Sansa is very big. Sansa is still insisting that I cannot shower without her coming in and watching me to make sure I do not slip and then licking water off my feet. Also, she has bat ears now.
The story of how Target Canada crashed and burned (it sure did!):
Fisher, 38 years old at the time, was regarded as a wunderkind who had quickly risen through the ranks at Target’s American command post in Minneapolis, from a lowly business analyst to leader of a team of 400 people across multiple divisions. Launching the Target brand in a new country was his biggest task to date. The news he received from his group that February afternoon should have been worrying, but if he was unnerved, Fisher didn’t let on. He listened patiently as two people in the room strongly expressed reticence about opening stores on the existing timetable. Their concern was that with severe supply chain problems and stores facing the prospect of patchy or empty shelves, Target would blow its first date with Canadian consumers. Still, neither one outright advocated that the company push back its plans. “Nobody wanted to be the one to say, ‘This is a disaster,’” says a former employee. But by highlighting the risks of opening now, the senior employees’ hope was that Fisher would tell his boss back in Minneapolis, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel, that they needed more time.
This old Mark Singer profile of close-up magician Ricky Jay launched me into a day of YouTube clips:
“Now, why might that be unfair?” he continued. “I’ll tell you why. Because, even though you shuffled, I dealt the cards. That time, I also shuffled the cards. Now, this time you shuffle the cards and you deal the cards. And you pick the number of players. And you designate any hand for me and any hand for you.”
After shuffling, I dealt four hands, arranged as the points of a square. I chose a hand for myself and selected one for him. My cards added up to nothing—king-high nothing.
“Is that fair?” Jay said, picking up his cards, waiting a beat, and returning them to the table, one by one—the coup de grâce. “I. Don’t. Think. So.” One, two, three, four aces.
The Native fashion community takes charge:
The Native fashion community is not new, though the buzz surrounding it is.
“We’ve always been here, but the internet has helped us get much more of a response,” says designer Jamie Okuma. “Social media has really changed the landscape. You can be your own PR person and get visibility just by posting.”
Okuma is one of countless Native American designers creating clothing and jewelry that draw inspiration and use designs from their tribes. While some have attended fashion school, many aren’t professionally trained. Making clothes is simply a part of Native culture.
“A lot of Native Americans learn crafts from a very young age,” says Jolonzo Goldtooth, the 28-year-old Navajo designer behind JG Indie. Living on his family’s ranch on the Navajo’s Huerfano Chapter in New Mexico, Goldtooth earns his income mainly by making traditional garb for his tribe, but he also takes personal orders for his contemporary line. “My grandmothers are seamstresses, so that’s how I learned to sew, bead, and put garments together. We’ve always made our own clothing.”
THE DARK SIDE OF THE SHOW-DOG WORLD (makes tea, settles into bed):
In the days that followed, the media erupted with sensational reports and lurid headlines about the scandal: MURDER AT CRUFTS, blared The Sun. “A canine whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie,” reported the Associated Press. “A murder mystery more outlandish than any Hollywood script,” The Telegraph chimed in. British dog-lovers took to Facebook, their preferred means of communication, to express their outrage. Soon, there were reports of other dogs’ possibly having been poisoned at Crufts, including two Shetland sheepdogs, an Afghan hound, a Shih Tzu, and a West Highland white terrier. According to one owner, they had not been lethally dosed but were believed to have been “given something to mess up their chances in the ring!”
“You have found who you’re looking for,” the man replied with a flash of defiance. “I’m Ratko Mladić.” It was the end of 14 years on the run.
Mladić had at one point told his elderly cousin Branislav to shoot him rather than let him be taken alive. He even showed him the gun he was supposed to use. But Branislav was out on the morning of the arrest. Anyway, Branislav told Šaljić, he could never have brought himself to pull the trigger. Neither, as it turned out, could Mladić. His Heckler & Koch was found lying among dirty socks at the bottom of a wardrobe.
This horrible school shooting in Saskatchewan:
A small community in northern Saskatchewan is in mourning after shootings at two locations — including a school — left four people dead.
