Nobody loves Rory anymore. All she has is her pile of clean laundry and her undying rage.
The former surgeon had to be persuaded to take the role, which required him to leave Sophia with a guardian while he shot on location in Thailand. There, Ngor revisited past traumas, such as when he had to watch his wife die in childbirth at a camp (exposing himself as a doctor would have gotten them both executed). Ngor wasn’t afraid to channel that pain: “He was very brave,” says the film’s director, Roland Joffe. “Acting means you have to give of your soul, and he did that.”
Ngor, who continued to act and appeared in more than a dozen movies and TV shows over the next decade, regularly “borrowed” the statuette for speaking engagements and return trips to Cambodia, spreading awareness about and delivering aid to a country that lost approximately 2 million lives under the communist Khmer Rouge regime. The local and overseas Cambodian community nearly unanimously believes that Ngor’s outspoken advocacy is why he was fatally shot at the age of 55 outside his Chinatown apartment in downtown Los Angeles on Feb. 25, 1996. But investigators did not uncover evidence of a political hit, and three local gang members eventually were convicted of murder in a robbery gone awry — according to the prosecution, Ngor resisted surrendering his prized possession, a locket bearing his only photo of his late wife. “I want to believe that our judicial system worked,” says Ngor’s best friend, Jack Ong, the executive director of his namesake foundation. “That way it’s easier to move on.”
I loved this wider look at the context in which queer activists protested Silence of the Lambs and the 1992 Academy Awards:
Hollywood’s antigay tendencies were still thriving in the early 1990s, and 1991 was a prime example. “That was the year of ‘The gays killed JFK’ and ‘Trans people are serial killers who will make you into a coat,’” jokes Gaudino, referring to the villains in JFK (with its highly fictionalized gay cabal of assassination conspirators) and Silence of the Lambs (with its serial killer who murders women to wear their skin), respectively. It was also the year of Fried Green Tomatoes, a film based on a bestselling novel about a female friendship turned romance, in which the protagonists’ lesbian relationship was eliminated; Prince of Tides,featuring one character traumatized by a gay rape and another who was a wise-cracking, flamboyant gay stereotype; and L.A. Story, in which all references to a lesbian character’s love life were cut before release. A few independent movies offered more balanced portrayals, including Gus Van Sant’s lauded indie drama My Own Private Idaho and the drag-ball documentary Paris is Burning — neither of which, despite making multiple critics’ best-of-the-year lists, were nominated for Oscars. (“So when our stories were getting out there, they were being completely ignored [by the Academy],” notes Gaudino.)
All of those films — particularly JFK (considered a Best Picture frontrunner) and Silence of the Lambs (the eventual winner) — would be singled out by the media in the months leading up to the Oscar protests in early 1992. But the protesters’ efforts began with another film entirely, one that was decidedly not an Academy Awards contender: Basic Instinct.
Oh, you guys, remember the engineer who’s been walking around for thirty years burdened with guilt that he wasn’t able to stop the Challenger launch? Well, apparently after he spoke to NPR about it on the anniversary of the disaster (I WEPT), the outpouring of support and sympathy from readers has actually brought him a lot of healing, and that makes me so so happy:
The note from Hardy and the phone call from McDonald seemed to be a turning point. It was two weeks now after the Challenger story, and Kathy had been reading letter after letter every day. Sitting in his big easy chair in his living room, Ebeling’s eyes and mood seemed brighter.
“I’ve seen a real change,” his daughter explained. “He doesn’t have a heavy heart like he did.”
Ebeling then jumped in.
“I know that is the truth that my burden has been reduced,” he said. “I can’t say it’s totally gone, but I can certainly say it’s reduced.”
The BBC’s report on the abuses of Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall is out, and it’s appalling, of course:
The Dame Janet Smith review identified 72 victims of Savile – including eight who were raped – and 21 victims of Hall, over four decades from the 1960s.
She said BBC culture “was deeply deferential” and staff were reluctant to speak to managers about complaints.
Director general Lord Hall said the BBC had failed to protect the victims.
The review found that senior managers were not told of complaints about Savile because of a culture of fear that still exists in the BBC.
I can’t imagine how awful this sort of nonsense is for grieving families (this is just an update to the original Buzzfeed piece we discussed earlier):
On Tuesday, authorities charged a suspect with the grisly murder of Jessica Chambers, the 19-year-old Mississippian who was mysteriously burned alive in December 2014.
But the internet sleuths who have obsessed over Chambers’ case since her death — at times harassing her family members, friends, and anyone else they considered “suspicious” in Chambers’ hometown of Courtland, population 512 — still aren’t satisfied.
I can’t believe Stephanie Beatriz doesn’t sound like Rosa Diaz, it’s like she’s an actress or something:
However, Andre Braugher sounds EXACTLY like Ray Holt:
Really though, probably all Rory *wants* is some laundry and her undying rage…
My takeaway is the grand injustice that Sansa gets to quadruple in size in a few short months if Rory doesn’t end up a panther. I might get a little rage-y in her place tbh.
I’m surprised the laundry is still clean–when my cat shows her undying rage it’s all funneled into peeing in laundry baskets.
My cat absolutely gets everything her tiny, cold heart desires, and the only thing keeping this situation manageable is the fact that she doesn’t ask for much beyond sunbeams to nap in, assistance with difficult doorknobs, and the opportunity to sample whatever I’m eating.
I can never, ever, ever have a dog.
is this YOUR cat? you have a CAT??
And here we come to the root of Rory’s rage.
despite all her rage she is still just a cat in a cage
I do. She is a mean ex-street cat we adopted from under a stoop in Brooklyn.
More kitty pictures, please.
Aw…she’s beautiful! But what’s not beautiful about thick, dense, sooty-grey fur; wait, do I suspect a preference for pets in shades of grey? Please disregard any literary references, ugh.
Did she accept the barn yarns, or reject them as a display of patronizing pity? This poor, poor cat.
HANG ON MY MOM JUST FOUND THE PACKAGE IT WAS UNDER SOME TOTES WHICH WILL EVENTUALLY BE UP FOR SALE
Jesus, just mail her to me in the same envelope, Cliffe!
NICOLE I WILL WELCOME YOUR CAT INTO MY HOME. My current kitty will share her cloth bag and sparkly puffballs with her.
Tonya sneers at the pitiful amount of clean linens Rory is allotted. A cat must have a full dryer load or nothing.
heads up, second challenger link goes to (<3) andre braugher.
Remember when the Cruel Intentions TV show was announced a few months ago? Sarah Michelle Gellar is joining in and reprising her role.
I’m not clicking that link because I’m going to allow myself to believe that SMG is reprising her role as in going to be a teenager again on TV and that delights me so much, after cackling over the Teenagers On TV tumblr.
This is old, but I thought the photographs from this article about suicide on Pine Ridge were just so, so beautiful. http://projects.aljazeera.com/2016/02/pine-ridge-…
Well that’s my morning cry done.
thanks for the link – what a heartbreaking (and beautifully done) article.
