Alternate Gilmore Girls‘ Series Finales: The Many Imaginary Deaths of Christopher Hayden
I. The Motorcycle Crash
II. Eaten By Bear at Zoo
III. Slowly Crushed By His Collection of Sweet LidsIV. Beaten to Death By a Loan Shark
V. Infection From Tattoo He Got With Third Wife
VI. Burned Alive During The Wicker Man-Style Ritual That Stars Hollow Performs Every Eighteen Years
My Playlist For Standing Outside Benedict Cumberbatch’s Wedding Venue
8. “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind,” Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton
9. “My Antonia,” Emmylou Harris (featuring Dave Matthews)
10. “Bird on a Wire,” kd lang
11. “Bird on a Wire,” Dave Van Ronk
12. “Bird on a Wire,” Jennifer Warnes
13. “Pictures of You,” The Cure
The memory grew brighter. “Professor Slughorn,” Hermione asked brightly, “What if someone wanted to split his wealth into multiple offshore accounts? Say…seven?
“Good heavens, seven?”
“Well, isn’t seven considered a magically significant number?”
“Merline’s beard, girl! Isn’t it bad enough to consider doing it once? To dodge their tax bill seven times…This is all hypothetical, isn’t it, Hermione? All academic?”
“Of course, sir,” Hermione said, smiling. “It’ll be our little secret.”
Matthew Perry And Matt LeBlanc Weren’t Invited To Jennifer Aniston’s Wedding
As for Thatch-Hair Sadlady the Night Hag, the three angels named her Jennifer and Anistonand declared that from that moment forth, every day one hundred of her children would perish. Every night she claims the lives of one hundred mortal children to soothe her loss. That is why to this day, new mothers clutch their babies to their chests and utter these immortal words the world over, the same words the angels used to rebuke her:
O you who fly in the darkened rooms
Be off with you this instant, screech-owl
This instant, Lilith, thief and breaker of bones,
Hag and snatcher, I abjure thee.And for four and ten thousand years has it been ever thus, until Jennifer Aniston, whose feet are as a hawk’s talons and who carries a scorpion between her legs, found a mate and a consort, and his name was Justin and his doom was red.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said kindly, accepting the phone from her and inspecting it closely several times over to make sure there was no damage. “Not compared to, say, the war crimes of George W. Bush. Elizabeth, was it? I’m Ted. I think you can let this one slide.”
“Are you sure?” Her beautiful face, sort of a cross between Olivia Munn and the Fox News anchor he’d hate-masturbated to last week, was creased with anxiety. “Could I buy you a coffee, as an apology?”
“Sure, why not?” Ted shrugged coolly, cool not in a rude way but in the laid-back, relaxed way of a man who’s very at ease with women. “I’m a pretty liberated guy, probably not like the ones you’ve known before. I’m okay with a woman buying me things.”
Elizabeth beamed. Her body was a 9 out of 10, or it would have been if he were crude enough to use that sort of scale.
A Chat With A Green Witch and A White Witch
It had taken him a few tries to pick up the phone. “Call her,” Michelle had said patiently. “You never talk anymore.” He shrugged. Twisted his mouth wryly.
“I had a reason to talk to her before. We were working on a project together. It’ll sound stupid if I just call her to hang out.”
Michelle put a hand on his shoulder. “She is your friend, you know. People like you.”
He ducked. “You have to say that.”
“I get to say that. I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. Remember that time she told the president of Latvia she thought you were smart and cool? And how usually with presidents, they’re either smart or cool, but not both?”
“Yeah.”
“She didn’t have to say that. She said it because she’s your friend.”
“Yeah.”
“So are you going to call her?”
“What if she doesn’t want to hang out with me?”
“She’s not going to say that.”
“I never heard from Janet Napolitano after she left. Not once. Not even on my birthday. And I gave those tins of popcorn, the ones with the three different flavors, you know, the ones with cheese and caramel and butter all in the different compartments, to everyone. And she didn’t say anything.”
“Hillary isn’t Janet.”
Adam Levine, Sexiest Man Alive
Chris Hemsworth, Sexiest Man Alive
David Beckham, Sexiest Man Alive
Erotic Fanfic About the Parents From the “Rude” Video
Benedict Cumberbatch: The Fan Fiction
REPORTER: How did this all come about? How did such a young Canadian woman manage to become the creator of a relatively high-production-value television program in the UK while editing a popular ladyblog?
