Matt left a sock behind, and now Sansa finds it wherever we hide it and chews on it mournfully, awaiting his return.
Melissa Harris-Perry bids farewell to her staff:
I have stayed in the same hotels where MSNBC has been broadcasting in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina, yet I have been shut out from coverage. I have a PhD in political science and have taught American voting and elections at some of the nation’s top universities for nearly two decades, yet I have been deemed less worthy to weigh in than relative novices and certified liars. I have hosted a weekly program on this network for four years and contributed to election coverage on this network for nearly eight years, but no one on the third floor has even returned an email, called me, or initiated or responded to any communication of any kind from me for nearly a month. It is profoundly hurtful to realize that I work for people who find my considerable expertise and editorial judgment valueless to the coverage they are creating.
The Times piece on the Republican establishment’s ongoing panic over the unstoppable Trump path to the nomination is full of delightful details, and you should read it, but also, even though he’s not going to beat Hillary, I am really depressed and disappointed with this country for buying into his racist nonsense, and that’s not going to go away:
While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.
He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.
A Toastie correctly assumed we might enjoy a fine poem that mentions strap-ons.
Steph Curry is magic:
Stephen Curry is not normal. He just broke the record for three-pointers in a single season, and there are still 24 games left to play. The record he broke was his own, set last year. Saying he’s the best shooter of all time undersells his shooting ability. Curry is so good at tossing the ball through the net that he makes other professional basketball players look pathetic by comparison. He is playing a different game than everyone else in the NBA. He is a great shooter like Einstein was a great physicist.
No one ever changes their mind about anything, so it’s nice when someone does (this is in no way meant to excuse previous bigotry, just that I sometimes fear that people are completely incapable of reexamining their beliefs, and here’s a counter-example):
I simply could not reconcile the joy and tolerance I saw in the gay community with the views I was supposed to hold. The more progressive I became, the more gratitude I received from gay men and women and the more visceral hatred from their opponents. It radicalized me of course; it could not do otherwise.
I now not only believe that equal marriage is a fundamental right but also a manifestation of Christian love and of the face of the living God. Of the 200,000 words in The New Testament a mere 40 refer to same-sex attraction and many leading theologians question the genuine meaning of those references. When it comes to the Old Testament it simply won’t do in the light of modern scholarship to accept the story of Sodom as referring to homosexuality; it’s a condemnation of rape, violence and rejection of strangers. There are around 20 further mentions of Sodom in Scripture itself and not one of them speaks of homosexuals. The handful of so-called anti-gay “clobber verses” in The Bible are deeply ambiguous. I could go on.
Deadspin broke down how the Holtzclaw story happened, and it is fascinating and aggravating:
We found, in the course of our reporting, that the failure here was in part a function of structural problems at SB Nation, which set up a system that would allow it to enjoy the benefits of running longform stories without actually having to do much work on them, and in part a function of the style and sensibility of Glenn Stout, who has, we can report, already been fired. We also found that this failure could have been averted if only Stout and top editorial staff had listened to one of their colleagues, senior editor Elena Bergeron, who explicitly and repeatedly drew attention to the story’s flaws in the days leading to its publication—and was, somehow, ignored.
Our own An Historian, the perfect Mo Moulton, will be on the Diane Rehm show next Thursday, talkin’ ’bout Downton Abbey, don’t miss it!
HERE FOR YOU, JENNIFER GARNER, YOU ARE SO PRETTY AND BEN SUCKS:
We live in a visual world, where a picture paints a thousand words. Millions of people had grown accustomed to seeing photos of this family to the point where we felt we knew them and their daily routines: getting coffee, going to the farmers’ market, working out, dropping the kids off at school. The combination of the two movie stars and their perfect family was both tabloid gold and aspirational ideal. After all, Garner and Affleck were a glamorous version of normal that almost defied believability. “It was a real marriage,” Garner tells me. “It wasn’t for the cameras. And it was a huge priority for me to stay in it. And that did not work.”
Now to end on what the gossip pages call “nannygate”—it’s all so unsavory and such a cliché. “Let me just tell you something,” Garner says. “We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny. She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce. She was not a part of the equation. Bad judgment? Yes. It’s not great for your kids for [a nanny] to disappear from their lives.” Months later, she’s still assessing the damage. “I have had to have conversations about the meaning of ‘scandal,’ ” she says, with her children.
Mallory went Too Far expressing her love for me in an interview for an Australian publication and now it’s awkward between her and my husband:
Rembert talked to Wyatt Cenac:
People are beginning to navigate the world of talking about police brutality topics with any smidgen of jest. I’ve had hesitation even substituting the “black” in Black Lives Matter for a joke, something you do in your stand-up. You also spend some time listing names of those killed, being like, “This is fucked up.” Going into it, did you want to make sure it wasn’t just jokes?
It’s tough. You’re talking about real life and you’re talking about real people and you’re talking about real issues. You want to be respectful, but, at the same time, I grew up with that sense of laughing to keep from crying. My thinking was, Well, if I’m going to make this joke, is there a way of making it so it both can give some people a sense of laughing to keep from crying, but also give other people a little bit of a dig, like, “Imma laugh, but it kind of hurts”? And it should hurt, and you shouldn’t necessarily be able to fully walk away from this absolved, whether it’s guilt or whatever discomfort you feel.
I definitely felt this sometimes with The Daily Show, where we gave people a catharsis. Okay, here’s something crazy that happened in the world and now you laugh at it, and afterwards you can go to sleep and not feel like you have to be burdened with it anymore. So, for me, the challenge has been, Can I talk about something in a way that is both funny but also doesn’t let you off the hook?
I have a Thing for Bill Hader, and the fact he reads like a mofo and thinks a lot about serial killers doesn’t help:
For instance, this is an awful thing: I was reading about the one guy who escaped Jeffrey Dahmer. And I was reading about him, and when he described his night with Jeffrey Dahmer, I was like, “Oh, I would never buy that!” You know? A killer…he gets the person alone, he tries to drug him, and then he just kills the person. But his whole thing with Jeffrey Dahmer was that Jeffrey Dahmer tried to drug him, but he didn’t like alcohol, which ended up, you know, saving his life, and Jeffrey Dahmer pulled a knife on him and tried to bind him up, and then the guy was able to talk Jeffrey Dahmer down so then they sat and watched a movie together? They watched The Exorcist III, and then everything was fine—
Wait—
And then Jeffrey Dahmer said, “Okay, I’m going to eat your heart now.”
And the guy said, “Okay, well before you eat my heart, can I go to the bathroom?”
And Jeffrey Dahmer said, “Sure!”
[Laughs]
And he ran out! I mean, if you were to put that in a movie or something, you’d go, “Oh, no way.” The plausibility and the logic of it is, “No. He’d kill the guy.” But that’s how it actually happened.
Two separate men did not care for How To Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story, and they can suck my dick:
Oh, okay, I should include these as well:
We had no idea Oprah loved chewing socks!
Apparently what Oprah REALLY likes is bread. I know because I have been watching Hulu a lot this weekend, and I’ve seen her Weight Watchers commercial like 25 times. And frankly I get more upset every time I see it, she’s just SO EXCITED about getting to eat bread, and I want to be like Oprah. Oprah my love. You can eat whatever you want okay, please just eat what you want.
The first time I saw that commercial I thought it was an SNL parody.
I thought it was meant to be a joke? But I think she’s really serious!! Poor Oprah has been depriving herself for so long that she’s that excited for BREAD.
She seems like she might be on the verge of tears in it, so I think it is not a joke. It is kind of upsetting.
It really is, and more so every time I see it, I just wanna make her a big buffet of bread and rolls and cakes and such tbh.
Her deprivation has also given her a very crisp pronunciation of “breadt”. I can feel the anguish when she says “I love breadt!”
(So glad I am Not Alone in this, too. I was beginning to feel like Oprah sans bread!)
That commercial, it is SO DEPRESSING. Oprah, girl, I eat bread every day too and think nothing of it and I’m NOT richer than God!
Every time I see that commercial, I just… Oprah, you are among the most accomplished and powerful people on the globe–like, maybe you don’t have to be skinny to live your best life? Other than this weird bread thing, you appear to be crushing it.
ALSO, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR UNFATHOMABLE RICHES. If I was that rich, I would have a panoply of breads from all the best places delivered to me, fresh and crusty, with premium butter from a well-pampered cow dedicated to the purpose, link à la Thomas Keller.
Did you read this? You aren’t alone in your assessment! http://www.vox.com/2016/2/15/10980830/oprah-winfr…
So that was a really good article that said a lot of good things, but I’m a little disappointed that it wasn’t about a rich person who spends all their money on fancy bread and butter.
So many things in life disappoint me, what with not being about spending unfathomable riches on fancy bread and butter.
Socks and tattoos, that’s what Oprah likes best.
Steph Curry did a very impressive thing, but also: Thunder Up. We can do both.
Hey Toasties – remember when I said I had been invited to run for office, but I needed advice?
I DID IT, I’M DOING IT, IT’S REAL
Look at me looking like a real candidate. I know y’all will get that Hamilton reference.
I just donated to your campaign! Not, like, a lot, but your priorities sound good to me.
Um, you are amazing!! I bought new thank you cards this weekend (because new stationary is the best part of any new adventure) and I get to write my first one to a Toastie!!!
100% I would vote for you if I lived I the right place. Best of luck.
I think I can say with full confidence that I am the only Toastie in the Missouri 130th. Something I will remedy when I take office!
Good luckkkkk! Signed, an unfortunate Toastie in Jeff City. (But I can tell you the good places to eat when you get elected!)
Whatever district is STL is where I am, but I have some solid memories of serving in Greene County!
Good luck!
Aaaaaah omg omg look at you!
THAT IS WHAT I KEEP SAYING TO MYSELF
The page looks awesome! Rooting for you!
Thank you!! My friends and family came through in an AMAZING way and raised $1k for me on Friday so I will be launching ellajanegoeppinger.com this week!
