Not too late to come to our NYC meetup at 8:15pm at the Penny Farthing tonight (as you read this, I am already on a plane!) If we overflow the venue it will be your own fault for not telling us you are coming. (I will be secretly really into that, but I also want you to have tables and chairs.)
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Mark Haddon has a strange and curious essay about animals in Aeon:
Slow and steady wins the race is what teachers said. Which was patently not true. Slow and steady wins the race if by some freak of luck your vastly superior opponent is stupid enough to sleep on the job, perhaps. The most sensible advice would surely be Don’t throw down a foolish challenge in the first place.
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The Beastmasters of Buzzfeed, clearly living #theirbestlife:
The Beastmasters’ lair is in the far left corner of BuzzFeed’s offices, past a football field’s worth of open-floor-plan desks. You walk a while just to get there—past a room full of candy, Milky Ways and Twizzlers and Starbursts in inviting glass jars; past yellow pod chairs, massive egg-shaped recliners with li’l legs sticking out of them and whimsical labels affixed: PODERDICT PODERPATCH, HARRY PODDER. The company’s conference rooms are named for famous Internet cats: Maru, the Japanese-born Scottish Fold whose reputation springs from his panache while fitting himself into cardboard boxes; Henri, star of a series of black-and-white French existentialist YouTube videos (sample subtitles: “My thumbs are not opposable…. Yet I oppose everything”), one of which was deemed by Roger Ebert to be the “best Internet cat video ever made”; “I Should Buy a Boat” Cat, about which your guess is as good as mine.
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Parsley’s great, we should call her.
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CHANGES! Changes. Changes! Perhaps someday Mallory and I will farm all this nonsense out to a bevy of sturdy young women and reap the benefits of our labour! I don’t work for Choire and Balk anymore, but they have a very special place in my misandrist heart. I was hoping Carrie Frye would return, but life is full of disappointments.
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Rachel Monroe’s piece on the West, Texas explosion is really special.
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Our own Alexis Coe, on the loss of her grandparents.
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Reinaldo Arenas, writers in exile, and a visit to the Havana of 1987.
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Jaya is a lot braver than I am.
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WHAT. Not a good explanation. You knew the application was coming! IT WAS THEIR DOG.
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Talking about PrEP.
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I shall make every last one of those parsley recipes! Except the shrimp one; I don’t like shrimp.
I will do it! I will make the shrimp recipe!
… though you do not know the way?
<3
(brb, rounding up the Fellowship of the Shrimp to help you out)
“You have my parsley.”
“And you have my citrus.”
“And my axe!”
“I wish the Recipe had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”
“So do all who live to see such thyme. But that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the thyme that is given to you.”
I legitimately had no idea people do not like parsely. I use it all the time.
My MIL claims that it tastes like soap! It’s odd.
I thought Cilantro was the soap one!
You know what, you’re right! I had it totally mixed up for some reason! But yeah, she’s a “cilantro is soapy ew” person, so something of a pain at Mexican restaurants. Otherwise, totally lovely.
I’m not sure if it is the same reason/gene as the “cilantro tastes like soap” gene, but I hate both of them. I also hate kale, which tastes like parsley to me. Bleh.
I DO NOT LOVE PARSLEY. I DO LOVE CILANTRO. NEITHER TASTES LIKE SOAP. I usually sub cilantro for parsley.
I love cilantro, but mostly hate parsley except in a few things (tabbouleh, you’re cool). WHY would you put it in your green juice though OMG.
SAME
I also love cilantro and hate parsley. Even in tabbouleh, which basically means I hate tabbouleh, even though I don’t want to.
It just tastes like Passover to me. I guess the only time I eat large amounts of it is at seders when I dip it in saltwater.
I moved into a house with three women last year and we cook for each other on a regular basis, so we’ve been doing a slow rundown of things we will not or prefer not to eat. At first I was being *immensely* chill, and saying ‘I don’t really like eggs except when they’re scrambled, but otherwise I’m easy’. But I keep remembering there are actually loads of things I prefer not to eat and some that I JUST CANNOT and parsley is very definitely in the latter category. It’s the worst herb! I love almost all of the herbs but parsley is the worst and I cannot eat it!