The second link about the NASA engineer leads to the Seth Meyer’s interview with Andre Braugher.
I am having the busiest work day (just had to cancel lunch plans with work crush, boo) but I am already looking forward to revisiting this tomorrow from the comfort of my bed. Especially those Brooklyn Nine Nine vids – my brain is itching that I can’t watch them now.
The Oscar protests article seems like an interesting read! Any sort of unknown queer history is fascinating.
I’m honestly glad Hannibal got cancelled before they got to Buffalo Bill. I really didn’t want to see how they would ‘update’ it, even though Bryan Fuller did pretty well with the Verger siblings. I just didn’t want it.
The book was very clear that Buffalo Bill was NOT really transgender–that he had been rejected for gender reassignment because everywhere he applied, the screening process revealed that he wasn’t a woman inside but was a person with a whole different set of problems. I don’t think the movie put that across very well at all. Since a TV series has a more novelistic scope than a movie, maybe they would have been able to present the situation more accurately.
Of course, the whole gender-nonconforming=other=monster is a horrible trope and should be burned with fire whenever it appears.
Another thing the book does which doesn’t really get emphasized in the movie but could be expanded on in a TV show is stating that Buffalo Bill has been – for YEARS – going down a laundry list of different false identities and mental health diagnoses. If I recall correctly, one of the defining traits of his character was that he pretended to be all of these different things than what he was for attention and to “become” something other than what he was (the whole butterfly/moth thing). And I think when the Benjamin Raspail story is being recounted it’s even mentioned that people could see through his bullshit and knew he was just taking on other people’s identities.
Yeah, he consistently hated himself his entire life, and was trying to find a diagnosis that would explain that. Being trans was just the latest in a series of identity disorders and various dysphorias that he was clinging to in an effort to quantify his own self-loathing.
When I was thinking about it earlier, it actually reminded me of when you see people online trying to co-opt a group’s identity or diagnosis because they secretly fear that what they are isn’t enough in some way (for example, straight cisgender people trying to find a way to define themselves as “queer” instead of just being content as allies). Jame Gumb hated himself and was trying to stitch together a new self instead. Just…the extreme, violent version of that.
And that’s where I think Hannibal, if it had gotten further seasons, could have really re-shaped that narrative, and made it clear that Gumb was just latching on to a diagnosis that he thought would solve his problems, even though gender wasn’t the core identity problem he faced.
I’m afraid there’s no getting around the fact that Thomas Harris just writes queer identities incredibly badly, though.
The problem with that is that it implies that trans people need to be ‘certified’ by a doctor, or indeed that a doctor (or literally anybody else other than the person in question) has any kind of say in somebody’s gender identity. The only thing required for someone to be trans is that they identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned as birth, and the idea that doctors have the right to say whether or not someone is ‘really’ trans is abhorrent. This applies even if that person has mental health problems, including ones that might be the ‘reason’ for their gender identity.
And on a related point, being rejected for gender reassignment, especially in the ’80s, and ESPECIALLY especially if the applicant also suffers from mental illness, is very, very far from proof that someone ‘isn’t really trans’.
So while I’ll give Harris a ‘you tried…a bit’ sticker for that whole doctor thing, it really doesn’t fix the problem.
The problem here is that “you not *really* trans” is something that Real Actual Trans People get told pretty much all the time. By medical “professionals”, too.
In my imaginary Season 4 Gumb is a cis woman. Probably never gonna happen.
I can see that’s a real problem. Since the surgery part of transitioning is rather permanent, and the medical industry is very lawsuit-averse, it makes sense that they would err on the side of caution. This sucks for the people who have to fight for their identity, even as it protects those who really are misinterpreting some other sort of identity crisis. Medicine in general leans too far toward “doctor knows best” and this is just one aspect of it.
There’s an amazing article on the same site about Longtime Companion, the living with AIDS movie that came out BEFORE Philadelphia, thank you, and after Parting Glances. I want everyone to read this article, then go see Parting Glances and Longtime Companion no-o-o-ow, dammit.
My first thought on the 1992 Oscar protest are “That’s forgotten history?” Let me go roll up my trousers.
As a Hannibal fan, I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time writing and re-writing a potential Buffalo Bill season in my head to try and figure out how to make it less problematic. It…is no easy feat. I just cannot imagine trying to find that balance between somehow using elements of Silence of the Lambs without actually going there. I would want to run it by a ton of people before being sure.
I really liked rageprufrock’s Ravenous, if you’re into fanfic, which basically just uses the same speech that the book does I think – makes it clear that Bill isn’t a woman at all; he just resents them and wants to control them. I think for the TV show it actually would have been quite easy, though – just have him murder/skin multiple genders. So he’s making a physical manifestation of Hannibal’s person suit, not a woman suit.
This is seriously testing my Lenten resolution to not read fanfic.
I think that externalizing more of Gumb’s inner monologues would go a good ways. Because actually reading the book, he didn’t come off as somebody who actually wanted to be a woman. He came off as somebody who hated women and viewed them as pigs, cows, and fabric swatches. He consistently refers to them as “it” and wonders about how to best slaughter and tan them in order to preserve as much of their skin and hair as possible. That’s hinted at in the movie dialogue, but I think his misogyny could be made much more direct and obvious in the show. And Bryan Fuller’s pretty good at portraying misogynistic violence as exactly what it is, not as voyeurism.
But the Piemaker (aka Lee Pace) would have played him!!! He would have brought it and it would have been, and here I hate to use this word but it fits, interesting.
What’s worse is that it’s such a common and unfortunate horror movie trope. Many movies that people consider classics and talk about fondly have the twist at the end that the killer is trans, or a cross dresser, or has some kind of gender confusion. I guess since anything successful in horror inspires lots of future filmmakers to do something similar and Psycho was one of the early iconic films, everyone jumped on that wagon.
I don’t feel I’ve ever really heard it talked about as the stain on the genre’s history that it very much is.
Not sure I have the strength to read the BBC report on Savile yet. Might have to look at the kittens on @foster_kittens’ instagram instead.
I clicked on it, looked at his horrible face, did an actual physical shudder and then came back here. I don’t think I can take any more Savile stories ever.
Much better choice. If you need even more @myfosterkittens has a Mama and a litter of five right now (all with berry names), who only just started opening their eyes.
Already on it, my friend! My feed is almost exclusively kittens! It’s the best.
Same! I follow so many cat/kitten instagrams, haha. I’m glad for myfosterkittens because the other pregnant foster kitty I was following (@love.and.hisses) turned out to be a FAKER and wasn’t actually pregnant! Betrayal.
Wow, I wish I had known foster kitten twitters were a thing when I had a litter of five that were born in my spare bedroom! I would’ve been all over that shit.
Oh yeah there are SO MANY great foster cat/kitten instagrams, it’s a whole community, I only found it within the last 6 months or so but it’s great. My instagram is full of cats haha. My favorites are myfosterkittens, love.and.hisses, my_foster_babies (she has two seal point kittens right now, I die), bethostern (howard stern’s wife, he’s meh to me but she is really big into fostering cats, especially ones with medical conditions, especially blind ones/ones with eye problems). A lot of them also, when the cats/kittens get adopted, will link you the instagrams their owner’s make, so you get to follow your faves forever.