AHHHHH amazing. My mother just up and decided to run for the statehouse when I was a kid, and it’s still one of the things I’m most in awe of any grown-up doing. If only we could turn all our statehouses Toastie.
This is a big reason I’m doing this… my daughter is too young to remember it, but I want her to know that if I can do this, she can do anything!
Awesome!
Yay! Thank you! <3
As I cannot vote for you and am brokey mcbrokerson right now, I tweeted out your link to friends of mine in MO that may be able to help! Good luck!!!
Great page, well-written copy (love the “we” language!). You seem awesome.
Thank you! I’d like to think my experience in marketing is going to help me, and it’s great to hear that I’m doing something right!
You did not throw away your shot. *wipes away proud tears*
OMG GO YOU! *\o/*
Donated! Seriously, you are amazing!
I wish I could vote for you. As a former KC resident, you are much needed!
Donated! Good luck!
Running for office is the most Adult of Adult Themes.
WOOHOOOO Good luck!!
OMG YOUR USER NAME IS ONE OF MY FAVE WORDS IN TE REO MĀORI (also best of luck for your campaign!)
I’m from Aotearoa! NO ONE HAS EVER GOTTEN IT BEFORE. I love you and kia ora!
I missed this yesterday but holy crap! I used to live in Jeff City and I am still over-invested in MO politics from afar. Donating!
You are too kind!!
Ok, but you missed the best quote from the Jennifer Garner interview: “One thing is for sure: she refuses to claim responsibility for the midlife-crisis tattoo—the rising phoenix—that takes up her estranged husband’s entire back, as seen in photographs. “You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart.’ A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario?”
And then the BEST best part: “I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.”
See now I REFUSE TO BE THE ASHES would be a great tattoo.
Yes. Yes it would. *nods*
I’m going to send this article to my mum, as she will always STRONGLY take the side of any wronged woman, regardless of whether she knows her or not (e.g. she disdains Kenneth Branagh because, in her words, “I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Emma Thompson”). “I refuse to be the ashes” seems an appropriate subject line.
I feel the same way about Kenneth Branagh!
So do I! (Though I do not like Greg Wise either because it means Emma is not available to be with, y’know, me.)
Maybe Alan Rickman’s character in Love, Actually was a subtle dig? I mean, not really, but we can dream.
Loving Emma Thompson is a requirement for Toasthood, so disdaining Kenneth Branagh for what he did to her only follows.
gonna take time this weekend to hand-letter a sign that says I REFUSE TO BE THE ASHES for my desk tbh
I’ve never had any kind of feeling about Jennifer Garner but this kind of makes me love her. Bless his heart.
I have a deep affection for her having been a huge Alias fan. She is far too good for Ben Affleck. Still think her and Michael Vartan should have stayed together.
Seeing her at the Oscars last night looking AMAZING and this article have taken me from having no feelings to TEAM GARNER.
Whoever her PR person is is KILLING IT.
Same here.
I love this interview. She has so many remarks that appear generous and polite, but are actually totally cutting. “Oh, I wasn’t bothered by the nanny, but it was so upsetting to OUR CHILDREN.” I mean, “Bless his heart” is basically Southern for “Fuck that asshole, up the ass and sideways.”
And, seriously, that tattoo says so much about how Ben Affleck sees himself and why he keep messing up his personal life.
I love Jennifer Garner so much, and that quote just encapsulates what I love.
“Bless his heart” is Southern for “What a dumbass” and you know that is exactly what she meant here.
ETA: Oops, too late. @aeryn_sun said it better!
My friend and I had a drunken theory about Jennifer Garner and her marriage to Ben Affleck; it started because I was like ‘wow they were married 10 years!… Hey she hasn’t done a whole lot professionally recently, and he’s been super busy…’
Basically it came down to; they made a deal that she’d take a step back from work for the babies and he’d keep working, and then they’d swap when the babies were appropriately aged, so like 10 years? And he’s had a great 10 years, writing, acting, directing, he won an oscar! And now its her turn, but he’s all like ‘naaaa, I’m having a good run, I don’t wanna give up’, so she left his ass.
TL:DR we got drunk and made up a theory that Ben Affleck is a bit self centered and Jennifer Garner is a badass.
This theory makes total sense!
It’s also the plotline to my mother’s first marriage.
And my aunt’s, but only if you replace “acting” with “lawyering”. I never liked her husband, and i never like ben affleck, either. *spits*
Wow, if that was the plan, it would be a bad plan, considering that there’s no work for actresses over 30. They really can’t step back for awhile and then step back in again.
I never said it was a smart plan, we were a good few beers deep at this point.
Although, if she’d 43 now, then she was already in her early 30s when they were getting married and talking babies…
ughhhh I loved that part. I’m from the South and that is just the A++++ best use of “Bless his heart” I have seen in writing. It’s half “what a dumbass” and half “well he just can’t help being dumb as a stump poor thing” and half “people make choices.”
Ben Affleck is all the worst guys from all my writing workshops rolled into one.
(I will admit a soft spot for his Keith Olbermann impression, though.)
I was talking to a baby 19-year-old on Saturday about primary voting and oh god y’all. He was like “Trump is too extreme!” but didn’t really know who he wanted to vote for in the primaries, so he wasn’t going to vote at all.
and and it was all I could do to smile and say “well, you should at least vote in the primary next week to keep the nomination away from Trump, yeah?”
and oh god what if this kid is way more indicative of what’s happening with the baby republican voters than i expect, on top of the ones who are gung-ho for Trump because he’s a celebrity and super racist and that appeals to them?
I am totally that person who votes in the other party’s primary for the candidate I find most palatable, and it is the advice I give to the youth but they so often look at me like whaaaaaaaaat
I have very seriously considered doing that myself, but cringe at the thought of my registration making the Republican voter rolls slightly more inflated. (Florida has closed primaries.)
But tbh I think I would have the same problem as this kid if I tried to do it – maybe I’d go with Kasich? he seems to be the most moderate (least openly offensive), but he’s also not likely to stand a chance unless something changes with the results on Tuesday.
Kasich is one of the worst, actually, in terms of record (even though his rhetoric is moderate). Samantha Bee nails him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBF3K5X6XE4 But Planned Parenthood also has a lot to say about the damage he’s managed to do fairly covertly.
ETA: To summarize, one example of his handy work is a gag order in place that prevents rape crisis counselors from discussing abortion.
Ugh, yes, that’s the thing – I’m tangentially aware of how awful he is, but it’s not the in-your-face awfulness of Cruz or Trump or Carson or Fiorina or Rubio. Even Bush was looking palatable to me, even though I lived under his governorship and it was miserable. (Still: he could be better than Rick Scott, it’s hard to say)
But this is why I’m not Republican or voting for any of them, because I find them all appalling and terrible.
Oh ditto, I mean, public education is one of the issues that I care the most passionately about, so by that metric I haaaate Jeb Bush. Even so, I sighed a tiny sigh when he dropped out, because …. now what?
You know things are bad when Jeb Bush looks fairly reasonable.
<3 Samantha Bee!!!
Kasich is terrible!!! He defunded Planned Parenthood last week on a Sunday, so no one would know about it. He also tried to destroy unions in Ohio, and the state whooped his ass and recalled it. As an Ohioan, I feel like I have to destroy this narrative of Kasich being a moderate. Do not believe it!!!
I am also totally that person.
I think that’s true about a lot of baby voters in general. It takes a bit of living through “a leads to b, b is actually c in disguise, and c either will or won’t lead to d” to get really enmeshed in electoral politics beyond the “gee, whiz” candidates (I knew a lot of Nader-supporting teenagers in 2000). But there are so very few baby Republicans to begin with, so I don’t think their apathy/confusion/etc even begins to scratch the surface of what’s up with the Republicans this cycle. For that, I’d start with the Southern Strategy and 1968.
OH NO i saw the awfulness in person just now!
I was walking in to put in my Democratic slip and this lady is Very Loud and wants to know who is on the ballot and is it that rich guy, the richest millionaire in the world she heard, and she wants to vote for… is it Bill Gates? is that the rich guy? well, who is on the ballot so she can find out.
It’s not at all surprising or unexpected, but still so dismaying to see in person. I wonder if she ever figured out Donald Trump’s name? The poll workers were very insistent that they couldn’t list any candidate names because they didn’t want to accidentally influence any votes.
…how. Like, really, how do you not know who’s running at this point? And also, why even show up to vote if you don’t know any of the candidates?
I know! Is she even registered Republican to vote in their primary, I wondered.
“I’m here to vote for the rich guy, and I require this team of volunteers to do my most basic homework for me” suggests to me that she totally is.
Wyatt Cenac is a national treasure.
I just listened to the Another Round episode featuring him, and he is so delightful. The weekly comedy night he hosts in Brooklyn is also GREAT, I highly recommend it to NYC-area Toasties.
did you hear him on another round? so good.
also a babe (I saw him recently and *heart eyes*)
I don’t really think about serial killers other than assuming every white male is probably one. So is Jeffrey Dahmer known to have been an inept one or did he just like The Exorcist III a lot
I mean he was quite prolific and avoided getting caught for a long time so I guess he just liked The Exorcist III.
I think by the time he was caught, he was killing someone like every two weeks or some very frightening rate.
makes you wonder how many people he attempted to kill but thwarted him by whipping out a movie
He’s one of the most notorious because of the “gay cannibal” angle, and he killed a lot of people without getting caught for a long time. There’s a lot of other grisly details about his treatent of the corpses that makes the case fascinated to morbid people like me, but it’s quite grusome so I’ll let you look it up yourself if you want to.
I kinda feel like the only cannibals you hear about are the gay ones. It’s… so weird? Like surely there are straight cannibal serial killers too, what with life being a tapestry.
I think most serial killers have an escapee? I, like Hader, for some reason, like to read up on these a lot. (Bizarre horror fascination, I guess?) And I remember reading both Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway Green River Killer) had a few victims who managed to escape, and then later on, when they were caught, saw pictures and realized they had nearly become a horrible statistic themselves and nearly escaped.
I think perhaps that only the mediocre serial killers have escapees. Don’t think about what I just said too much. I’m sorry.