BENEDICT: Wymyn’s blog.
REPORTER: Yes, of course. Wymyn’s power blog.
NICOLE: Oh, it’s all a blur, really. (sips tea) Who knows how it started, at this point? Let’s just pick things up as I began shooting on the first season of Sherlock.
A Harry Potter Where Hermione Doesn’t Do Anyone’s Homework For Them
“How would it be,” she asked them as they left the classroom for break (Binns drifting away through the blackboard), “if I refused to lend you my notes this year?”
“We’d fail our O.W.L.s,” said Ron. “If you want that on your conscience, Hermione…”
“I’d be very sad if you failed your O.W.L.s,” Hermione said seriously. “But how could your mistakes be on my conscience?”
“Do you value me for my friendship,” she asked them, “or do you see me as someone you can get to shoulder the burdens you deem unimportant enough for you by tossing me the occasional scraps of flattery and feigned dependence?”
“We do value you,” said Ron. “We just haven’t got your brains or your memory or your concentration – you’re just cleverer than we are – is it nice to rub it in?”
“Why would suggesting that you are innately inferior convince me to do your work for you?” Hermione asked, puzzlement creasing her brow. “If I truly believed that to be the case, I would do everything in my power to assist you, but I would not injure you further by encouraging you to space out during class and fall even further behind.”
Your Mother’s Sister Not Really Making $5465/Month Working From Home
She wasn’t making $5465 a month. She hadn’t been making $5465 a month for a long time. She didn’t know how bad things were, exactly, but that was mostly because she was too afraid to find out.
She got up earlier. She took her laptop to bed with her. If it was a matter of working harder, she would work harder.
Who could she tell? They were all so proud of her, especially her nephew. “My mother’s sister gets paid over $87 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I’d be able to do it but she earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless.” That’s what he told everyone. “She earns over 10K a month doing this,” he told all his friends, eyes bright with the promise of money. “That’s more than $87 per hour.”
“But The Grave Held One More Surprise”
“Bury it, and quickly,” The Eldest said. “I want that tomb closed again before my shadow grows longer. Put the spear in her hand, and do not touch the ashes if you can help it.”
Why was the flesh burned but not the rags that covered it, she wondered helplessly, madly to herself. Why would the rags not burn.
A Meeting Between Elizabeth Wurtzel and Jonathan Franzen
“If you say you’re taking a trip to Germany, you’d better be able to explain what specifically you’re planning to do there,” she said, “or else people will wonder why you’re not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus’s time, he might have said that Germany is uncool.”
“Wow,” he said.
“I read that in a magazine,” she said by way of explanation.
“I wrote that,” he said.
“Get out of here.”
“I did, I wrote that.”
“Where did I read that?”
“The Guardian.”
“I’ve never quoted anything from a magazine in my life,” she said. “That’s amazing. Don’t you think that’s amazing?”
“Look,” he said, “It spoke to you, and that pleases me.”
THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED FOR MY BIRTHDAY
can we still somehow get the annual “sexiest man alive” pieces please. WHAT IF IT’S CHARMING TATERS OR OSCAR ISAAC NEXT YEAR. WHAT THEN.
Seconding with my whole heart
I need a continuation of Sexiest Man Alive so badly.
He can no longer be Charming Taters to me, having been supplanted by an even more charming Tater, our very own CP Hashbrowns.
THE FRIENDSHIP BRACELETS.
And the pantsuits! Pantsuit Monday!
The Liberal Dude Erotica made my skin crawl the first time I read it.
Reading it again, I nearly threw up on my keyboard (which might net me a new one, so that could have been a win) and my skin actually crawled off my body to hide underneath my desk near my work shoes.
Skin, please come back. Or at least allow me to throw you at men like this so I can smother them.
Ok I missed the Barack and Hillary one when it was published and now I’m crying ??!?!!
I’m crying, too. And I read it the first go-round, so I knew what to expect.
“Her body was a 9 out of 10, or it would have been if he were crude enough to use that sort of scale.”
I know men who pretend that they don’t do this when they do. Being reminded of it today just sent my mood from Affable to KILL.
Does A Note From Aaron Sorkin count as fan fiction? Because while all of these are obviously great and wonderful (I loooooove Friendship on the Agenda with my whole heart), the line “We used to make skyscrapers. Now there’s Kardashians” is probably my most-quoted Toast line of all time.
