Hi team! I have missed you! Canada was wonderful and perfect (though also very humid, which I forget, because it is very dry where I am and you can toss a pair of wet jeans over a bannister and they’ll be ready to wear by morning.) Beyoncé was incredible. She was so gorgeous and brilliant and she was still BELTING IT OUT by the three hour mark while dancing in huge boots on a stage covered in water, while I took little breaks to rest my feet. She was also so filled with love for the fans, you could tell how much energy she got from the crowd, and we loved her, and it was good.
(I mostly ignored media while in Canada, so if any of these links got handled last week, consider them extra-special.)
Vox finished their EXHAUSTIVE internal review of how the terrible Holtzclaw piece happened, and I am linking to Slate’s coverage instead of SB Nation bc I can’t figure out how to quote from the pdf, sorry (you totally have to read the whole thing, it’s fascinating and infuriating):
In addition to flagging specific chain-of-command problems, the report criticizes SB Nation for its lack of diversity—according to the report, SB Nation’s editorial staff is 89 percent male and 87 percent white. The report avoids making the facile argument that got passed around in the days following the story’s publication: If newsrooms were more diverse, stories like this wouldn’t get published. This isn’t a simple case of oblivious white men with blind spots around race and gender pushing through an offensive story without realizing it was offensive. Indeed, many editors did realize it was offensive, and Bergeron, a black woman, voiced her concerns—she just wasn’t empowered to shut down the story. An increase in newsroom diversity wouldn’t have saved SB Nation from publishing “Who Was Daniel Holtzclaw?” unless more people had the authority to stop the digital presses.
The report indicates that SB Nation relied on a pair of women—Bergeron and senior content producer Sarah Kogod—to read stories on sensitive topics, and to flag any potentially offensive content. “That it is left to the newsroom’s two senior-most women, one of whom is of color, to be the people asked to identify issue-related editorial missteps in stories about sexual assault or race or LGBTQ issues is inexplicable and unacceptable,” reads the report. “They should not be seen as the gatekeepers of sensitivity.”
Vox Media’s report on SB Nation insists, powerfully, that it’s not OK for white men to shunt this category of work onto women and minorities. “It’s flatly unacceptable for any editor to assume that it’s not his or her job to care to the fullest extent about matters of ethics, integrity, and accuracy, which is essentially what caring about the construction and phrasing of sensitive stories boils down to,” write the report’s authors.
At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, Medecins San Frontieres and the U.N. Refugee agency said on Sunday.
About 14,000 have been rescued since Monday amid calm seas, and there have been at least three confirmed instances of boats sinking. But the number of dead can only be estimated based on survivor testimony, which is still being collected.
“We will never know exact numbers,” Medecins San Frontieres said in a Tweet after estimating that 900 had died during the week. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said more than 700 had drowned.
Virginia authorities handcuffed a middle school student and charged him with larceny for “stealing” a milk carton from the school cafeteria earlier this year. The child has also been suspended from school.
In Prince William County, Virginia, the boy’s mother Shamise Turk says police handcuffed and charged her son Ryan with stealing a carton of milk from the school cafeteria.
The school normally charges students 65 cents per carton for milk. Ms. Turk says Ryan is allowed to drink it for free, because he is registered on the school’s lunch program.
Ms. Turk says one day Ryan went back to the lunch line to get his milk, and a Prince William County police officer approached him and accused him of stealing it.
Like most athletes, Biles is not illuminating on the subject of her own gifts. “I kind of blow my own mind,” she has said. “I wish I could crawl out of my skin and see it happen from a different perspective.” During her tumbling runs, Biles says, the only thing she sees is the colors of the ceiling and the floor, whizzing past in revolving blurs. (If you want to make yourself dizzy, look up “GoPro gymnastics” on YouTube.) When she vaults, she sees nothing at all. Some élite gymnasts count to themselves while flying through the air, to keep track of where they are, but Boorman says that Biles has no need for such calculation. She never gets lost.
Seeing Biles next to her competition at Pacific Rims, I felt as if Isaac Newton had written a different set of laws on her behalf. She flew higher, spun faster, and landed more firmly than anyone else. As I watched a group of gymnasts from New Zealand, whose every action looked pained, I was reminded of the physical awkwardness of being a teen-ager, but Biles moved from apparatus to apparatus like a shark in open water. In Everett, several people compared Biles to Michael Jordan, for her ability to escape gravity; and to Michael Phelps, for the perfect match of her body to her sport; and to Serena Williams, for her total dominance. I thought of Stephen Curry, who has made a habit of performing impossibly difficult athletic feats with no apparent effort.
Many gymnasts point out that Biles is at least as singular on the sidelines, where she is often seen joking with her teammates moments before stepping onto an apparatus. “When you look back at a lot of my Olympic teams, the majority of us were either crying or super intense,” Dominique Dawes, who competed on three Olympic teams, told me. After I spent time with Biles—I’ve rarely seen such excitement as when she hopped around her living room after her mother gave her permission to attend a G-Eazy concert—it became clear that her intense focus on the beam was more forced than the giggling. “She doesn’t particularly like to think about what she’s doing,” Boorman said.
Jeanie is not the only person in this movie intent on bringing Ferris down; Mr. Rooney is on his own mission, too. But the humor in their respective narratives works on completely different levels. Mr. Rooney is a buffoon, an arrogant Keystone Cop of an authority figure who screws up over and over again. What’s funny about Jeanie’s scenes is her exasperation with the morons around her who have been completely snowed by Ferris’s long cons. Unlike Rooney, she’s no idiot. In fact, she and Ferris are probably the two smartest people in the movie.
The degree of injustice that Jeanie faces becomes most apparent when Jeanie calls the police to report that there’s an intruder (Mr. Rooney, although that doesn’t seem to register with her initially) in her home. After the cops inquire about Ferris’ well-being even though Jeanie is in the middle of an emergency distress call, she screams into the phone: “I am very cute, I am very alone, and I am very protective of my body. I do not want it violated or killed!” Again, Hughes may have been aiming for comedy here, but it’s a moment that also pretty starkly highlights the way that society often dismisses and discounts women. The victim-blaming is taken to new levels when Jeanie is the one who winds up at the police station, accused of filing a false report.
On Alanis Morissette’s Instagram:
I have never purchased (or tried to whip up by hand) an oil that Morissette recommends on her Instagram, but still, I find them deeply comforting. Staring into Morissette’s Instagram is like gazing out over the ocean or watching a prism cast rainbows on a wall: It is meditative, ruminant and a little numbing. The feed is a colorful font of Pinterest-ready, woo-woo, feel-good imagery: crystals organized in neat concentric circles, turquoise beads in ceramic bowls, a macro plate from Cafe Gratitude, spirituality books laid out on batik tapestry, wildflowers. The flow of images never feels too rushed or too planned — she will post three times in a single day, and then take a break for five weeks. There’s the sense that Morissette is currently doing exactly what feels right for her, and she transmits that intention into a kind of general social-media zen.
But of course, Elizabeth is more consumed by the show than most. She has memorized every word of the musical, read every word she can about Alexander Hamilton, and, naturally, she has asked us to start calling her “Eliza” after Hamilton’s wife Eliza Schuyler. She wears one of her three Hamilton T-shirts every single day that she’s allowed, and she regularly says things like “Thomas Jefferson was the worst,” though it has nothing at all to do with what we were talking about, and she will actually tear up a little thinking about poor John Laurens.
this was really interesting:
But Katz’s casting is by far the show’s boldest stroke. In a culture obsessed with picking apart the faux redemption arcs ginned up by Oprah specials and People magazine spreads, she built what turned out to be an ingenious business model: merging audiences’ appetite for ritual celebrity self-abasement with the PR interests of the celebrities themselves. “Dancing With the Stars allows celebrities to say, I understand I’ve been knocked off my perch,” said Tucker Carlson, who competed on Season 3. But, he added, “If you’re Paula Deen, you don’t have to answer questions about your racial views on this show. They are able to ensure that you may look slightly silly, but you’ll never really humiliate yourself. It’s a nerf environment.”