Apparently, my mom’s childhood babysitter was an escapee of Ted Bundy’s. One of his methods for luring victims was to hang out in parks pretending to have a broken arm and a boat that he needed to load on his car, then when a girl would go to help him he would take her. My mom’s babysitter was nearly one of those girls and the only reason she didn’t stop to help him was that she was late for babysitting my mom.
YES OH MY GOD. I remember reading about her!!!!!!
I remember reading about one teenage boy who did manage to escape Dahmer but was returned to him by the police, which is horrifying.
So once in May of ’90 he had lured someone to his apartment to murder, and (as was his MO) he prepared a drink for his intended victim that was laced with sleeping pills. But then — and this never fails to make me laugh at the horror, the absurdity of it — he ACCIDENTALLY DRANK IT HIMSELF, passed out, and was robbed by the man he brought home. Says Wiki, “Naturally, Dahmer never reported this incident to the police.”
Naturally.
Also has anyone read Joyce Carol Oates’ erm novella (I think it’s the right length to be considered one) “Zombie” — it’s based on Dahmer, and honestly, as weird as this sounds, it’s actually sad? Since she writes from his point of view, you get how TOTALLY MESSED UP the brain would have to be.
In Sad Dahmer literature I also recommend My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf – it’s a comic about his high school years by a guy who went to school with him.
Dahmer is one of those killers who- it would be wrong to say I feel pity for him, because he did such terrible things, but he really did have a messed-up brain. He’s different in that regard from someone like Ted Bundy of Gary Ridgway, who just killed because they hated women- I don’t think he was mentally ill to the extent that he didn’t know what he was doing (because he TOTALLY DID) but there were definitely Not Right things happening with his brain chemistry.
MHP’s farewell piece reminds me of something I once heard a black womanist theologian say: you can spend years working your ass off to get your MDiv, and even your DMin, but you will have to compete with, and be considered less than, the guy down the street who failed out of online Bible college. Education can’t confer authority on people who by virtue of their gender or race are always assumed to be lacking it. It’s complete fucking garbage.
*flops sideways in dismay*
UGH. Just. … … ugh
Oof
Folks who found my essay here a few weeks back resonant may want to investigate Conceivable Future: http://conceivablefuture.org/
They have interviews with people about their choices to have kids or not in the context of climate change and ecological degradation, and they also host gatherings for people to talk together, share concerns and plan local actions. They’re based in my home city and I’m trying to figure out how we might work together. Check them out if you’re feeling up to it.
They look really cool, thanks for sharing!
THANK YOU so much for that link!
My husband had the Oscars recording so wee could watch on a delay last night. My Facebook feed was full of people talking about how Rock was killing it in his opening monologue. I watched it and was underwhelmed.
It’s not racist? Asset you just said it was racist? #askhermore is overstating the sexism of red carpet interviews? That awkward Stacy Dash joke?
Better hosting than we’ve had in a while but no, Chris.
I was simultaneously pleased and disappointed in Chris Rock’s opening. Like, yes, great, you managed to get a gig where you got to do roughly 8 minutes worth of jokes calling Hollywood out for its racism, in one of the most visible places/time slots/etc. And The Academy clearly knew what it was getting into, and they don’t seem to have shied away from it, so maybe The Academy was hoping that maybe they could use Chris Rock to shame their membership into being less horrible, and that they’re willing to do that is probably a good sign.
And some of the jokes really landed for me.
But not all of it did. I sort of wonder what it would have been like without the softening, without the Jada jokes, without the #askhermore bullshit. Chris Rock is, at his best, sharper than that.
I think what I wanted comes down to what Cenac is talking about in the quoted bit up top. It feels like Rock gave us too much catharsis. I didn’t want to be let off the hook, I didn’t want Hollywood left off the hook. I wanted to be a bit more uncomfortable.
But, of course, I can’t expect Chris Rock to do all the hard work. I can’t expect him to go on stage and burn all his bridges. He’s the one who has to work with these people this week, month, year. He’ll do more by slowly pushing these people over the rest of his career than one explosive 10 minute monologue could ever do. In being as edgy and sharp as he was, he was already plenty more aggressive than I would have had the courage to be.
It was unexpected from where he was last year, when he pointed out that racism is a white people problem because black people have been qualified to be president for centuries. To completely dismiss #OscarsSoWhite because we have larger problems misses that it capitalizes on the current larger conversation. I just couldn’t get there with him.
OK, so here’s what I thought he was trying to do with that one, but this doesn’t seem to have landed this way for most people, so feel free to argue with me.
His “we had real things to protest” line hit hard, and people cheered, and it sickened me. Then he goes “we were getting raped and lynched” and people still laughed. And then he goes “if your grandma was hanging from a tree” and people still laughed? It felt like he was trying to make you feel REAL bad and uncomfortable for laughing that first time. Like, yo, this is NOT a joke, people. We were murdered.
But maybe that’s expecting too much from it.
Only, we’re still being murdered.
Getting white people to laugh at lynching does not seem like the best use of one’s monologue.
Yeah, that’s a good interpretation (IMO) — and maybe the reaction was that awkward gut reaction we all have — to laugh when something is true but uncomfortable, because if we laugh it off as a joke, we don’t have to really process it? Maybe an audience reaction as opposed to his intentions.
Especially when one of his points was POC in the 50s and 60s had more important things to worry about, which completely disregards that they were protesting the roles POC were being given and the lack of recognition because they knew representation matters. Like he specifically said there were no protests in 62 or 63 over the roles, which is interesting because there was a group in 62 called Hollywood Race Relations that protested outside the Oscars because of lack of inclusion. And then there were other protests like the NAACP calling for a boycott of CBS because of Amos n Andy, Paul Robeson leaving Hollywood over the racist roles, protests against Porgy and Bess including by the actors who were in it, etc, etc.
And there was segregation back in the 1930s! When Hattie McDaniel won her Oscar for Gone with the Wind, she was in another room in the same building!
Autostraddle put up a fantastic piece charting the Oscars’ long-term racism. Definitely worth a look.
http://www.autostraddle.com/2016-oscars-so-so-so-…
I misread and thought you said “the Rock”, and I was v confused throughout the entire comment. Weirdly relieved it was re: Chris Rock (although I didn’t watch the Oscars so I’m still not sure what’s going on)
Same and similarly confused because I honestly couldn’t imagine The Rock doing anything in an opening speech other than telling everyone they look very nice tonight, best of luck to everyone, and a shout-out to his grandma. Maybe a lil recap of his lip-syncing to Shake It Off, just to get the crowd’s energy up.
…you know, I would actually watch the Oscars if this was true.
You are not the only one who made this mistake; when there was no mention of Cod, I realized the error of my way.
Can someone please explain the Stacy Dash joke to me? Initially I thought the joke was that she was obviously not going to be there, but then…she was.
I though that the joke about how people weren’t protesting the Oscars in the 60s because they had real things to protest was super weird given (a) Black Lives Matter and (b) people DID protest the Oscars in the 60s for being racist.
Like Raven-Symone, Dash has recently achieved some notoriety for expressing unpopular opinions. Like, why we don’t need BET or Black History Month because they’re divisive. (BET was happy to clap back and point out that Dash was happy to cash a paycheck from them when she was employed in one of their shows.) She’s currently collecting checks as a token on Fox News.
Oh, I know what she’s been up to. I just don’t understand the punch line. Before she came out, I assumed the joke was that she’s this conservative token, but we’ve put her in charge of minority outreach, haha. But then she did come out, and…maybe that’s still the joke? It’s a lot less effective in my opinion if she’s in on it (and if they choose to give her the opportunity to promote herself).
The whole room I was in was equally confused when it happened.
I *think* people were supposed to laugh when she came out. She did that little Cruella de Ville laugh when she strut on stage. But the awkward silence showed the joke didn’t land. (I blame it on the fact that probably 80% of the audience had no idea who she was, and the other 20% didn’t care.) They maybe should have workshopped that a bit longer.
Yeah I did NOT get it at all either.
Yeah, the bit about “black people in the 60s had bigger problems” just made me think of MLK convincing Nichelle Nichols that it was important for her to stay on Star Trek. Media representation has been an issue worth addressing for a long time, and it’s not mutually exclusive with more concrete or immediate problems.
I read your comment and at first I thought you meant that The Rock hosted the Oscars and I got real sad that I missed it
And yet after that monologue, a couple of Asian kids were the butt of a joke. And there was a transmisogynist joke.
I didn’t watch, but I followed along on Twitter.
Tangentially, concerning commentary on deleted comments, it wll never fail to amaze and delight me that the “clean” version of that infamous line from GI Jane was, “Suck my stick.”
My favorite line from the NYT Republipocalypse piece: One senior Republican senator, noting that Mr. Kasich has truly contested only one of the first four states, complained: “He’s just flailing his arms around and having a wonderful time going around the country, and it just drives me up the wall.”
Have we been focusing on the wrong troll of the Republican party all along?
I loved this. It’s so high school movie mean girl- “who does he even think HE IS???”
“He’s HAVING FUN. HOW DARE HE HAVE FUN AT A TIME LIKE THIS.”
“Senator Rubio is like, so cute and tries so hard, and he’s like, totally going to get beat by that old orange troll, and like, how dare you enjoy yourself while such a tragedy is happening???”
Like, obviously the Republicans are evil and all, but I have a certain affection for John Kasich. I feel like he is very tired inside which is #relateable, and wants to take a nap and wake up without the fringe side of his party interfering with his campaign.
I have never empathized more with Jeb Bush than I did in the last days of his campaign, when all of his speeches amounted to, “Are you guys fucking serious? I’m disappointed in you, America.” I relate, Jeb.
“We’re all acknowledging that this is an actual reality show, yes? Oh, ok, we’re not. The shit?”
That “please clap” clip confused me, like all of a sudden I am having, “aw, sweetie” feelings about Jeb Bush? Purple monkey dishwasher what?
Do you PROMISE that he can’t beat Hillary? I’m so fucking afraid all the time right now.