Oh my god the story about the dog and the adoption and the INJUSTICE. If I were the new adopting family I think I would feel awful enough to give the dog back to the original family voluntarily.
CANNOT even. And their explanation is so elitist and gross. Also, if you are the new adopters, give back the damn dog, she is bonded to another family! HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT.
RIGHT!? I just CANNOT, all the way around. How all these people live with themselves is beyond me.
Seriously. It does sound like the shelter can’t do anything legally at this point. We can all decide whether we believe that the shelter didn’t know about the situation until after the adoption, but the new family can definitely give the dog back. Who are these people who think they get to keep this dog? It is a sad thing, but this is not a moral gray area.
The shelter could at least offer to waive the fee for them to adopt a new dog. And how many times did they passive-aggressively mention that the dog wasn’t microchipped? Obviously if you don’t outfit your dog with secret agent technology you are not a fit pet owner. People!
It sounds like the shelter heard from the original owners before they approved the adoption…and went through with it anyway.
Right? My cats are totally indoors, so they’re not chipped. Glad to know if they get out I’m automatically gonna be an unfit owner.
(Well. If I lived in LA.)
I have nothing to add to this but I COULD NEVER!! Also I have a new cat who got all of his shots and neutering and whatnot at his rescue but they don’t do microchips so I was gonna get one at his next regular vet visit but now I’m paranoid and feel like I need to get him chipped tomorrow.
I just got sucked into the black hole of the comments on the press release, which really double down on the elitism. It’s not surprising that the comments on the shelter’s Facebook page are taking their side, but their reasoning is so gross! Apparently the woman deserved to lose her dog because the dog got out and wasn’t microchipped, and she didn’t find it immediately (aka went to work, ate, and slept when she should have been searching for her puppy). It’s such a fun stew of judgement and classism.
But seriously, how can pet owners (like most of the people who are taking the shelter’s side) not understand how easy it can be for a pet to get out and how terrible it would be not to get that pet back? The complete lack of empathy is MIND BLOWING.
SERIOUSLY. There is a four year old boy out there missing his dog! I am tearing up just thinking about it. How do you live with yourselves? Stop being so terrible and give the dog back!
“After a mandatory hold in the shelter, LAAS can destroy the dog.”
They really need to come up with a better way to say that.
I know, right? Any Toasties in LA feel like organizing a dog-napping? That story fills me with rage.
I will fly to LA to join in your vigilante quest for justice.
“Karma Rescue’s stance — the group did what was best for the dog and the adoption can’t be undone”
NOPE.
What kind of reputable rescue organization approves an adoption same-day? No checking of references or home visit? I don’t know how most rescues operate, but I can tell you as a volunteer for a breed-specific rescue, that sort of thing would NEVER happen with us. I don’t understand this at all.
That’s an excellent point. All of this is shady and weird.
I know that the MSCPA (in Massachusetts) and the Washington Humane Society does same-day adoptions, but it’s borne out of the complete lack of space and small numbers of volunteers. Most breed rescues I’ve encountered are stricter, with the home visits and the reference checking.
In an ideal world, all rescues would be able to do such things but the fact is there is just not enough support for animal shelters and they end up having get animals through the system as quickly as possible. So the quoted former volunteer is right: the better solution would have been giving the original owner the dog back and placing a second dog with the adoptive family.
That description of the Buzzfeed offices fills me with blank horror. I shall accept my fate as a Boring Person if it means never having to work in an open-plan office and having to say the words “OK, our 10:00 meeting will be in Conference Room I Should Buy A Boat Cat.”
The place where I work has conference rooms named after animals, too, but it’s a Serious Business so I actually kinda like it! “Let’s meet in Penguin at like two?”