In Dancing With the Stars’ decade-plus on the air, Katz has converted a run-of-the-mill reality TV spectacle into something bigger: our culture’s foremost celebrity image rehabilitation machine, the easiest way for stars to rise from the ashes when they have something they want the public to forget. “I’m redefining myself right now,” Maples told me. “And this was my coming-out.”
<3 u Gord (I am returning to Canada for the final Tragically Hip show on August 20th, having bought tickets yesterday when the fan presale went live IT WAS A SHITSHOW, and am prepared to have all the feelings in the world, surrounded by other people having a lot of feelings. I will also eat poutine before the show with anyone who wants to join me):
Today in (Feminist) History! [Archive]
(Y’all, I am so not a scientist so I hope my summarizing of some of this makes sense.)
On this day in 1912 was the birth of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-American experimental physicist who was well known in the field of nuclear physics. Born and educated in China, she eventually studied at the National Central University in China, where she studied mathematics before switching to physics. In a time of strife between China and Japan, Chien-Shiung was elected as a student leader by her peers, who believed that her status as a top student meant that the authorities might overlook any involvement in political protests. She worked hard at her studies, but still lead protests, including a sit-in at the Presidential Palace in Nanjing.
After graduating, she did two years of graduate study at Zhejiang University, before taking the advice of a Professor and journeying to the U.S., where she was accepted at the University of Michigan. After arriving in California and visiting the University of California, Berkeley, however, Chien-Shiung changed her mind about which school she wished to attend; this was a decision aided by her discovery that the University of Michigan did not let their female students use the front door. (It was also at Berkeley that she met Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, a physicist who was the grandson of Yuan Shikai– the first President of the Republic of China, who was also self-proclaimed Emperor of China– who would later become her husband.)
During World War 2, Chien-Shiung joined the Manhattan Project, working in their Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Lab at Columbia University. Here, she helped “develop the process for separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion”. She is perhaps best known for conducting the “Wu Experiment”, which was designed to decide whether or not conservation of parity, previously established in electromagnetic and strong interactions, also applied to “weak interactions”. Essentially, she showed that “weak force violates the law of parity”, by determining that electrons (which are produced by a weak force interaction, beta decay) always flew in the same direction, rather than be affected by a magnetic field. (If this is confusing, you can read more here.) Suffice it to say that it was Chien-Shiung who developed this experiment, and she who performed it with the help of lab workers– but the Nobel Price for this discovery went instead to Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, her (male) colleagues who provided the theoretical knowledge, but nonetheless needed Chien-Shiung to design and perform the experiment.
Chien-Shiung did later win the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics, however, 13 years later for the same experiment, and in her time she was known as “the First Lady of Physics”, the “Queen of Nuclear Research”, and “the Chinese Madam Curie”. In her later life, she became a lot more outspoken, especially about gender equality. She corrected any men who tried to refer to her by her married name, rather than as Professor Wu, worked to eventually have her pay adjusted to be equal to that of her male colleagues at Columbia University, and also spoke out about Chinese politics, including the crackdown in China following the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
“I wonder”, she said once, during a speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium in 1964, “whether the tiny atoms and nuclei, or the mathematical symbols, or the DNA molecules have any preference for either masculine or feminine treatment.”
This is so great, thank you!
What an amazing woman, thank you!
Thank you! THE QUEEN OF NUCLEAR RESEARCH sounds so badass.
Thank you for always taking the time to share these with us!
Everything about that picture of your son is delightful. The bright pink hat! The sensible shoes! The dog! And he looks so happy.
The story about the middle schooler charged with theft is terrible. Why were police even present?
she regularly says things like “Thomas Jefferson was the worst,” though it has nothing at all to do with what we were talking about
Sounds reasonable.
(Off-topic: I have successfully booked a haircut, my first in more than three years! This is a super minor thing, obviously, but it feels like a big achievement to me. When living at home I just went to the house of a local hairdresser, five minutes’ walk from my house, and sat in her kitchen while she chopped the last few inches off. It took about ten minutes and cost well under £10. The thought of having a Proper Adult Haircut, at London prices, was paralysing (what if they want to wash and dry it? How do I know what to ask for? Will it be expensive? What if i have to make conversation?), but I have finally summoned up the nerve. I may even allow them to wash and dry it, even though I think the noise of blowdryers is horrifying.)
(My mum’s initial response to this news was “Furiosa crew?”. She has not seen MM:FR, but has heard me talking adoringly about how amazing Furiosa is for a year now. However, I will just be leaving it at my standard “long, centre-parted, just take a few inches off the bottom, please” cut, as I can only handle so much New Stuff at once.)
Good luck! I understand the haircut anxiety and avoided going for many years, and after that it took me ages to ask for the haircut I actually wanted, but then it was fine! Hope it goes well for you (I’m sure it will).
The milk stealing story is hideous.
Police were probably present because police presence is becoming more and more standard in schools. Some (particularly urban) school systems maintain independent police forces, some have officers on site as a matter of course and routine.
The justifications for police presence frequently focus heavily on safety and security, but officers can also be called in on issues of school discipline.
And this is such a bad idea that I can’t even. It’s like, basically, not having rational gun laws has morphed into an excuse for “concerned” adults to condense the school to prison pipeline by having an officer present to arrest kids for bullshit offenses, or for offenses that would be far better (for kids, the school, and society at large) dealt with via ordinary educational discipline, like a stern talking to from the principal.
Salons intimidate me too, and I always have to prepare mentally. I have learned two things that help:
1) Assert yourself. Ask any questions (including price) and insist on what you want.
2) hair grows, and there are plenty of salons. If there is a mistake, move on.
Good luck!
Hi! I don’t know if it’s the same in London, but where I am (in the US) it’s usually assumed that you’ll want them to wash your hair first and then dry/style it after the cut, but if you skip one/both of those things, the cut itself is actually cheaper! I learned this when I showed up for a haircut once with my hair still wet from my morning shower. Just fyi, since you mentioned concern about the cost and concern about the washing/drying part.
I had hoped tha twas the case, but as all the hairdressers I saw only seemed to list prices for “cut and blow-dry”, I was unsure. I will probably go with whatever’s standard (I need to get used to it at some point), but it’s good to know it’s not necessarily vital. (And the cost should be fine, especially as I get my hair cut so rarely; I just have an inbuilt aversion to spending money.)
I successfully found a new hairdresser in London that only cost me £18! Just down the street, no website, excellent haircut. I also always find it helpful to bring a photo of what you want. Sending some good haircut luck your way!
Thankfully all I want is “this, but shorter” (I do not really do hairstyles), so it should be relatively straightforward. And hurrah for cheap London hairdressers! (Mine is not likely to be that cheap, being in the City, but I should probably investigate places near me, which might be cheaper, at some point.)
You definitely don’t have to have your hair styled afterwards, or washed there if you go with clean hair, but those two things are my most favourite part of going to the hairdresser (well, that and the homemade biscuits!). Honestly, having my hair washed and head massaged is so lovely (plus my salon has massage chairs at the sinks!) and having my hair blow dried is also so wonderful, because I have so much hair and it’s nice to have someone else do the work. Maybe try it all once, and then you’ll be able to figure out if you’ll do the “whole experience” next time?
ugh I got teary yesterday just thinking about Bobcaygeon! It didn’t help that my husband and I were saying how the final show will be so fucking sad. I would just cry the entire time, knowing this is possibly the LAST TIME they’ll perform each song live.
I KNOW RIGHT?
Not handling this last tour well
I’m going to be sad in the comments for a little bit and then go apply Alanis’s instagram like a balm.