I can’t promise anything. But I think that fear is gonna motivate a lot of us. I know it’s got me.
Same. My partner started telling me about various reprehensible views supporters of Trump have been polled as having, and I just started sobbing.
I think this world is going to look interesting once he stops talking to republican primary voters and MAD SPRINTS towards the ‘middle’ during the general (since his whole purpose in life is saying things solely because he likes the sound of his own voice and other people cheering for his voice). I don’t know that anyone has any sense of what that sort of campaign will look like.
But on the day W left office, amidst a stock market crash the drove straight into layoffs, a bank bailout bill and two unpopular wars, he had an approval rating in 20s. That means one out of every four or five Americans looked at his presidency and went, ‘well, he did a pretty good job with that.’ That’s roughly the same percentage of USers who are currently willing to vote for the narcissistic billionaire. If you could tell that W wasn’t having a great presidency in November 2008, here’s hoping you can tell DT for the snake oilman that he is.
Yeah, this is my take: Trump’s base is basically boorish, obnoxious assholes, and that is roughly 20% of the electorate.
(slightly) more scientifically, Trump’s base appears to be those leaning towards authoritarianism, and that seems to be pretty consistently about 25% of homo sapiens.
Did anyone listen to that recent This American Life, with the evangelical radio host who couldn’t understand why his listeners were Trump fans? That freaked me out a fair bit. The radio host, even though he’s someone I disagree with on every possible thing, seemed to genuinely care about the direction of the country. The Trump fans were just having fun watching everyone get upset.
I haven’t, but I will now. And probably I will weep.
And then the other recent This American Life, interviewing the gay black kid adopted by homophobic Christian parents who is a student organizer for Trump!! Zoe Chace is doing really amazing work with these interviews; I wish I had a modicum of her ability to stay so nonjudgmental and personable in her conversations about such fraught topics.
That kid broke my heart. I just wanted him to go away to college somewhere where he could be appreciated and not judged and maybe get some real counseling.
OMG I just listened to that on Friday and felt totally . .I don’t even know! Overwhelmed with feelings.
I missed this one. Do you remember the name of the show?
I think it’s “Well, That’s One Way to Do It” or something along those lines.
Ep 580: That’s One Way to Do It
I think that was one of the best This American Life segments ever. When he was arguing with a caller and said that Muslims aren’t terrorists, they don’t want to be associated with the few extremist fringe people, just like he doesn’t want to be associated with Christians who blow up abortion clinics. Damn. I was so floored to hear that! It’s not a sentiment I’ve ever heard from an Evangelical before, and you rarely even hear it from more “normal” Christians.
Okay, so that Trump supporter, Barry. He opens by talking about following Jesus, and being hot for Jesus, etc. And then he spends MINUTES repeating his delight in “BASHING” and how great it is to watch Trump BASH people. Like, I missed that part of the gospels? Maybe we need to have a replacement of Peace or Love in the Bible with BASH.
Thank you for pointing me in this direction! I forgot how much I love TAL.
No promises, but I (an independent) will vote for literally anyone over Donald Trump, and I know Republicans who will do the same.
One of my moderate republican friends (who’s been holding her own for years as a centrist in a field of conservative mansplainers, and bless her balls for doing so!) shared a post recently strategizing anti-trump votes on super tuesday. AND declared her intention to vote Hilary in the general if Trump OR Cruz gets the nomination.
Danielle Allen recently called for unregistered people in the center and on the left to register as Republicans and vote him down. I don’t want to be cynical enough to hope for a Trump nomination for the sake of a democrat win… especially since I am not sure it will work.
I have been thinking about voting in the Republican primary here, but remain undecided b/c half of me thinks, “Probably Trump should get it, surely there’s no chance he could win in the general,” (so I should vote for my dem preference) but the other half whispers, “But Dora, there is apparently no underestimating the American people.”
Yeah, I know people who made a decision not to vote for McCain once Palin was named VP and those people will be likely to go to the polls to vote against Trump as well. Not sure how big of a difference they made back in the McCain/Obama race, but maybe they’re a big enough group to make a difference?
I’m absolutely terrified that Trump will be nominated and Hillary is going to get indicted somehow from some confidential email thing (even though it’s clearly a load of garbage) and Sanders doesn’t really have a shot at this point, so THEN WHAT WILL HAPPEN AAAAH
No one for president!
Yeah, this is what keeps me up nights.
If they haven’t caught HRC for something yet, after twenty-five years of desperately searching for ANYTHING, they’re not going to find something in the next ten months. And I very much doubt there is anything substantial to find.
Rationally, I know that. But, rational people were saying Trump didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming the nominee six months ago, so I’m worried Hillary’s top secret night job of moonlighting as a serial killer is going to be exposed. So, still flailing my arms around over here.
Honestly, the sooner she officially denies being the Zodiac Killer, the better off her campaign will be.
I’m now choosing to believe that ‘Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer’ was a wacky viral marketing scheme cooked up by Hillary’s PR team.
I mean…I wish that were the case, because I am not really impressed with Hillary’s PR team in general.
Exactly! They’re all pretending to be somewhat incompetent publicly so they can pull off stuff like this.
LET ME DREAM OKAY
I wish they would spin the email thing in their favor. “You think Hillary is sharing state secrets on her personal email? Nope! She’s just chatting with her pal Barb Mikulski and asking for tea. Some of the released emails are great… they make Hillary “more human” (hate this phrase, but you know what I mean), and you can see that she has a decent sense of humor!
Sadly, I feel like any attempts to portray Hillary as a normal human being with personal relationships and a sense of humor are still sparking backlash of “she’s just pandering to the youths, she doesn’t REALLY enjoy [relatable thing]!”
…maybe I should cut her PR team more slack, actually. They are clearly trying, and I honestly don’t know what angle I’d choose if I were in their shoes. Anyone have any suggestions?
No, you’re totally right. Everything would just get smacked down – she’s an emotionless robot, she’s an emotional woman, she’s pandering, she isn’t trying enough. Blah blah blah. For fuck’s sake, it’s exasperating.
I think a really good example is the reaction to the announcement that Hillary would guest star on Broad City this season. A lot of people went “UGH, she’s trying way too hard to seem cool,” whereas you KNOW that if it had been Bernie they would have lost their shit.
The observation that she is constantly skewered by hypocritical double standards is completely correct, and I don’t want to detract from that …. except to say, OMG she could do a Brooklyn Nine-Nine cameo and then I would die of happiness.
I can’t remember where I read it, but there was discussion about how in her elections she doesn’t do very well against Democrat opponents, possibly because of her perceived likability issue (which I will be happy never to hear about again when it comes to a woman candidate) where she’s working so hard not to alienate those Democrat voters that it comes across as pandering. But put her against a Republican opponent, she’s far more comfortable and less interested in winning those voters over to her side, so does much much better.
I like this theory. Also, I want to see her wipe the floor with Trump in a debate. Trump is one of those people who really feeds off of his ability to push people’s buttons, but Hillary has a LOT of experience with not letting entitled yelling manbabies ruffle her feathers. I feel like having her calmly refuse to give him the reaction he wants could potentially make him combust into a rage inferno.
I hope this rage inferno happens during a live debate.
I can picture him just losing more and more of his tenuous control over his brain-to-mouth filter, and just spewing forth all of the vile invective you know he’s thinking (like, I’m pretty sure his anti-Hillary comments have been nowhere near as vulgar and horrifying as his internal monologue), and everything will just go really quiet and awkward. Like in a movie.
Life is not a movie, so this probably won’t happen.
I would love to see this too, except it would mean that Trump actually got the Republican nomination, and that as we’ve discussed is downright terrifying, so no thanks.
I’m kind of hoping that the lawsuit in California that Trump’s facing for fraud blows big and helps a bit. But maybe after the primaries, so if he’s the nominee it just puts more wind in Hillary’s sails.
(I assume that Hillary will be the nominee at this point, though it’s still early.)
but what if they have something good and they’ve been hanging onto it for just the right/wrong moment :((
October Surprise, indeed.
Well, assuming “they” are based in the Republican establishment, they may choose not to release it after all if the alternative is Trump. Or at least a lot of people are claiming a lot of Republican politicians would be against Trump in the general–I find it hard to believe that partisanship won’t win out. :/
I don’t remember where I saw it, but some Republican staffer said that it would be GREAT if Hillary won, because it would energize the base in the midterms, and then the party would still have a lot of control (like what happened last midterms, but more so). The thinking is it’d carry on into the next presidential election, too.
What they still don’t seem to get is that they don’t have anyone better to proffer than Trump, Cruz, and Rubio, and they’re not fully landing with their own people, never mind the rest of the country. It’s an unholy mess no matter how you look at it.
I mean, at the same time, the GOP is spending significant amounts for ads to demonize Clinton and help Sanders. I think they’d prefer him to her as an opponent honestly.
That assumes that the Republicans are competent AND that they have the self-control to hold anything that could damage Hillary Clinton back.
People are always afraid of this, but the closest thing I’ve seen to it in reality is Romney’s 47% remarks, and that was about something that happened during his campaign. That’s not really the same as holding onto some secret damning information for years. In a different year the GOP might be disciplined enough and unified enough to pull off this kind of stunt, but things being as they are, I really think that if, say, Mitch McConnell knew anything damning about HRC he would scream it from the rooftops immediately. The GOP has been working hard to limit Obama’s successes since day 1. There’s no way they’d hold back on a scandal around his first secretary of state until she was running for president again–they’d publish it right away for the sake of their own obstructionism.
I am, too. I don’t even live in the US now, but I have started to take anti-anxiety medication because the prospect of a Trump presidency is becoming increasingly real and I think actual terrible will happen if he does. I’ve had to hide most of my liberal friends who keep posting anti-Trump things just because even seeing his horrible face triggers a panic response.
I am so glad you said that because I am having that exact same experience. I have to cover up images of his face while I’m reading articles about the political situation. I have to turn off the radio whenever a soundbite of his voice comes on. It’s like I’ve undergone some Pavlovian conditioning.
