisoning as early as July of last year — until an outside scientific study demonstrated extreme levels of lead in Flint children. In late December — over a year after the water switch — Snyder finally apologized and Wyant quietly resigned.
Glad to see some of our finest citizens quoted in this piece on the importance of a more diverse Nancy Drew:
Fans of the original who want characters that look more like them can be a powerful audience.
“When I was a kid, there were so few shows centring people of colour. Often the one non-white character, if there was one, occupied a sidekick/punchline sort of role,” Nicole Chung, managing editor of the Toast and a Nancy Drew fan says.
But for Chung, the idea of a non-white Nancy Drew particularly excited her because she grew up reading the books.
“Having Nancy played by a woman of colour would provide a great opportunity for some viewers to see themselves represented in a medium that often still struggles when it comes to diversity,” she says.
The enslaving of Native Americans:
A reductive view of the American past might note two major, centuries-long historical sins: the enslavement of stolen Africans and the displacement of Native Americans. In recent years, a new wave of historians of American slavery has been directing attention to the ways these sins overlapped. The stories they have uncovered throw African slavery—still the narrative that dominates our national memory—into a different light, revealing that the seeds of that system were sown in earlier attempts to exploit Native labor. The record of Native enslavement also shows how the white desire to put workers in bondage intensified the chaos of contact, disrupting intertribal politics and creating uncertainty and instability among people already struggling to adapt to a radically new balance of power.
Kathryn Schulz has a really good, probing piece on Making a Murderer:
Beerntsen had also been unusual among crime victims involved in wrongful convictions in that she had instantly accepted the DNA evidence—and, with it, her mistake. “It ain’t all her fault, you know,” Avery had said at the time of his release. “Honest mistake, you know.” But Beerntsen had felt horrifically guilty. “This might sound unbelievable,” she told me when we first talked, “but I really feel this way: the day I learned I had identified the wrong person was much worse than the day I was assaulted. My first thought was, I don’t deserve to live.” She wrote Avery a letter, apologizing to him and his family, and, concerned by the missteps and misconduct that led to his incarceration, became involved with the Innocence Project, which seeks to free the wrongfully convicted and to reform legal practices to help prevent miscarriages of justice.
Given her history, Beerntsen does not need any convincing that a criminal prosecution can go catastrophically awry. But when Ricciardi and Demos approached her about participating in “Making a Murderer” she declined, chiefly because, while her own experience with the criminal-justice system had led her to be wary of certitude, the filmmakers struck her as having already made up their minds. “It was very clear from the outset that they believed Steve was innocent,” she told me. “I didn’t feel they were journalists seeking the truth. I felt like they had a foregone conclusion and were looking for a forum in which to express it.”
Okay, so I’ve now watched “Art Crawl,” “Gayle’s Tales,” “Boyz 4 Now” and the one in the taffy factory, tell me which other ones:
My heart bleeds for this deleted commenter, who wanted to explain why what happened at Nikki’s party was not racist:
All the articles about what the filmmakers left out of Making a Murderer have made me feel a lot better about only watching the first few episodes and stopping because it all felt off. People are comparing it to The Jinx and Serial, but there is literally no counter-narrative presented for the Avery case. None. And having heard the Radiolab piece that aired ages ago, it felt like a completely different story (which is understandable since it’s a different POV) and that it wasn’t engaging with all the evidence.
tl;dr I stopped watching Making a Murderer and now I feel justified
(Last post on this: the mail chain for This Victorian Life is going to be set soon. The etiquette book would not provide enough snark, so we’ve changed it. If you’re seriously interested, fill out the form here. Addresses are going to be restricted to only those who are mailing to you, so no worries on sharing that with everyone. BTW, this is not restricted to the US! International Toasties are welcome!)
I’ve watched only the first episode and it sounded so familiar and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. And now I know: I listened to that Radiolab episode. That was driving me bonkers.
(not sure if I’ll continue watching, knowing this.)
Yeah, the whole show just made me uncomfortable, and not in a good way. I’m completely in agreement that the nephew is almost certainly innocent and was likely at least partially unaware of the consequences and manipulated by the police. But they left out a LOT of stuff about Avery and his past and idk.
As soon as it was revealed that Avery set a cat on fire I decided that he was absolutely guilty and there was no miscarriage of justice at all at any point.
See to me that’s the entire point of what the documentary series is trying to point out about this. You’ve heard one bad thing this guy did, and you have already decided that he’s guilty of murdering a woman. I’m not defending hurting animals in the least, its terrible, but his character is irrelevant to the crime. Right? We all agree a woman can be raped even if she’s had lots of public or casual sex. Her past sex life isn’t relevant to the issue at hand. Avery could be a monster and STILL be innocent of murder.
What I learned from Serial and other instances of this is that so much of what happens in a murder if it’s not fully investigated is a big blank space. We don’t know what happened to Terry! We know that she went missing and evidence and bones showed up at the home of a family who has more than one person who is in regular trouble of the law. But in the space in between there? Who can say? That’s because the investigation was a huge mess. They zeroed in on one dude and then they made it all fit by jamming puzzle pieces together regardless of how they fit. The investigation made it impossible for any of us to reassemble the truth now.
I have no idea if Steven Avery did it or not. I don’t know if he was abusive to his ex-fiance- I’ve seen her say he wasn’t and I’ve seen her say he was. I know about the cat thing because I heard about it in the show, it was disclosed by the filmmakers. What I heard sounded awful, but not premeditated or like deliberate torture so much as some level of cruelty with accidental burning included. To me that’s irrelevant. The idea that if we know a lot about what kind of man he is, we’ll know if he did it? That’s nuts. There needs to be evidence. Its not, does he seem like he did it? It’s: can it be proved that he did it. Is there clear untampered evidence that suggests this person over other people with the same possible abilities?
People trying to solve this and the Serial murder make it all about, “well if he was the murderer why would he be dumb enough to do x, y,z?” or “I dunno what was up with that other guy he seemed shifty” That’s ok to do with a novel, but it’s not how justice is supposed to work. Its not about a coherent narrative of crime, its about enough proof to say, “look she was here at this time. Here are the 3 people who could do it, here’s the proof that only one of those three was there. Here’s more information that makes it hard to doubt that it was this person, and only this person.” That’s when someone should go to jail.
That show is about how people on juries and in courtrooms do what you did all the time. “Oh yeah that guy? I heard he lit a cat on fire, he’s definitely a murderer.” And thats it. You’re in jail for the rest of your life. Ignoring the fact that one, that’s not proof. And two, what if you are wrong? Someone else who did kill her is out there, just because he looked like a better suspect. Someone who maybe never hurt a cat, you know, just some kind of regular “nice guy” who only killed a young woman and burned her body and then maybe helped frame someone else.
I’ll say something else about this. Those poor Averys. They’re uneducated. They have issues with staying on the right side of the law. they can’t afford good justice. They live on a lot that probably has a lot of heavy metal contamination. People in their community think they’re trash because they’re poor. This case has a lot to do with class. If you think he’s probably guilty based on things you read, those things are filtered through this narrative of these people being “rednecks” and that kind of person being a probable killer. So he never had a fair shake. I’m amazed at how many people think he did it, when the only thing this narrative is really about is, who can say, there’s simply not enough proof. All the “extra facts” i’ve read about are things like, “he had leg irons” and then they turn out to be a pair of fuzzy handcuffs.
Two quick points:
(1) Mine was a quick joke more than a thorough philosophical examination;
(2) I didn’t mean he was guilty of the murder of that lady; or, specifically, in this case, the brutal sexual assault of the first woman. I meant he was just guilty existentially. He killed a cat.
What Radiolab piece?
Reasonable Doubt from the “Are You Sure” episode. It’s about Peggy Beerntsen and what happens when you’ve mistakenly identified someone for a crime and how you go on from there. There’s an update at the end with an interview with the filmmakers.
Yay for an international mail chain! Will think about it. How long will the form be online?
It’s very short: Just your name, email, country and if you’re willing to mail outside your country. I’ll try and create a logical mailing chain from there, probably moving from farthest east to west, so it can make its way back to me in California.
No, I saw that, I’m just not sure yet if I really want to enter, and therefore basically asking how much time I’ve got left to think about it.
Ahhhh, sorry, it’s very early and my brain hasn’t come online yet. I likely won’t mail the book out until next Monday, so I’d say until Friday.
There’s a really interesting doc called “The Staircase” that I watched a number of years ago. It also follows the defense team for a man accused of murder, in this case of his wife. I finished that documentary wholly convinced of his innocence, until I Googled the case and read the other side of the story. Not so clear cut after all, of course. It was an important lesson for me about the propagandistic power of the documentary.
So I watched all of Making of a Murderer with my skeptic’s brain fully engaged. It’s a compelling story and it does raise questions (Dassey’s public defender…gawd), but it can’t be called balanced by any stretch of the imagination.
Slate did an article entitled “The Emotional Manipulations of Making a Murderer” that I thought summed up the problem pretty well.
My only exposure to the case from The Staircase is the episode of Criminal that explores the owl theory. So now I’m about 50% convinced an owl did it.
I didn’t come away from “The Staircase” so much with a sense of the defendant’s innocence as with a sense that the facts were messy but the conduct of the prosecution was shockingly unconstitutional. But then I saw it in the context of De Lestrade’s other work, which is too little known in the United States. “Sin City Law” in particular is almost too hard to watch.
I also started it and stopped, but in some ways, I think the question of Avery’s innocence is beside the point. What was abundantly clear is that our justice system is monumentally fucked up. He was certainly railroaded in the first case and even if they just happened to be right in the second, it’s pretty clear that the way they went about making their case was not on the up and up. What all of these recent true crime series have shown is the ways in which our criminal justice system that privileges the white and wealthy, while penalizing others.
Yeah, the series bothered me in that way, too. But I had some problems with Kathryn Schulz’s article and didn’t think it was as great as Nicole did.
I do think Avery is probably guilty, but as a lawyer I also think that the investigation process was so tainted that I can’t say his conviction was justice.
Also, on the theme of investigation techniques, the science is still out on DNA analysis when the sample involves a mixture of DNA from multiple sources. It is not the gold standard that DNA analysis from a single source is. That’s not related to Making a Murderer, but because it’s related to criminal investigations I thought I’d throw it out there.
See for example http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2015/09/res…
I don’t know, I felt that MaM wore its bias on its sleeve, and I was okay with that. It does remind me of Serial because the upshot seems to be “Look, the guy might or might not have done it, but the investigation was crappy and biased and should have killed the trial”, with bonus “Here’s a disabled teenager in prison too”.
