“Paint me like one of your French girls.”
NOPE:
LANSING — The Snyder administration quietly trucked in water to state buildings in January of 2015 – ten months prior to Governor Snyder publicly admitting there was reason for concern in Flint, according to a document obtained by Progress Michigan.
“The gal that’s running against me is a 30-year-old, you know, mom, mother of two infants,” said Patton, a 62-year-old Republican from Strongsville, in a recent radio interview. “And I don’t know if anybody explained to her we’ve got to spend three nights a week in Columbus. So, how does that work out for you? I waited until I was 48 and my kids were raised, and at least adults, before we took the opportunity to try.”
Patton referred to Herold as a “young gal” and, while talking about his role in bringing additional school funding to his area, said, “I want to tell her, ‘Hey Sweetie, I just got 27 percent of the pie in just my district, which is nine times what should have been done.'”
This oral history of the Challenger disaster really rocked me:
Rhea Seddon (astronaut): I happened to be at an off-site building [near Johnson Space Center in Houston], doing some training for my next mission. The launch was supposed to start around the same time as our meeting, so we found a TV and turned it on. It’s always a joyful morning, especially to see friends go to space.
Corlew: We made sure they were all properly suited before they went into the shuttle, made sure everything was right, made sure the hatch was closed properly. The whole crew was really jovial that morning. It was a joke between me and Christa: I’d told her I was going to bring her an apple. The day before she said, “Where’s my apple?” So the day we launched, I made sure she got her apple. She handed it back and said, “Save it for me. I’ll eat it when I get back.”
do what you love, kids:
Jae Rhim Lee and Mike Ma, co-founders of the Infinity Burial Suit, met at the Hassno Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Lee conceptualized the idea of a burial method that would help reconnect our bodies with the earth. She came up with the idea of an “Infinity Mushroom,” a fungus which would be able to “eat” her body and neutralize its toxins once she died. To test it out, she began “feeding” a group of mushrooms her hair, skin, and nails, and selected the ones that were able to best decompose them.
The Defense Department is set to announce it will allow new moms 12 weeks of maternity leave as part of its Force of the Future initiative, a doubling of the Army and Air Force policy of six weeks but cutting what’s now allowed for sailors and Marines.
Defense Secretary Ash Cater was set to announce the policy change at Thursday afternoon, along with spate of new initiatives designed to boost retention force-wide, especially among women.
HOW DID YOU GET ENGAGED WITHOUT HAVING HAD THIS CONVERSATION?
Dear Carolyn: We are engaged, and she has a ring. I have four indoor dogs, and they are Great Danes, well-behaved and more predictably glad to see me than “Alice” is. She says no wedding date until I have one dog or all outside.
Does it sound to you as if I need to take the pain and keep the dogs, or take the pain and yield to Alice? I’m 31, and Alice is 28.
This was a great profile of Diane Rehm (my unflagging politeness and desperate need for approval keeps me from ever being this kind of woman, but I LOVE this kind of woman):
“She’s very challenging. We had our first fight before I even got here,” says J.J. Yore, manager of WAMU-FM (88.5), a Washington NPR affiliate. Earlier this month, before she took a sabbatical for her thrice-yearly voice treatments, they had an hour-long dustup. Says her dear friend Mary Beth Busby, “You don’t ever ask Diane’s opinion if you don’t want it, because you’re going to get it.” Yet Rehm is celebrated for moderating civil discourse between often vehemently opposed guests.
I have the maturity of a 12 year old, and I laughed so hard at this I cried:
Janet Cremins (Physical Therapist): I’ve helped Navy SEALS get back on their feet after losing limbs in combat. I helped an NFL player come back from a torn ACL. I can honestly say that no one has ever worked harder in his or her recovery than Marilyn Manson. He was driven by something almost spiritual. It was inspiring. I am moved to tears right now just thinking about it.
Manson: I set a goal date in my mind. By March 30th I wanted that dick in my mouth. I stopped seeing my friends and family. It was Janet and I just constantly rehabbing in the pool. On the morning of the 30th, I had a final checkup with Dr. Foster.
SPEAKING of great profiles of cool women:
While the book didn’t really help (“You can learn the craft,” she says, “but it can’t make up for talent”), it did offer the kind of meet-cute that most New York women dread. On her subway ride home from work, a strange man noticed her stand-up guide and tried to make conversation, offering up the possibly dubious notion that he was, in fact, a comedian. He followed her after he got off the train and made a joke, when she got to her apartment building, that she’d need a subway token to get in. “He knew my building was formerly an SRO,” she says. The joke, at least, got her attention, and he asked her to do her routine for him. “He said, ‘Oh, you’re going to bomb,’” she says, but a combination of wide-eyed optimism and self-determination told her that the guy was wrong. The next night, at Stand Up NY, she showed up and expected a prime spot, only to learn from the booker that she was likely to get bumped. Her comedy benefactor showed up after all, though, and talked the booker into letting her go on—and she didn’t bomb after all. (When asked if the comedian is someone I’d know, Lazarus demurs, keeping the identity a secret. Every origin story, after all, needs a little mystery and magic.)
this is very sweet and wistful:
It all started off humbly enough. It was a forum dedicated to a band that came out of Glasgow in 1996, and the very first email, sent in 1997, set things in motion with a deceptively simple premise: “The Sinister mailing list was setup by Paul Mitchell in August 1997 to assist David Kitchen’s efforts to create information about the band Belle and Sebastian.”