There’s a plugin extension for that! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trump-f…
I’m tired of people critically reposting all his Islamaphobia nonsense, just rereading constantly his hatefulness hurts.
I’m terrified he’ll be elected and pick a fight with Putin within a week and a week after that there’ll be warheads on their way to the U.S. I do not even feel irrational about this fear.
Look on the bright side… maybe Putin will have him secretly poisoned with polonium!
or he will put Nair in his shampoo.
I can’t decide if this will be a horror movie/political thriller, or, like, a painful Adam Sandler-esque spoof of a horror movie/political thriller.
If Bernie Sanders’ campaign does nothing else, it’ll mean that Republicans will be much more likely to hold their noses and vote for Hillary if it comes down to her vs. Trump. I live in suburbia, and folks around here are running around like Joe McCarthy in the middle of the Red Scare every time someone mentions Bernie’s name, but they’re not any less scared of Trump, either.
I am a rabidly liberal democrat, and my husband is a “moderate” Republican, although he now mournfully describes himself as a man without a party. He has promised me that if Trump gets the nomination, he will vote for Hillary himself. And I do not believe that he is the only one. Some Republican senator just said recently that he would do the same thing.
My dad is a “moderate” Republican and I’m scared to ask (although maybe I can get my brother to, since an ocean is a lot better buffer than I have.)
My mother, aka “she who votes solely on restricting abortion” & hasn’t voted for a democrat for president since carter, informed me months ago that if trump gets the nomination she’ll vote for hrc, the end. My dad, too. So! There’s two more conservatives for your anecdotal well of hope.
About half of my siblings are Republicans and the rest of us are Democrat; over the holidays when we got to talking about the election, the Republican side were all universally offended by the suggestion that any of them might actually vote for Trump; but I don’t know if any of them have decided what they’d do if he got the nomination. My mom is also fairly conservative and I don’t know that she’s ever voted Democrat in her life. A few weeks ago she was actually asking my opinion on who I’d recommend out of the Democrat candidates.
I am fascinated by the fact that a big part of trump’s republican problem and the republicans’ trump problem is that the biggest R funders hate his liberal politics. Like, it isn’t the fascism, it’s the governmental subsidies, that make them sad.
I have been noticing this too! I am so confused. Like, register and ban Muslims? Cool. Want to give people some health care? THE SKY HATH FALLEN. It’s ridiculous and depressing all at once.
My husband’s cousin is one of these, she’s an evangelical in NC and a massive Cruz supporter. The crazy thing is, I agree with all the stuff she posts about Trump, how’s he’s narcissistic, a liar and would be terrible for the US, but then her stuff veers right off the rails into how liberal he is, and I’m like whaaaaaat???
From Australia, this all looks very, very bizzare…this coming from a country that keeps randomly changing our Prime Minister every few months!
My parents are coming to visit next weekend and I am actually going to have to have the conversation where I’m like “Mom, I know you think Hillary is the literal devil, but you have to promise me that if it comes down to her or Trump, you will either vote for her or stay home.” It drives me NUTS that my mom, not even a terribly conservative Republican, is more likely to vote for a fascist than Hillary Clinton. And I can’t have this conversation with every suburban Republican who hates Hillary for whatever reason from the 1990s, so there are probably other reasonable people out there who will vote for Trump! UGH.
Worst fight I have EVER had with my parents, which included extremely non-characteristic screaming, crying, and threats of never speaking again was about how my parents intended to vote during W’s second run. I am basically done discussing politics with them. I thought maybe there was a glimmer of hope since we’ve all grown and learned and whatever, but, no. My mom, who is a hospice director and an actual living saint, had the gall to use a comment I made about Hillary and education to jump into how unacceptable it was to ask tax payers to pay for sex reassignment surgeries for prisoners. Then I recalled how often she cursed out Obama because of traffic on her drive home when he was in town. Ffs, mom. Seriously? You commute in LA, on the bloody 405, and this is Obama’s fault?
And she’s the reasonable one.
i still really think her opinion of Hillary is about Bill, and that makes me angry to no end. Yuck,
So….. good luck! If it goes well, maybe I will take inspiration from you and gird my loins and try again.
Consider it a mission field for reason! Take one for the team & keep talking! You can do it! My husband is submitting his citizenship paperwork as we speak so he can be sure to vote in the general!
Uh whoa there were a lot of exclamation points there
https://www.facebook.com/LastWeekTonight/
Show this to everyone you know. Everybody. Make it go viral. The Donald himself doesn’t care about actual things that he’s actually done in the past, but other people might.
It made me so happy he specifically called out Trump on literally advocating war crimes as his foreign policy, because I don’t think that’s been laid out in plain language often enough.
Hillary’s going to eviscerate him over that, or at least I hope she will.
Have the Salt Lake City police begun releasing the dead kid’s life history yet? Was he a pot smoker, had he ever shoplifted, was he a thug from a broken home? Was his great-uncle a Black Panther? Have they started up a GoFundMe site for the cop’s defense? I hate to see them deviate from the usual cop antics when they execute some poor child in the street like a dog.
/fed the fuck up
That SB Nation story is so frustrating. OF COURSE they didn’t listen to the only woman involved in the editorial process who warned them that writing a 12,000 word defense of a convicted serial rapist was not a good idea on any level.
Not just only woman, but only WOC. I was screaming at my monitor.
A woman with SO MUCH EXPERIENCE.
Part of me really wants to see exactly what Stout said in the “intense conversation [that] devolved into an argument over the phone.” and part of me feels like I know EXACTLY what was said.
(Okay, maybe I want the gritty details to force some of the dudes for whom this was egregious enough to say “hey now” to see it in raw form.)
I ADORE Bill Hader. And by adore, I mean I find him deeply attractive in everything he does.
Yes, everything. Especially (not even, especially) Stefon.
I would so watch the Stefon Show.
Well, I would sit through the dreary rest of a Saturday Night Live episode if it meant a few minutes of Stefon.
I am also an adoring Bill Hader fan girl, even going so far to wiki his bio to see if he’s in a relationship (he is) so I could fuel my fantansies of accidently bumping into him while acting all LA casual* and charming the pants off him.
*Never been to LA, not charming, not model-esque, poor-ish, and usually covered in various types of animal hair. Sigh.
I already did, and now I am at swooning levels. Books. . .books. . .
It’s Monday. I slept no more than 2.5 hours last night. I am sad because of a guy. It is a rough start to the week.
Comforting GIFs or encouragement, anyone?
it’s not a gif but i have this bookmarked for moments like this
That was wonderful, just the ticket!
Here’s a gif for you! An adorable, determined little kiwi, sending you warm kiwi feels.
ETA: source
I understand CleverManka is not always around, or I am certain they’d be on this. I did manage to make note of their .gif photostream, so maybe… this will work? (am still learning, and not v. good)
In any event, sleepless nights because of other humans is dumb, and i am here for you.
http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0374/2389/files/…
I’m sending encouragement but I don’t know how to add gifs! I do know that you will be fine. No one is really awake today anyway.
You’ll get through this week!
A+++
This is one of my favorite GIFs of all time.
Do you want to see a cute kitty get its little nose tickled? https://twitter.com/CuteEmergency/status/70428835…
Yaaaay! You are here! I knew you’d do me one better ♥
I hope all is well in your life and that you in no way need the hug depicted above.
I’m sorry, Pygmalion. That stinks.
My GIF skills are failing me, but here are adorable monster hugs for you.
i do not know your feelings on barack and/or babies
but i revisit these in times of distress:
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-birthday-pho…
and i am sad about a girl from roughly seven months ago, so, i hear you.
I have great feelings about Barack and babies and that was the best!
I feel you. I am on short sleep. And sad because the project I am on is resulting in my being treated badly. WHY SO MEAN, MONDAY??
Wishing you kitteny naps very soon. This will pass. *hug*
Yesterday was my and my partner’s seventh anniversary, and because he knows me very well my present from him was a framed portait of Imperator Furiosa. We are also going out for a super fancy vegetarian meal tonight. (Unfortunately, I also have been hit by a bout of depression recently and spent a lot of Saturday night sobbing because Everything Is Terrible, but at least I can look at Furiosa to cheer myself up.)
Good vibes sent your way, bookwormV! I hope the bout passes peacefully, and soon. Happy 7th anniversary! (My boyfriend and I saw Fury Road four times in theatres, that’s a great gift idea I may have to steal…)
I haven’t been around recently because I’ve been busy with *side eye* things but here is an update on my life.
1) About 6 weeks after the miscarriage I FINALLY stopped bleeding and now everything is normal (I guess, lol anybody who thinks I’m going to a gyn anytime soon is trippin. I think I’ve had enough ob/gyn appts in the past 4 months to last me a couple years) I successfully kept the ENTIRE pregnancy/miscarriage/recovery disaster a secret from my parents, who I live with, who are a doctor and a nurse. Achievement Unlocked!
2) I GOT A JOB I GOT A JOB also it is my Dream Job and tomorrow I’ll be moving to a different state where I will start a postdoc at a National Lab. I’ve put off telling anyone about it because it seemed too good to be true, but it actually is true, I have a lease signed on a lovely apartment already and I am moving tomorrow. This is the “I’m not going to be living with my parents anymore” dance of happiness.
And finally, THANK YOU dear toasters for all of your kind words and advice about everything. I know I’ve said it before but you are all so lovely and I’m so happy to be a part of this community.
Congratulations on the lovely new job and new apartment, and best wishes with everything!
Congratulations! I’m so glad things are picking up for you, new jobs are so exciting!
Congratulations on the job, and I’m so happy you’re feeling better finally!
Oh gosh, I’m so happy for you! Best of luck with everything!
I’m so glad that positive things are happening for you! May your move go smoothly and your new job and apartment be all you hope for!
Go! Fight! WIN! (Edna Mode voice)
we luff you and are so happy for you!
Ahhh congratulations! So happy things are looking up for you!
Hooray! Glad you are moving out and getting a great new job!
Super big congrats on out of state dream job! May many more good things come to you.