*Rory contemplates retribution against her ungrateful, traitorous, dog loving former family*
Yes, that a “soon…” look if I’ve ever seen one.
She should ally herself with James Tiberius. He used to be the baby, before Sansa.
He seems way too laid back for rage, though. And cats aren’t known for their love of toddlers.
My childhood cat hated our dog at first but eventually allied with him and would knock food off of the countertops so that the dog could reach it.
She would also open the back door to let him out (but not back in, sorry, dog.)
Poor Rory. Come live with me and I promise to flood the internet with pics of you. I do have another cat already; that may affect your decision. He’s a very friendly kitty but he can also be overwhelming for other kitties. He has yet to meet a kitty he didn’t want to be BFFs with (he’s also never met a kitty for whom the feeling was mutual).
If a cat doesn’t have photos of it constantly posted all over the internet, is the kitty real?
The Stephanie Beatriz interview on Call Your Girlfriend is awesome, by the way! She’s part of an all-lady dance squad for the LA women’s basketball league!
This league?
I <3 CYG and evangelize it to everyone I know. Go listen to it, Toasties! If you’re looking for a place to start, the recent episode “Twitter Ninja” is basically PEAK Call Your Girlfriend.
Excited to go to CYG’s live show in DC in April!!! I tried to join the DC Toasties group but have since not been able to figure out if I was accepted? 🙂
SO excited for that!! Especially when they talked on the recent ep about how their friendship was born in DC, so I want TONS of notalgia 🙂 (Also I’ve never figured out the DC Toasties group either)
Yay! Closer to the DC CYG event will have to coordinate, like crafting some kind of “The Toast” pins, so we can find each other 🙂
Wait, there’s a DC Toasties group? In all seriousness, can someone let me know how I find/join/whatever?
Also, I will be at CYG event and I’m pumped.
Yes, not sure how to join either, there was a link ages ago. Will have to send out the call again in Open Thread, perhaps? It would be great if there was a “resources” center on the Toast that would collect things like links to local meet up groups, form to sign up for Toastie mail, and other activities that get lost in the threads! I know it would take a lot of maintenance …
Anyway, we need to find each other in April somehow!
If you want to know more about the LA municipal women’s basketball league and have a penchant for absurd comedy, might I suggest you listen to the podcast Pistol Shrimps Radio? It is one of the most delightful things I’ve come across in the past year.
I JUST started listening to Pistol Shrimps Radio (I’ve been listening to a lot of Spontaneanation and Mark and Matt are frequent guests) and it’s weirdly amazing? I feel like it shouldn’t really be as wonderful as it is, but they somehow make it work, and I love it.
Dire Straits!
OMG, she’s like a real life Gina!
I know it’s dumb, but everytime I see a reference to “Silence of the Lambs” I want to gnaw at my fingers. It’s “THE Silence of the Lambs,” GET IT RIGHT.
I am this way about the song “Oh, Pretty Woman.” Pretty Woman is a Julia Roberts movie.
OMG YEEESSSSS!!! It’s such a weird, twitchy, accuracy-check THING, but I get foaming-at-the-mouth irate when people drop the article. The creator of the work named it that way because it changes the perception/intention of the work to name it differently, this is important!
Edit for spelling, because Phone is tough and fingers aren’t that small.
All of this plus: You do not redact Roy Orbison. If the Beatles song is still Oh! Darling and Lemmy’s band gets their umlaut you can give Roy his due, by God. IT’S ROY ORBISON YOU SHOW SOME RESPECT.
YES, THIS. I *adore* Roy Orbison, and this also reflects back to my original quibble.
Am a huge Fannibal, did NOT plan to be because I loved Thomas Harris’s ridiculous purple prose so, SO much, and the title of tSotL is dropped, so gorgeously, as the last line of the book, and it was so good and made eighth-grade-me cry. And still makes almost-40-me cry. Skipping the article strips the concept of its meaning in ways that I ought to be better able to articulate and can’t.
Also, YAY ROY, how do you feel about The Traveling Wilburys?
I worship Roy. Born and bred. A love of Roy Orbison is one of me and my dad’s few Bonds Over Art of any kind. I like the Traveling Wilburys all right. I’d watch them on the Opry. (I’m a Nashvillain.)
I adore Red Dragon and TSOTL, Hannibal (book) had its moments, after that the book franchise loses me because the point of Lecter is there aren’t reasons, and making them felt wrong and forced (probably influenced because I know there was a Scrooge McDuck pile of money on the table by that point). All that had made me set my face against the show unseen because I was Done With This Franchise, but I read a fic someone discussed on this post and now I need to see the show with a burning.
Sorry for the delayed reply, life is being a thing. George Harrison has always been THE BEST for me, so combined with my grandaddy’s shared love for Roy it was a given I’d be into the Wilburys.
I’m the same with the books- have huge chunks of “Red Dragon” and “The Silence of the Lambs” memorized, and lovehate “Hannibal” because it’s pure insane batshittery but the prose is GORGEOUS.
Refused for years to deal with “Hannibal Rising” because it was a gross cash-grab TH was forced into, but finally just now read it a couple of months ago. In context of the Bryan Fuller show (which is incredible, so beautiful just to view, and a fantastic, respectful remix/expansion of the books’ plots and themes), it finally felt necessary to read HR because I was missing some source material they were riffing on. And the fanfic is incredible. I’ve never been a fic fan before, but this show has shifted me into true enjoyment of the ways people engage in fandom.
Ooh, go read “Ravenous” by rageprufrock on AO3 and see if you like it as much as I did.
I’m doomed, I just have to start this whole franchise over fresh.
I do! I love her!
Me, too!
I also love Sansa, but she doesn’t have to know that, right?
Not that we need something else to be sad about this morning, but this article about Debi Thomas (the figure skater) is heartbreaking and worth your time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issue…
I’m too young to really remember her (1992 is my earliest Olympic memory, since by then I was 8, going on 9), but definitely recall hearing her name and seeing clips.
Oh my god, Debi Thomas! She was amazing! She had a bad skate on the night, but that shouldn’t take away from all she did. Oh, that is heartbreaking. I had NO IDEA.
Whoa. I am an Old, and I very vividly remember that Olympics. Nobody was going to beat Katerina Witt that year, anyway, unless she fell down and never got back up again, but I remember being so sad for Debi when she fell.
That article is indeed heartbreaking.
if you need a little pick me up this friday morning, this article about how Julia Grant, wife of Ulysses S Grant, and Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, became unlikely friends made my heart swell with joy at female friendship: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-first-la…
That is wonderful, thank you for sharing.
Davis felt no ill will toward the late General Grant, who she thought had treated her husband fairly during the end of the war and his subsequent imprisonment.
grumble grumble goddamn right “treated him fairly”, if you’re into understatement, asshole should have been tried and hung grumble grumble
Varina Davis sounds like a badass!