If you haven’t heard about the situation with Amber Heard and her soon-to-be-ex husband…. it’s so bad, you guys. Not going to link anything, because the media is already horrible about blaming everyone but the spouse in a DV situation where said spouse is famous, but I feel like it’s being taken to an entirely new level for Amber. Among other things: she’s openly bisexual, and I feel like every other report is citing “jealousy” as a “reason” for what he did, but it’s doubly gross because the jealousy is aimed at women who are her friends, women who were probably the ones trying to help her get out of an abusive relationship. And so it’s not only perpetuating this sluttybisexual stereotype, it’s also ignoring factors that I think add credence to her claims, which is important as everyone tries to discredit her.
I don’t know. I’m so sad and angry about this one. I hope she gets justice even though I can’t expect it. I hope her career is ok.
LaineyGossip is my go-to for this sort of information. She’s very reliable for digging in deep without any gross victim-blaming language. I tried going to TMZ and immediately backed out once I read the article headlines, which tells me EXACTLY which camp the “facts” are coming from.
Lainey is so good at letting you see the publicists pulling the strings.
Also, yesterday, she slammed a director who was randomly dissing Keira Knightley and <3<3<3
I saw a couple of screenshots of tweets by Andy Richter yesterday (links below) about how one can pay publicists to sling mud at an ex after one has been accused of abuse, and that some publicists even specialize in it.
https://twitter.com/AndyRichter/status/7366301923… https://twitter.com/AndyRichter/status/7366303238…
Ugh, I foolishly read an article that was a roundup of some celeb responses (hoping that it would just be a bunch of celebs saying “Fuck that guy!” because I am naive apparently) and there were so many comments from actors and actresses who have worked with him/are friends with him being like “BUT HE IS THE GENTLEST SOUL I HAVE EVER KNOWN, THERE IS NO WAY IT COULD BE TRUE!”
Dudes, all domestic abusers are not crazy racist dudes in grubby tank tops! You are so dumb! Although hilariously, one of the people speaking out in his defense was Mickey Rourke which should have been a red flag to the rest of them.
So many of the people supporting him also signed the letter supporting Roman Polanski. It’s almost like they have a consistent ideology of victim blaming or something. 🙁
Chillingly, it’s the exact same language that’s used when their “great neighbour” or “awesome co-worker” is discovered to have killed someone.
I understand how shocking it can be, but it’s also never impossible that someone you know on the surface can be very, incredibly different behind closed doors. I remember I found out that my college roommate’s dad was a huge abusive, controlling asshole to his entire family; when I met him, he was politeness and friendliness incarnate. Fucking creepy.
Yeah, you never know what’s going on with someone when they don’t have their public face on. I had a friend growing up whose dad seemed like almost a parody of the perfect suburban family man until years later he was caught by an undercover cop soliciting sex from a minor on the internet.
Unless you were living in their home and watching them 24/7 you have no clue what went on between them! And what would Amber have to gain by making this up? We as a society do not have a history of treating victims of abuse by powerful men well.
Oh and this wonderful comic also seems relevant: http://therumpus.net/2011/10/smoke-in-your-eyesdr…
This is upsettingly applicable to me, but thank you for sharing it.
Oh my god right in the feels.
My grandfather was only ever sweet to me. His two sons are prone to narcissistic rage. His remaining daughter is kind to other people but has a wicked self-lacerating streak that I accidentally witnessed once.
Occam’s Razor says there are parts of my beloved grandpa that I didn’t see. Those behaviors don’t come from nowhere.
My dad has apologized for the shitty way he treated us when I was growing up. During that conversation he said my grandma was just as bad to him, when he was a kid.
And the thing is, I was my grandma’s favorite growing up, and I loved her to death. But I believed my dad the moment he told me–it just made too many other things make sense.
PCD2009 did a pretty good roundup, they’re firmly Team Amber and went and dug up all the previous, very public records of his violent behavior, so it’s not even surprising if you’ve been paying attention, which, granted, I hadn’t been. Seems like he might actually be a perfectly fine guy when he’s sober but the thing about marrying someone is you don’t get the benefit of his professional reputation being at stake if he gets drunk, nor do you have directors and producers and handlers keeping things in line.
Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who are nice enough sober but are repulsive when they’re drunk – but by continuing to drink they give themselves permission to behave that way.
I’ve also seen a lot of celebrity gossip sites dig into to Depp’s past to try to discover if he was abusive to his other partners or not; for me that is materially irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if he was ever an abuser before because he is NOW. It doesn’t matter less if it was a one-off.
So he has a history of violence? My impression was these accusations were the first ever.
Not even the first by a romantic partner. While he’s never (as far as I know) been connected to hitting a partner before, he was arrested for trashing a hotel room during an argument with Kate Moss. I can’t dig up the quote by Winona Ryder, but there’s an interview floating around where she talks about Johnny Depp’s temper scaring her.
The whole reaction to Heard is infuriating. She has witnesses backing her. She has photographic evidence of bruising. Depp does indeed have a history of violent behavior when drunk or high. Sure, it’s not impossible that she’s pulling a Gone Girl just as it’s not impossible that Johnny Depp is actually an alien shapeshifter from another planet. But both are certainly improbable!
This is has been my gif response to every celebrity I see defending him:
It adds a whole other layer of bizarre when you consider so many of the people speaking out in his favour are also celebrities. Meaning that they understand how PR works and that who you are in public isn’t always what you are in private.
If you’re a celebrity and somehow feel compelled to respond to this (or are asked by a reporter), why on god’s green earth would you say anything other than “I know X in a professional capacity and have no idea how he behaves in his private life”?
The conversation going on on my tumblr dash has several women (including myself) pointing out how our abusers are known as excellent people to everyone but their own families.
THAT’S HOW THEY GET AWAY WITH IT. Jesus. I cannot believe people still don’t realize that.
Yes, I’ve heard some revolting things being said about the situation.
Also, she’s doing everything we as a society tell victims of domestic violence are supposed to do. She left. She called the police. She got statements from witnesses. Honestly, it typically helps that she’s a pretty white lady. And STILL famous people are coming forward and framing him as the victim.
Also, going to your bros and complaining about how your girl is just “crazy” and going threaten you with blackmail is a pretty well known strategy that these assholes seem not to have picked up on.
It’s almost as if all of these “rules” exist only in their negative state, to be trotted out whenever a victim doesn’t follow them, so society can explain how simple it would have been to avoid whatever unpleasant/dangerous/fatal situation is happening, if only the victim had followed these simple rules.
Bingo.
See also: respectability politics and police violence.
It’s amazing how quickly people are jumping to label her as a gold-digging liar, considering that nobody but Johnny Depp and Amber Heard actually know what happened when the two of them were alone.
SMDH.
I partner has always been super attracted to Johnny Depp and I haven’t told her about this yet. I don’t want to break her heart.
Yeah, I used to think he was the most beautiful man alive too, in the ’00s. But all his public appearances over the last handful of years have been something else entirely (he clearly was unwilling to accept he was aging, and clinging to greasy ’90s boy band hair plus baggy gangster clothes with a million accessories was not a flattering strategy). Maybe you can show her some of those photos before breaking the news?
It’s been so clear for years that there was a combo of midlife-crisis plus alcoholism happening. And I also always thought that the relationship with Heard looked unbalanced as hell and not in her favor – but I don’t think many of us expected it to be as bad as it was.
Yes, he has not looked remotely like a healthy man.
For what it’s worth, I think even if the “jealousy” is about him being paranoid that she could cheat, it does sound like the way too many people think of bisexual people so it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how he actually thought, either.
Even without the disgusting assumptions about bisexual people, the whole “I’m jealous and paranoid you might cheat” is a huge fucking red flag.
Jeanie was always my hands-down favorite out that otherwise insipid movie.
I’d only seen bits and pieces of it as it aired on television when I was in high school (but in enough bits that I’ve probably seen pretty much the whole thing, just in no particular order), and maybe six months ago, my fiancé mentioned that he’d never seen any of it, so we decided to watch it on Netflix. And made it made a little less than halfway through before we decided that neither of us could actually bring ourselves to like Ferris very much or care what happens to him.
We pretty much decided that Jeanie was the real hero and then stopped watching it, figuring that’s what she would have wanted us to do anyway.