The deaths of Christopher Hayden though oh my werd *is dead*
I never saw it the first time around and I’m very happy it was pointed out here 😀
SWEARTOGOD Nicole, if I never read anything as beautiful as the Bandicoot Cummberbund interview again from you I will cry.
Oh, there are lots of these that I never got around to reading! What a treat.
On the topic of Franzen fanfiction (Franfiction?), here’s an email I sent some of my friends in publishing last summer that you all might appreciate:
Our director of marketing and publicity just got a coveted ARC of Franzen’s Purity from someone at Workman, she literally jumped up and down and squealed and everyone came out of their offices to also squeal and talk about how they’re going to pass it around amongst themselves.
Then they were like, “Sarah, do you like Jonathan Franzen?” And I had to be all like, “Ahh, haha…I haven’t read that much of him!” [swallows vitriol]
However, a bright spot overheard in the conversation:
“He’s such a good writer. Except his sex scenes, his sex scenes are really bad.”
“Yeah. Maybe he’s a bad lover.”
“I don’t think he’s ever had sex.”
…thousands of miles away, at his local coffee shop, Franzen’s heart pounds harder, sending a rush of blood through his body so forcefully that he can hear it in his ears. A vein, suddenly engorged, rises in his forehead. He freezes while paying, his crisp ten-dollar bill quivering in his hand.
“Mr. Franzen, are you alright?” the barista asks. The boy flatters the author in hopes of getting a better tip but always ends up rolling his eyes at his coworkers when Franzen leaves each day after putting all of his change in his pocket.
“Shut up,” Franzen hisses, dismissively waving his hand. “I don’t know where, but somewhere…a woman is laughing at me. I must start working on my next novel at once! I’ll show her. I’ll show all of them.”
Covered in flop sweat and muttering to himself, he rushes to the door, nearly knocking over a mother of two trying to herd her children into the cafe. “Get out of my way, bitch!” he snarls. “Don’t you know who I am?!”
Flabbergasted, the woman looks at the man’s back exiting the shop. She turns to the barista. “I don’t actually know who that was. Should I?”
“No,” the barista says, realizing that Franzen hadn’t paid him for his coffee. “That was just some asshole.”
Are we certain he can drive?
So this led to some confused googling and it turns out that Jonathan Franzen is not the guy who lied to Oprah about his memoir, which is totally who I thought he was.
He’s not? No wonder I was confused.
No, he’s the guy who didn’t want his book to be an Oprah Bookclub book because he doesn’t write for the masses, he writes ART.
Hermione!!
What about the sexually cruel sequel to The Devil Wears Prada? I looved that. Just thinking about it makes me feel a bit tingling and swoony.
That work from home spam fanfiction is so tragic I couldn’t finish it.
I was really hoping the Quentin Tarantino piece would be on here.
You guys remember, right?
http://the-toast.net/2014/06/02/quentin-tarantino…
I missed “But The Grave Held One More Surprise” when it was written and just read it now and I am so filled with delicious thrills because I went to school in Viterbo and we wandered all through the Etruscan tombs at Tarquina and WHAT IF I WAS WALKING RIGHT BY IT WHAT IF I BRUSHED THE DIRT WHERE IT WAS WAITING WHAT IF I ATE MY PICNIC LUNCH ABOVE ITS RESTING PLACE.
(Note: This story takes place a couple weeks before the end of The Toast)
It was a sad time at The Toast. Of course, everyone wished the editors well in their future endeavors, and all were doing their best to be positive and supportive. Still, there was the sense that something uniquely precious and special was ending. The “Best Of–” articles brought fond smiles of remembrance, yet also cast a distinct pall over the final days of the community, like holding a wake for a relative who wasn’t quite dead yet. The atmosphere was so bittersweet, it was like drowning in bakers’ chocolate.
Suddenly, at the witching hour, a mysterious stranger appeared. Her gaze conveyed a curious quality of ancient nobility that belied her youthful demeanor, yet with a fey aspect of mirthful chaos in her sparkling greyish-violet eyes. Tousled coppery locks framed delicate elfin features. She was dressed boldly in haphazard travelers’ motley, or maybe a wizard robe, anyway something like Pippi Longstocking as designed by Tim Burton. Her corset was made of knives.
“Who are you?” said a person.
“I’m Mnicollary Sue Ravenrune,” she said in a dusky twilight voice, “and I’ve come to save The Toast.“
!!!!!!!!!!(?)