We can’t say “okay the police/prosecutors broke the law but the suspect was guilty anyhow, so it’s fine”, because that just makes a mockery of the criminal justice system.
I think it would be kind of difficult to offer a counter-narrative given that no one on the other side wanted to be interviewed. I mean, I can understand why, but aside from showing video footage from the prosecution’s presenting of their case, where would the counter-narrative come from?
I’m so glad Nicole included this link because the article summed up a lot of my problems with true crime as entertainment and how that feels for the victim’s families, and how even when it provokes action it tends to be on behalf of individuals rather than fixing the system, and also a look at the failures of investigative journalism as it pronounces on the failures of the system. I’ve read several other New Yorker pieces by Kathryn Schulz and her stuff is consistently fascinating, beautifully written, and deeply insightful. She is one to follow!
I’m honestly uncomfortable with both Making a Murderer and Serial (and The Jinx, to an extent, but I consider that more of a documentary about Durst than a “whodunnit” storyline about Kathleen’s disappearance) because they seem to be making a public spectacle of violence against women, and presenting Adnan Syed/Steven Avery as tragic antiheroes who were brought down by the system with little to no focus on what was done to Hae Min Lee and Thesesa Halbach. There are criticisms to be made of the American justice system (sooooooo many criticisms) but the shows with their hyperfocus on one case don’t encourage judicial reform- it just encourages a lot of armchair detective work.
Yeah, it’s why I stopped listening to Serial and why I won’t watch MaM — I really can’t handle people being armchair detectives and being so certain they’re right, on only a single interpretation of the evidence. There’s such hubris, and then it makes the viewers/listeners make real crimes into entertainment.
So, I’m a lawyer, and obviously, all my lawyer friends are all over this show and it’s all anyone wants to talk about, and I have a dark secret: I haven’t watched it. I just have no desire to go home after a long day of law talking and…watch an emotionally draining show about good and bad law talking. I watched seasons 1 and 2 of Fargo instead. I just sort of nod my head when anyone asks me my opinion about it now.
Right?? Everyone wants me to watch it (because I enjoy True Crime shows) but the real secret is that I only like pretending that our Justice System Is Great and that Catching Serial Killers always happens and the Bad Guys Go Away. 🙁
Right? I know how shitty the justice system is. I want a nice fairytale about prosecutors devoted to justice and the rule of law and upstanding, moral cops using the rules of evidence who catch prostitute murdering serial killers and put them away with hard work and gumption.
Seconded. There are more and more articles coming out about just how biased the creators of this supposedly “unbiased” series were when creating this and the whole thing just puts a terrible taste in my mouth, because the series is so popular and if the allegations of serious omissions are true, they’re absolutely manipulating public opinion by not covering all the bases.
(OMG I’m so glad I caught this post, *signs up for the mail chain*)
I don’t know that the creators have ever claimed to be unbiased. They were film students, not journalists, who wanted to tell a story. I’ve been reading a lot of the articles on the omissions from the documentary, and I’ve yet to find any that are actually compelling. Many of the charge of omission have been rebutted fairly successfully by the defense lawyers in the case who’ve responded to claims made by the prosecutor in the case.
So now that I’ve actually read the New Yorker article, I find it pretty troubling.
1. She repeats the claim that Ken Kratz, the prosecutor, has put out about “sweat DNA” being found on the hood of Avery’s car. There is no such thing as sweat DNA! That was literally just something Kratz made up, it is not possible to determine whether DNA came from sweat or elsewhere (see: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/201….
2. I also just really disagree with the point she makes about documentaries like this, and Serial, get people all in arms about particular individuals, as opposed to the system as a whole. People respond to narratives with human faces, not abstract notions of “justice” and “the system.” I think when they get excited about stories such as Adnan Syed’s or the Avery/Dasseys, the impressions that they glean about the justice system transcend the individual stories, they stick. I think the idea of false confessions is a really good illustration of this– most people, before watching MaM, would assume that if someone confesses to a crime, they probably did it. Why would anyone lie in that situation? And yet, false confessions are EXTREMELY common. Watching it on MaM shows you exactly how they can happen– and viewers who see it here will remember that if they ever end up on a jury and have to evaluate whether a confession is reliable or not.
3. Which brings me to juries: the jury is one of the last places some of the fucked-upness of the criminal justice system can be stopped in its tracks. But the average person simply has NO IDEA how stacked the deck is against criminal defendants. They believe police officers generally on principle, they are suspicious when defendants don’t testify in their own defense, they assume eyewitness identifications and confessions are gold standards of evidence. It is only by seeing how these mechanisms and assumptions have the ability to destroy people’s lives can the viewing public — many of whom will one day serve on juries — can make different assumptions, come to different conclusions.
4. I am still trying to figure out how I feel about the ways in which these kinds of shows put the victim and the victim’s family in the spotlight. I can’t imagine how awful that would be, to have to re-live all of those moments of probably one of the most awful periods of their lives. But I don’t know, I don’t think that’s a reason to not tell these stories.
#3 – I’ve been wondering lately if the current jury system isn’t one of the weakest parts of the justice system, having served on one myself and having talked to others who’ve served. The problem is that the social pressure to convict is enormous. Even leaving aside from any biases jurors walk in with, serving on a jury is mind-numbingly boring. Dissenting just means that you’ll be sitting there even longer, tired, stir-crazy, missing work.
And, (still leaving aside specific bias) humans *hate* doubt, to the point that they will accept a shitty explanation over none at all. So if the prosecution presents a plausible story that still allows for reasonable doubt but the defense cannot offer a better one, people will settle on the prosecution’s version and convict on that basis.
I’m not sure how to fix it. I’m certainly not advocating for getting rid of juries, but there must be options out there to mitigate the effects I’ve described.
Re: Bob’s Burgers-Watch all of the Thanksgiving episodes and also Moolissa. I don’t remember if that’s the name of the episode but it features a cow in a wig named Moolissa.
The synchronized swimming episode was when I realized I loved the show.
I just watched that episode while getting ready for work. Its a bad habit, but I generally watch (or use as background noise) an episode each morning. I feel like it makes my day a bit better. I heart Bobs Burgers.
That was the episode that sold my mom on the show. When Louise pooped in the pool my mom was in stitches.
Moolissa is my very favorite episode! I thinks it’s the second overall in the series.
“I’m a castrated steer, Bob.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a married man.”
“Boyz 4 Now” is my FAVORITE episode, so congrats on watching that Nicole 😀 I got a couple of my coworkers to watch just because I’ve managed to work “Details” into conversation so often (it’s surprisingly easy)
I loooove that episode! Louise is the best and has the best reaction to a crush ever. The expression of absolute happyness on Louise’s face and profound horror in Boo Boo’s before the slap made me cry from laughter.
Details! I wanna know details! (now it will be stuck in my head for the rest of the afternoon)
Christmas in the Car, Topsy, Bad Tina, and The Kids Rob A Train are good ones too
TOPSY. Seconding that & the Thanksgiving episodes, adding in the one about Tina trying to get promoted as hall monitor and Tammy’s bat mitzvah.
They’ll say Awwwww Topsy at my AUUUUUUUUUUUTOPSY
(sorry)
(not sorry)
Is it weird that I legitimately love the song? I would pay the big bucks to see that musical in real life!
Never be sorry. I whistle it.
The Equestranauts was one of my favorite episodes of television maybe ever. Or just watch all of them.
Yes! That episode intersects with MANY interests in my household.
The way the main equestranaut guy says “tattoo” reduces me to nearly-peeing-my-pants levels of laughter every time.
Moolissa (Sacred cow) it’s the third episode from the first season. Also, watch every episode. It’s great, I’ve watched everything like, 20, maybe more, times.
aaaaaaaaaand if I had to choose, “Purple Rain-union” and the last two of the 4th season.
I still got three outta five – I still got three outta five – I still got three outta five sexy parts!
All the holiday episode have been excellent, in my opinion. Especially this year’s Thanksgiving episode. Also, The Kids Run Away is great. Basically, I love Gail.
Oh! and The Deepening. That’s one one I show people when I want to lure them in as fans.
The Kids Run the Restaurant – worth watching purely for the name “Misty Gish” and Michael Cera saying “finger crotch”
The Frond Files – “cuz farts are liberty”
Lindapendent Woman and Two for Tina – because Ben Schwartz is a legend and the only one worthy of Tina (sorry, J ju)
And the new one in season 5, “Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl” in which they stage a Working Girl/Die Hard musical.
yes, Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl, forever.
Also Tina-ranasaurus Wrecks. But also all of them?
Oh man is Two for Tina the episode with Little King Trashmouth? Linda explaining that he’s gay and married to his boyfriend might be my favorite moment of all time on Bob’s Burgers.
Someone already mentioned the Thanksgiving episodes but Bob’s Burgers does great holidays in general. Definitely watch all of the Christmas episodes and Halloween episodes but especially Full Bars, Fort Night, Bob Rest Ye Merry Gentle-Mannequins.
Yes, watch the Thanksgiving episode so you can sing THANK YOU FOR LOVING ME! THANK YOU FOR BEING THERE! in a Linda Belcher voice to all your loved ones every Thanksgiving (or every day). But all episodes are perfect, that show is perfect, amen.
and the valentines song
“Two people together forever, security in life, and someone ta love ya”
INSTEAD OF BEIN ALL ALONE!
ahhhhhh it’s so perfect, i am now grinning like a madwoman
+1 on the Thanksgiving episodes. Especially the one where the turkeys keep ending up in the toilet. Nobody does thanksgiving like the Belchers.
“Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl” is one of my favorites. Die Hard AND Working Girl, together in musical form.
I saw this for the first time last night! So great! I came late to the party on Bob’s Burgers – upside is I could binge-watch the first four seasons on Netflix once I knew. Team Louise? Team Tina? My husband and I are split.
Team Gene? I just love that optimistic/musical/supportive/visionary little weirdo with all my heart
Hawk and Chick from season 5 if you would like to feel some parent/child emotions. Then just every single episode, because Bob’s Burgers is the best.
I love episodes where it’s clear that Louise loves her family!
The new one Sunday night was hysterical. Tina doing the Spanish ballad – I laughed embarrassingly loudly.
This is where I want to share my work’s group Halloween costume. I’ve never had so many patrons get so excited about something at the library. https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1…
That picture is AWESOME! OMG, everything about it is perfect!
OMG. You all look AMAZING.
While I was watching BB the other night I realized I was reading Tina’s face for reactions as if there were a human actor on screen playing her. Maybe it’s my deep identification with the character or maybe it’s that the character animators are that good.
Not real fond of the things they do with Gayle, though. Yep, socially awkward spinster sisters … not sure why that’s mock-worthy.