I am cheering SO HARD!!!!!!!! Well done!!!!
Huzzah! Super pleased for you.
yay!
Congratulations on your new job!!
My choir did a all-Burt Bacharach concert on Saturday, and BURT WAS IN THE AUDIENCE!! We had no idea! Thank god we didn’t, we would have all died of terror. He loved the show and called us a great choir! We are all very stoked.
That is adorable and awesome. Congratulations!
Ahhhh, how fantastic is that?!?!
I had to share with you all that my adorable husband made the dad-est comment ever last night. I mentioned that there was a new season of Broad City we could watch, and he got excited, and said, with a happy little sigh, “such quirky characters.”
This is the most heartwarming thing I’ve read today.
CAN WE PLEASE DISCUSS THE FURY ROAD TECHNICAL SWEEP FROM LAST NIGHT’S OSCARS.
Also the awesomeness of Jenny Beavan’s outfit and how the men she walked by while receiving her award WOULDN’T CLAP FOR HER /rage
Didn’t some asshat tweet like ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if some people knew how to dress for the occasion’ about her and it’s like SHE’S A COSTUME DESIGNER, SHE KNOWS ABOUT CLOTHES DUDE. SHE’S JUST WON AN OSCAR FOR CLOTHES.
I was partaking in the oscars only via tweets from other people, and I had to unfollow an otherwise inoffensive account because of shit like that. First it was tweets about wtf Chris Rock then about the costume designer and then complaining that Star Wars didn’t win anything (uhm, did you see what it was up against, though?). I didn’t actively care about the Oscars, but damn was I not going to let that shit sully my feed.
HER LEATHER JACKET WAS FUCKING INCREDIBLE. IT HAD THE WAR BOY’S SYMBOL ON THE BACK. SHE DRESSED LIKE FURIOSA WOULD, AND THAT IS HOW YOU SHOULD LIVE YOUR LIFE.
*shrieks*
That is amazing! Go her.
At our household, we lost our collective shit over her jacket.
it had a BEDAZZLED war boy symbol on the back! It is my new everything.
I need this jacket in my life.
Same. I didn’t know I needed it until I just googled it, but now it’s all I want in the world.
Right? She dressed in a way that honored the film she was being honored for working on, which is pretty much the fucking definition of dressing for the occasion
She was also the same person that Stephen Fry referred to as “dressed like a bag lady” at the BAFTAs, and then he quit twitter in a huff over the pushback on it.
Here to discuss these things and also how George Miller was ROBBED. But it was magical that a film that subversive, feminist, and far out got so many nominations and wins.
My big takeaway was that everyone who works with George Miller LOVES him, which I think reflects really well on him as a director.
I’m (probably irrationally) SO ANGRY on her behalf. What the fuck, people?? Is it that hard to be gracious and clap for someone walking by you? I don’t even understand why? Ugh.
I am so pleased for Fury Road! (Although it should have been nominated for loads more – where is Theron’s Best Actress? But still they were all very well-deserved wins.)
I read an article about costuming Mad Max and it was so interesting. They had to make the costumes not only cool-looking but highly technical because they had to hide the harnesses that were holding the actors/stunt people on the vehicles, PLUS they had to endure having sand ground into them at high speeds every day.
Do you happen to remember where you saw it? I’d love to read that!
I don’t think this is the same one poppy read but it’s pretty great:
“in the absence of livestock, the film’s characters would have to make their leather goods from the flesh of their fellow post-apocalyptic survivors. To convey that effect, they shaped items like the masks worn by raiders from wet goat leather, since it resembles tanned human flesh.” http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/02/23/ma…
Oh my god that’s so delightfully fucked up. I hadn’t even considered the question of where they sourced their leather.
OMG that is quite the detail. Thanks!
This is the article I read. It actually covers several films. The part about The Danish Girl is really interesting as well.
http://fashionista.com/2016/02/costume-designers-…
Seconding request for a link!
It won so many awards I didn’t even care when it lost one to Ex Machina, because Ex Machina deserved some sort of recognition for being fucking awesome.
Also, I really need to see Bear Story, because if it’s better than World of Tomorrow I’ll eat my shoe.
Spoiler alert: it’s not better than World of Tomorrow. It is, however, a beautiful piece of animation with some really impressive techniques that tells a story of dictatorship through a bear and his family. And it’s won a bunch of awards already.
But World of Tomorrow is the best thing I’ve seen in a very, very long time.
PSA: World of Tomorrow is on netflix. everyone watch it. it is indeed the best.
Good to know! I’ll keep my eye out for it. I just really adored WOT and almost everything Herzfeldt-directed.
I saw Bear Story and it was maybe my fourth favorite of the five nominees? It was very visually impressive but I couldn’t follow what was happening. I might follow it better now that I understand that it’s a Chilean political allegory, but as a first-time viewer who came in cold it lost me.
At first, I thought by Bear Story you were referring to The Revenant.
Yes! I was so psyched for Ex Machina.
Bear Story was nice, but it wouldn’t have been my pick for the Oscar. Same goes for World of Tomorrow actually, but I know I’m in the minority there. I think I need to rewatch it and see if my opinion changes.
(fwiw, my favorite was We Can’t Live Without Cosmos.)
I want to enjoy the fact that the Republican party institutionally hates Trump as much as any sane person does, but the fact that they despise him and haven’t figured out a way to get rid of him is…disheartening. It seems like they were just hoping he would magically disappear and now that he hasn’t their strategy is basically “oh shit guys, whatever shall we do?” combined with total inaction. If Mitt Romney hadn’t pulled his head out of his ass and called attention to Trump’s taxes they would basically have NOTHING. Cruz and Rubio are totally useless.
I think they were hoping the voters would just…reject him themselves? But like, dudes, what did you expect them to do after the temper tantrum you’ve been throwing the past 8 years. You made this fuckin bed.
Yeah, it seems like they were waiting for actual primary voting to do anything, but a) the polls should have indicated that this was a bad idea in advance and b) that ship has sailed and they are still floundering around hoping somebody will reveal the man behind the curtain for them. (how’s that for mixing metaphors). And really, Trump’s past interviews show that he doesn’t give a shit about either party and has switched sides multiple times over the years. They really shouldn’t be wondering why he picked their party to launch his absurd racist platform, as you said.
Did you read Matt Taibbi’s piece in RS about this last week? It’s the first and only thing I’ve read that made me feel like I understand what is actually happening this year. Also, he calls Rubio a “walking haircut.” Delightful.
Taibbi is a national treasure.
Heh, the voters are all “WE LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOOOUUUUU!!”
Yeah, the biggest problem Republicans have with distancing themselves from Trump is that doing so would also distance themselves from everything they’ve been advocating for and saying in (slightly) more coded terms since, like, 1968. He’s the endgame of the Southern Strategy.
It’s like when John Boehner spent the entire government shutdown barely concealing his panic. Like dude, you grabbed that tiger by the tail, what did you think would happen?
I was under the impression that the fear is that if they take down Trump, Cruz will rise in his place, and Cruz is even more reviled.
Which really shouldn’t be possible, and yet it is. It’s as if they’ve made some secret complementarian pact to jointly cover all possible ways of being The Worst.
“oh shit guys, whatever shall we do?”
America’s ruling class in one sentence.
Yeah, their smoke-filled room is broken.
One of the pundits pointed out that Rubio and Cruz can’t even really attack him at this point, because the point of attacks would be for him to make a misstep and say something crazy that changes people’s perception of him, but he’s already said every crazy thing possible and gotten away with it.
Now it falls upon the Democrats, and possibly the GOP itself, to take down Trump.
Really can’t believe we have arrived at a day where I miss Mitt Romney.
I FEEL THAT. When I read that article and realized he was basically the only one attempting to go after Trump I felt a brief surge of pride that he was once my governor.
I forget who’s idea it was (not mine, originally), but I’m compelled by the idea that this all came about because of Republican refusal to accept the collective action problem. The collective action problem of course being a primary justification for government action, so if you want small government you have to ignore that problem. And so you get a party with varying components who could and should subordinate their particular goals to a coordinated attack under centralized authority, but finds the concept ideologically impossible.
And it’s not all that long since they managed to do that. That’s a big part of how Kerry lost the 2004 election; the Republicans were just more organized and disciplined than the Democrats, who were trying too hard to be All Things to All People. But then the Tea Party gained traction around 2008 (why, what a crazy coincidence), and now they’re reaping the whirlwind.
HEY TEA LOVERS
It’s LEAP DAY which means Adagio has Brigadoon Breakfast tea available again! It’s only available on Leap Day, because Brigadoon.
http://www.adagio.com/ http://www.adagio.com/black/brigadoon.html
Celebrate Leap Day with this Scottish Breakfast Blend of Assam and Keemun teas. We’ve added a touch of Silver Needle and blue cornflowers to evoke the blue and white of the Scottish flag that Brigadoon would fly.
$10 for a 3oz pouch of loose-leaf tea
Oooh, thanks for the heads up!
I just got that email and bought a pouch of it. I haven’t tried it before, I hope it’s tasty! (I may have also purchased an entire pound of Irish breakfast…)
I didn’t see the email until half an hour ago! I’ve been looking forward to it for 42 months, so it took me a little bit, but then I saw Leap Day mentioned all over the place and was like “Oh yeah! Brigadoon Breakfast day!!!” 😀
I thought it was a pretty decent breakfast blend, though a little earthy for my taste (that’s the Assam, I think). Even if you don’t like the flavor, it’s beautiful in a clear jar on the shelf and smells lovely.
I may have to try this.
And they’re the same place that Ann Leckie does Imperial Radch themed teas through, so I know what I’ll be filling up my order with.
It’s pretty good! Last time, when it turned out that I didn’t like it at all, I tweeted my sadness and they offered to give me a full refund. I ended up not taking it, and as my palate developed, I discovered that I do like it, though it’s a bit earthy for me (the Assam, I think). And, anyway, it’s really beautiful in a glass container because of the Silver Needle and cornflower bits.