I read a third of Julia Grant’s memoirs a while ago (that’s how long it took me to realize I was allergic to the book) and I continue to enjoy her response to Ulysses when he asked her to marry him:
Lieutenant Grant remained just a week in Missouri. Nearly all of the time was spent at our house. He went with me to St. Louis, where I was to stand bridesmaid for a schoolmate. On this ride, he declared his love and told me that without me life would be insupportable. I was surprised at his telling me this, for although I was eighteen, I was very young for my age and very shy indeed. When he spoke of marriage, I simple told him I thought it would be charming to be engaged, but to be married–no! I would rather be engaged. I do not think he liked this arrangement, but as he was going away and could not have taken me with him, even if I had thought it as pleasant to be married as engaged, he let the matter rest.
That is so delightful!
I have admired Stephanie Beatriz since seeing her character on Brooklyn 99 but the moment I fell in love with her was when I found out she sent 35 pizzas to the Hamilton cast after seeing the show. http://pearwaldorf.tumblr.com/post/131828653487/t…
She is the hero we all deserve.
Hulu has some Season 1 interviews with several members of the cast, including Stephanie Beatriz using her for-real voice and wearing the girliest pink glasses ever. Highly recommended.
One of us! One of us!
‘Web Sleuths’…we used to just call these people assholes.
Jessica Chambers (pretty blond cheerleader) allegedly murdered by black man: idiots go berserk on the web
Trayvon Martin (12 year old black child) shot in broad daylight: Crickets.
There’s a weird sense of entitlement to these people: how dare you not answer these questions that I, a random internet stranger, have posed to you? Where were on a random night two years ago and why don’t you have documentary evidence to back it up? You are a black person who once made a hand gesture – clearly you are in a gang!
And, yes, Jessica Chambers’ murder has specifically been invoked by right-wing websites as “evidence” that black people are allowed to commit murder, or something. Even though, of course, they just arrested the guy.
In this case, the internet has created a monster. Well, monsters. If this was 25 years ago, and people were harassing this poor family in person, they’d all be given restraining orders or charged with trespassing or harassment or something. But they probably wouldn’t even have the nerve to try to talk to these people to begin with.
The entitlement and fact that they can’t handle not having the answers is bizarre. There are mysteries in life. Yes, it’s frustrating to not know what happened, but that’s the reality of the situation, so effing deal with it. It would seem that psychologically something’s amiss if they lack basic coping skills.
I can sort of understand the impulse– I love researching stuff online, I hate it when I can’t find what I’m looking for, and it’s fairly easy for me to get hyper-focused on things. But never in my life has this led me to contact an actual human being in order to demand that they personally answer my questions.
Trayvon Martin was 17 and killed at night, I think you’re thinking of Tamir Rice.
Damn, you’re right – I’m getting my murder victims confused.
Depressing that there’s enough similar victims that they’re easily confused.
Crickets AND “POT SMOKING THUG” simultaneously.
No, that was Trayvon, I need to read threads before I reply.
Guys my actual literal police precinct is the one whose building is the outdoors establishing shot for BK99 and I will indulge until my dying day (or I move away, I guess) the fantasy that Ray Holt exists and is the person in charge of those who protect and serve my neighborhood.
It’s somewhere in Prospect Heights, right? I only watched the first season of Brooklyn 99 but I am AMAZED they never Went There with the whole… twee mother doing yoga while pushing her twin babies to brunch… thing. (No offense meant, btw, I live in Williamsburg and it is horrible.)
I like Rory. I relate to Rory. #TeamRory
I’ll have the t-shirts printed up!
Wait the link about the challenger engineer takes you to the Andre braugher YouTube clip also linked below.
It is supposed to be an npr followup.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/25…
Thanks for providing the actual link! I was very confused for a moment there.
Aw, man. I was listening to the whole Andre Braugher interview waiting for him to talk about space.
I absolutely believe that gay representation in film is vital and I know that the landscape was much different in 1992 and so these denials/erasures were huge blows to the LGBT community.
BUT
If you can watch Fried Green Tomatoes and then tell me with a straight face (no pun intended) that the two women are *not* lovers, then I would have to applaud your commitment to denial.
Esp. because 1990s Mary Stuart Masterson is utter dyke-bait.
.
I didn’t get it the first time I watched, because I was like 10. These were simpler times, when I also thought George Michael was straight.
Rewatched FGT a few years ago and it hit me about 6 minutes in that of course this was a movie about two lesbians, and also about cannibalism, which I think escaped me at 10 as well. I was kind of dumb as a kid. My Mom wanted me to watch Dirty Dancing when I was 8 or 9, and I said I had no desire to watch people dancing around in mud and getting all gross.
It’s ok, everybody is dumb as a kid.
After they saw the movie, my mother-in-law insisted to my partner (then an early teenager about to come out) that the Fried Green Tomatoes women were just *very good friends*. This was a woman who was friends with lesbian couples in real life, so I can only assume she actually thought this was a plausible reading of the film. My partner, of course, tried to argue back, but to no avail. So this particular example of lack of representation always gives me feelings. I want the movie to have given my little baby-queer future-sweetheart *totally explicit representation*, you know?
That’s a really useful point. I’m sure if, when I first saw it as a young teen, someone told me the thing your mother-in-law told your partner, I’d probably feel doubts, too! While I feel like the film’ same-sex relationship is obvious to an adult with any appreciation of nuance, there IS enough plausible deniability in it (because people deliberately tamped down the romance) AND we live in a heteronormative-enough world (because people are jerks) that it could really throw off any young person, especially if they’re already dealing with complicated feelings about sexuality and coming out.
Then again…that scene where they are smearing chocolate frosting onto each other’s bodies. I sure hope your partner (and all people everywhere, to be honest) got to enjoy that scene for what it was (delicious metaphor).
Oh, yeah, she adored the whole thing!
We watched that movie a couple times in Catholic grammar school (I think it must have been for the middle school kids only, after it came to video?) and I don’t remember the chocolate thing AT ALL. maybe i need to rewatch it.
Also this thread is starting to make me suspect that my tendency to assume that all strong two-girl friendships in western media are disguised f/f romance comes from this movie specifically. Also the fact that western media usually loathes genuinely happy girl friendships where the girls are competing and catty to each other doesn’t help at all.
It’s all massively clearer in the book – watching the film now, knowing the book, you kind of think the actors are really trying to get it across within the limits of not being able to say it out loud.
Wait, are they not supposed to be lesbians in the movie? Cause my lesbian mother and all of her lesbian friends fucking love that movie and all I knew about it was ‘Lesbians’.
On 1992 being a different landscape: I recently re-watched Ace Venture and was appalled and really upset by the treatment of the ‘Trans’ character. I had completely forgotten about it, having not watched the movie since I was a kid and only vaguely remembering something a man that was a woman or something, but I thought that was the second one? Anyway not only is there the whole sequence where Jim Carrey is physically ill from the *possibility* that he might have kissed a trans woman, at the end of the movie he sexually assaults her in a really traumatising way and it is super not ok in any way. I was fucking ANGRY watching that and the friend I was watching it with was like ‘Meh, it was a different time’, and that did not make it better.