Other than that I plan to catch up on all eps minus the Gayle ones.
I was skeptical with Gayle at first too, but I kinda grew to love her story lines. She occasionally gets one up on the Belchers like in “The Kids Run Away” (S04E19)
I ALSO LOVE THE SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING EPISODE! Seconding equestranauts (you want to see an episode where Tina and Bob get tangled up in brony culture, right?). Also, the go-kart racing one.
Anything that focuses on the kids, but especially Tina, and especially Tina when she’s talking about fanfiction.
anyone who says they haven’t thought about writing friend fiction is a liar.
Carpe Museum in the third season is also a must-watch! Regular-Sized Rudy is hilarious, and the Bob/Louise father/daughter bonding was especially great in this episode, like legitimately super sweet while still being really funny. Louise’s final line put such a huge smile on my face while making me tear up.
I liked every episode that has been mentioned in this thread, and I would like to add this year’s Halloween episode, called, I think, The Hauntening, which also features a return of Boys 4 Now with a great Halloween song.
Weekend at Mort’s is my not-already-listed favorite. Mort online dating, Bob building a model of the bus from Speed, and Tina, Gene, and Louise exploring the morgue.
Weekend at Mort’s, we’re gonna have a weekend at Mort’s…
I happily have this stuck in my head again!
DID NO ONE SAY “BOB FIRES THE KIDS”?!?!?!
Ahem. Excuse the caps, I feel very passionately about that episode. “Mr. Doglovich!”
PUPPIES http://www.theguardian.com/careers/2016/jan/19/gu…
AAAHHHH PUPPIES!!!
Wish I could start the day with a puppy on my head. It’s that kind of week already. (Plus is there life stuff puppies can’t help with?)
It looks like you are asking for recommendations for individual Bob’s Burgers episodes when really you should embrace your destiny, live your best life, and watch them all.
YES. And then you can join me in being upset that season 5 isn’t on Netflix.
SAME. Watch all of them, Nicole. Even the “bad” episodes aren’t bad, just “not as good”. SUCH an underrated show and so hilarious.
Yes, watch all Bob’s Burgers, then watch all Home Movies.
That is literally what we did Sunday night. After H Jon broke out his Jason voice for Bob’s, we had to watch all our favorite HMs.
Ugh SO GOOD! My favorites are probably Guitarmageddon, Renaissance, and Storm Warning… so I guess I really liked Season 3? But I love them all.
I watched all Home Movies, then I watched Archer. It was very confusing for the first few episodes.
Have you seen the Archer episode with the Bob’s Burgers crossover? Because that was a really excellent moment in my life.
Honestly, the only part of that episode I remember is the Tommy Hambledurger with Manning Coleslaw.
YESSSS. Then you, too, can have “They’ll say ‘awwww Topsy’ at my AUUUUTOPSY” stuck in your head for the rest of your life!!
Watch all the Bob’s Burgers, Nicole! All of them! Each episode is a precious gem and I am jealous that you have unwatched episodes before you.
However, I do have a special place in my heart for ‘Work hard or die trying, girl’. Also for The National covering Linda’s Sailors in Your Mouth<a> song from ‘Turkey in a can’.
Work Hard Or Die Trying Girl is a treasure.
I second Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl (I have previously stated my adoration for Working Girl on the Toast), as well as Full Bars.
“HELEN HUNT!”
I love the madpooper and beefsquatch
BEEFSQUATCH
I LOVE Bob’s Burgers! A few of my favorites, Mazel Tina, The Equestranauts, and all of the Thanksgiving ones.
you just KNOW that the lyrics to that song were “seamen in your mouth” before the censors got a hold of it.
But then “sailors” is somehow funnier anyway.
Re: Bob’s Burgers – ALL OF THEM, you cannot go wrong and we have so few chances in life to experience true joy.
It is very cold in New York today, but it would be even colder if I still lived in Chicago. I’m trying to embrace that fact but its hard to hug things with two coats on.
Also, I second above commenter to watch ALL of Bob’s Burgers. Literally any episode is amazing, you really can’t go wrong. It’s one of the few shows/things in general that never fails to pick me up when I don’t feel like being happy.
Yesterday in Chicago the “real feel” was -28 when I got up. When I checked again just before leaving work, I was all “minus nine is not so bad.”
chicago is good for some things and not good for others but one thing it is good for is training you to feel like a cold-weather badass
and yes, i know it’s colder in canada, COME AT ME CANADIANS I AM KINDA TOUGH
I was born-and-bred in the upstate New York “lake affect snow” belt, so I always considered myself pretty tough as far as weather goes.
Visiting Chicago in January (in the driving wind, up by the lake) was the only time in my life I’ve ever thought “…..you know, I think this is too much for me”.
yah. i grew up in vermont so i always thought i was hardcore…but it gets pretty epic around here.
I know it’s wrong to read that as a Chicagoan and feel a surge of pride but damnit, I do. This town messes with your head.
Hamiltoasties/Philly area Toasties: Lin-Manuel Miranda has just been announced as the commencement speaker at Penn!!! Commencement is usually open to the public (assuming your boss will let you skip work that morning), BUT it is also webcast live and then archived later so we can all experience his inevitably awesome words of wisdom.
Oh excellent. Thanks for sharing.
Argh. When I graduated, we had John Huntsman Jr. as our speaker. What the fuck. Argh. Talk about a lean year.
Hi fellow Quaker! At my commencement we had the CEO of Google, and I remember nothing about his speech, including his name, except for the joke someone made when introducing him. (On the plus side, I got John Legend as my graduation speaker, so it evened out a little.)
As an employee of another Philly-area university, my jealous knows no bounds.
HOORAY for accessibility!
I could have spent a happy life never thinking about poisonous snakes hiding under my fridge.
re: MLK Day, I just wanted to mention the #MLKNOW event at Riverside Church yesterday. I watched most of it via the livestream, which looks like it’s archived here: http://livestream.com/trcnyc/MLKNOW2016
(and here’s the program: https://www.instagram.com/p/BAsSNUmlnfM/)
I’m sure people are posting excerpts on YouTube by now. It was astonishingly good and so powerful. I started watching it at work and pulled it up on my phone to listen on the way home.
Lin-Manuel Miranda was the first presenter with King’s “Beyond Vietnam.” http://jezebel.com/heres-lin-manuel-miranda-readi…
You can read the text here: http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia…
I want to carry this with me in 2016, and somehow hold on to this in a terrifying election year and extremely messed up world.
“We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.” Unquote.”
Tessa Thompson reading the Angela Davis’ “Victory Speech” was amazing, Michael B. Jordan reading the Fred Hampton’s “Anywhere There’s People, There’s Power” was amazing, and Anika Noni Rose singing the J. Cole song was heartrending. I missed my university’s MLK Day celebration, but being able to watch this was a much better celebration and consciousness raising exercise than than what the university put together (I would imagine).
My favorite Eagles cover, for both of us, Nicole (pours one out):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiOD6QRid5I
Toasties, all of Crazy-Ex Girlfriend is on Hulu this week (and the CW app, I guess?) and I watched the first four episodes yesterday and I am HIGHLY in love. STRONG recommend.
Love love love Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Also, I’m mostly straight, but I’m totally obsessed with Rachel Bloom’s boobs.
Yeaaah she is like..exactly my type and her boobs are…whew.
They’re so bouncy! It’s mesmerizing.
I just started last night and I LOVE THIS SHOW and her boobs. Like. Wow.
Everyone needs to watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. EVERYONE. It’s so good! And thanks to that Golden Globe it might even get a second season even though its ratings up until now have been literally garbage. I have such hope! Rachel Bloom deserves to have this good thing!
(Also, the show was originally pitched to Showtime, and I lament them not picking it up nearly everyday).
I’ve listened to the uncensored versions of some of the songs, and I think the semi-modified network versions are actually funnier. Particularly in “I’m So Good at Yoga.”
Or maybe it’s that I just find the expression “butt stuff” hilarious.
I mostly just love the uncensored “I’m A Good Person.”
It is SO GREAT. If you’re not convinced, go watch “The Sexy Getting Ready Song” (uncensored) on YouTube and prepare to fall in love with Rachel Bloom.
I have made so many people watch that! The women all love it. Most of the dudes are horrified, which is fun for me so win-win.
Well, now I definitely want to watch it!
I don’t think I’ve ever identified with a fictional character more than Rebecca Bunch.
I just came across this article in the New York Times about Rachel Bloom (which I haven’t read yet): http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/make-e….
But ever since I learned about who was going to guest star in the season finale (you can google, but I’m leaving it out out of an abundance of spoiler-related caution), I decided I had to catch up.
Thanks! Good pictures on that profile, too.
SO GOOD. I admit though when I first saw the previews I thought “what is this literal garbage heap??” and then watched it because I will watch LITERALLY ANYTHING to avoid homework and I’m so glad I gave it a chance because it’s just so wonderful.
Yay! I missed the first two episodes; now I can finally see Sexy Getting Ready Song in context.
I wonder – when Sansa’s big enough, would she tolerate Nicole’s daughter sitting on her? Or would it do Sansa harm?
(Today in: I don’t know anything about animals.)
Should be fine in the near future. Now would also be an appropriate time to disclose that I have always been charmed by the mental image of a tiny child riding a large dog like a horse. Could this be in Sansa’s future? At least one person is crossing fingers for it.
Ever since I read The Little White Horse I, too, have this image stuck in my mind.
you may be the only other person i have ever heard of who has read the little white horse and so now i love you
<3
But Wrolf isn’t a dog!
I know! It nevertheless lead to this image, because he was described as a giant dog at first.
Lions don’t even look that much like dogs. The fact that most people apparently didn’t notice is bizarre.
You can’t ride dogs like you do horses – not enough oomph in the torso and ribcage area. Horses’ spines are much less flexible and in a lot more solid muscle – dogs and cats have much bendier spines because of how they run, and that flexibility makes them not strong enough for ‘heavier’ riders like a horse or a cow can cope with. A tiny child on a large dog is fine but not the equivalent weights that a horse would be fine with.
dream killer
#Science side of The Toast
I remember being so disappointed to learn that riding elephants is actually really bad for them. Not just the training, but their spines can’t handle it the way horse spines can.
I did not know that! Dreams, crushed. Crushed under the feet of unridden elephants.
Every time I think about children riding dogs like horses I remember this Dear Abby column.
Oh no, that’s horrible!
My sister used to ride our dog. She also used to sleep in his bed, and he would try to share his food with her. He was the best dog.
(She was a very tiny child, and he was a very big dog.)