Adagio used to do all kinds of seasonal or holiday promotions/specials, but they seem to have backed off on some of them and are promoting the fandom links more heavily. I wish there were an easier way to search the blends by ingredients, though. I’d hate to reinvent the wheel, and I’m dying for an Adagio version of Teavana’s Joy 2015 tea (because I get free cup points on Adagio, and giant bags of the stuff).
Wow that’s awesome she made blends there, I’ll have to try them on my next order along with this Final Fantasy bomb tea which loosk good: https://www.adagio.com/signature_blend/blend.html…
I had this on my calendar so I could order some today! I also got Chocobo themed tea.
I’ll be honest: I don’t watch election coverage because it stresses me out too much. I read results and post-mortems, predictions and analysis, but the TV stuff, it’s just healthier if I don’t partake. My ignorance of the situation at MSNBC thus admitted, that letter from Harris-Perry was heartbreaking.
You are not alone. I find politics to be infuriating, and I do not enjoy the feeling of fury.
But I still vote!
I too have a Thing for Bill Hader and I don’t really understand it but I awoke one morning from a sex dream about him and that was that.
Congratulations to Leonardo DiCaprio for ruining a fun meme.
It’s for the best, really. If he hadn’t gotten the Oscar this time, his next role would probably have been So Gritty And Authentic that he’d get his torso amputated for it or something.
We’ll probably get punished for it, somehow. He may end up pulling a Meryl Streep* and get nominated for whatever film he’s in that year, even though he didn’t do a good job in it/it wasn’t a good film.
* of course, she didn’t get her Annual Nomination this year, but still.
Can we talk about the amazing platform given to rape prevention last night? Joe Biden and#itsonus! Lady Gaga! Survivors bravely representing! Brie Larson winning! Spotlight winning twice! Okay maybe it won’t solve rape culture or Hollywood sexism, but I was impressed by the time and substance devoted to the issue.
Has Gaga ever apologized or released any sort of substantial statement expressing regret for continuing to work with R Kelly and Terry Richardson well after their behaviors were made public? If she has, I’d love a link to it. If not, she can STFU about supporting assault survivors.
While the number of people still working with/defending certain individuals (ie Woody Allen, Chris Brown, R Kelly, etc) is something that I very much think deserves scrutiny and (sometimes) criticism, I’m not sure that it’s helpful to declare that until a survivor has a perfect record on a topic, their contributions are unwelcome.
I know that it’s hard to be a successful woman in showbiz, and it’s hard to navigate the world of supporting survivors, and it’s hard being a survivor of assault. I even know some of that from experience. I don’t think it’s easy doing it all at the same time.
this is NOT to say that she necessarily deserves your attention or respect for what she has managed, just that I think the way forward is to encourage Gaga to do better rather than to encourage her to not even try if she’s not perfect.
(ie- Amanda Palmer said things defending Ghomeshi very very early on, and I’m not sure she’s ever really walked all of that back, and that’s something I’m frankly uncomfortable with. But I also think Palmer has displayed the ability to learn.)
I’m not asking for a perfect record. Nobody has one of those. I’m asking her to publicly apologize for a public action. Asking her for a simple “Yeah, that was a mistake, my bad” before applauding her isn’t too much, in my opinion.
Opinions are allowed to vary, though, even on The Toast!
(i have submitted a response to myself in which i thoroughly disagree with myself, and then disagree with myself for disagreeing with myself. i’m thinking you’ll likely agree with at least some of my concerns with my positions.)
(and, to be clear, i’m not playing devil’s advocate against myself. I feel very strongly about each of these opinions even when they are opposed to each other.)
Some additional thoughts (mostly ones in which I call myself out. And then further disagree with myself disagreeing with myself. Yes, apparently it’s one of those days.)
————–
In my above comment, I used the word “helpful”. I did so despite having some complicated feelings about “helpfulness”. Not everything we do is helpful, it is not necessary that everything we do is helpful. The implicit expectation that we all only do helpful things is one I dislike, perhaps even despise.
Being upset about rape culture is appropriate. Even if it wasn’t, feelings don’t need to be appropriate in order to be important. Not wanting to hear from a celebrity on an issue, when that celebrity had said/done some things that indicate that that particular celebrity may not be exactly trustworthy on the issue is a completely defensible position. And, to be clear, not just “I don’t want to hear from this person” —– but even the broader “this person has some work to do before we recognize this person as an ally in this space”.
We can expect people to meet a certain standard without expecting them to be perfect, and suggesting that people have to meet certain criteria before we give them our time/ energy/ respect/ etc makes sense. Saying that Gaga needs to think critically about her place in rape culture, and make apologies where appropriate is not out of line, and is not some sort of extremely high bar to clear.
————
But Coset, doesn’t the fact that she herself is a survivor, and based on her comments, still working through a lot of the emotional fallout from that, count for anything?
————-
Why yes, yes it does. I do have a lot of compassion for her because of that, and I imagine others do too. But her actions in the world still have consequences, and I have compassion for all of the people who live in the world, and are affected by the ways in which Gaga (and everyone else, including myself) have contributed to rape culture. Gaga herself is hurt by Gaga’s actions that perpetuate rape culture.
————
So, I guess you feel pretty conflicted about this one?
—-
Yeah, that seems like a pretty fair statement.
Babe, I hear ya. I’ve been conflicted about Gaga since November 6, 2013.
I know she’s spoken up about being a survivor herself, but I’m not sure if she’s apologized for working with them.
The Toast needs an algorithm that will sense when certain kinds of men are reading the site and open a pop up warning window for them that says: THIS IS IRONIC
Oh HELL no! Then the mods will have to read a million comments mansplaining what irony is, and how we’re doing it wrong!
But once we have the algorithm fine-tuned, we can just hide the comments box at the same time as we display the pop-up.
I couldn’t believe what Steph did at the end of the OKC game. He is truly remarkable.
Posting this in a reply cause not sure how big it will be, but this is just absurd.
Steph Curry is making me (and many many other people, I’m sure) care about basketball for the first time. He’s just such a remarkably beautiful player. A couple of my friends and I were at a bar (in the bay area) during that OKC game and at the end a) everyone in the bar lost their mind and b) even the people who knew very, very little about basketball were like “that can’t be real. that’s not what humans playing sports do. what is physics”
tldr I love Steph Curry.
I was with my very non sporting BF trying to explain the magic of Stephen Curry but he didn’t get it. But my biggest reasons:
1. He is a 3 point monster
2. He is adorable
3. His family is adorable.
Yeah, my brain STILL 20 years after its release reads “OKC” as OK Computer (ie the Radiohead album) and that would have been a better game in my opinion.
The interview with Bill Hader is great, but the interviewer is Kathleen Hale, who stalked a reader who gave her book a bad review and then wrote about it like it was not a completely inappropriate and terrible thing to do:
wa <a href=”http://shttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/am-i-being-catfished-an-author-confronts-her-number-one-online-critic” target=”_blank”>shttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/am-i-being-catfished-an-author-confronts-her-number-one-online-critic
I THOUGHT her name sounded familiar. Thank you for this!
Yikes, I’m glad you pointed that out.
i thought i was really busy today and wouldn’t have a ton of time to read link roundup goodies
turns out i am definitely willing to devote an hour to being horrified at this story and also go down a GR-politics-rabbit hole in exchange for staying a little late at the office
#yolo
I didn’t realize until I looked up her books and recognized the cover, but yeah. Cringe.
Did we talk about this last week? http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-ame… I’m pretty ambivalent to Taibbi in general, but this one in particular I found insightful. He gives Trump credit for what he’s doing, with the best I’ve read so far insight into why and how he’s winning, without being a Trump apologist. Also his certain sense of humor does provide certain gems:
“Cruz in person is almost physically repellent. Psychology Today even ran an article by a neurology professor named Dr. Richard Cytowic about the peculiarly off-putting qualities of Cruz’s face. He used a German term, backpfeifengesicht, literally ‘a face in need of a good punch,’ to describe Cruz. This may be overstating things a little. Cruz certainly has an odd face – it looks like someone sewed pieces of a waterlogged Reagan mask together at gunpoint – but it’s his tone more than anything that gets you.”
This is a little older too, but I can’t stop thinking about it. When we look at any Democrat’s record (epitomized in both Clintons, but includes Sanders, Biden, et al) from the 90s, we find something much more conservative than our national center of gravity today, because WE (not we Toasties, but we Americans as a whole) were more conservative in the 90s. So the candidates shifting left is as natural as the nation shifting left, largely thanks to effective activism. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/…
Does that article explain what’s going on with Trump’s face? I mean, I think he has a case of backpfeifengesicht too, especially when he squeezes his eyes shut while someone else is talking to him.
(No, actually I think his face is just a face, it is the arrogance animating it that makes me want to punch him.)
NO ONE knows what is going on with Trump’s face. No one.
http://metro.co.uk/2016/02/27/replace-donald-trum…
I think the problem is that Ted Cruz’ face is annoying, but it would be tolerable if it weren’t for his personality.
Despite being officially anti-face punching as a rule, I am so pleased this word is now part of my life.
I had not come across that article before (the Taibbi one) so I just read it and I’m…really depressed now.
It’s a technically great piece! Very entertaining as a piece of writing as well as insightful! But the underlying joke seems to be, “This fascist is pointing out real problems in our system and suggesting the solution to them is fascism! And a ton of people are going ‘I like this fascist and he’s saying some true stuff! I’ll vote for him!’ and so fascism is probably going to win.” Which is just about the bleakest punchline I can imagine.
I feel like with the election stuff going on, and Talia’s article on Yelp wages, I’ve been hearing a lot more grousing from baby boomer + age individuals about how young people today are entitled, along the lines of “when I had my first job I felt lucky to make $5 an hour!”. So I just thought I’d share that I have installed a link to an inflation calculator on my phone, and when people in my presence do this now I ask them when they held their first job and calculate the equivalent today. And it’s always way more than whatever they are complaining that young people want! I just thought I would share this fun party trick! I’m very popular on the dinner party circuit.
Srsly though, I feel like that whole thing is just a distraction from the wage and income repression that is hitting everybody, and it is making me very sad lately.