The ones at our law firm are named after dead musicians, which I think is just about as whimsical as you’re allowed to get before you fall off the cliff into trying too hard.
Ours are named after local mountains, which is not too bad.
Those “Rescue” people are the worst. After my 19 year old cat died, I applied to adopt but was turned down because a pet had died in my custody. Of OLD AGE. Give the dog back, people.
That is a god-damn tragedy. I hate that some rescue groups get so overzealous that they end up driving people away by acting like fools. An adequate home full of love and attention is 150% better than a “perfect home” where they won’t love the animal. Oh my god. Oh my god these groups.
What? WHAT? I mean, I assume they wouldn’t let you adopt if you’d previously had a pet that you relinquished to a shelter/sold/gave away (“OBVIOUSLY NOT, YOU PET-ABANDONING SICKO”) — so their policy is essentially, you cannot adopt a pet if you have ever had a pet before?
I just don’t get it. These rescues with hyper-stringent rules put people — people who want to follow the rules, who are trying to do a good thing by adopting an animal from a rescue, who would provide a good home for that animal — in a position where their choices are “break the rules, lie to the rescue people, run the risk that they’ll find out you lied and REPOSSESS YOUR FUCKING CAT SOME OF THEM ACTUALLY WRITE INTO THE CONTRACT THAT THEY CAN DO THAT” or “go to a breeder, contribute to the problems the rescue is trying to address.”
The local shelter I got Commander from did a follow up call, told me to never get her declawed, and had me sign a paper that said they could come from a home visit followup, I assume so that if they were concerned about what I said in the followup call they could come make sure I wasn’t mistreating her. They never came by, and I imagine they very rarely actually do that. But they didn’t have much in the way of prerequisites for adoption.
Those people are crazy. I went to an adoption event to see a cat that I liked and was chatting with one of the volunteers as I waited for them to get the paperwork done. She asked me what my parents fed the cat I grew up with; I told her that they used to give him dry food, and then he got diabetes, so now it’s mostly wet food. She was like, “Well, dry food is really really bad for cats. That’s why he got diabetes.” That comment, combined with her apparent general suspicion of me/my parents as suitable cat owners put me off so much that I told them I wanted to wait a week before adopting. I left and they never answered any of my emails. I’m kind of afraid they sent my name out on some sort of secret rescue people blacklist.
There is a place I know of that screens adopters with the question “Do you have a camera?”
I have no idea why. Do they not adopt to people who won’t take thousands of cat pix?
????
As much as we’d all love it if pets were immortal, rules that discourage allowing them to die don’t seem like the most effective way to go.
Whaaaat. We adopted our cat from the local humane society and they were pretty much like “You’ve got the $30? Great, here’s your cat, good luck!” Fortunately for the cat, we are not monsters and we love her very much, but wow.
Why is there no sugar in that ice cream recipe? Why? There is no excuse.
Someone on Twitter told me they asked their grandma, and she said they wouldn’t put down sugar because everyone already knew that ice cream needed sugar, so why would you be dumb enough to even write that you needed it! I hate the past.
WHY EVEN PUT MILK ON THE LIST THEN
or eggs
or vanilla
fuck these people
a lot of old recipes are like that, i find! the instructions are like very unspecific because people already essentially knew what to do.
I’ve found that a lot in terms of not having cooking directions, or directions like “cook until done.” But I’ve never seen them just not listing ingredients!
good point. since they presumably didnt have ice cream makers in the 1870s, how were they even making ice cream? just sticking a bowl of milk in the ice chest? did you use whole milk?
Yup, used whole milk. They used to have sort of crank machines sorta like this guy, I think http://www.amazon.com/White-Mountain-F64304-X-4-Q…
Or yeah just, sit in a freezer and churn by hand?