Growing up, we had a very large St. Bernard called….(it will come to me, it’s been almost 40 years since I’ve thought of him…)…and his owners would let very small children ride him in quick bursts up the street. Like nothing excessive, just 10 steps of so, and only if the opportunity presented itself.
BRUNO! That was his name! He was legendary on our block; he once defended his home from a burglar by chasing him right out the door and for a few blocks to boot (according to Bruno’s mom, as told to my mom).
TOAST. Did I unplug the space heater leaving my bedroom this morning? I’m 99% certain I did, but my anxiety brain is working overtime, spurred on by how I locked myself out of the damn house shoveling snow on Sunday. It’s electric, not gas or anything, and it has a failsafe that turns it off if it gets knocked over, but I’m debating going home at lunch (15 minute each way) to check. I realize this is neurotic but also I could use an allergy pill? Do there’s my reason?
I say do what makes you feel better. Letting your anxiety spiral because “you should be able to deal with this” or whatever is not productive.
Writing as a person who on more than several occasions has turned back 3 blocks from the house to make sure I’ve unplugged the iron, I say check for peace of mind even though you probably did turn it off.
I agree.
You totally turned it off.
You almost certainly turned it off, but if you don’t mind the drive home over lunch, you should go and check it just for your own peace of mind. I know this feeling so well.
Replying agin because this stuck with me over the day, and I’m going to offer a dissenting (much too late opinion).
If you have the kind of anxiety problems I do; spending a day living with the anxiety of “Did I turn it off?” might be good in the long run (assuming the house didn’t burn down) – because you are exposing yourself to an anxiety trigger, living with the anxiety and (crucially) surviving it.
This kind of exposure – intentionally living in the discomfort of the anxiety – was a part of my Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; and helps me both de-catastrophize (if the heater was on, but the apartment didn’t burn down) and reality check the link between the severity of the anxiety and what is happening.
Anyway – hope it really was off, and you’re feeling better.
I used to have this problem with my office heater. Then I bought a programmable timer power strip so I know that if I DO accidentally leave it on, the power strip will turn off at a particular time that evening.
I vote that you go home and check today so you aren’t crazy anxious, then buy one of these strips and program it so it’s only on during the morning hours when you are home. =)
Don’t leave us hanging! Was it off?
YES IT WAS. I did go home at lunchtime to check, but also because I had forgotten to leave the faucet on a drip so the pipes don’t freeze. So it was a win-win. And I got to be out of my office for a while, so win-win-win.
Excellent all around!
Re Burnout: my life for the past few months. I’ve been watching a season of Doctor Who a day this week. Now school is starting and I have to teach. And one class is across town and the other on the primary campus. *shivers* ugh people and the outside world.
Teaching at two sites at a distance from each other. I’m sorry. I thought I had it rough the year I taught at 3 schools, but they were within 3 miles of each other. Yours is the harder road.
Wishing you a Time Lord for swifter travel between teaching sites.
And the Time Lord of your choice. My choice is Nine. You can’t have him.
Oh my god guys this burnout article is playing me softly right now.
I’m having a strong “it me” feeling.
Yep. Suddenly the “burnout” I’ve been trying to manage for the last year and a half seems…different.
same!
All the “it me.” So strongly that, though I normally FB-post Toast links without a problem, I’m hesitating on this one because it’d be a confession. :/
Glad to see some of our finest citizens quoted in this piece on the importance of a more diverse Nancy Drew
Reading that article a few days ago and seeing Nikki’s name was extremely exciting. I wanted to shriek, “I know* her!” at the screen.
*for a loose definition of “know”.
A friend once sent me an email regarding Texts from Jane Eyre, and all I wrote back was “THAT’S BY MALLORY ORTBERG, I KNOW HER FROM THE INTERNET, SHE HAS REPLIED TO MY COMMENTS BEFORE”
I am currently feeling the same way about Tauriq Moosa’s tweet being quoted here. ME & TAURIQ, WE’RE LIKE *THAT*
… where *that* is that I follow him on Twitter and he’s replied to me about half a dozen times and retweeted me once.
Me too!
Wow, I wish I had the determination and willpower of Jill (from the rare genetic disease article). Seriously. That woman’s impressive.
I wish I had even a sliver of her determination and focus! It was a fascinating article.
Seriously, what a powerhouse!
It was jarring reading that article (and wishing the same) and then reading the burnout article. *light bulb*
What an incredible story. I did notice in the comments that she set up a GoFundMe to help promote research and testing, if anyone else is interested : https://www.gofundme.com/yyhtu45g
That story is incredible. And simultaneously makes me so encouraged by her determination, but angry at how much she was dismissed by people who could have potentially helped her. There’s been a lot in the news about how people (especially women) are routinely ignored by doctors, and I’ve seen it happen to people I know and care about. It’s so enraging.
I just listened to the TAL version of her story this morning and it made me want to send it to every doctor I know with a note about how their egos and condescension can KILL people.
Then again, why would anyone believe a woman’s theories about her own body which she herself lives in?
I’m blown away by this woman. So amazing.
Thank you for posting that burnout/depression piece; off to request vacation ASAP.
so bummed my schedule is changing and I will miss huge chunks of open thread 🙁
Also, this reflects a majorly shitty change in my job that if I”d had more than 1 week’s notice about, I would have made some different choices about other things. 🙁 🙁
It happened to me! Professional burnout that I have felt such shame over for twelve years, but now maybe realize was a mental health issue (serious depression/anxiety to the point that I’d call it a nervous breakdown) and not me being a loser in my field. Man. Didn’t get hospitalized, but it was *this close*. Man! Shame is a hell of a thing, right?
Also, Bob’s Burgers is the absolute best. All of them. All the characters, to a one, just so strong and multi-faceted and yes, hilarious. I don’t even have a favorite (shhhh, Linda). Or Louise. Or Bob! I don’t know! Don’t make me choose!
Related: The episode called Uncle Teddy speaks to my very very particular fears about how I come off in comment boards. I am Bob. Also the episode with Erotic Friend Fiction called Bad Tina. Could go on!
Gene, Gene is my favorite, I love his constant smile and weird enthusiasms. But then I also love Bob for not discouraging those weird enthusiasms (much) and then I love Louise for tolerating all of them despite being a seething pot of rage and so [endless chain of new faves]
I had totally forgotten about that message board storyline, clearly I need to do some rewatching.
Do you also get the sense that Gene is like….pansexual? That’s the vibe I get from him and I dearly hope it’s by design and that he will continue to grow up wild and free.
Yeah, I love that a lot of the stuff he says would be a totally transphobic or “eww, gay” joke in another show, but in this show it’s just Gene being Gene and no one ever “corrects” him.
In a similar vein, in the Thanksgiving episode where the meat counter guy hits on Bob, the fact that his response is not “I’m straight” but “you’re way out of my league” makes me smile every time. How many other shows would go above and beyond the obvious gay panic joke?
The “no one ever corrects Gene for gender or sexual expression” aspect is one of the happy-makingest things about this show for me. However he is, he just gets to wave his freak flag.
I own a bracelet full of Tina-isms and any human who doesn’t understand why that is the ULTIMATE POWER ACCESSORY is ready to either hear about something life-changing or never be spoken to again.
I need this.
#1 Bob’s Burgers ep, imo, is Broadcast Wagstaff School News. It’s the best Gene storyline yet. It’s genetastic!
My family moves around a lot.
His family moves around a lot.
Stop following me, in front!
You’re my family and I love you, but you’re terrible. You’re all terrible.
Seconded. Is it weird that, after seeing that episode for the first time, I started shipping Tina/Zeke?
Tina/Zeke is stealth otp
Not even stealth anymore. The hall monitor episode and the water balloon fight episode make it cannon, IMO.
So, apropos of recent Toast discussions, I was perusing a dating app this weekend and 2 guys mentioned Bukowski in their profiles, and I immediately swiped left on them, and it felt good. *fist pump*
SWIPE LEFT RULES: If he mentions any of the following
He admires Bukowski, Mailer, or Ayn Rand
He dislikes Fast & Furious movies
He says he is a “Whiskey Aficionado” or is otherwise ‘serious’ about whiskey
He’s “sapiosexual”
Oh lord there are so many guys who are really “into” whiskey. I am a non-drinker. This is frustrating.
So many of them list a type of alcohol as one of their interests! Like, how devoid of personality are you that one of the six words you used to describe yourself is “beer”?
<Raises hand> Guilty! Not with beer, but with wine for sure.
Sapiosexual is the worst. Everything else is a warning sign.
Sapiosexual makes my skin crawl.
What does that mean? I could google, but I’m kind of afraid…
You’re only sexually attracted to “smart people,” aka you filter potential romantic interests by your loudly voiced perception of their intelligence.
I am liking your comment in horror.
Thx! I am so grateful to be hitched. Dating sounds perfectly shitful.
Mmm yeah. I’m a poly bisexual lady and haven’t dated anyone outside my primary partner for a couple years because oh my god OK Cupid is a cesspool and the thought of putting up a profile that says I’m a bi poly lady makes my skin crawl with the knowledge of the horrible responses I’ll get and just ugh though.
My queer poly friends swear by the “only show my profile to other gays” filter on OKC these days, although I’ve yet to summon anything near the energy to set up a profile in years.
I swear it’s mostly used by straight people who want to feel fancier about their orientations. I’ve seen just… so many dudes who use it to imply they’d be attracted to the right guy, who then go out and have as many so-heteronormative-it’s-poisonous straight relationships as they can. It is a huge side eye-inducer.
I feel like people who are vocal about their dislike for “Fast & Furious” or “Jupiter Ascending” tend to be people who dislike watching other people having fun and loving things. Both those movies are just such vibrant, transparent “I made this because it was fun for me” joyfests!
*capeswoosh*
*whisper yelling*
*space princess*
i know a guy who left copies of Bukowski books on the nightstands of women he slept with in college…and leave while they were still asleep. this was a rumor, but i choose to believe it.
The best Bob’s Burgers episodes are all of them, but my absolute favorite is “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks.”
“And then I came to page 14.” WHAT HAPPENS ON PAGE 14 OH GOD
EVERYBODY DIES
*spoiler alert
I’m so bummed Bob’s Burgers isn’t on Netflix Germany. Why can’t we have nice things??
I use “Hola!” as a plug in (are still called that way? – my sean penn moment) for chrome and still works like a charm for watching US netflix from southamerica.
Depending on how you feel about your your IP address being sold to strangers, using Hola might not actually be a good idea- http://adios-hola.org/
noooooo, we really can’t have nice things.
I can’t 100% vouch for how accurate the info is but as soon as I heard about it I uninstalled Hola immediately, because no thanks!! It was a sad day.