Jeanie and Cameron are the heroes for sure.
Agreed. When we watching it, my fiancé was just sad about Cameron, saying, “His best friend doesn’t value him at all and he seems to have an abusive father. I just want to save Cameron.”
Yeah. Rewatching the movie as an adult has left me deeply unsettled with regard to Cameron.
Yyyup. When I had been catching the movie in disjointed parts as a teenager, I didn’t notice so much, but attempting to rewatch it now made me just worry about Cameron and want to yell at Ferris, “You do know you’re not the most important person here, right?”
He doesn’t, no.
Are you familiar with the Tyler Durden theory?
I am not? What is it?
Here it is. (Spoilers for Fight Club if you haven’t seen it.)
!
she would want you to at least keep watching until she reveals her astonishingly flexible ninja self and repeatedly kicks rooney in the face!
oooh, you are in some good company! http://www.shakesville.com/2015/06/jeanie-bueller…
Jeanie forever!
When I first saw the movie as a kid, I really identified with Jeanie, and now I understand that it was just my nascent feminist anger looking for a role model.
In general as a kid I always related to the fussbudget characters who resented the heroes getting special treatment and worried about fairness and internal logic, haha. (Archimedes from The Sword in the Stone was basically my spirit animal.)
Before my brother was humbled by some absolutely terrible things the world threw at him, he basically behaved like a combination of Ferris and Sterling Archer. I’ve always thought Jeannie was a hero.
TEAM JEANIE FOR EVER!
Also, I want to give Cameron a hug and my spare room to stay in whenever he needs to like my mom did for the kid across the street when his parents were divorcing and things were really hairy.
All the hugs for Cameron!
I was always so proud of Jeannie for hooking up with the cute guy at the police station!
Remember when Charlie Sheen used to be cute?
The sad thing is that he’s supposed to be this strung-out druggie in the film, and he still looks loads better than he did during the Tiger Blood/WINNING bullshit. (And, yeah, he’s older, but his dad and his brother Emilio look loads better.)
Oh Young Guns & Young Guns II. You completely gave up on historical accuracy in favor of a wonderfully fun time. And a kick-ass theme song that is the Bon Jovi-est of them all.
“Ferris Beuller’s Day Off” was my favorite for so many years, but I think that’s because I saw it at just the right age. I was twelve, and as a Very Good Kid who grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, skipping school and running around a big city and living in a big, fancy house with lots of cool gadgets just seemed like a wonderful fairy tale to me. I also had a bossy older sister, so Jeanie was definitely not my favorite. (My opinion has since changed about both Jeanie and my sister.)
Alas, that movie just does NOT hold up. I was so excited to re-watch the movie as an adult and show it to one of my friends who had never seen it, and it became really clear just how much of a privileged, entitled ass Ferris is. Boo. Boo, I say.
I have *always* loved Cameron!
I am having an angrysad day and so my contribution is Camp Cope, who are angry punky girls from Melbourne. I am listening on repeat. See especially “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” for patriarchy smashing
https://campcope.bandcamp.com/album/camp-cope
Gymnastics is insane. Watching gymnasts (both female and male) is like watching some kind of magic, I swear. Have you SEEN them? They are basically all one gigantic, springy muscle. I will never get bored of watching people bounce in the air eight times in a row or hold themselves on a set of rings using only their hands or anything like that. I know nothing about the sport but it’s WICKED IMPRESSIVE.
Same here, I will watch it endlessly with no idea what is happening.
My dearly departed kitty was fascinated by gymnasts. I always enjoy watching but gymnastics were the only thing on TV that ever caught her attention. I think she was trying to figure out how people could possibly move like that when the people she actually knew very clearly could not.
Yep! I’ve always loved the sport_ was involved in it for a decade because I thought tumning was pretty much the coolest thing ever, despite never being particularly good at it.
Watching Biles is like seeing physics do something it’s not supposed to do. Watching her, and Kohei Uchimura, and Oksana Chusovotina (who is in her 40s and will be competing in Rio against gymnasts who are younger than her son, in a sport that advantages youth) makes feel lucky to be alive right now, to be seeing people so thoroughly change the sport.
I just watch gymnastics going, “different gravity setting. Got to be. No way do humans do that.”
I’m sure it’s a great show, and I’m sure that being a professional theater designer has numbed me a little (lot) to the inherent charms of musicals, but Hamilton mania is really starting to… creep me out? Annoy me? I don’t know. I was an obsessive 14 year old too! But I also endured the hell that was Rentheads who broke into song in the cafeteria. I am a grump!!!
Ugh, Rent. Even as a kid I was so distracted by the weirdly entitled nature of the characters (we totally shouldn’t have to pay rent, and then be an ass who the guy who let us crash here for free when he finally asks us to chip in!) that I could never really enjoy it. But god was it everywhere for a while.
hello I am also not on the Hamilton train (Not anti, just not into) and i am SO GLAD someone else said this!
SAME! I have the cast recording and am planning on listening to it eventually, and would like to see the show at some point…but why on earth does every unrelated thing have to be viewed through the “what does Lin-Manuel Miranda think of this topic” filter. WHY.
oh hai – talk to me about professionally designing! Where do you work, what size shows, do you still like it?
I am a sound designer out of Boston and love, love, love working with Lyric Stage and Company One, but I’m also part of the American Repertory Theater/Oberon family and was a sound supervisor for some summer regional theater festivals (CATF if you’ve heard of it). I could solder cables or work through a director’s vision for a script all day– I love every part of designing sound. HOWEVER a lot about theater really sticks in my craw. And one of those things is: musical theater culture highly concentrated shenanigans. People still produce, and love, shit like Miss Saigon and Anything Goes and nobody seems to think colorface is bad when it’s back home in minstrelsy, the pay norms are actually oppressive, and *mumble mumble* musicals aren’t that fun to design since it’s mostly live mixing.
My favorite musical that I worked on was a community theater production of CHESS years ago that was SO HAMMY and NIHILISTIC I loved it.
Yeah, the general reaction starts to make me feel like I’m not allowed to have anything but a super-positive obsessive devotion to it.
I have spent my adult life avoiding all musical theater out of sheer spite, because in high school I was on the debate team and we traveled to competitions with the theater kids and one time they spent an entire ~6 hour trip on a charter bus singing the score to ‘Into the Woods.’
I will join you there. I’m just…not into it? The singing and the dancing and the more singing and dancing.
I like my theater with a small cast and my plots scrappy and weird.
Fringe theatre for life!
As a former theater kid who has done that exact thing on a bus before, I am sorry. I know it’s years after the fact, but still.
Yeah, theater kids pretty much ruin a lot of theater.
Into the Woods isn’t a long show so you must have heard the whole thing three times, maybe four? And the title song is a real earworm, too. Sympathy.
Haha yep I am also in the industry and also tired of the incessant Hamilton-worship. I like the cast album! I have tickets to see the show! But I’m exhausted by the fan fervor. It’s a whole new level even to me, and I worked on both Wicked in its heyday AND Next to Normal when they had to stop having rush tickets because people were sleeping on the sidewalk overnight.
I never saw Titantic because of hype aversion. It’s a lot easier to never see Hamilton than it is to never see Titantic, but nevertheless I hit peak hype aversion with Hamilton some months ago.
Hello I have also never seen Titanic. We might be the only ones.
You are not, but neither are you missing anything, imo.
I am in your company.
I didn’t see Titanic because I didn’t approve of the way they were desecrating the Titanic wreck to sell things (it’s one thing to go in there to get historic stuff, it’s another thing to sell the dishware). Anyway I finally saw the last half or so on TV in ’08 and I just bawled my eyes out. Snotty, red-faced, the works. Anyway my roommate comes home to me sitting on the floor of the living room rocking and sobbing and I had to explain that a) I’d never seen it before and b) the heart really does go on!
I saw Titanic in the theater, and saw it in the midst of a relationship issue that involved me realizing I was with the wrong person. I have only ugly cried at one other movie in public (When a Man Loves a Woman) and it’s kind of mortifying to think back on.