Yeah, I hear you. Re-watching movies and TV I really enjoyed growing up is now a minefield of cringing. PARTICULARLY, the trans*- and gay-panic jokes are really grating.
I always really liked the camp gay characters as a kid, because they were funny and sarcastic. *sigh*
Friends was also really terrible in this regard.
I had that show specifically in mind whilst writing the comment, in fact. One of the longest-running subplots of the show is “Chandler is straight but people think he might be gay! Tee hee hee!”
I was thinking about what they did with the character of Chandler’s father last night and getting mad again. That character is clearly a trans woman!!!!! Showing up in an evening gown to your son’s wedding isn’t a thing a super gay man would do!!! THEY CAST A WOMAN IN THE ROLE!!!! I felt so horrible for that character, who it seemed was actually a decent parent to chandler besides not fitting into his ideas of heteronormativity.
I love Friends, but there’s some episodes I skip when they’re on. Besides the other mentioned ones, there’s that one where Phoebe has sex with a guy without committing to a relationship and Joey’s like ‘LOL, he tricked you so he never has to call you again!’ and the bizarre one with the male nanny where Ross insists he has to be gay (?!) and the guys try to come up with jobs as inappropriate for women to do as childcare is for men (?!) and then the nanny gets sacked because Ross is ‘uncomfortable’ so they hire a hot lesbian nanny (?!!)
the guys try to come up with jobs as inappropriate for women to do as childcare is for men
See, I like that episode because the point is that as soon as he starts to say it, the women are all, “Like WHAT jobs would those be….? To me, the perspective of the show is that Ross is being ridiculous and the women are right to treat it as ridiculous.
I think Friends is super interesting as a transition piece. The men are constantly worried about being identified as gay, but that’s because they are played as never-masculine-enough, and their panic is a sign of their failure at being appropriately masculine, rather than “gay is a bad thing to be”. At the same time, they have real, close, caring friendships with each other, and there’s an ongoing joke that Chandler and Joey are more like boyfriends. I always feel like it’s a lot more knowing about it’s queer stereotypes and the ridiculousness of straight people than it is about bolstering those stereotypes.
You couldn’t have made Friends in the 80s, and it made a lot of other stuff possible.
LOL, I didn’t realise I had so many Friends thoughts!
You’re right on the episode, and it did have a fairly decent ending – they went to lengths to ensure the nanny wasn’t gonna suffer by losing the job and that he was fairly financially secure (lol, no one ever accused Friends of realism!) and that it was Ross who had issues with his masculinity; and Joey and Chandler liked the guy or were indifferent respectively.
And they also did well with Joey as a character in particular in that it’s so easy to go wrong with the pick up artist trope (I didn’t watch HIMYM, but I know people said the Neil Patrick Harris character was pretty much the worst of the stereotype) and make him predatory. Making him dumber as time went on was a Flanderization; but it made him less threatening than when they hit the off notes (like ‘Joey fucks a young girl and dumps her the next day’ or ‘Joey likes to sleep with drunk women!’)
I always enjoyed Chandler and Joey’s friendship as well, I think a lot of 90s sitcoms played with the boyfriend-or-friend joke (Boy Meets World was my fave) surprisingly well – a lot of stuff doesn’t age well from even a little while ago, but I think if it generally comes from a place of character building, it’s more timeless.
Ross is an interesting character too, you’re never really sure how much the show takes his side.
Chandler and Joey are generally the ones portrayed as dumber emotionally, but Ross as the most educated and the one who was married and a father first seems to be shown as the maturest (albeit a low bar), and it’s him that seems to conflict with the other characters the most, and who people argue over the most intensely.
I don’t mind him, there are episodes where I actively sympathise, like that one where Phoebe insists the cat is her mom, and everyone but Ross indulges her; or the thing with Carol and Susan.
But when he’s bad, he’s pretty much the worst. Like Joey never really dates anyone for long, and he’s too dumb to harm anyone overly; and Chandler is so self-loathing that it doesn’t bother me as a viewer as badly when he’s a dick; but when Ross is, it feels the most drawn from life, like that ‘fat ankles’ list thing.
It might be the Nice Guy thing, you get the sense that as a guy who’s been put down for his ‘geeky’ interests, the fact that he’s parlayed them into a successful career gives him this sense of needing the world to acknowledge he’s ‘won’ by the traditional rules.
When he’s at his worst is when he seems to be aping those attitudes (like when he implies Rachel’s job is less important by saying how successful Jurassic Park is, i.e. my job is interesting to the world, your job is just decoration.)
And when he’s at his most likeable is probably when he’s being himself and proudly dorky.
Also: the bi erasure in one of Phoebe’s songs. (“And then there are bisexuals / Who are really only just kidding themselves”, or words to that effect.)
I’m pretty sure they were meant to be lesbians in the film, but they had the plausible deniability mentioned upthread so it wasn’t too bold…
Yeah. Between that and Carrey’s “Vera de Milo” character on In Living Color, you gotta wonder if the dude’s got some serious issues regarding gender nonconformity.
One of my most favorite movies is Trading Places, but the sheer amount of not particularly funny gay jokes is pretty cringe-inducing and drags down what is otherwise a pretty perfect movie.
If the Toast wants to become a full Stephanie Beatriz fan-site, I am here for that.
Let me join in! Rosa Diaz is a character that embodies everything I have aspired to be, ever, which is unfortunate because I am embarrassingly similar to Amy Santiago. It’s a little uncanny.
I love them both so much. I think I love Amy the most, because I am very like her and I have a soft spot for the rule-following try-hard types, but Rosa is so stoic and competent and she has a leather jacket and a motorbike; part of me still wants to think I will one day be that cool. (I will never be that cool.) And they are both gorgeous, also.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that The Hyphen Toast is largely populated by Amy Santiagos. I am for sure an Amy but my love love for Gina knows no bounds.
Gina has some of the most killer lines, basically everything she says kills me. But yeah, Amy Army solidarity!
I was trying to figure out a way to say that we’re pretty much all Amys who want to be Rosas without sounding insulting, but we all know it’s true.
I am like 95% Amy and I aspire to be 100% Amy. I am not ashamed!
Yes, to thine own self be true! I don’t even want the motorcycle though, just the ability to look tough in a motorcycle jacket. [speaking as an 80% Amy, 19% Jake, one tiny percent that I’m trying to cultivate Captain Holt; who wishes to be 75% Amy, 2% Jake, 3% Rosa, and 20% Captain Holt]
I love that she’s so proud of her dorkiness! She brags about being named “Most Appropriate” and rejoices in the code name Hall Monitor and describes things like code camp as “pretty dope”. She embraces this aspect of herself, and it is inspiring.
Gina4life.
I aspire to one day allow myself to completely give in to my Id the way she has.
Have you seen the Yippie Kayak episode? It’s on channel 4 at the moment, and is max Gina crushing it as she always does (but also could have even more Gina time).
