“Oh, were you planning on wearing these sparkly flats again? SO sorry. I have eated them.”
Evictions, from both sides:
These days, evictions are too commonplace to attract attention. There are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. Some moving companies specialize in evictions, their crews working all day long, five days a week. Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings. Meanwhile, families have watched their incomes stagnate or fall as their housing costs have soared. Today, the majority of poor renting families spend more than half their income on housing, and millions of Americans are evicted every year. In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than a hundred and five thousand renter households, landlords legally evict roughly sixteen thousand adults and children each year. As the real-estate market has recovered in the wake of the foreclosure crisis and the ensuing recession, evictions have only increased.
But there are other ways, cheaper and quicker than a court order, to remove a family. Some landlords pay tenants a couple of hundred dollars to leave by the end of the week. Some take off the front door. Nearly half of the forced moves of renting families in Milwaukee are “informal evictions,” which, like many rentals, involve no paperwork, and take place in the shadow of the law. Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation. In 2013, nearly the same proportion of poor renting families nationwide was unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely that they would be evicted soon.
Nikki’s friend introduced John Cho as a speaker at her university and read him a chunk of If John Cho Were Your Boyfriend AND THEN (please shower her with your congratulations):
America’s quiet crackdown on Indian immigrants:
In 2013, the year Buta Singh arrived in Texas, 83% of Indians facing deportation were imprisoned — a far larger percentage than for immigrants from any other country, including Mexico, which had the highest overall rate of detention between 2003 and 2014. (BuzzFeed News obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, the branch of the Justice Department that operates the country’s immigration courts.)
New Dyatlov Pass Incident article alert:
In 2014, Discovery Channel produced a documentary titled Russian Yeti: The Killer Lives, a two-hour program presenting evidence that not aliens but the Yeti was responsible for the deaths of Dyatlov and his hiking crew. Quoth the channel of discovery: “Following the trail of evidence, [Director] Mike [Lebecki] finds proof that the hikers were not alone—a photograph, taken by one of the hikers a day before they died that suggests that they encountered a Yeti. But just how far will they go to find the answers?”
The 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy (early/silent comedy is UTTERLY LOST ON ME, so I had to wade through a few decades before the good stuff kicked in):
“They waited ten minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half-hour, 45 minutes. Finally, the cucko, you know, oozed out. Had his dark glasses on. Looked at him and said, ‘Man, what time is it?’”
At a time when most comedians of color were relegated to finding success only on the Chitlin’ Circuit, thanks to killer appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, mainstream audiences welcomed a “dirty old lady” stand-up named Moms Mabley into their homes with open arms. It’s unclear whether Mabley’s cuckoo-clock bit preceded her as a stock joke that she made her own or whether she originated the joke that would later be covered by comedy greats such as George Kirby and Redd Foxx, but Moms was the one to put the joke on the map. Mabley’s unmistakable cadence and uniquely gravelly timbre took a piece of unquestionably hilarious writing on a subject (successfully hiding marijuana in a cuckoo clock during a police raid, after which time the cuckoo gets high and forgets or neglects to coo for hours) that at the time would have been considered indelicate at best, and elevated it from just a solid joke to something that wouldn’t be out of place performed on the bluest comedy show you could find.
don’t be this person:
The attorney for Naruto, David A. Schwarz suggested that a ruling in favor of the macaque would be a progressive step forward similar to women’s emancipation, or the liberation of the slaves. He analogized Naruto’s supposed inability to own a copyright to an enslaved African-American’s inability to own a patent prior to the adoption of the 14th Amendment.
I truly loved Infinite Jest, which is now 20 years old, and, like this writer, I remember very, very clearly the experience of reading it for the first time (I don’t want to re-read it, because I suspect being 19 at the time added to the experience):
As I read “Infinite Jest” in the dark early mornings before my Uzbek language class, I could hear my host mother talking to the chickens in the barn on the other side of my bedroom wall as she flung scatters of feed before them. I could hear the cows stirring, and then their deep monstrous mooing, along with the compound’s approximately 10,000 wild cats moving in the crawl space directly above my bed. What I am trying to say is that it should have been difficult to focus on the doings of Hal Incandenza, Don Gately, Rémy Marathe and Madame Psychosis. But it wasn’t. I read for hours that way, morning after morning, my mind awhirl. For the first few hundred pages of my initial reading, I will confess that I greatly disliked “Infinite Jest.” Why? Jealousy, frustration, impatience. It’s hard to remember exactly why. It wasn’t until I was writing letters to my girlfriend, and describing to her my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and host-family members and long walks home through old Soviet collectivized farmland in what I would categorize as yellow-belt Wallaceian prose, that I realized how completely the book had rewired me.
no, come on now, just buy cheaper ones, this is like buying used underwear:
Exchange sites like Craigslist don’t boast many listings for used sex toys (and eBaydoes not allow used sex toys to be listed on their site), but there are at least a couple in every city. For the brave, great deals can be had. One listing for a WeVibe 4 plus, which retails for $179, is just $75 in one Craigslist listing, which specifies that it is “washed and disinfected but still USED.” Another lists a 9″ dildo for $25, “used only one time, still in the package. I can’t have in the house.” One seller offers a selection of “moderately used, like new” dildos for about the third of the price as they are new.
How to look excellent for Black History Month:
3. These earrings that show off Her Royal Flyness, Diana Ross.
Sarah Galo interviewed Molly Crabapple and it was pretty cool:
My friend Melissa Gira Grant had this amazing line. She said that perhaps the greatest and most subversive truth that sex workers possessed was the realization that a dick was just a body part, like an elbow. It isn’t something that could destroy your soul, it isn’t something that you should bow down to. It’s just a body part.