I saw Ghost in the theater when I was 8 and freaking LOST IT at the end. Thankfully my ugly crying is just common enough that I know how to deal with it when I have to.
This is why I would always just play the first VHS tape, rather than both! One included the fun sexy love stuff, and I was able to pretend that nothing bad ever happened afterwards.
That is a great idea. I like it.
I only watched the first tape of Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music growing up. All the best songs, none of the sadness.
I love Hamilton, I love LMM, and I’m close to obsessive about it. And I totally get that for some people, like teenagers, having a “cool” Broadway show is a big deal, when loving musicals make you feel weird.
But, as we get closer to the Tonys, I’m really annoyed by how overshadowed so many other shows are. This has been a great year for broadway–off the top of my head, The Color Purple, Shuffle Along, She Loves Me, Waitress (apparently, I know so little about it) and the Spring Awakening revival. Not to mention some fucking great dramas.
My problem with the hysteria is two-fold: 1) “This is the best thing ever on broadway, nothing else is half as good!” Um, no. And that’s the shittiest way to approach being a fan.
2) “The cast (especially LMM) have been really accessible and so they owe us access.” Oh god, the fan entitlement at the stagedoor when I saw it was scary. The reason a lot of people don’t stagedoor? It’s because you are all demanding selfies and trying to have your super-special moment with this person who just worked their ass off for nearly 2 hours. Get your playbill signed and move on with your life.
Don’t even get me started on the Tonys. They got rid of the Tony for sound design and guess what my profession is. HARUMPH.
I’ve seen it. It’s very good. I really like it. I’m fucking tired of hearing about it constantly. In places where I used to like to talk about theater on the internet it is 100% all Hamilton, all the time.
I totally get it! I felt that way before I saw it, and there’s no way for me to give you a response without sounding like a member of a cult BUT! For me, personally, it was the best thing I’ve ever seen, not just Broadway show (and I’ve seen more than 40 of them), but just…THING. Event? Spectacle? Performance? And there’s really nothing else for me to do but explode with enthusiasm about it, though I do try to keep it together since I know all my family and friends are sick of hearing about it. And, of course, the public at large as well. :/
The textile nerd in me hates the term “Batik tapestry”. Both Batik and Tapestry are a specific terms for a entirely different kinds of cloth and tapestry should not just be used loosely as a generic term for “decorative wall hanging fabric”.
I feel like only Toasties will understand my distress at reading careless use of fabric terminology
I UNDERSTAND YOUR PAIN.
I am absolutely WITH YOU!
friends were talking about buying graduates tapestries for over their beds and I was eagerly interested in techniques and where things came from and realized they were talking about (perfectly lovely but still batik on cheap cotton) bed spreads basically and I sat in a corner and sulked until my daughter talked me down.
can something even be both???
NO, it cannot be both a batik and a tapestry. Tapestry should not be used to mean “wall hanging”.
I am prepared to die on this hill.
I will die on this hill with you.
seconded.
*rattles shield*
Would it be inappropriate to want someone to make a tapestry of this epic battle over tapestries?
is it inappropriate that i want Two Monks to illustrate the reference?
aghhh me toooo I cannot stand it and the design-blog world is full of mislabeled textiles and it makes my brain explode.
solidarity in fabric rage.
I know it’s perverse of me (and I do feel your pain), but my fervent hope is that Mallory will come in here and be gloriously scornful of our collective textile pedantry.
Bucket List: To have Mallory to be scornful of our collective textile pedantry.
It’s not too much to ask
Ha, I was going to say, remember the time we tried to get Mallory to care that there’s a difference between knitting and weaving?
I don’t know much about fabric but I know the distinction between these two words and it bothers me too.
YES THANK YOU.
Posnanski, the author of the Hamilton piece, is a fantastic sports writer. I think he’s taken a bit of a hit because of his book on Joe Paterno, but he’s a wonderful storyteller.
Nicole, that Hamilton essay, too early for tears, I usually save my crying for the afternoon. This was so lovely.
That one got me, too–for my daughter’s high school graduation Saturday we told her that we’ll be going to Chicago in the fall to see Hamilton (IF THE TICKETS EVER GO ON SALE UGH) and she ugly-cried. It was awesome. 🙂
I would have loved to have taken her to NYC instead but I don’t have $$$$ to drop on tickets, sadly; college is expensive, yo.
Sounds like a wonderful graduation gift to me!!! Enjoy and all the hearts for you.
That’s going to be wonderful! Happy graduation.
My boyfriend and I are waiting impatiently for when they go on sale, because we want to plan a visit to his family in Chicago, and we’d love to see Hamilton while we’re there. I’ve put myself on the email list and I’m waiting very impatiently.
See, this is why I need to sit somehow between my sons for the show, but also next to my niece, because I need to have each of them grab me as they bawl, and vice-versa.
Really reminded me of my own relationship with my father, who introduced me to Les Miz and Evita. I’ve already started taking my six-year-old son to shows, and he loves the Hamilton soundtrack. But I can’t wait to see what his own obsessions will be, and to share them with him.
Oh toast. I’m feeling crappy because I had a great weekend, and even kissed the boy I like. And now I have a massive crush on him and I think he’s ignoring me and I’ve reached the limits of non-pathetic communications. I seriously thought he liked me but now I’m very confused.
Are we going to talk about the horrific victim blaming and woman bashing happening to the mother in the gorilla thing? Obviously I wish the gorilla didn’t have to be killed, but I trust that the trained zoo personnel made a judgement call and instead of petitioning for a mother who was involved in a really scary, but thankfully non-fatal, accident to have criminal charges brought against her, how about looking into how a 4 year old child was able to get into a secure enclosure under his own power.
The internet is adorable. Suddenly everyone is the perfect parent who never took their eyes off their children for a moment and also an expert gorilla behavioralist. (Same people soon to be found on an article about helicopter parents bragging about how their children got to roam free unlike these constantly supervised kids of today.)
I haven’t watched the whole video; but the bit I did see was the child being dragged through the water by a limb across the enclosure. That does not say ‘protective’ to me. Animals are not the disney-ified empathetic creatures that most people want to believe they are.
its a shitty situation all around, and that zoo is hella libel for damages, but imagine if it had gone the other way, everyone would be insane: ‘Zookeepers refuse to interfere as massive gorilla rips child limb from limb’
Oh yeah, the first video released just showed the gorilla standing over the kid, so that probably contributed to the “the gorilla wasn’t going to hurt him” perception. I saw the whole thing with the dragging this morning and gasped aloud — whatever the gorilla was trying to do, that was a very, very dangerous situation and that kid could have easily died in an instant.
I feel so awful for that mum – she must have been terrified. I take my kids to zoos, and occasionally one of them gets briefly out of sight. That’s normal. It’s not neglect or endangerment. There are no cars, they are surrounded by other families and the dangerous animals are supposed to be completely inaccessible. This whole thing is sad, but yeah, there is clearly a problem with the design of this enclosure if a small child was able to get in there.
Getting lost at the zoo is practically a rite of passage for most kids.
Kids are fucking fast and also fucking curious. Anybody who doesn’t understand that has no business being a parent. Or has forgotten what it’s like to have tiny children.
Cred: my child drew on herself from toes to chest with a pen when she was supposed to be falling asleep the other night. Which is not a gorilla pen but an example of how if there is trouble they will find it.
Took me a minute to realize you didn’t mean gorilla PEN, like that other kind of pen she was using, but in fact gorilla PEN = enclosure. Kind of a Laffy Taffy-level pun, but it’s groovy enough for me this morning since I’m back at work after two weeks of convalescence. Hallooo again to Toasting-at-work!
I did not even see that, ha.
I’m SO ANNOYed at pretty much everyone involved- I haven’t read anythign about why the gorilla wasn’t just tranquilized? but also no, no, I refuse to blame the parents (they keep bringing up the number of children they have like that adds to their irresponsibility) and the zoo made the right call.