My best dude friend called me ON THE PHONE one workday and said, “Oh my god, I just realized you are Amy. She is you. This explains so much.”
Guys Rebecca Traister on single women is SO. GOOD. http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/02/political-power-s…
I have been kind of loving their entire series on single women. I am newly single, not especially by choice, and reading essays by women who have found joy in unpartnered life– after thinking they wouldn’t– is giving me hope.
I had read Rebecca Traster’s piece but I had no idea there was an entire series. It’s giving me hope today too.
I MADE A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF ALL THE SONGS THAT APPEAR IN THE SLOW-MOTION BADASS SEQUENCES IN B99 AND IT’S PLAYING ME INTO THE WEEKEND Y’ALL
If you wanted to share the link, I would absolutely listen to that at least once or twi-thousandce.
Spotify seems bent on making it impossible to just share a playlist, but it’s called “B99 Slo-Mo” and has 10 songs on it.
Gimme gimme gimme. I need badass weekend music!
Spotify has a weird function where you can only share to other Spotify users, and copying and pasting the browser URL seems to lead you into a black hole. However! I titled it “B99 Slo-Mo” and it has 10 songs on it.
I can’t find ittttttttttttttt
No you’re crying over Bob Ebeling finally getting some peace in his life
Yeah, kind of glad I am at home where I can ugly cry in peace.
I AM CRYING. I AM DEFINITELY CRYING.
I teach Challenger in multiple courses and I cry in class every time and I just want to climb into that photograph of Ebeling and hold his hand and tell him what an important role model he is.
I STILL LOVE YOU, RORY!!!!!!
Me too!!
We did a case study in one of my business classes that was later revealed to be a mock up of the challenger launch decision. The premise was you were a racing team and essentially the ability to successfully race would secure you funding to keep going next you. You had partial data about engine failures, that didn’t show a clear cause. Only two people in the class voted not to race (lol for it being me because I am honestly too risk adverse to be a business student. I think). Everyone else was very, “This is racing!! It’s about risk! You have to do it!” People then balked that they would have made the same decision one the professor put up the photo for the astronauts. But really, that is evident in the space community. It is a risky business, you rely one public opinion and government to keep you funded. To delay launches that the world is following closely, such pressure on the people making decisions. Everyone is used to the high risk high reward premise. It’s so easy to fall into these group decision making traps.
So glad to read that Bob may now be finding some peace.
That sounds like a really interesting class approach!
Apparently it’s actually a really common one in business schools. It’s become the classic example.
I am an aerospace engineer and in a business-oriented class AT MIT, they used this example. I am very sensitive, and I was one of the people that made the decision to go ahead and race. Then they were like, “Hey, jk, this is just like the Challenger!” And then made us WATCH THE LAUNCH FROM START TO HORRIFYING FINISH. I was sick to my stomach for the rest of the day (and I still feel awful about it). We all like to think we’d make the right choice in hindsight, but the truth is that it wasn’t such an easy decision, given the information.
I work with NASA now and I can tell you that the Commercial Crew Program (with SpaceX and Boeing) and their own internal crew program (was Constellation, then was “cancelled” but mostly just renamed to be Orion), NASA is very concerned about safety. In fact, that’s what I do; I perform Probabilistic Risk Assessments to ensure that there is a likelihood of Loss of Crew less than 1 in 250 (which is 3 times safer than Shuttle was). For spaceflight, that’s an incredibly stringent requirement, considering we’re having people sit on explosives that launch them into space and then re-enter like a meteor. We can argue about the politics behind it (killing astronauts isn’t just bad, it’s also bad press), but after Challenger and then Columbia, NASA is very concerned with safety.
That doesn’t mean, though, that another Challenger-like politics vs. safety failure won’t occur. Which is why, as awful as that class was, I think it’s important for my generation of engineers (who were born after Challenger, yep, 1987) to understand the importance of those types of decisions and their consequences.
Any chance you might be willing to trade a few emails about this, in general terms? I’m preparing to teach a course in which risk and spaceflight would figure prominently and, if you’re able to share, I’d be interested in your perspective.
Absolutely! How, um … how does that work either of us publishing our emails for all the world to see? (I am clearly new to this interacting-with-internet-friends-in-the-real-world thing.)
Thank you! I’m okay posting my email and then you can drop me a line: I’m elitist [email protected], with NO space between elitist and semicolon. There – now you-all can email me and the spambots can’t!
You all might be interested in (sociologist) Diane Vaughan’s book on the subject.
I know I would feel horrible (and betrayed!) if I was given this case in school and then told that I would have blown up the Challenger. The racing decision is different from the Challenger decision, even if you disregard the fact that the racing decision is fake. Of course people will be more motivated to take fake risks in a case study, out of sheer curiosity if nothing else. The biggest difference is obviously that the chance of survival is much, much higher in a race car. In the racing car case, the main risk is loss of face, not life. It even says so in the case study, right? That the company is afraid that they’ll embarrass themselves on TV? If the racecar engine should fail, the driver might not even be injured (if they manage to stop the car), and realistically the racing track is surrounded by EMTs. But in a space shuttle, failure meas certain death – for SEVEN PEOPLE.
So if a careful student goes through all the possibilities and votes for racing because they judge that the risk of injury is low and that the potential gains are worth the risk of embarrassment, they actually DID make a responsible decision. The situation is completely different from the Challenger launch. It’s not their fault that their teacher change the goalposts after the students have decided!
Toasties, based on Roundup discussions yesterday I was going to go see The Witch on Saturday.
Then I remembered I’m spending Saturday night at my parents house in NH on their wooded land that abuts some unpleasantly Biblical sounding hiking trails. I pretty much have to watch it in New England (since I live here) but the least I can do for myself is go home to my urban apartment afterwards and not feel that isolation.
Also I don’t want to be woken up by gunfire or chainsaws… ever, but especially not the morning after watching a horror movie.
That is def not the ideal circumstance in which to see The Witch! I am going tonight with some lady friends, and will be happy to return to my urban apartment after.
Also, this is the third witch movie we have seen together this week. Our coven connection is ON POINT right now.
What were the other witch movies?! (if you don’t mind me asking!)
Brooklyn Academy of Music was hosting a film series called Witch’s Brew (man I love that place!), so we saw Suspiria and The Wicker Man (original).
Biblical-sounding hiking trails
I would like to hear more about this. Are they named after people or places in the Bible? Or books and chapter verses? Or specific types of smitings God seemed to favor?
I don’t want to get too specific because if I come out and say “It’s this!” then you could literally find my parents house on a map, and someone might still be able to guess from this, but it’s a place-name.
I just… I just give up: http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/millennials-are-t…
What has become of you, CBC?
I saw that on other sites yesterday and was just SMH. Personally *I* don’t eat cereal as a millennial because I’d rather make myself a bagel/toast, eggs, and fruit for breakfast and I don’t find cereal filling (plus your options seem to be either “really sugary and awful for you” or “taste like cardboard”) but sure let’s go with “millennials are so lazy haha”.