I use anonymox (from Canada) on the recommendation of a friend who works in internet marketing (so, I guess I think he’d have some idea if it was really sketchy?) and it had been good (until recently, maybe). Anyone have any other suggestions, haha
But Grimm is! As I discovered when we started watching it there then came home to Canada to find it missing 🙁
I’d give you Grimm in exchange for Bob’s Burgers anytime, if I could.
(Only watched two episodes of Grimm and didn’t like it enough to keep on watching.)
Fair enough; I haven’t started on Bob’s Burgers at all yet. I’m saving it 🙂
Tunnelbear is cheap and reliable and not as sketchy as Hola (which is why it’s cheap and not free), and it works for a whole bunch of countries.
I clicked on that burnout article SO FAST. My suspicions regarding the burnout I’ve been feeling at work for almost a year are now much less nebulous now. And the article about Jill Viles and her research, what a rollercoaster! And Evanna Lynch on Alan Rickman! And lesbian Boba Fett! And historical amnesia surrounding MLK!
This is one of the best link roundups you’ve ever done.
Is that commenter UPSET that someone compared him to Brad Pitt? Why not just take that as a compliment, no matter how off base it is? One of my friends said I look like Natalie Dormer once, and I’ll hold onto that forever.
He’s not upset. It’s a humblebrag swaddling a nib of racism. It’s “hey, some people in China think I look like Brad Pitt, so you shouldn’t be upset that people in America think you look like Constance Wu, Randall Park, and three little boys.”
With the implication, of course, that people from America are white.
I don’t know why, but “three little boys” killed me.
“Are they standing on each other’s shoulders, wearing a trenchcoat? Are you saying I am very tall?”
Someone once told me I look like young Cary Elwes, which was the highest compliment I’ve ever received.
No kidding! Congrats from an internet stranger, you handsome thing.
One time I was in line for a cosplay competition, and directly behind me was a Princess Bride cosplay group. Their costumes were very thrown together and not great, but their Dread Pirate Roberts looked SO EXACTLY like Cary Elwes, I spent half of my time chatting to them facing the other direction, because every time he looked at me I started giggling uncontrollably and couldn’t stop. (I chatted to them quite a bit, they were very nice, but eye contact was by necessity distinctly limited.)
My brother was once the reporter on a very rural beat where there were very few Jews, and everyone asked him if he was Seth Rogen.
I will be extremely interested to hear what Snyder has to say tonight at the State of the State. Fucker.
re: Bob’s Burgers – my mom has accepted that she is essentially Linda Belcher. Loves a good bed & breakfast, says “I love it!” a lot and mostly at weird kitschy things, and Christmas every year in our house is pretty much this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuabNnW4JVQ.
Watching Linda gesticulate with a spatula at family breakfast is just a joy.
Tumblr user sashayed is the voice of the people.
The truth. AND she co-wrote the single greatest piece of work to come out of Harry Potter fanfiction: The Shoebox Project. Ten years later, I am waiting for her genius to manifest itself in some great way that will make her filthy rich because she deserves it.
YES, ANOTHER SHOEBOX PERSON. sashayed is so, so good, she really does deserve it
Nicole – I’m very sorry for your (and all of our) loss. I thought of you immediately when I saw that Glenn had passed away. Which… is weird but whatever.
I thought the same thing when I heard it on the radio. “Nicole will be so upset!”
Same
Co-signed.
I agree completely with the unhelpful advice to just watch ALL of the Bob’s Burgers. Even the episodes that aren’t stand-outs still have moments of beauty. Also, I love with all my heart that the show is very rarely mean; Bob and Linda clearly ADORE each other and their kids, the kids ADORE their parents even when they’re frustrated with them (yes, even Louise), and they are all such lovely unique people who don’t try to stifle each other’s uniqueness.
Then, once you really start feeling the love among all the characters, watch “Hawk & Chick” (Season 5 so unfortunately only on Hulu at the moment, I believe) and weep like a baby.
Mr. Fischoeder: “Have you ever been in love, Bob?” Bob: “I mean, I technically…am…” Linda: “Hi!”
Nicole, please watch An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal (season 3).
It’s not unhelpful advice! It’s very helpful! Because watching all of Bob’s Burgers is the right thing to do.
I’m kind of convinced my husband is a grown-up Gene Belcher, and I love it.
Billy Graham is considered America’s saint, but between helping to make Christian belief all about personal piety, the rise of the religious right as a political force, and being one of the white clergy telling MLK Jr to “slow down”, I’d say his legacy is a lot more mixed than most people would like to acknowledge, especially since his one son is a raving lunatic and his grandson has openly said evangelicals are hurting themselves by being associated only with the Republican party.
Apparently he was really anti-union too, for some reason. Believed it was a sin to rise up against the bosses. The way people twist Christianity around to suit their own purposes is insane. I mean, common, but insane.
I was reading that article and remembering reading old newspapers about FDR’s economic policies– the rhetoric was exactly.the.same. then as it is now. “Businesses will have to stop hiring or shut down! This is an attack on our most productive citizens! It’s anarchy! It’s tyranny!” Hint: if you’ve been screaming about it since 1936 and none of your predictions have come to pass, they probably aren’t right around the corner in 2016.
Probably citing St Paul or some shit. Same reasons everyone gives any liberatory group actually reading what the biblical prophets said instead of maintaining the status quo. >:-(
Really? Do people other than right-wing Christians consider him America’s saint? I certainly never heard anything good about him growing up. But I was raised in a secular Jewish household so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fair enough, lol! I have almost never heard anyone say anything negative about him, as if he were above reproach.
Interesting! (To be clear, that was a genuine question, not a challenge to your statement! I’d never heard that before.)
I’m pretty confident that a significant portion of non-Evangelical Americans avoid criticizing Graham because they dread the reaction of Graham followers, not because they respect him.
I think that’s kind of like saying Rush Limbaugh is a saint. The people who like him love him and only listen to him, but outside of that bubble not so much? There was a poll from a few years ago asking why so many people have turned away from Christianity (the rise of religious “nones”) and a major reason was the Christian right–and suddenly, to be Christian meant being a republican (a la Graham, etc.) so people stopped going to church.
“In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the American public generally that there was a long-lasting ‘religious right’ connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way,” he said of the link between the Republican Party and groups such as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/09/survey-o…
Both my parents would have been amazed and amused if they heard anyone refer to Billy Graham as “America’s saint,” and I grew up in a secular-household-with-Christian-heritage-and-reverends-in-the-family. My experience is that Christians who are not also evangelical do not ever think of him that way, no.
All these different Americas that don’t really talk to each other often — it is indeed amazing.
Yeah, I was raised Catholic and my automatic response to anything remotely evangelical is a searing side-eye. Never heard anything good about him in my house either. I think a lot of these conversations are limited to particular denominations.
Ah, but Catholics aren’t real Christians to these people, remember, so we/they don’t count.
Sorry, this is in response to the Rachel Held Evans article. White church somehow still thinks they’re the heroes on civil rights, but Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb were the exceptions, not the rule.
Also, lol Tim Keller about Christianity being a liberating force when his Gospel Coalition is anti-GLBT and anti-feminist.
I had a big smart thought about American sainthood…then it faded away, like the actual historical truth of America’s saints, including Saint Billy Graham, Saint Jefferson, and (apparently) Saint Reagan.
The people we hold to greater accountability/critique are those who either were people of color or supported rights for people of color. Because the U.S. is racist as fuck, y’all.
Agreed.
My 78 year old mom considers him America’s pastor, so I’d say a lot of people her generation might still have the impression that he was a good man. He had multiple presidents’ ears, I think and a massive following. Filled stadiums back in the 50’s and 60’s, I think.
My mom’s kind of a liberal now and she still thinks the mythology around him is true. But then, she thinks a lot of messed up things are true, including the myth of Southern gentility and the niceness of plantations. She has never truly looked at the brainwashing she went through in Mississippi with a critical eye. Even though she’s liberal. It’s weird.
I’d say he’s a ‘saint’ to a very narrow sliver of evangelicals. He’s actually still alive – old as balls, but still alive.
He also has a grandson who is heavily involved with trying to get Protestant Christians to recognize the danger of sex abuse in their churches (his name is Boz…O forget his last name, but he runs G.R.A.C.E.), which I regard as the best thing to come from Billy Graham.
I have heard of that group, I think they try to do good work…they just get hired by patriarchal institutions who hate women because they want to look like they’re doing something in the same of sex assault or abuse scandals but don’t want to take any of GRACE’s actual advice and stop being sexist and abusive.
Wait, people actually respect Billy Graham? And wasn’t the Immaculate Virgin the patron of the US? /Catholic>
I LOVE Nancy Drew and would love a non-caucasian Nancy Drew! What I am emphatically not interested in is a 30-y-o, modern Nancy Drew! I feel like Nancy’s charm comes from being a Mid-century Teen Detective (MTD). Taking her out of that setting while maintaining her same MTD personality will make her seem very stilted and corny & it will flop like the Emma Roberts movie! Then people will blame the color-conscious casting for the flop & we’ll never get the plucky black MTD Nancy that we all deserve.
Agreed, I’m worried they’ll either make her “hardened cynical adult Nancy Drew”, which NO, or she’ll have the same affectations as old fashioned teen Nancy and will come across as ridiculous. Either way, I’m very skeptical.
I’m so DONE with hardened, cynical reboots!
“gritty” nancy drew, ugh
where ned left her for bess and nancy started drinking and smoking heavily and now she’s flirting with substance abuse as she tries to solve crimes slapdash in her PI company run out of the back of a station wagon
wait, i would totally watch that
I thought the ghostwritten case files where suddenly she solved murders instead of charming jewel thefts was the gritty reboot!
I totally forgot about those! At one point my goal was to read all the Nancy Drew books at the library but there were too many extra series and I gave up :/
there is a blogger out there who read Every Single Nancy Drew Book Ever (at least, the main series – I don’t think she did the Files or little kid ones yet but she DID do the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys crossovers) if you want to just read those summaries/reviews instead (http://series-books.blogspot.com) – Jennifer’s writing is sometimes a bit too influenced by the simplistic styles of the Stratemeyer books she collects, so I find it difficult to read too much of her blog all in one go, but she’s very thorough. She’s working through the Hardy Boys series right now, I believe.
The Eagles are one of my all-time favourite bands and today (well, most days) my work playlist is reflecting that.
Toasts, I haven’t been able to sleep properly in three days because “See My Vest” from the Simpsons keeps playing over and over in my head. This is like my own personal hell. Someone save me.
Quick, try this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwNz5gPlGSA
You gotta admit, it’s catchy.
Try singing “Happy Birthday, Lisa!” instead?
In the words of Bart, “You gotta admit it’s catchy.”