I think this is 99% racism, environment/animals > black child.
The piece I read suggested that because tranquilizers can take a while to go into effect, it was deemed an unsafe option. If they’d shot the gorilla with a tranquilizer, it could have only served to enrage him for a brief period of time before the actual drugs kicked in, which could have been an enormous risk to the child. Still an unbelievable bummer all the way around, 100% agreed on your take!
YES. My brother-in-law is a wildlife biologist who once had a brief moment of notoriety when he had to kill a moose that was loose in a residential area (and by “notoriety,” I mean “death threats.”) Tranquilizers are not only not immediately effective on large animals, they’re likely to make the animal even more dangerous and less predictable for a short period of time, which is why they’re inappropriate for use when the animal’s in close proximity to humans.
So tragic for everyone involved. (And I do side-eye the security of the enclosure.)
I have seen some arguments against tranquillising the gorilla: there’s a quote from a biologist on the BBC, for example, that says “Tranquilising a large animal is not instant. It could take many minutes and require multiple darts”, which sounds (from my extremely uninformed position) potentially dangerous, as it might anger the gorilla more. But it’s a shit situation all around.
Ahh that makes more sense!! TY. I mean, sure, it’s a shame that the gorilla had to die… but it pretty much did.
I’ve also seen people saying that they might have been concerned that the gorilla would collapse on the child and crush him or one of them would drown in the water if the gorilla passed out and pinned the child
a dead gorilla weighs as much as a live one, tranqs just aren’t magic insta sleepy darts like in the movies. Same reason nobody carries around tranquilizers for all the aggressive humans wandering about outside their cages.
From what I’ve seen they said that a tranquilizer would have taken minutes to kick in, and that they didn’t think they had that kind of time.
I saw a thing come up on my Facebook feed with a picture of the gorilla and a quote along the lines of “I don’t know why they shot me, I was paying more attention to that kid than his mother was”. This despite the fact that I had not seen (and still haven’t seen, actually) anything specifying whose care the child was in at the time of the accident. But of course let’s just assume that it was a woman, because mothers exist solely to be judged!
There were two parents there: mom and dad. Gee I wonder why everyone is talking about the mom?
Oh wait.
And here it is. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=102064612… Ugh.
I was an incredibly well behaved child and my parents were attentive parents and only had one child to worry about and I still slipped away and hid inside the circular racks at department stores. The amount of people who assert that they have literally never taken their eyes off their children in their entire lives are, quite frankly, liars.
I hid inside the circular racks, then cried when I couldn’t find my parents again. Children: sometimes they do things that don’t make sense.
Fun Fact: My family business sold circular racks (that’s the K50 or the K57 if we’re talking the larger diameter. Or did you mean the K53, which revolves?)
We sold a lot of other stuff, too, but going to work w/ Mom/Dad as kids always involved a great deal of time up in “rack heaven” where we stored all the used racks and it was a dusty, dark, overcrowded forest of chrome on a deck up above the loading dock and it was THE BEST.
JEALOUS.
I would disappear at department stores and then show up standing on a display pretending to be one of the mannequins. Then I would pretend not to hear my parents because duh, mannequin. I can’t believe they let me make it to adulthood.
THANK YOU, I posted a rant about this on FB because I was so upset about how this woman was basically getting crucified on the internet. Are we all so confident that we will never be looking the wrong way at the wrong moment? I’m not. Did our own parents prevent every moment of harm we might have caused or experienced? Mine sure didn’t. The fact that there was a tragic outcome doesn’t mean there is an easy villain.
Ha, I posted what I’m sure was a very similar rant. Still getting comments from people like “not judging but I heard she was looking at her phone” and “she seemed really insensitive in her statement after.” Like ??? I’m sorry the woman whose child was almost just killed by a wild animal was more concerned about her kid. And none of you have ever taken your eyes off your child for a single moment. Ok. grrrrr. (Sorry I know i’m preaching to the choir; I’m still annoyed!)
The Guardian’s report on the story does say (re. how the child got into a secure enclosure) that “the boy had apparently climbed over a 3ft steel fence, which has been in place for 38 years without being scaled, then pushed his way through bushes to the edge of the sunken ape habitat”. So it does sound like it wasn’t a particularly insecure barrier, and I would assume it would take a child more than a few seconds to get in (three year-olds are pretty short)
A three foot fence? That’s it?? My two year old could scale that in a HEARTBEAT. Kids are THE BEST climbers and a three foot fence is basically a siren song to them. I CAN CLIMB YOU, they think.
Yeah, but the fact that this is the first incident like this in 38 years shows that it has deterred a lot of previous toddlers.
When I was two three-foot fences were just warm-ups for the real climbing. All that was left between him and the gorillas was shrubbery?!! I’m sad about the gorilla too- and I wish circumstances had been different, but yes, they were in a situation where seconds counted.
We have a similar-sounding setup around the bear exhibits at our zoo, and they would definitely be no match for a 2-year-old, much less a 4-year-old. I saw an eyewitness account saying it happened really fast and that he’d slipped under the fence, which is even easier to do.
I don’t really blame the zoo either, clearly this setup had been fine for nearly 40 years. Sometimes weird shit just happens.
I’m not throwing any blame on the mother here. Kids are tricky. I’ve never been a parent.
However, as a Cincinnati resident who goes to the zoo all the freaking time since I was in diapers- there are several barriers and all of them are pretty hard to get across. I have never felt unsafe at my zoo, and I have taken several tricky toddlers and children there. It’s a sad thing, and really unfortunate for everyone.
Sorry. Being in the city- I’m sick of everyone blaming the mother (and curiously not the father?) and sick of people blaming the zoo. It’s just a sucky situation. Ah, the internet. I just want to mourn the death of a beautiful, dynamic creature who has been a part of our zoo for years.
Cincinnatian here.
There is a fence, bushes on a hill slope, and a 10-15 foot drop into the enclosure.
I have never felt unsafe at the zoo or felt that, as an adult, the enclosures would be easy to get into. The barriers are all constructed in a manner that it would have taken time to overcome them. There isn’t room to slip underneath the fence, and the area between the fence and the 10-15 foot drop into the enclosure is several feet wide with uneven terrain and shrubbery.
i am upset at the situation, obviously, as I love the zoo and my city, but what disturbs and enrages me about the situation is that witnesses overheard the child voice intent to go inside the enclosure and the parents said “no,” and yet it still happened?
its sad that the mother is being targeted, but my guess would be that it is because she can be heard in the videos calling to her son and then she made a controversial post on social media that didn’t even mention the death of Harambe. (I know when I read the post I was put off by it-full disclosure)
I’m still processing feelings as I love my zoo, want the child to be safe, want the animals to be safe, want the gorilla back, and want all the cake and to eat it, too.
I don’t think there was any way this situation could have ended up that didn’t result in a negative impact on the zoo or the parents.
As is probably obvious, I know basically nothing about children and their climbing abilities!
If that was a pool fence on a private property in Australia it would have been illegal. That kid did not have superpowers, if a four year old can scale it it is not secure enough!
Was he at the zoo only with his mother? I didn’t see anything about the story and heard about it from someone else so I don’t know all the details but if he was there with two parents, then it does seem irresponsible (and it’s irresponsible of both of them, not just the mother).
After reading some of the comments, the most fucked up thing is the way some people are taking the rhetoric used when talking about the shootings of black people and applying it to the gorilla. Especially if the family involved are black.
Maybe it would be best if everyone just received the news like I did and didn’t look up the details. I feel bad about the gorilla, I think it was badly handled, I don’t like the way most zoos treat their animals… but some of the comments people are reporting hearing suck.
Yes, this has been upsetting me all day. (Apart from the fact that most of the people I see commenting on my social media about this are white, childless men.) Some of the posts I’ve seen are literally saying that the life of an animal is more valuable than the life of a black child, and calling the necessary and sad shooting of the gorilla a murder.
Seriously! I think it’s possible to feel bad for animals and question the way they’re treated without resorting to rhetoric and comparisons that are damaging and offensive.