I balance it by eating bran cereal with granola on top. The bran is filling, the granola makes it edible.
*edit* Because cereal stores well and takes less than a minute to put together. I’m def too lazy to cook or cut up anything for breakfast.
Yeah, but it takes longer to eat and isn’t as portable.
I drive to work, so eating on the go isn’t really an option for me. And I can’t think of anything that is similarly filling, quick to put together, and takes less time to eat (maybe soylent?).
Go-Gurt! A hold over from when yogurt was a food for extreme children instead of loft-apartment-dwelling bowel-problem-having grey-hoodie-wearing women on diets. If you’re rich Siggi’s actually makes a yogurt-in-a-tube too.
Wow! I’ll have to look into it. I’ve wanted some sort of to-go keffir thing for a while now.
I have tried eating yogurt for breakfast, but it didn’t work because I brush my teeth when I wake up, and apparently there’s something in tooth paste that makes it harder to taste sweet stuff? I was left mostly with a sour dairy taste, which was not ideal.
up to 40% less sugar than the leading tube!
(pedant)
Siggi’s technically isn’t yogurt. It’s skyr, which uses slightly different cultures and is also strained of whey.
(/pedant)
I understood all the words in that headline individually, but together… Nope.
CBC, what have you become?
…………………….
The Baltimore Sun had the only follow up that was good, arguing instead that cereal just isn’t as convenient as a granola bar or pop tarts and so has fallen out of favour with low-income groups who have to work totally batshit hours just to pay their rents. http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/dining/… (Edit: Upon reread it’s still generally not a great article, but it was good to see *some* nuance when I first read it yesterday.)
The CBC is trying to play to corporate interests like the rest of the Canadian media because funding’s been cut so far. There’s a lot of weird unpaid intern shit going on behind the scenes too. I like to blame the government a lot but… I’m not so sure the CBC has any room to be principled anymore. (FWIW, I still read CBC North and CBC Health because the journalism is generally better there.)
This. Low-income folks don’t have the time for cereal (some don’t have the money, predictable schedule, or fridge for milk, either). On the other hand, high-income folks have moved away from cereal in favor of doing healthy slow food at home or going to fancy brunch places.
So I blame income inequality and the hollowing-out of the middle class.
I mean… cereal IS inconvenient compared to many other foods. You gotta keep milk in the house! Milk that’s in-date! You gotta balance the amount of cereal in your house with the amount of milk in your house, which is a perennial pain, I’m always trapped in a cycle where I run out of cereal but still have half a carton of milk, so I have to buy more cereal or the milk will go to waste, and then I run out of milk and have to buy more or the rest of the cereal will go to waste and… etc. You dirty TWO dish items, and you have to wash them promptly because they have milk residue in them, which is grosser than many other food residues. And you can’t eat it on the go. AND it’s not even filling.
Cosigned on all of these! When I do eat cereal I mix it with yogurt – partly because it’s more filling, but partly to bypass the expiry date/running out headache.
CBC, I am vastly disappointed in you.
I feel compelled as always to point out that this is a ludicrous article that speaks only to an urban experience because I can promise you there is nowhere to purchase either huevos rancheros OR a burrito of any type other than Taco Bell within probably, oh, 50-70km of where I live and work.
And I still don’t eat cereal. Come at me, CBC. It’s almost like there’s a whole galaxy of breakfast food that isn’t cereal (sugary, hamster food, or Rice Krispies that are delicious but make you hungry again in 7 minutes) WHO COULD HAVE FORESEEN THIS?
I think it’s funny that laziness is what they come up with when in reality I spend a couple hours on the weekend baking muffins or granola for my breakfasts. Too…lazy, okay.
Things I routinely eat for breakfast that are not cereal:
Migas
Red chili rice
Chicken pot pie
Fried rice
Single-size microwave pizzas
Sandwiches (usually when I bring cereal for breakfast and realize it won’t get me through the morning so I eat my lunch instead)
…in addition to all the other non-cereal breakfast items.
It might as well say “Millennials Smoke Less Pot, Captain Crunch Profits Sink.”
Millennials … feel entitled to a breakfast that requires less effort, it seems — like a huevos rancheros burrito purchased for $11 on the way to work
Fuck off and die you hack.
There’s some serious shade from Buzzfeed at the end though and I like that.
Maybe in addition to the fact that millenials are fucking busy, we’re also broke and don’t want to fill up on expensive sugar in the morning. I was a lover of cereal for many years, but its too expensive. Seriously, it can be £3-5 for a tiny box of cereal that I get maybe 4 bowls out of (if you want the fancy stuff), and since I’m trying not to drink cows milk any more (cause Yick.), cereal uses a whole lot of my precious, expensive, almond milk. Its £1.70 for a liter carton, and you get about 4-5 bowls of cereal out of that. And after all of that, I’m hungry again 5 minutes after a bowl of cereal.
I’m much better off getting a bag of oats for 70p, making porridge with water and using a bit of milk that means a liter lasts at least two weeks.
So yeah, I feel entitled to a filling, affordable breakfast. So sue me Mr Baby Boomer.
Of course, you really cannot be late. And that’s because the only technology involved in your job that your baby-boomer bosses actually understand is a clock, so that’s all they use to determine whether you can actually do your job.
So much shade. I’m in love.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/fuck-cereal#.n…
The milk thing soo much the milk thing.
I buy powdered milk, which is great for cooking but crap for drinking or cerealing, precisely because look: sometimes I can use a gallon of milk in a week; sometimes it takes 6 months and fuck buying a pint of milk, that costs more than the gallon.
Gallons of milk (much like having room temperature butter in a butter dish) are great when you have a four-or-more person household can relaiably consumer ANYTHING before it gets funky.
Yes! It seems so much that a lot of the (American) boomer attitude to life assumes that you have a car, live in a single occupancy house with storage and have a family of many people. Which not many millennials do partly for generation reasons and because we’re mostly in our 20s and who has their shit together that much in their 20s? (Apart from boomer males who got married at 25 and had a wife who ran their house so they could sit around and complain.)
Tbh this article also reads as ‘boohoo the big cereal companies aren’t making as much money because the young people are too smart for our marketing and don’t want to eat over priced sugar for breakfast. Let’s just call them stupid and entitled.’
Yes, all these reasons! Another reason I gave up cereal is because even the ones that taste like cardboard have a lot of sugar, so literally one hour after eating breakfast I’m like “dammit now I need a nap.”
This is so stupid. Personally I think people stopped eating cereal because it is a complete scam. In the heyday of the “food pyramid” the conventional wisdom was that “complex carbohydrates” were good for you (as opposed to “simple carbs” which are essentially sucrose/fructose). This was before anyone thought overprocessed and “white” foods were just empty calories with no nutrition. Also having read Marion Nestle’s “Food Politics” I know that the vitamin-fortified aspect of cereal was literally only an excuse to charge you more (and this was in the nineties). Prices went up astronomically for cereal when they could claim it was essentially a superfood, when we don’t actually get any proven benefit from a little vitamin dust. And sugary cereals are obviously terrible for kids, but make up the overwhelming majority because they actually sell. So, yeah, people are eating less cereal because we never should have been eating so much of it in the first place.