I have a 1940’s edition of The Settlement Cookbook, and it is awesome because it assumes you know absolutely nothing (a definition of “baking” is provided on the cooking terms page), has recipes for an insane amount of stuff (no recipe too basic to be spelled out) and is very low tech – it doesn’t even assume that you have a “mechanical refrigerator” just an ice box chilled with an ice block delivered by the iceman. It explains using an old-timey ice cream maker -referred to as the “freezer” – thusly:
“When making ice cream in a freezer, scald and then chill can, cover, and dasher of freezer before using. Adjust can in tub, put in the thoroughly chilled mixture. Have mixture in can not more than 3/4 full. And have salt and ice come a little higher on the outside of the can. Adjust dasher; cover can. Place ice in heavy burlap bag, pound and crush with wooden mallet, or chop in wooden tub with ice pick. Pack with fine and evenly chopped ice and rock salt.
Ue 3 parts ice to 1 part salt. Measure carefully before packing. Pack freezer 1/3 full of ice before adding salt, then add the salt and remaining ice in alternate layers.
Turn crank slowly for at first for about 5 minutes or until mixture begins to stiffen; then as quickly as possible until it is very difficult to turn, which will take about 6 minutes. Add more ice and salt if necessary using the same proportion. Pour off salt water. Do not let it flow over top of can. Push down ice and salt, wipe top with cloth. Uncover and and remove dasher, scrape it, beat the frozen mixture with a wooden spoon. Place heavy paper over it, put on cover and place cork in the hole. Repack the freezer, put ice on top, cover with burlap or newspaper, and let stand several hours to ripen.”
All the ice cream recipes have sugar or at least some kind of sweetener like maple syrup. Most of them also have some kind of thickener like eggs, cornstarch or gelatin.There are separate recipes and instructions for making ice cream in the “mechanical refrigerator,” where, yes, you churned the ice cream by hand.
THERE’S some instructions. Good on ya, Settlement Cookbook.
(I like the part about not letting your salt-ice-water overflow into your ice cream. Important tip!)
I still sometimes find myself, in the middle of making dinner, on Wikipedia trying to figure out what the hell a step in the recipe means.
maybe its just a bad cookbook!!! they definitely exist now so no reason to believe they didnt exist in the 1870s.
That is DUMB.
I also can’t quite remember the time period when this all changed but straight-up sugar used to be a rich people only thing before they started mass producing it, and for sweetness before then, people would just use fruit juice and honey and that kind of stuff.
There is no sugar because cookbooks and recipes assumed that all cooks KNEW that ice cream was sweet so they didn’t tell you every little thing, like make a creme anglaise, temper the eggs, strain, chill the custard first, because everyone knew.
It was originally supposed to contain Qream instead.
Today in “things that have risen from the shadows of the forgotten past”
We’re also having a Minneapolis/St. Paul-area meetup tonight at 8:00! Check the facebook page (The-Toast in Minneapolis) for details!
Adored the BuzzFeed article. I am convinced that BuzzFeed is the harbinger of doom for my generation, but damn if the staff isn’t right on when they say that we each want animals to make us better as people.
Oh BuzzFeed. On the one hand they employ some amazing writers and put out some amazing content. On the other hand, “I GOT BUFFALO BILL! WHICH FICTIONAL SERIAL KILLER ARE YOU?”
Okay, but the “Which member of Dipset are you?” quiz was SCARY accurate.
How did they know I am secretly Juelz Santana???
cuminafterall is as Juelz Santana. It is known, khaleesi.
Waaah it turns out I can’t make it to the meetup tonight after all, so someone can have my chair! *sulks*
Parsley is my favorite and I will not hear a word against it. The more dishes I can work it into the better. The more I can nibble on the leaves as I cook the better. PARSLEY! *hearts in eyes*
D.C. Toastie Book Club Update – The next meeting is Saturday March 29 at 3:00 at my apartment, and the book is Americanah. Also, I’ve started a thread in the Google Group for trivia night at Politics and Prose on March 15!
This is everything I want out of life and I am so sad I don’t live in DC!
LOVE the Mark Haddon essay, and the animals link roundup concept! Thank you.