I’m sorry that your crush seems to be ignoring you! That sounds hurtful and confusing, especially after the high of kissing him. Internet hugs to you <3
Every parent who HASN’T had a grace-of-god moment, which your child survived by pure luck, can criticize these two for taking their eyes off the kid for a moment in what they thought was a safe space. It’s a zoo! The animals are locked up! That kind of is the whole point. The rest of us will just sit quietly.
One of mine fell all the way down a flight of stairs backwards on his head once. He’s alive by a miracle.
That Hamilton article is just *wonderful.*
Tw: car accidents
Last weekend, the spouse and I were on our way to a wedding when he hydroplaned and spun out and hit the median divider and then the k rail. We were fine, somehow, but the car was impressively totaled.
Well, I got a new job in a nearby city a few months ago and a shitty commute is now part of my life so I rented a car and then bought a newish one Saturday. It was a little expensive because I needed it immediately and that’s a real drawback in bargaining.
Anyway. On our way to sign a lease on an apartment near my new job Sunday he ran a stop sign and we got t-boned. Once again we’re fine and the damage is mostly cosmetic but ffs.
Also I am unlearning how to deal with insurance. If there’s a third accident and we continue miraculously unhurt we’re climbing the nearest tree and hissing at interlopers like opossums.
I’m so glad you’re both okay! Car accidents are so scary.
I got rear-ended on the highway last week and I’d like to reserve a branch in your hissing tree.
That is both terrible luck (car damage) and good fortune (you’re ok!)
I had a minor car accident on Friday and it was my fault and I still want to do some hissing.
Same. I actually want to hiss more because it’s my fault. Find a better way to work society!
I am having a really hard time being patient waiting for driverless cars
I’m not even bothering to try to be patient. I want them to know how much I want them.
Oh noooo fingers crossed that your car luck changes course. I went 8 years without issue before moving to a new city and have now been through 3 cars in 5 years, including totalling one on my birthday and two hit-and-runs in under two weeks on its replacement. (do not) JOIN ME IN THE TERRIBLE CAR LUCK CORNER.
(most recent claim was my fault – lost a fight with a very stealthy fence gate – but NONE OF THE OTHERS WERE.)
I sent my dad that Hamilton article and it made him cry. Dads!
Joe Posnanski is the best kind of dad pleaser, because he’s both good at what he does and seems like a good guy.
Me too!
OT derailment: BUT I’M GOING TO PARIS FOR MY HONEYMOON! Neither Mr. Editor nor I have every traveled abroad. We’ve never had the money for plane tickets. And as writers and an art history-degree holder and a musician, it’s just been an absolute dream for both of us to go our whole lives. And now we get to go together! For our first week of marriage! Which coincides with our 8th year anniversary of coupledom! I very much so cried happy tears when it all came together. The best part!!! It’s not costing us any money! My grandmother has been saving her credit card points for like, 10 years & and she’s accumulated enough to cover both our flights & hotel! I will ask for cool Paris recs in a real OT, but I couldn’t wait to share this beautiful news!
HOW AMAZING!!!! Congrats to both of you and a happy, lovely honeymoon in Paris. Have fun wandering about, relaxing in cafes, and eating croissants. If all else fails, watch the “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” Paris episode. He gives good food ideas 🙂
I’m so happy for you! Every bit of this is amazing and the best news.
When I was 21 & on study abroad in England, a friend & I went to Paris for a few days, and we stumbled across a concert of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at Sainte Chapelle and it was the most magical and Romantic-with-a-capital-R experience of my life (not to mention the lower-case-r romance of chatting up the cello player afterwards using only my friend’s mediocre French and our hormones to communicate)
Highly recommend seeking out a concert there for y’all: https://www.classictic.com/en/sitesearch/?country…
Happy honeymoon, and way to go, Grandma, that’s excellent saving and gifting!
How lovely. Please to go look at David Lebowitz’s blog. Apparently he now has an app to guide you to the best pastries! I love technology.
http://www.davidlebovitz.com/paris/
That is so wonderful!!!!
Your nana is the BEST.
I live in Paris, there are a couple of us! I don’t always follow the open threads so just putting it out there if you needed recommendations
OT: I’m a reformed grammar prescriptivist and now fall squarely in the descriptivist camp, but lately I’ve been hearing “anymore” used in the positive sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore
Like, “she always does that anymore.” I’ve been hearing it intermittently for years, and I thought it was a Philly-area thing, but now I hear it everywhere, and I DON’T LIKE IT.
According to Wikipedia, it’s been used in this sense since at least 1898, but I still don’t like it.
That’s confusing! Does it mean “now,” like “she always does that now”?
Yes! It means “now,” or “these days.” It’s so jarring! “I walk downtown to pick up lunch anymore” = “now/these days I walk downtown to pick up lunch”! “anymore, gas is so expensive” = “these days, gas is so expensive”! This is not right!
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/writin… http://linguistlessons.blogspot.com/2010/12/posit… http://web.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/structur…
Apparently this is a thing, and I should just get used to it because it’s likely our future >:(
I can’t even wrap my head around what that means! Is it, like, from now on? If it replaces the godawful “going forward” I’m almost ready to hop on board.
APPARENTLY people around here (Massachusetts) have been known to say “so don’t I!” when they mean “me too!” and although I have never heard it myself, it breaks my brain. My fellow Massholes, is this in fact A Thing?
yeah, I 100% heard that growing up, though I don’t think I use it myself.
ok, so this was bothering me, because I don’t think of it as a 1 to 1 synonym with “me too”; but this
Globe article explains it!
“It’s often used to correct a false assumption that you might not agree with the speaker”
so I think it would be if the other speaker started with something like “wait, but I really like xyz…” or “well, I think it’s a terrible idea…”
Then I might respond with “yeah, no, so don’t I!” as like, “no, you’re correct, I DO agree with you”
… there’s a LOT of confusing positive/negatives in this explanation, haha. Sorry.
except it’s NOT used like that! Maybe it used to be, but I think it’s turned into just a weird direct synonym.
Is it “so don’t I” as in, “I also dislike that” or “me neither”?
A: Oh, I really don’t like mayonnaise!
B: So don’t I!
You’d think, wouldn’t you?
But no– it doesn’t mean “neither do I,” it means “I also do.”
A: I love mayonnaise!
B: So don’t I!
According to the Globe article, it was at least originally used as a sort of self-cancelling double-negative to correct a perceived misconception on the part of speaker A, as in:
A: [Unlike you,] I love mayonnaise!
B: [You’re incorrect,] so don’t I!
Which still doesn’t make sense but at least sets it apart from the more obvious “same here” or “me too.” But I don’t think it’s used that way anymore.
This is very hard to wrap my head around. Thanks for trying to clarify, though!!
That usage is older than you are. Respect your elders.
NO!
I got my ass saved on at least one reading SAT question because of the Pennsylvanian “anymore,” and I therefore have to put some respeck on it.
I’m not a native speaker and I find that usage very confusing. I could probably get it if I read it in a book but if I heard it spoken, I’d assume I’d misheard.
i am a native speaker and i think it’s stupid and confusing.
The only person I ever heard use it in that sense was my grandmother, so for me it definitely comes across as old-fashioned. (Edit: I’m from Ontario, not PA.)
That usage is pretty widespread, and has been for many years throughout PA and the Midwest (see the map in this link):
http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/positive-anymor…
I’d be very curious to know if it’s actually being used more often now. I rather doubt it, but I haven’t found any recent sociolinguistic studies saying one way or the other.
I had never heard of that until I was taking undergrad linguistics classes (I grew up in upstate NY, where it’s not really A Thing), but I heard it occasionally when I moved to northeast Ohio.
Thank you for liking this website its /fascinating/ & I had no idea people elsewhere didn’t say “this needs washed”, what do you say instead?!
“This needs washing” (or “This needs to be washed”).
In upstate NY, we’d say “X needs to be washed”, usually.