You see, many years ago (yet, after all, perhaps not that many? For what is a human life against the grand span of Eternity?), a young child learned that she was different. Unable to abide the foolishness of others, bewildered by their casual cruelties, she withdrew from them and learned instead to forge her own path, alone.
“Brilliant, of course,” the teachers told her parents. “If only she were not so… unconventional.” For indeed, this child had no small amount of genius, in addition to unnatural poise and charisma and also elf ancestry from somewhere probably. Also, and most unaccountably, a passion for adopting stoats. Forbidden to bring them into the house, she had turned a disused woodshed behind the house into a stoat farm where her charges could romp and frolic to their hearts’ content. Asked about this strange predilection, the child would only speak of “A Voice” from her earliest memories.
HER PARENTS DID NOT UNDERSTAND. Failing to see her genius, they tried to force her to conform. “Her peculiarities will bring scandal down on the good name of Ravenrune,” they said when they thought she could not hear. “It’s almost as though she knew of that ancient prophecy, that a child of the Ravenrunes would be Chosen for a grand exalted destiny.”
“Grandmother would have said that the child was a changeling,” they said, prompting the child to smile her secret smile in the shadows. But then the fateful words were spoken:
“Maybe we should take her stoats away.”
This was too much. She fled from that house, out to the woodshed, curled herself up among the stoats, and wept in her special inner way, her quiet way, with a face of stone. And as she wept, she plotted. She must leave this place.
A shadow moved at the door. She rose to confront it, prepared to denounce her cruel parents. But it was not they. It was indeed a Shadow, seemingly borrowed from one of the stoats. But now it moved of its own volition, enlarged itself, moved toward her. And from this Shadow, this Void, this Stoat that was not a Stoat, spoke the Voice that the child remembered from her earliest days.
And the Voice said:
Toast, not stoats. Save the Toast.
Not the breakfast item, it hastened to clarify. A website. You do not know what it is yet, but it is your Destiny. You have been Chosen. Go now into the world, and learn its ways. Prepare yourself. Embrace your inner Power. Learn to write both humorously and wisely.
Her violet-grey eyes were downcast in quiet humility. “I cannot write humor and wisdom,” she said, studying the stoat-gnawed toes of her shoes, which she could see perfectly well even in the darkened woodshed due to elvish heritage probably.
The Shadow rose up indignantly. Indeed? The Voice thundered. Then what of the note that your English teacher Ms. Garrity wrote on top of this essay? It produced the paper from somewhere, and she read again the note in red pen: “HUMOROUS AND WISE! VERY UNCONVENTIONAL! A ”
“Well…I guess maybe I can do that,” she acknowledged humbly.
Now you must go, and seek your Destiny, said the Voice of the Nonstoat. Mnicollary Sue Ravenrune, you are Chosen, and the stoats love you.
She stood, heart ablaze with a new soul-consuming fire. She was not “different,” she was special. The path of her fate stood out before her. She strode out to meet it without hesitation.
And as she walked, the stoats followed.
*shields eyes from the brightness of your glory*
Can I just express my appreciation here not just for this excellent real-life fix fic, but also for, like, your entire storied tenure as a Toast commenter? Whenever I see your username, I know I’m about to read something good.
You are very welcome, and I am glad I have been able to add some small crumbs of additional enjoyment to a profoundly enjoyable site.
But: cripes! “Storied tenure?” There are stories? LIES, ALL LIES unless you were referring to my own stories. Which are also lies. Yet still, I hope, “lies breathed through silver,” as C.S. Lewis put it. “These beautiful hand-crafted lies, breathed through brilliant sterling silver, are sure to please any collector. All these lies will go up in value! No, just kidding, I’m lying again.” C.S. Lewis’ final years were notoriously cash-strapped, as his frequent late-night appearances on QVC testified. Still, if you ever run across any Legends of Narnia™ collectors’ plates at a garage sale, snap them up, most of them sell like hotcakes on eBay. For gods sake don’t eat off them though, that paint is almost pure lead.
Mostly I’m just happy to have been noticed in a positive context, so thanks again for that. I had no idea anyone recognized my username from one thread to the other. If the ending of The Toast has any silver lining for me (breathed through lies or otherwise), it is that I might not ever reach the point where I’m posting heedlessly at 3 AM, say something unforgivably crass, and am forced to flee the site forever in shame, as I have at basically every other website where I have ever routinely commented. It’d be nice to end things on a personal high note instead.