When I am old and grey and full of sleep, I am fairly certain that my mind will shed all the knowledge I have acquired, save only for Simpsons song lyrics. Only then will I be free to return to my primitive self, chanting “The ring came off my pudding can/Take my penknife my good man” all the way.
Just posting to say that I just finished Transparent Season 2 last night and am so here to talk about it. What a goddamn show.
I will sit right here for all of the Transparent talk.
Thing that nags at me that I will say here as a starting point, but really we can start wherever because what a goddamn show – almost all of the reviews/write-ups I was able to locate* focused on the queer/trans issues in the show. On the one hand, yes, they should. On the other, I think one misses so much if one doesn’t notice how inextricably tangled the queer/trans themes and the Jewish themes on the show are. And, while the show does hard work to educate its audience on the trans/queer storyline (lots of defining of terms, clarification, characters asking “stupid” questions so we can all hear the answer), it shrugs off explaining Jewish religious practice and culture while foregrounding them. The audience has to roll with it and catch the jokes and thematic connections where it can.
Also I want 75% of Rabbi Raquel’s clothes.
* – I maybe don’t want to discuss how much time I devoted to this a few weeks ago.
Dude. I have you covered on the Jewiness factor:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/insi…
http://www.thenation.com/article/jewy-queer-darin…
Oh, thank you! I had seen the piece from The Nation, but I somehow missed Emily Nussbaum’s write-up. I won’t quote, so as not to spoil anyone who hasn’t seen the show yet, but the last handful of paragraphs of Nussbaum’s piece hit the nail on the head. The moves the second season makes and the parallels it draws are so bold and fucked up that it should be all wrong, but it’s so *perfect* and messy that it fills me with joy.
Yes! It’s pretty amazing, including the part about Jewishness as a lens to view queer culture in America. I’ve read some criticism that episode 9 equates MichFest with Nazism – which, come on, way to miss the point.
One thing I love about the show is its honesty, how nobody gets away with anything. Maura is shown escaping in the dark at the first suggestion that her pain and privilege are separate. Raquel is the closest to perfect, and even she makes Josh send Colton away. Nobody gets off easy here (okay, maybe Syd. But come on, she’s played by Carrie Brownstein and her mom is DiDi Conn. She’s incorruptible).
Syd and Raquel should probably get together for drinks and mutual support.
I can see why Raquel wanted Colton to leave. He’s the result of an experience in Josh’s life that he definitely does not have his head all the way around. Also, messed up as it is, he was a big barrier to the life she was trying to make with Josh. To say nothing of how out-of-place and uncomfortable Colton was *all of the time.*
Related – The cringing, ignorant, casual anti-Semitic remarks from Colton’s family, esp. when Colton points out that he, too, is Jewish! I nearly had to hide under the couch.
I’m OK with not having it explained clearly … we Old People used to have to figure that stuff out for ourselves via critical commentaries, working in Jewy law firms, living in NYC before it was Disney for the rich, etc. Will be perusing Frumiosa’s links.
Really really like this show too. I wondered if they were going to touch on the controversy abt trans women at womyn’s festivals … they did a pretty good job but not real good on why the “man on the land” thing might have come about.
So many ages, shapes, faces of women though … so gratifying to see.
My husband and I downloaded Bob’s Burgers to watch after the baby arrives and now the baby is two days late! I’m taking it all weirdly personally, for some reason.
Don’t wait! It will be years before the baby will appreciate Bob’s burgers. (also much sympathy. My first was 6 days late. He’s still grounded!)
You should make a note of this so that you can guilt-trip your child about it in the future.
I for one am not low key about Bob’s Burgers. Work Hard, or Die Trying , Beefsqatch, Bad Tina, Topsy, and Slumber Party are good starters.
Also, while Sansa and Amelia are adorable, I can’t help but feel that a childless 30 something, I would be arrested if I started my day by sitting on a small (or any sized) child.
So, after watching Downton Abbey – can we have a Lady Edith spinoff that is also the Peggy Carter origin story?
I’d watch it! Of course, I’d also watch a show that was nothing but “Lady Edith Wears Things”.
Peggy is a nickname for Marigold, right?
VERY Yes.
Although she may be too young. Peggy doesn’t seem like a teenager in First Avenger, but Marigold will only turn 20 at the very end of the war.
It’s 1925 on Downton, and Marigold is three-ish, so she’d be at least 23 by 1945. Which still seems young for Peggy, but I’ll take it.
Yeah, that’s right! For some reason, I had something wrong in my head. It was either Marigold age, the current year on Downton, or World War II. Or some combination of those and the math to change one to another.
Peggy doesn’t read that young to me, but she is a woman at war, and likely had to grow up very fast. Particularly around a bunch of American boys who haven’t seen combat, she’s going to seem as regal as the Queen.
So, I think I remember that Marigold’s father died in or around the Beer Hall Putsch, so that was 1923. When Hitler invades Poland, she’d be right around 16.
I’m certain that Edith and Marigold will be living in London by 1940, which means that they’re going to be in the Blitz. That’s going to be when 17-year-old Peggy refuses to evacuate back to Downton, and instead signs up with the Strategic Scientific Reserve, possibly lying about her age. She’ll be just about 20 when she meets Steve Rogers.
The question, then, is how to turn Marigold Crawley into Margaret Carter. The initials are right, so that’s a good start. Does Edith change their names in order to escape her repressive family history? Does she marry a Mr. Carter at some point? Or is this Peggy’s way into the SSR without being dragged away by her grandfather?
One option: Edith marries Howard Carter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Carter
YES to all of this. I don’t know what will happen later this season, but perhaps Edith will find it easier to claim Mari as her own by moving to London and changing both their names? Distance herself from the Crawleys? Considering that her whole family is fairly horrible to her on a regular basis.
Then young Marigold/Peggy, having grown up hearing about her mother’s experiences during the war, gets herself recruited for the SSR.
Margaret, technically, but I for one wouldn’t quibble. Sounds fantastic to me!
If my name were Marigold, I’d change it to Margaret as soon as I had the chance.
The record of Native enslavement also shows how the white desire to put workers in bondage intensified the chaos of contact, disrupting intertribal politics and creating uncertainty and instability among people already struggling to adapt to a radically new balance of power.
YA THINK??!!?
Speaking as a Canadian, I had noooooooo idea (and this is why I love LR).
This discussion about the church and civil rights is about my very own family. My grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher in the 1960s whose attitude about black people was, “They’re just not as smart as us.” He would not have considered himself racist because he did not hate black people; on the contrary, he often offered them menial jobs and gave money to poor black families in his community. He saw this as being VERY magnanimous since his own father, a horrible racist by all accounts, was murdered by a black man. Still I am quite certain he felt that black people did not belong with white people because they could not be expected to behave properly (yes, that is a heavily weighted phrase.). I remember asking my parents about how they perceived the civil rights movement, as young Christian Southerners in the 1960s and they said, “It didn’t really affect us. It was just something on the news.”
To avoid a rambling screed, I will just say that I am trying to learn from the good and the bad in my personal history about what it means to love your neighbor. Racism is certainly my problem; it is the problem of every Christian and every church and every American, and the church should play a role in helping people to see that. To shrug their shoulders and say, “The problem is sin in the world, and that’s never going to go away,” is a terrible cop-out. To say, “Well, I get along with all the black people I know,” is maybe a worse cop-out. The church needs to stop being so scared being corrupted by “humanist social justice.”
From MLK’s Letter From the Birmingham Jail: “So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.”
Dang. There’s part of me that thinks we need an entirely new vocabulary to talk about race in this country, because somehow the word “racist” has shifted in meaning to the point that you can say “I’m not racist, I just think other races have inferior intelligence and should be segregated from white people” and a huge percentage of your audience will say “yes, that makes sense.”
And I don’t know very much about religious thought, but the idea that a religious person could ignore a problem and go “eh well, there will always be sin in the world,” just doesn’t make sense to me. Aren’t these the same people who leap to action about things like abortion? How come one of those demands action and the other one can’t be helped?
There’s part of me that thinks we need an entirely new vocabulary to talk about race in this country, because somehow the word “racist” has shifted in meaning to the point that you can say “I’m not racist, I just think other races have inferior intelligence and should be segregated from white people” and a huge percentage of your audience will say “yes, that makes sense.”
White supremacy. It’s the driving force behind racism, a stronghold.
But that’s arguably more loaded– if we say that the problem is white supremacy, people are likely to look at themselves and say “well, I’m not a part of the Aryan Brotherhood, so I guess this doesn’t concern me.” I guess there ought to be some more succinct way that everyone immediately understands for us to talk about racial injustice even when it isn’t motivated by hateful emotions or consciously held ideology.
This is kind of a minor point in the burnout article, but everything I’ve heard about hospitalization for mental health concerns makes it sound…not just like a nightmare, but just completely dehumanizing and maybe worse than being depressed in the first place (at least for some people). My brother was hospitalized in high school, and my parents still talk about, a decade later, as one of their biggest mistakes. And an ex-boyfriend was placed under 72-hour observation (I think), and ended up getting fired because they wouldn’t give him access to a phone to let his job know what was going on. I understand the need for emergency measures to keep people safe, but there has got to be a way that treats people as, well, people with agency, not just as a nest of problems whose own wants can be totally ignored.
Yeah. I have been severely depressed on and off through my entire adult life, and I’ve resisted hospitalization because it sounds like it would be likely to actively make things worse. Even seeking help back in college had some negative consequences. It’s made me very skittish about reaching out.
Just one person here, but being hospitalized saved my life, for sure. Although I realize you maybe mean forcibly hospitalized and I took myself in (best decision I have ever made, proudest achievement of my life, not an appropriate response to that question in job interviews). So I can’t speak to concerns about BEING checked in, but I can say having checked myself in, that:
Being in the hospital sucks. The food is awful, it’s scary, you’re surrounded by CRAZY PEOPLE OMG, the noise, ugh. I hope never to have to do it again.
As soon as I checked myself in, I tried to check myself back out, because of the above.
It is ABSOLUTELY where I needed to be. I couldn’t trust myself and I was so worn down from trying to not die (IT IS SO TIRING TRYING NOT TO DIE when your brain is like “nah, just go for it.” SO TIRING).
The omg crazy people I was surrounded by were just….people. Scared, hurting people. Remembering some of them still breaks my heart. Especially the woman who was homeless and schizophrenic. She was lucid because of the drugs but she knew as soon as her stay was finished she’d have to go off them and lose touch again and she was so scared of that. I can’t even imagine that kind of fear.
It taught me so much about people, about compassion, about mental illness, about strength and resilience in the face of mental illness. I 100% believe that I am a better person because of that time in the hospital. Also, yknow, alive. So.