I don’t know if the website talks about this, but my guess is that “needs washed” is something that originally came from Scottish or “Scots-Irish” (i.e., from Northern Ireland) settlers in the US and spread from Appalachia to the Midwest. I heard that a lot when I was living and traveling in Scotland.
Yeah that’s obvious once you say it haha, sent this to my friend in grad school for this stuff (who grew up in the same area) & they said that most of time people have no idea that one isn’t standard if they live in an area where that’s super prevalent which made sense to me! 75% of my language weirdness is bc I’m autistic & struggle w/ (especially spoken) language but the other 25% is rural Ohio is weird.
The other thing I had never heard of before I started taking linguistics classes was “double modals”– e.g., “I might could go to the store”, “He might should go”, etc.
I thought that was something a friend of mine developed for his (wobbly at best) employment status as a post-doc, he called it a future hopeful tense: “once I sign the contract I will have had been paid”
I feel this pain. I’m extremely committed to being a descriptivist, but I viscerally H A T E it when people say “hence why,” like “It’s raining, hence why we’re staying inside.” I recently looked it up and it’s apparently fairly acceptable? But I still don’t like it.
Older folks in southwestern Ontario do it too! I’ve heard my parnter’s dad and grandma do it and it’s just WEIRD.
His mom also says “pregnant for” instead of “pregnant with”, as in “when i was pregnant for Child 1, I craved XYZ, but when I was pregnant for Child 2, I didn’t!” and it is something I have yet to look into in terms of linguistic trends but definitely stands out every time she says it.
HUH I thought this was a rural midwestern thing because my 73 year old grandmother /definitely/ says that & I thought it was from growing up in an isolated farming community like pronouncing Tuesday like “Tuesdee” or wash like “warsh”
I have never heard that before and I find myself hating it immediately. (Intellectually, I am a descriptivist, but I can’t quite shake my innate prescriptivism.)
What’s interesting to me is that I also have to fight a bit of a prescriptivist streak in myself, but positive ‘anymore’ doesn’t bother me at all, because I grew up hearing it and didn’t realize it wasn’t standard until a couple of years ago.
I’m going to the Hip’s August 13th show, thanks to my bestie. This is will be my first (and last) time seeing them live.
Nope, not teary about this at all. Nope, nope, nope
That is lovely news. Feel the feels for all of us who can’t go but will be with you in spirit.
Vaguely related, since it’s Hamilton-related, I have Hamilton tickets for tomorrow’s 8 PM show. I thought I might be begging for a Toastie to keep me company (hahaha, everyone would have been my instant best friend for a free orchestra seat), or maybe trying to gouge some poor fool on an absurd resale price, but MrKat still wants to go. Things are awkward and sad in our marriage right now, and I don’t want the black cloud hanging over our relationship to taint the show for me, but man, everything is tainted right now so fuck it.
I’m going to cry so much harder through Act II than I would have a month ago. It’s going to be awesomely weird! Sorry to be such a downer in a link round-up thread!
I hope you are so transported by the show that you don’t even notice that black cloud, at least for those few hours.
Thank you, that’s very kind.
Oh, all the internet hugs. <3
Thank you very much.
I’m so happy that you got such amazing tickets, and I also hope the show transports you so completely that you forget entirely about all those marital issues for the night.
I am so, so, sorry. I hope you can find some joy in the show. I am so familiar with that feeling, though – when my first marriage was ending, we’d do these couple things that felt so terribly artificial…I was so beat down and sad, but felt like I had to pretend to be normal. For me? For other people? I don’t know.
Anyway, all the hugs.
Might be worth asking the Box Office/House Manager if they can split your seats up? It’s possible you could both get equivalent-level seats a couple rows apart/in a different section, so you don’t sit together.
I hope the show is healing–either for your marriage, or for your heart, or both. 🙂 Have the best, best time.
having grown up in PWC, that milk carton story doesn’t surprise me even a little bit, and I don’t wanna know what the commentary looks like
Possibly of interest to my fellow Toasties: Dwayne Mr The Rock Johnson is going to play Doc Savage. *bounces excitedly*
http://variety.com/2016/film/news/dwayne-johnson-…
I saw this a few minutes ago on the Tor website and got so excited! Posted the link to the only other person I know who would care — pretty excited to find someone else who knows about Doc Savage! *makes strange trilling noise that comes from everywhere and nowhere*
WHY DO THEY HAVE POLICE OFFICERS IN A MIDDLE SCHOOL CAFETERIA TO BEGIN WITH
Because of the gangs and the vandalisms, and in case of school shooting. I had cops (cop? There was like one) at my elementary school in the early aughts.
WHY DO THEY HAVE POLICE OFFICERS IN SCHOOL TO BEGIN WITH
Fixed that for you.
THANK YOU I WAS WONDERING TOO. My schools didn’t have police or security or any such thing.
I went to an urban middle school where we had violent fights in the cafeteria pretty much every day, but I’m not sure police officers would have improved the situation.
same reason the schools out here have metal detectors and zero-tolerance everything and everything that’s not athletics has been cut to the bone
school’s there to prep kids for the environment of their adult life; these days, prison.
Oh my god, that’s horrifying and true and I’ve never, ever made that connection before and now I feel like an idiot. Oof.
We had a police officer at our elementary and middle school. He ran the DARE and the gang prevention program and trained us fifth graders to go dead silent if he was in the doorway and dangled his keys as a joke on our teacher. I actually mostly have fond memories of him as a lot of what he was there for was really PR for the police department as he was a friendly guy who was great with kids.
My middle school was one that had to deal with bomb threats and students bringing hand guns to school and also had students experimenting with drugs. It left less time for him to bust children for stealing milk so far as I know.
Toasties, this article is absolutely incredible:
https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-f…
Vertical underwater farming!
This is fascinating, thanks for linking!!
I secondhand know the farmer who wrote the article (he and my husband are long-time friends), and he is amazing, and his farm is amazing, and he’s the reason I now love to eat seaweed.
That is INCREDIBLE.
It’s also kind of funny to read his edited life story–because all the things he says in that article are true, but he leaves out the part where he actually did finish school, and got a law degree from Cornell, and worked as a lobbyist in DC before he went back to fishing. Personally I think all that makes him EVEN MORE INTERESTING, but it’s also fascinating to watch how people represent themselves depending on their target audiences.
Ooh I see! The article definitely presented him as someone who didn’t get much of an education… I agree with you, the full version of his story is much more interesting in its complexity — though I can see how for this purpose he wanted to streamline it.
I’m so glad he stopped being a lobbyist and did this instead!!
Oh. My. God. This article just kept getting better and better. It actually made me feel like there is hope. There must be a rebuttal somewhere? Thank you so much for sharing!!!
Yesss, I’m glad you also found it uplifting! It’s so rare with articles on climate change…
Bobcaygeon is THE BEST
Really interesting Rebecca Traister article on Hillary: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/hill…
That Hamilton article was lovely. This section in particular really resonated:
All of this reminded me, strangely enough, of the Cleveland Browns. They were my first obsession. Even now, I’m not sure I can put into words how consumed I was with the Browns. In classes, when I should have been learning how to find the area of a circle or how circuits work or what the heck Hawthorne was talking about (things I still don’t know), I was scribbling stupid little stories about the Cleveland Browns. You might think this was because I wanted to become a sportswriter, but no, I had no idea about sportswriting, no ambitions to be a writer. I was writing these Browns stories because I couldn’t stop thinking about them — no, more to the point, I did not want to stop thinking about them. […]
Now, of course, I see it: The rest of life was kind of scary. School was scary. Girls were scary. My parents were scary. Homework was scary. All the other kids seemed to me to know something I did not know. They knew who they were. They knew how they fit in. They knew what they wanted to do with their lives.
I have always been obsessive about things (in adolescence, it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and this is exactly why; the real world is scary, and obsessing over something self-contained and understandable is so much easier than living in it. I still do it; fictional worlds are much realer to me than the real one a lot of the time.