Several others were wounded in the violence Friday in La Loche, Sask., a Dene community nestled on the shores of Lac La Loche with a population of about 3,000.
Jaya wrote this amazing thing about why cartoon bombs look the way they do:
In 1920, the popular newspaper comic strip Jerry on the Job was adapted by Bray Studios into a few animated films. In “The Bomb Idea,” Jerry and another character read that “Bolsheviki” are on the loose throughout the country, and that all citizens should be on alert. Shortly after, a man arrives carrying a heavy, black sphere. Jerry and his friend panic, assuming the item is a bomb, when eventually it is revealed to just be a bowling ball. But it’s clear that by 1920, everyone knew what a bomb looked like.
OLD FRIENDS DOG SANCTUARY OLD FRIENDS DOG SANCTUARY HOLY SHIT
This is the best thing:
After college and graduate school — Rafi has a master’s degree in crisis and trauma studies from Tel Aviv University — he settled in Denver. Rafi began working as a community organizer, then a regional manager, for the Jewish LGBT advocacy group Keshet. In 2014, he took a job at Ramah Outdoor Adventure, a Jewish camp affiliated with the Conservative movement; he is now the director of camper care.
“We welcomed Rafi as a Jewish leader, and one that pushed us to live our value of being open and accepting,” said the camp’s executive director, Rabbi Eliav Bock.
Summer session 2015 at Ramah Outdoor Adventure, which serves children in grades 3–12, coincided with the third trimester of Rafi’s pregnancy. Rafi was met with a round of applause when he told the camp staff his news. But he asked his colleagues not to discuss his pregnancy with campers, who, Rafi said, “just thought I was a fat dude.” By the end of the summer, with Bock’s blessing, Rafi disclosed to the high school-age campers that he was pregnant.
As mentioned here numerous times before, Serena Williams’s entire career has been a prolonged troll for White Tears. From the moment the Williams sisters emerged from Compton and disrupted the tennis world’s effete and bourgeois establishment, White Tears have trailed her the way breadcrumbs trailed Hansel and Gretel. They’re shed when she wins, when she receives awards, when she expresses happiness, when she expresses anger, when she just exists. It’s almost as if she’s a Medela Swing Breastpump for White Tears, her very presence helping them drip and squirt, distilled and delicious, into BPA-free bottles.
This water-tasting piece is surprisingly entertaining:
Tasting Notes: “This is not black. It is distinctly brown, like root beer or a good Belgian quadrupel that’s been left open too long. Objectively, if you get past the color, it’s pretty neutral and tastes like water. This is the most structured water we’ve tasted: It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I would never drink something that looks like this. I don’t dislike it, and if for some reason I needed to drink it, I could survive.”
Would Pair Best With: “Something hearty and rich, like beef wellington or this rabbit pot pie we do at The Dutch. This is not an aperitif.”
SLEEP AT NIGHT LIKE A NORMAL PERSON DO NOT DO SHIT LIKE THIS:
Everyman has proven more accessible to aspiring polysleepers. Staver estimates that of people who start out trying Uberman, three-quarters end up on some version of Everyman. The online Polyphasic Society describes more than a dozen sleep schedules with varying numbers and lengths of naps, their details laid out in daily pie charts. In the diagrams for Uberman and “Dymaxion” (another schedule modeled after Buckminster Fuller’s), sleep appears as vanishingly small slivers in the nearly pristine pastry of the day.
No one gets there easily, though. The Polyphasic Society’s website warns of side effects people may experience while they’re adapting. There’s “metabolic panic,” meaning either constant hunger or a total loss of appetite. There may be chills, moodiness, constipation, and eye strain from keeping your eyes open all the time. The ominous-sounding “zombie mode” is also a concern.
Hey, guys, thank you so much for your support last week when we lost Doug. I felt very loved. I have decided to stop reading the detailed accident report over and over, because it doesn’t do any good.
“I have always relied on the kindness of [internet] strangers.” – Nicole Cliffe