Friend of The Toast Elon Green on the last years of Saul Bellow:
In the very last years of his life, when he was well into his eighties and his memory had more or less gone, Saul Bellow took great delight in uncomplicated pleasures. He liked to feed grapes to his daughter, Naomi Rose, arms draped around her. He’d play Bach on the recorder, the same melody again and again, as the six-year-old girl, whom everyone called Rosie, danced. “She’s so beautiful!” he’d say. “She’s such a little angel!” And night after night, Bellow and Rosie would watch The Lion King.
”Their strange interests matched in those last few years,” Janis Freedman-Bellow, his widow, said recently. “Those were the kinds of things that were eerily perfect, given how difficult the situation on the face of it was.”
Reeves, who lives in Missouri and flew out to California for the workshop, is missing her elbow in her left arm. She told Mic that she has three prosthetic prototypes, one of which she refers to as the Sun. She’s also a big fan of Rey, the new kickass female protagonist from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
“She builds things, and I’m building things,” Jordan said.
And yet, in one respect, “The Little Mermaid” represented a backward step in the princess genre. For a film centered on a young woman, there’s an awful lot of talking by men. In fact, this was the first Disney princess movie in which the men significantly outspoke the women.
And it started a trend. The plot of “The Little Mermaid,” of course, involves Ariel literally losing her voice — but in the five Disney princess movies that followed, the women speak even less. On average in those films, men have three times as many lines as women.
A beautiful account of a very, very premature birth (EVERYONE LIVES, by the way, though everything is hard):
The day before my baby was born, I left work early for a last-minute doctor’s appointment. It was the first time a doctor uttered the term “pre-eclampsia” to me; I learned it was an autoimmune response to pregnancy that I’d heard of only once before when eclampsia, the advanced form of the disease, tragically killed Lady Sybil Crawley on the third season of Downton Abbey. In pre-eclampsia, the blood pressure starts to rise, and the only cure is giving birth. Eclampsia can lead to seizure, stroke, and death. The family doctor sent me home with a blood pressure monitor and instructions to call in the morning. When I contacted my OB-GYN the next morning and told him about my appointment with the other doctor, he said, “meet me at the hospital.” My mom drove me; I ate a yogurt in the car.
HOW IS RABBIT FUR COAT TEN YEARS OLD?
Joined by The Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat was Lewis’ melancholy opus, dwelling in her own struggles with religion, stardom, loneliness and heartbreak. The crux of the album dealt with finding a way to love yourself despite your flaws, while questioning the values that were instilled in you and the choices you’ve made along the way. Rabbit Fur Coat was really a glimpse into the inner workings of Lewis’ head. Maybe it was her unabashed honesty on “Melt Your Heart” to admit her own regrets (“When you’re kissing someone who’s too much like you, it’s like kissing on the mirror/When you’re sleeping with someone who doesn’t get you, you’re going to hate yourself in the morning”), or her perspective of being a child star (“I became a hundred-thousand-dollar kid/When I was old enough to realize/Wiped the dust from my mother’s eyes/It’s all this for that rabbit fur coat”), but Lewis made her own experience growing up relatable to 16-year-old me.
As Lewis sang “You are what you love/But not what loves you back,” her lyrics revealed a light at the end of the tunnel. Despite fucked up childhoods, isolation and regrettable one-night stands, she realized that the most important thing to keep in mind was to love and appreciate herself, and she taught me to believe in myself. That belief is something that has stayed with me, and I’ve carried throughout my life and career.
Yes, AMCs Mad Men is my cosplay origin story and costume designer Janie Bryant was my Edna Mode.
There was no rhyme or reason for this choice other than the fact that I enjoyed Mad Men. This was early on in season 1, and Betty’s stoney, ice-queen of a character wasn’t winning me over personality-wise just yet. The only interest in vintage clothing I’d expressed to that point was a collection of eight American Girl Dolls and a foot-stomping insistence on being Josephine Baker for Halloween in the 5th grade. Betty was white, cold -looking, blonde, and blue eyed. I was Black, awkward, red-headed and wild haired while I grew out the effects of a consistent fifteen year relaxer and recent dye job, and an all around mess. In both style and appearance, Betty and I had a very “she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers” dynamic. We were polar opposites, but, in a media landscape lacking diverse representation, I chose the woman who matched the ideal of western beauty standards and ran with it.