Maybe I should pitch a thing about it? I have a lot of feelings and/or thoughts.
ANYWAY TEEL DEAR, it is not fun but sometimes it is necessary and it CAN be ok (although I know it can also be horrible, but just…is not a guarantee! my hospital was non-terrible).
Wow, thank you so much for sharing this. I hope you do pitch a piece and it appears here!
I’m a psych nurse that constantly questions if what I’m doing is helpful at all, so thank you for this. I, too, have heartbreak remembering some of the people I’ve worked with.
I worked as direct care for a children’s psych hospital years ago and have a lot of Feelings about it, and I found this reassuring and helpful, too.
ETA: I still think about and worry about those kids. I wonder if that will ever stop.
One of the psych nurses at my hospital was honestly the best and most useful part of my hospitalization. Just so you know.
*puts hand up* Not the same, but I voluntarily hospitalised myself in a private facility for two weeks and it was the best idea I ever had. I am still proud of broken, wants-to-walk-in-front-of-cars me for going “no, this is going too far” and putting myself into the place I needed. There is a difference though, between where I was and any kind of mandatory admission, since mine was low-security and voluntary admission only. Likewise, I was very lucky to be able to go to a private facility (that being said, where I am (not-America) there are more private facilities than public, so lucky, but not rare). From what I heard from other patients and staff, mandatory admission can be very different, and while our public system would probably have… been enough, I guess, I’m glad I landed where I did.
But yeah, although I fully acknowledge that I am so lucky to have a good story to tell, I want to put that there as a counter-narrative, not to invalidate other people’s bad experiences, but just to say that maybe if you (generic you) ever need it, sometimes it can be a good choice, and not because it’s the only one.
I think the same goes for most mental health services in general. It IS dehumanizing, and littered with professionals making misogynist and racist assumptions etc.
Having been through the system several times in my twenties, I am very ambivalent about the ways in which we advise people in crisis to seek help. It seems more practical to be pragmatic in acknowledging the limitations of psychiatry even as you encourage someone to give it a try.
For me, who checked myself in for a weekend, the hospital *was* sort of dehumanizing (no privacy, for example)…but much, MUCH less dehumanizing than being depressed & non-functional & wanting to die. It was a way of regaining agency, in fact, and I’m really glad I did it.
Yeah, I definitely recognize the need for some kind of option like hospitalization if not hospitalization itself. Maybe this is an issue of particular facilities or for hospitalization being used when it’s not the best option. I don’t know, I’m struggling with this, but I just think we can and should do better for people.
(Also, I’m glad that you are apparently in a better place).
Perhaps hospitalization wouldn’t work for you, or didn’t work for your people, but sometimes when people are really just at the end of their rope, having rigid structure is important. For some, it might be the mental/emotional break they needed. For those who are involuntarily committed, sure, I can see how it would be extra traumatic. But I don’t think we can use such a broad brush in this instance.
I certainly don’t mean to discourage people from taking care of themselves in whatever way they need, and I can see how my original comment comes across as “all hospitalization is bad” (to the extent that it reads as judgmental of people who are hospitalized, I apologize – that was absolutely not where I meant to go). What I’m trying to say (poorly) is that people should be treated well and with dignity, and that people should be able get the treatment that they need (be it hospitalization, or something else). In my admittedly limited experience, that just isn’t how things work for many people.
Oh yes, totally. Not all hospitals are good for all clients, and not all people would benefit from being committed or committing themselves. It’s usually a broken system, especially for those who are perhaps poor or can’t afford private care. If we had more clinics, outpatient and inpatient, that effectively treated mental illnesses, it would be better, and everyone is entitled to dignity and respect.
I have much more experience with this than I would like. It is complicated to be sure, but should not be rejected outright. A soft place to land, with caring nurses, sometimes. Hell on earth, others. Most often mixed. Having a close family member or loved one to advocate for you is very, very important, if possible.
It’s like what happened in the Rosehan experiment- a bunch of neurotypical people without mental health issues got themselves into an asylum on the basis of “hearing voices,” then dropped the act and said they felt better. All of them were diagnosed with something and forbidden to leave until they took antipsychotics.
And then it gets worse.
The staff got pissed at their false diagnoses and told Rosenhan to send more fake patients so they could suss them out. They ended up identifying 41 potential fake patients when Rosenhan had sent none. Not only can mental hospitals be awful places to be in, sometimes the staff can’t even tell whether you’re supposed to be there.
Great googly-moogly, but that is depressing.
This is almost EXACTLY what Nellie Bly described doing! To the almost exact same result!
You’d like to think inpatient psychiatric care had made some improvements in at least DIAGNOSTICS in 130 years, ffs!
I mean I don’t want to find a venomous snake under my fridge either, but the snake would actually have to lay eggs in moist sandy soil for them to hatch, so unless some of that happened to be under the fridge too…
Well, wouldn’t you still have one venemous snake and fourteen rotting snake eggs under your fridge, then?
I am 95% sure there are no snake eggs in my purse sand.
brb dumping out my purse sand now.
Oh, wow, Maria Accardi (the burnout piece) in the link roundup! She’s great! I took a class with her last spring and am currently working on a chapter for a feminist reference desk anthology she’s doing for Library Juice Press.
I was following along and contributing a bit to day one of #LISmentalhealth week on Twitter. It’s of interest to the libraryland people, but I think it could be helpful to anyone in a profession that does a lot of caring work or emotional labor.
I’m really glad the LISmentalhealth conversation is happening; it’s much needed. Actually, I’m really glad for librarian Twitter in general.
The Kylo Ren Cat, not sure if anyone would be interested but it made laugh-fart
http://www.someecards.com/cute/animals/adam-drive…
Catlo Ren!
Hi Toast, it’s the first day of the semester and I’m TAing for the first time and my dog is sick! Somehow he always seems to do this, get sick at difficult times. But mostly I feel bad for him, for it is probably a UTI, and almost every adult human with a vulva knows how bad those are.
In less off-topic things, protesters shut down the Bay Bridge (from Oakland into San Francisco) yesterday and everyone on the internet seems to have an opinion about whether Dr. King would so inconvenience and alienate potential allies *eyeroll*
My vote is for “yes, he almost certainly would.”
Seconded! ““I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Ref: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Some-of…
Word.
OMG I hope your teaching is going better than mine (I never made it to school, I’m snowed in)
It’s raining hard here, which for the Bay Area is like a full-on apocalypse. But I will still (hopefully) make it to class. Stay warm!
The thing I keep repeating in recent discussion is that inconvenience is a crucial part of nonviolent action. Disrupting the status quo, putting the movement in the way of people’s attention: that’s how these things get noticed.
First thing I thought of when I saw that picture was… “penis bone”
sorry not sorry
The Jill Viles story is UTTERLY gripping. And it makes you feel good. It’s the opposite of most stories like this, where you just keep getting more frustrated for the hero. It’s a hopeful story about an admirable group of women, and you should read it.
Ooh, thank you for that additional encouragement.
Yes, I loooooved this piece. So interesting!
Fellow Hamiltoasts and Discworld fans, please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks Moist von Lipwig was at least partially inspired by Alexander Hamilton.
Or is it just my fan-fever consumed brain?
Lin-Manuel Miranda would be the most charming Moist ever. Can we petition him for a musical adaptation?
This is the best idea I’ve ever heard in my life???? REG as Adora, naturally.
I could read a 10-page laundry list of evidence that Steven Avery was involved in the murder and still not believe that he got a fair trial. Show me the list of evidence of due process and I’ll reconsider.
If “as long as a guilty person is in prison, it doesn’t matter how he got there” is the basis of our justice system, we need to seriously examine our values.
Yes. That was my overwhelming opinion throughout watching the show (well, that and “Ken Krantz is a creepy scuzzbag”)
That, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kratz#2009_Sext…
It is possible to think he is totally guilty and also think that the trial was awful and also think that the criminal justice system needs a complete overhaul and also think that the documentary is gross and not want to watch it.
Similar feelings Re: Adnan/Serial.
I think if nothing else, the true crime exposé fad may (I hope) make more people aware of how screwed up our justice system is.
In addition to Evanna’s tribute, Sean Biggerstaff’s made my eyes well up: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1so6djn
That was the one that nailed me, and now I have my sad everywhere.
Oh wow, oh wow, how wonderful.
Re: BOB’S BURGERS
START FROM THE BEGINNING, WATCH EVERY EPISODE, REPEAT.
Oh, you just described my monthly viewing patterns.
About the worst thing that I could say about Glenn Frey is that most of my favorite Eagles songs were really Don Henley songs, but snotty hipsters tend not to make those distinctions. (They also tend to quote The Big Lebowski for support, not seeming to realize that The Dude, while amiable enough, really isn’t much of a role model.) The Eagles were victims of their own success; Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) is still the second-best selling album in history (after Thriller), and that’s without “Hotel California”, “I Can’t Tell You Why”, “New Kid In Town”, or anything by Joe Walsh. If it wasn’t playing on the radio, it was on tape in the car you were riding in; people got sick of it. I, myself, never got a copy, but I’m thinking about it now.
Isn’t the whole joke that the Dude is very laid back, but inexplicably hates an inoffensive band like the Eagles? That’s what I thought.
and then, like, the Eagles are on the soundtrack? TWO Eagles songs, in fact!
Thanks for linking to that depression/burn out place. I’ve been having a bit if a rough time lately, and the general consensus seems to be “burn out/grad school’s hard” but even in the past couple days there’s been a couple moments where I’ve thought that this is not typical frustrated with my work feeling. The article definitely gives me some things to think about.
ALSO worth considering — i have been, at any rate — does “burn out/grad school’s hard” mean that its associated episodes are not worrisome symptoms? like, i have had two all-out crying jags at my husband this week (he is a trooper) and i am actually CERTAIN they are “burn out/grad school’s hard” situations rather than independent mental-health manifestations, but they are still concerning and probably need to be dealt with somehow. that the problem has a source doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem.
(i’m sorry things are not going great! sympathy!)
I think this is also completely legitimate. I thought about this a lot in undergrad as well – my school had a very high acceptable misery threshold, where all sorts of behavior that really weren’t healthy or productive (chronic stress, sleep deprivation, etc) were totally considered par for the course. On the one hand, it is nice to have people say “oh you’re not alone, a lot of people feel overwhelmed” but that can backfire into people hearing “oh it’s completely normal to feel that way so you shouldn’t worry about it/seek out help/try to change” which can be non-productive. It’s a hard problem to fix or even address properly.
They just knew there were a lot of strong and well-defined people in the family, especially the women.