Guys in preparation for the meetup I cut off half of my hair!!!!! I am very pleased with this decision.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMRYry_MzAw
“Which of the manifold hairs on Sir’s crisp and winking headdie would Sir like to entrust into my care for the purpose of encutment?”
Would that Steven Fry could have been the one to cut my hair.
Pro tip – A Bit of Fry and Laurie is now on Netflix!
Hell yeah it is. “Marjorie!”
I cut off most of mine, but I’m not sure if I’m going to come (depression and lateness and whatnot).
Oh great, another reason to hate dog rescues.
So much for the moral high ground. I’m very tempted to relate this horrifying story the next time someone gives me guff for buying my dog from a (very reputable) breeder.
I really want to like animal rescues, but honestly they can pretty much all go fuck themselves. This shit is appalling, but also utterly unsurprising.
I tried to adopt an adult Pit mix a couple of years ago, but I was turned down because I worked “too much” (30 hours a week, at the time) and my fenced in yard was inadequate (4′ chain link fence, not that I would let a dog sit outside all day by itself). So I told them if I’m not good enough to give you $400 for a dog that I will love forever, then I’m glad that there is apparently a surplus of qualified homes that want 3 year old Pit Bulls. And then I went on Kijiji, found a nice “oops” litter of mixed breed pups, and paid the owners $25 towards the cost of the mom’s spay. No thanks to the elitist rescues.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26341350
I want to be her cross-cultural fellow 28-year-old single woman penpal.
I keep checking online to see if the family that adopted the dog has returned it to the original owners, but it hasn’t happened yet. Come on, y’all. Let the kid have his dog back.
I read up a bit about parsley folklore a few months ago, and now I think everyone should grow it. I don’t care if you like it, grow it anyway. Here is why:
1) it is reputed to grow best in households headed by women
2) the seeds take a really long time to sprout because they must travel to hell and back 7 (or 3 or 9) times to ask the Devil’s permission
3) it is bad luck to give it away or receive it as a gift, but stealing it/having it stolen is fine
4) there’s all sorts of folklore about women getting/not getting pregnant because of it that hint that it was used as an abortificant (although I don’t imagine it actually works as one)
After reading all that I went out and bought some seeds from a weird medieval variety and I am so excited to plant it this spring.
My boyfriend and I almost had to give up our (found) cat after we took her to the vet for the first time and learned that she was microchipped. Turns out the microchip had been inserted at a shelter, and the woman the shelter had on record as adopting the cat had never registered the chip, did not have a working phone, AND, through bizarre coincidence, was in collections to the same vet for care of several different dogs. We spent like two hours sitting in the vet’s office as the whole thing unfolded, while I clutched our poor terrified cat and tried really hard not to start crying. It was the worst! But we would have given her back, if we had to, because that is kind of the baseline of decent human behavior.
(THANK GOD we didn’t though, because she is the literal best cat in the whole world.)
I will be there in NYC. I will be the one dressed like Hannibal Lecter Goes To Prep School.
Sorry for the late rsvp, but it turns out I don’t have work so I’ll be there tonight! I will happily bring my own chair/build one out of men if there aren’t enough.
Are there any fellow Toasties in New Haven, CT? I feel like there must be….
I’m in Western Mass and would totally be up to meet somewhere in the general MA/CT area! I think New Haven is like 90 minutes from where I am, so not too bad.
I am in New Haven! I’d love to meet up with Toasties 🙂
At first I thought that Buzzfeed article was going to be about this beastmaster:
I was disappointed.
The Alexis Coe article is so beautiful and heartbreaking. I recently lost my grandmother very quickly after she was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. It was the longest, most agonizing two weeks of my life. This article hits home with all of the love, pain, and sadness. Thank you for linking.
I also can't quite remember the time period when this all changed but straight-up sugar used to be a rich people only thing before they started mass producing it, and for sweetness before then, people would just use fruit juice and honey and that kind of stuff.
I cut off most of mine, but I'm not sure if I'm going to come (depression and lateness and whatnot).