Notably it says cereal says have been declining since the late 90s. TWENTY YEARS!
Snake people weren’t the ones not buying cereal twenty years ago.
I think it’s trying to be sarcastic…
but very much
I used to eat cereal for breakfast lots until I realized that I Am a Grown-Up and I can eat in my comfy chair instead of at the kitchen table if I want to. Downside of comfy chair breakfast is that when I eat cereal milk tends to spill onto my Nice Work Clothes. So now I eat less drippy things for breakfast – does this make me a lazy millennial?
Wait, everyone is mad at the CBC article, and not the articles it is ridiculing? I thought it was rolling it’s eyes at them, given the subtitle: “40% of young adults say cereal is too much work, giving millennial-haters new fodder for digital ridicule”
“Inconvenient to consume” doesn’t mean lazy. If I were answering that I might say “yes, it is” in the sense that it’s not really portable, it can be hard for me as a single person to get the right amount of milk I can consume before it spoils, I usually have to add a protein anyway, it’s not something I can pack up and eat at lunch. . .
True fact: corn flakes were invented to help prevent people from masturbating.
TRUTH
I love cereal, it’s a huge comfort food for me, but it’s kinda expensive. And it takes up a lot of space in my bags when I go shopping–not a small consideration when you grocery shop by bicycle.
I heard that Bob Ebeling piece on my way to fencing practice last night and I was like “NO, YOU CANNOT SHOW UP TO FENCING LOOKING LIKE YOU’VE BEEN WEEPING IN THE CAR STAY STRONG EVIL OVERLIBRARIAN” as a single tear trickled down my cheek.
(currently eavesdropping on two of my colleagues trying to untangle the mess of Trump, and why he’s gotten this far. they are speaking in slow and measured words. this is the verbal equivalent of walking through a haunted wood after dust. it is dark & we cannot find our way.)
Out of the corner of your eye you see him.
I have nothing but praise for the subversive humor of @manwhohasitall. The best part is reading his tweets and being like “That’s ridiculou…oh shit.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-a…
Thanks for this! This is some razor-sharp satire and I love it.
I have told so many women about @manwhohasitall, it’s some of the best satire around. Even tiny things like all the women have their job title after their name while the men have their age, it’s golden.
You know, I’ve heard plenty of JFK conspiracy theories, but “secret gay cabal” was never on my radar. Is there a reason the gays wanted JFK dead, or . . . ?
(Is it weird that I’ve never watched Silence of the Lambs? Or rather I think I did, once, but I barely remember it. The only reason it’s ever stuck out for me is because I’ve read about the man who inspired Buffalo Bill, and it’s actually a terribly sad story.)
The secret gay cabal theory was central to Jim Garrison’s theory of the case… Kevin Costner plays Jim Garrison. I saw part of that movie again recently and I’m amazed that I ever thought it was remotely plausible.
I saw it in the theater, and I couldn’t immerse myself into the movie as much as I wanted, because there was a very upset and confused four year old in the seat in front of me.
FOUR YEARS OLD. WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?!
Did anyone else notice the rando white dude photo bombing the discussion of being a successful Latina?
Also, Stephanie Beatriz is so great that it almost makes up for shattering the illusion that Rosa Diaz is real. It does help to know that Andre Braugher sounds like that all the time.
Also, everything that Stephanie Beatriz says about how good it feels to have a show with two latinas who have that as part of their identity, but not their whole identity or in some reduced, stereotypical way is so, so true! Seeing other latinas getting breaks and getting to be themselves and/or interesting complex characters in shows is so refreshing. Yet another reason for my B99 obsession.
The effortless diversity of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one of the best parts of the show. Like…black people exist in New York. Latin@s exist in New York. Gay people people exist in New York. Women exist in New York. It should not feel vaguely revolutionary to see the people of New York in a show about New York, but it sorta does.
I would like to submit a vote for liking Rory — indeed, preferring her to Sansa. More cats on the toast!
I believe in the superiority of cats.
I am most definitely a cat person. And had a cat that looked EXACTLY like Rory! While I do find Sansa totally adorable, I am always team cat.
I’m going to post this again in the open thread, but ohmigod, the #TrapCovers on Twitter is fucking phenomenal.
That is absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that!! That cover of You Belong With Me is so so good.
I’m not crying into my coffee as I read that update on the Bob Ebeling piece at work. I’m not. I’m fine. I’M FINE.
Nope. No chopping onions going on here either.
– I always had a huge amount of respect for Dr. Ngor, who appeared in the film a few years after escaping the killing fields himself. I think that there was some awareness of the genocide, since the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, but the movie really drove the reality home for a lot of people.
– That’s a good article that helps put some of those early 90s protests in perspective. I’m glad that they included JFK, which seems to be overlooked in these sort of lists, more so that Silence of the Lambs (which got a lot of attention specifically because of the participation of the still-closeted Jodie Foster) and Basic Instinct (because Joe Eszterhas seems to thrive on controversy). I like the comment that someone made that Jim Garrison’s entire conspiracy theory seemed to have originated in his shock on finding out that there were gay people (specifically, Clay Shaw) in New Orleans high society. (The movie also minimized or eliminated the more ridiculous aspects of Garrison’s theory and prosecution, such as that one of his principal witnesses had his own daughter fingerprinted before she went off to college so that he could be sure that she wouldn’t be replaced by an imposter), and invented a Deep Throat-type mysterious government insider to endorse Garrison’s crazy speculations.
– Speaking of crazy theories:
“They are upset that [Champion] said Jessica’s murder wasn’t related to gangs and drug dealers, because they wanted this to be a hate crime from the beginning,” she said. (The Rudds are black, and Chambers was white.)
Yep, that’s our internet.
There’e a scene at an episode of Season 2 where Rosa smiles and tells Jake how nervous and uptight she’s been because of how hard she’s been working a drug case for months. It’s the one time she’s used her actual voice thus far and I flipped out when I heard it.
In summary, Stephanie Beatriz is the goddamned best.
This badass sounding lady is suing El Al airlines for making woman move seats when Haredi men request it. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/world/middleeas…
More on Diversity In Publishing:
http://www.bkmag.com/2016/02/26/what-comes-next-2…
Relevant to Toastie interests: Hamilpeeps! http://www.themarysue.com/dont-need-tickets-for-h…
I write for a science magazine and I had to actively distance myself from covering anything dealing with Challenger because I just burst into tears whenever I thought about it and this poor man. Now I’m crying at work anyway but at least it’s happy tears at the outpouring of humanity and goodness towards someone who tried so hard to do the right thing.
Also: the bi erasure in one of Phoebe's songs. ("And then there are bisexuals / Who are really only just kidding themselves", or words to that effect.)
OMG Andre Braugher is Captain Holt. I adore him much all the more at this point. That meeting was uncanny. Presently I simply need to discover meetings of Braugher and Samberg together, I accept the element is precisely the same…
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