Lake Wobegon?
I thought this was a good read about the Flint crisis – covers a lot of the “wait, how did the water get contaminated in the first place?” background details.
“You’re drinking toxic waste, but hey, we saved some money!”
As a former Michigander, this whole debacle breaks my heart.
God save me from white people who try to downplay POC experiences with racism by sharing their experiences of prejudices when travelling abroad.
Hear hear. I mean, I lived in a country where I was a minority ages 10-13, and there were interesting/weird aspects to that, but I looked like the minority that had colonized that country and ruled it for a long time. That’s really not the same as being a POC in a largely white country. Not by a long shot.
what’s really great is when they pitch you essays about these experiences
Is this the most ridiculous fallout The Toast has ever had in response to a piece? At this point it seems like you could start a “Helpful” White Advice tumblr and never run out of material.
I am not sure if it’s the MOST ridiculous, but it has to be right up there. This piece brought us the double whammy of Actually Racist Trolls as well as People Trying to be “Helpful” Who Just Manage to be Condescending. I expect it will, like Jess’s emotional labor piece, bear trollish fruit for months if not years to come.
some “well meaning” Embodiment of White Cis Male Privileged i used to work with once told me how “forward thinking” his (I think really annoying) church was for doing outreach in Harlem to black churches, since church membership in his church was so white. to which i deadpanned, “Your church is not integrated in 2015 for complicated, historical, racist reasons. There was a movement of integration 75 years ago, and your church was actively against it. going into someone else’s faith tradition, pulling them out of the church they’ve made for themselves, to make your congregation’s demographics look more PC today is morally corrupt, myopic, racist act.” AND I WALKED THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY OWN CUBICLE. Super proud of that moment.
And thank god Rachel Held Evans is pointing it out. I grew up in an insanely progressive church environment, so a lot of her spiritual journey doesn’t resonate with me, but i love how she’s giving a huge voice to the silenced.
Depression has a way of sneaking up on you. For the past 6 months or so I’ve been (when not at work) lying on the sofa watching TV and surfing the web obsessively. I thought I was just enjoying myself. Then I noticed how little I was able to accomplish, even on my days off. All I wanted to do was sleep and watch tv while surfing the web. This is a new one on me, and I’m working on it. My sofa IS extremely comfy, however.
It me.
Several months ago I caught myself asking the question “how do I tell the difference between being an introvert and being depressed?” at least a couple times a week; eventually it occurred to me that having to ask that question strongly suggests the latter.
Especially this time of year! Am I depressed/SAD or just a cold introvert is a question I ask regularly (so far, the answer is “cold introvert” but some years it’s definitely SAD).
But that really is how I like to spend my time most. Now you have me worried :/
guys, come on, he SAID it was going to be a spoiler. i guess he should have put it in a reply, though.
No lie, Bob’s Burgers makes me excited about the prospect of raising a family of weirdos. I just need to find my Linda (I’m definitely more of a Bob).
My husband (Bob, though he may deny it) and I (Linda) are pretty sure our hypothetical future weirdos will be exactly like Tina and Gene. Somehow that makes it less intimidating?
Speaking of period dramas (no one is speaking of period dramas) did anyone watch the pilot for Mercy Street? I’m torn between my desire to watch old-timey medical dramas with Strong Female Characters, and my dislike of Josh Radnor from HIMYM. Like, I just keep seeing his character as Ted doing some overwrought cosplay.
I just keep seeing his character as Ted doing some overwrought cosplay.
Whatever it is, I’ll watch it just for that.
those are my feelings preCISEly
I watched it! My fiancee and I enjoyed it very much, but we are also the sorts of people who watch ridiculous period dramas while also making fun of them/shouting at the screen, so.
to be fair i think even ted was ted doing some overwrought cosplay
“oh yep i have my costume all thought out it’s Chivalry’s Last Stand but i’m bummed i couldn’t find quite the right goatee”
Ah ha ha ha I hated Ted so much
My thoughts exactly. Fucking Ted Mosby. Now that I think about it my entry for the worst ex story should have just been “strongly identifies with Ted Mosby.”
Oh that’s who that is! He’s also independently unlikeable on Mercy Street. I hope he gets dysentery.
i have trouble looking at Bob’s Burgers because i don’t like the animation. can someone smack me and tell me to get the hell over it so i can enjoy this clearly very good show?
Would it help if I told you that I worked at an animation studio for a few years with a group of people who had done the first season of Bob’s Burgers? They were all really lovely and talented and funny!
Because of the snappy dialogue, the show works surprisingly well without watching. I mean, I love watching, but you can totally listen to an episode while sweeping or whatever and most of the jokes will land.
I’m the same way! And I can’t watch Rick and Morty because of their weird eyes (although the auditory aspect is pretty gross as well).
No specific advice, but it took me a bit (and probably reading rave reviews) to get over my initial dislike of the animation, and now it doesn’t really register. (Whereas–content aside–I don’t even like to look at any of the Seth McFarlane things, and my South Park tolerance is very low, for context.)
You guys! I am working on individual thank yous, but thank you Toasties so much! Nicole posted my parents’ You Caring page last Friday and it resulted in a wonderful boost towards our goal. I am so overwhelmed by the generosity of so many people. We are now super close to the goal and, even better, being able to pay down so much of the bill has led the agency to offer to work with us on a payment plan for the rest. The immediate threat of him losing the in-home care is gone!
I haven’t been able to post sooner because my phone will never let me log in to Intense Debate and I am currently staying with my parents for a few more days because my dad ended up having emergency surgery a couple of days after we started the fundraiser (he’s doing really well now, which is amazing in itself), but I just snagged a few minutes on my dad’s tablet while he’s being prepped for the day because I had to share how thankful I am. Toasties are the best.
The other day I remembered that Mameshiba exists and I almost melted.
Did you know?
this is so incredibly weird but yet i am mesmerized
#neverforgetneshitteru~~~~~
edamameshiba is my bae (my favorite though was the tv ad with the babies several years ago omg so cute)
#butts
I clipped out this Onion story from a calendar and had it pinned to my bulletin board for years. “My Lord.”
If the burnout post speaks to you (as it does to me), also maybe check out the #LISmentalhealth tag on Twitter. Library types of all kinds are talking about mental health this week.
Posting before getting to any of the links OR the comments, because my week has been like that:
My kids had yesterday off of school. They were at their dad’s until 8 am. Found out that while at dad’s over the weekend 19 yr old and 15 yr old got into a FISTFIGHT. (I cannot even remember them doing that in the past ? decade?). Also 15 year old fell on the ice. Between the two, 15 yr old might have a boxing fracture. His third or fourth hand injury? Andabout the 4th time one of my kids has a *punching* injury (two anger, two karate).
That would be dealable except it’s snowed OVER TWO FEET in the past 36 hours. I can’t take him anywhere. I can’t get anywhere.
I was supposed to start assistant teaching and my first PhD classes today. Snow has the roads all closed. I can’t get anywhere. So I’m missing my first day of classes. AND my kids have a snow day.
I’m stressed. Also, I have nowhere for my team to practice, so I’m losing my mind asking all 4 school locations and a community gym out of desperation, and trying to fit all that into my work, school, and kid schedule.
ARRRRRRRRGH!
Sorry, a bit of cabin fever here.
I am going to try to salvage today by making my children write thank you notes.
nice thing: my daughter is watching Night at the Museum and telling me all about Ceasar and Marc Antony and Octavian. So awesome.
Okay so I’m pathetic and currently have no friends beyond my husband (who is SUPER PROUD of me for this and almost made me cry) so I’m saying this here because I needed to share and you are all amazing and understand, right?
I realized this year that I’m a non-binary transperson and that I need a primary care doc who doesn’t misgender me aggressively. I also have some significant trauma that makes doctors… hard. Today on lunch, I reached out to a clinic where several (!) doctors focus on serving trans patients and they’re working to get me a new patient appointment and I sorta want to cry because omg. I’ve got some stupid uterus issues and the prospect of medical care for it where I’m not assumed a woman is intoxicating/overwhelming/making me feel elated.
Only good things can come of this, right? I mean the receptionist congratulated me for discovering I was trans, and was genuinely happy for me!
That’s so great! Reaching out to new doctors is scary, and finding supportive medical care as a transperson is hard, and you just did both! Congrats on that, and on figuring out that you are trans.
Thank you!! Even better, I got an appointment for the end of February so I don’t have to go back to Awful Triggery Doc before I run out of a med she prescribed. Today does not quite feel real. Good doctor stuff doesn’t happen to me normally.
This is wonderful! As a nonbinary trans person afraid of doing this thing, I’m inspired by and proud of you.
Thank you – I know how hard it is to go looking. I got lucky and discovered that the local university health system (Mizzou in Columbia MO) is Big on helping trans people access care of all stripes. I sincerely hope you are able to find something similar soon. I wish it were available everywhere.
YAY what a great story!
Wishing you all the best!
Yay! This internet stranger is also super proud of you!
Good luck! Sounds like this place is just what you need 🙂
Congratulations! I’m so happy for you and wish you all the good things going forward.
public service announcement: i just went to maximumfun.org for my daily podcast prowling and Nicole is a guest on “Can I Pet Your Dog” and my Tuesday just got a bajillion times happier and Sansa-ier.
THANK YOU NICOLE. It’s hard out here for a legit diehard Eagles fan. I am experiencing Heartache Tonight.
I feel like sitting on a child would be uncomfortable. Can I sit on Sansa instead? She’s so fluffy.
The Guardian article about that snake included the lines “The snake is recovering from the exhaustion of laying the eggs. She was given some mice and water to build up her strength before being released”, which caused me to say “What a darling!”. (www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/13/heavily-pregnant-deadly-snake-found-under-fridge-by-australian-woman)
I woke up even later than usual so I’m not sure if anyone will see this, but! I’ve started a group on facebook called “PDX Toasties” for any Toast readers living in/near Portland, Oregon. I’d love to see more members! 😀
So Liz Bourke has a piece on Tor.com about how we should set the representation for women bar higher in Star Wars (and other films).
http://www.tor.com/2016/01/19/sleeps-with-monster…
She mentioned on Twitter that she wished she could get some discussion that wasn’t all about the menz, so I naturally thought of The Toast.
I enjoyed TFA so much and I LOVED Rey, but I was definitely disappointed by how little screen time Leia and Phasma got. And I definitely want to see more Jessika Pava!
Two quick points:
(1) Mine was a quick joke more than a thorough philosophical examination;
(2) I didn't mean he was guilty of the murder of that lady; or, specifically, in this case, the brutal sexual assault of the first woman. I meant he was just guilty existentially. He killed a cat.