That is a brilliant strategy. What sort of reactions have you received?
And depending on where you live, there’s also the matter of what kind of pension boomers can expect, versus the pittance millenials will be offered. Why can’t we just resent the entitlement of EACH generation’s rich assholes?
Ugh. My first job paid me $5.50 an hour, in 2004-5. It was a small business that was exempt. How do you think that compares to the $5 you used to make in 1980? It was fine when I was in high school, but we aren’t talking about “first jobs” here.
And so much of this resentment seems like it can be summed up with ‘I resent kids these days for their insufferable texting so obviously they don’t deserve job security or a living wage.’
This is a great trick.
Also, my boomer father, like many of his contemporaries, was able to pay his own way through college by working a part-time entry level job and was able to buy a house immediately afterwards. (He was became a veteran which helped, but the majority was paid for by him.) Number of dollars is nothing–it’s the buying power.
SAY IT AGAIN FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK.
Yes. Maybe I only know really nice Millennials, but none of the ones I know seem all that entitled! And if wanting enough to eat and the ability to see a doctor when you’re sick is entitled, then that’s flummery, Archie!
(The other thing is that I’ve made so many bad choices myself, while having access to a bunch of privileges other people did not, and I am in no position to judge, none whatsoever.)
ETA: Old Economy Steven http://www.quickmeme.com/Old-Economy-Steven/
Ouch, the one at the bottom (at the time I got the page) that’s just “RETIRES”.
The Gen Xers who say this stuff make me even angrier than the Boomers. Gen X, don’t you remember how horrible it was when we were all graduating HS and college? The millennials have it even worse than that! C’mon, have some damn empathy. And maybe vote for a better safety net.
I mean, I’m on the young edge of Gen X and it’s STILL BAD for a lot of us. That’s 20 years’ worth of unused liberal arts degrees continuing to accrue interest.
Or also the bootstrapping millennial martyrs, how they suffered, so they’re convinced that everyone else has to suffer to make their own worthwhile. http://www.moneyaftergraduation.com/2016/02/25/th…
I have exactly the same first job that my father did. I make exactly the same amount of money that he did. 30 years ago.
I am SO EXCITED to discuss Steph Curry on The Toast. Did y’all catch that article where the Warriors were devastated that their higher ups made them stop eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then they magically reappeared in the locker room one day because no one wanted to tell Steph he couldn’t have them? AMAZING
AMAZING. I am always here for weird athlete habit stories. I adore Steph Curry but hockey is my first love, and my other fav SC athlete, Sidney Crosby, is the #1 player on the Pittsburgh Penguins and certainly one of the best in the league and always eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before the game. I’m 100% sure this would play out in the same way if someone tried to take the peanut butter and jelly away from the Penguins.
I love that kid with so much love. Ever since that year when he was a sophomore at Davidson and they eventually lost to Kansas (whom I swore to hate thenceforth) I have loved him, for what I now realize is the same reason I love Kimmy Schmidt: he just radiates happiness.
I like Jennifer Garner, but one line bugged me:
“Alias was the first time since Wonder Woman in the 1970s that audiences saw a sexy, badass female action hero.”
My immediate reaction was “what about Buffy?!”
Or Xena!
And Xena!
Maybe it makes sense if you restrict it to major networks? Not sure.
Yes!!!! I was just about to write the exact same comment!
An “action hero”, not a *genre* heroine, eew. /s (p.s. Wonder Woman was genre, so yes, Xena and Buffy are her inheritors, more than whats-her-characters-name on Alias.)
Ripley?
Ha! This makes me smile — I was MAJOR into Alias growing up, and my husband was MAJOR into Buffy, and we occasionally make each other watch episodes of each other’s show, and then have long discussions about how similar they are, despite their clearly different concepts.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks about serial killers a lot, thanks Bill Hader. (My favorite Bill Hader bit is when he does Keith Morrison and now I’m really seeing a connection here)
There is no way that sock isn’t part of Jaya’s plan.
Re: the newspaper headlines, one is the SL Trib and one is *Deseret News* soooooo
(For those who don’t know, the Deseret News is basically run by the Mormons & the Salt Lake Tribune is much more like a normal largish local newspaper, i.e., liberal)
Basically what I’m saying is yes this is garbage, but given the context not very surprising
– Mitch McConnell may believe that he can build a firewall of sorts between Trump and his GOP colleagues’ re-election campaigns, but he’s also advising them to not let Obama name a Supreme Court justice, so he could still lose the Senate. Here’s hoping. And I’m not at all surprised to seen Paul LePage support Trump.
– Re: Bill Hader’s comment about Dahmer, I can’t remember who said this–Stephen King, maybe?–but someone made the comment that, contrary to just about every serial killer in the movies (except probably for the one in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), most serial killers IRL are not these superhuman geniuses that hatch and flawlessly carry out elaborate plans. In fact, IIRC, they tend to be below-average in intelligence; they tend to be able to kill as many people as they do because most people aren’t expecting to be attacked by random strangers, and they get away with it for as long as they do because most murders aren’t solved. Even Hannibal Lecter got caught (at least in the book; no spoilers for the show, please, I’ve only seen the first episode) because he got a little too cute with one of his “tableaux”, and the BTK killer got caught because he sent a Microsoft Word file to the police on a floppy disk and they got his name off the metadata. Dahmer was an alcoholic*, and the account of his arrest makes me wonder if his last intended victim got away in no small part because Dahmer was passing-out drunk.
*There’s a very disturbing and sad graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer by the cartoonist Derf, that describes Derf’s impressions of Dahmer from high school; Dahmer used to chug a six-pack before school every morning.
And I’m not at all surprised to seen Paul LePage support Trump.
Least surprising thing ever.
I’m still chiming in on serial killers, someone should probably stop me — but yes! I think I read a line in one of Ann Rule’s books — she who worked with Bundy and then was involved in the Green River Killer search — about how most serial killers just really study normalcy and know how to pass themselves off with Normal Human Behavior, miming and replicating what they see others do to hide their own differentness.
No, nobody stop you. I need someone around to make me feel weird for googling “heterosexual cannibal serial killers” on my break earlier.
I am also curious, but I’m afraid some kind of “red alert” klaxons will start blaring if I Google this at the office.
Which would explain why they so often fail, because most people don’t have a standard set of behaviors for “how do I cover up the fact that I sometimes bring people to my house and murder them?”
Death Investigation in America is a fantastic history of forensic medicine and investigations in the United States. When he was the Chief ME for Milwaukee, Jentzen handled all the evidence from the Dahmer case; his book integrates examples from various Kennedys. I haven’t read the entire thing but I’ve heard him speak multiple times and… yeah. He’s fascinating.
(ETA: His stuff is usually a good read even if you are not morbid like me.)
I’m not the first person to make this point (I believe Jimmy Carter made it quite well at the 2004 DNC), but damn, ’80s liberals, when Ronald Reagan hijacked the concept of morality, why the fuck did you let him? Where was the outspoken Christian Left back when that could have headed off all sorts of annoying problems? 1980s, I’m so mad at you.
I didn’t have a chance to post this on the Open Thread on Friday so apologies for doing it here: a friend (and hero!) of mine is going to the Greek island of Lesvos on Friday to spend her spring break working with an organization helping the masses of refugees landing there from the Middle East. She taught briefly in Damascus just before things went to hell in a handbasket and she wants to do what she can to help. She’s covering all her own expenses, but she’s also doing a crowd funder to raise money to help the refugees–aside from the processing fee, everything goes directly to them. If you can pitch in a few bucks, it will be well worth it! Here’s the link: https://www.youcaring.com/refugees-arriving-by-bo…
I’m not dealing well with other people’s issues today. Can’t they all leave me alone for another 1.25 hours?
So I’m late to the thread but did anyone read the Nancy Jo Sales “American Girls: Social media…” excerpt in Vanity Fair? I read it twice because the girl read as really contrived to me. I work with teenagers and she just seemed too perfect, especially how she knew about everything teens so but did not do any of it herself. It’s been making me crazy thinking about it but maybe I am crazy.
OT but the shoutout to the Western Art History posts made me super happy this morning. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-guy-walks-in…
That’s amazing.
Louise Rennison has died. I’m surprised by how much it hit me. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-3569…
Oh my god no! Her books are the only one who made me laugh until I cried. It’s so sad.
I just finished listening to Rhiannon Giddens’ album “Tomorrow is My Turn” and it is so thoroughly beautiful. Like every song is good to great. It’s free to stream on Amazon prime but I think I’m going to buy it so I can hug the media that contains the mp3 to my chest while I sleep. (Also because I want Rhiannon Giddens to make bank, but it would be dishonest of me to deny that I have the strong desire to cuddle her songs in electronic form.)
I love her! Such a gorgeous voice – and she seems like such a badass…
My dad changed his mind on LGB (working on the T) years ago, which has been wonderful to see. Just a complete 180. He credits me (yay!) and also a gay coworker who was willing to answer his questions (I would like to find that person and thank them personally sometimes).
Again, thank you all for the really kind words. It's overwhelming to have strangers on the Internet care so much but it really helps, you guys are the best. Just a quick clarification – I'm pretty sure I don't have depression. I don't feel like I fit the symptoms, and the psychologist at the hospital agreed. She said she thought the problem was that I've 'developed inappropriate coping systems after traumatic experiences'. But a lot of it is the same struggle, so all the advice and support given here definitely helps. I'll be thinking about all of you who are struggling with depression and other mental illnesses and hard times. I think you're so brave to live your life while carrying that burden, and I hope you get lots of love and support from yourselves and from people around you and make it through OK.
I looked up Rhiannon Giddens on Spotify and I saw she'd covered Nina Simone and had Hurray for the Riff Raff listed in 'Related artists', so I knew she was a good recommendation. Her voice gives me shivers.
Also, I don't care if saying this embarrasses her, Nicole Cliffe for real got my e-mail address via Intense Debate magic and sent me a line letting me know she was thinking of me. The Toast really is the best place in the world.